by D. M. Pulley
Ben continued the prayer, “‘It is the blood that makes atonement for the soul.’”
Jimmy’s eyes darted to hers. He shook his head. Don’t.
“It is the blood—”
The front door crashed open.
“Hey, Kris?” Her roommate, Pete, backed into the room, hauling his bike. “Say, what’s with the spray paint? Has the landlord seen th—”
His voice cut out as he turned into the room and registered knife, victim, killers.
“Pete!” Kris shrieked. “Help!”
“Oh, shit!” he gasped. He threw his bike as the ex–football star lunged for him. Metal tubing and wheels knocked Troy back, and Pete took off running down the street.
“Dammit!” Ben unholstered his gun and took off after him.
“Police! Help!” Kris screeched out the open door.
Her father grabbed her by the mouth. “Troy,” he barked. “Bring me that kid.”
Troy grabbed the bike off the kitchen floor and headed out on it without so much as a word.
CHAPTER 50
The monster with her father’s voice softly closed the door behind him, his hand still gripping her neck, dragging her like a bad dog. “I wouldn’t worry about him. We have several friends in the area. That mark on your door is like a beacon . . . Word spreads fast.”
Kris kept the knife hidden against her leg. She’d had an opening with his head down, but now she had his full attention. A trickle of blood leaked from her eyebrow where his blow had landed moments earlier. The pain throbbed.
“Dad,” she pleaded, hoping to sway him now that it was just the two of them. “Please. This can’t be right. You can’t do this! Let him go! For me . . .”
His eyes lit at her and he bellowed, “Who the hell are you to tell me what I can and cannot do? This is for you!”
She shrank from the booming voice that had terrorized her as a child every time he had caught her stepping out of line. She’d always been afraid of him, she realized. Some part of her saw the murder behind his eyes, even when she was small. “You can’t kill him,” she whimpered. “It’s wrong.”
“I’ll be the judge of what’s right and wrong.” The monster brushed her cheek the way a father might and shook his head. Stupid little girl. “Is it wrong to kill the beast threatening your children? Is it wrong to kill a rapist? A drug dealer? A murderer?”
The killer’s eyes shone with certainty. There would be no convincing him. Behind him, Jimmy thrashed and strained to break free. The seconds ticked by on the Elvis clock on the far wall. She said a silent prayer for Pete and tightened her grip on the knife.
“If he’s a murderer, what are you?” she whispered.
He picked up the cleaver again. “I’m just a hunter, Kris. A hunter culling the herd.”
“He’s not a deer! His name is Jimmy!” She just needed to get close enough. He’d never suspect an attack from her. She couldn’t even shoot a squirrel.
“Sweet girl, if he was a deer, at least he’d be useful. This one’s nothing but a drain on society. This damned city’s warped your senses, making you believe that we’re all the same, that we’re all equal. And now you’re acting like you’re in love with this animal. Are you?” he demanded, his eyes dilated with the bloodlust of a predator pinning its prey.
She shook her head and turned her flooded gaze to Jimmy. I’m so sorry.
“Look at me when I’m talking to you.” The killer squeezed her neck, yanking her welling eyes to his. There was no trace of the father she knew in them. Her heart pounded against his grip.
Thump-ump.
Her trembling fingers squeezed the splintered handle of the knife, pressing the blade into her thigh to keep from letting it go. The killer dragged her toward his victim.
Thump-ump.
Jimmy hung there from his ankles. Kris could see his carcass dripping blood onto the garage floor, a wooden stick holding open his ribs, shaking gently while her father peeled off his skin.
Thump-ump.
“In the old days, we’d take the head while the animal’s heart was still beating. They say the blood could tell the future if you knew how to ask it. Let’s see, shall we?”
The killer’s jugular pulsed inches from her nose. He lifted the cleaver to strike.
Thump—
Kris plunged her blade into the soft meat of the monster’s neck.
A warm plume of blood erupted, splashing over her hand. Blurred colors and sounds burst. Arms flailing. Hands grasping. She heard herself screaming from a faraway room until he squeezed the noise out of her windpipe. She twisted the blade. His eyes bulged from his head, Stop. She twisted harder. His grip tightened on her throat, but she was beyond feeling.
She was gone.
A blast split the air. The monster blew into Kris, knocking her to the floor amid a muted chorus of shouts. The weight of him crushed the life out of her, blotting the light from the room. White flashed behind her eyes as her chest collapsed. Her fist held fast to the knife. Die. Just die. Just die. Just—
Air rushed back into her lungs like broken glass when someone pulled the bulk off of her. She rolled to her side, sucking dry sand until the thinnest thread of oxygen slipped through. A tinny ring in her ears mixed with the smoke and dust. She dragged herself away from it, retreating until she hit a wall, the knife still locked in her hand. Someone was calling her name, muddled and distant from somewhere underwater.
Jimmy’s face appeared under the table, distorted with swelling and a broken nose. His bloody lips were moving as though he was shouting, but nothing was coming out. She just shook her head. He reached out his hands to grab her. She shrank away. He’s dead. He’s come to take me with him.
An old woman’s withered face hovered several feet behind his, crowned with a pink curler and a puff of gray hair. The basement door was standing open.
Kris tried to speak but couldn’t hear her own voice through the ringing in her ears.
Jimmy grabbed her by the front of her shirt and looked her dead in the eye. We have to go.
She nodded and let him pull her out from under the table. Blood and plaster dust lay exploded over the floor. Madame Mimi was standing at the basement door, clutching Kris’s shotgun. She motioned Kris over. Flashing red and blue lights pulled up outside the kitchen window. Jimmy dragged her to the basement stairs.
Kris stopped to look back. Her father’s body bled out over the floor, his hand lay inches from the cleaver. It wasn’t him. The man that had raised her—the man that had kissed bruised knees and carried her on his shoulders—wasn’t the killer lying dead in her kitchen. Maybe he’d never existed at all.
Two dogs crept out of the bedroom with their tails down. They stopped to sniff the body. Kris pressed her lips together and let out what she hoped was a whistle. The sound got lost in the high-pitched squeal between her ears, but Bogie and Gunner lifted their tails and ran to her.
A trembling hand gripped her shoulder. A voice finally cut through the ringing.
“Kris!” Jimmy shouted. “We have to go.”
Kris blinked herself awake and nodded, the words Go where? not even registering. She herded the dogs down the steps after him and looked back one more time, expecting to see her father standing there in judgment of what she’d done, expecting to see him lunge at her with his knife. But her kill didn’t move. Her first kill.
I finally did it, Dad. I pulled the trigger.
Another pair of flashing lights appeared outside her window. Any second, the police would burst through the door. They would arrest them and throw them into a dark cell for the rest of their lives.
“Kris!” Jimmy prodded.
She couldn’t move. His blood soaked its way through her clothes down to her skin, still warm. The knife fluttered in her hand like a living thing. She hung there in the moment, dangling from the meat hook, her heart and guts carved out, a stick between her ribs, her own blood pooling out over the ground.
Then Jimmy pulled her down the steps and shut the
basement door.
CHAPTER 51
The dark stain spread out over the underside of the floorboards overhead. The old woman in the pink curlers led Mimi and Jimmy past the abandoned stove and the dusty boxes scattered across the basement floor.
A hard knock pounded the front door above them.
Bogie and Gunner started barking. “Shh!” Kris pointed a stern finger at each of them, and they shut their muzzles and sat down.
“This is the police! Open up!”
Kris froze and listened. The old homeless woman shuffled across the floor to the storage closet in the corner. Her foot connected with the side of a box with an all-too-familiar thump. The sound of their basement ghost registered somewhere in Kris’s ringing ears.
Another knock shook the wall above them. “Police! We’re coming in!”
“Kris!” Jimmy grabbed her arm. “C’mon. We have to get out of here.”
Out of here? Her eyes circled the basement walls as he pulled her into the tiny storeroom and shut the door. The muddy yellow glow of the streetlights above streamed in through a small dusty window. Spiderwebs hung in curtains from the rafters, and rusted paint cans sat four high on the floor. There was no sign of the old woman or Madame Mimi. They’d vanished through the hole in the floor.
Someone had built the house over a large well. A low ring of stone cut in half by the foundation wall. Dusty wood cover boards leaned against the stone wall in the shape of a half-moon. Candlelight flickered up through the cavern below.
A loud crash above them was followed by a rush of footsteps. “Police! Freeze!”
“Somebody get an ambulance!”
Bogie and Gunner began to yip. “Shh!” Kris hissed at them.
Jimmy shut the storage closet door and climbed halfway down into the well. Ladder? she wondered dully. “Give me the dogs.”
Kris nudged Bogie and then Gunner whimpering down into the hole. A pair of boots came pounding down the basement steps on the other side of the door.
“Anybody down here?” a policeman called out. “If you can hear me, put the gun down and come out with your hands up!”
“Cover the back door!” another voice barked.
Kris looked down at herself covered in blood. The knife trembled in her hand. I killed him. Oh, God, I really killed him. She turned toward the police officer’s voice in a trance.
“Kris!” Jimmy whispered up to her. “Come on!”
She peered down into the hole.
“Watch your step,” he whispered, stepping off the wooden ladder leading down beneath the house.
Outside the closet door, she heard the policeman kicking his way through the piles of boxes.
“Kris!” A hand grabbed her ankle, pulling her toward the hole in the floor.
She stepped onto the ladder and slid the wood cover boards back into place over her head.
Clammy cold air drenched her wet skin as she stepped down onto soft dirt. The yellow light of a candle bounced off the stacked stones set in a wide ring around her. “Jimmy,” she whispered, surveying the strange cellar. “Where are we?”
“I think it’s an old cistern. Back when this was all farmland, they used them to store rainwater.” He motioned her toward a two-foot hole in the wall before crawling inside it with the candle.
Kris climbed in after him. Pain registered in her knees as a mere curiosity, army-crawling across the uneven, damp fieldstones.
Talking seemed to soothe Jimmy’s frayed nerves. His voice echoed back to where she lay the dark. “I’m guessing the bricklayers didn’t know what to do when they found all this buried, so they just built around it. Or maybe the landowners liked the idea of leaving a few secret bunkers. You know the underground railroad had a big hub here in Cleveland.”
“Where are we going?” she heard herself ask. “Shouldn’t we talk to the police? What about Pete?” Somewhere inside she knew these were the right things to say, but she couldn’t conjure a single emotion. He’s dead . . . Maybe I’m dead too.
“Your buddy Ben is the police. Something tells me they’ll be takin’ his word over ours.”
Kris and Jimmy crawled fifty feet across the mossy stones until they reached a larger cavern. Candlelight danced across the round fieldstones lining the walls. They had landed in a cave the size of a barn. Tree roots hung from the arched ceiling. Large stone pillars stood every ten feet like a forest of tree trunks holding them up. A series of black hieroglyphics marked the far wall next to a wood ladder where Madame Mimi and the little old lady stood waiting.
What the hell is this? Kris wondered, turning around.
Madame Mimi closed her eyes before answering, “The city built these caverns as rainwater reservoirs . . . It was before they put in the municipal water supply system in the 1850s.” She tied a batik scarf into a skirt around Jimmy’s naked waist. Black ink tattoos stretched across his back. Squinting, Kris could see a list of names and dates. She recognized them from his murder wall. He’d written the list of Torso Killer victims across his back. The word unclaimed carved over and over. She wanted to touch one, but her hand was covered in blood.
Something rustled at the far end.
Kris turned to see Bogie and Gunner rooting around in a pile of trash. She walked over to pull a piece of plastic from one of the dog’s mouths only to find the wrappers from all the bagels and bologna Pete had stolen off her shelf in the fridge. It wasn’t Pete. Her photograph of her father had been discarded with the trash. She lifted it off the ground.
“Did you take this from my room?” She turned to Jimmy. The bumps in the night, the stolen food, her missing picture all suddenly made sense. Kid’s got a rap sheet a mile long, kiddo. “Have you been breaking into my house this whole time?”
He raised his eyebrows, offended.
“No. No, I’m afraid.” The little old lady with the pink curlers shuffled over, her eyes glassy. “I’m afraid that was me.”
“What?” Kris felt herself squeezing the knife in her hand. The old witch wandering around her house, eating her food, watching while she slept—the thought landed without a flutter of feeling. Dead numb, she asked, “Why would you do that?”
“I like to come and visit my ghosts from time to time. Don’t you?” A crooked smile split the woman’s face from ear to ear in the flickering candlelight.
“Ghosts?” Kris heard herself ask through the tinnitus left by the blast. It was like listening to someone else. “Whose ghost? Norma’s?”
The smile shrank as the woman nodded and muttered to herself. “No. That’s not really her name. I just thought . . . I thought she might come back.”
“Who? Who is she?” Jimmy asked, intrigued. Maybe desperate.
“You know,” the old woman chuckled. “I’m not even sure. She called herself Johnnie before we changed it. We had to, you know, after all that mess up there.”
Madame Mimi touched the old woman’s shoulder. “It was Rose’s girl, wasn’t it?”
She didn’t answer, she just gazed up at the network of roots and stones overhead.
Kris turned to Jimmy. Rose’s girl. Jimmy’s grandmother. “Did you know about this?”
He shook his battered head.
She considered him for a moment, watching everything unfold from some place outside herself. He’s quite a catch, Kritter. He’s even wanted for questioning in a murder case. “Are you really wanted for murder?”
“Bein’ wanted for murder and actually doing the murdering are two different things.” Jimmy gave her a beaten smile. “There’s a lot of ways for good folks to go to jail, and being black is one of them. They find us right now, I can tell you who’s gonna serve time, and it ain’t the white girl with the knife in her hand. Get me?”
She gazed down at the bloody knife. Her knuckles were white from gripping it so hard. I’m the killer.
“Kris, c’mon. It’ll be okay. We’ll figure it out.” He crouched down next to her, making her realize she’d fallen to her knees. “You did what you had to do. You saved m
y life. That’s gotta count for something. Right?”
She stared down at her blood-covered hands. They were her father’s hands. “What if I’m like him?” Her voice sounded farther and farther away.
“You’re no more a killer than I am. Sometimes you just do what has to be done. You want to know why I’ve got warrants? Because I loved my mom. I loved her every day she fell down drunk, every day she was too messed up to notice her boyfriend beatin’ on me or how he’d turn her out to his friends. She still doesn’t remember shooting the motherfucker. She still doesn’t remember how I cleaned her up and got rid of the gun . . . but what else could I do?”
She looked up at him. “So they think you did it?”
He shrugged like it was nothing. “It was self-defense on her part, but no judge’s gonna care what really happened. They’d just lock her up and throw away the key. Nothin’ makes white folks feel safer than putting black folks in jail, so I took the gun and just fell off the grid. It wasn’t hard . . . You’ll see.”
“But what if I don’t want . . . to fall off the grid?”
“Maybe you won’t have to, but we’ve got to contact somebody outside the good ol’ boy network. We have no idea how many friends your dad’s buddy has on the force. C’mon. Let’s get you up.” He pulled her to her feet.
We have several friends in the area. That mark on your door is like a beacon.
Kris shook off his voice and focused her eyes on Mimi and the old lady. “How did you find us?”
Mimi chuckled. “The Auglaize County sheriff’s cruiser out front helped.”
The old woman pointed a gnarled finger up another ladder and said, “This is the way out.”
As they climbed up out of the dark, Kris felt a part of herself fall behind. The part that never got up off her kitchen floor. The part that never dreamed of killing anything. Maybe the most important part. Between her ribs, she felt nothing but a wooden stick.