Read The Bottom for Free Online

sometimes.”
    He says he crawled up the hill a little and stumbled onto a path, another way to the river farther downstream.
    “I can see good at night,” Awesome says, “but it was dark as hell. I heard another couple of sounds, like maybe an animal or something, and then some little ‘whirr-whirr’ kind of sounds. And then I heard the bushes rustling, and I laid real still.
    “Dude, he walked right by me. He couldn’t of been ten feet away. I just about shit myself. And then he was gone.”
    I ask him what he did then.
    “Soon as I felt safe, I got the fuck out of there.”
    He knows the night it happened for a good reason. Two days later, the searchers found Kelli Jonas’s abused body around the place where that path would have met the James River.
    “I never went back there,” he says. “I run into Red a few months later, and he said the cops was all over him for a while, along with everybody else down there. He said he didn’t tell ’em about me, which I appreciated.
    “I know I shoulda gone to the cops, or told somebody, but I was scared. I didn’t want nothing to do with any of that mess. The cops got it in for me anyhow.”
    The police did have a tendency, in Awesome’s more feral days, of homing in on him. He’s spent a few weeks in jail over the course of his troubled, drug-addled life.
    “I thought they’d catch the son of a bitch,” he says. We’re standing by my car now, me smoking a Camel and the Dude talking.
    “But they never did, and he keeps doin’ it. I want it to stop, Willie, but they’ll think I did it if I tell them now.”
    I ask Awesome if he remembers anything about the man.
    “It was dark as shit. Couldn’t hardly see my hand in front of my face. All I remember is seeing his feet when he walked by, not hurrying, like he was out on a damn picnic.”
    I don’t know where, if anywhere, this is all leading. They already found footprints.
    I tell the Dude to let me know if he remembers anything else.
    “You ain’t gonna tell the cops I was there, are you, Willie?”
    The look of desperation fades when I tell him I won’t.
    “I just want to help,” he says.
    TALKING ABOUT THE Kelli Jonas case makes me wonder if Mark Baer’s gotten around to calling her parents yet.
    At the office, I see that Baer’s spending his Saturday at his desk. For all his butt-kissing and ladder-climbing efforts, I have to admit that Baer does work. I am sure that the meter has already run out on his time-clock week.
    “I called twice, but nobody answered, just got voice mail,” he says. “They haven’t called back yet.”
    There’s nothing much going on in the newsroom. Most of Baer’s compatriots ran out of hours sometime yesterday afternoon.
    There are no dirt naps in my in-box yet, so I make an offer.
    “How about if I drive by there?”
    Baer surprises me by accepting my offer.
    “I’m up to my ass, got two more stories to write. I’d appreciate it.”
    I tell Sally I’ll be back in a while and to call my cell if mayhem erupts before sundown.
    “Be sure and clock out,” she says. Her hours are long since up, too, I’m thinking.
    Between there and the front door, I forget, as usual.
    The Jonases haven’t moved since their daughter’s murder. They live where they always have, in a western Henrico suburb that still has some life left before the renters start moving in, but it has seen better days. The new mall at Short Pump drew the developers and suburbanites west with it. The burbs keep moving west, and if you don’t change houses every few years, you wake up one day and find that the nice little strip mall half a mile away now houses a nail salon, a judo studio, a payday loan operation and a bunch of For Lease signs.
    Nobody answers when I knock, but I hear a lawn mower. I walk around to the side yard and there’s a man, about my age, working his way around the Bradford pears with a push mower.
    He cuts the mower when I make my presence known. When I tell him I’m from the