Out of Control

by Shannon McKenna

“I would have been, too,” he said.

  She shot him a doubtful look. “You? Get out.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Me.”

  “The ballistics analysis proved it was my gun that killed them. I should have gone to the police, I guess, but I was convinced that Craig’s killer would get me if I poked out my nose. I followed the manhunt on the news. Little old me, the modern day Lizzie Borden.” She sighed. “I don’t have family living. I decided not to contact my friends. I didn’t want them endangered. Bad enough that I compromised poor Dougie.”

  Davy caressed her bare shoulder. “What about the necklace?”

  “Oh, that,” she said wearily. “I was wearing it when I woke up in the hotel room. Like his dog collar, or something. I haven’t been able to find anything in the library or the Internet to explain where it’s from or what it means. What scares me the most…” She shivered.

  “Is what?” His voice was gentle.

  “I wasn’t supposed to wake up before he got back,” she said. “Suppose I’d woken up, say, an hour later? Maybe he just stepped out for a burger or to gas up his car. Maybe I got away from that monster by pure chance. It gives me nightmares.”

  “There is no such thing as chance,” he said. “You got away because it’s not your destiny to get eaten by a monster.”

  She braced herself to ask the question. “So you believe me, then?”

  He didn’t answer for a long time. She tried not to hold her breath.

  “Yes,” he said.

  The simple word rang with sincerity. Her eyes filled.

  It had been months since she’d had any point of reference in the world that was not her own shaky, vulnerable self. He’d just given her one, and she loved him for it. She sniffed back the tears and fumbled for something to get her over the awkward moment. “So do you think Craig’s killer and Snakey are the same guy?” she asked.

  He shot her an eloquent look. “You have doubts?”

  “Hopes. Not doubts.” She shook her head. “I swear, I did everything I could to cover my tracks. Not that I’m any great shakes as a fugitive, but I did hitchhike all the way to—”

  “You what?” He sounded outraged. “Do you have any idea how dangerous that is?”

  Her laughter had no real amusement in it. “Please. After what I’d been through, hitchhiking doesn’t hold much terror for me. Besides, I got lucky. It went fine. I got lots of nice rides. Decent folks. No scary moments, comparatively speaking.”

  He grunted his wordless disapproval.

  “No, really,” she insisted. “Not all my luck is bad. I mean, look at Mikey. I defy you to show me a more incredibly special animal.”

  Upon hearing his name, Mikey leaped up and put his paws on Margot’s knees. Davy glanced down at the dog. “I decline the challenge.”

  “Wise.” Margot echoed his cool, remote voice. “Very wise.”

  “Let’s get back to the subject,” Davy said. “You’ve had this stalker problem for what, two weeks? What have you done recently that’s different from what you’ve been doing for the past months?”

  “I did buy some fake job references,” she faltered. “But not with my old name. I got a job in a graphics firm in Belltown, but the place burned down ten days later. It was right after that when—oh. Oh, my.”

  “It was your references,” he said. “They raised a red flag.”

  “But I never used my old name,” she protested.

  He shook his head, started the truck back up and drove on, giving her time to get used to the new ideas jostling in her mind.

  “I just don’t understand it,” she said forlornly. “I didn’t step on anybody’s toes. I didn’t steal anything. I’m not rich, or connected. I don’t have a microchip with a code to explode the planet embedded in my teeth. I just design web sites. That’s all. Why I should grab somebody’s attention to this extent? I swear, I’m just not that special.”

  “Makes perfect sense to me,” Davy said.

  Her head whipped around. “How do you figure?”

  “I’ve been thinking about you since the moment I saw you,” he said. “You don’t need a microchip in your teeth to get noticed.”

  She licked her dry, swollen lips. “Oh,” she whispered. “Wow.”

  “I can tell you, from direct personal experience, that there doesn’t need to be any outside reason for this guy to have fixated on you. You yourself, Margot Vetter, are reason enough.”

  She couldn’t think of a reply at all for over a minute. “Um, I’m not sure whether to say, gee, thanks for what I think was a freaky, twisted sort of compliment, or to just throw up right now.”

  His mouth twitched. “Please, please do not throw up in my truck.”

  She started to giggle. “Oh, God. Why am I laughing? This is so not funny. And I just don’t get it. Why play me like this? He could nab me or kill me any time he wanted. There’s no one to stop him.”

  “There is now,” Davy said.

  She looked away. She wasn’t ready for this soft, hopeful feeling unfolding in her chest. It was dangerous. Like everything else in her life, it could turn around and chomp her at any time.

  “Did you get yourself checked out by a doctor?” he asked, his voice gentle.

  “God, yes,” she said. “There was no evidence that I was raped, but I still feel raped. I don’t know what happened when I was with him. I don’t know what I did, or what was done to me. I don’t know how I felt about it. I hate it. It makes me feel sick. And helpless.”

  He pulled the truck over into the shadow of some trees, and reached over to take her hand. “Whatever happened in that hotel room, you did your best,” he said quietly. “You were true to yourself. I would bet anything on that.”

  She could hardly breathe for a moment. She tried to laugh, but the effort petered off to a breathless nothing. “Wow. You’re good, Davy. Here I think I’m dealing with Mr. Ice Cube, and out of nowhere, you make me go all gooey inside. It’s a diabolical technique to keep women off balance, right? Do they teach you how to do that in man school?”

  He massaged her hand. “Nope. I figured it out all on my own.”

  She stared at her hand, clasped in his. “I haven’t been able to even think about being with a guy since then,” she whispered. “I got myself tested for HIV and every STD that exists, but they told me I was fine. From a physical point of view, at least.”

  Her stomach fluttered at the blatant implications of what she’d just said. “Not that it’s relevant, or anything,” she added.

  He nodded. “While we’re on the subject, I’ve been tested since the last time I was involved with someone, too. I have a clean bill of health. Just so you know.”

  Her hand buzzed, trapped in his delicious warmth.

  “Not that it’s relevant, or anything,” he added awkwardly.

  “Of course not,” she murmured.

  “My timing sucks,” Davy said. “But it’s hard to find a good opening to make that kind of announcement. You gave me one, so I took it. Didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”

  “No biggie,” she said. “I’m not uncomfortable. Just surprised.”

  “At what?”

  “I thought…” Her voice cracked, and she swallowed to loosen it up. “It’s a wild tale, you must admit. I thought you wanted to keep your life simple. I thought that if I told you all this stuff, you would change your mind about wanting to, um, be with me.”

  He lifted his hand to her face and ran his finger tenderly over her lower lip. It felt like a kiss. “Surprise, surprise,” he said. “It hasn’t.”

  His eyes could set fire to an iceberg. She looked down, blushing.

  “No pressure,” he said. “Really. Relax.”

  “Relax, my butt,” she said. “If you really want me to relax, stop smoldering at me like that.”

  A slow grin spread over his face. “I don’t mean to smolder.”

  “Oh, get out. You do it on purpose, and you know it,” she snapped. “Come on. Let’s go talk to this guy
before I lose my nerve.”

  Davy couldn’t even explain to himself why he believed her so implicitly. Maybe it was just his dick talking, but he didn’t think so. His dick had never played tricks like that before.

  By now, he was in the habit of trusting himself. It was the way he worked, the way he reasoned. He fed everything he thought or sensed or felt into the magic machine, and a gut level conclusion churned out the other end. He could either trust it, or not. He didn’t know how the process worked. All he knew was that it did. And that the only serious fuck-ups in his life had occurred after not trusting it.

  Margot was in truly deep shit, but she deserved some help.

  Bart Wilkes lived in a small, nondescript bungalow in the Central district. The lawn was overgrown with weeds and littered with junk, surrounded by a six-foot chain-link fence. A battered, ancient white Chrysler was parked in the driveway. Lights were on inside the house.

  Davy maneuvered Margot behind himself as they crossed the lawn to the porch. He knocked on the front door, and waited. No response.

  He peered into the windows, which were covered with heavy drapes. “Let’s go around the back and see if there’s a—”

  He cut the words off as Margot marched right on in the door.

  “Aw, shit,” he muttered. “Wait. Margot. For God’s sake.”

  He stopped to wipe the doorknob, and followed her in. The room was cluttered and stale, with mismatched furniture and dominated by a large screen TV. The coffee table and carpet was littered with overflowing ashtrays, crumpled beer cans and fast food wrappers.

  “Bart?” Margot’s voice wobbled. She dragged in a deeper breath and tried again, more loudly. “Bart Wilkes? Are you here?”

  The depth and heaviness of the silence made Davy’s skin crawl. There was a faint, unpleasant smell that went beyond stale cigarettes or spoiled food. Something nastier. Meatier.

  “Don’t touch anything. Something’s not right,” he said.

  “When is it ever?” She rolled her eyes, her usual brave schtick, but her face was translucent in the sickly light of Wilkes’s living room. She squared her shoulders and headed briskly towards the kitchen.

  He lunged instinctively to stop her. “Wait. Margot. Don’t—”

  “Oh, no.” She flinched back from whatever she saw in there, bumping off the wall and stumbling into him. “Oh, God,” she whispered.

  He steadied her, placed her behind himself, and took a look.

  It was bad. The man he assumed to be Bart Wilkes lay on the dirty linoleum floor, his long body curled up into the fetal position. Blood was smeared all around him, big swooping streaks, as if he’d struggled and writhed in it. One bloodstained hand was extended in a desperate, pleading gesture. His fingers were drawn into stiff claws.

  Eyes wide, face grayish, mouth open in a rictus of agony. Dark blood from his nose and mouth was pooled beneath his head.

  “Is that the pawnbroker?” he asked.

  “That’s him,” she whispered. “Oh, that poor, poor guy.”

  Davy crouched down next to Wilkes and put his fingertip to the man’s throat. No pulse, not that he expected one. The man looked very dead, though he wasn’t cold yet. He looked around the filthy kitchen. The phone was pulled off the wall. The receiver lay on the floor a few feet from the man, still beeping. He’d tried to call for help. Poor bastard.

  He wanted badly to examine the guy’s body under the loose, blood-soaked shirt, to see what wounds had caused the bleeding, but he kept his hands to himself. That was for the cops to ascertain. The best way to maintain a smooth working relationship with the local police was to be very careful not to step on their toes.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “This looks like a crime scene.”

  She followed him out to the truck without protest, her hand pressed hard over her mouth. When he got off the phone with the cops, she tapped his arm. “How do we justify being inside his house?”

  “We don’t,” he said brusquely. “We saw him through the kitchen window when we came to the back door to knock. No way would we just march into a stranger’s house uninvited. Oh, no. Not us.”

  She didn’t come back with a smart remark, which was weird. He turned her face towards the streetlight. Her lips were trembling and bluish, her eyes glassy. She was done. Out of gas.

  “Get into the truck.” He softened his tone. “I’ll deal with them.”

  It took a while, as such things did, but he knew and liked both the cops who came to the scene. He told them he’d dropped by to ask Wilkes if he’d recently moved a certain piece of stolen jewelry, and they had no problem with that story. Nor should they have, since it was literally true. Davy was good at lying when he had to be, with his poker face, but he didn’t enjoy it much. Not even half-truths.

  He was glad when he finally got Margot home. Mikey trailed alongside, whining anxiously as Davy led her into the house. He wrapped her in a blanket and made a cup of tea, stirring in lots of sugar and milk. He put it into her hands, steadying them with his own as liquid sloshed out on to her lap. “Try to drink some of that.”

  But her hands weren’t steady enough. She gave him an apologetic smile and put the cup on the table. “Do you believe in curses?”

  He thought about it. “Depends on how you define a curse,” he said. “One thing’s sure, though. I don’t believe in coincidences.”

  Mikey snuffled Margot’s knee. When she failed to respond, he turned to Davy and propped his paws on the couch, his dark, gleaming eyes full of hopeful speculation. Opportunistic pissant. Davy eyed the dog’s long, fine black hair and his own pale gray furniture.

  “In your dreams, buddy,” he told the dog.

  Mikey jumped down, unsurprised, and flung himself over one of Davy’s feet with an air of cheerful resignation. He reached down to pet the animal, his fingers tracing the shaved patches where the stitches from Mikey’s battle wounds were still visible. Mikey licked his hand in response. A thought slowly took form in his mind. “Margot? You said the dog Snakey left on your porch was a shepherd mix, right?”

  Her eyes focused on his. “Could be,” she said apprehensively.

  “What kind of dog was it that attacked Mikey in the park?”

  She stared at him, and her mouth started to shake. “Oh, no. That’s so gross and awful. You think that this freak thought he was doing me a favor? That he’s…he’s courting me?”

  Davy wished he’d kept his mouth shut. Too late now. “It was a message,” he said. “Maybe a love note. It would go with the rose petals.”

  She hid her face against her knees. “Only me,” she whispered. “Only I could possibly get a love note like that.”

  “It’s a starting place,” he offered.

  “It’s a terrible starting place,” she snapped. “It sucks.”

  She reached for the tea. He covered her shaking hands with his own as the tea sloshed. “You’re going with me tomorrow,” he told her. “I can’t miss my brother’s wedding, and I can’t leave you alone. Don’t make me be an asshole about it, because I’m more than capable.”

  A ghost of a smile twitched her pale lips. “I believe it. I couldn’t run off tonight if I wanted to. Which I don’t.” She eyed him. “It’s just that…” Her voice trailed off, uncertain.

  “What?” he asked sharply.

  “Are you sure you want a fugitive with a stalker on her tail at your brother’s wedding? I’m not a girl you can take home to Mother.”

  He draped an arm over her shoulders. “You won’t be meeting my parents. They’re gone now. I wish you could, though. My mom would have liked you. And as for Dad, well…” He hesitated. “He would’ve had a lot more respect for a fugitive on the run from the law than he’d have had for any respectable, so-called normal person.”

  She frowned, bewildered. “Huh? How so?”

  “It was a badge, for him,” he explained. “Clear proof that you’re fighting the system. You’re not a mindless, brainwashed worker bee feeding the evil machine. You
’re part of the elect outlaw tribe. That really turned him on. Dad was…he was unique.”

  She shook her head. “Wow,” she murmured. “Would he have been disappointed to learn that there’s nothing I want more than to go back to being a mindless worker bee? That it’s my most cherished dream?”

  Davy shrugged. “We just wouldn’t have told him that part.”

  “My mom’s gone, too,” she said wistfully. “I miss her so much.”

  “And your dad?” he asked.

  She hesitated, too long. “Not a player. Gone when I was small, before he could do much damage. I wish I could’ve met your folks.”

  “It’s just me and my brothers now,” he said.

  “You’re still really lucky, to have your brothers. I wish I had some. Big, mean, scary ones.”

  “You can use mine,” he offered. “They’re mean and scary whenever they need to be. And they’ll do anything I ask them to.”

  Her smile was so tender and unguarded, it pierced right into him. It was an oddly painful sensation, but he liked it. “Thanks, Davy, that’s sweet,” she said. “Do your poor brothers know that you contract them out behind their backs to strange women in trouble?”

  “They’d both go out of their way to help somebody,” he told her. “That’s just the way they are. Besides, you’ve got me already. They would just be reinforcements.”

  She gazed into his eyes, her face bleak. “Have I got you, Davy?”

  His breath stuck in his throat. “You’ve got me bad.”

  They stared at each other. The air buzzed with tension. Voices in his head told him to back off, chill out. He couldn’t hear them over the roaring in his ears. They stood together at a doorway, and he couldn’t seem to turn back. The only way he could see was onward. With her.

  He scooped Mikey gently off his foot, and slid to his knees to the floor in between the couch and the coffee table. He pushed her knees apart, reaching behind her to cup her bottom and slide her closer to him on the couch. Her legs clasped around him, her arms followed.

  He slid his arms around her waist and hid his face against her breasts. Her curves fit the angles of his body perfectly. His chest felt soft and unstable. He didn’t dare risk catching a glimpse of his own face in the glass of the stereo cabinet or the reflection of the TV screen.