“Sir?” Ron asked. He had his hands clasped obediently behind his head, his lips brushing the grungy floor as he spoke. “How’re we supposed to move if we’re laying on the ground?”
Dylan, the skinny gunman who’d threatened to kill me, chuckled. “Like worms.”
Ron looked up at him, but before he could speak, Dylan’s sneakered shoe flashed out, busted Ron in the cheek. Ron yelped and grasped his face, but the skinny gunman moved with him, aiming kicks at Ron’s buttocks. “Move, Wormy! Move along, little Wormy!”
“You!” the gunman in the front of the store shouted at the young Indian woman. “Get your chunky butt out here and lock the store. I want all the lights out and the doors buttoned tight.”
“Do you want me to hand you the money?” the young woman asked. Her voice was steady, not at all the way I’d expect someone to sound when she was staring at a loaded gun.
“Did I ask you to hand me the money?” the gunman demanded. “Do I look like I’m capable of walking around a counter and lifting a few bills out of a register? Now get your dumb ass out here and lock the fucking doors!”
Wordlessly, the woman began carrying out the gunman’s directions.
“That’s right, bitch. Kill the lights.”
She did.
“And don’t even think about triggering the alarm. I know you haven’t yet because it’s under the counter there.” A nod. “That’s right,” he said, his voice oily and cozening. The young woman approached the door with a jangling key ring. “Good girl,” the gunman said. “That’s right…don’t think about running for it…” The woman locked the doors, tested them, turned to face the lead gunman, who I noticed was shorter than the other two. “Now get your ass over there with the others.”
She began to cross the entryway, but before she got far, the lead gunman moved up behind her, snaked an arm around her waist, and began stroking the front of her shirt. The woman resisted, but before she could break the gunman’s hold, he dug the barrel into the small of her back.
“Yeah,” he said, moving the muzzle around to poke her in the ribs. He dragged his gloved hands over her groin, over the mounds of her breasts. “You like that, don’t you, honey.” He began pushing his pelvis into her from behind, grinding himself against her buttocks. “Uh-huh,” he said, the woman shuddering with revulsion now, “you know you like it.”
I looked away, sickened. I wanted to do something, but what could I do? I was nearly as scrawny as Dylan, and I wasn’t equipped with the devil-may-care lunacy he possessed. I had to—
Possessed, I thought.
Malephar.
The idea slammed into me like a bonecrushing fist. What if I allowed Malephar to come forward?
(Yes)
What if I followed through with my original plan, that of combating evil with evil?
(Yessss)
Nervelessly, I began to crawl after Ron on knees and elbows, like some poorly-trained soldier avoiding gunfire.
Cries erupted from the corner area where everyone was being herded. I heard a muffled protest, then someone hushing someone else.
When I joined Ron in the corner, I saw what the commotion was about.
The largest gunman was sitting on a teenaged girl’s legs. He had freed his huge paws of their black gloves and was now sliding his fingers up and down the girl’s back. Her clothes were still on, but I suspected that wouldn’t last long.
Bright rage flickered within me. I gnashed my teeth.
“Get the fuck on the ground,” the lead gunman shouted, dragging the Indian woman around the corner and shoving her toward the group. He was rubbing his ribs. “Fucking bitch elbowed me. You believe that, Dylan?”
“Stop using my name,” Dylan said, but his voice was toneless. I glanced up at him, saw how dead his eyes looked. They were battened on the massive gunman and the teenager he was fondling. The huge paws had graduated to the girl’s lower back, were kneading their way toward her buttocks.
I was quaking with fury, my muscles bunching.
(Let me out)
I ignored Malephar. I couldn’t tell whether the one named Dylan was watching the sexual assault with longing or dismay, but his next words clarified matters:
“Let her go, Fish.”
The enormous gunman stared up at Dylan. “Hey! What the fuck? Just cuz they know your name doesn’t mean—”
“It’s a nickname, man. Take it easy.” A glance toward the door. “C’mon, let’s just take the money and go.”
The lead gunman stalked over to Dylan, gave him a rough shove in the chest. “I decide when we’re leaving, dickhead. And this bitch over here—” The gunman stepped over, and kicked the prostrate Indian woman in the arm, “—this cunt, she elbows me and thinks she can get away with it?”
“You need to stop that talk,” someone said. I pushed up slightly and saw it was the black man, who, up close, was older than I’d at first guessed. Sixty-five at least.
But his expression was unblinking. “You need to stop messing with that girl,” he said to the huge gunman.
“The dude’s right,” Dylan said.
But Fish only cackled, his hands now prying the girl’s legs apart. “Old enough to bleed is old enough for me!”
Then something happened that I wouldn’t have anticipated in a billion years.
Ron said, “She’s just a kid.”
So strained was his voice yet so raw was the emotion it contained that the huge gunman glanced at Ron. So did the assaulted girl, whose face had been mashed into the crook of an elbow, perhaps in an attempt to mentally escape from the degradation being inflicted upon her. She had big brown eyes, light brown hair, quite long, and a squarish but attractive jawline. She was gazing at Ron with something that fell just shy of hope.
The huge gunman glowered at Ron. “The fuck do you care? She your kid or something?”
Ron got swayingly to his knees, grimacing at the cracking sounds they made. “She’s not mine,” he said. “But she’s somebody’s.”
Fish stared at Ron in astonishment, then his big gut began to jiggle. He glanced at the main gunman, who’d been watching the exchange, then they both began to gust laughter.
Ron didn’t back down. “It’s true. You three should get out of here before the cops show up.”
“That’s what I’ve been telling you,” Dylan said. He was jittery now, bouncing on the heels of his sneakers. “We don’t leave soon, we—”
“We what, Dylan?” the main gunman snapped. “We what? From the street it looks like there’s no one here. The lights’re off. If the cops do come by, they’ll think the little Hindu princess here closed early for the night.”
“We stay open twenty-four hours,” the woman said. “My parents never close. The police will know that. They’ll check on the store. They’ll see you.”
“She’s right,” Ron said. “You guys leave now, you’ll have your take and nobody’ll get hurt.”
The main gunman, who’d been eyeing the Indian woman with a mixture of disdain and lust, now strode toward Ron. The way the gunman moved and talked had disquieted me. But now that disquiet blossomed into a full-blown dread. The man had staked a claim as the leader of this motley trio, which meant he’d asserted power not only over Dylan, but over the huge man as well. The lead gunman, I decided, must possess some amount of cunning, a caginess that the other two lacked.
In other words, he was a dangerous man. A man who has seen much and no longer cares about anything, least of all doing the right thing.
And the largest gunman? Fish? He was a sociopath who yearned to inflict harm upon others. Had probably already done so. I had little doubt he had raped women before, perhaps even killed them.
Let me out, Malephar demanded.
I swallowed. No one deserves that.
These wretches do. I’ll leave Dylan alive if you’d like, but only if he doesn’t interfere. These other two, however… they deserve to be gutted.
I couldn’t argue with that. The massive gunman had res
umed his sickening explorations of the teenaged girl’s back. Her friend, lying beside her, was grasping her hand and whispering tearful words to her in an attempt to mitigate the horror.
“Yeah,” the main gunman said, watching the assault. The leader’s muddy eyes were glazed with sadistic pleasure, his mouth half-open.
Animals, Malephar declared.
“I told you to stop it,” Ron said, and actually took a step toward Fish.
“That’s it,” the main gunman snarled, raising his gun toward Ron. “I’m shuttin’ this cocksucker up.”
“They’ll hear you,” the Filipino woman said. “If you fire the gun, everyone in the neighborhood will know there’s a crime in progress. And you’ll be a murderer.”
A feral smile curved the leader’s lips. “Maybe I’m already a murderer.” He let that sink in. Nodded. “Maybe I came prepared, huh?”
With that he reached down, tugged up a leg of his black jeans, and unsnapped a large knife case on his ankle. When he stood erect, he grasped a Bowie knife.
“Hold on,” Ron said, his palms up, but the leader moved closer, poked the tip of the blade under Ron’s jaw, lifted his face with it.
I must admit to harboring the worst thought, the most selfish thought of my life at that moment. If Ron died, Liz would inherit a great deal of money and would be free to enter another relationship. With me.
Yet even as this thought tumbled through my head, it enkindled in me a feeling of such self-loathing that I feared I might vomit. No man, no matter how much he desires a woman, should sink to such emotional depths.
Servant of God indeed.
The gunman bared his teeth in a grin. “That’s right,” he told Ron. “You’re gonna be the first to get it. I can tell by your clothes what a rich prick you are.”
Ron started to speak, but then everything happened fast. The Bowie knife shifted higher, and Ron attempted to stand on his tiptoes. The knife tip pierced his flesh, the razor-sharp blade filleting the soft shelf of his jaw and unleashing a happy stream of blood. Ron let out a gargling, high-pitched cry.
I pushed to my knees, but a flurry of movement drew my gaze. The huge gunman was fiddling with the fly of his jeans.
“Jesus, Fish,” Dylan whined. “You gotta stop it.”
Fish unsheathed his erect penis.
“Let her go!” the black man shouted, up on his knees now.
Fish grabbed for his gun, retrieved it and aimed it at the black man. “You move again, you get this. I don’t give a fuck who hears it.” He grunted, reached up, peeled off his ski mask. “Fucking thing, can barely breathe in it.” The enormous man’s features were slack, formless. A scraggly beard the color of cinnamon reefed his ruddy round face. But when his eyes returned to the girl, his mouth curled into an indecent leer.
Several people were muttering oaths; Ron was still moaning that reedy moan and actually trying to grab the blade that pierced his underjaw. The knife hadn’t gone deep, but a quarter-inch of it was slitting his chin in a delicate filigree, and the blood was splurting over both men’s hands.
And as I watched the blood stream in rivulets down Ron’s wrists, I remembered Ron’s son, remembered Casey as he’d been the other night. Bound to the bed, the handcuffs gouging his wrists and the tender meat of his hands. I remembered Father Sutherland facing down the demon, recalled Sutherland’s awe-inspiring courage in the face of evil.
Wasn’t this evil just as unconscionable?
I thought of the Sweet Sixteen’s victims, those poor girls butchered for no reason, save the satisfaction of a madman’s whims. I looked at the teenage girl, sobbing into her elbow, the monstrous Fish about to tear her open and murder her when he was done.
Yet it was Ron that finally galvanized me, Ron who’d never to my knowledge done anything unselfish in his life, who’d brought others only misery and heartache. Even Ron had proven himself capable of goodness.
Was I so low that I couldn’t still bring some good to the world too?
I closed my eyes, letting my body go limp.
Come forward, I urged.
This time Malephar did not hesitate.
¨¨¨
There was a sensation of weightlessness, of being propelled forward rapidly, as if strapped to some high-speed roller coaster. Yet with it came a singular sense of volition, one I hadn’t anticipated. Far from feeling anesthetized and manipulated, as I’d felt twice that day at St. Matthew’s, I now experienced the most exhilarating feeling of vitality. Malephar did come forward. He did seize control of my body. But I was not subverted or marginalized; to the contrary, I was rendered a willing, thrumming accomplice, my very will transformed into that of the demon. I wanted to spill blood. I wanted to rip flesh and inflict violence on these jackals.
I went for the main gunman first, not only because he was the closest, but because if the Bowie knife plunged any deeper, Ron would be mortally wounded.
One moment I was prone on the tiled floor. The next I was hurtling toward the leader. Yet I didn’t take a step, didn’t push to my feet. I was on the ground one instant, and the next I was flying toward the gunman and his Bowie knife. No creature of the natural world could have moved with such immense speed.
My body crashed into the main gunman’s. At the same moment, I seized his wrist and jerked down, the Bowie knife leaving Ron’s flesh with a wet schlitt. Peripherally, I saw Ron stagger back against the refrigerator door, both hands clamped over his bleeding underjaw, but my attention was lasered on the main gunman, who, Malephar’s tactile clairvoyance instantly revealed to me, was an ex-con named Randy Connelly, a man who’d indeed murdered three people, one of them a delivery boy he’d crunched over in his SUV after drinking too much, his other two victims fellow inmates Connelly had been paid to kill. He had also, I realized as we crashed to the floor, sold drugs to children, not on street corners but from his own squalid apartment.
Which only enraged me further.
The force of my body slamming into his had knocked Connelly’s wind out and completely disoriented him; the impact of our bodies on the hard tile was so great that the vertebrae at the base of his neck fractured, the crunching sound audible even above the shrieks and shouts around us.
I knew the scrawny gunman named Dylan would be too stunned at first to act, but the one they called Fish, the giant who’d been about to rape the teenaged girl, would not hesitate to shoot me. And though Malephar’s powers were prodigious, I suspected there were limits to the wounds he could heal. If I were shot in the head or the heart, there’d be no saving me.
I turned, and just as I’d surmised, Fish had his gun trained on me, was even now in the process of squeezing the trigger. Though we were steeped almost entirely in darkness, I could yet make out the darker circle of the muzzle as it rose toward my face.
I lunged forward, my body sailing over Randy Connelly’s, just as Fish fired. The bullet shattered a glass refrigerator door and sent a ghostly gout of milk spouting from its ruptured container. As the shards of glass and droplets of milk rose into the air, my agile body banged shoulder-first into the metal-walled corner. I knew Fish would be firing again, so I spun along the wall, swiftly flanking the massive gunman. Bullets split the thin layer of metal in my wake, but Fish’s reflexes, though fueled by what I could only assume to be derangement, were no match for mine. I sprang off the wall, spinning toward him as I did, and in the instant before my body reached his, a new vista of sensory input revealed itself to me. I smelled everything in the store: the sour aroma of the rent milk jug. The fear-sweat hovering over the victims of this nightmarish robbery. The rancid stench of bad breath. And Fish, most of all, who reeked of bacon fat and crystal meth and unwashed armpits and unwiped ass. Beneath it I sensed an even more incisive odor, one I associated with Danny Hartman.
The unmistakable perfume of sadism.
I reached down as my body traveled over Fish’s. My thumbnail wasn’t especially long, but when it plunged into his left eyeball, the hard edge of the nail razoring into th
e tender cornea, Fish let loose with such a strident wail that one would’ve have thought I’d crucified him.
Though my momentum carried me over his kneeling body, I plunged my thumbnail deeper, grasping hold of his doughy red face like a bowling ball, and as we tumbled, I twisted his head unnaturally, hauling him off his teenaged victim, sending both of us crashing into a red wire rack full of hanging bags of candy. Our combined weight caused the entire rack to crumple, the metal prongs from which the candy distended gouging our bodies, the candy itself pinwheeling around as though a giant piñata had just exploded.
I didn’t loosen my hold on Fish, whom I now identified as Marlon Meeks. Our bodies jounced on the overturned rack. My grip on his face was tightening, my fingers now compacting his temple, his left cheekbone, my thumb crushing his eye.
I reveled in his wails.
The girl Meeks had been assaulting was on hands and knees now, gaping at her dying attacker with disbelief. The Indian woman, I noticed at a glance, had leaped upon the injured form of Randy Connelly and begun battering his face with wild blows. Within moments, she was joined by the black man, the short woman, and Ron, who though he was still bleeding, appeared furious. Like a pack of wolves, they fell upon Connelly, the black man hammering his upflung arms, the short woman kicking him in the side. Ron was actually impeding the others by shouldering his way closer, evidently bent on exacting revenge on the man who had stabbed him under the chin.
But it was on Marlon Meeks I was focused. I beheld his life’s work as I dug my thumb deeper into his eye socket. I saw him raping multiple women, watched him torturing animals. But the images that floated to the surface and dominated my mind’s eye were the ones that enflamed my fury the most, that whipped my dark passion into a frenzied blur: Marlon staring at his two-year-old sister as she slumbered in her crib, Marlon himself twelve years her senior and certainly old enough to know how unhealthy his thoughts were. Marlon reaching into the crib, one hand gripping his sex, the other rustling the bedsheets…
“Die, pedophile!” I growled, my voice unlike any that had escaped my lips before. “Taste death, you defiler of children!”
Exorcist Falls Page 19
