Sweet Cherry Pie

by J. D. Monroe

  41. THIS LIFE

  WHEN SHE GETS BACK TO TIPTON, she spares Mike another fight with his girlfriend and lets herself into the pop-up camper, which is hot and humid after sitting empty for a week. She cranks up the box fan and flings herself onto the bed.

  This is how the hunt ends. When the dust settles and all the loose ends are tied, she finds a bed to fall into and sleep as much as she can. But it never takes long for the guilty sense of duty to wake up, whispering people are dying, and there’s work to be done.

  She sleeps like a rock until she’s shaken awake by a rattling knock on the door. She flops out of the bed and peeks out through the blinds. There’s a sliver of familiar red hair.

  “Can I talk to you?” Georgia asks when she opens the door. Her face is fresh and clean, but she still looks like hell. Top lip split and swollen like cut-rate plastic surgery gone wrong, forehead bandaged up into her hairline. Her eyes are sunk in shadow. If she’s slept at all, it didn’t do much for her appearance. She’s got a red gym bag slung over one shoulder.

  Charity scrubs at her eyes. “Can we do it over food? I’m starving. Gimme ten minutes.”

  Georgia frowns, almost like she’s disappointed, then nods slowly.

  What are you going to do? she thinks as she changes clothes and dabs on a touch of makeup. She still doesn’t know how to read Georgia. Georgia might be ready to hit the road and never think about hunting again. She might not want to see Charity ever again. The thought of Georgia taking off on her own makes her strangely wistful. Things weren’t so bad, up until the attempted murder part.

  Charity squints into the sun as she emerges from the camper. “What time is it?”

  “Two in the afternoon,” Georgia says.

  “Lunch, then,” Charity says. They walk in silence through the back door to Mike’s. “You want anything?”

  “Not hungry,” Georgia says.

  “We gotta work on that,” Charity murmurs. “Suit yourself.” She walks behind the bar and pours herself a Coke from the nozzle. Mike turns and catches her eye.

  “You want some lunch?” he asks.

  “Please,” she says. “I’m starving.”

  “You got business to settle with your friend over there?”

  “Something like that.”

  “All right,” he says. “Have it up for you shortly. Good luck.”

  She’s barely in the seat across from Georgia when the other girl squirms and blurts, “Here, this is for you.”

  She hauls up the red gym bag and plunks it onto the table, knocking the ketchup bottle off in her hurry. Charity sets the ketchup upright and hooks the bag’s strap with one finger. “What’s this?”

  “Just— It’s for you.” Georgia looks like she wants to crawl out of her skin and fall through the floor.

  “Well, that’s helpful,” Charity says. She unzips it and peeks inside. Her stomach leaps into her throat as she pokes through the contents. If Santa ever visited Charity Lee Pierson, he’d have left her this. There are a few pairs of brand-new jeans. A stack of shirts, even a new bra. She’s not going to ask how Georgia got her sizes. Brand-new phone, still in the box, with a brochure and printout rubber-banded to it. On top, a bank envelope barely sealed shut around a thick wad of cash. The greedy side of her smacks its chops, but the rest of her goes cold. “What is all this?”

  “Well, I kind of destroyed your phone,” Georgia says. “I couldn’t activate it without you, but the instructions are in there. The guy said if you kept your contacts backed up online, it should transfer over fine. I know you need one for the job.”

  Charity holds up the bank envelope. “And this?”

  “It’s…” Georgia squirms. “I just— I don’t know how to make up for what happened. I know the whole thing was a total disaster, and we’re going to part ways after this. This is the only way I know how to make up for it.”

  Charity sighs and pushes the bag aside. She’s going to keep it, that’s for damn sure. But she’s not letting Georgia off so easy. “Is this really about the hunt, or is this about what happened with the knife?”

  “Both,” Georgia says, her face pinched into an expression of anguish. The unreadable mask is gone. “All of it. The things I said to you, I didn’t—”

  “Okay,” Charity says. Mike pauses by the table and sets down a plastic basket overflowing with French fries and a thick cheeseburger. He raises his eyebrows. “Thanks, Mike.” She nods slightly. “Help yourself.”

  “Not hungry,” Georgia says.

  “More for me, then,” Charity says. She douses the fries with ketchup and takes her time eating a few. It’d be a bald-faced lie to say she didn’t enjoy Georgia’s obvious discomfort just a little. “Honestly, I’m less concerned with the things you said than I am about the fact that you fight dirty as shit.” She tries to sound playful, but Georgia looks like she just took a rabbit punch to the kidneys. “I’m joking. Lighten up.”

  Georgia folds her arms tight across her chest. “How is this funny? I almost killed you. You trusted me to take care of the knife, and I failed. And I don’t really blame you for all that stuff, I swear.”

  “Well, I was trying to let you off the hook.”

  “Enough. You joke about everything, but just be serious for once.”

  “Okay,” Charity says. She holds up a finger and takes a big bite of her burger. Georgia’s cheeks flush higher and higher as she slowly finishes chewing, dabs her mouth clean, and pushes the basket aside. “This is me being serious. I’m putting away my food so you have my full attention.”

  “Fine.”

  “First of all, you did mean what you said,” Charity says. “Every bit of it.”

  “But I—”

  “If you want me to be serious, then don’t interrupt me,” she says coldly. Georgia clenches her jaws, then nods. “You meant it. Somewhere deep down. Whatever that thing did, it didn’t lie. It latched on to something powerful in you. You had a whole lot of rage you didn’t want to admit you had. Probably still do.”

  To her credit, Georgia doesn’t deny it. “What was it for you?”

  She drums her fingers on the table. “It was none of your damn business.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “You’re giving me shit about keeping secrets?”

  Georgia sighs.

  “Anyway, I get it. You try to keep it all down and repressed. But I have a tenth grade education and even I know that’s a bad idea. It’s okay to be pissed. Your family died. It fucking sucks, Georgia. You should be angry. Get drunk, punch your feelings out, go have angry sex with a stranger in Vegas, but let it out somehow, for God’s sake.”

  Georgia’s eyes well up as surely as if Charity had popped her in the nose. Good.

  “And you can’t get mad at a ghost,” she says. “I mean, me and Patience killed it. Again. So when you needed someone to blame, you put it on me.”

  “I’m—”

  “No,” she says firmly. “It makes sense, but it’s also completely wrong. Let me tell you my story about that night.”

  42. ONE DARK NIGHT

  IT’S MID-MARCH, and she and Patience are blending in just fine at Daytona Beach Spring Break. If someone asks, they go to South Carolina State, and everyone’s too drunk to notice when their mascot goes from the Pirate to the Tiger to the Galloping Jackass. They like Patience’s tits and Charity’s ass, and every time she turns around, someone is pressing another fruity drink into her hand. They have to leave a couple of guys unconscious on the beach when they don’t understand not interested, but all in all, it’s a good time.

  They’re snoozing off a midday drunk in their seedy motel room, sand in the sheets and windows open to the warm salt air, when both their phones ring. Charity gets hers first. It’s Fox, and he’s not cruising for a hookup on his way through town. Too bad.

  “Sober up. I need you in Tallahassee. Now.”

  The last time Fox sounded this serious on the phone, his father was dying. It’s like cold water in her face, and sh
e immediately dumps an actual glass of cold water on Patience. When the swearing stops, they pack and clear out in ten minutes flat.

  They make Tallahassee by sundown, where they find not only Fox and his older brother, Jason, but over a dozen hunters gathered in a hotel room on the far edge of town. Some she recognizes, some she doesn’t. The ones she doesn’t recognize worry her. She knows pretty much everyone Fox knows, and if they’re bringing in outsiders, that means something big and bad.

  He brings them up to speed fast. Trail of dead bodies across the Panhandle. Each city has played host to a traveling museum exhibit featuring true crime memorabilia, including the electric chair formerly housed at the now-defunct Dellman State Penitentiary. They throw out plan after plan. Finally, they call in a bomb threat to shut down the museum for the day. Officials get a bomb squad in and out in time for a late opening by noon.

  Then Fox’s brother, Jace, pulls the fire alarm and gets thrown into the Leon County Jail for a week until they get sorted enough to bail him out. It’s like this thing is destined to go down. It’s a hunter from upstate New York who suggests a fake giveaway. It’s better than anything else they’ve got.

  So five of them, the ones who can shine and polish well enough to pass for professionals, stand at the doors and convince visitors to sign up for a special drawing for a hundred-dollar grocery gift card. They leave at closing with a list of addresses of every visitor to the museum. It’s a pretty smart plan, until they realize there are twenty-two families but only nineteen hunters—not counting Charity and Patience, who are stuck in the museum to break whatever bad juju is in the chair. All of them spend all afternoon calling everyone on their lists. It’s still not enough. They draw straws for who will go unprotected. They call in anonymous tips about suspicious vehicles outside the unlucky homes. They pray it’s enough.

  They all know it won’t be.

  Charity gets to break back into the museum after closing. One look, and there’s no doubt that it’s the chair. The wood practically moans, and the varnish shifts and swirls like smoke when she looks at it. Touching the metal sends a phantom current up her arm. Patience watches for guards and checks in every few minutes with Fox, who’s on duty at a house out in some swampy burg right outside of town.

  She’s closing off a circle of salt when Patience walks right up and grabs her. “We gotta go,” she says.

  “Security? Can’t you hold them off?”

  “Tom and Glory aren’t answering their phones,” she says. “Fox thinks they’re…” She shakes her head. “We gotta go. The chair can wait.”

  They saddle up and haul ass across town to a sprawling house in a nice neighborhood. Tom’s blue Jeep is parked across the street. The streetlight flickers, and the porch lights are shattered, a carpet of glass glittering on the porch.

  Charity trails behind Patience, stomach turning in circles and winding itself in knots. “Where are they?”

  She trips headlong over a charred black limb that turns out to be Glory’s outstretched arm. Electrocuted, and bad. It reeks, like spoiled meat left to burn on a grill. The flesh falls off the bone, and Charity loses her lunch all over the manicured bushes. For once, Patience doesn’t give her shit about it, just pulls her up and into the house.

  The house is wrecked. Black burn marks zigzag up and down the narrow hallways. It’s like their spirit brought the lightning back with him. There’s a weak whimpering coming from the first door on the hall.

  Patience peeks in, cries out, “Charity!” Then they hear an ear-splitting scream from the end of the hall. “Go!”

  The doorknob is melted, so she kicks the door open in a spray of splintering wood. The ghost is a big, ugly bastard. Prison coveralls, burned spot atop his shaved head from the chair. He’s standing over a crying girl, maybe three or four years younger than Charity, working a knife into the palm of her hand. The girl arches like a bow, eyes squeezed tight as she screams. Charity doesn’t care who comes. She squeezes both triggers of the shotgun and fills the spirit of John Edwin Mitchell—she comes to learn—with silver shot. He evaporates, but she can hear the murmuring hiss as he moves unseen. She plants her feet on either side of the girl and keeps shooting. When she runs out, she pulls a silver knife and flings prayers and pleas like projectiles, calling for God and Michael and anyone else who might be listening. And eventually, Mitchell stops. Eventually, he doesn’t come back.

  But neither do they. Mother, upstairs. Two younger sisters down the hall. All gone, cursed from the moment the sun went down.

  43. FIVE O'CLOCK SOMEWHERE

  “THE REST YOU KNOW,” Charity says. She intently stares into her Coke, while Georgia dabs away tears. “You may not know me that well yet, but you’ve probably figured out I’m an open book. I don’t pull punches. Hell, you can call Fox. He’ll tell you the same story.” She shrugs. “Your family died because John Edwin Mitchell was an evil son of a bitch. He got off on torturing little girls to death, and he was so evil down into his marrow that he managed to hang on to this world and keep on doing it even after he died.”

  “But why us?”

  “Had to be somebody,” Charity says. The same could be said for the knife finding its way into her mother’s grasp. Wrong place, wrong time. “You and your dad stopped by the exhibit, and Mitchell liked the look of you. Hell, he took out two hunters who had thirty years of experience between them. Me and Patience were lucky to even get to you. It sucks. And nothing is ever going to make it right.”

  “Well, that’s helpful,” Georgia says. She takes a deep breath, and her expression goes neutral again, like she’s putting her mask on to hide away. “Life’s a bitch, right? I think there’s a T-shirt for that.” She balls up the napkin and deposits it in Charity’s French fry basket. This is a serious offense, but she lets Georgia slide. “Thanks anyway.”

  And with that, Georgia eases out of the booth and loops her keys onto one thin finger. “Take care, Charity. See you around.”

  She sighs. What is it about Georgia? Patience was wrong. It’s not about having someone to take care of, or someone to look up to her. She’s enough of a mess without having to protect anyone else. But there’s something that she likes about Georgia. It’s not a warzone, like living with Patience, where every conversation is a minefield. In her own way, Georgia can take care of herself, and she’s not looking to score points on Charity every time they come in striking distance. With a little time, they might actually be good for each other.

  And God knows it’s a hell of a lot better than being alone.

  Charity lunges out of the booth and catches Georgia’s wrist. It’s still red and rashy from the duct tape. They match. Pointing that out probably won’t help matters, so she bites her tongue. “Sit down, Barbie.”

  Georgia tenses, swings around to look at her. “What?”

  “Where the hell are you going?”

  Georgia just frowns. “What do you mean?”

  “Sit down,” Charity says. “We’re not done talking. You came to me because you wanted to learn something, right? So listen up, because school’s in session.”

  Georgia’s shoulders slump, and the sight of it makes Charity inexplicably sad. She slides back into the booth, slouching like a pissed-off teenager. “I’m listening.”

  “Georgia, you and me are a lot more alike than we are different,” Charity says. “Damaged goods. You’ve got your family shit, and I’ve got mine. No one ends up living like this because their life is all sunshine and Chippendales.”

  “What are you—”

  “Shut up when your elders are talking,” Charity says, slamming her hand on the table. The silverware jangles, and Mike glances up from the bar. She gives him a thumbs up before turning back to Georgia. “Up until the part where you tried to kill me—”

  “I’m so…” Georgia’s face goes ashen, and her eyes start to well up again.

  “I don’t want an apology,” Charity says. “Seriously. That wasn’t your fault.”

  “Then how come you co
uld stop it? And I couldn’t?”

  “I’m going to ignore the very thinly veiled insult buried there,” Charity says. “This is what I do. I’ve had nasty things, shit you can’t even imagine, digging around my head. Point being, I knew what to do, Georgia. I knew how to fight back. And it still almost got me. No offense, but you didn’t have a chance, and I should have realized that.”

  Georgia sighs. “So what, I just let it go? I somehow forget that I tried to kill you?”

  Charity shrugs and slides her sandwich toward herself again. She removes Georgia’s napkin. Considering what she tangles with on a regular basis, she probably has a superhuman immune system anyway. “That’s your choice, my friend,” she says. “What I’m going to remember is the fact that you have a mean right hook.”

  There’s a ghost of a smile on Georgia’s lips. “So I hear.”

  “Look, shit happens,” Charity says. “I shot Patience in the ass once. Twice, actually, if you count when I got my new crossbow.”

  “I saw the scars,” Georgia says.

  “Everyone east of the Mississippi’s seen then,” Charity says. “Patience is a lot of things, but shy ain’t one of them.”

  “So what about her?”

  “What about her?”

  “Well, it seemed like you two were getting along,” Georgia says. “Kind of.”

  Charity shakes her head. “She’s my sister, and I’ll always love her, but after twenty-six years, I’m ready for a break.”

  “So what about me?”

  What about her indeed? Maybe it’s time to start something new. She’s had her six months of pouting about Patience, and that act is tired. Traveling with Georgia isn’t the worst idea she’s ever had.

  “What about you? You’re not ready to turn in your shotguns and be a soccer mom?”

  Georgia snorts in derision. “Please.”

  “Well, I dig the RV. It beats the hell out of motels,” Charity says. “You do need to learn how to stock a liquor cabinet, but I think you can be trained.”