by Jack Ketchum
“You’re going to a package store?” she said. “What about the car? I can’t believe you people.”
“What car?” said the man sitting behind her.
“The Jeep you left behind. Don’t you think somebody might be looking for you?”
“Well, that Jeep ain’t actually ours, ma’am. Sort of a loaner. You don’t have to worry about the Jeep. It was nice of you to ask though.”
“Your fingerprints will be all over it.”
“Fingerprints don’t work. They never get anybody on fingerprints. That’s TV.”
He wasn’t exactly right there but he wasn’t exactly wrong either.
“I’ve got a police band here,” said Marion. “We can turn it on if you want. Just in case.”
“Later, maybe,” the man called Emil said. “Police band’s a godawful noisy thing.”
Marion slowed and turned into a gravel lot with two cars parked in front of a squat stucco building and a neon sign saying WILEY’S LIQUORS over the door and even before they stopped Janet wrenched at the door handle, her heart racing as the door opened and the impulse was irresistible, the gravel was going to hurt like hell but damn the gravel she was about to leap and roll when a hand gripped the back of her neck and pain shot through her head like a sudden migraine.
“When you got up this morning,” the man behind her said, “did you get up this stupid?”
She could barely hear him, the pain was so bad. Some pressure point or something.
“Please . . . let . . . go.”
“You gonna scream?”
“No!”
“Nobody around to hear you anyway. Couple frogs maybe. They build these stores like concrete bunkers. I guess I could let up a little.”
“Pu . . . please do.”
The man did but still held on to her with one hand so that the pain wound down to a dull throbbing ache while he leaned over and closed the door with the other and settled back in his seat.
“Better?”
“Y . . . yes.”
“You’re welcome.”
The man called Emil opened the door on his side and climbed out of the car.
“Ray, stay with her. What’s your name again, honey?”
“Janet.”
“Stay with Janet here. Billy, come on along with me.”
The man who had her was Ray and the little one was Billy.
He turned to Marion and smiled.
“C’mon,” he said. “You’ll see something.”
“Wait here,” Emil told her so she stood by the counter like she was interested in the magazine rack and listened to some old duffer in a white T-shirt and suspenders bend the balding store clerk’s ear with some ragtime about plaster dust and sawdust just pullin’ the moisture right out of his hands, just pulling it outa my hands, look at them hands, just pullin’ it right on out, i’nt that awful? and the clerk looking at the upturned palms of his hands and saying Yeah, Bob, that’s terrible, the customer paying for his bottle of Old Times and the clerk brown-bagging it while Billy set the two six-packs down on the counter just to the left of her and Emil his fifths of Makers Mark and J&B next to that.
The old man shoved his wallet into the front pocket of his baggy tan pants, hefted the bag into the crook of his arm and started to leave.
“Excuse me? Sir?” Emil said.
The man stopped and squinted at him.
You‘ll see something, he’d said. She guessed this was going to be it. She had to work to keep from smiling.
“Pay for this for me, will you, friend? I’m short on cash.”
The man glanced at the whiskey and the beer. He shook his head.
“Crazy sumbitch,” he muttered.
He moved toward the door again, and Emil flung his arm across her shoulders from behind and pulled her between the man and the door. When she felt the gun against her cheek the gasp was real.
“Pay for it. Or I shoot the lady and then I shoot you.”
“He means it,” Billy said. “He’s not facetious.”
“And you behind the counter. Don’t move.”
You could see the old guy sizing up the situation. She wondered what war he’d served in. He wasn’t particularly rattled. Tough old bird.
She was doing all right so far though, she thought, playing the victim, eyes wide and mouth hung open in what she hoped looked like sheer terror though she was practically coming in her pants here for god’s sake—and then Emil made things worse by sliding his hand down over her breast and squeezing and the old guy seemed to get the picture all at once. His face changed, hardened. And Emil must have seen that too because that was when he turned the gun and fired and the old man dropped to the floor howling and clutching his left foot, the Old Times bursting beside him.
“I forgot to mention that I could just as easily do it reverse order,” Emil said. “Bag it. Ring it up,” he told the clerk. He caressed her breast and she couldn’t help it now and didn’t try, she moaned. “Soon as he can, I know he’ll be happy to pay up.”
Which was exactly what both of them did.
They’d come whooping out of the package store like schoolkids at a panty raid but she’d heard the muted gunshot and now Billy was driving, with Emil and Marion in the back with Ray and she glanced around and saw the two of them kissing and his hand between her legs, so that she wasn’t at all surprised when he told Billy to pull onto the narrow dirt access road and then to stop and cut the lights. They got out, a bottle of scotch in Emil’s hand, and went running, laughing, for the woods.
They didn’t go far. Just behind a stand of pines. She could hear them over the drone of crickets through the open window. Marion giggling and then groaning. Emil grunting like a goddamn animal. Brush crackling beneath them in the still air.
They were animals. So was the one Ray with the gun against her cheek, running it along first one side of her face and then the other so that each time she had to pull away and finally rapping her head with the barrel to make her sit still—rapping her lightly but her head was taking such a beating tonight it still hurt like hell—and then she could feel him lean over her, could smell the beer on his breath as he ran the barrel down over her neck and collarbone, heading for her breast and she could feel Billy’s eyes on both of them.
You’ve got to stop this, she thought. Now. Already she felt bathed in filth.
“You’d better be ready to kill me,” she said. “Just one more inch.”
“Who says I’m not?”
“You didn’t do the cop. He did the cop. You get caught, I can say that. You kill me, I can’t. You’ve heard of state’s evidence?”
“Uh-huh.”
“‘Course he has,” Billy said. “Everybody has. It’s where you angle in on somebody and you get impunity.”
The little guy was short a few major cable stations. She’d keep her pitch to Ray, who at least appeared to be somewhat sane—and she’d damn well have to hurry. The sounds from the bushes had all but stopped now.
“If you don’t hurt me and you don’t abuse me I can help you. I know what I’m talking about. I’m a lawyer. It’s my job to know.”
“A lawyer?”
“A defense attorney.”
“Bullshit.”
She’d expected that. She dug into her purse for the wallet, opened it and flashed the laminated card at him.
“See that? That’s a court pass. They don’t come in cereal boxes, Ray.”
He took it from her. The gun no longer pressed her flesh.
“I’ll be damned.”
He studied it a moment and handed it back to her.
“Well,” he said, “I probably wouldn’t be the one to shoot you anyway, truth be known. ’Less you started something. I’m a family man, you know. Want to see?”
She heard him digging into his back pocket, pulling out his own wallet and flipping through the plastic inserts. He couldn’t seem to find what he was looking for.
“I had a lawyer once,” he said. “I kinda liked the man. I ap
preciated his efforts on my behalf.”
Then she heard him slap the wallet closed and abruptly shove it back into his jeans and turned and saw Marion and Emil come thrashing through the brush. Marion leaned in through Janet’s window and smiled.
“Nothing like the great outdoors, hon. Shove over.”
Alan was already thirty yards past it and headed along the downslope, briefs for the Mohica case foremost on his mind, when he registered Janet’s blue Taurus, warning lights blinking like fireflies, dark and silent by the road. It wasn’t safe to pull a U-turn here on the hill so he continued to the bottom and turned and drove back up again. He crossed lanes and parked into her dead headlights and got out of the car and peered in through the window. He didn’t know whether to be relieved or not to find that there was nobody home.
He got back into his car and tried her on his cell phone but all he got was the machine and that definitely didn’t relieve him. The gas station, maybe? Arranging for jumper cables or a tow truck? Could be. He got Kaltzas’s number from Information but when he tried it the line was busy.
The anxiety really didn’t hit him until he reached the roadhouse and saw the side of the road swarming with cops, saw the jackknifed car and the Jeep and the crime-scene tape and the forensics team working over the body of a man and then it really hit him when he saw the paramedics wheeling a woman into an ambulance. Janet? My god, he thought. He didn’t know why he thought it—the woman could have been anybody—but it came unbidden and pounded through his blood. He slowed and then stopped even as the officer waved him on. He flashed his ID. The officer frowned at him anyway.
“What happened? Accident?”
“Shooting. One dead. One of ours, dammit.”
“The woman?”
“Girl. Can’t be more’n seventeen. Concussion, fractures, god knows what else. It’s a helluva mess.”
He nodded. “Thanks, Officer. Good luck. Hope you get the bastard.”
“Bastards,” he said. “Three of them.”
Alan guessed it was just his night to be corrected. He pulled out and tried her again on the cell phone.
“Leave a message,” she said.
“Vehicle described as a late-model four-door Buick station wagon, light blue. Suspects are assumed to be armed and . . .”
“Dangerous,” said Emil.
Billy reached over and flipped off the police band and pounded once at the steering wheel. “Shit,” he said.
“How’d they make the wagon?” said Ray.
“The car that passed us by back there. While Billy was toyin’ with the Man.”
“Shit!” He pounded the wheel again.
“Called us in as an accident, probably. Good citizen. Well hell, we are an accident. An accident waitin’ to happen!”
It seemed to break the tension and they laughed. Broke it for them, anyway, if not exactly for Janet. They were all too damn matter-of-fact about this. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t normal. And Emil. Couldn’t anything shake Emil?
“We’ll just find us another car, that’s all,” he said. “Meantime we better get off the road awhile.” He turned to Marion. “You know a place?”
She looked at Janet.
“Do I know a place? Hell, yes.”
She draped her arm over Janet’s shoulders and gave her a squeeze.
“‘Course I do,” she said.
She’d chosen the house because, unlike the Justice Building, where every footfall echoed like pistol fire across the marble floors, where even the walls were polished on a weekly basis, where the air was processed and always traced with disinfectant, the house was as much of nature as in the midst of it. Over 120 years old, it stood surrounded by tall untended grass atop a hill at the end of a two-lane dirt track that wound past a small country graveyard and an abandoned church of even earlier origin. Its beams were hand-hewn. Both fireplaces worked. The occasional bat still fluttered upstairs in the attic.
Her nearest neighbors were over a mile away. The house was quiet. It was private.
Now it was remote.
“How many phones?” Emil said. He’d walked in with his gun drawn. He shoved it in his belt.
“Just the one in the kitchen.”
‘Truth, now.”
“Just the kitchen.”
“Ray? You want to take care of that?”
“Sure.”
Ray walked into the kitchen, put the paper bag containing the whiskey down on the counter and the beer in the refrigerator and unplugged the wall jack. The blinking light on her answering machine blinked out.
“Any guns?”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure. You want to hide the carving knives? I promise not to look.”
Emil smiled. “I just might do that.”
Billy plopped down in her armchair like a man after a hard day at work. Emil went to the refrigerator to get himself a beer. He popped one for Ray and handed it to him, then another for himself and closed the door.
“Hey,” said Marion.
“Oh, right.”
He got her a beer, opened it and stepped out of the kitchen and handed it to her.
“Sorry, Marie.”
“Marion.”
“Sorry. You care for one?”
“No,” Janet said.
She needed something a whole lot stronger. Not too much, god knows she had to keep her wits about her. But Jesus, something. She went to the kitchen cabinet and took down the fifth of Glenlivet and a glass and uncorked the bottle.
“Scotch?” Ray said.
“Uh-huh.”
“Hey, we got scotch too. Have some of ours. Be our guest.”
“No thanks. This is scotch. You bought rubbing alcohol.”
She poured herself a double. Ray took the bottle from her hand.
“So educate me,” he said.
She got him a glass. He poured and drank.
“Smooth. What is it?”
“Single malt.”
“Good stuff,” he said.
“Where’s the bathroom?” said Marion.
Janet pointed. “Through there. Through the bedroom.”
“What’s over there?” Emil said.
He was pointing to the closed door to the study. Neither Emil nor Marion knew what she happened to do for a living yet and for some reason she didn’t want them to. So far the others hadn’t said anything. But if he went browsing around in there he could probably figure it out for himself.
“A study. Books and papers.”
He moved to the door and opened it and flicked on the wall switch and his eyes went to the cluttered desk.
“You work here?”
“Sometimes.”
“You some kind of writer or something?”
“I write.”
She walked over and as she turned the light off again and closed the door in front of him she saw Alan’s forgotten briefs on the end table.
He needed them tomorrow.
He’s supposed to be staying in town tonight.
“Please,” she said. “This room’s private.”
He shrugged and smiled. “Sure. Okay. You figure on writing about me?”
“Would you want me to?”
She glanced at Billy, slumped in the armchair, opening and closing a big sharp-looking folding knife, his brow furrowed as though deep in thought Billy’s got a knife, she thought. You damn well remember that too.
“Sure I’d want you to. Farm boy makes good, right? You know I’m the seventh son of a seventh son? Supposed to be magic or spiritual or something, real powerful. Now Billy here’s a preacher’s son. A very spiritual being in his own right. And Ray . . .”
He turned to Ray, who was drinking Glenlivet straight out of the bottle.
So much for a second one for me, she thought.
“Hey, Ray, what’s your story anyhow?”
“No story, Emil.”
He laughed. “That’s what I thought.”
Then the door to the bedroom ope
ned and Marion appeared and her anger at all four of them flared from dull to blazing. She was wearing the black Versace nightgown, the one Alan had more than splurged for in Manhattan last Christmas, the one she’d worn just four times since—that night and then on his birthday, her birthday and the Christmas following and the garter belt was hers too and the panties and the black silk stockings.
“I borrowed some things,” she said. “Hope you don’t mind.”
Oh, I mind, she thought. You bitch. You bet I mind and you damn well know I do.
“Lord, Maria! Look at you!”
He went to her and Janet had cause to wonder exactly how much jealousy was floating around here in the room just then between these guys because Ray moved toward them too from the kitchen, the expression on his face unreadable as Billy stood up gawking while Emil ran his hands over her, showing off for them and for Janet too, Marion laughing and wrapping her arms around him as he dragged her back through the doorway to the bedroom and pulled her down on top of him across the bed, hips already grinding.
She saw Marion break the kiss, his big hands roving her breasts, and saw her turn and stare at her and knew that Marion was showing her something at that particular moment too. It was something about power and spite, she thought, that the girl from the wrong side of the tracks was all grown up now and somebody to be reckoned with. She got that message clearly. And never broke the look as she purposefully and calmly walked over to the bedroom and closed the door.
Billy slumped back into his chair. Began fiddling with his evil-looking knife again. She crossed to the couch nearby and sat. He wasn’t going to scare her. Damned if he was. In the kitchen she could hear Ray swilling at the bottle. In the bedroom she could hear them. They all could. She had the feeling that it bothered each of them in one way or the other. She reached into her purse.
“You mind if I smoke?”
“Unh-unh. It’s your domesticity.”
She lit it, crossed her legs and tried to relax.
“Your TV work?” he said.
“Remote’s right over there.”
He took it off the table and pushed the POWER button. Some innocuous family comedy sprang out at them and the sounds from the bedroom disappeared beneath canned laughter. He started surfing the channels. His attention span seemed to be just about what she’d expect it to be: nil.