“I wouldn’t.”
“Not you. I meant in the sense of ‘Why would one go out of one’s way…?’ And why drag you into it? Dan, why didn’t you die in the house? That’s really bugging me. Why aren’t you dead?”
“I don’t know, Colt.” Carter was wondering how long he’d been stunned. It can’t have been so very long or Harrelson would be back by now, and he didn’t strike Carter as the kind of guy who would wait for long before going on the offensive. He slowly rolled himself a few degrees over, ostensibly to look at Colt more squarely, but really hoping to feel his phone in his pocket. It had gone. Unless radio silence was enough to alert Lovecraft or Harrelson, then it looked like the cavalry wouldn’t necessarily be riding in anytime soon.
“I don’t think you know, either, Dan. But I have to be sure.”
Carter didn’t like the way this was going and, with an intention to distract, said, “You just happened to have restraints lying around the place?”
Colt smiled. “Well, it’s not my place anyway, Dan. And, yes, they did. The Waite family isn’t much like any other family I’ve ever come across. You might have, being an ex-cop and everything, but I don’t think so. There are Waites in every single one of these houses, Dan. Waite Road really is the street of Waites.”
“I wasn’t expecting inbred hillbillies in Providence.”
“That’s not kind and it isn’t accurate. They’re not inbred. Every one of the Waite men comes from elsewhere. The family name is maintained by the women. They wanted you, you know. I had to talk them out of it.”
“I’m not marrying a redneck anytime soon. Not on my bucket list.”
Colt’s smile returned. “Like you’d have a choice. They’re very persuasive. Not with me, of course. That’s not my relationship with them at all.” His smile faded and his brow clouded. “Very much a business relationship. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there. I need to know how you got out of the house. It’s important, Dan.”
“I don’t know how I did it.”
“Yes, well, can’t really take your word for it. Sorry. Wish I could, but the Waites are insistent, and I can understand their concern. They’ve been living with The Twist for a long time and it’s important to them. Of course it is. Somebody starts just, kind of … shrugging it off … You know we were talking about gods a minute ago? Well, what you did is kind of heretical to them. Blasphemous, even. They’re not happy with you, Dan. Can you understand that?”
Carter looked at Colt. “Colt, you’re in as much danger as I am. Can you understand that?”
Colt broke eye contact to look off and up into the middle distance, thinking. “I know I am, but not from the Waites. I’m too important to them. Y’know, I thought they were just riding on my coattails at first, but now I’m not so sure. I might be riding on theirs. The Twist is tied into their destiny, Dan. That’s how they see it, and I guess they’re right.”
Carter scrabbled around for anything he could use for ammunition, anything he could use to undermine Colt, and settled on recent events. “You screwed up with Ken Rothwell.”
Carter was disappointed when Colt barely reacted. “Yes, I know. That was a mistake. I saw your friend go off with him and thought, synchronicity. I recognized him immediately. I read the papers, you see? I thought, Well, here’s how I leverage one form of power into another. It’s meant to be. But it wasn’t. There’s perceived destiny, something tangible but just out of reach, like the Waites’ destiny. And there’s just seeing a pattern in coincidence. With everything that’s been happening, I thought I’d know the difference without trying, but I was wrong. Rothwell’s whole worldview was so rigid. I guess that’s why he wants to be a politician. Showed him he was wrong about the way things work and that the reality has the most amazing opportunities. I thought he’d like that, thought it would excite him, but no. Crack!” Colt almost shouted it. “More than he could bear. And there go my political ambitions for the time being. Have to be more circumspect about it next time. People like you and me are different, Dan. Special. More than I realized. Turns out there’s a knack to dealing with all this stuff.”
“There’s no trick to how you do it,” said Carter. “You’re a sociopath.”
“Yes,” said Colt, nodding philosophically, “there’s that. I do have a certain degree of dissociative behavior. You don’t though, Dan. You’re a reg’lar guy, a straight-up guy, a pillar-of-the-community kind of guy. Why aren’t you as broken as Ken? What’s so special about you? Good idea to tell me before the Waites lose patience.”
The door opened. Carter couldn’t see who was there, but Colt looked up, nodded, and then said to him, “Oops. Time’s up, Dan.”
* * *
Carter was lifted by his elbows by two men who brought him to his feet, and then off them, dangling so that his toes barely brushed the floor. They turned him to the door. One of the women was leaning by it, watching events proceed with interest. She was wearing a red tee washed to a patchy pink, the transfer on it flaked and indecipherable, jeans that ended at her shins, and sandals, dark brown hair in a scrunchie. She looked to be in her late twenties, all but her eyes, and there was no dating them. She was smiling; Carter doubted it was because she was being polite.
“Hey, remember what they used to say in old Westerns, Dan?” Carter heard Colt say behind him. He put on an accent. “Don’t let them give you to the squaws, boy.”
“Who was that meant to be?”
“Walter Brennan,” said Colt, offended.
“Nothing like him,” said Carter. He was carried out.
In the hallway was a cheap, lurid rug. The men held him still while the woman lifted the rug and exposed a long trapdoor. Carter looked around, looking for anything that might provide an advantage. He couldn’t feel the weight of his pistol at his hip, nor of his backup on his ankle; they could hardly have missed it while securing his feet.
Thinking of the ankle restraints, he looked down and saw that they were indeed made of broad brown leather, but looked more like historical artifacts from some abandoned asylum rather than an upmarket sex shop. They were certainly old, and had seen heavy use to judge from the cracked leather and aged stains on them. The stains looked like they might be old blood.
The woman hooked her finger into the recessed ring and lifted the trapdoor, six feet long by three feet wide easily. From the underside it was plain that the trapdoor was reinforced wood and must weigh a great deal. The effortless way the woman had raised it was something else to worry about. Carter raised the bar of “necessary force” still higher; as far as he could see, the only way to be sure of dealing with the Waites was through the use of lethal force. Part of him was starting to worry that still wouldn’t be enough.
The men started to move forward to what looked like simply a dark pit, but as they drew up to it, Carter saw the top of a set of utilitarian wooden steps descending.
“Wait, you idiots,” said the woman. She said it without vigor or rancor, as if “idiots” was a standard and accepted term for the men of the street. Carter remembered Harrelson’s story about the man who’d married into the Waites. Looking at the two holding him, they looked similar enough to be brothers, and much like the man he’d spoken to on the riverside that time. Yet if what he’d learned was true, the men weren’t related by blood at all. A thought about the lack of children on the street started to form, but he withdrew his attention from it, throttling it before he came to any conclusions he didn’t want to know.
The woman descended the steps until she could reach under the lip and flick a switch. The harsh fluorescent glare of strip lighting flickered into life with the clacking of initiators. The woman walked down, turned, and waited, watching the men as one released Carter’s elbow and gathered up his feet, leading down the steps, his fellow holding Carter under the armpits. The procedure felt very practiced. Carter never stopped looking for opportunities, and he never stopped failing to spot anything at all. It would have been too easy to accept that there was no way out, to sl
ip into despair, to go to his death—for they surely meant to finish him—without hope. Daniel Carter did not intend to do that. He would choose his moment, and he would fight. All noble enough but, as he reminded himself, pointless if the moment never arrived. The bindings were secure and the Waites were watchful. He concluded his best chance would come from an external distraction. If Lovecraft should want to kick in the door and start firing, this would be an ideal moment.
In the meantime, he would keep gathering data in the hope that some fragment of it might prove useful. The steps were not professionally made, but sturdy enough. The cellar floor was earthen, but an underbed of smoothly rolling stone was visible beneath it. The woman wore a knife in a brown leather scabbard on her belt, about a six-inch blade, he guessed. The lighting was a pair of cheap tube lights mounted on a wooden lattice across the ceiling, and again was not a professional job. The walls were irregular and continuous stone was visible in many places; it seemed the cellar had been crudely excavated down into the surface of a large boulder. Lovecraft was sitting in the corner, her hands tied with cord.
Well, shit.
“If you were depending on her,” said the woman, “you made a bad choice.”
Chapter 27
THE VERY ODD FOLK
“So, let’s go back to the top and start again, huh, Dan?” Colt was descending the stairs behind Carter. Carter was still looking for options. There was an exit from the cellar; a crudely cut hole in one wall opened into darkness. Carter distinctly felt a breeze blow from it. Not a dead end, then. Or, possibly a dead end with ventilation. He’d take that chance if he could get an even break here.
“We don’t want to hurt you—”
“So you say,” interrupted Carter.
“It’s true,” said the woman. “You’re interesting, Mr. Carter. We want to know all about you.”
“And I’m telling you nothing. So I guess that’s a stalemate.”
“No,” said the woman, “not while we have your friend. She we have no use for.”
Lovecraft was watching him and must have heard the words, but she didn’t flinch or react. Carter guessed she’d already heard enough threats to desensitize her to them. She looked disheveled, but not beaten up. He wondered what had happened. Then he decided to ask, largely because it was putting off the inevitable.
“How did you catch her? How did you even know where she was?”
“We sent a couple of the men to go around the long way and sneak up on her, Mr. Carter,” said the woman. “As to where she was, the trees told us.” Carter glared at her, but she only smiled lazily. “They whisper all the time. Easy to unnerstan’ them if you only listen.”
“Okay, Dan,” said Colt. He was sitting halfway down the steps. “Crunch time. Tell us what we want to know, or Keturah will start playing with Ms. Lovecraft there. It’ll get messy.”
“Keturah?” scoffed Carter, but he was just playing for time, and everyone in that cellar knew it.
Then Lovecraft spoke. “It’s Hebrew. The second wife of Abraham. Old Puritan name.”
“Well, now, ain’t you educated?” said Keturah Waite, crouching by Lovecraft. “Shame that it’s not really what we wanna know. But Mr. Carter could take a lesson from that for sure. Be a little more forthcoming”—she drew her knife and held it against Lovecraft’s cheek—“afore I start peeling.”
“‘Afore’?” said Carter, clutching at straws. “You people really are inbred.”
“Okay,” said Keturah. She looked unimpressed, even bored. “I’m tired of this shilly-shallyin’. I’m going to cut Ms. Lovecraft’s right ear off now, an’ maybe that’ll concentrate your attention, Mr. Carter.”
“Don’t!” snapped Carter. “Don’t hurt her! There’s no need!”
“You ain’t takin’ me serious, Mr. Carter. There’s a need.”
“I am taking you very seriously! I—”
Keturah looked at one of the men and nodded toward Carter. The man punched Carter in the stomach without hesitation. The surprise caught him as much as the pain, and he tried to double up, his bound feet scrabbling on the floor for purchase as the two men held him up. When he finally stopped writhing and they hoisted him up straight, his eyes were streaming.
“I just want to say…” Lovecraft was speaking, her voice small and frightened. “I just want to say something. Can I say something?”
“Go ahead, sweetheart,” said Keturah. “Talk some sense into your gentleman friend.”
“No,” said Lovecraft. She was at the edge of tears herself. Carter felt desperately useless. It wasn’t right she was suffering. He should have ignored her badass act and told her to stay in the store, handled this with Harrelson. He wanted to apologize to her, but he could hardly breathe. “No, I want to talk to you, Keturah. I want to say something to you.”
“Me?” Keturah Waite smiled, very mildly surprised. “And what have you got to say to me, Miss Lovecraft?”
“I just want to say, you had better let us go.”
Keturah’s smile faded with disappointment. “That’s it?” She raised the knife again. “Okay … fair warning, darlin’, this is goin’ to hurt.”
“You’d better let us go, or you are going to die.”
The knife halted in its movement. “Did you jus’ threaten me, girl?” There was menace in Keturah’s tone now. Not her usual bored feline sadism, but something more atavistic and brutal. “Did you just fuckin’ threaten me?”
“I warned you. Not a threat. I warned you. I’m warning you.”
“Fuck the ear. I’m cutting your nose off.” The knife shifted, changed angle, and—at the sound of a shot—stopped.
Keturah dropped the knife and it rang on a surface of exposed stone. She fell sideways and crawled away from Lovecraft, clutching at her side. When she drew her hand away, it was dark with blood.
The shot had stunned them all. Despite the closeness of Keturah’s body first concealing the sight of the Beretta Pico and then muffling its report, the sound had resonated strongly in the small cellar, bouncing from the rock walls. The man on Carter’s right made no effort to dodge, but only made an incoherent lowing as Lovecraft raised the pistol gripped firmly in her bound hands, her hands shaking and her face creased with fear, and fired again, and again.
Colt was already on his feet and out of there, his shoes clattering on the wooden steps, and the second Waite man followed him at a clumsy lope, shying from the pistol as Lovecraft tried to get a clear shot at him as he ducked behind and around Carter. He ran up the steps on all fours.
Lovecraft fired again, but the bullet struck a step and stuck in the wood.
Keturah was thrashing on the floor, screaming in an endless keening note that never seemed to break for her to draw breath. Her blood splashed and sprayed as she rolled and convulsed. Carter had seen people shot on more than one occasion in his life, but never anything like this. Lovecraft was staring at the shot woman, the Beretta gripped in her bound hands. Lines of blood spatter lay across her clothes and skin. Carter looked down at the shot man. He wasn’t dead, but he was only lying there, his head casting from side to side, as confused as someone shaken from a deep sleep.
“Emily!” he snapped at her. He had to almost shout it before she suddenly looked up at him, startled. “Get me loose! Quick!” He hopped around on the spot until his back was to her and waggled his fingers urgently.
She got up and came to him. “I can’t do it with the gun in my hand!”
“Put it down, then! For Christ’s sake, Emily, please? Hurry! They’ll be getting more men and guns!”
He heard the clatter of the gun being half placed, half dropped to the rocky floor and felt a small relief that the thing didn’t go off.
Emily fumbled at the restraint buckles, made clumsy by her own bonds and her terror. “Why is she making that noise?” she asked as she worked. “Why won’t she stop?”
Carter looked down. The corner of the room where the woman was still thrashing like a landed marlin was dense with blo
od. A human body carried more blood than most people liked to think about, and God knew a little of the stuff could make a fuck of a mess, but this was extraordinary. “I don’t know,” he said. “She should be in shock by now.”
His hand were free. He had never been restrained like that in anything other than bedroom games, and would have loved to have rubbed his wrists and generally felt the Indiana Jones “and in a single bound, he was free” vibe. There was no time. As soon as the wrist restraints grew loose, he shook them off, got down on the floor, and released the ankle restraints, too. Once they were off, he grabbed the Beretta and Keturah’s dropped knife from the floor.
Keturah was still screaming, still thrashing in a pool of her own blood. Carter looked away; maybe it was just the way the cheap tube lights lit the cellar, but the blood just didn’t look right. It was too dark, even for venous blood, and where it lay on the pale dirt between the exposed rock, it seemed too bluish, more a purple than a crimson. He thought of what he had seen by Lovecraft’s car earlier, and then drove the obvious corollary from his mind. This was no time for that. Now was the time for simple, visceral intent and action. If he stopped to think about what was really happening there, what the true nature of their situation was, he might never start again.
“They didn’t search you?” he asked Lovecraft. He made her spread her hands apart like an opening orchid so he could reach the cords with the knife’s blade. The edge cut the cord very easily. It wouldn’t have taken much effort for Keturah to cut off Lovecraft’s nose with it, especially given how strong she had seemed.
“It was sticking into me, the way I was lying, so I put on the ankle rig instead. They didn’t search me at all. Just took my shotgun, and my bag, and my phone.”
As Lovecraft spoke, her eyes kept flicking sideways to Keturah, and then immediately back to Carter. They had to speak loudly because she was still screaming. They looked down at her. Coated in her own blood, her white eyes wide and glaring at them. Carter shook his head, shook it at her vitality and the small sea of blood she had lost yet barely seemed to need. He shook his head and denied the possibility of her. “Not possible,” he said. “Not possible.” He shot her between the eyes, and the screaming stopped as if by the flick of a switch.
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