“I thought about it,” Ramon replied. “I dreamed about this. I want him in a box, no way out.” He looked at me. “My parents died in a house fire when I was nineteen. Down in San Berdoo. By then I was gone, living in Reno. I heard ’em screaming. My dad made it out a window even though he’d been tied up. Later I thought the rope must’ve burned through before the fire really got him. Learned something that night. It took him a few hours to die, which was pretty cool, even better than what I’d hoped for. Police said it was arson.” His eyes glowed with the memory. “They never did find out who did it.”
“You didn’t get along with your folks,” I said.
“Not much.” Then he smiled. “Not much, man, but if I got caught, it was worth it just to hear the two of ’em screaming in there, just like you’re gonna do pretty soon. Then my dad came out that window. Surprised the shit outta me. He came out like a torch, set fire to an acre of weeds out back. But there ain’t gonna be no window for you, dude. No door either. Just this empty box sealed up tight and fire crawling up your legs.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“DON’T,” LUCY SAID.
Ramon lifted his eyebrows at her. “Don’t what?”
“Do it to me, not him.”
“No way, girl. You’re the best-looking piece I’ve seen in a long fuckin’ time.”
“I won’t be. I’ll rip your heart out.”
“Spread-eagled and naked? That I’ve gotta see.” He looked over at Dooley. “How’re you doing?”
“About got this one done. Eight screws on a side like you said. That’s … like twenty of ’em. It’s takin’ a while.”
Lucy snickered softly. “Genius.”
“Do that other window the same. Then cover the bathroom door. We need to get movin’ here.”
“Goin’ fast as I can,” Dooley said. He set a plywood sheet against the second window and went to work.
Ramon went over to supervise. In her chair, Kimmi was hugging herself. She looked chilled in a thin shirt showing a fair amount of pale breast, pants that ended at mid-calf, flip-flops, toenails painted black, same as her fingernails. Lovely.
“What’s your story?” I asked her.
She stared at me. “What story?”
“You’re sixteen and into drugs, lowlifes, murder. Must be a story there. Dropped on your head when you were young?”
“Fuck you.”
“An intellectual response for sure. But seriously, kiddo, what do you want out of life? Lethal injection? That’s boring, all you do is pass out, but they don’t do firing squads or the electric chair these days. They might hang you, so there’s that. You’d probably have to ask, though.”
“Fuck you, asshole. You don’t know shit.”
“Educate me. You and these two killed that guy Soranden, didn’t you?”
“So what if we did?”
“So there’s a story there. Why him?”
For a moment she was silent. Then, “Daddy was gonna buy me a new Jetta. He tole me, promised me, then that guy stole a bunch of Dad’s money, and all I got was that cruddy old piece of shit Honda.”
“Seriously? People are dying because you didn’t get the car you wanted?”
“Hey, he promised! Then he said he couldn’t because that guy stole like a hundred thousand dollars from him.”
“He told you that?”
“No. I heard him and stupid Marta talking about it.”
“Anyway, it was just a car.”
Her eyes boiled over. “It’s a fuckin’ piece of shit Honda!” she screamed. “I wanted a Jetta!”
I looked over at Lucy. She rolled her eyes at me, then gave me the bleakest look I’ve ever seen.
The room went silent, except for Dooley putting in screws. Ramon looked over at me and smiled, nodded his head at Kimmi, and raised his eyebrows a quarter inch.
“Okay,” I said to Kimmi. “You got a lousy car so naturally people had to die. I totally understand that. Lots of people would kill for a Jetta. How did you get to that IRS guy, Soranden?”
“Get to him?”
“Capture him, kill him.”
“I didn’t. How would I do that? I got Dooley and Ramon to do it.”
“They do what you tell ’em to do?”
She shrugged.
“You must be a good lay,” Lucy said.
“Better’n you, bitch.”
“Don’t think so.”
Kimmi started to get out of her chair.
“Keep the hell away from her,” Ramon said sharply.
Kimmi sat back down. “You should burn up too,” she said to Lucy.
I didn’t want her thinking that way, or Ramon, not that I knew what he had in mind for Lucy once he was through with her, not something I wanted to think about. I said, “This whole thing with the ants and putting his skull in our car. Whose idea was that?”
Ramon drifted over. “Mine. You’ve been in the news for a year or two, finding dead people. Now they’ll find you. You’ll look like a briquette. They’ll identify you by your teeth.”
As I’d thought. There was a downside to this famous PI bit. I’d felt it last summer when Reinhart’s hand was FedEx’d to me for much the same reason—weird, insane deaths following me around like the churning wake of an ocean liner.
“Wish I could’ve kept that skull,” Ramon said. “Thing was ugly but so cool. I had it on an entertainment center. Then some bimbo I had over picked it up and asked if it was real. I told her no, but I don’t think she believed me so I figured I better get rid of it. It’s illegal to own a skull. I mean a human skull. I followed you and hot tits to that casino that night and dropped it into your car. Like a kind of joke.”
“Ha, ha,” Lucy said. “So funny.”
Ramon smiled. “It was, kinda. And I knew it would end up on TV so we could see what happened. Didn’t know it would turn out like this, though—you two up here, famous dipshit PI about to go up in flames. That’ll make the news too. I’ll TiVo it and play it back whenever I need a laugh.”
I looked over at precious Kimmi. “What got you going this evening? Your father gets a phone call, you rush out. How’d that work out?”
“You oughta know. You’re the one who phoned him.”
“Actually, I didn’t.”
She didn’t believe me. “I was right there. I answered the phone. It was for Dad. He listened, then hung up, said some guy said something about harvester ants and Arizona. He thought it was just a weird joke, but I knew it had to be you and that you must’ve figured things out, sort of anyway. So I told Dooley and he told Ramon. Ramon said we had to get rid of you.”
Shook the tree. Kimmi fell out.
“You thought you were so smart,” she went on. “That day you came over and talked to my dad, got him all upset. I put a recorder under an afghan on the back of the couch and heard everything you said, accusing him of stealing thirteen thousand dollars, maybe getting the police involved. When you left, he was totally freaked. He and Marta had a big talk after. I listened to that too.”
Dooley finished putting up the second sheet of plywood. He started on the door to the bathroom.
“You listen in on adults’ conversations?” I said to Kimmi.
She shrugged, didn’t say anything.
“Ants?” I said. “That was really something.”
She smiled. Not a nice smile. I didn’t think anyone would ask her to the prom with a smile like that. “That IRS guy was dead,” she said. “Dooley wanted to put him in the river or take him into the desert and dump him, but then I remembered those ants we saw in Arizona on vacation. Some guy down there told us those ants were super vicious and always hungry and to keep away from them. Said they could eat a coyote in like a day. I mentioned it to Ramon and he thought it would be way cool to watch ’em strip out a person’s head. We had to take out his eyes so the ants could get in easier, then it took them like only four or five hours to totally clean him out.”
I shuddered. They took out his eyes. She’d said it li
ke she had gone to a 7-Eleven and bought gum. She had even less soul in there than Ramon. She was a perfectly amoral creature.
“His head,” I said. “What about the rest of him?”
She looked at Ramon. He gave her a little nod, so she said, “We left it off the highway in a kind of gully. In three of those big garbage bags.”
Three bags. They’d cut him up. Putrid child. “Where?”
She shrugged. “Just some place. I don’t remember where.” Then Ramon said, “We dumped him in the hills south of Fallon on the way to Arizona. Before we got to Schurz.”
I looked at Precious. “Which one of you winners cut off his head?”
“Who cares?”
“Just wondering which one of you falls asleep at night with that treasured memory rolling around in their brain.”
Another shrug. “I did some. Dooley did the backbone neck part, it was so tough. The guy was creepy, like staring at us until Ramon said we should take out his eyes.”
“Done,” Dooley said. He stepped back from the bathroom door and grabbed an edge of the plywood sheet, braced himself and pulled on it, hard. “No one’s goin’ through that.” He looked at me and grinned. “Especially not tied to a chair.”
“Good work,” I said, then I looked at Kimmi. “None of this would’ve happened if you’d gotten your Jetta?”
She stared at me without expression. “Jesus. You just go on and on. Like my dad and his creepy asshole sister.”
She wasn’t much of a conversationalist. A talk with Hitler might’ve gone pretty much the same, all I, I, I, and me, me, me, except Adolf might’ve clicked his heels a few times since he had that fetish.
Ramon said something to Dooley. Dooley grabbed Lucy’s chair, tilted it back and dragged her out the door, left her facing the bedroom. Then he dragged me into the center of the room on the chair’s back legs. Tilted like that, I saw that he’d strapped my ankles to the lower part of the chair’s legs, below the cross bracing that strengthened the chair’s legs. Below it. I couldn’t believe it. Given his stupidity and Ramon’s inability to do the work, I might have a chance to get out of this. Slim, but maybe. As a kid, Dooley was probably too busy torturing small animals to work puzzles. With all four legs of the chair on the floor, the straps might look secure to your basic lowlife dimwit, something to do with gauged ears holding black onyx rings, which implied an IQ somewhere south of eighty. Farther south than I’d given him credit for earlier.
He left me in the middle of the room facing the door. And Lucy. She gave me a terrified look as Dooley and Ramon exited the bedroom. Dooley set the last sheet of plywood against the door frame and began to drive screws into the plywood, but not yet into the frame.
After he’d readied half a dozen screws, he slid the plywood sheet off to one side. “Get the diesel,” Ramon said.
Dooley left, returned half a minute later with a plastic one-gallon container. “Check this out,” Ramon said to Kimmi. “This is so cool.” He motioned her back into the bedroom. She came in like a sheep, expectant little smile curling her lips, and when she was inside he lifted the gun, aimed it at her face.
“Hey, that’s not fun—”
He pulled the trigger, blew out the back of her head.
My ears rang. The smell of gunpowder filled the room. Dooley stuck his head in the room and grinned. Kimmi was sprawled on the floor, blood and brains covering the wall behind her. Ramon said, “I shoulda done that sooner. Never met a bitch half that dumb. Motor mouth would’ve bragged about this to a bunch of her friends. Now, not so much.”
He turned to Dooley. “Get some of that under his chair. Not too much. I don’t want him to burn up too fast. Pour a little on his shoes, too. Then douse the girl real good and make a trail out the door.”
Dooley opened the can, sloshed diesel under my chair and around my feet, ankles. A pungent odor wafted up. Cold liquid crept into my shoes, soaking my socks.
Aw, shit, no.
“That’s enough,” Ramon said. “I want it to take a while.”
Dooley poured diesel on Kimmi then backed out the door, leaving a dark glistening trail on the floorboards that included my feet. Lucy bucked in her chair, screaming, “No, no, no! Oh, don’t, please don’t!”
Ramon stopped at the door and looked back at me. “Enjoy the ride, fucker.” Then he turned out the light, shut the door, and in the other room Dooley drove half a dozen screws through the plywood and into the door frame.
I was left in absolute darkness.
* * *
Lucy’s screams got weaker as they took her outside and put her in the car. The smell of diesel was nauseating, permeating the room. I sat in the dark, heart pounding, anticipating fire. I couldn’t see a thing, but I had to get free of that chair, fast. First thing, I had to tip it over backward. I bent forward then threw my weight back as I shoved with my toes, tipping the chair over. I tucked my chin into my chest to keep from banging my head against the floor. I heard them come back, then the only sound was that of Dooley driving the rest of the screws through the plywood into the door frame. Ramon wanted me in a box and he thought he was getting it. Which shows how dumb drug dealers can be. You wouldn’t want one as a contractor on your house. It’d be a mistake to hire one to build a birdhouse.
Ramon knew drugs, supply and demand. He also had more than the average homeowner’s knowledge about knives, not that it had served him well, but what he knew about the real world wouldn’t fill a thimble. He looked at the room with its windows and doors covered and saw a box. He was a modern-day savage, not a carpenter.
And speaking of boxes, we were at the end of a dead-end road in the mountains, no way out except to backtrack down a bunch of switchbacks. I was thinking about that, too.
Freeing my legs took longer than I thought it would. On my back in the chair, I slid my left leg down, taking the plastic tie with it, but it snagged, held, slid half an inch, snagged again. It took a full minute to slide it off the end of the chair leg.
I worked on the other leg, felt as if I almost had it when the sound of screws being driven into wood ended.
A moment of silence followed.
Muffled voices. Insane laughter.
Then a scratching sound, a faint whoosh, and a golden line of fire came under the door and traveled toward me, not as fast as if it were gasoline, but fast enough.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
I USED MY elbows, knees, and shifting weight to roll to my right, chair clattering across the floor, away from the puddle of diesel where I’d been sitting. I was six feet away when the pool ignited. Eighteen-inch flames boiled up, hot, bright, and smelly, throwing off oily black smoke. Moments later, Kimmi went up.
My rolling had left disconnected drops of fuel on the floor so they didn’t ignite. Nor did my feet, for which I was more than a little thankful. I was still tied to the chair, on my back on the floor. I worked on my right leg. If Ramon was in the other room, he would expect screams, so I screamed as if I were on fire. I didn’t know if they’d already left, but I gave them a show just in case. It might slow Ramon down. They had several miles of dirt road with switchbacks ahead of them. I felt a clock ticking. I had to hurry. If Ramon killed Lucy, my life would truly be over. Jeri, then Lucy? I wouldn’t be able to live with that.
My right leg came free. Awkwardly I staggered to my feet, straddling the chair, still shrieking. I couldn’t hear anything in the other room but I hoped they were still there. The rope around my waist bound me to the chair, but it was loose. I jumped, bounced, shimmied, finally got it to slide up and off the back of the chair. Then I was on my feet, mobile. The rope dropped off my waist to the floor. I kicked it away.
My wrists were still held behind my back with a plastic tie. I tried but couldn’t break it. I had no choice about how to free myself, no time to think, I had to move. Flames flickered on the trail of burning diesel that had come beneath the door. I dropped to the floor with my back to four-inch flames and held my wrists in the fire.
I scream
ed, this time for real. Holy fuck it hurt. I’d never felt anything like it. I tried to look behind me but couldn’t see what I was doing. I smelled burning flesh. The pain was unreal, but I had to do this. For Lucy. For a chance to save her, however unlikely that might be.
I pulled on the tie, tried to keep it in the flames. It parted abruptly and my wrists whipped out of the fire. I rolled, got to my feet, coughed in the thick oily smoke that was filling the room from the ceiling down to four or five feet from the floor. The roar of the fire drowned out all hope of hearing the car’s engine, but Ramon would probably get out fast now that I was no longer yelling and the flames would be visible from Verdi or the interstate.
I dropped to the floor near the plywood sheet Dooley had put over the back window. I kicked the wall. I was motivated, and my foot went through it like it was nothing. As I’d thought, it was crumbly drywall. Ramon had seen a solid, impenetrable barrier because he didn’t know shit. I saw it as a flimsy coating over two-by-fours. I tore more drywall out, grabbed fiberglass insulation, flung it into the room. The frame of the house was two-by-fours on sixteen-inch centers. I kicked between the studs and felt that old outside plank siding give way.
Black smoke boiled around me. The heat was building, fire giving off a lusty roar. I hammered at the siding with a foot, felt it splinter, nails pulling through old wood. I pounded out a hole big enough to crawl through, felt something sharp rip at my face as I scooted through feet-first, then I was out.
* * *
Lucy.
I came out at the back of the house. I ran around to the side where they’d parked the car. Headlights were visible up through the trees. The Charger was through the first switchback, headed back this way, climbing fast.
I ran.
Across the yard and straight downhill into the trees. Ramon and Dooley had two miles of switchbacking dirt road to traverse before it would pass below the house. How far below the house? A quarter mile? Half? I didn’t know, but it was my only hope of cutting them off.
Cutting them off how?
I didn’t know, but I ran all out, breakneck speed down the side of the mountain. It was steep, with dead branches littering the ground, rocks underfoot. A steeplechase in the dark, down a hillside of tricky moonlit shadows.
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