The Lost (42 page)
Authors: Jack Ketchum
The effort almost toppled the chair and her with it. She didn’t care. It felt good.
It felt wonderful!
She watched him fall forward over the woman’s body, fall face-to-face with the woman, Ray staring down into her open dead eyes and open mouth just a moment before what was left of the lamp came down on him again, Sally not finished, not finished with him yet, going after him—then his hand shot out and gripped the base of the lamp and pulled it from her hands and sailed it across the room over his head and he staggered dazed to his feet. She saw Sally backing away and looking for something else to hurt him with but there was nothing, only boxes and crates and chairs and then the pistol was out of his belt and pointing at her ending all bravery and all resistance.
In the silence she heard two women cry out, a dissonant two-part harmony. One of the voices was hers.
Do the dead dream?
Katherine did.
She dreamt she was in the workshop, her father’s workshop, and she was doing what neither she nor Etta were permitted to do.
She was cleaning up.
And not just sweeping, either. She had the Electrolux out there, and the Electrolux was roaring, sucking up sawdust and shavings and chunks of wood like tiny bits of bone, sending them clattering up through the-extension wand and hose, both of which almost seemed a part of her, like something abstracted from her hand and arm. She vacuumed workbench, vise, clamps, sawhorse, hanging tools and shelves and mason jars full of nails and screws arranged by size, vacuumed his power saw, his circular saw, his coping saw, his planer and sander and finally the floor a second time and it was amazing, she was moving like lightning, moving effortlessly and it was done in a flash, all this space of his spotless now. So that he could start in fresh. A clean slate. And get on with life.
“Which way on Stirrup Iron?”
“The house is off to the left.”
They had the kid in the cage in the backseat behind them and three state highway patrol cars following them, their headlights gliding along the winding road over shallow dips and inclines climbing gradually into the hills. The kid said he knew the way and which house though not the family’s name or the actual address. Lenny Bess would have known because the kid said he’d worked for these people but the line to the Bess house was busy. The kid seemed absolutely positive he could get them there and pick out the place in the dark. Time meant everything. So by far their best bet was to take him along and just
get
there.
The inside of their vehicle felt like the lake on choppy water before a storm. Emotions swirled and eddied. Mainly tension. But fear was there, the one-on-one personal fear you’d have of any armed killer and anxiety for the women he had in tow was there in spades but there was excitement too.
Because they ought to be able to do this
. If Tim Bess was right in his description of the house Pye was in a place he
thought
he wanted to be in but didn’t Two entrances, front door and rear glass sliding doors. Isolated and easy to cover. No neighborhood civilians to worry about except Bess who would remain in the car well out of the way. They’d have surprise and darkness on their side and plenty of backup.
If the kid was right they’d get the little sonovabitch.
He glanced at Ed staring straight ahead at the lights on the empty road. He knew that look. It was grim and humorless and purposeful. It wouldn’t falter. You could take that look to the bank. But he damn well knew better than to try to converse with it.
He looked at the kid through the rear-view mirror. The kid was shadow, a penumbra in the glare of headlights framing his head and skinny shoulders.
“Tell me about the girls, Tim. Jennife.r and Katherine. What are they like?”
“I dunno. Kath’s new in town. I really don’t know her too well. She’s kind of stuck-up I guess. Jennifer’s just . . . god, I dunno. Jennifer’s just
Jennifer
.”
“Would either of them give him any trouble? Piss him off? Try to fight him?”
“Not Jennifer. Katherine? Man, I got no idea.”
“Are they going to go ballistic on us when we go in there? Do they know enough to keep the hell out of our way?”
“I think so.”
They drove in silence for a while, headlights sweeping a field, a group of houses, a dirty white dog barking in a fenced-in yard.
“Can I ask you something?” Tim said.
“Sure.”
“Am I in a whole lot of trouble here?”
Schilling glanced at him. It was the first time he’d asked. Schilling figured it was a good sign if not quite an admirable sign that it had come so late in the game.
“What do you think, Tim?”
“I think I’m in deep shit.
Truly
deep shit.”
He wasn’t.
He’d been underage on Steiner/Hanlon and he was cooperating with them on this one. But Schilling wasn’t necessarily going to tell him that his problems were only juvie. A good hook was one that had a barb in it. They still needed his testimony on Ray.
“Let’s just worry about the girls for now, okay, Tim? Then we can worry about you getting a shovel.”
It had dawned on Tim steadily that she might be dead.
It was like an ache in your head you’re barely aware of at first and then it grows and grows and pretty soon the headache’s blinding.
That this should be so was an amazement to him. Not a single person he’d ever known at all well had died before, only one distant uncle and who gave a shit about him. And now Mr. Griffith and Ray’s mother dead in one night. But even between the two of them and Jennifer there was a huge difference. He had never
touched
Mr. Griffith or Ray’s mother. Not once in his memory, not even to shake hands and he had made love to Jennifer Fitch and that seemed to him to make all the difference in the world. As though the touching
were
the knowing.
No one he had ever
touched
had died before.
No one he had loved.
Or at least thought he loved. Because once not long ago he’d have said he loved Ray like a goddamn brother but there was no love in him for Ray right now, not a fucking ounce of it, he didn’t care if Ray lived or died. So what was love anyway? Something you turned on like a clock alarm and slapped off the minute you awoke, once it suddenly got too loud and noisy? He wondered if he would still love Jennifer after this was over. And if she did die, would he love her memory.
Was it even possible to love a memory?
He tried to picture her dead because he knew it just might happen and he felt he needed to be prepared for that. He tried to picture her shot like those girls, shot through the heart or through the head. Beaten to death or strangled. He tried to consider these things because all of them were possible. But then he’d remember the feel of her, of her flesh, her lips and breasts the smell of her hair and it just wouldn’t come, he couldn’t find the cold dead body inside the living body of Jennifer.
She
couldn’t
die. How could she?
He’d
touched
her.
“Turn here,” he said.
“I know, kid,” said Schilling. “I know.”
You should have run
, she thought.
You could have. You could have slipped right out the door
.
She didn’t even know Jennifer, really. She could have left her. Just left her.
The woman on the floor was past helping
And then she thought,
what would Ed have done?
It didn’t matter. She’d done what the moment and who she was told her to do.
There was some satisfaction knowing that she’d hurt him—
marked
him. He was not coming out of this clean and unscathed. It was no longer possible for him to plead innocence or lie his way out of this no matter how he tried to cover up. When the police found him they’d know him, match his face to what she’d done to him and
know
. The bloody crown of his head. The deep gash across the forehead, the shallower half-moon slice across the cheek.
I got you
, she thought.
Me
.
She watched him wipe the blood out of his right eye and across his chin and shake his head, blood flecking the wall. Watched him pick up the knife and walk toward her.
Here it comes, she thought. Oh god!
She pressed back against the wall. The wall was solid, firm. Reality.
He stepped to one side of her and put the gun to her forehead and smiled. There was a thin film of blood across his teeth. The hand that held the gun was slick with it.
“You fucked me up, you know that?”
He laughed.
“You really did. I mean, this
hurts
.”
He dropped the gun away from her forehead and cocked his head and studied her. Blood pooled in his eye and he wiped it again.
“Man, have I got taste in women. I just knew you’d be something else. Just like Kath over there. I knew the first time I looked at you. Am I right, Jen?”
She glanced over his shoulder at Jennifer slumped in her chair, that single kick to the head draining all the fight she had in her. Maybe it was the fact that the kick had done nothing to end this. That it was still playing out his way, not theirs. She saw her eyes drift empty and lifeless from the woman’s corpse at her feet to the man’s body and back again.
He seemed all at once aware of the taste of blood in his mouth and ran his tongue along his teeth.
“You’re sure something all right. I ain’t seen you naked yet, though. Only one of my girls I haven’t.”
“
I’m not one of your girls, Ray
.”
The smile disappeared like a quarter in a magic trick. The gun pressed cold and hurtful into her cheek.
“You are now, you little cunt. That blouse is a fucking mess anyway. You got your girlfriend’s head all over it! Take the fucking thing off.”
It was as though he’d physically slapped her. She saw it all over again.
Tonianne laughing with her in the car. Nibbling on a cheeseburger. Turning at his approach. The split second when everything changed and the world went haywire in one dark moment of explosion
.
She choked back a sob and then something composed itself in her as instinctive and fundamental as the sob had been, and she looked him in the eye.
“You’re right,” she said. “It
is
a mess.”
Her fingers fumbled at the top button of her blouse but her voice was calm.
“You don’t need the gun, Ray.”
“Oh, you’re all cooperative now?”
“I’ll do what you want.”
“You will?”
“Yes.”
“You will?”
“Yes.”
She unbuttoned the top button and then the second.
“You gonna show Ray your titties?”
“If that’s what you want.”
“You are?”
“Yes.”
“Gonna show Ray your snatch?”
“Yes.”
“Say it.”
“What?”
“‘Gonna show Ray my snatch.’ Say it.”
“Gonna show Ray my snatch.”
“‘Gonna show Ray my titties.’”
“Gonna show Ray my . . . my titties.”
“That’s
good
!”
He giggled like a little girl. Wiped more blood out of his eye. Lowered the gun from her cheek and held it at his side.
“I ain’t fucked you yet, either.”
“No. You haven’t.”
She heard a low moan and looked at Jennifer. But Jennifer was just sitting there shaking and staring down at the woman as before. And Ray had taken a step backward. He was looking down the hallway.
It wasn’t Jennifer.
It was Katherine. My god
.
“You fucking believe it? That bitch is still alive!” He laughed. “I shot her good too.” He shook his head. “Well what the fuck, we can get to that shit later. You were saying?”
“I . . .”
“You stopped at two.”
“What?”
“Buttons. You got two more buttons left there. Let’s go. Let’s see ’em. You think I got all night?”
She released the third button and realized she hadn’t wished for a bra since her mother’d bought her her first trainer. There was no way to know what to do anymore. He was standing close but not close enough. Katherine’s moan, that single step back had defeated her, ruined the only thing close to a plan she had.
“You a good fuck or a bad fuck?”