Authors: Jack Ketchum
The Lost (39 page)
“We’ll get you some help, sir. You hang in there.”
He’d seen a phone in the girl’s room so he used that to call first aid, who were having a helluva busy night and then Jackowitz and by the time he got back Ed had the man leaning against his shoulder and was tying a bath towel tight across the entry and exit wounds.
“How bad?”
“Guy’s in shock and he’s lost a lot of blood. The shot won’t kill him, the shot’s clean. The shock and the bleeding might though. You see the bullet there?”
He did. The bullet had passed through the guy and into the wall at just about the level of Schilling’s hairline. Which meant it had been fired from downstairs.
“Any sign of the girl?”
“Nothing.”
“Dammit. You know what this guy’s doing, Ed? This guy’s
collecting.”
“Yeah. And we got to hope for two things. That he’s through with that part of it for now and that he wants to keep his collection intact awhile.”
“We’ll wait for first aid and then I want to head back to the station.”
“Tim Bess?”
“He’s all we’ve got.”
He was climbing through the northern hills where the houses and grounds got bigger and there was still raw acreage between them. He kept an eye on her in the seat beside him. When he saw her start to come around he parked the car by a low stone wall, took the keys out of the ignition and walked around to the passenger side. He made sure that the first thing she saw when she opened her eyes was the Ladysmith pointed at her forehead.
“Slide over. You’re driving.”
“
Fuck I am
.” Her voice was thick. Like she needed a drink of water.
He smiled. “You’re gonna have a helluva lump on your head in the morning, Kath. You want another one? Slide over.”
She looked at him a moment, a look of hate and disgust that he didn’t like to see there but she did as she was told. He got in and handed her the keys. She started the car. He swatted at a gnat buzzing around his head. They were out in full force this year.
“Where to, Ray? Back to the campgrounds so you can dump the body?”
“What body?”
“My body.”
He smiled. “No campgrounds. You’ll know when we get there. Just drive the car.”
“Did you kill my father, Ray?”
“Maybe yes and maybe no. You won’t know either way unless you do what I tell you though, will you?”
“If you did then you better kill me. Or you’ll be watching your back the rest of your life. I swear it.”
“I don’t know what I’m gonna do with you yet, Kath. That’s my business. Your business is just to drive. Simple, right?”
He realized that he really
didn’t
know what he was going to do with her or with any of them for that matter. There was no particular plan. He had some ideas, sure. Of course he did. And he had a destination. That much he definitely did have. He guessed it was plenty for now. He felt happy as a kid again in the car with her and holding the Ladysmith on her—her driving away because he said so, understanding he’d gut-shoot her in half a second if she didn’t—only this kid also had an erection. He had the other two in the trunk and her not even suspecting they were there. This was really too cool. He felt like all of this was exactly as it ought to be. Like getting a song down exactly right and perfect.
Too bad Tim wasn’t around to appreciate it. He was a fucking artist and there was nobody around to see. He couldn’t be mad at Tim. Tim was just a guy like he was trying to get by, trying to get a little pussy now and then. He kinda missed Tim.
But Tim would just go sissy on him at this point like he had over those other girls and besides there was Jennifer tucked away in the trunk. He wouldn’t like that.
Tim and Jennifer. Tim and Jennifer
fucking
. Unbelievable.
What a world.
She was dying in there. They both were.
She wasn’t at all sure but that Sally Richardson wasn’t already dead. She hadn’t moved in the longest time and trying to shake her or talk to her got no response at all. Her throat felt so raw she could hardly talk anyway so she stopped trying.
She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t get a proper breath
. The smell of gas fumes was like a hand clamped tight over her mouth and nose, like the fumes were inside her skin, invading every organ in her body. Her legs had cramped up bad earlier but now she couldn’t even feel them anymore. For a while her head had ached worse than she’d ever thought possible, so much pressure she’d thought it would burst. Now even that was gone. She fought constantly against the drowsiness.
Sleep would kill her.
She thought about the Griffiths. It wasn’t right. What had the Griffiths ever done to Ray? He hardly even knew them.
What had
any
of them ever done that was so awful?
To make him do this
.
She saw Mrs. Griffith crawling. A bright trail of blood behind her.
And surrendered.
Perhaps it was that image that caused her to surrender. The old woman bleeding, dying, crawling toward the kitchen. Because this was better than what had happened to Mrs. Griffith. That was
pain
. This was just sleep.
She closed her eyes and the darkness fell and then lifted some unknowable time later into some other, brighter darkness that was the real dark and not the dark of sleep and she realized that her eyes were open and the trunk was open and she was breathing real air and pain hit her suddenly like blows from a hammer, a crack to her head and a crack to each of her legs and then descended into her belly and she turned her head and vomited into the dirty rusted hub of the spare tire.
She heard Sally Richmond coughing and vomiting too and stared up at him frowning outside the car, him standing with a gun in Katherine Wallace’s belly, stared up at the moon and stars that framed him, the brightness far beyond him huge and clear and open.
“Look at the mess you guys made! Shit.”
The pain didn’t matter. Neither head nor legs nor stomach. She actually welcomed the pain. She’d been wrong about Mrs. Griffith.
Pain meant you were still alive.
“You look like shit,” he said.
However she looked it was nothing to the way she felt. She’d never been so sick in her life. She had no idea where they were or how far they’d gone or how long they’d been driving. She had no idea where her brain had taken her in the interim, only that she was weak and sick and that her mouth tasted of vomit and gas fumes and under all that, horrified at what he’d done and scared of what he
was still
doing.
“Get the fuck out of there.”
She slung her legs one by one over the rim of the trunk and pushed up with her arms until her ass scraped over it and she was standing wobbling in front of him.
“You too, Jen.”
She heard Jennifer moving around behind her but didn’t look. Her attention was focused on the pistol he was shoving into this third girl’s stomach. It was the same one he’d shot Tonianne with. The girl was a stranger to her, extraordinarily pretty, wearing jeans and a man’s white shirt. She could see a livid welt on her forehead. The shirt was stained with dirt.
Who were these people and why was she, Sally, suddenly and out of nowhere with them? Because of a single argument in a parking lot?
And Tonianne? Shooting Tonianne? It defied understanding.
We think he kills people
, Ed told her.
And he did.
She had better get straight. She had better be aware of everything any of them did if she was going to get through this.
The first thing was, where was she? She had to force herself to take her eyes off him and off the gun and take a look around.
They were parked on a narrow dirt road at the base of a hill. Off left on the car’s passenger side were deep thick woods as far in and up the hill and down along the road behind them as she could see. Off right what in the moonlight appeared to be a wide field of tall, long-untended grass. Beyond it, more woods. Leaves and branches in dark silhouette against the sky.
They were parked in the middle of nowhere.
She considered which would be worse, a run through the open field or a scramble through dense scrub and thicket. In each case a gun would be aimed at her back. Neither choice was a good one. She couldn’t afford to panic. Running wouldn’t work. She’d have to wait and see.
She heard a metallic rattle and turned back to Ray.
Something gleamed and dangled in his hand. He was holding it out to her. It took her a moment to realize he was offering her a pair of silver handcuffs but he was speaking to the new girl.
“Know where I got these, Kath?”
The new girl’s name was Kath. Kath and Jen. Who was she?
Sal?
Did everyone in this guy’s world have a diminutive?
“
New York City
, Kath. Times fucking Square. Remember our date at Tavern on the Green? Where you told me about your sorry sick fuck of a mother? And I told you about the worst thing I ever did? About trashing that house? ’Course I lied about that being the worst thing. But this is where it all happened! Right up there! That’s where I got my firepower. House right at the top of the next rise, you can’t make it out through the trees.”
He laughed. “Scene of the crime, babe, scene of the crime.”
He gestured with the handcuffs. She was supposed to take them.
“I figure Kath’s gonna be the one wants to give me the most trouble and I only got one pair. So do the honors for me like a good girl.”
She took them. The girl Kath held out her hands. The girl managed to look both furious and disgusted with him. She had to be scared, there was no way she couldn’t be scared but she wasn’t showing him that. She thought,
good for her
.
Ray shook his head.
“Unh-unh. No way. What the fuck’s wrong with you, Kath? You ever see a cop cuff somebody that way in the movies? Huh? You got shit for brains? You cuff the hands
behind
the back, not in front. Jesus! You see somebody do that in the movies, you know you got one fucked-up movie. You just wasted your dollar-fifty. You know the guy’s gonna bust heads, cuffs or no cuffs. Man, it’s bullshit.”
Kath turned and stared him straight in the eye and then folded her hands together behind her back. He swatted at something in front of his face and looked at Sally.
“Flies, man,” he said. “Whole fucking town’s in-fested with flies. They come off the lake this time of year, buzz around your apartment.”
Sally stepped over.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Not your fault,” Kath said. “It’s okay.”
She said it as though she meant it too. Sally suddenly liked this girl. Liked her quite a lot. And hated what she was doing.
Snapping the handcuff home around her delicate wrist.
“Katherine, is it?”
She nodded.
“I’m Sally.”
And saying that and snapping the second cuff shut was like throwing a bolt on some prison cell and she felt the sob catch in her throat and she was silently crying again, no stopping it and Kath turned and looked at her and she raised her own eyes and looked back and saw an unexpected gentleness there, knew that the forgiveness was real. The girl smiled sadly.
“If I could give you a hug, hey, I would,” she said. “It’s okay. You understand?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Good.”
“All right.”
But it wasn’t all right. It was awful.
She glanced at Ray, and Ray was smirking at them.
You bastard
, she thought.
You little weasel. If Ed were here
. . .
Ray waved his pistol.
“Okay, ladies, on up the hill. Mush.”
She turned and saw Jennifer hesitate, afraid to go and afraid to stay, saw that Jennifer was terrified of him, her face pale as death and the eyes deeply hooded and shadowed, dark circles like bruises beneath them and red-rimmed and she wasn’t surprised when Katherine stepped out ahead of her to lead the way instead. Something in the line of her back maybe, in her steady gait seemed to give Jennifer the nerve to follow and then catch up with her so that they were walking side by side with her trailing a few steps behind and she could hear Ray, rifle over his shoulder and gun in hand, shuffling in the dirt in back and a little to the left of them where he could keep an eye on each of them.
It was only as they reached the crest of the hill that she heard him pause.
“What the fuck?” he said.
Through the thick copse of trees they could see the house ahead.
A porch light burning.
Fuck this
, he thought. This was
his
place
his fucking place
and he wasn’t turning around, he wasn’t piling them all in the car again and driving someplace
else
.
