Devil's Oven (23 page)

 “So this is why you haven’t been to the club lately?” Dwight said. He squinted against the jail’s garishly bright interior lights, which were so intense he thought his corneas would probably melt if he looked directly into them. All that brightness had to have been intended as some symbol of truth and its revelation in the light. Another government idea, no doubt.

“Yeah, I’m four days on, three days off,” Jim said. “Screws with my digestion. Drinking’s out of the question. Sucks to be me.”

Dwight shook his head. “Too bad. We’ve got a couple new girls. Real dancers,” he said. “They’re all effing gymnasts now. Some of them even come in with resumes like they think they’ll be filing and shit.” He paused while Jim scanned the bank of eight monitors to his left.

“No matter how old they are, these guys in here are little kids,” Jim said. “You gotta watch them every minute. Doesn’t matter what they’re here for. It’s all suicide watch.”

Dwight couldn’t see the screens from where he stood. Bud was surely on one of them, his every move recorded by a camera mounted securely in the ceiling. But there was no way Bud would ever commit suicide, right? He’d been charged with shooting a dog, a charge that sounded dumb as hell to Dwight. It wasn’t like they had charged him with murder or kidnapping. The irony was that a murder had happened at his house.

The fact that
he
was the one who had actually committed murder that day wasn’t lost on Dwight, either.

“So, you get why I can’t let you see him tonight.”

“Sure,” Dwight said. “I get it. I wouldn’t want you to jeopardize your job, man.”

“It’s just that it’s not visiting hours, and he
has
been charged with a felony,” Jim said. “Everything will happen in the morning.”

“Funny how you and me always do our business at night,” Dwight said. “Sometimes I feel like an effing vampire, you know?”

Jim held up a finger to have him wait while he answered the radio. The other deputy was going on a break. “Ten-four,” Jim said. “Let me know when you’re back.” He put the radio down.

“I should probably go, man,” Dwight said. “The club won’t run itself.”

 Right before he left for the courthouse, a lone deputy had shown up at the club and had a cursory look around, as though Lila might have been shackled to the walk-in or tied up beneath the sink in the women’s bathroom. The deputy was a good-looking kid who had hauled some troublemakers off the premises in the past, and his firm ass and blue eyes gave the girls backstage a little thrill. Dwight had taken a risk leaving the club in the hands of Charity and the bartender. A small risk, but still a risk. He hated the thought of waiting until the morning to see Bud. The cops would probably be all over the club by then, and he had Pat’s body to get rid of in the meantime.

Pat’s body. Shit.

Jim nodded, then put up his hands in a gesture of self-defeat. “I didn’t get my stripes being anyone’s girlfriend,” he said. “Screw the regs. I need to stretch some, anyway.”

He stood, pressed a button near the video screens, and motioned for Dwight to follow him down the stairs.

“He’s in a basement holding cell. There’s an empty room a couple doors down. You can talk, but he’s got to keep the cuffs and shackles on.”

“I owe you, man,” Dwight said.

They stopped outside a gray door with a coded lock.

“Oscar likes to take himself an extra long break about now, but this can’t take all night. Five minutes?”

“No problem.”

“Wait,” he said. “Come over here.”

In less than a minute, Jim patted him down and had him empty his pockets of everything, including his wallet, phone, handkerchief, and a substantial Gerber knife he hadn’t carried with him in years.

“Just in case,” Dwight said, when Jim held it up to inspect it.

“I bet,” he said. He put everything in a shallow tray and locked it in a cabinet behind a nearby desk. “By the way, what the hell happened to your ear, man? Things getting rough at the club these days? I’m not sure I want to mess with those girls if that’s how they leave you looking.”

Dwight raised his hand to lightly touch the bandage on the side of his head. “It was my own fault,” he said. “A misunderstanding.”

•  •  •

“You’ve got to find Lila,” Bud said. “I can’t do anything from here.”

Bud was sitting down, but Dwight had a sense of the violent internal battle he was fighting. The bags beneath his eyes were gray and pronounced, though Dwight didn’t think for a second that Bud had been weeping.

“You’re absolutely sure she didn’t take off somewhere?” Dwight said. “You know how she is sometimes.”

“Of all the people who’ve asked me questions today, I thought you’d be the first one to believe me,” Bud said. The note of scorn in his voice stung Dwight. “The same sonofabitch who killed Claude ran off with her. And nobody’s listening!” He banged the table with the flat of his hand.

Dwight had never seen Bud so angry. Below the anger, there was an unmistakable current of fear that shook Dwight.

“If you say that’s what happened, then that’s what happened,” he said. “Just calm down. We’ll figure it out.” He didn’t really know what there was to figure out. The story about the big man who had run off with Claude had sounded like a fairytale, something that loon Sheryl Dixon had made up. She was a freak, and it didn’t surprise him that she would claim a freak had run off with her husband.

“Didn’t you see the poster they did of the guy who got Claude? It’s the same guy. That’s who we need to find if we’re going to find Lila.”

Dwight shook his head. He had heard one of the girls say that the guy on the poster was kind of cute in a scary way, but things like posters never got his attention because he never had the chance to see them. If it wasn’t front and center at the club or on his bedroom wall, it didn’t exist. That’s how his life was.

Bud closed his eyes. The tension folding his brow told Dwight he was picturing Lila.

Opening his eyes, he whispered, “She was naked, Dwight. She had no defense. No protection from the cold, the ground—nothing. She hates to be cold. Hates it. Starting in November, she even puts socks on when she goes to bed.”

Dwight wanted to reach over and put his hands over Bud’s to comfort him, but he didn’t do it. Bud was suffering. Bad. But Dwight couldn’t help this time.

Or wouldn’t.

“They can’t be serious, not looking for her,” Dwight said. “They’re not stupid.”

“They’re hinting around that maybe I did something to her,” Bud said. He looked in Dwight’s eyes as though waiting for some kind of response. “Maybe you already know why.”

“I don’t get it,” Dwight said, puzzled.

“They said they heard she was sleeping with that Tripp Morgan guy. The DNR officer that’s at the club sometimes.”

Ah, so it was true.
Dwight knew he should’ve been paying better attention.

“They said it was common knowledge. Common enough for Sheryl Dixon to bring it up when they asked her about Claude working in my office.”

“Bullshit,” Dwight said. “Sheryl Dixon’s a crazy bitch who doesn’t know her ass from a hole in the ground. Nobody listens to her.”

Even as the words came out of his mouth, he knew he was wrong. Not about Sheryl Dixon being crazy—that was true enough—but about her knowing about the affair. Tripp Morgan had been coming around the club more and more, but he never messed with any of the girls or brought one in with him. Rarely even talked about them. But Dwight had seen him following Lila around at some party at the house, and Morgan had mentioned that he’d gone to school with Lila and Sheryl Dixon and any number of other locals.

Tripp Morgan. Too bad. And too bad it was messing with Bud’s head. Why hadn’t any of the girls at the club mentioned the affair to him? The girls knew everything about everybody, and they disliked Lila Tucker to a person.

He glanced at the door. Jim looked back at him through the window and held up two fingers. Dwight nodded. Jim was a good guy. He would have to arrange something special for him with one or two of the girls.

“They think you found out about it and Danelle Pettit got in the way?” Dwight said. “You know Lila better than that. She wouldn’t do that to you, man.”

“I thought I did. But they made me doubt her, you know?” Bud said. “What would she want with a guy like that? What would she want with
any
other guy? I mean, not that I’m such a catch or anything. I’m over six feet tall of ugly. But we have a life. Lila loves me. Tells me every day.”

“Exactly,” Dwight said.

Some of the tension left Bud’s face.

“So you don’t think it’s true?” he said. “You think they’re just trying to get me worked up?”

“That’s what I think,” Dwight said, hoping he sounded convincing.

“Thanks, man,” Bud said.

“We’ve got to get you out of this shithole,” Dwight said. He looked around. “As shitholes go, it’s not too bad, though. I’ve seen worse.”

Bud seemed not to hear him.

“I told them his name,” he said.

“Whose?”

“The creep who has Lila,” he said. “His name was written across his back. You know, a tattoo. A big one.”

“No shit,” Dwight said.

One of his hands stiffened reflexively into a fist. Almost everybody had tattoos these days, but hadn’t he seen one recently that had been pasted like that across someone’s back? He didn’t see that many guys without their shirts. In the dead of summer, the occasional biker would try to get in the club wearing an open leather vest, both his arms sleeved in tattoos. The area had its share of bare-chested guys in pickups, but Dwight tried to keep himself from looking in case they thought he was staring.

“It was blue and gold and white,” Bud said. “
Saint Anthony
. Who in the hell would have the balls to call himself a saint?”

Dwight didn’t have to think about it. He knew exactly who’d have the balls to do so.
Impossible
. If it had been any other day, he might have doubted himself, but he’d been listening to a dead guy bitch all afternoon.

“Goddamn, Bud,” he said. “Goddamn it to hell.”

“What?”

Jim stuck his head in the door. “You need to get along,” he said. “Time’s up.”

“Three more minutes. That’s all I need, Jim,” Dwight said, pleading. Jim
had
to give him the extra time.

“I can’t do you any more than that,” Jim said. “You owe me. Big time, buddy.”

Dwight nodded, wanting to scream for him to get out of the room again. Jim let the door close.

Dwight grabbed Bud’s forearm and squeezed it so hard that Bud winced. “I need you to hear this,” he said. “And you’re not going to believe me.”

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Lila had been floating without any sense of time passing. Not on a cloud, or anything so magical or comfortable, but she had seen her body beneath her and didn’t want to recognize herself.

She wasn’t floating anymore.

She kicked at Ivy from the bathtub, landing her foot solidly on Ivy’s bony chest. Ivy let go of Lila’s soap-covered leg and flew backward onto the floor, her mouth gaping.

Lila’s scream was a siren of rage, barely human, bursting with every drop of pain she had suffered since that animal first touched her. Ivy kept scrambling away, driven by the sound, but the wet floor was treacherous and she slid into the hollow door, banging her head. But Lila couldn’t hear her whimper of pain over the sound of her own voice. Like an inconsolable child, she kept on.

Ivy felt her way up the wall from the floor and grabbed on to the doorknob, poised to run away. She shouted for Lila to
stop!
but Lila might have been blind and deaf in that moment.

When Lila’s screams finally subsided, she collapsed back into the water, exhausted with fear.

“Shhhhhh,” Ivy said, crawling back over to the tub. “Shhhhhh. It’s all right, Lila. Everything’s going to be all right.”

Who was this woman coming toward her? Lila had a sense that she knew her, but couldn’t be sure. She shrank away. She was freezing. The water she was sitting in was ice cold. Had it ever been warm? Where the hell was she?

“Lila, Lila. It’s all right, I promise.”

The strange mouth. The white hair. It had always been white, hadn’t it? This woman didn’t seem safe to her.
God. I just want to be home with Bud!
The thought of her husband elicited a soft cry from her lips.

Bud. A man. My husband. My help. He’s not the other man, the one with the weird stitches on his neck, his wrists. The man who couldn’t be real.

“Lila,” Ivy whispered.

“Go away,” Lila screamed. “Get away from me. Get away from me now!”

This woman, this
Ivy
—that was her name—wanted to hurt her. She had been with the other man. It came to Lila now, their talking in front of her. Ivy talking to him, telling him what to do.
Ivy knew
. But
he
hadn’t talked at all, had he? Because he
couldn’t
talk. He could only grunt.

His breath was foul on her face, in her nostrils and mouth
.
His hand had gripped her hair so hard that she couldn’t turn away
. She grabbed the edge of the bathtub and hung her head over it to vomit on the floor. It splashed on Ivy, marking her clothes. But Ivy didn’t move away.

She put her hand out to touch Lila’s water-soaked curls.

“You’re going to hurt yourself,” Ivy said. “You need to let me help you. Please.”

She was begging now. Lila had heard her beg before. Was it yesterday? Some faraway time? Maybe she was wrong about everything. Time had collapsed in on her and she suddenly couldn’t imagine existing in any other time, in any other place. It was just her, here with Ivy
.

She pulled back and wiped at her mouth with the back of her hand. She looked at Ivy.

“I’m cold,” she said. Her entire body was shivering.

“Of course,” Ivy said, sounding relieved. She got up to grab a threadbare towel from its place on the rack.

Lila stood. She didn’t want to look down at her own body. She never wanted to see her body again. She moved slowly, careful to avoid the pool of vomit on the floor, but lost her balance stepping over the tub’s edge. Ivy caught her, and they were suspended for just that second, the two of them touching, almost embracing.