She was missing an anchor, and the unknowns in her life were overwhelming. The sooner she could put this place behind her and return to the Triple S, the better off she would be. She was getting ready for bed when her cell phone began to ring. It was Bud, which meant he wasn’t too mad or he wouldn’t have called her again.
“Hi, Bud.”
“Yeah…hey, Holly. I need you to hang on a minute.”
She frowned. He sounded strained. He was definitely upset.
“What’s—”
“Hang on,” he muttered. “I’m connecting Savannah to this call.”
Now she was in a panic. Something bad must have happened.
“What’s happened? Are you okay?” He was no longer on the line. Had he put her on hold, or had she lost the call? “Bud! Bud! Hello!”
Then suddenly he was talking.
“Okay, I need you both to listen to me and try not to freak out. Maria is hurt. Someone put a bomb in her car. She wasn’t in it when it went off, but she was close enough to be seriously injured. She’s in the hospital under police protection. The hospital called me, then put me through to the detective in her room.”
Savannah gasped.
Holly started to sob. “Is she going to be all right? Please, Bud, tell us she’s going to be all right.”
Bud’s voice was shaking. “I don’t know anything more than what the hospital and the cop told me. She’s in ICU, has stitches in her head, arm and legs, a concussion, and bruised ribs. They’re waiting for lab results for confirmation that nothing more is wrong. What you do need to know is that it looks like Maria has made a conquest. Whoever this cop is, he’s taken this attack on her very personally. I was getting ready to fly out there when he told me I could come if I wanted, but that I needed to know he wasn’t leaving her side and wouldn’t let anyone hurt her again.”
“What should we do, Bud?” Holly asked. “Do you think we should all fly to Tulsa?”
“I don’t know. I think I’m going to wait to make a decision until I hear from him again. I’ve got a mess on my hands here at the ranch, and I hate to leave right now.”
“What’s wrong?” Savannah asked.
“We had another snowstorm last night. It’ll melt soon, but right now we’re a little short on hay and trying to feed cattle in two feet of snow.”
“Oh, my,” Holly said. “I’ve been so focused on what’s happening here that I haven’t watched the weather once since I left.” She felt even guiltier that she hadn’t asked him more about what was going on back home when they talked.
“Me, either,” Savannah said. “So you think we should wait until you call us again to make a decision?”
“Yes,” Bud said.
“Okay,” Holly said, then added, “Are you okay, Savannah?”
“I’m fine. How about you?”
“I’m good. Take care, okay?” Holly cautioned.
“Both of you be careful,” Bud said. “I don’t want to make another phone call like this. As soon as I hear an update, I’ll call the both of you. And just so you don’t forget, I miss you—both of you.”
“We miss you, too,” they said in unison. “’Bye.”
Holly dropped the phone and started praying. It was all she could do for a sister in danger too far away.
Harold pulled up to his house, grabbed the KFC takeout he’d picked up on the way home and went inside. The house smelled stale—a combination of cold coffee and cigarettes—and there was a thin layer of dust on all the surfaces. He cleaned now and then, but not often. He didn’t mind a little clutter, and dust was a fact of life. He’d never understood the need women had to make everything shine.
He was still thinking about that woman calling his work. Even though nothing had come of it, he didn’t believe the story she’d fed Sonya. As he dug into his meal, he turned his attention to the woman he’d trailed to the Jameson. There was no way he could pin her to the phone call, and trailing her like he had was probably overkill. This was most likely nothing to be concerned about, but he’d gotten away with pursuing his passion all these years because he’d been careful, and he wasn’t about to stop now.
Later he wheeled his trash to the curb, and as he was walking back through the house, he glanced at a picture on the end table by the sofa. It was one he’d taken of Twila and Harriet on the front porch of their house. That had been a lifetime ago, and he rarely thought about either of them. The photo wasn’t there for remembrance. Visitors were rare at his place, but it was a nice touch, just in case. It kept up his image as the abandoned family man, which had been his status for twenty years now, and he had no reason to drop it. He sat down to watch some TV.
The room bore evidence of Harold’s passion for hunting. There were trophies of all kinds filling every open spot on the living room walls. He was a taxidermist’s dream of the perfect customer: trophy fish, the rack from a twelve-point buck, even the stuffed head of a bighorn sheep.
He aimed the remote as he settled into his recliner. He kicked back and channel surfed until he found an episode of
Deadliest Catch.
Those men knew what it meant to fight the elements and succeed. If he were younger, he would have gone to sea, if for no other reason than to see how he fared against it.
Sitting amid these trophies gave him an itch to visit the ones he considered his prize possessions. He went down the hall and into the spare bedroom, which he used for storage. Except for a good thirty boxes as yet unpacked from his twenty-year-old move, the room was empty. He had no idea what was in boxes, nor any desire to search. It only took a few moments to shove a certain number of them aside and lift the door in the floor. It led to an old bomb shelter that had been installed during the early fifties and was the single reason he’d bought the house. He started down the steps, paused to pull the cord hanging from the cellar ceiling and switched on the light.
His pulse kicked. His skin got hot. The longer he stood looking at his collection, the harder he got. Each hunt had been special, but some more than others. He began to circle the room, running his fingers through each scalp he’d mounted and tagged. The names were as familiar to him as his own was. He’d chosen them not for the magnificence of the pelts of hair that he’d taken, but because of the meaninglessness of their existence. In one way or another, Harold Mackey had judged and found them lacking in any kind of ability to benefit the human race.
He paused, eyeing the first tag. Beverly Harlow. He palmed the hank of dark, brittle hair and closed his eyes, remembering the night he’d ended her worthless life.
A storm was approaching. Intermittent flashes of lightning ripped across the darkness, followed by low, distant rumbles of thunder. Harold liked hunting in this kind of weather. The noise from the storm hid the sounds of his approach.
He knew the back door to the restaurant would be unlocked, because he’d watched the skinny blonde carrying out garbage from the kitchen and knew she wasn’t through. His pulse was racing, just like it always did when he was anticipating a kill. It was a heady thing, knowing he held the power of life and death in his own hands—just like God.
He’d already scoped out the parking lot. There were only two cars left. One belonged to the skinny blonde, the other to the night shift manager, Beverly Harlow. The blonde would leave first. Harlow last.
It began to rain a few minutes later, and as predicted, the blonde dashed out into the night holding a folded newspaper over her head. Harold waited in the shadows until her car had cleared the muddy parking lot, and then he moved to the door, standing off to the side so as not to be seen, waiting for Harlow to emerge.
He knew when she began going through the restaurant, turning off all but the night lights, because the place began to go dark. The anticipation of what was coming made him shiver. The endorphins shooting through his bloodstream shot him to a high so fast he nearly came. He rubbed the front of his pants, feeling the erection behind his zipper, and smiled. It was only going to get better.
Suddenly the door opened. Beverly Harlow was halfway out, carrying the bank deposit bag and to-go box with the leftovers of her half-eaten dinner, when Harold grabbed her by the throat.
In the half-light, he saw the fear, then the recognition, in her eyes. She dropped everything and began trying to tear his hands away from her neck.
“You’re a worthless piece of shit,” Harold said. “You bitch about your exes and the brats you whelped that the state has to raise.” Before she could scream, he doubled up his fist and knocked her out cold. She dropped into the mud.
A quick glance across the parking lot confirmed that they were still alone. The door to the restaurant was ajar, the bank bag and her food were on the threshold where she’d dropped them, and the thunderstorm was gaining strength.
Harold didn’t mind the rain. It washed away a multitude of sins—and evidence. He threw her unconscious body over his shoulder and retraced his steps into the alley where he’d parked, tossed her inside his van, then grabbed a piece of rope and tied her hands and feet. Within seconds, he was gone.
The rain was still falling, hitting the roof of the van like little bullets as he drove to a deserted place outside the city. He parked, then crawled between the seats and into the back, where Harlow’s body was lying. She was semiconscious and moaning.
He knelt, eyeing the red smear of lipstick across her cheek and the imprint of his fingers already appearing on her neck, while he waited for her to come to. The moment she awakened she began to scream, begging him to let her go.
“The only place you’re going tonight is straight to hell.”
“Why? Why?
Why?”
“You’re flawed. You sleep with men who mean nothing to you. You give birth and then abandon your children as if they were nothing. You won’t be having any more babies to dump on the foster system for someone else to raise, and you’re gonna have to fuck the devil for your next piece of tail.”
In her terror, Beverly’s bladder gave way right where he was kneeling.
Harold smelled it and grinned. It didn’t offend him. He knew how the body worked when faced with great fear. He’d seen animals do the same thing right before he ended their lives.
She started to plead in a thin, high-pitched voice. “Please, please, don’t.”
He opened the back door and shoved the upper half of her body out into the rain. When she saw him pull a knife from the inside of his boot and then grab a handful of her hair, her eyes widened in disbelief.
Before she could think, he had scalped her. Her screams of pain rose above the sound of the storm, then ended abruptly as he slit her throat.
Her trussed and lifeless body was still dangling halfway out of the van. The downpour was convenient, washing away the flow of blood. Harold dropped his trophy scalp into a plastic bag, then got out and dragged the body into the culvert at the side of the road. One more defective female competently removed from the population.
He eyed the crumpled heap of her butchered body as he calmly cleaned his knife on the wet grass at the side of the road. Back in the van, he grabbed a roll of paper towels and wiped up the urine from the floor of the back, then tossed the towels into the rain before driving away.
It was the siren of a passing fire truck that pulled Harold back to reality. He moved past the Harlow plaque and continued around the room, reliving his conquests all the way to the last—the one that had caused him to quit hunting.
He eyed the thatch of long, dirty-blond hair without touching it. Pamela Ulster. Prostitute. The last thing she’d said before he cut her throat was that he’d just killed himself, too. It wasn’t until her body was found a month later and the story came out in the papers that he learned what she’d meant. She had AIDS. The news horrified him. What if he had contracted it?
But after a year of periodic tests, he was still clean. He’d dodged the bullet, but enough was enough, and he called it quits on his harvest. The world was going to have to find another way to strengthen the gene pool without him.
He yawned. It was time to get to bed. He climbed up and out of his trophy cache, turning out the light as he went, then shut the trapdoor and pushed the boxes back in place. He slept a long and dreamless sleep, comfortable in the belief that his conscience was clear.
The next morning, he woke without need of an alarm, stretching leisurely before rolling over and swinging his legs off the side of the bed. It was his day off, and he planned to take a drive out of the city. Maybe stop by to visit with some people he knew who let him hunt on their land.
He pulled his hair back into a ponytail without bothering to brush it, dressed in old jeans and a sweatshirt with a picture of the Arch, and went into the kitchen to make coffee, only to find all his mugs were dirty. Eyeing the pile of dirty dishes in the sink, he opted for another look in the cabinets and began digging into the back of a higher shelf. When his hand curled around a mug, he pulled it out, then grunted with surprise.
It was a small white mug with a tiny ceramic frog in the bottom. He remembered Twila buying it for Harriet when she was still a toddler. It was meant to encourage a child to finish her milk so she could see the frog at the bottom. He hadn’t seen it in years and hadn’t even remembered that he’d brought it with him when he’d moved. The fact that he had a daughter rarely occurred to him, and he hadn’t thought about her in ages until that strange call for him at work.
For a couple of years after she’d disappeared, he’d wondered where Twila had hidden her, but over time he’d forgotten all about her, never even noticing the photograph he kept as camouflage. The mug was a vivid reminder. Frowning, he put it back and dug a dirty mug out of the sink, then filled it with coffee. Seeing that tiny mug made him think of the woman who’d called his work. He wondered if the universe was trying to tell him something. Maybe he would take a second look at that woman from the hotel…just in case.