Dead Reckoning (37 page)

“Admit it and I won’t kill you,” I lied.

“Fuck no, man. I didn’t do sh…” I pulled the trigger and shot him in the face. Blood, bone, and tissue sprayed all of the shelves behind him and on the man in next to him. The man in the middle jumped up to run, and I shot him in the back. He sprawled out on the floor.

“Jesus!” I heard Sonny say under his breath behind me. Neither Sonny nor Jeff moved.

I turned to the last guy. He trembled and held up his hands.

“It was all them,” he said. “I tried to stop them.”

I recognized him as the one who took my clothes back on the road.

“Stand up and take off your clothes,” I said.

He did as I demanded. I pointed my gun at his naked crotch and told him to beg for his life. He began to beg, and I pulled the trigger. He stumbled backward a few steps, dropped to his knees, and looked down at the hole in his groin. Blood poured out. The nine millimeter is a small bullet, and it didn’t have the effect I intended—much of his manhood remained intact.

I walked right up to him and put the gun to his forehead. I leaned down, my face just inches from his.

“Why would you do that to women, girls?” I asked. “They never did a thing to you. What about all the others? How many were there?”

“I never did nothing,” he said.

“You either did it, or you let them do it,” I replied. “How many more were there?”

He froze in fear.

“How many!” I screamed, my angry spit spraying onto his face.

             
“Fuck you,” he said calmly, resigned to his fate. “That’s just how it is now.”

             
My mind flashed to the beach community on Vancouver Island. I stepped back and told Jeff and Sonny to cover them until I returned. I ran to the truck and searched it. Amongst the general filth in the cab, there was a variety of firearms, a couple of gold coins, and some cans of food. I rummaged around and came upon a girl’s flip-flop, a dirty and worn outline of a little foot in its middle. I angrily threw it from the cab.

             
I stepped out and looked in the bed. Dark stains covered the rusty metal floor of the bed, but I found what I was after: a length of rope. I tied a noose as I re-entered the music store. The man pleaded for Sonny and Jeff to stop me.

             
“Shut the fuck up,” Jeff said.

I pushed past Sonny and Jeff and went over to the other man on the floor. He struggled in pain as I placed the noose around his neck. I pulled on the loose end and flipped him over. I dragged him kicking from the store. I dropped him in the street next to a light pole and went back in for the other one.

              “You are fucked in the head,” the last man said.

             
“I’m fucked in the head?” I questioned indignantly. “You pillage and loot and rape innocent women and children, and I’m fucked in the head?”

             
I grabbed the man by the hair and began to drag him out. He grabbed my legs and tried to fight. While still holding him by the hair, I lifted my left leg and brought it down full force on his left arm. I felt the bone snap as he screamed out in pain. I dragged him out in the street and positioned him next to the other man.

             
“I want you to watch this,” I said.

             
I threw the rope over the light pole and raised the man up until he could no longer touch the ground. He kicked and squirmed as blood and spit foamed from his mouth. He tried to grab the rope above his head and pull himself up. It was no use. He trained his bulging eyes on me and I saw the terror. I dragged the last man over in front of him.

             
“Watch!” I yelled as I grabbed his hair and forced him to look. I held him there as the man struggled. It took about two minutes but finally he twitched for the last time.

             
I cut the remainder off the first rope and began to tie another noose. The man screamed at me as I placed it around his neck and dragged him over to the pole.

I leaned down to his ear and whispered: “How does it feel, you piece of shit?”

I waited for a response, and none came. I punched him in the face, and he grunted and struggled as blood trickled from his nose. Then I grabbed his broken arm and twisted. He screamed in pain and nearly fainted. I slapped him back to reality.

“He was for my wife and daughters,” I said, pointing to the man swinging slowly from the light pole. “You are for all the other women.”

“I’ll see you in hell!” he screamed.

“There has to be a different hell for people like you,” I replied.

I looked over the Jeff and Sonny. They stared in shocked silence. My anger began to drain away. Having had all the suffering I could stand, I took out my gun and shot the man in the back of the head. He fell dead on the street. Then I strung him up the pole and tied it off. The rope creaked as he swung back and forth.

             
“I should have let him hang too,” I said as I passed Sonny and Jeff on my way back into the store. “But I’m not like them.” They didn’t say a word.

             
Jeff and Sonny dragged the third man out of the store and strung him up as I fashioned a sign that read “this is what happens to rapists in this town.” I held the sign to the chest of the man in the middle and plunged his own knife through the sign and into his chest.

It was done—revenge had been exacted. I had expected to feel some closure, but I felt nothing.

              Sonny checked their clothes for useful items while Jeff and I went to the truck. Music still blared from the stereo. The lights and noise made me suddenly self-conscious, so I walked around to the driver’s side and killed the lights and ignition.

I used my flashlight to collect all the firearms, ammunition, and other useful items from the truck and piled them in the street. Sonny took two handguns and a hunting knife off the men and added them to the pile.

“How are we going to carry all this stuff?” Jeff asked.

“We could take their truck,” Sonny offered.

“There are a lot more animals in this pack,” I said. “I don’t want that truck anywhere near Shadow Beach when they come looking for these three.”

We turned our attention back to the task at hand. I walked over to Langley Drug and swept the store with my flashlight. All that remained of the front windows of Langley Drug was a small triangle of glass with the letter L on it. The aisles were oriented lengthwise in the narrow store allowing us to see all the way to the back. Debris was everywhere, but there were no bodies inside.

              Langley Drug was one of many businesses in Langley that were owned by the Rajcik family. The Rajciks were Russians that had immigrated to the United States less than a generation earlier. They established businesses on Whidbey Island, mostly in Langley, and were thought to have been involved with the Russian mafia before coming to America. They were nice people, but had a bit of a mysterious side which only fueled people's suspicions of them. Nevertheless, within just a few years, they owned half of Langley, and so all people could really do was to try to get along with them.

             
I stepped through the broken window into Langley Drug whilst Sonny and Jeff covered the front. As with every other place I had been, the store had been savaged. Everything not edible or intoxicating was smashed on the floor, and all that remained upright were the shelves too heavy to move.

             
I clicked on my flashlight and scanned the floor for anything useful as I moved down the aisle toward the back. I moved quietly but quickly to the pharmacy. The metal security fence over the “submit prescriptions here” window had been forced open. I crawled through and to my surprise, there were many prescription medications strewn across the floor. I saw bottles of injectable insulin, heart medications, and pills for male sexual dysfunction. Sonny and Jeff came in behind me and went right to picking through the medications.

             
“Look at this,” said Sonny.

             
He held up a box with the word Oxycodone on the side.

             
“Empty,” he commented.

             
“I think that's all they were after,” I said. “The painkillers. See, here's some more amoxicillin.”

             
“Yep,” Jeff said. “Vicodin, empty.”

             
“Hey guys!” Sonny exclaimed. “Here is something. Cipro!”

             
“How much is there?” I asked.

             
“A whole big-assed bottle!”

             
“Ok,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”

             
“Wait a minute,” Jeff said. “Grab as much of these other antibiotics as you can.”

             
I began filling my backpack with anything that sounded familiar. Jeff and Sonny did the same.

             
“As long as we don't need a tooth pulled we'll be fine,” Sonny said. “Everything else you can think of is still here.”

             
Jeff moved further back into the shelves of medications. His light flicked about as he scanned the products.

             
“Hey, look at this.”

             
Jeff held up a huge ring of keys.

             
“It says Langley Motors on it.”

             
“The people who owned this drug store also owned a car dealership here,” I explained.

             
“We can’t take their truck,” Jeff said. “But I don’t think anybody’s going to miss one of these.”

             
“Yeah. I'm getting tired of walking,” agreed Sonny.

             
We gathered up all the pharmaceuticals we could hold and made for the back door. Since the back door entered directly into the pharmacy, it was solid steel and dead-bolted. Jeff unbolted the door and kicked it, and it swung open to the alley behind the row of stores. A Cadillac Escalade sat vandalized in the alley. The windows were broken out, and the body was severely dented. The interior smelled of alcohol. The gas door had been pried and was severely mangled, but it had thwarted the gasoline thieves.

             
“I suppose it still has gas,” I said to Sonny.

             
“I guess there were so many targets that if it didn't give up easily, they moved on,” Sonny replied.

             
“These keys are mostly for Fords and Dodges,” Jeff said. “There are only a few Beamer keys on here and, oh yeah, only two Cadillac keys.” Jeff jumped into the driver’s seat and tried the first key. Nothing happened. Jeff inserted the second key and turned it and the dash board lit up.

             
“You've got to be kidding me,” Sonny said, racing around to the passenger door.

             
Jeff started the Escalade and music poured out of the speakers, bass thumping.

             
Sonny began to pump his head in rhythm, smiling. I let the armload of drugs I had fall through the window into the back seat and I climbed in.

             
Jeff turned down the stereo.

             
“No point in drawing more attention to ourselves than we already have.”

             
“If there is anybody else here, they know we're here now,” I said.

             
“Screw it!” said Jeff. “Let's see them stop us.”

             
Jeff put the SUV in gear and gunned it down the alley. We rounded the corner and covered the half block to Main Street in a split second. We drove back up to the truck and loaded all the other supplies we had gathered into the Escalade. We piled back in. Jeff slammed it in reverse and gunned it. We screamed down the street backwards and then Jeff attempted one of those rolling U-turn maneuvers we’d seen in the movies. It didn’t go as planned and we ended up crashing backwards through one of the store fronts.

“Oops!” Jeff yelled.

He put it in drive and tore out of the store, dragging debris all the way. We screeched back onto the street, and Jeff floored it up Main Street. The headlights suddenly illuminated two vandalized cars blocking the exit to town.

             
“Hold on!” yelled Jeff.

             
He stomped on the accelerator again, and we plowed into the parked cars, hurtling them off into the ditches. The impact barely fazed the Caddy.

             
We screamed out of town and turned onto a straightaway that extended almost all the way to Shadow Beach. Jeff opened it up, and within a few seconds, we were careening down the road at a hundred and ten miles an hour. The wind poured through the broken out windows, and it felt exhilarating.

             
Just as we approached the end of the straightaway, a raccoon jumped out in front of us. Out of habit, Jeff turned slightly and avoided it, but he could not avoid the deer that had stepped out into the road right in front of us. We smashed into the deer at about eighty miles per hour and sent it sprawling thirty or forty yards down the road. We came to a stop just before we ran over it again.