It’s been an hour since I left Knoxville.
An hour since Judi told me Bill was dead.
“I slipped in it, Keeler,” Judi says. She isn’t looking at me when she says it, just keeps her eyes focused on the tip of her smoke. “Looks like I’m guilty as hell, but I swear I found him this way. I turned to throw up and I slipped in the blood.”
I believe her. If there’s anyone who doesn’t deserve to be within a hundred miles of whatever happened here, it’s Judi. She’s the good one, the one that always keeps us grounded no matter how hard a job gets.
I tell her so.
She’s crying now. “What do we do, Keeler?”
“Show me,” I say. “You need to show me.”
Judi mashes the cigarette into the porch boards and nods in agreement, but the nod just keeps going without her saying anything else, the wind pecking at her blonde curls.
I sit beside her, and she leans into me.
She’s not like Bill and me.
She doesn’t deserve any of it.
• • •
Bill Connelly was an ex-cop, SWAT. Before the academy he served overseas in the military. Not Iraq or Afghanistan, but places just beyond the edges of CNN’s infographics. The places you don’t learn about in fourth period geography class. Kinshasa. N’djamena. Manbij. When we ran an interrogation on contract, he was the one that made it real. He’d pull a fingernail or two. A tooth. Once he showed up with a leaky car battery with jumper cables and sharp, fanged leads.
I saw him use a potato peeler once.
He made it fucking real.
Looking back on all the contract jobs we did together, nothing compares to how Bill has ended up. When Judi opens the front door it takes me a moment to even register what I’m seeing. My legs stall in the threshold. Bill is tied to a dining chair, feet bound and hands behind his back. A black pond of blood thickening over the linoleum. His eyelids are sucked into the sockets and there’s a crust of coagulate over the cheekbones. The scalp is severed and there are crude carvings on his skull like Celtic knots.
“Jesus, Bill,” I say, as if the pity would do him any good. “What the hell did they do to you?” There’s no avoiding the blood on the floor. It makes a sick wet sound as I plant my feet. Whoever did this knew how to drain him quick. A brutal slice up the femoral might have done it.
I crouch to study his face.
Those sunken lids.
“They’ve taken his goddamn eyes,” I say.
I turn to the door. Judi’s lighting another cigarette, hands shaking. I give her a nod and she gets the meaning, hands me the lit smoke and lights another for herself. I take a long drag and let the smoke through my nose.
There’s something about the lips.
A blond thread at the center of Bill’s bloody mouth.
“You see this, Judi?” I say.
“See what?” She’s still watching from the doorway. “It’s a goddamn hatchet job, Keeler.”
I look again, closer this time. I cup his bloodstained cheeks and squeeze gently, parting his lips. From the void of his mouth I pull a hairy braid of wheat. The stalk keeps coming, green leaves slick with blood and mucous. When it’s ten inches past his teeth, there’s a snag. I’m careful not to snap the stem. With the cigarette smoldering at the center of my lips, I gently guide the wheatstalk the rest of the way. At the base of the stalk, wrapped in roots, is a small woven bag. I go to the kitchenette and lay the stalk over the Formica counter. There’s a steak knife in the drawer and I use it to slice open the bag.
I drop the knife and cover my mouth.
“What is it, Keeler?” Judi says. “What’d you find?”
I don’t say a word, not yet at least.
Inside the bag are Bill’s emerald green eyes.
• • •
The eyes aren’t the only items in the root bag. There’s also a pair of molars, along with a thin wad of gray hair. But mostly I’m interested in the folded cardstock. It’s a small piece, coated with wax. When I unfold the paper there’s writing on the inside. More Celtic imagery, but this time there are words encircling the symbols. It says: CMB KNOTWORK HILL.
We sit on the porch with a bottle of bourbon planted between us and the cardstock folded in my palm. There’s a hollow chime overhead as a pair of tiger moths skitter against the porchlight. Night animals scampering in the outer darkness.
Judi takes a hard pull from the bottle. She plucks the cardstock from between my fingers and looks it over. “Knotwork Hill,” she says, like she knows the place. “If I wasn’t thoroughly creeped out already, I’m there now.”
“I’ve never heard of it,” I say.
“You wouldn’t,” she says. “Not something a city boy would know anything about. I doubt Bill ever heard of it either. If it didn’t have tits or a line on a quick buck, Bill wasn’t interested.”
I acquiesce with a flip of my hands.
She wasn’t wrong.
“This place, where is it?” I ask.
“Halfway between here and Coker Creek. Just a few minutes down the way, really. Up an old fire road.” She laughs quietly, shakes her head. “I just can’t believe it’s come up.”
“There’s got to be more to it.”
“There could be. It’s a place local kids hang out sometimes. Kind of a rite of passage. They go up late at night and see how long they can last before, well.”
“Before what?”
“It’s a dumb story, Keeler.”
“Whoever did this to Bill didn’t think so.”
Judi holds her breath and lets it out slow. “Something called a bronach, some kind of Irish witch. The settlers built a small convent on Knotwork Hill and one of the nuns was double-dealing with the devil, so it goes. The teenagers
