She gritted her teeth, noting he’d left the shotgun behind. “If there are people hurt here, I can help them. Just let me loose, or even let me call someone. I—”
“Jesus, shut the fuck up. You must think I’m fucking stupid.”
From far down the hallway, cries for help came again. The other captives must have heard Keller’s voice.
Pigpen’s face creased in irritation, and he teetered to the counter and took a pull at the whiskey before going back to the hallway and barking a “Be quiet!” into the darkness.
While his back was turned to her, she began moving her arms up and down. Slow, short strokes, working the zip ties against the sharp point of the scissors on her belt. Her wrists were already abraded and pain followed immediately as the ties dug into her skin and the scissors scraped against her arms, but the hurt was dilute compared to the throbbing in her skull and injuring herself was no real concern anyway. There was bandaging in the ambulance and… well, fentanyl in her pocket.
But free wasn’t nearly enough. Not by a long shot.
Where would she escape to? Unless she’d been moved some distance—and the tacky, not dry blood on her eyelids suggested that wasn’t the case—she was still somewhere in the rural countryside east of Drumheller. She’d be without a cellphone and running from a man with a gun—assuming there was only one man—hardly optimal, even if she wasn’t concussed.
“Be quiet, you cunts!” Pigpen shouted down the corridor again when the calls didn’t cease. He looked back at Keller, who froze. “Bunch of bitches… I’ll get you all acquainted soon.”
She blinked at him and sniffed. “You got something cooking up there?” She looked upward and Pigpen followed her gaze. Assumption verified. She was in a basement. “Smells like it’s burning.”
Pigpen looked puzzled for a moment, like drunk drivers at car crash scenes when paramedics asked what happened. Then he swore under his breath, looking her over again as if assessing how well she was restrained. A snort of satisfaction accompanied his wink.
“I won’t be long.”
He vanished into the corridor and she began pumping her arms up and down again, rubbing her wrists and the ties binding them against the sharp edge of the trauma shears on her belt. Within seconds her wrists were bleeding freely, the blood warm as it ran over her hands.
She gritted her teeth and rubbed harder.
Six
The ties snapped and fell away, and Keller gave a shuddering sigh and pulled cramping arms around in front of her. Her wrists were on fire, a bloody mess. One particularly long cut across her right wrist was bleeding hard. Fighting dizziness, she rose cautiously to her feet, grabbed a stained rag off the counter, and clamped it against the wound.
How long did she have till Pigpen got thirsty for more whiskey? Surely not long.
“You keep your fucking mouths shut down there!” he called from somewhere upstairs.
Keep shouting, asshole. Keep telling me where you are.
Her legs were shaking and she fought to control her breathing. The nausea and dizziness were both worse now that she was standing, and her skin was crawling with cold sweat, as if she had a fever. Never mind what Pigpen might do to her, how long before she simply collapsed?
She pulled open the cupboards below the counter. No radio, no cellphone—of course it wouldn’t be that easy. A quick look around the room produced no further inspiration as to where to search. So…
Decisions, decisions.
She glanced toward the doorway. Left or right of it there would be stairs. If she chose correctly, she might be outside in thirty seconds. Might. And that was just one in a cascading subset of mights. Like the ACLS algorithms medics used to run cardiac arrest calls, except a wrong choice on this algorithm meant she would die.
To wit, she might run into Pigpen, might not have the strength to push past him into the open. After that, well, her ambulance might not be where she’d left it, or the keys in it might be missing. Then there was herself to consider. Would she be able to drive, or might dizziness drive her, into a ditch? Given that her skull was a pounding hip-hop song and vertigo threatened with every movement, this last subset of possibilities was eminently imaginable.
Track back. She could flee on foot into the darkness. There must be other farms nearby. She might make it… or collapse in some fallow field for the coyotes to find.
And Pigpen knows the area, and probably has a vehicle. And a gun.
That left only one thing.
It was a crazy, appalling idea. Maybe if she wasn’t terrified, head-injured, and short on time she might’ve thought of a better one. But here she was, out of options.
She reached up to touch her breast pocket but already knew the fentanyl was still there. She would have sensed its absence like a lover gone in the night.
Two more unsteady steps brought her over to the whiskey bottle, the neck still wet where Pigpen’s mouth had been. She dug into her shirt pocket and found the baggie, the three blue-green pills inside. Pure fentanyl, according to Glasgow, though the pills could have contained a hundred other things too. So few drug dealers with instincts for quality control out there.
Still, as near as she’d been able to discern with her stringent vetting process of cautious nibbles and poised naloxone syringes, Glasgow’s latest batch of pills were of decent potency. A small morsel would’ve gotten her high. Much more and she’d be flirting with respiratory arrest. It was remotely possible she might survive swallowing one whole tablet, but never all three.
More yelling from down the hallway. The other prisoners hadn’t been here long, Keller decided. Anyone held captive for any length of time would quickly give up yelling for help. These girls hadn’t.
Pigpen was crashing down the stairs, cursing in steady concert with his footfalls. She heard him stomp-stagger down the hallway on her level, then the banging of wood on metal.
“Fuck you, asshole.” This voice sounded older. Less scared. More outraged. “Let us the fuck out of here.”
“Shut your fucking mouths!” More banging and a shriek of pain. The cries halted abruptly.
Keller shook the pills out of the baggie and onto her palm. The perspiration flooding her hands made the tablets slippery and she was trembling so hard she nearly dropped them.
Deep breaths. She was running out of time.
She steadied herself and, one by one, crushed the pills between her fingers and let them slide into the bottle of Old Crow. Some of the powder clung to the inside neck and she gripped the bottle, her thumb over its mouth—don’t for fuck’s sake drop it—and spun it gently until the particles were gone.
Shuffling sounds—Pigpen coming back down the hallway. She retreated to her chair. This would be the hard part. The bluff.
She eased back down onto the chair, vertigo tearing at her like a circling pack of jackals. But first things first. Remnants of blue-green powder clung to her fingers, traces of that delicious nutritious breakfast she’d missed. Maybe enough to keep her steady in the coming minutes. Get her into that Cool Smooth state of mind.
Waste not, want not.
She licked her trembling fingers clean, the bitter taste of the narcotic mixed with the hard coppery tang of her own blood.
Pigpen’s shadow appeared in the hallway as she pushed herself taut against the back of the chair and wrapped her arms behind it, panting through her teeth. She lowered her head, gulping back hard against fear and nausea.
Shit.
On the floor, the broken zip ties were lying in plain view. Belatedly she realized there would be blood from the lacerations on her wrists on the floor as well. Pigpen might overlook the blood as being from her head wound, but the ties?
She kicked at the plastic strands, unable to avoid the noise but succeeding in sending two of the four pieces careening under the counter.
Pigpen lumbered into the kitchen, running his hands through his hair. Blood on them. “You trying to get loose?” He laughed. “You can stomp your feet as much as you want
. Ain’t gonna happen.”
Seven
“You have to let me go.” Keller licked at her lips, tasting salt and blood as she watched Pigpen settle on his chair. Her gaze moved down the hallway. “If someone’s hurt back there, I can help.”
Pigpen snorted. “Yeah right.” He leered at her. “You can help yourself, maybe. If you’re good at sucking cock, maybe you’ll stay alive a little longer. My friends… well, crooks in high places, they love a good cocksucker.”
Keller bit her lip, hard.
You must be dry, Pigpen. Dry as a bone. Killing and raping has got to drive a thirst right into you, doesn’t it? Why don’t you have another sip of your go-to juice?
Absent any comeback, Pigpen’s expression went flat and he sighed. As if this were all part of some conversation he’d had many times before. As Keller watched, he lurched abruptly sideways, reached for his whiskey…
And missed, his hand brushing the bottle, setting it spinning on its base.
Her breath caught in her throat.
The bottle spun on, like a galaxy unwhirling, threatening at any moment to fall, then gravity took hold of it once more and it spun in faster orbits about its base until it was stable again.
Pigpen snatched the bottle up, and for an instant the tattooed cobra on his wrist appeared to be envenoming the drink. He raised the whiskey to his lips, then frowned, his hand hanging in midair as he drew the bottle back to examine it.
Blood.
She swore under her breath. Pigpen turned to look at her and she held his gaze, projecting her best blank poker face as her heart pounded in her throat and every muscle in her body pulled taut against the trembling that threatened to overwhelm her.
Then she realized blank wouldn’t do. Blank was suspicious. She tried to assemble an expression of disgust and fear. She looked into Pigpen’s eyes, then dropped her gaze. A terrified deer, shying away from a predator.
He stared at her for a long moment, blinked, and looked at his own bloody hand. Keller realized she was holding her breath but she couldn’t seem to exhale.
Come on now. Aren’t you thirsty? All those girls yelling at you. Don’t you want another taste of that sweet, sweet thing you love?
She was feeling something herself now. Just a bump of it, an easy nudge of the fentanyl she’d licked off her fingers wiggling into her brain.
Don’t you want a taste, Keller?
Pigpen paused again, frowning, watching her. Maybe he’d seen something in her body language, decoded some sign of hope in her eyes; but the fear and anger behind it must have muddied the signal because he sat down and drank again, eyeing her as he swallowed—a long, slow gulp—while she gritted her teeth and tried to dampen the long, shuddering sigh that rushed out of her.
But Pigpen heard. He frowned at her, then chuckled. “You’re not a bad piece of ass, are you? Little older than I usually like. Pretty mouth, though. I might just have some fun with you anyway.” Some fun came out sounding like shum fung.
Fuck you. Drink.
He took another pull and leaned back in the chair, licking at his lips thoughtfully, grimacing.
Jesus, it doesn’t taste the same. Of course not. Stupid of you to think it would, with death swimming around in it.
But five thundering heartbeats later, Pigpen took another drag. As unacquainted with toothpaste as he looked to be, maybe odd aftertastes were nothing unusual for him, or maybe there was enough Old Crow swimming around his brain to push him past caring.
“You know what happens to the ones that don’t behave, now, don’t you?” He jerked a thumb toward the hallway, where she imagined the body of the girl he’d raped and strangled lay lifeless. “Treat me right and you’ll be okay.” He sniffed and looked over his shoulder. “She didn’t do what she was told, was her problem.”
She just stared at Pigpen in disgust, but when he didn’t seem to find her silence strange or offensive she knew the fentanyl was already working in him.
She probed for some feeling of guilt as he drank again but found nothing, and it did not especially surprise her. She was terrified, and experience had taught her that fear was a predator in its own right, one that gobbled up guilt as if it were ice cream.
Pigpen was blinking hard now, and Keller thought his pupils were beginning to constrict, the narcotic narrowing his vision. As he took another swallow, she imagined all the tiny deaths she’d dodged in the last two years washing through him now.
Eight
The Fixer’s phone vibrated in his pocket and he drew it out, cursing under his breath when he saw the number. He swiped the phone app away and checked the distance to his destination. Fifteen more minutes at a rapid walk.
The phone vibrated again. Timothy Kapp. Hunt’s right-hand man. The call needed answering, if only to avoid the annoyance of endless callbacks.
Never pausing his stride, he nonetheless glanced around before answering. The dark road was deserted but he’d learned long ago not to take any risk you could reasonably avoid. Clear corners. Unclip your pistol before exiting the car at a traffic stop. Search suspects down to their socks. Stay alive.
He tapped at the phone and lifted it to his ear. “What?”
“Good morning to you too.” Kapp sounded somehow both sleepy and angry at once. “I got a message from Oakes. Could hardly read it. What’s going on?”
“Oakes is going on. He’s a drunken mess. Let one of your presents get away. I’m taking care of it.”
“Wait a minute…” Panic was rising amid the sleep and anger. “What does that mean?”
“It means I’ll put things right, but you’re going to owe me. This is extra.”
“Extra?”
Now Kapp really sounded worried. With good reason. Among other things, he was Hunt’s financial manager, and the Fixer’s services did not come cheap. But that was why you hired professionals; when amateurs like Oakes were involved, sooner or later you needed a pro to pull your ass out of the fire.
“Yes, extra. Oakes fucked up big time, and got civilians involved to boot.”
“What?”
“Don’t call me again. I’ll call you when I’m finished.” He hung up and looked at his watch again. Twelve minutes out, ten if he ran it.
To kill the time, he imagined what it would be like to get the paramedic on her back and have her looking up at him while he made her pay for all the inconvenience he’d suffered tonight.
Nine
Keller watched as Pigpen’s eyes fluttered and then closed. In the following minutes, his head dropped onto his shoulder and he slumped in his chair like a melting candle.
That was fast. Must be good stuff.
Was she jealous? It didn’t matter. There was plenty more where that came from. But the thought left her torn, with a long-absent but welcome anger brewing inside her.
Is that really what you’ll do if you get out of this? Go straight back to Glasgow and buy more of his supremely potent poison?
Glasgow, a dim bulb who’d failed out of university but found his true calling as a dealer for a biker gang, would likely take “supremely potent poison” as a compliment. But even if he didn’t, he’d be glad to sell her more.
Figure it out later.
A snore rumbled out of Pigpen and drool trickled over his lips like a waterfall, dribbling down onto his shirt.
Keller took a slow, deep breath, then exhaled hard and watched for any answering movement from the man.
Nothing.
She coughed… coughed louder.
Pigpen slept on.
“Hey…” she hissed. “Hey. Hey, you fat dickhead asshole.” Her voice rose with each word.
Nothing. No, less than nothing. Pigpen’s snores were lengthening, disintegrating into shallow, wet gurgles as his breathing became irregular. The narcotic chewing into him.
Eyes on Pigpen all the while, Keller rose from the chair slowly, still fighting dizziness. But the constant urge to puke had receded. She checked her wrists. The right one looked a little like meatloa
f but the bleeding had halted.
Call it in.
She took measured steps toward the doorway. Looked left and right. Darted toward a phone on the wall a few feet down the corridor, boney-white plastic cracked in places, like a stone-age fossil. She lifted the handset to her ear, tapping at the switch.
Dead as a dinosaur.
Great.
A door at one end of the darkened hallway was padlocked, the handle below black with grease. Might be a garage on the other side, but no easy way out anyway. In the other direction were several open doorways, all dark.
She looked back at Pigpen, her heart still pounding—would she ever run out of adrenalin? She almost wished she hadn’t crushed all of the pills into the whiskey.
Just another lick…
But the thought was reflex more than real desire.
Get your fucking head on straight.
She stepped back over to Pigpen, who looked as though his muscles were coming unglued from his skeleton as narcosis dragged him slowly off the chair and onto the floor. He was still breathing—though more and more slowly, to be sure—but she didn’t really care one way or the other.
So as not to offend her newly fragile sense of balance, she gripped the counter as she knelt beside him, grimacing at the waft of B.O. when his body gave up its grip on the chair entirely and he spilled onto the floor. She’d smelled worse in her life to be sure. Puke, pus, pee, blood, shit, infection… But in this moment, in this now, Pigpen smelled worse—like something not quite human. Like something that ate humans, in fact.
Get your imagination under control.
She patted at his clothes, looking for a phone. His front pockets held a set of keys—not the ambulance keys or she would’ve taken them—and some cash.
Great.
Wishing for gloves, she gritted her teeth and reached around to check his back pockets.
Yes.
She prodded at a rectangular bulge that could only be a cellphone, trying to pluck it out of his pocket. Pigpen groaned and his eyelids fluttered, and she scrabbled backward across the room, her mouth taut, holding back a scream.
The Beast in the Bone Page 3