She hadn’t lied. She told him where Lucy Panther was staying. So scared he was about to feed her to his devil dogs like he’d done that pale-skinned girl. Confused and telling herself it was her only chance, she’d confessed to this evil man where her friend was hiding.
She was mortified. She should’ve been smarter and sent him on a wild-goose chase, and tried to escape before he returned. But seeing the girl die made her head swirly, and she’d done the totally wrong thing.
Now her only way of fixing it was to get free and warn poor Lucy. It was maybe a twenty-minute drive down the mountain and into the town of Cherokee, past the casino and out a couple of narrow roads, then into the woods a piece to the campground. Maybe twenty-five minutes total if he did the speed limit. So Nancy Feather guessed she had somewhere around ten minutes left. Ten minutes to save her best friend’s life.
Earlier, out on the porch, Nancy Feather watched the pale blond woman go down and watched her kick and wriggle in the dirt and smack at the dogs while she was crippled up and hopeless from being fastened to a pole. Farris made her watch the last part, when the two dogs got the woman’s throat and face and yanked their heads from side to side and then they stopped all at once and walked away into the shade and licked each others’ faces, more like they were comforting each other than because they liked the taste of human blood.
After the woman was dead, he dragged Nancy Feather over to the body and made her see it close up. Then he hauled it out to the lip of the gorge and heaved it over, and told Nancy that’s where she was going if she didn’t tell him where Lucy Panther was hiding out.
So she’d done a Judas on her only real friend.
Now she stood in the bathroom, hands duct-taped behind her, ankles taped, mouth wrapped up tight so she could barely breathe through her nose. She looked around for scissors or a nail file or anything sharp but saw nothing sitting out. With her chin she opened the medicine cabinet and found it empty.
On the landing the dogs were rustling around, making a little more noise than before, like they knew she was up and around. Nancy Feather didn’t know if they’d go for her without a signal from Farris. But that was getting ahead of herself. What she needed now was some way to get free and do it fast enough so she could call Lucy’s cell and warn her what godless thing was on the way.
Around the reservation there’d long been talk about Farris and his family, talk of evil doings, but she’d never taken it serious. Now she knew, by God. Now she knew it was all true and more. More than anyone had guessed.
It didn’t take her long to search the whole bathroom and see it was useless. Nothing anywhere. And the door was locked from the outside, so it looked like she was stuck. She went back to the sink and looked at herself in the mirror, her sad face, her eternal pudginess. Then the idea came to her. The one thing Farris hadn’t thought about. Smart man, yes. But Nancy Feather saw something he hadn’t seen. Little fat squaw like her, she saw a way to beat him. She saw herself. Her reflection.
She leaned her waist against the front edge of the sink and cocked her head back and bashed her forehead against the reflection, and the mirror spider-webbed. She saw about a hundred Nancy Feathers then, all with blood running from their hairline down their foreheads toward their eyes.
She bashed her head into the mirror again, and this time it all came loose.
She blinked the blood from her vision. Her head hurt bad, but it didn’t make her groggy or slow her down. She saw a few likely pieces near the tub, so she lowered herself until she was kneeling on the cold tile and rummaged around behind her until she found a piece that felt long enough and sharp.
She couldn’t get the angle right to saw at the tape on her hands, so she worked on her ankles. It was slow going. And she could feel the hundred pieces of broken glass under her knees and shins, slicing and jabbing through her jeans, but that was all right, too. Because now it wasn’t just about saving Lucy, or herself, but about beating Farris. The prideful son of a bitch.
She rocked her body to put more pressure against the sticky, thick tape, then had a better idea and jabbed the pointed end through the tape, puncturing it and opening a hole in it, then backing out and opening another one and then connecting them. That worked. Still took a while, but eventually she could feel her ankles loosening, feeling the sticky, slimy film of blood on her hands and running into her mouth, tasting that. But she got it done.
And she was up on her feet with her hands still behind her.
Door locked, window locked. Hands still bound. She hadn’t thought that far ahead, but now it seemed stupid to be on her feet and still just as imprisoned as she’d been.
Then she figured it out. It was another special skill she had on top of her limberness. That thing with her toes that her ex-husband, Albert, hated so much. The way she could grip things. Prehensile, he said, malting an ugly face. He’d asked somebody about it at work, thinking she might be part ape. The way she could hold a fork with her toes, tweezer up pennies off a flat floor. A trick she’d been able to do since she was a kid.
She kicked off her shoes and got down on her knees again, and looked around her and picked the piece of mirror glass she wanted and then commanded her toes to pick it up and turn the piece around and get it set tight. The damn toes were bleeding before she’d even begun to saw at the tape around her hands. The skin between her toes was splitting but it looked worse than it felt. She had to lean way back, like some kind of swami on the yoga channel. Bent backward, hands out, toes gripping the glass.
Five more minutes at least. And the pain was finally starting to make her dizzy, and her stomach was moving around.
When she got the tape off her hands, first thing she did was pull the rest of it off her mouth, and then she didn’t even bother with trying the door. Between the lock and the dogs, there was only one good choice.
She undid the window lock, raised the sash, and climbed out onto the rusty tin roof. A cold rain had started, and the roof was slick with it, shining like a playground slide except for one thing—the screw heads sticking up everywhere. Which at that point, hell, it didn’t matter. What pain? Pain was burning her toes and her butt and every part of her, and even after wiping the blood out of her eyes, she could still only half see.
She pointed herself right, then let go and slid down the roof and got going so fast she couldn’t stop at the gutter but went over and landed in a mountain laurel. One of the screw heads ripped her jeans and tore a chunk of meat from her thigh. But thank God for the laurel bush, or there’d have been bones broken.
The dogs were out the door by then, and they came for her.
Not looking mean, but then they hadn’t looked mean when they killed the woman in the clearing. Real slow, like a sleepwalker, she headed toward her car. Not making eye contact, showing no fear, not saying anything. One of the dogs got close behind her and started licking blood off the gash in her jeans, the other one nosing her butt. But she didn’t push it away or acknowledge it. And she thought maybe the dogs had a conscience after all, were good and sweet and fine down in their dog hearts and the bad things they did were just because they were ordered to. Left to themselves, they’d just lick and play and howl at the moon like any old dogs.
She was only about ten yards from her car, thinking now that there wasn’t no master alive could train a dog to do something later on, after he left, if X, Y, or Z happened, and expect them to remember to do it. No dog was that smart. No master, either.
She walked to her car, opened the door, and got in.
The dogs lay down beside the car in the light rain, finding comfortable positions, then closed their eyes, resting like dogs do when they’ve had an active day.
Nancy Feather got her cell phone out of the glove compartment and turned it on. Her bloody fingers were getting the keypad all red and gooey. And now her head was spinning, really spinning. Eyes fogged over so bad she had to scrub them with the back of her hand before she managed to punch in Lucy’s number.
Then s
he listened while the phone rang and rang and rang again.
Thirty-Seven
“I need to go home,” Gracey said. “I need to go back to Miami. Like right away. It’s a career thing.”
Since last night at the motel, Lucy had barely said a word and she didn’t say one now. Seeing Jacob shot down had switched her off.
After they got away from the motel, they dumped the Lincoln at the casino parking lot and spent two hours hiking back to the campsite, Lucy dead silent the whole time. Walking like a zombie on Thorazine. Which gave Gracey a serious case of the creeps.
Sure, it was terrible seeing Jacob lying there on the pavement with bullet holes. Sure, it had freaked her out, too, and it was still making her sad, but Lucy, man, Lucy was somewhere else. Moving around like she was a mile underwater, sluggish and sleepy.
“Maybe Jacob’s not dead. Maybe he survived,” Gracey said. “It happens, you know.”
Lucy rose up on an elbow and looked at Gracey. Her eyes were red, her face drained, the way people got when they ran out of feelings, cried themselves empty. Gracey had seen that same face in the mirror a few times and recognized it right off.
“I’ve seen it happen,” Gracey said. “A guy gets shot, three, four times, he survives.”
“Where’d you see that?” Lucy Panther said. “In the movies?”
“The movies are as real as anything else.”
“Sure they are.”
Lucy closed her eyes and pressed her head back into the pillow.
“I’m ready to go,” Gracey said. “What’re we waiting for? You said you were taking me back to my parents. So let’s go.”
But Lucy just lay on her bunk, taking breath after breath but not saying anything else. Catatonic. Gracey had been that way a few times and knew how it felt. Nothing you wanted to do. Nobody you wanted to see or talk to.
In her head Steven was quiet, too. But not Joan Crawford. She was yakking about Sudden Fear, that movie she did with Jack Palance. In the film her character was a rich heiress and she married Palance, then found out he was going to murder her for her money. She should’ve known better. Anybody could look at the bone structure of Palance’s face and know he was a killer. All those sharp angles. My God, you could slice steel cable with those cheekbones. But no, Joan fell for him because the script said so. She had to act like she was in love with the troll for half the movie. Play kissy face.
But if Gracey wanted to learn something, really learn something important about acting, she should look at the scene where Joan hears on a tape recorder Jack Palance’s plot to kill her. She’s alone in her room, hearing her lover’s voice plotting her murder. No dialogue, just his recorded voice and Joan reacting. Look at my face, the way I go through about ten octaves of emotions. Look at it, Gracey. Study it. What I did with my eyes and mouth. Play that over and over and analyze it, girl. And was I naked one time in that movie? No, sir. I was in my nightgown, sure. I was in robes and silky things but never any flesh. And tell me how sexy I was. Get your big-shot director to take a look at that movie, why don’t you? See if I wasn’t sexy as hell.
Joan got quiet, and at the same moment Lucy popped straight up in the bunk. Then Gracey heard what Lucy had heard: a car coming up the drive, then its engine shutting off. Gracey rolled over on her cot and peeked out the tiny window high up on the mobile home. A porthole, like.
“Aw, shit,” Lucy said. “Christ Almighty.”
A man was climbing out of a cop car. It was a tall, gawky guy with black hair and a big jaw and a blue policeman’s uniform with gold all over it. He walked over and stood by their barbecue pit, looking at the camper, just standing there like a gunslinger out in the middle of the street waiting for the other guy to show. That’s the look he had.
“Get on the floor. Face down, flat,” Lucy barked at her. “Do it, don’t ask why. Get the hell on the floor.”
Gracey got on the floor.
Snatching her pistol, Lucy duckwalked toward the front seat, reached out, and touched the keys hanging from the ignition. Then drew her hand back, changing her mind.
On Lucy’s cot the cell phone rang. It rang and rang, but Lucy just stayed crouched behind the bucket seat, peeking out the windshield at the man standing there. Gracey raised herself up so she could see. This was something she could use later. This was one of those high-octane moments Mr. Underwood was always raving about. Gracey could feel it.
But that damn Joan Crawford kept jabbering about another movie of hers, a part she’d played, not an Indian, but a disfigured woman with a face so scarred up that she hated everybody she came in contact with. Bitter about how she looked, taking it out on everybody else because of how ugly her face was. And the wardrobe in that one, hell, it was still with the deep cleavage, but what were you going to do? You couldn’t fight every little thing.
Gracey got up, scooted over to the bed, and picked up the cell phone and pushed the On button. Thinking maybe it was Jacob, calling from the hospital, letting them know he was still alive.
“Hello?”
Lucy hissed and waved for her to get down.
“Lucy?” It was some woman on the line.
“Lucy can’t come to the phone right now. Can I take a message?”
The woman was silent for a second, then said, “Who’s this?”
“I’m Gracey. I’m visiting from out of town.”
She said she wanted to talk to Lucy, sounding sleepy and weird, the phone cutting out, part of her sentence missing in the static.
“You’re breaking up,” Gracey said.
“Get the hell down on the floor,” Lucy screamed at her. “Do it now.”
Flat on the floor again, on her tummy, Gracey kept the phone at her ear, but the woman’s voice was going in and out, Gracey catching a word here and there, that was about it. Gracey twisted around to see what Lucy was doing. She was in the driver’s seat, turning the key, the motor coming to life but not sounding good, a sputter, a knock, like it was running out of gas before it even got going.
Gracey clicked off the phone and tossed it onto the cot.
“Stay down.” Lucy turned, gave Gracey a quick look, then slid the pistol down the floor toward her. “Use this if you have to. Whatever you do, don’t let this guy get you. He comes within ten feet, start shooting. Ten feet, you hear me?”
Lucy shoved the gearshift and hit the gas, and the camper lurched forward. It bumped over a rut and dishes came spilling down. Gracey covered her head with her arms and stayed down. Heard glass breaking, and then her hair was showered with something. There was a gunshot and Gracey looked at the pistol in her hand, thinking it’d gone off, but it hadn’t because there was another gunshot and more stuff sprinkled her head and itched against her neck.
She felt back there and it was wood chips or something and she turned her head a little and saw a big gash in the fiberboard next to her head and looked the other way and saw the rip in the metal side of the camper, like about two inches above her head. Big hole you could put your hand through.
“Hold on!”
Gracey lifted her head to see out the windshield, shattered now, but she could see the roof of the police car coming up fast, Lucy aiming the camper at its side and holding the gas down and crashing hard into the truck and driving it sideways into bushes and trees, then ramming the shifter into reverse, backing, and swinging the big, top-heavy thing to the left.
Woo-woo, she heard in her head. One of the voices. Could’ve been any of them. Woo-woo, hang on tight. Woo-woo.
The camper was weaving down a gravel road, then it started slowing down, slower and slower. That wasn’t right.
Gracey looked up from the floor and saw Lucy slumped sideways, still holding on to the wheel, but not steering anymore. Gracey could see trees coming at them through the windshield, she scrambled up there and bent down beside Lucy and took over the wheel. A ditch coming, too, ten feet ahead, deeper than a regular ditch, more like a valley.
She was frozen, just holding on to the wheel, un
til Barbara Stanwyck said, Do it, be brave, make your mark. You’re too young to die, kid. Do it.
Gracey yanked the wheel to the right and got the camper back on the gravel. She leaned over Lucy and looked into the big rearview mirror, and she couldn’t see the man anymore, so she figured he was running to his car to see how bad it was smashed up.
Lucy looked at her, eyes groggy but open. Blood ran down her neck. Gracey’s breakfast started to back up into her throat, the eggs, the toast.
“Can you drive this thing?” Lucy crowded past her and dropped into the passenger’s seat, holding the wheel until Gracey was in the driver’s seat and got her hands set and found the accelerator and got them going somewhere, she wasn’t sure where, Lucy telling her, “The left coming up, yeah, this one, here, now look for the first right, a highway, be careful. It’s busy.” Her voice fading on every word.
Talk about blood, Joan said, you should’ve seen me when I went under the knife, and lo and behold the surgeon performed a miracle and I came out of the anesthesia and I was beautiful, and it completely changed me, I was well for the first time in my life and I started being good to people, loving and kind. Then, Joan’s voice got sarcastic and she said, best acting job of my career, hell, I only had to be sympathetic for the last five minutes of the film.
Gracey got them to the edge of the highway, lots of cars going past.
“Which way?”
She looked over and Lucy had closed her eyes, but she got her hand up and waved to the left, so that’s which way Gracey turned, going somewhere, she didn’t know where. But she had them rolling along, settling into the stream of traffic and that seemed good enough for now.
Woo-woo, somebody said. Sounded like Steven. Blood and bullets and car crashes and chases. Woo-woo.
Nancy Feather was dialing Lucy’s number again. Using her thumb. Her head was foggy, eyes misting over. Steering her little Volkswagen down the twisting highway, going fast on that familiar road, knowing every switchback, every pothole, every damn passing lane.
Forests of the Night Page 29
