The girl remained leaned over, fresh cleavage like a beacon. There was something pleasant or even erotic about the faint sweat-scent.
"You know anyone around here who makes boots, shoes, leather gear ?" he asked.
Her bland face pinched up in some perplexion. "Well, yeah, an' that's a might funny ya asked."
"Why?”
"On account of what'cha asked before."
"I don't get it." Cummings admitted.
Her face seemed to float before the sky. "See, there was a fella who made boots 'round here, fine boots they was, an' it's the same fella I'se just told ya ‘bout. Jake Martin. Travis Tuckton's grandpap."
........
She'd given directions, at least to the best of his comprehension. The information put a fast spark in him. Yeah, this Jake Martin, he's probably dead, state cops've probably already cheeked it out, but—
Header, the word came like a spirit's voice. Head-humpin'.
Cummings had more important things to worry about now, like where to secret a veritable shitload of bands of $100 bills that he'd ripped off of a drug dealer he'd murdered. But the case—this bizarre, inexplicable set of sexual homicides—had long-since put a hook in him. At the very least, it couldn't hurt to look into the loke.
Off Tick Neck, he thought. He was there now, cruising slowly up the road's winding cant. There were a lot of side roads, but...
No mail routes, no addresses. Anybody who lived back here wasn't a legally censused resident. These roads had no street names, some of them weren't even on the county map grid.
Cain't's remember too good, the girl had told him just before she'd left. But I'se think ya turn 'cross from the deadfall, the big 'un. You'll's see it...
Just when Cummings would give up, there it was: a deadfall of logs, branches, and cut brambles. The county left them all the time after storms, but this one. Cummings noted, was large as it was old. Rotten and falling in on itself. He veered left up a dirt-scratch lane barely wide enough to admit the car.
Wound up and around. And—
Wham.
A cottage, just like the girl had said. Ramshackle old place, falling in on itself like the deadfall. Ivy growing up rotted sideboarding, missing shingles like missing teeth. A human pock in the woods. But—
What the fuck?
This was the craziest thing he'd ever seen. A squatter cottage, yes, but parked right before the crumbling front porch sat a gleaming Rolls Royce Silver Shadow.
Guess this old man Martin's not dead after all, Cummings assumed, but the rest was folly. A hillfolk shoemaker? Must sell a lot of shoes to be able to drive a car like that...
Cummings pulled right up. If he wanted the element of surprise, he'd blown it royally: anyone in the cottage would be able to hear his car ease up. But, wait—
No, he thought.
They wouldn't be able to hear at all. Because another sound permeated the surrounding woods.
A high-pitched screech.
A... Cummings' ponderings were guillotined by what he next thought. It couldn't be. No cop was that lucky.
The screech sounded like a power tool. A power drill.
No way. no way, he thought. He disembarked, walked up to the house, peeked into a side window.
Cramped room. Would've been large were it not for all the junk. Tools, leather sheets hanging. Rows and rows of hand-carved wooden shoeblocks. And—
A table.
No way, no way, Cummings thought yet again, but this time the thought was drained as a bled pig.
The screeching ceased. Then a voice erupted, a crotchety, old hillbilly voice.
"Get it, son. Ooo-eee! Cut yerself a good peckerhole in that cracker head! I ain't lyin' ta ya. Travis! This here's the white trash bastard who done head-humped yer maw!"
Was Cummings gazing into a rent in hell? On the table lay a well-dressed man, on his back, a cleanly cut hole gushing blood as a ham-hock hand withdrew a knife from the hole. The hand belonged to Travis Clyde Tuckton, the boy whose photograph Cummings had already seen at the state crime lab. And sitting off from the table was a wizened, whiskered old man in a wheelchair. A man with—
No feet, Cummings recognized.
Jake Martin. Tuckton"s grandfather...
"I'se so pissed. I'se in a swivet. Grandpap!"
"Only fittin' an’ proper, son. Just like it says in God's book. An eye fer a eye!"
"An" a heads fer a head!"
Cummings stared.
The boy, a big, brawny, short-haired lad with a surprisingly friendly face, lowered his trousers and promptly inserted his erect penis into the hole in the corpse's head. Then, biting his lower lip in a perverse rage, he grabbed the corpse's ears, and—
Began to hump.
He began to hump the head.
"Ooo-eee!" the footless old man exclaimed. "Hump that there evil head, boy. I say, hump it!"
As Cummings stared on, his sentience felt akin to a swamp rat racing round in his mind, madly seeking exit. The old man in the chair had his penis out too, was masturbating as he whooped. And Tuckton continued to hump the head in a fury...
"Yeah. Travis! Do'm up reals good!" the old man celebrated, his hand choking his own penis like a chicken neck. "Get'cher self off a dandy nut in that there head!"
"Gonna come in his head so hard. Grandpappy" the boy huffed, humping away, "my peckersnot's gonna squirt out his butt!"
"Yeah, boy! Yeeeeeah!"
So here it was, right before Cummings’ eyes. He'd stumbled upon this, he was watching it, for God's sake. He was bearing witness tο the same macabre crime which had obsessed him for months.
He was witnessing a header...
Cummings, an automaton now, unholstered his service revolver. Turned. Walked up the porch steps and entered the dilapidated house.
"Aw, shee-it, Grandpap," he heard, "I'se gonna gets me off my first nut likes real fast in this cracker head!"
"Go fer it, boy! Get it! We'se got all night ta fuck that head, plenty time fer more nuts. Why, I'se'll hump four 'er five times myself! So don’t’cha worry 'bout comin' fast. Pipe a load a juice that'd make yer daddy proud!"
Numb, and oddly fearless, Cummings stepped into the room.
"Who the hail!" the old man cracked.
The boy, evidently in the spasms of orgasm, slowed down his pelvic thrusts into the corpse-head and opened his eyes.
'"S'a cop!" he realized.
BAM.'
Cummings squeezed off the first shot. The boy's eye disappeared as a pulpy red blur, and he fell away from the table, from the... head. He landed on the wood floor hard as a side of fresh-butchered beef, his erection still pulsing down, offering semen to the air.
"Ya blammed fuckin' cop! Look what'cha done!"
BAM!
Cummings' second shot caught the old man in the belly, who doubled over in the wheelchair. And—
BAM!
The third shot divided the top of his head almost as cleanly as a machete through a melon.
Cummings stood. Stared. For the second time in a day his eyes went wide in spite of rising cordite. Silence like a graveyard at 3 a.m. insinuated about him, and so did the simple thought.
I just solved the head-humping murders.
That's all it had taken. Three shots from his service revolver, and it was all over...
What... now? There was no phone, no way to report the incident to the state. And on this side of the ridge, his radio probably wouldn't reach the dispatcher.