Both were redheads. Both held machine guns exactly like the one Jack had so recently possessed. And both were dressed in black leather as well. Together the three women comprised an outlaw gang that would warm the heart of any cattleman—a whole lot of bovine flesh had obviously been shed so they could look way past dangerous.
Three dangerous gringas, and one not-so-dangerous senorita in a horizontal position behind Jack. For a second he imagined the four of them not as a gang of criminals, but as a Phil Spector girl group driven to desperate measures.
Jack was about ready to toss up his hands and ask where the Candid Camera crew was hiding. In fact, he almost certainly would do just that, and do it soon. But first he had a bit of unfinished business to attend to.
Because the cellular phone in his hand was still ringing.
Ringing insistently.
Jack raised his free hand, smiling at the women as if he finally got the joke.
“Don’t do it, cocksucker,” the old woman said, and she didn’t sound at all like Alan Funt.
The two younger women pointed their weapons at him.
A chill traveled Jack’s spine, the kind of chill he couldn’t ignore. Still, his hand closed around the speaker panel. Flip it open and he’d know. He had to know.
“I’ve been waiting a long time for a phone call,” Jack explained. “Almost a year. I think this might be it. I’ve got to find out.”
The old woman barked laughter. “Answer that phone and you’ll never find out anything, ’cause you’ll be deader’n a paraplegic’s dick before you so much as say howdy-do.”
The phone rang again. Spike squirmed in the old woman’s grasp, barking sharply, worried puppy eyes trained on Jack.
Jack hesitated. It was weird. Like being in some old Lassie movie or something, like the moment when Lassie warns Timmy just before the idiot falls down a mine shaft—
But Jack had to know. He had to answer the call.
Spike stared at him. No. That wasn’t right. Not at him. Behind him.
Jack turned and came nose to nose with the woman in black, sans sunglasses.
Man, her eyes were something. A real surprise. Clear blue and—
“Don’t just stand there!” the old woman yelled. “Take care of him!”
The young woman’s irises flashed like chiseled ice as she smashed the butt of her machine gun against Jack’s forehead.
He didn’t hear the telephone anymore.
But he did hear bells . . .
***
. . . as if some crazy Quasimodo was ringing in the New Year up there in his head.
Jack knew it was an illusion. Just as he knew that he could get a grip on reality if he could only open his eyes.
Open his eyes and he’d see Freddy G laughing. Pack O’ Weenies, too. And the Phil Spector girl group gang singing, backup band chugging to a “He’s a Rebel” beat. Oh, we had you going, Jack, they’d sing. We had you going, and good! Yeah. That was how it would be.
Jack tried mightily. His brain listed starboard as he got his right eye open, then to port as he raised the lid of his left.
They stood above him like some imposing female forest. Blurry as watercolors running in the bright sunlight that washed them from behind, but Jack could see them just as surely as he could smell all that black leather. Black leather scented with jasmine perfume.
He heard their voices. The younger woman spoke first, the one he’d punched out. Her voice was as smooth as leather and jasmine-sweet.
“I don’t want him to suffer, Mama.”
“If you would have done your job right, he’d be dead by now.”
“But Mama—”
“Don’t Mama me, girl.”
“But—”
A hard slap ended the conversation. Defeated, the younger woman moved away. Another figure replaced her, this one taller . . . rangier. . . .
The stranger leaned over him. A male smell burned Jack’s nostrils—the minty stink of Ben-Gay laced with the sickly sweet odor of ginger ale and bourbon.
The old woman’s voice again: “Should I do him, Daddy?”
“Don’t waste a bullet, sugar pop. I got a better idea.” The man hovered over Jack, wheezing heavy bourbon breaths. Jack worked to see him clearly. He blinked several times and a gaunt face covered with jerky skin came into focus above him. Icy blue eyes wild with frostbitten fire were set beneath the man’s heavy brow as if pounded there with a sledge hammer. He wore a top hat and a frock coat and—
Jack’s eyelids fluttered. Focus was going. He was fading again.
Something was draped around the man’s neck.
Jack fought to remain conscious.
Something shiny encircled the man’s neck. Something slick, ends hanging free, like lengths of garden hose—
Like—
The man reached out, shedding wriggling shadows, his scarecrow arms laying midnight stripes across Jack’s body. And then the stranger’s bony fingers reached into the heavens and closed around a black cloud, and he pulled it down . . . down . . . and further still . . . down . . . until finally the cloud slammed closed over Jack Baddalach’s head.
THE HEAT WAS THE FIRST THING JACK NOTICED when he regained consciousness, only the word heat seemed too timid a description. Get your ass trussed up in a mummy bag on the hottest day of the year in the middle of Death Valley, and you wouldn’t be one degree hotter than this.
Jack opened his eyes, but he couldn’t see a thing. Wherever he was, it was completely dark. Completely quiet, too. He lay on his back, knees twisted to one side, right shoulder pressed against something hard. He moved his hands and feet, just a little, and was relieved to find that the dognappers hadn’t tied him up.
Jack sucked a shallow breath and immediately wished he hadn’t. The air was foul. A single breath made his gut churn miserably. Add to that the mother of all headaches, blooming at the spot where the woman in black had struck him with her machine gun.
Jack reached for his forehead to see if he was bleeding, but his hand struck something hard before his arm could make the trip.
Suddenly he didn’t care about his head.
He reached out, palms pressing against smooth metal barely a foot from his face. His fingers traveled the metal—down to knee level, up above his head—and found no breaks in the wall.
There were walls above and below, too. He was trapped. That was why he couldn’t see anything. The women had locked him up.
Inside something.
Claustrophobia. Jack didn’t want to even think the word.
Instead, he took a deep breath. He knew he needed air and—
He tasted it this time. Actually tasted the stink. It was like drinking sewer sludge. He gagged.
He’d hardly moved at all, and already he was covered in sweat. Damn, but it was as hot as Satan’s backside. Jack’s heart started pounding, a live thing roasting on a barbecue grill. He could almost hear the searing hiss of red hot metal.
He had to get a grip on things. Because if he didn’t . . . if he didn’t get a grip on himself—
But Jesus, how the hell was he supposed to feel? Maybe the crazy bitches had locked him in a metal box, dug a hole in the middle of the Mojave Desert—in the middle of fucking nowhere—and buried him alive.
Panic sank sharp hooks into Jack’s spine. He pushed against the metal wall above him, then hauled back and rammed it with his elbow. Once. Twice. Three times. Harder, then harder still. Again and again, but the wall did not give.
Jack sank back, sweating like a pig, the imaginary mummy bag tighter now. His breaths came hard and fast, but that didn’t bother him because suddenly he didn’t notice the stink so much. He was scared and he was hungry for oxygen. No matter how rank it smelled. Whatever he could get he’d take.
He rested a moment.
And nothing changed.
He knew he couldn’t rest at all. Not now. Rest, and the heat might drag him down to a place where he couldn’t fight it anymore. The mummy bag would get tighter . . . an
d tighter . . . until there was nothing left for him to do but suffocate in silence.
He wouldn’t do that. Wherever he was, he wanted out. Right now. He slammed his elbow against the metal wall again. Nothing. Pressed against it with his hands and knees until his spine ached. Still nothing.
Okay. He had to stop and think for a minute. Just a minute. He couldn’t panic. If he was going to get out of this, he had to figure things out.
His hands drifted over the metal above. It was hot to the touch, like an electric stove notched on low heat. He slammed his elbow against it one last time, and not very hard. The wall made a flexing sound, a deeper sound than metal would make if dirt were piled on top of it.
If he’d been buried in the desert, metal might very well hold heat like an electric range, but it certainly wouldn’t make a flexing sound. No. That fact meant something else.
But if he were locked in something black—say the trunk of a big black limousine—well, a black metal trunk would heat up real nice in the afternoon sun. Hell, if this were August instead of February, you’d probably be able to fry an egg on the sucker. And a trunk would make a flexing sound if you smashed at it like a wildman. Even the trunk of a Cadillac.
Yeah. It had to be. The women had locked him in the trunk of the limo.
Jack relaxed a little. Not much. Maybe a millimeter’s worth. Okay. The trunk wouldn’t give. And it was dark. He had to get the trunk open, because even if the air held out, he couldn’t take the heat forever. Let alone that stink—
There had to be something in the trunk that he could use. A jack maybe. Or a screwdriver. Yeah. With a screwdriver he could jimmy the lock from the inside—
Sure he could.
First things first. Things would go much faster if he didn’t have to work in complete darkness. If he could find an emergency kit, and if it held a flashlight—
Jack reached out, fingers groping blindly across heavy carpet, until he found something plastic, shaped like—
A water bottle. He tipped it back and forth, and the liquid slosh he heard was sweet. He twisted the top and drank greedily.
Jack couldn’t tell what he had, not in the dark. Evian or Calistoga or Perrier. And he certainly wasn’t up for any blindfolded designer water taste test. No way. Jack Baddalach was strictly a tap-water kind of guy.
Jack capped the bottle and set it aside. For the first time in his life he thanked God for yuppies. If he just kept his cool he’d be okay. He reached out again, searching for the emergency kit that had to be there.
Was there. He opened it and searched the small compartment—socket wrenches, a screwdriver, a flashlight . . .
With dead batteries. Okay. That wouldn’t stop him. He held the screwdriver in one hand, reaching out toward the spot where the rear seal of the trunk should be with the other.
His fingers struck something moist and rubbery. Instinctively, he drew back, his mind playing a little riddle-me-this-Batman game. What the hell would you find in a trunk that felt like . . . well . . . lukewarm Jell-0?
There was only one way to find out. Jack reached out again, two fingers pressing gingerly against the rubbery thing, two fingers exploring it carefully.
The thing was slick, and there was a hard casing around the rubbery part that was also slick . . . okay, Jack, you’ve found a hole rimmed with something hard . . . and then below that hole was another hole, but this one was more like a slash, a rip in the rubbery surface, and just inside the rip were two hard, curving ridges . . . two rows of—
Two rows of human teeth.
Shock shotgunned Jack’s consciousness. He yanked his fingers out of the corpse’s mouth and squirmed away, giving in to panic, slamming his elbows and knees against the trunk lid once more, sucking deep lungfuls of fetid air, finally huddling against the rear of the trunk at the place where it joined with the backseat of the limo’s passenger compartment.
Jesus . . . Jesus! He was locked in a trunk with a fucking human corpse!
Maybe it was Pack O’ Weenies. Yeah. The limo driver, with a hole in his head courtesy of a machine gun-toting gang of Ronettes wanna-bes. Pack O’ Weenies, with his mouth welded into a death grimace by rigor mortis, and Jack Baddalach’s fingers had almost been on the motherfucker’s dead swollen tongue—
Oh, man. This was too much. But Jack wouldn’t think about it. He couldn’t. Because it didn’t matter. Not now. What mattered right now was getting to hell and gone out of this trunk.
He clutched the screwdriver in his right hand, afraid of losing it in the darkness. As he shifted onto his side, something rounded and long dug into his ribs. Jack raised up on one elbow and pulled that something free.
It was an emergency flare. In a second he’d have light, and then he’d crawl over Pack O’ Weenies dead fucking carcass, and he’d pop the trunk with the screwdriver, and he’d get down on his hands and knees and give the dusty Mojave Desert a big sloppy kiss.
Jack struck the flare.
It sizzled alive, hissing white fire.
The corpse’s face was washed in the sickly glow, a twitching mask of shadow and light that would have frightened Stephen King.
It wasn’t Pack O’ Weenies. The face belonged to a young blond woman dressed in a smartly tailored tuxedo. A bullet hole drilled the spot where her left eye should have been, and Jack knew instantly that he’d touched that spot, just as he knew he’d touched the woman’s open mouth, passed his fingers between those full lips that were smeared with lipstick and touched her teeth—
An inescapable wave of horror washed over Jack. Forget wave—this was a fucking tsunami. God, he would have crawled into that suffocating mummy bag right now if only he could have. Crawled into that sucker and zipped it tight over his head. Anything to escape the horror that lay before him.
But he wouldn’t do that. No. A minute ago he was ready to crawl over Pack O’ Weenies’ corpse to be free of the trunk. And now he would crawl over this woman. Dead was dead, after all. And nothing dead would stop Jack Baddalach.
Jack exhaled sharply—a low, rushing sound. But the sound didn’t end when he took another breath, it only grew louder in Jack’s head, bringing with it a memory, the memory of a man who pulled fistfuls of black clouds from the sky as he locked Jack in the limo trunk, a tall man dressed in a frock coat and a top hat, a man who wore lengths of garden hose around his neck.
No. Not lengths of hose. Seeing the snake curled around the woman’s throat with its head nestled in her long blond hair. Jack knew that the things the man wore around his neck were a long way from lengths of garden hose.
The snake drew back, away from the hissing flare, retreating, its head pressing against the hollow of the woman’s chin.
And then came another sound, a sound that told Jack he’d made another mistake, a sound that told him the snake wasn’t retreating at all—a sharp, angry rattling that played unrelenting counterpoint to the hot hissing of the emergency flare.
***
Jack pulled the flare away. The rattlesnake slithered forward, its head pressing between the dead blond’s small breasts.
Not that the blond seemed to mind. She stared at Jack with that one murky hazel eye, the one that hadn’t been shot out of her head, the one that was both unblinking and dead. Her mouth was open and her lipstick was smeared as if from a kiss. She didn’t blink, and she didn’t move, not even with a rattler coiling around her slim and elegant neck like some hideous living necklace—
You won’t have it bad, Jack, she seemed to say. Just a couple of fangs pricking your skin. Just a little poison pumping through your veins. Not like facing down a gun . . . not like watching a long black barrel spit fire inches from your face . . . not like feeling a couple of ounces of lead blow your eyeball through the back of your skull.
Cold scales whispered over the woman’s silk blouse. The snake began to coil near the corpse’s belly. In just a few seconds its rattles would be free of the woman’s neck.
Jack coughed. The flare was burning, sure, but it was
smoking too, filling the trunk with fumes that burned his lungs and stung his eyes.
Maybe Jack could burn the rattler with the flare. But if he missed. And if the snake didn’t. If the reptile sank its fangs into his flesh. He was in the middle of nowhere. Even if he got out of the trunk, he might not get help in time. He didn’t know anything about the killing efficacy of rattlesnake venom, and he sure as hell didn’t want to find out.
The snake’s rattles beat hollowly against the woman’s trachea, then slipped free.
Jack dropped the flare, and a shadow curtained the corpse’s face, and she seemed to smile, whispering. Not a bad place to die, Jack. I’m here. At least you won’t be alone.
Fuck no. Jack twisted away from the corpse and the coiling rattler, thinking now of the skinny bastard in the frock coat and the top hat, gas from the flare burning his lungs as he pulled at the rug that covered the trunk compartment, eyes watching the rattler all the while as he tore the carpet free of its Velcro moorings like he was tearing into that jerky-faced man who’d left him locked in a trunk with a corpse and a rattlesnake, crawling under the carpet when it finally came free, putting it between his body and the rattler and he could hear the flare hissing like a whisper as the carpet caught fire, or maybe it was just the woman’s corpse inviting him to relax, to stay with her, or maybe it was the hissing sound of the rattler as it sprang . . .
. . . its fanged head sailing over the thick carpet . . .
. . . just missing Jack as it struck the metal fire wall that separated the rear compartment of the limo from the trunk . . .
. . . striking hard, dazed, scales slapping against the metal floor as it fell next to Jack, stunned, slowed, but still a creature of instinct, coiling again . . .
. . . until one strong human hand closed around its throat and silenced its hiss, and another gripped its rattles, and it spit fitfully as its coiled body was pulled to its full length . . . and its scaled belly was ripped open as human teeth tore it in half and then it was nothing . . .
. . . it was dead.
The Ten-Ounce Siesta Page 3
