Those Who Wish Me Dead

by Michael Koryta

  “Be still,” he said. He had a doctor’s bedside tone. A professional soother.

  She stood where she was as he walked toward her from the front and the other one reached the porch at her back. No way to face them both. At once, she was relieved that she had not taken the shotgun. She could shoot only one of them at a time, the way they were positioned, but that was still more shooting than they likely wanted, and if they’d thought she was a threat, they might have fired first. Right now, they did not think that, and in their perception of her as harmless, she was being given one last valuable tool: time. How much of it, she did not know. But there was some, and she needed to use it now, and use it right.

  She thought of the bear spray, and then she lifted her hands into the air. To reach for it was to admit it was there. The bear spray was of little comfort in the face of a gun but it was what she had and she intended to keep it. Keep it and earn more of what these men could grant: time. Whether it was hours or minutes, whether it was seconds, her hope lay in buying more.

  “What do you want?” she said. Voice no longer so strong. “There’s no need for a gun. You can tell me what you’d like.”

  “Hospitable,” the long-haired man said. “That is a pleasant change from others we’ve encountered.”

  “It certainly is.”

  “A calm woman, all things considered. Middle of the night, you know. Strangers.”

  “Strangers with guns. Very calm, I’d say. Unusually so.”

  They were talking around her as they advanced, conversational as two men on a road trip making observations about the scenery. It chilled her more than the sight of the gun had.

  “What do you want?” she repeated. They were almost upon her, one at the front and one at the back, and it was harder now to keep her hands in the air; she wanted to bring them down and throw a punch, wanted to run, wanted to drop to the porch floor and curl up and protect herself from their impending touches.

  But none of those options would buy her time. She kept her hands in the air, though they were shaking now.

  “May we step inside, Mrs. Serbin?”

  The one facing her, just inches away, asked the question, but he wasn’t looking her in the eye. His gaze was covering her body, and she had the sense that he was inventorying her in every way. There was violation in his stare and also threat assessment. She wore black leggings, nothing over them, her boots loose along the calf, and when she’d lifted her arms, the jacket had pulled back to reveal the long-sleeved T-shirt she’d been sleeping in. There was no place on her body, under the jacket, to hide a weapon, and that was evident. The oversize jacket hid the bear spray well. She had a feeling that they would take the jacket, though. That, too, was only a matter of time.

  Out in the stable, one of the horses whinnied again. A high keening sound. The moon was visible now, clean white light. Would things have been different if it had been out when she opened the door? Would she have seen enough to step back inside? Could a cloud change your life?

  “Yes, I think we’ll go inside,” the man behind her said. He reached out and pushed her hair back over her shoulder, one fingertip on her skin, and that was when she dropped her hands and screamed and then his arm was around her, drawing her body hard against his, pinning her arms to her sides. The spotlight fell to the porch floor and bounced. He’d wrapped her up in such a way that her hands were pressed up near her face, useless.

  The man in front of her had watched the brief flurry of resistance without reaction. Heard her scream and did not blink. He stood still while the other one held her, and for a time there was no sound but the horses stirring, unsettled by Allison’s scream. The spotlight beam shot crookedly into the night sky, illuminating half of his face.

  “Still hospitable?” he said at last.

  The grip around her felt like a steel band and there were tears threatening, pain and fear mixing. She blinked the tears back and forced herself to look directly at him when she nodded. She didn’t say a word.

  “Marvelous,” he said. He drew the word out slow and looked away from her, taking stock of the grounds a final time, the stable and the pasture and the empty bunkhouse and the garage beyond. She had a feeling they’d inspected the property thoroughly before approaching the house. She didn’t like that measured surveyor’s stare. He saw too much, missed too little. It was the way Ethan took in a place. It wasn’t a quality she wanted to see in a man like this.

  When he was satisfied with his assessment, he made the smallest of nods and the other one shoved her forward, through the door and into the living room, without loosening his hold.

  “I believe I’ll give myself a tour,” the long-haired one said.

  “One of us probably should,” the other answered. Allison could feel his breath on her ear. Could smell his sweat and a heavy odor of stale, trapped smoke. Not cigarettes. Wood smoke.

  He held her in the center of the room and did not speak while the other one took a patient stroll through her home. He unplugged phones and lowered window blinds and talked while he moved, and the one holding her answered.

  “Quite an empire they have here.”

  “Beautiful place.”

  “They like mountain landscapes, did you notice?”

  “Seems to be the favored artwork, yes.”

  “Strange, living in a place like this. Why do you need the paintings, the photographs? Just look out the window.”

  “Gifts, I suspect. What do you give someone who lives in the mountains? A photograph of the same mountain that person sees every day. It doesn’t make sense, but people do it all the same. Like that man who raised the dogs. Remember him? The bloodhounds.”

  “Pictures of bloodhounds all over the place. Even though the real deal was right there.”

  “Exactly. I’m telling you, they are gifts. No one has any imagination these days.”

  The grip on Allison hadn’t loosened a fraction, though the man who held her spoke easily. Another smell mingled with the wood smoke, but it took her a minute to confirm what it was. Or accept it.

  He smelled of blood.

  The long-haired one faded from sight but she could hear his boots as he moved through the rooms behind them. Then he reappeared and crossed the living room. He had a hat in his hand. A black Stetson, wide-brimmed. Ethan’s hat, one that he’d never worn. He hated the cowboy look, but people had their assumptions.

  “I like this,” the long-haired man said. “Very Wild West.” He put the hat on and inspected himself in the reflection from the glass door. He smiled. “Not a bad touch.”

  “Not bad at all,” the short-haired one said.

  “Is it your husband’s hat?” He turned to face Allison.

  “It was a gift,” she said. “He doesn’t like it.”

  They laughed at her then. “Excellent,” the long-haired one said. “That’s excellent, Mrs. Serbin.” He wandered away again, still wearing the hat, and entered her bedroom. He’d picked up the spotlight when they came inside and was using it rather than the overhead lights. She watched the beam paint the walls and then come to a stop on the shotgun. He went over to it and lifted it with one hand and opened the breech. When he saw the shells inside he snapped the breech shut and returned to the living room, carrying the spotlight in one hand, now turned off, and the shotgun in the other, held down against his leg. The pistol was in a holster at his back.

  “Oh my,” he said, easing onto the couch, stretching his legs out in front of him, and leaning the shotgun against the cushion. “It’s been a long day, hasn’t it?”

  “Productive, though.”

  “True.” The longhair gave a heavy sigh, chest rising and falling, staring at the woodstove. He looked at it for a long time before glancing back at them. “You good?”

  “Just fine.”

  “Do you think she needs to be held?”

  “I suppose we could give her a chance now that you’ve completed the tour.”

  The long-haired one fixed his eyes on Allison’s. Cold empty b
lue. “What do you say, beautiful? Can we take that chance?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, then. We get our first test of your honesty.”

  The iron grip was gone, as if it had never existed. She was free again. The one who’d held her stepped back after releasing her. She hadn’t seen his face since he’d walked toward her in the spotlight. The two men never stood together.

  The long-haired man said, “Do you know why we’re here?”

  She shook her head. Immediately, he sighed again and turned from her and ran a hand over his face as if he were exhausted.

  “Mrs. Serbin.” The words were heavy with disappointment.

  “What?”

  “You know. You do know, and you just lied, and that, at this point in the night…” He shook his head and rubbed his eyes. “It’s not what we need. It simply will not do.”

  “My brother’s had a long day,” the one behind her said. “I’d warn you that he’s a less patient man when he’s tired. You’re not expected to know him as well as I do, so I’ll give you some insider perspective. He’s worn down right now. It’s been a trying day. For us, and for others.”

  She wanted to turn and see him, but looking away from the one on the couch seemed risky. He had the only pistol she’d seen but surely the other one was armed too. My brother, he’d said. She wondered where they were from. They spoke without accent. Flat affect. Someplace in the Midwest. Someplace near the center of hell. They had not taken her jacket from her and so she still had the bear spray, but what use it might be she couldn’t imagine now. Cause them some pain, but that would only anger them more. Blinding them in a cloud of poison and running through it for the shotgun? It would never work.

  “Tell me, then,” Allison said.

  That brought a tilt of the head and an almost amused stare from the man on the couch. “Tell you?”

  “Yes. Why are you here?”

  For a long time he looked at her and did not speak. Then he said, “I believe your husband is in the mountains. Leading a group of boys. Troubled boys. Very honorable thing to do. Because if you don’t stop the trouble in a boy early? Well, then. Well.”

  “It simply won’t stop,” his brother said. “Once trouble takes hold, Mrs. Serbin? It won’t stop.”

  The man on the coach leaned forward and braced his arms on his knees. “Do you know which boy it is?”

  Allison shook her head. “I don’t.”

  “This time I believe you. But it’s irrelevant. Because we know which one he is. So we don’t require that information from you. What we require is his location.”

  She knew what was coming now as if a map had been drawn for her. They wanted the boy and they wanted to move with speed. The thing she had wanted to take from them, time, was the very thing they could not afford to grant. There were other ways to find Ethan, but not faster ways, not for them. So they intended to travel via shortcuts. She was one of those.

  He commenced rubbing his face again with a gloved hand. Somewhere behind Allison, his brother shifted, but still she did not turn. Let him move. She couldn’t watch them both, so there was no point in trying. They would ask her for Ethan’s location now, and when she did not tell them, it would go bad fast. She saw that on the map but she also saw that the destination was the same no matter which route she took. There were detours available to her but no exits.

  So it would go this way, then. They would ask and she would answer and they would be done with her. Or they would ask and she would not answer and they would not be done with her.

  “We’re going to need to catch up with your husband,” the man on the couch said. “I assume you realize that by now.”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you tell us where we might find him? Remember that he, personally, is of no interest to us.”

  He was willing to try one tactic, at least, before resorting to more direct means. Willing to pretend. She would now hear that no harm would come to Ethan if she told them where he was, and no harm would come to her. His heart wasn’t in it, though. At some point he had looked at her and an understanding had transpired between them. He would not waste his efforts on a lost cause, and convincing her that she had any hope of safety was a lost cause. She knew that they were here to kill a boy because that boy had seen them, and now she had seen them. All of this lay unspoken between them. And what it meant.

  “He will be,” she said.

  That earned a raised eyebrow. “You think?”

  She nodded. “You won’t just take the boy. Not from Ethan.”

  “But we’re going to have to.”

  “It won’t go easy for you.”

  He seemed pleased by that prediction. “Sometimes it doesn’t.”

  He left the couch and leaned down on one knee and reached for the woodstove. Opened the door and let smoke out into the room. A few embers clung to life. There was a basket of kindling beside the stove and he took a handful and began to build a fire.

  “The technique has been good to us today,” he said.

  “It has,” his brother answered. “Cold in here too. A cold night.”

  The flames caught the fresh fuel and grew and he added a log then and sat back and watched the fire take hold. There was an iron rack of tools on the wall—ash broom and dustpan, poker, tongs. He ran his fingertips over all of them as if undecided on the best option and then let his hand float back to the tongs. Removed them from the rack and dipped the business end into the flame and allowed the iron to soak in the scorching heat.

  “Please,” Allison said, and he looked up at her as if with genuine surprise.

  “Pardon?”

  “Please don’t.”

  “Well, you’ve had your opportunity to cooperate. Surely you can’t blame me for the consequences of your own decisions, your own actions?”

  “You’ll spend your life in prison for this,” she said. “I hope the days are long for you there. I hope they are endless.”

  He removed the tongs from the fire and smiled at her. “I don’t see anyone here to arrest me, Mrs. Serbin. In fact, it is my understanding that your sheriff is dead. The law has changed with our arrival, do you see? You are now in the jurisdiction of a new judge.”

  “This is the truth,” his brother acknowledged, and then the deep red glow of the iron tongs was approaching Allison and she spoke again.

  “There’s a GPS.”

  He seemed almost disappointed. As if he’d expected her continued resistance and had not thought she would be so easy to break.

  “Cooperation,” he said. “Marvelous.” That word again, said slow, as if he liked the flavor. “Where is this GPS?”

  “Nightstand. By the bed.”

  His brother moved without a word and quickly returned with the GPS in his hand. He was studying it.

  “Does it track them or does it just have the planned route?”

  “Tracks them.”

  The one by the fire rose and hung the tongs back on the wall. Allison prayed that he would come closer, join his brother in looking at the GPS, finally be close enough that she would have a chance to get them both with one shot of the bear spray.

  He didn’t. He walked to the end of the couch, the two men still well separated, and said, “Show us where they are.”

  She reached for the device. Her hand was trembling. The man who smelled of smoke and blood handed her the GPS and she tried to make it look as if she fumbled it on the transition, tried to hide the way her thumb came down on the red emergency button, the one that issued the distress signal. You couldn’t just tap it, though; the emergency responders didn’t want to be inundated with accidental SOS calls. You had to hit it three times in succession.

  She’d hit it twice before the first punch came, and as she fell she hit it the third time and then dropped it as a kick caught her high in the stomach and hammered the air from her lungs and left her curled in a ball of agony, trying to choke in a breath as blood flowed from her shattered nose and torn lips.

  “Emerge
ncy signal,” the man who’d struck her said, not even looking at her, his attention back on the GPS. “She just called for a rescue.”

  “Can you stop it?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll see.”

  Allison writhed on the floor and tried to suck in air, but all that came was the taste of hot copper. She wanted to reach for the bear spray but first she needed to breathe, and her hand went to her stomach instead of her pocket, a reflex action—touch where it hurts. The long-haired man bent and grabbed her by her hair and dragged her backward, fresh pain flooding in even as she drowned in what was already there.

  “She should hope,” he said, “that the rescue team is very fast.”

  He dragged her close to the fire and dropped her on the floor and then knelt to take the tongs from the rack. His brother was still looking at the GPS, trying to abort the signal. Allison rolled onto her shoulder and found the bear spray and withdrew it. There was a plastic guard on the trigger. She snapped that off with her thumb, and at the sound of the breaking plastic, the long-haired one turned back. When he spotted the pepper-spray canister, she saw something unsteady in his eyes for the first time. Saw all of the anger he kept wrapped behind the cloak of cold calm. It was there for a flicker and then gone. The cloak returned, and with it a menacing amusement. A smile spreading beneath that frosted stare.

  “Very good,” he said. “Pepper spray. Very good. But Mrs. Serbin? As proud as I am of you for the effort, you’re pointing it the wrong way.”

  The muzzle of the spray canister was facing away from him, back toward Allison herself.

  She spoke to him through a mouthful of blood. “No, I’m not.”

  She closed her eyes then and depressed the trigger, aimed not at his face but at the open door of the woodstove just behind her head, and the living room seemed to explode. A cloud of fire rolled out of the stove and over her and the flames caught her jacket and hair and then found her flesh.

  She willed herself to keep holding the trigger down. Keep spraying. Keep feeding it. Knowing even in the agony the thing that she had known from the start: the pepper spray was not weapon enough to fight these men.