There she sat in her curlers, a cigarette hanging from between her lips, her Coke-bottle glasses so thick he couldn’t actually see the eyes behind them. You’ve always been a careless boy.
“Shut up, Mama,” he said, and his voice, gruff, echoed in the car.
That cigarette smoke smell made his stomach hurt. He rolled down the window more.
Micki realized he was tired, maybe too tired to be driving, if he was having conversations with his dead mother.
But he couldn’t stop, not now, when it felt like someone was still following him.
Welcome to California.
He turned in his seat, following the sign as far as his eyes would allow.
He planned to stop in San Diego, maybe Tijuana. Yes, Tijuana was better. That’s where he’d regroup, assess his situation. That’s where he’d get some sleep. When he woke with a clear head, he’d figure out who had found him and where he’d gone wrong. He had plenty of cash on hand and more stashed away in a few accounts, and even two computers locked in the trunk.
He’d be up and running in no time.
He reached into his plastic cup holder and fished out another packet of speed. He tore it open with his teeth, his sweaty fingers sliding off the steering wheel as he grabbed for his drink. He tore off the red cap and downed it in several deep gulps.
The car hummed, groaning as it slipped over the rumble strip on the side of the road.
He pulled the wheel left, getting back into the lane.
He threw the drink back into the cup holder with a sudden rage. He was pissed about losing the girl. She was such a sweet little cherry. Just the thought of her little hands on him was enough to get him hard.
That bitch with the guns and the mirrored shades. He’d make her sorry for taking away his girl.
Bees bounced off the inside of Micki’s skull, lulling him with their rhythm. The Coke in the back of his throat stopped burning and the white line in the middle of the road swayed, seeming to be playing a song. A bass line.
Da dum da dum da dum.
You were always a careless boy, his mother said again from the backseat. Remember when you fell off that little wooden bridge into the river. You weren’t watching where you stepped and you got your nice shoes, your best Sunday shoes, all wet. Tore a hole in the seat of your pants, too, if I remember.
“Shut up, Mama,” he said again, wishing he’d grabbed a bag of chips or something he could have mindlessly shoved into his mouth. Something for his hands to do.
He turned on the radio, but a touch too loud, and it made his head hurt. He turned it off and opened the window, all the way down now, and angled his head out into the fresh air.
That was better, as the frigid cold pulled tears from his eyes. The sleepiness receded.
With his head back in the car, he blinked away the tears and saw a woman in the backseat.
“Go away, Mama,” he said. “I told you to shut up.”
“I’m not your mama,” a voice said.
His bleary eyes snapped to the rearview mirror again.
She was right. It wasn’t his momma in her Coke-bottle glasses and tight gray curls. There was no cigarette smoke rising thin and blue toward the car’s roof.
It was the shades he remembered.
The woman in the hallway, the one who’d taken his little cherry pie. She leaned forward and grabbed the steering wheel. She yanked it hard, veering his car off the road, over the rumble strip and into the grass.
Here Micki thought to hit the brakes, but at first attempt his foot slipped off the pedal. The second attempt sent the vehicle into a slide but didn’t actually slow it much. He was going too fast, the pillar was too close.
He began to scream.
The concrete barrier rose in his vision, doubling, tripling in size until all else was blotted out.
His heart hammered, beating furiously as he waited for the impact that never came.
* * *
Later, as the emergency crews hosed down the flaming car, they’d wonder where the driver was, and if he—or she—had taken off on foot. All agreed that whoever the driver had been, they must’ve rolled from the vehicle before it slammed into the overpass barrier.
They sent a search party to look for the driver. If they’d survived, they might be hurt, disoriented. But after three hours and no sign of life except the coyotes hunting rabbits under the large moon, they called it a night.
They believed the driver would turn up eventually.
Cars didn’t drive themselves.
33
Diana emptied her Smith & Wesson .45 into the wooden target at the far end of the dirt path. Once the gun clicked empty and the trees lining the path stopped their rustling, an optimistic cardinal let out a shrill chirp. However, Diana was just getting started. She reloaded and went for another round.
Again, her mind railed. He escaped again. How could it keep happening? How?
There was nothing special or gifted about Winter. He should’ve folded like a house of cards under all her efforts by now.
A tap resounded against her shoulder. Blair held a folded piece of paper between two fingers.
“I told you not to bother me,” Diana said, turning toward the target again and raising the gun.
“Spencer’s gone. I think Lou killed him.”
“No, she didn’t.” Diana gestured to the heap of dirt beneath a nearby sycamore. “He’s over there.”
She managed to empty the gun before her sister recovered from the news.
“You killed him?”
“I thought you hated him,” Diana said, unable to hide her irritation.
In truth, Diana hadn’t meant to do it. She’d said the word, giving Spencer permission to plunge himself inside her after roughly four weeks of refusal. Before she’d had a chance to orgasm, he came, abruptly ending her rhythm and her pleasure. The next thing she knew she had her hands around his throat, squeezing, grinding her hips into his, until an orgasm finally shivered through her.
She’d thought he’d liked it, the squeezing, since he’d resumed thrusting. It wasn’t until she unzipped the leather mask and saw how blue his face was—she would never forget the bulge of his eyes—that she’d fully realized what she’d done.
I didn’t mean to do it, she told herself.
Are you sure about that? a colder voice asked. Or did you know exactly what you were doing? Will that be your next craving? Find a guy, enslave his cock, and kill him once you get bored? Sounds promising.
“It had to be done,” she said simply. “He wanted to go to the police. I couldn’t let him do that.”
Blair gawked at her, unblinking. “You’re lying. He did everything for you. He was—he was the best—”
“Don’t exaggerate.” Diana wanted to change the subject. “Why did you think Lou killed him?”
Blair produced the folded piece of paper she’d first waved to get her attention. “She left this taped to the bathroom mirror. She was in our house. Surprise, surprise, it didn’t even trip the alarm.”
With a huff, Diana applied the safety to the gun and slipped it into her waistband. The warm metal bit into her flesh, chafing the bones beneath.
She unfolded the note. There were jotted coordinates, and then below them, Get there before he wakes up.
Diana’s heart skipped a beat. “Have you checked it out?”
“I don’t like it, Dee. She’s shown up at our house twice. And in the cornfield, she just slipped past me like I was nothing. One second she was there, and—”
Diana was sick of these ghost stories. She raised her voice. “Did you check it out?”
Blair shifted. “Yes. You’ll want to see for yourself.”
Diana took off for the waiting truck at a steady jog. At the end of the dirt path and adjacent lot, her beat-up truck sat parked in the shade of an old-growth maple tree. She hauled herself up into the beast.
Hanging from the window, she called to her sister, “Coming or not?”
Blair climbed int
o the passenger seat, her jaw tight and working. Dust swirled around them as the truck reversed and sped out of the lot. It was almost a mile of packed dirt before concrete finally rose up to meet them.
The coordinates on the note were a short drive from Diana’s worn farmhouse in Kansas. She was trying not to be bothered by the fact that Louie had found her so easily. The land and farmhouse and its two barns had been her hidden sanctuary for over six years. It was off grid and buffered by wild, overgrown land on all sides. The idea that Louie could find it only hours after they parted made her mind run wild with possibility. Had she put trackers on their cars? On her, somehow?
The coordinates took them to a service road marked only by a number. Diana drove the beat-up truck down it slowly, letting the oversized tires gently roll through the dips, creaking.
It seemed like an hour before they found a small, leaning shack at the edge of a dirt field.
Diana pulled the truck around back into the heart of the thicket so that it couldn’t be seen from the road, and the two women hopped down into the long-overgrown weeds.
Someone was crying inside the shack.
The deep, rolling sobs could barely be heard over the rushing water of the river coursing behind them.
Diana pulled her gun from her waistband, removed the safety, and inched toward the shack.
“You won’t need it,” Blair said.
Diana paid her no mind. The door was rough under her hand and felt wet.
It’s rotting, she noted. One more good rain or storm and this shack would go down. She wondered if this was what was left of a garage, perhaps the house long obliterated by the elements. Or perhaps a boathouse for the river behind them.
A man lay in the middle of the concrete floor. Naked and shackled.
Not just shackled, but in the way the children were often chained in his videos, with iron-like collars clamped over their throats and thick, unyielding chains drilled and hooked into the floor.
He was pulling on the chain, but it wouldn’t give.
When their boots hit the concrete, the scuffs muffled by the wooden walls, he jumped. His cries escalated into panicked yips.
Then he seemed to see Diana.
“Please,” he said. He shuffled toward her on his knees. “Please help me. Get me out of here before she comes back.”
Diana knelt down and took his arm, turning it in the light to see the scar.
“Wha-what are you doing? What are you looking for?”
It was an old scar, at least twenty years since she’d carved it, but she’d recognize the hooked mark of her savage blade anywhere.
This was her man.
This was her Winter.
“Please,” he begged, his face red and covered in snot. “Please, before it gets dark. She moves in the dark.”
“I’m not here to help you,” Diana said, dropping his arm.
The shack stank of his body odor and sweat. She thought he’d probably pissed himself too.
Even so, her pleasure uncoiled inside her. Her excitement doubled, then tripled, until her chest felt ready to explode with it.
“I’m here to hurt you.”
The wind blew and the wooden sides of the shed groaned. He flinched, his eyes darting toward the blackened corners pressing in on them.
“Please,” he cried, inching toward her. “Please, before it gets dark. Sh-she could come back.”
Diana yanked hard on the collar.
His hands shot out instinctively to catch himself. Seeing him on all fours reminded her of Spencer. “Did you hear me?”
“He can’t hear anything. He’s scared out of his mind,” Blair said. There was a sound in her voice Diana didn’t like. Awe? Fear? Or some unnamable emotion halfway between the two?
And Winter was scared out of his mind, that much was clear.
But he wasn’t scared of her. He barely registered Diana’s presence at all.
No, she thought. Her fist tightened on the chain. No, he should be afraid of me.
She deserved that much from him.
His eyes kept darting to the corners of the shack every time the wind rolled along its delicate sides. Each creak and moan intensified his fear. Diana could almost taste it, like battery acid on the tongue.
He made himself smaller and smaller. He folded and compressed himself in the medallion of sunlight shining from the hole in the roof above, as if the light was his last chance at salvation.
He’s terrified, but not of me.
34
“Questions loom around the suspected raid in Springfield, Missouri. Police have identified two of the men as registered sex offenders connected to an internet pornography website known as—”
“Turn that up!” Piper stepped out of the bedroom with her toothbrush in her mouth and pointed at the television.
“In the eight hundred apartment block of Henderson Street…”
Dani, wrapped up in a thin summer blanket on Piper’s sofa, reached for the remote. She turned up the volume with a mash of her thumb.
“We’ve found evidence in the building behind me that this was a shooting location for child pornography videos,” a man was saying. He stood in the camera’s spotlight with the smoldering building behind him. Even though the firefighters had been working on the building for days, it seemed the smoke wouldn’t quit.
“Several children, all identified and returned to their families, were rescued from the scene. The only bodies present were the suspected pornographers, shot execution style in the back of their heads.”
Piper spit into the bathroom sink. “Can they say that? Can a cop just say that on television?”
“I think he’s in shock,” Dani said. “Look at his face. Maybe he’s not thinking about what he’s saying.”
Piper wiped her mouth and turned off the bathroom light behind her. The man on the television did look shocked. His eyes were too wide, the visible white nearly eclipsing the color. His mouth had a slack look to it, as if it were incapable of fully closing.
Piper suspected that if he took his hands off his hips, there would be a tremble to them.
A rough knock on the door made both girls jump. Dani pulled the blanket close. Piper reached across the counter and pulled a knife from the butcher’s block.
“Who is it?” she called, her voice an octave too shrill.
“It’s me.” King’s gruff voice was muffled by the door.
The tension in the room evaporated.
“Come in.”
King entered with a cardboard box in one hand, the other on the knob he was turning. “I’m heading out for the night. I thought I’d see if you guys wanted the other half of this pizza. I’m not going to eat it.”
Stepping into the living room, King stopped. When he saw the knife in Piper’s hand he frowned. “Did I miss something?”
“No,” she said, sliding the knife back into the block.
His gaze flicked from Piper to Dani. “You okay?”
“I’m good, thanks,” Dani said automatically.
“Sure,” he said with a snide laugh, as if he didn’t believe anything either of them was saying. He lifted the cardboard box to show his half-devoured sausage pizza. “Do you want this?”
“What do you think, babe? Pizza?”
Dani smiled a bit too brightly. “Sounds good. Thanks, Robert.”
“My pleasure.” He placed the box on the island cabinet and headed back toward the door. “I’ll lock up on my way out.”
He hesitated when his eyes caught the news report.
“Is that—”
“Yeah,” Piper interjected as she slid a slice from the box. “It looks like a mess.”
“It was,” King said as the story faded to black and the next tragedy cued. “Diana made a real mess of it. Trigger happy, that one.”
“Authorities are searching for a woman by the name of Diana Dennard. The suspect, white, female, thirty-eight years old—”
King, who’d been turning toward the stairs, froze and whirled
back. “What did she say?”
“Oh yeah.” Piper spoke around the pizza in her mouth “Here we go.”
Diana’s picture appeared, covering half of the screen while the report prattled on.
“—responsible for at least thirty fraudulent scams across the US. Credit card bills exceeding two million dollars have been attributed to her seven known aliases…”
“Shit.” With his hands on his hips and mouth ajar he looked like the police officer who’d reported on the raid. He turned to Dani. “Did you do this?”
Dani pursed her lips, ready to speak.
“It was me.” Piper sucked in a deep breath. “Before you get mad, let me explain.”
She took another slice of pizza from the box in case King decided to rescind his gift.
“What’d you do? Why in the world would you provoke her?” King ran a hand through his hair, clearly trying to compose himself.
“Aren’t you tired of it?” Piper threw up her hands. “Bad guys are always coming after us, kidnapping us, telling us what the rules of the game are.”
“If we were confrontation adverse, we would find new jobs,” he said.
“I don’t want a new job. But I’m not going to be the prey either. Nope. No more waiting around to be rescued while Lou does all the badassery. I’m taking control, damn it. Those jerks are going to start worrying about me.”
“Huzzah.” Dani was smiling as she took her slice from the box and began picking off the sausage. “That’s the spirit, baby.”
King, however, looked far from optimistic.
* * *
Diana was scraping the dirt and blood out from under her fingernails with a metal pick when she saw someone step into her periphery. She met their eyes in the mirror, finding Blair, her body tense and face drawn.
Diana wanted a shower. She wanted to fuck Spencer and sleep for two days. Maybe then the dull ache in her overworked shoulders and back would go away.
You killed Spencer, she reminded herself. I suppose you could dig up his corpse and fuck that. And when you’re done with him, why not Winter too?
Diana sighed. She thought she’d feel better. Energized. Overwhelmed with triumph or at least relief.
Devil’s Luck Page 21
