Thicker Than Blood - The Complete Andrew Z. Thomas Trilogy (63 page)

Beth climbed five brick steps to the front door.
  

Moths loitered above her head, bouncing off the
porchlight
, over and over like maniacs.

Nausea hit her but there was nothing on her stomach.

Through slits in the blinds, she saw the shadow of a man lying on a couch, blue light flickering on the walls around him.

Beth opened the screen door and knocked.

The man did not move.

She banged on the door, saw him sit up suddenly and rub his eyes.

He staggered to his feet.

She heard his footsteps coming.

The front door opened and a
whitebearded
man gazed down at her through glassy eyes. He cinched his robe and she smelled gin when he said, "Do you have any idea what time…"

He rubbed his eyes again, blinked several times, and squinted at her, Beth crying now, the warmth of his home flowing out onto the porch, reminding her what safety felt like. The man saw the blood pooling at her feet, traced it to the hole in her stained and ragged lingerie.

She heard audience laughter on the television.

Cold blood trailed down her leg.

"Help me," she whispered.

Her knees quit and she fell forward.

He caught her, lifted her off her feet, and carried her inside.

61

RUFUS pushed the
Generac
Wheelhouse into a corner of the death chamber, fired up the soldering gun, and proceeded to fuse the no. 4 copper wire to the copper plating on the chair’s front legs, the room filling with the sweet sappy odor of the melted alloy.

When the soldering was done, he took the hacksaw he’d found in a corridor near the alcove, and cut two four-foot lengths of no. 4 copper wire from the dwindling coil. With a hammer, he beat out the ends of the wire until they were flattened enough to fit into the two legs of the generator’s 220 volt outlet.

Behind the toolbox he found Maxine’s contribution to the project—a homemade skullcap. She’d taken a North Carolina
Tarheels
baseball cap, cut up one of her thin leather belts, and sewn the pieces into the sides so the buckle could be tightened under the condemned’s chin.

Maxine had drilled a hole through a square-inch of copper plating and put a brass screw through it. She’d then
superglued
a square-inch piece of sponge to the copper plate, removed the button from the top of the baseball cap, and bolted the electrode to the inside so it would rest flush against the condemned’s head.

Rufus grabbed one of the four-foot copper wires and hammered its other end so that it had enough surface area to accept a screw. He drilled a hole through it, then took both the wire and the skullcap and sat down in the chair.

Unscrewing the bolt that fastened the electrode to the cap, he slipped the copper wire onto the brass screw, tightened the bolt back into place, and grinned.

He now had his own personal electric chair, and though he had doubts about whether it could actually deliver a lethal jolt, it would certainly be fun to try.

Rufus came to his feet.

His side was hurting again.

He walked upstairs to tell Maxine that everything was ready and see if Luther had come home.

Charlie Tatum was sobering up fast. He set the broken creature down on the soft leather sofa where he’d been drifting in and out of sleep for the last two hours, and called out to his wife down the dark hallway:

"Margaret! Come out here!"

The woman was still unconscious.

Charlie knelt down on the carpet and straightened the lingerie so her nipples didn’t show. He lifted her satin chemise to see where all the blood was coming from.

The wound was located just above her hipbone, like a small black mouth, open with surprise, blood oozing from its corner, down the woman’s side, and onto the leather sofa.

"What in the world are you yelling about, baby?"

Margaret emerged from the hallway and stood in her flannel nightgown, a woman with heft, her dyed red hair in turmoil,
sleeplines
down the right side of her face.

"Are you drunk?" she asked, pointing at the empty tumbler and the half-empty bottle of
Tanqueray
sitting on the driftwood coffee table between the sofa and the television.

"Just put your glasses on,
Mag
," he said.

Margaret pulled a pair of thick-
lensed
frames from the patch pocket on her nightgown, slipped them on, and gasped.

"My God. What in the world happened to her?"

"You tell me. She just knocked on the door. When I opened it she said ‘help me’ and fainted right into my arms."

Margaret moved a step closer across the carpet. She turned on a stained glass lamp sitting on an end table.

"Is that blood?" she asked.

"Yeah. She’s got a bad cut right here. And her arms and legs are all torn up."

"I’ll call nine-one-one. Or should we just take her to the medical center? I’ll drive."

Charlie lay his ear against the woman’s heart, her mouth.

"No, she’s breathing. Just tell them to send an ambulance."

While Margaret called 911 from the adjacent kitchen, Charlie leaned in close to the woman on his sofa and spoke in a low and calming voice into her ear.

"You’re safe now. An ambulance is coming and they’re gonna take good care of you." Charlie felt her burning forehead, then held her swollen shattered hand. "Just hang in there, okay? Everything’s gonna be fine now. You came to the right house."

Margaret walked in from the kitchen, sat down on the end of the sofa.

"Ambulance is on the way and they’re also sending a police car since I told them she might’ve been attacked. What do you think happened to her?"

Charlie shook his head.

He stared at the television for a moment, then reached for the remote control and turned it off.

The woman stirred.

Eyes opening.

Wide with fear.

"Remember me?" Charlie asked.

A nod.

"You’re safe now. The ambulance is coming."

There was a knock at the front door.

"That was fast," Margaret said, rising from the sofa.

"See, there they are," Charlie whispered. "Lightning quick."

As Margaret reached to open the front door she said, "Wonder why they didn’t use the siren or the lights?"

Charlie was staring into the woman’s glazed eyes when Margaret opened the door.

He said, "We’ll come see you in the hospital tomorrow, maybe bring you some—"

Margaret emitted a strange gurgling sound.

Charlie glanced over his shoulder at his wife.

She turned slowly.

Faced him.

Standing in the open doorway, stunned, face gone pale as sand, sheets of blood flooding out of the long dark smile under her chin.

"
Mag
!" Charlie shrieked, coming to his feet, leaping awkwardly over the coffee table as his wife went to her knees and fell prostrate across the carpet.

A man with long black hair stepped into the
lowlit
living room as the sound of distant sirens grew audible.

Charlie lunged at the intruder who simply held fast to the ivory-hilted bowie, letting the old drunken sailor impale himself with his own inertia, the carbon blade turning,
riving
its quiet devastation inside him.

Charlie tumbled backward and fell dying onto his dead wife.

Luther drew the blade between his thumb and forefinger, flung blood onto the walls, and turned his attention to the leather sofa.

Beth was gone and the sirens were approaching.

62

THE inside of the wicker clothes hamper smelled of
fishguts
and mildew. Beth had burrowed down into the laundry, covering herself in underwear and panties and damp jeans and a blanket that stunk of gasoline.

The old man was no longer keening and above the distant moan of sirens she could hear hallway doors opening and closing.

Having managed to put the lid on the hamper from inside, her only view of the master bedroom was through a gap in the wicker. But there was little to see. A blue nightlight by the doorway provided the sole illumination.

Footsteps stopped behind the door.

Doorknob turning.

Sirens closing in.

Stay alive one more minute and you get to live, see your children again. He can’t stay once the police are here.

The bedroom door swung open.

"Elizabeth."

A voice without a shard of emotion.

Through the wicker she could see his legs in the
electricblue
glow of the nightlight.

"We don’t have much time. Come on."

The flashing lights of the ambulance passed through the bedroom’s only window, bursts of vermilion streaking across the walls. She could hear the rocks crunching under its tires as it sped down the dirt road toward the saltbox.

"I’m just gonna cut your throat and leave. You’ll be dead in a minute tops. I think that’s very reasonable."

Beth watched him walk past the hamper, kneel down, and glance under the bed. He rose, moved toward the adjoining bathroom, disappeared inside.

Her heart banging.

Sirens blistering the frozen November night outside.

Reaching out of the clothes, hands on the wicker lid, she heard him rip the shower curtain from its rings.

Go now. Climb out. Go.

A cabinet under the sink opened and closed.

She started to lift the lid when his footsteps reentered the bedroom.

Walk past. Please just go. Leave. Run away. They’ll catch you.

The ambulance parked in front of the house. She could hear its engine, doors opening, slamming.

The man sighed and rushed past the hamper to the doorway.

Oh yes thank you God thank

He stopped abruptly in the threshold.

Paramedics pounding on the front door.

"Almost," he said. "Almost."

And he spun around and moved toward the hamper, Beth peering up through the stench of strangers’ laundry as the lid disappeared.

The man with long black hair gazed down at her and smiled, flashing lights rouging his pale and bloodless face.

The voices of the paramedics reached them, yelling for someone to unlock the front door.

What Beth heard next was the sound the blade made, moving in and out of her— footsteps in squishy mud.

He did the work with the casual efficiency he used to clean fish, then put the lid back on and ran out of the bedroom.

Beth heard a window break across the hall. He was escaping through the backyard.

Her heart sputtered, trying to beat, failing, the pain tempered by the expanding vacuum the life left as it rushed warmly and fast out of her throat.

It occurred to her that she couldn’t breathe but she was gone before it mattered.

63

MY head was clearing, the bleary shapes clamoring back into focus.

Still disoriented from a bash on the head that had knocked me unconscious, I found myself immobilized in an uncomfortably straight chair in a
lowlit
stone room that smelled of solder and copper and freshly-hewn oak.

Violet had been thrown in a corner onto a pile of sawdust, hands bound with duct tape, another strip across her mouth, tears streaming down her face as she watched me through horrified eyes.