The 13th

by John Everson

  The doctor surveyed the group of people and nodded perfunctorily at them, including the police. “Thank you for trying to help,” he said. “We’ll take it from here.”

  Rockford started to pull Carrie away, and his nurse reached out to take Carrie’s arm away from Christy. But the chief set a beefy hand over Rockford’s arm. “Just a minute,” he said. “Who are you, and what makes you think you can waltz in and take this woman out of my custody?”

  The doctor’s eyes widened, and then he gave an “aww shucks” grin and apologized. “I’m sorry, Officer,” he said. “I should have told you right away. My name is Dr. Rockford, from the Castle House Asylum down on 190. Your officer here—Christy, is it?—came out to visit us just the other day. She can vouch for me, isn’t that right?”

  He looked at Christy, who nodded, but still didn’t release the woman’s arm. Carrie only stood still, eyes blinking in disorientation. She looked as if she’d simply fold up and collapse at any moment.

  “Carrie is one of our patients,” the doctor continued. “Somehow she got out last night, and after we searched the grounds, we came looking for her in town. We need to get her back in her bed and on her medications. Please help us to help her.”

  The chief released his hold on the doctor, but didn’t break his gaze. “I’m a little concerned about your security, Doctor. I don’t want to start seeing a parade of mental patients roaming around this town—both for their sakes, and for the safety of my people.”

  The doctor nodded. “It won’t happen again. We’re going to change our lockdown procedures today.”

  Then he grinned at Christy, as he pulled the limp girl away from her grasp. “Nice to see you again, Officer Sorensen.”

  In moments, they had stuffed the woman into the backseat of the sedan and pulled away, and the small crowd dispersed, murmuring among themselves a variety of anecdotes about crazy people.

  “Chief,” Christy said finally when they were all out of earshot. “How could you let him take her?”

  He shrugged, staring after the black car as it rounded the block to head out of town. “What grounds did I have to keep her? She’s hurt, and he’s a doctor.”

  “But he is not helping her,” she insisted. “I don’t know what he’s doing to her, but it’s not about making her better.”

  “We’re going to see about that,” he answered, and pointed at the car. “Let’s get back to the station. I think we need to have a short review of police procedure, Officer.”

  She didn’t like the way he elongated the pronunciation, awwwww-ficer. “Yes, sir,” she answered, and hurried around the car. Christy didn’t think she’d ever had such a long drive back to the station. The chief could make five minutes feel like an hour when he was angry. And the car ride was only the start of it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  TG rolled the keg across the dirt to the steps of the mountain shack. As he muscled it up the steps and pushed it in through the bent aluminum screen door, he thought that there was maybe nothing better in this life than a cold beer. And anyone taking a cursory look at the kitchen would quickly grasp the depth of that infatuation.

  Empty beer bottles sporting a variety of brand logos lined the faded yellow countertops, though they all shared one trait in common—a six-pack of any of them would set you back less than six dollars. A Budweiser beer light glowed bright red on one wall. TG and Billy had broken into a bar in Oak Falls after hours to get that light, and they were damn proud of it—kept it lit twenty-four/seven.

  But the capper was the next stop for the new keg. TG had found an old beat-up refrigerator at the side of the road one day and drafted Billy into getting it onto the back of a pickup and up the hill. Then they gutted its insides and rerouted the ice water spigot line to a plastic hose. TG now tapped the keg, hefted it into that fridge and hooked up the hose to it. When he closed the door, he pulled a mug from the freezer and pushed it into the water spigot on the outer door of the unit. In seconds, the mug was full of frothing golden goodness.

  Yeah…there was nothing better than a cold beer.

  In fact, as he thought of that, he called out to Billy. Then he stomped fast on the floor and grinned as he ground the green guts of an inch-long cockroach into the stained white linoleum.

  Billy called back from the other room. “In the middle of a game,” he complained.

  “Nothing better than a cold beer, is there Billy?”

  “How about a hot woman?” came the disembodied response.

  TG scratched his balls at that and grunted. “Hmmm. Tough call,” he finally decided. “Be perfect if you could combine the two.”

  There are times when you can almost see the thought balloon appear above somebody’s head, and if anyone had been standing in the run-down shack’s kitchen right then, they would have seen a big, electric neon sign pop into life above TG’s head. Truth be told, he was bored. He and Billy had spent the summer picking up chicks to deliver to the asylum, and while the first few had given him a rush—hell, be honest, a hard-on—he’d started to wonder what could come next. TG wasn’t the kinda guy who sat still.

  Oh sure, he drank a lot of beer, and sat up here at the cabin day in, day out watching game shows on the tube and fast-forwarding through the slow parts of his porn collection. (He hated it when they tried to tack a plot onto the sex. “Show me the MILFs,” he’d complain.) But at night…TG always had a new game plan. Over the years he’d gone from robbing convenience stores while wearing a Bill Clinton mask to busting dope dealers while pretending to be a cop. He got away with some good cash AND a lotta weed on those gigs, until the word got out on the street about the false shakedowns. Billy and he had hot-wired cars, burned down buildings and forced housewives to strip naked and walk down the center of the streets where they lived (a favorite ploy of TG’s for months running). It’s amazing what people will do when you hold a gun to their kids’ heads.

  So when Dr. Rockford had come to them with the offer of kidnapping a few women and dropping them at the old hotel for a thousand a pop, TG hadn’t blinked. It was the job that was made for him…or he was made for the job, whatever. Point was, he didn’t do it just for the money. He enjoyed stalking the girls, watching that first glint of fear in their eyes when they realized that they were being snatched. When the first tears came, it was all he could do to keep it in his pants. And actually, on the last run, he hadn’t bothered to, had he?

  Of course that had led to one pissed-off employer. But he didn’t care too much anymore. He’d gotten all the kicks he could out of kidnapping, and now he needed a little more. It’d felt good knocking in that split tail’s skull a few days ago. Maybe it was time to hire out as a hit man. Hell, he’d done just about everything else. You could get real creative in how you disposed of a body. And TG even had an old meat grinder tucked away in the back of the shed, something he’d nicked back when the grocery in Oak Falls was going under. Gave him a way to make all the iffy parts of the deer and cows they shot usable. ‘Cuz when you’re living on a mountain in a shack with virtually no cash, you don’t waste shit.

  Now maybe, he could use the damn thing to get rid of the evidence. Knocking someone off had to pay better than kidnappin’, right? A couple bodies run through the grinder and then he and Billy could probably finally afford to open up that bar on the edge of town they’d been talking about since the first dope dealer they rolled. Had a good $15,000 in the bank at this point, but TG figured they needed double that. And once they owned their own bar, they’d get the kegs for the fridge a lot cheaper, he speculated, pushing his glass to the door to fill it up again.

  ‘Cuz what was better than cold beer?

  Billy poked his head around the corner, finally. “Doc called,” he said. “Wants us to do another run.”

  “Pussy run?” TG laughed, tilting back the beer. “Did you tell him we’ll be happy to when he pays us for the last one?”

  Billy shook his head. He didn’t smile. TG was getting worried about the boy. He always had had
a bit of a stick up his ass, but he’d gotten into the game a lot more not so many months ago. These days, he never wanted to do anything off the charts. It was getting old.

  “He asked what we did with the car and I told him. Then he said he’d pay us for that chick and the new one when we brought her in tonight.”

  TG pulled a switchblade from his pocket, and thumbed it open. The blade slipped free with a thin swish. He poked the tip of the blade between his teeth and picked at something left over from lunch.

  “Doc better not stiff us,” TG said. “I’m in a mood. And I don’t work for free.”

  Billy shook his head. “He sounded all right,” he said. “But I gotta tell ya…I’m not feeling so good about doing this anymore. I mean, what’s he doing to those girls? What if he’s shooting ‘em full of weird chemicals and shit, like lab rats? He’s gotta be doing something to ‘em that makes sure they’re never coming out again.”

  “Yeah, so what?” TG asked, now using the blade to make a thin paper-meets-brush sound as he scraped at the stubble beneath his chin.

  “He’s gotta be killing those gals,” Billy said, his voice rising an octave. “It’s like we’re ack-cess-tories to murder.”

  TG shook his head. “You got a problem with that?” he asked. “You didn’t care when we rolled that pimp into a tarp of gasoline and set it on fire before we left the room.”

  “That was different,” Billy whined. “That guy was bad news. These girls haven’t done nothin’.”

  “Yeah, well I’m about ready to cut out the middle man and have some end-of-the-line fun with these bitches myself,” TG said. He held the blade out at arm’s length and then flipped it, smiling as it made a satisfying twang when it stuck in the dirty floor.

  “Time for us to get serious about having some fun,” he said. “You ready to head up to Oak Falls and find us some?”

  Billy’s eyes were downcast. “I guess.”

  “You want to buy that bar or what?”

  “I guess.”

  “You’re really starting to piss me off, pansy ass,” TG said, retrieving the knife from the floor. The next twang it made was when it embedded in the wooden door frame a foot from Billy’s face.

  “I’ll load the car,” Billy said.

  Amelia jabbed the needle into Carrie’s arm and pushed the plunger down. She didn’t worry about the finer points of finding a vein, or making the pain minimal for the patient. This little vixen had caused them enough trouble, and she hoped the damn injection did hurt. Either way, Carrie was going to be sleeping soundly for the next twenty-four hours at least.

  They were so close now to everything. Amelia could barely sleep at night. For years she had planned, hoped, dreamed of being where she was now. Finding Barry Rockford had been the ultimate coup. Without him—without his connections and money—she could never have pulled this together on her own. And the fact that he was a world-renowned scientist—if a little tarnished—was perhaps the best piece of the pie. But here they were, just a few weeks from the moment that would change everything. Some had spent their entire lives waiting for such an opportunity. There were books on their experiments and failed attempts. Not books in wide circulation, obviously. But Amelia had read widely in places most had never dreamed to go.

  There was a reason she had arrived at this moment. It was not an accident.

  She closed the door on room twelve and walked the silent hallway slowly. No sound came from any of the patient rooms; she’d seen to that before they had left to pick Carrie up from town. It helped to have a police band scanner; that’s where Barry had first heard that Carrie was wandering around like a true loon in the middle of town. Thank God he had. Amelia had shot up the rest of the patients with a sedative so they wouldn’t add to the trouble and headed into town like a bat out of hell to reclaim their patient. Amelia liked to think of her as simply “Number Twelve.”

  She opened the door to the basement and descended the wood plank steps feeling warmly pleased with herself. When she found Barry fiddling with a test tube at the far end of the cement-walled room, she placed her palms on either side of his face and wrapped her body around his from behind, pressing against him like a boa.

  “Amelia,” he complained, but she only craned herself up to nibble at the lobe of his ear, breathing warmly against his neck.

  “Now?” he said, his voice no longer sounding quite so annoyed. She didn’t answer, only slid one hand between the buttons of his shirt to press cool nails against the hair of his chest. Her pelvis ground against his ass and she moaned, just a little, in his ear. That was all it took for Barry Rockford to lose his cool, and setting down the test tube in its stand, he turned to give Nurse Amelia his full attention.

  Her lips were already flushed and full of wanting, and her eyes bored into his with an intensity that many would have found frightening. Rockford, however, found it sexy, and he wrapped an arm around her, crushing her thin body to him. She ripped open the front of his shirt, slipping her arms all the way around him to dig nails into the flesh of his back as she inhaled the subtle scent of him while burying lips to his chest.

  Some would have called her a witch, but there were times that she preferred being the word that sounded similar.

  “You’re a pushy bitch, aren’t you?” Barry whispered, slipping a hand down the back of her jeans.

  “And you like it that way,” she answered. “Where would you be if you hadn’t found me? Still moping in a research lab, wishing you could keep doing the shit they wouldn’t let you do? With me, you can do whatever you want. And I won’t tell.”

  She dragged him over to a bed against the opposite wall. A woman lay there beneath heavy white sheets, an IV bag hung at the head of the bed with tubing disappearing into her arm. Amelia held on to Barry with one arm, but with the other, she pulled down the sheets, exposing the naked breasts of the woman beneath. She took Barry’s hand and guided it to the unconscious woman’s chest, helping him massage the full, creamy breasts. She matched her thumb and forefinger to his and rolled the woman’s thick nipple between their fingers before turning to kiss him, tongue forceful between his lips.

  He was out of breath when she pulled away, and she laughed at his excitement. “Without me, you’d still be a pawn,” she said. “Now, you’re a king. And when you’re a king”—she yanked the sheets off of the bed, exposing all of the woman—“you can do anything. What do you want to do, Barry?” she whispered, while pulling her shirt over her head, and unbuttoning her jeans. “What do you want to do?”

  Then she lay down naked on the bed next to the unconscious woman and waited for his response. At the risk of a bad pun, it wasn’t long in coming.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  For a place that perched on the outcrop of a mountain, Castle House Asylum sure had a hell of a lot of grass to cut. And the killer was, since so much of the lawn crawled down steep slopes, it wasn’t a very smart idea to sit on a riding mower while doing it. You could pretty easily find yourself unbalanced and flipping over hundreds of pounds of steel with a big, deadly spinning blade.

  So that’s why David was huffing up a storm as he pushed the hand mower up a hill back toward the gabled windows of the asylum. Oh, the mower was self-propelled, naturally. That just didn’t count for much when the incline was about 160 degrees!

  He consoled himself that at ten dollars an hour this was great money for a part-time job while at the same time serving as great training. But that didn’t make the sweat streaming down his cheeks any sweeter.

  The job was simple. He had an acre or two of grass to cut each week (which might take him two days, from the feel of today’s attack), and a bunch of wild rosebushes to trim. And a handful of topiary gardens to bring into civilized check. At the moment, the bases of all the bushes on the property were completely overrun in crabgrass and thistles.

  David figured he could put in three afternoons a week and still have plenty of time to work on the projects around Aunt Elsie’s place. But he’d be pocketing p
robably $150 a week, instead of simply spending the money he’d arrived here with.

  Apparently, he’d been the only one to apply for the job, because Dr. Rockford had hired him on the spot, with the promise that he not get into any more accidents on the grounds. Now he was feeling a little sorry he’d taken the job.

  The rules were pretty simple. Show up after lunch, check in with Rockford or the nurse to see if they had any special jobs to do, and then hit the yard for four or five hours. He had a key to the gardener’s shed out back, and access to a small bathroom near the asylum’s back entrance.

  Today there had been no special jobs…just get the yard cut. It was hard to believe that there was any grass left on the hills around the old hotel to cut, after decades of neglect, but while there was plenty of clover and weeds interspersed, there was still some remnant of what had probably once been a five-star-resort lawn of rich emerald grass. Each time he pushed the mower back up the steep hill toward the old hotel he stared at the old building, trying to imagine what it must once have been like. He knew people had come here from all corners of the world to enjoy the pampered life. But he also knew that something had cut that heyday short. He remembered some tiny fragment of a rumor about a bloodbath that had killed guests and ended the hotel’s attraction. No amount of promotion had ever managed to overcome that, and so the hotel had slipped through poorer and poorer hands until it had been left to rot into the hillside, vacant and empty.

  Now the ivy crawled up and around nearly all of the front brick, cascading over the upper-story windows in mystery and stirring shadows. The glass of most of those rooms remained dark even in the daylight; ciphers that showed and promised nothing. Except in one window…David stared as he pushed hard to crest the top of the hill. There was someone in that window just to the left of the main entrance, on the second floor. He thought it was a woman.