Dig Two Graves

by Kim Powers

  So why—after years of being dormant—did TJ’s stupid idea of “getting revenge” finally jolt into high gear after such a terrible thing had happened? A man TJ admired—at the lowest possible place he could be . . . and this is what TJ does?

  He sits on a stupid line of Latin for a few hours?

  How much more of a loser could he be?

  He couldn’t do anything right. He couldn’t finish anything.

  Well, now he would.

  Maybe they’d miss him in death; it was the only time TJ had really missed his own father. His father had loved the football field, so that’s where he’d done it; TJ loved the library, so that’s where he’d do it too, both of them swinging from the end of a rope. He had all the materials he’d need here at hand: he could use the rope from that mailing tube sculpture thing that hung from the ceiling, all the way down through the open part of the stairwell. TJ didn’t want Mrs. Castle, the head librarian, to be the one who found him, but since she was the one who always opened up the library in the morning, it would probably fall to her.

  Fall to her? No, that was his job.

  At least he could write her a note, apologizing in advance. Explaining everything. His father had one, a suicide note, explaining what Ethan had done to him. Like father, like son.

  And that’s when TJ remembered—he wasn’t finished. Not yet.

  TJ had said it to Ethan at the gym, when everything began going to hell. “You tell me what happened at the Olympics, and I’ll tell you what I know.”

  TJ had kept his side of the bargain. Ethan hadn’t.

  Now he was about to.

  Scire et taceo.

  To know and keep silent.

  Ethan wouldn’t stay silent anymore.

  Then TJ could come back and kill himself.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  Four in the morning, and Wendy’s door was wide open. She liked living out on the edge of town, in the middle of nowhere, but not so much that she didn’t lock the door at night.

  “Wendy? Wen?” I didn’t care if I woke her up, running in. “Wendy?”

  Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus . . .

  Even in the middle of the night, this was the wrong kind of stillness, the same thing I’d felt when somebody broke into our house. There was a different DNA. You could almost smell it. The scent of fear left over. I knew something was wrong, even before I saw the bedroom.

  The sheets were tousled, a chair was overturned, and there was blood. A lot of it. Probably from where Wendy’s wounds from the lion had started bleeding again and some new ones had been started. And there was the same kind of outline on Wendy’s bed, in spray paint, that had been on Skip’s. This time, the shape of a grownup. Wendy’s shape. With a note pinned in the middle:

  “You’ve got a strong one here. She was harder to take.”

  And on another sheet of paper, the start of another long, insane, rambling poem. The longest one yet. Epic. I’d barely started reading it when a cell phone rang. Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger.”

  “Yeah, I know. I’m a goon,” Wendy had said, the first time I’d heard it play as her ringtone.

  Now, “Risin’ up, back on the street,” words from the song, came at me from somewhere under the sheets. I dug through and snatched up Wendy’s phone.

  On the other end was that voice I could now recognize anywhere.

  “Smile! You’re on candid camera!”

  “You sick fuck! What the hell have you done with . . . ”

  “Labor Number Nine. Stealing the leather belt of the Amazon Queen. Your girlfriend just happened to be in it at the time. That belt she always wears at the zoo. I know I’ve jumped ahead in the lineup, but it was just too good to Skip. ‘Too good to Skip,’ get it?”

  “Please . . . ”

  “Please, please, it’s all you ever say,” the voice mocked me. “If you only knew. How many times I’ve said it. . . . ”

  “I’ll do anything.”

  “Yes. You will. The next four Labors. All combined.”

  “What do you WANT?” I screamed back at him. “You don’t want me dead, you could’ve killed me already . . . so take me, take me instead. I’m begging you. Who are you?”

  “If you don’t know. If you can’t remember. On your own. Then it’s no good.”

  “Know what?”

  “ME. Who I am.”

  “Give me a fucking clue . . . ”

  “I’ve given you. Six of them. Already. And here’s one more. Just ask yourself: what did Hercules. Do?”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  Wendy’s eyes flickered open in the dark, just coming to, and the first thing she saw was Skip’s hands. Her fingers. Her fingernails.

  “I TE WENDY” they read, the fingers between the I and the T taken up by gauze on the fingertips.

  Even in pain, Skip tucked her fingernails down, under her palms, so Wendy wouldn’t see, but the damage was done. Those tiny white letters, painted onto the black polish, the relief of white against black in this room.

  “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean it. I was just mad . . . ” Skip stammered out.

  “Oh my God, Skip, what did he do to you? We saw the letters, the H . . . the A . . . oh my God, are you okay?” Wendy moved to grab Skip’s hand, but she couldn’t. Her own hands were tied up the same as Skip’s, in front of her.

  “It’s okay. It doesn’t hurt anymore,” Skip whispered. “He keeps giving me shots.”

  “He gave me one too I think.”

  Skip could see Wendy trying to make her tongue work in tandem with her brain.

  “He’ll give you some water. It’s okay. It’s not poisoned. I thought it was at first, but it wasn’t.”

  Skip had been moved from the desk in the middle of the room and was now on the floor, leaning up against the wall, next to Wendy. It felt good to touch against someone again, even though it felt sticky. Wendy still had blood on her, from where he must have attacked her. And she was still bleeding.

  “Where are we?” Wendy asked. A light spilled into the room from the command post, and Wendy could just begin to make out what Skip had lived with for days now.

  Madness, turned into murals of the Labors of Hercules. Some of them had a neon X from spray paint slashed through them, as if they’d been completed, or the artist had decided he didn’t like his work anymore.

  “We’re okay until he finishes them all. I think,” Skip said. “He says . . . he says he knows Daddy. He says . . . ” Skip dropped even further into a whisper, afraid he would hear, and she wouldn’t let him hear her fear. “ . . . he’s on crutches . . . sometimes a wheelchair, but he’s scary. I’m so glad you’re here. I’m so scared.”

  “I know, I know.” Wendy kept swallowing, trying to wake herself. Her eyes went over the murals she could see—Skip could feel her body move next to her, just the tiniest little bit, taking it all in. “Your dad’s going to save us, I know he is. He’s got this all figured out . . . these Labors . . . and he’s doing them. You can’t believe how smart he is, how strong, how much he misses you. He’s doing them, one by one, he’s going to do all of them.” Then Wendy paused, as if the Labors really were sinking in, the ones left to be done, and she saw the enormity of it all. “We just have to wait and . . . we can get through this . . . we’ll take you to the hospital, we’ll get your fingers fixed . . . ”

  Now Skip tried to make it better for Wendy, so she wouldn’t be so scared. “Some of the girls at school wear press-on nails. They’re not so bad. You can decorate them with different colors and stuff.” Skip didn’t know if she should tell Wendy everything, but she did anyway. “He’s already killed somebody. His helper. This guy who was trying to help me, and he shot him. He fell on top of me.”

  “Oh my God, Skip . . . ”

  They heard him moving into the room, and his voice. “Ah, ‘girl talk!’ That’s what I like. To hear! Up and at ’em!”

  He moved in front of them, and what Skip saw was maybe scarier than seeing what he really looked like.

  His f
ace. He was wearing some sort of light ski mask sort of thing; only his eyes, mouth, and nose were visible, through slits in the material.

  “Forgive me. For not having my. Face on yet.”

  “Isn’t that hot?” Skip said, then hated herself for even caring how he felt.

  “Hot is the. Least of my problems.”

  Skip would have thought that would be enough to recognize him, the shape of his head, if he’d known her like he said, but with all the other connecting stuff gone—cheeks and skin and a forehead and a chin—it still didn’t add up to anything. He still wasn’t anybody.

  Wendy pushed against the wall, trying to shield Skip from whatever was coming next. He leaned on his crutches and reached toward one of the murals, of Hercules stealing the belt off the Amazon queen.

  “Pardon my reach while I. Check you off. Labor Number Nine. AKA Dr. Borden.”

  As Wendy and Skip cowered together, he nailed Wendy’s leather belt she wore at the zoo into the mural. It fell down onto the top of Skip’s head, as the sound that had become so familiar to her started again. The cap coming off the spray paint can. A ball, rattling inside. A whiff, sprayed into the air, as he made a fresh X through the mural.

  “This is the true. Nectar of the gods. All I had, when I was little, to take myself . . . away. One huff and . . . Valhalla.”

  As much as Wendy wanted to look in Skip’s eyes and let her know that everything was going to be fine—she couldn’t. She could only look on in terror and not have a single thought of what to do next, because she was more terrified than she had ever been in her life.

  “Of course, if you’re keeping count, Skip—and I’m sure that’s all you’ve been doing—you’ll realize I’ve. Jumped ahead a few Labors. He’ll have to backtrack. Do the ones I jumped over. But then we’ll have a. Party! Doesn’t that sound fun? He had one, a birthday. Didn’t he? I was there. Watching. Across the street.”

  “You were there?”

  “I hadn’t been. Invited. Of course.”

  Skip moved closer to Wendy, their bodies pressed so closely together they were like conjoined twins.

  “But even at a distance . . . it made me. Jealous. Everyone forgot my birthday. So I’ll just have to. Make do with you two. As my presents! But what will we do for cake?”

  Skip took the lead. She could do this. She could show Wendy what to do.

  “I could make you one. German chocolate. I made one for Daddy, and I could make you one too. It’s his favorite, even though he doesn’t like coconut just by itself. Do you . . . do you have a favorite? I could make a different kind for you, whatever you like most . . . ”

  “Jelly bean.”

  “What?” Skip tried to keep her voice even, to not let him know how strange it sounded.

  “Jelly bean. My favorite. White icing, studded with jelly beans. One of the nurses. Made it for me. Not a whole one. Just a little . . . what are those called? Just a few bites . . . ”

  “A cupcake?”

  “A cupcake! I wasn’t even worthy. Of a whole cake, just . . . a cup. But my Mamarie made it for me. My favorite . . . teacher? Nurse? My earliest . . . helper. A party for two. Mamarie and me. Yes, we’ll have. Jelly bean cake. When this is all . . . over.”

  His voice began to wind down, and he slowly moved on to the bas-relief of the Sixth Labor, the Stymphalian Birds. So tired it seemed as of he could barely lift his arms, he taped an old photo, torn out of a magazine, to it: of a birthday cake, in faded Technicolor. He blew at the imaginary cake, but he started choking, barely able to get a lungful of air to speak.

  “I’ll huff. And I’ll puff. And I’ll. Die. We all will.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  Mizell hated herself, but she couldn’t help it. She was glad it was Wendy who was gone, instead of her own daughter. LaTrice had just been in the back seat of the car the whole time, curled up and sleeping there. She said she couldn’t sleep with all the talking in the station. Those pictures. It all scared her.

  “I’ll scare you . . . for giving me a heart attack. Why didn’t you tell me you were going out there? I’ve told you . . . ” Mizell grabbed her shoulders, about to shake her, when she started shaking herself. And crying. So relieved that she hadn’t been taken. That she was just sleeping.

  She’d fallen to the tarmac out in the police parking lot and cried and prayed, scaring LaTrice even more.

  And now, this other woman had been taken, and Mizell wanted to cry again.

  Not just because it was a horrible thing, but because it wasn’t her little girl.

  “You know what to do,” Mizell said to her forensics team in Wendy’s bedroom, and they started doing it. I flashed back to days ago, the nightmare starting all over again, déjà vu, except with a different victim. Fingerprint powder came out and went on the bedposts and doorknobs; Wendy’s twisted sheets were picked up and dropped into giant evidence bags.

  And they swabbed up blood and put it in plastic vials.

  “She’s already lost so much blood on account of me, at the zoo, and now she just gets home and . . . ” I couldn’t finish saying it. Or thinking it.

  “Hopefully she hurt him,” Mizell said. “If there’s blood other than hers mixed in with this, we can start running it through the system. We might get a hit.”

  “There wasn’t any blood with Skip. Not when he took her. Well, her fingernails. There was blood on her fingernails. When he sent them back,” that other FBI guy said. Zaccaro. Walking dead.

  “He’s ratcheting up,” Michaelson said to Mizell. “At least with the fingernails, he’d been provoked . . . ”

  Didn’t they realize I could hear them, sitting right there in a chair, dazed, as Mizell and the two FBI guys worked through Wendy’s bedroom, dressed in white paper HAZMAT suits and booties and looking for a hidden camera.

  “That’s what he said, when I first picked up her phone. ‘Smile. You’re on candid camera.’”

  “We’ve got a team over at your house, looking to see if there are any hidden cameras there, like this one.” Zaccaro pulled what looked like a tiny little bulb from the crown molding at the ceiling, in Wendy’s bedroom. “You have any workmen in your house over the last few weeks?”

  “A cable guy. They offered us a free upgrade,” I said, still in a daze. “Skip wanted it. More channels.”

  “That could have been him, planting cameras instead. It’s like he always knows where you are. We’re going back in, double-checking all the sites you’ve been to . . . the science lab, the ski lift . . . if there are cameras, there could be fingerprints . . . ”

  “My fault, it’s all my fault. Wendy was mad at me, and distracted. She says you can’t get distracted around animals, but she was, and he was . . . he was here. Waiting. He’s taking everybody I love. And he’s trying to kill me now, with the fire . . . ”

  “I think he knew you could get out. I think he just did that—to distract you. Tie you up, while he was here, doing this. Make sure you didn’t show up,” Mizell said.

  “It’s like the Olympics. He keeps getting me to the point of exhaustion, like I can’t go on, like I want to be dead, and then . . . one more thing you’ve got to do. It’s somebody who knows what that feels like . . . it’s like I’m redoing the whole fucking thing, all twelve events at Sydney, for an audience of one.”

  “I think we should get you to the ER, get you checked out,” Mizell said, looking at me. “Your ankle. Your burns. Make sure you didn’t get a concussion.”

  “No hospital. I don’t have time.”

  Twenty-four hours. I had twenty-four hours. That’s all. And I knew where he wanted me to go next. I’d figured it out, the minute I saw part of the latest poem he had left for me on Wendy’s bed.

  They guard the nests at the old petting zoo . . .

  A fun place to go . . .

  Before the horses became glue.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  Skip had been so careful to just whisper, to not draw attention. To stay . . . under the radar. No m
ore. She raised her voice, to the man in the next room. She could feel him in there, just waiting. Looking. “Please, get Wendy some help. She won’t stop bleeding where her arm’s hurt so bad. She won’t wake up. You’ve got to help her . . . she’ll bleed to death . . . ”

  He wheeled himself into the room in his chair, evidently too tired to stand anymore, and still wearing his mask. Skip watched his hands grip the wheels, pushing himself along; his hands seemed more fragile now, like it was almost too hard to even gain any momentum on a flat floor. “I’ve often wondered. How that would feel. Bleeding out. It’s not sudden . . . you’re mostly asleep . . . it doesn’t hurt. You just. Slip away. That’s how. I’d like to go.”

  Ignoring Skip, almost lost in his own world, he wheeled himself to the murals on the wall and began adding in more elements.

  A bird’s wing, crawling with lice.

  A toy plastic horse, white with black markings. A tiny strip of leather for reins and a metal bit in the mouth, to complete the picture. He hammered it with a long nail into the eighth mural and barely seemed to notice when the long nail smashed the hollow body of the horse to pieces.

  “You’ve gotta let us outta here,” Skip said, risking everything. “If something happens to you . . . it looks like you’re . . . that you don’t feel well. We’d be stuck . . . nobody knows where we are . . . we’ll starve . . . please . . . ”

  He started gliding back to the other room. But just before he went over the threshold, he suddenly reached up and whipped off the mask he’d been wearing.

  “Here, wrap up her hand with this.” He flung the mask over his shoulder to Skip. “I won’t be needing it much longer.”

  To Skip, that could only mean one thing, as she whispered in a panic to Wendy, trying to shake her. “He’s going to kill us. He’s getting ready to show us his face. He doesn’t care if we see him anymore. You’ve gotta wake up. He’s just got three Labors left. We’ve gotta get out.” Skip joggled her body against Wendy, both of them still tied up down on the floor, but Wendy didn’t move.