Mute (19 page)

“Hold the beef, cowboy. This one’s mine,” Skillings
said. She grabbed the battering ram and pounded through the door in two blows.
“No need to ruin a fine pair of boots.”

Moni rolled her eyes. At least this time, Skillings
showboated on a defenseless door and not on Moni’s ribs in kickboxing class.

Even Skillings’ tough girl armor didn’t prevent her
from clutching her nose and groaning when she entered Randy Cooper’s house.
Pizza boxes with their rotting, half-eaten leftovers littered the floor. Some
of them were atop piles of clothes. A familiar mud-stained shirt covered one of
the boxes. He had left beer bottles all over the place—on the couch, on the floor,
on the window sill, on the TV, and all over the kitchen counter where they also
found a pile of toxic dishes overloading the sink. He had nearly run out of
surface space for the bottles and dirty dishes.

“I guess he wasn’t a stickler for recycling, or
cleaning,” Moni said as she trudged through the pizza boxes and foam takeout
containers. “At least he didn’t make his garbage man work hard.”

“This isn’t by choice,” Skillings said as she drew
her gun and checked the bathroom. She wretched, but didn’t fire, and quickly
shut off the light. “Bleh. Something’s wrong. No one would live in conditions
like this.”

“What are you talking about? When I got out of high
school, I got an apartment with a couple of buddies and our shithole put this
shithole to shame,” Harrison said. “When the pizza boxes get so high you can
sit on them, that’s when you’ve got it made.”

Skillings, who kept her desk so neat that paper
clips were sorted by their different sizes, shuddered.

“Our resident cave man has a point,” Moni said.
“Let’s settle this. I bet our witness is sleeping off one wicked hangover.”

They crept toward the master bedroom. The door had
been left open a crack. Through it, she caught a whiff of the most horrible
stench yet. Maybe he never washed his sheets, she thought. But anyone who had
visited a crime scene or a trauma ward would instantly recognize the meaning of
that smell.

Moni paused and took a deep breath. With each beat,
her heart pounded harder in dread of what waited on the other side of the
bedroom door. She slipped into Randy Cooper’s room. Moni saw his body splayed
out across the blood-soaked carpet alongside his bed. His flesh had been gnawed
up. His skin hung off his face in ribbons of meat around his bare, round
eyeballs. Randy’s lips had been whittled down, exposing a skeletal smile that
was missing one tooth and sporting puffy gums. His clothes were in tatters,
mostly from bite marks, but there were also patches of black ashes where the
fabric had been burned through. The acid had singed his bed, which had the
bloody tread marks of tiny rodent feet with needle-like claws: rats.

Moni tasted the half-digested eggs and ham from
breakfast as they catapulted up her throat. She scampered for the bathroom, but
the smell wafting from there turned her reeling back. She let it heave all over
the tile in the hallway.

The wretched aftertaste of stomach acid only
reminded her of the foul acid that the infected rats had burned Randy with as
they ate him alive. On the same night Moni had barely avoided a snake attack,
the only other person who had witnessed the lagoon killer’s work had been torn
apart by rats in his bed. The monster wanted them. It wouldn’t stop.

Moni started back toward the room, but Harrison
placed his palm on her shoulder in the hallway. Instead of its usual mauling,
his hand lingered there warmly.

“If it’s too much for you, I’ll understand,” he
said. “Hell, I wish I hadn’t downed that protein shake ‘cause it’s sitting
extra heavy now.”

“Call the cleanup crew,” Skillings shouted from
inside the bloody room. “And tell them to sweep the outside of the house.
There’s a hole in the wall where the little bastards chewed their way in.”

Now that rats had started breaking, entering, and
murdering, Moni couldn’t think of an animal she shouldn’t fear.

Chapter 18

The children huddled before Mrs. Mint and sat on
the carpet for story time. Mariella didn’t join them. While she stared in
fascination at the white mouse Snowflake, half of her classmates snickered at
her.

Mrs. Mint called her over. The girl did nothing.
The teacher didn’t know whether Mariella had a good reason but simply couldn’t
articulate it, or whether she had flat out ignored her. Her classmates could
care less. They saw it as an act of defiance that went unpunished because
little Mariella played by different rules.

“She’s trying to kiss her boyfriend!” said Cole
Buckley, the hyperactive boy that Mariella had knocked silly—supposedly on
accident—on her first day back.

“No way. Even Snowflake thinks her breath stinks,”
said his twin, Kyle Buckley.

As Mrs. Mint told the boys they better cut it out,
Mariella swiveled around and froze the twins with a cold stare. Those dark eyes
extinguished their childish laughter. Mariella stalked right up to their noses
and then took a seat on the carpet behind them. The Buckley boys didn’t say
another word until the teacher finished the chapter. They didn’t even turn
around for a glimpse at their silent adversary behind them.

Mrs. Mint tried helping Mariella talk, but hadn’t
gotten a word out of her. She had become more communicative in different ways,
such as pointing, facial expression and occasionally writing down a few words
like “Need bathroom.” It didn’t hamper her class work too much. Mariella picked
up math better than even before the tragedy and she copied words perfectly. But
when she had to compose a few sentences on her own, she refused. Mariella would
reach a hand out from behind her shield, but she wouldn’t set the barrier down.

So Mrs. Mint went along another route. She sat the
class at their desks and had them draw their favorite animals. That would make
Mariella reveal something for sure, and next she could push a little deeper,
like for a drawing of the scariest thing she has ever seen.

The teacher scanned the animal pictures the
children had taped across the classroom window. She saw plenty of lions,
dinosaurs, dogs and horses. None of them had Mariella’s name. The girl remained
at her desk working diligently on her drawing after all her classmates had finished.
Walking behind the girl, Mrs. Mint peeked over her shoulder. Mariella
delicately traced Snowflake the mouse with a colored pencil and filled out
every detail of his cage, from the water bottle to the feed bowl.

“What a fantastic job, Mariella,” Mrs. Mint said.
She caught the Buckley boys giving her a pair of peeved glares with their
freckled faces. “When you finish, why don’t you put it up on the window with
the others?”

The girl nodded with a coy smile. Her classmates
had chosen something a bit more exciting than a little mouse, but Mrs. Mint
could understand why Mariella identified with it. The poor thing had been
mishandled by rough kiddie hands so many times that she didn’t let them take
him out of his cage any more.

Mrs. Mint had just sat down behind her desk when
she heard the Buckley boys laughing. Kyle had snatched Mariella’s drawing off
her desk and circled the classroom with it—enticing the girl into giving
chance. Mariella pivoted and watched him the whole way. Her eyes trained on him
like a machine gun turret, yet she didn’t make a move.

“Put it down, Kyle,” Mrs. Mint snapped. She hoped
he’d listen, because she couldn’t run that fast on her clumsy bloated ankles.

“Oh, sorry. Oops.” Kyle giggled as he dropped the
paper—right into the hands of his brother. Cole took off around the classroom
the other way. For every second of recognition their teacher paid the fragile
girl, the Buckley boys demanded her attention tenfold.

“You love a mouse! You love a mouse!” Cole taunted.
“Why don’t you like a cool animal, like my dog? He’s the most kick-ass dog
there is, not like those stupid Chihuahuas they have in your home, Mexico.”

“She likes the mouse ‘cause she thinks it’s a
Chihuahua,” Kyle said. “Our dog could eat your dumb mouse.”

“Kyle. Cole. That’s enough!” Mrs. Mint shouted. She
wished Mariella would stand up for herself instead, but the teacher couldn’t
tolerate her taking that much abuse. None of the other kids, even Mariella’s
former friends, stuck up for her. “If you don’t give her that picture back
right now, you’re spending every recess this month cleaning the blackboard.”

Cole slowed his run into a cocky strut and waved
the drawing above his head. Mariella held her hand out anxiously, but he
chucked it on the floor between the desks. She dashed after her precious
picture, tripped and fell flat on her face. As the whole class roared with
laughter Mrs. Mint caught sight of a giddy Kyle retracting his foot from the
aisle Mariella had just run down. Mariella sat up cradling her drawing against
her chest and, besieged by faces reveling in her pain, buried her head into her
knees. Even Mrs. Mint’s scolding and threats of detection couldn’t smother the
contagious cruel laughter.

Most children would have broken into a fit of
whining or enraged screaming. That would have been a very human reaction. And
it would have required that Mariella make a sound. Instead, the girl rose up,
left her once treasured drawing on the ground and marched to the window with
the other pictures. Snatching a handful of crayons on her way, Mariella made a
B-line for Kyle’s drawing of his golden Labrador retriever. She reared the red
crayon back and stabbed at the page, slashing a red gash across the dog’s neck.

“Hey! That’s mine!” Kyle charged at her, but he
couldn’t weave between the desks in time.

Mariella smeared the crayon against the page until
it blotted out the dog’s head. She did the same to one of its front legs. Then
the girl took a purple crayon and bashed it over the dog so it left blotchy
spots.

Her parents had lost their heads, Mrs. Mint
thought. Could this be a reenactment of what she saw that horrible night? If
she wanted revenge on the Buckley boys, she’d use the most deadly thing she’s
ever seen. That must be it. She would save the drawing for the child psychologist.

Mrs. Mint caught Kyle by the collar a second before
he reached Mariella. She blocked off Cole and snatched him up too.

“That stupid wetback is ruing my picture of Butch!”
Kyle protested.

“Watch your mouth. That’s a dirty word,” Mrs. Mint
said as she dragged the brothers toward the timeout chairs. “You didn’t let her
finish her picture, so now she’s putting the finishing touches on yours.”

Ignoring the familiar refrain of “It’s not fair,”
Mrs. Mint put the mischievous twins in punishment. When she returned to face
the rest of the class, she found them staring at the massacre Mariella had made
of Kyle’s drawing of his dog. With it hanging in the window, everyone who
passed by her classroom would know there’s a disturbed child inside. The girl
had already returned to her desk, where she finished off her picture of
Snowflake the mouse. The whittled stubs of red and purple crayons lay at
Mariella’s feet. Studying her face, Mrs. Mint couldn’t detect a hint of the
malice Mariella had bristled with moments earlier. It had dissipated like the
ripples from a dropped stone smoothing out over the lagoon.

How
much longer can I protect her, and still protect my class from her?

Chapter 19

Aaron knew he’d need those cheesy eighties cop show
sunglasses for something one day. The perfect opportunity for playing a
bad-ass, cocaine cowboy-buster came when the real cops called him along for a
search warrant. The target: Harry “Lagoon Watcher” Trainer.

Seated besides Aaron in the back seat of the police
cruiser as they sped up A1A along the sand dunes and hotels of Satellite Beach,
Professor Swartzman didn’t look all that pumped. Aaron overheard him pleading
with Sneed over the phone that morning in the lab. The professor had told the
police investigator that they were wasting their time. Trainer couldn’t
possibly engineer a baffling organism like this, he had said. Sneed didn’t give
a damn what the professor thought. He only wanted his opinion on what they
found in the Lagoon Watcher’s digs in Merritt Island.

It looked like the Watcher had been growing a rain
forest on his lawn. With the thicket of bushes, the knee-length tangle of grass
and weeds and un-pruned trees, a passerby wouldn’t know the house sat on a
canal leading into the lagoon without looking at the normal home next door. In
this neighborhood of meticulously manicured beachside homes, Trainer’s shaggy
place had a mailbox bulging full of letters, which Aaron guessed included many
homeowner association fines.

“Recognize the place?” Sneed asked from the
driver’s seat as he eyed Swartzman in the rearview mirror.

“I thought I would, until I saw it,” the professor
said. “I remember when Harry had the housewarming party with his wife—ex-wife
now. That was nearly 20 years ago. I haven’t visited in at least five years.”

“Was that the last time he mowed his lawn?” Aaron
asked.

The wisecrack drew a chuckle from Sneed, but it
didn’t get his professor off the hook.