Pray To Stay Dead (30 page)

“
Huh?” Karlatos asked, blinking, surfacing from somewhere else. Misty followed his line of sight. Her heart grew cold.

Stacy had pulled herself into a sitting position. Her bare feet were on the floor. She looked around, her eyes listless, her movements labored. Her hair was a mess and her shirt had been pulled taught, the v-neck collar stretched down to reveal the swell of her right breast. The cloth of her shirt was thin, and her nipples pressed against its surface.

This was Stacy—you got used to the way she dressed same as you got used to her nonsense claptrap about crystals and spirits and Bigfoot taking a crap in the hills: bare legs, short shorts, and a loose-fitting white shirt that hung like a ghost.

“
Oh, hey,” Baker said, taking a step toward Stacy, who pawed sleep from her eyes with one hand while massaging her temple with the other. “Stacy Starshine.”

She looked up, blinking, shielding her eyes with one hand and taking in Baker’s uniform, the look of bewilderment on her face changing. She went from looking like a woman who had no idea where she was to one who knew exactly where she was. Misty glanced at the doorway leading into the back.

Charles sat at the table blubbering into his hands, his shoulders hitching.

“
Come on,” Karlatos said, waking up to what was in the air. He stepped past Misty and put a hand on Baker’s shoulder. “Let’s just pack up what we need and go, like we planned.”

Baker shrugged him off. “Haggarty was right. I think we should stay a while,” he said, his voice taking on the singular flat quality Misty associated with men whose minds had been wiped clean simply because their balls needed emptying.

“
Drew,” Stacy said. “What’s going on? Why are you dressed like a cop?”

“
I found it,” he said, glancing at Haggarty. “I like the way it looks on me.”

“
Oh,” Stacy said. “Yeah. It looks nice.”

“
So do you, look nice,” Baker said, and Haggarty chuckled.

“
No,” Misty said, stepping toward Baker. Karlatos grabbed her by the shirt and pulled her toward him, his large hands closing around her flabby biceps and pressing her arms against her sides.

“
Don’t,” Karlatos whispered, close to her ear.

“
You can’t do this,” Misty said.

“
I can do whatever I want to do,” Baker said, shooting a spiteful glance in her direction. He lifted the beer to his mouth and finished it off, crushing the can. “And if I get a few more of these in my blood, I just may be able to do it to you, too.”

He threw the can across the store. It clattered onto the floor behind the deli counter. Charles jumped, his watery eyes large above his fingers, which tugged at his cheeks and eyelids.

Misty struggled to free herself from Karlatos’s grasp but he was stronger than he looked. His fingers sank into the flesh of her arms and she knew that she’d have bruises, if she lived long enough.

“
You’re hurting me,” she said.

“
I know,” he said, pulling her away and turning her around to face him. For the first time, she wondered where he’d placed his rifle. He shook her once, made eye contact. “Stop. He’ll kill you.”

He let go of her and retrieved his rifle from the checkout counter. She took two backward steps away from him. The barrel of the rifle wavered. He was incapable of pointing it at her.

Baker spoke in hushed tones to Stacy, who giggled once, uncomfortably. Haggarty laughed again. He’d left behind the cart and was slowly approaching Baker and looking down at Stacy, his fat head cocked to one side.

“
Dammit,” Misty said. “Just take what you want and go.”

“
Yeah,” Baker said, looking back. He held Stacy’s right hand in his left, like a man asking a lady to dance. Her other hand was pressed to the crystal resting upon her chest. “Jeff?”

“
What?” Karlatos said.

“
This is what you wanted, isn’t it?”

“
What?”

“
This right here,” Baker said, yanking Stacy to her feet. “I saw the way you were looking at her. So come on. You can go first.”

Baker slid behind Stacy, who swayed on her feet, her face a pale mask of fear. He placed his hands on her hips and eased his fingers up her sides, her shirt bunching up ahead of them.

“
No, God,” Karlatos said as Baker pulled Stacy’s shirt over her head and tossed it over his shoulder. Her hands went up to cover herself. Baker pried them away with little resistance. Next Baker dropped to his knees behind her and pulled her shorts down to her ankles. She was not wearing panties.

“
Okay,” Baker said, standing up and pressing his entire body against Stacy’s back, his own hands rising up to cup her breasts. “You don’t want to go first, you don’t get to go at all.”

“
Wait,” Karlatos said, stepping forward, rubbing his dick through his pants.

“
Jesus,” Misty gasped.

“
I won’t hurt her,” Karlatos said, meeting and holding her shocked and withering gaze for less than a second. “I promise I won’t.”

“
Right here,” Haggarty said, holding up a hand. Karlatos tossed him the rifle and stepped up to Stacy, who stared down at her crystal.

“
Jesus,” Karlatos said, his voice distant and flat now, not much different from Baker’s voice. Baker slid his hands away from Stacy’s breasts and Karlatos replaced them with his own. His fingers were long and thick and clumsy, and he kneaded Stacy’s breasts in a pitiful imitation of a schoolyard tit-squeezing pantomime:
honk honk.

Some part of Misty hurt for Karlatos, for the fact that this was surely the first set of tits he’d touched, but mostly she wanted him dead. She wanted all of them dead, and she wanted to kick Crate in his old balls for sleeping through this, the bastard.

She glanced at Charles, and she wanted him dead, too—he no longer cried. His face was red, his eyelids puffy, but the tears had dried up. His eyes were on Stacy’s naked body, taking it all in, up and down, down and up, and by the time it was over he’d probably get in line.

“
I won’t hurt you,” Karlatos said. “I mean it.”

“
Get back down there,” Baker said, kicking the cot toward Stacy. It struck her, and her knees buckled. Karlatos caught her, pressed his face into her hair, inhaling. She sat on the cot, listless, her eyes elsewhere.

“
I won’t hurt you.”

“
Speak for yourself,” Baker said, slapping Stacy across the side of the head. She didn’t go down, as Baker had probably intended her to. Instead, he’d merely slapped on a light switch. She threw herself at Karlatos and raked four bloody lines across the soft contours of his face, knocking his glasses to the floor.

“
Nobody!” She shrieked. “Nobody!”

Karlatos closed one of his large hands into a fist and punched her in the forehead. With a yelp, she fell onto her side. Baker grabbed her knee, wrenched open her legs, and waved a hand at the thick patch of hair between them. “Get to it.”

Karlatos fumbled with his belt. He wiggled his pants down around his ankles and then kicked away his boxers. Baker looked at what Karlatos was packing and sniggered, just once. Haggarty said nothing, just stood there sucking on his bottom lip and rubbing his dick through his pants. It occurred to Misty that the candy bars in his pockets must have already begun to melt. Charles remained silent, his eyes locked on the scene that was unfolding before them.

Dazed, Stacy pawed at her forehead. Karlatos knelt at the foot of the cot and tried to position himself between her legs. The cot creaked beneath their combined weight.

“
I don’t think that thing is going to hold me,” Haggarty said, smiling, and there was a deafening pop. His left eye vanished, the back of his head flapped open. He crashed into the shelf behind him and rolled to the floor, aspirin bottles and bandage rolls and tubes of antibiotic salve raining down around him.

“
Ho—” Baker said, and there was another loud pop. His forehead burst and he crumpled into a heap, his ruptured face jetting blood.

“
That’s right,” Crate said, stepping into the store. Bilbo Baggins was at his feet, growling. “Lousy fucking
assholes.
”

Now it was Karlatos’s turn to yelp. His pants and underwear bunched around his sock-clad ankles, he took one step back and stumbled, his naked ass slamming into the ground, his skinny dick bobbing up and down.

Bilbo Baggins growled and barked, and Crate stood over Stacy, looking at Karlatos down the length of his rifle.

“
You okay, honey?” Crate asked.

“
Yeah,” Stacy said, covering her breasts with her forearms, and Misty rushed to her side.

“
Please don’t,” Karlatos said, his wavering hands held up before his bloodied face. His small pecker retracted and was little more than a pale nubbin perched above his balls. “Don’t shoot me. Don’t shoot me. Don’t. I’m sorry. I don’t know what I—”

Crate shot him. Lifeless, he flopped backward, his skull and the tile floor coming together with a sickly wet crunch. Blood spread in a circle around his head and urine pooled on the floor between his legs. By the smell of it, one of them had shit himself just after dying. Misty’s money was on Haggarty.

“
God, Crate,” Charles said, stumbling to his feet and then falling to his knees, his legs entangled with those of the chair upon which he had been sitting. He looked up at Crate, and the tears were back now, chasing one another down his cheeks. His bottom lip quivered. “You saved us. Thank you, oh, God, thank you.”

“
What did you do?” Crate asked.

“
What?” Charles said. He was on his hands and knees now, and he crawled toward Crate, face red and glistening.

“
Come on,” Misty said, helping Stacy to her feet and leading her away from Crate and Charles, who had come at last to a confrontation long overdue. They avoided Haggarty’s fallen bulk, skirting blood and a few curls of brain, rounding the tables. She picked up Stacy’s shirt and led her into the deli.

“
You didn’t do a fucking thing,” Crate said. “You just watched.”

Despite the fact that she knew it was coming, Misty still jumped when Crate pulled the trigger.

“
Oh, man,” Stacy said, pulling her shirt over her head, snaking her arms through the holes, and covering her nakedness. “This wasn’t a good night.”

“
No,” Misty said.

The fingers of her right hand bushed against her crystal and Stacy folded her arms across her breasts.

“
You all right, woman?” Crate asked.

Misty looked at him.

“
Good,” Crate said. He walked to the door leading into the parking lot, killed the overhead fluorescents, and peeked through the blinds.

“
Anything?” Misty said, suddenly whispering, as if the darkness magnified sound.

“
No,” Crate said. “The coast is clear for now. I’m going back to bed. You’d both best come into the house and lock the door. We’ll clean up in the morning.”

Twenty-Two

“
What’s his name?” Colleen asked. Their meeting with Niebolt had ended in a rush. Maxwell, the spirit and image of his father and his number one fan to boot, had interrupted them, his face stony. The two of them had gone outside for a few minutes, and then Huff had returned, his face now as stony as Maxwell’s, but his eyes wet with tears barely held in.

“
We’ll finish this,” he’d said, eyeing Colleen. “Something has happened and I’ve lost another son.”

The women had looked at one another, and there’d been no need to feign surprise. Huff left, and now, nearly three hours since his hasty departure, Colleen sat on the couch, holding the infant to her chest.

“
He doesn’t have a name,” Sally said, closing her book—a tattered paperback of Ralph Ellison’s
The Invisible Man.
Mathilda had gone to bed, leaving her child in their care. There had been no sign of Embeth at all for several hours, and Evie was in the other room, perched once more before her work. Colleen found the muffled whirring of the sewing machine somehow comforting.

“
Why not?” Colleen asked, tracing her right forefinger along the child’s forehead and down to the tip of his nose. Not for the first time, she pressed her nose into his stringy brown locks and inhaled. There was something about the smell of a baby’s scalp—as well as the breath of a kitten, God help her—that she loved. As a child, she’d loved the smell of gasoline, and she’d told her mother that someone should bottle the smell, that it would make a wonderful perfume. She wasn’t so sure about that anymore, but kitten breath and baby head? Pure bliss.

“
Why else? Huff.” Sally said, readjusting herself upon the chair. She looked like she was about to burst. Colleen wondered how she slept. “He usually names the kids right there on the spot—he’ll have two names picked out, a boy’s and a girl’s, and he’ll go with whichever one is called for. Doesn’t seem to bother him one way or another. Not this time, though.”

“
What happened?”

“
He took one look at this one and said that Ezekial was not his name,” she said. “It was a good name, but this child had no name. He’d have one before long, once he had a chance to establish his personality.”

“
Oh,” Colleen said.