Devil's Oven

by Laura Benedict

  The blooming twilight hid the creature’s expression, but Bud felt the menace of him, or rather, the absence of anything vital about him. The creature was like the opposite of a black hole—repelling every good or living thing.

  Without any kind of warning or significant sound, a dog ran into the space between them and stopped. Turning toward Bud, it sent up a frantic series of barks. This was no feral stray, but a collared mastiff, glossy with health.

  When the creature took a single step toward it, the dog stopped barking and turned its head to look. Still, Lila didn’t move.

  “Put her down!” Bud screamed.

  But the dog and the creature were locked on one another and ignored him. The dog made a sound in its throat that Bud felt down in his gut.

  Despite all the dog’s training, it lunged at the creature and Lila instead of keeping Bud nailed to where he stood.

  The creature brought his arm up to defend himself, and caught the dog in the throat. It fell on its hind end, but then quickly rolled on its side and struck again. Its teeth sank into the creature’s arm, and now the creature howled.

  The dog clawed frantically at both Lila and the creature. Bud realized it was only a matter of seconds before Lila was seriously hurt.

  Knowing the risk he was about to take, Bud exhaled deeply and aimed for the base of the dog’s skull.

  Within a second of the shot, the dog’s legs stopped moving, and he hung, suspended, from the creature’s right arm. The creature flung it away, and the dog landed in the dirt not far from Bud’s feet.

  Bud glanced down at it. Its eyes were closed, but he couldn’t tell if it was dead or alive. He felt like vomiting. He had never shot a dog in his life.

  When he looked up again, Lila and the creature were almost out of sight.

  “Lila!”

  Knowing he couldn’t chance another shot, he ran after them. Before he had gone a hundred feet, he heard shouting and glanced back to see a second dog, a German shepherd, chasing him. Their brief eye contact was enough to make the shepherd seem to double its speed.

  “Tucker!”

  Flashlight beams blurred the gray dusk behind the dog.

  “Police. Stop!”

  Still running, Bud sought to distinguish Lila’s precious skin from the trees and brush around her, but she had disappeared.

  Which choice gave him a better chance of getting Lila back? The troopers or the creature?

  No contest.

  Let the troopers try to shoot him in the back. He quickened his pace, trying to ignore the pounding in his chest, in his head.

  But he wasn’t fast enough to outrun the shepherd.

  One moment he could hear the dog’s feet brushing the ground right behind him, then for a long, long second, there was no sound at all.

  The shepherd hit him in the upper back with the full force of its body, knocking him off balance and onto the ground. Then the dog was on his chest, and Bud felt its teeth break through the fine calfskin of his jacket and into his shoulder.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Damn you, Pat.

  Dwight rolled the big man onto a blue plastic tarp. For a fat man with two bullets in him, Pat hadn’t bled a whole lot. That was good news, and Dwight desperately needed some good news. Twice in the span of three weeks, he had killed someone. For five years he’d been able to avoid it. He had retired a week after he overheard someone refer to him as Dwight, that butcher. It wasn’t his fault he was good at carving up people. With a father who had been a kosher butcher, he came by his skills honestly.

  He hated that this time it was Pat who was dead. He had meant it when he told Pat he’d done him a solid, that he really owed him. But Pat had freaked out. Pat hadn’t trusted him, and that really hurt his feelings. Everyone knew that if Dwight Yarbro was anything at all, he was trustworthy.

  Should he empty Pat’s pockets, take his ID? What the hell was he going to do with the body? His friend’s body.

  Who was he kidding? People you could trust didn’t shoot you. Well, at least they didn’t shoot you dead. Usually.

  Another forty-five minutes and the girls and the bartenders would be showing up. He hadn’t finished next week’s schedule, and he still had this mess to clean up. Pat was going to be the kind of handful he couldn’t deal with alone.

  Bud’s the only one who could help.

  The thought of getting Bud involved made him feel worse than ever. This was all supposed to go away without Bud getting too messed up. What burned him was that all this bullshit had happened because of some money. It was just money! Now he knew his grandma had been right about money and greed being at the heart of everything that was wrong in the world. Bud was going to hate him after this. But he didn’t know if Bud could hate him any worse than he hated himself at this moment.

  • • •

  Bud’s cell phone rang five, six times. Dwight was about to hang up when a man—someone younger who wasn’t Bud—answered.

  “Who is this calling, please?”

  Dwight checked the number he had dialed. It was definitely Bud’s.

  “Who wants to know?” Dwight said. “Let me talk to Bud. What the hell are you doing answering his phone?”

  The man on the other end cleared his throat. “This is Officer Petrillo of the Eastern Quadrant Trooper Detachment. Who am I speaking with?”

  Dwight swallowed. Shit. This was bad, really bad, on so many levels. I have to keep it together. He ran his hand down the chest of his bloodstained shirt as though he were trying to look respectable.

  “I’m looking for my boss,” he said. “I run The Twilight Club for Bud Tucker. Is there some kind of problem? Is Mr. Tucker okay?”

  He was so freaked out about having Pat lying dead just a few yards away, it didn’t occur to him that something might have happened to Bud until the words were out of his mouth.

  “Mr. Tucker is in custody,” the trooper said. “I need your name, please.”

  Dwight told him what he wanted to know, and assured him that he would certainly make himself available if any questions came up.

  “Wait,” Dwight said when the officer started to hang up. “What’s he been arrested for?”

  “He hasn’t been charged. Yet.” The smug way the trooper said it implied the actual arrest was just a formality. “We’re holding him for questioning about the murder of Danelle Pettit and…”

  “Danelle?” Dwight said. “Danelle’s dead?” He liked her. She was always nice to him, sending leftovers by way of Bud, and making sure he had plenty to eat and drink when Bud and Lila threw their company parties, with the truck business people mixed in with the dancers and bartenders from the club. Bud liked the mix, liked everyone in the same way. Dwight could tell Lila was never thrilled about it, but she smiled and threw the parties anyway. She was phony like that.

  “I’m not at liberty to discuss the details of the case,” the trooper said. “There’s also the possible disappearance of his wife. You haven’t heard from Mrs. Tucker, have you, sir?”

  “I’m not understanding here,” Dwight said. What in the hell was going on?

  “Have you heard from Mrs. Tucker, or do you know her whereabouts?”

  “I’m not exactly a close personal friend,” Dwight said. “She takes off for the city every so often. Maybe she went shopping? She likes the stores.”

  The trooper’s face remained impassive.

  “I’ve got to get back to work,” Dwight said. “Thanks for the info.”

  “We’ll be in touch, Mr.—was it Yarbro?”

  • • •

  Bud, in custody? No one who knew Bud could think he would actually kill someone. Bud just didn’t have it in him. Dwight wanted to kick his own ass for thinking for a second that Bud could have stomached dealing with Pat’s body.

  Shit, again.

  Thirty minutes. That was the most time he had left to do something about Pat. Less time if the police decided to come right over. After that? His money friends up in the city had already sent t
wo people—Anthony and Pat—to talk to him and Bud. How many would there be next time?

  He wasn’t sure where Pat’s car was parked, but there wasn’t time to get him into its trunk so they could both be sunk in some local water. He unrolled the tarp and felt his way into the dead man’s pockets, avoiding looking at Pat’s flaccid, pained face. He apologized as he pulled out Pat’s wallet, keys, loose change, and a box of those wintergreen breath mints Pat was so fond of.

  “Sorry, man,” Dwight said. “I know this really sucks.”

  “You’re an asshole, Dwight. You always have been. But I had hopes for you.”

  Dwight fell back on his heels, stunned. But when he looked closely at Pat’s face, he saw it hadn’t changed.

  “The hell you say?” Dwight said. “Don’t talk to me, dead man. Quit messing with my head.”

  He put the breath mints, wallets, keys, and change in his own front pocket. Then he put the mints in a rear pocket.

  “Maybe you did me a favor,” Pat said. His mouth wasn’t moving, but it was his voice all the same.

  Dwight began to sweat profusely under his arms.

  “Shut up!” he said. It wasn’t right to scream at the dead, he knew. But it wasn’t any more right that Pat was talking.

  “I thought Marie might have been screwing around,” Pat said. “Bugged the hell out of me the way she flirted with every dickbreath who came to the house to fix the toilet or whatever.” He gave a sigh of regret.

  Dwight glanced around, looking for some joker who might be screwing with him. But the voice was definitely Pat’s.

  “I don’t know what the hell is going on,” Dwight said. “I’m sorry, man. You know I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have pulled a gun on me.”

  “She never did, you know,” Pat said. “My mother always told me that when you die, you know everything you ever wanted to know, ever wondered about, ever gave a shit about. Of course, she didn’t use those words. She was a lady.”

  “I know she didn’t like Marie.”

  Pat belched. Just a small one, like he’d had a few swallows of beer.

  “Her loss,” he said. “My mother had a hard life, you know? My granny tried to keep her from marrying my old man by locking her in a closet the night before they were supposed to get married. Tried to make my old man think she had run away. What a bitch.”

  Dwight knew he didn’t have a hell of a lot of time to talk to a dead guy, but he and Pat hadn’t had much chance to talk in the past two years. And they almost never got really personal.

  “Marie never screwed around. She had to fight off a couple of assholes. Including you.” Pat paused.

  Dwight had been drinking back then, and had driven Marie home from a party once when Pat refused to leave. Even as he tried to kiss her, he knew he shouldn’t have done it.

  “I apologize for that,” he said to Pat. “It was an asshole thing to do.”

  Dwight decided he was going crazy. All this shit with Bud, this killing people again—it was making him insane. The police would be there any minute and he would be screwed.

  “Like killing me wasn’t an asshole thing to do?” Pat said. “But I wasn’t honest with you, was I? It ain’t nice to mess with your friends that way, as you well know. We can call it even.”

  “I’ve got to get rid of you, man,” Dwight said. “You wouldn’t believe how sorry I am.”

  “Yeah,” Pat said. “Doesn’t matter. I’m not going anywhere.”

  Dwight had to get Pat’s body out of sight. Both the office and the storage closet had doors that could be locked, but the police would want to see inside because of Lila. There was the kitchen’s lock-in. No. Too much regular traffic.

  Maybe under the stage. No one ever wanted to go under the stage. It spooked people. Dwight likened it to the underside of a bed. You never knew what might be hiding there.

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” he told Pat.

  After grabbing a flashlight from the storage room, Dwight squatted beside the stage and pushed aside the shimmering polyester curtain that trimmed the apron. He flicked on the flashlight and duckwalked to the back. Bud had ordered the stage lights a year earlier, and the crew that had delivered and unpacked the long black crates the lights came in had asked if they should be hauled away. Bud had said sure, but Dwight, who didn’t like to throw away things that might be useful later, had convinced him to keep them. He hadn’t been thinking at the time that they looked like coffins, but now he saw that they did.

  Pat was so heavy—even heavier in death, it seemed—that Dwight had to position one of the smaller step stools beside the crate and raise one end of Pat’s body onto it. It took several tries, and Pat rolled more than once off the stool, collapsing in an undignified heap.

  When Pat’s body was finally inside the box, Dwight stood up, almost breathless. Pat lay on his side, his face stuck into a corner like a kid being punished. The tarp had slid from around him and now Dwight laid it over him as a kind of blanket, covering him from his head to his feet. He apologized again, but Pat didn’t answer.

  As he pushed the box back underneath the stage, and into position beside the others, he tried to think how long he had before Pat started stinking up the place. Two, maybe three days? Everything depended on how serious the police were about going after Bud. It was possible they would tear up the place right away.

  Would they bring in tools and lights and that glowing stuff to search for bloodstains? They were likely to find a hell of a lot of nastier fluids staining the floors and walls. People were pigs. There was nothing like working in a strip club to learn that, and fast.

  But Dwight could deal with only one thing at a time. He needed to wash up the blood, get rid of the cash, put away the 9mm, take a quick shower in the girls’ dressing room, and change into the extra set of clothes he kept in the office. And he only had about fifteen minutes to do it all.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  “Are you all right?”

  Tripp was clutching the steering wheel of his truck so hard that his knuckles had turned white. Jolene was worried for him. She didn’t like the way his aura flickered, like the light from an ugly green bulb. He seemed to have lost all his inner strength, all the good and playfulness she had seen in him when she had first noticed him at the club. She hadn’t told him she had been watching him ever since she started working there. He was already skeptical. And she had played a part in that. Showing him her life, her first life, had weakened and frightened him.

  She didn’t know everything. She didn’t know why he was as vulnerable as he was. Was it from living on the mountain his whole life? The mountain had nurtured him, but now it was destroying him, just as it had her mother, and others she loved. There was no way to explain to him the dual nature of Devil’s Oven. It was just something she understood. She had understood it the moment it saved her, enfolding her in its warmth, like the once-loving arms of her mother.

  “There’s no way they’re here,” he said. “Not Lila. Why would she be at Ivy’s?” He looked at her like he was sure she was lying.

  Jolene wanted to touch his face, to try to heal him. Sometimes she could heal spiritual brokenness the same way she could physical pain.

  “Because he’ll come back here. He has Lila Tucker. I can feel it,” she said.

  “I hope to God you’re wrong,” he said.

  “Ivy knows,” she said. “She began all this. She thinks she needs him.”

  “If this really is some kind of monster that Ivy made…shit, there’s no way,” he said. “You can’t sew up people and bring them back to life. She’s going to tell you you’re crazy. You know that, don’t you?”

  Jolene shook her head.

  “I told you the truth,” she said.

  “Bullshit.”

  “Ivy has a gift.”

  Tripp laughed. “Ivy can sew a seam straight. She has a gift for making pretty clothes.”

  Jolene wondered about her own nature. This part of her that lived now, that touched and tasted and s
ometimes felt happy, or ill, or deeply sad—this part of her needed someone, too. Their coupling in the woods had been necessary for Tripp, so he could be shown the truth. But it had felt necessary for her, too. She was sure she wouldn’t be here long now. She could feel it.

  But first, she had to heal Ivy and Thora. Lila and Bud, too. Tripp would be more difficult. She was sorry there were others, like Claude Dixon, who had just been in the way. She couldn’t help them.

  “I told you already that you scare the shit out of me,” he said. “I’m here because of Lila. You need to get this thing moving, or I’m going to go look for her myself. And it’s not going to be at that Ivy’s place.”

  “I thought you’d believe me by now,” Jolene said. “What more do I have to show you?”

  “Stay the hell out of my head,” Tripp said, stopping the truck in Ivy’s driveway. “Let’s get this over with.”

  • • •

  “He’s been here,” Jolene said. “Can’t you smell it?”

  “If there is a him,” Tripp said.

  They began to search the house.

  “No one’s here,” Jolene said after they had combed the back bedrooms. Standing in the doorway of the guest room, Tripp covered his mouth with a sleeve to keep from gagging at the stench.

  “Jesus,” he said. “It’s like a damn zoo in here.”

  They went to the kitchen.

  “Wait,” Jolene said. “Where’s her sister?” Where’s Thora?

  She pushed past Tripp and hurried back to the living room. Thora’s three-footed cane stood beside the empty chair, and the tissues and medicine bottles had been cleared from the table. Her stomach went cold.

  I couldn’t know everything.

  “Maybe they went out to eat,” Tripp said from down the hallway. “I sure as hell wouldn’t eat here.”

  “The car’s outside,” she said. Her voice was low. Tripp didn’t hear her.

  “Or they’re up at that trailer,” he said.

  Jolene closed her eyes. She couldn’t feel Thora’s presence, a presence she knew. Thora was need, wrapped in anger and pain. She regretted that she hadn’t touched Thora when she saw her that day. She might have been able to give her some relief from the diabetes ravaging her body. She owed Thora so much. Thora had protected Ivy, maybe even loved her.