The Biker (Nightmare Hall) (19 page)

Deejay shook her head groggily, then got to her feet, one hand on the railing for support. “What do you think you’re doing, Echo? That’s my bike. It used to be Pruitt’s, of course,” she smiled a half-smile, “but I bought it, and for your information, it’s still registered in his name. He didn’t know that, of course. Thought he was completely rid of it. But I never changed the title when I bought it. And I used my mother’s maiden name to buy it, just as I’m using it here at college, so he wouldn’t know it was me. Ross’s sister.”

“You killed him,” Echo whispered.

Deejay shrugged. “He had it coming. Should have done it long ago instead of coming up with this scheme that you blew all to hell. I’ve wanted to kill him ever since the accident. But I knew that if I did it, the police would investigate, and I’d be the very first person they’d suspect. Pruitt deserved to die, so why should I be punished for it? Justice, that’s all it was. Justice. As far as I’m concerned, the idiot just fell off the bridge. Shouldn’t have been out here in the middle of the night, especially in this fog.”

“You killed him,” Echo repeated dully. “Cold-blooded murder, that’s what that was. Just like you killed Polk and Nancy and Gabriella. How can you say that Pruitt is worse than you? At least what he did
could
have been accidental. But not what
you
did. There wasn’t anything accidental about any of those deaths.”

Deejay stood up, her face twisted with rage. “Do you
know
what he did to you?” she screamed. “The only reason he knew anything about those first few incidents with the bike was because he’d heard about them on the radio. But when you went to him and told him you thought he was this mad, ferocious biker, he
loved
that idea. It was what he’d always wanted. So he pretended he’d actually been there. He saw an opportunity to make you dance a jig and he took it. He took it in a
big
way. You should
hate
him for that.”

Frightened by the raw rage in Deejay’s face and still in shock over Pruitt’s death, Echo began backing away, mindful of the hole in the floor behind her. “I do! I … did. Hate him. And I don’t blame you for hating him, after what he did to you. To your brother. But you still didn’t have the right to kill him. Nobody has that right. Nobody.”

She remembered the tape then.
Deejay’s
tape. It was Deejay who’d been out for revenge, not Pruitt. And the tape wasn’t one of the things Echo was supposed to have found. The books with Echo’s name in them, yes, Deejay had clearly planted those in the cave. And the fake license. But the tape had been better hidden because it was the one thing Deejay wanted to keep for herself. That first night in the cave, Deejay couldn’t have known that Echo was hiding in the crevasse while Deejay went insane with rage. So she wouldn’t have expected Echo to know that opening was there, or to look inside it.

I have the bike, Echo thought, gripping the handlebars tightly, and I have the tape. That’s enough. I can take them both to the police. They won’t believe me at first, but when they hear the tape, they’ll know I’m telling the truth. They will find Deejay and put her away where she can’t hurt anyone else ever again.

And while she was thinking all of that, Deejay made a sudden end run around her. When Echo looked up, Deejay was standing between the bike and the exit from the bridge. “You’re not going to get past me,” she shouted over the engine’s sputtering. “That’s
my
bike! I want it. Give it to me!”

“Get out of my way!” Echo shouted back. “I’m leaving, and you can’t stop me. You can’t run me down the way you did Pruitt.
I’m
on the bike now. I’m the one with the power, not you.”

Deejay waved her arms in dismissal. “You don’t know the first thing about power
or
that bike! You couldn’t steer around me in a million years, and you’d never have the guts to hit me. I
want
that bike, Echo.”

Echo knew what she was up against. Deejay had no conscience. Not anymore.

But the bike was huge. If it was going fast enough, speeding as fast as it would go, the trip across the rest of the bridge would only take a second or two. And didn’t Deejay know better than anyone the power of a motorcycle the size of this one? Desperate or not, would she really be foolish enough to try to stop it?

I have no choice, Echo told herself. Terrified that she wouldn’t be able to steer the huge machine accurately enough to avoid the gaping hole in the floorboards up ahead, she revved the accelerator and the bike shot ahead.

For just one hopeful second, she thought she was going to speed by Deejay so fast she would leave her behind in the fog like a vapor trail.

But there was the hole, yawning wide and open. Echo had to veer around it, and when she did, Deejay seized the moment and leapt for the handlebars.

She misjudged the distance by a millimeter. The bike sideswiped her, knocking her sideways. She slipped and fell, at an angle, into the ragged opening in the floor of the bridge.

At the very last second, her right arm flew out and clutched the jagged end of a rotting board. It creaked ominously as her body weight pulled at it, but it held.

Deejay hung by one hand high above the cold, deep river.

E
CHO YANKED THE BIKE
to a screeching halt. She jumped off, lay it on its side, rushed over to the hole.

“Help me,” Deejay whispered. “Echo, help me.”

The floorboards groaned.

She is a murderer, Echo told herself, cautiously kneeling beside the gaping hole. A coldblooded murderer. She’s insane. If you try to pull her up, this whole part of the bridge could cave in. You’d both die in that water down there.

She could hear the river gurgling, bubbling, as if it were excited at the prospect of two more victims following Pruitt.

“Please, Echo, please,” Deejay pled. “Don’t let me fall!”

“If I pull you up,” she told Deejay even as she leaned precariously close to the hole, “you’ll kill me.”

“No, no, I won’t. Not if you help me. I never wanted to hurt you, Echo, it was Pruitt, only Pruitt.”

The board Deejay was holding bent lower, sending out an agonized squeal. Deejay gasped.

“You have to go to the police, Deejay,” Echo said shakily, lying flat on her stomach on the wet floor of the bridge. “You have to tell them the truth.”

“I will, I will! I promise! Just get me up, get me up, Echo,
please!”

She will kill me the instant she’s safe, Echo thought with conviction.

But she didn’t have it in her to let Deejay fall.

Reaching behind her, she yanked the heavy helmet off the bike’s handlebars, looped the strap around her right arm and pulled it up to her shoulder. It was the only thing mildly resembling a weapon she had left. Then she dropped her arms into the hole and instructed Deejay to grab them.

The boards screamed in anger the whole time Echo was slowly, painstakingly inching her way backward on the slippery, wet floor of the bridge with Deejay clinging to her arms. The former tennis player was heavier than Echo, and the strain on Echo’s back and shoulders was unbearable.

After what seemed to Echo like hours, the last of Deejay, her legs and feet, came up out of the hole and flopped limply next to an exhausted Echo. The helmet was prodding her chest painfully, and she reached over to slide the strap down and off her arm. Then she lay on her back on the cool, wet floor of the bridge and struggled to get her strength back.

They lay there silently for a long time, breathing hard, the fog and the dampness of the bridge’s surface seeping into their clothes, chilling them to the bone.

Finally, Echo turned her head, to find herself staring straight into Deejay’s eyes.

Deejay was smiling without warmth. “You are such an utter fool, Echo.” The arm that came up from beside her then was holding the baseball bat. She began to raise it over Echo’s head. Her eyes were tiny slits of hatred. “Such a fool.”

“No. I’m not.” Echo’s fingers closed around the solid, hard plastic helmet, and she brought it up and around, slamming it against Deejay’s temple.

The baseball bat fell harmlessly to the bridge surface and rolled away.

Echo didn’t get up right away.

When she did, she walked slowly, painfully, over to the baseball bat, picked it up and tossed it over the railing. It made a satisfying splash when it hit the water.

Then she went back and picked up the helmet and put it on, looking at an unconscious Deejay. She returned to the motorcycle, lifted it upright, climbed on, and started the engine. The roar exploded into the fog like the cry of a wild animal.

Patting her pocket once to make sure the tape of Deejay’s voice telling all was still there, Echo rode the bike off the bridge, back to campus.

She sat on the bike well, her shoulders back, her head high.

F
INALS OVER, THEY SAT
on the low stone wall around the fountain on the Commons and let the fine, cool spray relieve the heat of the day. Echo was wearing the pretty white dress she had put back on the rack when she went shopping with Deejay at the mall, and Liam had an arm casually draped around her shoulders. Marilyn and Ruthanne, fresh from the whirlpool, finger-combed their hair.

“I can’t believe you thought I had an aunt named Ross,” Marilyn said, smiling at Echo. “Why would anyone name a girl Ross?”

“Why would anyone name a girl Echo?” Echo responded. But she returned the smile. “You really should do something about your penmanship, Marilyn. If that last letter on your aunt’s name had looked like the ‘e’ it was supposed to be instead of an ‘s,’ I would have known it was ‘Rose.’”

“True. But to tell you the truth, Echo, I’m kind of flattered that you thought the Mad Biker could be me, even for a little while.”

“Marilyn!” Ruthanne exclaimed. “Are you serious? That’s disgusting! Deejay was seriously sick in the head. She’s going to be in an institution for the rest of her life.”

“I know. I didn’t say I wanted to
be
her. Or even be
like
her. I know she’s sick. It’s just that most people who know me could never imagine me riding a motorcycle in the first place, and of course I couldn’t, with my legs the way they are from the fire. People see me as someone shy and quiet and probably afraid of my own shadow. But Echo could picture me on that bike, so maybe she doesn’t see me that way.”

“I don’t think you’re afraid of anything,” Echo said matter-of-factly. “How many other people do I know who saved their entire family from dying in a house fire, burning themselves seriously in the process? That’s not the profile of a coward, Marilyn.”

“Well, you saved Deejay. You could have just let her fall into the river. Lots of people would have, Echo.”

“I would have,” Liam said, tilting his head back to let the sun shine on his face. “I most certainly would have. After what she did …”

“No, you wouldn’t have,” Echo contradicted. “You would have wanted to. But you’d have pulled her up out of there just like I did. So would Marilyn. You, too, Ruthanne.”

Ruthanne lifted a skeptical eyebrow.

“If I didn’t know that about all of you,” Echo added, “I wouldn’t be sitting here with you now. Anyone who would have let Deejay drop to her death would be as bad as she was.”

“That’s true,” Liam agreed grudgingly.

“We all know I am an antisocial pain in the neck who doesn’t make friends easily,” Echo said, beginning to smile. “The only reason I have made an exception in your cases is because you are the only people on campus who know exactly what happened. You could blackmail me, threaten to tell everyone on campus all about how I was involved with Pruitt against my will. So I have to be very, very nice to all of you.”

Ruthanne was shocked again. “Echo! How can you joke about blackmail after what Pruitt did to you?”

Echo shrugged. “I figure I have two choices here, Ruthanne. I can either laugh about it now that it’s all over and I’m being allowed to stay in school as long as I do nine zillion hours of community service, or I can spend the rest of my life crying about it and jumping every time I hear the roar of a motorcycle. Pruitt is dead, Deejay’s safe inside a hospital she can’t get out of, and I’m here. I’m alive and well, and in the company of friends. What’s not to laugh about?”

Twenty minutes later when a motorcycle’s engine roared past campus on the highway and Echo instinctively jumped so high she almost fell into the fountain, she laughed as loudly as anyone else.

Turn the page to continue reading from the Nightmare Hall Series

H
E JUST KEEPS TALKING
and talking and talking. His mouth flaps open and shut, open and shut, like that dumb goldfish I had when I was eight instead of the puppy I really wanted. Every time I think he’s finally going to shut up and let me talk, he opens his mouth again.

He never lets
me
talk. Loves the sound of his own voice too much. But he’s getting paid to
listen,
isn’t he? Isn’t that what a shrink is supposed to do?

“Let me talk!” I scream at him, and he looks up at me like I’ve lost my mind.

Oh, that’s funny. That’s really funny. Of course I’ve lost my mind, or I wouldn’t be in this stupid office in the first place with the eminent Dr. Milton Leo, would I?