by Jack Ketchum
I got you, she thought. Me.
She watched him wipe the blood out of his right eye and across his chin and shake his head, blood flecking the wall. Watched him pick up the knife and walk toward her.
Here it comes, she thought. Oh god!
She pressed back against the wall. The wall was solid, firm. Reality.
He stepped to one side of her and put the gun to her forehead and smiled. There was a thin film of blood across his teeth. The hand that held the gun was slick with it.
“You fucked me up, you know that?”
He laughed.
“You really did. I mean, this hurts.”
He dropped the gun away from her forehead and cocked his head and studied her. Blood pooled in his eye and he wiped it again.
“Man, have I got taste in women. I just knew you’d be something else. Just like Kath over there. I knew the first time I looked at you. Am I right, Jen?”
She glanced over his shoulder at Jennifer slumped in her chair, that single kick to the head draining all the fight she had in her. Maybe it was the fact that the kick had done nothing to end this. That it was still playing out his way, not theirs. She saw her eyes drift empty and lifeless from the woman’s corpse at her feet to the man’s body and back again.
He seemed all at once aware of the taste of blood in his mouth and ran his tongue along his teeth.
“You’re sure something all right. I ain’t seen you naked yet, though. Only one of my girls I haven’t.”
“I’m not one of your girls, Ray.”
The smile disappeared like a quarter in a magic trick. The gun pressed cold and hurtful into her cheek.
“You are now, you little cunt. That blouse is a fucking mess anyway. You got your girlfriend’s head all over it! Take the fucking thing off.”
It was as though he’d physically slapped her. She saw it all over again. Tonianne laughing with her in the car. Nibbling on a cheeseburger. Turning at his approach. The split second when everything changed and the world went haywire in one dark moment of explosion.
She choked back a sob and then something composed itself in her as instinctive and fundamental as the sob had been, and she looked him in the eye.
“You’re right,” she said. “It is a mess.”
Her fingers fumbled at the top button of her blouse but her voice was calm.
“You don’t need the gun, Ray.”
“Oh, you’re all cooperative now?”
“I’ll do what you want.”
“You will?”
“Yes.”
“You will?”
“Yes.”
She unbuttoned the top button and then the second.
“You gonna show Ray your titties?”
“If that’s what you want.”
“You are?”
“Yes.”
“Gonna show Ray your snatch?”
“Yes.”
“Say it.”
“What?”
“‘Gonna show Ray my snatch.’ Say it.”
“Gonna show Ray my snatch.”
“‘Gonna show Ray my titties.’”
“Gonna show Ray my . . . my titties.”
“That’s good!”
He giggled like a little girl. Wiped more blood out of his eye. Lowered the gun from her cheek and held it at his side.
“I ain’t fucked you yet, either.”
“No. You haven’t.”
She heard a low moan and looked at Jennifer. But Jennifer was just sitting there shaking and staring down at the woman as before. And Ray had taken a step backward. He was looking down the hallway.
It wasn’t Jennifer. It was Katherine. My god.
“You fucking believe it? That bitch is still alive!” He laughed. “I shot her good too.” He shook his head. “Well what the fuck, we can get to that shit later. You were saying?”
“I . . .”
“You stopped at two.”
“What?”
“Buttons. You got two more buttons left there. Let’s go. Let’s see ’em. You think I got all night?”
She released the third button and realized she hadn’t wished for a bra since her mother’d bought her her first trainer. There was no way to know what to do anymore. He was standing close but not close enough. Katherine’s moan, that single step back had defeated her, ruined the only thing close to a plan she had.
“You a good fuck or a bad fuck?”
Are you a good witch or a bad witch? The guy was crazy.
“I’m . . . I’m a good fuck.”
“Who says so?”
“My boyfriend.”
Her fingers picked at the fourth button.
“You got a boyfriend? Who’s your boyfriend? What’s his name?”
“Ed.”
“Ed? Like in Mister Ed?”
“What?”
“The horse. He hung like a horse or something?”
“What?”
“Pull out your shirt! Pull out the shirt and lose the fucking button. Now! Or I put you down like they put a horse down like I put my fucking mama down. Do it!”
She had the shirt out and unbuttoned before he even finished, and it took her a moment to understand the last part, a moment for it to sink in, that he’d killed his own mother but when she did she felt something glide up her spine and start her trembling again. She was losing all control again.
If she’d ever had any.
That one step. That one step out of reach.
She felt a breeze from the open window like a ghostly hand across her stomach.
“Ed. Jesus! You are so full of shit, Sally. There’s no fucking Ed. You aren’t balling any Ed you rich-bitch fucking dyke. You think I don’t know you? You think Ray don’t know some queer when he sees one? You bull-dyke skanky bitch? Let’s see those tits. I ought to let Jennifer suck ’em, bite ’em. Bite ’em off. Hey Jen, you want to suck some titty? Take off your goddamn shirt you fucking bitch.”
She closed her eyes and shrugged it off her shoulders. Felt it glide down over her bare arms and back like a fallen veil. She kept her eyes shut tight. She did not want to see him see her body. She did not want to look into his face. She knew her breasts trembled. She trembled. She couldn’t help it. She did not want to watch him enjoying that. The wall felt cold against her back.
“Not bad. Pretty good in fact. Uh-oh. Got blood on ’em, though. Dried blood. Kinda gross, Sal. Messy. But they’re good all right. Look at me.”
No.
“Look at me!”
No.
“Open your eyes you little cunt!”
She did and he had it out of his pants, the knife stuck in his belt and his dick in his hand and he was working it, squeezing it, milking the thing and then jerking it rapidly and hard and then milking it again, then jerking, his penis red with blood from the palm of his hand, his mouth open wide and blood pooling in one eye and the other staring straight into hers and then she could see he was almost ready, he was coming this fast, the brow knitted, the mouth open wider and he took one staggering step toward her to throw his slime across her body, his filthy slime over her bare legs but that was what she needed, what she had prayed for and she brought her knee up hard.
He howled and fell to his knees both hands clutching his bloody groin and she ran for the door. Heard Jennifer scream something behind her. Flung open the door. Saw a fine, dear face at the threshold.
And never heard the gun.
Chapter Forty-eight
Anderson
One moment she was a sudden half-nude presence in the doorway, her expression terrified then excited at seeing him there and the next moment the right side of her chest seemed to explode in front of him. He tried to catch her but she fell reeling off the side of the porch and into the shrubs and it was a uniform behind him who leapt from the porch and got to her, and the cop in him simply took over then, the furious raging man in him took over, and he and Schilling were through the door and firing. Pye was firing too, his limp dick dangling out of his
pants, trying to stuff it back in and shooting wild twice, three times, trying to back away down the hall where ahead of him somebody lay tied to a chair.
He heard a massive shattering of glass which would be the uniforms at the back double doors. Anderson’s own shots went wild—goddammit, he was way out of practice—but out of the corner of his eye he saw Schilling take the position unflinching as Pye’s fourth round cracked into the wall behind him and saw him fire and Pye went down screeching, grabbing for his right leg which had burst open at the thigh.
He felt a rushing white heat in his head and ran for him and Pye turned and fired but the pistol clicked on empty. He tried to unsling the rifle but Anderson was on him and the next thing he knew he was astraddle him and pounding at him, pounding at his pretty face and then suddenly the face wasn’t pretty anymore, the face had burst, the face was a tangled mess of torn flesh, of bloody lips and nose and eyes beneath him. His hands ached and stung and he kept pounding, the kid wheezing squealing squirming under his thighs and he was aware of Schilling’s hands on his shoulders and at the same time the kid trying to reach for the knife in his belt and then he felt Schilling release him, Schilling stepping over and stomping hard on the hand that wanted the knife, kicking it aside, standing on the hand and then grinding it to the floor.
He heard bones snap and the kid screaming, spittle and blood flying out of his mouth. His fist found the oozing eye socket one last time. And then just as suddenly as it had come over him his rage deserted him.
The kid didn’t move.
He felt exhausted, drained, empty. His hands were raw and in his left hand something was maybe broken. He was shaking and it was entirely possible he might puke. He looked up and saw that he was surrounded by uniforms with their guns drawn. Mostly kids. The kids were looking at him with a kind of amazement, like he’d just stepped out of a spaceship, a big blue, bug-eyed Martian. The older hands looked grim. One of them slowly nodded.
Two of them were kneeling beside the girl in the chair. He heard one of them ask if she was alive. Barely, said the other. Shot bad. Lost an awful lot of blood.
Jennifer Fitch was wailing in the living room.
He got off Pye and stood. His legs were wobbly. He felt Charlie’s hand on his back supporting him. Ed turned and looked at his face. The face was unreadable as a stone.
Charlie finally had got his man.
He wondered how it felt to him.
He turned and walked down the hall toward the door and heard Fitch’s wail soar higher, louder as two of the uniforms approached her. Jesus Christ look at this place somebody said and then he was out the door.
They had gotten her out on the lawn by then and one of them was giving her mouth-to-mouth and working on her chest while two others stood over her and another approached from his squad car and Anderson heard him tell the others that the ambulances were on their way.
The ones who were standing parted for him and he knelt beside her and looked first at her, at her face and the terrible wound in her chest, and then at the young dark-haired patrolman who was working on her, doing it right, doggedly and by the book but looking as though he were only moments away from bursting into tears. There was a desperation about the boy and Anderson knew that something had occurred within the boy that would last and which in the full flower of manhood would turn him one way or the other, an event which had branded him. To be helpless in the face of death, at the hollowing and coring of another and to wish so mightily not to be was not one of the great favors god did man.
“Give us a minute please, will you?” he said.
The boy looked at him. And Anderson thought that he would cry then, because Anderson was telling him what he didn’t want to hear, that it was futile, that it was over, to give it up. But he didn’t cry. He just nodded and set her head down gently in the grass and stood and like the others, moved away to give him space. Anderson took the boy’s place beside her in the grass and held her and rocked her and reached into her hair and only then did he feel the freefall tumble of his heart.
“Oh, Sally,” he whispered. “Oh jesus, look at you. Jesus, what you could have been. What a fine, fine woman you are. Oh christ, what you damn well could have been!”
He saw the lights in the distance and heard the sirens of the emergency crews approaching and was half-aware of footsteps on the stairs coming and going, uniforms going about their business, doing their jobs, the kind of jobs he’d wanted never to have to see or do again and he held her and waited for her to go cold in his hands so that the cold could convince him it was finished.
Afterward
“What then must we do? . . . we must give with love
to whomever god has placed in our path.”
—Christopher J. Koch
The Year of Living Dangerously
Flower Power
Do the dead dream?
Katherine did.
At the epicenter of her dream stood her mother as in a spotlight, a much younger version of her mother which Katherine had seen only in black-and-white stills in photo albums, the age perhaps of Katherine herself, her mother dressed in a pink silk chemise dress with spaghetti straps and matching turban, every inch the flapper and she was smiling, standing leaning against a bar surrounded by the empty chairs and tables of some unknown long-ago restaurant and drinking from a long-stemmed glass.
Behind her and to one side the barman appeared in white stiff shirt and gartered sleeves and as she watched him polish a glass the room was in an instant full, every chair at every table filled with stylishly dressed young people of that era all in their teens and twenties talking together and laughing and she had the strangest impression of floating toward her mother, not walking, of gliding by the diners and drinkers who partied together at the tables around her as though she were a breath of summer air, as though she were a ghost. But she was not a ghost, she couldn’t be because her mother set the long-stemmed glass on the bar and embraced her, smiling. She could feel her hands light and gentle across her back and then felt the hands release her, her mother’s young pretty face all serious now.
You’re not me, her mother said. You never were. There’s nothing wrong with you at all. You’re just fine, Katherine. You’re absolutely fine.
And as the lights in the room all went out at once and the bright gay laughter of the young suddenly stopped, Katherine believed her.
Schilling watched her go.
Watched her father sobbing by the hospital bed. In two weeks’ time the man had lost everything he loved. There was nothing Schilling could say to console him.
All the same he tried. He did try. His words seemed to him to be the equivalent of dropping pebbles into a lake. From any height at all you could barely see a ripple. What could it possibly mean to this man that Pye would spend the rest of his life in jail? What could it possibly mean that no plastic surgery was ever going to get him back his arrogant pretty face? That he would never kill again? In the enormity of this man’s loss these things were trivial. Pye was alive on the earth and his little girl was not.
End of story.
End of story for Schilling too. If Schilling was ever going to eat his pistol it was now. Today or very soon. Nights alone all this week waiting for her to die the enormous gulf between what he’d set out to do and what he’d managed to do yawned wide and cavernous. He was sober. He was afraid not to be sober. But sobriety brought no absolution for his cleverness, his rigid determination. Sobriety was an angel that came to him with empty hands.
He spent a couple hours each night at the hospital, spelling Wallace if Wallace would allow him to, urging him to go down for some coffee at least, a breath of fresh air. Most of the time he declined and the two of them would sit in a silence broken only by the man’s occasional fragmented remembrances his daughter, which sometimes seemed to force themselves out of him despite himself. He spoke of his fortieth birthday party when Katherine had crept up behind him and mashed chocolate cake with strawberry filling and vanilla icing in his fac
e and he’d followed suit, the image of a laughing little girl and grown man rolling faces smeared with birthday cake across a living-room floor. He spoke of her birth, her difficult delivery, of his wife’s seven hard hours in labor, her refusal of a cesarean. He spoke of a defiant black dress at her junior prom.
He listened to all this and much, much more until he almost thought he knew her. Brought flowers nightly to her bedside and then she died.
The night she died Schilling left him there, left him reluctantly but because the man insisted, climbed into his car and drove not to his home but down through the mountains and flatlands to Barbara and Elise Hanlon’s house in Short Hills. The house was dark and the driveway was empty. There was nobody home. He parked in front of the house and waited. He didn’t know for what. Just waited. He sat for three-quarters of an hour in the dark and smoked five cigarettes down to the filters before it occurred to him exactly why he was there.
The Hanlon house was for him a kind of wishing well. A place where his mind might just possibly empty itself enough, divest itself of enough of what he knew of the real world and the way the real world worked to let feeling in, to let hope and trust and tenderness in. He’d gone to the well the night Elise Hanlon died and the well hadn’t worked for him. His coin had disappeared into the empty dark of what Barbara Hanlon had become since last he’d seen her.
But now he was trying it again.
Please, he thought.
In the morning he woke slumped against the wheel. The car smelled of cigarette smoke and ashes. His windshield was covered with dew. There was still no Ferrari in the driveway.
He drove back into the mountains.
The day they sentenced Ray for the murders of Lisa Steiner and Elise Hanlon was only the second time Tim had seen him since Ray had punched a hole in his bedroom wall and stalked away with a pound of hash in his fist. The first was the day he had to testify. That afternoon Ray was already seated with his attorney when Tim entered the courtroom. Today he was standing. And today, maybe because he wasn’t so nervous, maybe because he had nothing to do but watch, he came to the realization that Ray had reinvented himself once again. The broken nose and flattened cheekbone made him look older, less the pretty boy and more mature, as did the sober blue suit, striped tie and shiny new brown loafers.