by Adam Cesare
She’d made it halfway to the truck when headlights flared at the end of the driveway.
It was probably too much to ask for it to be a helpful midwestern family in an RV, returning from vacation.
It only took a second for her to realize that Matt was still alive and that he was tearing down the driveway toward her.
Quinn remembered back to the Frendo scarecrow, how Ronnie and Matt had left it in the middle of the road. They’d planned this whole thing out, all in an effort to stay close to Cole throughout the night. Matt had even tried to coax them to park farther away; it was Janet who had shot that down. In the spotlight glow of the oncoming car, Quinn realized it’d been Ronnie and Matt’s job to keep Cole safe. But safe for what?
Quinn ran for the open cab of the truck, diving inside just as Matt zoomed past, nearly taking the door off.
Quinn watched as Matt applied the brakes. He was moving too fast; he avoided colliding with the house, but the ass end of his two-seater crashed into one corner of the screen porch.
“No!” she heard Matt yell as she tossed the rifle onto the seat next to her and began to fumble with the keys.
Matt’s back tires spun out in the dust, engine revving, but the porch roof was pinching him in place. Finally, the car got traction and was able to pull free, the sound of more wood cracking.
But instead of driving after her, taking another dive-bombing run at the truck, Matt got out of his car. Maybe to come after her on foot, maybe to inspect the damage to his ride. Quinn kept searching for the right key on the ring.
“Oh no,” Matt said. Quinn looked up again; there was blood coating the side of his head, down to his ruined hand.
If Matt thought the damage to his car was bad, wait until he saw what Quinn had done to his girlfriend.
Quinn inserted the right key and the engine turned over on her first try.
Miraculous.
Matt crossed in front of his car, limping toward her now. He was seemingly unarmed, opening and closing his fists, not even wincing as he worked the damaged one.
He stumbled, grabbing onto the front of his car, staining one of the headlights red with his blood.
“Newwww girl!” he yelled, slurred and pained.
Quinn reached for the gearshift and had a sudden, terrible realization.
This truck. It was an antique. A real slice of Americana.
It had a manual transmission.
She looked down between her legs and began to despair.
Three. There were three pedals.
“Why are there three?!” Quinn screamed into the empty cab.
“Do not test me,” Matt said, yelling at her, still a number of yards away, weaving drunkenly as he marched to her. He stumbled and fell, too far from his own car to use it to prop himself up.
He didn’t seem like a threat. And she had the rifle. But she did not want to waste the bullets on him.
Quinn knew enough to know that one of the three pedals was the clutch. Now, did you need that pedal depressed in order to start rolling? She had a fifty/fifty shot.
She hit both the gas and the clutch, moved the gearshift to 1, and . . . nothing.
Wait. Not nothing. There was sound, revving. With her feet still on both pedals, she felt around in front of her, flashing the headlights accidentally. She squinted against the sudden illumination, then watched as one of the meters on the lit dash began to count RPMs.
The needle was halfway up. That seemed like enough, right?
Matt was screaming again, but a different sound now, frustrated, rage-filled. He made it to his feet, but was down again before he could make much more progress toward her and the truck.
Quinn lifted her foot from the clutch slowly, but maybe not slowly enough. The truck jerked forward. She had to lock her elbows to stop the bridge of her nose from colliding with the steering wheel. Tensing from the force of the sudden acceleration, she pressed her weight farther onto the gas and she ran . . .
. . . right into the side of Matt’s car.
There was engine smoke and Quinn coughed.
Quinn blinked the world back into focus, her fingertips humming, ears ringing.
There were two blood streaks on the truck’s hood and Quinn’s hand fumbled to get the gearshift to R, and this time she went lighter on the gas, slower on the clutch. There was a horrible crunching sound, part fiberglass, part flesh, as she eased the truck back.
She’d ended Matt Trent’s screaming in a fairly spectacular manner, crushing his head between the bumper of the truck and the side of his own car.
Her only thought: At least I saved a bullet.
Who even was she anymore?
She left the truck’s engine on and gathered up the rifle, unsure how to check how much ammo she had left.
One side of Matt’s car was crumpled in, but the paint job helped hide the boy’s blood.
Matt’s sporty two-seater was an automatic. Even though the passenger’s side door was hanging off, scraping the road and throwing sparks, Quinn was able to drive it just fine.
She peeled away from the Tillersons’ and headed south until she could see Baypen blocking out the lights of the town.
When the building was about a hundred yards ahead of her, she cut the headlights and crept forward, parking a good distance from the factory and proceeding the rest of the way on foot.
Whoever was in there, she didn’t want them to know she was coming.
Twenty-Seven
Glenn Maybrook made a show of checking the corpse’s pulse.
Again.
He pinched Trudy’s intact wrist in one hand, mouthed counting aloud, then set her arm back down on the table. He’d been doing this for an hour now. Occasionally he’d try holding a conversation with her, lift her shortened arm and help her flex the elbow joint. The motions were an approximation of physical therapy. Soon rigor would start and the charade would need to end. But hopefully he’d be gone long before that.
She’d waved in and out of consciousness while he’d placed all the sutures he could. Even with a sewing needle and thread, the stitches held together well when he snipped off Trudy’s zip-tie tourniquet. But the second time she’d blacked out, she hadn’t come back. Her last minutes awake hadn’t necessarily been lucid, but she’d been able to speak. She alternated laughing and crying.
Trudy called him terrible names with one breath and begged for his forgiveness the next.
The man on the speaker hadn’t said anything in a long time, and Glenn was starting to suspect something was changing. That the clowns were moving to a new phase in their plan, their eye-in-the-sky leader’s attention turned elsewhere.
Over the last ten minutes or so, Glenn had tested this theory. He posed questions to the voice on the speaker, had pushed the limits of insulting him, just to elicit a response. But he got nothing.
Glenn Maybrook was alone down here.
That was good.
There was the crunch of machinery somewhere above him, then the sound of a car engine and wheels, then voices.
Something was happening.
He had to make a decision.
He looked at Trudy’s body, then to the mask on the floor, then finally back to his small jail cell. Dr. Weller’s corpse was buried inside, a feast for rodents and rot. That would be him if he didn’t try to make a break for it. There would be two dead doctors in Kettle Springs.
Using both hands, Glenn gripped Trudy by a dead shoulder, lifting her from the table, and began to peel away her jumpsuit. It was baggy on the thin woman and even if they weren’t made one-size-fits-all, this one would fit Glenn Maybrook just fine.
A few minutes elapsed as he stripped the jumpsuit off the corpse and changed into the costume over his clothes.
The mask was the final touch. It smelled like sweat and death and extra-hold hairspray.
There were voices above him as he worked. There was arguing, then crying, and Glenn could recognize one of the echoing, booming voices as his captor.
It hadn
’t been a trick, he hadn’t been ignoring him: somebody was too busy to watch Glenn on the monitors.
He stretched the elastic band over his ears, not yet wanting to pull down the mask and obscure his vision.
He picked up the scalpel.
If someone came down here, he’d have to strike quickly, before they realized what was going on.
If you’re still alive out there . . . Hang on, Quinn.
“I love you,” Glenn Maybrook whispered, finishing the thought out loud as he began to climb the stairs.
Twenty-Eight
“Dad,” Cole said. “Don’t do this.”
Arthur Hill walked out the door of the suspended foreman’s office. The room’s windows had been broken out in the fire, but the floor and the catwalk around it held firm.
Cole’s father approached the railing above them and raised his voice to be heard on the refinery floor:
“Don’t call me that.”
The three of them—Cole, Dunne, and Mr. Murray—watched Arthur Hill descend the metal stairs from his office. It took a long time for him to reach the factory floor. Which meant Cole had a lot of time to think what he would say to get him to reconsider. To get his father to realize how wrong this entire night had been.
They’d left the sheriff’s car somewhere in the gloom behind them and gathered under the noose and light.
There was a soft clank-clank from his father’s shoes on metal stairs.
“Don’t try anything,” Sheriff Dunne growled, and squeezed Cole’s arm as his father approached. What was he going to do? Cole had been put in handcuffs, hands behind his back.
Mr. Murray stood between them, Frendo mask perched on top of his bald head, his arms crossed. He never struck Cole as a guy in good shape, but now he wheezed impatiently, glancing up to the lit catwalk, positively giddy to hang Cole from it.
Eventually, Cole’s father reached the bottom step and began to walk toward them. He stepped into the shadows with them and stopped.
“Please, Dad,” Cole said. Trying again to reach him. “This is crazy.”
“You haven’t been my son for years,” Arthur Hill said, not acknowledging Cole’s pleading. “But you knew that. I lost you long before the reservoir.”
“However I disappointed you, I don’t deserve this!” Cole yelled, already frustrated, too angry to try to appeal to reason. “I was sad without Mom!”
Dunne dropped a hand down to Cole’s back, then twisted the chain connecting the cuffs. The metal pinched his wrists.
“Sad, so you killed your sister? That’s quite the revelation,” Arthur Hill said. Cole could see the blankness in his eyes. That the word “accident” wasn’t in his vocabulary. To him, Cole was a murderer—plain and simple. The man in front of him was hollowed-out and dangerous. He wanted to make someone pay for Victoria’s death, and Cole realized that someone was going to be him. “Is that why you took away the one thing in life I had left? And I assume that’s also why you burned down the factory?”
The cuffs tightened another notch around Cole’s skinny wrists, Dunne punctuating his father’s question.
Cole thought about his mom. About the late nights and chartered jets to Columbus. The chemo.
“Sure. I’ve been a shitty son, but I never meant . . .” He stopped—what did it matter. “You know what? There’s no convincing you. You were never much of a father. But I never thought you were a psychopath—”
Dunne shook him by the cuffs, a dog with a rat.
“Oh, so you blame him now? Or is everything that happened because you’re a misunderstood snowflake? Which is it?” Dunne was tall enough he needed to bend to hiss into Cole’s left ear. “You and your friends never stop blaming other people. Never think about the consequences of your actions. It’s pathetic.”
“George.” Arthur Hill nodded his head and Sheriff Dunne relented. Cole felt blood start to return to his hands, the fingertips stinging.
“Don’t think this was easy for me. My solution, when I first raised the subject with George, had been more targeted. Just you. Dead. That’s all I really wanted. Maybe your skull broken, about a foot of dirt as your grave. It took a little convincing to go along with all this . . .” Arthur Hill motioned to his side. “This Frendo business.”
Mr. Murray tensed. Cole had a hard time reading what had upset him. That the sainted Arthur Hill thought he’d allowed his stepdaughter to be murdered in the name of something silly?
Cole’s father held up a hand to Mr. Murray.
“But I came around. Sheriff Dunne’s not wrong. It’s not just you; it’s your generation. You’re all rotten. But it’s only you who got my little girl killed, Cole.” Emotion returned to his voice, but none of it for Cole: “God. She looked so much like your mother . . .”
“You don’t think that I wish every day that I could trade places with her?” Cole said, not trying for hyperbole, just stating a fact. “Think about what you’re doing, Dad. You can stop this if you just—”
Before Cole could finish, his father’s hands were around his throat.
“I told you not to call me that,” Arthur Hill said. This close, his eyes were red, not with tears, but with mania.
Cole tried to speak, but he couldn’t.
The hands tightened.
His father’s thumbs against his windpipe, Cole could feel their intent to kill.
“What is it you want me to stop, Colton? It’s already done.”
Cole’s face began to pulse, feel hot.
“You took everything! My livelihood. You took Victoria. You burned these people out of their hope. So I took what you care about and now I get what I want.”
Dunne cleared his throat.
Arthur Hill’s thumbs eased back, just enough to let a little air slip in between Cole’s clenched teeth.
“Damn it, fine,” Arthur Hill told Sheriff Dunne. “Let the town take its revenge.”
He let go.
Cole dropped to his knees, coughing and sputtering.
“That’s right, Arthur. Let us do it,” Sheriff Dunne said, moving to pat Arthur Hill on his shoulder, but his target shrugging away.
“Just do it,” Arthur Hill said.
Dunne hefted Cole to his feet and bent his arms back as he walked Cole forward. Arthur Hill stepped out of the way and Mr. Murray followed, wearing the smile of a kindergartner.
Arthur Hill had said his piece.
Talking was over. Death was here now.
Cole tried to slow their progress, stamping his feet, dropping to his knees only to be hoisted up, his shoulders feeling ready to dislocate. The sounds of his struggle echoed through the empty warehouse. The air felt damp the deeper in they marched. There was the sound of dripping somewhere. Was it possible that the water from the fire crews still hadn’t dried?
“I never even liked your grandfather’s clown,” Cole’s father said, voice raising, sick insane humor creeping into his otherwise flat affect: “But I have to admit, he’s grown on me tonight.”
Cole fell forward onto the foot of the stairs, metal biting against his chest, the side of his face, unable to put his arms out and protect himself. Dunne finally pulled him up, only to push him over three more stairs before letting him drop again.
His body couldn’t take this, but he also didn’t want to freely climb the makeshift gallows. There was a landing, then a turn, another half set of stairs, and then they would be out on the catwalk with the noose, the position chosen to spotlight Cole’s hanging body.
Madness. Hate. Insecurity. Tradition. The American Dream.
Cole’s thoughts spiraled as his toes dragged, looking for purchase on the stairs but finding nothing.
The last thing Cole was going to see before his neck snapped was his father standing twenty feet below him, looking up with a disappointed expression on his face.
“Pick up your feet and walk,” Dunne said, urging Cole around the turn, up the final set of stairs. “Be a man. Stop making this harder than it has to be.”
“Bu
t it doesn’t have to be!” Cole screamed, knowing that there was no reasoning with any of them anymore.
Dunne lifted Cole by his belt with one massive hand and tossed him, throwing him so far up the final set of stairs that he almost tipped over the banister. While he was momentarily free, Cole considered jumping down to the factory floor: splat. He could kill himself a minute ahead of schedule just to piss off his dad, make it harder to stage his death like a suicide.
Still prone, Cole looked back down the steps, his lower lip bleeding. Bleeding again, if this was the same cut from the back of the cruiser, wider and deeper now.
On the landing below Cole, Dunne made an after you motion, urging Mr. Murray forward. The bald man started up the steps toward Cole.
Dunne was breathing heavy. The big man lifted his hat and mopped at his hairline with the back of one sleeve. The sheriff grimaced, mustache twitching, the chest of his uniform on one side now sodden with blood and sweat.
Good. Rust had done more than pepper him.
“You know the plan!” Arthur Hill yelled up from the factory floor. “I’m sorry I choked him, but don’t add any more defensive bruises!”
“Get moving,” Mr. Murray said, leaning over Cole.
Janet’s stepdad lacked the height and gravitas of Sheriff Dunne, but in a way that was more frightening. He was a friend’s dad who’d always been hard to talk to whenever Cole was over at Janet’s. Now Cole could see why:
Guy was a sick fuck.
Mr. Murray pulled the Frendo mask down off the top of his head, adjusting it over his eyes. It wasn’t a mask now, but an executioner’s hood. Janet’s stepdad lifted Cole up and carried him a few feet, the rest of the way out onto the suspended walkway. They were now higher than the small bank of fluorescent bulbs. Below them, through the metal slats of the catwalk, the noose was visible.
Cole was lifted up.
Mr. Murray held Cole steady, keeping him on his feet with an arm around his waist. Then, his movements clumsy in the mask and gloves, Mr. Murray reeled in the noose, hand over hand. His foot caught in the slack of the rope for a second before he was able to pull up a few more feet and work it free.
