Malevolent (32 page)

“She can’t sleep no more. The cats gonna get her!” Dolly cried. “She’s not hungry no more, but I am.”

They’d been starving themselves to death. “Why’d you do this?” Tim demanded.

“Vincent told us,” Dolly said. “He took all our food and we din’t have no more.”

Vincent Applegate would have some explaining to do, Tim would see to that.

Then he heard the wet sound from behind the room’s only other door. The women, even the dazed Germaine, stared as he did at the muffled, slurping noises.

“I closed it,” Dolly said, apparently of the latched door.

Let it go
, Tim told himself.
It can’t get you
.

But he knew he couldn’t do that, just as he couldn’t have avoided gawking, with all of the other street gawkers, at the flashing lights and prone victim those many nights ago. There was just something in him that had to
know
. He tiptoed to the door and lightly grasped the knob with both hands.

“No,” Dolly said, but softly as though already convinced that he’d ignore her.

“Tim?” There was a frantic mix of warning and confusion in Melinda’s voice, like she couldn’t believe she had to caution him against the action he was about to take.

“Where’s your gun?” he asked her, a question that probably should have been asked earlier.

“With my cell phone. In my purse,” she said. Then, “In the car.”

He let out a sigh that perfectly summed up how their day had gone. He twisted the knob and pulled.

Chapter Fifty-Three

“Stop, you!” the landlady shouted. “You so big and chubby, you gonna break my flowerpot, my railing, everything.”

He’d made it as far as the porch railing. From there, Griffin let himself glance for only a second at the landlady just a couple feet below him. He already felt woozy. He’d feel great by the time his ass hung twenty feet in the air. “If you forget your damn railing,” he muttered, “I’ll forget to tell the Renters’ Authority about your kitchen paint job.”

Renters’ Authority. Made it up on the spot, but she didn’t have to know that. She mumbled something that Griffin didn’t ask her to repeat.

It looked like that first concrete ledge was reachable by merely extending his leg a foot or so over his head. Yeah, right. It was also theoretically possible to reach high enough to grasp the ledge and shimmy his way up the post to it. Then, from a standing position, he could repeat the process. Shimmy up to the next ledge.

Theor
fucking
etically.

He looked over his shoulder, searched the street for a police car popping into view like the US Cavalry.

No such luck. He tightened his grip on the splintery pole and hopped up, halfheartedly relinquishing the relative safety of the porch rail.

Forward momentum, gone. He was a big bug plastered to a paint-flaked wall. The act of hugging the post for dear life turned him into a much more honest person. He couldn’t have climbed the face of this house even when he was ten.

“If that isn’t the most disgusting sight…”

He just knew, based on the landlady’s hushed, almost reverential tone, and the warm air blowing up his hairy ass, that his jeans and underwear hadn’t shimmied even as far up the house as the rest of him had.

Just shoot me, he thought. Shoot me and get it the fuck over with.

“I don’t know why you put yourself through such pains when I have a ladder on side of the house.”

He counted loose paint flakes inches from his eyes. Like counting to ten before letting fly with the temper. Still staring at the post—where else to look?—he said calmly, “So you have a ladder?”

“Of course.”

Griffin danced his feet in the air in search of the railing. He lost his balance before finding it, yelped, and toppled in a heap to the ground. It was almost embarrassing how little pain he felt after the fall from a height that had seemed so much steeper. He brushed himself off with as much dignity as he could muster and hitched up his jeans.

He let the landlady walk ahead of him to the driveway side of the house and point out an aluminum ladder already resting against the building, toward the rear.

“Margie Weeks’ son’s been scraping for me, but he don’t work so fast.”

Griffin nodded, still holding it together. “Just wondering,” he said, “why you didn’t tell me about the ladder beforehand.”

She shrugged. Scattered fresh cigarette ash. “You didn’t ask, so I thought you were a good climber. Hah.”

He gripped the ladder in both hands, dragged it across the building to the front, ignoring the sputtering woman’s comments regarding gouged siding.

Griffin braced the ladder against the balcony railing, turned and growled, “Go call the cops. Now.” Then he stomped his way up, the ladder shaking and groaning every step of the way, but he didn’t give a fuck. He dared it to spill him.

It didn’t.

At the top, he grabbed hold of the balcony railing and, with a final lunge—

Heard something. He replanted his feet on a rung of the wobbly ladder and watched the patch of blonde hair atop the figure approaching him on the balcony. Peering down at him. He almost lost it, one foot actually slipping from the rung.

Griffin could clearly see for the first time her delicate nose and overpainted dark eyes. Just a young woman with a face somewhat plainer than her body.

“Go away,” she said softly. Her voice just a voice, nothing familiar or eerie about it.

His sweat was turning the aluminum handholds to grease. “You’re not real,” he said quietly. “So get the fuck out of my way.”

She wasn’t expecting that, his phantom. A shadow passed over her face. It lengthened and her eyes grew darker.

“Patty already took you on and beat you,” he said. “And I know the truth. You’re not there. You’re here.” He tapped his temple with a finger and tugged his lips into an unfelt smile. His bladder felt heavy, groin tight. He grabbed hold of the balcony railing and prepared to swing his leg over. But stopped, distracted by background movement.

A man came forward now, though Griffin hadn’t seen him there before, and the French doors hadn’t opened. As recognition set in, Griffin knew he was in trouble. He’d fall off the ladder in a dead faint and the police would find him on top of the equally cold and still landlady, and wouldn’t that make a story?

“That face of yours, it looks like it’s approaching the boiling point again,” his father warned.

John Solloway ambled closer. Close enough to place a protective arm around the smirking blonde. “Watch how you talk to our little friend here, will you, son? You know how it is when you lose your temper. Women end up hurt. Remember your mother?”

Griffin shook his head. “Not real. None of it.”

The blonde smiled. She placed a cool hand over his clammy one on the balcony rail. It felt sensuous to the touch, nothing hallucinatory about it. Griffin felt his skin prickling.

“Not
real
?” she said, giggling. She tucked a finger under one of his and gently pried it off of the railing. Then another.

“That’s right,” his father said. Same soft, mournful eyes as when he’d lived. Eyes that could spark instantly to fury. “Don’t let your temper get the best of you this time, Griffin my boy.”

No, the old man was fucking with him once again. It was Dad who’d been the threat to Griffin’s mother, not him.

All of his body processes felt cold and sluggish, the blood slogging through his veins, his heart barely pulsing, lungs expanding and compressing like rusted machinery. His eyes couldn’t close even long enough to blink. He could only stare at his pale father, dead more than a year.

The old man leaned on the rail and smiled gently at his only son. “Make me proud of you, boy. Step right on down that ladder and let this poor girl be.”

Griffin smiled back at the nicest guy in the world—except when provoked. The old man had a real talent for laying the blame for his outbursts on whoever he felt had driven him to it. He wasn’t angry now, though. He’d never been more patient.

“All right, so I called them,” the landlady called up huffily. “The cops, they think I’m crazy with stories of pudgy men climbing ladders. Maybe they come, maybe they don’t. I did all I could and I’m not doing no more.”

Griffin forgot the height. He looked down upon the hefty woman with arms crossed, scowling up at him. Behind him, his father and the phantom blonde peered over the railing. Griffin adjusted his gaze from the ground to the balcony to the ground. The landlady looked bored.

“I know what you’re thinking,” his father said. “But you’ve got it all wrong.”

No he didn’t. He gave his father a pale smile. “The landlady, she hasn’t been to the church, has she? And she doesn’t have father and women issues. That’s why she can’t see you.”

“Griffin, I’m telling you—”

“No, I’m telling you, numbfuck.” God, it felt good talking to the father-thing like this. He deliberately let the years’ accumulation of anger wash over him until the ladder trembled with his rage. “Out of the way,” he bellowed as he plowed up and over the railing and fell in an exhausted heap to the balcony floor.

“What the hell?” he heard the landlady murmur.

Now he could see the father and the blonde for what they were. He watched eyes blacken, faces shift as if resettling over icebergs. Nostrils flared into black pits, mouths stretched but still couldn’t accommodate broadening jaws of teeth.

The things roared together, “YOU ARE NOT WANTED HERE.” Their voices no longer even mimicked human speech, but sounded like the grinding of hollow metal plates.

Griffin rose and stepped away from the creatures. His anger was gone again, expended. He spoke in a little voice, all he had left. “Eat me,” he said.

Still panting with exertion, he watched the creatures flicker, fade, melt away with twin snarls of ineffective rage.

He moved shakily to the French doors and prepared to face whatever he’d find on the other side.

Chapter Fifty-Four

When the pain came in white licks of fire delivered straight to his brain, he longed for the blackout of moments or hours before. If he could just close his eyes again maybe he could drift back to the blackout place without thought or pain or worry.

“Get up and get her, you fool.”

Laney, no doubt. Lovely Laney. The white pain jagged deeper and hotter into his sore brain. Even more irritating than his dead wife’s voice was the retching, hitching, wheezing, rasping, phlegmy sounds he heard in the background. He forced his eyes open, wiped away the red trickle disturbing his line of vision and saw the girl rising to her knees, snorting like an overexerted racehorse.

Oh good. He hadn’t been out that long after all.

He watched her gain her feet and stagger past him to the front door.

“Now,” his wife screamed and she must have been proud at the speed with which his arm shot out to grab the bitch by an ankle and tug her back to the ground.

He jerked himself to a seated position over her, but faster than he’d intended. The room reeled and he felt his last meal, whatever that might have been, prepare for a return engagement. Since he knew he was going to fall anyway, he made every effort to topple onto the upended girl, to seal her under him. Good plan except that she rolled away at the last instant so that he crashed facedown to the hard floor.

His nose throbbed like a motherfucker. Blinking away the blood still blotting his vision from a half-dozen sharp shards of porcelain from the lamp, he watched the girl make for the back of the apartment in a sort of cockroach crawl on all fours, quick and awkward.

Oh good. Now he could be all alone with his wife’s fury.

“I can’t fucking believe you,” she told him. “What do you think she weighs? One-thirty and she beats the shit out of you? Try to remember this–she gets away, you get the needle.”

Somehow he got to a wobbly standing position. Lethal injection, if it came to that, would come as a consequence of his following Laney’s instructions. She was conveniently forgetting that.

“Look at you, weaving like a drunk.”

She was right. It took every effort just to remain vertical against the back of the colorful couch. He wondered how steady Laney would be if
she
got conked on the head with a lamp. In fact, he wished he’d thought of that instead of a painless blast of carbon monoxide.

“I heard that,” she snarled, though he hadn’t voiced a word. “Get your attention back on the matter at hand and tell me what you intend to do.”

He’d get the cunt at the back of the apartment, of course. He’d had his moment of moral weakness, but not after she creased and slashed his scalp with the lamp. Now it was going to be a treat to wrap his fingers around that delicate throat.

“You’re going about it all wrong.”

“What do you suggest?” He let the sarcasm drip.

“Stop and think. Don’t worry, she’s not going anywhere.”

His dead wife sat on that bright couch, dangling one long leg over another. She wore the burgundy dress from that final night together in their garage. Is that what she’d been wearing all along?

“It’s just the kitchen back there,” she told him. “The door’s painted shut and they lost the key a long time ago.” Saying it as though it was common knowledge.