by Ninie Hammon
“How’re you going to hold a gun and Cody at the same time?” Malachi asked.
“He’s hungry,” Sam said. “Cody’s got his little fist wrapped around my finger and he’s sucking on the end of it. You need to nurse him.”
She took the words like a blow, almost staggered forward.
“Where’s the key?” Charlie demanded. “No key, no baby!”
“I got the key right here in my pocket.” Abby ducked her chin and indicated the pocket on the front of the filthy, bloody, ragged Mickey Mouse smock from the Dollar Store. “Danglin’ on that old rabbit’s foot fob with that other little bitty key and that big ole door key that likely don’t open nothing.” There was a lump in the pocket. That was it, then. Now, they just had to get the gun away from her without anybody getting hurt.
“You bring him here right now.”
Sam walked slowly, cutting her eyes to Malachi, who was maybe twenty feet away from Abby with the rifle aimed at his chest. Sam nodded to him almost imperceptibly.
Then Charlie started toward Abby.
“I said, no key, no baby,” she said. “Give me the key!”
“No!” Abby backed up a step, started to turn the gun toward Charlie, but didn’t, just told Sam, “I done told you once — give me my baby right now!” When Sam didn’t move, Abby cocked her head to the side, almost sounded like a little kid. “You don’t think I’m serious, do you? Guess I need to prove it.”
She turned her attention back toward Malachi and put her eye to the sight on the rifle. Without a moment’s hesitation, she shot him.
Chapter Thirty-Three
The sound of the gunshot shattered the cricket warmth of the night like a bomb. There was a heartbeat of silence then, before Malachi crumpled to the ground. Sam screamed and rushed to where he lay on his side on the road. She probably didn’t even notice that she had dropped the bundle on the road.
Abby noticed!
Charlie watched horror wash over Abby’s face when she thought Sam’d dropped her baby … then saw the horror morph into rage when the doll rolled out of a ragged afghan onto the pavement. Abby turned, racking another shell into the chamber as she aimed the weapon at Sam. Charlie charged. She dived through the air, catching Abby around the midsection like a tackle going after a running back heading into the end zone. The rifle went off, the shot blasting out into the night as she landed on top of Abby, tried for a grip on the rifle but felt a bump, instead, not really painful, just stunning, a blow to the head like she’d stood up from leaning into the refrigerator and whacked her head on the freezer door she’d left open above her.
The world stopped being real for a heartbeat or two, while pain rushed to replace the numb spot on her temple and she felt herself tumbling onto her right side, her cheek scraping across the rough asphalt.
The whole thing couldn’t have lasted more than a second or two, but that was all Abby’d needed. The rifle she’d slammed into the side of Charlie’s head was now pinned between them. She let go of it, wiggled out from under Charlie’s body and was gone.
Charlie came back to herself in time to see the bloody scrub shirt vanish out of the spill of headlights down the embankment toward the river. She staggered to her feet, only three or four strides behind Abby, and ran — dizzy — after her. At the edge of the road, she hit a wall of black. She’d been staring into the car headlights and the darkness beyond them was a wall of tar. She plunged forward anyway, lost her balance and fell forward and slid on her belly halfway down the riverbank, through bushes that caught on the terrycloth of her bathrobe and briars that grabbed at her hair and face.
It was totally dark — like the inside of the kiln! The thought froze Charlie’s breath as she struggled to her feet, squinting into the black in front of her, trying to get her feet under her so she could keep going.
Staggering forward another couple of steps, she broke free of an oleander bush she’d tangled with and crossed a clear space two or three more steps. Her feet splashed into water. Any farther and she’d be in the river, and Abby was in front of her, which meant she already was.
“Charlie!” she heard Sam’s voice calling from above her. “Charlie, are you down there?”
She looked back up the hill at the black silhouette standing at the top of the ridge, light glowing all around her, then she turned her face back to the darkness of the river in front of her. She was too late. Abby was out there somewhere in the dark water and Charlie had absolutely no hope of finding her. Surely she’d already been washed downstream the thirty or forty feet to the Jabberwock. She was gone, and if Charlie wasn’t careful, the current would carry her there, too. And she couldn’t let herself be grabbed right now, land disoriented and desperately sick in a bus shelter. She had to get to Merrie. Had to get her out of that kiln.
And the woman with the key to the kiln in her pocket had just ridden the Jabberwock to the Dollar General Store parking lot in the Middle of Nowhere.
Sam had heard about people who froze, just suddenly couldn’t move. But it had never happened to her until she heard the gunshot and turned to see Malachi Tackett grab his chest and crumple to the road.
She couldn’t move. Froze as solid as a hood ornament.
Except she didn’t.
While her mind was processing the fact that she was frozen, the rest of her body was obeying the messages she was sending. She screamed, heard herself make a sound like a scream. And the next thing she knew she was kneeling beside Malachi, seeing the blood on the back of his shirt and some part of her brain processing that and being glad about it.
She had no memory, no sense of movement, no spatial history in her muscles to explain how she could have been standing beside the car one instant and the next leaning over Malachi, with absolutely no passage of time in between.
As she turned him over from his side to his back she heard another gunshot, but that was out there where the world was doing its thing, but Sam Sheridan was all about and only about one thing. Malachi Tackett. She took hold of the halves of his button-down shirt and ripped downward, sending buttons pinging off like shrapnel into the night.
Abby’d had the gun trained on Malachi’s chest. She’d fired at a range of only twenty feet. But either her aim was off or Malachi had started to move out of the way a fraction of a second before she pulled the trigger because when Sam lifted up his tee shirt she saw that the bullet wound was not in the top left quadrant of his chest. It was in the lower left quadrant a little higher than his navel and far out on the edge. That was the entry wound. There’d been an exit wound on his back that Sam’d seen and recorded the information for use later, which meant the bullet had entered his left side, cut a path through his body about two inches below the skin and exited out the back. It might have ricocheted off a rib in its progress through his body but she didn’t think the angle was right for that. What else she didn’t think was that the injury was life-threatening. A bullet wound in that spot could not have entered and exited through any vital organs. Though painful and bleeding like a spigot, it was what they called in all the cop movies “a flesh wound.”
She ripped the front half of his shirt off from the shoulder seam, thinking as she did that it took a lot of strength to rip fabric like that, but it was another piece of information she filed for future perusal. She yanked the arm hole seam apart and pulled the piece of fabric down the side seam and off into her hand. Then she ripped the piece of cloth into two halves. She wadded up one piece and jammed it into the hole in his side on the front, deep into the hole, heard him groan but didn’t care. Then she rolled him onto his side and did the same thing with the exit wound on his back.
Then she took a breath. Possibly the first one she’d taken since she knelt beside him, which had to have been less than a minute ago. Then she leapt up, raced to her car, yanked open the back passenger side door — please let it be here, please, oh please let it still be there! — and felt around in the dark footwell and under the front — there! The ACE bandage from the small plas
tic tub she used to carry supplies — stethoscope, thermometer, blood pressure cuff — while she was working had fallen out of the tub when she was unloading it on Friday afternoon, and she had meant to go back and get it.
She heard his voice as she was running back to kneel beside him, had probably been hearing it the whole time she’d been crouched there, but had not until now attended to the sound. Which, of course, was words and it took her a moment to shift her brain into the mode that translated words into meanings.
“… all right? Where is she?” he asked.
Charlie.
Sam’s head snapped up and she saw the rifle lying on the roadside. Charlie and Abby were gone.
“… they went down toward the river,” he said, his voice breathless from the pain.
She held the end of the ACE bandage to his abdomen and wrapped it once around his body to hold the wadded-up fabric bandages in place, then she shoved the remainder of the roll into his left hand and placed it over the piece of fabric in the wound in his side.
“Press here. Hard. Keep pressure on it and don’t let go.”
Then she got to her feet and ran past the rifle on the ground to the top of the embankment, calling out for Charlie.
A voice came up to her from the darkness below, along with the sound of somebody scrambling up through the bushes and over the rocks.
“… into the river,” were the first discernible words, but the voice was Charlie’s and that’s what Sam had so desperately wanted to know. “I was right behind her and I hit the water. She had to have gone in.” Charlie emerged from the dark bushes and raced toward Sam. Her pajama pants were muddy up almost to the knee. Her robe was untied and flapping around her.
A random thought rode a single synapse through her brain — Charlie’s hair was perfect, looked just like Princess Diana — and then was gone.
“… Malachi hurt bad?”
Charlie brushed past her to Malachi, looked down at him, then back up at Sam.
“Abby went into the river so she must have washed downstream into the Jabberwock. She has the key to the kiln in her pocket. I have to get that key.”
Her voice got higher and more hysterical with every word. “Merrie’s in the kiln. That monster put her in the kiln and shut the door!” She looked at her watch and squeaked out an aborted scream. “It’s three thirty-two. Merrie’s only got enough air to last until three forty-five — that’s thirteen minutes and it takes twenty minutes to drive—” She cut herself off, cried out hysterically, “No!”
She clamped her jaw shut, ground her teeth, spoke with words wrapped in iron control.
“No, that’s an hour and she has more time than that. There’s enough air for an hour and a half. There is! Until 4:15.” Charlie was hanging onto her emotions with her fingernails, fighting hysteria. “Maybe longer, another …” She pulled in air and a sob rode with it. “I’ve got forty-three minutes! Merrie will die in—”
“Pull me up,” Malachi spoke from below them and they looked down at him. He was trying to rise.
“Malachi, don’t,” Sam said. “You shouldn’t—”
He grabbed Sam’s restraining hand. His voice was gruff. “Pull me up!”
She pulled him up.
“Sam, you need to go to the bus shelter and get that key out of Abby’s pocket and take it to Charlie’s,” Malachi said. Sam just looked at him, her understanding lagging a beat or two behind his words. “Go now!” He was standing now, bent in pain at the waist but holding the roll of ACE bandage in place. “Charlie and I’ll go to her house and see if we can find some other way to get the door open.” Sam only paused for a beat, was turning toward her car as he urged her to “Hurry.”
She called over her shoulder as she ran, “Roll that bandage around and around tight.”
Then she was in her car, wheeling it around in the middle of the road like a Nascar driver and racing off into the darkness.
Chapter Thirty-Four
It was a good thing Malachi was doing the thinking because Charlie didn’t seem to be able to. She was totally consumed by the monster imperative: Get Merrie out of the kiln! She could hear only that, banging around in her head, blotting out all other sound or thought.
After he instructed Sam to go to the bus shelter, he grabbed hold of her arm.
“Help me to your car.”
She didn’t question. Just wrapped his arm around her shoulder and helped him walk to her car.
When Sam wheeled her car around in a skidding turn and raced away into the night, the action freed Charlie from some kind of trance. Suddenly, she no longer felt like her thoughts were wrapped in cotton, her actions lagging behind her volition. She was absolutely here and now, totally present. Could smell the river on her clothes, was aware of the pebbly asphalt on the bottom of her bare feet and the weight of the man leaning against her.
She got the door open and helped Malachi inside. Then she bolted around the car and jumped into the driver’s seat, started the car as Malachi began to wrap the ACE bandage around and around his abdomen. Then she turned the car around and pointed it back into Nowhere County and sped away into the worst hours of her entire life.
The drive from the county line down Route 17 to Barber’s Mill Road, and then down that to her mother’s house, took only seconds. Seconds that were hours long. Charlie was not aware of the passage of time or of driving the car or what Malachi was saying, and he was saying something.
She’d blinked when she got behind the wheel. And when she blinked again, she was careening into the driveway of her mother’s house and it wasn’t likely she’d ever remember anything about the time in between.
She slammed the transmission into park, leapt out of the car, leaving the door open and the engine running.
From the car to the back gate.
Through the back gate into the unlit backyard, where a hammer slammed into her chest. The kiln was a puddle of deeper darkness just beyond the side door of the garage, but even with only the light of the full moon, she could see it well enough to know that the door on it was closed.
She took one step and she was standing in front of it. She took one breath, then reached out and grabbed the cold metal handle and yanked on it with every ounce of strength in her body. It didn’t move. The door wasn’t just closed. It was locked.
Almost the whole backyard was dirt, her mother’s unplanted vegetable garden. But there was a slice of grass beside the garage all the way to the gate that probably hadn’t been mowed since … You could see an indentation in the tall grass in front of the kiln where the door had been opened, had swung out across the grass and bent it down. In fact, several blades of grass had been caught in the door when it closed and were now stuck there.
She might have started sobbing then. She knew she was making some kind of sound, but she couldn’t hear it.
There was a slab of concrete in front of the side garage door and a small roof jutting out from the building over it with an overhead light, though no sidewalk attached the side door of the garage to the screened-in porch on the back of the house.
She flung open the garage door and slammed her hand on the light switch on the inside wall beside it and stepped inside. The dim florescent in the ceiling flickered a time or two, then remained on. It cast a paltry glow through the big dusty-smelling enclosure, but it was enough light to see the ten-penny nail in the wall behind the door.
The nail was bare.
Some part of her mind registered that it was only recently bare, too. She’d noted when she’d gone looking for duct tape to seal up boxes that the garage was so coated with dusty cobwebs she’d need a face mask if she moved anything or the dust would ignite a brushfire in her allergies.
The rest of the garage was still enshrouded in cobwebs. But there were no cobwebs around that nail now.
She gasped a strangled sob, her hands flew to her mouth and she actually staggered backward a step.
Oh, dear God in heaven it was true.
This was real.
She’d put the child in the kiln, laid her on the piece of Mama’s new carpet, but left the door open a crack, just enough to let in air.
Or she had closed the door, but left it unlocked.
Or she’d locked it, but put the key back on the nail.
Reality was a thing too hateful to countenance. Abby Clayton hadn’t been bluffing. She had done exactly what she’d said. She’d used the key on the nail to unlock the kiln and opened the door — you could see the impression in the grass. She’d seen how full it was, that there was barely any room … but still she had put Merrie inside, closed and locked the door and dropped the key — the one “danglin’ on that old rabbit’s foot fob with that other little bitty key and the big ole door key that likely don’t open nothing” into her pocket.
Now Abby was gone. And the key in her pocket was the only way to open the kiln.
Charlie looked at her watch. Three fifty-six. Nineteen minutes.
Sam went roaring into the parking lot of the Dollar General Store so fast if any of the handful of people there had been in her way, she’d have run them down.
The lights the fire department had set up were still turned on, bleaching the color out of the world. She threw the car into park and leapt out, her head on a swivel, her eyes searching. Liam Montgomery was there. He must have gone home and changed out of his uniform because he was wearing street clothes now. When she ran across the lot to the bus shelter he followed her there.
“What’s goin’—?”
No way to tell him now. No time.
