In The Forest Of Harm (23 page)

Joan looked up through the branches that coiled high above their heads. Not a star or a glimmer of moonlight shone through the leaves, which seemed to press down upon them like a shroud.
What a rotten place to die
, she thought, and she crept closer to Mary, knowing nothing could save them now.

THIRTY-FOUR

It's going to be daydown soon,” Mitch said, using the Real Life Cherokee's quaint term for sunset as a line of pines turned to somber silhouettes against a wild tangerine horizon. “Time for tired little trackers to make camp for the night.”

But he walked for a few minutes more, watching as the golden light paled to mauve. Above him an owl hooted hidden in the trees; on the ground, the forest floor was spongy with moss and dead leaves. He wondered what everyone was doing at home. His mother was probably keeping company with Jack Daniels and Oprah Winfrey while his father barked orders from the library. Cal, he suspected, was sitting in his cell, royally pissed that their father hadn't been able to buy him out of this mess.
Is my
testimony still funny now, Cal? Does the hour I spent for you
being humiliated by Mary Crow still crack you up like it did in
court that day
?

“I hope so, bro,” Mitch said aloud. “Hope you still think it's just a scream.”

When he tripped over the roots of a sprawling tree and nearly fell, he decided it was time to stop. No point in breaking an ankle, he thought. It's not like Mary Crow's going anywhere.

Beneath a white spruce he staked three tent poles in the ground, clipped his orange tent to them and crawled inside, pulling his rifle and gear after him. He dug in his pack for his lantern, which lay tucked beneath the duct tape and clothesline he'd bought at the convenience store. He switched on the light and a small radio, bathing the tent in a tropical glow and filling the air with the sounds of a scratchy R&B station out of Chattanooga. He knew he would be highly visible listening to music in a tent the color of a cantaloupe, but why should he care? He and the Beretta could deal with anything that appeared at his tent flap, and if Mary Crow and company came by, so much the better. It would save him a lot of shoe leather in the morning.

He heated some freeze-dried beef stew on his propane stove and topped off his dinner with a chocolate bar. Unrolling his sleeping bag, he remembered how the Real Life Cherokee had admired his gear, especially this bag. The Indian would have loved the Beretta, too, if he'd ever gotten a chance to see it. Oh, well, Mitch thought, as he climbed into the bag's featherweight warmth. Shit happens.

He turned up the radio. As Al Green's thumping “Let's Stay Together” filled the tent, he rolled over on his side and closed his eyes. He tried hard to revisit Rio Blanco, but his dreams took him in another direction.

Sandra is on top of him, her tongue working in lazy circles
around his nipples and down the cordon of hair that bisects his
belly. He's anticipated her ultimate destination; already his dick
feels hot and swollen, rising to meet her touch. She's at his navel
now; he feels the soft weight of her breasts sliding down his thighs.

Suddenly his cell phone chirps from his trousers by the bed.
Sandra stops, looks up.

“You expecting a call?” she asks, her honey-colored eyes surprised.

“No,” he tells her, trying not to sound annoyed. “Ignore it.”

“I don't think you'd better,” she says, rising off him as the
phone chirps on. “It sounds important.”

Irritated, he rolls over and grabs for the phone. Cal's voice,
drunk, stoned, whatever else Cal is, comes on.

“No,” he replies. “I can't come get you. Not now.”

But Cal pleads, begs, even weeps. Christ, his twenty-one-year-old brother bawling like a baby! The cops will get me, Cal
insists. If I get busted again Dad will kill me.

He sighs, knowing his brother will not give up; has never in
his life allowed “no” to thwart him. “Okay, Cal,” he sighs.“Stay
right there.”

He hangs up the phone and dresses, easing trousers tenderly
over a dick that has not yet gotten the message.

“Where are you going?” Sandra asks.

“To get my asswipe brother,” he answers, too angry to say
more. “He's down at Five Points, stoned.”

“Oh, bring him back here,” she says. “I want to meet him.”

“No you don't,” he snaps, knowing what always happens
when his handsome brother meets women. “He's a jerk.”

“Oh, come on, Mitch. He can sober up here.Then he can go
and you can stay.” She looks up at him so sweetly, what can he

say?
No, I'm afraid my little brother will steal you away?

“Okay,” he says
,
brushing her large, dark nipple with his fingertip. “But only till he's able to drive.”

He picks Cal up. He's done a lot of coke and some other street
drugs he's probably never heard of. Cal's head wobbles on his
neck, but his eyes are bright, his cheeks red. Cal's knuckles are
swollen; he complains that he's been in a fight.

Don't do this,
a voice tells him, but he ignores it. He will not
allow himself to fear his fucked-up little brother.

Later, she opens the door to both of them, smiling especially
sweet when she sees Cal. “Hello,” she says, like they were meeting at some damned cocktail party. “Mitch has told me so much
about you!”

Which is a lie. He's told her nothing. He wishes he had no
brother; wishes Cal would overdose on something and die.

They sit on her sofa; she in the middle between them. Cal
pulls a bottle of whiskey from one pocket and a tin of white pow
der from the other. “Let's party!” he says.

Cal and Sandra do a few lines of coke and turn on the CD
player too loud. The downstairs neighbor starts banging on the
ceiling. The phone rings—another neighbor calling to complain
about the racket, threatening the police. He turns down the CD,
but Cal turns it back up again.

“You want to learn the fuck-me-blind polka?” Cal giggles,
sweeping Sandra up off the sofa. He holds her tight, she seems to
melt in his arms, giggling, almost swooning at Cal's handsome
face.They gyrate around the room, then the loud music slows and
their movements become a slow grind—her hips meeting his in a
pantomime of sex, her gaze locking onto his as if she's wanted
him forever. Cal smiles at her, holds her close, then over her shoulder he winks at Mitch.

Cal's grinning face ignites a poker in Mitch's gut. There's no
point in sitting and watching this shit. He goes to the kitchen
where he turns the cold water on full blast. He needs to take the
heat, the hotness, away from his skin. He plunges his head
beneath the faucet, letting the water douse his face and his hair
and run dripping down the collar of his shirt. It feels good; cools
him like the turquoise waters of Rio Blanco. He wishes he were
there right now, and away from this stu fy apartment and Sandra
Manning and his stupid asswipe brother.

He shakes the water from his face and looks back into the living room. He can hardly believe it. Sandra's panties are in a puddle around her ankles while her skirt is pushed to her waist. She
and Cal are not doing the fuck-me-blind polka, they are simply
fucking, hammer and tongs, like two dogs in an alley.

He turns away. Though he has no particular love for Sandra
Manning beyond the roundness of her breasts and tightness of her
twat, she was his first.That is his twat his brother is fucking.

Angry, accusatory voices crackle through the air.

“Stop!” Sandra cries, over Cal's “You fucking cunt!”

Mitch hears slaps, blows resounding against flesh. Leaving the
water streaming from the faucet, he runs back into the living
room. He knows what can happen to a woman when Cal
gets mad.

They are standing by the fireplace now, no longer fucking.
Cal's face is scratched and the front of Sandra's blouse is ripped
away. They are struggling. Cal takes that mean right cross and
smashes it into her jaw. A tooth goes flying, lands near Mitch's
boot. Sandra leaps at Cal, yowling, nails scratching at his eyes.

“Are you two nuts?” Mitch yells. He rushes forward and tries
to pry them apart, but both are too angry and stoned to be subdued. Cal's dick dangles like a limp, dark worm from his fly.

“Stop it, Cal!” Mitch cries, suddenly in the fight himself. His
brother's fist glances off his jaw, while Sandra hisses at him like a
cat. Finally he lowers his head and shoves them apart. He pushes
Cal backward on the couch, but Sandra is something else. Sandra
he heaves as hard as he can. He wants her to know that
he's
the
Whitman she needs to fear, not his stupid little brother. He
laughs as she careens toward the fireplace, the panties around her
ankles tripping her up. Suddenly, she's falling, waving her arms
and screeching, but going down, down until her head shatters the
glass fireplace screen and her skull smacks into the andiron
behind it.

He closes his eyes as the glass explodes around him.When he
opens them again he expects to see blood. Instead, there is no
blood, just Cal passed out on the sofa while Sandra lies there, her
neck at an impossible angle inside the fireplace.

“Sandy?” he says. “Are you okay?”

But Sandy does not answer. Sandy is not okay. Sandy looks
like a broken dummy in a department store, and when he bends
and puts his hand between those big soft breasts, he feels no
heartbeat at all.

For an instant, a panic bubbles inside him as the neighbor's
broom bangs harder on the ceiling.Then, strangely, his terror congeals into an icy calm. He stands up with the realization that for
the first time, he's found a way out of being Cal Whitman's
brother.

Leave,
he thinks. Just walk out the door and out of his life.
There'll be no more cleaning up Cal's messes, covering Cal's
tracks, camouflaging Cal's dirty little secret that two other girls
met their deaths at his angry fists. Mitch smiles. As sorry as he is
about Sandra, this was too perfect to pass up.

“You pack a mean punch, bro,” Mitch says, lifting Cal's eyelids with his hand. His pupils are dilated, but moving. Cal will
wake up with a head the size of Texas and a dead girl at his feet.

And this time the shit's all yours, brother.

Then, as a distant siren wails closer, he moves quickly, wiping
his fingerprints off everything he can remember touching, stripping Sandra's sheets from the bed and bundling them under his
arm.The water is still running full blast in the kitchen sink, but
there's no time to turn it o f. He knows the back way out of this
old apartment building: hell, his father owns it. He also knows
that the old people who live here are too scared to open their doors
and that the alley where he parked his car is unlit. If he hurries
he can make it.

“Serves you right, Cal,” he calls softly as he lets himself out
the door, just as the police siren turns up Sandra's street. “From
now on I'm gonna be reading about you in the papers.”

Mitch sat up in the tent, gasping, his body drenched with sweat. The sirens were back. The police were here. But this time they'd come for the true killer of Sandra Manning.

He couldn't focus. His breath came hard. A bright red light bathed his body. Then the hard edges of his radio resolved against the soft bulge of his pack. The Colt lay on one side of his bedroll, the Beretta on the other.
It's
okay
, he thought,
it was just a bad dream
. But it had been so real—the cops, the siren . . .

Suddenly, his muscles tightened. The siren hadn't been a dream. The siren was just outside his tent.

Eeeooowww.
The sound pierced the thin orange nylon. No cop siren ever sounded like this. Nothing he'd ever tracked or hunted sounded like this. His heart raced as he tried to place the cry. It sounded like a woman, but no human female could approach that piercing volume. Gooseflesh prickled his arms. Maybe this was the Wendigo he'd once read about up in Maine—the forest monster that tore flesh from unlucky people's limbs.

Eeeooowww.

Leaves rustled on the ground. The thing was moving closer. He found the radio's switch and turned it off. Marvin Gaye died mid-verse as he reached for the lantern. Suddenly he sat in darkness.

Crouching in his sleeping bag, he listened. Nothing. Had the thing gone away? He reached for his rifle and flipped off the safety.

Eeeooowww!

He could hear snuffling now, and the crackle of leaves close to his tent.
Damn
, he thought.
What the hell is that?
Bears don't sound like that, and the little red wolves they've released up here aren't big enough to make a noise that loud. Boars? he wondered, desperate to pair something up with that noise.

Eeeooowww!

Suddenly, he knew. Though every game warden and ecologist in the country insisted it was not possible, Mitch Whitman knew. Outside his tent crept a mountain lion.

Eeeooowww!