“Crowder says your wife likes expensive jewelry. He says he knows for a fact she’s got way more than enough necklaces and rings and other shit to cover your debt. We’re gonna go up to your room, or wherever she keeps the stuff, and I’m going to fill a garbage bag. Then I’ll go, and I’ll take that hundred bucks in your wallet as a bonus.”
“Listen,” McHugh said. “I’ve got a line on the games this weekend, and by Sunday night I’ll be able to wipe the slate clean, or at least make a significant down payment. Just give me another couple of days.”
“Not gonna happen. Now get moving.”
Anger flickered in McHugh’s eyes and he made a move toward Derek, who had lowered his gun slightly. It wasn’t exactly pointed at the floor, but halfway, and now he raised it again in a hurry and said, “Not one more fucking step.”
McHugh stopped in his tracks and jerked his head left, at a doorway that opened into a dining room or something, and Derek sensed sudden movement from that direction, and McHugh started to say something but what it was Derek did not know because as he turned to face the movement a shrill scream sounded, and Derek jumped, he literally left his feet and bounced into the air in surprise, and he was so fucking surprised he staggered backward when he came down and as he staggered backward he pulled the trigger.
It was a reflexive action, absolutely no thought involved, and the gun roared and McHugh shouted something and on the other side of the doorway a body dropped to the floor.
4
It was a woman.
The woman was about McHugh’s age and it had to be his wife, and Derek had just enough time to register the fact that she was lying in a rapidly spreading pool of blood before the heavy sound of footfalls returned his attention to Jeff McHugh.
The man was bellowing incoherently and charging at Derek, coming at him like a freight train, and Derek had just enough time to swing the gun in the man’s direction and squeeze off another round before McHugh hit him and both men fell to the floor in a tangle of arms and legs, the gun skittering away across the room.
They had fallen next to McHugh’s wife, who was lying unmoving but still leaking impressive amounts of blood onto the hardwood floors, and Derek slipped and slid in it as he scrabbled to reach his gun.
If McHugh got to it first, Derek knew he would not survive beyond the next few seconds, and once again he felt that odd sensation of longing. He didn’t want to die, was fighting to live, but somewhere deep down inside his subconscious the thought of leaving this shit show behind for good held real appeal.
He crawled across the room on his hands and knees—holy shit, there’s already so much fucking blood—and against all odds managed to reach the gun before McHugh. It had slid almost all the way under a pine dining table the approximate size of a football field, and Derek picked up the gun and turned onto his back like some hero cop in an action movie, but this was no movie and he was sure as hell no hero, and he lifted the gun and prepared to fire at McHugh or at least scream at him to stay the fuck away.
But he didn’t do either thing.
He didn’t do anything.
Jeff McHugh lay next to his wife on the floor, every bit as unmoving as she, bleeding from a bullet wound in his chest that was almost a perfect match for the one in the middle of his wife’s body. She’d had a slight head start in the bleeding contest, but he was working hard to catch up, and the blood continued to soak their clothing and spread onto the floor.
He was supposed to be alone. He was supposed to be alone. He was supposed to be alone. The words raced through Derek’s head on a continuous loop, like an old vinyl record album with faulty grooves that was repeating the same lyric over and over.
Derek wiped the sweat from his eyes and tried to think. How the hell was he going to get out of this mess? McHugh was dead or dying and so was his wife, and Derek had pulled the trigger on both of them.
He had fucked up royally, and he wasn’t any closer to wiping his drug debt clean—or getting that heroin he needed so badly—than he’d been before he stepped foot in this house. Crowder was still going to want his money, dead couple or no dead couple, and Derek had no idea what to do.
McHugh was supposed to be alone.
It was all he could think, and Derek was so afraid and confused, and he knew there was something he should be considering, but for the life of him he couldn’t figure out what it was, because it was just so fucking hard to concentrate.
He raised his eyes from the bodies of the two people he’d killed—you’re not just a drug-addicted fuckup now, you’re a murdering drug-addicted fuckup, you’re a killer, a goddamned murderer—and just like that it all clicked into place and he realized exactly what he should have been considering before. It should have been the very next thought in his head the moment the bodies of McHugh and his wife hit the floor, and if he hadn’t been so fucking stressed out and panicked, Derek wanted to believe it would have been, even though he couldn’t quite convince himself.
McHugh didn’t just have a wife who should have been out of the house tonight.
He had a daughter.
And Derek remembered that fact because she was standing in the doorway six feet away.
5
She was maybe thirteen, just beginning the transformation from little girl to young woman, and it was already plain to see she was going to be stunning. Slim and tall, with raven hair that cascaded over her shoulders and halfway down her back. Her facial features were delicate but sharply defined.
Under virtually any circumstance the girl would be strikingly beautiful.
Except this circumstance.
Her face was screwed up in horrified confusion as she hung just outside the still-spreading ring of her parents’ blood. She stood unmoving, still as a stone, her gaze fixed on the two bodies.
Derek doubted she even realized he was in the room yet.
A pair of white buds sprouted from her ears and he guessed she’d been in her room listening to music during the brief confrontation. The struggle had gone unheard, but even the loudest of hip-hop or heavy metal music—or whatever teens listened to now—wouldn’t have been enough to mask the sound of two gunshots.
And here she was, and any moment now she would start screaming and Derek would probably panic like he’d done just seconds ago, and another bleeding body would hit the floor, this one a kid.
So Derek said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t know…I don’t…it…it was an accident.” The words came out high-pitched and quivery, the sound of someone else’s voice. Someone who was pretty close to stroking out.
The girl jumped in surprise and backed away a couple of steps before stopping and meeting Derek’s eyes. She must have seen the gun in his shaking hand but she paid it no attention. “You shot both my parents by accident?”
He lowered his eyes. He knew it was stupid, knew any second now the girl would run to a phone—assuming she didn’t have one in her pocket, which given her age was almost certainly a bad assumption—and call 911. He should be threatening her with execution to keep her quiet, should be tying her up and then figuring out a plan.
But at this moment, and under these circumstances, he couldn’t bring himself to do any of that. He couldn’t bring himself to hold her gaze. So he stared at the floor and said, “Um, yeah. Something like that.”
“I need to check for a pulse,” she said. “I need to make sure they’re alive and then call for ambulances. If you want to stop me you’re going to have to shoot me.” The girl’s eyes were watery and red, but she hadn’t screamed or panicked or started crying and her voice sounded steadier than Derek’s.
He couldn’t think of anything to say so he nodded.
Lowered his gun to the floor.
Watched as the little girl who was just starting to become a young woman dropped to her knees in front of the two motionless bodies. She landed closest to her mother so she started there. She lowered her head to the bloody chest and listened, then placed her fingers ag
ainst her mother’s neck and closed her eyes in concentration.
After a moment she glanced across the room at Derek, her eyes giving away nothing. She pushed to her feet and stepped over her mother, dropping again to the floor in front of her father. Then she repeated the exercise.
Then she lowered her head to her father’s chest and began sobbing deeply. “They’re both dead,” she said, the words muffled by McHugh’s bloody shirt. “They’re both dead. You killed my parents.”
She hugged her father’s body and then sat back on her haunches and faced Derek. “YOU KILLED MY PARENTS,” she screamed, and then she popped to her feet and charged across the room.
He barely had time to raise the gun and didn’t have time to aim it, which was probably a good thing because he didn’t trust himself not to pull the trigger. The last thing he wanted was to commit his third murder in two minutes by killing a child. She slammed into him at full speed, screaming gibberish, and they tumbled into the dining room chairs.
Then she was slapping his face and punching him, kicking him for good measure, and he realized dimly that if he didn’t get his shit together he was going to get beaten to unconsciousness by a little girl. He had brought his arms up reflexively in front of his face to protect himself, and now he drew his right hand back, giving the girl a couple of free shots at his eye and cheekbone.
She rocked him twice with closed-fist punches and then he pistol-whipped her, slamming the butt of the gun against her raven-haired skull. She had drawn her fist back to hit him again but her lights went out immediately, as if someone had tripped a circuit breaker inside her brain. She fell off him sideways and hit the floor with a thud, her arms and legs spasming once and then falling still.
Derek realized he was panting and he worked to get his breathing under control. A shadow in his peripheral vision caused him to jerk his head to the side, fearful another McHugh was coming to beat his ass.
But the shadow was nothing more than the swelling beginning on the side of his face where the now-unconscious girl had slugged him multiple times. He placed the gun on the floor and lifted his fingers to his face, touching the skin gingerly.
It stung and he grimaced, and he realized he’d begun crying at some point. He knew Crowder viewed him as a fuckup; hell, the whole world viewed him as a fuckup, the most obvious reason being he was a fuckup. That much would be impossible to deny, not that Derek ever would have tried.
This situation, though, this was a fuckup on a scale that dwarfed even the worst shitstorms Derek had ever managed to involve himself in. This was a whole new level of fucking up. This was the Mount Everest of fuckups. The K2. The mother of all fuckups.
You killed two people and then because you weren’t quite enough of a dick, you knocked out a little girl.
The dining room chairs had scattered like bowling pins, and he pushed a couple aside and rose unsteadily to his feet. His face continued to swell and he only now realized he was bleeding from the nose and maybe the mouth. He took three wobbling steps toward the front door before he remembered the gun lying on the floor next to the girl.
Jesus, you’re an idiot. He retraced his steps and picked the gun up off the floor and not a moment too soon, because as he did so the girl’s eyelids began fluttering. She moaned and twitched as her brain rebooted, and Derek realized he’d been seconds away from potentially getting shot in the back.
It was no more than he deserved.
His mind was spinning, everything felt like it was moving too fast, slipping away from him, but one thing he knew for sure was that the girl was waking up and if he wanted to avoid a repeat of the fiasco from a couple of minutes ago, he was either going to have to leave the house or restrain her.
Since leaving the house was out of the question, at least until he could figure out some semblance of a plan, the only remaining option was the second one: tying her up.
Junk drawer, he thought. Everybody has a junk drawer. He touched his still-swelling face as he stumbled out of the killing room, gasping at the resulting sting and blinking the tears out of his eyes. He had no clue where the kitchen might be, and he knew he needed to hurry.
Down the hallway and to the right, and Derek caught his first break of the goddamned evening as the first room he entered turned out to be the one he needed. He began yanking drawers open, the clanking of silverware sounding about as loud as the sirens he expected to begin hearing at any moment.
McHugh’s house was located all by itself in the middle of the freaking boonies, but still Derek couldn’t quite fathom how it could be possible to kill two people without anyone hearing anything when the gun had sounded like a fucking cannon going off. And what if someone came to investigate? What would he do then? Say someone was walking by, strolling along the side of the county road with Fido and they heard the gunshots? They could be standing right outside the front door ready to knock, and then Derek’s problems would be even worse, he would have to—
He found some duct tape. There was maybe a third of a roll left, tucked inside a drawer along with pens and pencils, thumbtacks, envelopes and assorted other crap, just as Derek had envisioned. He grabbed it and hurriedly retraced his steps, feeling a sense of accomplishment and pride in being right for just a moment before remembering why the hell he needed the tape in the first place.
He turned the corner into the dining room, wrinkling his nose at the smell. The blood odor was heavy and strong, but it was tinged with something more. One or both of the people Derek killed had voided their bowels and the resulting stench caused his stomach to flip-flop. He had to swallow hard and clench his jaws together to avoid puking all over the floor and probably himself, too.
Across the room the girl had lifted herself into a sitting position. She was shaking her head carefully, wincing with pain, and supporting herself with her hands on the floor. She looked woozy and still only semi-conscious, and while Derek didn’t know how long it would take before she became fully alert, he had no intention of finding out the hard way.
He hurried across the room and slipped in some of the blood on the hardwood floor and damned near fell on his face. It was like walking on the ice at Boston Garden. He glanced back and saw an almost three-foot-long skid mark he’d made through the spilled blood and almost puked again but somehow choked it back.
When the girl saw him coming she tried to skitter backward and get away, but she crab-walked straight into an upended dining room chair. Before she could recover Derek was on her.
He started by slapping some tape on her mouth.
Then he righted one of the chairs.
He forced her into it and in seconds had secured her with more tape.
He stepped back, horrified by what he’d just done.
Great. You tied up a kid. Now what?
6
Derek realized he’d been pacing for at least twenty minutes, lost in confusion and terror and the certainty that a SWAT team was at any moment going to knock down Jeff McHugh’s front door and riddle him with bullets. He was breathing heavily and tracking blood all over the floor and he was just so fucking afraid.
He glanced at the girl and saw her following his every move with eyes that were large and fearful, and the shame he felt over killing two innocent people—and tying up a child—intensified.
He needed to apologize, to explain himself, as silly as that sounded. He needed to make some kind of attempt to shed a little of the awful weight that had descended onto his shoulders the moment he pulled the trigger, and the only person he could do that to was the girl.
He made a snap decision. Walked over to the girl and stopped in front of her.
She tried to shrink back, to get away, but of course she was strapped to a chair, helpless and unable to escape.
“If I take the tape off your mouth, do you promise not to scream?” Removing the girl’s gag would be stupid on so many levels. It was asking for trouble, but Derek had to do it. He couldn’t say why, exactly, all he knew was that
once the notion of unburdening himself had popped into his head, it was all he could think about. It had turned into a compulsion every bit as strong as the craving for heroin.
Mistrust joined fear in the girl’s expression. It was written all over her face, but still she nodded slowly.
Derek reached down and scratched at one corner of the duct tape. After a moment he’d exposed enough of an edge that he could grab it between his thumb and forefinger, and he began tugging, pulling slowly in an attempt to avoid hurting the girl any more than he already had.
The tape wouldn’t come.
When he tried to remove it gently from her face, all he succeeded in doing was lifting the slack skin of her cheek. He gave it a couple of tries but then the stress and the guilt and the horror—knowing that in the space of a few awful seconds he’d transformed from heroin junkie and small-time fuckup to multiple murderer—became too much. The tape was just one more example of a world with nothing better to do than fuck with Derek Weaver, and he couldn’t take it anymore. He tightened his grip on the goddamned tape and yanked hard.
It ripped off the girl’s face and to his surprise she gasped but did not scream. She’d already demonstrated her toughness by nearly beating Derek senseless, but this was a whole new level of badass. The adhesive left a raw red strip running from one cheek to the other and directly across her lips. Her eyes watered but she seemed determined not to give the home invader the satisfaction of seeing her cry, or even complain.
“You killed my parents,” she said dully. She met his gaze fiercely, head-on, and said, “Why did you kill my parents?”
“You don’t understand,” Derek said. He’d felt the overwhelming need to explain himself to the girl, to get at least a little of the guilt off his chest, and this was the best he could come up with? You don’t understand?
“Of course I don’t understand!” she said. “How could I possibly understand? You come into our house and shoot my mom and dad and you think I’m going to understand?”
Chasing China White Page 3