by R.J. Ellory
She stood there, her eyes closed, her whole body shaking.
He raised the gun. He cleared his throat, and then touched the barrel of the gun to her forehead and looked right at her with his fiercely blue eyes.
“Open your eyes,” he said, and his voice was strong and commanding.
She did as she was told.
“Ple-please … I didn’t mean to …”
He slapped her with his left hand. The shock of impact jarred throughout her entire body.
He raised his hand again. She shook her head. She pressed her hands together as if in prayer.
“N-no, don’t h-hit me again,” she said.
He didn’t move. He just looked at her.
She started to cry then.
“Shut the fuck up, you sniveling fucking bitch … Jesus, you’re all the fucking same, aren’t you? Walking around out there, all dressed up pretty, and then when it comes down to it you don’t want to know. I was nice to you. I was real nice to you. ‘Go wash up. I’ll make a sandwich …’ ”
She felt her knees give, and she dropped suddenly, and she hit the floor. She thought one of her teeth was loose. She thought about Ben’s impacted bicuspid, that she would get a twenty-five percent discount on her own orthodontic work because she was an employee …
And then he was kneeling beside her, and he had his hand on the back of her neck, and he was squeezing real hard. For a moment she wondered whether he was going to choke her to death, but then he released his grip and walked away. She wondered if he was leaving. She rolled onto her side and tucked her knees up into her chest, and she wrapped her arms around her knees and hugged them tight, and then she realized that he hadn’t gone to the front door, he’d gone to the kitchen, and when he appeared in the doorway he had a knife in his hand.
“Oh God,” she said, and she started crying again, and he took two steps toward her and he knelt beside her, and he just dug that knife into her shoulder.
He closed his eyes as he did it. And when he opened them and saw the blood he seemed to gag.
He took a deep breath, and he dug the knife in her again.
Digger’s mind turned over and his heart was filled with something he couldn’t describe, and it took all his concentration to hold on to the thing and not drop it right there on the floor.
He felt really sick and really afraid. And then he felt stupid and hateful and incensed with her betrayal. He had been betrayed. Betrayed by this girl, and the one from the bank, and betrayed by Earl, and before that by Clay, and before that by his mother and his dumbass father …
Betrayed by the whole fucking world it seemed, and the betrayals just kept on coming like a wave.
Dee opened her mouth to scream, but he put his left hand over her mouth and she felt like she was going to suffocate because he blocked her nostrils as well, and then he dug that knife in a third time. She had betrayed him … was going to call people … which people? The police? She had planned all along to call the police, and now she was going to betray him some more by screaming at the top of her voice and bringing other people here, and then he would be in for it. Then he would really be in trouble. She was not going to do that. He couldn’t let her. It was her or him—that was the truth—and the choice was not difficult.
He stabbed her in the breast and he felt her surge upward against his hold, and he knew if he took his hand away from her mouth she would just start hollering like a fire siren, and Digger—filled with the certainty that this time he would not be outdone and outsmarted by a fucking girl—set the knife aside and used his other hand to choke her as well. She fought back, and she was no weakling, but he got his entire weight on top of her, and within a minute she was limp and lifeless and silent. She was not dead, merely unconscious. He had no intention of killing her. He just needed her to shut the hell up.
He stood up slowly, and he looked down at the girl. He was motionless for quite some time and he thought about what he had done.
A minute ago he had hated her. A minute ago he’d wanted to hurt her and punish her and make her feel like nothing. A minute ago she’d represented everything that was despicable about other people. Everyone that had made him feel useless and ashamed for being who he was.
But now, seeing her there on the floor, he felt something else. He wanted to wake her up, to tell her he was sorry, that he didn’t mean it.
Digger knelt down beside her. He listened to her breathing.
He wanted to cry but he didn’t dare. He was scared Earl Sheridan might be around someplace, like his spirit might still be in the room, and he would think of him as nothing but a frightened little boy. Which was how he felt.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m really sorry.”
And in hearing his own voice he realized how pathetic he sounded. He wanted to kick her. He wanted to stab her some more. He picked up the knife, but then merely wiped his fingerprints from it with the hem of his T-shirt, and dropped it again. He cursed himself for not buying two pairs of jeans.
Closing his eyes, he took a deep breath and then slowly released it.
It was done now. There was no going back. He’d made his decision.
He got up. He used the kerchief to wipe his prints from everything he’d touched in the apartment.
He paused at the door, looked back at her, shook his head.
If ever he’d needed confirmation that people were all the same, well, this had been it.
He left the apartment quickly, walked down to the street and was away and gone within a minute.
Dee Parselle was alive—barely—but she was alive. She’d managed to hold on to her life, but—in all truth—she’d managed to hold on to little else.
DAY FIVE
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Rich sunlight shone through the punched-out window of the door. The girl was still sleeping. She had pulled away during the night and curled into a fetal position, her knees drawn toward her chest, her face down amidst her hair. Her breathing was slow and deep.
Clay sat up. He looked around and oriented himself. When she woke they would walk into Tucson and get some breakfast, and then … well, then he didn’t know. She needed to talk. She needed to tell him her name, where she was from, where she needed to be returned to. There would be family awaiting her somewhere, and Clay imagined they would be worried. They had come this way simply because Clay had believed that Sheridan and Digger would go the other. Whether he was right or not now didn’t matter. They were a handful of miles from Tucson and they needed food. He also wanted to smoke cigarettes. That much he knew. He had smoked little before, had liked it, and now for some reason craved the sensation. He would buy cigarettes in Tucson as well, and damn the cost.
When the girl woke he told her they were going to walk into the city. She looked at him with the same flat absence of expression.
“I don’t know if you just can’t talk,” he said, “but I think it’s gonna get to a stage where I find your silence too uncomfortable to bear. I helped you away from that place ’cause I believed you might have wound up dead if you’d stayed there. And the man that was dead … hell, I don’t know who he was to you—”
“He was my father.”
Clay was silenced. He stood and looked at her with his mouth half-open for a good while, and then he closed it without saying a thing. He didn’t know whether it was the shock of hearing her voice, or the significance of what she’d said.
“His name was Frank Jacobs and he was my father,” she went on. Her voice was soft, a rounded tone, and something of the deeper South in it. “And I thank you for getting me away from there, but I left him behind and I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to forgive myself for that.”
Clay smiled as best he could. “He’ll have forgiven you,” he said. “Worst thing that could have happened for him was to have you killed as well.”
She nodded. “I reckoned the same thing.”
Clay cleared his throat. He held out his hand. “My name is Clay Luckman.”
She took his hand. “Bailey Redman.”
Clay frowned.
“My mom and dad weren’t married.”
“I see,” he said, “and where is she now?”
“We were just on the way back from Oro Valley. She died and we went down there to bury her.”
“Hell, you ain’t doing so well for good luck now, are you?”
“S’pose not.”
“So you’re on your own now?”
She shook her head. “I got you.”
“Yes, sure, but I mean no family. No aunts and uncles, grandparents maybe?”
“Nope,” she said. “No one.”
“Shee-it,” Clay exclaimed.
“And you?”
“Me?”
“Sure. Where’s your folks?”
“Hell, I lost them a good long time ago.”
“So it looks like we’re in the same trouble, then.”
“Seems that way.”
“And those people … the ones that killed my dad. One of them was your brother?”
Clay nodded. “My half brother. Crazy half, it seems. The older guy was an escaped convict. He was on his way to get hanged someplace south I think and he broke out and took us with him as hostages.”
“So you’re on the run too?”
“Sure am. Sure they’ve got me all fixed up for a couple of murder charges already. Mostly they’ll be looking for Earl Sheridan. That was the older one’s name. They’ll just be looking for him to finish what they started.”
“And your brother … your half brother?”
Clay shook his head resignedly. “I think he made his choice. I think he’s gone the way of the devil. What little time I had I tried to talk some sense into him, but he had his mind set on not listening.”
“Why were they gonna hang the other guy?”
“I think he killed someone already. Capital offense an’ all that.”
Bailey tilted her head to one side. “That’s something that never made sense to me,” she said.
“What?”
“The death penalty. I mean, how does killing someone prove that killing people is wrong?”
“You got me there,” Clay said.
“So what do we do now?”
“Well, that’s what I’ve been thinking about. I got a handful of dollars, get us food and whatever for two days, maybe less, and then we gotta get smart.”
“Where were you headed?”
“Originally I wasn’t headed anyplace. This was just the direction I went in ’cause I figured the other pair would head west. Now I’m thinking we should head for somewhere called Eldorado in Texas.”
“What the hell is in Eldorado?”
Clay smiled. He pulled out the advertisement and showed her. “Pretty houses with green lawns and swimming pools.”
“And what the hell are we gonna do there?”
“I don’t know,” Clay replied. “I just feel that my brother ain’t gonna go there. That’s the way we were all going, and now that all this has happened I reckon they’ll double back and go some other place entirely. And if my brother don’t go there then Earl Sheridan ain’t gonna go there neither, and the farther away from him I am the better I’ll feel.”
She shook her head. “I don’t under—”
“It was somewhere we were going to go together, somewhere we always talked about. He’ll figure that if the cops get me I’ll tell them about how we were always going to go to Eldorado. He’ll be smart enough to stay well away from it, I’m sure.”
“And that’s it? That’s your plan?”
“Yeah, that’s my plan.”
“So really … well, really you don’t have a plan?”
Clay smiled wryly. “Sister, I ain’t never had a plan in my life. This is about the closest I’ve ever got to having to make a decision. You spend your life in places like I have … you get up when you’re told, you eat when you’re told, you work when you’re told, you sleep when you’re told. There ain’t a single decision to make. This is a whole new world of mystery and madness for me.”
“Maybe we don’t have to make a decision.”
“Eh?”
“Maybe we just keep on going and see what happens.”
“That ain’t a plan.”
“Seems to me there ain’t a great deal of point plannin’ anythin’ in this life. I planned to spend the next few years with my mom and then maybe go traveling around, maybe get a job or something, and all the while I was gonna keep on visitin’ my dad in Scottsdale and get to know him properly. Now they’re both dead and the only person in the world I know is you.”
“I’m sorry about your mom and dad.”
“What’re you sorry for? You didn’t have nothin’ to do with it.”
“You know what I mean … I’m sorry that something so bad as that had to happen to you.”
“Yeah,” Bailey said. “Me too.”
“So we’re gonna walk into Tucson and get some breakfast, okay?”
“Okay,” she said.
Clay paused. “How old are you?” he asked.
“Fifteen years old,” she said. “Sixteen in October next year.”
“Right,” he said.
“And how old are you?”
“I’m seventeen,” he replied. “Be eighteen come next June.”
“I ain’t gonna have sex with you,” she said.
Clay turned suddenly, his eyes wide. “What? What the hell d’you say something like that for?”
“My mom told me that men think about sex like three hundred times a day.”
“Well, I don’t know where the hell she got that kind of information from.”
“She was a prostitute.”
“She was what?”
“She was a prostitute. You think that’s bad?”
Clay shook his head. He was all sixes and sevens. “I don’t think nothin’ about it. Don’t make a blind bit of difference what she was.” He hesitated. “I mean … er, I didn’t mean that disrespectfully or nothin’. Hell, you know what I meant …”
She was laughing. “It’s okay. I was just teasin’ you.”
“Well, don’t. Jesus, girl, enough of that sort of talk. The idea of having sex with you didn’t even cross my mind—”
“Why? You don’t think I’m pretty?”
Clay took a step back. He was finding it difficult to speak.
“You wind up real fast, Clay Luckman,” she said.
“Enough,” he said, and wondered if there wasn’t something wrong with her, something in her mind. Maybe something was broken. Maybe the sudden and unexpected deaths of both of her parents had snapped her somewhere inside and she was now all over the place and then some. Clay wondered what something like that would do to someone.
“Let’s go,” she said. She turned and started walking toward the doorway.
Clay followed her. He would have to watch her carefully. What he’d gotten himself into he didn’t know. Out of a pan and into a fire was the phrase that came to mind.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Back at Gila Bend the sheriff’s department duly informed the federal authorities about the discovery of Wheland’s car behind Gil Webster’s house. By ten that morning both Nixon and Koenig had arrived at the Webster house. Laurette Tannahill was already in the hospital. She had slipped into a coma almost immediately as a result of the head trauma. Her vitals were weak, and there was no hope of her identifying anyone. Gil Webster could help them little. He gave an estimate of height and hair color, of course, but the young man’s face was covered with a rag and he could not make a positive identification. They showed him a photograph of Clarence Luckman, to which he responded, “Yes, sure, it could have been him. Looks about the right age … similar sort of shaped face …”
Both Nixon and Koenig were veterans of the business. They had seen their fair share of attacks and killings. Stabbings, shootings, hangings, decapitations, drownings; they had experienced the stench of a body left to rot for days and days, had felt the in
stinctive gag reaction when faced with dismembered body parts, had seen the very best of people subjected to terrible things by the very worst of people, and they remained open-minded and sober. The upper bedroom of Gil Webster’s house, however, seemed to possess an all-pervading melancholy the like of which neither had experienced before. It was the pattern of blood on the mattress perhaps, the shape of Laurette Tannahill’s face still evident there upon it. It had ceased to be impersonal when Nixon had spoken to Laurette Tannahill’s mother only the evening before.
“We are doing everything we can Mrs. Tannahill. Everything.”
It was as good as a promise. And now that promise would be broken. They had done what they could, but not everything. If they had done everything then surely Laurette would be home by now?
Garth Nixon stood there for a long time. He thought of his wife, his son, his nephews, his nieces. He thought of Ronald Koenig’s wife and children, people he had never met, would probably never meet, but people of whose existence he was aware. Laurette Tannahill and her parents were much the same as them. Their daughter had made it through childhood—through coughs and colds, through measles and chicken pox, through bumps and scrapes and falls and teenage crushes and first loves and school prom, and here she was—all of twenty-five years old, working in the bank—and someone had waltzed right in and snatched her away. That didn’t happen to twenty-five-year-old women. It just couldn’t. And then to bring her to some stranger’s house, to lock him in the basement, to take her upstairs and beat her senseless? It just didn’t bear considering. But it had been considered by this Clarence Luckman—not only considered, but done—and now the girl was in a coma, and they had to tell Mr. and Mrs. Tannahill that things hadn’t turned out the way any of them had intended.
Luckman was working alone, it seemed, and from the absence of Gil Webster’s white pickup Koenig and Nixon at least had a vehicle model and registration plate for which they could put out an alert. That alert went to Phoenix, Scottsdale, Mesa, Chandler, Glendale, Buckeye, Casa Grande, Wellton, Yuma, all the way southeast to Oracle, Oro Valley, Tucson, and Tombstone. Right now they knew nothing of his intentions. He could have headed in any direction, so all directions needed to be covered. Reproductions of the most recent pictures of Clarence Luckman, courtesy of Tom Young’s staff at Hesperia, were also circulated to eleven local sheriff’s departments and the federal offices in the region. Both Nixon and Koenig concurred that a dissemination of flyers or posters beyond the immediately relevant counties was not best advised at this stage. Alert a fugitive to the breadth of the search and he could go to ground. That’s what they were concerned he would do. People had a way of just vanishing. Luckman had been Sheridan’s accomplice, and now he had attacked and harmed in his own right. As far as this one was concerned people were expendable. No, they would continue to contain it within official parameters for a little while longer. All relevant county and federal officials would be informed, those pictures would be in the hands of all pertinent departments and units, and they would find him. Come what may, they would find him. The only questions were how rapidly, and how many lives would he take before they secured his arrest or confirmed his death.