Dark Duet

by Eric Beetner

  Martha wasn’t sure how much longer she could resist the urgent call of her bladder.

  Brian had to be over at that bitch Sarah’s house. She knew all about it, well, not all. Most of it she probably didn’t want to know about. Whatever she let him to do to her that Martha wouldn’t stand for. That’s why most men cheat. For the girls who actually read those Cosmo articles on how to make your man go wild. The ones who act like strippers and whores and who let the guys call them terrible names in bed.

  Not Martha. But, she thought, look at yourself. Handcuffed to your own kitchen chair about to piss yourself. And who did this to you? Him.

  Divorce was an option with the others, not so much Brian. If she wanted to leave, she’d have to leave, as in get out of town. With hubby number one, he did the leaving. With Buck, he was sent away to prison. Martha thought, how different are we now?

  Nash didn’t see Brian’s car around. A dim light came from somewhere deep in the house, but it barely penetrated the curtains so it could have been a switch absently left on.

  Nash put the car in park but let it idle while he stared at the home he left behind. Jacy made no move to leave the car either. They sat, waiting for an invitation from the house, searching for a reason to go back home when they both thought they’d left it for good.

  “Dammit,” he said.

  “What?” Jacy said.

  “I should have taken his gun.”

  “Yeah, that would have been smart.”

  “I guess I’m not cut out to be a criminal.”

  “You’re not a criminal. It was self-defense.”

  “It’s taking way more self-defense to get out of this stupid town than I thought it would.”

  Jacy looked at the house. Neither one of them moved.

  “Is it true?” She said.

  Nash kept his eyes on the dashboard, the dials and numbers a meaningless blur.

  “What have you heard?”

  “That you killed a guy.”

  “Yeah,” Nash said. “That’s true.”

  Jacy let a moment pass, her eyes following the headlight beams as they faded out over the empty street. “I heard you caved his head in with a rock.”

  “It was a cinder block. And I didn’t cave his head in. I hit him with it. Only a little too hard, I guess.”

  “You did it because you loved the girl?” She turned to him. His chin hung low, almost touching his chest.

  “I didn’t love her. I liked her. We all did. She looked like Winona Ryder.” He smiled to himself at the memory. “I did it because it needed to be done. He was raping her.”

  “You did the right thing.”

  “No, I didn’t. Stopping it was right. Killing him was an accident. That’s why we covered it up. It was sort of an accident and sort of not. I mean, I hit him. I did. It was my fault whether I was trying to kill him or not.”

  Jacy turned her eyes back to the house. “I would have wanted someone to do it for me.”

  Nash turned to the house as well. “I wish it had been him instead.”

  “Me too.”

  “A little late for that, though,” Nash said.

  Jacy turned to him. “He gave us up to have us killed,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “Don’t you want to get the asshole back?”

  “Best thing we can do is bring him down in the media. It’s not a fight we can win one-on-one. We need that video.”

  “And if the laptop is gone?”

  He paused, looked her square in the eye. “Then it’s your word against his.”

  Jacy turned back to the house. “After this we leave, right?”

  “Yep.”

  Jacy opened the car door and started walking toward the house. “About fucking time.”

  Martha heard the front door rattle. Brian was home, but would she get the angry drunk fixing for a fight, or the bitter blue-balled bastard angry that Sarah’s wasn’t home? Would he finish the job he started?

  She heard the five quick beeps of the alarm code being entered, then the final long beep of the disarm.

  Her jaw began to ache again against the dish rag. The sour mold taste had long since dulled her taste buds, but it somehow bloomed fresh in her mouth at the sound of someone entering her home.

  Two of her children entered the kitchen.

  Jacy took a half step back, barely recognizing her own mother. She put a hand to her mouth and stifled a gasp. Nash rushed to her and pulled the dirty towel from her mouth. Martha sucked a welcome breath of fresh air as long strings of drool hung down from the corners of her mouth.

  “Mom,” Jacy said. She still hung back in the doorway to the kitchen. “Did he do this to you?”

  “Baby girl,” Martha said. “I’ve had some time to think sitting here, and whatever he done to me tonight it ain’t nothing compared to what he done to you. So, I don’t want you to worry none about me. I’m just so goddamn glad to see you kids.”

  She turned to Nash with cheeks wet from tears. He studied the chair and the handcuffs. The metal chair had been looped through with the cuffs, pinning her in place.

  “Mom, where are the keys to these handcuffs?” Nash said.

  “He’s got ’em.”

  Jacy took a step forward. “I can’t believe he would do this to you.”

  “Can’t you?” Nash said. His feet crunched over the broken shards of plastic from the laptop casing. The electronic guts of the computer were strewn over the kitchen table like leftovers from a meal.

  “I thought you kids left town,” Martha said. Nash stalked the room looking for something to use to pry the chair apart and free his mother.

  “We tried,” Jacy said. “Things got complicated.”

  “His doing, huh?”

  “Partly. A lot of it dumb accident.”

  Nash, empty-handed, came back to the chair and tried prying the bars of the backing with his bare hands. They didn’t budge.

  “Don’t you worry about me,” Martha said. “You need to get before he comes home.”

  “We can’t leave you here,” Nash said.

  “I’ll be fine. If he wanted to do me any worse than this, it’d be done.”

  “We’re gonna send him to jail, Momma,” Jacy said.

  “With him bein’ a sheriff? How you gonna do that?”

  “I’m gonna tell. Tell them everything.”

  Martha shook her head, wearing a sad smile as if she realized none of her lessons had stuck with the girl at all. “And then what? He’s just gonna deny it.”

  “Mom,” Nash said. “Where does Brian keep his guns?”

  “In the safe. And I no more know the combo to that than I know how to get out of these cuffs. Now you two scat before he gets back and uses one of them guns on you. And you keep going. Don’t stop for nothing. Don’t bother telling your tale, ain’t nobody gonna listen.”

  “No, Momma. I can’t just forget about it.”

  Martha sighed. “Nash, talk some sense into your sister.”

  “It was my idea.” He went back to searching drawers for some sort of tool.

  “I mighta known. You always did have big ideas.” She sighed again. “Well, listen. If you two ain’t gonna take good advice, at least you can arm yourselves better. You need more ammunition. Now I want you to get going. He’ll be back soon and I’m fixing to piss my drawers any second anyhow and I’d rather have privacy. But I know someone you can go see. If what I heard is true, I think you can get her on your side and then at least it’s three against one.”

  Nash and Jacy both stopped to listen.

  “You need to promise me, though. You get out of town as quick as you can.” She looked them in the eye, turning her gaze between them. “And you get that bastard good.”

  CHAPTER 16

  The call came in from the station. Sutherland on the line.

  “What?” Brian said, ignoring the state law against driving while talking on a cell phone.<
br />
  “Just got a call. Evel’s dead.”

  Brian lifted his foot off the gas. “What?”

  “Some guy called lookin’ for you. Said to pass on the news. Sheriff, what’s going on?”

  “Nothing. Drug dealers get killed.”

  “But why would someone want you to know?”

  Brian exploded. “Because I’m the goddamn sheriff is why.”

  Sutherland quit his line of questions, but the doubt in his voice remained. “Also, the alarm at your house was disarmed.”

  Brian had a remote monitor device installed at the station so he could know when Jacy might try to sneak out of the house. Once Brian left and the alarm was set, consider it lockdown. If the alarm was disarmed, he knew what it meant.

  “They tell you where Evel’s body is at?”

  “Yeah. Cliff’s on his way out there now. Had to wake him up.”

  “Okay. I’ll call you back.” Brian ended the call and hit the gas up to eighty as he steered toward his house.

  Brian listened at the door for a good minute before he turned the key. He wanted to know what he was walking in on. His revolver led the way. Felt good to have it in his hands. Not much call for a shoot-first-ask-questions-later kind of job in his sleepy town. It never should have to be at your own house, though.

  He found Martha still in the kitchen, though the rag was out of her mouth and the room smelled like urine.

  She seemed unsurprised by the gun sniffing the air out in front of him.

  “You missed them,” she said.

  “How long?”

  “Long enough.”

  Brian holstered his gun, began stalking the kitchen going over the destruction Nash had wreaked on his hunt for a tool to break apart the chair.

  “Have you proven your point yet?” Martha said. “Can you let me out of these goddamn things?”

  Brian ignored her. He stepped around the puddle of her warm piss.

  “It’s over, you know,” she said. “It’s all going to come out.”

  “No one will buy a cent of what you got to say.”

  “They won’t have to. It’s not me who’s doing the saying. It’s Jacy.”

  Brian moved behind her now and she wished she could see his face.

  He combed the countertops and the emptied-out drawers. He searched like Nash did, but not for a tool. For a solution. An escape. The black curtain was drawing closed and he knew it. He could disprove anything Jacy said in court. She had a history of methamphetamine use, a broken home, bad grades. But an accusation like that—the DA takes it seriously. And by the end of a trial…his life would be in tatters. No coming back from being accused of statutory rape.

  “I should have spoken up,” Martha said. “I should have stopped you. Best I can do now is sit back and watch you burn.”

  Brian’s hand fell over a steak knife on the counter, one spilled out of a drawer Nash had searched. He gripped it, spun to Martha’s back and reached around her throat. He pulled slowly, cut deep. She jerked in the chair, her legs kicked out with the initial shock of the cut. He had to set a palm on her forehead to steady her neck as he drew the knife from edge to edge. Blood fell onto Martha’s chest as it rushed from her neck, splashed on the table like an overturned bucket.

  He stared at the clock above the doorway. The yellow bakelite analog with a second hand that hung down limply, always pointing at the six. Her struggles slowed. His ideas were vague, but there was a plan. Any plan is better than nothing.

  A smile almost broke across Brian’s lips as he thought, how could they manage to flip things on a guy like Evel and kill him, and not even be able to get an old lady uncuffed from a chair?

  Brian pressed the speed dial on his cell phone. Sutherland picked up.

  “We got a situation,” Brian said. “I’m at my house. Martha’s dead.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Yeah. But I know it was those fucking kids. Her own goddamn children did this to her.” He allowed himself to look down at her body. Blood still flowed out, her fingers twitched, sending drops onto the chrome legs of the table.

  “Call the states, call the FBI, I don’t care. I want an all points on them two. Don’t let them get out of my county.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And, Sutherland, they’re armed and dangerous.” Martha’s body stopped moving. Brian took a step back away from the spreading pool of blood. “Shoot to kill.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Sarah answered the door in a more modest state of dress. She kept the security chain on and asked through the gap, “Yes?”

  “Sarah? I’m Jacy. Brian is my stepdad. Can we talk?”

  She shut the door and undid the chain, reopening it to invite them in.

  “I’m Nash, Jacy’s brother.”

  “I know about you two,” Sarah said, trying to stifle a yawn.

  Nash noticed a bruise under her right eye, and a cut on her lip to mirror Jacy’s.

  Jacy moved into the living room. “We know about you, too.”

  Sarah wasn’t surprised or caught off guard. “I suspect a lot of people do. If you’re here to talk me out of seeing him, you’re preaching to the choir. But I got no vote in that decision.”

  “We need your help.”

  “For what?”

  “To send him to jail.”

  Sarah exhaled, seemed to come more fully awake, though she hadn’t been dead asleep. She sat on the couch. “Is that right?”

  “What happened to your face?” Nash asked.

  Sarah regarded him with a mild suspicion. “Probably the same thing that happened to yours.”

  “So he hits you?”

  “Among other things.” She turned and looked at the cushion next to her on the couch, remembering the way he forced himself on her earlier in the night.

  “We’re going to send him away for what he did to me. We’d like to build more of a case, and for that we need your help.”

  “You two do realize he’s the sheriff, right?”

  “We’re going directly to the district attorney and to the media,” Nash said.

  Sarah tightened her robe at the mention of a media circus. The idea of outing her as the other woman in an affair, as well as detailing the ways in which she permitted herself to be mistreated, all out of fear—well, the appeal was less than stellar.

  The desperation in Jacy’s voice increased. “He’s got to pay for what he did. To both of us.”

  “And what exactly do you think he did to me?” Sarah asked.

  Nash gestured to her face. “I’m guessing that’s not the first time.”

  Not exactly, she thought. But tonight was the worst. She thought of all the times she wanted to break it off with him. All the times she stayed out of fear for what he might do. Something like tonight.

  Sarah looked at Jacy. She asked, “What did he do to you?”

  Jacy didn’t answer, stared at her shoes.

  “It’s okay, Jace,” Nash said. “You have to start telling it.”

  “For four years,” she said. Sarah looked at her, calculating the girl’s age. Four years? Good God, she’s still a kid now. “He came to my room. Once a week. Sometimes twice.”

  Sarah turned away. She’d been seeing him more than four years. He’d come to her when he got bored with Martha, it seems he’d grown bored with Sarah too. And yet he kept coming by trying to relieve that boredom.

  A revelation hit. Some of those weeks he’d been with her only a night or two after…maybe the same night.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” Sarah said. “I’ll do it.” She stood and went to the liquor cabinet, not sure if she should pour a stiff scotch or pop champagne. Even in the short walk across the room it felt good to have a backbone again.

  “Okay, good,” Nash said. “I’d like it if you came with us now. We want to get things moving fast so he doesn’t have time to weasel his way out of anything.”

  “He’s the king we
asel,” Sarah said, pouring the scotch into a glass, neat. “Let me get myself put together and I’ll be down.” She drank the liquor in one shot, turned to Jacy. “You’re really sure about this?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “They’re gonna be all over you like vultures. You know that, right? They’ll try to embarrass you and shame you.”

  “Ain’t a goddamn thing they could do to shame me more than how I feel about myself.”

  Sarah exhaled and set the empty glass down, admiring the girl. “Alright, then.” She headed upstairs, but when she reached the bottom step the doorbell rang, followed quickly by a hard pounding on the door.

  All three turned to the door. They knew that pounding.

  Sarah waved them away with her hand. “In there,” she whispered, aiming them toward a half bathroom off the kitchen. Nash pushed Jacy in ahead of him as Brian started to bellow.

  “Sarah, come on, wake the fuck up!”

  Sarah padded over to the door and opened it, dispensing with the chain. That would only piss him off. She wasn’t sure what she’d be opening the door to: another angry fuck, or a drunken apology?

  Brian pushed past her. “Could you get out of here in a hurry if you need to? Like, what would you need to pack?”

  “What? What for?”

  “I’m just saying, if I needed to split town how long would you need to get ready to go?”

  “I’m not going anywhere until you tell what the hell you’re talking about.”

  Brian took a deep, tight breath. Blew it out, trying to remain calm. “Would you answer the fucking question.”

  “I don’t know, Brian. And I’m not going to take the time to figure it out for you. I’m done here. What I wanna know is how long is it gonna take for you to get the fuck out of my house.”

  Brian stood perfectly still. His neck angled over his right shoulder so he could look at her and the twisted neck stare gave Sarah a chill. “What did you say to me?”