by Bryan Smith
Pete sniffled again and said nothing.
Mary’s fingernails began to dig into his cheek. “Answer me. Wouldn’t you agree?”
Pete choked back a sob and nodded. “Yes. I … agree.”
Mary smiled and her hand came away from his face. Little beads of blood welled up from two of the deeper indentations her nails had made. “Good. Now, here’s what happens next. Go back to your house and get the girl. Bring her over here and put her in the crawlspace like I told you in the first fucking place. In one goddamn piece. I don’t care how you do it, just do it. You’ll have ten minutes to get it done starting as soon as you leave by the front door. When it’s done, text me a picture of the bitch in the crawlspace as proof. If I don’t get that picture by the time your ten minutes is up, I start posting those other photos. I won’t be here by the time you return and neither will that axe so get any ideas of turning things around on me out of your stupid fucking skull. Got it?”
He frowned. “I don’t think I should risk being seen going out the front way. Bringing her in through the back would—”
She took the gun away from his abdomen and smacked the butt of it against the side of his head, making him take a few staggering steps sideways. “Don’t argue with me. Do exactly as you’re told or eat a fucking bullet. Up to you.”
Pete gingerly touched the aching side of his head and whimpered.
Mary aimed the gun at him again, this time at the middle of his face. “Go, Pete.”
He nodded and turned away from her, leaving the house through the front door without another word.
SIXTEEN
A car turned down the street in the same moment Pete stepped out onto the porch. He debated staying where he was until the driver either parked the car somewhere on the street or drove on by, but the car was moving slowly and Pete was conscious of the necessity of working quickly. His allotted ten minutes had already started and were ticking by quickly. Muttering a curse under his breath, he stepped down from the porch and began to hurry across the lawn. He was at the edge of the lawn when the car abruptly sped up and came to a squealing stop in the middle of the street, blocking his way.
The window on the passenger side of the old, maroon-colored Tercel slid down and the pudgy face of a rotund and rosy-cheeked young man peered out at him. His spiky hair had an excessive amount of product in it. “Hey, dude, you know how to get to the stadium from here?”
Pete knew how to get to the stadium, but giving directions would cost him more time than he could afford. Even asking the fat guy why he didn’t just use GPS was problematic, as it would come with the risk of opening up a prolonged line of conversation. Being rude was something he always tried to avoid, even when doing so was the easiest way out of an uncomfortable encounter.
He shook his head and said, in as emphatic a tone as he could manage, “No.”
The big man frowned and tilted his head, glancing at the house behind Pete. “Man, don’t you live around here?”
Pete simply repeated what he’d already said: “No.”
The driver, who looked like a thinner version of the guy who’d first addressed Pete, sighed in exasperation. “Fuck it, man. Dude’s an asshole. We’ll ask somebody else.”
The big man in the passenger seat sneered. “Thanks for nothing, dick.”
In his lap was one of those enormous fountain drinks sold at convenience stores. The big man removed the top and tossed the plastic cup out the window at Pete. The contents of the cup soaked the front of his shirt as the cup hit him and fell to the street. He heard the laughter of the young men trailing out of the car’s open window as they sped away.
Pete stood there in disbelief for a moment, plucking the wet front of his shirt away from his skin. “Jesus. Fucking assholes.”
This just wasn’t his day on any level whatsoever. He felt cursed.
He hurried on across the street and raced across his own lawn, vaulting up the steps to the porch and hauling the door open. As soon as he was inside, he stopped cold and put a hand to his mouth, his face twisting in disgust. Shane Watson had again entered the house during his absence. He was naked now, his discarded clothes in a haphazard pile by the coffee table. It wasn’t Shane’s nudity that bothered him, though, but rather what he was doing. He was on top of dead woman number two, rutting away between her spread legs. Her black panties had been stripped away and tossed aside.
Pete took the hand away from his mouth. “What the fuck are you doing? What’s wrong with you?”
Shane glanced up at him, pausing only slightly in his rutting. “Hey, don’t judge me, man. I’m not doing this because I want to. The evil cunt told me to do it. I don’t have a fucking choice. Don’t believe me? Look over there.”
Shane jerked his chin in the direction of the coffee table.
Pete followed his gaze and saw that Mary was monitoring the act of necrophilia on her iPhone via Facetime. It was initially hard to tell from the angle of her phone’s camera, but she appeared to be inside a car.
She smiled when she saw Pete looking. “Hi, Pete. You better get cracking. Time’s running out.”
Pete groaned and ran a hand through his hair. “Please just give me another few minutes. I got delayed by some assholes asking for directions.”
Mary made a tsk-tsk sound and shook her head. “Not my problem. You’ve got less than seven minutes.”
“Fuck!”
There was no point in any further pleading for leniency. She clearly wasn’t interested in cutting him even the slightest slack. Moving with as much speed as he could manage, he hopped over Shane and the dead woman and shoved the coffee table aside. The iPhone had been propped up against the black gift box, but now it fell over. He doubted Mary would be pleased about that, but he needed room to operate. Grabbing hold of dead woman number one by the ankles, he summoned as much strength as he could manage and hauled her off the couch, grimacing when the back of her head hit the hardwood floor with a sickening crack. He dragged her around the prone forms of Shane and the blonde corpse, grunting and straining as rivulets of sweat began to slide down the side of his head.
By the time he maneuvered her over to the door, opened it again, and got ready to drag her outside, it felt as if multiple more minutes had already passed. The task was feeling more impossible than ever. A crazy idea occurred to him. Maybe he should get in his car and drive away from all this, go somewhere far, far away and start over with a new identity. Crazy though it clearly was, he was momentarily tempted by the idea. The only problem was he didn’t have the first clue how to go about successfully crafting a new identity for himself. He wasn’t a professional criminal. The police would track him down, he was sure of it.
Then he thought of another crazy idea.
An even crazier one, actually.
The car.
The idea was beyond insane, but it might be the only way he could get this done in the time remaining to him. He dragged his keys out of his pocket, dashed outside, and got in his car. After jamming the key in the ignition and starting the engine, he put the car in gear, hit the gas, and sped across his lawn until his front bumper bumped against the bottom step of the porch. He wrenched the gearshift over to P and left the motor running as he got out of the car. Next he opened the screen door and set the sliding clasp at the top to hold it open. He then grabbed dead woman number one by the ankles again and dragged the body across the porch and then onto the hood of his car.
The heels of his shoes made slight metallic crumpling sounds as he maneuvered the body around on the hood, arranging it so it was sprawled lengthwise in front of the windshield. He wished he had a rope or something he could use to strap the body down, but he didn’t and there wasn’t time anyway. He’d just have to hope the corpse wouldn’t go slewing away to the ground as he got the car turned around and pointed toward the house across the street.
Then it hit him—why even bother with that?
He jumped down from the hood and began to get back in the car. Before he could drop
in behind the wheel, he heard Shane shout at him, “You’re a crazy motherfucker, Adler!”
Pete almost grinned at the comment.
Takes one to know one.
He got in behind the wheel, hit the button to roll his window down, and reached out to take hold of the woman by an arm. This might not do any good, but it was better than nothing. He put the car in reverse and hit the gas again. The car sped backward across his lawn, bumped jarringly as it hit the street, then bumped again upon reaching the opposite lawn. He did this without any regard for anyone who might be watching or any possible oncoming traffic. Things had reached a desperate point. All he could do was act and hope for the best.
The bumps did jostle the corpse, the other end of which began to slew toward the center of the hood. However, he was able to maintain his grip on the dead woman’s arm and thus keep her from sliding off. When he was almost all the way to poor, dead Stan Richardson’s porch, he maneuvered the car in a sort of half-loop over the remaining distance, cutting the wheel hard as he came to an abrupt stop parallel to the porch. This final maneuver was executed with enough momentum to send the body flying off the hood and onto the porch.
He heard someone call out, “Holy shit! Touchdown!”
His heart almost stopped at hearing these words. Then his head snapped back toward his house and he saw Shane Watson on the porch. He had his hands upraised in the manner of a football referee signaling a touchdown and was doing a goofy little circular dance on the porch. Then he stopped and pointed across the street, raising a thumb to signal either admiration or approval. Or both. The inadvisability of both the ridiculous display and the loud exclamation was obvious, but he couldn’t take the time to admonish Shane. Besides, the maneuver had kind of merited it.
Throwing open the car door, he got out, hopped up onto the porch, and grabbed hold of the dead woman’s ankles again. He took a quick look around and saw no one other than Shane watching him, though there were headlights again at the far end of the street. His heart pumping so loud the beats sounded like amplified bass drums, he nudged the partly open door the rest of the way open and hurriedly dragged the body into the house. He got the front door shut in the last instant before the car drew abreast of the house and drove on by.
Helpfully, the lamp was still on in the living room. Twisting his head rapidly around, he was able to locate the likely main hallway entrance. Grunting and straining again, he dragged the body in that direction. He moved fast and without much care, causing the woman’s head to bang against the corner as he pulled her into the hallway. He twisted his head around again as he made himself keep moving, spying the closet at the far end of the hallway. Sweat dripped from seemingly every pore in his body as he closed the remaining distance faster than he ever could have imagined. He was hauling a significant amount of weight around like a longshoreman or something, which was probably only possible due to the massive amount of adrenaline currently racing through his system.
Once he reached the closet, he let go of the dead woman’s ankles and the heels of her feet thumped on the hardwood floor. He opened the closet and saw the crawlspace door at the back. A vacuum cleaner was in the way. He pulled it out and tossed it down the hallway. It landed with a loud clatter, pieces of it breaking off and spinning away on the floor.
Crouching down, he leaned inside and pulled at the door, encountering stiff resistance at first that made him whine in frustration. He kept at it, though, bearing down with all his might until the door abruptly slid all the way open. A glance into the dark space revealed that another body had already been shoved in there. He couldn’t see the face, but judging by the shape of the nude form, he surmised it was likely Stan and Linda Richardson’s dead daughter. This was irritating at first, but another moment’s inspection left him pretty sure there was room for the dead stripper in there, too.
Almost done, he thought, panting heavily. Just get her the fuck in there.
And that was what he did.
SEVENTEEN
Getting the second body jammed in there wasn’t easy. By the time he was finished, the corpses were packed into the crawlspace like sardines. Fitting anything else in there larger than the size of, say, a can of beer would have been impossible. He didn’t care, though, because he had gotten it done, which was all that mattered.
He took out his phone and squatted just inside the closet as he aimed the phone at the open crawlspace, tapping the flash button before taking a picture so the image would be clear. After snapping the picture, he backed out of the closet and got to his feet. He inserted the image in a text to Mary and hit the send button.
Less than a minute later, notification of an incoming Facetime call appeared on the screen. He accepted the call and Mary’s image appeared. She was still behind the wheel of a car, probably parked somewhere nearby, though again it was hard to tell much from the angle and close-up view of her face.
“Hello, Pete,” she said, flashing a big smile worthy of a swimsuit model in a tanning lotion ad. In Pete’s opinion, she looked far too happy for someone who’d spent the day orchestrating a series of gruesome murders. “I see you were able to deliver the package to the designated location. Congratulations on a job well done.” Now the smile faded and her expression took on the stern aspect of a frustrated teacher admonishing one of her slower students. “Unfortunately, you failed to complete the task within the time frame allowed. I didn’t receive photographic confirmation until just over four minutes after time was up. And you know what that means.”
Pete groaned. “Oh, come the fuck on! That’s not my fault. Please don’t punish me for getting waylaid by those assholes asking for directions.”
Mary’s stern expression remained in place a stomach-churning moment longer, then it softened again and she laughed. “Relax, Pete. Performing these tasks in the prescribed way and within any constraints I place on you is important. In this one case, however, I’ve decided to cut you some slack. After hearing Shane’s account of how you delivered the package, I’m awarding you some bonus points for creativity and, frankly, for showing some fucking balls for once in your life. I won’t post the incriminating images to the PD’s Facebook page.” Her smile shifted, becoming a smirk. “At least not yet.”
Pete let out a relieved breath and put his back to one of the walls in the hallway. The adrenaline burst that had been driving him for the last several minutes was fading. He felt an overwhelming weariness in every part of his body. It was tempting to just slide to the floor, close his eyes, and take a nap right here in the hallway. He cleared his throat and said, “Is the game over yet? Because I have to tell you, I’m already at the limit of what I can take. Beyond, maybe.”
Mary shook her head. “Not quite yet. There’s still one other package in need of being rerouted to a new location.” She chuckled. “I’m sure you get my drift. Oh, don’t look so upset. I’m going to allow you some time to rest and get your energy back up for the final phase of this thing. You have an hour to spend in whatever way you wish until I contact you again with your next set of instructions.”
Frowning, Pete pushed away from the wall. “You said ‘final phase’. Will this next thing really be the end of it? Because I wasn’t lying about being at the end of my rope. There’s not much more I can take.”
She nodded. “Yes, Pete. The next part is the last part. You have my word on that.”
Her image vanished as she ended the Facetime call. Pete dropped the phone back in his pocket and walked out of the hallway, pausing long enough in the living room to verify the axe was no longer there. It was gone, just as Mary had said it would be. He thought about the chainsaw still out there in the shed and considered taking the time to retrieve it, but ultimately decided against it. He couldn’t imagine effectively wielding it as a weapon. Mary was too careful and tricky about everything, controlling the situation at every step. The gun she’d pulled on him was evidence of that. She would never allow herself to be in a truly vulnerable position. And with corpse dismemberment bein
g forbidden under the rules of her game, he no longer needed it for any other reason.
Pete went to the front door and cracked it open just enough for a peek outside. His car was right where he’d left it, parked alongside the porch. He opened the door a little wider and saw that no one was out in the street gawking at it. Slipping out of the house, he eased the door shut, but left it unlocked. If he managed to survive Mary’s game, it might become necessary to return before sunrise and do some cleanup work. He would at least need to wipe down every surface he might have touched. Or, and this idea occurred to him as he was stepping down from the porch, he could soak the interior of the house in kerosene and just set the damn thing on fire. Complete obliteration of the place might be the surest method of eliminating anything incriminating.
His car’s engine was still running as Pete slid in behind the wheel. After changing gears, he steered the car back across the street and into his driveway, cutting the engine as soon as he’d come to a stop. He got out and took a look around. There were still no signs that anyone other than Shane had observed his lunatic stunt, which he could only ascribe to sheer luck. He had a hunch he would need a lot more blind luck to have any hope of surviving Mary’s game without winding up dead or in jail. What scared him was the possibility he’d already used up the last bit of luck the universe would allow him for one night. He hoped the last part of the game wouldn’t involve risk of public exposure, because he strongly sensed he wouldn’t get away with something like what he’d just done a second time in one night.
Shane was gone by the time he got back inside the house, but evidence of the vile act he’d performed was still on display. The discarded panties and the splayed legs of the corpse, now stiff and discolored from rigor mortis. A significant amount of a white, thickly creamy substance oozed from the dead woman’s vagina. Pete’s stomach churned at the thought that this was Shane’s semen, because if it was, the man had to be infested with every venereal disease known to man. Glimpsing something in his peripheral vision, Pete turned and saw a jar sitting on one of his bookshelves.