by Jack Ketchum
She smelled cordite thick and vile for the second time that night and thought of the little girl again. She felt nothing at all for Billy—not even satisfaction. It was no surprise to her at all.
She looked at Emil. His face was white, his mouth slack. Without his own gun he seemed smaller, diminished down to just another weak aimless man. Harpe moved on past them down the stairs, saying nothing to either of them, past Marion and Ray peeling themselves up off the floor and past Billy’s pooling blood, and Emil stooped and helped her up and they followed, Emil’s legs just as unsteady as her own, she thought, the guard a step behind them. Followed him as he moved through the crowd and gunsmoke like a walking boulder or some living, breathing god past a biker leg-wounded in the crossfire, patting him on the shoulder, the man grinning at that, followed him to the back of the room where he opened a door and led them down to more stairs and darkness.
* * *
Billy was there one moment and not there the next and that was the way of it, the way it always was, Emil thought, for the cop and for that family back there and for all the others, nothing too fucking astounding about that, nothing to worry a man particularly. So he had to figure it was the fucking room and what was going on in it that was troublesome, the dark of the room and the long moving shadows against the rough stone walls as they came off the stairs, the room dark except for some candles and a flickering fireplace way down at the end. So the room was bothering him? The fucking room?
Or maybe it was the fucking altar?
Because that’s what it was all right, a goddamn altar, three long wide slabs of what looked like solid granite— these assholes and these rich bitches gathered around it a bunch of weirdo zombies going about their business crowded around the altar toward the back, the word RISE painted across the ceiling, some dumb-ass pentagram thing on the wall behind them just like in the horror movies, diamond necklaces and formal ties showing above black robes, diamond earrings and Rolex watches, no bikers or Nazis in this neck of the woods, no sir, all these rich-fuck weirdo zombies moving along one by one, washing their hands and faces out of a great big copper bowl and toweling dry and throwing the towels in the fireplace.
All that was bothering him. Yes it was.
The six big Dobermans prowling around were bothering him too. Their eyes gleaming by firelight, their wet panting. The chattering sounds their toenails made against the fieldstone floor.
And the one he guessed was the Big Kahuna, the only one facing him, the one with the hooded robe and the upraised bloody hands and the goddamn blood streaked all over his goddamn bony face, he was sure as hell bothering him.
“Who the fuck are these guys?” he whispered to the guard.
“Ever hear of the Church of Final Judgment? Meet your basic pastor.”
And then he was coming toward them, smiling, face and hands washed and dried now just like the others who parted to let him pass and Emil could see what else besides the bowl was on the altar.
It had been a guy once. Now it was naked body parts. A hand here. A leg there. A cock and a pair of hairy, bloody balls.
“Jesus Christ,” he said.
“Healthy, Mr. Harpe?” said the man.
“Depends on your point of view,” said Harpe. “Healthy enough, I guess.”
And then the goddamn fruitcake was walking around inspecting them. All of them. He took a while checking out Whatsername’s tits in particular.
“Seedy,” he said. “I like that.”
“The price is ten thousand,” said Harpe. Whatsername had already begun to cry. Fuck her. Two black-robed women took her by either arm. “All right. They’ll do,” said Harrison.
“Hey. We’re only talking about the ladies here, remember?” Emil said.
“Really?” said Harrison.
He looked at Harpe and Harpe looked at Emil.
“Not really,” he said.
* * *
She watched them bolt up the stairs and hit the door at a dead run. The door wouldn’t budge. Ray stumbled and lull and Emil backed off and tried again.
“This one’s excepted,” Harpe said.
“Why?” said Harrison.
“She’s a lawyer. A defense attorney.”
Harrison laughed. “Quite right, Mr. Harpe. No policemen, no lawyers and no Supreme Court justices. I suppose I can live with the other three.”
There was considerable strength in numbers and it didn’t take them long to pull them off the stairs—Emil’s furious terror, his flailing feet and fists be damned. Ray put up practically no resistance at all. Maybe he really it us sorry about what he’d done to her. Maybe he figured he deserved this. Whether he felt that way or didn’t, she couldn’t care less.
On the floor they surrounded them and began to kick and as though that was some signal the Dobermans began to bite and growl and shake. Ray’s calf, blood flying off it, his right hand. Emil’s arm and then his shooting hand. Over the howling of the men and shrieks from Marion she heard Harrison tell Harpe he could take her now.
“You want to watch?” he said.
“No.”
They started toward the stairs. Behind her Marion screamed her name and she turned.
“Janet!” She was struggling to get free of the women behind her. There were three of them now. One of the women clenched and squeezed her breast, her diamond ring catching the firelight, just as she’d done to herself not so very long before. She wondered what passions Marion was feeling now.
“Jesus, Janet! For Christ’s sake, please! You got to help me! I didn’t kill anybody! You know I didn’t kill anybody!”
“I know,” she said.
They’d hauled Ray and Emil up off the floor to the cinderblock wall, to the shackles there. The family man was sobbing. Someone was stripping off Emil’s belt and tugging down his pants while another took his head between both hands and pounded it against the wall to make him stop his bellowing. She supposed it annoyed him.
It worked.
She looked at Marion again. The women were already dragging her toward the bloody altar.
“But this way,” she said, “you never will.”
* * *
The naked woman in the main room was still swaying from her chains as they passed. Three men were gambling, throwing dice beneath her. Another was snorting something white—coke or speed or heroin.
At the door Harpe stopped her.
“You want to know,” he said. “Little’s full of shit. He shot those people and he was all by himself when he did it. My brother always was an asshole. You tell him for me that if and when you get him off he better slit his own fucking throat because I’m coming after him and what I do to him will be a whole lot worse.” She nodded and turned and walked into the half light of the coming dawn.
* * *
Micah Harpe closed the door behind her and thought that you never did know what the day was going to bring. When he was a young man he ’d quietly slit some lawyer’s throat in his very own office because of a padded bill for services rendered on a chickenshit DU I rap and here he was letting another lawyer go—and this one was defending his idiot little brother. Forgetting the generally damaged condition of her, a damn good- looking lawyer too. Under other circumstances he’d have poked her all night long into the morning. Life was full of surprises.
He walked over to the bar and Edwin the bartender— not Eddy, never, the man was one vain sonovabitch— looked up at him and smiled.
“You guys downstairs missed the good part, ” he said. “Oh yeah? What part was that?”
“Guy got up and walked right out of here. See that trail of blood over there? Guy went for a little stroll. ”
* * *
She walked slowly, half-dazed in the clean open air and head pounding and reflected with grim humor that her head had taken a whole hell of a lot of abuse for a single night. The dog skeleton on the swing swayed on a breeze that wasn’t there and with so little light she saw too late in her approach the bloody hand that moved the chain and sa
w him slide around from behind the tree, Billy grinning and covered with so much blood that it could only be craziness keeping him alive and standing. The hand that darted out at her and closed over her wrist was cold and slimy red. All of him was red. Only the knife blade in his other hand glinted clean at his side.
“You swayed your charms with him, didn’t you?” he said. “You did.”'
Blood bubbled over his lips and slid over his chin and she tried to jerk free so that he staggered toward her but somehow kept his stance and pulled her toward him with improbable, impossible strength and then he raised the knife.
And then screamed.
Harpe’s hands were over his wrist. She heard it snap like a dry twig in the forest and the knife fell to his feet. Billy clutched at the wrist, wailing, Billy suddenly gone boy soprano as Harpe lifted him off his feet bear- hugging him chest-to-chest and walked him from the swing and grinning remains of dog or wolf and then lifted him high to the first of the nooses hanging beyond and slipped his head through and then dropped him like a log.
The snap of neck was louder than the snap of wrist had been. She could hear bone grind bone inside him. His legs jerked and spasmed and then he was quiet, swaying, drooling pulsing waves of blood and pissing the length of his jeans.
Harpe turned to her and smiled. “Hole-in-the-Wall,” he said. “A little frontier justice.”
* * *
She was nearly to the turnoff to the main road when she saw the headlights coming toward her—on a night filled with blazing headlights searing into her, two more now, like lasers burning through the most awful headache of her life and she fell dizzy to her knees before them.
Too much, she thought, too damn much and then she heard car doors slam and feet pound the dirt and then he was calling her name.
* * *
So that’s it,” Alan said. The Turtle Brook was busy with the lunch crowd for a change. He wiped some burger juice off his chin and wondered why they had to make these things so thick no normal mouth could close over them.
“Thanks to you and your late friend Marion they finally got to close the place down. Harrison gets indicted on four counts of murder for the kid, who turns out to he your basic runaway by the way and for Marion, Short and Rothert, with Thaw and Coombs as co-conspirators since they run the place. Thaw and Coombs? They may very well beat the rap or take a plea. Hole-in-the-Wall’s a big place to supervise and you can’t be everywhere at once. You know, that kind of thing. The Church of Final Judgment keeps no records and it looks like takes no prisoners and nobody thinks Harrison will do a whole lot of talking, so that’s probably all they’ll get. Too bad it took a day to get that goddamn search warrant.”
“Why couldn’t you get the warrant?” she said. “I thought you and Judge Lardner were thick as thieves.” You should only know, he thought. He hadn’t called her in months, that was why. It pissed her off. Simple as that. She wouldn’t even talk to him. And he couldn’t do much begging with Frommer standing by. He shrugged and bit into his burger.
“So there’s nothing at all on Micah Harpe.” “Nothing,” he said. “Vanished.”
“Good,” she said and smiled.
She looked terrific in the turban, he thought. Hell, she’d even looked terrific in the bandages last night. The bandages and nothing else. Stark white against tanned smooth skin. She was quite a goddamn woman to have gone through all of that and come out of it the way she did. He was going to have to marry her soon before somebody else beat him there. If he didn’t know that before, he sure did now.
“Good? Why’s that?” he said.
Her smile broadened. “Don’t worry. You’ll see.”
* * *
Arthur “Little” Harpe sat on a bench in the hall flanked by guards on either side. He got up when he saw Janet and her new co-council Linda Morrison striding in his direction and smiled that shaky, snaky little smile of his that she used to wish she could dissuade him from using in the courtroom.
“Hi, Janet,” he said. “Feeling better today?”
“Much better, thank you.”
“What was the problem? I mean, if you don’t mind my asking. All’s they told me was you weren’t so hot.” “Nothing to worry about, Arthur.”
He didn’t need to know about the nightmares. God, no. Certainly not Arthur Harpe. He didn’t need to know about that poor little girl twisting in a sudden gale of gunfire.
“Come on,” she said. “We’re going to see if we can’t get you out of here today.”
The smile this time was absolutely genuine. The little worm probably had never hoped for such luck. The fact that it wasn’t luck—-that she’d be lying when she got up there on the witness stand and told the jury that Micah Harpe had confessed to the Willis murders to her back in Hole-in-the-Wall—that was something he didn’t need to know either.
Linda opened the door to the courtroom for them and they stepped on through.
“By the way,” she said, “I have a message for you. From your brother.”
The look of alarm on his face nearly made her smile. But it wouldn’t do to smile. Instead she put her hand on his shoulder and turned him toward the defense table. “But that can wait for now,” she said, “can’t it?”