Price of Angels (17 page)

Holly had no concept of the scale of a big city. When the mailman reached an intersection dotted with a used car lot, a Dress Barn, a salon and a diner, and let her out saying he really wasn’t supposed to have anyone in the truck with him, Holly didn’t know if this was a roaring metropolis, or a tiny shabby town. Months later, she’d realize just how tiny and shabby it was, but in that moment, it seemed as wondrous as Disney World.

              She didn’t have so much as a nickel in her pocket, but she was hungry, and she was lost, and she had no idea where to go or what to do now. She went into the diner, where a harried-looking woman with a falling-down topknot served heaping greasy plates to truckers at the counter. Holly stood politely by the register, until the woman noticed her with a little start.

              “Excuse me, but I was wondering where I might go, because I think I’m homeless now, and I don’t have any money.”

              The woman stared at her a long moment, a strange expression on her face, stray wisps of graying hair dancing in the drafts of the air conditioning. Holly had a brief wonder if her mother would look like this lined and weathered now, if she’d been allowed to live.

              Then the woman said, “Come here with me,” and came around the counter, leading Holly to a booth by the window, where a puddle of sunlight warmed the vinyl seat. “Sit right here,” she said, “and I’ll be back.”

              Holly sat, lulled immediately by the warmth of the sun. In the glass, she could just make out the bruises on her face, but she looked beyond them, out at the street bustling with traffic, the ladies in the spinning chairs in the salon across the way.

              The woman brought her a plate of chicken, green beans, potatoes with brown gravy, and a bubbling glass of Coke with a striped straw. “Eat as much as you want, darlin’,” she said, “and I’ll make a phone call to the shelter.”

              A shelter. That’s where the homeless went for help, wasn’t it?

              Holly didn’t care. She’d rather go there than home. Anywhere was better than home.

              The chicken was baked, and the skin was crusted with herbs. She cut into it and the steam rose up into her face, fragrant with spices.

              As she ate, she planned. She would go to the shelter first, so she’d have a place to rest a moment, a base from which to begin her real search. Shelters helped people find work, didn’t they? Maybe there would be a job board with postings. If she could find work, any kind of work, she could save up enough money for a bus ticket, and then she could get a little farther away, and she could get a job somewhere that wasn’t so close to home.

              It thrilled her, the idea of escape. This foreign sense of freedom. She’d work as hard as possible, do whatever she had to, but she’d make this departure work. None of the horrors of the street frightened her: she’d lived through horrors much worse.

              She was mopping up the last of the gravy with a honey-buttered roll when movement at the door caught her eye. The bread got caught in her throat.

              Abraham and Dewey stood just inside the diner, staring at her, Dewey with abject relief, Abraham with quiet murder in his gaze.

              The woman from the counter came toward Holly. “Darlin’, your family’s come for you.” She hovered at the edge of the table, expression etched with concern. In a whisper, she said, “Should I call the shelter anyway?”

              Holly shook her head. “No thank you, ma’am.”

Time had lost meaning. Her body could no longer be Holly-shaped, could it? How could one small vessel contain such throbbing, awful pain?

              She’d stopped counting the strike of the belt after fifteen strokes. The hot blood running down her arms from her wrists where the rope was tied tight enough to cut into her flesh had cooled. Her arms themselves were like someone else’s arms, for all she could feel of them. Every inch of skin was aflame, fevered, even the sheets beneath her too rough to lie against. She closed her eyes tight and let her face rest on the mattress and prayed for unconsciousness.

              “Who are you?” Abraham had asked, as he held the belt. “Who do you think you are that you can go running off like that?”

              Dewey had knelt on the floor beside her, crying. “Holly, why’d you do it? Why’d you disobey when we love you so much?”

              Now she was alone, and the house was quiet around her, and she thought it had been a blessing, truly, that Lila hadn’t survived this.

“I knew, after that,” Holly said, “that I had to get away, but I’d have to be more careful, and clever. They kept the gate locked down. I had no sway over anyone but Dewey, and so I used it. I got him to teach me how to drive. Just the old truck, back and forth across the yard, when Abraham and Jacob were out. The Chevelle was in the barn, under an old tarp. It took almost six weeks once I started looking, but I finally found the keys.”

She been the best she’d ever been, for three months. Perfect meals cooked at the perfect time, not a breath out of turn, not one frown or grimace. Pliant in their hands. Just a few tears for Dewey, to show her contrition.

              And all the while she planned, and she’d never been more terrified.

              Then the perfect chance came.

              Abraham and Jacob had picked up work loading fresh-cut hay bales onto a truck. A backbreaking, all-day affair. They left just after dawn, leaving her alone with Dewey.

              In the kitchen, she washed the skillet at the sink and watched her father and uncle drive off through the window. When they were gone from sight, she counted to fifty, time enough for them to get through the gate and out onto the road.

              Dewey was at the table, eating the last of his eggs, his back to her. Holly lifted the dripping skillet from the suds, spun, and cracked it across the back of her husband’s head with all the force she could muster. There was an awful sound of the cast iron hitting his skull, and the skillet rang like a gong afterward. Dewey crumpled forward onto the table, boneless, maybe even dead.

              Holly didn’t have time to check. She had to move.

              There was a makeshift sack composed of an old knotted bedsheet in a closet upstairs, already packed with all the clothes she had worth taking, a toothbrush, paste, and what money she’d been able to squirrel out of the men’s pockets and store away in the old sewing machine for the past three months. She raced upstairs, stepped into her old sneakers, collected the sack, and from inside it, fished the precious keys of the Chevelle.

              All the way across the yard, she waited for the truck to come back into view. What if they’d forgotten something? What if they came back? She wouldn’t survive the beating; she knew she wouldn’t.

              But then she was sliding back the barn doors, and there was the tarp-covered glorious beast of a machine, waiting for her. It started on the fourth turn of the key, the giant engine roaring as it turned over. There was a shovel in the backseat that she’d stowed there earlier in the week. She used it to break open the lock on the gate, terrified with every strike that the sound would rouse Dewey, and he’d come for her.

              But the chain had given way, and then she’d been behind the wheel again, ill-prepared for the power in the old muscle car, pushing it hard anyway.

              Driving, driving, driving…

              And she was gone.

Michael had the Crown again, drinking it like it was water. Holly played with the purple screw-off cap and told him how she’d stopped in Nashville for a while, without money for gas or food. She’d roomed with an aspiring country singer who was trying to make it big with cliché songs about girls in bikini tops, who’d made use of her a few times, in exchange for a roof over her head. She’d found work as a waitress. And when she could afford it, moved east, to another town, and another diner.

              In Chattanooga, she learned about the Lean Dogs, about the violence and law-breaking associated with them, and she’d come to Knoxville out of curiosity and desperation. She’d taken a job at Bell Bar. And there she’d met him.

              “That’s it,” she said, finally, sitting back with a deep sigh. “That’s how I got here. That’s why I approached you.”

              Then she was done with her tale, deflated against the back of the couch, watching him, waiting for the scorn, the disgust, the censure.

              “I was looking for a killer,” she added, softly. “And I took one look at you, and I knew you were The One.”

              Michael set the Crown bottle on the coffee table with great care. The sun was coming up, bronzing the windows, dancing in the tiny droplets of condensation on the glass. The birds were waking in the trees outside the house with a rising tide of chatter. Below, tenants were getting ready for work, the mansion alive with the thumping and creaking of water pipes, the low buzz of wakefulness.

              For hours he’d sat here listening to the long, awful story of her life, and he was very drunk at this point. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d overindulged like this; couldn’t remember a time when his head had been this fuzzy, and his thoughts so clear despite it.

             
“My life’s been nothing but one long rape,”
she’d told him, and she hadn’t been exaggerating.

              He took several long moments, staring at the soft glow emanating from the windows, collecting the violent anger cycling through him into something expressible and manageable. He had to say something, he had to find some kind of focus, or he’d reach a point of such fury that he’d be forced to act on it.

              “You told all of this to the cops?” he asked, hearing the awful tightness in his voice.

              “Not in detail, no. But they said they’d need evidence – physical evidence – to bring charges, and by that point, I didn’t have anything that could tie them to the old scars.”

              “Typical,” he growled. He understood how the law had its hands tied, but it infuriated him anyway.

              He took a deep breath, and then another, and then looked at her.

              Her beautiful little face with its delicate features and those huge green eyes was a mask of hurt and uncertainty. She was already fearing his reaction, so sure of another rejection.

              The most awful part was the painful way he wanted her. He always had, in a subconscious way. She was a pretty girl, and he was male, after all. That much was natural. But now he desperately wanted to smooth all her fragile sharp edges in the only way he understood how.

              Selfishly, he wanted it for himself, too. He wanted something besides a semi-willing groupie looking to punch another hole in the Lean Dogs belt.

              He wanted, if he was honest – and being this drunk, he could shoot straight with himself – to be something besides the angel of death for once. And for this girl, he could be. For her, death would be the most precious gift, a gift that would make her…

              Love him. He knew that. Given all her trauma, she was the sort of girl in grave danger of falling in love with her savior.

              He’d deal with that when it happened.

              “Holly, I want you to do something for me.”

              She straightened, tension coiling through her. “Yes?”

              “I want you to keep all this between you and me. You can’t breathe a word about your family to any member of my club. Do you understand? They can’t know you’re related to them.”

              She shook her head. “I would never tell.”

              She would never reveal that connection to anyone. Not anyone but him, because he was The One.

              “And I need you to trust me, okay? And do what I say, when I say. None of my brothers can ever find out that I killed them.”

              Her eyes widened, and then flooded with tears. “Oh…” she whispered, voice a quavery, broken breath of sound. “You mean…you mean you will? You’ll do it?” She started to tremble all over. The tears glimmered at the corners of her eyes, threatening to spill over.

              “Yeah, I’ll do it.”

              In a fast flurry of movement, she rose up on her knees, and leaned across the couch cushions to get to him. She pulled up short, gasping a little, with her hands braced on his shoulders, their faces just inches apart. Sudden flash of fear in her eyes. Uncertainty.

              Keenly aware of her closeness, and the warmth of her skin, he said, “What were you going to do?”

              She dampened her lips, let her gaze fall downward, lashes dark fans against her cheeks.

              His voice sounded coarse and alien to him. “It’s alright.”

              It wasn’t what he’d expected; it was so much more delicate and stimulating than that.

              She laid her small, soft hands on either side of his face, against the harsh lines of his cheekbones, and her eyes fluttered shut in the last second before she placed her parted lips against his. It was a gentle, hesitant, virginal kiss, and he realized something truly terrible before she pulled back a fraction and told him, “I’m sorry. I’ve never kissed anybody before.” A blush stained her face, deep embarrassment.