by Tracy Sharp
“Please hurry.” She said, then a moan.
When Rina discovered that she was in labor, it would be all over for Susan. “Susan, you need to block that door.”
“What? No. I need help.”
“Listen to me. Rina is going to come down the stairs and take your baby from you if she gets into that room. Do you understand? She will kill you after she takes your baby.” I hated telling her this, but she had to understand. She had to do anything she could to keep Rina from getting in there with her.
“Oh, my God.”
“Is there something you can use to block the door? The bed?”
“Yes.” There was a pause. I could hear her grunting with the effort of trying to push the bed. “It’s so heavy.” Her voice was further away.
“Just push it as hard as you can, Susan. You have to block that door.”
Small little scraping sounds against the floor. It was taking too long.
“God. Please hurry, Susan.”
More scraping sounds.
Footsteps on the stairs.
I started crying out, yelling. “Oh, no! My baby is coming! Somebody help me! Help!”
Susan stopped moving the bed.
I hoped she got the drift.
She did. More scraping sounds.
“Help me! Somebody!” I cried.
The footsteps stopped. I couldn’t tell if she was standing outside my door, or Susan’s.
The locks slid aside, one after another, gingerly. She’d be expecting me to be hiding beside the door. Instead I sat on the floor, unable to make myself go anywhere near the bed, and held my fake belly. I took several short breaths, blowing them out in short bursts, the way I’d seen pregnant women do it in the movies, and prayed that I was convincing. I cried out again, moaning, trying to cover any sounds that Susan was making in the next room.
The door opened slowly, just a crack at first. I saw an eye and a slice of face in the crack of the door, and I could not remember, at that point in time, if I’d ever seen anything so spooky. But what really scared me was that this wasn’t Rina. This person was taller. Her eyes narrower. Familiar.
Once she’d determined that I wasn’t near the door, she opened it wide, staring at me with my gun aimed at my head.
Noel.
Chapter Nineteen
Still watching me, she called over her shoulder. “You really fucked up this time, Rina.”
“What?” Rina said from somewhere out in the hall. She was wiggling the door knob to the room Susan was in. Pounding on it.
“She’s not pregnant,” Noel said.
The pounding stopped. Rina’s face appeared behind and just above Noel’s shoulder. “What are you talking about? Look at her.”
“This is one of the private investigators I was telling you about. Leah Ryan.”
Rina looked at me, wide eyed.
Noel cocked the gun, her finger on the trigger. “And now she has to die.”
***
She was going to shoot me dead if I didn’t come up with something fast. “Jack is smarter than that, Noel. He’ll figure you out, if he hasn’t already.”
“Obviously I can’t let you walk away,” Noel said, as if she were talking to a four year old.
Susan cried out in the other room. She sobbed.
Rina’s head snapped around to listen. She disappeared again.
“You need help delivering that baby in there. Somebody keeps botching the job.”
Noel squinted at me. “You know how to deliver babies?”
“I know that giving a woman a cesarean when you don’t know what the hell you’re doing will most likely kill the unborn baby. I’m sure you’ve figured that out.”
She stared at me, eyes calculating.
“Look. I really don’t want another baby to die. Okay? Please. Let me help. At least I’ll know that the baby is okay.” I didn’t mention that Gabriel had said that she’d murdered her own baby, which had to have been intentional. It had to be some kind of weird compulsion. She had some deep seated, deranged urge to murder babies. But she had a girlfriend who really wanted an infant, and I was guessing that she’d do just about anything to keep her. Which desire would win out this time?
“Do you want that baby to die, Noel?”
She stared at me, saying nothing.
“Rina really wants a baby, doesn’t she? She’ll leave you if she doesn’t get a live one soon. You know that, don’t you? Maybe she’ll even turn to a man to get her pregnant.”
Her face hardened. “No man is going to touch her. Ever.” Her voice was like stone. “I tried that. Got pregnant. For her. Didn’t turn out so good.”
“You killed your baby, didn’t you, Noel?”
“Didn’t turn out so good,” she repeated, her eyes shuttering over. “I told her it wouldn’t. It’s better to get a baby from somebody else. You don’t suffer that way.”
No. Only the unfortunate mother and the baby suffer. I marveled at how crazy a person could be and still function. This woman was a fucking fruit loop. “I can help with the baby. You need to let somebody else handle the birth this time. Let me be part of a miracle before I die. Let my life have some meaning. Please?”
Her eyebrows furrowed. “You make one wrong move and I’ll blow your fucking head off. Got it?”
I nodded quickly. “Absolutely.”
“Get up.” She stepped aside, gestured to the hallway.
I pushed myself up.
“Get rid of that fake belly. You’re nothing but a fraud.” She spat this last part out, red faced.
Yeah. Okay. I’m the fraud. I whistled low in my mind. I went out into the hallway and relief washed over me, just being out of that death room gave me renewed energy and my mind cleared of cobwebs. Even if she shot me in the back out in that hall, it would be better than dying in that room.
Rina stood staring at the door to the room Susan was in. She turned to look at us as we entered the hallway. “I’m going upstairs to get something big to knock the door down.” Her tone was matter of fact as she started up the stairs.
“Okay, honey,” Noel said. She had a slightly pained look on her face, which said that she knew that Rina wasn’t the sharpest tack in the box, but she loved her anyway.
How sweet.
“What do you want me to do?” I said.
“Tell her to open the door,” Noel said, sarcasm lacing her tone, like I was the biggest idiot she’d ever had to endure.
I knocked on the door. “Susan?”
“Yes,” she moaned, crying.
“Do not open this door,” I screamed, throwing myself back and knocking Noel backward. She grunted, and I turned and dodged to the side. The gun went off as she fell, and I jumped on her, hauling back and punching her in the face. Her head snapped back, hitting the back of the wooden step behind her. She was half sitting, half lying on the stairs and I brought my hand back and smashed the back of her head against the step. She dropped the gun.
I grabbed it and knocked the hell out of her with the butt, bringing the gun down two, three, four times. It took that many until I realized that she wasn’t moving. I felt for a pulse. She had one. That was good enough.
Rina’s footsteps sounded on the stairs. “I can’t find anything to use, Noel.”
I waited until I saw her legs, then I shot her in one of them. She screamed and fell down the stairs, knocking Noel down to the floor as she went. She no longer had the gun in her hand. She must’ve laid it down during her search for a large object to bust the door open with.
I banged on the door. “Susan! Open the door.”
“No,” came the voice.
“Susan, we don’t have much time. They’re both out of commission, but not for long. Hurry up.” I banged on the door with my open hand.
“No.”
“You will die in there! Open the fucking door!”
I could hear her crying. Groaning and weeping, and the sound was so helpless that a knot rose in my throat and I felt like crying myself.
“Please, Susan. I know you’re scared. But if you don’t let me in, we’ll never get out of here, either of us. Because I’m not leaving you and your baby.”
I could hear her moving. Shuffling. It had to be hard as hell with labor pains taking over every few minutes.
A hand clamped over my ankle and yanked and I fell backward, but caught myself with a hand on the wall and one on the railing before I fell. Rina reached up, swiping a hand at my gun. I turned and booted her in the head. The same treatment I’d given Gabriel. I wanted to shoot her and Noel dead where they lay. Make sure they never hurt another human being, another pregnant mother, another unborn infant, ever again. But there had been so much death already. I didn’t have the stomach for it. And there was something really wrong about murdering two people and then helping bring a baby into the world.
I needed to get Susan out of there.
Susan pulled back on the bed. She was grunting and screaming now.
“Just enough to let me in,” I said. “And for you to come out.”
She finally opened the door, just a crack at first, her eyes so frightened they were almost bulging.
“It’s okay. Look.” I pointed to Noel and Rina lying on the floor.
She started crying again, pushing her way out, her belly brushing against me as she moved.
“I have the gun. They aren’t going to hurt you.” I placed an arm under hers and helped her navigate around Rina and Noel.
Bent over and moaning, she climbed slowly up the stairs.
I sensed movement behind me. I turned.
Noel had opened her eyes.
I shot her in a leg. She screamed. An enraged wail that went right through me. I booted her in the head for good measure.
Her eyes rolled up in her head and they fluttered closed.
We made it up the stairs and I looked quickly for a coat for Susan to wear. I stepped away from her for a moment and found a hall closet behind the stairs. I pulled a large winter coat down from a hanger for her. Scanning the floor, I found her some boots, hoping they were big enough for her. I silently thanked God that I still wore my own. Rina hadn’t taken them from me. A bad mistake on her part.
I ran into the kitchen and found my jacket still draped over the chair.
Ran back to Susan and opened the coffin door. Helping her out the door, I led her to the stairs, looking up to see how far away my truck was.
My heart froze. The truck was gone.
***
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” I turned my head, looking around the drive way for my truck.
“Is there a garage,” Susan asked, her voice high and reedy with labor pain.
I felt like I’d lose it, panic spreading through me. We didn’t have time to go searching for a garage. “Fucking hell.”
“It must be here. Let’s look for a garage,” she said, keeping her voice as even as she could.
If she could keep calm with agony radiating through her belly, then by Christ, so could I.
I helped her down the stairs and into the drive way.
“There,” she said, pointing.
She was a right. A small, white garage sat slightly behind the house, near the back of the large yard. The doors were closed.
“Stay here,” I told her. “I’m going to go see if I can get into that garage. If you see Rina or Noel come out of that house, scream bloody murder. I’ll come running. Okay?”
She nodded, wincing as another labor pain shook her. She bent forward, almost buckling over. She sat down on the snowy drive way. “I can’t stand right now.”
“Okay. It’s okay. I’ll be right back,” I told her. “Keep a close eye.”
She nodded, looking at the house, her eyes wild and rimmed with dark circles.
I made my way to the garage, shivering. My body was beyond tired but the fight or flight instinct helped me keep moving. If I didn’t get my truck out of the garage, Susan would have her baby in the freezing cold. I really didn’t want to go back into that house.
I tried the door. Not surprisingly, it was locked. “Sweet Jesus.” I sighed, about ready to cry. I looked up to the sky. “If anyone up there is doing anything other than laughing their asses off at me right now, I could sure use a hand.” I paused, realizing that I had to be half out of my mind to be talking to the sky. To anyone who could be listening, who would give a damn. “This isn’t just about me, okay? Can you cut Susan a little break? Bring her baby into this fucking frightening world safely? Huh? Do you think you could do that?” I was rambling, but it felt like there was nothing else I could do.
I thought of my little sister, whose ghost I was certain had come to me during a violent life and death struggle I’d had not so long ago. “Susie,” my throat tightened around her name as I whispered it, a tear sliding down my face and stinging as it seemed to freeze there. “Please help me.”
I walked around the garage, looking for a window. At the back of the structure I found one. I peered in.
Motherfucker. My truck wasn’t there.
There were two cars in the garage. I could hotwire one of them.
Susan moaned loudly. “Please, the baby is coming. Please help me.”
I covered my face in my hands. We wouldn’t have time.
I ran over to where she was laying back in the snow. “The baby is coming. I can feel it.”
We had no choice. “Susan, we have to go back into the house.”
“No.” She shook her head. “No, please.”
“My truck isn’t in that garage. Your baby could freeze to death.”
She wept softly. “Oh, God. Oh, God.”
“Come on. I won’t let anything happen to you.” I helped her up. We moved as quickly as we could back to the house. Each of the four stairs was terrible for her, making the pain worse. We finally got to the door. “Stay here.”
I went into the house, opened the basement door.
Noel was just on the other side of it, about to try to open it herself.
I shoved her in the chest. She began her fall down the stairs. I didn’t watch her get to the bottom before I closed and locked the door again.
They could bleed to death down there. I really didn’t give a rat’s ass.
This is what I’ve become. This is why Callahan couldn’t say. And this is why I try to run away from myself.
This is my life.
I went back out and helped Susan back into the house. I took her coat off, led her to the living room floor.
“Okay, Susie,” I said to my little sister, the irony of Susan sharing a name with her just now hitting me. “If you’re up there, let’s do this.”
Chapter Twenty
We delivered a healthy baby girl. Susan smiled and named her Faith. When both mother and baby were safe and comfortable, I found my cell phone in a back bedroom drawer. In that back bedroom was also an elderly woman, who was paralyzed, and hadn’t been bathed or fed in days. If I hadn’t found her, she would’ve died there in that bed. Rina and Noel had been cashing her social security checks and just leaving her to lay in her own filth.
I had nothing left to give. I nodded off several times during the police interview. They finally let me go with the promise that I’d come back in and explain more coherently. It’s been a lot of years. They know me now. If somebody was in really bad shape and I was anywhere around them when it happened, that person richly deserved it, and those cops would’ve done the same. If somebody was dead by my hand, that somebody had been a really nasty person while they were alive, and I’d made the world just a little bit brighter by removing them from it.
Jackson wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. He wouldn’t leave me alone long enough for me to take a shower, standing outside the bathroom door until he heard the water shut off. I didn’t really mind. Though I would never admit it to him, and barely admitted it even to myself, I wanted him close. I needed him near me.
He was staying in the spare room that Jesse used to sleep in until he was certain that
I was back to my strong self and safe. I’d seen that look in his eye before. Arguing was pointless because he wouldn’t discuss it. He simply looked at me, and then continued on with whatever he was doing at the time. He would not leave me, no matter what.
Pango was overjoyed to see me, and I felt the same about seeing her. I wrapped my arms around her and buried my face in her thick fur and breathed her in deeply. I could hear her heart beating when I lay my head against her fur, and felt some of the horror of the past several weeks start to let go of me and fall away.
Jack wouldn’t let me answer my cell phone. He sent me to bed, assuring me that he’d take Pango out and feed her. He loved her too, and I knew he wanted to play with her. He needed her calming effect as much as I did.
I fell onto my bed and closed my eyes. I thought that the images of Rina’s house of horrors would haunt me, but I was just too tired. Just before sleep overtook me I heard Pango enter the room, sniffing. She jumped on the bed beside me, placing her chin on my hand. I patted her head until my hand fell to the sheet and a thick, dark sleep settled over me like velvet.
What woke me was the feeling of somebody sitting on the bed next to me. When I opened my eyes, Jack was sitting, watching me, concern in his eyes. “Hey Kicks. How you doing?”
“Swell.” I was still groggy, and my tongue felt thick in my mouth. “How are you?”
“Good. I was getting a little worried about you, though. It’s been fourteen hours”
“That would explain why I have to pee like a race horse.” I sat up, brushing my hair out of my eyes and blinking several times.
“It would.”
Pango was looking at me from the edge of the bed, wagging her tail.
“Hey pretty girl.” I patted her head and threw my legs over the side of the bed and winced. “Wow.”
“Feeling the effects of our recent escapades, huh?” Jack asked. He offered me his large hand for support.
I wasn’t in the mood to be a hero so I took it. “Thanks. And yes. I am. Didn’t used to be like this, Jack.”