While Cherry wound her way through the bureaucracy and backtracked toward civilization, I studied the map scrawled by Jimmie Hawkes, one more relic of this bizarre case. Jimmie Hawkes had lived amidst the stinking boxes, fought the bouts, ate the maggoty food. His mind was a stream-of-consciousness retelling of the horror.

I didn’t know if he’d entered the camp a damaged child, or been damaged while there and during the crime-ridden post-camp years of his life. Given that his pre-camp life was spent shunted from relative to relative and living most of that time outside like a farm dog, I figured - from a fair amount of experience - that Jimmie Hawkes was pretty much broken from the git-go.

I stared at Hawkes’s childlike symbols: a wavy line for a creek, cross hatches for the plowed dirt of a field, lollipop shapes designating trees. Simple signs.

I put his map in my lap and replayed our prison experience in my mind, the half-faced man bouncing from toe to toe and firing tight, hard punches and whipping kicks at head height.

Saw Hawkes cup his hand over his crotch. “PIN A NUMBER ON YOUR DICKS, BOYS! PUT ON YOUR CUPS AND COVER YOUR PUPS!”

Athletic cups. The only fight protection the boys wore, according to Mickey Prince. A cushioned plastic and fabric semi-oval covering penis and testicles, held in place by slender straps around the hips. I thought of skinny boys wearing the protector, recalled Crayline wearing a cup and nothing else when he’d been spotted by the surveyor. I picked up a pencil and made a few loose sketches. Felt my heart skip a beat.

I turned to Cherry. “You have to call LaGrange and check on their video capabilities. I need to show Jimmie Hawkes something.”

“What?”

“It’s too strange. I have to run it by Hawkes.”

Fifteen minutes later we pulled into her office. Her computer set-up had a camera for video conferences and I sat and played with the controls while Cherry confirmed a similar set-up at LaGrange.

“Do they have the technology?” I asked.

She clapped her hand over the phone. “There’s a secure room with video capability, used for depositions and the like. Hawkes is headed there now.”

I pulled a black marker from my pocket, slipped a sheet of paper from the copier tray and drew a simple picture. Cherry ran in, tapping her watch.

“One minute to show time.”

We sat in front of the monitor and camera. Jimmie Hawkes appeared on our screen. The cheap lens flattened his face to create the impression of a bizarre mask, half a face of an intense-looking man with pronounced features, the other something clipped from a lunar landscape. The shadows on his face moved when he moved, creating the impression the landscape was pulsing.

There was an institutional-yellow wall behind Hawkes and I saw the arm of a guard behind and to the side of the man. Hawkes gave us his splayed grin and leaned close to his camera, face ballooning to fill the screen.

“Yo! Anyone in there?”

“We’re here, Jimmie. Detective Cherry and me, Detective Ryder. Look at the computer screen.”

Hawkes’s face turned to the monitor at his end, giving us a full shot of the ruination of the eyeless left side of his face. “I wish they’d have put the camera on the other side,” Cherry muttered.

“Ssssh,” I cautioned, knowing the mics could be surprisingly sensitive.

“I thought this was the side you liked, Miz Cherry,” Hawkes giggled. He flicked his tongue in and out and moved his damaged face to the lens until the screen went dark with shadow. He jolted back. I saw the guard’s large black hand on Hawkes’s shoulder, returning him to the chair.

Thanks, buddy, I thought to the guard. Maybe his presence would calm some of Hawkes’s wilder antics.

“I take it you hear us fine, Jimmie,” I said.

“This is fun, I never been on the tee-vee afore. Want me to sing you a song?” He leered into the camera and sang in a raspy falsetto.

“There once was a sweetie name of Cherry, who had a sweet pretty butt… and ever’ time I think of it, my peter starts standing straight up.”

I saw the hand come down and put the squeeze on Hawkes’s shoulder, heard a cautionary voice, deep: “Behave, Mr Hawkes.”

Hawkes shot a dark look at the guard. “He’d never a done that if I was Hank-fucking-Williams!”

“You know Hank Williams, Mr Hawkes?” Cherry asked.

“That shit played all day and all night when I was a kid. I’d sneak in the house while the record was on and Mamaw’d yell YOU MADE HANK SKIP! NO EAT FOR YOU!” Hawkes canted his head and leaned it closer to the camera. He winked. “I’d sure a-liked to eat Hank Williams. BETTER THAN PREACHER MAN MAGGOT SLOP!”

“Maggot slop?” Cherry asked, shooting me a glance. “Are you saying Brother Tanner fed you bad food, Jimmie?”

Hawkes poked his finger in his mouth, gagged. “GARBAGE CAN MEAT WHAT GOT THROWED AWAY AT THE STORE!”

I figured Tanner must have cooked with rotting ingredients scavenged from dumpsters behind groceries. It made sense: the killer had returned the favor by killing Tanner with poisoned food. I pasted a bright smile on my face and winked into the camera.

“I want to show you something, Jimmie. I want your impression.”

I reached to the side of the desk and retrieved a drawing done a few minutes before we’d fired up the theater of the weird.

“I want you to say exactly what comes into your mind, OK, Jimmie?”

I held up the paper, reproducing a symbol much in my mind of late:

=(8)=

Hawkes’s eyes widened. He screamed, “PUT ON YOUR CUPS AND GRAB YOUR PUPS! IT’S WHUP-ASS TIME!”

He started bouncing in his chair, agitated. “What is it, Jimmie?” I asked. “Tell me what you see.”

“COVER YOUR BALLS SPLATTER BRAINS ON THE WALLS!”

“Jimmie!”

“STRAP IT TIGHT AN’ WEAR IT RIGHT WE GONNA HAVE THE EAT TONIGHT!”

“What is it, Jimmie? What did I draw?”

He stood from his chair so all we could see was from his belly to mid-thigh. He cupped a hand over his genitals, jerked his hips at the camera.

“SOMEBODY’S NUMBER EIGHT TONIGHT! FIVE-FOUR-THREE-TWO-ONE … PUNCH THAT MUFUKA!”

Hawkes went crazy, flinging kicks and punches. Guards rushed in and the scene turned to tumult. It was over and I snapped off the video feed. Cherry pulled down the edge of my drawing so she could take a long look.

“I see it now,” she said. “It’s an athletic cup, right?”

I nodded. “A simple and effective representation. The equals signs are the straps, the parentheses form the cup, the number is the fighter’s number.”

Her eyes widened. “Is it possible that—”

I shook my head. “There’s no way to ID a fighter by the numbers. They were drawn fresh each fight night. But Crayline is number five.”

“The number on the symbol when Bridges got killed. Crayline killed Bridges, right? He had it in for the guy.”

“I figure Bridges served two purposes. One was revenge, Crayline carrying through on his threat. Two was a demonstration of how a kill was done. A teachable moment, as they say.”

Cherry made a face. “Ugh. But it makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is posting the information on the geocache site. The athletic-cup symbol of a fighter. The coordinates. Again, why post info that draws people to the murder scenes? It made it more likely to get caught.”

“Like calling in the FBI, it added the element of risk,” I said. “Get it?”

Cherry paused. I saw her re-playing the day Taithering died. Hearing my brother’s explanation for his public display of vengeance against a dead man.

“Danger, destruction, display,” she said, turning to me. “Charpentier’s criteria for symbolic victory over the past.”

I nodded. Cherry walked to the window and stared outside, finger at her pink lips. After a long minute, she turned to me, a strange light in her eyes.

“Who says only one kid from the backwoods fight club made it to the XFL?”