Hell in the Heartland by Jax Miller

Hell in the Heartland by Jax Miller

Author:Jax Miller [Miller, Jax]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2020-07-01T17:00:00+00:00


18

* * *

THE OUTLAW LANDS (CONTINUED)

* * *

2001

Less Than Two Years After the Fire

Wyandotte is about a half-hour drive east from Welch and only ten miles from Missouri’s southwest corner. One particular trip finds the roads littered with dead turtles after historic flooding. The snapping turtle, the symbol of the Wyandotte Nation, and of the ancient American Indian belief that life started on its shell, crushed on the shoulders of US Route 60. The mornings are rosy and have no resemblance to the nights and the men who inhabit the Outlaw Lands. Wyandotte feels like a graveyard where you hold your breath upon driving by to avoid drawing up restless spirits. Streetlights dwindle to blackness, and my imagination stirs the darkness into the silhouettes of men leaning on the shadows of broken-down signs and long-out-of-order stores. My headlights reflect off the animals’ eyes that now belong to the shadows of imagined killers. Anxiety is a red-hot flash up my breastbone, like the devil licks my sternum. I shut off the music and roll down the car windows to listen to the hot wind outside and never take my eyes off the road the many times I have to drive past the meth houses.

My heartbeat is but a demon on my shoulder, tapping the backs of his heels against my ribs. But I fashion my past into a shield so that I meet the addicts where they’re at. I speak their language; I know their pain. Unlike the missing girls, these are the ones that I understand.

In the spring of 2001, shortly before the Shadwick searches, a twenty-six-year-old up-and-coming meth cook from Miami, Oklahoma, named Johnny Rose was hired to help transport berries from the fruit farms of Oklahoma and Colorado. While on one such trip, Rose divulged to the driver that he knew who’d taken Lauria and Ashley. Perhaps the cattiness of meth drove Rose to tell the driver what he’d seen and heard of the girls. Perhaps guilt pressed his impulse control. Perhaps it was to make room at the top of the food chain when Rose told the driver that the crimes landed with the Glovers of Wyandotte, a father-son duo who helped control the local world of methamphetamine.

When the driver provided the girls’ families with this new information, they sent over one of several private investigators they had hired to speak with Johnny Rose, who’d grow into one of Wyandotte’s more notorious violent criminals over the next few years. “Johnny Rose started talking about the Glovers, but we hadn’t heard of them before,” Lorene says as we drive through Wyandotte. She and I have driven this way before, a terrifying thing in and of itself if you’re familiar with Lorene’s notorious lead foot. “We’d heard a lot of stuff coming from the Wyandotte area.” So Lorene and company took it upon themselves to shake the trees, hoping for fruit to fall. Still, no one was searching for the girls outside the relatives and those they hired.

One of



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.