Fear the Darkness: A Thriller

by Becky Masterman

  “How did you kill Joe?”

  “The kid bragged about drinking, but he couldn’t hold his liquor to save his life. He came up a few times, but it was easy to hold him under with the pool strainer.”

  “Jacquie was right.”

  Mallory shrugged and tilted her head toward Owen. “For now he’s not going anywhere.”

  She might have been doing her best to be all tough gal, but I knew her well enough to know she was nervous. The roll of her eyes was to cover up the fact that they were jumping. Her whole body was kind of jerky, not the usual fluid moves I had been accustomed to. I didn’t think she was nervous at the thought of killing, just nervous about the possibility of making a mistake that would get her caught at it. Afraid the killing might fail somehow.

  Still, for all her nervous twitches she had enough wits about her to stay far enough away so I couldn’t grab the gun, but close enough so that I could tell she could hit a vital organ. She’d been a nurse; I figured she knew anatomy well enough.

  She told me to stay where I was, and she stepped close to the bed and kicked the gun further under the bed. She pulled the tote out with her toe and reached down for it, still keeping her own gun trained on me. Good balance; she was a dancer, after all. She sat on the edge of the bed and reached around inside the bag while I kept my eyes on her. I could feel Owen’s eyes on her as well, while I think both of us willed to be able to move just a little, and fast enough, to knock the arm that held the gun. She was a rightie, and made sure she kept her gun in that hand while she felt around inside the bag with her left. The first thing she found was my cell phone. Keeping both her eyes and gun trained on me, she was able to turn it off. Then she found the car keys and tossed them to me. I caught them neatly.

  “Okay, let’s go for a drive,” she said. She gestured with the gun for me to finally stand, and I did so. I looked over at Owen. His eyes had moved as far to the right as he could manage, trying to see me.

  “Sit tight, Owen. I’ll be back for you,” I said.

  Mallory didn’t bother to laugh. “Owen will be too busy. We have a date to play the Choking Game now that I know how well it works,” she said. “Out the door. Keep your arms by your sides.” With a sense born of long experience I could feel the gun trained on my back, so one well-aimed bullet would sever my spinal column, and if not that, at least hit something important on either side of it so a second shot would finish the job.

  We walked through the living room and out the front door. When we got into the front yard I glanced around, but everything was customarily quiet. No one passing by on the street way down the steep drive could see us from where we stood in front of her house. When we got out to the car she made me go around to the back and open the trunk.

  “Get in,” Mallory said.

  “I still don’t know why you don’t just shoot me,” I said again.

  “I could. Enough guns go off in this part of the world that nobody pays attention. And I will if I have to. But I really don’t want to hurt you. I just want to take you somewhere where you can’t do any harm.”

  Whatever she said, I didn’t think getting in a trunk was a real good idea.

  I turned to run. It’s always better to run because it’s really hard to hit a moving target.

  Mallory fired. I heard the sizzle and smelled that combination of what seems like burnt hair and sulphur before I felt the pain. Lucky shot—it barely grazed my left thigh, but the impact made me stumble, and I rolled to a stop just before the driveway descended.

  “God damn it, Brigid. Why did you make me do that? If you’re not screwing up one thing you’re screwing up another. Get off the ground.”

  “I think I need my stick. It’s in the backseat.”

  “That one with the little blade at the bottom? Forget it. Crawl to the car and use the fender to get yourself up.”

  I did that.

  “Now show me your leg. Does it hurt much?” Mallory took off her Eileen Fisher overblouse and threw it to me. Awfully solicitous, that blouse. Her words reinforced her action. “Tie that around your leg to help the bleeding, and we’ll get it taken care of when we get where we’re going.”

  Once I did that, she said, “Now face away from me and throw the keys on the ground behind you. Then get in the trunk.”

  Understandably, I hesitated.

  “Look, Brigid. I don’t want to hurt you. I just want to take you somewhere so I’ll have a head start on whatever you do next. But you know now I’ll kill you if I have to.”

  She wasn’t tying me up, and that gave me all kinds of options. Safety latch. Fold-down backseat. Surprise when she opened the trunk. I tossed the keys and got in.

  “Thank you,” she said. “You got me into this mess, the least you can do is die quickly.”

  She shut the trunk. I immediately felt around. No safety latch in this older model.

  Though the breeze outside wasn’t Africa hot, the trunk was. It was also not terribly well soundproofed. She must have picked up the keys where I threw them. I could hear her getting into the driver’s side and turning on the ignition. She spoke, but not to me, practicing her words in what must have been her way long before I met her.

  “Yes, she was here, Carlo. She asked me if I wanted to go for a hike, but I didn’t have anyone to look after Owen. She must have left, oh, about three hours ago. I can understand your concern. Would you let me know when she gets home?” She paused as if listening to her own words and then started again. “Uh-huh, she was here, but she left hours ago! I don’t know, maybe three? She wanted me to go hiking, but I couldn’t leave Owen. That idiot, she should have known not to go by herself at her age.” She repeated this second version with a different tone, this one frantic. Then once more, hitting a tone between the first and the second. Only this time, she added the phrase “No, she didn’t say where. She seemed troubled.” Apparently pleased with that, she did what I felt was a neat three-point turn and pulled out of her driveway.

  Die quickly, she had said. Tucked safely in the darkness, in the heat, I figured out her plan. She wasn’t going to road-trip me. She was going to drive around until I succumbed to heatstroke, and dump my body on a hiking trail.

  Fifty–four

  Cause of death, hyperthermia.

  This was what George Manriquez would dictate into his drop-down microphone while doing the external examination of my body during autopsy, if there was one. If I was found before the coyotes had fought over me with the buzzards. Or if I was found still locked in the trunk, the car dumped out in the desert where no one would find it for days. You could do that in the desert and you didn’t have to go far. I imagined my still-unscavenged body lying naked on a gurney under George’s gaze, neither of us finding the situation absurd.

  Two possible causes of hyperthermia are excessive heat, causing stroke, and adverse effects of drugs. In the case of Brigid Quinn, a puzzling combination of the two, heat and high levels of tetracycline antidepressants, proved deadly.

  Manriquez would have taken blood, and this time would have had a faster analysis done than when Joe Neilsen died. He would mark how I had elevated levels of antidepressants in my system. If they did an investigation, Mallory might helpfully provide information, suggesting that the detectives do a search of my house, that I had been concerned about my niece poisoning me. Carlo would reluctantly corroborate this. The evidence would mount against Gemma-Kate. Anything she said in her own defense, any accusation of Mallory, would just look like more of her lies. Carlo would see this, too. He would be convinced that I had been right all along, and that Gemma-Kate had finally succeeded in killing me.

  But I wasn’t dead yet. For now I was wedged more comfortably than a tall woman would be inside the spacious trunk of Carlo’s Volvo. The atmosphere was close, but not enough to suffocate. Mallory would have thought through that in advance and known that if she was going to drop my body in the wild, heatstroke would be a more plausible cause of death than suffocation. Trunks have some ventilation, and if
I could figure out where this one’s was coming from, I might find a way out. I wondered how she would account for the wound that had started throbbing in my leg.

  The wound reminded me that Mallory had seemed concerned about it. Why? Because if I got blood in the trunk my death wouldn’t look like simple hyperthermia? Before figuring out what could save my life, I needed to be sure I saved Gemma-Kate’s. I took off the blouse that had been tied snugly around my thigh and, though it hurt like hell, I dug at the wound with my fingers until I could feel the slick blood. If I died, and Mallory dragged my body out of the trunk, she would see it on the pad and clean it off. I slipped my fingers underneath the pad and left a blood mark there instead. Then I dug into my leg for more, trying not to grunt so loudly Mallory might hear, and marked the inside of the trunk lid, where you couldn’t see it immediately upon opening. I wiped my fingers on the blouse as thoroughly as I could in the dark, hoping Mallory wouldn’t spot the blood under my fingernails. I retied the blouse around my leg.

  Now there was evidence, for anyone who was clever enough to find it, that I had been in this trunk, been driven somewhere, and hadn’t died from poisoning or heatstroke on a hike. Even if the investigators missed the blood, Gemma-Kate wouldn’t. Plus Mallory would still have to do something about that hole in my leg.

  That taken care of, I took a moment to let the pain subside, and started assessing what was at hand.

  There’s an urban myth about getting imprisoned in a trunk where the victim kicks out the rear light from its frame, sticks his hand out of the hole, and waves down the car following it. That doesn’t work, at least not in the particularly well engineered Volvo.

  Signs and symptoms of hyperthermia vary. We can see in this woman the remains of dry skin, and swollen lips. Some traces of vomitus around the mouth indicate nausea prior to death.

  Too bad I had thrown up the activated-charcoal solution. I could have used those fluids about now. I wished I knew how long I had to live.

  This was followed by organ failure as the blood pressure dropped and the heart was unable to sustain adequate circulation. Besides insufficient water consumption and exposure to high temperatures, the heatstroke may or may not have been exertional as in the case of strenuous hiking. Non-exertional heatstroke is more prominent in the elderly.

  That’s right, George. Death likely occurred from non-exertional heatstroke, caused by being locked in the goddamn trunk of a car with internal temperatures exceeding two hundred degrees.

  Take high doses of antidepressants, get locked in the trunk of a car, and it doesn’t matter how much activated charcoal you’ve had or how young you are; you’re fucked.

  At first I tried to figure out where we were going, but the car turned so many times I gave up and concentrated on what might be in the trunk that would help me get out. Like Black Ops Baxter had said, use whatever you’ve got. Except that, unlike my trunk that often served as a second office, with lots of clutter that might prove useful, Carlo kept his pristine. There wasn’t any tool I could use to pry myself out in any direction. Then I thought about the spare tire. I pushed against the backseat with my back by curling up in a fetal position and pushing on the outer part of the trunk with my feet. The seats wouldn’t give. I curled around in another direction, this time to make it easier to reach under the covering over the tire well. In the blackness I could only feel around, identifying the spare tire, jumper cables, the jack. A short bungee cord that Carlo used to tie the trunk down when he transported things that wouldn’t fit with the trunk closed.

  Like our last Christmas tree, for instance. I nearly sobbed with self-pity, then stopped being a pussy and returned to the tools at hand. Any of these things would make a good weapon if I could only get out and use them. I pulled out the jumper cables, the bungee cord, and the jack, and rolled the covering back over the tire well. Then I hid the materials behind my back and settled in to survive.

  Mallory was probably hoping I would die while en route so she wouldn’t have to wait around wherever she was going to stage my heatstroke death. She was also probably hoping that whatever I had ingested over the past week or two would speed the process. Except for the fact that high levels of antidepressants would be found in my system, it would look like a most natural death.

  The spring weather had been leaning toward summer during the days. High eighties outside meant two hundred in the trunk, with the midday sun heating the metal of the car. Running the engine helped raise the temperature, too. Hot enough to cook a turkey.

  Mallory pulled to a stop. Maybe a parking lot, or maybe a light. Half in desperation and half in sheer rage, I yelled and banged against the side and roof of the trunk with my feet and fists. But no one came to help before the car started into motion again. Just as well; the exertion only raised my respiration and heart rate, and I noticed it failed to come down quickly the way it usually did when I exercised. If I had any hope of surviving, it was important to be aware of these changes in my condition.

  My condition: Let’s say you’ve accidentally spent too much time in a dry sauna. Aware of your heart beating, and more than a little woozy, you get up and go to the door. The door is locked. How do you feel?

  We must have been on a good road; the drive felt smooth, except for small plunges into those dips where the road crossed a small wash or arroyo. I lost track of time then, or may have slipped into unconsciousness momentarily, but came back when the car started to bump. A dirt road, probably approaching what would be the dump site for my body. If Mallory was smart, and I wasn’t quite dead yet, she should leave me somewhere off the road but drive the car a good distance away so I’d have no chance of getting back to it. That’s what I would do.

  The car finally slowed and then stopped. My mind was beginning to go along with my body. The best I could figure was that it was still daytime. Once the sun started on its downslope at this time of year the temperatures cooled very quickly, and the trunk would follow. But I could tell it was still hot. If I had the will to reach my hand up to feel the surface of the lid, I thought, it would be very hot. I thought about the horrible experiment where the frog was put into a pot of water and the temperature slowly, slowly raised to see how long the frog would survive. I thought about the toad. I thought about the Pug. I thought about Carlo.

  The Volvo’s backseat folds down in two parts to allow a larger space for transporting things. Rather than being equal size, one side is narrower than the other. This side folded out a bit, now, letting some light into the trunk. I had been curled with my back to it, but I managed to turn enough so I could face the opening, and at the same time moved my tools to the other side of my body so Mallory couldn’t see them.

  I discovered how blurred my vision was. I saw Mallory’s face, two of them. She had crawled into the backseat. That would mean we were in a place far enough away from traffic and hikers where she didn’t have to worry, at least for a time, about being interrupted. I thought she might be holding the gun on me. I had a hard time caring about such a thing.

  “Brigid, dammit,” she said, sounding exasperated. “This is awful. You should have been dead by now.”

  I opened my mouth, feeling my lips pull apart. My mouth was too dry to speak, and my tongue felt swollen. I tried to swallow, but that wasn’t working so good either, so I just lay there looking at her with eyes that wouldn’t open all the way. I wondered if she could see the jack and other stuff, or if my body was hiding them from her.

  “I didn’t need you dead before, I just needed you distracted. You don’t distract easily, do you?”

  Just to test my strength I tried to grip the jack. I didn’t think I had enough swinging room to hit her with it, even if she obligingly stayed still long enough. If she came around the back of the car and opened the trunk she would see it. I remembered times when all I had to worry about was a bad back. In some little part of my brain that was still functional and watching what was happening to the rest of me, I chuckled. I was caring less and less what happened.

/>   “Well, I’ll keep you company for a while,” Mallory said. She pushed the seat back just far enough to leave a crack without letting much of the air-conditioning get back to me. I heard her get one of the bottles of water that Carlo kept on the floor of the backseat, open it, and make herself comfortable lying across the backseat with her back against the door so she was only twenty inches away from me, though we were divided by life and death.

  “Sorry I have to do it this way, but it needs to look natural. I even figured out what to do about that hole in your leg.” She sounded so normal; it was as if Mallory had spent so much of her life cultivating the picture of perfection, the picture was all she had left. “You must feel terrible,” she said, not without sympathy. I had the sense that even in the course of murdering me she would want me to like her.

  It didn’t matter to her that I wasn’t responsive, and I thought it was probably better for her this way, not having to worry about paying attention to another person. She kept on, talking as she had in countless friendly conversations over a glass of wine. Only now she was taking gulps of water I would have killed her for. And she was talking about the future in ways she never had before. “Santa Fe seems like a nice place. Everybody from someplace else, like Tucson. Lots of arts and crafts. Money. I’m planning to sell the house once Owen dies. Boy, what a mess I made of that. It’s true, all the rest of this is your fault, but I take the blame for botching Owen.” A sigh, and another gulp of water. Some silence, maybe thought. She said, “Maybe Carlo would like Santa Fe. Did you really mean what you said about not wanting me to look after Carlo if you died? I even sort of like Gemma-Kate. She’s a girl after my own heart.”

  I stayed silent because I was too far gone to protest that Gemma-Kate wasn’t anything like her. Or at least not much. But Mallory mentioning Carlo sparked my mind and my muscles into whatever life was still left in me. Carlo would not be the next.

  As she felt me weakening, she grew less tense. “It’s too bad you can’t talk right now. I’d like to know more about how exactly the drugs affected you. In case I want to try it again sometime. I was experimenting with you, but you’re tougher than you look. I’m not sure of the optimum dose.”