Sawbones: A Novella (6 page)

They must be miles from anywhere by now.

The Winnebago slows, turns and then lurches from pothole to pothole. Finally it stops.

In the darkness Laura can hear the other girls taking scared breaths. This is it.

The Bastard isn’t singing any more, he’s swearing as he pushes through from the driver’s compartment and turns on the light. The carpet glistens dark red in the washed-out plastic glow, littered with jagged shards of white and clumps of grey.

The muffled screaming starts again.

One of the girls is slumped forward. She’s tied up against the motor home’s back wall and the top of her head is missing. Blown off by whatever idiot was shooting at them out on the Interstate.

Laura looks away. Tells herself she’s not going to be sick.

The Bastard stands there with his mouth open and his eyes like burning coals as he stares at the dead girl. “HOW DARE THEY!”

He storms through the Winnebago, yelling, “SHE WAS MINE!” and when he reaches the girl with no top to her head he kicks her lifeless body. “MINE!” He kicks her again, “MINE!” and again and again, making the whole motor home shake. “MINE! MINE! MINE!”

And in between the yelling and the sound of his foot slamming into the corpse, Laura can hear the other girls screaming behind their gags.

Then the Bastard falls to his knees and cries. Cradling the woman’s half-head against his chest, sobbing that he’s sorry and they had no right to take her from him.

He sits back and wipes his eyes with a bloody hand, leaving dark scarlet smears across his cheeks. Then he pulls out a pocket knife and cuts through the cable-ties holding the dead girl in place. Drags her out of the Winnebago’s side door.

Two minutes later he’s back, and someone else is cut free. The girl whimpers as he drags her away. Then the next one. And the next, until there’s only Laura left.

He stands looking down at her, his face like sadness carved in stone. “None of your shit, understand?”

Laura nods, the motion stopped midway by the rope around her neck.

The Bastard pulls out his knife again, and holds it against Laura’s throat. “Now I gotta go out and get me another girl. You play nice or I can just as easy make it two.”

He raises the blade and saws through the noose, then he cuts the cable-ties that go through the rings on the floor. But her wrists and ankles are still bound, the gag’s still stuffed in her mouth.

“There we go,” he says, putting the knife back in his pocket, “I knew you could be a good girl.” The Bastard strokes her hair, smiling. “My good girl. We’re going to – ”

He doesn’t get any further, because Laura head-butts him in the face. SMACK!

By the time he hits the blood-soaked carpet, she’s struggling to her feet – not easy with both ankles cable-tied together.

Weapon. She needs a weapon.

He groans, lying on his side under the table, arms wrapped around his battered head.

WEAPON!

There are drawers on either side of the stove. Hands tied behind her back, Laura fumbles for a drawer handle and yanks the whole thing clean out of the unit. It clatters to the floor – dish towels. Laura swears behind her gag and tries the drawer on the other side. This time it’s cutlery, stainless steel glinting dully in the thin light. Forks, spoons, knives that look so blunt they couldn’t saw their way through a milkshake, scissors . . .

She squats down and feels for them, not wanting to take her eyes off the Bastard. He’s still groaning as her fingers find the round handles of the scissors, and fumble them into place. No way she can cut through the plastic holding her wrists together in time. She goes for the cable-ties around her ankles instead, forcing the open blade of the scissors between her skin and the plastic. Then SQUEEZING.

Nothing, nothing, nothing . . . and then all at once, snip. She’s through.

She stands, eyes darting to the Winnebago’s door then back to the Bastard. She can’t stab him with her hands tied behind her back, but there is something she
can
do.

Laura takes a big step forwards and kicks him in the stomach. Shouting at him through the gag. Another kick – going for his nuts, but The Bastard curls up in a ball and her bare foot slams into his thigh instead.

If she still had her stilettos on she could stamp on his ugly fucking head till it went right through his skull into his sick fucking brain. But she hasn’t, so she hammers her foot into the hands covering his face, hoping to break a finger, or his nose.

And then she turns and runs.

Out through the door and onto the hard-packed dirt of a farm track. The dawn’s early light is just enough to make out the shape of a rickety old house. Some barns, knee-high grass, the corpses of long-dead cars.

Laura runs down the road, trying to ignore the jabbing pain of stones as they dig into her feet. Behind her, she can hear the sound of a dog barking. Raising the alarm. She speeds up.

Faster.

The dirt road gives way to gravel and she knows she can’t run on that. So she makes for the grass that grows along one side, on the fringes of a field of corn – the stalks taller than she is, rustling in the faint breeze. The grass is cool and damp on her battered feet, but slippery. Dangerous. And running beside the road isn’t exactly clever, is it? The Bastard has a Winnebago, and it can go a lot faster than she can.

She has to get off the road. Cut through the field. Find somewhere to hide until daylight. Maybe another farmhouse where she can call for help.

An engine’s roar comes from the darkness behind her. He’s got over his kicking. Any minute now he’ll come racing up behind her and she’ll be caught in the headlights. No place to hide.

Laura dives left, into the corn. Stalks whip past as she runs deeper into the darkness, the leaves slapping wet against her legs and face. She’s making a hell of a lot of noise and she knows it. But not as much as that fucking Winnebago.

Or the dog.

The barking’s getting closer.

The Bastard’s set the dog on her and it sounds HUGE.

Oh God, oh God, oh God . . .

She risks a glance over her shoulder and trips on a clump of something. With her hands tied behind her back she can’t even break her fall – Laura slams face-first into the muddy earth between the massive stalks of corn, all the breath leaving her in one painful rush.

She doesn’t want to do this any more. She wants to be home in bed. She wants to be safe. She wants to be in the kitchen with Mom, sharing a cup of coffee. She wants to curl up and cry.

But if she does that, he’ll catch her for sure.

So she fights her way to her feet and starts running again. The breath hissing in and out through her nose as she pushes herself harder than she ever has before. Running for her life.

The dog’s quicker.

She can hear its paws skittering through the mud behind her. Rattling the corn stalks, barking, growling. Getting closer. And closer. And . . .

Chapter 13

Des Moines, Iowa

The Fish Trap Lounge is a dingy bar in a concrete strip-mall on Army Post Road. Ouside, the sun’s baking the sidewalk, but in here it’s dark – some people would say the guy who owns the place should get some more lights in here, but they’d be missing the point, wouldn’t they? It’s
supposed
to be dark. That way no fucker can see what you’re up to.

It’s half-ten in the morning, and I’m nursing a cup of bitter coffee, trying to blunt the edges with way too much sugar and cream. Still tastes like shit, though. Henry’s on Bud Lite with a bourbon chaser, and Jack . . . well, Jack’s sulking ’cause Henry tore a strip off him for his lousy shooting last night. Then Jack shouted back how it was all Henry’s fault for making us steal that piece-of-shit Ford in the first place. How if we’d stolen a decent car we would have caught the bastard.

So Henry hit him. Again.

The bar’s owner is a short, round guy with a shaven head, glasses, a big moustache and a T-shirt with no sleeves showing off a lion’s head tattoo. He clatters a big plate of hot wings down on our table and tells us they’re compliments of Mr Luciano, whose right-hand man will be here as soon as he’s taken care of a little business.

We thank him, and he goes back to whatever the hell it is bar-tenders do when they’re not delivering chicken wings and messages for the local mobsters.

Jack picks up a wing and takes a bite, winces, then drops it back on the pile. “Fucking loose tooth . . .” He runs a finger around the inside of his mouth.

Henry glares at him. “Don’t put it back on the plate! You think we want to eat stuff with your spit on it?”

Thank God, Jack has enough brains to keep his big mouth shut this time as he picks the wing up and dumps it in the ashtray instead.

“I should fucking think so,” says Henry, but he doesn’t help himself to the pile. Not after spending so long glued to the toilet last night – blaming the breakfast burrito Jack bought him. So that means all the wings are mine. Which is cool.

I’m halfway through them when the front door opens and a big guy in a black and yellow Hawkeyes jacket saunters into the bar and straight over to our table.

“One of you guys called Henry?” He’s got that strange Iowa accent, the one that goes up and down in the middle of sentences for no reason.

Henry nods at him. The guy looks like he’s in his mid forties, getting a bit heavy round the middle, but he carries himself with the same kind of quiet violence you see in grizzly bears. He sits at the table and helps himself to a wing – stripping the meat off the bones as the barman hurries over with a pint of beer and a bottle of hot sauce.

“Right,” says the guy when Mr Short-and-Bald goes away again, “I understand you need a favour, Henry.”

“For Mr Jones. Yes.”

“What d’you need?”

“Winnebago – it’s got Polk County plates with a little soldier on them.”

“Uh-huh,” the guy nods and another wing vanishes. “National Guard plates – it’s an infantry man, couple of planes in the background?”

I nod. “I didn’t get the registration on account of our car exploding, but it’s something like ‘Swooner’ or ‘Stoner’?”

He shakes his head. “Won’t be ‘Stoner’, we got laws against people putting disrespectful shit like that on their licence plates.”

“OK,” says Henry, “so we’re looking for a brown Winnebago that belongs to the National Guard?”

“Nope.” The guy takes the top off the hot sauce and splashes it over the remaining chicken wings. “Them there’s vanity plates. Don’t cost that much. If you’re a fire fighter, you can buy fire fighter plates. If you’re a war veteran you can buy war veteran plates. For the ones with the little soldier on them, you got to be
in
the National Guard. You got to get your unit commander to certify you’re still on active duty every year you got those plates on your vehicle.”

Henry leans forwards. “We need an address.”

“Not going to be easy. Half the state’s in the Guard. Iowa’s big on doing its patriotic duty.” Another wing gets turned into bones, then the guy downs his beer, belches, and says, “Stay here.”

We watch him leave.

Jack scowls at the bar, not meeting anyone’s eyes. “I still say we should go to the Feds with this.”

That gets him ‘the look’ from Henry.

“No.”

“But – ”

“I have to tell you
no
again,” says Henry, “I’m going to break your arm.” He finishes his bourbon and places the glass carefully on the tabletop. “I’m sick of you whining and moaning and not doing what you’re fuckin’ told. You want to live to see New York again? You keep your fuckin’ mouth shut.”

Jack looks at him, then at me. For a moment I think he’s about to say something, but he doesn’t. He does what he’s told. Looks like he’s finally hearing that little voice. This time he’s not going to poke the bear.

Which is just as well. Jack’s a big bastard and I don’t fancy having to drag his dead body out into the woods to bury it.

Chapter 14

The middle of nowhere

Laura comes back to life with a cough, only she’s still got the gag in her mouth, so it comes out like a dry retch. Everything hurts – arms, head, chest . . . Her left leg stings and throbs . . . and it takes her a moment to remember why. To remember where she is and just how fucked up her world has become.

She’s sitting in the driving seat of an ancient, long-dead car, both wrists secured to the steering wheel with more cable-ties. She’s seat-belted in, but just in case that’s not enough, the Bastard has chained her to the seat as well.

The throbbing pain in her left leg is getting worse, and she looks down to see her jeans stained with blood.

It’s all coming back to her – the scrabble of the dog behind her, paws on mud getting closer. A sudden moment of silence as it leaps, and then the pain as it sinks its teeth into her leg, whipping its head back and forth, tearing out chunks of meat. The sound of her own muffled screams. And then the Bastard’s there, hauling the dog off her, so he can punch and kick her instead. She can barely see out of her right eye now.

Laura tries not to cry. She knows it isn’t going to help. But it’s no use – she’s sore, miles from home, scared, bleeding, and she wants her mom and dad so badly . . .

She cries till there’s nothing left but dry heaving sobs, then even they subside and she’s left feeling hollow and empty.

From where she’s sitting she can see that the car she’s in is one of about a dozen abandoned in a field, all of them axle-deep in the knee-high grass looking like they haven’t moved in years. Some have more glass than others, but they’re all older models, stained with rust. A graveyard for automobiles.

One of the girls from the Winnebago is chained up in an ancient Volvo. Next to that there’s someone else in a Volkswagen Beetle. Another one slumps in a rusty Dodge pickup . . . There’s an old Ford sitting on flat tyres on the other side – the girl in that one’s dead. Her head hangs to the side, eyes open and glassy, flies clustering around the stumps where her arms used to be. Oh, Jesus.

Laura can’t twist round very far, not with her hands strapped to the steering wheel, but she can see other cars in the rear-view mirror. At least three of them have dead women in them. There’s only one girl still alive back there, chained to the seat of a rusty Cadillac. She’s nodding. Back and forth, and back and forth, like she’s listening to heavy metal, but Laura gets the feeling there’s something broken inside the girl’s head. Something that snapped when her arms were cut off.