“Overreaction from acute frustration and paranoid delusions.” She sighed. “Hysteria and headaches are textbook responses. Goddamnit, Burt, where is he? Off making my reasoned Sherlockian deductions come true? Boy, that would change all our lives really fast. And if not—where is he? He’s not in the cabin, and that means he lied to you on the phone the other day. That snotty little bitch might have been telling the truth. For all you and I know, Lucas hadn’t even been to the damned cabin in the first place!” She constricted her face in pain. “Christ, I’m making my headache even worse. The sun is scouring out my eyeballs.” Her sunglasses were not much of a buffer.
“What if Lucas had just stepped out to get groceries or something?” Burt’s eyes stayed on the highway. He was back in the realm of questions and answers, relentlessly sorting data and seeking possibilities.
“Big joke on us.” She spoke softly, to deny the thin claws of pain a tighter hold on her belfry. “Ha. Ha.” The girl had been so spunky, so self-assured. Sara detested being shot down by someone who had been a squalling baby while she was busting hump to survive her sophomore year at university. “But she saw Lucas, Burt—he might have been up there as recently as a week ago. Why should she bother to construct an elaborate lie when the truth works even better?”
“Just what I was thinking.”
The Rolling Stones rolled through “Ventilator Blues” on the sound system of Burt’s Eldorado. He’d twiddled up and down the FM dial until he found a station he could stand. Heavy metal was not to his taste; Mick and the boys, just barely. He thought about killing the music in deference to Sara’s headache but never got around to it. For the next four miles it was the only sound in the car.
“So we’re back to square one. Where is he?”
“We’re not leaving for real, are we, Burt?”
His mental gears had been grinding. “I thought that if you were amenable, we could enter the dreaded metroplex and shack up in one of its finer motor lodges. Tomorrow, we’ll check again. Just in case Lucas went to the 7-11. He’s got to be driving something. It’ll be parked somewhere if he is. We can quietly spy. He’s probably using a Jeep, or something similar, if he drives right up to the cabin’s front door.”
“If we were just looking for his car, we could have avoided that hysterical scene up there.”
Burt thought it best to ignore her embarrassment. It had gone badly, yes. But that was the past, and they were planning for tomorrow. “We didn’t know that until we went and checked, now did we? Now we know better than to go knocking.”
“Unless something is parked there.”
“Now you’re catching on.” Burt was not one of those half-wit drivers who stare at their passengers while carrying on a conversation. His attention was on the driving. When he did sneak a glance to check her condition, he said, “Look in the glovebox. There might be something ancient and painkilling stuffed away in there.” It was about time for him to choke down one of his awful blood pressure pills as well.
“There’s another problem.” She rummaged and held up a rock-hard pack of chewing gum. “I can’t do overnighters and mountaineering indefinitely.”
“Not the outdoors type? You weren’t bad on that hill, you know.”
“That’s not what I mean. I’m shirking my duties at the hospital. I’ve already cashed in most of my sick time for the fiscal year. What if Lucas takes four weeks to come back, like that girl said?”
“I’ll stay. I can get away with it. I’m president of my own company. You can drive this car back to L.A. After all, Lucas might show up at Olive Grove, or at Kroeger Concepts, if he really isn’t up here. I’ll rent myself a Jeep and tool back to the cabin—maybe to charm the harpy therein into balming me with all the hot poop there is to know.” He paused, pleased with his own turn of phrase. “Sounds good, anyway.”
“I wonder what Lucas told her. You notice that she seemed to be fully briefed? Ready for us?”
“Yeah. I thought about that, too, and it might be another reason Lucas might show up sooner than she says. But he didn’t rent her along with his camping gear. Who is she, where did she come from?”
“If Lucas was out there avenging Kristen, killing the guys in Whip Hand, and he somehow acquired a substitute daughter, a surrogate Kristen… would he stop his vendetta?” She was speaking with her eyes shut.
“What about that combination-brain stuff? What if he’s-I don’t know, programmed. And can’t stop.” Burt was thinking of the death junkies he’d known in the service, the guys who thrived on night patrol, the machines who collected VC ears and balls and didn’t want to go home.
“I was just thinking that if he got a surrogate Kristen, it would nullify the motive for the vendetta, wouldn’t it?” It also might mean that a surrogate Cory would be next, and his brain would rebel at that thought. Cory was death for him.
On the radio a few seconds of burp-gun deejay patter bled over into the opening of Wall of Voodoo’s “Mexican Radio.” For a moment Burt wished he was back at Kroeger Concepts, chiding Gustavo de la Luces good-naturedly about the silly tune and busting his brain on stratagems that were, in Gustavo’s words, “do-able, get-able, and cashworthy.” Lucas had once joked, long, long ago, that those three words sounded like a Beverly Hills law firm.
“Something else,” Sara said. “What if that girl has slept with him, Burt? She might be the Cory substitute, not Kristen. Those bruises we saw might be Lucas’ fault.” Her voice trailed away. “I… I just don’t know…”
“Yet,” he said, hoping to deter her from further self-excoriation. “But if he’s all the way back to Cory, and that girl’s not dead, maybe it means he didn’t help kill Cory after all. Remember, he was seeing other women after she died.”
“Yes. Yes.” Maybe she was a bigger victim than Lucas. Maybe it was all innocent and hubbed on a third explanation no one had thought of because there wasn’t enough information. Yet. “Oh, God, Burt—where the hell is he?”
“Best we can do for now is—”
“Wait, shh!” Her hand flew to the radio knob.
The deejay was reporting that there were no new developments in the ’Gasm concert tragedy in Tucson, Arizona. Three members of the band were dead. Two were in critical condition. Their assailant, a middle-aged man who had opened up on the band with an automatic weapon during their Community Center show, was in the custody of the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. His name was being withheld, but he was described as a “religious fanatic.”
Sara blanched. Burt suddenly wanted a drink, very badly.
As far as the deejay was concerned, the attacker was “one of those ass-backwards backward-maskers. They condemn us, gentle listeners, yet they kill and we don’t. Let’s just hope that lynching hasn’t gone out of style in woolly old Tucson, you hear what I’m sayin’? Here’s ‘Toledo Breakdown.’ ”
The song was one of ’Gasm’s few slow numbers, like “Agent Orange Blues.” The inevitable ballad, as Chic Garris would have put it. Song style #3.
The Eldorado slowed to a stop on the shoulder. Burt was staring at Sara. “Now what?”
Her trusty words had failed her, and she felt useless and dumb. The jock had referred to the assassinations as the “latest Whip Hand murders.”
18
The axe swung down in a sharp silver arc toward Cass’ head as she slammed the cabin door.
She had reacted to the sight of Reese instantaneously, trying to engage the heavy sliding bolt on the door. In a single, horrible moment of elongated time, she saw Reese’s thick wrist flick. The cording defining his arms jumped into hard relief, and the axe pivoted upward with frightening speed. She knew how heavy it was; she’d levered it from the chopping stump the day before, and its mass caused the blade to thump to the ground, wrenching her still-mending left hand.
She threw all her weight into the door. No good. The blade thudded in and blocked. Its crescent, dirty and pitted, was inches from her nose.
A savage kick snapped the door inward, fre
eing the axe and sending Cass sprawling on her ass to the cabin floor. She looked up at Reese, framed in the light filling the doorway, as his foot drifted back down to its starting position.
“Jackpot time.” His lips barely moved when they formed words. His voice was a nightmarish memory, whisper-soft, sandpaper-hoarse, a deep and purring register that issued from somewhere black and demoniac inside of him. The axe, which had moved in a blur, now hung idly in his grip, at ease. He gave the cabin interior a bored once-over with eyes the color of anodized aluminum. “Nice place.”
Cass hoisted onto her elbows but did not try to stand, not yet. Reese’s pupils were pinpricks. His habit was to pop Dexamyls like black M&Ms until the steady beat of the speed pounded like rock ‘n’ roll in his bloodstream and made his chest and arm muscles twitch and tic at random. Reese preferred crank to sugar in his coffee.
He wore steel-toed mountain climbing boots, tight, roughed-up jeans, and his favorite denim vest. No shirt. His solid pectorals bulged to fill the gap between the vest’s thonged button slits like sculpted rose-colored marble. The vest’s bone fasteners dangled with nothing to do. A wild, lightning-bolt scar interrupted the hard muscle of his abdomen. It was a keepsake of some long-ago buck knife fight, and Reese’s recently begun tan made it obvious, a white zigzag etched into his flesh. What his brain waves must look like, Cass thought. Bound to the hollow of his throat by a strip of leather was a lozenge of ivory, cold and alabaster. It held an opaque disc of jade in a pewter setting. It was the only thing close to personal jewelry she had ever seen Reese wear.
His tongue slid behind his teeth like a snake in a chuckhole. “Miss me?” The viper’s gaze, unblinking, sought and engulfed her. “Sugar daddy ain’t home. I know. I watched for a whole day, just to make sure. Your other pals drove away, too.” He was talking about Sara and her companion, Mr. Hyde. Reese’s mouth pulled back slightly at the right corner—his version of a casual smile. “The mountains just ain’t for them, puss.”
His right leg arched up and back with a practiced aikido motion, and the door crashed shut; Cass heard loose junk sifting down out of the frame from the impact. He took three measured strides forward and straddled her at the waistline, gazing down at her, the axe off to her right, hanging like the pendulum of a lethargic grandfather clock
Her mouth tried to moisten, to form words. “How… how did you know I was here?”
Interest glinted in the metallic eyes; they ceased their random scanning of the cabin to nail her. “I’m a timber wolf, puss. I followed your smell.” The eyes flickered to the kitchen, then back. “Any food here?”
The normalcy of the request allowed Cass to flush away some of her terror in favor of anger. “Why don’t you just get the hell out of here, Reese? Leave. Just leave me alone.” She did not unclench her teeth; they might start chattering.
Again the peculiar glint came and went in his eyes, as though he was receiving orgasms in his brain via electroshock. “Or what? You’ll kick me in the nuts again? Hey, make your move. I’m even spread out for you. Give it another shot.” His tongue tested the cutting edge of his incisors.
She didn’t want to try. She needed to maximize whatever time she had left, not to touch off his fuse. She visualized him crouching in the forest cold in the middle of the night like some genetically mutant Indian guide, bare-chested and not feeling the temperature. Kick me, sure.
“That’s good.” The hooded gaze started to mesmerize her. “We don’t want to fight. We want to make love, don’t we?”
She remembered the time he’d swerved the Datsun long-bed across two lanes to splatter a darting rabbit all over the grille and front bumper. Blood and viscera shaded the headlights and steamed on the pebbled glass. All Reese had said was got him. He had just said make love in the same tone, rippling stalactites of ice into her spine.
“Forget it, Reese, no way.”
“Sorry I got pissed at you. You shouldn’t’ve kicked me.” He planted the thick tread of one boot against her shoulder and pressed until her back met the planking again. Then he leaned on it until her face tightened in pain. “Bad girl.” He gripped her jaw and squeezed, mashing her mouth until it parodied that of a goldfish. He examined her head like a melon. “You healed up nice.” He bent closer; something popped wetly in her shoulder. His unblinking eyes filled her universe. “Remember Jonathan?”
“Oh, no…” Her world was coming to an end.
“Poor guy. I feel for him, puss. Because you had to spread your legs for him, he’s gotta spend the next four months in intensive care.” He tsked, released her face, and stepped back. “Terrible thing. Poor dude.”
She lost it. “Motherfucker! What did you do!?” She was halfway up, the door at hand. She tried frantically to calculate the success potential of running.
A pained look stabbed his features. “Don’t be so crude, puss. Watch your language. Jonathan had himself an accident. Little accident. Can’t move his head, has to piss through a tube for a while… that’s all.”
Cass’ imagination spun grisly stories as she got to her feet. Her hands brushed off her backside to keep from shaking.
Reese has spotted Lucas’ tapedeck, on the kitchen table. “Nice,” he said. That meant the deck would leave with him. “Are we going to eat something, or what?”
Buy time! Do something! “Right,” she said dully. To move toward the sink she had to pass Reese.
He caught her quick glance toward the door. “Don’t run.” His voice was quite calm. “Don’t even think of running. You can’t outrun a hungry wolf.” The cocked twitch-smile came and went.
Mechanically she untied her bindle and pulled out the paper-towel-wrapped sandwiches. She pulled open the first kitchen drawer and took stock of the knives there. No good. He’d dare me to try, and I’d need the fire department and a gynecologist to get the knife out of me. Behind her, Reese leaned on the axe and propped one boot on a chair.
“What’s inside the secret room with the padlock?”
“I don’t know.” She moved to the fridge and considered Lucas’ stock of Dos Equis. Maybe if she could get enough alcohol into him…
And then? Take the axe away, or bash him with something solid, or run? Run where, with him chasing her? Distract him enough to sneak out a knife? Sure. She swallowed hard; it felt like trying to swallow a votive candle. You can always kick him in the crotch again —hadn’t that worked out great?
“Sugar daddy’s big secret, hm? Hey—pass one of those beers over.”
He twisted the cap off. She didn’t know if they were twist-tops or not. She pulled open another drawer. Plastic bags, a knife sharpener, batteries in store packages, a flashlight, a card of thumbtacks. Useless.
“Let’s take a gander. Maybe more tapedecks and stuff. You got the key?”
He drew off half the brown bottle in a gulp. His dark hair was strewn lankly across his forehead, making his eyes glow chromium. “You sure the key ain’t in your pocket? Or on a string around your neck?” He stroked his ivory pendant. “Or stuffed into your underpants? Sure I shouldn’t check you out, puss?” He licked his lips. Wolfishly.
Her minimal control was eroding fast. Reese was revving himself up to pummel the shit out of her, this time for keeps. That was why he was so calm. He was going to catch her face in his hand with big, molar loosening slaps, then punch her in the stomach until the fight leaked out of her. Then shove himself into her, fuck her till she bled, as he was fond of saying. He would rape her until he’d come three times. For Reese, it was three orgasms or it wasn’t sex.
And then, if she wasn’t dead, he’d kill her.
“I don’t have the goddamned keys, Reese!” she shrieked. Fear was what he wanted to see. She was certain that if she looked down, she would see the erection prodding forth inside his pants. If she saw that, he’d win the fear he craved. She kept her eyes locked on his.
A humming sound stopped halfway out of his throat. It was almost a laugh. “No prob,” he said dismissively.
C
ass recalled telling Lucas about Reese. Somewhere along the road, she’d told herself that life would never be dull with Reese around.
The hasp on the door dented into a crooked V with Reese’s first roundhouse swing of the axe. With the second, the door splintered loose. Flat-headed screws chocked with wood pulp hung like pulled teeth. Reese gave the door his boot, and the whole cabin shook as the top hinge ripped free. The door skewed inward on the bottom hinge and rasped across the floor. The padlock hit the floor with a clank, tangled up in the bent hasp. Reese peered inside but did not step over the barrier. “Looks like good stuff,” he said. “Nice.” He set the empty beer bottle gently on the floor—Reese did not believe in littering—and motioned for a fresh one.
Cass’ sandwiches sat on the counter, hardening and looking ridiculous. Her pupils were stopped down with shock. Mechanically, she pulled another Dos Equis from the fridge. Then she remembered the gun in the kitchen’s third and last drawer.
She nearly dropped the bottle to shatter on the floor. Instead, she moved very methodically, fighting for control. She used a church key to open the beer. They were not twist-caps. This was going to be touchy.
I certainly don’t have to touch the icky thing….
At the sound of Reese’s footsteps crossing the cabin, she turned and held the beer out to him. He touched the mouth of the bottle to his forehead, saluting her. Toasting her imminent death, perhaps. Time to find a new girl. Then he turned back to Lucas’ cache.
The drawer was missing a knob, and she had to jiggle it open. Confused into the candle stubs and wads of tinfoil was—it. The cross-grained butt of the .45 jutted from a contraption that looked like some kind of leather knee or shoulder brace, with tiny sawtoothed buckles and loops of nylon webbing. A shoulder holster, that’s what it must be.
Touching the butt of the gun made her want to wet her pants.
In one more second, Reese’s attention would be back on her, wondering what the hell she was doing by the sink. In that eye blink of time, too many questions froze her. Is it loaded? What do I have to do before I shoot it? Can I get it out of the holster? Does Reese see it? Do I want to get it out of the holster?
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