But when he saw what was lying on the ground, less than a foot away from him, his hand went back into the pocket and closed around the grip of his pistol. It was a pair of black high-heels, one with the heel missing. The pair of heels Angela was wearing Friday night.
“Jeff, never mind that. He’s just playing with your head. Hurry up and deal with him, because I think I know where she is, but I’ve got to have your help to get to her.”
Jeff’s eyes moved from the shoes to Damon’s smiling and pleased face. “What did you do, you sorry bastard?” he demanded hoarsely, his face having lost all color.
“I had myself one hell of a good time with her, what you do think? I must say that she fought the hardest of any bitch I’ve ever had and screamed the loudest. I finally had to cut her goddamn throat just to shut her up.”
Jeff felt something come loose inside him. The rage came quickly, hot and fierce, the likes of which he had never experienced before. It was like a wild and vicious animal escaping its cage. Inside the pocket of his jacket, his hand tightened around the pistol.
“The only bad thing about it was that you weren’t there to see the show,” Damon drawled matter-of-factly. “Could’ve had myself another two-for-one. But then, shit, you were off and gone somewhere, and later you were too busy lying there in the dirt, trying to die. So I decided to do you a favor when you called here.” A grin that was hideous creased Damon’s lips. “At least you got to hear that bitch screaming.”
All that had been tearing him apart since Friday night roared out of Jeff’s mouth in a long and bellowing wail. He ran at Damon, his hand pulling free of his jacket pocket.
Damon, clearly anticipating a reaction, ducked back inside the shed at the first sound from Jeff’s mouth. He moved so quickly that he didn’t see the gun that appeared in Jeff’s hand. As he hauled the door closed, slamming it behind him with a wet thud, Jeff worked the pistol’s action, jacking a round into the chamber. From inside the shed Jeff heard Damon laughing softly.
“I got your ass now,” Damon drawled, his voice muffled and confident.
“Come out of there, you lousy piece of shit!” Jeff yelled.
“Fuck you. You’re dying to get your hands on me now, but you’ll have to come in here to do it—and nobody can be that stupid.”
Jeff edged closer to the shed’s door, the pistol gripped in both hands and held straight out in front of him. “Damon, I’ve got a gun in my hands.”
“Sure, you do,” Damon drawled laconically. “Next thing you’re going to tell me is that you grew a pair of balls since I last saw you.”
Jeff drew to within about three feet of the door and stopped.
“Careful, Jeff. He’s trying to trick you.”
“I mean it, Damon, I’ve got a gun and I’m about to start blasting holes—”
“Bullshit!” Damon yelled a split second before the door burst open.
“Jeff, look out!”
With a sound like a bull in full charge, Damon rushed out of he shed, something short, heavy and slightly curved gripped in both hands and held high above one shoulder.
Jeff saw it coming down, saw that it was an old axe handle, and threw up his arm to ward off the blow. At the instant the old wood connected with the underside of his forearm with a sickening snap of bone, his finger squeezed the trigger of the pistol in his other hand.
Damon grunted; Jeff tumbled to the ground.
“Jeff!”
“Goddamn!” Jeff wailed, holding his lifeless arm against his body as he tried to sit up. He managed to get his good elbow under him, but the sleeve of his jacket slipped in the pine needles and he ended up on his back again. He still had the gun in his hand.
“You son-of-a-bitch,” Damon muttered, his voice hoarse and bewildered.
Jeff raised his head. Damon leaned heavily against the shed’s wall, his face pale, both hands pressed to his lower abdomen, right below and to one side of his navel. Dark and thick blood was seeping between his fingers. The broken halves of the axe handle lay near his feet.
“You shot me, you fucker,” Damon said as though the very idea was ridiculous.
“I warned you, asshole,” Jeff retorted, leveling the gun at Damon.
Damon lunged down and to one side a split second before Jeff fired a second time. The bullet smacked the wall in a spray of splinters less than an inch above where Damon’s head been. Jeff levered his body on his butt in Damon’s direction, bringing the gun around, but his brother was running and weaving too wildly to afford him a certain or even decent shot. Jeff waited until Damon slid behind the wheel of Janice’s car and lowered the gun, aiming as best he could at the back of his brother’s head.
“No, Jeff, no! Don’t shoot at the car!”
The trigger was about to break under the pressure of his finger, but the sudden and familiar voice surprised him to the point that he froze. The hesitation gave Damon time to get the car’s engine started. Jeff lowered the gun and watched as Damon sped away in a screech of tires and white smoke when the car reached the street. Once the car was gone, Jeff lay back on the ground, the adrenaline flow quickly easing as the moment passed.
He became aware of the throbbing pain pulsing up and down his broken arm. He let the gun drop from his fingers and he reached for his arm. After several long and deep breaths, he rolled his head a little to one side and…
…stared into Angela’s anxious face.
“Angie?” he breathed, his eyes filling with disbelief and something very close to horror. Wearing the same black dress she had on Friday night, she was huddled on her knees beside him, her clenched hands on her thighs.
“Yes, baby, it’s me. Please, don’t freak out on me—we don’t have time for that.”
Jeff looked away and closed his eyes. “No…no, it can’t be you,” he said under his breath, slowly shaking his head.
“Baby, listen to me, okay? You always had a pet name for me: your little Spitfire. Do you remember that and how much I loved it?”
Jeff’s head turned back toward her, his eyes opening slowly. Though they still shone with shock and disbelief, there was now a tiny glint of wonder in his eyes. He tried to reach for her with his good hand.
She moved away. “Don’t, baby, because you won’t feel anything.”
“Then you’re not really here, but how the hell can that be? I can see you and hear your voice—I’ve been hearing it for days. God, I’ve got to be losing my mind.”
“No, you’re not. Jeff, try to understand this—please, try for me, okay? All that’s really here is my spirit and my energy. What you’re seeing is…it’s like a picture I’ve created to let you know it’s me. It’s like the picture I put in your mind of your phone to let you know something was wrong. It’s the same thing with my voice—it’s the way you remember how my voice sounded when I was alive. Do you understand?”
“I’m not sure,” Jeff allowed softly. “What is it you want from me?”
“I need you to help me help the others.”
“Help you and these others do what?”
“For one thing, stop Damon. He’s pure evil—we have to stop him. What he did to me was awful, but I wasn’t the first. I wasn’t even the first Friday night. He killed a younger woman and her ex-boyfriend a little more than an hour before he got to me. He killed the guy for the sheer joy of it—but it was the woman he was after because she offended him. All his life, beginning with your mother, women have offended him. He can’t stand that, and he’s been raping and killing us for years.”
“How many has he killed?”
“Seventeen, including me and the guy. That doesn’t include another woman that hung herself years ago. He could’ve stopped that but, instead, he chose to watch it happen.”
“Jesus,” Jeff groaned.
“But, Jeff, now there’s someone else besides him to consider, and that’s Janice. We can’t let her become the next in his long line of victims.”
“Where is she?”
“In the trunk of th
at car he’s driving. That’s why I yelled at you not to shoot, and why I couldn’t find her at first—the car was hiding her from me.”
“Is she hurt bad?”
“Yes…she is. The bastard not only raped and sodomized her, he beat her while he was doing it, and all because she discovered his dirty little secret. Worse still, he’s got more in mind for her—I could feel that coming off him like a bad smell the moment we got here.”
“How the hell can we save her? We don’t know where he’s going with her. If we knew that we could call the cops.”
“I know exactly where he’s taking her. It’s where he always goes when he kills. I think you may have already done your part in helping us stop him, I’m just not certain about it yet. I couldn’t really tell how badly you hurt him. But even if we can finish what you started here for us, we’ve got to have your help to save Janice. If she stays in that trunk, we can’t touch her. You have to get her out of there for us. It could very well be her only chance. Now come on, baby, can you get up? We’re wasting too much time and we can’t stay here very much longer—there’s bound to be cops on the way by now.”
“And if they find me and this gun,” Jeff mused softly, “I won’t be going anywhere except, maybe, to jail until they get it all sorted out, and Janice won’t have a chance.”
“That’s it, baby. That’s it exactly. Can you get up?”
“Yeah,” Jeff groaned, grimacing as he sat up. “Damn arm’s killing me, but I can make it. So where the hell are we going?”
“Not too far from where we were stranded that night. I’ll show you the way.”
Jeff struggled to his feet, reached for the gun and put it back in his jacket pocket. Then he looked at the figure of Angela standing anxiously beside him. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear I could reach out and hold you.
“I wish you could. My God, how I wish you could.”
As Jeff began moving toward his truck, his throbbing and swelling arm pressed to his body, it started raining again. A light rain that promised to get heavier soon.
I can’t believe I’m doing this. There’s so much here that doesn’t make any sense.
“I’ll explain as much as I can on the way. Now let’s go.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
It felt like someone had poured his guts full of gasoline and set a match to it. As he drove through the worsening rain, one hand pressed to the wound in his belly, Damon could feel that he was still bleeding. Not as much as before, not right at first, but it was still seeping out of him. He was sitting in a pool of it, for fuck’s sake! Only there was something wrong with it. It wasn’t red, like it was supposed to be, but a dark and dirty- looking brown…and it smelled just like shit.
He couldn’t believe what that fucker had done to him. Goddamn son-of-a-bitch and his fucking gun. What kind of man needs a fucking gun? Nobody had ever fucked with him in such a way. Even in prison, where the hand of every man was against him because he had slapped some uppity bitch around who had it coming, nobody fucked with him. Just proves he’s not a man at all. Just a worthless ass momma’s boy that can’t stand face-to-face with a man. He had stared one and all squarely in the eye and dared every one of the fuckers to just try and make good on his bullshit threats, but not one of them made so much as a move in his direction. Every one of them knew better than to fuck with the likes of him. Just look at the way he laid down in the dirt Friday night like a titty-sucking baby. If he thinks, for even a fucking second, that he’s dodged the hell I’ve planned for his ass, then he’s an idiot, on top of everything else.
He had breezed through his time inside; he would breeze through this shit. He hurt like a motherfucker, but he was still alive and that meant that nothing had really changed. It was no different than when he went down: a temporary set-back, a fucking delay, nothing more. He would take care of business now just the same as he had been doing since his second day on the outside. The very same day he met the bitch in the trunk.
That business was a favor for a friend. The only person on earth he had ever felt was worthy of his favors and friendship. They not only shared many of the same ideas and tastes, but it was a person Damon could control and twist to his will with ease. It was this friend who had Damon’s possessions at the time the cops popped him. The friend took all of it and stashed it in a mini-storage with money Damon had left behind. That had saved Damon from a shitload of questions that he couldn’t very well answer.
More of a favor than his own brother ever did for him.
So Damon gladly took care of his friend’s chore that day. The favor had really not only benefited his friend, but himself as well and in more ways than one. Only Damon knew every detail of what happened; his friend knew some of it, but would never talk or ask questions. His friend knew better. All the time spent looking after Damon’s things and his friend still didn’t know what was in the boxes and bags. Never seemed in the slightest interested in knowing or finding out and too smart to get curious and look. Unlike a certain bitch in the trunk he could name.
Damon grimaced as a bolt of searing pain ripped up his body and down into his legs. He felt a fresh gush of blood between his fingers. Breathing in hard, short gasps, he took his hand away and looked down at it. The blood looked darker than ever…and there was a small lump of something in his hand.
What the fuck is that? A damn piece of me?
Damon looked up, eyes back on the road, and swallowed hard, dryly. Goddamn, he was thirsty. His throat was so dry that it felt like sand paper.
He knew he should have left all his shit in the mini-storage, but he had wanted it back. It was his, after all, and he had always kept it within easy reach. It all meant something to him and he had been deprived of it for almost two years. He loved to spend time with it, thinking about his father and wondering what might have been. He loved spending time with his bitches, savoring each experience with them and reliving the moment when he made each one of them a good bitch.
A good and sorry bitch…
The one in the trunk was going to be good and sorry before he was finished with her. Goddamn whore, fucking with his shit like she had some kind of right to know what it was. A right to pry into his life and privacy! She deserved nothing less than what she had already received…not to mention what still awaited her. Something so right for her that it had a feel to it that was almost ceremonial in its simplistic beauty.
And nobody was going to stop it. There was nobody who could. Even if somebody who knew where he was going with the bitch, as unlikely as piss turning to wine that was, they couldn’t stop him. No one had ever stopped him.
And no little piece of lead and copper would, either. He swore that on his daddy’s good name.
Forced to drive much slower than he normally did to avoid notice, it seemed to take forever for him to finally reach old County 7. By the time he was nearing the spot where he had found Jeff’s bitch Friday night and where he would leave the two-lane, it seemed another eternity had passed. Finally, he spied the mouth of the dirt road coming up on his right.
Not far now, just a few more miles. Goddamn, why am I so fucking cold? I feel like I’m freezing to death.
He was shaking so hard that it was all he could do to hang on to the wheel with one hand. He had started sweating a few miles back; now it was running into his eyes. He took his hand away from the hole in his gut, looked at his hand, then changed his mind. I’ve got enough of it all over me as it is now without smearing it all over my face. Fuck the cold and the sweat and the blood, goddamn it. Just drive the fucking car. Just get there and take care of the bitch, that’s first. Then I can figure out how to get my shit away from her house and back across the river, where it’ll be safe again. Then, Jeff, you fucker, it’s going to be your turn for all the trouble you’ve caused me. I swear, they’ll never find enough pieces of your sorry ass to even burry.”
The rain started falling heavier than it had all day soon after he made it to County 7. He knew what awaited him on the dirt roa
d—I’ve come this far, so fuck it—and he wasn’t wrong. The moment the Cobalt left the pavement and hit the soupy mud it took both hands just to keep the car pointed, more or less, straight. His body shook, his teeth rattling from the chill, and his eyes stung from the sweat running down his face. The car’s engine raced, both feet working the accelerator and brake. He had to keep the car moving; if it ever stopped, it would never move again without a four-wheel drive or a tractor to pull it. His mouth twisted into a snarl of pain, he fought the road like a bareknuckle brawler, correcting the car’s every slide and swerve. The pain—goddamn the fucking pain! —had assumed such a level of fiery intent that it began to seem like something alive that was trying to devour him from the inside out.
He grimly battled on, fighting the car, the road; the goddamned weather. Him against the world—had he ever faced anything else in his life?
He almost lost the fight when one of the front tires smashed into a water filled pothole. Not only did he nearly lose control of the car when the wheel spun out of his hands, but the jarring impact and the accompanying slam of white-hot agony almost caused him to pass out. His head swimming and his closed eyes filled with points of bright and exploding light, he refused to let the darkness have him, shifting his focus for the moment to that opponent. He saw it as a duel to the death and nothing or nobody had ever beaten him. Only through force of will was he able to get his eyes open again and to grab the wheel in time. With a feral shriek of rage and pain and determination he stopped the car’s slide just as it was about to swap ends. After a brief yet fearsome struggle, he got the car straight again and kept going.
Suck on that, you motherfuckers!
Finally, he made it to the point where the road narrowed to a space barely wide enough to accommodate one vehicle. Where the fields ended and the deep woods began. It was raining harder now; with the lowering cloud deck and the afternoon growing late, the shadows of dusk had arrived early in the woods. He had a little more than a half mile to go. The going was somewhat easier now that the tires had found a little more traction. He switched on the headlights and eased off the gas. Then he turned on the heater, full blast. His teeth were chattering so hard that it felt like every one of them was going to snap off and fall out of his mouth.
The Evil Returned Page 14
