The Blood We Spill: Suspense with a Dash of Humor (A Letty Whittaker 12 Step Mystery Book 4)

by Donna White Glaser

  “Holy crap,” Beth whispered.

  “Look, now that we’re all caught up, we really need to get the hell out of here. We can fill in the details later. If we can’t walk out and we can’t steal a car, what are we going to do?”

  This was a poser.

  “You guys have to go ahead without me,” Priella said. “I can hide in the woods tonight. By tomorrow you could have the—”

  “That’s not happening,” Beth said. “We have no idea how long it might take us to find help, especially if we’re walking. I’m not even sure where we are and Sawyer County probably has a higher bear population than people.”

  We all looked warily at the woods.

  “Beth’s right.” I said. “I don’t think you would make it in the woods overnight. You’d probably die of exposure. Hunters and off-roaders may love it, but this county is mostly lakes and woods with a couple of small towns sprinkled in. I know we’re somewhere southeast of Hayward, but—”

  Beth grabbed my arm. “Trails.” She pointed at the tarped ATVs.

  Thank you, God.

  “This could work,” I said.

  “Maybe,” Beth said. “We need the keys.”

  I turned to Priella. “Any idea where they might keep them?”

  “None. The only time I could hear anything over the music was if they were in the yard fighting.”

  “Okay, let’s not make this more complicated than it needs to be,” I said. “You guys wait here. I’m going to slip over and see if they’ve left them in the ignition. This is Wisconsin, after all.”

  But of course a bunch of meth cooks were a tad more security conscious than the average Wisconsinite. They had covered the three machines with a heavy tarp, which I didn’t bother trying to pull off. Instead, I slipped underneath and crawled from ATV to ATV. They were fairly clean for off-road vehicles, making me wonder if they were only used for travel between camps. None of them had keys conveniently left in the ignition.

  But there were two sheds. The other sat on the opposite side of the trailer. I didn’t remember seeing a padlock on it, so in the interest of being thorough, I scooted across the rutted drive. It was indeed open, but it was full of miscellaneous yard tools, including a lawn mower that reeked of gas. I didn’t see any keys.

  By the time I made it back to the other women, Priella had reverted to sitting on the ground.

  “Find anything?” Beth sounded strained.

  Priella looked up hopefully.

  “No,” I said. “If Justus didn’t take them, they’ve got to be in the trailer.”

  “Okay, look.” Beth’s turn. “We’ve got to get in there. If we could get Maggie alone, she might be willing to come away with us.”

  “Two problems. How do we get Maggie alone, and how can we be sure she’ll come with us?”

  “We’ll need a diversion. As far as whether she’ll come with us, there’s no telling. We can only try,” Beth replied.

  I rubbed my eyes. “How do we set it up so that the guys are diverted and Maggie isn’t?”

  Priella said, “I don’t think Maggie ever comes out of the trailer. I mean I’ve never heard her. It’s always Luke or Ben who bring me my food. Unless Father calls for a mandatory meeting, they’re usually the only ones that go to Megiddo too.”

  “Maybe if we leave the shed door wide open and make a big ruckus, they’ll follow one of us into the woods?” I said. “Then the other two could get in the cabin, grab the keys and hopefully Maggie. The diverter can circle around once she gets the guys out deep enough. Then we all take off.”

  Beth chewed her lip. “It’s not good, but it’s all we’ve got.”

  Priella shrugged. “We can’t get caught. You know that, right? If Maggie doesn’t want to come, we can’t spend a lot of time convincing her. As soon as they see I’m really gone, they’re going to alert Father and the Seven.”

  “More like Father and the Three or Four,” I said. “So, the big question is, who’s going to be the diversion?”

  Priella lowered her head, staring at the dirt in front of her face. I looked at Beth. She rubbed her sore arm.

  “Oh, come on.” I hiked my skirt back up and pointed to my gouge. “I was stabbed. With a hook!”

  “I’m older than you,” Beth countered. “Way older.”

  “Six years, Beth. That’s not—” I heaved a sigh. This was going nowhere, and we all knew who was going to be running around the woods being chased by crazed meth heads.

  “Maybe we could just reason with them,” I said weakly.

  “We’ll need a place for Priella and me to hide,” Beth said. “Maybe under the tarp?”

  “No.” Priella rose and stood beside us. “What if they decide to send someone to Megiddo? They might take one of the four-wheelers. How about the other shed? If I really was escaping, I’d never hide there.”

  “Or we could trade our bodies in exchange for the keys,” I tried. “Like ATV hookers.”

  Beth scooted around the shed and pulled the door open. It started to swing shut.

  “Or prayer! We haven’t tried that yet.”

  Priella waded into the weeds and came back dragging a branch. They wedged it under the door to prop it open.

  Beth finally turned to me. “Wait til we’re in the other shed, then go ahead.”

  “Go ahead? Go ahead and what? Scream ‘come and get me, boys?’”

  “You’ll think of something. Good luck.”

  As soon as they got inside, I hurried over to the path entrance. I stood poised like a track runner, ready to sprint off the mark. Then I cut loose with a yell loud enough to wake the dead. I took off like a popped cork but paused about five feet in to see who was coming.

  No one. I stopped and waited. Still no one came bursting out of the trailer after me. I walked back to the yard. Beth stuck her head out, and I gave her a WTF shoulder shrug. She shrugged back.

  Obviously, they couldn’t hear me over their stupid metal band racket. I searched the ground and came up with a rock the size of my fist. I threw it as hard as I could at the door. I could only hope that they wouldn’t stop to ask themselves why Priella would do such a thing before making her escape. Since the rock landed ten feet short, I didn’t have to wonder for long.

  The “really?” face that Beth shot me from the shed sizzled my face. I flipped her off.

  Found another rock. This time I crept forward until I was fewer than twenty feet away. Only an imbecile could miss at this distance. I thought about it and moved another five feet closer. Then I hurled that sucker at the lab window and sprinted for the path. Glass shattered. Someone screamed.

  I tore down the path, running until my chest hurt, then plunged off-trail, behind a thicket of scraggy bushes. I paused a moment, but I couldn’t hear anything over the roar in my ears.

  I was too exposed. I moved at an angle, away from the path but afraid to go too far in case I got lost. I hid behind a huge oak tree, got control of my breathing, then peeked around the trunk. I could hear them. They were coming.

  Lots of yelling. Men, I thought. The men were coming. I knew I had to lure them farther away, but my muscles locked, my breath coming in little, begging squeaks.

  I still couldn’t see them, but the racket they were making sounded like they were almost on top of me. I needed to run, but my fingers clenched so tight they peeled bark off the tree. If I didn’t run now, they could get ahead of me on the path. If they did that, they might not keep going. If they thought they had lost my trail, they’d head back to the trailer for the ATVs or to call in reinforcements.

  I had to. I took a deep breath and pushed off the oak into a stumbling run. I ran parallel to the path, the overgrowth dense but not impassable. Still, it slowed me down. And it sure made enough noise to entice Luke and what’s-his-face to follow me.

  Which was proved true when they shot at me.

  Holy shit. The shotgun blasted again. I lurched to the right, ran several feet, then dropped and rolled. This would have been movie-star impressi
ve except the drop happened right after I tripped over a batch of exposed tree roots. I belly crawled another twenty feet, twigs stabbing my legs and hands, and huddled behind a fallen tree trunk, panting and as wide-eyed as any hunted prey.

  Guns were not part of the plan.

  I struggled to get control of my breathing so I could listen for the men, but before I could manage to, they went jogging past, following the path around a bend. As soon as they were out of sight, I took off in the opposite direction at a dead run. This time I stuck to the path to make better time, despite the danger of greater visibility. I had to get back to Beth, and there was no telling how much time we might have before Luke and his buddy came back.

  With luck, Beth would have gotten the ATV keys and convinced Maggie it was time to go. I hoped when I got there she would have the machines running, pointing down the drive with the other women ready to go.

  But no. The tarps hadn’t even been removed from the vehicles. I went straight inside.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  The front door opened into the dismal living room where I had spied Luke sleeping on the couch. I had a mini freak-out when I thought I saw someone sitting in the matching recliner, but it was just a pile of laundry—dirty by the look of it, jackets flung over the back in lieu of a coat rack. On the wall next to the door hung a homemade plaque with five brass C-hooks. Only one pair of keys dangled from it—house keys, I could tell. I hung a left into the kitchen-slash-meth lab and found the party.

  Maggie looked like she had been up for days. Her dark hair lay in greasy strands around her shoulders. Agitated and visibly shaking, she stood with her back to the row of barrels, a butcher knife in her hand, business end pointed at Beth. Priella was nowhere to be seen, but I could hear someone rummaging around in a back room and hoped it was her.

  “It’s okay, Maggie,” Beth was saying. “We want to help you. Your mom sent us.”

  “My mom?” Her initial confusion turned to anger.

  Meth-intoxicated tweakers with butcher knives and an attitude made me nervous.

  I said, “Reggie is worried about you. She wants you to come home.”

  “I told her to leave me alone. She doesn’t understand.”

  “But we do,” Beth said. “We’re part of the church, just like you. You can trust us.”

  “You’re doing all this—” I spread my hands wide, indicating the lab. “You’re doing this for the church. For Father.”

  The anger receded from Maggie’s face, but she kept shifting from one foot to the other, swinging the knife point back and forth between Beth and me. When Priella emerged from the back room wearing somebody’s flannel jacket and a navy blue stocking cap, Maggie grew even more agitated.

  Four people in the tiny kitchen was at least two too many. I cleared my throat to get Beth’s attention. When she turned to me, I said, “Keys?”

  She shook her head and looked at Priella.

  Priella nodded and patted one of the jacket’s pockets. “And a phone,” she added.

  I shot a pointed glance at the door. “We can’t stay. They could be back anytime.”

  “You’re supposed to be in the shed,” Maggie said to Priella. “You’re an infidel. ‘The wages of sin is death.’”

  Priella flushed. “I’m not an infidel just because I don’t believe we should be selling drugs to unbelievers. My brother died from this shit. This is evil.”

  Maggie’s eyes narrowed, and a canny look came into them. She hefted the knife.

  “Priella, go outside.” I stepped in front of Priella, blocking Maggie’s view of her.

  Beth coughed and shuffled a step to the side, the motion instantly drawing Maggie’s attention to her. “No, it’s okay. We do get it. Um… ‘If you are led by the Father, you are not under the law.’ Right?”

  Maggie nodded, but her eyes flicked back to Priella and me. This was going nowhere.

  “Guys,” I said. “We have to go. Now.”

  Beth looked frustrated. “Maggie, if you want to come with us, you have to put the knife down. You can still come, but you can’t bring that.”

  Maggie was still eying Priella. I reached behind me and grabbed a hunk of Priella’s confiscated jacket and pushed her to the door. When I heard it open and close behind me, I breathed a tad easier.

  “Beth,” I said. “Come on.”

  My friend’s eyes watered, and I didn’t think it was from the pervasive chemical stench.

  “Maggie—” Beth started.

  “Get out,” Maggie said, her voice void and flat. “You’re infidels too. You will all perish in the coming days. You’re dead already. You just don’t know it. You’re, like, zombies.” She giggled. “Dead zombies.”

  Yeah. We left.

  As we ran, Beth struggled into a fleece pullover I had grabbed off the recliner on our way out of the trailer. I was stuck with a Minnesota Vikings sweatshirt, which I almost couldn’t bear to put on. We found Priella bending over a red Honda three-wheeler, fiddling with something. When she saw us heading for her, she yelled, “Not this one. The blue one!” She pointed at the four-wheeler with the metal basket that the tweakers had used for supplies. A key twinkled at me from the ignition.

  The other two machines didn’t twinkle.

  “Where are the other keys?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Priella said, joining us next to the blue ATV. She was breathless from either exertion or excitement. “I only found this set. I had to try all of them to see which would fit. We’ll have to ride together.”

  Maggie burst out of the trailer and for a seemingly endless heartbeat I thought she had a gun. It wasn’t. But, almost as bad, it was a cell phone and she was shrieking into it. “They escaped. They’re getting away!”

  She caught sight of us by the ATVs. “Get away from there!” Her face twisted into a snarl, and she turned as though she was going to come at us.

  Beth darted to the shed where she and Priella had hidden earlier, reached in, and brought out a baseball bat. She cocked it back over her shoulder and screamed, “Come on, then! Just come on!”

  Maggie stopped. Her eyes narrowed to slits. Slowly, she backed up to the trailer.

  Strangely prudent of her, I thought.

  Having achieved the safety of the doorway, Maggie screamed toward the woods, “Luke! Ben! They’re here!”

  “Oh, crap,” Beth said. “We gotta go. I’ll sit in the back. Which one of you is driving?”

  Priella and I pointed at each other.

  Eyes wide, the three of us started a jumbled chorus of “I don’t know how to drive an ATV.”

  “Stop!” I yelled. “We don’t have time for this. Priella, get in the basket. Beth, get on.”

  “You can do this? You can drive this?” Beth’s eyes were so wide her irises looked like tiny peas floating in a bowl of cream.

  “I used to ride a dirt bike. This is the same thing.”

  One slight exaggeration and one lie. I had ridden a dirt bike exactly one time. Subsequent rides were made impossible since I lost control in the yard, crashed through the garage, and plowed into my dad’s week-old Chrysler sedan, thus totaling it and triggering a two-week-long binge when the insurance finally paid off.

  And an ATV was certainly not the same thing as riding a dirt bike twenty-some years ago. For one thing, my recognition of my own mortality had grown every year since.

  Beth and I jumped on. If I were less panicked, I would have pointed out the appropriateness of her riding “bitch,” but that would keep for later. Priella clambered into the basket while I studied the machine, trying to figure out which control did what.

  A turquoise-dyed rabbit’s foot keychain and a tiny compass dangled from the key ring; I had a feeling we would be needing both. The four-wheeler started right up. We were off to a good start. It had gas. Also cool. I fiddled with the hand controls and figured out by revving the engine that the gas lever worked off my right thumb. Which meant the clutch lever would be on my left, and the gear worked off my foot.


  See? I could do this.

  We surged forward about two feet in what I guessed was first gear. I almost lost Beth off the back, but she screamed and grabbed me around the middle in a death grip. Priella had her head down and was white-knuckling the sides of the basket. I was pretty sure she was praying, which was probably our only hope.

  “I got it,” I said. “I got it now.”

  Beth must not have heard me, possibly because she never stopped screaming in my ear. We hopped and jolted a half dozen more times while I worked out the gear sequence. For first gear, I had to press my foot down, but the rest of them were toe up, until I finally got the ATV up to fifth gear.

  “Here we go!” I practically sang.

  Here we go immediately morphed into oh, sweet shiny shit the instant I realized I should have figured out the brake system before implementing the go-like-a-bat-out-of-hell system. We headed directly for the shed.

  Now both of my passengers were screaming.

  I grabbed the longer lever on the right handle, perhaps a little too hard. Beth rammed into my back, and we almost went ass over tea kettle into the basket with Priella.

  “That’s the front brake,” I announced loudly.

  “No shit!” Beth shrieked.

  Priella was either channeling her inner Aztec or speaking in tongues.

  Luke and Ben burst out of the woods just as I rediscovered the joys of fifth gear.

  And we were off.

  The grassy road we were flying down consisted of two tire tracks, a lot of twisty S-curves, and a whole bunch of teeth-jarring ruts. All on a steep incline, no less. At the speed we were going, the ATV tossed us around like three highly unlucky lottery balls. I felt Beth twist to look over her shoulder, and then she yelled, “They’re going for the other ATVs.”

  “I don’t think they’ll be able to drive them,” Priella yelled back. “I pulled a bunch of things. Wires and stuff.”

  Beth shouted with glee.

  We were coming to a particularly snarly part of the trail, so I didn’t answer right away.