by Jude Hardin
3 TERRIFYING THRILLERS
RATTLED
BAD NURSE
GHOST
Jude Hardin
RATTLED
Copyright © 2014 by Jude Hardin
It had been twenty years since I’d picked up a hitchhiker, so naturally I chose the one carrying a rattlesnake in a coffee can.
He was an older guy, mid-to-late sixties, with long gray hair and a scraggly beard. From the highway, he’d looked harmless. He wasn’t. He started revealing his intentions about half a mile from where I’d picked him up.
“You do what I tell you to do,” he said. “Or I’ll pull the lid off and throw him on you. We’re a long way from a hospital, and I doubt you’d make it.”
“How do I know there’s really a snake in there?” I said.
“How do you know there’s not?”
Good point, I thought. He tilted the can toward me and pressed his fingers against the edge of the lid. Now I could hear the rattle shaking.
“You want to find out if there’s really a snake in here?” he said.
“Nope,” I said.
It was 5:30 in the evening, December 2.
My birthday.
The sun had set on an exquisite, crystal clear fall day, the kind everyone in northeast Florida longed for more of. Bright sun, low humidity, highs in the mid seventies. Perfect.
At a little after five, my wife Juliet had sent me on an errand. There was a grocery store down in Keystone Heights that stocked a lot of items from local growers, and she’d heard that the ruby red grapefruits were particularly fine this year. She wanted some for breakfast tomorrow morning, she said. Of course it was just a ruse to get me out of the house for a while, to get everything set for the surprise party. That’s what I figured. After all, you don’t turn fifty every day.
About halfway there, traveling in my 1996 GMC Jimmy on a long and lonely stretch of State Road 21, I spotted the guy with his thumb out. Any other day, I would have just ridden on by. Hitchhiking is dangerous business, on both ends. If you’re the driver, you never know who you’re going to pick up. If you’re the hitchhiker, you never know who’s going to be behind the wheel. It’s like Russian roulette. You might get lucky, or you might get a bullet in the brain.
So, normally, I wouldn’t even have thought about stopping, but this guy looked OK. He wore jeans and a long-sleeve chambray shirt and a fishing vest. Hiker’s backpack, sturdy boots, cardboard sign that said GAINESVILLE. He looked like the kind of guy who’d decided long ago to make the road his home. I didn’t expect any trouble from him. Just your everyday drifter trying to get from one place to the next, I thought.
But of course I thought wrong.
“What do you want?” I said.
He set the red Hills Brothers can on the floorboard between his feet. It was still rattling.
“There’s a turnoff about ten miles down the road,” he said. “I’ll show you where.”
“But your sign says Gainesville.”
“My sign lies.”
“So where are we going?”
“You’ll see. Just shut up and keep driving.”
He had a beaver skin hat, the kind Harrison Ford wore in the Indiana Jones movies, and he reeked of tobacco and bourbon.
He wanted me to be quiet, so I was determined to talk as much as possible. Just to be contrary. I didn’t think he was going to open that coffee can and throw that rattlesnake on me. I didn’t think he was that stupid. For one thing, the snake might turn around and bite him after biting me. For another, I might wreck the car and kill us both. Opening that can in such tight quarters, while barreling down the highway at seventy miles per hour, would be just as hazardous for him as it would for me. I didn’t think he was that stupid, but I wasn’t quite ready to call his bluff. Not yet.
“What’s your name?” I said.
“Not important.”
“My name is Nicholas Colt, in case you were wondering.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Let me tell you a little bit about myself, since we have some time to kill. I’m a private investigator. Or, at least I was. I lost my license over a narcotics bust, but I still take cash-under-the-table jobs as a security consultant sometimes. A man has to make a living, you know? A long time ago, before I started doing the PI thing, I was a professional musician. Maybe you’ve heard of my band. Colt Forty-Five. We had a nice string of hits back in the mid to late eighties. Still get airplay on the classic rock stations. I was rolling in cash back then, had mansions on both coasts. Unfortunately, all that came to a screeching halt when our chartered jet crashed and burned one afternoon. I was the sole—”
“Clam it,” he said.
“Sorry. Was I boring you?”
“Shut up.”
“Anyway, I was on my way to pick up some fruit for my wife just now. Down in Keystone. She’ll be wondering what’s taking me so long. Maybe I should go ahead and call her, tell her I’m going to be a while.”
My hobo friend was starting to get agitated. He reached over and snatched my cell phone from the drink holder in front of the center console, rolled down the window and whizzed it out to the pavement.
“No phone calls,” he said.
“That wasn’t very nice, Snake. Do you mind if I call you Snake?”
“I thought I told you to be quiet.”
“How about I just pull over to the shoulder and get out,” I said. “You can have the car. Really. I’ve been thinking about getting a new one anyway.”
“I don’t want your car, mister. If I wanted it, I’d take it.”
I needed to put this nonsense to an end. There was a .38 caliber revolver in the glove compartment, and I was waiting for the right opportunity to grab it and force this idiot out of my car. I didn’t know what his game was, but I definitely didn’t intend on taking him all the way to his destination.
“So what do you want?” I said.
“A drink, for one thing.”
He pulled a pint of whiskey from one of the pockets on the fishing vest. He unscrewed the cap and took a big swig. From the same pocket emerged a pack of cigarettes. Full flavor, crushproof box. It was one of the cheapest brands you could buy. I’d tried them one time, back when I was still smoking. One time had been enough.
“Would you mind not smoking in here?” I said. “I quit a couple of years ago, and I really can’t stand to be around them anymore.”
Especially the ones that smelled like cow manure.
He patted his pockets, ignoring my request. “You got a light?” he said.
“No,” I lied.
He punched in my car’s cigarette lighter with his thumb, waited about thirty seconds, pulled it out and said, “Cold as a stone.”
“I could have told you that,” I said. “It quit working years ago.”
That’s when he reached for the glove compartment. I tried to beat him to it, but he grabbed my hand and started twisting my fingers. I thought he was going to break them, and I definitely couldn’t afford another crippling injury. My left hand, which had a death grip on the steering wheel at the moment, had been stomped on by a vengeful hillbilly on a job up in Tennessee a while back. Six surgeries later, it still ached like a bad tooth twenty-four-seven. It was the reason I couldn’t play guitar professionally anymore.
I pulled my hand away, opened and closed my fist in an effort to work the pain out of my fingers. The coffee can started rattling louder than ever. Apparently the snake wasn’t very happy about all the commotion.
“You just stay on your side there, mister. Try anything like that again and—”
“All right,” I said. “You made your point.”
I looked straight ahead, into the abyss. Into the flat, infinite ribbon of two-lane
blacktop. I knew what was coming next.
“Well, what do we have here?” he said, pulling the .38 from the glove box. “I don’t ever carry a piece myself. Don’t even own one. Guns can get you in all kinds of trouble. Rattlesnakes, not so much. It’s not illegal for a convicted felon to carry a snake around. Oh, it’s frowned upon, but it’s not illegal. They can’t put you in jail for it. But this is a nice revolver you have here. Smith and Wesson. The best. And it might just come in handy tonight, you being such a wildcard and all.”
Now I was worried.
“Be careful with that thing,” I said. “It’s loaded.”
“Oh, I’ll be careful with it all right. You can be sure of that.”
I basically had two choices: I could run the car into a ditch or a tree or something and hope the impact killed him and not me, or I could take him where he wanted to go. Crashing the car wasn’t much of an option. We both might survive, and he would still have the gun. And the snake. But maybe there was another way. Maybe a little game of chicken was in order.
I downshifted and floored the gas pedal, and the Jimmy’s big V8 Vortec yanked us forward like a toy on a string.
“You want to go for a ride?” I said. “I’ll take you for a ride.”
The speedometer immediately shot to 100.
110.
120.
“Hey, what are you doing? Slow down. You trying to get us killed or something?”
I veered to the left, straddling the center line now, the needle twitching over the 125 mark.
A set of oncoming headlights loomed in the distance.
“This is fun,” I said. “I haven’t driven this fast in a while.”
He pressed the barrel of the .38 against my right temple.
“Take your foot off that accelerator, or I’m going to blow your brains out,” he said.
“Sure, that would be real smart. Then we’d crash, and you’d get killed too. I don’t think you want that, do you?”
“You’re nuts. You see those headlights coming at us? Get over in your lane and slow down. Now.”
He spoke with the kind of frantic urgency you only hear when someone realizes a catastrophe is imminent. He braced himself against the dashboard with one hand, held the gun on me with the other. I tried to project a calm exterior, even though the needle on the speedometer was pegged at 130 and probably in sync with my heart rate.
“I’m not afraid to die,” I said. “I’ve had a pretty good fifty years. A lot of ups and downs, but pretty good. Better than most, I’d say. And I was never all that thrilled about growing old anyway. How about you?”
“Slow down!”
“Tell you what,” I said. “I’ll make you a deal. You throw that gun out the window, and I’ll slow to the speed limit. Then I’ll drop you at the turnoff you mentioned. Everybody wins. Me, you, Mr. Rattlesnake down there, everybody. How about it?”
He eased the gun away from my skull.
He hesitated for a second, and then pointed it at my right foot.
“If you don’t take your foot off that gas pedal, I’m going to take it off for you,” he said.
He cocked the hammer back, wrapped his finger around the trigger.
The approaching headlights were only about a half a mile away now. It was a big truck, an eighteen-wheeler. The driver started blasting his horn at me.
“All right,” I said. “You win.”
I took my foot off the gas, eased back over to the right side of the road. The semi whooshed by, the GMC Jimmy and I shuddering in its wake.
“Good choice,” the old man said. “Dang, I think I might have pissed my pants a little. Now I really need a cigarette.”
I could have used one myself.
“There’s a lighter in the center console,” I said.
Being contrary and aggressive hadn’t gone over so well. Maybe I would have better luck pretending to be on his side.
He opened the lid to the console and found the lighter. A red Bic.
“Much obliged,” he said.
He lit the cigarette, the noxious stench of the cheap tobacco filling the cabin like some kind of poisonous gas. He reached over and switched on the radio, fiddled with the tuning knob until he found a song he liked. “Ring of Fire” by Johnny Cash.
“Mind if I take a slug out of that bottle?” I said, thinking a communal drink might augment my artificial attempt at bonding with him. More flies with honey, my grandmother used to say. In reality, the thought of drinking after the grubby old sot gave me a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.
“No drink for you,” he said. “Alcohol dulls the senses, and I want yours to be nice and sharp. Anyway, we’re not pals now, just because you told me where the lighter was.”
So much for that.
“Well, there’s no reason we have to be enemies,” I said, trying to salvage something from my counterfeit efforts at being congenial. “I can drop you off, and we can forget any of this ever happened. No cops. I promise. I have a criminal record myself, so—”
“Hey, the turnoff’s right up here. Slow down and take a left.”
I slowed down and took a left. He told me to take the next right, a dirt road that wound through the woods. It was completely dark back there except for my headlights, completely isolated from the rest of the world. I made a series of turns at his direction, and finally pulled into a gravel driveway that led to a singlewide mobile home.
There was a large metal tool shed beside the trailer. More like a small barn. A rusty chain and a padlock secured its double set of doors.
He pointed the gun at my face, kept eye contact as he opened the passenger’s side door and backed out slowly. Two motion-activated floodlights mounted to the soffits on both sides of the singlewide switched on and bathed the area in a shade Crayola might have labeled Headache White.
“Cut the engine off,” he said.
I cut the engine off.
He shouted Martha, and a few seconds later a morbidly obese woman emerged from the trailer’s front door. She looked to be about the same age as the hobo. She wore fuzzy pink slippers and a housecoat you could have covered a Buick with. Her hair was done up in a bandana, her eyes pale blue and glassy.
“What you got there, Lloyd?” she said.
“Got us another one. Come on out and give me a hand.”
Martha descended the stairs, the wooden risers groaning under her enormity. She waddled out to the car, smiling and patting her hands together like a chubby little girl in a pastry shop.
“Oh, that’s a nice one,” she said, hunching over and peering in at me. “You done good, schnook-ums.”
“Thanks,” Lloyd said. “Son of a bitch was a little feisty at first, but I think I got it calmed down now.”
I was an it to them. Like a lobster caught in a trap or something.
“What do you want me to do?” Martha said.
“Here. Hold this gun on it while I open the funhouse.”
He handed Martha the revolver. She aimed it at me while Lloyd walked to the shed and stuck a key in the padlock and undid the chain wrapped around the door handles. The doors swung open. Behind them, a white bed sheet curtained the room’s contents. The sheet was dirty, streaked with what appeared to be dried blood.
The funhouse, Lloyd had called it. Agonized moans—muffled but clearly human—emanated from within. It sounded like one person. Female. It didn’t sound like she was having much fun, if any.
The rattlesnake was still on the passenger’s side floorboard in the Hills Brothers coffee can. It was quiet for the moment.
Lloyd walked back to the car and took the gun from Martha. He instructed her to take care of the snake.
“Open your door and get out,” he said to me. “Slowly.”
I opened the door and got out. But I didn’t do it slowly. I did it quickly. I ducked behind the Jimmy and took off zigzagging into the shadows.
Most handguns are practically worthless except at close range, especially with a moving target. I doubted that
drunken old Lloyd would be able to hit anything as skinny and fast as me, and I was right. He fired twice, missing both times.
“Stop,” he shouted.
I didn’t stop.
He fired again. Missed again.
I was home free now. All I had to do was make it into the woods. From there, I could follow the dirt road back to civilization. Find a phone, call the police, send Lloyd and Martha to the crossbar hotel for a long time. I didn’t know what was behind that filthy white curtain, but I knew for sure it wasn’t anything good.
I sprinted up a little hill. I could see the silhouette of the tree line. I could smell the dead leaves and pine needles, their redolence rising like an autumnal potpourri in the cool dryness of the night. I was almost there. Victory was mine. I could taste it.
Unfortunately, I didn’t see the barbed wire fence until it was too late.
The razor-sharp steel barbs gripped my clothes and pierced my skin. As I tried to untangle myself without becoming a gelatinous mass of shredded flesh, Lloyd came up from behind and grabbed me by the collar. When he yanked me backwards, I felt a dozen or so tiny cuts open up on my arms and legs and torso.
I fell to the ground. Lloyd stood over me with the revolver. He had three more bullets and—drunk as he was—would only need one from this distance.
“That was a stupid thing to do, mister. You’re mine, you hear me? You run off like that again, and—”
“Go to hell,” I said.
“You better start cooperating, or things are only going to get worse. I can promise you that. Now get up.”
I rose to a standing position. I was breathing hard, my respirations fast and shallow and labored and wheezy.
I could feel the blood trickling from various points on my body. Lloyd stood a few feet away, wary now, keeping a prudent distance between us. He was too far away for me to land a kick or a punch before getting my head blown off.
“Give me a minute,” I said, trying to catch my breath.
“I ain’t giving you shit. Turn around and start walking.”
I turned around and started walking. Sweat dripped from every pore, stinging every puncture wound from the barbed wire fence. It felt like a busload of people were poking me with soldering irons. Happy birthday to me. For some reason, I was starting to doubt I’d ever see another one.
