Bad Moon On The Rise (2 page)

I sighed. Marcus had all the
fun.

“
I need your help on a
case,” I told him.

“
What kind of case?”
Marcus asked. I heard a click as he lit up one of his girlie smokes
and waited for details.

I explained about Corndog Sally and
her search for her grandson. Marcus was from Durham, a good thirty
miles away from Sally’s old stomping grounds in Raleigh, so he
didn’t know who she was. But he picked up that she was as black as
he was, which he approved of, and he understood immediately when I
explained about her family situation.

“
Drugs,” he said with
distaste. “I’ll kill anyone who gets near my family with that
shit.”

I believed him. So did the dealers in
Durham, who were also wary of Marcus’s job as a clerk for the
police department. A dozen Duprees had been born and raised within
spitting distance of some of the worst blocks in town, and yet all
had escaped the lure of drugs. Every single one of them. This was a
miracle that makes the Shroud of Turin look like a piece of used
Kleenex.

“
I think the key to
finding the kid is to track down his mother,” I explained. “He’s
fifteen and never had a daddy. Dollars to doughnuts he’s with her
right now, trying to take care of her sorry, drug-riddled ass.
Corndog Sally was taking care of the boy until about a year and a
half ago.”

“
Why’s she named Corndog?”
Marcus interrupted.

“
I don’t know. You ask
her. She’ll chew me out if I do.”

“
Why’d she wait so long to
look for him?”

“
Until this past summer,
she knew where he was. He was living with his mother, going to
Perry County High. Sally got to see him every now and then. She
said he seemed okay, but he and his mother both disappeared this
past summer.”

“
So they’ve been off the
grid for at least four months?”

“
Yup. Sally got a phone
call in August from the boy. The kid said he was fine, but wouldn’t
say where he was. She’s heard nothing since.”

“
You been on the Web?”
Marcus asked, knowing I’d have already searched every nook and
cranny of the Internet hoping for a hint to the mother’s current
whereabouts.  

“
I have. She did some time
at a women’s prison for robbery about five years ago, probably
trying to support her habit. Then she moved from shitty apartment
to shitty apartment all over Durham for the next few years before
moving out into the country. But I don’t know where she is now.
I’ve talked to just about every brother and sister she has, and
they don’t know either. And they don’t much seem to
care.”

“
Where are her people
from?” Marcus asked. It was a traditional Southern question, asked
as part of nearly every conversation, regardless of social
milieu.

“
Mostly Durham and Wake
County. Some of them have moved to Johnston County. One or two to
Perry. That’s where she and the kid lived last year, but the house
they rented is empty and she left no forwarding
address.”

“
Why would anyone live in
Perry County?”

This was a very good question. Perry
County was a tiny slice of North Carolina, linking Wake and
Johnston counties. It was known solely for its red clay and white
trash.

“
Beats me,” I said, though
I knew firsthand how limited your options are when you are poor.
One man’s trailer is another man’s mansion. 

“
Did you check out the
Raleigh/Durham drug houses?” Marcus asked. The only saving grace
about drugs infiltrating the Triangle was that the area was still
small enough that it was obvious where all the activity was taking
place.

“
Yes. That’s how I ended
up with tall, dark and dudly tonight. I’ve been up and down the
bars on Roxboro, Mangum and even Hillsborough Street for two days
now, rounding up the usual suspects. No one was sober enough to
recognize the mother, though I admit it’s a sorry photograph. I
suspect it was taken about three tankers full of crystal meth ago.
But I’m still pretty sure she hasn’t been hanging out
locally.”

“
I could call my friend in
Perryville, see what he knows. Maybe she went back to her old
stomping grounds there.”

“
Will he be up this late?”
It was nearly one o’clock in the morning.

“
He’s working,” Marcus
said. “They tend to stick the gay cops on the night shift out in
Perry County. When they’re not running them out of town on a
rail.”

“
Okay,” I agreed, grateful
for the help. “Her name is Tonya Blackburn. The kid’s name is Trey.
She’s in her mid-thirties, small and toffee-colored. I got a couple
photos of her from Sally and the most recent one shows her hair in
corn rows that turn into lots of little braids.”

“
Well, she won’t be
keeping that look up if she’s on the powder,” Marcus predicted
before he hung up. He was right. A lot of people liked to delude
themselves that semi-rural America was safe from drugs. Marcus knew
better, and so did I. Coke and crack may have been bumped down the
line by crystal meth, but they still ruined a lot of lives. So did
cheap ass heroin, ecstasy and a bunch of other crap. People were
mixing and matching their drugs these days as enthusiastically as
bums trying on clothes in a thrift shop. And there were always kids
coming up who would try anything up to and including sniffing
toilet bowl cleaner to catch a buzz. If they made self-destruction
an Olympic sport, America would bring home the gold medal for
sure.

I ate a bowl of leftover
macaroni-and-cheese while I waited for Marcus to call me back. I
knew I could depend on him. Marcus was a rarity in Southern law
enforcement: he was as gay as a tree full of parrots and had
crawled out of the closet at birth. As a result, he was at the
epicenter of an informal network of others in police and sheriff
departments across the state who were still in the closet but
sometimes in need of a little moral—or computer hacking—support. I
figured his friend in Perryville was part of this underground group
or else Marcus would have given me his name.

He called me back about an hour later.
“There are two drug houses in Perryville, and then there’s another
one tucked into the county just outside of town.”

“
Did your friend recognize
Tonya’s name?”

“
Oh, yeah,” Marcus said.
“She was picked up a few times, once for being passed out on the
courthouse steps, so I think it’s safe to assume she’s now a
candidate for the short bus. But she’s never been booked in Perry
County. He says her kid was a basketball star at Perry County High.
Played on varsity as a freshman.”

“
Was a star?” I said as
hope that she’d be found easily faded.

“
The kid didn’t show up
this semester. The coach and cheerleading squad are heartbroken. My
friend thinks they’ve left Perry County.”

“
Did he have any opinions
on where she might be?”

“
He didn’t much care,”
Marcus admitted. “But he was pretty sure that if she was anywhere
nearby, she’d be at the drug house outside the town limits. He said
she was picked up there a few times in the past during drug sweeps,
but never had anything on her so she walked. That’s the advantage
of gobbling down every scrap of drugs the second you get your hot
little hands on them, I guess.”

“
Thanks, Marcus. I owe
you.”

“
I’m putting it in the
bank with the rest of your IOU’s,” he warned me.

If Marcus Dupree ever decided to call
in his chits, I’d be his slave for life.

It’s not pretty being a private
detective. But it’s not boring, either—which was the point. At
least most of the time. At the moment, staring at the parade of
living cadavers slipping in and out of a rural house in the middle
of Perry County, well, let me tell you: it wasn’t anywhere near
boring enough.

The Carolina countryside at night is
like a church, hushed and filled with expectations. It belongs to
the darkness, to the shadows of pine trees bending beneath the
night wind, to the whisper of owl wings slipping through the
silence. Empty roads stretch beneath the moon, leading over the
horizon, beckoning with endless possibilities. It is a time when
man becomes insignificant and benign.

Except, of course, for those nights
when mankind proves it is the worst of all species, capable of
debasing itself to bottomless depths while destroying all that is
good in the world around it. 

I had parked behind a pair of deserted
mobile homes rusting among a jungle of overgrown weeds. A fallen
tree had crashed across both roofs, popping the metal open like the
tops of sardine cans, exposing the jagged edges of corroding
walls.

Through a gap between the two
structures, I could see the stoop of a dilapidated ranch house
going to ruin next door. Its dirt yard was crowded with broken-down
cars, refrigerators and a huge pile of scrap furniture that loomed
up into the darkness like a junkyard blooming in the night. For the
last two hours, at any one time, two or three cars would be parked
only inches from the front steps, the passengers having moved
ghostlike into the interior of the drug house, their movements
hurried and furtive. Black and white, short and tall, young and
old, men and women—it didn’t matter. They shared a desperation and
a feigned confidence that was frayed around the edges with an
uncontrollable need to hurry. They scurried inside as if life and
death awaited them there. And, of course, for most of them, it
did.

About five o’clock in the morning, a
white woman drove up in a red truck. She climbed out of the
vehicle, screamed at someone in the front seat to stay put, then
hurried inside for her drugs. I had visions of a Mastiff leaping
from the cab to shred newcomers and decided to check out the
occupant. I slipped from my car and crept closer, memorizing the
truck’s license plate number out of habit.  As I got near, the
front seat shadow morphed into two scrawny children jammed into the
front cab—no child safety seats, or even seat belts, in sight. They
were watching the door to the ranch house, each tiny face frozen
with an unwavering gaze that would have put the most loyal dog to
shame. Would their mother return?

She did. She hurried out five minutes
later, slipping out the door so quickly I could not get a glimpse
of her down-turned face. She was thin and dressed in a grimy tee
shirt. Her blond hair hung in greasy strands to her
shoulders.

“
Hold it,” I said as she
reached the truck.

Her body froze, except for her right
hand, which flew unwillingly to her back pocket. I shoved her
against the side of the truck and patted her down. She’d stuck a
baggie full of pills and some rock in her back pocket. Scattered
among the crystals and a fistful of familiar blue and pink pills
were several large white pills that I did not recognize. I patted
down the rest of her pockets. She didn’t have a penny left on
her.

“
You a cop?” she asked in
a reedy voice, resigned to being either robbed or arrested and
sounding as if she couldn’t decide which would be worse. Her
ferret-like face had a jumpiness to it and I knew she’d stopped to
sample the wares inside.

“
Sure am,” I lied,
confident I had the upper hand and could pull off just about any
charade. For one thing, I outweighed her by a good seventy pounds.
“Get in the truck.”

“
Why?” she
asked.

“
Get in the truck,” I
repeated.

She climbed in and forgot to shut the
door. The dome light illuminated the lines in her face. She was
thirty going on sixty. Her skin was the color of boiled turnips and
her teeth as brown as tea.

The kids didn’t look much better. They
turned out to be a boy and a girl, almost identical with their
bright blond hair, runny noses and suspicious eyes. They were
dressed in oversized tee shirts and underwear. They watched me
silently, expressions unchanging, as I stepped closer to the truck.
I locked eyes with the little girl. Something in her face shifted
and softened. She leaned forward slightly, as if secretly
entreating me to take her away. How I wished that I
could.

“
Recognize this woman?” I
asked the mother, holding a photo of Tonya Blackburn up to the
light.

The woman squinted at it, confused by
my failure to arrest her. Her eyes slid to my left hand, where I
still held her bag of drugs, then reluctantly returned to the
photo. 

“
I think so,” she said.
“She comes here sometimes. I think maybe she even works here. Can I
have my stuff back now?”

“
When’s the last time you
saw her?” I asked, holding the bag of drugs up a little higher,
like it was a prize I intended to give for the right
answer.

“
I don’t know.” Her voice
broke. “Maybe six months ago.”

I shook my head, disgusted. Six
months? She’d been coming to this hellhole for at least half a
year, which meant her kids had been waiting in the front seat of
that truck for their mother to return to being a mother for an
awful big chunk of their lives.

I had to ask. “How long you been
coming here?”