In the distance of the orange basement, there was an outline of someone walking away. “Tooth?” I whispered.
Now Victoria was screaming, a desperate plea that cut through my trance. She was staring at the cages, staring at Bob’s drugged up, dickless, unconscious body in the middle of the dirt.
It was time to go.
Before I raced to her, I looked back through the door one last time, saw Marshalll’s unmasked head emerge from under the boards. His hair was on fire.
I locked the door.
“Victoria,” I shouted as I grabbed her. She saw my face, my broken and swollen face, and reached up to touch it, suddenly stopping her screams. “Step over. Don’t touch him. Let him stay here and fry.”
We stepped over Bob and made our way down the exit tunnel, found the ladder leading up to the shed. I went up first, checking for the lock, which was still secured. It was a simple latch that flipped open, and once I did that I scrambled back down and shoved Victoria up. “Climb. Hurry.”
She did, and I followed.
We emerged in the shed, and walked out on to the backyard lawn. We stopped for a moment and sucked in clean air. Before us, the house was a mountain of flame, reaching up toward the dark sky above us. Parts of it had already caved in.
As we made our way down past the carport, then down the driveway, keeping ourselves shielded with cars and trees and other barriers, I thought I could still hear the people screaming in the basement. But then, I thought I’d seen and heard a lot in that basement. But you know why at this point.
My car was still where I’d left it, the keys still on the seat. I’d done that on purpose to have a quick getaway. One thing I learned from that summer in Skinny Man’s basement was to be proactive. I hadn’t been about to give up or lose my keys in a fight.
The car started without a problem. In the passenger seat, Victoria put her head against the side window and sobbed. I stared at the streaks of blood she left on the glass, leaned over and touched her shoulder. The tablecloth draped around her was black and had burn holes in it. The rest was covered in dirt and blood.
“Victoria. We’re safe now.”
She turned and looked at me, tears welling in her eyes. Her breath grew shallower and she was shaking. Her teeth showed through the slice in her cheek. “Gabe.”
It was the last thing she said before she put her head back against the glass and retreated inside of herself.
She was alive, though. I hadn’t let them kill her first. This time, the girl didn’t die.
I drove for many minutes, lost in the back roads but unconcerned about having no bearings, just happy to be free. There are no words to describe the pain I felt, both physically and emotionally, as I did my best to steer us away from the hell we’d just escaped. Looking at Victoria, my heart hurt as much as my face and arm.
The trees soon gave way to a main road lined with cafes and real estate offices. It wasn’t a big road, nor very long, but it was civilized, and I heaved a sigh of relief. Above us in the sky, the moon swam out from behind the clouds, just enough to give me a little extra light.
Then my eyes sank down to my knees, fatigue and blood loss finally forcing me against the ropes for their final takedown.
My foot slid off the gas pedal. The car drifted forward, slowing, turning, and finally crashing through the front window of a bakery.
All I remember before I passed out was: it smells like Sunday morning.
CHAPTER
22
Where to begin?
I guess with the hospital.
I woke up there, bandaged, splinted, with IVs feeding me a kind of supplement that made me itch. I saw faces hovering above me, but none that I recognized. A lot of them were male, and most had sunglasses on.
“Roger? Can you hear me?”
A man in a dark gray suit bent over me. He had a bushy mustache and his breath stank of coffee.
“Mmm,” I said.
On the other side of the bed a man in a white coat leaned over. “Roger, I’m Doctor Lipski. Do you remember me?”
I shook my head no. Realization was coming back to me though, little by little, and I had vague memories of being put in an ambulance, then wheeled through some white hallways, then having an oxygen masked placed over my face. Or maybe it wasn’t oxygen, because I had no memory whatsoever from then ’til now.
“Roger, you’re lucky to be alive.” Dr. Lipski sat down, put his arm on my own. “You’re in St. Mercy Hospital. You’ve been out for a couple of days. These men here are detectives, and they need to ask you some questions. But your health takes precedence over their interrogation so I’m here to stop it if you can’t talk any more. And before I can even let them start I need to check some vitals on you, okay?”
His words registered but had little meaning to me. Suddenly my only thought was of Victoria. I didn’t even know why I was thinking of her, just that I needed to know if she was okay.
I rolled my head sideways, felt a wave of nausea crash over me, but somehow managed to fight it down. “Victoria?”
“She’s in another room.”
“I don’t want him to see her,” said Mr. Mustache. “Not until we’ve established some facts.”
“Definitely not until he answers some questions,” said one of the other detectives. “And tell them to turn the TV off across the hall.”
I wouldn’t have even noticed the news story coming out of the room across the way if he hadn’t said that. But I caught the last little bit of some reporter’s chattering before the TV went off: “. . . say they have a suspect in the case of Marshalll Aldrich’s mansion fire.”
And so it began. The questioning, the cross examinations, the detectives coming back hour after hour for two whole days, as they tried to make sense of what I’d done.
“I didn’t let him kill her,” I repeated. I’d been saying this a lot.
“But you shot those men?”
“They had to die.”
“You killed nineteen people, Roger. I’m just not following this story.”
“They were wolves. They ate people.”
“You’re referring to some of the statues?”
“Ugly statues. Probably worth millions.” This from one of the other detectives.
“No,” I said. “Marshalll.”
I was getting frustrated but was having a hard time expressing it since the morphine had me in a daze.
“What did you do to Victoria, Roger? She keeps saying your name. Did you rape her? Did you do that to her. Her insides are ruined, do you know that?”
“Told you. Saved her. Not afraid anymore.”
“I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” said the doctor.
“We’re not done, doc.”
“You are now. I told you. Twenty minutes at a time. Come back later. He needs to rest.”
And that was how it went until the third day when Victoria began to speak. I’ll just cut to the chase here.
She woke up to her parents, an aunt and uncle and cousin. A whole extended family had come to see her. The detectives were there as well. The doctors had sewn up her fissure, taken skin from her buttocks to cover up some of the wounds. Like me, she had superficial burns on her body. The scar on her cheek was thick, and the doctors told her she’d need lots of plastic surgery to get it back to something that wouldn’t scare little kids.
She asked about Gabe a lot, and I heard her crying the night they told her he was dead. I’d already told her of course, but she’d retreated so far inside her own mind that she’d forgotten. She cried for so long. If anyone in this world ever tells you love is not real, make them listen to someone crying like that. It was the sound of someone’s soul dying.
At some point she recounted her story. There were holes of course, but enough to begin to put the pieces together. It took about another week for forensics to start corroborating. Leslie came out of the woodwork as well. He’d called the cops about Gabe and Walt and they’d been drilling him ever since.
When word got out I was in the hospital they brought him there to confirm everything. I heard him in the hallway with the detectives. From what I could make out he repeated for the umpteenth time the story about Walt and the incident at the house on his road. It all matched up with Victoria’s account. Of course I corroborated as well. Leslie was pretty much a hero.
The doctor asked me if I wanted to call my family. Apparently the detectives had gotten him to hold off on that until they’d had time to talk to me. I told him to call them but tell them I was okay and not to fly out. I mean, it’s not like they weren’t going to read about this soon enough. Once my name got out and that I was involved in another murder--murder spree, rather--all those websites and magazines that had reported on me in the past were going to have a field day.
But get this: when the detectives finally came back to my room, they apologized. They actually said they were sorry, and congratulated me.
“But,” Mustache said, “don’t get us wrong. We’re still investigating, and if any of this starts to smell like lies we’re gonna have you behind bars faster than you can think. I am still finding it hard to think Marshalll Aldrich and Winston Coates and all these others did everything you say they did.”
“Where’s my car?” It was all I could think of right then.
“In holding.” The detective waited a moment and then ran his hand through his hair. I could see he was exhausted from trying to make sense of all this. “I’ll get it for you. But remember what I said.”
Then I was alone for a while, just me and my thoughts, and all I could think of was that the detectives would never know the half of it. How many others had the cannibals eaten? How many others had been kidnapped and raped? Where had the bodies been taken? Marshalll wasn’t Skinny Man, he wouldn’t bury them in the backyard; he’d get rid of them for good somehow. And I hadn’t heard anything about the cages and tunnels. Maybe the house had fallen in on it and burned it all.
Except the wolf statues. The detectives had mentioned them.
“Praise Veles,” I whispered, wondering just what the hell had really been taking place in that mansion. “Eat shit, Veles. I beat you.”
When I could walk again, I found myself in Victoria’s room. There was a uniformed officer outside the door who gave me a funny look when I passed by. Pride, contempt, I dunno, I couldn’t tell.
Her parents were in there sitting next to the bed, her father looking stoic, her mother looking like she’d just come back from a war--eyes red, skin pasty, her hands constantly wringing themselves. I understood it, maybe more than anyone. No one wants to see their child like this.
“You’re Roger?” her father asked.
I nodded. I was back to that again. Just nodding and hoping I didn’t have to answer questions.
Her mother walked up to me, studied my face. The seconds ticked away as she looked for something inside of me. “Thank you,” she said.
I nodded again.
Victoria’s parents were gracious enough to give me a moment of privacy with her, said they were going to go down to the cafeteria and get some food. I sat in the chair beside her bed, tried hard to see her as the girl I’d fallen for, the spritely girl from the gallery. She looked different, had lost weight, was bandaged up pretty good. Part of her hair had been shaved off to sew in stitches; the scar on her cheek was under a dressing coated in a mustardy stain. I hoped it was just iodine or some other type of antibacterial agent.
I reached out and took her hand. It was cold.
She opened her eyes and looked at me.
“Hi,” I said.
The corners of her mouth turned up slowly. It wasn’t much of a smile, maybe all she could muster, but it was enough for me. Finally, her fingers closed on my hand. I put my head down on her chest and smelled the hospital gown, listened to her heartbeat. For some reason I just wanted to know she was still alive. I wanted to hear the life inside of her, to know that it was going to continue. I wanted to kiss her, but not the way I had wanted to in the past, not in a passionate way. I just wanted to let her know I cared. Her other hand came up and stroked my hair. Her hands were delicate. Her chest rose and fell in a way that felt like I was drifting on a calm sea.
I knew right then as I looked at her, as I felt the heat of her body against my ear, that she would never be the same. Something was long dead in her now.
I knew the feeling.
I still know the feeling.
I had saved her, but only part of her. I had still let part of her die.
We stayed like that for a while, holding hands, my head on her chest, cherishing every heartbeat, until her parents came back in.
It must have looked a little weird but they didn’t say anything. I left without another word.
Two days later I was allowed to go home.
But as with everything in my life, I was to find that things were not going to be okay. In fact, things were about to get a whole lot worse.
CHAPTER 23
The hospital kept my clothes in a pile in the closet near the bathroom. My jeans were burned and stained beyond recognition, my white sneakers now entirely black. The Red Sox cap was there, burned in places and ripped in others. It had looked decrepit before I’d broken into Marshalll’s place; now it looked like it had been dug out of a trash heap.
My Ghost in the Shell shirt was missing. I had torn it off after stabbing one of the goons. It was no doubt a small pile of ashes near a charred wolf statue somewhere. The hospital, in all their sterile and officious graciousness, gave me a flannel button-down that was obviously pulled from the used overstock bins at Goodwill. It was too tight around my neck, but at least it covered up my fish white arms and belly.
My car’s hood was dented, but beyond that was in pretty good shape. It started right up when I put the key in.
The drive home was somber. I listened to the news but heard nothing about the incidents at the Aldrich manor. Victoria was still in the hospital and would be for many days to come. She had more counselors than a pothead has places to hide weed. I hadn’t gone back to see her after our little meeting, nor would I ever. In the years that followed I thought about her often, but I never bothered to pick up the phone. Other things became more important, and I rarely had the time to chit-chat.
When I got home I tore the constricting shirt off and tossed it right in the trash, put on my favorite Will Eisner collectable t-shirt. I spent some time staring at myself in the mirror, admiring my slanted nose. My eyes were still swollen and black, and my arm was in both a cast and a sling.
“You’re a looker, hot stuff. Can’t understand why the girls avoid you. Oh wait, because they all end up dead when they hang out with you.”
My beta fish was still swimming in its tiny bowl of a world. It was lucky, because if I’d been killed no one would have come to feed it. I gave it some food, let it eat, and then walked across the hall to the apartment opposite me. A tiny Korean woman answered, wiping her hands on a food-stained apron.
“Hi, I’m Roger. I live . . . um . . . there.” I pointed to my apartment.
“I know you,” she said in perfect English. “I’ve seen you come and go. Do you need something?”
Her accent surprised me, because I’d never heard her speak but had, on numerous occasions, heard her yell at her children in Korean.
“What do you want?” she pressed, staring at my black eyes with appropriate suspicion.
I held up the fishbowl with my shiny blue pet inside. “I saw you have kids. I thought they might like this. I’m not meant to have it. She needs someone who will feed her every day, change her water once in a while. That sort of thing.”
“We already have a cat and a Chihuahua.”
“You’re allowed to have cats? They told me . . .” I couldn’t finish the thought because she was staring at my bandages and making me uncomfortable. “Forget it. I just want to find the fish a good home. Would your kids take care of it if I gave it to them?”
As if on cue, one of the children, a gi
rl of perhaps seven, appeared beneath her mother’s arm.
“I’ll feed her!” she said. “Can I, Mom, can I?”
I held up the small shaker of fish food. “This should last at least a year. Just put the bowl where the cat can’t get it, okay?”
The little girl nodded emphatically and did her best big doe-eyed impression for her mom.
The woman reluctantly took the fishbowl and said something in Korean that looked like an admonishment to her offspring. Probably something along the lines of, “This is your fish now, kid, and if you mess up and it dies then you won’t get any more.”
The little girl thanked me about a million times and I somehow knew she’d take good care of it.
Back in my apartment, I checked my email, saw I had nothing but spam and online bill payments due.
Wait, there was also a message from Dr. Marsh. I opened it:
Roger, tried calling but got no answer. I really think you should come in. I heard about what happened on the news. I think you need to talk about all of this. I’m very afraid this is going to set our work back. I also would like to report on your prescriptions and start you on some others. We can discuss it when we meet. Please call me at your earliest convenience.
Sincerely,
Gail Marsh, Ph.D.
“Not very likely.” I deleted the email. While I did need to get back on my meds, I wasn’t about to go back to Dr. Marsh’s office and let her pick my brain about what happened with Victoria. It was over and done with and I wanted it to stay that way.
Since crashing my car into the bakery window, I hadn’t heard any voices in my head. I hadn’t seen any boogey men hiding in the shadows. I hadn’t had a conversation with a ghost. I probably did need to get back on meds, but right now I was going with this new wave of silence.
I turned around and found a man standing behind me. In my apartment. “Who the hell are you? How’d you get in? How’d you--”
Born To Bleed (The Roger Huntington Saga, Book 2) Page 19