Winter's Rage, page 3
Henry watched the addicts file in ready to stand up at the front of their junkie congregation and profess themselves sober for a day or a week or a month.
“What are we doing here?” Caleb asked, prodding at his teeth with a wooden pick that snapped as he rooted around. His incessant pick-pick-picking had his gums bleeding.
“What’s the one thing we know about the delightful Raelynn?”
“That she’s got a mighty fine ass on her, ripe like a peach,” Dale offered from the driver’s seat.
“What’s the other thing we know about her?” Henry tried again.
“She’s a junkie whore,” Caleb said.
“And that, my friend, is why we’re here. Where better to look for a junkie whore than in a crowd of junkies who’re going to stand up there one after the other and tell their life stories?”
“Like taking candy from a stranger,” Dale said.
“A baby,” Caleb corrected him.
“Who you callin’ a baby?”
And so it went.
“Park up, Dale. We’ll make ourselves a new friend on the way out.”
Dale did as he was told, putting the Caddy into park and killing the idling engine. He reached for the radio, but without the engine turning over there was no power. He looked across at Caleb, then back at Henry for permission to turn the engine over again.
“Knock yourself out,” Henry told him, and a couple of seconds later they were suffering through Wang Chung’s “Dance Hall Days.” It was relentlessly happy, a stark juxtaposition to the world outside their window.
A hobo shuffled out of the liquor store with a bagged-up bottle that was at his lips before he’d made it to the corner. Wang Chung gave way to Strawberry Switchblade, who faded into Steven ‘Tin Tin’ Duffy telling them to kiss him with their mouths.
“Like you could kiss him with anything else, stupid song,” Caleb said, staring out of the window.
There was nothing worse than waiting. He didn’t do it well.
Henry was better at it. He’d learned patience inside. Good things were worth waiting for. Like the yearning that made the junkie’s score all the sweeter.
Karel Fialka kept urging them to tell him what they saw and some sweet-voiced kid kept saying, “The A-Team.’ It was enough to have him clawing at the doors.
Mercifully they were spared too much more of the saccharine-sweet synth pop rubbish as the big old iron door of the Quaker Hall opened and the first of the recently confessed addicts filed out with their chips and twelve steps to follow.
Henry watched them go, like animals, two by two. He knew what he was looking for: one of them on their own, separated from the flock.
It didn’t take long.
“Her,” he said, tapping Dale on the bony shoulder.
The stick insect of a man moved the gear shift into drive and they rolled off the gutter, inching out to crawl along the curb beside the woman. She quickened her pace, just a little.
Caleb rolled down his window, and leaning out a little, smiled and called out, “Excuse me, miss?” Doing his best not to sound like the monster they all knew lived beneath his skin.
She turned, still walking, black curls falling across her face as she leaned ever so slightly to see if she recognized the man talking to her.
“We’re looking for an old friend. She lives round here.”
“Not sure I can help you,” the woman said, not realizing that the worst thing she could possibly have done was talk.
Victims never understood that.
“We thought she might have been at the meeting,” Caleb went on.
The woman stopped walking, and looked back at the Quaker Hall with its dark windows. It was amazing how quickly the place had emptied out. Or maybe it wasn’t so amazing. How many people would willingly linger around a building full of addicts?
The woman shrugged. “What’s her name?”
“Raelynn,” Henry said from the backseat.
“Can’t say I recognize it,” the woman said. “Sorry.”
“I’ve got a picture,” Henry said, taking the creased photo from his back pocket and passing it forward to Caleb, who held it up, but didn’t pass it out through the window. He wanted the woman to come closer to get a better look.
She did.
Everything happened so quickly after that.
Caleb’s hand snaked out and grabbed a handful of her black curls, pulling her face down toward the window. She slapped at his wrist and pulled back but his grip was vicelike. No matter how fiercely she fought him, he wasn’t letting go.
Henry got out of the car. He walked up behind her and punched her hard in the base of the spine. Her legs buckled, and as she tried to rear up and fight free of Caleb’s grip, he yanked her forward again and her forehead cannoned off the top of the window frame. The impact staggered her. Henry’s second punch dropped her.
He hooked his arms under hers and hauled her up, bundling her into the backseat of the stolen Caddy. She grabbed at the sides of the door, screaming loud enough to earn a savage elbow to the side of the face and another punch to the kidneys that beat the fight out of her.
It was all over in less than ten seconds. He glanced around. No one was looking their way.
He clambered into the backseat, the woman’s head on his lap, and slammed the door.
“Drive,” he told Dale.
They peeled away from the sidewalk in a shriek of burned rubber, the Beastie Boys telling everyone there’d be no sleep til Brooklyn.
7
The headlights of Wayne’s truck lit up the cabin. We’d concluded the more-beers-or-more-work argument. Wayne had prevailed.
Not that I’d argued hard. I knew what families were like—in theory—and was more than a little familiar with the panic that went along with a prodigal returning. The least I could do was hammer in a few more nails and heave a few more timbers if it made the difference between his grandkids having somewhere to rest their heads and not.
The long shadows made it more difficult to do any sort of precision work, but a lot of what we were doing was just grunt stuff. A few spikes driven to hold things in place, the nail gun doing the hard work.
“I promise we’ll get beers when the last couple of timbers are laid,” the old man said.
I smiled. He’d been saying that for the last two hours and, best I could tell, would probably be saying it in his sleep in two hours’ time, like some sort of mantra. Truth be told, I was happy enough to go through till dawn. One thing I’d learned in special forces and intelligence work was that the best way to ingratiate yourself with the local community was to do the hard work, no questions asked, and be seen to be happy about doing it.
I grabbed another two by four and dropped it into place. It was like putting together a huge three-dimensional puzzle. Every timber had its place and every joist and crossbeam and brace slotted together just so. It wasn’t exactly handcrafted pioneer stuff, even though we’d assembled a pretty impressive array of circular saws, jigsaws, sanders, planes, work benches and the like. Ideally, we’d have had another ten days to finish the frame, make it weather-proof and start on the inside. We’d be lucky if we had three.
Wayne had a hunting lamp shining up at me. Grinning down at him, I cut a pose, pretending to be a Wolfman howling at the moon. That earned a chuckle.
“You’re a strange one,” Wayne said, after a while.
“That I am, my friend,” I agreed.
I could tell he wanted to talk. Again. And I knew the direction the conversation would go because his eyes kept drifting to the hole his foot had made.
“You’re in pretty good shape for a geek,” he said.
Not subtle. I laughed. I’d been interrogated by some of the nastiest bastards on the planet and could fend off a few questions about my past easily enough. “I used to work out a lot,” I said.
“I can see,” Wayne said. “Seriously, though, thanks, you know.” Again with the meaningful look at the hole.
“No worries. You’d have done the same for me.”
“No, I wouldn’t,” he said. “Not even close. I wouldn’t have been able to get that beam into place on my own, never mind move fast enough or have the presence of mind to grab you before you fell.”
“I got lucky,” I said.
“Bullshit,” he said. “That wasn’t luck, son. That was instinct. That was the kind of thing they can’t teach you. And if you’re a desk jockey I’m banging Halle Berry.”
“How is she?” I said.
“Surprisingly flexible.” Wayne grinned, shaking his head. The old guy knew better than to press too hard.
Over his shoulder I saw the twin white globes of headlights turn down onto our long drive. The trees obscured the car itself for a good two hundred yards, but it wasn’t as though the driver could sneak up on us in the dark with at least three thousand lumens burning bright from their full beams.
We had maybe sixty, ninety seconds before the car pulled up at the cabin.
My backpack was on the ground. My weapon of choice, a loaded SIG Sauer tucked inside.
It was no good to me up there. Without a word, I dropped into a tight crouch, swung down, landing lightly on my feet, and walked over to my pack to fish out the gun. The familiar feel of the heavy-gauge mill-finished metal in my hand never got old. Watching the headlights approach, I slipped the barrel into the back of my jeans.
Better safe than sorry.
8
They switched off the headlights and drove another six hundred yards in darkness, with only the moon to guide them. The suspension on the stolen Cadillac was ridiculously soft and on the pothole-pitted road it had them rolling around like they were at sea.
Dale switched off the tape deck. They drove on in silence, only the crunch of stones under the tires for company. No one said anything.
Henry stroked the dead woman’s hair. As gestures went it was almost tender. She stared up blindly at the padded roof. She’d died badly. Dale had played rough. The radio had played that damned Madonna song right the way through it. Henry hoped never to hear it again.
She hadn’t recognized Raelynn Cardiman’s face, so letting Dale have his fun before they disposed of her body had been the least he could do. It was always better to feed Dale’s proclivities in a controlled environment than ignore them and leave them to boil over when they least expected it. The guy was dangerous at the best of times, unpredictable and dangerous at the worst.
They reached the end of the dirt track and Caleb switched off the engine. He let the Caddy roll to a stop to avoid the flare of brake-lights. “This ought to do it,” he said.
Henry nodded. He already had the door open and was clambering out. It was colder than a witch’s tit out there. “Give me a hand,” he said, reaching into the car to manhandle the body halfway into the road before Caleb clambered into the back to help push her all the way out. She fell onto the ground, legs wide open, skirt up around her waist.
“Grab the shovel out of the trunk,” Henry told Dale, who didn’t look any too happy at the idea of digging a grave, but they had an arrangement: if you killed it, you buried it. He popped the trunk and came back around the side of the car with a pick and a shovel. He tossed the pick to Caleb.
“Sooner we get this done, sooner we get back on the road,” Henry said.
Caleb bent down for the pick. By the time he straightened up, Dale had already broken ground. He watched them work, silhouetted against the Hunter’s Moon.
It was hard labor. It hadn’t rained for a while, and beneath the layer of cracked top soil the dirt hid a wealth of sins. And rocks. But the dead woman wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry and they had sins aplenty between them.
Caleb’s pick struck stone over and over again, each blow ringing out loudly in the darkness. Beside him Dale dug, whistling a Gloria Estefan song while he worked.
Henry walked over to the trees and took a leak. The thick yellow stream pattered against the hard soil, running off the surface around his feet.
“Can’t we just weigh her down with rocks and throw her in the lake?” Dale grunted, breathing heavily as he sank the shovel into another six inches of black soil.
“No,” Henry said, putting an end to the argument before it began. “And we can’t cut her up and leave her out here for the animals, either. Dig.”
“And torching her’s out of the question?”
“Unless you want to light up the sky from here all the way to kingdom come.”
“Whatever you say, Henry. Whatever you say.”
He went back to his whistling. Henry didn’t recognize the tune this time.
Dale danced around the shovel like some sort of pole dancer.
Henry shook his head. “You’re one strange little man, my friend.”
“And don’t you forget it.” Dale started digging again.
9
The vehicle’s headlights went out. A big burly guy clambered out of the sheriff’s car. He had a buzz cut and a beer belly. I knew him. Everyone did. Jim Lowry represented the town’s entire Sheriff’s Department.
Wayne called, “Hey, Jim, what can we do for you?”
“Wayne.” He raised his right hand in greeting as he slammed the car door. He scratched at the back of his buzz cut as he walked toward the old man. He had the look of a man who wanted to be anywhere but there, but whatever he had come to say, it was obvious it had nothing to do with me so I took the opportunity to drift back to my rucksack to make sure my SIG Sauer was tucked away before his attention turned to me.
Lowry was always going to say howdy, it’s what old-timers like him in small towns like this did. They used to call it breeding. Lowry raised a hand again, his shadow stretched out all the way to the cabin wall. “Howdy, Mike,” he called, like clockwork.
“Jim,” I said, dusting my hands off, and walked over to them.
“Working late, boys?”
Wayne nodded.
“Mind if I ask why?”
“My little girl’s coming home,” Wayne told him.
Lowry didn’t look surprised. Bad news had a way of traveling fast, even in small towns. Wayne had taken the call in Maeve’s, and his last word before hanging up had been “When?” and his first three after hanging up had been “That was Rae.” It didn’t need rocket science to piece together that puzzle, and gossip was Maeve’s stock-in-trade. If anyone could decipher half of a conversation in the name of tittle-tattle it was her.
“When?” the sheriff asked, mirroring Wayne’s own question.
“Soon as,” Wayne said. “She’s on the road now.”
Lowry nodded thoughtfully. “Then you boys better get a shift on. That shack’s not gonna make itself watertight, is it?”
“You can always lend a hand, Sheriff,” I said, earning a cockeyed grin from Lowry.
“My manual labor days are long behind me, son,” he said, although he was only ten years my senior. Maybe less. It was part of the small-town-sheriff shtick. He played the part well. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Wayne, I’m pleased for you, I really am. Family’s everything. But I gotta ask, is she okay? You know, after last time …”
“It’s all good, Jim,” Wayne assured him.
But Wayne couldn’t be sure. I knew that. The sheriff knew that. It was one of those pillow promises made to lovers, filled with good intentions but with absolutely nothing to back it up.
“That’s good to hear, Wayne. It really is. Rae’s a real spitfire of a girl. It’ll be good to have her smiling face back around town.”
“I hear you.” Wayne nodded.
Neither of them acknowledged the simple truth: no matter who you are, what your experience, what shit life has thrown at you, you can never go home. It just doesn’t work. And if you’re hopping a midnight bus, you’re running from something, not to it.
“Besides,” Lowry said, “we’ve already got our resident stranger in Mike here.” He smiled at me, but it was plenty obvious he didn’t trust me. He was right. I was a stranger in town, and for all any of them knew, I was running from something, so I could hardly blame him for being suspicious, even after a few weeks of my charm to wear him down.
“A stranger’s just a friend you haven’t met yet,” I said, matching his grin with one of my own.
“Very Hallmark of you, Mike,” the sheriff said. “Anyways, like I said, I’m really pleased for you, Wayne. A man needs his family around him. You know me, all I want is a quiet life.”
“Don’t we all?” I said.
“Amen to that.” Wayne rounded off the agreement for everyone. “She won’t be any trouble, Jim. You have my word.”
More of those promises that couldn’t be kept.
Wayne Cardiman was really good at making them, I realized.
One of them would end up breaking his heart.
That was always the way with rash promises and old hearts.
10
Raelynn tossed and turned all night, gripped by fever-sweats. Despite the cold room, the sheets clung to her skin. She’d cranked the air-conditioning up as far as it would go, and that wasn’t enough. There was no blessing in oblivion.
Behind her eyes images flashed. In one fractured moment she was a fox being chased by hounds, in another a rabbit racing from a dog. On and on it went, in each version the predator capturing its prey in a savage circle of death.
“Mom.” She felt a hand on her shoulder, shaking her awake. She grunted, pulling the sheet up over her.
“Mom,” the voice came again. “We’ve got to go or we’ll miss the bus. The alarm didn’t go off.” Words, just words. She didn’t want to open her eyes. Not now. Not for ever.
“Just a minute,” she mumbled. “Five. Just a few. I’m so tired.”
“You’ve got to get up, Mom.” Anna pulled back the blankets, leaving her all but bare to the morning in her bra and panties. She groaned again, but opened her eyes.
The ceiling fan turned lazily over her head, wobbling as it finished each new rotation. The screws must have worked themselves loose. One fine day the whole thing would come down and make a mess of the sleeper below.
