by Bryan Smith
He popped open a beer and sipped from it as he thought about why Mary had left the tongue on the recliner. Was it meant as some kind of symbolic gesture, yet another warning of what could happen to him if he went blabbing to the cops? He thought it was possible. It seemed like the kind of thing Mary would do. Or it might have no meaning at all beyond being just another attempt on her part to freak him out.
The pain continued to recede over the next several minutes as he leaned back in the recliner and drank more beer, finishing the can he’d opened upon sitting down and immediately popping the tab on another one. After another few sips from the fresh can, he turned his head toward the couch and stared at dead woman number one, trying to visualize himself carrying the corpse to the house across the street. Getting her over there and stashed away would be a difficult proposition for lots of reasons. For one thing, he lacked Shane’s upper body strength. A guy like that could cradle the body in his arms and quickly carry it to the other house without breaking a sweat, whereas Pete had barely managed to drag the blonde-haired corpse in from the porch.
Dragging the body over there was seeming like his only option. He could possibly get it done that way, but it would be risky as hell. The people across the street were all dead, apparently, but he had other neighbors, and it wasn’t yet late enough that they were all in bed asleep. The likelihood of one of them taking a random peek out a window at just the wrong moment was far higher than Pete would have liked. And that wasn’t even taking into account motorists who might turn down the street or people out walking around. These were some of the same concerns he’d had prior to getting dead woman number two back inside, except that the risk factor would be far greater this time. Getting an apparently passed-out drunk woman in off your porch wasn’t quite the same thing as openly dragging a corpse across a neighborhood street.
He sighed and shook his head, feeling hopeless as he reached the bottom of yet another can of Bud. Instead of immediately opening another one, he got up from the recliner with a grimace and set the carton and empty can on the coffee table. His bladder was feeling the strain of all the beer and he needed to go unburden it. The pain in his gut flared up slightly as he took his first shaky steps in the direction of the bathroom, but it was far duller now. He no longer felt crippled by it. In the bathroom, he flipped up the toilet seat, unzipped his pants, and began to urinate. The stream came out fast and strong and went on far longer than usual. It was only as it began to slow and come out in dribbles that a possible solution to the question of how to transport the corpse across the street came to him.
A solution that would probably require the use of an axe.
FOURTEEN
Pete went back out to the living room and approached his front door, peeking through blind slats for a look outside. No lights were on in the house across the street. Stan Richardson had lived there with his wife and a college-aged daughter for at least as long as Pete had lived in the house opposite their own, probably far longer. He hadn’t known the family well, but they’d seemed nice enough. If what Shane had told him was true—and Pete thought it probably was—Stan’s wife and daughter were also dead.
Of course, the needless slaughter of an entire family was tragic and unfortunate, but for Pete the lack of anyone alive over there was also fortuitous. It meant he could trespass on the property without being stopped or challenged. And going over there would be necessary to accomplish the grisly task he’d envisioned.
Okay, so Mary wanted him to transport a corpse over to that house and stash it in the crawlspace. This was problematic for all the reasons that had been troubling him, but it had occurred to him while in the bathroom that Mary had set no additional requirements regarding how he was to get the job done. She had not, for instance, stipulated that the corpse must remain intact. He couldn’t drag the body across the street and he couldn’t carry her. Not in her current form, anyway. Hacking the body into a bunch of smaller parts and carrying them over there in black trash bags, however, might just be a viable way of going about it. He wasn’t much thrilled by the idea of committing a messy act of corpse mutilation, but there weren’t any other workable options he could see.
There were some problems to overcome, however, the biggest one being that he didn’t have an axe or any other kind of heavy-duty tool capable of dismembering the woman’s body. He believed there might be a possible way around that, though. There was a storage shed in Stan’s back yard. Pete had glimpsed the roof of the little building jutting over the top of the fence there numerous times over the years. Stan had been the kind of guy who appeared to actually enjoy working on his yard on the weekends. He was frequently out there trimming hedges, mowing the grass, putting down new mulch, and so forth. Pete, on the other hand, took the lazy man’s way out and paid a landscaping company to come by every two weeks and do those things for him. Stan likely would never have dreamed of doing such a thing. He was a hands-on kind of guy all the way. Or had been, at least, until Shane killed him. All of which meant Stan had probably owned the full range of yard work tools.
Including, almost certainly, an axe.
Pete’s path forward from here became obvious. He had to go over there, slip into the back yard, and rummage through that storage shed until he found what he wanted. He just hoped the shed wasn’t locked. The house wasn’t, according to Shane, but the shed might be. An image of a closed padlock hanging from a hasp came into his head, taunting him. Grimacing, he pushed the image away. He’d just have to hope for the best. If the shed was locked, he’d have to break into it somehow. No way around it.
Instead of opening the door and immediately heading across the street, Pete grabbed another beer from the carton, popped it open, and chugged it down as fast as he could manage. He’d consumed enough beer at this point that he’d already achieved what was, for him, a hitherto unknown level of inebriation. For most people, this was what they would call “buzzed”, he supposed. That midpoint between sobriety and actual drunkenness. Pete was beginning to understand the appeal. He felt less on edge now and capable of doing things he’d normally never even consider. Maybe his father and uncles had been on to something with this drinking thing all along. Sure, they were belligerent assholes and he hoped to never see any of them again, but maybe they would have been belligerent assholes even without the booze. Who could say?
After finishing the beer, Pete opened the door and stepped out onto his porch, easing the door shut behind him. He stepped down from the porch and walked briskly across his yard to the street, trying to move fast without running. He figured being spotted running would look more suspicious on the off-chance a neighbor did happen to look out a window and see him. He picked up his pace considerably, however, when a pair of headlights appeared at the end of the street. The car was three blocks down to his right and approaching fast. He didn’t think the driver would spot him, but it wouldn’t do to drag his heels.
He got to the hedges at the front of the house by the time the car was a block away and ducked down behind them, remaining there until he saw the taillights recede at the other end of the street. Sighing in relief, he got up and eased himself out from behind the hedges. Some sticky burrs and hard little leaves adhered to his clothing and he plucked a few of them away as he moved down along the side of the house. Like his own back yard, this one was encircled by a tall privacy fence. He opened the gate and entered the yard, pulling the gate most of the way closed behind him without latching it.
The shed was in a corner at the back of the yard, which was approximately half the size of Pete’s back yard, a consequence of the way the property lines were set along the neighboring streets and alleys. He started moving across the yard and gasped softly in surprise when a light came on at the back of the house. For a moment, he didn’t move, frozen in place by shock. Some moments elapsed and he realized all that had happened was he’d triggered a motion sensor. No one was alive in the house, so it didn’t matter. He started across the yard again when the light went out.
; An initial groan of despair came to his lips as he arrived at the shed and glimpsed the padlock dangling from the hasp. Despair gave way to relief in the next instant, however, when he realized the lock was hanging open. The shackle had not been clicked into place. He sighed in relief, slipped the shackle free of the hasp, and tossed the padlock aside. It landed with an audible thump on the ground somewhere nearby.
The hinges on the shed’s door creaked as Pete pulled it open, making him wince until he again belatedly remembered he was the only one around to hear it. Once the door was all the way open, he stepped into the shed and felt around until he found a light switch. He flipped the switch and squinted against the sudden glare dispersing the darkness.
A big work table took up much of the space. Various tools and boxes were piled atop it. Stowed beneath the table was a push mower and a rusting tricycle. The item he needed was hanging from a peg on one of the walls. He maneuvered around the table and took the long-handled axe down from its peg. It had a solid, heavy feel to it. He put the ball of a thumb to the blade, gingerly testing it for sharpness. Even this slight amount of pressure produced a shallow, bloodless slice in his skin. He jerked the thumb away before the bloodless part of that could change. The axe was plenty sharp enough. If he couldn’t dismember dead woman number one’s body with this thing, he wouldn’t be able to do it at all.
Pete was starting to make his way back around the table when he spied a chainsaw resting on a bench. It looked like one of the gas-powered ones rather than an electric model. A gas can sat next to it on the bench. He hesitated before continuing on out of the shed, contemplating the possibilities of the chainsaw. It would make the nasty job ahead of him much easier. The big blade would be able to chew quickly through muscle, bone, and sinew. He could be done dismembering the corpse within minutes, as opposed to strenuously hacking and hacking away with the axe. It was going to be a nasty, messy job no matter how he went about it. Speeding the process up considerably would be a wonderful thing. On the other hand, taking a corpse apart with a chainsaw would be far noisier than doing it with an axe. He imagined people walking by in the street and hearing a chainsaw running in his house. Maybe they’d think nothing of it. Maybe they’d think he was watching a scary movie on a loud surround system.
Or maybe not.
Maybe they’d hear it and call the police right away.
Another thing to consider, concealing an axe when he crossed the street again would be a far easier thing than concealing a chainsaw. He could jam the axe-head up under his armpit and hold the handle stiffly at his side as he hurried across the street.
He sighed.
Okay, the axe it is.
He’d just flipped off the light switch and was about to step out of the shed when the phone in his pocket rang. Frowning, he took the phone out and squinted at the screen. It was Mary.
He answered and put the phone to his ear. “What?”
“Stop rooting around out there and come into the house.”
“Um …”
She grunted. “Yes, I’m in your neighbors’ house. I saw you come out of your house and cross the street. Then I saw you go in the back yard. What are you doing out there anyway?”
“Um …”
“Never mind. Just come into the house through the back. It’s not locked.”
She hung up.
Pete put the phone away and hesitated a moment longer, wondering if he should return the axe to its peg or take it with him.
He opted for the latter.
FIFTEEN
A set of sliding glass doors overlooked a patio at the back of the house. Pete rolled the door open and stepped into a large dining room, a gauzy curtain billowing in the breeze as he entered the house. There were no lights on in the house. Leaving the sliding door open, he moved carefully through the dark dining room, seeing the faint outline of an archway to his left and another one right in front of him. The one in front of him was much wider and on the opposite side of a big round dining table.
A woman was seated in a chair at the dining table. She was facing away from Pete as he moved closer to the table and tightened his grip on the axe handle. He began to lift the axe, consumed with the sudden urge to put an abrupt end to this madness. Killing a person was something he would have found unimaginable before today, but he had a different view of the matter now. This woman had set horrendous things in motion and was responsible for the deaths of several people. Even if she hadn’t killed them with her own hands, their murders had happened at her bidding. She deserved retribution. Also, if he killed her now, he might be able to locate her phone and scrub it of any incriminating information. He became almost giddy at the thought. The possibility of getting free of what had seemed an impossible situation suddenly felt within his grasp.
Before he could get the axe lifted above his head, however, he noted the slouched position of the woman in the chair. Other things were off as well. Her head was lolling to one side. The woman’s wavy hair was blonde like Mary’s and in the dark appeared similarly styled, but now he saw it was much shorter.
“That’s not me, you idiot.”
Pete gasped and glanced in the direction of the wider archway. The slim, shadowy shape of a woman appeared. As Pete eyed the form warily, he heard the sound of a thumb flicking at a lighter. A thin column of orange flame appeared in the darkness. She lit a cigarette and put the lighter away.
“Come in here with me, Pete. Let’s talk.”
She turned away from him and disappeared into the deeper shadows beyond the archway. Pete did not immediately follow her into whatever room she had entered. Instead, he moved around the table until he had an unobstructed view of the woman sitting slumped in the chair. He pulled out his phone again and used the light of the screen to see her better. He grimaced, seeing the deep slash wound to her throat. Gouts of blood had left the front of her body coated in crimson. The dead woman was Stan’s wife, Linda. He took a closer look around the dining room and saw no sign of the murdered couple’s daughter, but he was sure her corpse was somewhere else in the house.
He followed Mary through the wide archway into what he was able to discern as a large living room even in the inky darkness. Mary had taken a seat at one end of a long sectional. Pete saw the glowing tip of her cigarette rise in the darkness and burn brighter for a moment as she inhaled from it. As he inched closer—moving slowly to avoid unseen obstructions—she leaned forward and stubbed her cigarette out in an ashtray. He edged around a coffee table and in another moment stood no more than five feet directly in front of her. His hand again tightened around the axe handle.
“That’s close enough,” she told him.
There was a click and then Pete was squinting against the glare of a lamp, which was on a little round side table at the end of the sectional. A gun was clutched in Mary’s right hand. A little revolver. The barrel was aimed directly at his abdomen.
She smiled. “Put the axe down if you don’t want to get shot.”
Pete tossed the axe aside. It landed with a muffled thump on the carpeted floor. “I’ll need to take it with me when I leave.”
Mary had changed out of her professional attire since the last time Pete had seen her, much earlier in the day. Gone were the pencil skirt, fitted pinstriped top, and heels. Now she was wearing a pair of dark blue sneakers, tight black leggings, and a loose black sweatshirt. Pete immediately understood the practical reason for the change. These were clothes for prowling around in the night.
She gestured with the cigarette. “And why would you need an axe, Pete?”
“Because hacking up that poor woman’s body into manageable pieces is the only feasible way to accomplish the latest fucked-up task you’ve assigned me.”
She frowned, shaking her head. “Hmm, no, that’s not what I want. If I’d wanted you to dismember a corpse, I would have said so. I’m afraid you’ll have to bring her over here in one piece.”
Pete made a sound of deep exasperation. “There’s no way I can do that withou
t someone seeing me.”
She shrugged. “Well, Pete, you better find a way. My game, my rules.” She stood up and slowly approached him, keeping the barrel of the gun aimed squarely at his midsection. “You have just two other options. One, you can quit the game, at which point I’ll have no choice but to start posting those photos. Or …” She smiled as she came closer still and pressed the gun’s barrel against his stomach, pushing it in hard enough to hurt. “If you feel you can’t live with the shame and consequences of what you’ve done, I can just kill you now. In your place, I would seriously consider picking that option. You’d be dead, but you’d be spared the messy aftermath. Make up your mind, Pete. Keep playing or don’t. You have ten seconds until I decide for you. One, two, three, four—”
The rapid way she rattled off the numbers sent a jolt of terror through Pete. “Stop! I’ll keep playing. Jesus.”
She made a sound of mock disappointment and arranged her features in an exaggerated frown. “Aw, I was sort of hoping you’d choose that last option. Killing you has never been the ultimate goal of the game, but I have to admit I’d find satisfaction in watching you die.” The gun was still wedged against his stomach and now she dug it in a little deeper, making him wince. “I’d shoot you once right through here rather than doing the standard double-tap to the back of the head. Then I’d sit down, smoke another cigarette, and listen to you moan and cry while you bleed out on the floor. I think I’d really enjoy that.”
Pete started trembling again as she talked about shooting him. He didn’t think she would do it, at least not yet, but the hard steel pressing into him made it difficult to take that for granted. He sniffled. “Please don’t.”
She reached up to lightly stroke one side of his face with her fingertips. “You poor thing. You’re so frightened. Like a little child afraid of the boogeyman. Only you’re a grown man, sort of, which makes it extra pathetic. Wouldn’t you agree?”