Three Graves Full

by Jamie Mason

  The blow to his throat had made the dry heaves agonizingly interesting, with the waves of nausea roiling upward against his lungs sucking downward, struggling for air. The fight under his breastbone seemed fit to crack it, but he had to put aside the wonder and the pain and manage a flat-out run even without breath. No time for hurt or sick. He had to run so he could flee.

  He hadn’t thought of this whole tromp through the woods as a retreat. In his mind, even as he’d flashed his fingers at his pups to have them hold the cops to their places, he’d only thought of it as “moving on.” In seconds, those two ijits who’d just tottered up the back steps and into the house were going to shred his lead on being able to get himself out of there before the cops found him out.

  Boyd wasn’t a man who devised harm to others, though harm he had certainly done. No matter what had happened here, or anywhere else for that matter, no one could say that he’d ever crossed anyone’s intentions that had steered clear of his own. As such, he didn’t stand for being crossed. Whatever had brought these two danged fools out in the middle of the night, this one and only night he’d needed something here, it was not his doing. He would not be held to fault for what he didn’t plan.

  There had to be a working car between them, and he meant to be in the driver’s seat before the only thing he had between himself and a standoff with Johnny Law was his list of reasons. Fine and true as those reasons were, he couldn’t very well see them as the only thing for him to live or die on.

  He swept up the shovel with hardly a falter to his stride and cracked the junction box at the side of the house with a mighty swing. A brief shower of sparks and a clanging swell of shock waves through the bones of his hands, and the power and phone lines were cut straight through. The silent night fell apt to stay that way.

  18

  The urge to run crawled deeper into Jason’s bones and set them humming. The soles of his feet had an itch that only the slap of asphalt could scratch, or better yet, the resistant nudge of the gas pedal. If he kept straight though, he could make the front door and beyond before anyone could stop him. He ached for a blurring wall of trees just off the side-view mirror. All he wanted now was the sigh of a speed-forced gale over the windshield and the surety that all this disaster was falling behind him with each turn of the tires. But it wasn’t. Not yet.

  Leah hung on his arm and dragged them to a full stop before they’d even cleared the kitchen.

  “Where’s your phone?” she pleaded. “We have to get help. He tried to kill me out there.”

  The insight that had flared for notice during the scrabble over the shovel sparked in his mind again. The woman he’d walloped wasn’t afraid of him, and Harris, in all his venting glory, was still unrevealed as any sort of new problem. Nobody knew anything yet. Jason’s opportunity was indeed tunneling down, but it wasn’t yet an utter cave-in. Dialing 911 was out of the question.

  “It’s okay. Just hang on.” Since it had primarily been for self-soothing, he wasn’t aware he’d said it out loud until she responded.

  “What? What do you mean? You already called the police?”

  Jason flinched. His moment of revelation, of course, hadn’t helped the girl one bit. Her fingers dug, demanding, into his arm. He plucked a string of true words free of their meaning and plugged the silence with them. “It’s Leah, right? I’m Jason. It’s okay. The police have been here. They’re coming back.”

  A muted bang at the side of the house clapped off the kitchen lights. A sudden unplugged silence shoved out the civilized electronic background buzz. The computer’s fan purred to dead, the refrigerator fell silent, the central-air blower held its breath, and the blackness pressed a primeval quiet down over the two of them.

  Jason’s mental replay of locking the dead bolt, and a gulped “Oh, God!” from Leah took up all the time there was to be had from the blackout to the first blow against the kitchen door. The brass latch proved sturdier than the doorframe, tearing through the wood at the second kick. The door sailed back from its slam against the rubber-tipped stop and clobbered Boyd Montgomery into the shredded doorway as he lunged inside.

  Jason had named himself a coward many times and sometimes even fairly. He’d lost count of his regrets, but kept a running tally of all that his yellow streak had cost him over the years. In this case, though, he was blameless. He wouldn’t deliberately have left her there as a gift to his own head start, a speed bump in the middle of the kitchen floor for Boyd Montgomery to slow down on. Jason had taken for granted that she, in the face of a huffing, bloodied intruder—someone who had killed her fiancé and, as far as she knew, whacked her in the head with a shovel—would have run with him.

  • • •

  Mutual surprise froze Leah and Boyd to their respective places. She’d felt the space beside her fall empty, the air around her rippling just slightly cooler in the breeze of Jason’s abandonment. He’d left her. Like a locked turnstile, Leah’s mind lurched forward only to rock back into it—he’d left her, alone and dead center in the path of a man who had already shown more than willingness to cave her head in. She stared him down, her short-circuiting thoughts standing in for defiance. The spell broke for both of them simultaneously, and they danced the grocery-aisle two-step: both to the same side; stop; lurch to the other side; stop. They mirrored their movements into each other’s path, left and right over the linoleum.

  “Now just hang on,” he said, instead of taking his next slide-to-the-right turn. It gave way for Leah’s extra cut to finally break their synchronized sway. She dodged left to put the kitchen table between them.

  “I only want a car,” he said. “That’s all. I swear.”

  The room wavered gray at the edges and Leah sucked in her cheeks and locked her lips against a sob. The cannonade of her heartbeat swelled into the bump under her hair, and her legs trembled as if God himself thought it a good idea that she sit down, but she gripped the back of the chair in disobedience.

  To save her life, which felt very much at stake, she couldn’t think back to the point she’d last been in her car or what the hell had happened to this crazy day to leave her running desperate circles around a stranger’s kitchen table. Her knees wobbled and everything reeked distractingly of rot, while her mind zipped through the checklist of what was hers: her name, her house, her job, what she’d done that day. She flashed over her visit with the big detective and the first trip out to the house on Old Green Valley Road. She’d come back again to pay her respects to Reid. Reid. The world, and the whole sorry state of her plight, was wrenched once again into focus. The back of her free hand flew to her mouth. Her knuckles rapped her lips painfully against her teeth.

  Whatever telegraphed over her face, Boyd Montgomery read trouble. He reached out for her. “Now, wait! I ain’t gonna hurt you.”

  She bolted from her place, tapping some lightning-spiked reserve of strength, but after only two blundered steps backward, Leah’s legs met with a tangle of too much chair and not enough space. Her arms windmilled in vain as her feet slid from underneath her and she crashed down against one of the chair’s upended spindle-legs, snapping it off.

  He scrambled around the table, but Leah grabbed for the broken chair leg and swung it, catching him lightly across the cheek with the jagged end. “Stay away!”

  He scurried backward, then regained his feet out of Leah’s reach.

  She pulled herself up, bracing against the window frame and brandishing the bristling chair leg. “I mean it. Stay back!”

  “Just give me your car keys and I’m gone. I’m not lookin’ to hurt you. I promise.”

  She patted her empty pocket for keys and searched her foggy past for a clue as to where they might have fallen. “You already hurt me, you goddamned son of a bitch,” she said, but her jousting arm trembled.

  “Don’t you cuss me, you little . . .” He dove off to the right to herd her from behind the table, but she was around it and through the dining-room doorway before he could reach her.

&nb
sp; Leah couldn’t keep up the dashing pace for more than a few steps. The pain grinding into the side of her head pulled her off-balance, and only the ambient moonglow through the front windows made the black a barely navigable gray. She held the chair leg close and tight.

  She glanced through the dining-room window and her pulse redoubled. Her car. It was directly in front of the house, intact and, as she now remembered, at the ready with the keys still in the ignition. She considered and discarded the notion of a scramble out the window as horribly likely to leave her half in, half out, and defenseless by the time he reached her. Instead, she edged to the doorway, heartbeat jackhammering in every cell.

  She looked to the left, back down the hall. Jason was nowhere. The back door beckoned, closer than she would have thought, but farther than she dared without knowing exactly where Boyd Montgomery was. Across from her, another room glowered deep in shadows. And to her right, no more than four steps away, was the front door, with a thumb-latch bolt and a brass safety chain spanning the doorframe. If there was time to undo it . . .

  “I just want to get on out of here.” Montgomery seeped from the gloom in the passway between the kitchen and dining room. “Now be a good girl, put down the spike, and help me do that.” His tone was gritting frustration, but the words were pure mild reason. His posture, on the other hand, was all linebacker: arms poised to catch, legs cocked to run. Leah didn’t believe for a second that he wasn’t plenty angry enough to finish what he’d started with the shovel. She finally found her voice and screamed a full-throated wail. She darted across the hallway. Three strides in and her shins slammed into a low table, spilling her onto the carpet and launching the chair leg truncheon out of her hold.

  A bit of shadow at the corner of her eye broke free of its murk and rushed up at her faster than another scream could rise through her throat. A hand clamped warmly over her mouth.

  “Shh. Shh,” Jason whispered. “Where is he?”

  • • •

  Boyd felt insult raking up the hairs over the back of his neck. The affront at being thwarted and cussed on his own turf—but even worse, the familiarity of it—was too much.

  “If you’d just listen!” Each of his words grew in volume as he took the rest of the hallway at a run, but he left off his pace as he neared the front of the house. The living room held its cold breath, just as it had since the day he’d taken up his gun in anger.

  “God-dang it!” he bellowed. “You people will not like it if I have to run you down and take the ever-lovin’ keys myself.” Boyd gave them to the silent count of three. He sucked in his last of the hall air, balled his fists, and stomped into the living room.

  Jason hunkered down in the dark corner beside the sofa and raked the carpet for the lost weapon. Leah huddled beside him and clutched his other arm as if it were all that was keeping her off a steep fall.

  “And it ain’t like I can’t see you, stupid.”

  Jason jackrabbited from his crouch. Beyond all likelihood, he felt the glow of embarrassment stirred into the mix after thrusting the spiny, and now obviously inadequate, broken chair leg out in front of him. He hauled up on Leah’s sleeve and pushed her toward the den behind him. “Go! Through there!”

  Clutching his free hand, she hustled to her feet. Her eyes had grown more accustomed to the gloom, and she drew away through an open French door into a small room, trying to pull Jason along with her.

  Boyd’s hesitation evaporated over the threshold and he pounded off the paces to the far corner of the room, his long arms slapping at the broken lance. He caught up the stabbing hand and crushed Jason’s fingers against the wood, before snatching it away from him. Boyd took a handful of Jason’s shirtfront in the other fist, ramming the whole works up under Jason’s chin.

  “Give me your keys!”

  “Jason, just give him the keys,” Leah pleaded.

  “Give him your keys!” Jason countered through the choke hold.

  “Mine are still in the car!” she wailed.

  Boyd shoved off and broke for the door. He’d only just cleared into the hall, with a passing wonder if the living room had only ever been haunted by his own moods and not an ill will of its own, when all the remaining hell that had surely been biding its time crashed loose.

  Boyd had rounded the corner squarely into his path. Too fast. How could he have gotten ’round that fast? The man loomed up in front of him, taking his same corner simultaneously from the opposite direction, arms outstretched to catch him. Boyd locked his knees and tried to reverse, but his momentum was more than the maneuver could manage. He slowed, but didn’t stop. Hand to God, he meant no harm, but he would not be stopped. Boyd drove his arms, and their splintered wooden extension, forward.

  There was only a brief resistance, then the spiked end sank into soft belly. After a halting friction in the other direction, the spindle pulled free, and the two men staggered back from each other. His hands landed heavily on Boyd’s shoulders, and grappling, they fell together out of the darkened entryway. He was so much bigger than Boyd had thought and so heavy as the man tugged at Boyd’s arms for balance. The man’s legs folded and he dragged them both to their knees. He still towered over Boyd, and Boyd raised his head to look into the man’s face as they tumbled through a patch of refracted moonlight on their way to the floor. The chair leg slipped from Boyd’s numb fingers.

  “Oh my God. What did you do?” Jason asked, running out from the doorway of the den behind them.

  In the last reaches of the weak light from the windows, Ford Watts lay on his back in the main hallway of Jason Getty’s house—what had been Boyd Montgomery’s house—and his blood mingled with the ghosts of the three who had bled here before him.

  19

  The same goes for distinctions as holds for slivers: oftentimes the smallest are the sharpest. Jason had committed murder, but being blinded in the moment with Harris, he had never actually seen a killing in real time. Now though, front row and center, in the most candid 3-D that life can offer, he watched the big detective fall.

  Boyd Montgomery, still on his knees, spun away from Detective Watts. The frayed end of the chair leg glistened an indeterminate dark color that Jason’s mind screamed red for him anyway. Jason remembered the fever-sick prayer he’d said in those first few seconds after he’d pulled away from Harris’s body, begging to undo it. He searched Boyd’s face for what that might look like from the front view. But what he read there could have been horror, regret, or just unfulfilled rampage. It was hard to tell, and that couldn’t be good news, so he decided in all but his feet to remove himself from the equation.

  Then Jason felt a brief statistical curiosity over how many people died annually because they couldn’t move when they should. He couldn’t think as far away as his feet, and they weren’t going anywhere on their own. It seemed that the internal conflict should have screamed in his head like a sold-out theater on fire, but in practice it felt stupidly bovine, like shoveling in more dull food when you were already full.

  An electronic purr overlaid with the tinny-but-still-ominous first bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony blared from the foyer. Jason yelped. Montgomery startled, tipping his crouch into a half sprawl, while Leah full-on screamed and clamped a towing hand down over Jason’s arm. She had pulled them away from Montgomery and the fallen cop, and they were nearly clear of the hall and into the kitchen when Jason finally placed the sound as a campy cell-phone ringtone.

  The ringing phone made a word-association game in Jason’s mind: ring-phone, phone-call, call-help, help-this poor lady (probably to the hospital), help—Detective Bayard solve his case, help—Jason Getty into an orange jumpsuit and then a prison cell for the rest of his life.

  The back door beckoned. His car stood ready in the carport. It was time to run.

  • • •

  Boyd staggered up and roared after them. Low-blood-sugar fireworks dazzled his eyes, and the floor canted and rolled beneath him with each step. His mind howled for time to think, and h
is fists buzzed with fury, but a glittering blackness feathered the edges of his eyesight.

  “Don’t you quit,” he murmured to himself as he reached the kitchen. He remembered the open padlock dangling from the catch on the shed and saw the chance to herd those two pains in the ass—oh, yes, Lord help them, they’ve surely driven me to cursing, now—inside it, locking them clear out of the path of his getaway. His will reasonably restoked at the doorjamb, Boyd launched himself through.

  • • •

  Jason’s rush was faster and more sure-footed than Leah’s concussion. He’d had to clutch her elbow twice to steady her on the way out. She’d been at his side, then no more than a pace behind him—he would have sworn—but Jason realized he’d lost the sense of her again, once he heard Montgomery’s boots pounding down the deck boards.

  Jason checked behind him to find her closer to Montgomery than she was to him. How had that happened? He ran back for her, recalibrating the distance with each stride in hopes the math would work out better for them. It didn’t.

  Boyd clamped a hand over her mouth and lifted her clean off the ground. “You!” he called to Jason, his voice lowered. “Don’t you make a sound. I will hurt her. I don’t want to, but hand to God”—Leah was small enough that he could hold up one hand, palm out, to God presumably, and still keep her pinned and half-smothered with the other arm—“I will hurt her and more if you don’t just walk straight to that shed right there and set yourself inside.” Boyd boosted a choked squeal from Leah, her feet dangling even higher off the ground, just to show Jason how easy it was. “And I do mean now,” Boyd snarled.

  Jason stopped on the far side of the splatter-heap of Harris and turned to them, his own palms out. He couldn’t just leave her in Boyd Montgomery’s arms and lead the way into the shed like a bad dog skulking into its pen. He’d eventually be freed, probably by the cops. Then he’d trade his garden shed for a jail cell.