Jerry Bledsoe - Blood Games

Diversion Books
A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.
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Copyright 1991 by Jerry Bledsoe
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

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First Diversion Books edition May 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62681-287-1

Before He Wakes
Bitter Blood
Death Sentence

For Greta

Names of some minor characters have been changed and some identifying characteristics slightly altered to protect privacy. Names changed are indicated with an asterisk on first use.

I SEEK A FATHER WHO MOST NEEDS A SON.

T he hogs never showed alarm, no sense of their awful and imminent fate. If they had, Noel Lee wasnt sure that he would have been able to raise them. He had been a hog farmer for just two years, a small-time operator raising only five hundred at a time, a sideline to the nine hundred acres of tobacco, peanuts, corn, and soybeans that supplied his main income.

The hogs actually werent his. They belonged to a contractor, W. L. Murphy, who ran the biggest hog operation on the East Coast. Murphy supplied pigs, feed, and medicine to Noel Lee, and he simply provided a place and care for the pigs to grow. They came to him ten weeks old, weighing about forty pounds each. Sixteen weeks later, they weighed six times that much and were ready for market.

Lee had mixed feelings when that time came. He looked forward to being paid for his work, but felt a sadness about it, too. Hogs were friendly and intelligent, he had discovered, and despite his best intentions to the contrary, he grew close to them in the four months that he tended them. They recognized him and sometimes came up to him seeking affection, not unlike a dog, making it harder to send them off to the packing house when the time came.

That always took place in the middle of the night. Hogs were easier to handle when they were still drowsy with sleep. Whats more, in the hot Carolina summer, moving hogs at night was imperative. Hogs cant survive long in heat. Even in the coolness of night they had to be sprayed with water while being moved to keep them from overheating and dying.

That was the primary reason that loading times ranged from midnight to 6:00 A.M., the coolest hours of the day, and on the twenty-fifth of July, 1988, Lee drew a four oclock loadout, as the operation was called. He was up after only a few hours sleep, and at three-fifteen, he climbed into his gray Chevrolet pickup and headed for his hog house, just a short distance up Grimesland Bridge Road from his large brick house on the eastern edge of Pitt County. Situated on a sandy lane well back from the road, the hog house was long and low, with a corrugated metal roof and canvas sides that remained open in summer to provide air circulation. When Lee arrived, he was surprised to see the lights on, the big truck with its railed, double-decker trailer already backed up to the wooden loading chute at the rear.

Newton Carter, head of the three-man loadout crew, was already in the pens, marking the backs of the biggest hogs with a fat orange crayon. Only the biggest, most aggressive hogs would be taken. The others, more timid at the feeding troughs, would be left to fatten for another week or so.

Im glad to see yall early, Lee said. Might get some sleep tonight.

Loading hogs was hard and smelly work. The stench permeated clothing after only a few minutes and was powerful enough to set sensitive stomachs aboil, but loadout crews were accustomed to it.

After the biggest hogs were marked, Lee and the two crew members went into the pens carrying heavy plywood boards with handholds cut into the top. These cutting boards, as they are called, were used to isolate and direct the selected hogs to the gates of the pens and into the aisle, where Newton Carter encouraged the reluctant toward the chute and into the trailer with a battery-operated electric prod. The hogs were disgruntled and confused at being rousted from sleep, and the loadout always proceeded with much recalcitrance and squealing on their part and much scrambling and yelling from the men. This night, however, it went more smoothly than usual, and by four the job was done, the men sweat-drenched and dung-besmeared, the hogs snorting and squirming in the close confines of the trailer, cooled by automatic sprinklers. By mid-morning, the hogs would be hanging by their rear legs, eviscerated, soon to be rendered into bacon, pork chops, ham, and sausage.

The truck driver, taking no chances on losing any of his crowded passengers to the heat, left immediately with his load, but the crew lingered for a while, chatting with Lee, discussing the next loadout.

Well, see you next week, Lee said, as the crew made ready to depart. After they left, he returned to check the automatic feeders, to make sure the pens were secure and to shut off the lights.

Ten minutes later, he was back in his truck heading home, eager for a shower. But as he neared the road, he saw an orange glow against the trees to the north, perhaps half a mile away. His first thought was that a neighbors trailer home might be ablaze, but then he saw that the fire was too near the road to be the trailer. A wreck, he thought. Thered been wrecks in that curve before. Perhaps somebody was trapped in a burning vehicle.

Lee had been a volunteer fireman and rescue squad member for more than twenty years, and he turned instinctively toward the blaze, his foot pressing hard on the gas pedal. Up closer, he saw that the fire was not from a wreck either. It was about eight feet off the road, beside a path that led through the trees to an old black cemetery, overgrown and never visited anymore. A small pile of something was burning, the flames blue at the base and leaping straight into the air, four feet or more. Lee taught fire science at the community college, and he recognized immediately that the fire was fueled by an accelerant, probably gasoline or kerosene. Clearly, it had been set only minutes earlier. What was burning? And who would set such a fire alongside a lonely country road in the middle of the night? Something odd was going on here.

Lee slowed the truck but the thought struck him that whoever had set the fire might still be lurking nearby and might not want anybody to know what was burning. That sent a shiver up his spine. He crept on past, seeing no sign of anybody, and started to turn around in the first driveway that he came to, only a few hundred feet beyond the fire. But the driveway angled back sharply from the road so that he couldnt see if a vehicle might be parked there, and he continued on a few hundred yards to the intersection of U.S. 264, a four-lane highway with a grass median. There he turned around and drove back to the fire, which was still burning vigorously. This time he paused without getting out of his truck so he could make sure that the fire had no chance of spreading. The surrounding area was naturally swampy, and the roadside was still wet from a thunderstorm that had passed earlier in the night. Satisfied that the fire would be contained, Lee headed for home and his much needed shower, but he couldnt stop thinking about the fire and how strange it was. Surely whoever had set it had been up to no good.