by Knight, Dirk
“So that’s how you want to do it?” asks Jiménez. “You want to do her in the tub?”
“Might be nice,” he says, “to watch Libby thrash against the thick plastic sheeting and scalding hot water. I would love to see that again. And, no offense, seeing your dad in the shower curtain kinda ruined it for me. I need to freshen that memory up.”
“Father-in-law,” Jiménez corrects.
Libby’s good eye pops open at hearing her name, and she wonders, what am I going to do to get out of this one?
The Road and The Cop
The interceptor engine in his Crown Vic is whining from the strain of the speeds Carron is forcing into the block. His usually nondescript unmarked sedan is catching eyes of other wayward travelers as he screams past them on winding mountain roads. He had, for a moment, dialed Jeff Parker, to have him en route to intercept Foster/Dean, whoever he was, but he had clapped closed the clamshell phone before the call completed. Jeff is the type to call in the cavalry and try to make a big bust out of this case. Carron is sure that getting other departments involved before he can be on scene will be disastrous.
Likewise, he debated at length about calling his partner, but he still cannot extend the trust needed, and isn’t sure that he can count on him right now; he’d been a good sport about the B&E, but had lost his nerve toward the end.
No, this was something he had to go at alone.
Carron doesn’t care about getting his name in the paper anymore, he’s had plenty of publicity in the past, and he hungers for anonymity, especially after some of the attention he had gotten over the Lutz case.
He only cares about his young niece. He wishes he hadn’t taken Eleman to 44 Monroe with him to begin with. If he had taken care of things the way he used to, he could have beaten a confession out of the bastard in his own apartment. He would already have her home, safe.
The only person he really trusts in this type of situation made it more than clear that she wouldn’t lift a finger to help him.
Other than the address lookup, she was done getting his back. He had almost cost her a promising career; he had flown off the handle, and she had sat and taken the chastisement from McKenna, instead of rolling on him.
She had remained a loyal partner; she had remained by his side during his psych evaluations, during his dismissal, and even when he was reduced to working a beat in the heat of summer, busting shoplifters and potheads. She had taken his abuse and negligence for as long as she would, and now she had moved on.
Carron now thumbs the ring she’d given him so many years ago; he spins it tirelessly on his finger, pulls it out to his knuckle, and then forces it back into the crack of his finger.
Maybe I should take it off, he says to himself, at last abandoning the fidgeting and deciding that he will throw it out on the way home, with his niece safe.
For now, he needs her with him. The ring remains on his gnarled hand as reminder of his love for her, which still hasn’t faded. It reminds him of Jenny Massy, who died because of his cowardice; it reminds him of Karl Webb, who died because he believed in something more than life. It reminds him of Evie, who was never afraid to live; never afraid to speak out; never hesitated to do what she thought was right, even if it cost her greatly.
He will not let her die.
With This Six Gun, I Make My Final Stand
The distant chirp of his driveway alarm pitches his eyebrow into fierce angles. He had installed the equipment himself from bits he’d bought at an electronics store. He isn’t the handiest of men, as one could see judging from the condition of his once-spectacular Harold Dean estate, but he has managed to rig up the device to the stone block pillars supporting the archway that formed at the entrance to his drive.
“It’s showtime,” he says to a curious Jiménez, and bounds out of the bathroom with his razor in his hand. His reloaded .38 special tucked into the back of his trousers is unforgivingly cold against his skin.
Libby clenches her eyes shut, feigning sleep, but he snatches her up by her tangled meadow of lustrous black hair. She yelps in surprise, in spite of her having heard his detached conversation with himself, and knowing he intends to kill her. She pleads for her life.
“I can help you, Dennis. I will always be loyal to you, just let me prove it. I’ve been so far, right? I done good last night didn’t I?”
“You done fine. Too good, in fact, but my name ain’t Dennis,” he says before head butting her in the face, shattering her nose and showering her mouth and chest in fresh crimson.
She folds and sags against the wall.
On the landing, the stereo his father left behind lay in wait for this moment. The record, a forty-five, he has spooled up is none other than Patsy Cline. He clips the toggle and sets the turntable in motion, making sure he has selected the proper playback speed, and quickly switches the setting from thirty-three and a third to the recommended RPMs.
There is the familiar snap crackle hiss of the stylus as it settles into the groove, and tiny particles of dust are pushed about, adding a vintage quality to the track, which the artist could never have intended, nor reproduced.
The music starts in, and in a rare out-of-character moment, Dennis starts to sing along.
“I faaall to pieces,” he bellows in a tremulous falsetto, while hovering over Libby’s limp form at the head of the stairs.
The razor is glinting in his hands, while he dances it in and out of a sliver of morning light.
In and out, as if her were conducting a symphony.
The door below crash-bangs open. The poorly maintained wood splinters from the cast iron western style hinges and rocks back into the den.
He drags Libby to her feet with a fistful of her glorious black mane, putting her between Detective Staley and himself.
Staley tosses the small one-man battering ram, which he had taken from his trunk, into the hallway atop the splintered door. He enters the room fearlessly, intent on destroying anything that gets in his way, slinking through the opening with his Glock leveled over his Maglite, forming a cross.
“Freeze, don’t move,” he shouts when his pistol trains on Dennis.
Libby screams for him to help her. The young Flashdancer look-alike is beaten and disheveled, barely recognizable if not for the flowy hair. He doesn’t want to hurt her, nor does he wish to exterminate the only man who knows where his Evie is.
Been there, done that.
Libby’s cries for help, her words of betrayal, are her last.
“No one’s gonna help you, bitch,” Dennis says then tears into her with the sharpened blade with as much force as he can muster. He can sense the layers of muscle, tendon, and tracheal material giving way one by one, feeling the ecstasy as the edge does what it was intended to do. And fulfills its destiny.
The blade grinds to a stop, when it reaches the column of vertebrae holding her beautiful head up. He shoves her forward. She catapults down the stairs and into Detective Staley, but not before he can squeeze off a round.
The Glock’s punch slams Dennis in the chest, sending him reeling back, faltering into the record player and skipping the needle. He scurries backward away from the landing, tossing the blade aside, and searching for the handle of his shooter.
Staley, shrugging the dying bimbo off like ASU running back Brandon Cole shedding a tackle, continues eagerly up the stairs, pausing before the top, and reaching the Glock high over his head, firing blindly onto the landing. He lets fly six rounds before he confidently raises his head above floor level.
Deserted.
One by one, he goes into the doors. Using years of aggressive military and law enforcement training he clears, one room, two rooms, and the third.
The last door on the left has streaks of blood trailing down in fresh heavy tracks. He crashes through, gun pointed, and sees nothing.
Behind the bed, on the floor, Dennis is lying in a growing pool. Staley takes one cautious step into the room, and Dennis fires a well-placed round into his foot. Staley stum
bles back, tripping over his own shot foot, and falls onto his back.
Both men trade rounds firing under the bed. Though his shots are from the hip, several rounds from Staley’s Glock find their mark.
The .38 slugs are delivered with a colder, calculated aim, and tear into Carron’s face, neck and chest.
He goes limp.
Dennis knows he’s toast. There is no way he can get through this, nor does he want to. He only wants to live long enough to end the redhead who brought this down on him. The fucking bratty cunt who tried to wreck him for spite, and because she thought she could get away with it. He would be doing the world a favor by getting rid of at least one entitlement-hunting little bitch.
He manages his feet to the landing before falling down the stairs, the impact only softened by the cooling mass of flesh that used to be his girlfriend. He swims through her limbs, and makes a path to the kitchen, out the back door and pops the latch free with his boot. He has two rounds left in the snub-nosed.
More than enough for a hundred pound girl.
Part XI:
It’s too cold to sleep. It may even be too cold to write. An arctic breeze blows though the broken windows across the hall from my cell, dropping the temperature to the point where my breath turns to fog. Who called Florida the sunshine state? He should be in here with me.
- Ted Bundy
“Whoever does not obey the law of your God and the law of the king must surely be punished by death, banishment, confiscation of property, or imprisonment.”
- Ezra 7:26
Machete
Evie is flummoxed, on the verge of a panic attack from trying to plan her escape, by the time the gun blasts erupt overhead. She’s been freed from the bondage of the cot and tape for maybe a half hour, and has tried the cellar door to no avail. She’s surveyed the old refrigerator, which contained a couple bottles of water, which she greedily drank, a Pepsi from the past generation, which she hadn’t touched, but had designs on doing so soon, and a box of Arm & Hammer baking soda, for which she had no plans, as yet.
The pegboarded workbench is equally disappointing. Other than the rusted Machete of terror, that he had been looming over her, there was a planer, a staple gun, and a few random bits for a power drill, a handful of zip ties, and a wood saw.
The zip ties and a three quarter inch drill-bit had made a handy little splint.
She had now gathered the machete as her preferred self-defense article; although not ideal, it would be a whole hell of a lot more effective than trying to, slowly, saw an enemy in half. Especially now that she had ruined the saw.
Though the cellar doors were predominantly wooden, the doors were lined with cast iron cross beams and borders. Trying to saw through would prove a useless expenditure of energy for her. Although she hasn’t eaten more than a protein bar in days—and has evidently laid a twenty-pound egg while sleeping off the dope—she wouldn’t be able to slither her way through the spaces between the cold metal brackets, even if she could punch through the thick, treated lumber. She’s also tried to saw through the locking bar, which is laid across both doors on the outside, but it’s made of iron as well, or at least something harder than the saw, and wore the tiny interlaced teeth, made for cutting saplings, into smoothed hot nipples. She finally gave the door up as her point of egress, when she tried and failed to use the saw blade to lift the weighted bar from its stirrups. It would wiggle ever so slightly from the pressure of the blade, but she hadn’t the necessary power nor leverage to lift it from the catch.
Presently she drops the dingy, room temperature Pepsi and hunkers down in anticipation of what the gunfire may bring. She hasn’t any idea who is opening the cellar doors, but her fear overrides her caution and as the heavy footfalls reach her eye level, she readies herself for battle. The single sixty-watt bulb snaps to life and she thinks to herself that she will never see her mother again.
It’s him; she sees his face under a masque of blood and shaving soap as his expression turns to one of torture. He sees the cot filled with blood, shit, and nothing else. Before he can level his pistol and locate Evalyn, she chops down aggressively with the dull and rusted machete. And though the edge has long since seen a proper honing, the weight of the blade, coupled with the gravity of her enraged swing, is enough to sever his Achilles tendon from his heel, and send him careening down yet another flight of stairs, firing a wild shot from his pistol as he goes.
He yelps in agony as his weight crashes down upon itself and steals his breath. He writhes and slithers down the final few stairs, righting his body along the way to face her.
“Fuck you, you little bitch,” he says through bloody teeth, and squeezes off another round, which hammers her in the arm. She drops the machete and recoils from the blast, squatting down near the loudly humming ancient refrigerator.
Dennis clicks past a few more empty chambers before he drops the revolver to the concrete floor, the sound of the steel striking cement echoing over the humming of the fridge.
Rising to her feet, and now with a bloody gash down her bicep from the misplaced shot, she hobbles in the direction of the machete, securing it in her left now, and marches toward the crippled, unarmed son of a bitch. She raises the big blade above her head.
“Go on and do it, whore. Kill me. You know you want to. That’s why I chose you,” he says to her, bringing his ultimate victory to her. He sought, always, to destroy her innocence, to make her like him, and now was the moment. She had a choice: she could walk away, she could escape, but she wouldn’t.
He fumbles for the pistol again and opens the cylinder, shaking out the empty rounds.
The rusted tool in her hands is starting to wobble. She would never sleep again if he were alive. If there were even the slightest of chances he could still be alive—that the boogey man was still under her bed--but she can’t bring herself to end it Dennis pulls out a handful of bullets from his jeans, and starts raggedly jamming them into the chamber. He cannot get purchase on the ejector rod and drops the pistol to the stone floor once more. He turns his empty hand into a child’s finger gun, and aims it at her face.
Pow, pow, like a seven-year-old cop fighting imaginary seven-year-old robbers. He begins to laugh through gargles of phlegm and he is audibly fighting against his lungs as they fill with blood. “Fucking kill me, bitch!” he screams to her, so he can watch her innocence end in the same moment as his life, trading one for the other. He sees her clearly. Not dimly, as she sees herself. He knows her desires and her motives more than she herself does. She will do it. She just needs a push.
He fumbles again for the pistol, as she summons all of her strength.
His body clenches in anticipation. It isn’t a question of whether she will chop his head off, but the question of how many whacks it will take.
Before she can swing, another gun blast fills the room and the machete hits the floor again.
Abigail
The only thing bitterer than the coffee is how she feels towards Carron for giving up. She long ago realized that he was right about this place, and that the coffee was overpriced, and way too acidic to be enjoyable, yet still she comes loyally. She comes because she knows she’ll never bump into him here, and for that one grace, she swills down their wretched coffee and orders extra soy to drown out the shitty taste. It’s a bonus that she gets to make him suffer by forcing him to meet here, on the few occasions she grants him audience. And though he always suggests a more neutral locale, she invariably opts for the acidic home turf of The Coffee Lab. Even its name suggests experimental and toxic connotations. She loves secretly hating it too.
He is here before me. He’s probably been here since we hung up the phone, she thinks.
He looks like shit.
She still misses him; seeing him under any pretenses always stirs up familiar emotions.
Nostalgia.
The nostalgia she’s tucked behind years and layers of hope and reasoning. Hope that he will get better, and reasoning that tells her she w
ill always be better off alone. That she wasn’t wife material then and isn’t any more suited to the task today. That she is too much like Carron to be with him, but that she felt he was the only one who’d ever truly gotten her. This is why he made her weak. He shone a flashlight on her weaknesses and exploited the softness within her. He did this without trying or even knowing. She had fallen for him in Quantico during FBI training. She had watched him burn through his first marriage and still fell for him.
He was distant and scarred deeply; this only added to his mystique, and besides, she had her warts too. She’d lied to him in the divorce. She wanted him to think it was entirely his fault. She had wanted him to give up, and think that she couldn’t love him at his core, so that maybe he would move on.
Carron wasn’t the “moving on” type.
He ruined another farce of a marriage, shortly after their divorce. Proving again that he couldn’t move on. Hell, he’d never even taken off the ring Abigail had gotten him. It was unmistakable with his and her birthstones set in the band. God knows what he told the poor girl, and why he used his old band for their new marriage. It didn’t matter. The third marriage had lasted no longer than the ceremony. She moved out before her boxes were fully unpacked (saving her time, at least), and before the fresh coat of paint had dried.
For a while, Carron kept calling Abigail.
He told her he was sorry all the time; she tried not to hear him. This is why she kept him at bay; nostalgia was useless to her.
She had pushed him to get back on the horse for her own benefit, not his. She felt uncomfortable still being with the Bureau and him sitting home.