by John Everson
But even as he cursed his existence, he thought again of Brenda’s kiss just hours before. The hangover was absolutely worth that. Anything was worth that.
The thought of her lips at the top of his mind, David eased the shampoo cap open and began to massage it into his hair. He would live through this. Toast and the Motrin might have him stabilized by midafternoon, he hoped. And when he was, he intended to dig out that number from his shirt pocket. Assuming he hadn’t just dreamed that she’d put it there.
It wasn’t a dream. After many painful minutes in the shower, and twice as many painful minutes hobbling his way into underwear, socks, fresh jeans and a T-shirt, David fished the scrap of paper from the shirt that lay rumpled in the corner of his room, and took himself and the number downstairs.
His aunt was waiting in the living room, watching television with a cup of coffee in hand. “Well, the cat dragged something in, but I’m not quite sure what it is,” she poked. “What time did you get home last night?”
“Dunno,” he said, and slipped into an easy chair next to her.
“Guessing you won’t be riding today,” she mused.
“Um, no.”
She stood up and lightly touched his shoulder. “I don’t believe in hair of the dog, but I do have a cure. How ‘bout a bit of French toast to sop up the sauce?”
It sounded awful to him at that moment, but David knew the bread probably was the best thing he could eat. He nodded, and slipped deeper into the chair.
Everything hurt. His leg was stiff as a plank from where he’d taken the fall yesterday. After the hours at the bar last night, the accident and trip to Castle House earlier in the day seemed a year away. Quite a day, he thought. Bike the ridge, get run over, wake up in a haunted house populated by crazy people and then meet the girl of your dreams in a bar and hang on the hurting-est drunk ever.
Another twelve hours like that, and he’d be dead.
He fingered the paper tucked in his jeans pocket. He was supposed to be here for one purpose this summer: training. All pain, lots of gain. In between, he’d promised to help Aunt Elsie around the house with some painting and to reengineer the deck out back, which bowed and creaked whenever you walked across it. He guessed not much was going to remain but the posts once he started stripping away the rotten wood.
He didn’t have time to blow, not on a girl. Even if she did have amazing breasts and a kiss that would melt the metal off your old silver fillings. One thing he knew about sports was that single-minded training and losing yourself in the smile of the opposite sex did not mix. Pretty soon you were consuming lots of high-calorie dinners and spending precious time pumping on the couch instead of pumping iron and pedals in the pursuit of the ring.
And after all, hadn’t she abandoned him at the bar in the end? The smell of cooked butter sizzled into the room, and presently his aunt called from the next room.
“David, drag yourself in here and get some of this in your gut while it’s hot!”
He pushed off the chair, and felt queasy for a moment, clutching the arm hard. Then he shoved the scrap of paper deep into his pocket, and vowed to eat. And then, somehow, to ride.
No pain, no gain.
CHAPTER TEN
David pressed his foot to the pedal and stifled a moan. While his entire left side was stiff and painful, the leg really ached to put pressure on it. And then there was his head. And his stomach. He felt nauseated and gimpy and he was pedaling a bike up a steep, curved hill for no good reason.
Clearly he’d lost his mind.
And it wasn’t even his bike. The cop had bent the back tire of his Triomphe with her crappy old car, and now he was borrowing his aunt’s Huffy ten-speed. Who knew how much it was going to cost to fix racing wheels. They didn’t keep parts for Triomphes at your local Wal-Mart.
Aunt Elsie had laughed when he’d pulled on his riding shorts and limped to the garage after lying on the couch most of the afternoon.
“You’ve got to be joking, Davey,” she called from the kitchen. “French toast can only do so many wonders. You have to let time—and a lot of tap water—do the rest.”
Impatience was one of his virtues…or so he defended. The fastest way to work the stiffness out of his leg was to pedal. The fastest way to get past the hangover was to burn off all the poison.
But he wasn’t a complete idiot. Rather than take the 190 out over the ridge again, he rode down Main and took the cutoff to Brookstone. The view there wasn’t as breathtaking as the ridge, but it did raise an eyebrow. The little subdivision only had four streets, but the homes were all mini-mansions. This was the rich part of Castle Point, and many of these homes were only occupied part of the year. It was hard for David to look at the brick archways and rich oak entry doors and garages and imagine that someone could not only afford to live there, but keep a presumably larger domain elsewhere.
His aunt’s style of living was more along the lines of what he thought of as normal. She had a three-bedroom Cape Cod a couple blocks from Main, on Second Street. It lacked a basement and most of the rooms measured no more than a dozen feet wide. The front room was just big enough to put a couch, an easy chair and a TV in, and she used what was probably supposed to be a fourth bedroom on the main floor as a second family room where she kept her sewing machine and a couple bookcases. David liked staying there despite its closeness, because Aunt Elsie slept on the main floor in the largest bedroom, which meant he had both upstairs bedrooms and the bath there to himself.
He looked at a country-style three-story on Culligan Street and just shook his head. The upstairs master bedroom had floor-to-ceiling windows and a walk-out balcony. You could probably fit most of Aunt Elsie’s house in those peoples’ bedroom!
David pulled off the subdivision’s paved route and onto a dirt trail that ran up a hill and down to merge with Park Street just behind the Clam Shack. The late-afternoon heat beating off the asphalt was starting to get to him, and he considered stopping along the forested path to rest.
A squirrel darted out in front of his bike and froze. At the last possible second, but before David could brake, the animal took off into the brush, leaves rustling behind it. Close call.
That would be a good one. Yesterday get hit by a cop, today get hit by a squirrel. He opted not to stop—once he did, his legs would stiffen, and he didn’t want to tackle the incline between Main and Second with a charley horse.
In minutes, he was gliding down the dirt trail where he’d kissed Brenda the night before. He recognized a huge log decomposing at the side of the trail, and then he was at the Shack’s back parking lot. Where he’d peed in front of a girl too.
Oh man. No wonder she’d blown him off last night. Who cares if she was dropping trou…he should not have followed that lead. What if she saw his stuff and thought…
He pushed the thought from his head and circled the bar, noting the beat-up red siding and ripped screens all around. The white soffits had been painted recently, but aside from that, the building looked as if it was slowly moldering into the earth. Even the red neon sign looked forty years old in the daylight; at night all you could see was the flickering call to all barflies within a twenty-mile radius.
David took a long pull from his water bottle and realized that his head was pounding a little less in sync with his pedaling, and he hadn’t felt like puking in at least a mile. His eyes still felt sunken and fried, but a night’s sleep would solve that. Tomorrow he intended to be back out on 190 across the ridge. Today was just a reminder ride.
He pulled up the hill on Park and gasped as his legs slowed. It was like running up steps that never ended. Finally, just as he thought he couldn’t stomp his feet toward the pavement anymore, the familiar brown brick of Aunt Elsie’s house came into view, and he turned the corner and pulled into her cracked asphalt drive. That was one of the projects he’d promised her this summer—the drive needed a strong dose of crack filler and sealant.
There was a police cruiser parked out on the street, but
David didn’t think much about it until he ditched the bike in the garage and walked in the kitchen door.
“David, is that you?” his aunt called from the front room. “There’s someone here to see you.”
Now? David cried mentally. He could barely walk, he was puffing like he’d run a marathon and sweat was pouring in torrents down his temples and across his cheeks. He grabbed a hand towel from the kitchen drawer and solved the latter issue, and then walked into the living room.
“You!” was the first word out of the blonde policewoman’s mouth.
David blinked twice when he saw her. While her outfit was regulation—navy pants, black belt and medium blue shirt buttoned to the neck, there was no mistaking the wavy curls of honey blonde hair that cascaded across her shoulders and sent unruly wisps out to straggle across her cheeks. Yesterday when she’d run him over, Christy had looked casually sexy. Today she looked like a sultry coed who’d donned a uniform for a costume party. The uniform couldn’t constrain or contain the organic ease of her attraction.
“Um, yeah,” was all he came up with. He wiped his face once more with the towel and wondered how deep the sweat stains around his pits had leached. He wondered if she could smell him across the room.
“David, this officer wants to talk to you about a girl you were with last night?” his aunt said.
“We’ve met,” Christy said.
Aunt Elsie looked confused.
“This is the woman who sideswiped me yesterday,” David explained.
His aunt suddenly put folded two arms over the orange hibiscus flowers of her housedress and looked suitably perturbed at the cop.
David put a hand up to calm her. “It’s okay,” he said. “It was an accident.”
He looked at the formal uniform again, and gestured at the couch. “Do you want to have a seat? Can I get you something to drink?”
Christy shook her head. “I just need to ask you a few questions about last night.” She looked pointedly at his aunt, who got the point.
“I’ll be in the kitchen,” she volunteered, and then slipped from the room.
“What’s up?” he said.
“You look none the worse,” she said, sizing him up.
“Best way to get over a spill is to get back on the horse.”
“Last night, you spent some time with a girl at the Clam Shack.”
“And this is a crime?”
Her dark eyes flared at him in disgust. “Don’t be cute. Who was she? How well do you know her?”
David felt uncomfortable suddenly. Why were the police concerned with whom he’d been talking to in a bar?
“Her name was Brenda. I met her last night and we talked a while. What of it?”
“Her parents called the police because she never came home last night.”
“Yeah, well you can ask my aunt—she didn’t come here.”
“Well, when was the last time you saw her?”
David wiped his face again; he could feel the blood still pulsing in his temples, and he couldn’t stand any more. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to sit,” he said.
She followed suit in the chair across from the couch. David couldn’t help but notice when she flicked a strand of almost amber blonde hair back across the uniform blue. He’d been too shocked yesterday to appreciate it, but…
“Tell me about last night,” Christy prompted.
“Look, after you knocked me around, I went to the bar to drown my sorrows a bit. Figured I wouldn’t be training anymore this week after that and I was going to lose time.”
“Obviously you went out today,” she countered.
“Figured it was the best way to burn off a hangover,” he laughed. “But I wouldn’t call it training. Just a ride.
“Anyway…I met her while I was at the bar. She said her name was Brenda, and we got on pretty good. Talked for about three hours, and she kept buying me Guinness and got me so drunk we had to walk around the bar outside.”
“So you took her outside alone?”
“Yeah, but we went back to the bar after, so I could have some water. I chugged the first one, and when she went to get me a second glass, I laid down on the table to rest. That’s the last I saw of her. Next thing I knew, Joe, the bartender, was shaking me and tossing me out. Not much of a story.”
Christy nodded and jotted down something in a small notebook. “Jibes with what Joe told me,” she said. “Just wanted to check it out.”
She rose to leave.
“She seemed really nice. I hope she’s okay,” David said.
Christy shrugged. “She may be sleeping it off at someone else’s house. Are you all right with coming down to the station to give a formal statement if need be? We’ll see if she turns up in the next twenty-four first.”
“Sure,” he said.
“Thanks,” Christy said, and then looked him hard in the eye. “Watch yourself,” she said. “You seem to be in the wrong place at the wrong time lately.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The fuckin’ piece of shit Nova. Carrie slammed her hand down on the dashboard and then swore when it stung from the impact. She turned the key five more times to hear five more clicks, and then got out and slammed the door behind her in disgust.
She walked back to the trunk, changed her mind and walked to the hood, then turned again to look through the driver’s window at two empty seats.
“Fuckin’.
“Piece.
“Of.
“Shit.”
She pronounced each word clearly and distinctly, sending her damnation of the car out to anyone in a five-mile radius. Unfortunately, there most likely wasn’t anyone within a five-mile radius of where the Nova had opted to summarily quit. You could sit for hours overnight on the crossback and not see a soul.
That’s why Carrie thought it was her lucky day (well, night) when the headlights broke over the ridge heading in her direction—toward Oak Falls. It was at least another twenty miles, and she did not want to attempt walking it. God knows what might pick up her scent from the hills and choose her as an easy dinner. There were bears, wolves, even a mountain lion or two up in those hills. She stood halfway in the oncoming lane and waved both hands frantically. The car slowed, and pulled in right behind hers.
A black Mustang.
Two men got out of the still-running car and started toward her. The driver, a big man in a lumberjack flannel, waved a broad hand. “What’s a matter, ma’am, you stuck?”
“Fuckin’ piece of shit Nova just quit, just like that,” she said. “I just had it in for a tune-up a month ago.”
“Mechanic probably left a screw loose,” the big man said, finally reaching her and extending a palm. “I’m TG,” he said, and nodded at the smaller man, who wore dark clothes to match his shadowed eyes. His nose was long though, giving him a birdlike look in the harsh shadows of the Mustang headlights. “This is my partner Billy. We can take a look under the hood if you like, and if we can’t fix it, we can at least drive you into town.”
“Thanks,” Carrie said, trying unobtrusively to straighten her blouse and hair as the two men moved to the front of the car.
“Go ahead and pop the hood,” TG said.
She opened the driver’s door and leaned down to find the latch that released the lock on the front hood. It was just a small handle, but she’d never had a problem finding it before (not that she opened it much, but every now and then she added wiper fluid to the car herself). Naturally, now that two guys were waiting on her, she couldn’t seem to find it. Her fingers flitted through invisible space, grasping at nothing and coming up with…nothing.
“Let me help you,” the smaller man’s voice said from behind her.
Carrie jumped, just a little, and she pulled up from her crouch to flash the man a nervous smile of thanks. But the look froze on her face and transformed into something that wasn’t very thankful at all. Because the hook-nosed man was not there to help her. He was definitely there to hurt her. The blade that suddenly presse
d cold and sharp against the underside of her throat said that her car was not going to get fixed tonight.
She was.
“Fuckin’ piece of shit,” she whispered for the third time that night. Only this time she wasn’t talking about the Nova.
“What do you want?” she whispered. “I don’t have much money. If I did…I wouldn’t be driving this.”
TG’s face peered over Billy’s shoulder. He wore a grin that showed yellow teeth and an unsympathetic mean streak. “Well, for starters,” he said, “you could unbutton that blouse. That ought to be worth a buck or two.”
Deep inside Carrie’s stomach, a pin pricked. And that pinprick opened a hole that grew and grew, as ice water cascaded from somewhere deep within her worst nightmares and filled her belly with terror. She suddenly knew without a doubt that she was not going to get back to Oak Falls tonight, or probably ever.
With trembling, clumsy hands she released the buttons on her blouse, exposing the white lace bra beneath.
TG approved. He reached into his back pocket, pulled out a beat-up leather lump of a wallet and pulled a dollar bill from it. Then he made a big show of folding it in half long ways before reaching past Billy’s knife and slipping it across her right breast to lodge under her bra. His hand lingered a moment before he pulled back.
“Well,” he said, plucking the blouse away from her, “you’re not dressed for strippin’, but that ain’t half bad. Billy, back up. Let’s see if the panties are a match. I hate it when a girl wears droopy drawers and a sexy bra. Just not right neglecting the other half, you know what I mean?”
“Please,” Carrie said, flattening her back against the cold metal of the rear car window. The tip of Billy’s knife followed her as she stepped out of the trap of the driver’s-seat entry. “I’ll strip if you like. I’ll do whatever you want. Just please let me go home afterward?”
“We’ll take you home,” TG said. “I already promised you that.” He gestured at her jeans. “Now let’s see about the other half.”
“You some kinda lingerie conn-o-saur now?” Billy mumbled.
