“I get it. Stop,” I said, surprised to find myself embarrassed at the idea of Gary overhearing this.
There were a few flattened areas of greenery surrounding the site. Places where tents had been pitched in years past. Then we came to the right spot in that slight rise in the hillside, the incline where Shurn had hastily buried Jenny Starks. We set our human bundle down again. Gary’s terror made him look less than human, all bugging eyes and trails of saliva escaping from the tape. I was glad the dark made only the palest parts of him visible.
“Jason didn’t want or need my help by then. He wanted posterity, wanted recognition. I didn’t want to get in the way, but I didn’t want the last kill to be stumbled on by some idiot. Which is what I thought I was seeing when you came up here and had yourself a good stare. If you were a few minutes later, I would have killed you right there.”
“Where’s the shovel?” I asked. I looked down. Gary was trying to master his panic in order to look at me, imploring, confused. I looked right back at him for a second.
“Don’t you want the kill first?” the Ragman asked.
“No. I want to kill him in the hole.”
“That’s fair,” said the Ragman. “And a good idea. We’ll leave less scatter up here.”
Digging was, of course, my job. The Ragman started back toward his truck, but I stopped him.
“The backseat, right?”
“That’s right, Martin.” I started walking, gauging the darkness as I went, the distance between the Ragman and myself. I could jump in the truck and drive off if Kylie was in the back. I could do that. But it wouldn’t finish what was happening up here. It wouldn’t allow me to be sure.
I came up to the back passenger door and quickly dodged a hand under a loosened corner of the pickup bed cover, feeling around.
“Please. Please,” I muttered. And I heard it. A sound, a whimper. Then I felt her, her hair, her face. I couldn’t risk jumping up to peer into the back, but I knew it was her. Kylie. I opened the back passenger door and grabbed the shovel handle, whispering as loudly as I dared.
“Kylie, it’s Dad. It’s me. You’re going to be fine. Just, you have to be quiet. Be quiet and don’t listen to anything until I come back for you, okay?”
There was no sound from the bed. I took that as a good sign. I had to. While I was reaching for the gear in the backseat I checked to see if the keys were in the ignition. They were. I came back with the shovel and the large, flimsy plastic bag full of liquid-filled jugs that had been on the backseat. Cleanup materials. The Home Depot price tag was still on the shovel’s handle. I stepped over Gary and pointed out a spot in the shallowest slope of the hillside. The Ragman pointed four feet to the right. I drew an outline with the tip of my shovel. He nodded.
“This is where I remember her being,” I said.
“That’s right,” the Ragman said. “There was a spread of paw marks around—I don’t know if you noticed them—coyote, had to be. Jason was in a rush, yes, but to leave your kills in coyote-digging range is odious. I mean, he wasn’t hiding them for his own freedom at that point, he was hiding them to give me something to come back to. A small gesture, sure, but it had the bigger effect of making me sure he wasn’t going to rat on me. That he intended me to be out here, celebrating what we’d done. Damn sloppy digging job, though.”
I pushed the blade into the soon-to-be grave, and it went in more easily than I hoped. I tossed the earth into a circumscribed area behind me and to the left. Once I heard some bucking sounds of protest, and saw that I’d caught Gary with a stray cast of pebbles and dirt. I went over to him and wiped his face off, so he could watch what I was doing. The more scared he was, the calmer I became. That time-flattening excitement that came with me on hunts arrived, and the shovel entered and left the expanding hole with a hypnotic regularity. The Ragman stayed quiet the whole time, sometimes breathing more heavily, always with his eyes on my back. I looked back once to see him kneeling next to Gary, his big palm overlaying my old assistant’s chest, feeling the heartbeat. He nodded at me, and I continued. The pit spread below and around me, and I stopped only when it was up to my shoulders.
“Now?” I asked the Ragman.
“First you kill, and then we clean.”
The Ragman wasn’t next to Gary anymore. He was a few feet away, waiting to see exactly how I’d do it. The front of his pants bulged, and his eyes were absent, glossy, far away.
I went over to Gary. He screamed as well as he could, using the give he’d created with the saliva and lip movement eating into the duct tape glue. It still came out as a sad, muffled bleat, but there was enough real terror in it to make the Ragman make a small puffing sound of contentment. With the tip of my boot, I started to roll Gary toward the pit. He was little, so small and light, and it was easy work until I reached the incline. At that point, I grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him upright. I pulled him a foot off the ground, though my exhausted arms screamed, before I dropped him into the hole.
The Ragman ran up behind me, but his footfalls didn’t have any scare left for me. The beam of a flashlight filled the grave, where Gary lay on his back, up-angling from the pain of falling five feet and having the wind knocked out of him. I could hear it wheezing through his nose as I lowered myself in there with him. The flashlight beam danced around to the upper part of the grave, illuminating the back of my neck, reflecting light off Gary’s eyes.
I read in those eyes, for a moment, a collaborator’s hope: Gary thought maybe I was going to pull a last-minute switch, pretend to leave him for dead, deal with this huge stranger behind us through trickery that I’d explain to Gary on our backslapping, triumphant ride back to town. Fantasies built from the movies we’d all seen, the books we’d all read.
But Gary should have felt what was coming even before my fingers started pressing into his neck. Once you start something, it has to be finished. I pressed harder.
I stopped for a moment and hope flooded into his eyes again. I tore the tape off his mouth. His voice, when it came, was quiet. The work I’d already done on his throat had squeezed the volume out, even the tone.
“Please. You can’t. I left a note, I texted—people know I’m with you.”
“I already figured out that angle, Gary. Don’t worry about that. And you didn’t leave a note or text anyone, did you? Just like you couldn’t wait to get your phone back from me in the motel so you could take some pictures of what I had in the Jeep. You just couldn’t wait to show me how much better you were than me, how much smarter, how much more deserving of my money.”
“Speak up,” the Ragman said. He was at the rim of the grave, crouching. “I want to hear all of this.” I obliged.
“You’re not better, Gary. That’s why you’re here, without my money, without any part of my life. And you’re going to stay here forever.” For a moment, a moment that made me feel both disappointed and relieved, I did feel sorry for what I was going to do. Not sorry enough to save him, but sorry.
“I have to, Gary. For Kylie, for Ellen.” And for myself. I pressed down on the soft parts of his flesh, on the cartilage structure of his windpipe, which gave in the rubbery way the undesirable parts of a fried chicken thigh do. His neck was slender enough for my fingertips to meet at his spine when I used all my strength. I pressed and leaned down, time fading out altogether, the reflected beam in Gary’s eyes jumping and darting as blood vessels burst and threaded complicated rivulets around his irises. His arms and legs spasmed, the bones and tendons themselves seeming to scream. I kept the pressure on until he was dead, and then for a few minutes more.
“That’s good,” the Ragman said, his voice quiet, strained. He was craned over the hole with the flashlight, and startled back when I looked up at him and the beam caught whatever the expression on my face was. He dropped the heavy, old, nickel-plated thing into the grave, and I handed it back up to him. He wouldn’t grab it.
“Leave it in there, douse it with the body.” The Ragman’s tone was almos
t back to normal, assuming some authority as he swatted the flashlight out of my hand. He walked back toward the truck. I stepped on Gary’s chest and boosted my way out of the grave. One of his ribs gave under my boot.
The Ragman flicked on his headlights, outlining the scene around us.
“Don’t worry about anyone noticing the lights. We’ll be quick.” He walked toward the bag of jugs, each full of a different corrosive fluid, and set them on his side of the grave. “It’s not a matter of being delicate. We spill all of this stuff over him, over everything we touched, and we should be fine. They’ll be able to find traces of us, maybe, but the samples will be too contaminated. If they find him at all, we’re done for anyway.” He passed me over one of the jugs, pure white with a blue label, a knockoff of the Clorox logo.
“Usually I cut the tops off them so they pour more easily,” he said. “Give me that back. I forgot. Got kind of charged up watching you do the kill.” He reached for the jug, almost bashfully, and took it out of my hand. He poured out a cup’s worth of bleach into the grave, where it dropped onto Gary’s pants and began turning the black cloth orange. The Ragman took a Leatherman knife out of his back pocket and carved off the top of the jug. He handed it toward me, and I backed a pace or two away. He came to the lip of the grave and offered me the jug again, a little closer. The knife was closer, too.
“Is she here, Ragman?” I asked.
“What? Oh, your daughter. Yes, she’s in the truck. The bed. I gave her a real scare today, I’ll tell you, popping her in my freezer for a second.” The Ragman laughed like a little kid, an enthusiastic honk. “She still hasn’t seen my face, don’t worry. We’ll come up with a great story.”
“You and me,” I said.
“I didn’t think I would, but I want to do this again, with you,” said the Ragman. I took the bottle of solvent from him. “Rochelle’s hidden very well, now. I can show you later tonight, just so you know how well. Then we can start talking about what’s next.”
“Yeah.” I didn’t go on, not moving until he spoke again. It took a moment. He folded the Leatherman up and pocketed it, and when he spoke again, I understood something had changed. Without aiming for it, I’d made him trust me. He really did see another kill for us, together. He didn’t want to stop.
“You shouldn’t call me Ragman,” he said. “That was Jason’s thing. Let’s go with just Frank,” he said, reaching out with his right hand in the beginning of a gesture. I’d never find out if it was going to be a handshake or an arm squeeze. I steadied the bottom of the jug on my left palm and juddered the container toward his face with my right hand on the handle, pulling back when it was closest to the Ragman’s eyes, so the maximum amount of liquid would spill into them. He screamed and I dropped the jug into the grave, then grabbed his shoulders and pulled him toward me. He stumbled, clutching his searing face, falling over the grave without going all the way in. I had to jump on his back, making him scream again, differently, making him fall in under me. I hauled myself out, evading the wild hand that whipped out for me, and ran for the truck. His huge bulk wasn’t a factor as long as he was in that hole, not with the pain from the burns.
I covered the fifteen feet to the vehicle and got in, twisting the key and hoping for exactly the sight I saw. Frank Connell, strong again in his anger, had levered himself upright, his head and massive chest poking out of the grave. The engine came to life and I floored the accelerator, taking it full speed toward the Ragman, smashing into him with crushing, beautiful force, continuing up the sloping ground as I felt his ruined skull slide under the pickup, bumping along the metal until it struck the muffler with a wet clang. I reversed and looked out at what I’d done.
It was a big mess.
THROUGH THE BURNING, THROUGH THE Agony of his melting eyes, the Ragman took in the ending, accepted it as perfect and his due. He tried to get proper words out, to let Martin know this was okay, he’d gotten exactly what he wanted, this was perfect. He couldn’t get his tongue to work. All he could do, all he did, was position himself when he heard the motor start and knew what Martin was about to do. His brain was still working, in fits and starts, until the muffler punched the largest shattered piece of his skull right through it. All that was left before that point, the pain being so great that it had crested and stopped, was happiness.
SANDRA HAD BEEN CRUISING FOR five hours, trying to shake leads out of Frank Connell’s business connections, from the crew going through the burnt hulk of his house, when the call came in from Chris.
“Reese. He made contact with Ellen. She came down to the Sheraton lobby for me, yelling, not herself at all.”
“Where is he?”
“At her store. Reese said all he could think to do was go back there and set the alarm off. He’s got the kid, Ellen says. He has Kylie.”
Sandra gunned the engine and made it to tinsley in ten minutes. Martin Reese was sitting in front of the store, barefoot, a pickup truck parked halfway on the curb in front of him. Kylie Reese, intact, part of the green dress she’d vanished in visible under the swaddling of wool blankets that cocooned her, was next to him. They were holding onto each other very tightly.
“Mr. Reese. Kylie. Kylie, are you okay?”
“She’s alive. He didn’t hurt her. You were right,” Reese said, tilting his head up at her. “It was—the digging up, all of that. They explained it to me. The whole thing.”
“Who did?”
“The big guy. The one with that truck,” Reese said, pointing. “The one who took Kylie. He had—Gary told me to come meet him here, he told me to turn up without Ellen, that the cops had been threatening him too. I came here, and that truck—Gary was in that truck, with a huge, just a fucking insane looking man. He told me Kylie was in the back, and if I didn’t do what they said, if I didn’t do it—”
“It’s okay, sir, slow down,” said Chris. Sandra couldn’t help flicking a betrayed look at him. Convinced so quickly. Chris stooped to pull the blanket more tightly around Kylie Reese.
“You okay?” Chris asked her.
“I’m okay,” she said. “He’s dead. My dad killed him. I told him my dad would help me. I told him.”
“Shhhh,” said Sandra, putting a hand on the girl’s hair. The chattering speech stopped, and Martin Reese started talking again.
“They made me get in. They grabbed me, they didn’t ask. Blindfolded me, took me to the woods. Forty minutes of driving, but I don’t know—I couldn’t tell in what direction, at first, but they pulled off the blindfold a little before we got up into the place, up to the big hole. God. It was behind Torland’s, the old plant. I thought they were going to kill me. I thought I was dead. The whole ride up, Gary was telling me the same things you told me. Except it was him, not me. When I tried to scream he put a piece of tape on my mouth. That he’d been obsessed with Ellen since he started working at ReeseTech. He took the job because he knew I was married to Tinsley Schultz’s sister. He digs up bodies, I mean, he dug up bodies, bought files from Keith Waring. They killed Keith last week, him and the big guy. That big guy and him, they started killing women together. Rochelle. That other one. They were going to keep doing it. The cop, he was part of it, spying on me. The big guy said Keith’s body was gone for good, and I don’t even know what that means.
“When I got up there, when they took the blindfold off, that was it. I was going in the hole. But the big guy put Gary in it instead. He got in there with him and started strangling him, making these awful noises, both of them. I wasn’t tied up or anything, and he must have forgotten, or just been too—he wasn’t paying attention to me, so I got into the truck. I just meant to reverse, to get out of there, but my brain wasn’t working right. I drove forward.”
Martin Reese pointed at the truck, and started to cry. Sandra walked around to the front of the pickup, where it had nosed up onto the curb. A great dent in the front fender. She bent down a little and saw the marks of gore beneath it.
“Jesus,” she said.
; “I can take you there,” Reese said. “I can take you to them. Once Kylie is safe at home with Ellen.” Sandra told Chris to take Kylie into the squad car, get her warm. Reese let her go, making encouraging sounds, and Sandra faced him, leaning down, whispering almost.
“Are you bullshitting me? I mean, I know you’re bullshitting me, but are you going to admit it?” Sandra stooped, looked into Reese’s shaking face, the tears in his eyes. He was shaken up, for real, but that didn’t mean the version he’d just given her had anything to do with what happened.
“I’m telling you the truth. I’ll show you the bodies.”
“I’m sure you can. That’s not the part I don’t believe.”
For a moment, Reese stopped shaking, staring at her dead-on, a different expression than she’d ever seen in his eyes before. Something cold and white hot at the same time.
“My daughter’s back. I brought her back alive. There’s nothing you can do to me that will hurt.”
THE HARDEST PART WAS NOT telling Sandra Whittal that Gary’s car was in the alley across from the store. I couldn’t point it out without making her even more suspicious, so I kept my mouth shut. When Ellen’s car pulled up, nudging over the curb just before she careened out of the driver’s seat, running over to pull Kylie out of the back of the squad car and hold her in a heap on the pavement as uniform officers got gawkers out of the area, no one was paying attention to me anyway. But it was Ellen who spotted it, as we were all heading inside tinsley.
“That’s Gary’s car, isn’t it?” The yellow boot clamped on it picked up the streetlight.
I didn’t indulge an impulse to look over my shoulder as Detective Gabriel jogged across the street to look at the vehicle. Ellen let me hug her, even hugged me back. I was doing a good job of looking like a wreck. I heard Gabriel call out as he shone a flashlight in. It was almost dawn, but not quite—still dark. “It’s locked up. Laptop half-under the passenger seat.”
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