The Hollow Ones(9)
Leppo looked back at the girl. He yanked her hair back even harder, leaving her tender throat fully exposed. Something was very wrong.
In that moment, Odessa could feel what was going to come next.
“LEPPO!” Odessa screamed.
Without any warning, Walt Leppo stabbed downward. The blade sliced through flesh, bone, and cartilage and got stuck in the girl’s clavicle and shoulder—a sickening, muffled bone crack audible as Leppo struggled to disengage the knife and the shoulder popped out of its socket.
The girl screamed.
Odessa fired twice on pure reflex. The Glock jumped in her hands.
The force of the impact pushed Leppo off the girl. He pinwheeled back into a nightstand next to the bed, still holding her hair.
The girl fell with him, bleeding, howling, landing on him. She jerked away, her hair released from his grip. Three thick strands of ripped hair stayed on Leppo’s hand.
The girl crawled away quickly on all fours into the far corner of the room.
Leppo’s fall knocked a humidifier off the nightstand, the jug coming loose as it fell to the floor, water glugging into the carpet. Leppo crumpled against the side of the bed, sliding down, his body settling, his shoulders and head leaning against the bed frame at an unnatural angle.
Odessa stood frozen in place. She cried out, “Leppo!” as though he had been shot by someone else, even as she stared at him over the barrel of her smoking gun.
Loud voices called out from downstairs. Cops in the house, finally.
Leppo’s horrible grin relaxed, his eyes losing their focus. As she stood there staring, unable to believe what had just happened, Odessa saw something…
A mist, looking like a ripple of heat mirage, rose from Leppo’s twisted form. A presence in the room, hovering like swamp gas. No color, only—again—the odor of burnt solder, different from the cordite smoke still wisping out of her gun barrel…
Leppo’s body sagged perceptibly, as though something, some entity, had fled his body as he died.
When the Montclair cops burst inside the bedroom, they found a young woman sitting on the floor with her arms around a sobbing, trembling nine-year-old girl with a deep knife wound on her shoulder. A middle-aged man lay slumped against the girl’s nightstand and bed, dead from two gunshot wounds. The young woman pulled one arm away from the thrashing, wailing girl, showing the armed police officers her FBI badge.
“Agent down…” Odessa said, hyperventilating. “Agent down…”
1962. The Mississippi Delta.
He was briefed on the investigation by a supervisory special agent on the short predawn flight from Knoxville into Jackson, Mississippi. The particulars of the case featured many notable peculiarities, but the fact that the Bureau had chartered an airplane to expedite his immediate reassignment to the Jackson Field Office—he, Earl Solomon, a twenty-eight-year-old rookie FBI special agent just four months graduated from the academy—indicated above all else that this was to be no ordinary inquiry.
A sedan picked him up from the airport tarmac for the long ride north on Route 49 into the Delta. Aside from an initial, perfunctory greeting, the driver, a white agent in his late thirties with a twang in his voice that was just this side of hillbilly, remained silent during the ride, preferring to flick cigarette ashes out his open window rather than dirty the dashboard ashtray. Solomon understood the dynamic. He also understood why he had been dispatched to this tinderbox of civil rights activism and violence. It had nothing to do with his abilities as an agent, nor with his experience, which was almost nil. A disturbing number of lynchings had occurred recently in the Delta, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation was being stonewalled by local law enforcement. They needed to present a black face to the locals.
Solomon was one of the first three black agents accepted into the FBI Academy earlier that year. In his few months in Knoxville, he had gotten along fairly well with his fellow agents, most of whom had military experience and so had previous exposure to integration. Solomon supposed he had endured no more than any other green agent learning the ropes through the most menial assignments. When the call came in the middle of the night for him to report to the office, he didn’t know what to expect, but it certainly wasn’t a flight to Jackson, Mississippi, to join his first active criminal investigation. His special agent in charge in Knoxville intimated that the reassignment order may have come directly from Mr. Hoover himself. Solomon felt the eyes of the Bureau upon him.
Because this was no ordinary investigation. Another lynching had occurred, this one in a remote, wooded thicket, apparently with ritualistic aspects at the scene. Local law had cited irreligious characteristics of the crime, reported as “satanism,” but there were no crime scene photographs yet and local law was notoriously unreliable. That wasn’t the most incendiary part of this homicide, however.
This time the lynching was of a white man.
The local agent drove him northwest from Jackson, up Route 49, north of Greenwood, well west of Oxford. The town was called Gibbston, a fertile stretch of land between the Mississippi and the Yazoo Rivers where cotton—and the white race—was king.
They pulled up outside the post office, a small shack that looked like a bait shop with a faded federal shield on the door. The Jackson agent got out and waited for Solomon to join him, though never looking Solomon in the eye. They crossed the street to a clutch of white men in suits without jackets, fanning themselves with their hats, mopping their brows with sweat-dampened handkerchiefs. Solomon was introduced to the local sheriff, two deputies, and the Jackson special agent in charge, whose last name was Macklin.