Thunder Falls

by Michael Lilly

  “Damn, girl. You’re good. You’re a pain in my ass, but you’re good.”

  She knows. But she’s always been good for herself, and now she can be good for Remy, too.

  Finally.

  She hates to be a pain in the ass (at least, to people who are doing good in the world), but Esther has things to do tonight, and she’s already plotting her escape from Officer Kent’s watch. However, her plan becomes moot in a few seconds, as the front door bursts open and the intruders start spilling out (Thank you, Esther hears the house say), sprinting in every direction—two even run directly toward the cop cars, and Esther imagines them all inside, drawing straws to see who got that duty.

  Esther takes aim, but Simpson is too fast—he pelts one guy with a couple of rubber bullets, he topples, kicking up a barely visible cloud of dust. Esther watches for further movement, but he seems to be unconscious—she wonders if perhaps Simpson hit him in the head. Another runs just to the side of the squad cars.

  He spots Esther crouching there and yells, “I found her! She’s—” and Esther puts a round into his chest. She then looks toward Officer Kent to be chastised, but Kent is on the other side of the cars and doesn’t even seem to have noticed the shot. Kent herself has a taser out and fires it at yet another man, who crumples less gracefully than the one Simpson brought down.

  Eight men ran out of the house, as far as she could tell. Two are unconscious and one is dead. The other five simply ran off, into the desert or toward town. She doesn’t suspect they’ll return. They’re all after saving their own skin at this point.

  So what about the other one? JT, wasn’t it? He’s out looking for Esther, according to the burly guy lying dead in the bedroom. She is reluctant to let the other five get away, but she vows to herself now not to let this JT guy get away. Something about him—his implicit importance, his arrogant nature, the audacity of bringing two dozen guys to try to throw a wrench into Remy’s and Todd’s lives—it gnaws and burns at Esther’s insides, and propels her toward vengeance. She can’t let him escape.

  But where would he be? Esther knows he’s looking for her, and she considers giving herself up as bait, but she doesn’t think that would work. This JT guy seems to be wary of the dangers of underestimating her, and he’s shown that he’s more than prepared to fight dirty. He won’t offer himself up, even if Esther baits him out. She must seek him—hunt him.

  Her first instinct is to call Deliverance; there’s a good chance they’d be able to find him. But as she thinks it, she remembers that her phone is on the counter at the house. Unless one of the guys who fled has it. If that’s the case, she can only hope that they don’t have the resources (and brainpower) necessary to get into it and use it to manipulate Remy. Based on what she’s seen so far, though, excessive brainpower isn’t something she’ll have to worry about, which allows her to focus more on finding this JT guy.

  So where would he be? Probably looking for her, frankly. So where does he think she would be, if not at the house? She wonders what they know about her, and whether they know about her relatively limited familiarity with the area. She thinks about how the articles were written and what information was revealed in them, but there was nothing at all about her, thank god. Not that there is any reason there would be—this massacre will be her first time making news anywhere, at least as anything other than ‘anonymous’ or ‘unknown.’ She might have been able to get away with lying about her whereabouts tonight, but running into Officer Kent removed that option from the menu.

  She runs through the town in her head, place by place, trying to determine where she’d be most likely to find JT. Not at the library, the gas station, or the bed and breakfast, certainly. Possibly the police station? It’s the best she can think of. At least for now.

  Once again sticking to the winding corridors of shadow—or rather, avoiding the blazing disks of light spilling onto the roads and sidewalks—Esther canters through the night. Every couple of minutes, she’s forced to take refuge from sweeping headlights behind a bush or a parked car, but the journey is short nonetheless thanks to Wometzia’s small size.

  Instead of making a beeline across the street when the building comes into view, she works her way around the south, then to the west, behind the building. She crouches at the edge of the property line, just outside the hopeful reaches of the station’s lights, and strains her eyes to pick out any movement in the darkness.

  In the distance, a couple of dogs escalate a barking match. A beaten-up sedan rolls northward, playing some muffled hip hop that makes the ground rumble rhythmically. After a minute, however, the dogs have quieted and the car has left earshot, leaving the area to saturate in Wometzia’s signature pregnant quiet. Ever since Esther came here, she’s loved the specific brand of ambience produced in the town. The odd cricket chirping or passing vehicle seem like accents to the calm, rather than disruptions of it, like the whole town settles down to sleep at night.

  She continues to watch for another minute, then creeps toward the building. The patches of light illuminating the ground are full and bright; Esther identifies the least luminous route to the building’s south wall and takes it, stepping quickly but crouching to avoid being seen through the windows.

  Aware that there’s nowhere to conceal herself while she looks into the lobby, Esther resigns herself to pressing her body up against the wall and being as still as possible, hoping that, should there be any onlookers, the minimal movement is sufficient to evade their attention. She takes a deep breath and pushes her hair in front of her face—her pale complexion would stand out immediately in contrast to the dark, but her dark hair should aid as a shoddy camouflage, even if only for a few moments. Esther lifts her head to look through the window, slowly at first, then with a more confident swiftness. Her hair obscures her vision, but only slightly, like looking through a screen door.

  There’s soft light coming from floor lamps in the corners of the office as well as a desk lamp that somebody forgot to turn off—perhaps in responding to the massacre of the past hour. The surrounding flood lights burst in through the windows from behind Esther, their stark blue-white hue cut up into little rhombuses by the fortifying wire in the window. Seeing two such different lights compete for the same space is somehow dizzying.

  Esther scans the lobby for any sign of…well, anything. But it’s quiet. An older gentleman—the dispatcher on duty—sits at an archaic computer playing solitaire and doesn’t notice the shadow Esther casts.

  She spots movement near the door and is unable to quell the rush of adrenaline before realizing that it’s just a frond of a tall, fake plant swaying in the breeze of a nearby vent.

  Nothing to be found here, it seems.

  Esther retreats back off of the property via the same route she used to approach the building, all the while wondering: Where the hell did he go? This started out as something of a ‘Find him before he finds me’ task, but the longer she searches for him, a furious conviction stirs and bubbles with rapidly increasing intensity, and she undergoes a transformation from prey to predator.

  But, Esther knows that, as much as she would enjoy indulging these feelings, she also can’t risk putting herself into a position of emotional engagement that might cloud her mind.

  Twenty-Two

  Still crouching in the shadows, Esther sifts through the contents of her mind, which shift like tenuous dunes in a windy desert—her memories of the articles written last month, mostly—to try to remember whether any of them had mentioned any locations outside of Albuquerque. Todd and Remy’s house, obviously, but equally obvious is why JT definitely won’t be there. The murder sites or dumping grounds, perhaps? No; those are in Albuquerque, and JT knows that Esther didn’t take her car. He may have suspected that she would hotwire one, but even if that is the case, she won’t have to worry about him being in town, because he’ll be trying to head her off on the road that runs east out of Wometzia.

  She considers making herself comfortable and keeping a closer e
ye on the police station, but instead the farmhouse charges into her conscious, like the Headless Horseman bursting into Sleepy Hollow.

  Oh, she thinks. Without further thought, she knows that that’s it. There are very few times that Esther can get herself to have confidence in such a concept as instinct, but in this case, it tugs at her like the master’s call to a loyal canine.

  She knows the location somewhat; her curiosity got the better of her one night and she explored the farmhouse herself. Certainly, that’s not enough of an edge to call home court advantage, but it’s preferable to stumbling through the dark farmhouse to serve as target practice.

  As Esther steels herself for the journey to the outskirts of town, her attention is called to her aching joints, her sore muscles, and the dull beginnings of a headache.

  I’m getting too old for this shit, she thinks dryly, half-smirking in the darkness. But she sends those thoughts on their way; they have no place in her mind right now. Any thought that isn’t directly involved in getting herself through the next couple of hours has a lesser priority.

  A fresh wave of adrenaline surges into Esther and she draws her fresh, fully loaded weapon from her waistband, replacing it with the nearly empty one. She zips through the streets with a careful balance of speed and prudence, cutting across streets in the darkness and stopping at every corner to listen for movement. As she nears the western town limits, the quiet seems to embolden and encroach upon her. The heavy weight of her gun is comforting.

  She turns northward and hears the first movement in what seems like hours—a sort of raspy chuffing, like an extremely old machine chugging to life. She turns around to see a (wolf?) dog running straight for her. It seems to morph and sway in strangely alien ways, until she’s able to focus more fully and realize that it is, in fact, two dogs, chasing after each other playfully in the dark.

  This realization comes a second too late, however; Esther steps back and loses her footing on a large rock near the side of the road and stumbles onto her backside. In the process, her handgun slips from her hand, clattering to the ground and off toward the curb. Esther’s worst fears are confirmed when she hears a faint but distinct splish as her weapon makes its dive into Wometzia’s limited sewage system.

  Dread threatens to well up inside her, but with tremendous effort, she keeps it at bay. With luck, the next person she encounters will be JT, and with a little more, he’ll be the last hostile person she encounters tonight. She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, and pulls the first gun back out, reminding herself that it’s only a few rounds away from becoming a paperweight.

  She continues north—not long to go now.

  As she looks upon the old, creaky house, she wonders about what angle would be best to approach from. Her one and only visit here was also during the night, so she didn’t get much of an idea of the surrounding terrain. She expects that JT is already here, waiting. He would have gotten a head start, and there’s a good chance he came straight here, rather than having made the detour at the police station (and being frightened by a couple of loose canines), like Esther did.

  She looks up at the barn and the house, silhouetted against the night sky with a graceful subtlety. It would be a beautiful night, if it weren’t so full of death and blood. As she observes the house, she thinks there may be a blind spot in the back, and if she’s careful, she can make her way around to the other end of the property without being seen. Assuming, of course, that JT is in fact here at all.

  Oddly, she has no doubt that he is.

  Esther steps carefully through the umbral cover of the night, hoping that her footfalls on the dead grass aren’t audible from a distance. In time, she looks at the house from the northwest. From this angle, it seems to lose some of its charm, its innocence, but perhaps it’s also because she is aware of its past and present—and maybe a bit of its future.

  Well, she thinks, it’s now or never.

  Keeping in as much of a crouch as reasonable, she trots in a straight line toward the house’s back wall, then flattens herself against it. She steps along the perimeter toward the screen door at the corner, eases it open, and steps inside, holding her firearm at the ready all the while. The screen door closes behind her and she holds her breath, listening for movement. For a brief moment, she wonders whether this was how Remy felt when he came through here only a matter of weeks ago.

  She wonders whether the blood is still upstairs—one thing that television shows don’t cover is the macabre aftermath of a crime scene. Typically, if the scene is on private property, the local police will give them the number of a professional cleaner and send them on their way. But, being that this house is abandoned, that probably hasn’t been the case. Not that there was a murder here, but there was some gruesome violence upstairs, and Esther suspects that that hasn’t quite been taken care of.

  She crouches against the wall near the door and holds her breath, listening. A surreal kind of quiet holds the room with an austere firmness. It would strike Esther as unsettling, but she takes comfort in knowing that if JT so much as scratches his ass anywhere in the house, she’ll be able to hear it.

  She considers going into the pantry and the basement, but knows that it’s not necessary. He’s upstairs. In the room where Remy and Todd found Stan Romero, sliced open and left to bleed to death. JT may even have been involved back then. Who knows?

  Sure enough, she hears an abrupt thunk from upstairs, followed by the creaking of floorboards.

  Her first option is to sneak upstairs and pray that she’s quicker on the draw than he is. She’s confident in her own skills, but without having any knowledge of his, it’s a hard gamble to make.

  Her second option is to hunker down and wait for him to give up and come downstairs, but she doesn’t know how long that could take. Minutes, maybe, but the possibility also extends to hours or even days. And, even through her famous disciplined resolve, she’s not so arrogant to think that she would never let her guard down during a vigil so long and constant. On top of that, the couple of guys who managed to slip away from Remy’s house may be headed this way (or even already here), and that’s a variable far too unpredictable to calculate for.

  Her third option is to notify the police, but she would have to make a phone call to do so, which would mean either having an audible conversation in the house or making her way back outside to do it, far enough from the house so as not to risk being heard—a task that would be a feat in and of itself. In retrospect, perhaps she could have contacted the police sometime in the past half hour, but they’re also chasing the others all over town, no doubt.

  The silence is broken by the gradual rising of distant sirens, likely the reinforcements called in from Albuquerque finally arriving. Esther hears the house’s other occupant shift once more—possibly moving to a window to see if he could spot any of the flashing blue and red lights.

  That he’s moving about strikes Esther as a good sign for two reasons: First, because it means he’s fidgety. He’s on edge and spiraling. Of course, this can lead a person to be more dangerous, but Esther is prepared for that, anyway. Second, because it means he’s most likely unaware of Esther’s presence. If he had any idea that she was in the house, he wouldn’t dare make a sound.

  Option one it is.

  She takes a deep (but quiet) breath, flicks her weapon’s safety off, and begins up the stairs, praying that they aren’t creaky enough to alert JT to her approach. She takes each step at a glacial pace, her practiced patience in a fretful duel with her desire to put a bullet into JT.

  At last, she’s outside the bedroom where Remy found Stan. She presses herself against the wall by the door frame, listening with all her might. The sirens still blare in the background, but at this distance, they’re not full enough to drown out even JT’s breathing. Esther steels herself, feels the weight of the gun in her hands, and tries to visualize how the following few seconds will occur.

  But as she places her weight on her back foot, the tired old floorboards
betray her and let loose a brief but audible creak. There’s an immediate shuffle from within the room, and Esther knows that the time has come. JT heard her, knows that she’s here, and is coming for her.

  In slow motion, she can almost see him rising to his feet and barreling across the room, even through the closed door.

  Thud—one step—thud—two steps—the door swings open and there stands a man, smaller and more fearful than Esther had imagined. He’s holding a gun, but the look in his eyes isn’t so much murderous as it is flooded with panic—despair, even. He lets out a yelp.

  “It’s you,” he says. His face pales, visible even in the tiny slivers of moonlight filtering in through the grimy window. He begins to raise his weapon, but Esther is far faster on the draw. She sends a shot into his left shoulder, the force of which carries him stumbling backward to the center of the room, his dropped gun clattering toward the open closet. Esther’s ears fill with a ringing, punctuated by JT’s anguished grunts.

  The pallid light glints in the pooling blood. Esther steps toward him and he attempts to push himself away, but with his good arm wounded, he only makes it a few inches before gasping and collapsing into a heaving, bloody heap. She kneels down and looks at his face, and suddenly she understands: These aren’t the fearsome monsters she’s made them out to be. Monsters, yes, but not fearsome.

  They aren’t the domineering type, out to flex their muscles and intimidate the world into submission. They’re the quiet cowards. More than likely, these guys are patrons to the filthy business, blackmailed or otherwise coerced into helping clean up the mess that Keroth and Perkins left for them. JT’s eyes buzz with a disoriented, pained terror.

  Even as she thinks it, however, the fear in his eyes is, for a brief moment, abated by a desperate surge of boldness, which allows JT to strike at Esther. A nasty left hook, his fist collides cleanly with Esther’s face, throwing the room’s tricky lighting into a dizzying pot of streaks and flashes. The room’s ambience and the far-off sirens are once again subdued by a prominent ringing in Esther’s ears, and she feels herself hit the ground, stunned and disoriented.