FIFTY-EIGHT
None of us made a sound at first, only stared back and forth at one another, even Frisbee was silent. No bark, no growl. All I could think was this doesn’t make any sense. This timid woman, who flinched every time her husband raised his voice or looked cross at her, could not be the one responsible for the deaths of the little girls in Corona. Could she?
After what seemed like an eternity, Emily Manning finally spoke. I’m not sure about Steve, but for me, like her daughter Jamie, it was the first time that I had heard her talk.
“Are you real?” she asked in a squirrelly, nervous voice that didn’t fit her six-foot, two-hundred pound frame.
Steve and I stood by, looking at her for a moment but Steve eventually answered her with a question of his own.
“Are you?”
I couldn’t tell for sure but it seemed as if some of the anger and all of the fear had left Steve. His voice was now calm; his hands steady, holding his rifle pointed at Emily’s head. I, on the other hand, was about to turn my Fruit of the Looms into Stinkfest ’82.
“I am real, child,” Emily said. “I am the Cleanser and I have work here.”
I didn’t see his reaction exactly but I saw Steve shake his head out of the corner of my eye in the flashlight’s illumination.
“You’re what?” he asked with a chuckle between words.
She took a step forward and we took a step back. My leg brushed against Frisbee’s muzzle reminding me of his presence, thankful for it. There was about fifteen feet between us and we weren’t about to let her close the gap.
“I am the Cleanser,” she repeated. “I’m here to cleanse.”
She spoke it as if it were matter of fact, as though it were simply a job she’d come to perform.
Steve and I glanced at one another and then back at Emily.
Steve said, “What do you think you are some kind of maid? What is it that you’ve come to cleanse, lady?”
“Not what. Who,” she said and took another step toward us and we took another one back. I held the flashlight pointed at her face-her eyes looked deranged-and in the light saw her switch the screwdriver from her left hand to her right, hold it more like a weapon than a tool. “There is a filthy child here, a filthy girl that needs to be taken care of. And I shall cleanse her.”
Now the anger returned to Steve. “That girl is my sister and you’re not going to lay a fucking hand on her, you crazy bitch. I know who you are, Mrs. Manning. I know where you live. I know who your husband is and I know who your daughter is. And when this is all over I will make sure that you never see any of them again. Especially Jamie,” he said and shot her in the neck. I never saw the BB hit, just the welt that instantly bloomed on her windpipe.
She made a muffled yelp, something that was half shock and half cry as she reached for her throat.
“You, dirty shit!” she gargled and lunged for Steve, bringing the screwdriver up and down.
Thank God Frisbee was with us because all though Steve was quick enough to dodge the blow, the dog jumped and snapped at her face with a vicious growl. He didn’t bite her but it gave us a few seconds to start off from the side yard before she could give chase.
Just before we rounded the corner by his garage, Steve grabbed hold of the plywood and tipped it over; making sure that Frisbee was out of the way first. It landed with a flat thud, landing just the way he wanted; with all nineteen of those nails sticking straight up.
When we had been huddled in Cory’s playhouse, one of the things in our plan was to create a way to slow the Sesame Street Killer down. We had no idea who it was at the time but knew it was an adult who could prove to be faster than us.
“You wont ever see your daughter again, you psycho bitch,” Steve hollered. “I’m going to do to her what you did to those other girls when this is over.”
He didn’t mean it. Steve wasn’t going to kill Jamie Manning. He only said it to goad Emily on. He was improvising our plan in order to get her to chase us and it worked. She took the bait.
In a whiny voice, she said, “You can’t cleanse her. You can’t touch-“ and was abruptly cut off. It took a few seconds until the moan came and we knew exactly what had happened. She had stepped on at least one of the nails in the board. Score one for our team.
And sure enough when we reached the street we turned back to see her stumble around the side yard favoring one foot. When she saw us standing there she bolted straight at Steve and me as if the hole in her foot had instantly healed.
Steve grabbed my sleeve and we hauled ass toward the gate at the alley a few houses down. He loaded another BB on the fly and began pumping the gun up once again. When we reached the gate, Emily Manning was half the distance to us from Steve’s house and gaining. Frisbee slipped through first and Steve slid his gun underneath, gave me a boost over. After he was up and over himself he told me to head through Dead Grove and toward the abandoned house and that he would be right behind me.
I began to jog but turned to look back at Steve who had taken a shooter’s stance in the middle of the alley. He was aiming at the top of the gate, waiting for Emily to pop her head over. Instead she slammed into it with all two-hundred pounds of her body, snapping the bolts, latch and lock with what would have been a hell of a sound if it weren’t drown out by a ripple of thunder.
In the next instance I heard the whap of the BB gun but no indication that he had hit his mark. I did, though, here him coming up fast behind me, Emily too.
“I’ll kill you!” she said, making it sound as if it were on a list of things to do. She sounded winded but gave no sign of slowing down. “I’ll kill the both of you and then go back for your filthy sister.”
“Fuck you,” Steve cried. “It’ll be Jamie who dies. There’s nothing you can do.”
What was coming out of Steve’s mouth was the equivalent of ‘neener, neener, neener, you can’t catch us,’ and she was buying every bit of it.
The short wall that separated the alley from Dead Grove was impossible to see in the dark. It was hard enough to see in the daytime with all the weeds and trash around it but Steve and I had been through there so many times before we could have found it blindfolded. Emily had no idea where it was or that it even existed. In the next instant, just before she could get any closer-and she was close now-Steve, Frisbee and I hopped over the cinderblock obstruction. A moment later she tripped over it and came down like a sledgehammer.
We didn’t see it happen, but we sure heard it. It sounded like a chimney falling over and she gasped in pain. We turned back to look and it was as though she had disappeared. Until the next bolt of lightening struck. We saw her lying in the dirt like a discarded heap of carpet, rolling around on her back, trying to build up enough momentum to sit. Steve loaded another BB and pumped the rifle six or seven times. And just as she was getting to her feet, bending over to straighten up, Steve pointed and fired off another shot that nailed her in her fat, right butt-cheek.
She cried out like she’d been stung by a bee, which is probably just what it had felt like. A second later she was turning and running at us again. But now she seemed slower and less coordinated. The nail, crashing through the wooden gate and falling over a brick wall had done just enough to take a little fight out of her.
Steve and I continued our slow run down the dirt path through Dead Grove. At about the halfway point-the same spot where Mike and Cory had tangled just days before-I noticed that Frisbee was no longer with us.
“Hey,” I said to Steve, out of breath and scared to death. “Where did Frisbee go?”
Looking, into the darkness all around us, he shrugged. “I don’t know. He’ll be alright though.” He turned and jogged backward, checking to see how close Emily was getting. “He might of just-“ He was cut off by a flash, like a strobe light above, and an immediate crackle of thunder that sounded like a tractor crashing. “There he is,” he pointed behind us.
I turned sideways while I ran and saw that Frisbee had fallen behind. But he had done so on purpose
. He had stayed back and gotten behind our pursuer and was now barking and nipping at her ankles, keeping her moving forward, toward us, toward the abandoned house.
He was herding her.
She took swipes at him with the screwdriver but never connected. He was too quick. He did fall back a bit to let her catch up to us, but wouldn’t let her get too close. When she started to, he would begin the nipping all over to slow her back down but still keep her on course, on our trail.
When we reached the end of the path that led to Magnolia Street my heart was knocking through my sternum and I had to stop and bend over to rest. The adrenaline rush and all the running was starting to slow me down quick. We only needed to make it another block up to Fullerton where the house was, where Jason and Cory were, where we planned to trap Emily Manning and then call the police and become heroes for all of Corona to worship.
Just another block.
“Come on, Ricky,” Steve urged. “Don’t stop now. We’re almost there.”
I took a couple of deep breaths and began to pace him again. “What about Frisbee?” I asked. “What if she gets him?”
Steve said, “He’ll be okay. He’s tough and smart. He’s helping us. It’s why we found him, you know.”
I nodded, although he couldn’t see it, and said, “I know. But he found us.”
“Yeah.”
For the last time that night, and for the last time ever, Steve loaded a BB into the chamber of his Daisy eight-eighty and began pumping it as we ran. Emily wasn’t far behind us, maybe fifteen yards and Frisbee wasn’t far behind her, maybe five. There wasn’t a lick of traffic on Magnolia at that time of the morning, not one car, not one headlight. It was after three and the only illumination we had was from the street lights spaced out every hundred feet and the lightening that flickered every half minute or so. I still held onto the flashlight but kept it off to conserve the batteries.
We crossed the street and made our way through the field behind the abandoned house. The only sound: the dead grass whipping our legs, Emily gasping for breath and the pounding of thunder.
A hundred yards before we got to the house, a brilliant bolt of lightening hop scotched its way from cloud to cloud to cloud making the world around us light up, nearly blinding us.
“No you don’t,” Emily Manning screamed at us. “No you don’t. Not the Shelter. That’s my place. That is my secret place. It’s for the girls only. Don’t you go there! I will make dying so bad for you, you don’t even know.”
She could see where we were headed but it didn’t make any sense to me just then what she was talking about.
The Shelter?
Steve was quicker and tried to manipulate her. He turned his head and yelled, “That’s right. We’re going to the Shelter now. In fact, that’s were Jamie is. We kidnapped her earlier and tied her up inside.”
Emily, nearly out of breath, grunted out, “Bullshit! I saw her before I left the house. You ain’t got her. She’s home sleeping, you shits.”
“If you say so,” Steve challenged. “But I know better. I’m going to pull the tongue out of her retarded mouth when I get there.”
“You bastard,” she screamed. “Don’t you call her that! She deserves better. You’re dead.”
The house was only fifty yards away now and Steve looked at me. “Are you ready for this, Ricky? There’s no turning back now, you know that?”
“Shit, Steve, I’m so scared. I don’t know. What if she kills me? Stay with me, please.” I was starting to cry now. This was it. I was scared when we had caught her trying to pry Jackie’s bedroom window open. I was terrified now. I was only eight. There was no way she was going to let me live. Not the way we had planned it. Nothing made sense anymore. What the hell were we thinking? This was an adult, a grown woman. I stood no chance alone against her.
“Frisbee will be with you. You know that,” Steve reassured me. “Stick to the plan. In through the front door and out through the garage. It’s that simple. You’re faster than she is. She can’t get to you. We lock the door and she’s… Well you leave the rest to us.”
“Promise me I’ll be okay, Steve,” I said.
“Ricky, if you do everything like we planned then you’re going to be just fine. Okay?”
I nodded and said, “Okay.”
“Then this is where I leave,” Steve told me. “Once I’m about twenty feet away, you turn the flashlight back on and get her to follow you.”
Steve broke away from me and when he was at the right distance I clicked the lamp on just as another bolt of lightening began its heavenly two-step. The thunder broke and Frisbee barked.
I could see the front of the house and the door to the entrance was wide open as planned. I couldn’t see Jason or Cory. They would be on the Fullerton side of the house, out of site, waiting with bricks and bottles to throw in case anything went wrong. I wouldn’t know for a few more minutes that that wasn’t the real reason they had come up here before Steve and me. The original plan had changed just a bit while I was taking my nap earlier. Steve, Jason and Cory had another plan concocted that I wasn’t fully aware of. They didn’t think that I would go along with it. And they were right, I probably wouldn’t have.
It was when I crossed the driveway and rounded the walk that I tripped, losing the flashlight. I skidded on my knees and watched it go tumbling through the air and land in a pile of dead weeds, the light shining straight into the opened front door, lighting the way.
I got up and took two steps and nearly fell over in pain. I was wearing shorts and had skinned both knees in the fall. Bending over and clutching my thighs I felt blood begin to trickle down my shins. It hurt like a bitch but I slowly made it to the doorway and rested against the jam. I thought I had enough distance between Emily Manning and myself but I was wrong because in the next instant I was tackled by six-feet of serial killer and knocked into the foyer, the air forced out of my lungs.
“You shit,” she growled, pinning me to the floor, her hood now back, exposing her face and greasy hair. “Now I got you. I’ll get that faggot, long haired buddy of yours in a minute. Right when I’m done with you.”
She snapped her teeth in my ear. Her right leg was pinning both of my legs down, her massive breasts crushing my airless chest as I gasped for breath. My knees stung.
All I could do was wait for that screwdriver to plunge down into my heart. I thought back to Mike Wood holding the steak knife over Cory’s chest.
Just one quick one.
All of her weight pressed down on me as she readjusted herself. My ears were ringing and my sight had blurred but there was enough light coming from the flashlight to see that she wasn’t holding the screwdriver at all. Instead she wrapped both of her big hands around my neck. But before she could begin to squeeze, Frisbee pounced on her, biting the back of her head.
She squealed like a pig and swung one beefy arm around to swat at him. She missed and Frisbee was right back on her and bit her on the side next to her right breast. As she howled in pain and bucked at him, I squirmed my way out from underneath her, slithering like a snake to get away.
Frisbee released her and trotted over to me, licked me on my chin and stood in front of me for protection. I still couldn’t catch my breath but my sight was clearing and in the next few seconds two things happened. First, Steve appeared in the open doorway, his BB gun held in one hand just the way Mark Payne had showed him. He was a dark shadow in front of the flashlight. He looked like a gunslinger. He said, “Surprise, bitch,” and shot her dead center in her left eye. The second thing to happen was he grabbed the door and slammed it shut, throwing us into complete darkness.
Frisbee Page 66
