by Chuck Wendig
By now, everything’s gone tunnel vision. The roar of blood pounds in her ears. Her wrists feel tight.
At the back, she sees him.
Mahoney. Owen Mahoney, to be exact.
“This prick,” Guy said. “He’s not someone you wanna mess with, ’Lanta. He’s been around for years. Doesn’t work with one bunch but works with them all: the Death’s Head Riders, the Romans, the Poles, some other one-percenter assholes. He’s like the Swiss Army knife of white supremacist cabrónes. He does it all. Getaway driver. Leg-breaker. Killer. Did a stint up in Frackville, just got out a year ago or so—been keeping a lower profile ever since.” She asked Guy where he hung out. Guy hesitated. She said she’d leave Mahoney alone—a lie, so many lies now—and he said, “Fine. He’s got some kinda owner stake in the Wagon Wheel off of 29 in Grainger Hill. He hangs there most days and nights.”
And here he is.
He’s fuzzy, grungy, like a rangy pit bull with a bad case of mange, leaning back in a booth, feet up on the table, looking at his phone. A Yuengling sits in front of him.
Eyes start to turn toward the girl who just came through the door.
Atlanta hot-steps it right toward the back.
The bartender says: “Hey. You. You’re not s’posed to be in here—”
But she keeps walking even as his protests get louder.
She closes in, and Mahoney doesn’t move a muscle—but his gaze flicks from his phone to her. She gets right up to the table. The floor shakes behind her as the human mountain bartender grabs for her arm.
Mahoney hisses like a cat. “Hold up, Derek, shit.” Then, to Atlanta: “What is it, Red? I’m busy.”
“I brought you this,” she says, holding up the bag. Her voice shakes. She can hear it shake. Be cool, you idiot.
Mahoney takes his boots off the table and leans forward. His eyes are these black circles—like thumbtacks stuck there, almost colorless. The skin around them is baggy and dark. He nods, and she puts down the bag.
He takes it, opens it, gives a sniff. “I didn’t order food.”
She pulls her arm out of the bartender’s grip. “I was told to bring it,” she says. “To you.”
“To me.”
“To you, yeah.”
“Who told you that?”
She knew it might go this way so she pulls out the only name she thinks might matter here: “Mister Carrizo.”
A smile curls up at the edges of his mouth. He looks her up and down, and then her heart leaps right into her throat and gets stuck there like a frog in a drinking glass—oh, god. That was the wrong thing to say.
Suddenly, it’s not about the food.
It’s about her.
“Carrizo knows how to treat a guy,” he says. “I like people with money. Real money. Higher class of folks, you know?”
He thinks she’s what Ty Carrizo sent over.
The meal: just an excuse.
But that’s not it at all—she didn’t want it to go this way. The meal is the deal. The meal is the one part that matters. Shit, shit, shit.
He stands up, grabs her wrist. “C’mon, Red. We can make this quick. You can earn your dole, then I can eat the—what is that? Chicken parm?”
“Meatball parm.”
Owen Mahoney whistles with his chapped lips. “Oooh. All right. Let’s go.”
“Wait,” she says, swallowing hard. Her wrist in his grip makes her feel like a rat in a trap. I have to get out of here. This is all wrong. “You should eat first. Build up a . . . build up your strength.”
“My strength?” He sniffs. Gives a look to Derek the bartender: the big mountain jiggles with quiet laughter. “Red, I’m good. I don’t like to eat beforehand. I don’t wanna be all belchy when we do it.”
“It’s . . . it’s okay, I don’t mind.”
“You’re nervous. Oh, Red. This’ll be over fast enough.”
He starts to lead her away from the table.
She looks to the food, sitting there on the table—receding as they move away from it, toward the back. The food is everything. That’s where she crushed up the Ambien. In the drink. In the sauce of the sub. Even sprinkled on the damn fries. Enough of the stuff to knock out a whole stable full of Clydesdale horses.
But none of that matters if he doesn’t eat it.
She thinks: Just run. Pull away. Run out the door. Maybe he’ll still eat it anyway, not wanting to give up a free meal. She tries to pull away, but his grip is strong like a vice. He laughs, keeps pulling. It’s like something out of a nightmare, one of those bad dreams where your feet are stuck in greasy mud and you can’t pull them out, can’t get anywhere, and the thing that’s chasing you is right up on you, and ain’t nothing you can do about it, not one dang thing—
She thinks: Just go with it.
Go as far as you have to but not as far as he wants.
A plan starts coming together. A broken, jagged thing—like so much of her life, a puzzle with too few pieces—but some are better than none.
Mahoney pulls her down a brick-lined hallway.
They pass a door: EXIT.
One last chance to run—but she doesn’t take it. They keep going. Toward a back room. EMPLOYEES ONLY.
All parts of her are lit up like a murderer in an electric chair—every molecule in her body frozen and screaming. But she tries to hide it, tries to shove the fear down into a hole.
Through the door: a wood-paneled office, dimly lit. Industrial metal desk. Porn up on the walls: just nasty, nasty business, women doing things to men, other women—kind of stuff you can only find in the strangest parts of the Internet. He directs her toward a ratty green couch with car magazines on the cushions. He sweeps them away onto the floor, then kicks them underneath.
Nearby is another door—it’s open. She sees a toilet and sink in there.
Already Atlanta’s looking around the room for any kind of weapon: she’s got her baton in her bag, but she may need something bigger, sharper, meaner. There’s a stapler on the desk. A letter opener. A couple pint glasses.
Then it hits her.
She has a different weapon on her.
Same weapon she’s been planning on using all along.
Owen Mahoney starts unbuttoning his pants—but she clears her throat, tells him to hold up. “Ty sent these over, too,” she says, taking out the little baggy with pills in it. The Ambien are inside.
Little blue pills with As on them and the MGs printed on the back.
It strikes her, then: there’s another pill looks similar. Pale blue. An A on them, too—different A, smaller A, but maybe he won’t know, or won’t look, or won’t care. She says, “Oxy. Will make us feel good beforehand.”
“Party girl,” Mahoney says. “Great.” He takes the baggy, shakes out one into his palm.
“Take three,” she says. “Those are only tens.” Meaning ten-milligram pills.
He nods, pops out two more. “You want three, too?”
“I took mine already,” she says. “You know, uh, pharmaceutical courage and all that. You should, ahh, you should chew ’em up real good. Make ’em work faster.”
He nods. “Good idea.” Into his mouth they go. Crunch. Dry swallow. He moves toward her for a kiss—
She pulls away. “Can I freshen up a bit?”
“No,” he says, then kisses her.
Revulsion runs through her. His tongue tastes like beer and chewing tobacco and pulverized pharmaceuticals.
She tries her damnedest not to throw up in his mouth.
She pulls away. “I gotta pee. Won’t be a minute.”
He holds her wrists so hard it hurts. “You can hold it.”
She tries to play it funny, tries to be quick and smiley, though she can hear how scared she sounds even when she says: “You don’t want me to piss all over this nice floor. Plus, it’ll give us time for the Oxy to work.”
He hesitates.
Then his grip loosens. “Toilet’s there. Sink. Go on.”
She tries not to run screa
ming into the dingy bathroom. Even still, she puts a spring in her heel and once she’s in there, she closes the door—again slowly, softly, denying every urge to slam it, letting it click gently shut.
Then she locks it.
Tries not to cry.
Tries not to throw up.
She sits on the toilet.
The bathroom’s dirty—black mold around the base of the toilet, the sink with a rime of grime on it. It smells okay, though: a chemical vanilla odor rises from an unlit, scented jar candle there on the sink next to a bare sliver of soap.
Wait—right.
Her hand darts out, spins the sink faucet, lets a little water trickle out. Hopes like hell it matches the sound of her tinkling.
Atlanta works to catch her breath. This is all going sideways. Slipping in the wrong direction like a car on an icy mountain road.
A knock on the door.
“Hey,” comes Mahoney’s voice. “Occurs to me that you look familiar.”
“Nope,” she says, working hard not to cry out. The fear sound that wants to come up out of her has to be strangled in its crib before it ever wakes up. “Don’t figure.”
“Something about you. Red hair. That accent.”
“Nope. Wait. Wait. I . . . I’ve worked with Ty before. Maybe that’s it.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
Dangit.
She calls out: “Oh, man, I . . . I got bad news.”
A grunt of disapproval on the other side. “Jesus, what?”
“I’m on the rag, mister. Aunt Flo’s here.”
Another grunt, then a laugh. “So? Your mouth and your ass ain’t on their period, are they?”
Her stomach lurches.
“You gotta be done in there,” he says. “Come on out now.”
He rattles the knob.
She braces her foot against the door.
Rattle, rattle.
“Open up,” he growls.
The door shakes now.
“I don’t feel so well,” she says.
“I don’t feel like I give a shit,” he barks back.
The door bangs.
She thinks: What now, what to do, how do I get out of this? Maybe puke on herself. He won’t want to touch her then. More likely he won’t care. He’ll take what he thinks is his anyway. She should’ve never come in here.
Atlanta wants to kick herself.
Call the others. That’s an option. Get them in here. They’ll help.
But that’ll put them in danger, too. She won’t be able to stomach that—any of them get hurt, that’ll weigh on her shoulders till she’s six feet deep. (A day she fears now is coming far sooner than she’d like.)
“Goddamnit,” Mahoney roars on the other side of the door.
There, on the sink. Only thing in here that counts as a weapon beyond the lid to the toilet tank—that’d be too heavy to use. She could get out the baton, but this room is so small, she won’t have much room to swing it.
The candle. Glass jar. Fits in her palm okay.
She stands up, holding the jar tight in her right hand.
The door strains against its hinges.
He curses on the other side.
Then a moment of silence.
She thinks, Maybe he’s gone.
Gone to do what? Get the others, maybe. Get a weapon.
But then the door pops open wide—she has to tuck in her knees so it doesn’t hit them. And there he stands. Owen Mahoney, chest rising and falling, staring out at her, leering like a starving lion.
“You little tease,” he says.
Those three words slur together.
His face changes—it’s like he hears the sludgy drift in his own voice. And it bewilders him. His eyes narrow and he looks down at himself. At his hands. He moves his hands, watches them.
His words go wibbly-wobbly when he says: “Thah wuzn’t Ocks . . . Ocks . . . eeeee.” He swipes a paw at her, but she pins herself against the wall of the little bathroom. His clumsy bludgeon misses.
Atlanta gives him a hard shove.
He goes ass down, heels up.
Now, she thinks, it’s time to make a call.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“Is he dead? He’s dead,” Shane says, pacing back and forth.
“He’s not dead,” Atlanta says, pretending to be sure. But just in case, she checks his pulse. Mahoney’s got life in there yet—but it’s just a flutter, like holding a spider in the palm of your hand, a faint tickle. She wonders: Is it too weak? She needs him alive. He has information she wants. But if he dies, he dies. He’s not a good person, and unjust men deserve unjust ends. And yet, if that’s true, why does the thought of him dying fill her with panic? And sadness? Don’t die, don’t die, don’t die.
Above their heads, leaves starting to lose their green shake and shudder as a pair of squirrels run free. The fading light of day comes at them from the side like a wolf on the hunt. Mahoney sits at the base of one tree, an old paper birch, with so much duct tape binding him up that he’s practically a duct tape mummy.
Steven says, “What do we do?”
“We wait,” Josie answers. A hard, firm thrust in her voice. Maybe a little fear, too, but for her first time exposed to all of this, she’s tougher than Atlanta figured. And there Atlanta chides herself, because the reason she thought Josie wouldn’t hack it was because she is a girl. Except Atlanta herself is tougher than most boys she knows. Shane’s the one here who’s gone the color of overmilked coffee.
“He’ll wake up soon en—” Atlanta’s about to say enough, but then Owen Mahoney takes a long, deep gasp. His eyelids peel back, and big, bold eyeballs stare out—pupils gone all black. They drift upward, suddenly, up past the lids. Only the whites show, and then he’s back out.
Again Atlanta checks for a pulse.
“Is he—” Shane starts to say.
“I’m checking, jeez,” Atlanta says, again feeling around for his pulse.
It’s not there.
Oh, god, oh, god—
Wait! Wait. That flutter. That tickle. It’s there. It’s there!
She just missed it.
“Owen Mahoney is still among the living,” she says.
“I didn’t sign up for this,” Shane says.
“You signed up by driving the car,” Atlanta says. “It’s not like I sold you a bucket of spit and said it was a milkshake. I told you how this was gonna go.”
“It went differently,” he says. He stops pacing, stares down at Mahoney. “What did you give him again?”
“Ambien.”
Josie says: “My mom takes Ambien. It doesn’t do . . . this.”
“I gave him three pills,” Atlanta says. “He thought they were three ten-milligram pills, but . . . they were thirty.” She sighs. “One helluva horse kick.”
“He could be out all night,” Shane says.
“Try to wake him,” Steven says.
“And then what?” Shane asks.
Atlanta sighs. “We have a talk with him. Find out what he knows about Bee and her . . . situation.”
“What’s that mean? Talk to him?”
“It means I ask politely, and then when he tells me to screw off, I keep asking, less and less politely each time.”
Shane stiffens. “You’re talking about torture.”
“No, I’m talking about kicking his ass until answers come out like coins out of a Super Mario Brothers block. It’s not . . . torture. Dang.”
“It’s close enough. This guy—you said he’s just a low-rent thug.”
“An armed low-rent thug,” she says, pointing to the gun on the grass. A small .38 snubnose they pulled out of Mahoney’s ankle holster. Serial numbers scratched off it. When she called the others, they came to the exit door at the back of the Wagon Wheel, and together they carted his limp body into the trunk of the Saturn. Josie had the good sense to look for a weapon as they were taping him up—and sure enough, the gun. “Besides,” she adds, “he’s not . . . exactly a low-rent thug. Thug,
yes. Low-rent, not so much.”
Everyone goggles.
Shane leans forward. “What do you mean? You lied to us?”
“This fancy gentleman right here is more than just a thug. He’s like, a thug’s thug. The Terminator of thugs. Hired by every hate group this side of Pittsburgh to do work for them. And not nice work, either, like landscaping or babysitting. He’s a killer. Guy told me once that some plumber from somewhere—Scranton or Wilkes-Barre or something—owed some people money, people tied to a neo-Nazi group called the Aryan Vanguard or whatever. This man right here didn’t go after the plumber. He went after the plumber’s wife. Cut up her face, her breasts, her back. And now he just got out of jail. Not the first time he was there, either, okay? Owen Mahoney is not good people.” And, she thinks but won’t say aloud, he was gonna take what he wanted from me no matter how much I protested.
“So, he’s . . . more than just some thug?” Shane’s eyes are wide and his hands are shaking.
“Look. Guy told me he has . . . artwork.” She pulls down some of the tape, pulls up Owen’s sleeve. The top half of a keystone shape with a pair of red lightning bolts inside it. “Some kinda Pennsylvania Nazi group.” She points to Shane. “He’d whip your ass just for the color of your skin. I say that lets us whip his ass to find out some information. And if that means—”
Owen Mahoney gasps again.
His hand flops around at the end of his bound-up arm, and he grabs hold of the bottom of Atlanta’s jacket. A sound comes out of his mouth: a moan that gets louder and louder, higher- and higher-pitched. She clips him in the cheek with her elbow and his hand springs open—
She scrambles away, hurries to her feet.
Owen Mahoney is awake.
His eyeballs, big and bold, rotate in their sockets. Then his stare falls to each of them in turn, clearly studying each one before his gaze flicks over to the next. Shane whispers: “He’s memorizing our faces.”
“I need to buy a lottery ticket,” Mahoney blurts.
They all look at each other.
“What?” Atlanta asks.
“I need to buy a goddamn lottery ticket.”
“Is this code for something?” Josie asks.
“Get me out of this fuckin’ bed and get me my car keys.”
