Bone Valley

by Claire Matturro

  Oh, yeah, right, like we were going to miss this.

  With no words spoken to confirm our mutual new plan, we let Josey run around to the back and get out of our sight because that presumably put us out of her sight too. Once Josey had disappeared, Olivia and I, as if we had one brain between us, advanced through the rain toward the house.

  Because it seemed likely that Josey had gone through the back door, we did too. Scurrying inside, I saw that the door had been crudely pried open, no doubt by Miguel, as I didn’t think Josey had had time. Dripping water, Olivia and I stopped and cocked our heads to listen. From the end of the hallway, I could hear the murmur of voices. I pointed in that direction, and Olivia nodded.

  As Olivia and I started skulking down the long hallway, we both stopped, as if on cue, and stared around us at the dead animal heads hanging on the walls. Having grown up in Bugfest, Georgia, I was used to the occasional stuffed deer head or tarpon on a wall, but I didn’t even recognize some of these animals. It was purely disgusting. I put a finger to my lips in the universal sign of silence, and stared at Olivia, whose face reflected that she was every bit as dismayed as I was.

  Creeped out or not, we started walking again, following the hum of voices to just outside of what looked like a big den-type room. Like I was some TV cop who knew what I was doing, I motioned Olivia to one side of the door into the room, and I pressed myself against the hallway wall on the other side. Then we both peeked inside the den.

  What I saw freaked me out far more than the stuffed dead animal heads hanging on the walls.

  With his back more or less toward us, a big guy I assumed was Rayford had a gun pointed at Josey, who was kneeling on the floor near what looked like a body. After glancing at Olivia, I stared back at the crumpled body, and thought it might be Miguel’s. Though facedown, the hair and the long, thin body fit Miguel. Plus, it didn’t take a law degree to figure out that, what with his truck in the driveway, the man on the floor statistically stood a good chance of being Miguel.

  To my relief, I didn’t see any pooling blood and hoped that meant Miguel had not been shot.

  Movement from Olivia caught my eye. She mimicked dialing a phone. When our eyes locked, she pointed down the hallway. I gathered she meant to go in search of a phone, and I motioned her first toward silence—oh, like I was 007 and she was an idiot who would thunk and bang—and then toward movement.

  As Olivia slipped quietly down the hallway, I stared back into the den, my gaze first on the maybe-dead body, and then on Josey.

  “Like I told you, you better put down the gun. I’m an investigator with the sheriff ’s department, and you don’t want to shoot a cop,” Josey said as she crawled up from the floor and stood.

  I bit my tongue. I sweated. I listened for words of advice from Grandmom, and I shut up the part of my brain that was telling my mouth to scream. This was not the time to do something stupid, and I was already one in the hole on that. From my hiding place—that is, I was hidden if no one turned and looked at the space that I occupied—I basically froze in a panic of indecision.

  Josey was no idiot, I reminded myself, she was a trained law-enforcement officer.

  Too bad she didn’t still have that gun. Too bad my Glock was at the bottom of the Peace River. Too bad I wasn’t at home, sipping the good wine and listening to Nora Jones lull me into a moody sleep.

  “You’re not much of a cop,” the man said, and laughed.

  When he laughed, the space directly in front of my eyes went black for a moment and a piercing pain arched through my intestinal tract.

  He’d laughed the same laugh when he put me in the panther cage.

  Suddenly, I had less faith in Josey.

  Trying to work past the pain in my gut and the black spots in front of my eyes, I took a moment to analyze the situation. Olivia had run on tiptoe to the left in the hallway in search of a phone; I should run on tiptoe to the right in search of a phone, and call 911.

  But I didn’t want to leave Josey, or Miguel.

  Also, I realized that on a night like this, 911 would be overloaded, and there was no telling how long it would take to get a deputy sheriff out here, and I didn’t think we had a generous leeway. Carefully, and quietly, I pulled out the only weapon I had, my carrot-scraping kitchen knife.

  I don’t have a superhero complex. But I had been pretty damn good at mumblety-peg as a kid.

  “Not much of a cop at all,” Rayford Clothier said, repeating himself, unnecessarily if you asked me. “Coming in here and bending over that loser while I knock you down and take your gun.”

  “I’m enough of a cop to have called backup. This place will be crazy with cops in a few minutes.”

  Thank goodness, I thought, and cocked my head like a dog listening for sirens. But then I wondered, had the DEP folks even found a cell phone that worked and gotten through to 911? But before I could calculate the reliability factor of the DEP cell phones in a hurricanelike hundred-year rainstorm, Rayford upped the ante.

  “Yeah, then let’s make this quick.” Rayford raised the gun, and pointed it at Josey.

  Rayford still stood with his back to me, and that broad back looked like a broad target. Besides, I had to do something, and quickly, if not sooner. Running on adrenaline, as I’d never gotten supper to properly fuel me, I spun into the doorway and raised my hand, poised to throw the knife at Rayford’s back. Fervently, I prayed for the mercy of the gods and hoped that some vestige of my childhood tomboy talents remained in my throwing arm.

  If not, I was hoping to at least distract the man, and then my well-thought-out-plan was to scream and run like hell, and I figured Josey would do the same.

  Taking aim with my sore eyes, I threw my overextended kitchen knife at a big man who was about to shoot my new good friend.

  Chapter 34

  Jimmie likes to quote a poem by a woman who says she danced barefoot through shards of glass with no visible wound.

  That rather summed up Rayford’s and my experiment with knife throwing.

  Instead of drawing blood, and at least stunning him, the knife merely ripped through Rayford’s shirtsleeve.

  When the knife tore through his shirt, Rayford spun around toward me, and pointed his gun smack-dab dead center at my head.

  Uh-oh. I guessed the run-like-hell part should have started sooner, because now I was heavy, and leaden, and rooted, and tied in place by invisible cords and I couldn’t make myself move.

  Though, as a purely practical matter, I don’t believe the human body can ordinarily outrun a bullet.

  Considering that I was about to be seriously wounded, or killed, I felt a kind of strange calmness. Unable to do otherwise, I waited in place for a really, really mean man to shoot me.

  But timing is everything in life. Just as I had begun to throw the knife, Josey had begun a head-down lunge toward him. And now, even as evil Rayford began to squeeze the trigger, Josey rammed him in the side, kidney level, with her head. Though this hardly seemed to hurt him, he did tilt, as if he was losing his balance.

  No doubt thanks to the rammed-by-Josey impact, Rayford’s shot went a bit to the left, but the sound of the bullet zipping by me released me from those strange ties that bound me to the floor, and I moved. I moved like an Olympic runner, a greyhound, a Derby winner at the wire, I moved as if all the forces of nature were compelling me forward. As if I were stealing home in a tied game, bottom of the ninth, game seven of the World Series.

  I moved.

  After a running jump start, I slid on the terrazzo floor toward the closest thing to another weapon I could see—a beer bottle on a low coffee table. Crashing into the table, I grabbed the bottle just as Josey kicked Rayford in the knee. Since I was conveniently crouched on the floor with a beer bottle in my hand, I started pummeling Rayford in the same knee with the bottle, and then I spun toplike away from him as he toppled.

  Once he hit the floor, Josey started kicking him in the hand like some crazed kickboxer, tap dancer with just way, way
too much cocaine in her system, and Rayford grunted, and lost his grip on the gun. Josey kicked the weapon and I watched with mixed feelings as the gun spun under the couch. Yeah, Rayford couldn’t get it, but then, neither could I.

  With the gun out of play, Rayford, down but not out, pounced for the upper hand. Before Josey could jump back, he grabbed her ankle and yanked her down on the floor with him.

  If death hadn’t been a seriously possible outcome, this might have been more fun. I dashed back into the fray, scurrying on my knees, and hit Rayford over the head with the beer bottle, which, amazingly enough, had not broken. Hitting Rayford with my puny weapon only seemed to irritate him further, but didn’t make him stop banging Josey’s head against the floor.

  Works in the movies, I thought, and smacked him again with the beer bottle. I’d show him raw hamburger and getting locked in the lion’s den. I’d show him banging Josey’s head. I hit him again and again.

  He stopped banging Josey’s head.

  A modest success, only briefly enjoyed, I noted, when he smashed his fist into my face. I stopped hitting him with the beer bottle.

  Apparently, I went down easier than Josey, and I blacked out, or I think I blacked out, as there seemed to be this space of time in which I wasn’t there at all. When I woke, out of a dizzyingly whirling and altered vision, I saw Rayford clobber Josey’s face with his balled-up hand, and she flopped over, limp, apparently out of the game.

  Hyperventilating against the fear and the pain in my face, I tried to tuck myself into a tight little ball and roll toward the couch that now protected the handgun. In the background, I heard the sound of a crash and breaking glass. Oh, Lord, I prayed, quickly as it were, let that be Olivia breaking into the gun cabinet. Let it be stocked with a loaded assault rifle.

  And, please, dear Lord, let Olivia know how to shoot straight, I added. Okay, so yeah, maybe that’s not a good Christian love-your-enemy type of prayer, but I needed somebody with a gun on my side, right now, because Rayford was much closer to me than I was to the handgun under the couch. And I had dropped the beer bottle somewhere in the melee.

  When Olivia didn’t sprint like John Wayne into the room, I spun out of my body ball, and tried to slide to the gun, but Rayford the maniac, now standing tall, grabbed me by my feet and dragged me back, where I landed, a wad of whimpering, wounded female flesh, right at his feet.

  When I tried, for gosh knows what reason, to sit up, Rayford shoved me flat down again. My head hit the floor with a loud and painful thud, and Rayford, who I suddenly noticed had unusually large hands, starting using both of those unusually large hands to choke me about my tender neck. Even as I clawed at him with my free fingers, I felt the world going black.

  “The carrot,” Grandmom screamed into my ear.

  The carrot? I’m dying and my grandmother wants to discuss vegetables?

  Then I remembered the carrot in my shirt pocket and, moving amazingly fast for a near-dead woman with no air to breathe, I whipped it out. Rayford still had both his hands around my neck and his face hovered close enough over my own that I could see a small piece of something brown caught between two of his front teeth.

  Air, glorious, wonderful air, I thought, and I jerked the carrot out of my shirt pocket and jabbed the man who was separating me from that wonderful air; I poked him as hard as I could in his right eye with the narrow end of the carrot. He screamed and banged my head on the floor, but he didn’t let go of my neck. Tough guy, I thought, but without appreciation, and I jabbed him again in the same eye, which is actually a gross and definitely unladylike thing to be forced to do, but this time he let go of my neck to grab my hand with the carrot. Blood and mess and stuff were coming out of his right eye, but apparently Rayford was not about to let go of his immediate plan to kill me to seek medical attention. So, yeah, the bastard was tough, frighteningly tough.

  Tough enough that with much less trouble than it should have been, Rayford wrenched the carrot from my hand. Then, to my increasing horror, he reached back the hand holding the carrot with the clear intention of jabbing the carrot in my eye.

  I jerked my head sideways as quick as I could, and just before I became a blind woman, I saw Olivia running into the room.

  Armed.

  Armed, not with an assault rifle as in my prayers, but with a bottle of some kind of detergent. Dish detergent in a squirt bottle.

  “It’s got phosphate in it,” Olivia screamed.

  A minor point, I thought, at a time like this.

  “Phosphate,” she screeched, in the voice of an apocalyptic madwoman. And then, with perfect precision, she squirted that bottle of phosphated soap into both of Rayford’s eyes.

  Rayford uttered a series of inarticulate, anguished screams while grabbing at his face.

  And then he rose off of me, and, blindly, he stumbled from the room.

  I shook my head clear, gulped air, and sprang for the handgun, under the couch where Josey had kicked it.

  Olivia ran for Josey, who was moaning, and struggling to move.

  We could hear a trail of Rayford’s screams as he ran down the hallway, then a door crashed open, and he must have run outside.

  Maybe he thought the rain would wash the soap out of his eyes.

  Maybe he was beyond thinking.

  Maybe he was just regrouping for the next round.

  I got the gun, and stood facing the den’s door, the weapon held tightly in both hands, in case he came back. Behind my back, I heard Josey grunt.

  “She’s coming to,” Olivia said.

  “Did you call 911?” I said, still gasping for air.

  “Yes. I broke into his gun cabinet, but none of them was loaded. I couldn’t find the bullets,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  “Olivia, you did good,” I said, and turned for a moment to look at Josey, who seemed to be struggling to speak but not wholly succeeding, and then I looked at the still-prone body of Miguel.

  “Is he—”

  Before I could ask it, we heard a new scream, and the slamming sound of truck doors, and then gunfire.

  “Rayford must have gotten a gun out of his truck,” I said.

  “Samantha,” Olivia said, a new hysterical pitch to her voice. “My God, she’s in the trailer.”

  “We better—” I started to say, then realized I didn’t really want to leave this room until a small army of Official Law-Enforcement people were in it and another barrier of law-enforcement officers was between me and Rayford the killer.

  “Save the panther,” Olivia finished for me.

  I looked at my friend. She had been cradling Josey’s head in her lap, but she put it down gently on the floor, and jumped up. “Come on,” she said.

  “Don’t go out there,” Josey said, her voice faltering.

  “We can’t let Rayford shoot the cat,” Olivia said, with no faltering at all.

  No, instead, we’d let him shoot us, I thought. But I was the one with the gun, and Olivia was already out the den’s door, so the only loyal thing I could do was follow her, so I did.

  Down the hallway of the dead things, and out the same door we’d come in, and, around to the front of the house, and there we were, standing in the rain, again, and watching the cosmic forces set the stage for a tableau from hell.

  Samantha, the one-eyed panther, was out of her cage, and seemingly stalking the madman with a gun and no clear vision.

  “Told you that granny knot on the belt wasn’t any good,” Olivia said.

  Hardly the time to play I-told-you-so, I thought, and waved the gun in my hand around, trying to figure out exactly what I was supposed to do now.

  Even as I waved mine, Rayford positioned his gun in front of him with one hand and rubbed at his eyes with his other hand, all the while screaming out curses. The cat was circling him.

  Then Samantha began to crouch. Even in the rain, I could see the tight bands of muscles in her chest and shoulders tighten.

  “Give me the gun,” Josey demanded. �
��Now.”

  I turned and looked at her. She was standing, but she was shaky.

  “No,” Olivia shouted, and Rayford turned in Olivia’s direction and fired a couple of rounds. For a man half-blinded by phosphate soap and carrot jabs, he seemed to have a pretty good aim, I thought, as I fell prone to the ground, still clutching the gun.

  “Give me the gun,” Josey said, the distinct sound of an Official Order in her voice. I looked up. She was still standing. I glanced back at the crouched cat and the maniac, Rayford, the man who I now knew in some not fully detailed understanding had killed M. David and Angus and set up Miguel for both murders. All those animal heads on the wall—no doubt, he was the one who had killed that nursing panther back at Antheus.

  A killer. No question. I stared at Rayford and Samantha. I had a clear shot at either of them. I turned the gun on Rayford.

  Josey dropped down beside me and grabbed at the gun. “Give it to me,” she shouted. For special emphasis, Rayford fired off another couple of shots toward us.

  Hey, I’m a trial attorney, and not, as Josey had been apt to remind me, a member of the law-enforcement community. They don’t pay me to carry that kind of kill-or-be-killed load, so I handed the gun to her. But I wished I’d gone ahead and shot Rayford instead when I saw Josey the Official Law-Enforcement person follow standard procedure and take aim in the rain at the crouched panther.

  Chapter 35

  Olivia and I watched Josey’s grim face.

  And we watched as she didn’t fire, didn’t shoot the panther, and finally dropped the gun to her side.

  As Josey put down her official training that told her to kill the wild cat in order to save the man, Samantha leaped at Rayford in a single arch of power and grace, and he was down, and she was the wild beast she was designed by nature to be, and we knew he was dead before the 911 call could have brought anyone to the damned house on Morgan Johnson Road with the heads of dead animals on the wall.