"What? Tell them what?" she cried.
"That he tried to rape you," the bitch said impatiently. "That you shot him. That you came here for help."
Knife poised at her dog's throat, Hottie didn't even know how close he was to death.
Rainey didn't know what to do. It was over. All over.
"Okay, I'll do it! Anything, just plea-hease don't hurt him!"
The crazy bitch tucked Hottie under her arm. He stayed there, shivering, as she dialed the police from a list of emergency numbers above the phone. Bo held the phone out to her. Rainey nestled into it, holding the bitch's gaze.
Two rings later, a woman picked up—surprisingly cheery for a police dispatch. She'd expected a more somber tone. "Fort Garry Sheriff's Department, how may I help you today?"
Now or never, girl.
"Bo Lowery's holding me hostage, please come quick—!"
Sparkles flashed in front of her eyes as the receiver smashed into her cheekbone and temple. The crazy bitch slammed the phone on the hook. It fell off, and cracked against the floor, springing up on its coils.
"Say goodbye to widdle piddle," the bitch said, picking up the knife again.
"Please, don't! Pleeeease!"
Everything about the moment that followed surprised Rainey. It surprised her how easily, how coldly, the woman could draw the blade across the neck of an innocent animal. It surprised her how much blood would come gushing out of such a small thing, how hot it was when it splashed over her face and down her chest, and that as he died he didn't yelp or whimper—not once.
His throat had opened, his tongue had stuck out between his teeth, and his eyes had fallen closed. She doubted she could ever be so strong.
Then the psycho murdering bitch tossed her Hottie aside like a bag of fast food trash, and Rainey began to cry. The walls she'd built around herself had crumbled. She was broken. Finally broken. Her bodyguard dead, her dog dead, dead herself soon. And for what? For the animals? Because she couldn't let well enough alone? Let bygones be bygones?
Their lives deserved to be mourned.
"Amaaazihing Grace, how-ow sweet, the-uh sound" she sang, high and clear. The bitch's hard expression, spackled with Hottie's blood, softened. "That saved, a-huh wretch, li-hike meeee. I-I once wa-hus lost, bu-ut now, am found. Was lost, bu-hut now, I-I seeee."
Behind Rainey's back, the ropes loosened further.
It was the boy who drew Bo's attention away from her, screaming "MOMMA!" in that moment, and pounding on the window. Rainey turned, saw a dark-haired woman in a black pantsuit approaching behind him. She whipped her head back around and saw that the psycho killer had seen her, too.
Bo's jaw dropped.
The knife dropped.
Rainey made to call out, but Bo pushed the chair over, and for a startling few seconds she was in freefall. The chair struck the floor, knocking the wind out of her a split second before her head crashed, hard enough to bring stars, her teeth clacking together painfully. Her ears whined, and for one shocking moment she was sure she'd gone deaf.
Bo hurried past her, her muffled boot falls moving out of sight. She heard a door creak open—the broom closet, she remembered the sound—and the clack-clack of a rifle. The bitch scuttled around and dropped to her knees in front of her. "You make one peep and I'm putting you down like I done to your dog. No more warnings."
Rainey believed her.
Then the crazy bitch was up and gone.
BO STOOD AGAINST the doorjamb, rifle pressed against her left shoulder.
Outside, Caleb went to the cop. Bo wished she could hear what the woman was saying to him as she flashed her shiny brass badge, but she thought she had an idea. Caleb pointed toward the house, his face twisted in fear.
Shouldn't have been short with him. Shouldn't have grabbed the dog. He got attached. Just like he did with Daisy.
She knew if they tried her for kidnapping and two counts of homicide in Alaska, she'd spend the rest of her miserable life at Hiland Mountain Correctional. Prison rape citaaayyy, the girl's voice taunted in her mind. Chances were high they'd try her back home though, to include the previous charges of grand larceny, three counts assault with a deadly weapon, and grand theft auto, the crimes that had put her and Roy—Al—on the run here in the first place.
Louisiana had the death penalty. She'd spend years on death row, Caleb living with the knowledge that one day soon—but never soon enough—his mother would be given lethal injection. His formative years spent visiting her instead of growing up strong and smart and proud with new parents who might never love him as much as his momma, but loved him despite his roots. If she bowed out now, the police would assume she'd killed the bodyguard. Caleb would be spared a lengthy trial, and eventually, he might even be able to have a life.
He didn't need to see this, though. Watching his mother die would haunt him for the rest of his life.
Suicide by cop, she thought. Never thought I'd go like that.
Bo peered around the window frame as the cop ushered Caleb behind her and drew her sidearm.
"Mrs. Lowery, I'm a police officer! Come out slowly with your hands up!"
Like hell.
"Caleb?"
He squinted at the grimy window. "Momma?"
"Run, honey!"
Caleb stood where he was behind the cop, caught between wanting to help her and obeying his momma.
"RUN!" she screamed at the top of her lungs.
As if snapping out of a daydream, Caleb did as he was told, bolting off toward the back woods. The cop didn't even flinch, kept her sidearm steady on the door.
Blaze of glory now. Just like Butch and Sundance.
Bo opened the door a crack. "All right, I'm coming out!"
The ragged voice from behind her startled her out of her death fantasy. "Wait!"
Bo scowled down at her. "What the hell do you want? It's over."
"Please," the girl said, drenched in the congealing blood of her animal. Her eyes full of sorrow. Finally getting it, Bo thought. "I need to tell you something."
Outside, the cop's cell phone rang, distracting Bo. "I don't want to hear it. Can't you see I'm trying to end this?"
"Detective Okalik," the cop said into her phone.
"My daddy raped me…" the girl breathed, her voice so soft Bo wasn't sure at first if she'd heard what she said right.
She blinked, stunned. What is this, confession time? "Okay then. Why are you telling me this? Why now?"
"If I'm gonna die, I need to tell somebody. You ask why I don't like people—well that's why."
Bo held a hand open through the crack in the door. "Can you give me one minute? I'm gonna untie the girl and let her go," she said, knowing the detective had just received the most recent news from the Jolene in dispatch at the Sheriff's office.
"You got sixty seconds!" the cop shouted back, tucking her phone in her lapel pocket.
Bo got down on her hands and knees in front of the girl, resting the rifle on its butt beside her, like a walking stick. "All right, girl. You heard her. You got sixty seconds before she comes in here guns a-blazing. Say what you gotta say."
RAINEY NODDED SOMBERLY, but her sadness was only partly an act. This would be the first time she'd told anyone about her daddy, about what he'd done to her when she was just thirteen until she'd finally gotten free of his house, his rules, his hands and his filthy dick.
But she'd never really gotten free. She'd continued to live under his evil shadow even after she'd emancipated herself. Likely would be still, even if she managed to emancipate this crazy bitch's head from her fucking shoulders and get out of here alive.
"Soon as I started to bleed, he was on me whenever he got a chance. I never told anyone," she said, making her voice quieter and quieter so the bitch had to move in to hear her as she worked her hands together behind her back, conscious not to let her shoulders move visibly. Holding the bitch's gaze so if she slipped the bitch wouldn't see. "Not even Darius. I need to whisper this part," she said.
>
Confusion in the bitch's horrible eyes. "It's just you and me here."
"Please?" Rainey said, as pathetically as she could. Behind her back, her hands finally slipped free of the rope. She dug her left hand into her back pocket, felt the cold sharp bite of glass against her flesh.
The dead bitch drew closer.
"Bitch," Rainey snarled into her face, and slashed out with the glass.
It struck Bo in the throat before her eyes had a chance to widen. She sprung to her feet, staggering back as a gout of blood pulsed from the hole in her throat. She put a hand up to stop the flow, but it continued oozing out through her fingers, the rifle held forgotten in her other hand.
"Time's up!" the policewoman shouted. "I'm coming in!"
Bo turned to the door with a strangled gurgle. Blood poured from her open mouth.
Doused in the bitch's blood, Rainey began to laugh.
Bo fell against the counter, toppling the boxes and cans off the shelf. As the door kicked in, she dropped her hand from her throat and grabbed the rifle, streaking the polished wood with blood as she drew it upward and pointed it dangerously close to where Rainey still lay, legs tied to the chair, the laughter dying in her throat.
"Dammit!" the cop said, taking aim at Bo.
Rainey closed her eyes.
The first shot—from the cop, thank God—was music to her ears.
The second shot, nearly simultaneous, was the last sound she heard.
DETECTIVE OKALIK SLUMPED against the doorjamb, expelling the breath she'd been holding since she'd started counting down from sixty. She allowed herself one long, calming inhale before stepping over Layne's dead Pomeranian and dropping to a knee in front of the girl on the floor, her arms free but her legs still tied to the chair.
No pulse. The way she'd been lying, the bullet from the Lowery woman's .22 must have gone right into her open mouth and penetrated her brain. She drew Layne's eyes closed, feeling a pang of guilt for ignoring her instincts and not moving in sooner.
Rather than replay the events all day, beating herself up in every way imaginable, Okalik turned her attention to the woman slumped in front of the pantry shelves. Her .9mm slug had struck the woman in the sternum, pinning her to the counter. She'd already been bleeding from a wound to the throat, likely caused by Layne rather than self-inflicted. The weapon, a three-inch, curved piece of glass, lay between them on the hardwood, wet with blood.
Okalik kicked aside a few cans of sweet corn and bent to check Lowery's vitals. As she pried the rifle from her hand, the woman's chest hitched. Breathing raggedly, shallow. Hard blue eyes staring straight at her.
"She was gonna take my boy," the Lowery woman grunted. She breathed two more times, in and out, and then was still.
Okalik took her pulse at the wrist, struggling to comprehend how quickly the situation had gone south from spotting a couple of acorns on the ground to two women dead. Scratch that—two women and a dog. She laid the rifle aside and stood. In the distance, she finally heard the drumming of helicopter blades.
She turned, peering out the window. As she did, she caught sight of the boy standing in the doorway, his reddened face twisted in grief.
Well, if there's one thing on the plus side, this boy is still alive, she told herself.
His hands balled into fists, and he ran at her. His forehead slammed into her stomach, his small fists beat against her chest and arms. "You killed my momma," he wept, "you killed my momma!"
Detective Okalik let him strike her, letting the pain of his small knuckles fan the flames of her guilt. When he'd tired himself out, he collapsed against her, and she hugged him to her bruised, muscular stomach as his frail bones shook from weeping.
She hoped what he'd seen here today hadn't damaged him irreparably. She hoped Child Services would find the boy a good, stable home, with strong, law-abiding parents, and that someday she would get to hear his laughter.
Outside the house, sirens joined the thrumming helicopter.
Soon the property would be swarming with police, with crime scene investigators, photographers, reporters, everyone wanting to know how. But right now there were just two strangers, brought together by destruction and death, holding each other with tears in their eyes. Out in the woods a wildfire still raged, while inside this house an embrace began the process of healing.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The first readers must be thanked: Ken Preston, Matt Hickman, Chad Clark, Alex Kimmell, Jeffrey X. Martin (all excellent writers of dark fiction, by the way—you should look them up). Thank you for reading, and for giving me the confidence to release this strange little animal into the wild.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Duncan Ralston was born in Toronto and spent his teens in small-town Ontario. As a "grown-up," Duncan lives with his girlfriend and their dog in Toronto, where he writes dark fiction about the things that frighten, sicken, and delight him. In addition to his twisted short stories found in Gristle & Bone, the anthologies Easter Eggs & Bunny Boilers, What Goes Around, Death By Chocolate, and the charity anthology The Black Room Manuscripts, he is the author of the novel, Salvage, and Woom, an extreme horror Black Cover novella from Matt Shaw Publications.
For more from Duncan Ralston, including exclusive updates and contests, please join him at his official website, The Fold (duncanralston.com), or follow him on his Amazon Author Page, BookBub, Facebook, and Twitter.
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