Dreams for the Dying, page 3
“What’s the matter?” John asked the kid at the counter. His voice sounded too loud in his own ears, like firecrackers in a cave.
The jittery young man cut his eyes to the right and shook his head a few times quickly. “N-Nothing, sir,” he stammered. His long brown hair swung back and forth in front of his greasy face like a pendulum as his head moved.
The kid pushed five wrinkled and greasy five-dollar notes across the Plexiglas counter in Jack’s general direction, motioning with a shaky hand for him to pick them up. The kid was purposefully avoiding making even incidental eye contact with Jack.
Jack stepped back a few feet so he could fully assess the guy’s body language.
Something was wrong.
Jack looked behind the counter to see if there was a television set, but he didn’t even see a radio. Still, anyone with a cell phone knew everything these days. If anyone had seen him with the waitress in Slidell, if someone had seen what happened in the parking lot, it might be nationally broadcast news by now.
He wondered if the police had issued a “be on the lookout” broadcast for a red Freightliner with a driver matching his description. If they had, he doubted the search would have expanded beyond Louisiana state lines at this point. But he couldn’t be so sure.
He was being paranoid. She had to be missing for twenty-four hours before law enforcement would consider her missing. He guessed the waitress’s coworkers assumed she had hitched a ride home with a good looking trucker, and was maybe riding him like a cowgirl in a sleazy hotel room even now.
But what if someone had seen him stick a needle in her neck and called the cops right away?
The nervous kid developed a voice and broke Jack’s reverie.
“Don’t you want your money, man?” he said, shuffling back and forth frantically. Jack eyed him warily.
“You gotta piss, or what, kid?”
“Yes, sir,” the teen laughed uncomfortably. “Back teeth are floatin’,” he added with a nervous guffaw, undulating in his unceasing potty dance.
Jack shook his head and chuckled.
“Have a good night,” he advised the vibrating counter jockey. Twenty dollars richer, Jack’s confidence was growing again. But as he strolled past the surveillance cameras in the brightly lit parking lot, he still could not shake the feeling that the kid behind the counter knew.
Jack rode the razor’s edge the rest of the way home. His fear was at full tilt, and threatening to undo him. Danger seemed to be around every curve. Every Sheriff’s Deputy or Statey he passed watched him intently as he drove by. He felt the heat of their gazes penetrating right through his façade to the dirty truth.
Jack was slick with sweat and in desperate need of a bathroom by the time he made it into his neighborhood, navigating with extreme caution. He drove a slow five miles an hour down the narrow dirt road that took him home.
His driveway was at the end of the street, a mile and a half beyond the point where civilization ended. It looped around a copse of water oaks and back out onto itself.
His house was a modest prefab with a dainty looking flower garden in the front that feral cats had taken to using as their litter box. Dark woods surrounded the house on three sides.
Jack eased the tractor to a whining stop by the front door. He had driven twelve hundred miles over the last two days, about eighteen hours straight, and it was a miracle that he had not had to go off his route at all. Lady Luck had smiled on him so far, but now he was almost completely exhausted.
Floodlights lit up around his property, activated by motion sensors. They bathed the front yard with a stage-like glow.
He looked in the rearview mirror and didn’t like the hollow-eyed, haggard reflection staring back at him.
Lord, please let all of this be worth it.
He knew his prayers were probably useless. Why would God grant a kidnapper’s requests?
Jack unrolled the waitress burrito wedged in the back of the cab. The burrito’s filling was now wide awake: darting, panicked eyes one second, steely eyes fixed with a vengeful resolve the next. She tried to resist him at first, but once she realized he going to drag her from the truck one way or the other, she lay limp and allowed him to heave her bodily over his shoulder.
“Don’t try anything stupid, lady. This will all work out fine, you’ll see. Dianne will take care of everything,” he said in a voice that was reassuring but firm.
The waitress stiffly nodded her head in agreement.
He opened the door to his humble abode, and stepped inside. He stood in the doorway with the girl slung over his shoulder, eagerly awaiting Dianne’s adulation.
As he stood in the doorway awaiting the appearance of his beloved Goddess, a song by John Cougar Melloncamp floated in from the other room. It was “Jack and Dianne,” how appropriate. Jack knew that Dianne must have waited for this precise moment to play her favorite song. She was so good at things like that.
The front entrance opened into a small foyer. On the left was the living room, sparsely furnished with a threadbare beige sofa. A dusty lamp cast a dim pall on its cushions, and a coffee-stained end table next to it was adorned with a stack of ancient TV Guides. Jack carried Rayne into the dining room.
Dianne was waiting for him there, adorned in shadows, sitting in a wobbly wooden chair facing toward the front door. Even in the near darkness, she shone with a radiance that filled the room.
He was surprised to find her sitting in the exact same position she had been in when he last saw her two days ago. Her hair was perfectly coiffed, and even though her expression was blank, she was still as attractive as when they had first started dating so many years ago. She had done her makeup just right, and she was wearing the pink dress he had bought for her on one of their anniversaries, fifth maybe.
She was beautiful.
Jack smiled broadly as he stood triumphant with Dianne’s trophy. He eased the waitress down into a chair facing his beloved, and said, “Dianne, I’d like to introduce you to Rayne.”
He waited for any sign of her approval. She didn’t acknowledge him. What was this now? She just sat there.
Was she playing a practical joke on him? If so, it was such a rare occurrence, he could not tell.
“I have got to pee,” he said, looking for any reason to excuse himself from the awkward silence. “You girls get to know each other for a minute. I’ll be right back.”
Jack strode briskly back into the family room, leaving the quivering young waitress and his surprisingly subdued wife to get acquainted. He stepped into the bathroom to relieve himself, splashing cold water onto his flushed face to hide the massive perspiration that was developing on his brow. After he felt that he had sufficiently regained his composure, he walked back to the dining room, where Dianne looked as though she was ready to talk.
“So, how do you like her?” he asked Dianne sweetly.
Her voice finally comforted his ears. “So, this is my prize, is it?”
“Indeed, my dear. I told you I could do it,” he said, looking desperately for any sign of approval.
“Take all that tape off of her and hold her down on the table for me, lover.” Dianne cooed.
Jack was taken aback by this. There had not been any discussion about doing anything like this, but he had to go along with it. What was the old saying? In for a penny, in for a pound? He thought he understood what that meant now.
“You won’t try to get away, will you, little lady?” Dianne whispered slowly to the girl as Jack lifted her from the chair, and gently laid her down on the table. “If you think you can get away, think again. Jack is strong, he won’t let go. Right lover boy?”
The girl tried to wriggle free from where she lay on the table, but the duct tape didn’t yield. When Jack approached her with his knife drawn, she stopped moving, but her eyes betrayed her terror.
He began to cut her free of the tape. He tried to be careful, but his hands shook so badly that the knife slipped and sliced into Rayne’s thigh not once, but two different times.
She bucked from the pain of being cut, but Jack held her down tightly as he continued to saw his way through the tape, fresh blood glistening on the blade. The waitress was bleeding from both of her calves and her left arm by the time he moved on to her mouth.
Jack tore the tape from her lips with one sudden yank. She let out a loud scream, and rolled over onto her stomach on the dining table, to find her face only inches from Dianne’s breasts.
Next, Jack sliced through the tape binding her throbbing wrists, freeing her hands. Unbound, she arched back and tried to buck away from Dianne, wincing as she touched wounds Jack had carelessly inflicted with his knife.
“Take off those rags she’s got on, Jack. I want to see what we’ve got to work with here.”
Jack began awkwardly tugging her shirt up and over her head. The waitress sat up straight, holding up one arm in a gesture Jack assumed was intended to make his job easier. But then her other hand shot into her fanny pack and came out with her tube of lipstick. For a gleefully oblivious moment, Jack was happy to see her getting into the spirit of things.
Rayne flicked a little clip on the tube, and a hole opened in the top. Before he fully understood what was happening, Jack had a face full of pepper spray. He cried out in agony as she blasted him in his eyes. Jack tripped over a chair and fell onto the floor, where his skull thudded loudly against the linoleum.
He was blind, and the pain was worse than anything he ever imagined.
The waitress was on him so fast he never had a fighting chance. He heard a scraping, like alligator teeth grinding together, and then came the real pain.
A second blow to his head was accompanied by the brittle crack of splintering wood, then another. A tsunami of anguish cascaded over him, leaving mass destruction in its wake.
Then nothingness, as Jack collapsed in a heap on the floor.
When he regained consciousness, panic and pain were having an orgy inside his skull. His pulse quickened as he heard the brash bang of the screen door slamming shut somewhere behind him.
He was still blind from the pepper spray, his eyes felt like fried eggs stomped into shag carpeting by a grizzly bear with shit on its paws. He tried to blink the chemicals out of his eyes, but it was no use.
Jack could hear fervent activity going on in the room around him, but was too blind to see what was happening. He licked his lips, and gagged in revulsion as his gums and tongue and lips began burning in earnest.
As he attempted to wipe his eyes with his sleeve, he realized the gravity of his situation. He was bound tightly to a chair. How the hell had this happened?
How had he lost control so utterly and completely?
How had this little waif managed to turn the tables on him?
Blindness was utterly terrifying, but the sounds of movement erupting here and there around him made his stomach squelch, and nausea washed over him. He struggled to free himself, but he couldn’t budge an inch. The waitress seemed to be a natural at this sort of thing.
“Dianne,” he croaked. He began to cough convulsively, his throat on fire.
Dianne did not reply, but he knew she was in the room with him. He caught a whiff of her perfume, and realized she had to be within feet of him.
“Dianne?”
Strong gasoline vapors assaulted his nostrils.
“Rayne,” he coughed. “What are you doing?”
“Don’t you ever say my name again.”
Jack understood all too well that the waitress held the reins now, and she was driving this horse straight into a ravine.
After a few minutes, she began furiously scrubbing his face with a handful of scratchy paper towels. His eyes were still watery and sensitive, but finally he saw blurry images and shadows through the veil of pain.
The waitress stood before him wild-eyed and disheveled. She reminded Jack of Sissy Spacek in the movie Carrie after the scene where she is drenched with buckets of blood. Fresh blood was smeared across her face and was leaking out of the wounds on her legs.
She was holding his five-gallon gas drum, the one he kept in the shed. The one he always kept full.
He knew he was in deep shit, but Jack was more worried about Dianne. He glanced around the room and saw her still sitting calmly in her chair, a ghostly shadow sitting directly across from him.
He was about to whisper to Dianne that everything would be fine, but then the waitress walked over to Dianne and doused her with gasoline, emptying half the drum on his Goddess.
Jack called her name over and over in a high-pitched voice, like a helpless pig squealing in a cage. Rayne told him to shut the fuck up.
“You know what Jack?” she asked, in a tone more incredulous than afraid, “I guess I should have known, since you’re obviously a dummy, that your wife would turn out to be a dummy, too.”
“Leave her alone you bitch!” he wailed. “Leave her alone! Don’t you dare hurt my Dianne!”
The waitress swung the gas can with all her might, connecting with the side of his head with a loud clang. He heard and felt the impact at the same time, the pain was surreal.
“Watch this, Jack,” she said, and walked into the living room. His vision was still blurry, but she was carrying something. She had his hatchet. She hefted it and swung it a couple times, laughing maniacally.
Jack’s heart thumped and kicked with fear at the sight of the razor-sharp blade.
“Stop,” he cried. “You can go. Just leave, please leave us alone. I’m sorry.”
He writhed and wriggled. The waitress, sensing his distress, turned and walked to his Goddess’s side, gently stroking her hair.
Dianne just stared ahead.
“Take off those rags she’s got on, Jack. I want to see what we’ve got to work with here,” the waitress sneered sarcastically, mocking him. She took one of Dianne’s hands and laid her arm palm-down on the table.
Without hesitation, she raised the hatchet and brought it down in a tight arc, severing Dianne’s arm cleanly at the elbow with a single savage stroke.
Jack cringed in horror, waiting for Dianne’s scream and a gush of blood from her newly dismembered arm, but neither came.
It was all too much. He thought he might pass out as the hatchet blade came crashing down into Dianne’s shoulder with a cold flash.
Again, Dianne sat stoic and silent.
Jack screamed enough for both of them.
The waitress dropped the hatchet to the floor, and began to dig around in her pocket. When the waitress pulled her hand back out of her pocket, Jack saw that she held something shiny in her fist. His heart sank.
It was his Zippo lighter.
The waitress flipped it open, striking it alight in one fluid motion. For a moment she held the flame close to her chest, as she canted her head upwards toward the ceiling. She appeared to be praying.
Then she searched Jack’s gaze, studying his eyes. Once it was clear that she had found what she was looking for in them, she held the tip of the guttering flame against Dianne’s hair.
An immense whooshing sound filled the dining room, accompanied by the heat and intense light of an instantaneous blaze. Dianne was wholly devoured by flames. She fiercely burned.
The waitress walked away from the burning pyre and stood before Jack.
“How could you love that thing, you idiot?”
Jack watched with growing confusion as Dianne’s body melted in front of him, black smoke spiraling upward toward the ceiling. She never moved once, never even seemed to notice she was on fire as she sat burning.
Jack’s vision was now almost back to normal. He was helpless to do anything but sit and watch his beloved burn. What he saw was more than enough to make him wish he was still blind. She, who had been so beautiful, was now nothing more than a melting charred blob.
What was happening? It was impossible, his Goddess dying, liquefying in front of his eyes.
What kind of cruel trick is this? That isn’t Dianne, it can’t be.
The waitress tapped him on the shoulder. As he turned, she doused him with the remaining gasoline. Fuel sluiced down his body. He watched as she poured a swath along the floor all the way to the front door.
She was going to light it like a fuse, he realized. The pepper spray had burned his eyes, but he knew nothing could ever prepare him for the pure agony to come.
“I need help, Rayne,” he said. “You know I do. I’m not right, and I need help. You can’t burn me up like this. You can’t just kill me.”
She stared at him, clearly unmoved by his plea for mercy.
“Didn’t I tell you to never say my name again, freak?”
Across from Jack, the remnants of the department store mannequin still bubbled, bits of melted plastic dropping to the dining room floor with sickening splats as the flames weakened.
Then, his Goddess toppled.
“There was something I wanted to tell you last night, after you gave me this,” she said, holding the Zippo lighter out in front of her. “But you never gave me a chance, did you, Jack? You think I’m just some piece of trash no one would ever miss—a random victim, right, Jack? You dope me, tie me up and bring me here to do . . . well, who the hell knows what the fuck you were planning to do . . . and you thought that would be that? You fucked with the wrong bitch.” The waitress shook, voice crackling with rage.
It was at that moment Jack realized he was going to die. He never anticipated this ending to his story. All he’d wanted was to make things right with Dianne. Now she was gone, horribly murdered and mutilated in front of him, and this bitch was going to do him next.
“Anyway, Jack,” she spat at him, “I have my chance to say now what I wanted to say then: Thanks for the light, motherfucker.”
Rayne thumbed the Zippo’s wheel.
The flint sparked and a blue-tipped flame appeared.
Releasing a sigh filled with both finality and triumph, she dropped the lighter into the puddle of gasoline beside the empty can. An eruption of flame lit the night, as a surging inferno raced through the front door along the trail she’d left, to find the man inside.
The waitress turned and walked away into the cool night, Jack’s dying screams trembling in her wake.
