Die Dog or Eat the Hatchet

by Adam Howe

  All things considered, the nuthouse wasn’t so bad. It sure beat being put to sleep like a dog. But Hingle had no intention of staying here.

  And so he’d waited, watched, and every year the tired old cop, reeking of desperation, would come to interview him … until Hingle finally saw his way out.

  Maybe once he was footloose and fancy free, he’d send the dumb bastard a thank you note, carved into the belly of the next gal he met.

  Hingle gazed across the infirmary at the orderly posted on the door. The man’s chin rested on his chest. He was snoring softly. Just the two of them in the room.

  A splinter of steel from the paperclip was buried beneath the skin of Hingle’s palm. He’d secreted it there while the orderlies were dragging the old cop off him. Curling his left hand inwards, careful not to clang his cuffs against the bed frame and wake Sleeping Dumbass, Hingle tweezed the splinter free with his thumbnail. He wiped the blood off the splinter onto his sheets, and then inserted it into the keyhole of the cuffs, and as he worked the lock with his improvised pick, searching for the sweet spot, his mind wandered back to when he’d first learned the trick.

  * * *

  Terry Lee Hingle was ten years old, living with his momma and the monkey on her back, and all the uncles a young boy could ever want, in a white trash ghetto apartment that made darktown look like Disneyland.

  Momma’s pimp was a vice bull, Little Cyril Dupree, the kind of guy who pulls the wings off flies till he’s old enough to break arms and he takes up the badge.

  He came for the rent every week, and for a piece of momma whenever else he felt like it. He’d toss his hat down on the table. Unbuckle his gunbelt and hang it like a saddle on the back of his chair. Sit in the kitchen, drinking and counting his cut and searching momma’s face for signs she was holding out on him. Dipping a hand in his pocket, he’d dig out a few wraps of whatever he’d scrounged from the evidence locker, or shaken down from street dealers, scatter the junk on the floor and watch with amusement as momma snatched up the wraps like a pigeon gobbling breadcrumbs. And then he’d cuff Terry Lee to the drainpipe under the sink and take momma back to the bedroom for the rest of the rent.

  Chained like a dog to the drainpipe, huddled on the stained linoleum floor among the rotting food cartons and the cigarette butts, the empty beer cans and bottles, the dead roaches and the rat shit, Terry Lee would listen to Little Cyril rut his momma, or bounce her head off the bedroom walls if he was too drunk to fuck, sometimes both—dreaming up ways to way to fix that fucking pig’s wagon.

  The next time Little Cyril came and cuffed him to the pipe, Terry Lee was prepared. He’d glued one of momma’s hairpins behind the drainpipe with a wad of gum. Little Cyril went out back with momma. Terry Lee started picking the lock with the hairpin. It wasn’t as easy as the cop shows on TV had led him to believe. There was a knack to it. He didn’t get it right away. It took several more visits from Little Cyril before one night, the hairpin clicked in the lock, and the steel bracelets slid almost by magic from his wrist.

  When Little Cyril emerged later from the bedroom, it took him a drunken moment to register that the kid wasn’t cuffed to the drainpipe, that his gunbelt drooped impotently over the chair back, and that his pistol was no longer in the holster. He turned in time to see the boy aiming the barrel at his open fly.

  Terry Lee squeezed the trigger. Little Cyril crashed to the floor, squealing like a stuck pig, clutching his crotch as what was left of his junk gushed through his hands. The boy shot him once more in the chest. Little Cyril thudded back against the pantry door and his high hog-like squeals stopped. Terry Lee wiped his prints from the gun with his tee shirt, just like he’d seen on the TV cop shows.

  Momma clattered through the curtain beads behind him, stopping in her tracks when she saw him crouching over Little Cyril to remove the .22 from his ankle holster. “What—oh, baby—what have you done?”

  “Take this, momma,” Terry Lee said, calmly handing her Little Cyril’s pistol.

  She was still staring at the gun in her hands when Terry Lee fired the .22 and knocked her back into the bedroom. He heard the heavy thud as she crashed to the floor. He wiped his prints off the .22 and then forced the gun into the stiffening claw of Little Cyril’s hand.

  Then he went and cuffed himself back to the drainpipe and waited for someone to come and find him there.

  It took longer than he expected.

  The flies came first.

  Then the rats.

  They stripped Little Cyril’s skull to the bone, until all that was left was a grinning death’s head mask, topped with ragged clumps of hair, and black-hollowed eyes that seemed to bore into Terry Lee. The rats burrowed under Little Cyril’s clothes, his shirt and pants billowing and bulging, blooming with blood as they gnawed their way inside him. Next they went after momma. Terry Lee listened to the sound of claws tearing flesh, incisors scraping bone, the frenzied squealing as they feasted and fought over scraps; watched as the vermin scuttled back from the bedroom, fur slick with blood, carrying away pieces of momma—a finger here, an ear there—like she was takeout food.

  After two days, still shackled to the drainpipe, Terry Lee began to have serious doubts that anyone was ever going to come for him. The kitchen was a storm of flies, the air choked with the stench of blood and death. Little Cyril was barely recognizable as human, and momma had run away with the rats, piece by piece. The vermin turned their attention to the helpless boy. Terry Lee deeply regretted having tossed away that fucking hairpin. As the rats crept towards him, he saw his reflection in their beady black eyes, like a nightmare house of mirrors. He screamed, thrashing against the drainpipe and kicking desperately to fend them off. He was still screaming and thrashing and kicking when the cops came and found him and freed him from the cuffs, and as they carted him away in an ambulance, and for months at the orphanage he still woke screaming and thrashing and kicking from nightmares in which the cops arrived too late.

  * * *

  The splinter clicked in the keyhole. The cuffs snapped open. The orderly didn’t stir. Hingle freed his hand from the bracelet, and then used the splinter to work the lock on the second set of cuffs. With both hands free, he unbuckled the strap restraining his legs, slowly peeled back his sheets and then lowered his bare feet to the floor. His eyes never strayed from the sleeping orderly. He unraveled the thick surgical bandages from around his skull. His fingers brushed the stitches lacing the back of his scalp together. The wound flared angrily, but the pain only sharpened his senses. Like a cat stalking a bird, he padded across the room towards the sleeping orderly. Looming behind the man, Hingle looped the bandages around his neck like a gauze garrote, and put him to sleep forever.

  There was no time to get creative on the corpse. He switched his hospital pajamas for the dead orderly’s uniform. Swiped the man’s keys and the billy club hooked to his belt. Hingle used the keys to proceed through the maze of locked gates, and the billy club to brain the fatass guard on the front desk. The guy never looked up from the titty magazine he was ogling, blood and brains splattering the centerfold bunny like clotted crimson jizz.

  * * *

  The escape siren didn’t start sounding until Hingle was already pounding away through the vast acreage of forest from which Pine Grove State Hospital got its name. A storm was raging, the rain lashing down, soaking him through to the bone. Lightning flashed across the night sky like yellow sutures on black velvet. His orderly whites were mud-soiled and torn where he’d clawed his way through the wilds. It had been years since he’d expended more energy than it took to zombie-walk about the hospital. His lungs burned. His legs cramped. A stitch gouged his side. And yet he barely paused for breath, energized by the storm as he plunged on through the woods.

  The trees began to thin as he reached the far fringes of the forest.

  The lights of a diner glittered into view. BIG BOB’S EATS, the sign said. Replete with a neon-lit likeness of Big Bob who licked his lips when the lights flashe
d. In the parking lot were a trucker’s Peterbilt rig, a Kawasaki motorcycle, and an old beater Volkswagen Beetle. Hingle matched the people he saw through the diner window to the vehicles. There was the trucker at a window booth, sipping a cup of coffee. A tired-looking waitress in a red check apron sat leafing through a magazine at the end of the counter. She didn’t look much like a biker. The hog had to belong to the short order cook Hingle could see through the kitchen service hatch behind her. That meant the Beetle was hers.

  Ted Bundy had driven a Bug; Hingle took that as a good omen.

  He worked his way around the building to the rear. An open restroom window clattered in the wind. A dumpster was pushed up against the wall. All it’d take was to give the dumpster a little nudge—after checking it first for rats: Nasty little bastards—and he could boost himself up inside the window. Hingle grinned to himself.

  Returning to the front of the building, he hunkered down in the shadows of the forest line, and then he bided his time and waited, watching the waitress with a hungry gleam in his eyes.

  It had been four long years since he’d had a woman, and though she wasn’t really his type—a little older than he liked ‘em—Terrence Hingle aimed to catch up for lost time.

  3.

  The diner was quiet as an Edward Hopper painting.

  Tilly was perched at her regular spot at the end of the lunch counter, flipping through a celebrity scandal-rag some customer had left behind. In the kitchen behind her she could hear Earl scraping grit off the grill with a spatula. Glancing up from the magazine, Tilly checked to see how her only customer was getting along with that cup of joe he’d been nursing for damn near an hour. Alone at his window booth, the trucker was stirring his coffee in time to the slit-your-wrists country ballad warbling from the juke between the doors to the restrooms. Tilly hoped the guy didn’t ask for a refill so she could close the diner early. Business wouldn’t pick up on a night like tonight and she was beat from having already worked the day shift.

  It should’ve been Mathilda Mulvehill’s night off; Tilly would think about that many times in the hours to come. Not that she’d had any grand plans. Just another night curled on the couch watching TV with Marmalade the cat and a ménage a trois with Misters Ben & Jerry. She hadn’t even changed out of her day shift uniform when Big Bob called her at home and asked her to cover his shift tonight, with his usual empty promises of a raise. Of course, she’d agreed.

  Scolding herself for being such a pushover—though it was her mother’s voice she heard in her mind—Tilly had ignored Marmalade’s despairing glance as she crammed her aching feet back inside her crepe-soled work shoes. She trudged outside the trailer through the rain to her Bug. The car seemed to have more backbone than its owner, refusing to work at first—but a few more turns of the key and old Betsy Bug finally putt-putted to life.

  As she passed through town on her way to the diner, not for the first time Tilly sighed and asked herself what she was still doing in this place. There was nothing keeping her here since mom died. Hadn’t the plan been to save up enough money to go back to school; what had happened to that plan?

  A pushover and a coward … her mother’s voice said.

  Tilly turned on the radio to shut up the voice.

  What happened to that plan was Lizette Mulvehill.

  Sometimes Tilly wondered if her mother started drinking because her father walked out on her, or if dad bugged out because mom started drinking. The story tended to change every time Lizette told it, which was often. What never changed was that Brandon Mulvehill was a no-account piece of trash and that Tilly was her daddy’s daughter and destined to turn out just the same way.

  When she went to college she thought she’d finally escaped. But it was less than a week before the phone calls started. Begging her to come home. Saying she was sick. Real sick this time. Asking how—after everything she’d sacrificed to raise her daughter right—how could Tilly leave her own mother to die alone?

  Another month of calls and Tilly buckled and went home to do her daughterly duty. It turned out her mother wasn’t quite as close to death’s door as she’d led Tilly to believe. It would be another five long years before Lizette drew her final hateful breath. By then Tilly’s dreams of college and bettering herself hung in tatters. Mom had seen to that.

  The trucker finally gave up on his coffee. He tossed a few bills on the table to cover the check, and then shuffled to the door. Turned up the lapels of his jacket before braving the rain, the bell above the door tinkling as he left. Tilly glanced at the clock above the lunch counter—quarter to ten. Putting down her magazine, she hopped off her stool and went and locked the door. She flipped the sign in the window to CLOSED. Rain needled her tired reflection in the glass as she watched the trucker’s Peterbilt rumble off into the night. She was a petite young woman—more mousy than cute—with a heart-shaped face, freckles dusting her nose and cheeks, her eyes hiding beneath sandy lashes, and shoulder-length strawberry blonde hair scrunchied back in a ponytail.

  Tilly cleared the trucker’s booth. Stuffed the tip the cheap bastard had left in the apron bib of her uniform. Earl shoved his head through the kitchen service hatch, wearing his cook’s hat like a rumpled paper crown. “I thought he’d never leave,” Earl said. “You mind if I scoot, Tilly? Leave you to lock up?” The question was of course rhetorical; Earl was all but already out the door and buzzing away home astride his Kawasaki.

  “Go ahead,” she sighed.

  “You’re—

  (such a pushover)

  “—a doll,” Earl said.

  The kitchen door banged shut behind him; she heard the waspy whine of his bike tearing away from the lot.

  Tilly turned off the juke. If she heard one more country song tonight she thought she’d scream; the dreary lyrics were like her life set to music. She fetched the menus off the tables. Piled them at the waitress station at the end of the lunch counter. Stacked the chairs on the tables. Considered sweeping and mopping the floor before she remembered she was working again first thing tomorrow and deciding it could wait until then. She checked the windows in the restrooms were locked. The ladies room window had blown open, clapping in the wind. Tilly had to stand on tiptoes and lean outside—and was rewarded with a ripe whiff from the dumpster—before she could drag the window shut.

  Returning to the diner floor, she took the cash float from the register and went to Big Bob’s office to stash it in the safe. In the corner of the office was the staff closet. Big Bob also kept a surplus of waitress uniforms and kitchen whites and a change of his own clothes, because even on cold days, Big Bob would sweat like a racehorse. Tilly took her parka off the rail, car keys jangling in the pocket as she shrugged it on. She fetched her bag from the closet. Slung the carry strap over her forearm. At the bottom of the closet was a crumpled cardboard box with LOST & FOUND Sharpied on the side. Customers were always forgetting their hats or scarves or—

  “Alone at last,” said a man’s voice behind her.

  4.

  Tilly whirled towards the voice, thudding back against the wall and knocking the EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH photo to the floor. The glass frame shattered and a crack zigzagged through the Tilly-in-the-photo’s timid smile.

  Silhouetted in the doorway stood a slender young man with brilliant blue eyes. His dark hair was slicked back with rain. Tilly thought he was wearing kitchen whites at first. Then she realised it was some kind of uniform, like a hospital orderly or a male nurse might wear. His white shirt and pants were soaked through, soiled with mud and torn in places, as if he’d crawled through hell just to get here—and Big Bob’s coffee wasn’t that good.

  The man grinned at her with huge white teeth, the Big Bad Wolf wearing human skin. As he crept towards her, trailing mud and rainwater across the carpet, Tilly saw one of Earl’s fillet knives clutched in his fist. She gave a low moan. In the event of a robbery—please God, that’s all this was—there was a procedure she was supposed to follow. But the only thing she could thin
k was

  KNIFE!

  “Muh-money’s in the safe,” she said, in panicked staccato.

  The man nodded calmly. “That your car in the lot? The Bug?”

  He had a soft Southern accent. All that was missing was the stalk of prairie grass in his mouth, maybe LOVE and HATE tattooed on his knuckles.

  It took a moment for his words to register. Then she clawed through the pockets of her parka, found her car keys and held them out. The keys jangled in her shaking hand. “Tuh-take it.”

  He took the keys and she snatched her hand back to her chest.

  “Ted Bundy drove a Bug.” The man grinned. “Did you know that?”

  No. No, she hadn’t known that. What person in their right mind would?

  Fear shuddered through her. “Oh god, please, don’t hurt me—”

  He whipped up the knife and pressed the cold blade to her lips.

  “Hush now,” he said. “You do what I say when I say it, me and you are gonna get along famously. Now why don’t you open that safe you mentioned?”

  Removing the knife from her lips, he backed up a step. With a flourish of his arm, he gestured for her to move past him to the safe—a gesture that might have been gentlemanly had he not been clutching a big-ass fucking knife.

  He parked his butt casually on the edge of Big Bob’s desk.

  Tilly glanced at the telephone beside him—

  He stabbed the knife down into the desk, blocking her view of the phone.

  “You get any bright ideas like that,” the man warned her, “you’d best remember you’re just a waitress at a greasy spoon diner and not Brain of the fucking Year.”

  He nodded at the safe. “Go on now.”

  She kneeled in front of the safe. What was the combination? She couldn’t remember. Her mind had gone blank. For the life of her she would not have been able to unlock the safe with a gun to her head … or a knife to her throat. And then it suddenly came back to her. Nearly sobbing with relief she entered the combination and unlocked the safe and dragged the heavy door open.