by TAYLOR ADAMS
This was almost like that.
Ray-Ray must have hesitated, because Lena’s voice rose: “Talk, Ray.”
Her breaths were hitched, shivery. Theo reminded himself: This wasn’t a Super 8 unit, and she wasn’t a dumb stray with heroin needles in her purse. Lena was a fighter, a scrappy little Asian like her sister, and she was still high on the adrenaline of the shootout. In her world, she’d survived the O.K. Corral. But Theo had gained some breathing room by playing dead, and now he would choose his moment to counterattack. She’d already made a cardinal error by not confirming her kill.
You don’t have the instincts for this, he thought. Not like Cambry did.
You’re just a shadow of her.
He smelled the girl’s sweat. Green apple in her shampoo. Maybe a deodorant of some sort, something breezy and floral. They always did smell nice.
Finally, Ray-Ray spoke. “He’s . . . he’s not a good man.”
“Your dad?”
“I know he’s not a good man.”
Speak for yourself, Ray-Ray. This was like listening to his own eulogy.
“He, uh . . . he murders people.”
No shit.
“Not just people. He targets women.”
Oh, is that worse? So much for gender equality.
“He’d take them . . . uh . . .” Ray-Ray’s voice quivered with discomfort. “Off the roads. He haunts the highways, from Chicago to Austin to Memphis, like a roving demon in an eighteen-wheeler. He’d offer to help stranded girls, hitchhikers, drunk kids who just needed a ride home. If he couldn’t get them inside his truck, he’d find out where they were sleeping that night. He called them his strays. Anyone young, tormented, living in her car, outrunning a rough past . . . who could easily disappear without a last known location.”
Don’t shit in your own backyard. I taught you that.
“I remember once when I was five or six, my brother and I were playing Nintendo and he walked in from his workshop. And he was cloaked in this big raincoat. Head to toe, like a walking corpse in a body bag. Terrifying us both. I asked him what he was doing. And without missing a beat, he beams this huge crocodile smile through his respirator and says in a goofy voice: Why, son, I’m the Plastic Man!”
Theo barely remembered this. But it was oddly heartwarming that Ray-Ray did.
“Like a superhero,” Ray-Ray said. “Like Clark Kent disappearing into a phone booth. It became normal to me, that sometimes Dad would disappear because he was being the Plastic Man.”
His tone darkened. Like the sun passing behind clouds. “My brother and I learned the extent of it later, when we were eighteen. We each coped differently. He put a Mossberg under his chin, like I told you. And meanwhile, I’m about to start the academy in Missoula, my lifelong dream, and I’ve just lost my twin brother, and my father—my only surviving family—is a pathological killer. What do I do?”
Theo sensed motion. Three feet away, the girl was adjusting her stance in the doorway. She was focused on Ray-Ray outside and not on the slumped corpse down in the floor space.
This was as good a time as any.
He slid open his good eye. Breathed through his nose. Slowly, he crawled his right hand down to the Winchester’s polished walnut stock. A reassuring familiar shape, sticky with blood and iced tea. He mentally rehearsed his attack: He would raise his head, lift the rifle, and blow the girl’s lungs out. All in a microsecond, before she turned her pistol on him. He could do it now, if it weren’t for one problem.
One major problem.
A round wasn’t chambered. He would need to first crank the rifle’s lever action to cycle a fresh .30-30 round, and that would make a distinctive noise. Lena would hear it.
Shit. He’d forgotten about that.
“I offered my father a deal,” Ray-Ray continued. “That if he promised he would never, ever do it again, I would . . . help him cover his tracks.”
“He did it again, didn’t he?”
You bet I did.
“He relapsed, yeah.”
“Poor guy.”
As they spoke, Theo applied slow, constant pressure to the rifle’s action. Opening the scissor jaws, millimeter by millimeter, to cycle the weapon as quietly as possible.
Then he would thrash up and shoot her.
“Seventeen years,” Ray-Ray continued. “I’ve cleaned up my father’s messes. Everything he’s needed. Any hour. I’ve made bodies disappear. I’ve torched evidence. Buried vehicles. Misfiled records. For my entire career, he’s been my ugly secret and I’ve been his guardian angel in blue.”
My guardian angel in blue. Theo remembered saying that—those exact words—one morning while they poured cement. Father’s Day, it had been. You can’t make that shit up. Under his belly, he felt the Winchester’s hinged mechanism open farther, farther, the firing spring’s tension building—
“But,” Ray-Ray added, as if this was important, “I only did the cleanup. Only the aftermath. I never had the stomach for the . . . you know.”
This was true. How shattering it must have been for his young son, who’d idolized the boys in blue, who’d dreamed of being a cop ever since he’d first arrested his brother with plastic handcuffs—only to find himself grown up and playing for the wrong team. Life comes at you fast, huh?
The rifle’s action opened to its apex and pushed out a spent .30-30 casing, which Theo silently guided out into his palm. He couldn’t let her hear it hit the floor.
“You didn’t try to stop him?” Lena asked.
“I-I always tried to stop him,” Ray-Ray stuttered. “I threatened to turn us both in. Many times. But he always called my bluff, because he knew I was as committed as he was. And I had more to lose.”
This would be the risky part.
Theo adjusted his two-handed grip and closed the lever a fraction of a degree at a time, slow and steady pressure, sealing a fresh round into the Winchester’s chamber like closing a vault. Finally finishing with the faintest, most muffled click.
A whisper of motion. It was Lena, turning her head to face him.
She heard.
Theo sat in jagged, sweaty silence. His pierced belly clenching, the hairs prickling upright on his skin. He wondered if she’d recognized the sound as a lever action closing. She knew her way around guns, didn’t she? Unusual in a female. The temperature inside the cab seemed to change, hanging on a knife’s edge. If Lena leaned in and inspected closer, she’d notice that the corpse’s bloody fingernails were now clasped suspiciously inside the rifle’s trigger guard.
A second passed.
Two seconds.
He waited in darkness with his good eye clamped shut. A drop of sweat trickled down his nose and hung from his nostril. It faintly tickled.
Finally, he heard the girl exhale and speak again. Back to Ray: “That’s it? I’d been so fixed on you. But you’re not even the killer.” She sounded disappointed, like this whole shootout had been a waste of her time. “You’re the killer’s little cleanup boy.”
His son sighed, audibly hurt.
Theo felt an amused chortle well up from his gut, somewhere near where her 9-millimeter round was lodged. Maybe he did like her. Maybe she was worthy of Cambry’s DNA after all. Not that it mattered: the Winchester was now cocked and ready between his knees. His index finger crawled around the trigger.
Lena hesitated, as if she dreaded saying it: “Was she . . .”
“What?”
“Was my sister one of his victims?”
This was a big question. It would receive a devastating answer, so Theo knew this was his moment to attack, to snap open his eyes, thrash upright, and raise the now-loaded .30-30 to fire into her chest. He waited in his private darkness for Ray-Ray to clear his throat and respond, and then he would give this little bitch the biggest surprise of her—
* * *
Lena shot the old man in the face, just to be sure.
He thrashed, a thin spray of blood filling the cab like sunlit powder. His skull thudded off
the radio and he slumped against the stick shift, cranking it forward. The rifle clattered. Maybe it was Lena’s imagination, but she swore she saw a split-second expression flash over the corpse’s face.
It looked like surprise.
The gunshot reverberated in the confined space. Raycevic cried out in shock.
“I had to be sure,” she said. “He could have been playing dead.”
She’d fired the revolver bullet right through the man’s upper lip. A little low on her usual deck of fifty-two, because she’d drawn and fired left-handed. But a solid hit nonetheless. She thumbed out the revolver’s cylinder—all primers punched now—and dropped the empty weapon.
Raycevic stared with baffled horror. “Why . . . why would you do that?”
Gut feeling, she almost said.
And now her gut sensed something else—an uneasy motion. She realized the truck was moving. Below her footrail, the pavement inched under. Like standing over a receding tide.
Raycevic noticed it, too.
The old man’s body slumping against the gearshift must have kicked the rig into neutral. Ten tons of machine and cargo now rolled down the slight decline of Hairpin Bridge. Air brakes whined softly—fighting, but not hard enough.
Lena decided this was fine. She’d spent enough time perched in the doorway of this vessel of sun-cooked sweat and snake shit. They would continue this conversation by the cars, near the Shoebox, so the rest of Raycevic’s confession could be captured for history. If this rig had a date with the bottom of the valley, she sure as hell didn’t want to be there for it.
“Back up, Ray.”
As he obediently stepped back from the rolling truck (“Back . . . back”), Lena kept him at gunpoint and descended the footrail, jumping the final few feet, landing hard and twisting an ankle, squinting in the blazing daylight. Raycevic stared transfixed at something in the distance. She saw it, too.
East of Hairpin Bridge, the nearest hill—and its bristly coat of pines—was now consumed by a roiling wall of apocalyptic flames.
The Briggs-Daniels wildfire was here.
Chapter 21
“We’re running out of time, Lena.”
She clicked another ninety-minute cassette into the Shoebox recorder and ignored Raycevic. She slapped the record button, leaving a bloody thumbprint. She’d come too far and fought too hard today to let that forest fire sweep in and interfere.
“Lena,” he whispered. “We need to go—”
“Not yet. How did my sister die?”
“You’re insane.”
“Was she one of his . . .” She grasped for the vile word. “One of his strays?”
“No. Cambry was different.” Raycevic watched the distant trees go up like seventy-foot candlewicks, feeding pillars of oily fire. “She wasn’t a victim. She saw my burn pit firsthand, and it was too much for her—”
“Your what?”
“My burn pit.”
“What does that mean?”
He struggled to organize his thoughts. “Out that way, on Pickle Farm Road, there’s . . . right behind the burned-up barn, if you follow the dirt road south . . . my uncle gave my dad some land when his logging company went under. We call it the Raycevic Estate. The family legacy was supposed to be a big house, something grand, but it never came together. Roads kept washing out in the winters. Trucks never got the materials there. Then the foundation cracked and the groundwater well dried out and it eventually just became a place where I . . . uh . . .” He trailed off and stared shamefully at the concrete between them.
His burn pit.
Lena tasted stomach acid in her throat. “She . . . saw you burning a body?”
“There’s more to it than that.”
“And you had to make her disappear, too?”
“I wish it never happened, Lena.”
He means it. Somehow she knew: this was not a lie.
The idling semitruck had inched a hundred feet down the bridge now. With Ray’s daddy inside, slumped beside his dead snake. The human predator who stalked highways and gathered souls like a crow collects glass. He was the dark heart of this mystery—perhaps the one most responsible for Cambry’s death—and he was already dead. Unreachable. He couldn’t be punished any further. Was shooting him supposed to feel good? Was that the sugar high of revenge, already spent?
Lena felt her eyes water in the smoky air. “That’s the whole reason Cambry had to die?” Her jaw quivered, but she fought it. “Because she saw a stupid fire? I don’t have a sister anymore, and it’s because of that?”
“What were you expecting?”
She didn’t know. A conspiracy, maybe? Ghosts on Hairpin Bridge? Anything was better than this. The true monster was already dead inside an eighteen-wheeler inching down the bridge, and all she had left here was Ray-Ray, the killer’s sniveling little assistant.
Cambry died. All because of a fire.
Answers can let you down. Lena knew this as well as anyone. Your friends can move away. Your expensive English degree can qualify you for a career in retail. Your dream about your dead sister, the night before you avenge her murder, can end with her refusing to look at you, refusing to speak, basically telling you to fuck off from the grave. Go, Lena. Just go.
Please go—
A scream reached her ears. Gritty, metallic, screwdriver on a chalkboard. It was the semi’s right flank scraping against the bridge’s guardrail. Two hundred feet away now.
“She was running. I had to stop her. I’m sorry, Lena.”
“Are you?”
“Yes. For everything. I deserve you. You know that? My dad and I, we had this coming. You came in like a gunslinger in a Western, to clean up this place and stop its resident serial killer, and you did. He’s dead now, and you’ve caught me.” His voice broke. “And I regret what happened to Cambry.”
“Don’t say her name.”
“Cambry Lynne Nguyen. I have all of their names. I had to remember them, because Dad wouldn’t. It’s like you said: When you’re dead, you’re not a person anymore. You’re an idea.”
Down the bridge, the grinding metal shriek intensified. The bridge’s guardrail warping, sagging, about to snap—
“Anna Richter. Molly Wilson. Kara Patrick. Ingrid Wells.” He inhaled, a jarring speed rap. “Janelle Ross. Ellie Erickson. Erin DeSilva. Megan Hernandez. Mary Keller. Sara Smith.”
She stepped back. They kept coming.
“Karen Fuller. Alex Ford. Kelly Sloan. Melanie Lopez.” He glanced at the Shoebox. “Did you get them all? All of those people, erased. Dad operated mostly in the summer months, when women travel late and alone. There was no master plan. No strategy. He just indulged his whims, like a kid ordering toys from a magazine. He’d call me up when he was done with them. And I’d be at home with Liza or lifting weights at the station, and my phone would ring—I’ve got a stray for you, he’d say, and then that was my part. I’d step in.”
She imagined him stepping in and dutifully charring some stranger’s body to black bones. And Cambry, poor wayward Cambry, stumbling across the macabre scene on her journey, witnessing the Raycevic family secret, and being marked for death.
The screech reached an anguished peak. The railing sagged under ten tons of cargo, rivets bursting like gunshots, the semitrailer leaning over Silver Creek, inches now from tipping irreversibly.
His voice lowered. “I killed a kid this week.”
She looked back at him.
“Dad called me one day and told me he had another stray to disappear. And her car. And . . . he said there was a situation to deal with in the back seat.”
His eyes glimmered.
You didn’t, she thought. You didn’t—
“Age three, maybe four.” His voice broke. “This brown-haired little boy, looked just like me or my brother when we were kids. In a car seat covered with superhero stickers, Captain America and Thor and the Hulk. He was crying because he’d just seen his mama taken. That’s what Dad’s situation was. That’s what I was expect
ed to clean up.”
Lena wanted to shut her eyes, to make it all stop. The truck’s screech was intensifying.
“I took the boy to our shed and kept him there. Dad told me it was a bad idea. But I didn’t know what else to do. I brought him food and clothes and old toys I snuck out of my attic. Built Marbleworks with him. He got an ear infection and I brought him some of my dad’s antibiotics. I thought . . . fuck, I don’t know what I thought. That we could raise him, I guess. But my wife could never know. So then I thought maybe I could drive him down south, to Arizona or New Mexico, and leave him outside a fire station in the middle of the night. They’d process him back to his surviving family. Right?”
He paused, as if waiting for Lena to agree. She wouldn’t give him the validation.
“But he’d seen our faces. He remembered everything.”
As if he were the victim.
“I had no choice.” He swallowed, letting it all out. “I spent three months ruling out all of my other options, okay? And finally, this week, I blindfolded him and told him that once the T-shirt came off, he’d see his mama again. And I carried him to the groundwater well. It’s long dry, a forty-foot drop down to solid shale. And I just . . . dropped him headfirst and heard him hit the bottom. It was fast. Too fast to hurt, just like Cambry. I think he died instantly on impact, which is good, because a slow death by dehydration down there would have been far worse . . .”
He trailed off again. He was only trying to convince himself. He glanced up at her, a pathetic overgrown child in a uniform himself, like he expected her to pull the trigger now.
She considered it.
“That was two days ago. You asked why I haven’t slept since Thursday? That’s why.”
Thursday. The day Corporal Raymond Raycevic fully lost the battle for his soul.
“There you go.” He sniffed. “Congratulations. You just solved fourteen cold cases reaching a decade back, missing persons from California to Philly. It’ll make a hell of a book. You’ll be famous.”