by Jack Ketchum
It was like he was looking inside her, looking to find the fear. As though fear were an organ. Locating it like you would locate heart or lungs or vagina. He took his time.
“Oh, I got something planned for Sally. You wouldn’t like it, Lizzie. Ken wouldn’t like it either. But I think it’s pretty small of you to suggest it, don’t you? Now sit down in the flicking chair!”
He pointed the gun at Ken the barrel only a foot from his head, and she barely heard him when he spoke again.
“Or I kill daddy. With daddy’s daddy’s own gun. How about that? It’s the truth! This belonged to your mom and dad once, Kenny. That’s right. Rifle too. ’Member somebody trashed this place a few years back? That was me. Me and my buddy Timmy who unfortunately is not here to reunion with us. Lizzie, please be seated.”
The woman took a deep breath and wiped her cheeks and moved slowly around the chair and sat.
“That’sa girl. Much, much better. Look, she’s all setded in. Kenny?”
The man hesitated and then stooped and picked up the ball of twine. Held it in his hand a moment as though the twine were some object wholly unfamiliar to him. He unrolled a length of it and dug into his pocket for the red Swiss army knife. Pulled open a blade and cut the twine.
She wondered if the blade was big enough to kill a man.
He walked over to his wife, hesitated. Looked into her eyes.
And then he just stood there.
“Kenny? Hey, Kenneth? You’re not gonna go all Steve McQueen on me, are you?”
The man still held the knife. The red knife open in his right hand and the twine dangling from the other. He stood and looked at his wife. His eyes were the saddest eyes on a man she’d ever seen.
As though he knew.
“Fuck it, Kenny. I didn’t like you anyway.”
A sound like a bomb going off in the room then and the back of the man’s head was suddenly mud flung over the faded white wall in front of him and he jolted into the wife’s lap, the wife screeching, trying to reach him and missing her grip so that he slid off her and crumbled into a fetal position on the floor. Sudden movement to her right and in front of her and Jennifer saw Sally bolt for the door, Ray stepping over one long step and hitting her sidearm in the head with the barrel of the gun, driving her first against the wall and then down to the floor . . .
. . . and Katherine thought, you son of a bitch, fuck you! you think you got me? you think I can’t hurt your sorry ass? and rose chair and all, handcuffs cutting into her wrists and whipped around fast, to hell with the pain, the legs of the chair slamming into the back of his legs just below the knee and she heard him grunt and fall, heard the pistol hit the floor and she knew what to do, she’d seen the glass double-doors in back down the hall while he had her standing against the wall so she made for that, turned and ran, she’d go through the goddamn doors glass and all and . . .
. . . Jennifer saw Ray falling, cursing and twisting and firing again twice and saw Katherine crash to the floor with a bloom of red spreading across the back of her shirt like red ink spilled from an inkwell, Katherine jerking facedown on the bare wood floor, jerking and then still.
She saw this all in an instant and couldn’t understand how these things could happen, how they could be accomplished and so suddenly. The moment had changed everything and astonished her, left her quivering, twitching in its wake as though her body were crawling with spiders. She couldn’t have moved from where she was in a million years. Let alone hit him with a chair. Let alone run. She was aware of the tangy metallic smell of gun and the echo in her ears which blotted out all other sound, aware that at some point during this brief lightning flash of time she’d peed her pants, a sudden voiding, she didn’t even know it had happened.
The wife Elizabeth, her name’s Elizabeth for godsakes can’t you remember? was down on her knees on the floor with her husband. She had her hands to his wound, in his wound, like she was trying to hold some lost part of him inside. She was shaking her head and sobbing and Jennifer could dimly make out the sounds of her hysterical grief over the roar in her ears. She heard Ray say something to the woman but she couldn’t make that out either.
She watched him glance slowly from one of them to the other. His glance lingering on each. Katherine didn’t move. She lay on her side still cuffed and tied to the chair, one leg bent at the knee as though frozen in the act of running. The two middle spindles had snapped at the base during her fall.
Sally lay half propped against the wall. There was blood on her forehead.
When he looked at Jennifer she saw him notice how she’d wet herself and saw his lip curl in disgust and realized that she felt no shame in it, no thoughts about it at all, the peeing didn’t matter.
He turned abruptly and walked away down the hall—that choppy, jerky walk of his—digging into his jeans for bullets to reload the gun and disappeared.
She still couldn’t move.
She wasn’t like the others. The others didn’t know him.
They did now.
She was pinned to the spot.
The woman Elizabeth didn’t seem to be aware of his leaving. Her eyes were shut against the steady flow of tears and she was shaking with hysteria and her hands were red with blood nearly to the elbow. She kept rocking him. Holding on to the ruined head. Holding him in.
Her skirt was sodden.
He was gone just a moment.
When he returned his eyes were wide and seemed to focus outside the room, not on her or any of them or anything in the room in particular but beyond or maybe inward, she didn’t know. He drifted into the room like a ghost and his head turned for a long moment to where the circular mirror had left its clean impression on the wall and he had the gun in one fist and a serrated steel carving knife in the other.
He stared at the spot like there still was a mirror there and then he turned.
Light and dark swam together the second time for her that night and she clutched at the arms of the chair knowing she could not lose conciousness, not now or else she might never wake up again so she gripped the chair until her fingers ached and slowly the room and everything in it returned to her the way she needed it to return, blank pale walls and covered furniture. Sally against the wall. Katherine in the hall. She saw that he’d drifted past her, was moving slowly past to stand behind the woman kneeling with her husband on the floor. He shoved the revolver into his belt.
He raised the knife and held it above her pointed down and her hearing had returned enough by then for her to hear him mutter do her just like Sharon, he was talking about Sharon Tate and if the woman even knew he was standing there she didn’t show it, she just kept holding on to her husband’s head until the knife came down and entered her just above the collarbone and she yelped like a struck dog and blood spurted up and out and Ray pushed the entire length of the blade down into her.
Her arms flew up and clutched his fists on the handle of the knife and he pulled it out, a rough sawing motion and he reached for her shoulder and pushed her face-first across her husband, her blood already pooling on the floor as now the hands went to her own pulsing wound as before they had gone to his, holding it in, holding in the life. A high mewling and a gurgling sound were coming out of her and blood ran down her chin and Jennifer looked away, just closed her eyes and looked away until she heard a thump on the floor beside her.
She looked down startled by the sound and saw that Ray had rolled the woman over on her back and pushed her again so that she lay sprawled right at her feet, the thump was the back of her head against the floor. Instinctively she drew her feet in beneath the chair seat as though away from something dirty and polluted flowing toward her, away from what he was doing, cutting through the buttons of her blouse and unzipping the skirt and pulling it down around her thighs, cutting through the white padded bra while the woman choked on her blood, the woman staring up at the ceiling and coughing a thin, bloody spray at him up into his face which he wiped away with the back of his hand, the one that held the knife wh
ich then cut through the panties too, and Jennifer closed her eyes a second time.
She had to.
She was going to be sick. She was going to throw up again.
She knew what they’d done to Sharon Tate.
They’d cut out her baby.
And that’s what Ray was mumbling about, that and all the other filthy things they did to her, toneless, mild, talking about cutting her tits off and carving these words in her belly and blood on the walls and that’ll give ’em something to think about absolutely, cut out the baby and put it in her lap, wrap the cord around her neck and telling the woman to beg, beg for her baby and meantime he was stabbing her over and over god knows how many times she could hear the woman’s tiny cries deep in her throat and thumping sounds like melons dropping, heard every impact, she could smell the blood in the air thick as the smell in a butcher shop, she could hear it fall like heavy raindrops on the floor, imagine it flowing pooling toward her feet.
Please stop you have to stop! she thought, she was going to go crazy if he didn’t, she was going to, it was going to happen, please, what you heard could drive you insane and heard two footfalls and a crash, glass breaking and she opened her eyes and saw Sally standing over him, blood running down her cheek and holding the finial and harp and socket and part of the broken base of a white china lamp in her hands. She saw Ray covered with shards and china dust reel across the glistening naked body beneath him and throw out his hand for balance, saw it slide across the blood-soaked floor so that he came down hard on his elbow and she felt a wild surge of pleasure at his pain.
“BIIIITCH!” he roared and reached for the pistol in his belt, the rifle slung over his back clattering against the floor as he rolled but Sally just took another step forward. She could see that Sally was terrified to move anywhere near him but she did, she did it anyway! and shoved the jagged base of porcelain into his face, hard against his forehead and cheek so she heard it scrape bone and suddenly he was screaming and bleeding, Ray was bleeding not somebody else, bleeding from his head and from his face, and Jennifer brought both her legs out from under the chair as fast and hard as she could and kicked him in the back of the head, aiming for the blood that already welled there.
The effort almost toppled the chair and her with it. She didn’t care. It felt good. It felt wonderful!
She watched him fall forward over the woman’s body, fall face-to-face with the woman, Ray staring down into her open dead eyes and open mouth just a moment before what was left of the lamp came down on him again, Sally not finished, not finished with him yet, going after him—then his hand shot out and gripped the base of the lamp and pulled it from her hands and sailed it across the room over his head and he staggered dazed to his feet. She saw Sally backing away and looking for something else to hurt him with but there was nothing, only boxes and crates and chairs and then the pistol was out of his belt and pointing at her ending all bravery and all resistance.
In the silence she heard two women cry out, a dissonant two-part harmony. One of the voices was hers.
Chapter Forty-five
Katherine
Do the dead dream?
Katherine did.
She dreamt she was in the workshop, her father’s workshop, and she was doing what neither she nor Etta were permitted to do.
She was cleaning up.
And not just sweeping, either. She had the Electrolux out there, and the Electrolux was roaring, sucking up sawdust and shavings and chunks of wood like tiny bits of bone, sending them clattering up through the-extension wand and hose, both of which almost seemed a part of her, like something abstracted from her hand and arm. She vacuumed workbench, vise, clamps, sawhorse, hanging tools and shelves and mason jars full of nails and screws arranged by size, vacuumed his power saw, his circular saw, his coping saw, his planer and sander and finally the floor a second time and it was amazing, she was moving like lightning, moving effortlessly and it was done in a flash, all this space of his spotless now. So that he could start in fresh. A clean slate. And get on with life.
Chapter Forty-six
Schilling/Tim
“Which way on Stirrup Iron?”
“The house is off to the left.”
They had the kid in the cage in the backseat behind them and three state highway patrol cars following them, their headlights gliding along the winding road over shallow dips and inclines climbing gradually into the hills. The kid said he knew the way and which house though not the family’s name or the actual address. Lenny Bess would have known because the kid said he’d worked for these people but the line to the Bess house was busy. The kid seemed absolutely positive he could get them there and pick out the place in the dark. Time meant everything. So by far their best bet was to take him along and just get there.
The inside of their vehicle felt like the lake on choppy water before a storm. Emotions swirled and eddied. Mainly tension. But fear was there, the one-on-one personal fear you’d have of any armed killer and anxiety for the women he had in tow was there in spades but there was excitement too. Because they ought to be able to do this. If Tim Bess was right in his description of the house Pye was in a place he thought he wanted to be in but didn’t Two entrances, front door and rear glass sliding doors. Isolated and easy to cover. No neighborhood civilians to worry about except Bess who would remain in the car well out of the way. They’d have surprise and darkness on their side and plenty of backup.
If the kid was right they’d get the little sonovabitch.
He glanced at Ed staring straight ahead at the lights on the empty road. He knew that look. It was grim and humorless and purposeful. It wouldn’t falter. You could take that look to the bank. But he damn well knew better than to try to converse with it.
He looked at the kid through the rear-view mirror. The kid was shadow, a penumbra in the glare of headlights framing his head and skinny shoulders.
“Tell me about the girls, Tim. Jennife.r and Katherine. What are they like?”
“I dunno. Kath’s new in town. I really don’t know her too well. She’s kind of stuck-up I guess. Jennifer’s just . . . god, I dunno. Jennifer’s just Jennifer.”
“Would either of them give him any trouble? Piss him off? Try to fight him?”
“Not Jennifer. Katherine? Man, I got no idea.”
“Are they going to go ballistic on us when we go in there? Do they know enough to keep the hell out of our way?”
“I think so.”
They drove in silence for a while, headlights sweeping a field, a group of houses, a dirty white dog barking in a fenced-in yard.
“Can I ask you something?” Tim said.
“Sure.”
“Am I in a whole lot of trouble here?”
Schilling glanced at him. It was the first time he’d asked. Schilling figured it was a good sign if not quite an admirable sign that it had come so late in the game.
“What do you think, Tim?”
“I think I’m in deep shit. Truly deep shit.”
He wasn’t.
He’d been underage on Steiner/Hanlon and he was cooperating with them on this one. But Schilling wasn’t necessarily going to tell him that his problems were only juvie. A good hook was one that had a barb in it. They still needed his testimony on Ray.
“Let’s just worry about the girls for now, okay, Tim? Then we can worry about you getting a shovel.”
It had dawned on Tim steadily that she might be dead.
It was like an ache in your head you’re barely aware of at first and then it grows and grows and pretty soon the headache’s blinding.
That this should be so was an amazement to him. Not a single person he’d ever known at all well had died before, only one distant uncle and who gave a shit about him. And now Mr. Griffith and Ray’s mother dead in one night. But even between the two of them and Jennifer there was a huge difference. He had never touched Mr. Griffith or Ray’s mother. Not once in his memory, not even to shake hands and he had made love to Jennifer Fitch a
nd that seemed to him to make all the difference in the world. As though the touching were the knowing.
No one he had ever touched had died before.
No one he had loved.
Or at least thought he loved. Because once not long ago he’d have said he loved Ray like a goddamn brother but there was no love in him for Ray right now, not a fucking ounce of it, he didn’t care if Ray lived or died. So what was love anyway? Something you turned on like a clock alarm and slapped off the minute you awoke, once it suddenly got too loud and noisy? He wondered if he would still love Jennifer after this was over. And if she did die, would he love her memory.
Was it even possible to love a memory?
He tried to picture her dead because he knew it just might happen and he felt he needed to be prepared for that. He tried to picture her shot like those girls, shot through the heart or through the head. Beaten to death or strangled. He tried to consider these things because all of them were possible. But then he’d remember the feel of her, of her flesh, her lips and breasts the smell of her hair and it just wouldn’t come, he couldn’t find the cold dead body inside the living body of Jennifer.
She couldn’t die. How could she?
He’d touched her.
“Turn here,” he said.
“I know, kid,” said Schilling. “I know.”
Chapter Forty-seven
Sally
You should have run, she thought. You could have. You could have slipped right out the door.
She didn’t even know Jennifer, really. She could have left her. Just left her.
The woman on the floor was past helping
And then she thought, what would Ed have done?
It didn’t matter. She’d done what the moment and who she was told her to do.
There was some satisfaction knowing that she’d hurt him—marked him. He was not coming out of this clean and unscathed. It was no longer possible for him to plead innocence or lie his way out of this no matter how he tried to cover up. When the police found him they’d know him, match his face to what she’d done to him and know. The bloody crown of his head. The deep gash across the forehead, the shallower half-moon slice across the cheek.