Helltown (19 page)

“Then why are they here?” She was whispering hoarsely.

“Go upstairs,” he told her. “Keep searching for the phone. You’re right. There has to be one. I must have overlooked it.”

Steve guided her toward the staircase. Jenny hesitated, then tromped up the steps, zombie-like. Steve didn’t believe he’d overlooked the phone, but if she didn’t do something to occupy her mind she was going to have a nervous breakdown right then and there.

He returned to the window, pulled the floral-patterned curtain aside, and peered outside.

Nothing but fog and rain.

What were they doing? he wondered. What could they be discussing at such lengths? Were they hiding from him? Did they think he was going to pick them off with the rifle? Would he attempt that given the chance, without knowing who they were or what they were doing here? Would he even be able to hit them? A few years ago he’d fired a handgun at a friend’s cottage in the Pocono Mountains. They’d set up beer cans as targets and shot at them with the cheap .25 caliber Saturday Night Special his friend’s father kept in the cabin. Steve had missed the cans more times than he’d hit them, and he’d only been twenty feet away. So, rifle or not, how would he fare striking a mobile target at fifty yards?

Not good, he suspected.

Abruptly the man with the muttonchops and handlebar mustache emerged from the mist into the headlights. He held his hands over his head, the machete gripped in the right one. “Don’t shoot, boy!” he called. “I just wanna talk about this.”

“Talk about what?” Steve shouted.

“We don’t wanna hurt you, y’hear? We only wanna get our friend some help.”

Steve hesitated. Could this be true?

In a show of peace the man turned and set the machete on the hood of the utility coupe. He turned back, smiled, and stepped forward.

“Hold it!” Steve said. “You can get your friend, I’ll let you get him, you can take him to the hospital, I won’t shoot. But first tell me what you’re doing here.”

“I told you, we heard—”

“You heard nothing! There were three shots, not two!”

“That’s what I said earlier. Three shots.”

“Stop bullshitting me!”

“I ain’t bullshitting—”

Steve sensed movement to his right and dropped to the floor just as a gunshot boomed and a bullet whizzed past his head, so close he heard it. In the second it took the bookish man to cycle the rifle’s bolt and fire again, Steve had moved fast and far enough to avoid the second shot. He charged the man, driving him into the dining room table and chairs. They collapsed in a tangle of limbs, dropping their rifles. They were roughly the same size and their struggle became a grappling match that had them rolling back and forth. Steve gained some leverage and kneed the man in the groin and shoved apart.

Steve considered scrambling for one of the rifles, but the man got to his feet just as Steve did. His eyeglasses sat askew on his nose. Blood smeared his mouth and chin. He raised his fists like a boxer, taunting Steve, then launched a punch. Steve dodged it and kicked him in the right knee. The man buckled. Steve went for the nearest rifle and grabbed it just as the man wrapped his arms around Steve’s midsection. Steve jammed the rifle’s stock into the man’s gut. They stumbled backward and crashed into the dining room table a second time. The impact knocked the wind from Steve’s lungs but also broke them apart. Spinning, Steve swung the rifle with all his might. It cracked against the man’s shoulder. He cried out in pain and sank to his knees, holding onto the table to remain upright.

Steve raised the rifle over his head. He was going to bring it down on the fucker’s head, he was going to crush him like an insect, he didn’t care if he killed him, he was half insane right then and in a fight to the death, and he was going to—

Steve sensed someone behind him. He spun to find the hard man a foot away, machete at the ready. The man didn’t say anything. He didn’t smile. He showed no emotion at all.

Steve opened his mouth, to plead for his life, but the blade ended it first.

Jenny heard the reports of two successive gunshots. At first she thought it was Steve firing through the window, but then she made out the commotion of a scuffle.
They’re inside!
Her first impulse was to rush downstairs and offer Steve whatever assistance she could. Yet reason nixed that idea. The men were both armed. She was five-foot-five, one hundred twenty pounds. She couldn’t help. She could only die, and she didn’t want to die. More than anything she’d ever wanted in her life, she didn’t want to die.

Glancing frantically around the bedroom, Jenny searched for a place to hide. There was nowhere—nowhere but under the bed. She contemplated returning to the hall, fleeing down the staircase, out the front door. But it was closed and locked. She wouldn’t be able to escape before the men captured her. She had to hide.

She dropped to her chest and wormed beneath the bed. She lay perfectly still. She was so afraid she felt simultaneously flushed and chilled, headachy and nauseous, almost as if she were in the initial stages of the flu.

Something loud crashed downstairs. Steve cried out, what sounded like a roar.

Of triumph?
she wondered.
Was Steve winning the fight? Should she return and help him after all?

She listened, but heard nothing except the blood pounding in her head. No—she heard footsteps. Coming up the staircase, quickly. Only one set of footsteps.

Please be Steve, please let it be Steve, please God please.

The footsteps stopped outside the bedroom. They moved away, into the room across the hall. Jenny’s hope was already curdling into doom. If it were Steve, he would have called her name by now. So it wasn’t Steve. Steve was dead. Just like Noah was dead and she was going to be dead next. As soon as the man finished searching the room across the hall he was going to come into this room and he was going to—

The footsteps returned to the hall.

“Darling?”

The word iced her blood. It wasn’t spoken with singsong cockiness but softly and monotonously, almost as if it were a scolding.

The man entered the bedroom where she hid. Jenny’s left cheek was pressed flush to the floorboards. She could see his black boots. He took three steps into the middle of the room and stopped.

Jenny became acutely conscious of her breathing. It sounded far too loud. It was going to give her away. She bit her lip and tried not to go insane as she waited for the man’s face to appear upside-down, peering under the bed at her. He would grab her by the hair and drag her out and kill her.

Abruptly Jenny found herself praying for a quick death. She didn’t want to experience it. She didn’t want to lie there, bleeding out, in excruciating agony,
waiting
. She didn’t want to see her life flash before her eyes. She didn’t want to think about never seeing her mother or father again, her two older brothers, her friends. She didn’t want to think about everything that could have been. She wanted a painless bullet in the head—

The black boots shuffled in a circle, then left the bedroom.      

Jenny knew she couldn’t remain beneath the bed. It had been stupid to hide there in the first place. She had trapped herself. She needed to get out of the house, make for the trees.

She wiggled out from the small space and went to the window. The upper sash appeared fixed in place. The lower one, however, slid vertically in grooves in the side jambs. She tried to shove the sash upward. It didn’t budge. Had sloppy paint sealed it shut? Had the wood swelled or distorted? Fighting frustration and terror, she felt along the top of the sash and found some kind of metal latch. She worked the keeper free and shoved the panel upward. This time is slid easily.

She climbed through the opening.

Having checked all four bedrooms, and not finding the thin blonde in any of them, Cleavon suspected she would be behind the last door on the right. What he discovered instead was a steep set of stairs leading to the main floor.

He took the steps three at a time and emerged in the kitchen.

A back door led outside.

Cursing, he hurried to the door and found the deadbolt engaged.

Which meant the girl couldn’t have left through it.

Jesse appeared in the hallway, eyeglasses busted, face a bloody mess.

“Where is she, man?” he asked. “Where’d she get to?”

“Go wait by the front staircase,” Cleavon told him, then returned upstairs.

Arms and legs spread wide, back pressed against the house’s weatherboards, Jenny inched away from the window along a thin horizontal strip of molding. Blinking rain from her eyes, she glanced to the fog-frosted ground twenty-five feet below and suffered a moment of vertigo. It was too far to jump. She’d break her legs. Fifteen feet to her right, though, a tall maple tree grew close to the house. She thought if she could reach the branches, she could climb safely down.

She continued inching sideways, her fingernails clawing the wet wood for a grip that didn’t exist. With each small step she half expected to lose her footing and plummet to the ground. Still, she pressed on. She didn’t have a choice.

“Well, fuck me blue!”

Jenny was so startled she pitched forward. For a sickening second she was convinced she was going to fall. But then she flattened her back against the weatherboards once more.

She turned her head to look the way she’d come. The man with the mutton chops and handlebar mustache was leaning out the window, leering at her.

“Come back inside, darlin’. You gonna kill yourself out there.”

“Leave me alone!”

“Come on back. I ain’t gonna hurt you.”

She resumed edging sideways.

“Shit, darling, I wanted you dead, I’d shoot you right now with this rifle. Now come on inside.”

That was true, she realized. He could shoot her easily. So why didn’t he?

Because he wants to rape your first.

Swallowing a moan, she continued her progress.

“Jess!” the man shouted.

“You find her?”

“Get outside! To the side of the house. She’s gone out the window.”

“Okay!”