The Biker (Nightmare Hall) (10 page)

This was a whole different side of Pruitt that she was seeing. She had hated the cold, calculating Pruitt, but that dispassionate, heartless side of him hadn’t paralyzed her with fear as much as this deranged, demented side of him did. Maybe there was a slight chance that you could reason with the dispassionate Pruitt. Maybe if she had been able to say to him that night in front of Johnny’s Place, “Don’t do this, Pruitt, you’ll be sorry,” and if he could have heard her words over the roar of the motorcycle, maybe he would have steered around those people. The possibility, she knew, was remote, but it could be there.

But there would be
no
reasoning with this incoherent, irrational madman running around the cave, ranting and raving, flinging tools and books and canned goods at the stone walls.

If he found her now, she was dead.

She should have kept the knife she’d used on the tires.

The screaming stopped, not suddenly, but slowly, dwindling to an angry mutter. The clanging against the wall ceased a moment later.

Echo worked up enough courage to glance over the edge of her wall again.

He had his back to her, and was dragging two tires over to the motorcycle, muttering the whole time.

Echo strained to listen.

“Lousy vandals, think they’re going to stop me.” Mutter, mutter … “Touching my things, my private property, who do they think they are? They’ll be sorry.” Mutter, mutter.
He removed the ruined rear tire, replacing it quickly with the new one.

Dismayed, Echo watched in silence. He wasn’t going to take the bike, was he? That would ruin everything! She’d have nothing then to take to the police, except the location of the cave. And what good would that do her without the motorcycle itself?

“It’d take more than two ruined tires to stop me now. It’s been going so well, exactly the way I wanted. Almost finished, not quite
…”
Mutter, mutter.

Echo struggled to hear. Almost finished with what? Changing the tires? Or something else? Something much more … deadly? He was making so much noise, clattering and clanking as he dropped one tool and picked up another, she could barely hear.

He kept his back to her, almost as if he knew she was there. But she knew he didn’t. He had lifted the face shield, but was still wearing the helmet, which, made her heart sink. He’d have taken it off if he wasn’t planning, at any moment, to ride the bike right out of the cave. And there was no way she could stop him. Wouldn’t even dare try. It would be safer for her if he was never, for one moment, aware of her presence in the cave.

“I’m not stopping until I get what I want, and no one can make me stop. I didn’t come all this way for nothing.”
The new front tire was in place. He stood up, dusting off his gloved hand with satisfaction.

“Shouldn’t have touched my bike.”
The voice was cold, hard, and angry.
“Isn’t that how all of this started? Someone who shouldn’t have been anywhere near a motorcycle was allowed to touch it. And nothing was ever the same again after that.”

With that final, cryptic comment, the lantern went out, plunging the cave into complete darkness. A second later, the bike’s engine roared to life.

When Echo peeked out again from behind the stone wall, she felt, rather than saw, that she was alone in the cave. Pruitt and the motorcycle were gone.

She stayed in the crevasse another agonizingly painful few minutes, just to make sure. The top of her head was icy cold and very wet, and her arms and legs and hips burned from being squeezed between the layers of rock. But if she moved out into the mouth of the cave and he was still sitting right outside, he’d see her. She’d never get away from him then.

She tilted her head, listening. There it was, the faint roar of the bike, fading further and further away.

He
was
gone.

With effort, she pushed herself free of the stone walls and, rubbing her scraped elbows to soothe them, moved back into the middle of the cave, stumbling over the mess now littering the floor. It was late. He wouldn’t be gone long. He’d be back to put the bike to bed for the night, and she didn’t dare be here when he returned. There was no time to search for something that would associate Pruitt with the hideaway.

Where was her flashlight? Taking the time to hunt for it could mean the difference between making it back to the dorm in safety or getting caught for a second time that night. And taking the lantern with her would be foolish. If she did run into him, she could lie about where she’d been. But not with his lantern in her hands.

She would have to go back in the dark.

The thought that she had risked her life for nothing was galling. Desperate, Echo bent to fumble around in the dark for something, anything, to take with her. She grabbed the first thing her fingers touched. It felt like a notebook with a hard cover. Maybe it was something, maybe it wasn’t. But she wasn’t leaving empty-handed. Not after what she’d been through.

She thrust the notebook into the waistband of her jeans and, turned and hurried from the cave.

The hike back to campus was a nerve-wracking one. Sliding down the alternately rocky, then slippery, hill was much harder without the aid of a light. With no moon above, she couldn’t see a thing but black, bulky shadows. Worse, she couldn’t be sure Pruitt wasn’t hiding somewhere, behind a boulder or a bush, waiting to see if the culprit who had ruined his tires was still hanging around. She stayed within the shelter of the pine trees and the undergrowth as much as possible, glancing over her shoulder repeatedly. Twice she fell, tripping over a large rock or a fallen tree limb. Both times she scrambled upward quickly, afraid that if she remained on the ground, an angry Pruitt would suddenly appear from behind one of the bushes, pounce on her like a cougar, and choke the life out of her.

Crossing the railroad bridge was the worst. If he came roaring out of the darkness on his way back to the cave while she was on the bridge, where would she hide? There was no place for her to go, unless she was willing to dive into the cold, rushing waters below. I might have some tiny little chance against him, she told herself as she hurried across the creaking bridge, but I’d have no chance against the river.

She stayed as close to the railing as possible, ears alert for any sound of an approaching motorcycle.

It never came.

She made it back to Lester without incident.

Only to find her room crowded with Trixie’s “study group.”

Echo heard the girls before she got to the door, and groaned aloud. She’d forgotten it was Sunday night. Every Sunday, Trixie and her pals, which included Deejay, Marilyn, and Ruthanne and a bunch of other girls Echo didn’t know and had no desire to know, went to the movie in the rec center and then returned to room 324 at Lester to “study.” Echo usually escaped to the library long before the group arrived.

But tonight, all she wanted to do was take a hot shower and crawl into bed. She needed peace and privacy to decide what to do about the cave. There’d be no peace or privacy in her room tonight.

She was surprised to find the room unusually quiet when she opened the door and walked in. They were all there, sprawling on the floor or sitting on Trixie’s bed (not on hers, Echo noticed gratefully), but the usual loud music was absent, no one was laughing, and even the conversation seemed subdued.

“Wow, what happened to you?” Trixie cried when Echo walked in and plopped down on her bed. “I thought you had a date. You look like you’ve been mud-wrestling instead. I told you you were nuts, going out with someone like Pruitt. He’s too weird.”

“Hey,” Deejay protested. “Pruitt’s not nuts! He’s just … different, that’s all. You don’t even know him, Trixie. Leave Echo alone.”

“I don’t want to know him,” Trixie said. “And I don’t understand why Echo
does.”

“I wasn’t with Pruitt,” Echo said wearily. “The date ended a long time ago. I went for a walk and I … I fell.”

No one seemed to care where Echo had been, and Trixie went on to explain, “We were just talking about those two kids in the Miata. The car that went over the cliff? Polk Malone and Nancy Becker. No classes tomorrow, because of them. Marilyn said the dean’s going ballistic, because she’s had to field a lot of phone calls from parents about the Mad Biker.”

The topic of conversation explained why they were all so unusually quiet. It was a depressing subject.

“Well, if Nancy Becker had kept dating Pruitt,” Deejay said, “she wouldn’t be dead now, would she?”

You don’t know how right you are, Echo thought bitterly. She knew Deejay meant that Nancy would have been with Pruitt, instead of in Polk’s car. She didn’t mean that if Nancy hadn’t dumped Pruitt, she’d still be alive.

Echo went into the bathroom, closed the door, and sank down on the floor with her head in her hands. She was going to have to keep seeing Pruitt, horrible though the thought was, until she had something to take to the police. And not just because she wanted, needed, to prove him guilty. Because she feared for her very life. Ignoring Pruitt’s threats would be foolish, even crazy.

When she came out of the bathroom, Ruthanne was saying vehemently, “Well, somebody has to do something! Everyone’s scared to death. It could be any one of us next time. People are going to start hiding in their rooms pretty soon.”

“I agree with Deejay,” Marilyn said quietly. “At least Echo won’t be alone like she usually is. She has Pruitt to keep an eye on her now.”

That was so close to what Pruitt was actually doing, Echo fought an urge to laugh aloud. She was tired, and scared, and sick at heart. Unless that notebook she’d taken from the cave proved valuable, she’d wasted two hours when she should have been studying for finals, and she had almost been caught by an insane killer in the process. “That part about hiding in our rooms,” she said, not caring if she was being rude, “sounds like a great idea. Since you guys aren’t really doing anything here, maybe you could go back to your rooms and do nothing, okay? I need to sleep.”

No one took offense. It was late and they were all still shaken by the afternoon’s tragedy. They left quietly.

When they had gone, Echo took a hot shower and crawled into bed, tired and aching.

But she didn’t go to sleep right away. Two people had been killed today, brutally, in what looked like a random, vicious act of cruelty.

And she, Echo Glenn, knew who had done it. She couldn’t prove it, not yet, but she knew.

Ruthanne, for once, was right. Somebody had to do
something.

There had to be some way to prove what Echo Glenn knew about Aaron Pruitt.

Checking first to make sure the deep, even breathing coming from Trixie’s bed meant that she really was sound asleep, Echo reached under her pillow and pulled forth the black notebook she had surreptitiously slipped beneath it when she’d flopped down on her bed earlier.

Switching on the small blue lamp on her bedside table, she began reading.

T
HE ENTRIES IN THE
journal weren’t dated. The handwriting was barely legible, and there weren’t many entries. The first was brief, but bitter:

Everything is ruined. Everything! No reason to live now. Life will never be good again, like it was. Can’t be. It’s not fair. Not fair!

The second entry was angrier, less despairing:
Why should
I
stop living? I haven’t done anything wrong. It wasn’t my fault. It was someone else’s. That’s who should die, not me. But it shouldn’t be a quick, painless death. It should be slow and torturous, deservedly so. Like Ross’s. His death wasn’t quick and painless. Far from it. He was dragged such a long way, his skin being ripped off by the highway, his clothes shredded. I thought he would never stop screaming. I’ll hear those screams in my sleep until the day I die. But then when the screaming stopped, I wanted it to start again so that I would know he was still alive.

But he wasn’t.

I couldn’t go to him, couldn’t help him. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. My legs wouldn’t work, and there was a bone sticking out of my right arm. Even now, weeks later, I’m having trouble writing this.

Whatever sentence the judge pronounces, it won’t be harsh enough. Can’t be. I wish I could be the one to decide what the punishment should be.

The third entry was frightening in its rage:

The judge said “Accidental death!” I can’t believe it!

The judge was wrong. There wasn’t anything accidental about it. It was negligence, pure and simple.
Criminal
negligence. Ross took the bike in to have it fixed, not to have it destroyed. He thought it had been put back together the way it was supposed to be. He didn’t know the clerk had messed up, forgotten to order the right part. Afraid to admit it. So a part found in the back of the shop was substituted. But that part was back there because it was defective! It had been taken off another bike. The clerk never checked. Neither did the mechanic, because he thought it was the new part that was supposed to have been ordered.

That’s what killed Ross. They gave him back his bike with a defective part, all because of that spineless clerk. If that isn’t negligence, I don’t know what is. Like I said, criminal negligence!

Mom said when she looked up, toward the front of the room, she thought she saw a smile on the face of the person who had trashed our lives forever. A smile! Well, why not? Justice wasn’t being served, was it? There wasn’t going to be any punishment, none at all, so why not smile?

She said it was all she could do to keep from rushing up there and smashing in that face.

If the law isn’t going to seek justice, I’ll have to. I have no choice. This crime can’t go unpunished. That wouldn’t be right. It would make a mockery of Ross’s death. I can’t sit by and let that happen.

And I won’t. I promised Ross. We went to the cemetery a couple of weeks later. Mom cried her eyes out and Dad just kept quiet.

Mom and Dad left and I was alone with him, and I knelt beside the grave. That’s when I promised Ross. “It wasn’t an accident,” I told him. “You and I both know that. I’m going to see to it that you didn’t die for nothing, Ross. I promise.” Then I stuck the flowers I had brought him into the dirt, and went to the car.