Page 8 of Ewing

“I don’t have any idea. Might be because, you know that it’s still the spring thaw or something. You know how nasty the roads can get when there is flooding everywhere.” The asshole nodded like he had any idea how hard it was to get things in and out of this god-forsaken place. He wasn’t a working man. “I’ll gather up all the orders and call the places here in a bit. You just leave it to me. I might have ordered them wrong or something. I’ll get on it.”

“You said that Mr. Mason ordered them.” He nodded, not sure what he’d said to the man but Ewing was nodding. “Yes. That’s right. You told me that he’d ordered it, and now you’re saying that you did. Which is it?”

Putting his hand on the largest of the eye hooks he’d been playing around with to use out in the old barn, he tried to think of the best way to get out of talking to this fucker. Just as he was going to pick up the hook and use it on him, the phone rang. Thank god.

The person on the other end was asking if they had any pen bolts. He knew what the person was talking about but hadn’t been able to order them either. People would use them to build bear-proof fencing around their land to keep their animals safe. It didn’t work, and just as he was going to tell the person on the phone that, the Cross’s left him, and he simply fell to the floor and put his head on the front of the counter.

“Is Mr. Mason there. He knows what works better than you do, Tetter. Christ, for as long as you’ve been working there, you’d think that you’d have the first clue as to what all that shit in the store is for by now. Instead, all you do is walk around there looking like—” He hung up on the man. He didn’t have time for that sort of shit either.

Pulling out his cell phone while still on the floor, he called the number that he had for Vance. It rang for a bit, and he was just thinking about what sort of message to leave when the phone was picked up. They answered it with ‘Agent Farnworth, how may I help you’ and confused him even more.

“I’m sorry. I must have dialed the wrong number.” The man asked him what number he’d dialed. Before Mac could figure out that hanging up might be a better idea, he told him the number that he’d been given. “It’s for a man by the name of Vance Tetters. No, that’s not quite right. His momma was married, so I don’t know… He’s my nephew.”

“Really? Then I hate to be the one to tell you this, sir, but Vance Tetters, as well as three other men, were killed not too long ago. I think that it’s only been about three days now.” He was glad that he was sitting down when he got that information. He wondered aloud what happened. “Well, they were doing something illegal, and it caught up with them. Are you, by any chance, their boss? They had someone keeping them in line, I heard.”

He closed the connection after thinking about who he was talking to. Were the Feds involved? Why did they care for his little business? Getting up, he pulled the closed sign down and locked the door to the shop. Getting on the computer, something else that he didn’t know a great deal about, he logged into the local newspaper page, one that he’d been reading all his life, and found the article on the front page.

“Four men killed after killing four teenagers in a massive murdering spree.” It went on to talk about how these four men had kidnapped three females and one male from the mall and had murdered them. In the most heinous way, the paper said. They’d been caught, it said, by the Feds and consequently killed. Then it asked if anyone had any news on the men or what they’d been up to because they had some other missing children that they’d like to put names to.

That meant that they’d found his dumping ground, too, he thought. Closing the computer when someone yanked on the door, he nearly laughed out loud when they tried three more times to gain entrance. When they finally gave up, looking in the window to see if they were kidding about beingclosed, Mac let out the long breath that he’d been holding.

It was just a little side business, he told himself. Why were the Feds involved? He could see the police being curious, but the Feds? It was just so that he’d have some cash, damn it. But it had also been really fun for him too. Like getting the girls ready to be sold off for the night had been his special treat.

Washing them down with the coldest water that he could have coming out of the tap at home, he’d then hang them from the rafters of the old barn on display. It had been something that he’d never dreamed of doing before. Not only that, but there were enough people out there willing to pay big bucks to fuck and kill someone smaller than them.

He didn’t know how to make the computer work for him, so he’d just been making up flyers about having a man’s night out had been simple enough. He had only meant to sell the girls to someone and then not have to worry about them being around. But the first man who won the bidding asked what he could do with the girl he was bidding on, and Mac had told him anything that he wanted.

The man bought and paid for the kid, walked right up to her, and put a bullet in her head. He was so shocked that it took him several minutes to understand that was all he wanted to do. To murder somebody. Then, he was asked how much he charged for disposal.

“It’s not going to be cheap, you know. I have to clean up the place, then put them someplace nobody will find them.” The man said that he was in a generous mood and would give him an extra five grand if he could do that once a month. So that was what he charged for just dumping the girls over a hill to let whatever was down there to have at them. Men, too, when they got smart with him. Though there weren’t too many of those.

Since he had no overhead but the boys that worked for him, he was making a good profit off it. However, now that he’d been doing it a while, Mac knew that he was going to have to start putting some of the money to better use than just having a thick steak every meal and then buying himself all kinds of fun, manly toys like the new truck that was sitting outside in the parking lot.

He now had a boat, a pool, and even a pair of snow ski things that he loved more than the boat. The boat, a big one, had to be moored in the water too far away for him to get to use it every day, but the ski things? Why they were a hit with every snow fall.

Getting into his new truck, the sucker had everything that could be ordered on it, he made his way home. He had some thinking to do, and tonight wasn’t going to be fun for him because it hurt his head to think. But he did feel better about getting home when he had his new baby.

The truck was bright red and had a pair of smoke pipes on it that would allow him to drive fast. However, with all the twists and turns around here, the highest speed that he’d been able to get to was fifty-five. And even that on long stretches wasn’t all that easy. His plan was to have taken it all the way out to Vegas one of these days and race it up and down the strip. He’d heard of people doing that.

He’d not done anything to the Mason’s house but move in. All their things, including the shirts that Mr. Mason wore all the time, were his to do with what he wanted. The freezer had been nice and full, and even it was beginning to look a little bare now that he had been eating all the stuff in it. The man had a great deal of bear meat and wondered if he could figure out where it had come from so that he could get more. There was even bison and elk meat, too. But he didn’t particularly care for the elk meat. To him, it was just too gamey.

Setting up his meal to thaw out, he decided that tomorrow he’d go out to the dump place and see if there was anything around that might get him caught. He’d never taken any precautions always thinking that one of the bigger animals of the park would take care of the bodies for him.

Glad that he’d remembered to bring home the laptop, he decided that as soon as his supper was over, he was going to figure out this ordering thing. While that was going on, he was looking at all the newspapers that had been delivered to the Masons since he’d moved into their home. It wasn’t like they were going to use it.

The Masons surely had to be gone by now, having been the first body that he’d dumped in his special place. Even the gun that he’d killed off the couple with was there. He was going to be in a lot of shit if he got caught. He was sort of happy to know that his nephew Vance was gone so that he didn’thave to worry about him telling on him. Paying him a small part of what he’d been making had been little compared to what he’d get when the night was over.

Chapter 4

Ewing was glad when it was bedtime for the kids. He just needed to relax his mind a bit so that he could figure out this thing with Tetters. He knew that he was the man behind the kids being killed the other day. Knew it in his heart and soul. But what he was afraid of was that there was something more going on, and this was because he knew that Tetters was as dumb as a rock, so how did he figure out to kidnap the women?

Also, and this terrified him even more, was how was he selling them, to whom, and what did they do that had them ending up in a crevice on the mountain? He looked at Trinity when she said his name. He was sure that she’d said it more than the one time, too.

“I was thinking about Tetters, the man that looked like he was going to snatch up one of the girls.” She said that she was sure that he had wanted them. “I didn’t want to think about that, but you’re right. And that makes me more uncomfortable when I think about what he was doing with the others that were killed.” She told him that she didn’t know what was going on with that.

“Oh, that’s right. You weren’t here when the girls were found to be kidnapped.” After telling her what had happened that night, he went on to tell her of finding the stash of bodies. “There are ten so far that we can’t put an identification to. The two men were easy enough to figure out. We’d only had the two missing and now they’re accounted for. But since their bodies have been down there for some time, there is no telling what happened to them prior to them being dumped. Some of them have bullet holes in their bodies, others knife markings. It’s hard to tell what the animals did to them versus what actually killed them. What we do know is that they were all dead before they ended up there.”

“So you had these four pieces of shit kidnapping teenage girls, ten of them—” He told her that it was a total of twenty-three so far. “Christ, that’s a lot of deaths, but they were taken someplace that perhaps this Tetters person knows about, and they’re killed.”

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