by David Bell
“I don’t know,” Bill said. But he kept looking. He dug through a pile of clothes in the corner. He felt the woman’s hand on his shoulder, pulling him back.
“Hey, pervert. That’s mine. Get out of it.”
Her nails dug in like a cat’s, and Bill winced in pain. He shook loose from her grip. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know.” She took a menacing step forward, raising her hand as though to strike. “Get out of here.”
“Okay, okay.” Bill took the bracelet with him and stepped out of the tent, brushing past the woman and trying to give her as wide a berth as possible. He shone the flashlight into the area to his left, aiming the beam deeper into the trees. Something moved there, a flash of a red jacket coming toward him. Bill lifted the beam, aiming for the figure’s face. But he’d already recognized the jacket. He knew who it was: Doug Hammond.
Facing him that way, directly, for the first time, Bill noticed Hammond’s short, compact body. Like a wrestler’s. The flashlight showed the dinginess of his clothes, a smear of mud across his right cheek. His fingernails were caked with dirt, and the red jacket had a large rip under the left armpit. But Hammond gave off a sense of power and menace, like a long coiled spring ready to be released.
Hammond held his hands out in front of him. He looked to be somewhere in between asking for peace and getting ready to fight.
“Where is she?” Bill asked. “Just tell me where she is so I can go there. Or the police can. I don’t care. I don’t even care if you go to jail at this point. She’s alive, isn’t she? Just tell me she’s alive and where she is.”
“I don’t know where she is.”
“You’re lying. You came into my house. You said you wanted to talk to me, but you killed my friend.”
“He doesn’t know anything,” the woman with the pink hair said.
Bill didn’t look over at her. He refused to take his eyes off Hammond.
“I’ve been shacking up with him off and on,” she said. “He doesn’t know.”
“You have to listen to me.” Hammond moved his hands again, and now there was no doubting that he was trying to ask for peace. For calm. “You seem too agitated. There’s a wild look in your eye. I don’t trust it. And I’m trying to help you.”
“I told you how to help me.” Bill tightened his hold on the flashlight and felt a pulse in his palm where skin met the rubberized grip.
“I went to your house to talk to you. Taylor came to town, telling the whole world, even you, that I took your daughter and killed Emily. What was I supposed to do? I’m a guy with a record. I needed someone to listen, to hear what I had to say. I figure the father of one of the victims would want to hear it. I get it—I do. Emily was like a daughter to me.”
Bill took a step closer. A hot energy coursed through his body, the kind of thing he might feel if he were laid up with an illness—a nasty flu or infection that needed to work its way through his system and out.
Hammond took a step back. “Easy. If you help me, I can help you. I can’t tell you where your daughter is, but I can tell you what I know. Just help me with the police—”
“The cops are all over,” Bill said. “They’ll probably be back soon. Maybe they’re pulling into the lot up there now. So spill it.”
“He’s right, Doug,” the woman said. “They’re way up our asses tonight. Did you do something?”
Hammond’s body remained tense and alert. His voice sounded arrogant. “You wanted to come out here and take care of this yourself. You’re sick of the police, sick of their inability to solve the crime. You came alone with your flashlight and your weekend-hiker clothes.”
“Let’s just take care of this right now. Tell me. Where is Summer? Is she out here somewhere? Just take me to her and you’ll be off the hook for anything else you’ve done.”
Hammond started backing up. “I killed a man.”
Bill hadn’t made the conscious choice to do so, but he realized he’d raised the flashlight like a weapon. The beam illuminated the bare branches of the trees, and Hammond’s figure became less distinct in the darkness.
Then two hands clamped down on the arm that held the flashlight. The pink-haired woman took hold of Bill and used her body weight for leverage, trying to force his arm down and shake the flashlight loose. Bill made a quick twisting motion with his upper body and managed to throw the woman off him. She thudded against the ground, making a sound like the air had been forced from her.
When Bill looked up, orienting himself back to what lay ahead, he saw Doug Hammond moving forward, his body in a low crouch, his hands coming up in the direction of Bill’s neck.
Bill swung. The flashlight made a sickening smack against the crown of Hammond’s skull, the vibration from the blow traveling up Bill’s arm and into his shoulder.
Hammond dropped to all fours. For a moment he stayed like that, shaking his head as though trying to clear the effect of the blow he’d taken.
The woman made a wailing noise. She pushed herself up from the dirt and scrambled to Hammond, cupping his face in her hands and cooing to him. “Oh, he’s bleeding. Oh, Doug. Oh, baby.”
Bill dropped to the ground next to Doug. He reached around and took the man by the front of his jacket, pulling him out of the woman’s grip.
“Hey,” she said. “He’s hurt.”
Bill pulled Hammond closer, brought his face closer. “Where is she?”
The man’s eyes were half-lidded, and a trickle of blood ran down his forehead.
“Where?” Bill asked. “Where?”
Then a jolt rocked Bill, the sharpest pain he’d ever felt in his life. It traveled from the base of his skull down into his chest.
His vision swam, the dark woods growing darker. He felt control of his body slipping away.
He saw the pink-haired woman standing over him. She held something in her hands. A bag? A sock?
She looked like she was about to bring it down again, when everything went black.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN
Bill saw Summer. She walked toward him across a darkened horizon. Her figure was indistinct, but he recognized her.
And then Julia joined her.
They both walked toward him, holding hands. Their faces obscured.
Bill wanted to cry out. To call their names.
But he could make no sounds. His voice was muted, his throat incapable of doing anything.
The figures stopped and turned. They started walking away, receding over a hill and out of sight. Bill still couldn’t make a noise.
He ended up standing alone. In blackness. A world without light. No sun, no electricity.
For a moment, he thought he must be in some version of hell.
He felt tired. He wanted to sleep, to drift off into the blackness and be done with it all.
But he couldn’t. He knew he couldn’t.
Then something cold and wet hit his face.
He tried to open his eyes, but just like the struggle to make a sound, the struggle to open his eyes led to failure. He couldn’t open them. He wanted to slide back into the part of the dream in which Julia and Summer walked toward him.
He wanted a chance to make a sound again. This time he would. This time they wouldn’t slip away from him.
Then the cold wetness hit his face again. He smelled dirt. Decaying leaves and the rocky ground underneath him. He reached up, wiping the liquid off his face.
“Quit faking it,” a voice said. “Open your eyes.”
Bill tried harder. The lids peeled open, and the reality of where he was landed on him with the force of a hammerblow.
His head hurt. A sharp ache like his skull had been split apart. He worried that maybe it had. He recalled that snapshot in time—the pink-haired woman standing over him with something raised above her head. Was it an old-fashioned sap? A sock filled with ball be
arings or quarters? He lifted his hand and gingerly touched the top of his head. He felt a sticky wetness there and, bringing his hand forward, saw the blood. But not too much. Not as much as he thought—feared—he might see.
But the pain. It made him wince, made him close his eyes again.
“Open them.”
Bill did. It took a moment to focus, but he saw the man in front of him. Doug Hammond.
Bill jerked his body, attempting to stand up, but he couldn’t quite move. Something bound his feet together. He looked down and saw the crude ropes around his ankles. His hands were free, but he couldn’t rise or fight or run with his feet tied together. And Doug Hammond sat next to him, the flashlight in his hand, making sure Bill didn’t. In his groggy state, Bill wasn’t sure he could do anything even if he weren’t bound.
“Take it easy now,” Hammond said. “We had to put you down. You wouldn’t listen, and you wanted to fight. And fighting isn’t going to do you any good right now. You’ll just lose. Trust me, you’ll lose. It isn’t your arena, is it?”
“Where is she? Summer? Just tell me.”
“Are you going to listen?”
Bill blinked his eyes. The coldness from the ground had seeped through his clothes and into the center of his body. “Okay. What do you have to say?”
Hammond appeared to relax a little. He lifted a hand and touched his own head. “You smacked me pretty good with this.” He hefted the flashlight in his hand. “When Karen hit you with that sap, she wanted to hit you again. And, I have to be honest, I kind of wanted her to. I wanted to do some of the damage myself to your thick skull.”
“Why didn’t you?” Bill asked. “You killed my neighbor. Hell, I think you kidnapped my daughter. You beat those other two girls. Why not just throw me into the mix?”
Hammond shook his head. “See? You don’t listen. You’ve been going around telling everybody I beat those girls, that I kidnapped your daughter. You let my ignorant ex-wife infect your mind. And what has it gotten you?”
“The cops will be back soon. They’re looking for you. They might be pulling in right now.”
Hammond looked disappointed. He pursed his lips and shook his head again. “And then you’d never know why I killed your neighbor. You’d never know what happened to your daughter.”
CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT
Bill started to squirm. He tried to jerk his body up, lifting his torso and pushing off the ground so he could come to his feet. But Hammond was right there. He placed his hand on Bill’s chest and shoved him back down. Then Hammond reached into his own pocket and brought out the canister of pepper spray. Bill saw the locking mechanism was open, so it would only take one push on Hammond’s part to hit him in the face with a stream of the burning liquid.
“Where are you going to go?” Hammond asked. “Even if you got away from me and called the police . . . then what? I’d be gone. Just like Karen is gone. And you’d be sitting somewhere, holding your pecker in your hand. Why don’t you sit for a minute? Take a load off. And listen to what I have to tell you.”
Bill saw no other way. His head swam a little. The ground seemed to lurch like he’d just stepped off a Tilt-A-Whirl. If he did get to his feet, how fast could he move?
And he wouldn’t know anything Doug Hammond knew.
Bill relaxed his body, and Doug Hammond removed his hand from his chest.
“You’re cool?” Hammond asked.
Bill nodded. He wasn’t sure he could say anything right then. He wasn’t sure he wanted to.
“Good. Good boy.” Hammond leaned back, his posture relaxing as well. “I wanted to talk to you out here that day, and I wanted to talk to you at your house earlier because I wanted you to know what was really going on. I had to talk to Taylor first, to remind her that I’d never hurt Emily. Shit, I was a better parent in some ways than Taylor. I watched out for that girl. Bought her a car, paid for her braces. I had to calm Taylor down after everything she’d been saying about me. And then I figured the cops might be likely to listen to you if you knew the whole story, straight from me. They weren’t going to listen to anything I said. I have a record, and Taylor had already poisoned their minds about me.” He leaned closer. “Hell, you’re the most sympathetic guy in the whole town, maybe the whole country.”
Bill made a grunting noise deep in his throat. “Why’d you kill my neighbor? In my house?”
“I came to your house, looking for you. I went to the back door so it was less likely I’d be seen. I knocked and knocked. No answer. So I tried the knob. What do you know? The door was open.”
“I locked it when I left. I always lock it. Especially now.”
“Makes sense. Hell, I wondered about it at the time. I thought it was odd that the door was unlocked if you weren’t home.”
“But you went in anyway. Why?”
Hammond looked surprised. “Have you ever been hunted? Do you know what that’s like? I couldn’t go anywhere. To eat, to get a drink, to get a motel room. Why do you think I’m spending time out here? I can’t go anywhere without worrying some cop is going to grab me. And once I got in their hands, with my past record and the dead guy in your house and with Emily missing or whatever, I’d be finished. The only reason I stayed was to talk to you. That’s why I thought I’d wait. You have a nice house—you really do. Taylor told me about it.”
“I just saw her. The police told her Emily is dead.”
Hammond looked stricken. His mouth opened but no sound came out, and some of the color drained from his face. “Dead?”
“Yeah.” For a moment, just a single moment, Bill felt bad for blurting out the news so callously to Hammond. But Bill figured he already knew. Bill figured he’d killed her. “They used dental records.”
Hammond’s eyes lost focus, looking past Bill into the darkness. “Taylor must be crushed. She loves that girl. And, look, I wouldn’t hurt Emily.”
“Why did you kill my neighbor?”
Hammond’s eyes snapped back into focus. “Because I went into your house. I needed to use the bathroom while I waited, and I wanted to look around in case you were in there and hadn’t heard me knocking. I went down the hallway, and when I came to the door of your daughter’s room, I saw your neighbor, the flannel-wearing guy, standing in there, right in the center of the room, holding a stuffed bear and going through your daughter’s chest of drawers.”
CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE
Bill was shaking his head. Back and forth, back and forth, until it made him woozy, and he stopped.
“No,” he said, the word almost a gasp.
Hammond was nodding his own head, certain of what he was saying. “He saw me standing there, and you could tell by the look on his face he didn’t expect to get caught that way. I mean, how does a guy explain that? A teenage girl goes missing, and some middle-aged guy shows up in her house going through her bedroom drawers? At minimum, he’s a really creepy perv, taking things from a girl who disappeared. But at the very worst . . . he looks like he’s guilty, right? He had that stuffed bear in his hand, and some clothes that belonged to your daughter. Why was he in there taking those things? Why?”
The cold from the ground had spread throughout Bill’s body. It was no longer a physical thing. It penetrated his mind and his heart, turning everything about him to ice. “What did he say to you?”
“He looked like a kid with his hand in the cookie jar. He told me some bullshit about how he was watching the house for you, that he needed to check on things, and he wanted to make sure no one had taken anything from Summer’s room while you were gone. What fifteen-year-old has a lot of valuables?”
“But you killed him.”
“He came after me. He tried to lull me into a false sense of security. He tried to play it cool and just casually mention that he was going to call the police because I shouldn’t be in there.” Hammond paused, the look in his eyes distant as he replay
ed the moments leading up to Adam’s death. “I could tell he was about to make a play. I can always tell when that’s going to happen. I could tell you were about to hit me tonight, but I didn’t want to hurt you. It was a good thing I had my backup here. She took you down harder than I would have.”
“So what did you do to him?” Bill asked.
“I’ll give him credit—he was a strong son of a bitch. I didn’t think I’d be able to take him once it started.” Hammond pulled up the sleeve of his jacket, revealing an ugly bruise and several scratches on his arm. “There are more on my body from where he hit me. It was a good battle. But you Mister Suburbans don’t understand what it really means to fight, do you? Well, I do. And I got the best of him.” Hammond’s tone turned almost gleeful, as if he were recounting a winning touchdown. He patted his pocket. “I used my trusty sap. And I used it more than once. And I aimed to hurt, not just to slow down.” He almost looked regretful. “Sorry for the mess.”
“You should have called the police and told them.”
“Didn’t you hear what I said?” His voice rose, and he leaned in, jabbing an index finger in the vicinity of Bill’s nose. “They’d bury me. Under the jail. They’d stick his murder and the beatings of those girls and your daughter on me.” Hammond reached out again, and this time he placed his hand around Bill’s throat, squeezing and adding pressure until Bill saw red spots before his eyes. “Do you know what it’s like to have the cops choke the life out of you? To want to bury you? I bet you don’t.”
Bill reached up, grabbing hold of Hammond’s hand and trying to force it away. He couldn’t make it budge. But Hammond released his grip, allowing Bill to breathe freely again.
“You think it’s all so fucking simple, don’t you?” Hammond rose to his feet, but he pointed at Bill before he moved and spoke to him as if addressing a dog. “Be still.” He reached down and dug around in the dead leaves and mulchy ground. He came up with the bracelet Bill had found in the tent. “I found this in that asshole’s house. I went all through it, digging in every drawer and closet. Look, I needed money. I had to find something to sell, and, to be honest, I couldn’t bring myself to steal from you. That’s how I found out who your neighbor was. I checked his wallet. No cash, but I saw he lived behind you. So this is all you need to know to understand what your neighbor was up to. And you can do with it what you want. I’m leaving town for good now. It belongs to your daughter, right? It has her name engraved on the inside. I saw her name engraved there, so I took it. Jackpot.”