The 13th

by John Everson

  She’d left his office in a huff, and proceeded to drive her shift around town, not seeing anyone doing much of anything this early in the morning on a Saturday. After a couple spins through the little town she had turned and headed out toward the asylum. She didn’t know what she hoped to see out there—and she certainly couldn’t bang on the door again. But the place had become her private obsession.

  The radio squawked when she was just a couple miles out of town.

  “Cruiser 103 come in.”

  It was Glenna, their weekend dispatcher. Nobody else used the car numbers when calling. It was kind of ridiculously formal in a department of three.

  “Yeah, Base, whatcha got?”

  “Captain said to let you know that the fingerprint report came back on that screwdriver. Thought you might like to know whose they were.”

  Christy impatiently thumbed the talk switch. “Of course I would. Spill it!”

  There was a burst of static and then the stentorian-voiced dispatcher clarified. “They matched the prints to a Billy Walker. Five previous offenses, all of them robbery related. He’s got an address outside of town, if you want to pick him up for questioning.”

  Christy shook her head and laughed. Fuckin’ Terror Twins. How did they figure into this? Or did they?

  “Nah, Base, I know right where he is. On my way there now. Out.”

  Christy put down the radio set and frowned. The screwdriver had been found on the road near the wreck, and the woman the car was registered to was in the asylum. Was there really a connection? Billy and TG were habituals, but she didn’t see them wrapped up in a kidnapping scam. They were just a couple stupid local thugs who tried every scheme to get ahead…and generally failed miserably.

  Still, if there was any connection to be made between Billy, the car and the woman she’d seen in the asylum…she intended to find it.

  Christy stepped on the gas and sped down the 190, trying to establish the line of questioning she’d begin with when she got to the twins’ shack. Or should she even ask a question there? Maybe she should just bring Billy in for questioning…though once she did that, they had to make it pay off, or he went back out scot-free—and knowing that the cops were watching his ass.

  When she neared the turnoff for the Terror Twins’ shack, Christy took the turn slow. She wanted to approach this one quietly.

  As it turned out, it was a good thing she didn’t barrel around the corner. Because as soon as she turned, she saw a familiar set of tires ahead of her.

  David Shale.

  Was that fuckin’ kid EVERYwhere?

  She hit the brakes and pulled up next to him, rolling down the passenger window.

  “Can I ask just what the hell you are doing here?” she said after he pulled off his helmet.

  “I’m riding up to see the Terror Twins,” David answered, narrowing his eyebrows at her gaze. “Is that a crime?”

  “No crime,” Christy said. “I’m just getting tired of you turning up every time I have a job to do.”

  “Yeah, well, the feeling’s mutual,” he said, and slipping on his helmet, he kicked off from the gravel and started pedaling up the hill.

  Christy let out an exasperated groan and kicked up gravel as she punched the gas, passed by the biker and then headed him off with a hard swerve to the right. This time when she rolled down the window, it was David who was angry.

  “What’s the big idea?” he yelled. “I have just as much right to ride this road as you do.”

  “Look, I’m here on police business, and I’d appreciate it if you don’t interfere.”

  “I thought your only official business was to try to run me over.”

  “Wise up, brat, or I’ll throw you in the back of the car too.”

  Christy hit the gas and left David behind. She could see him shaking his head and yelling something at the back of her car in her rearview mirror.

  The twins’ shack looked quiet in the late-morning light. Christy had only been out here once before. During her first week on the force she’d had to drive out here after a public indecency charge had been leveled at TG. Seems he’d mooned a couple of old ladies in broad daylight after they’d called him a hooligan. Christy had slapped him with a warning and gotten out fast. He was a hooligan, after all!

  Nothing much had changed since her last visit. The old place looked as if it sagged under the weight of a hundred years of winters. Its tin roof had a sway to its center that she was sure it hadn’t had in the early days of its installation, and the small windows on either side of the old wooden door looked crooked. The gray paint on the four stairs leading to the small wooden porch was all but gone, though the wood underneath was almost the same weathered color as the remaining paint.

  Around her the wind whispered through the thick stands of trees, but the shack itself stood silent, seemingly vacant.

  The first step creaked under her foot, and Christy hesitated. She couldn’t explain why, but she felt nervous about this visit in a way she hadn’t the last time she’d been here. Not that she necessarily thought Billy would get violent and resist her, but…something just didn’t feel right. Shaking off the feeling, she stepped up the next couple stairs, and then paused on the landing, again getting a chill up the back of her neck.

  She stood there, just inches from the door, and listened. The breeze whispered by her ear just above the sound of silence and then she heard the telltale sound of gravel clicking gravel. Christy turned and there was David, still astride his bike, stopped just in front of her squad. He held his helmet to his side and stood there, watching.

  “I told you…” she began, but her reprimand was interrupted by a muffled scream. It came from inside the shack.

  Christy held a hand out directing David to stay where he was, while she drew her gun and stepped to the side of the door frame. With her free hand, she reached out to turn the knob. It turned easily, and with a quick motion, she pushed open the door, at the same time putting both hands on the gun and holding it above her head, ready to come down and fire if someone stormed out of the shack.

  But instead, the door simply swung inward, revealing the shadowed entryway to a dilapidated kitchen. She dropped to a crouch and pirouetted to face the entrance, gun at the ready, but saw nobody.

  “Ewwwwahhhhhaaaiii!”

  The scream was loud and unmistakable this time. It was high-pitched, a woman’s voice. It was close by.

  Christy stepped on the stained and yellowing black-and-white tile of the kitchen and slowly began to rise from her crouch. It didn’t seem like this was going to turn into a hostage/gunfire exchange. She instinctively reached out to push the door shut behind her and stopped.

  “Aiiiiiiieeeaaaiiiii!”

  The noise came from the floor behind the kitchen door.

  Or, more specifically, from the naked woman bound and gagged on the dirty floor behind the kitchen door. Her long black hair tangled in knots all around her neck. She shook it away from her eyes, which bugged open wide, bloodshot and filled with desperation. The woman’s arms and legs were tied behind her back, leaving her exposed breasts and tummy to thrust forward in a terrible display of helplessness. Her whole body was smudged and smeared with dirt from the floor, and blood caked the edges of the bindings around her wrists where she’d struggled to break their hold to no avail. Her cheeks displayed the trails of a river of dried tears, and the floor in front of her still held a pool of yellowed water, where she’d apparently scooted forward to pee before inching back away from the mess. As Christy registered the scene in front of her, the woman let out another long wail behind her gag—a sad and horrible cry of anguish—and tried to bring her legs up tighter to hide her nakedness, but she only succeeded in yanking open the wounds on her wrists again, resulting in a new round of whines from deep in her throat.

  “Holy shit,” David said from behind her.

  “I told you to stay outside,” Christy hissed.

  “Again, it’s a free country,” he said. “Are you going to
cut her loose, or should I?”

  Christy stifled the urge to punch the cyclist right in the mouth, and knelt down by the bedraggled captive. She untied the gag first, gently pulling it away from the woman’s face. She took a deep, gasping breath when the material left her mouth, and whispered, “Thank you.”

  “Is anyone here?” Christy prodded, nodding toward the inside of the shack.

  The woman shook her head. “No,” she gasped. “They left me here the night before last. Nobody’s been back since.”

  Christy stepped behind her and began working on the knots at her wrists and ankles. David reached into his pocket and pulled out a pocketknife. “Here,” he said. “She might want to get out of that, um, today.”

  She took the knife without comment, and in moments, the woman lay limp on her back. Her whole body began to tremble, and she started to cry.

  Christy put her hand on the woman’s forehead. “Shhh,” she said. “It’s okay now. We’re here.”

  “I…can’t…move my arms,” the woman gasped. “Pins and needles.”

  David knelt at her side and began to massage a shoulder and elbow.

  “I think you should…” Christy began.

  “Rub her other arm,” David insisted. “She’s been lying here for like thirty-six hours. We need to help the circulation come back.”

  “What’s your name?” Christy asked.

  “Amy Lynn,” the woman whispered. Her voice was raw as chopped meat. After a few minutes, she pushed herself away from their massage and sat up, slowly pulling her legs up in a crouch and crossing her arms over her bare chest. “Will you take me home, please?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” Christy promised. She stood, and caught David’s eye. “Stay here with her a minute?”

  He nodded, and pulled his gray T-shirt over his head. “I can’t say it’s totally clean,” he said, offering it to Amy Lynn. “But it’s better than nothing.”

  The pale skin of her dirt-streaked face betrayed the hint of a blush and she whispered a thanks. Christy nodded at them and stepped through the kitchen, gun in hand, to investigate the rest of the house. Again, she was trespassing without a warrant. But this time, she had cause, and she wasn’t going to pass it up.

  After she left the room, David put his arm around the girl, who now wore his Boston U shirt. It settled loosely over her middle, and she pulled its edge to cover some of her thigh. “It’s all right,” he promised. “It’s all going to be okay now.”

  Amy Lynn started to say something, but then her eyes welled up, and she simply collapsed into his arms, hoarse cries coming fast and hard. He held her and tried to give comfort. But in his head, he had only one thought.

  Was this what had happened to Brenda? Part of him grew cold at the idea of her naked and tied up in a basement somewhere. At the idea that she was just waiting, somewhere, for him to find and help her.

  Christy returned to the kitchen a few minutes later, shaking her head. “Nothing,” she said. “C’mon, help me get her out of here.”

  “Now it’s okay that I’m here?” he poked.

  “Do you WANT me to bust your balls?” she asked. “There’s a woman who needs help and we’re here to give it. Shut up and help the girl up.”

  Amy Lynn leaned heavily on both of them as they walked to the car. David helped her slide into the backseat, but as he stepped away, Christy nodded.

  “You can take the other side.”

  “That’s all right,” he said. “I’ve gotta get to work. I’ve got my bike.”

  “I need you to come down to the station and give a statement,” Christy insisted. “We can put your bike on the rack.” She pointed to the silver struts on the car’s roof.

  David opened his mouth to protest and Christy put up a hand. “Look, just do this, okay? That girl in the car needs our help, and she needs an ironclad case whenever we find the guys who did this to her. Which means I need you as a strong witness to what just happened, and the best way to establish that is a statement immediately after the event. So take a ride with me and let’s get this girl a shower and some clothes faster, huh?”

  He somehow couldn’t argue with that one. Christy helped him strap the bike down, and then the gravel was crunching behind them as they pulled away from the shack.

  “Where are you from, Amy Lynn?” Christy asked, looking at the girl in the rearview mirror. The woman clearly was in shock, eyes wide, arms tightly crossed at her chest.

  “Oak Falls,” she answered. “These guys…they picked up me and another girl at a bar there…They seemed really fun, you know? Kinda redneck, but good for a night, you know? I was making out with the one, he was a big guy, in the backseat while his friend drove. He had a girl in front too.”

  “Do you remember his name?”

  Amy Lynn shook her head. “No. Tom or Tim, or…T something. He had a black Mustang.”

  In the front seat Christy smiled sourly. “After they brought you back to the shack, what happened?”

  “They were taking the other girl somewhere else,” Amy Lynn said. “She was passed out in the front seat and T…TG! That was his name. TG said he wanted to hurry up and get their money so he could get back to me. Then he dragged me into the house and dropped me there on the floor. But he never came back.”

  “Did he say where they were taking her?”

  “To the doc’s, he said a couple times. And once he mentioned an asylum.”

  David’s stomach turned to ice as he pictured again that girl in the upstairs window of the asylum. Meanwhile, Christy’s foot increased its pressure on the accelerator. Maybe now the chief would process a warrant.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Something cold interrupted the warmth between her thighs. There were voices, whispers outside. She could hear them. But as much as she tried, Brenda couldn’t open her eyes to see the speakers. Her world swirled with a hum of dark violet and sinister shapes slipped between the curves of silver clouds. Brenda floated in a sea of sensation; her arms and legs tingled with the touch of a thousand tiny pinpoints. A feather’s kiss of touch on every part of her. She seemed perfectly free, and yet somewhere inside she knew that she was trapped here. Now, as she heard the voices just outside, she knew she had to escape.

  “Open your eyes,” she whispered to herself.

  “Open your eyes.”

  Again the coldness between her legs, as the buzz of a vacuum grew inside her ears.

  “Open your eyes.”

  “She won’t be fertile for a couple more days,” a woman said. “That’s really cutting it close.”

  And a male voice.

  “It will be enough. She only has to have conceived for her to serve as the Eleventh.”

  “What if it doesn’t take?”

  The man laughed. “C’mon, Amelia. We’ll make sure it does. And you’ll enjoy every minute of it.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  “Can I talk to you a minute?” David asked. He was gritting his teeth as he said it, but he couldn’t hold back any longer. He’d been thinking about it throughout the morning as a police captain took his statement. Christy had disappeared to procure some clothes for Amy Lynn and get her statement. Now the blonde officer had come back to escort him from the station, and he knew he needed her help.

  “Sure,” Christy said, raising an eyebrow. “What’s up?” They were standing near her cluttered desk in the middle of the station; Captain Ryan was just a few feet away, typing at his computer; probably keying in things about David’s statement.

  “In private?” David asked softly.

  Again, she cocked an eyebrow—well tweezed, he noted—and motioned for him to follow.

  Outside the station, she led him around the back to the parking lot. Resting her butt against the hood of her squad, Christy looked him in the eyes and held empty palms out in front of her. “Okay,” she said. “What’ve ya got?”

  “Something’s going on at the asylum,” he began.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The doc
tor…He isn’t really a psychiatrist.”

  She nodded, but didn’t interrupt.

  “And I don’t think they’ve got those women there to help them with mental illness.”

  Christy shifted on the hood and looked toward the front of the station. When she looked at him again, she said, “What makes you think that?”

  “I work there,” he said. “And yesterday, I saw what they were doing in the basement.”

  “And that was?”

  He told her about witnessing the ritual in the basement of the old hotel, and as he did, Christy looked toward the front of the station, as if waiting for someone. When he finished, she slid off the hood of the car and put her hands on his shoulders. David found his stomach went just a little weak when she did that. Her eyes were intensely blue as she leaned closer to his face and whispered, “Look, David. We’re looking into what’s going on at the asylum. That’s why I was out there the day we first ran into each other.”

  “Well, actually you ran into me.”

  She rolled her eyes at that. “Whatever. Look, I want you to stay clear of that place for a while, okay?”

  “But my job…”

  “Call in sick.”

  David shook his head. “I can’t,” he said. “Somebody’s got to do something. I don’t know what they’re doing to those women, but it can’t wait. And, there’s one other thing…”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m worried they’ve got Brenda Bean in there somewhere. If those guys have been tying girls up and taking them to the doctor to experiment on…”

  “We don’t know that.”

  David grew insistent. “C’mon. They tied up the girl we found today. They took someone else to the asylum that night. And Joe, the bartender at the Shack, said they were in the bar that night that Brenda disappeared. If she’s there, I have to help her.”

  “How do you suggest we do that?”

  “We go there tonight after dark, when everyone’s asleep, and we look for her.”

  Christy nodded, as if impressed. “Brilliant plan. I love it. Just one problem. How are we going to get in? I don’t think the front door is open after-hours.”