The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires(50)

Beneath him, a young black girl lay sprawled on the floor, long orange T-shirt pushed up to her stomach, legs akimbo, an ugly dark purple mark on the inside of one thigh, oily with fluids.

James Harris slapped the palm of one hand against the metal side of the van and the vehicle shook from side to side as he hauled himself to his feet. He squinted and Patricia realized her flashlight had blinded him. He took an unsteady, lurching step toward her. She froze, not knowing what to do, and then he took another step, rocking the van more, and she realized there was only three feet between them. The little girl moaned and squirmed like she was asleep, whimpering like Ragtag in his dreams.

The van rocked as James Harris took another step. There were maybe two feet between them now and she had to do something to get that little girl out of there, and he still squinted into the flashlight beam. He reached for it slowly, fingers outstretched, inches from her face. Patricia ran.

The second the flashlight beam was off his face she heard his feet clang once on the van’s floor and then hit the sand behind her. She ran into the woods, flashlight on, beam dancing crazily over stumps and trunks and leaves and bushes, and she shoved her way past branches that slapped her face and tree trunks that bruised her shoulders and vines that lashed her ankles. She didn’t hear him behind her but she ran. She didn’t know for how long, but she knew it was long enough for her flashlight’s batteries to dim. She thought these woods would never end, and then the woods spat her out beside a chain-link fence and she knew she was back on one of the roads leading into Six Mile.

She shined her light around but it only made the shadows loom larger and dance crazily. She searched for something familiar and then everything exploded into bright white light and she saw a car coming her way slowly, jouncing up and down the bumpy road, and she cringed against a fence and it stopped, and a police officer’s voice said, “Ma’am, do you know who called 911?”

She got in the back and had never been so grateful to hear anything as she was to hear the door slam shut behind her. The air conditioning instantly dried her sweat and left her skin gritty. She saw that the officer had a gun on his hip, and his partner in the passenger seat turned around and asked, “Can you show us the house where the child went missing?” They had a shotgun in a rack between them, and all of it made Patricia feel safe.

“He’s got her right now,” Patricia said. “He’s doing something to her. I saw them in the woods.”

The partner said something into a handset and they turned on their flashing lights but not their siren, and the car flew down the narrow road. Patricia saw the Mt. Zion A.M.E. church ahead of them.

“Where did you see them?” the officer asked.

“There’s a road,” Patricia said as the police car bounced into Six Mile. “A construction road back in the woods behind here.”

“Over there,” the officer in the passenger seat said, lowering the radio handset, pointing across the car.

The driver turned hard, and mobile homes reeled to the right in their headlights. Then the police car surged forward between two small homes and they left Six Mile behind. Trees surrounded them and the officer driving turned the wheel to the right and Patricia felt its tires slide on sand, heavy and slow, and then they were on the road she’d found.

“This is it,” Patricia said. “He’s in a white van up ahead.”

They slowed, and the officer in the passenger seat used a handle to steer a spotlight mounted outside the car to shine into the woods on both sides of the road, panning across the trees. It was thousands of times brighter than Patricia’s little flashlight. They rolled down their windows to listen for a little girl’s cries.

Before they knew it, they’d reached the end of the road, coming to where it ran into the state road.

“Maybe we missed him?” one of the officers said.

Patricia didn’t look at her watch but she felt like they drove up and down that soft, sandy road for an hour.

“Let’s try the house,” the driver said.

She directed them back to Six Mile and they parked outside Wanda’s trailer. The partner let Patricia out of the back and she ran up the rickety front porch and banged on the door. Wanda practically threw herself outside.

“She hasn’t come back,” she said. “She’s still out there.”

“We need to see the child’s room,” one police officer said. “We have to see the last place you saw her.”

“You don’t need to do that,” Patricia said. “His name is James Harris. He lives near me. He might have taken her back to his house. I can show you.”

One officer stayed in the living room and wrote what she said on a pad while the other followed Wanda down the short hall to Destiny’s bedroom, then a loud shriek filled the trailer. The officer lowered his pad and ran down the hall. Patricia couldn’t squeeze past the officers so she stayed with Mrs. Greene until Wanda Taylor emerged from between them with Destiny in her arms.

The little girl looked sleepy and unconcerned about all the fuss. Wanda sat on the sofa, Destiny draped across her lap, limp body cradled in her mother’s arms. The officers didn’t say anything and their faces betrayed no expression.

“I saw him,” Patricia told them. “His name is James Harris, he lives on Middle Street, his van is a white van with tinted windows. Something’s wrong with his mouth, with his face.”