by Tony Healey
Stu parks away from Lester Simmons’s house. Much like Ida, he lives apart from the rest of town. His home lies down a dirt road, a couple of minutes’ drive from suburbia. The houses out here are big and old and come with plenty of land. Stu leaves his car door open, and gets closer on foot, careful to stay out of sight. He can hear his phone ringing, and he knows who it will be and why. Harper will tell him this last name on the list is very likely their killer. She’ll tell him to wait for her, to get backup. But suppose they’re wrong—suppose he calls all that in, and the man is innocent. Or doesn’t even live here. The hospital records can be only so accurate . . .
He returns to the car, grabs his phone, and switches it to silent but keeps the vibration on so that he can feel it ringing in his pocket. Stu locks the car, then pulls his sidearm out, checking the clip before sliding the gun back into the holster. He looks up at the house, and the sight of it sends a cold shiver down the back of his neck.
Well, here we go.
“Where does this guy live?” Ida asks.
“I don’t know,” Harper says. “Do me a favor, Ida. Open that file there. The printouts are in the back.”
Ida pulls several loose pages out. “These?”
“That’s it. You’re looking for Lester Simmons,” Harper tells her, checking her mirrors and changing lanes. “I know I’m headed in the right direction, but I need the actual address.”
“Okay, sugar,” Ida says. “Ah, it’s here. Got it.”
“D’you know how to use Google Maps?”
Ida just looks at her. “Google what?”
“Never mind. I’ll have to pull over for a second.”
More time wasted, she thinks. I know what he’ll be doing. He’ll be knocking on the door, confronting the guy. He won’t wait.
She finds a place to stop and asks Ida for the phone. The map takes a moment to load, and now she knows where she’s going. Still, she clips the phone back into its holder so that she can follow the map if she gets lost.
Her palms are sweaty on the steering wheel as she weaves through the traffic.
All she can think is, He won’t wait.
Lester strokes Ceeli’s hair. He is naked but for his head. The torn hood is on; the belt is pulled tight, held in place with the buckle.
He pulls Ceeli’s head back and strokes his cock in her puffy face, rolling his eyes with the thrill of it, the tingle in every fiber of his being at performing such an act.
Lester pleasures himself, reveling in the moment, knowing it will come to an end. Ceeli will have to be moved. He’ll have to burn her body the way he burned Mack’s. But for now, it is glorious.
I feel like a new man.
He once watched a program on television that showed a pupa sealing itself in a cocoon, emerging some time later as a beautiful butterfly. A different beast altogether. After all these years, Lester knows it is his turn.
The man Mama wanted me to be.
Lester’s grip tightens on Ceeli’s hair, and his head jerks back, groaning, as wave after wave of euphoria washes over him . . .
Stu rings the doorbell and waits. When nothing happens he presses it again, tries to see through a dirty, dusty window if there is movement in the house.
None that he can see.
He takes out his gun and walks around the side. There’s a gate there and he has to reach over the top to unlatch it. It squeaks on its rusted hinges, and Stu’s hand flexes on the gun. The backyard is trashy, overgrown in places. There’s a rusted swing. Old trash cans. Stu looks at the house. The door is open a shade, swinging back and forth on the frame as the breeze nudges it.
Someone’s home.
There is a shed in the yard, but he dismisses it. Lester Simmons has to live here and, chances are, he’s in the house.
He moves toward the door.
Lester hears the squeak of the gate and watches from one of the shed windows as a lawman stalks across his yard, heading straight for the house.
His mother’s voice tickles like hairy spider legs inside his ear.
We don’t have no truck with people invadin’ our property lester baby you go get him you teach him a lesson he won’t soon forget . . .
“Yes, Mama.”
When the man’s slipped inside the house, Lester bounds across the lawn and goes after him.
15
As she drives, Harper’s head is foggy, awash with trepidation and a hundred different emotions.
“You alright, sugar?” Ida asks her. “You look ill.”
“I’m okay,” Harper lies. She feels sick to her stomach with worry. She wishes Stu were different, that he’d wait. But she knows he won’t. It just feels right that the last name on that list is the name of the killer.
Ida looks at the phone on the dash. “Don’t look like we’ve got much longer to go.”
“Say, Ida, do you think things will change for you when this guy is caught?” Harper asks her, just to get her mind off what they’re driving toward.
“Perhaps,” Ida says mysteriously. “I think that maybe they might.”
“Would you ever sell your house? Move closer to the town?”
Ida looks out the window, her face unreadable. “I don’t know. That’s a lot.”
“I know it is.”
When Harper thinks that Ida won’t say anything more, she does. “I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”
He can hear the man walking farther into the house. Lester lifts the axe he keeps by the fridge and adjusts his grip on the worn handle. He creeps from the kitchen to the main entrance, where the man stands with his back to him. Lester’s bare feet on the dusty floor make no sound; he holds his breath and is silent as a shadow.
The man is deciding whether to go to the other side of the house or straight upstairs. But he spends too long thinking it over. In the seconds he has hesitated, Lester has closed the gap.
A noise—Lester’s foot scrapes the hard, cold floor as he raises the axe—makes the man turn around, gun coming up. Lester hacks down. The axe slices through the front of the man’s chest. He staggers back, fires his gun to the side. Thunder fills the inside of the house, and Lester has to resist the urge to clamp his hands on his ears.
No. Finish the job.
He brings the axe down again, this time into the man’s shoulder. The heavy blade hacks into him and gets wedged in his shoulder blade. The man lets loose a gargled scream that dies as he falls to the floor. Blood spews from where the axe juts up from his convulsing body.
Lester kicks the man’s gun away. It skitters across the floor. He puts one boot against the man’s chest, and tries to pull the axe free with both hands.
“That’f it,” Lester says, grunting with effort. “Come to Papa.”
Harper lowers her window, pulling up alongside Stu’s car. “Damn . . .”
A bloodcurdling scream pierces the silence. Ida grabs Harper’s hand and squeezes, hard.
“Oh no,” she gasps, looking up at the house.
Harper throws her door open. She passes Ida her phone. “You know how to work a cell phone, right?”
“I can figure it out.”
“Go into my contacts. Find Dudley. Call him. Tell him to get here. The address is on that piece of paper. Tell them everything that’s gone down here.”
“I will.”
Another scream rises, then fades away to nothing. Harper can barely think. “Stay in the car. Press that button there to lock the doors from the inside,” she tells her, walking away, pulling her gun from the holster.
“Jane!”
She turns back.
“Be careful.”
Harper runs to the house.
The man is dying. Lester looks at him, the axe in his hands dripping dark-red blood.
“How doef it feel?”
The man frowns, gasping for air, looking at him with a mixture of confusion and desperation. As Lester squats down next to him, the man looks away, a big tear running from his eye, rolling down his cheek. His breath catch
es; there is a long moment when nothing else happens, then a release of air, one final exhalation.
Lester stands up and considers the man in his hall. There is blood everywhere, mixed in with the dirt on the floor. Perhaps he should cut him into pieces the way he did with Mack . . . Wouldn’t that make sense?
He hears the unmistakable sound of footsteps crunching their way toward the house. The front door is locked. Whoever is coming is likely looking for the man he’s just killed. If they come in by the back door, they’ll see him lying there in the hall. They might hesitate, back off, and call for help.
Lester wants them to come in. He wants to cut them into chunks and watch them die, watch them draw their last breath. Quickly, he runs to the front door and unlocks it so whoever it is can walk straight in.
Then, he hides.
She tries the handle. The front door is unlocked. Harper eases it open with her foot, weapon at the ready, and moves inside. It’s dark compared to the brightness outside, and it takes a second for her eyes to adjust. There is a staircase, doors to the left and right. On the floor in front of her, a crumpled form lies in a widening pool of scarlet blood—Stu. Harper fights the impulse to run to his side. She watches every angle, carefully crossing the entrance hall and dropping to one knee beside him.
“Oh God . . .”
It’s obvious he’s gone, even before she puts her fingers to his neck and attempts to find a pulse. His clammy skin is already cool to the touch.
The tears come, but she fights them back, swallows them down inside for later. There is blood everywhere, his whole body is covered in it. Harper tries not to look at where he’s been cut—or hacked—into. She reaches out and touches his face.
If I just look at his face, he could be sleeping.
Later, she will find a dark, quiet place. She will drink; she will cry; she will let everything out. But for now, her training kicks in. Harper knows that what she is going through, what she is feeling, must be bottled up inside.
There’s a creak, a foot passing on a floorboard, and she is up, gun in front of her. There is a door to her left, leading to a series of shadowy rooms. A door to the right opens into a scruffy kitchen. The whole place is covered in dirt and stinks to high heaven.
Another creak of old wood. Fine dust filtering down from the ceiling.
Harper looks up at the big staircase, at the landing on either side of it over her head. She holds her gun at the ready and backs her way up to the bottom step, watching for signs of movement from the landing. It is empty. Her heart hammers in her chest, her blood pounding through her veins. She reaches the top step and has to decide: left or right.
Should I call out? Get him to surrender?
Harper dismisses the idea right away. Her hands flex on the gun. Her palms are sweaty. She goes to the left, back to the wall. The door on the other side is shut. She might’ve heard it close behind him if he’d gone that way. That leaves the door she is edging toward, swallowing spit to lubricate the sore dryness of her throat, sweat pouring down her back. She glances down, to the bottom of the stairs, where Stu’s body rests in a bloodbath.
“Stay put, we’re on our way,” Dudley tells Ida on the phone.
“Jane told me to call . . .”
“Listen to me. Lock the doors, roll up the windows,” Dudley says. “Stay where you are. Backup is coming.”
Ida ends the call and is left with the phone, the silence of the car, the house in front of her. She unlocks the door and gets out, gripping the cell phone tight in her hand. A thought comes to her. A name. It howls in her head like a storm wind rushing under the eaves: Jane.
Harper licks her lips, swallows, gets ready to peer around the edge of the door frame. There’s no way he’s on the other side of the landing . . . but what if he is? What if he got the door shut so quietly she didn’t hear it? Now she’s not so sure.
I need to call him out.
Everything inside her begs her not to do it.
“This is Jane Harper! Hope’s Peak PD!” she yells at the top of her lungs, waiting for something to happen, waiting for a sound, for anything to indicate the killer has heard her.
Nothing.
Harper clears her throat. Sweat trickles down one side of her face. She cocks her head, wipes it away on her shoulder. The air in the house doesn’t move; it is hot and stuffy. Funky with mildew, dirt, and grime.
Decay.
A floorboard creaks, ever so slightly, on the other side of the wall she is standing against.
He’s there. He’s listening. If he doesn’t come out you’re gonna have to swing around the door frame and take a shot.
She turns, trying to follow the sound with her gun. The wall behind her bursts apart, explodes, throwing her forward against the railing. A cloud of plaster, dust, and debris flies around her. Harper barely registers the way the hard railing jams into her midsection before a body crashes into her. The wooden rail splits, gives way, and the two of them fall, hard.
Harper hits the stairs, and the other person falls just below her with a thud. She pushes herself up, feeling pain all down one side of her chest, across her ribs. Her left forearm tingles as if electricity is coursing through it. But she manages to get up at the same time her attacker reveals himself.
His rapid breathing pushes the white cotton mask in, out, in, out. His eyes glare at her from the crude holes cut into the white material. The belt is around his neck. He is buck naked and cut all over from leaping through the wall at her. There is an axe at his feet, the blade covered in blood.
Harper backs off, coughing on the thick air. She glances to the right. Three steps up, her gun lies beneath the cascading dust. The killer sees it, too. As she makes a dive for it, he comes at her, snarling like an animal, his strong hands finding her skin and pinching so hard she thinks he’ll tear holes in her body. Harper screams, reaches out for the gun, her fingertips barely scraping the bottom of the handle.
The killer claws his way up to her, and when he’s close enough, she realizes there’s nothing else to do. She sinks her teeth into his chest. He screams, a high-pitched wail, and pushes himself off her, rolling away and hitting the banisters. Harper grabs her gun, aims it at him.
The man shoves Harper’s hand away as she fires, and it goes wide, the sound of it like thunder.
The killer wrestles with Harper for the gun, trying to tear it free from her hands, all the while managing to hold it far enough away from him. They end up lengthwise across the stairs, him on top of her. Harper uses what energy she can muster and shoves to the left. They tumble down the steps, the impact of each stair punching her straight in the ribs. She lands on top of him at the bottom and sees that Ida is watching from the front door.
The man thrusts upward with his hips and sends Harper rolling over him, landing in a heap against the wall. Grunting, he clambers up the stairs and grabs the handle of his axe.
He turns.
Ida blinks, backing off one step, then two. The killer cocks his head inquisitively from one side to the other as he takes her in.
“Ruby?”
Ida looks down at her feet. The gun has clattered along the hall to land next to her. Eyes on the man in front of her, she stoops down and picks it up.
He shakes his head. Reaches up, tears his mask away. Blood dribbles from one side of his mouth. The killer walks toward her, the axe dragging behind him, scraping on the floor.
“You killed my mamma.”
That makes him stop. Ida has never fired a weapon. The weight of it, held in front of her, clutched in both hands, is something completely alien to her. She points it at his chest, hoping that her aim won’t be too far off. Her finger caresses the trigger. It feels impossible to press down on it, releasing death.
“I loved her,” he says, coming for her. “I love ’em all.”
Ida looks at Stu’s body on the floor, at Harper watching her with one eye open, looking as though she’s not far from death’s door herself.
“You destroyed them,”
Ida says. She pulls the trigger. The gun jumps in her hand, and the shot goes wild, punching a hole in the wall. The killer flinches away.
“Ida! Give me the gun!” Harper yells.
As the man rounds back on her, Ida skims the sidearm along the floor. Harper catches it neatly, leveling the weapon on the killer. She fires just as he turns to face her. The bullet strikes Lester square in the chest and he is blown back, landing against the bottom steps. The axe falls from his limp hand as he slides to a sitting position, attempts to move, then falls facedown on the floor, blood bubbling up from his nose.
Ida rushes to Harper’s side. Harper is trembling, the gun still clutched tight in her hand, pointed at Lester Simmons’s inert form.
Harper looks at her, panting—her breath coming in ragged gasps. “Ida . . . we need to teach you how to shoot a gun.”
In a daze, Ida looks back at the killer. “I don’t think I ever want to touch one again.”
“Maybe a good idea,” Harper says. “Next time you might shoot a hole in yourself.”
Ida stands, barely hearing her. “Keep an eye on him, sugar. Case he’s still got fight in him.”
Confusion clouds Harper’s face until she realizes what Ida is doing. “No! Don’t go near him, Ida! He’s still alive!”
Ida looks at her with fierce determination. “I have to do this. I have to know,” she says, crossing the landing and kneeling down next to him. The blood continues to bubble out of his nose. The fingers of one hand twitch sporadically.
Harper flops back, knowing the fight is lost. She aims the gun at Lester Simmons. “Don’t touch him . . .”
“I got no choice.”
Ida presses her hands down on Lester Simmons’s warm body, and she is taken away, carried on a hurricane of light and shadow, hot and cold. His fading heartbeat is the slowing rhythm of a cosmic metronome . . .
Lester’s mother rocking back and forth in her chair, knitting needles clicking as she speaks. “Your daddy hated them niggers. He was KKK through and through, yes sir.”