by Catie Rhodes
She watched me, face expressionless. “I just don’t remember.”
Irrational anger flared again. I’d risked the man I loved, probably lost him, to help her, and she didn’t even remember.
The hag waited, eagerness swelling its presence. The malignant presence started whispering. “You’re stronger. You could scramble her brains, tear open her body, and spill her blood.” The image took form in my mind.
My fury increased, now directed at my nasty little guest. The mantle snapped inside me. The thing writhed, its screams loud in my head. I gave myself a shake and found Hannah watching. A crease had formed between her eyebrows.
Tears brimmed in her eyes. “It’s killing you now.”
“No. It isn’t,” I said too quickly and cheerfully. “Let’s get back to yesterday morning. Tubby and Wade helped me conduct a raid on the Six Gun Compound.”
Hannah paled. “They have guns.”
“We had explosives.” Tubby grinned. Hannah got even paler and put her hand over her mouth.
“We were able to get you out, but Trench Coat shot Wade.” I paused here and let the urge to scream and tear at my hair pass.
Hannah put her hands over her face and rubbed her temples. “Oh no,” she moaned. “Wade is so nice. A real gentleman…for that group anyway.” She grabbed at the beer Tubby had sitting on his desk, gulped it down, and stifled a burp. Tubby and I exchanged raised eyebrows. Hannah took several deep breaths. “King won’t let you have Wade back alive. You know that, don’t you?”
I knew it was a possibility, but I wasn't ready to admit it. Tears burned my eyes, and rage heated my cheeks. There was nothing I could do to stop whatever was happening to Wade, nothing I could do to take back what got him into this mess.
Corman let out a beastly yell. “I’m dyinnnnng.” Nobody bothered to answer him. “Hey, is that Hannah I hear? You wanna come suck my dick? Take my mind off it?” His words ended in a combination cackle and sob.
Hannah’s eyes widened with fear, and she gripped her own wrist, right over the finger marks. Understanding flashed over me.
“If Wade doesn’t make it back here,” I said through my teeth, “Corman’s days are gonna get real short too. Trust and believe me on that one.” Hannah flinched away from my fury. I tried to rein it in, but my malignant passenger stoked the coals, showing me images of King hurting Wade.
“Hannah caused it all,” the thing whispered in my head.
“Will you shut the fuck up?” I screamed the words and clapped my hands over my ears. The parasite retreated before I could rally the mantle.
Hannah’s mouth drooped. She began shaking her head. “No, no, no. I don't want that monster to have you. Not to save me. I wasn't worth saving. There’s nothing left but…” She waved a hand at the air. “Nightmares, panic attacks, and loneliness.”
I wanted to tell her that loneliness plagued me too. And the nightmares were no picnic either. But never in the history of the universe has it helped someone else to downplay their wounds. So I said what I meant again. “You’re worth it, Hannah. We will get this straightened out. The first step is to find that tape that King wants. You were looking for it, weren’t you?”
She began shaking her head. “I won't tell you where it is just so you can give it to King.” Her lips turned down in scowl. “Damn, it makes me mad for King Tolliver to get what he wants. For him to hurt Jesse and Rainey. To let him kill Wade. But I don’t want to give him the tape. Do you understand?”
I ducked my chin to make eye contact with her. “Who said I’m going to treat King Tolliver fairly?”
Hannah pulled on her fingers, wringing her hands so hard the bones popped. “How will we cheat him and still have a chance of getting Wade alive?”
“We’ll figure it out.” It was the best I could do. “We have to get that tape. That’s the price King set for us to have Wade back.”
Hannah sat silent for several long seconds, eyes moving back and forth as she thought. Lines I’d never seen before appeared on her face. Finally she took a deep breath. “I’ll help. But I need some coffee. I’m about half drunk.”
She stood and walked toward the stairs. Tubby and I followed. Hannah poured herself another cup of black coffee and sipped from it. She sat down at the table across from Dillon and tried to smile at her. Dillon stared back until she caught my scowl.
She flashed Hannah a quick, insincere smile, pulled out her cigarettes, and said, “Papaw, why don’t we go have a smoke while Peri Jean talks to Miss Hannah? I won’t tell Shelly.”
Cecil’s wife, Shelly, didn’t want him smoking because of his heart condition. Dillon’s offer got Cecil to his feet faster than I’d seen him move in a while.
“I might smoke one.” He gave Hannah a more sincere smile and a little wave. The two went downstairs.
I pulled a chair away from the table and sat where I could see Hannah but not too close. “So the tape.”
“I stumbled into a booby trap.” She sniffed her coffee and pushed it away.
I tried to smile at her reaction to the coffee. “Smell like the morning after?”
Hannah smiled back, but it was only a ghost of the smile that had made her almost famous for fifteen minutes. “Catch me up on what you know about Rainey’s and my investigation.”
I told her all I knew. The email. Rainey’s missed meeting. Barbie’s luggage getting looted.
Hannah nodded. “Okay. I remember all this. Rainey brought me Barbie’s overnight case. It was one of those old-fashioned ones, hard-sided and with a little mirror in the lid. I wondered what Barbie wanted with an outdated thing like that.” She held out her hand, and I put my cigarettes in them. Watched her light up like a pro. “Nothing was in it other than regular toiletries and—get this—a pink vibrator.”
I laughed, nodding. I remembered encountering the nasty thing.
“I gave up on it pretty quickly and got into searching her laptop. I’m no hacker, but I’m not a slouch either.” She glanced at me and winked, but quickly looked away. “I found a payment to a hotel. Scratch that. It’s not a hotel. It’s more of a roach motel.”
I wrinkled my nose. “I thought Rainey had her PI look at the laptop. Can’t believe he didn’t find that. She needs to fire him.”
“Oh, he probably did find it. But I’d seen that dump a dozen times driving between here and Tyler for my therapist appointments. So it caught my interest.” She stopped talking.
I watched her closely. She might have decided to shut down again. I hoped not. Wade was running out of time. So was I.
Hannah took a few deep breaths and seemed to rally. “I wanted to help Rainey. She’s been so caring. So I went to the motel. Just walked in the office and told them a lie about being a private investigator hired by Barbie’s family. The guy handed me a key. He was…weird.”
The hag had said Hannah met its master. This must have been the guy. I considered asking Hannah how the guy who gave her the key was weird, but one look at her face froze the question in my throat.
Hannah stared straight ahead, eyes dull, chewing on her lip. Whatever she saw in her memories upset her. I wouldn’t dig out of respect for her feelings.
She spoke with a sigh in her voice. “I went into the room. You should have seen this place. Shit city. Almost immediately, the phone started ringing. I picked it up and said hello.”
My shoulders cranked up even though I knew the end of the story. Somehow the monster now inside me had come through the phone and gotten inside Hannah, probably through her ear.
“I-I-I thought I saw a shadow in the mirror, hovering over me.” Her voice broke. “And after that, I was—I kept having these bad thoughts. Thoughts of how I was worthless and dirty. How w-w-what Michael Gage and Nash Redmond did to me tainted me for the rest of my life. It was like living through it again. I went into the bathroom and threw up.”
A slew of emotions ran through me. Anger, grief, remorse. Self-loathing, which made the entity inside me shiver with pleasure. When I spoke, it was
an effort to keep my voice neutral. “Then what?”
“I thought I had food poisoning, so I drove back to Gaslight City. I barely made it into the bathroom. I knocked the night case off the counter. It hit that tile floor and busted into a million pieces. When I finished being sick, I started cleaning it up. Sewn inside the lining were pictures.”
“But Rainey’s PI…” I was going to tell Rainey to fire this no-account.
“Rainey never gave him the overnight case,” Hannah broke in. “It somehow got separated from the rest of Barbie’s belongings. Good thing. Otherwise it might have been stolen with the rest of it.”
The evil voice inside me spoke up. “Your own mother hated you. Ever wonder what that means in the grand scheme of your life?”
The words ached, rotten and throbbing like a tooth that needed pulling. I considered stinging the little monster, but it wouldn’t change how I felt. The words were true. Barbie had hated me. How lovable I considered myself always traced back to that awful fact. I shunted the thought away and turned my attention back to Hannah. “Were the pictures you found dirty pictures?”
Hannah smiled. “Not raunchy ones. They were pictures like a private investigator would have taken. The people in the pictures didn’t know they were being photographed. One had King and Barbie in it. They were arguing. Another had Uncle Joey and Barbie in it. Then there were a few of you.”
“Could you tell when the pictures were taken?”
“Judging by the length of your hair, I’d say the ones of you were taken around the time of Barbie’s final visit to Gaslight City. The ones of King and Joey were older. Uncle Joey was actually good-looking.”
I couldn’t imagine. “You decided to go out to Long Time Gone because of the pictures?” The transition from puking sick to in the mood to go bar-hopping was a little odd.
Hannah shrugged. “After I purged, I felt fine. I wanted to change the channel, put the bad feelings behind me. I knew Long Time Gone had started open mic nights, and I’d been playing my guitar again. I figured I’d find a way to chat with King while having a legit reason to be there.” She shrugged, the sick expression back on her face.
“Did King ever tell you anything useful?”
Hannah’s cheeks got so red I couldn’t even make out the freckles. “As soon as I brought up Barbie, King invited me into his office. But instead of answering questions, he had some, uh, pot.” Hannah got even redder. “I hadn’t smoked since college. It was really strong stuff, much stronger than I remember. Then we did tequila shots. Later one of the Six Guns had ecstasy. I woke up the next morning naked in King’s bed, thinking I’d go home…”
I cut her off. She didn’t need to go through this. Talk about a chapter of life worth deleting. “That’s fine. I see what happened.”
Hannah raised her voice to speak over me. “Like I said, I thought I’d go home. But I could smell bacon. I figured a greasy breakfast would make me feel better. I wandered into the kitchen. There was more tequila. By noon, I was drunk and had forgotten all about home. It was all a blur until you got that thing out of me.”
Footsteps thumped up the stairs. Hannah jumped, her long hands fluttering over the tabletop.
Tubby’s head appeared. “You have got to see what Dillon made Corman do.” He motioned frantically, nearly jumping up and down with excitement.
I stood from the table. “You’re welcome to join us.”
Hannah just shook her head, her animation drained away. I remembered what Corman had said to her downstairs. Her reaction had told a story, one whose details I didn’t want to know.
“All right. You know where to find me if you need me.” I headed for the stairs.
Hannah’s voice floated after me. “I do just fine without you.”
I walked down the stairs, my skin stinging with humiliation. Good thing Hannah couldn’t see my face. It would have given my pride a nice shot to the gonads. In one second, I had gone from making progress with her to pissing her off all over again. I was going to hurt and humiliate Corman and King in a way they’d never forget. Maybe that made me just as bad as them. I didn’t care.
11
Tubby led the way down the stairs, through the building, and toward where he’d stowed Corman. I followed without much hope that whatever they’d done to Corman would help. Tubby had mentioned something with Dillon. That alone gave me a few ideas what may have happened. Dillon had the gift of persuading people, but she was young and full of herself. She had the bad habit of using her gift more like parlor trick than an actual tool.
A board creaked above us, followed by shuffling footsteps. Hannah. She’d turned nasty so quickly I didn’t dare go back to check on her. I had to trust her to find herself again, emerge from the ashes, and…
The hag’s voice started up again, older than time and smarter than I’d ever be. “She’ll never be better. People don’t get away from me. You’ll see.”
A hole opened in my chest, its emptiness sucking away all positive thought. The hag had caused train wrecks like this since the dawn of humanity. It knew how things would go. I gave my head a hard shake. No. It couldn’t end that way. Hannah had to get better. Our bond, often cemented by silliness, meant so much to me. Losing that bond meant losing part of me.
“Wishes never come true. Not for a little girl whose mother hated her. Whose grandmother was ashamed of her.” The cadence of the hag’s words sank in and throbbed like an ant sting.
The pain gave me an idea. I concentrated on its presence and imagined the mantle as a red wasp circling the hag’s head. The imaginary insect’s buzz filled my ears. The hag shifted on my shoulders. I couldn't see the entity, but I guessed it was slapping at the imaginary wasp. First lesson in life for East Texas kids: never slap at a red wasp. I made the imaginary wasp swoop in for the kill. The hag screamed.
“I’ll get you. I’ll get both of you,” the hag shouted in my head, rattling my eardrums.
My lips spread in a hateful grin. Hurting the hag had felt almost as good as eating a whole bag of tortilla chips with good, hot salsa, but it had cost me. My body trembled. Rivulets of sweat trailed down my back. I wouldn’t be able to do that very many times without needing sleep or one of Mysti’s potions.
Tubby halted, perhaps realizing I had stopped walking, turned around, and came back to me. “I heard what Hannah said to you there at the end, and I bet I know what you’re thinking.”
I didn’t answer. Tubby, more intelligent than people realized, probably did know my thoughts. Tubby’s insight into human nature worked only when he was playing eye in the sky. When it got down to a personal level, he didn’t know when to keep his mouth shut, when to back off, or how to show love. I tensed, waiting for an analysis of my relationship with Hannah that I didn’t want to hear.
“She’ll waffle back and forth between loving you and hating you for a long time. But that’s only because you’re easy to blame.” Tubby leaned to speak into my ear. At least he wasn’t shouting it where everybody could hear. “She’ll have to accept that what happened wasn’t her fault any more than it was yours.”
“It would have never happened if she didn’t know me.” I didn’t need the hag to make me accept at least that much blame.
Tubby nodded at that. “My stepfather would have never beaten me if my mother hadn’t married him. I ain’t mad at her.”
He wasn’t. Tubby treated his mother like gold. When she said she couldn’t stand Texas summers any more, he bought her a place to live in Colorado. When she said she didn’t like Colorado winters, he got her a condo in Florida.
“Yeah, she’s your mother though.” I pushed around him and walked straight to Dillon.
My cousin-by-marriage had a Cheshire cat smile on her face. I felt a rush of love for her, leaving her kids with her husband, who might or might not let them eat bugs, to come on this risky mission just to help me. “What’s up?”
She held her hands, palms facing, about an inch apart and began moving them with the first word she said.
“So we’re down here smoking, except for Mysti, and Corman starts up. He’s hurting. He’s going to get an infection from the bullet wound.” She rolled her eyes as though she’d been shot half a dozen times and survived them all. I bit my lip to keep from smiling. “Tubby went over there and looked. Said the bullet passed right through. He poured some alcohol on it. Corman started hollering again.” She licked her lips and locked her eyes on mine. This was the part she was proud of. “I went over there and told him to quit hollering, that he wasn’t hurting. I had to tell him a couple of times, but he did what I said.”
I nodded my encouragement and said, “Good job.” My mind roved to the next thing. That motel. The tape and why King wanted it. How King played into this whole thing. Those pictures. Maybe King had had some kind of deal with Barbie. But what? The connection wouldn’t come. Dillon started talking again, but I barely listened.
“Did you hear me?” She raised her voice.
I cut off my thoughts. “I’m sorry. Tell me again. Hannah told me some stuff upstairs, and I’m trying to figure out what to do with it.” I made a point to look at Dillon's face.
“I know what you’re thinking, but this might help. Corman might have the answers to all your questions.” She shrugged. “I can make him tell, but I don’t know what to ask.”
I thought it over. Not a bad idea. The how and why of Barbie and King’s connection mattered if Rainey was going to get Jesse out of prison. It might matter if I wanted to get out of this alive. I motioned Dillon to follow me and walked to the alcove where Tubby had put Corman. Just before we reached him, I pulled her to a stop. “How are we going to do this? I ask you the questions, and you ask Corman?”
Dillon shook her head. “If I can get him willing to talk, I should be able to convince him to talk to you.” She turned and strutted up to Corman, so proud of what she could do, so happy to help.
