Bring Her Back

by Jeff Strand

  I walked across the kitchen floor, dripping blood on the tile.

  Then I dripped blood on the living room carpet.

  Then I dripped blood in the upstairs hallway.

  I could clearly hear the television. Robert was watching that show where people pitched products they'd invented to billionaires. A door was ajar and some light spilled out into the hallway.

  "Matthew...?" called out a voice—Robert—from the bedroom. The teenager's name must've been Matthew and not Mike. At least I guessed right with the "M" part. He was still Mike to me.

  I froze.

  The door didn't open and Robert didn't call out his son's name again.

  After a couple of minutes, I resumed creeping toward the bedroom.

  I stood outside the door, hoping he couldn't hear my breathing. I held the rake tightly with both hands. It was a long, unwieldy weapon, but I was confident that I could make it work.

  I took a few slow, deep breaths.

  Then I kicked open the door and burst into the bedroom, where Robert and his wife were sitting up in bed.

  nineteen

  You could argue that I shouldn't have been surprised that Robert wasn't alone, and I'd concede that you'd made a valid point. I suppose I'd just assumed that Mike came from a single parent household. More importantly, as I've said before, I was not entirely sane.

  I didn't know for sure that this was Robert's wife. She looked about his age, and she was wearing the kind of nightgown that implied that they were in a comfortable long-term relationship with no need to impress each other. Her expression was about what you might expect when a large blood-covered man burst into her bedroom brandishing a rake.

  "Don't scream!" I shouted, louder than I intended. "I mean it! Don't scream, either of you!"

  Neither of them made a sound or moved. There was a nightstand on Robert's side of the bed, and it was certainly possible that there was a gun inside the drawer, but I was sure I could slash him with the rake before he opened it.

  The woman, who looked like a Bernice, pointed behind me. "There's a safe in the closet. We'll give you the combination. Take what you want and leave. Please."

  "I'm not here to rob you."

  Bernice pulled the covers up over her chest, as if to hide breasts that hadn't been exposed in the first place. "Just leave us alone. Our son will be home any minute. He'll call the police."

  I was conflicted on how to respond. The proper vengeful reaction would be to gesture to my clothing and say, "This is your son's blood." But Bernice had not, to the best of my knowledge, played a role in Abigail's death. She'd married a terrible spouse and raised a shitty kid, but she was not one of my targets.

  Don't get me wrong. I intended to massacre her husband while he sat in bed next to her, but I didn't feel right about being cold and cruel when revealing that I'd killed her son.

  "I'm not worried about that," I said, hoping I was sending the message.

  I could tell by Robert's face that he had a pretty good idea whose blood was all over me. I kept watching for his eyes to dart over to the nightstand, but they didn't, so perhaps there wasn't a gun in there.

  "What do you want?" Bernice asked.

  "Do you want to tell her?" I asked Robert.

  "Tell her what? I have no idea who the hell you are."

  "That's the angle you're going to play? Really?"

  "We have a silent alarm that you would have tripped when you broke into our house. I'd advise you to leave right now."

  "I used Matthew's key to get in." I still thought of him as Mike, but figured I should use his real name to avoid confusion.

  Now it seemed to sink in for Bernice where the blood came from. Her face twisted in anguish.

  "You need to leave," Robert said. He was trying to sound calm and commanding but his voice was trembling.

  I didn't have anything worthwhile to say ("And you need to die!") so I stepped forward and started to bring the rake down upon him.

  Bernice scooted in front of him before I could do so.

  I lifted the rake again. "Get out of the way."

  "Don't hurt him."

  "Get out of the way."

  "No!"

  I was holding a rake with metal teeth. It would have been pretty easy to whack her on the side of the head and make this situation less complicated. But she hadn't done anything. That wasn't really an option.

  Robert, piece of crap that he was, seemed perfectly willing to let his wife be in front of him as a human shield, even though I was clearly homicidal.

  "Move," I told her.

  She didn't budge, even as tears streamed down her face.

  Maybe she was complicit in Abigail's death. Maybe she'd laughed about it when Robert and Mike came home and told her the gory details. Maybe she'd asked them to repeat the best parts. Maybe, while relaxing in a warm bubble bath, she'd pleasured herself to mental images of Robert smothering Abigail with a pillow.

  I had no evidence that she knew anything about it. She was innocent. I was not going to kill an innocent person.

  I didn't have to kill her. I could knock her unconscious with the flat side of the rake.

  No. That could still seriously hurt her.

  Even if it only gave her a nasty gash on the side of the head, that was too much. This was about revenge. That meant only harming people who deserved it. Until I knew for sure that Bernice was complicit, there would be no violence against her.

  However, she didn't need to know that.

  "Get out of the way or I'll tear off your face with this," I said, waving the rake.

  "I'm not going to let you hurt him."

  "You don't have a choice."

  Bernice shook her head. "You have to come through me to get him."

  As a reminder, I was creepy looking even when wearing clean clothes and neatly groomed. Right now I looked like a feral spree killer. To protect Robert like this, she had to really be in love with him. This was even stronger than "you float on the plank while I drown in the icy waters" love. Could Robert truly be that bad of a guy if she was this devoted to him?

  Yeah. He could.

  "My girlfriend's name was Abigail. She was going to run away with me. We talked about how we were going to spend the rest of our lives together." That last part wasn't true, but it didn't matter. I nodded at Robert. "Do you want to tell your wife why I'm here?"

  "I have no fucking clue why you're here," said Robert.

  "Your husband murdered Abigail. He and his gang kidnapped her to get me to turn over some drug money that I didn't have, and then he killed her while your son sat there and played games on his cell phone."

  "You're lying," said Bernice.

  "Nope."

  "You've got the wrong person."

  "I was in the trailer with them. I saw her body. I wish this was a case of mistaken identity, because you seem like a very nice lady, but it's not."

  "I don't believe you."

  "I'm not asking you to believe me. I'm asking you to move out of the way."

  "Did you kill our son?" Bernice asked, her voice breaking.

  "Yes."

  She let out a sob that was so loud and sudden that I flinched.

  I was starting to get nervous. There was a dead body in the front seat of the car parked outside, so it wasn't as if I had unlimited time to complete my task. And, let's be realistic, a rake wasn't all that great of a weapon. If Robert and Bernice chose to take the offensive, I wasn't positive that I could fend both of them off.

  "What excuse do they give you when they leave the house?" I asked. "Does it ring false?"

  Bernice continued sobbing and didn't answer.

  "Get out of here," said Robert, still not moving from behind Bernice. "Go or you'll spend the rest of your life behind bars."

  "I'll go when you're dead."

  I moved around the bed, trying to get a better angle to reach Robert, but Bernice kept herself in front of him. Unless Robert had a sudden moment of nobility, there was no way I was getting Bernice
out of the way without doing it by force.

  Could I use the rake to just sort of pry her away from him? I didn't have to actually strike her with it.

  Nah, then they'd try to pull it out of my hands and it would become a tug-of-war.

  I couldn't believe how badly this was going. I mean, Jesus Christ.

  Would it really be so bad if I grabbed her by the hair and pulled her off the bed? She'd be okay. She wouldn't be gushing blood from her head. I'd drag her out of the way, slam the pointed ends of the rake into Robert a few times, and then get out of here.

  That seemed reasonable.

  But I couldn't do it.

  Bernice had to be a bad person. She had to know that her husband was up to something criminal. She had to at least notice that they were living outside of their means from whatever day jobs they held, right? She had to question the extra spending money.

  She could even be a drug dealer, too. Why was I assuming that she was clueless about this? It might be a family business.

  For all I knew, she could've given the order to terminate Abigail by phone. "If you let her go, she'll squeal. Kill that bitch."

  I didn't think so. She seemed to be genuinely shocked by my presence, and she wouldn't be if she'd known that I was on the loose.

  That didn't mean she didn't know about the other crimes. She might have been kept in the dark about Abigail's murder yet still been well aware of the types of activities Robert and Mike were involved in when they left the house together.

  It really wasn't hard to come up with a scenario where Bernice deserved to be injured with a rake, but I'd be rationalizing it without any facts. I still had absolutely no evidence that she wasn't simply a loving wife and mother who was protecting her husband from a home invading maniac.

  I couldn't harm her. No collateral damage. It might have been a fucked up code of ethics, but I had to have some kind of moral code, right? I couldn't go around hurting innocent people in my thirst for vengeance.

  I held the rake as if it was a baseball bat and I was going for a home run. "I'm giving you one last chance to move out of the way," I told her.

  Bernice didn't move. She looked me in the eye with defiance.

  I swung the rake.

  I stopped a couple of feet before it would've plunged a half-dozen metal tines into her skull. She hadn't ducked or scooted out of the way. She was indeed serious that if I wanted to get to Robert, I was going to have to go through her. And now that I'd halted in mid-swing, she knew that I had no intention of following through on my threat. She'd called my bluff.

  If there weren't the ticking clock of somebody noticing Mike's corpse, I suppose I could've figured out a way to overcome this problem. She couldn't protect her husband forever. But since I had to get the hell out of here, my only choices were to abandon my hastily constructed moral code, or save Robert's death for another time.

  His death could wait.

  I turned and ran.

  I fled the house. The car had plenty of visual evidence that a violent stabbing had taken place inside of it, so it would be reckless and flat-out insane to use it as my getaway vehicle. Instead, I tossed the rake on the ground, then unlocked the trunk and took out the bicycle. I kept waiting for Robert to emerge from the house with a shotgun, but he was probably still cowering behind his wife.

  I climbed on the bike and pedaled away.

  twenty

  I rode for about six blocks, until I saw a house with no garage and no vehicles in the driveway. I pedaled into their backyard, then lay the bicycle on the ground and sat against the back of the house. I wasn't positive that the house was empty, but I felt safe enough to take the chance.

  I sat there and listened for sirens.

  After about ten minutes, I still hadn't heard any.

  This meant that Robert had convinced his wife not to call the police, even though their son was a bloody dead mess in the car. Or I was wrong about her innocence, but I suspected that he'd simply convinced her there was a better way to handle this. Maybe he'd made a full confession.

  The police would use their sirens, right? They'd want to get to a murder scene as soon as possible. Did I have the procedure wrong? Would they just use flashing lights when responding to a crime that was no longer in progress?

  Shit. Going back didn't seem like an intelligent idea. But surely I could get close enough to see red and blue flashing lights without any cops noticing me.

  It was worth the risk.

  Yes, the authorities were already after me, but it was important to know if Wulfe's men were cooperating with them. My plan—and let me be clear in stating that I knew it wasn't an awesome plan—was to return to the trailer and wait for the bad guys again. I couldn't do that if the cops might be showing up there.

  I rode back toward Robert's house. If I got the angle right, I could be safely two or three blocks away and see the flashing lights.

  No lights.

  I decided to get closer. I didn't ride right in front of the house, obviously, but I got close enough to see that the car was no longer in the driveway.

  They wouldn't have moved the car if they'd called the police. They were hiding Mike's death for now.

  Good.

  I made one last stop before I left the neighborhood. I found a house with a coiled garden hose on the side, and I rinsed myself off with extremely cold water. It was too dark to tell if all of the blood came out of my clothes, but I no longer looked like I'd been sleeping inside a deer carcass.

  I rode back to the trailer and went inside.

  More time with my thoughts. Oh goody.

  I was not proud of what I'd done. I hope you understand that I'm not writing this book to brag about what a badass I am. I know that I suck. When all of the bloodshed was over, I didn't expect to say, "Okay, well, the balance of the universe has been restored, and now everything is just peachy!" I fully anticipated that I would be permanently fucked up from this experience.

  I boiled some water, both so that I could have macaroni (it was a box of macaroni and cheese, but it had been opened and the cheese powder packet was nowhere to be found) for dinner, and to potentially fling in the face of Wulfe's men if they showed up. I'd enjoy watching their skin blister. You couldn't really throw boiling water into somebody's face and expect them to suffer quietly, but it would be worth waking the neighbors.

  I ate my plain macaroni without company arriving.

  Was it possible that anybody would show up? Would Robert, the blond, or the mustached man ever say, "Should we check the trailer?" It was hard to imagine that they'd look for me here.

  Would Robert expect me to come back to his house so soon?

  I knew that he was on high alert, and he'd know that I knew he was on high alert, but what if I didn't care? Going back tonight was such a bad idea that he'd never expect it.

  Maybe he wasn't home anymore. If I could hang around in this grotesque trailer for three days, I could surely spend some quality time in his house, and be hiding in his closet when he finally did return home.

  They wouldn't come back to the trailer. That seemed ridiculous.

  It might be good to get some sleep, but I wasn't looking forward to the nightmares and wanted to postpone them for a while longer. I'd return to Robert's house. Maybe I'd grab the same rake when I got there.

  I rode back to his neighborhood. Still no signs of the police. I was happy to see this, though at the same time it wasn't reassuring to know that you could get stabbed to death in a parked car without anybody noticing.

  I stopped on the other side of the street, a couple of houses away, and watched Robert's home. There didn't seem to be any lights on inside. Had they driven the car away, or hidden it in the garage?

  I watched the house for about half an hour, switching my vantage point every once in a while so that nobody got suspicious of the dude staring at a house. A woman did jog past me, but all she did was give me a polite nod.

  It was unthinkable that they'd simply gone to bed, so Robert and B
ernice were almost certainly not home. They wouldn't have had time to change the locks. I could sneak inside, find a secure hiding space (maybe even up in the attic, if they had one) and wait for my chance to give Robert his proper fate.

  The rake was no longer there, disappointingly. I unlocked the back door—it had been relocked, so they knew I'd come in this way the first time—and crept into the kitchen. I opened the refrigerator door, hoping to provide enough light to see but not enough light to alert anybody watching from outside that I was in the house. Then I opened one of the drawers and took out the biggest knife I could find. I closed the refrigerator door without succumbing to the desire to steal the plate of leftover fried chicken.

  Maybe the attic was a bad choice. I should stick to the first floor, in case I needed to make a hasty escape. And hiding in the closet, though it would be a wonderfully scary surprise, really only worked if Robert was the one who opened the door. It was a big enough house; I'd find a decent place to lurk.

  I walked into the living room. Was somebody sitting in the recliner...?

  "Don't move," said Robert.

  He turned on a lamp, which allowed me to see that he had a gun pointed at me.

  "Set the knife on the floor very slowly," he told me.

  Even if Robert didn't have a gun pointed at me, I didn't think I could fling the knife with enough accuracy to hit him in the heart or throat. As per his instructions, I very slowly crouched down and set the knife on the floor.

  "Stand back up," he said.

  I stood back up. It simply hadn't occurred to me that Robert might be sitting in a dark house waiting for me to come back. It was absurd that I was here. Somehow he'd anticipated my lack of sanity.

  "You've destroyed my life," Robert said, and he did indeed look like somebody whose life had been destroyed. I suspected that he'd spent much of his time in the dark weeping. "You took my son away from me. Can you even imagine what it's like to lose a child?"