by Sam Sisavath
Chapter 14
This was it.
The straw that broke the camel’s back.
The end of the road.
The light at the end of the tunnel.
The…
Jesus, he couldn’t even come up with four clichés? If he didn’t know he was in deep shit before, then this pretty much confirmed it. Not being able to come up with four clichés about how up a creek without a paddle he was—
Number four!
He laughed. LOL? Maybe. Or perhaps just a light chuckle at the least. Then again, he might have just opened his mouth and wheezed out some labored breath that had nothing to do with laughing or anything beyond breathing. It was hard to tell at the moment.
He wasn’t even convinced he was actually still alive. All of this could have been a figment of his imagination, something his fevered mind had conjured up just to occupy him as he lay in the front yard of the cabin, dying from his wounds.
Buckshot in the side.
Broken nose.
Right hand…
Did he even have a right hand anymore?
He peeked at it now, not sure he wanted to actually see what was down there, if anything. His hand seemed to still be attached under the khaki shirt he was using as a tourniquet. It looked more like a giant loaf of bread, albeit one that was drip-drip-dripping blood as he trudged through the woods without any real direction. Or a shirt on, for that matter. For some reason, though, he barely felt the cold. He blamed (thanked) his body’s general numbness for that.
Apparently this was his life now—staggering through unknown woods while trying not to bleed to death.
What a life.
At least it was still night out, if the suffocating darkness around him was any indication. And he was far, far from the nearest highway, so all those gunshots probably went unnoticed. It was why he had chosen this area—or, well, the general vicinity, anyway—to do his work in the first place. It was even more desolate two miles down the road where everything would have worked out fine if he had taken her as planned. Of course, he’d had no idea she had come prepared.
Goddamn, she had come prepared!
And yet, things were working out anyway despite all his bungling. He had convinced those college kids (Kids these days are dumber than bags of rocks, amirite?), somehow managed to get the upper hand on Allie (Who’s in charge now, bitch?), and was about to have a little fun with not one, but two people who perfectly fit his ideal type when…
The two hunters.
What was that one of them had said back at the cabin?
“We found your vehicles near the highway! Wanted to see if anyone was hurt and needed assistance!”
The truck.
My truck.
He stopped for a moment and looked around him. Really, really looked around him instead of just stumbling along like a blind fool. He focused on his surroundings for the first time since he had crashed into the woods back at the cabin.
Every tree looked like the other hundred trees he had walked past, and every stretch of ground looked identical to—
I’m lost. I’m so lost.
Christ on a stick.
If he could only find his truck again. His, or the hunters’. Or maybe even Allie’s car. It didn’t matter as long as it worked. All he had to do was get to one of them. That, unfortunately, was easier said than done. Especially out here, at night, with no signs of—
There!
It was the sound of a car moving somewhere in the distance. It came out of the blue, like a sliver of hope, and then it was gone again. But it had been there just long enough—maybe half a second—for him to turn in its direction.
The highway. It was a car driving down the highway.
He began moving toward the origin of the sound. Or where he thought it had come from.
Let me be right. Come on, God, just this once. Have I ever asked you for anything? Besides letting me kill those girls, I mean?
He might have laughed then.
Or cackled.
Or maybe just let out another haggard wheeze.
*
The truck.
All he had to do was reach it before he bled to death in this godforsaken stretch of abandoned woods. Well, not abandoned, exactly. There was that cabin, and those two hunters clearly knew the area, so maybe they lived around here. Maybe he could find their house or cabin or hideout and rest for a while. Wouldn’t that be ideal?
Now that was worthy of an LOL.
And he would have laughed out loud too, if not for the fresh jolt of pain that made his entire body quiver for a few seconds. Who knew getting shot, then having your nose smashed in, and then getting mauled by a dog could hurt so much?
He did, now.
He pushed on anyway, because there was no other choice.
Keep moving, chum. That’s right, keep moving.
One foot at a time.
One foot at a time…
Whenever he thought he might have gone in the wrong direction, he heard what sounded like vehicles moving in front of him. Not right in front of him, of course—that would have been way too easy—but further away.
Cars.
Or, at least, he thought he was hearing cars. Which didn’t really make a lot of sense. This was a lonely stretch of road that cut through the middle of nowhere. The last piece of civilization was almost twenty miles back up the road, and there wasn’t anything on the other side until twenty-five miles later. That was why he had chosen this area, after all.
Not completely true. The cabin, remember?
Right. The cabin. He hadn’t known it was there until tonight. This wasn’t prime hunting ground, so most people stayed away, which meant those hunters had to have stumbled across the vehicles while they were driving on the highway, but for some reason decided to stop and investigate.
Good Samaritans with rifles. And a dog. Just what he needed.
Pfft.
They had ruined things, not just with the college kids, but with Allie, too.
He still remembered the taste of her sister, Carmen. Everything about her had been perfect. The blonde hair, the blue eyes, and the slender figure. Carmen had been twenty or twenty-one (Which one was it? Can’t remember) when he took her…how long ago now? Too long ago, back when he was still young and new at this. He had been sloppy back then. Was that how the sister tracked him down? Using those early days, finding mistakes he didn’t know he had made?
She was smart, that one.
And feisty. Just my type.
Too bad he’d have to kill her. He would have liked nothing better than to keep her around a little longer, but that wasn’t going to happen. At least, not if he wanted to get out of this with his head still attached to his shoulders.
Now that she’d failed to kill him, he had no doubts she would settle for exposing him. He would have to go on the run. Start all over again somewhere. Maybe Mexico. He was fond of Mexican beer. It tasted like piss, sure, but you could fix that with a little Tabasco sauce…
*
He found it.
The truck.
It was parked in the woods with the highway in the background exactly where he had left it. The white Ford was also there, with its shattered driver-side window. In the moonlight, he fancied he could actually see his own blood spatter along the hood of the vehicle where he had done his Dukes of Hazzard slide to keep from being perforated by her shotgun blast.
He expected to see all those things, but not the two state troopers.
One uniformed figure was shining a flashlight into the front seat of his truck through the window, while the second one was inside the Ford going through the glove compartment.
He thought about turning and fleeing back into the woods, but then what? He was weak, half-dead, and he wouldn’t have gotten far. At least this way he could beat Allie to the punch. He had been pretty damn convincing with the kids, and he didn’t even know them. These guys, on the other hand, they were his brothers.
Hey, it worked onc
e before…
Beckard stumbled out of the woods, crunching grass under his shoes and making as much noise as possible. The last thing he needed was to get shot again.
The trooper peering into the truck saw him first and shined his flashlight into Beckard’s face while at the same time drawing his sidearm. “Hold it right there, mister!”
Beckard stopped and threw up both hands, even though doing so caused a tremendous tidal wave of pain to wash over him. He gritted his teeth through it and shouted back, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”
The other trooper back-crawled out of the Ford and rounded the hood, his hand resting on the butt of his sidearm. He also shined his flashlight in Beckard’s face before lowering it to Beckard’s right arm, then finally down to his exposed gauze-wrapped side.
“Stay right there until I reach you,” the first trooper said. He stepped closer before a spark of recognition spread across his face. “Holy shit. Is that you, Beckard? Where’s your shirt?”
Beckard lowered his arms and sighed with relief. “Yeah, it’s me, Pratt. Can you guys get me to a hospital? I think I’m about to bleed to death here.”
He sat down on the ground and leaned back against a tree. Gnarled bark pricked at his bare back, but it was nothing compared to the pain coming from the rest of his body, so he easily ignored it.
He was tired. So, so tired.
Pratt and the other state trooper, whom Beckard recognized as Barnes, moved toward him. Barnes was talking into his radio while Pratt crouched next to him and shined his flashlight in Beckard’s face again before lowering the beam to his bare chest, then to the shirt wrapped around his bloody arm.
“Jesus Christ, what the hell happened to you?” Pratt asked.
Yeah, I can definitely make this work…
“There was a woman,” Beckard said. “She’s dangerous, and she has a shotgun…”
Chapter 15
The girl was shaking as Allie removed the duct tape from her mouth, then used the knife she had gotten from the kitchen to cut the strip of duct tape.
“Stay here,” she told Rachel. “The both of you.”
Rachel nodded and scooted over to Wade as Allie did the same to his binds.
He sighed with relief when the duct tape was removed from his mouth, then sucked in a large breath. “Where are you going?”
“After him,” Allie said.
“You’re crazy. That guy’s a maniac.”
“That’s why I’m going after him.”
Rachel was glued to the dog across the room, still sitting next to its owner. If it was aware of their existence inside the cabin, it didn’t show it. She wondered if it knew its master was dead. Or did it think he was just sleeping? How smart was a dog, anyway?
“Should we…” Rachel started to say.
“Leave it alone,” Allie said.
“You saw the way it clamped down on his arm?” Wade said. “I can’t believe he’s still walking around out there after that.”
Allie turned to the window and peered out at the darkness again. Wade was right. Beckard was out there, somewhere. The way he had been bleeding all night, it was a miracle the man was even still alive. If she was lucky, he had fallen unconscious somewhere in the woods not far from here and all she’d have to do was track him down and put him out of his misery.
If I’m lucky. Because I’ve been really lucky tonight.
Yeah, right.
She looked back at the college students. “Rachel, do you still have your phone?”
The girl nodded and pulled her cell phone out of her pocket and handed it over. “Do you really think he called the police earlier?”
“I don’t know, but we can find out.”
Allie took the phone and punched up the calls list. The most recent was less than two hours ago. It wasn’t, as she had expected, 911, but a string of numbers that looked almost random. She pressed redial and put the call on speaker.
A computerized voice answered. “The number you have dialed is no longer in service. Please hang up and try again.”
She ended the call. “I guess not.”
“Was he even really a cop?” Wade asked.
Good question.
She had been trying to figure that one out since Beckard revealed himself in his state trooper’s uniform. If he really was law enforcement, it explained so many things, but she couldn’t pretend as if he wasn’t capable of another lie. Beckard had proven all night just what a good liar he was.
“I don’t know,” Allie said. “I spent so many years looking for him, studying everything he’s done that the cops and the papers knew about. Not once did it occur to me that he might have been a cop. A state trooper. But it makes sense, now that I think about it.”
“You’ve been searching for him,” Wade said. It wasn’t a question. “How long?”
“Ten years.” She pulled the handgun out of her waistband and walked to the window, letting the chilly air wash over her. “How far are we from the highway, Wade?”
“A mile, maybe,” Wade said. Then, “Aren’t you going to call the cops?”
Allie looked down at the phone.
“Ma’am?” Wade said.
She was surprised by that, but then realized he wasn’t wrong. She was thirty-three and at least ten years older than him. Wade looked barely twenty-one, maybe twenty-two at the most. He was just a kid.
Like Donnie, dead in the kitchen.
Or Sabrina, in the bathroom.
Like Carmen…
Beckard’s victims. That was the point of tonight—to keep him from taking more lives. But she had screwed that up, and Donnie and Sabrina had taken the brunt of that failure. And he was still out there, right now…
You can run but you can’t hide, you sonofabitch.
“Not yet,” Allie said. She walked back over and tossed the phone to Wade. “Give me until dawn.”
“Dawn?” Wade said, confused.
“Before you call the cops.”
Wade exchanged a worried glance with Rachel. Then he looked back at her. “Why? What are you going to do between now and dawn?”
“I’m going to hunt him down.”
“But why? He’s gone. All we have to do is call the cops and wait for them to show up. The real cops. They’ll take care of it. Take care of him.”
“It’s safer that way,” Rachel said, clutching Wade’s arm.
Allie handed the pistol to Wade, who took it hesitantly.
“He killed my sister,” Allie said. “And he just killed your friends.”
Wade’s eyes darted to Donnie’s half-visible body in the kitchen.
“Do you know what the cops will do when they find him?” Allie asked. “They’re going to put him in prison and he’s going to sit there and wait for a year—if we’re lucky—while he goes on trial. More likely, he’ll spend years inside with a nice comfortable bed, eating three meals a day and exercising in the yard, while the trial drags on and he becomes a celebrity. Girls will send him letters, and he’ll smile for the camera and mock everything that’s decent. Even if he’s convicted, there will be appeals. A lot of them. Five years, maybe more, until he gets what he deserves for killing your friends. For killing my sister. For killing all the other sisters and wives and nieces.”
She paused for a few seconds to let her words sink in.
“Do you want that?” she continued. “Can the two of you live with that? I can’t. It took me a long time to get here. Trust me when I tell you, you don’t want to live the next five or ten years waiting for him to get what he’s got coming. That’s no way to live.”
Wade’s face had slowly hardened as she talked, and she knew she had gotten through to him. He looked over at Rachel and, to Allie’s surprise, the younger woman nodded, her own face looking just as grim and determined.
She’s a lot tougher than I gave her credit for.
“Okay,” Wade said. “We won’t call the police until dawn. That should give you enough time to hunt the sonofabitch down.”
> Allie nodded gratefully, then walked over and picked the shotgun up from the floor. Wade and Rachel watched her curiously as she reloaded the weapon with the extra shells from the side carrier.
“I won’t be coming back to the cabin, Wade,” Allie said. “If you hear someone coming and there aren’t police sirens, you should shoot first and ask questions later.”
Wade stood up from the floor, pulling Rachel with him. “We’ll be fine,” the young man said. “Don’t let the bastard get away.”
She smiled at them and walked to the open door.
Allie stopped next to the dog. It lifted its head slightly and looked up at her with large brown eyes. Was it asking her a question? Maybe about its master?
She crouched next to the animal and stroked its head, forgetting that less than ten minutes ago it had tried to bite its way through Beckard’s arm. It might have sighed (did dogs sigh?), before laying its head down on its chin to let her run her fingers through thick, blood-matted fur. Beckard’s blood.
I hope you’re bleeding to death out there right now, you piece of shit.
She put her palm in front of the dog’s head and the animal licked it. “Stay, boy. Stay with your master.”
It seemed to groan in response, then returned its stare to its unmoving owner.
She stood up and left the cabin.
Her side still hurt, and the ribs that Beckard had broken made her wince with every step. She hadn’t felt the pain when she was running around earlier, thanks to the abundant adrenaline. It was gone now, and she couldn’t avoid it any longer. And she didn’t want to. Pain helped her concentrate on the moment, on what awaited her out there.
I’m coming for you, Beckard.
Every step, every breath, reminded her of those ten years of research, the six years of training, and the three years getting ready for this one moment. She thought it had passed after the bad turn earlier, but things had reset. She had a second (third?) chance, and the night wasn’t over yet.
It didn’t take her very long to pick up his trail. All she had to do was follow the bloody drops, still fresh, on the grass. They led her around the minivan, where she spotted handprints along the side of the vehicle. How the man was even still alive, much less fleeing while bleeding like this, was mindboggling. Maybe, like her, he was just determined not to die until the job was done.