Desert Son Trilogy: Desert Son, Wayward Soul, Spiritual Intervention (Books 1-3)

by Glenn Maynard

  He then had a flash of the scuffle he and Reggie had gotten into earlier. He had been kicking Reggie in karate-like fashion, and Reggie was returning the favor. They were exchanging blows, but that’s where his memory faded.

  Carter thought how great it was to see his Brenda again, but he dearly missed what he had just moments before. He looked back up at Brenda, who continued pressing towels against his wounds. “What did I miss?” he asked.

  “You missed plenty,” said Brenda. She sunk down to his chest and squeezed him tight. “Don’t ever do that again against your will.”

  “I didn’t choose to nearly get killed. It chose me.”

  “That was so scary,” Brenda said, her voice cracking and breaking up as she covered her mouth with both hands, adding additional smudges of blood to her face.

  Carter pulled her down to him again. “Come on now. I’m back. I’m here now.” He looked into Brenda’s eyes and they were red and puffy. He knew that she had been crying, and by the looks of it she had been crying for quite a while. She looked like she hadn’t slept in days. She had suffered greatly too, and had cuts and scrapes on her face, arms and legs. The three survivors were in really bad shape, but it was a miracle they survived.

  “I thought I lost you for good this time,” Brenda said. “It’s one thing to have an out-of-body experience voluntarily, but the involuntary ones are scary as hell, because you very well may never come back. That was bad.” She wiped the tears away from both eyes with her hands, and then turned to Basement Brenda. “Are you okay?”

  The girl turned and looked up at Carter and Brenda, and the reality of what she had just gone through seemed to hit her like a ton of bricks, and she started wailing. Her uncontrollable sobs muffled whatever it was she was trying to say. Carter could see that she was not physically okay either. Her swollen eye looked as if her vision would be jeopardized. She had fresh scars on her face and arms. Her long black hair was all disheveled, and she looked like she was about a week removed from her last shower. It didn’t appear that she was bleeding anywhere at first sight, but perhaps she was… internally anyway. She had retreated to the corner of the kitchen and was catatonic.

  “I’ll get you some water,” Brenda said. She got up for a glass of water, and then returned and handed it to the girl, who poured a couple of splashes over her face, then drank the rest. Brenda refilled the glass three times. She then walked over to Reggie and grabbed his wrist. “No pulse,” she said, dropping his appendage, which made a blood-splash about four inches out. Then she moved to the kitchen phone on the wall. She lifted it up and there was no dial tone, so she hung it up. “Reggie must’ve cut the lines. We’re going to have to drive to the Police Station for help.”

  “The Police Station,” Basement Brenda said, lifting her head up and looking at them squarely for the first time. “Why would we do that?”

  Brenda looked at her in disbelief. Carter could only imagine that Basement Brenda was hiding something from them, and that’s why she was averse to contacting the police. She had just been kidnapped, and her captor had just been killed, and there were actually three people dead at one point, and she did not want to contact the police? All of them needed treatment for their injuries, and questions would be asked. They had to get medical treatment at a hospital soon, and there was no way around it, or they too could die.

  “There’s a girl dead downstairs!” Carter could not understand her objection. “There’s a murderer dead right over there. He kidnapped you. He tied you up. He put you under the basement stairs. You were his caged animal. He nearly killed me, and he surely would have killed Brenda… had we not intervened. It’s by the grace of God that Brenda is alive… both of you Brendas.”

  “I might have killed the girl,” confessed Basement Brenda in a soft, guilt-ridden voice.

  “What?” Brenda asked.

  “What?” Carter followed. They couldn’t even process that statement and did not know where to go from there, wondering if by some outrageous chance she was covering for Reggie, even though he was very dead. Here they were with this girl, who had just been held captive in the basement, terrorized and abused by her explosive boyfriend, and she wanted to just forget about everything as if it never happened. Reggie may have been dead, but there was so much more that had to be reported.

  “I might have killed the girl,” she repeated.

  “What do you mean when you say you might have killed the girl?” Carter fidgeted with his hands, trying to process this confession. She was still crouched down in the corner, sitting on her butt with her arms wrapped around her knees as she rocked back and forth.

  “I came home and caught her in bed with Reggie,” she said. “I confronted them, and she tried running away. I chased her out the door and… tackled her in the yard. I was so damn angry. Thankfully we don’t have a lot of neighbors… because she was totally naked trying to hold her boobs with her arms as she ran. I had a piece of wood that I had grabbed as I was running after her. I had the advantage with smaller boobs… plus I was wearing a bra.” She chuckled through tears for a moment, and then returned to her story. “It was easier for me to run, so that chick had nothing on me… besides… bigger boobs, but for once that was a girl’s downfall. Reggie could not get dressed fast enough.”

  “Oh my God! So how did both of you end up in the basement,” Carter asked, and Brenda nodded in agreement as if she was about to ask the same question.

  “Reggie pretended that it was okay, and that the girl had it coming. I hit her over a dozen times in the head. I was so enraged. I was wondering why the board kept sticking to her head when I hit her. Afterwards… when it was all over for her… I realized that there was a nail sticking out of the board. I just lost it! Did quite the damage, though. I swear I must’ve gone insane… there’s something to that temporary insanity plea… for sure. I was there and I didn’t know it.”

  She again put her face in her hands. She cried hard, and then tried to regain her composure when she started to speak. “Next thing I knew… I was crying in Reggie’s arms, and the issue was not Reggie cheating on me… it was where do we hide the body so I don’t spend the rest of my life in jail.” She again put her face in her hands and began to hyperventilate.

  “Try to calm yourself,” Brenda said. “We need to find a way out of this. I realize how traumatic this is for you. I know Reggie. I used to be you. Reggie must have gotten worse after I left, but he was pretty bad before I left. That’s why I left. So tell me… what happened after that?”

  “Reggie convinced me that it was a one-time deal and he would never do it again…not with her, anyway. He was big enough of a man to promise that much. Damn asshole! So we dragged her body back into the house and into the basement. We patched up her head wounds… so the blood would not continue to ooze out of her… slutty body. Then he put her body in that closet… in the basement. We had to clean up all of the blood inside and out of the house. It was everywhere. It was so gross, and I always had trouble with seeing blood.”

  “So how did you end up being tied up in the basement?” Carter asked.

  “After Reggie got all the help he could out of me, he just wanted me out of the way. He wanted to wipe the slate clean. That’s what he actually said to me… in those words… wipe the slate clean. What a fuckin’ coward, huh?”

  Carter and Brenda nodded in agreement, but they still needed as much out of the girl as they could get in order to formulate a plan of their own. The girl looked uncomfortable with the lull in the conversation, together with two sets of eyes begging for more. She opened up the floodgates with the rest of the story because she knew they needed to act quickly, and the details of her story needed to get out in order for a plan to be hatched.

  “He wiped the slate clean by overpowering me and tying me up as tigh
t as ever with bed sheets. These were the same bed sheets that we made love on five times a week… those same sheets that had been exposed to such pleasure were used to cause such pain.” She put her head down in her hands as recreating this nightmare seemed very hard for her to do, as if she was actually reliving it. “He used a box cutter to get the rip started… and then he tore the pieces that were used to bind me. Carter… that was the same box cutter you used to free me from my confinement. He tied me up and I was here for about a week.” Her sobbing increased, but her story went on. “He would feed me… once or twice a day… hit me… when he didn’t approve of my attitude. Dumb fuck. GOD… he got what he deserved!”

  Brenda reached over and gave her a hug. She understood the mental torture that Reggie was capable of putting people through. It was a deadly life. This is where naïve young girls go to die. Whether they actually died or lived to tell about it… well, those seemed to be the two scenarios. If you lived to tell about it, then you escaped from his Alcatraz.

  As Carter watched the two Brenda’s hugging, he realized that this was probably the tragic event that Angie had envisioned. It had all the ingredients of a horrific event, but maybe Angie wasn’t aware that Carter ended up coming back to life. This was actually a good thing because nobody worthy died in the end. It was certainly nothing that he would choose to happen in their lives, but it was almost a relief that they had made it through the traumatic event. They hopefully would be able to reconnect with Angie and tell her that the traumatic event is now in their past. He was in terrible pain, but as he looked at the two Brenda’s during their extended hug, he smiled a bit, realizing that his lease on life with his Brenda would be extended.

  “So you can’t go to the police because you are responsible for the girl’s death,” Brenda said. “That’s a tough one. I know what it’s like to be cheated on. It’s not pleasant, and I can see the temporary insanity plea having teeth, but there is no guarantee.”

  “Why don’t we pin it on Reggie,” Carter said.

  “Are you insane?” Brenda asked.

  “Keep going,” Basement Brenda said, both ears to Carter.

  “Reggie’s dead. It would be more believable that Reggie killed her than it is that you killed her.”

  “Why, Carter?” Brenda looked at him in a chauvinistic way. “Is it because he’s a guy?”

  “Don’t you want this one?” asked Carter. “Are you really going to argue this point? Yes… there… I said it. Reggie is a guy who is stronger than she is because she is a girl. He’s probably 230 pounds and she’s 100. Eyes are on Reggie. He killed that girl… because… I don’t know, but off the top of my head… she was going to tell Reggie’s girlfriend that Reggie was having an affair with her. He tried to break it off and… the scorned woman syndrome kicked in. I mean, come on… do we owe Reggie any favors?”

  Carter got two looks, but the looks softened when they saw that he had a pretty solid argument.

  “So how do you suppose we pull this off?” Basement Brenda asked.

  Carter made a face as he pondered the question. He looked over at Brenda, and she could only offer a look that indicted it was entirely his idea. “We have to contact the police.”

  “What happens if we don’t,” asked Basement Brenda.

  Carter took a few moments to answer. “Then… we all walk away and live our lives with a guilty conscience.”

  “Great,” said Basement Brenda, “I’m all for that.”

  “We all have to agree on a plan,” said Brenda. “I know what you want to do. You want to pretend none of this happened. I get it, but there are two people dead here, and all they have to do is go through Reggie’s history… and they will be knocking at both of our doors. You have to be smar... ”

  There was a loud boom and the front door was kicked open from the outside. “Freeze! Police! Let me see your hands! Let me see your hands! Everybody get down on your stomachs and show me your hands!”

  Before the three of them could process what exactly was happening, there was a swarm of police activity busting into their lives in what instantly became a very chaotic scene. The three of them were shoved to the floor and handcuffed. It happened that fast. One moment they’re having a discussion about walking away from a crime scene versus doing the right thing, and the next moment they’re being forced to do the right thing.

  Their options went from two to one. No longer could they walk away from this. Carter could see nothing because they all had been shoved to the ground face first. He knew only that he could taste the dirty floor. He didn’t know if there was a SWAT team or local police or even the FBI, but he did know that there were a lot of them. He could hear footsteps as they were securing this crime scene, spreading through the house like a lava flow.

  There appeared to be about five or six police officers on the scene, so it was unclear if this was a planned sting against Reggie or whether somebody heard or saw something. It didn’t matter. They were here, all of them, and they weren’t leaving anytime soon. They had a lot of work to do, and the last thing Carter wanted to do was hinder the investigation. He had nothing to hide. Brenda had nothing to hide. In fact, she was a victim here. As for Basement Brenda… well, the jury was out on her, but she may get off on a temporary insanity plea. She wasn’t really the criminal here, either. She was more so the victim.

  “Anybody else in the house?” screamed one officer who had his gun drawn and his foot resting on Carter’s back. “How many are in the house? Are there other people in the house?” Every word that came from the officer was a loud scream.

  “If you take your foot off my back I can tell you.”

  The officer took his foot off Carter’s back and patted him down, apparently satisfied that he was not a threat at this moment in time. A female officer patted down the girls carefully, and released their shackles.

  “The three of us are the only ones alive. There are two people dead.”

  “Where are they?” asked the officer. A helicopter could be heard overhead. Sirens blared through the once silent neighborhood. Flashing lights from the police cars coincided with the noise.

  “One’s right over there,” said Carter, pointing his shackled fists to the pile of Reggie by the far window, “and the other’s… in the basement.”

  “What happened?”

  Carter paused for a second and realized that his voice was the only one that was going to be heard. The girls put it all on him since it was his grand idea. During his pause, he realized how much of a scumbag Reggie really was and how he had destroyed lives. He was a sick man. He looked at the two girls and saw the intense pain in their eyes. They had both lived in hell for a time, but Reggie had gotten his due. Carter realized that none of this would have happened had it not been for Reggie, and he wanted to hold him solely responsible.

  “Here’s what happened this morning,” he began, pointing his shackled fists to Basement Brenda. The officer then took the cuffs off him. “This girl here was dating Reggie… the dead man over there.” Carter cleared his throat, pointed and then looked up at the officer to make sure he was watching and listening. He also needed to clear his head and think of how to proceed. “Reggie decided to have an affair with… the dead mistress in the basement. When he tried to break it off, the mistress was going to tell Reggie’s girlfriend about the affair, so Reggie chased her out into the yard and clubbed her to death.”

  “Clubbed her to death with what?”

  “With a board. Brenda and I happened to be driving by only because she wanted to show me where she used to live. She wasn’t sure that Reggie even lived here still.”

  “Stop right there,” came a voice from behind.

  Carter turned around and saw who else, but Officer Barney. “Jesus… are you the only co
p in town?”

  “I’m not following you, Carter… it’s just… whenever something terrible happens… you are somehow involved. You seem to be very much a part of my job.” Officer Barney had a stern, somewhat fed up look pasted onto his face as he flipped his little notepad page to a clean sheet, prepared his pen to take over the investigation from the initial officer on the scene. “I’ll take it from here,” he said to the first responder, before turning back to Carter.

  “Now let’s take it from the top. First of all, who is the girl that you said was dating Reggie?”

  “Brenda,” said Carter.

  “Isn’t Brenda dating you?”

  “No… I mean yes… but they use that name for other girls.”

  “Smart ass. Always the funny man. This is a serious situation you got yourself caught up in, Carter. I suggest you answer the questions straight. Are we clear? Most of your situations are serious. Now let’s try this again. Both of these girls are named Brenda?”

  “At least.”

  “Here we go again. What do you mean when you say at least?”

  “Our friend Reggie in the kitchen seems to be attracted to girls named Brenda. Apparently my Brenda had a big effect on him when they were together, before I came around. I don’t know, officer. It just seems like he was a really demented guy.”

  “Oh, he was demented, all right!” Brenda said.

  “Talking to Carter.”

  Brenda rolled her eyes, which she did most of the time Officer Barney spoke to her. He just didn’t like her, and it was obvious. The feelings were very mutual. Carter tried to take the attention off of Brenda in order to keep her out of trouble, but it seemed Carter fared no better in this officer’s eyes. He didn’t care for either tongue. Everything he said seemed to have a sarcastic tone, but that wasn’t always what Carter was trying to accomplish. What good would it do him to wise off to an officer of the law, especially in this situation.