by Rowan Hanlon
He held up and then threw the knife at Hadley. She dodged it and it flew over her head and to the floor. She glanced over at Clara, who gave her an exasperated shrug and focused back on him.
“You have anything to say for yourselves?” he hissed.
“Just this,” Clara said. “Fuck you!”
He straightened up and grinned at her. “She does speak and when she does, she does so well.” He sighed loudly and shook his head. “You know, I think I’m just going to shoot both of you in the head and let you rot here. I’m bleeding, I’m tired and I just don’t think you two are worth all this trouble.”
They didn’t reply.
“But, then again, I already got the grave dug,” he said. “You two took it for a test drive. Did you like it?”
No response.
“And I got the gasoline,” he said and pointed to a large red gas can in the corner. “It’d be shame to let it go to waste.”
He leveled the gun at Clara’s head. She squeezed her eyes shut and prayed for a quick death. Then she heard the shot and her heart felt like it exploded. But it kept beating. She opened her eyes to see his hand, which had been practically shot off. It looked so grotesque. He fell to the floor onto his knees, holding his elbow as blood spewed everywhere. And then she saw Sloan and she nearly burst into tears.
Sloan kept the gun on him, walking towards him with determination. She didn’t glance at Clara or Hadley. It’s like she couldn’t do anything but concentrate on him.
“We meet again, motherfucker,” she growled.
“Oh, you,” he said, grimacing with pain. “So, you found me, huh?”
“I told you I would,” she said, looking very, very pleased with herself. “I told you I would find you. Believe me now?”
“Well, you took long enough,” he seethed, the hatred for her clearly displayed on his face, twisting it grotesquely. “You gonna play that game? That what you came for? You gonna make me run, too?”
“I don’t have to play a game with you,” she said. “Especially not a game we both know I’ll win.”
He nodded. “Sure. You’ll win. If you’re winning, why are you here? You came back for these two bitches?”
She shook her head, a grin spreading across her face. “Go ahead!” she screamed at him, walking over to tower over him. “Run! Run motherfucker! Run! See how far you’ll get from me! I will hunt you and then I will kill you and I will feed your lousy ass to the vultures that are waiting on you!”
“Oh, is that right?” he hissed.
“Oh, that’s right,” she hissed back, her voice heavy with hatred. “And your mistake, you dumb fuck? Kidnapping them again! Oh, yeah, I was pulling up to Clara’s house just as you were pulling out. You dumb fuck, you! I’ve been following you ever since. But I guess that ego of yours couldn’t comprehend someone might be onto you.”
“Oh, Sloan, how I’ve missed you,” he said as if he really meant it. “How I always regretted letting you go.”
“I escaped,” she seethed.
He laughed harshly. “Oh, you did, did you? Oh, you escaped and she escaped and that other one was rescued, right? Sure. Sure. I didn’t let you choke me, did I? You think I didn’t know you had the pliers? You think I didn’t know she was out of her chains? And the other one? Legs over there? You don’t think I didn’t see those surveyors on that land? I knew someone would find her. I could have killed her before that but I didn’t. I let you escape and I let her escape and I let her get rescued.”
Sloan seemed at a loss for words.
“I let you go,” he said, almost grinning. “And you escaped, didn’t you? But you didn’t help the cops find me, did you? No… You’ve all three been protecting me all along and not even knowing it.” He laughed harshly.
“No, we haven’t,” Hadley said.
“Really?” he asked. “Then why did they never find me? All three of you knew enough to get me. But you didn’t want that, did you? No. None of you did. You wanted this. You wanted me back.”
“Shut the fuck up!” Sloan yelled.
“No, I won’t,” he said. “I taught you well. I taught you how to keep quiet. The day you escaped you could have told them so many details but you didn’t. None of you did.”
“I didn’t remember that much,” Hadley said.
“Yeah, you did,” he said. “You had nothing else to think about, Hadley! How could you not remember? You didn’t remember because you didn’t want me to get caught.”
“Just shut up!” Sloan yelled. “You’re still trying to mind-fuck us! Listen to him! He’s so insane he believes what he’s saying!”
“But why did he let us go?” Clara asked and stared at him. “Why?”
He turned to her and grinned. “You three were the jewels in my crown. I wanted you out and I wanted you strong again. And then, well, I wanted to get you back.”
Clara felt chills go up and down her spine.
He turned to Sloan. “I knew all along, Sloan, about your stupid daddy looking for me and your hacker and all that stupid shit. It amused me so very much. But, honestly, I didn’t think you’d figure out Jeremy Clemmons. Kudos on that.”
Sloan glared at him but the gun in her hand didn’t waver.
“I would have gotten you years ago, but the way you dedicated yourself to me so obsessively was very flattering,” he said. “I liked that you couldn’t give up. But then…” He turned to Hadley. “She came along. She was my downfall, I have to admit. But she was so pretty, so very pretty. I just wanted her, you know? Oh, by the way, Hadley, your boyfriend got real close to the house one day. I almost had to kill you. You can thank him for that later. But then, again, you probably won’t be able to as you’ll be dead.”
Hadley glowered at him.
“Yeah, I should have skipped you,” he said, nodding. “Memory like an elephant, even if you won’t admit it. I tried to stamp that out, sure; I tried to rewire you, okay. But it was still in there, wasn’t it? Oh, I read all the reports about how you remembered Jeremy’s name from a sales pitch. And the only reason you remembered was because of these two. Right? Otherwise, you’d never have allowed yourself to remember. Because you didn’t really want me to get caught.”
“Shut up,” Hadley sad. “Just shut up! That is not true!”
“He’s just trying to mind-fuck you, Hadley,” Sloan said then turned to him. “You’re such a sack of shit to do that to her.”
“And this sack of shit ain’t through with you,” he said, then grinned evilly. “Wait a minute. You’re here so that means you had to know I wasn’t Jeremy Clemmons.”
“That’s right,” she said. “Oh, you didn’t know I knew you were stalking me? You didn’t know that?”
His eyes widened in disbelief.
“Yeah, I kept having this feeling, this ominous feeling after Jeremy Clemmons was sentenced to death for your crimes,” she said. “I couldn’t shake it. And then he got killed, you know, by that other inmate. And that just… Something about it just didn’t seem right.”
He looked away from her and shook his head in anger.
“And I beat myself up over it pretty good,” she said. “And everyone said to let it go, that I was just stressed because it was finally over, but I couldn’t. I could not for the life of me believe we got the right guy. Something just didn’t add up, asshole.”
He turned back to her. “What was it?”
“You’re dying to learn from your mistake, aren’t you?” she said, smiling widely. “Right? Isn’t that right? So, in the future you can remedy it. Oh, Joseph Almus, what you don’t realize is that you don’t have a future.”
“What did you say, bitch?” he seethed.
“Joseph Almus, Joseph Almus, Joseph Almus!” she shouted. “You think I didn’t finally figure you out, asshole? I did. I knew I would. And it wasn’t anything I did. It was some asshole standing near my building a few days ago while my stupid ex-husband and I argued. I just glanced over and I s
aw him. And he was wearing this blue t-shirt—‘Almus Bait and Tackle, Sunrise Florida.’”
His face went pale.
“Huh, I thought to myself,” she said, “And I immediately knew where I’d seen that t-shirt before. In Jeremy Clemmons’ apartment, folded neatly, almost as if he were preserving it.” She laughed. “And it looked vintage, old. But like it came from a real place. And it did. I went there myself, took a day trip down to old Sunrise, Florida. It came from Peter and Sally Almus’s Bait and Tackle Shop. Your adoptive parents. Old now, really, really old. And so lovely. They have a grown son who never visits and rarely calls. And it was weird but one day many, many years ago a young man came in with his family to buy some bait and he looked a lot like Joseph, and they took a picture of you two together. Just an old Polaroid they’d put up with all these other old Polaroids on a bulletin board behind the ancient cash register.” She smiled at him. “Your mother loves to talk, by the way. Such a Chatty Cathy, she is!”
He glared at her.
“Why keep the shirt?” she asked. “Oh, I know why. Whenever you visit, they give you a new one, don’t they? They beg you to stay and help them with the shop but you never do. They want to hand it over to you so they can retire, but you don’t care. You come in, you eat, sleep some and take what money there is out of the register and then you leave. And they don’t hear from you for months, sometimes a year will pass without hearing from you. I’m guessing the longest time you stayed away from them was when you had Clara there in the barn. Right?”
Clara stared at him, entranced by his reaction to all this. He literally looked like he was going to explode. She hoped he did. She hoped he would just spontaneously combust. It would be a sight to see, if it were possible.
“Your mother said she knows that one day you just won’t show up again,” she told him. “She said she doesn’t know what you do or where you go but she hopes the world treats you right. She was so nice I couldn’t tell her that her adoptive son was a monster. But I have a feeling she knows. She told me about the turtles and the frogs and the occasional alligators. She told me how she’d find them maimed in the backyard from time to time and your father would just go back there with a shovel and throw them into the swamp. She said he’d never say a word, but every once in a while, he’d tell her, ‘That boy ain’t right.’”
He shook his head and turned away from her.
“And he’s right, your father,” she said. “He doesn’t know how right he is.”
Clara had to agree with that. She was glad someone saw it in him. If only they’d done something about it. But, she reasoned, they probably couldn’t face it. It would be very hard.
“I’m guessing you saw your own father kill your mother in some horrible fashion,” she said. “Is that what happened? Is that what happened to turn you into this? Well, we’ll never know, will we? Maybe nothing happened. Maybe you were just born like this. Some people are, right? However, those records are so sealed no one will ever get into them. Not even my stupid hacker, as you called him. Right?”
He grimaced in pain, but still managed to shoot her a hellacious look.
“And then there’s poor Jeremy Clemmons,” she said, shaking her head in empathy. “If only I’d known… But you set that up good. What an asshole you are!” she exclaimed. “Once you saw him, you knew you had your mark, didn’t you?”
“Smart, so fucking smart,” he hissed and started to rise. “I’ll win. I’ll rise up and I’ll get you yet.”
Sloan shot him in the leg. He howled with pain and fell to the floor. “Keep talking!” she yelled. “Keep on! It’s your choice! You can shut up and let me call the cops and they come right here and get you or you can keep talking and I can keep defending myself!”
“I can keep talking,” he seethed, his face contouring grotesquely in pain. He was now bleeding so profusely, his blood was flowing all over the floor, onto and into the pale, threadbare area rug that Clara and Hadley’s chairs were sitting on.
“And to think, all you had to do was walk away,” Sloan said and hunkered down beside him. “You could have got away with it all. I would have never found you if you hadn’t pulled this shit. All I had was a t-shirt and the name of man who never even registered for a credit card! A man who didn’t even own a car! I would have never, ever found you! But you had to test your luck, didn’t you?” She glanced over her shoulder at Clara and Hadley, then she turned back to him, narrowing her eyes. “At the root of all this is your stupidity, Joseph Almus.”
His eyes narrowed back at her.
“Oh, yes, Joseph Almus,” she said, almost sweetly, as if she were enjoying this so, so much. “Joseph Almus from North Florida, near Jacksonville. Adopted by Peter and Sally Almus, like I said. Thirty-nine years old. Never married. No children. Went to trade school and was kicked out for fighting. First victim, a young woman on the banks of a river not too far from your house, strangled and left for dead. Found early in the morning by a fisherman, who had to get all the seagulls off of her. They were plucking out her eyes.” She stopped talking and hissed, “What did she ever do to you?”
“She said hello,” he said. “And that’s all it took. Just like you said hello to me in the cafeteria in that place where you work. Just like Hadley said hello, not even knowing she was saying hello to me just outside that hotel. Just like Clara said hello, once, in the grocery store. Just like all of them. You women made the first move, you instigated the communication and you got the ball rolling.”
Clara stared at him. He was crazy enough to think that them saying hello to him was them choosing him. But she couldn’t remember saying hello to him. All she remembered was glancing over and seeing him in the grocery store that day.
He must have sensed her confusion because he said, “You gave me the look, Clara. You gave me the look. You didn’t say hello, but your eyes did.”
He was truly, as her father would say, bat shit crazy. Clara didn’t respond to his words and only wondered what it was like to think like that, to really have no idea how the world really worked. To live in such a dark place that a glance from a woman indicated she wanted what he wanted to give her. Which was torture and torment, and mostly likely, a painful, slow death.
Sloan, obviously getting fed up with his ominous explanations, leaned over and pistol whipped him, hitting him so hard, his head fell to the floor. His body began to shake. She stood up and took three steps back, all the while keeping her eyes on him. And then, he pulled his last move. He got up on his elbows and with one hand yanked the rug from beneath her feet. She stumbled backwards, the gun in her hand falling to the floor before she reached it. She fell hard. And then he was up and he was out the door, limping, cursing and running away.
Within a matter of seconds, Clara was up out of her chair, grabbed Sloan by the arm and then her gun. Hadley got the knife and all three raced out of the house and after their captor.
They didn’t have to go far. They found him in front of the house trying to escape, slowly propelling himself forward with his elbows, dragging his body along behind him. He looked so pathetic. His strength was being drained from him ounce by ounce as he continued to bleed out.
They stood back and watched him, not moving. It was like they were all mesmerized. Clara couldn’t for the life of her find her voice. It was just the scene was so horrific she couldn’t find words to express her feelings.
Once he got a few feet away, he wormed around in the ground, like he was digging for something. Suddenly he sat up and pulled a gun on them. He fired once and the gun flew out of Clara’s hand. She screamed with the pain and held her hand to her chest, jumping up and down with it. She held it out and stared at it. It was covered in black smoke but it wasn’t bleeding.
He fired again, aiming for Sloan, who dodged the bullet, which went into one of the few last remaining windows of the old house. Then he leveled the gun on Hadley, who, like a vigilante, started walking towards him. He fired but she weaved out of range. H
e fired again, missed again. She got to him, dropped to her knees and began to stab him with the small knife. Over and over again she stabbed. It was almost like she was possessed. It was like she couldn’t stop herself.
Then she began to cry, this really low wail erupting from her body. And she called out to Sloan and Clara, “He won’t die! He won’t die!”
She kept stabbing and stabbing and he laid there, fighting a little at first but soon enough, he fell back, giving up. Sloan found her gun, grabbed it then jogged over to them, bent down and took the knife from Hadley, who fell back, breathing heavily, staring up at her.
“Let me finish, Hadley,” she said. “Please.”
Hadley nodded and stood up, walked away, then turned around to watch. Sloan didn’t hesitate and she shot to kill and she did, firing one bullet into his head. He fell back and then he was dead.
It was so quiet all Clara could hear was the katydids. As she stared at the dead man, now known as Joseph Almus, she felt something shift in her and that was relief. She didn’t stop feeling it until a smile came to her lips. She turned to Sloan, who eyed her, then smiled back. Then, together, they turned to Hadley, who returned their smiles with one of her own.
“He was hard to kill,” Sloan said.
“He was,” Hadley agreed.
“Maybe we are crazy bitches,” Clara said and shook her head a little, the smile refusing to leave her face.
“Maybe?” Sloan said and laughed a little. “Phew! I mean, fuck! Fuck!”
“We got him,” Hadley said, nodding in triumph. “We got that motherfucker!”
At this, they formed a circle and hugged each other, jumping up in down in delight. Clara couldn’t remember feeling so good and at ease with the world. The psychopath was dead! The psychopath was dead! They had stamped him out once and for all. He would never, ever harm another person again, never degrade them, never force them to live in fear, never kill again. It was a good, good feeling to know.
Once they stopped their celebratory hug, Sloan pulled away first and said, “We have two options. We can call the cops and tell them everything and risk them not believing he’s the real killer. Or we take him and put him in that hole he intended for you two and burn him. Then we can bury him and then we can leave.”