Page 48 of Race With The Devil

“Right, like that. Can we start out first thing tomorrow? I’d like to get my assistant to fly in my favorite tracking dog, too. Let’s see if she can do that by tonight.”

“Smooth move. I was thinking about bringing my drone. We could scan the entire trail with that baby. Vera said it looked from the black and white tape Lavinia might be wearing a red jacket, so that’ll help.”

All good ideas. I strode off to my rental car. We couldn’t finish this job without Unity. It was just wrong to take all the glory and revel in work she’d done. But I had no idea how much longer she would think of me as some twisted freak who got his rocks off—or didn’t, in the case of my brother Sonny—by forcing himself upon unwilling women. Unity’s wounds ran deep, and she could easily never want to speak to me again.

Why had I withheld that tiny shred of intel from her, that Sonny had been busted for sexual assault and battery? The obvious reason was that I didn’t want her running scared. Since Sonny had done the crime and not me, it didn’t really affect anything in the real world.

But for Unity, it would. Of course it would. Because Sonny had choked and beaten that girl, resulting in additional assault charges, I’d been housed in a special unit along with pedos. Nobody distinguished much between the vagaries of different sex crimes in prison, and we were marked men, dying from inmate violence at twice the regular rate. I retreated into the landscape of my mind to avoid the horrendous environment. Books saved my life, and by extension so did my dad, but when he vanished off on the scent of another woman, I turned to self-harm too. That’s how I knew so much about it. I vowed I’d tell Unity one day if I was ever given the chance. She hadn’t seen the grotesque mass of scars on my hip that had originally, in my mind at least, been a rose.

Tacky, angst-filled symbolism. I guess it was easier to carve a rose than an inscribed tombstone. Or a pentagram.

It hadn’t seemed to matter much when I was seventeen, taking the rap for my brother. Fuck, we lived in a garbage dump. What future did I have? It was a joke to think I could ever attend college. How would I support myself while going to school? I listened to heavy metal, and the lawyers in court interpreted it as my friends and me carrying staves, chanting, drawing pentagrams. The jury gobbled it up. High drama for Tennessee. It only confirmed what they already suspected about teens wearing eyeliner who smoked weed.

I became “penitentiary old” by the time I was twenty-five. Raymond Nonnatus was my patron saint, the saint of those falsely accused. I began correspondence with a Zen monk who taught me zazen meditation, sitting it two, three hours a day just to block out the yelling voices, the echoing clanging of doors. With Slushy’s help, working with Puppies Behind Bars, I pulled myself out of the muck. The air force allowed me to join, determining I was suited for flying fighters, first Jayhawks, then Strike Eagles.

I figured such a radical turnaround qualified me for some kind of sainthood, only to come full circle, to hit a wall. I was in love with a woman who was grossly disturbed by me.

And I couldn’t say I blamed her.

I was tossed in the hole several times because of some radio interviews I’d given protesting my innocence. By that time, I was like every other inmate—blamed for a crime I didn’t commit. Guards starved me, spat on me, threatened me with horrific death, but I didn’t stop talking to the press. I’d never despised such a category of lowlife men as those guards. And that was how I met Slushy, the Bare Bones’ attorney, when someone at the Innocence Project heard me on the radio.

I called Josie in St. Louis to see if she could fly out Paddington. I’d been a giant burden on my ranch the past couple of weeks with my absence. She said there was no way she could take the time to come to Arizona. She was training an Australian shepherd for a paraplegic boy who needed the dog to travel to Chicago and receive a scholastic award. I had to balance what was more important in the greater scheme of things.

“We decided to go on It’s A Small World next,” said Bellamy. We sat on deck chairs on her expansive back deck overlooking Mescal Mesa. There were so many colorful pastry-colored mesas and ridges in this furrowed land, you couldn’t see a speck of Pure and Easy proper from here, although it was only a twenty-minute ride to downtown. Bellamy, Lyric and I were just relaxing, Bellamy and I with crushed ice margaritas, Lyric with a lemonade. I was certain she drank alcohol in general, just not around me, and that was all I could control.

I was jealous of Bellamy, and fully aware of it. She had an amazing job doing what she loved best—the art of motorcycle maintenance at the Illuminati Construction airplane hangar, the Citadel, just ten minutes away. As a “wrench,” she repaired all the men’s rides, belonged to the union, and thrived in the lowdown, gritty construction atmosphere. Bellamy actually looked hotter in black leathers and her tight-fitting “Property Of” cut, or vest, which Knoxie had given her. Some might think it old-fangled or insulting to boast such a patch indicating you were a man’s property. Bellamy wore it with pride. In addition, she wore a wooden bead necklace with a mandala, a photo of Knoxie. This was no Bare Bones thing, thank God. It had something to do with her growing up in Bihari, the cult that had been shut down by the Attorney General.

Sure, she was infertile. Her cult had practiced forced sterilization on young women, so they could be “penetrated” at any moment by any man the guru ordered—often, the swami himself, of course. Knoxie had two teenagers from a prior marriage who tried to spend half their time at their new stepmother’s house, but it was rough going. They were going to resent any woman who tried to “take their mother’s place,” and eventually their nastiness wore down Bellamy’s patience. Luckily, by that time, the kids were on their own.

So they’d worked out a life without anyone to care for them in their elder years. Shit, they had the club, their brothers, old ladies, and all the attendant kids that came with it. Who needed kids of your own? That was one of the many reasons I enjoyed hanging around the club. It was a built-in family. Tanner said that belonging to something bigger than yourself helped with depression, with cutting. Well, I can tell you now, it really helped with a panic-stricken fear of the future. As long as I didn’t move out of state, I’d never die alone, neglected in some “care” facility, drenched in my own pee. The Bare Bones would be storming the fortress in a hot minute, scaring the bowels out of everyone.

Bellamy was describing her and Knoxie’s recent visit to Disneyland. She took a toke of the Leaves of Grass Eminence Front and passed the spliff to me. It was all right with me if Lyric smoked pot. Bellamy croaked out smoke with every word. “But Knoxie was so high, when he went to get into the little boat he fell right on his ass sprawled on the seat, halfway on some middle-aged lady’s lap.”

I spit out my laugh before I could even inhale the tasty smoke. “Oh my God.”

“That wasn’t the best part,” said Bellamy. “The guy who was helping people get onto the boat? He goes, ‘Those aren’t reclining seats, you know.’”

We laughed until we choked. It was one of those long, roller coaster laughs that starts to fade out, then becomes more intense when you remembered what you were laughing at. Finally, watery-eyed, we just sighed and looked out over the cliffs of red velvet.

I expected a lecture from Bellamy, but not from Lyric.

“You know, you really have to take Tanner at face value,” my half-sister said. “He probably just didn’t tell you about the rape conviction because of what happened to you.”

I was prepared with my defense. “And you!” I could feel my eyes flashing with anger, my nostrils flaring indignantly. “How would you feel if some guy you, you know, liked, suddenly popped up with a rape conviction?”

Lyric drew herself up in her chair. “A rape his brother did? I’d be like wow, that’s difficult. I’d ask if the brother was ever arrested later.”

“I assume so,” croaked Bellamy, “since they released Tanner and wiped the conviction.”

Lyric said, “They can do that even if there’s no new suspect, like if DNA evidence clears you.”

“Which I assume was the situation,” said the wrench. “I read that they had DNA evidence to begin with, but I guess our technology wasn’t so up to par yet to differentiate between brothers.”

“Or the people in his county didn’t care. An article I read said they were determined to convict either Tanner or one of his friends because they listened to Cannibal Corpse and Dying Fetus.”

I spit out angry smoke. “Dying Fetus? What the fuck?”

“Death metal bands,” Bellamy informed me, her eyes watery.