by Harvey Click
“Does anybody live there with him?”
“I don’t think so. His wife run off three, four years ago. They don’t have no kids. Why?”
“Just wondering.”
“I’m going to hang up and tell the other guys what’s going on. I think Bo and Pete will help me look, maybe Andy will too. I’m thinking we can get out a map and divide up the area so we’re not all searching the same places.”
“Thanks,” Shane said.
He hung up and put the phone back in his shirt pocket. Then he turned on the prepaid phone he’d just bought and used it to call another number.
***
Amy was handcuffed to the metal arm of a futon in the little living room of a little house. She wasn’t sure what direction they’d taken her because she’d been on the floor of the backseat, but the drive hadn’t lasted more than ten or fifteen minutes. The house was shabby and poorly furnished, and she knew it was isolated because she didn’t see any other houses out the window and she hadn’t heard a single vehicle on the road since they’d gotten here several hours ago.
One of the good ol’ boys was named Butch and the other was Floyd. Butch was sitting at the other end of the futon drinking a beer, and whenever Floyd wasn’t talking on the phone he sat on the beat-up chair across the room drinking his own beer. His phone rang every few minutes and then he went into the kitchen, where he was now, so she couldn’t hear much of what he was saying, but when she could hear something it was usually “How the hell would I know?” or “Ain’t my fuckin’ problem.”
He came back into the living room and sat in his beat-up chair. “Dipshit wants to know who’s pickin’ him up after he drops off the car,” he said.
“He shoulda worked that out beforehand,” Butch said.
“That’s what I told him. How the hell would I know who’s picking him up? I’m sure’s hell not. It ain’t my fuckin’ problem.”
Butch chuckled and said, “Maybe some hot Mexican hussy will pick him up.”
“That’ll be the fuckin’ day,” Floyd said. “Ain’t no whore in the whole fuckin’ world would want to pick up that sad ass piece a shit.”
“Well, he can sit there till hell freezes over far’s I’m concerned,” Butch said. “He never did have no brains. Remember when he robbed his own house for the insurance?”
Floyd spit out some of his beer laughing and said, “Then he remembered he didn’t have no insurance!” He grinned at Amy with some beer dribbling down his chin. He looked even worse than usual when he grinned.
He wiped his chin on his sleeve and said, “Butch, you really think anybody’s stupid enough to pay five hundred dollars for her? She don’t even get the joke.”
“It ain’t five hundred dollars, asshole, it’s five hundred thousand dollars,” Butch said.
“That’s what I meant,” Floyd said. “That’s the way gangsters talk. When they say ten dollars they mean ten thousand dollars. I seen it in a movie once.”
“You’re full a shit,” Butch said. “You ain’t never met a real gangster in your whole life, and if you ever did you’d piss your pants.”
“I didn’t say I ever knowed any, I just said that’s the way they talk. I’m askin’ if you think anybody’s stupid enough to pay five hundred thousand dollars for her. I seen better lookin’ women you can have for fifty bucks and maybe even get some change back.”
Butch sighed and said, “Sometimes I think you’re even dumber than Dipshit. Somebody wants her real bad and we got her, and that’s that.”
***
It was getting dark when Sheriff Candy called Shane. “I got news,” he said. “Your wife’s car was found in a remote area beside the Rio Grande.”
“Did they find her?”
“No. Just her car sittin’ there beside the river, no sign of any struggle. There was a .30-30 Winchester rifle in the front seat. Is that her gun?”
“It might be. We have a Winchester.”
“I’ll be honest with you ‘bout what I’m thinkin’,” the sheriff said. “I know you don’t want to hear this, but at first glance it appears possible to me that your wife has gone off the deep end. It appears possible that she shot her brother and maybe also this babysitter who lives down the road and who’s now missing, and then it appears possible she set your house on fire. I just hope we don’t find your baby in that rubble. By the way, was she sick or acting crazy or something that she needed this babysitter?”
“No.”
“It appears possible she then called 911 with this crazy story about a gang dressed in black, like something out of a movie. When a person goes off the deep end like this it’s not unusual they invent some wild story so they don’t have to believe they did the deed themselves, understand what I mean? Where she might be right now is anybody’s guess. That river’s deep and it’s got some flow to it right now. If she jumped in the river there’s no tellin’ where her body may turn up, if it ever does turn up. Or she might be hid out there someplace.”
Shane didn’t say anything.
“Where are you?” the sheriff asked.
“Driving around looking.”
“I don’t think there’s anything to look for. If there’s a dented blue Tahoe out there it would’ve been spotted by now. Where are you staying?”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
“Well, you let me know just as soon as you decide. I want to know where I can find you if I need to.”
Shane hung up and turned around in a driveway. It was too dark now to see a dark blue Tahoe unless it was right out in plain sight somewhere, and he didn’t think it would be. He’d already called Jim Blaine to tell him that he and the others should go home. Jim and two others had been driving around looking all afternoon but hadn’t found anything.
When he got back to Silver Stone he bought some beef jerky and several bottles of water, then he drove out of town on Slate Road and parked his Jeep where it couldn’t be seen behind the old deserted shoe factory on the right side of the road. There was an overgrown hedge on the south side of the building, and he sat on the ground hidden inside it where he had a good view of Sheriff Candy’s big two-story house just a short distance away on the other side of the road.
The moon had already risen. It was about three-quarters full and giving off enough light for his binoculars to pick out any details that weren’t buried in shadow. There was a sheriff’s car parked in the driveway and behind it a deputy’s car. Lights glowed downstairs in the house, and before long he saw somebody looking out the window of the front door. A little later somebody looked out of it again. Somebody in there seemed to be waiting for someone.
An hour passed and then another. Shane ate some jerky and drank some water. There was little traffic on this road, and after 10:00 it thinned out to maybe one car every five minutes. A few minutes after 11:00 he saw a vehicle approaching from the south. It pulled into the vacant lot just south of Candy’s house and shut off its lights. It was an SUV that could be dark blue or maybe black, but it was an Explorer, not a Tahoe.
Two men got out dressed in black but not wearing ski masks, and one of them opened the hatch. Shane couldn’t quite see what he was doing because the back of the vehicle was facing away from him, but a few seconds later he saw two other figures running back into the foliage toward Candy’s house.
Or maybe running wasn’t the right word. They were short and stocky and hunched down like gorillas, and to stay upright they seemed to be using their hands as much as their feet.
***
“Sit the fuck down,” Deputy Joyce Hodges said. “You’re making me nervous.”
Bob Candy glared at her. She was sitting in his favorite chair in his living room, knowing full well it was his favorite chair, and that’s why she was sitting in it. Sitting there with no more emotion than a rock, the way she always was. The only time he’d ever seen her show any emotion was when a drunk they’d hauled into the cooler had called her a fat ugly dike, and then an emotion had passed over her rock-hard face that
Candy never wanted to see again.
“Who the hell wouldn’t be nervous?” he said. “This is the stupidest damn thing I ever let you talk me into. This is the stupidest damn thing I ever done in my life.”
“You didn’t have to agree to it,” she said.
“You didn’t give me no time to think it over.”
“I didn’t have anything to do with the timing,” she said. “The opportunity presented itself, and it didn’t offer all the time in the world for you to sit around and ‘think,’ as you put it, not that the mess that goes on in your head should ever be mistaken for thinking. You’d still be sitting around moping and frowning and trying to make a decision.”
“And I wish I was,” he said. “I wish to God I was. That church ain’t gonna hand over a million dollars to us just like that. That ain’t the way they play.”
“Sure they will. We have the woman, and they’re going to have to pay if they want her. What part of that equation don’t you understand? They’ve been handing you hush money for six years now, and they’ve never complained. A million more bucks doesn’t mean shit to them. They move a million bucks worth of dope in the time it takes you to decide if you need to take a shit or not. Now sit the fuck down, you’re giving me the creeps pacing around like a lunatic.”
Candy sat on the sofa and stared at his fat hands. He hated Joyce Hodges more than anybody else he’d ever met in his entire life, but he had to put up with her because she had the goods on him. She knew why his wife had disappeared three years back, and she knew where the body was buried.
This morning when the call came in about Amy Malone, Hodges had immediately figured out that the church had botched a kidnapping, immediately like the way some inhuman machine can figure out a complicated math problem as soon as the numbers are typed in, and a few minutes later she’d talked him into doing something that was likely to get him killed. And then before he had a chance to change his mind she’d already called three of her shitball thug friends to help out. The shitballs had been promised an even five-way cut of the pie, but she’d told them the pie was five hundred thousand instead of a million.
“I have half a notion to call them right now and say they can have the woman for free,” he said.
“You’ve got half a notion because you’ve got half a brain. Now shut the fuck up.”
He was about to argue when his phone rang. “Three minutes,” a voice said.
“It’s gotta be cash, just like I said,” Candy said. “Either that or gold bullion.”
“It’s cash.”
“Okay then, put it on my back steps,” Candy said. “And don’t let no one see you. And then walk away. I want to see you walking down the road.”
He hung up and said, “I’ll watch out front, you watch out back.”
Joyce Hodges moved to the kitchen and Candy grabbed his Glock, shut off the living room lights, and stared out the front window. Pretty soon he saw two men dressed in black walking up the road, one of them carrying a briefcase. They came into his driveway and walked to the back of the house.
“They’re here,” he said.
A minute later he saw them walking out of his driveway without the briefcase and heading back down the road.
“They’re leaving,” he said.
He heard Hodges opening the back door and then heard her bellowing like a steer being castrated. Candy was about halfway out the front door when something leaped out of the darkness of the front porch and nearly knocked him down as it shoved him back inside.
It was the ugliest thing Candy had seen in his entire life, almost human but not quite, more like a hairless gorilla naked and stinking, whole body a nasty gray color like a slimy garden slug. The head was too big for its body and the face, my God, like a deformed human face covered with horrible tumors or polyps an inch or two long wriggling like worms. The nose was punched in and the forehead was huge and lumpy with two glowering red eyes beneath it and a wide gaping mouth filled with slobber and long sharp teeth.
Candy tried to shoot it, but it grabbed his gun hand and he heard his wrist snap. It threw him to the floor and sat on him with its stinking bare ass until the two men dressed in black stepped in through the front door and shut it behind them. Hodges’ bellowing had stopped, but now Candy could hear noisy chewing and lip smacking coming from the kitchen.
“You got a choice,” one of them said. “You can take us to the woman or you can be a nice juicy snack like your friend back there in the kitchen.”
Chapter 5
Shane watched the two men return to the SUV with Sheriff Candy walking between them. He appeared to be handcuffed. One of them got in the backseat with Candy and the other opened the hatch. Pretty soon two hunched figures scrabbled out of the foliage and leaped into the back. The man shut the hatch, climbed into the driver’s seat, and fired up the SUV. It turned around and headed back down the road in the direction it had come from.
Shane followed the SUV with his headlights off and his GPS switched on. Pretty soon approaching headlights appeared, and he had to pull to the side of the road so he wouldn’t arouse suspicion driving without lights. Maybe the approaching car saw him and assumed he was a cop, because it slowed down and seemed to take forever getting past him, and by then another car had passed him and was now between his Jeep and the SUV, which was so far ahead he could just barely make out the taillights.
Shane drove with his headlights on now, since there was a buffer between him and his quarry, but three or four miles out of town the buffer turned right on a crossroad and a mile later the SUV turned left. Shane drove past the crossroad, quickly turned around in a driveway, and turned into the crossroad from the other direction.
Now the taillights had vanished. He sped up and when he topped a rise in the road he saw them again, very far ahead. He kept the speed up until he had closed the distance to about a quarter mile or so, and then he slowed to match the SUV’s speed.
About twenty minutes later the SUV turned again. This was a back road off a back road, and he thought they’d be suspicious if they noticed him turning behind them, so he shut off his headlights again. Though the moon was bright, it wasn’t bright enough for driving safely at this speed, but then it wouldn’t be very safe to let them know they were being followed either.
They were getting into hilly country where there were plenty of curves, and the taillights disappeared in them. Eventually the road straightened out for a stretch, but he still couldn’t see the taillights—he must have been driving too slow.
He switched his headlights back on and pressed the accelerator, taking the narrow pitted road as fast as the Jeep would allow, and he spotted the stop sign up ahead barely in time to stop. The road he was on continued past the intersection, but he wondered if the SUV had. He didn’t see taillights in any direction.
***
Sometime after 11:00 p.m. Floyd came in from the kitchen saying, “Bastard won’t answer his fuckin’ phone.”
“Maybe he’s doin’ the transaction right now,” Butch said.
“Yeah, or maybe he’s skippin’ out with our money,” Floyd said.
By 11:30 both of them were pacing drunkenly around and saying things like “If that candyass sonvabitch run off with my money I’ll kick his ass so fuckin’ hard he’ll be shittin’ out his mouth.”
A little before midnight Butch said, “Floyd, you drive to his house and see if he’s there. I’ll wait here with the girl.”
“Fuck that,” Floyd said. “I ain’t goin’ nowhere, I’m too damn drunk to drive.”
“For christsake, Floyd, all ya had was a couple fuckin’ beers,” Butch said. “I guess I’m the only one ‘round here that can handle a couple fuckin’ beers. Okay, you just make damn sure this bitch is still here when I get back or else my money better be sittin’ on that table. Or else you’re gonna be drinkin’ your own teeth instead of Pabst Blue Ribbon.”
Butch shoved a gun in his belt, put on a dirty denim jacket, and left the house. A moment later through the wi
ndow Amy saw the old green SUV tearing out of the driveway.
Floyd opened another beer, sat down on his beat-up chair across from her, and grinned. “It’s just you and me, sweetie,” he said. When she didn’t reply he grinned again and said, “Are you one a them feminuts that don’t like to be called sweetie? ‘Cause if you are I don’t give a shit. I believe a man’s a man and a woman’s a sweet piece of ass, ‘less of course she’s ugly, and I wouldn’t call you ugly. You might be a little bit on the scrawny side but nobody’d call you ugly. I admit I’ve fucked a helluva lot worse in my time, and I lived to tell about it.”
He staggered over, pulled her feet up onto the futon so she was lying flat, and then he unbuttoned her jeans and unzipped them. He was bending over to tug them down when she threw her legs up over his head, clamped them around his back, and pulled him down on top of her.
An hour ago she had filched a heavy glass ashtray from the cluttered coffee table and had kept it hidden behind her back. With her free right hand she brought it down hard on the top of his skull again and again until he lay still.
A stream of blood was trickling through his thin greasy hair. She reached in his pants pockets, found the handcuffs key and unlocked her wrist. He was heavy, and it took some effort to roll him off of her. His bleeding head smashed into the coffee table on the way to the floor.
She zipped up her jeans and cuffed Floyd to the futon leg where he lay, though she wasn’t sure he’d live long enough to need the cuffs. There was a Browning Hi-Power on the table across the room beside his beat-up chair. She stuck it in her waistband and fished again in his pants pockets, which were now soaked with urine, but there weren’t any car keys. She ran out of the house and saw why there weren’t: there was no garage or car in sight. Apparently Butch had left with the only vehicle.
She was heading to the road when she saw headlights approaching in the distance. She ran and hid behind a small tin shed about twenty feet behind the back of the house. She heard the vehicle pull into the driveway but didn’t stick her head out to look at it.