“Shut the fuck up, Stephen,” Nick said. “That kind of talk doesn’t do anything to help us.”
“I’m just saying.”
“Yeah?” Nick looked behind him, taking his eyes off the road. “And what do you suppose we do with that bit of wisdom? No fucking shit we’re in over our heads. That doesn’t mean we can just press a RESET button and start the day over. We’re in this shit whether we want to be or not, and now we’re gonna deal with it the best we can.”
“And how are we gonna deal with it?” Louise asked.
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t want to go to prison,” Stephen said. “My mom’s gonna be so angry.”
“Nobody’s going to prison,” Nick said.
Louise whimpered. “Sergio . . . ”
Nick sighed, squeezing his fists around the steering wheel until his knuckles whitened. “Fuckin’ Billy.”
34. IMPROV
They tried bringing Samantha to the backseat and getting her dressed so she didn’t have to ride in the trunk with the psycho, but she wouldn’t listen to reason and kept screaming no matter what they tried to do to calm her, so eventually they had to surrender and stuff her back in the trunk with Lewis and his heads.
Harlan sat in the backseat. His hands remained duct taped, but they removed the tape from his mouth. They figured it’d be kind of suspicious looking if any passing cars happened to glance inside.
It took a while to calm Harlan down. He kept staring at Sergio’s body and screaming. Eliza didn’t blame him. She kept crying, too. Shit was fucked-up.
“We have to go to the police,” Harlan said. “This is really serious.”
Billy turned around from the passenger seat and told him to shut his mouth. “If we started listening to your opinions, then we’d never write again and all go jump off bridges. Isn’t that what you said in your blog?”
Harlan threw his head back against the seat, groaning. “Will you imbeciles forget about my blog for one moment? A man has died. He was murdered. You need to go to the police.”
“We never said we weren’t,” Eliza said, focusing on the road ahead, afraid that if she looked elsewhere she’d burst out crying again. “But first, we’re going to the cabin so we can meet up with everybody else, then we’ll figure out what to do. We just need some time to think.”
“What’s to think about? Go to the fucking police. What’s wrong with you people?”
“We’re gravy-brained retards,” Billy said. “According to you, at least.”
Harlan groaned again and kicked the passenger seat. “You immature asshole. I hope you rot in prison for this.”
Eliza drove. The rest of the ride, everybody was mostly quiet. When a pounding started rising from the trunk, Billy turned up the radio to drown out the noise. Eliza didn’t like leaving Lewis and Samantha in the trunk together, but she didn’t know what else to do. This wasn’t her typical routine. This was improv at its finest. Besides, who the fuck was Samantha, anyway?
The cabin was unlocked because there wasn’t a lock in the first place. Billy dragged Lewis into one of the bedrooms, wrapped his body with more duct tape (they’d made a stop at Dollar Tree on the way over) and threw him in a closet, then propped a wooden chair under the knob. Harlan, not in any mood to escape, just walked into the cabin. A cloud of dust exploded as he planted himself on the couch in the living area. When Billy walked back outside to retrieve Samantha, he found the trunk empty. He looked down the driveway and saw her naked ass running halfway down it.
“Shit,” he said, then she flipped over another car turning into the long, dirt driveway.
35. THAT WAS NO DEER
Nick slammed on the brakes. “What the fuck was that?”
“A deer?” Louise suggested, peering through the now cracked windshield.
“You both know what that was,” Stephen said.
Nick ran his hands through his hair, shaking. “Shit. Shit, shit, shit.”
He got out of the car, looked at the blood all over the hood, cursed some more. He walked down the ditch branching from the driveway, into the weeds and bushes. A naked girl lying in the thick of it all, covered in blood. Her eyes were open but she wasn’t seeing.
Someone was shouting down the driveway. He looked up, saw Billy running toward them, waving his hands in the air. Nick climbed up the ditch and proceeded at a calm pace toward Billy. The closer they came to each other, the more fucked-up Billy looked. His face was broken and bloody. Nick didn’t care. When he was close enough, he kept his mouth shut and ignored the words coming out of Billy’s mouth. He stared at Eliza’s druggie brother, not thinking, just trying to hold back a mountain of rage and failing to prevent the avalanche. He speared Billy onto the dirt driveway and started pounding into his face, cursing at him and telling him how he’d fucked everybody over, they were going to prison because of his stupid ass, and he was going to murder him right here in this driveway.
If it wasn’t for Stephen and Louise breaking them apart, he really might have done it.
Louise noticed the dead girl in the bushes. “Who the fuck is that?”
“Ask him!” Nick shouted, pointing at Billy.
Coughing blood, Billy sat up. “That’s Samantha. She’s a girl I know.”
“What was she doing out here?” Louise asked.
Billy scratched his head. Dirt clouds floated out of his hair. “Well, you know, one thing led to another, and to keep her from going to the cops, I had to throw her in my trunk. Well, Lewis’s trunk.”
“You kidnapped her?” Nick said, pushing Stephen off of him and lunging at Billy again. He got one good punch in before Louise and Stephen managed to pull him away. “Stop fucking kidnapping people, you asshole!”
The backdoor of Nick’s car opened, and Jared stepped out, groggy, holding his bleeding head wound.
Billy eyed him, confused. “What’s he doing here?”
Nick went quiet.
Louise laughed. “Shit,” she said. “I guess we kidnapped him.”
36. EVERYTHING ENDS AT A CABIN IN THE WOODS
“Where’s the naked chick?” Eliza asked as they returned to the cabin.
“Dead,” Billy said.
She stood on the porch, staring at them, silent.
Billy gestured behind him, at Nick. “Our faithful editor-in-chief hit her with his car.”
“Fuck.”
“That’s about the gist of it.”
“So now we’re murderers on top of kidnappers.”
“Next on the list: terrorists,” Billy said, walking past her into the cabin.
Nick stayed outside, dazed, looking at the setting sun.
“Are you all right?” Eliza asked.
He shook his head and held his hand out to Billy. “Give me my phone.”
“A ‘please’ would be nice.”
“I am going to fucking murder you.”
Billy handed him his cell. Nick stuffed it in his pocket and walked off into the woods, not saying another word.
“Where’s he going?” Stephen asked.
“Climb a tree, wrestle a bear, take a shit, who knows,” Louise said. “Just let him be. Dude just killed somebody. That has to bruise your soul.”
“What’s Jared doing here?” Eliza asked.
Billy began laughing. “He was kidnapped!”
Eliza nodded. “That makes sense.”
“You two look like shit,” Louise said.
“Eliza punched me,” Billy explained.
“And what happened to her?” Louise nodded to Eliza’s bloodied face.
Eliza pointed to a closed bedroom. “That fucking lunatic attacked me, right before he half-decapitated Sergio.”
Everybody fell silent in the cabin, the image of Sergio looming above them all like a black cloud casting a great rain upon the earth.
Jared was walking around in short circles, staring at his opened palm and becoming mesmerized. Blood dripped from the gash in his skull like snot from a toddler’s nose. Eliza asked hi
m if he wanted to sit down. He responded by drooling and asking for some toast, then he fell down on the couch and started snoring heavily. His head rested in Harlan’s lap.
“Did you say the woman you kidnapped has been killed?” the book reviewer asked.
“That’s none of your fucking business,” Billy said.
“This situation is going to continue to spiral out of control until you call the authorities.”
“Fuck the police.”
Harlan shook his head. “I believe it is you who is going to get fucked.”
“Not before I gouge your stupid eyeballs out of their sockets.”
“Afterward, are you going to bury my body with your other victims?”
Billy collected the duct tape and wrapped it around Harlan’s mouth, then he sat down in a recliner, satisfied with his work.
“I want to see these heads I’ve been hearing so much about,” Louise said.
“Now’s not the time,” Eliza said. “We need to figure out what we’re going to do.”
“Should we wait for Nick?”
“Fuck him,” Stephen said. “If he doesn’t want to be here, then we can make a decision without him. He isn’t our father.”
“What are we going to do now that Sergio’s dead?” Eliza asked.
“Same as what we’re doing with everything else,” Billy said. “Move onward.”
“Yeah, until you want to get high again,” Stephen said.
“True.” Billy paused. “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen.”
Harlan laughed from behind the duct tape, and in unison, they told him to shut the fuck up.
“Maybe we should just give up,” Eliza said. “Turn ourselves in to the police.”
“No offense,” Louise said, “but that sounds like a pretty dumb idea.”
“Maybe they won’t be so hard on us if we surrender willingly. They might even be relieved we helped them catch that head-collecting psycho.”
“We’ve still kidnapped a shit ton of people. Plus we have a dead girl out front now.”
“Well, then what do we do?” Eliza asked. “Try to sneak out of the country, live the rest of our days in Mexico? We’re all broke as shit. I assume the book selling didn’t go over too well.”
Louise shrugged. “I sold a decent amount.”
Stephen laughed. “Yeah, after showing a sea of men your tits.”
“It worked, didn’t it?”
“Do I even want to know how y’all ended up with Jared?” Eliza asked.
“He was being his usual jerk self,” Louise explained. “You know how he can be.”
Eliza nodded. Jared was known for being an asshole.
“I don’t want to keep driving around with hostages and severed heads,” Billy said. “It’s freaking me out.”
“Well, why did you start?”
“It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“I’ll give you this,” Louise said. “It’s definitely been an interesting day.”
“I mean, I have this gun.” He pulled out Lewis’s handgun to show everybody. “Maybe we should just shoot Harlan and Lewis, and I guess Jared too, and then start driving very far away from here. Live life on the road. Do what sis said and go to Mexico. Mexico wouldn’t be too bad. I love churros.”
“Where the fuck did you get a gun?” Stephen said, backing away.
Louise’s eyes lit up. “Holy shit. Badass.”
“It’s Lewis’s.”
“He’s probably murdered a ton of people with that,” Stephen said.
“I figured as much.”
“Then what are you doing with it?”
“I don’t know.” Billy examined the gun like it was an alien object fallen from the sky. “I guess we’d be better off with it than him, considering we’re the kidnappers and all.”
Billy made a solid point.
“I don’t want anyone else to die,” Stephen said.
“Even the motherfucker who killed Serg?” Billy asked.
Stephen looked away, unable to respond. Nobody could respond. They couldn’t say what they all thought because what they all thought was madness and confirmed their inner psychopaths.
The group broke apart to explore the cabin. Canned food was stored in the pantry, along with a few cases of bottled water. The cabin didn’t have electricity, so they started lighting candles and lanterns as the sun fell and the moon rose.
There wasn’t much to do in the cabin. Sergio’s uncle never came up here anymore. Sergio would visit once a month to go on a writing retreat. It was his favorite place to work. Out in the wilderness, away from society. No internet, no TV, no distractions. This cabin was his paradise. And now he was dead, and it was all Billy’s fault.
Eliza would never forgive him. And she was his sister. The rest of the group must have hated his goddamn guts. She didn’t know how long she’d be able to protect him—she didn’t know if she wanted to protect him. He had brought this misery not only upon himself, but the rest of the company as well. He had killed their futures singlehandedly. Their lives as writers and publishers were forever shattered, like a bullet through a mirror.
Louise and Stephen went into an empty bedroom and shut the door. Eliza didn’t know if they were fucking or sleeping or what. Billy pushed Jared on the floor and lied down on the couch, resting his head on Harlan, who’d already started to doze off. Eliza watched him lying there, shaking, blinking like the air was electric. Guy was too pumped up on whatever was in his system. He would never sleep again at this rate.
She wondered where Nick had gone. She doubted he’d left them. He was probably just walking around, collecting his thoughts, trying to come up with a plan that wasn’t piss-poor pathetic, unlike the rest of them.
In movies, the criminals always had these master plans that sounded brilliant. Yet nobody could think of shit to do besides sit around and wait for something to drop in their laps. It was pretty sad. What was the point of wasting their lives watching movies if it wouldn’t help them when it really mattered?
All Eliza knew was there was no way she was tired. For one thing, she was starving. Everybody else had to be hungry, too. Nobody had eaten anything all day. All they’d had was bad coffee. She went into the kitchen, took some aspirin she found in a cabinet, then sorted through the canned food in the pantry. She got out some bean dip and Tortilla chips, ate a few, then pushed the food aside. She was hungry, but the process of physically moving her mouth and swallowing seemed too overwhelming right now. Maybe she was tired, after all. Maybe she was more tired than she’d ever been in her life. She left the food on the table in case anybody else wanted some. She briefly considered bringing a plate to Lewis, but decided the psycho didn’t deserve food. He could starve in that closet for all she cared.
She went outside and sat down on the porch and stared at the night sky. In the darkness, everything was calm.
37. SMALL PRESS OUTLAWS
Nick walked through the woods debating never returning to the cabin. This didn’t have anything to do with him. He hadn’t kidnapped anybody. Well, okay, he’d kidnapped Jared, but nobody gave a shit about Jared. And, all right, he might have killed a random girl with his car, so maybe he did have a lot to do with the situation now, but goddammit, he didn’t want to be involved. This wasn’t his fault. Why the fuck did they have to bring those assholes to his apartment?
There was no longer a simple solution to this problem. The bribery plan was shot out the window as soon as Sergio was murdered. Driving to the cabin, a million thoughts running through his head, Nick was sure of one thing: once he got ahold of that sick fuck Billy had kidnapped, the one who’d savagely murdered Sergio and undoubtedly others, he would drag him to the police station and turn him in. Then Nick would confess to everything that had happened and pray for them to go easy on him. Nick had a company to run, and he sure as hell couldn’t run it if he was an outlaw.
But now? Well, that was all shot to hell as soon as Billy kidnapped yet another person and Nick killed
her with his car. Now there was no going to police. He would have to deal with this himself.
He kept checking his email on his cell, but the signal out here was awful. It was doubtful that the publisher he submitted his own novel to would be contacting him at this time of night, anyway. It was doubtful they’d be emailing him tomorrow or any other day, either. Obviously his book was going to be rejected. Maybe they wouldn’t even send a rejection. Maybe it was so bad, the book didn’t warrant an email letting him know just how bad.
Like it really mattered at this point. They could accept it, sure, but he’d be in prison long before he was given a chance to sign a contract, and he seriously doubted any publisher would want to do business with a convicted murderer and kidnapper. Although, Nick hated to admit it, if the tables were turned, he would go out of his way to sign on a controversial case such as his own current situation. People would eat that shit up and he’d probably sell a ton of copies. But not everybody had the same kind of balls as he did. People were too afraid of being offensive. That’s why Nick dug small presses. They just didn’t give a shit.
Was there a way to get out of this without going to prison? Nick doubted it. They could try to flee the country, but would they make it across the border? And if they made it across the border, what then? It wasn’t like they were flowing in cash. Where were they going to get money? Maybe they’d fully embrace the outlaw life and start hitting up liquor stores and gas stations across the US on their way to Mexico. Go out with a bang.
The idea seemed surreal and ridiculous. Nick wasn’t an outlaw. He was barely a writer. And he was even less of a publisher. He was nothing.
Except now, he was a kidnapper. He was a murderer.
Last night, he had his whole life ahead of him.
Less than twenty-four hours later, he was closing in on a dead-end with no room for a turn-around.
Where to go from here? Nick didn’t know. He was just going to keep walking until an answer came to him, and if an answer never arrived, then his feet would start getting sore.
He wondered what his mom would say when she found out. Would she understand? Did she understand when he got arrested for fighting in that bar? Or the time he got drunk and stole an inflatable Santa?
How to Successfully Kidnap Strangers Page 12