BIRDS OF PREY - A Psycho Thriller

by Blake Crouch

  Winston hit his mother in the face and told her to make some pretty noise.

  Luther crying angry tears now.

  His mother said something that caused him to hit her again, and this time, she cried out and made a strange noise.

  Winston didn’t hit her again, just moved over her faster and faster.

  Rufus said, “Close your eyes, Katie. Go someplace else.”

  Ben said, “Little girl, if you close your eyes, I’ll fucking cut you out of your skin.”

  Luther clambered to his feet, took two steps down the dune, and stopped.

  He turned around, went back to his hiding spot.

  Wept bitterly into his shirt.

  If he ran down to the bonfire and tried to stop this from happening, he’d only get hurt, tied up, maybe even killed.

  He was five years old.

  Tiny.

  Weak.

  Slow.

  He couldn’t stop anything.

  Couldn’t save his family from these terrible men.

  The complete helplessness crushed him under terror and shame—a weight he would never be rid of.

  Luther looked back toward the bonfire.

  Winston was on his feet now, pulling up his trousers.

  “Sorry about the sloppy seconds, brother,” Winston said, taking the shotgun from Ben.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I plan on breaking new ground.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Ben pointed at Katie.

  “Oh…all right then.”

  “You son of a bitch!” Rufus cried. “She’s eight!”

  Ben smiled. “That’s what I call a selling point.”

  “I’ll kill you,” Rufus said.

  Ben squatted down in front of Luther’s father. He cocked back his fist and swung down, hitting Rufus in the face with a blow that cracked bone.

  Luther couldn’t stop himself, couldn’t just sit there and watch this happen for another second. Anything, maybe even death, would be better.

  He crawled down the front side of the dune, the voices getting louder and clearer.

  “Let me tell you what’s about to happen,” Ben said to Rufus. “This is your last hour of living. In that hour, you’re gonna watch me hurt your little girl. Hurt her so good. And you better watch every fucking second. And then—”

  “Why?” Rufus screamed. “What have we ever done to you?”

  “Didn’t you hear what Winston told you? It’s fate. All your miserable lives you been racing toward this moment. Toward this awful end. And now it’s here.”

  Rufus was hysterical, blubbering. “We’re a good family. We’re decent people. We’ve never hurt anyone. Why?”

  Maxine lay unmoving in the sand, and as Luther crawled closer, he wondered if she was dead.

  “‘Cause we like it, you stupid fuck,” Ben seethed.

  Then he stood, pulled out his pocket knife, and flicked open the blade.

  Luther crawling faster and faster through the sand.

  Ben stared down at Katie.

  “I don’t think I got your name, sweetheart.”

  Katie squirming, trying to scoot away.

  Rufus said, “I’ll do anything you want. Anything. Please don’t do this to my little girl.”

  “I’m Ben,” Ben said to Katie, kneeling down beside her.

  Luther was twenty feet away.

  Ben grabbed Katie by the back of her shirt and dragged her toward him through the sand.

  He rolled Katie over onto her back, her wrists bound, arms pinned underneath her.

  She was crying, and Rufus begging, and Maxine still trapped in her horrified daze.

  Luther stopped.

  Ten feet behind Ben.

  Hidden in shadow just outside the ring of illuminated sand.

  As Ben cut into the side of Katie’s yellow swimsuit, the girl began to hyperventilate.

  Luther telling himself to get up, run full speed at the man, claw his eyes, hit him, just do something to make this stop—

  “Ben, you hear that?” Winston said.

  Ben looked up and down the length of the beach.

  It took him a moment, but Luther heard it too over the constant crush of the breakers—the low rumble of an engine.

  In the distance, a pair of headlights appeared, and then another.

  Winston walked over to Rufus and put the barrel of the shotgun against his throat.

  “Where are the keys to the truck?”

  “In the ignition.”

  “Maybe they won’t even stop,” Ben said.

  “Maybe they fucking will. Maybe there’s a half-dozen people coming to crash the beach party. We’ll never get off this island if word gets out.”

  Ben closed his knife, slipped it into his pocket. Then he scooped Katie up and threw her over his shoulder.

  “No!” Rufus screamed.

  “What are you doing?” Winston asked.

  “Taking a little something for the road.”

  The twin growl of the approaching trucks was getting louder—fifty, maybe seventy-five yards away and closing fast.

  “Kill ‘em,” Ben said, stumbling toward the truck.

  He dropped Katie in the bed and climbed in behind the wheel.

  “No,” Winston said. “If the trucks don’t stop, we’ll come back.”

  Winston rushed around to the passenger-side door as the Dodge grumbled to life.

  The tires slung a stream of sand and the Dodge whipped around and sped off into the darkness like a phantom—no headlights, no taillights.

  Rufus screaming after his daughter.

  The oncoming trucks roared past, one on each side of the bonfire, and in that half-second of firelit illumination, Luther saw the truck beds crowded with teenagers hollering and drunk, beer bottles raised to the sky.

  A midnight race down the beach.

  Luther got up and started toward the bonfire.

  Rufus still screaming from the bottom of his soul, “My baby girl! My baby girl!”

  Maxine was coming to her feet, and when she saw Luther, she said, “Darling! You’re alive!”

  He ran into his mother’s arms and she held him tight for five seconds.

  Shaking.

  Sobbing.

  Then Maxine went over to Rufus and tore at his knots until the rope came loose.

  “We have to go,” she said. “They’ll come back.”

  “We can’t leave,” he said, sitting up. “Not without Kate.”

  “They were going to kill all of us, Rufus. They’ll finish the job if they come back and we’re here.”

  “I’m not leaving my little girl!”

  Maxine stared north up the beach, the noise of the trucks steadily dwindling away.

  “I’m taking Luther, and we’re going to the sheriff’s house. Stay if you want.”

  Rufus stared at his wife.

  “Are you okay, Max?”

  He reached out to touch her face but she swatted his hand away.

  “What do you think?” She took Luther by the hand. “We have to run, boy.”

  From the southernmost tip of the island, they could either bushwhack through the live oaks for a mile to the village of Ocracoke, or stay on the beach for two until it lead them to the access road that joined Highway 12.

  They started jogging up the beach.

  “We have to go faster,” Maxine said, panting.

  “I can’t go any faster, Mama.” He was crying. “My feet hurt.”

  Maxine stopped and collapsed in the sand.

  “I’m tired too, Luther, but we have to reach the sheriff. Do you understand what will happen if those men get on the ferry tomorrow morning with Kate?”

  He shook his head.

  “We’ll never see her again.” She squatted down with her back to Luther. “Get on and hold on.”

  Luther climbed onto his mother’s back, and she came to her feet and started jogging again.

  The trucks had long since gone.

  No sound but Maxine
’s bare feet pounding at the tide-smoothed sand and the endless white noise of the sea.

  Luther watched the breakers and the starry sky and the dunes scrolling slowly past.

  He thought about his sister, tied up in the back of the truck.

  He didn’t know how long his mother had been running when she finally collapsed.

  Maxine hunched over on all fours and threw up in the sand.

  Luther pulled her hair out of her face.

  He patted her back.

  “It’s okay, Mama,” he whispered.

  In the weak starlight, he could see the black blood running down the inside of his mother’s thigh.

  Another image to haunt his dreams for all time.

  “Are you hurt, Mama?”

  “I’ll be okay. Just climb back on.”

  Luther snapped back into consciousness.

  His arms were draped over his mother’s shoulders, and she stood in the middle of an empty, two-lane highway, bent over and trying to catch her breath.

  “Luther, you awake?”

  “Yes.”

  “I need you to walk for awhile.”

  He slid down her back and eased his shredded feet onto the pavement.

  Felt like standing on a bed of razor blades.

  “How much longer?” he asked.

  “Just a half mile up the road to Dom’s place.”

  “Is Katie okay, you think?”

  “I don’t know, son.”

  Maxine started jogging and Luther followed along down the double-yellow lines.

  He couldn’t stop crying and every step left a bloody footprint in his wake, but they kept on, half-jogging, half-limping, until the first buildings of Ocracoke appeared in the distance.

  The driveway leading to the home of Dominick James was a long, single lane framed by live oaks dripping with Spanish moss.

  When she saw the saltbox in the distance, Maxine accelerated to a sprint, Luther calling out for her, begging not to be left, but she didn’t even look back once.

  Luther came to a full stop and sat in the middle of the gravel road, watching the shadow of his mother running toward the house.

  He wrapped his arms around his knees.

  He’d been apart from Katie before—when she’d spent the night at a friend’s house, when she started school three years ahead of him—but it had never felt like this.

  Like he’d left a core, integral piece of himself behind.

  Like he wasn’t Luther apart from her.

  He was less than. Or some new version of himself he didn’t know or understand.

  In the distance, he could hear his mother banging on the screen door, her voice shouting, echoing through the live oaks, descending back into hysterics.

  Ten seconds later, the porchlight winked on.

  Maxine’s legs gave out.

  She was crying, screaming Katie’s name over and over.

  Sheriff James stood over her in a dark-colored robe, and as he reached down and put his hand on Maxine’s shoulder, Luther heard him say, “We’ll find her, Max. We’ll find her. I promise you we’ll find her.”

  The next morning, one of the half-dozen deputies sent out to scour the island found the Kite’s Dodge pick-up truck abandoned in front of the Tatum dock on Silver Lake Harbor.

  The Tatum’s Island Hopper had been stolen during the night.

  Thirty-six hours later, the Tatum boat was discovered beached in the swamps east of Swan Quarter, on the mainland of North Carolina.

  No Winston.

  No Ben.

  No Katie.

  The going theory was that the two convicts, now escapees from a South Carolina prison, had crossed the Pamlico Sound under cover of darkness and fled into the mainland of North Carolina.

  They’d be caught, probably within the week, Sheriff James assured Rufus and Maxine as they sat in their living room like a pair of broken figurines in clothes they hadn’t changed in five days, staring at the lawman standing before them with his hat in hand and a somber intensity in his eyes that belied the optimism he was trying so desperately to sell.

  Nearby, Luther crouched in the darkness under the staircase, beside the little door that led into the basement, listening to every word.

  But days and weeks and months crept by.

  Then years.

  They didn’t find Winston and Ben.

  They didn’t find Katie.

  And a dark cloud came down upon the House of Kite.

  The One That Stayed

  Gary, Indiana, 1983

  “Don’t leave,” Alex Kork said, tugging on her brother’s shoulder.

  The cramped bedroom was warm, and the August heat brought a funky smell. The only light came from the bedside lamp, which was shadeless, its thirty-watt bulb making the siblings look jaundiced.

  The battered, thrift-store suitcase on the bed was half-filled with meager possessions, all belonging to Charles.

  A pair of jeans with a hole in the knee.

  A striped necktie, ten years old and twice as wide as the fashion of the day.

  Black leather dress shoes, another Good Will purchase, half a size too small.

  A lonely, bent toothbrush.

  Tube socks, gray from repeated washings.

  Half a box of salt.

  Rubber gloves.

  Duct tape.

  A straight razor.

  A soldering iron.

  A cheese grater.

  Needle nose pliers.

  Alex eyed the pliers and felt herself shiver, remembering the first time she and Charles had used them.

  Uncertain times. Good times.

  Charles smiled. His hair was a bit longer than the current trends, and the faint mustache on his teenaged upper lip reminded her of Father.

  “There’s a whole wide world out there, Alex. I wanna see it. Don’t you?”

  Alex did. More than anything. But she wasn’t ready yet. Charles was comfortable with himself. Unlike Father, whose every waking moment was wracked by worry and guilt, Charles owned his identity. Proudly. Unabashedly.

  “I’m scared,” Alex said.

  “Of what? We’re the ones people need to be scared of.”

  Alex didn’t want to tell him the truth. That the thing that scared her most was herself. Of what she was capable of. This shit-hole town was like a cage. Small. Defined. Everyone knew everyone else. Easy to get into trouble, so Alex and Charles had to restrain themselves.

  There would be no such restraint Out There.

  It was an exciting thought. A sexy one. To be able to unleash their appetites on complete strangers. People who wouldn’t be missed. Who wouldn’t leave trails for the cops back to their front door.

  “You want to be a mole your whole life, Alex?” Charles said. “Like Father? Or do you want to be a lion?”

  They called Father a “mole” because he hid from people. Constantly caught in worry and doubt. Always self-loathing. Burying his shame and his nose in the dirt. Yes, he killed. But he spent so much time planning, and then later hating himself. He was a slave to his own urges. They owned him, when Charles insisted it should be the other way around.

  In contrast, lions killed their prey out in the open, stalking and slaughtering with pride and freedom. They occupied the top of the food chain, and knew it.

  “I want to be a lion, Charles. But I’m not ready yet.”

  Charles stared at her, hard.

  After a few seconds of silence, he nodded. “When you’re ready, look me up.”

  Alex felt an urge to throw her arms around him, to kiss him, to beg him not to go. But instead she reached into the suitcase and grabbed the pliers. The tool gave her strength.

  “Remember how Mother screamed when you used those on her?” Charles said.