More roars from the crowd.
Another rain of bills.
The blonde turned away from the ecstatic audience
and sprinted across the stage, slashing at the bound man with the razor as she passed him. The blade sliced off the tip of an ear, and the man bucked in his chair, screaming now as the tears continued to roll down his face. Still in motion and moving at top speed, the blonde dropped the blade and leaped into the air. She hit one of the dance poles high up and spun around it, holding herself aloft with amazing grace and ease. She turned herself upside down, held her legs high in the air and spread them wide as she slid slowly back to the stage, revolving slowly around the pole all the way down. The men in the audience were going absolutely wild in a lust-induced frenzy. Many of them climbed up on their chairs and screamed through cupped hands. They went even wilder as she scooped up the razor again and approached the doomed man from behind.
Megan scanned the faces of the men in the audience. Some of them dressed like regular guys. They could almost have fit in with a crowd at a blue-collar bar in Minneapolis. Neat, combed hair. Blue jeans and stiff, button-up shirts. But many of the others looked like rejects from a casting call for a
Deliverance
sequel. Fat and dirty, clad in decaying overalls and homemade clothes. She saw a lot of mouths with a lot of missing teeth. There were jugs of what had to be moonshine on a lot of the tables. More than one of them had their dicks out and were playing with them as they watched the decadent and depraved stage spectacle. Megan tried to see herself performing in front of these pigs without throwing up.
She wasn’t sure she could manage it.
She swallowed hard and thought,
I am so fucked.
The blonde was standing right behind the bound man now. She flicked her wrist and popped the blade open again. With her free hand, she seized a handful of the man’s sweaty hair and yanked his head back, exposing the
tender flesh of his throat. Megan saw his Adam’s apple go up and down and felt a flutter in her stomach. But the blonde didn’t slash his throat. Instead she forced the blade inside his mouth, wedged the sharp side up against the inside of his cheek, and held the pose as she stared at the audience, allowing several dramatic moments to elapse. During this time, Megan finally realized that another song was playing.
It was yet another Mötley Crüe oldie. She didn’t know the name, but could guess. The singer kept yelping about some chick with the “looks that kill.”
The blonde yanked her arm back and the blade ripped the man’s cheek open. He squealed and thrashed in the chair as blood spilled down his chin and splashed the front of his shirt.
Megan’s stomach twisted again.
Madeline leaned close and yelled into her ear in order to be heard over the cacophony of sound. “ISN’T HELGA AMAZING?”
Megan made herself nod.
But what she was thinking was
This is what I have to follow?
I am fucked.
Fucked hard.
Helga kicked the chair over, and the man tumbled to the stage with it. He lay on his side as Helga stalked the stage, the bloody blade held high as the crowd roared its approval. Yet another flurry of bills rained down around her. When she was finished reveling in the roar of the crowd, Helga strutted back across the stage and stood over the man she’d tortured as part of her act. She planted a foot on the side of his head. A spiked heel dug into his ear canal.
Madeline yelled into her ear again. “WATCH THIS! IT’S AMAZING!”
What else could she do?
Megan watched.
Helga applied her full weight to the man’s head, lifting her other leg off the stage to stand on him with one leg. The spiked heel sank deeper into his ear canal. Megan kept expecting the man to try to shake her off, but he didn’t move. He was possibly already dead, but that didn’t keep the audience from eating it up. Some of the men were up on the tables now, jumping up and down like monkeys. She saw some of them fall and crack their heads on the floor. She hoped the redneck fucks broke their necks, but she knew better than to expect a kind twist of fate at this point. And she was right. They were all on their feet and hooting and hollering again in seconds. It was absolute bedlam out there now. Helga maintained an incredible, perfect balance for many moments before lowering her other leg and planting it on the dead man’s neck. She raised her hands over her head and unleashed a roar of triumph.
The music stopped.
Madeline leaned toward her again and said, “You’re next.”
Megan gulped.
Shit.
Helga stepped off the dead man’s head, bowed, then turned and blew kisses to the audience as she headed to the backstage area. Employees of the Sin Den rushed out to collect the piles of scattered bills. It looked like a small fortune. Two husky men in colorful Sin Den T-shirts came out to retrieve the dead man.
Helga blew into the backstage space, shooting a pleased smirk in Megan’s direction as she breezed through the room and down the stairs beyond. Had Megan felt intimidated in the woman’s presence before? Good Lord, there wasn’t a word for what she felt at being close to her this time. She was a fucking force of nature. Despite her
inner bravado before, she knew she could never compete against the likes of Helga. The woman was in a league of her own.
The DJ’s voice was booming out, announcing and introducing a new dancer at the Sin Den, Amber Wine.
Madeline’s hand was at the small of Megan’s back, pushing her toward the stage.
Megan’s heart raced.
She wasn’t ready.
But she had no choice.
Her first song started. Another old hair-metal anthem. Later she would be told it was “Look What the Cat Dragged In,” by Poison.
Megan swallowed hard and hit the stage. The crowd roared.
And somehow she found within her the ability to do what was expected of her yet again. It wasn’t even that hard. And when it was over, she was stunned by how much she enjoyed the enthusiastic approval of the crowd. It wasn’t much different from how she’d often felt during her high-school cheerleading days. She was even called back for an encore. Madeline was impressed.
Megan only wished Helga had been watching.
Sheriff Rich DeMars was thinking about the word clusterfuck. It was one of many bits of military jargon and slang that had come into common usage over the years. The term referred to an unfortunate convergence of previously unrelated events to form a perfect shit storm of violence and death. And right now his job was to unfuck what looked like the mother of all clusterfucks.
He swigged whiskey from a flask and added it all up in his head again.
Three dead deputies.
Two dead from gunshot wounds, one from some unknown trauma.
Two totaled official Sheriff’s Department cruisers.
Another cruiser missing.
A dead suspect from a liquor-store robbery.
Two crashed trucks, both stolen.
He swigged more whiskey as he watched the heavy machinery being used to pull the tangled mess of wrecked vehicles apart. Klieg lights lit up the night. The rural route was blocked off to through traffic for a mile in each direction. Too many civilians had happened across the scene already. He’d paid out an ungodly amount in hush money so far and unfortunately knew he was far from being done with doling out the green. The tidy profit he’d made selling the outsider girl to the Prestons was almost gone. Soon he’d be dipping into city
money, which was sure to stir unhappy rumblings from the commissioners, but those old assholes could suck his fucking dick. He would do anything necessary to cover this mess the hell up, regardless of the strain it would put on his relationship with the local power structure. In the end, they would have to admit he’d done what he had to do in the midst of a difficult situation.
Greg Saunders stepped out of his cruiser and came over to where Rich stood leaning against the hood of his own car. “Got a GPS fix on the missing cruiser. It’s stationary. Whoever took it must’ve ditched it. Want me to check it out?”
Rich looked at Saunders. The guy was young. Twenty-three. He was one of just two still-living deputies on the Hopkins Bend Sheriff’s Department payroll. Doug Smith, the other guy, was minding the store at HQ. Doug wasn’t as green as Saunders, but he had about as much brainpower as the average fence post. In retrospect, offing Hal was looking more and more like an error in judgment. Sure, the cocky bastard got too big for his britches at times, but he had been a good deputy. Would have been a good man to have around right now.
He sighed. “Nah. I’ll go have a look myself. You stay here and oversee this operation while I’m gone.” He dug into his pocket and pulled out his wallet. He flipped it open and took out a stack of crisp green bills, the last of his take from selling the girl. “Here’s a grand. Before they leave, give a hundred each to these men.” He waved a hand to indicate the tow-truck operators and the bored-looking paramedics leaning against their meat wagons. “Tell ’em this is just a down payment. They’ll get another grand each by tomorrow morning.”
Saunders took the money and whistled. “More than ten grand of city money, huh? Wow.”
Rich grimaced. “Yeah” He took another slug of
whiskey and screwed the cap back on the flask. “So where’s the cruiser?”
Saunders told him.
Rich frowned. “Way out to the eastern edge of town.”
Saunders nodded. “Almost to the city limits.”
“Shit. I better get a move on.”
The one thing he did not want was any whisper of what had happened here today to get out to the state boys. The location of the missing cruiser was close enough to the very edge of his jurisdiction to scare the shit out of him. He dropped the flask in a jacket pocket and got back in his own cruiser without another word to Saunders.
He started the car.
Backed up and turned around.
Then drove away from the scene of the clusterfuck.
Fast.
The .38 caliber bullet punched a big hole through the center of Roxanne’s throat and sent her staggering backward. She was dead weight before her body hit the ground with a hard thump.
Jessica sat up and stared in shock at the dead bodies sprawled across the green lawn. Bathed in the glow of the floodlights, they looked like props from a horror movie. It wasn’t fair. Some part of her had really believed the blood and killing was behind her. Which made her feel like a fool. It wouldn’t be over until she was far from this place. She looked at Larry’s bullet-riddled body and felt a surge of grief. She’d known the man barely a half hour,
but she’d experienced what felt like a real connection with him. An instant, electric chemistry she’d known with only a few other men. And now she could never know if there might have been something between them beyond that initial burst of intense desire.
Tears welled in her eyes.
She glanced at Roxanne and felt real hate for the dead woman. She felt like shooting her corpse again just for spite. Pump all the remaining bullets into her skull. Make a fucking bloody mess of her. She almost got up to do just that, but some still-functioning pocket of common sense in her brain stayed the impulse. And after that, she began thinking in a colder, more logical way.
Her first thought was to get in Larry’s car and drive away. Just drive and drive until the gas gauge was hovering around that big letter E. Until she’d put a hundred miles and more between herself and this lunatic asylum of a town.
There was just one problem with that.
She couldn’t find Larry’s keys.
Obviously they had been in his hand when Roxanne started blazing away. And he had let go of them as he died. She checked the porch and the ground around the porch. They weren’t there. She searched the ground around Larry’s stiffening body and still came up empty. She was feeling pretty frustrated by the time it occurred to her to look
under
Larry. She got on her hands and knees and cringed at the sight of the bloody holes in his chest. Then she gripped him by the shoulder and grunted as she heaved him up onto his side and saw the keys. She snagged them and let go of the dead man in a hurry.
As she got to her feet and staggered across the lawn toward Larry’s Chevy Nova, she happened to glance across the street and saw a light turn off close to the front door of the house over there.
Shit.
So someone was awake there. Awake and observing everything that had happened. The light going off was an obvious attempt to hide that. Jessica thought of some things Larry had told her. The man who lived in that house was his friend. He was probably calling the cops right now. And he would tell them there had been a woman with Larry. A woman who shot and killed Roxanne before driving away in the dead man’s car. And soon cops would be looking for that Nova. She’d get pulled over. God alone knew what might happen then. Nothing at all fucking good, based on the evidence of everything else she’d endured so far.
She was trapped.
There was one clear course of action available to her, but to make it work she had to get her ass in gear right now. She turned away from the Nova and jogged back across the lawn to Larry’s porch. She went inside the house and found a panel of light switches just inside the door. She flipped them all down and the floodlights cut out, drawing a welcome blanket of obscuring black across the lawn.
Then back out of the house and across Larry’s lawn at full speed, the .38 held down at her side as she raced across the street. Her feet pounded across the lawn of the other house, and in moments she was standing on a dark porch, free hand wrapped around the doorknob.
She tried it.
Locked. Of course.
She stepped back and aimed the gun at the knob.
She bit her bottom lip and squeezed off one shot. Then another. Then she kicked the splintered door open and stepped into deeper darkness. She reached out with one hand and found a row of light switches. She flipped them up and light flooded a small foyer and adjacent living
room. She heard a startled whimper from somewhere in the house. At the end of a foyer was a dark archway leading into another room. To her right was a short staircase leading to a second floor.
Jessica held her breath and listened.
The whimper didn’t come again, but she was able to detect the sound of a person breathing rapidly in and out. It was the sound of fear and panic. She could almost smell it radiating from her quarry. She moved slowly toward the dark archway, and the hardwood floor creaked beneath her steps. The whimper came again. Hearing it made Jessica feel like a predator. A killer. Which was apt. She was those things. It was what circumstance had forced her to become.
She reached out and found another row of light switches as she stepped through the archway. She turned on the lights and saw a balding fat man in a bathrobe clutching a portable phone. They were in a small kitchen. The man stood with his back against the stove.
Jessica kept the gun on him and moved closer. “Calling the cops, William?”
The man blinked, startled to hear his name spoken by this gun-wielding stranger. “How do you know my name?”
“Larry told me.”
“Larry’s dead.”
“Yep. What did you tell the cops, William?”
He stretched an arm out, holding the phone with a shaking hand. “Couldn’t get through. Number just rings and rings.”
Jessica was close enough now to snatch the phone from his trembling fingers. She jabbed the gun against his gut and said, “What’s the number?”
He told her.
Jessica punched the number in and held the phone to
her ear. She listened as it rang more than twenty times. She clicked a button to cancel the call and tossed the phone over her shoulder. It landed with a clatter on the linoleum floor.
“Today might be your lucky day, William. I might not have to kill you after all.”
His eyes were wet with tears. He sniffled. “Oh, bless you…bless you…”
“Shut up.”
William’s mouth snapped shut, biting off yet another
bless you
.
Jessica pushed the .38’s barrel harder into his gut. “You swear you were calling the cops? That wasn’t some other number you knew would just ring and ring.”
His eyes went wide and his mouth dropped open. He sputtered for a moment, temporarily unable to articulate what he was thinking. It was clear to Jessica he’d never considered the idea. His reaction was more convincing than any verbal denial would have been.
“Shut your mouth again, fat man. I know you didn’t do that.”
William looked relieved.
Jessica stepped away from him and waved the gun at the archway. “Let’s go out to the living room and get you situated.”
William frowned as he shuffled away from the stove. “What do you mean, ‘situated’?”
Jessica aimed the gun at the small of his back. She considered shooting him right then. It would be kinder to kill him when he wasn’t expecting it and couldn’t see it coming. But she didn’t apply pressure to the trigger. She’d killed so many people today. It would be nice to let just one live if she could.
“I’m gonna tie you up so I don’t have to kill you. You got a problem with that, William?”
He did not have a problem with that.
In the living room, Jessica shoved a coffee table out of the way and had him lie down on his stomach in the center of the room. Directly opposite a long blue sofa was an entertainment center, housing the usual array of electronic equipment. Television, stereo, DVD player, cable box, and gaming system. She kept an eye onWilliam as she pulled the entertainment center away from the wall and looked at the profusion of dangling wires and cords. She wrapped a hand around several and stepped on the power strip on the floor. They came loose with one savage yank. She shoved the .38 in her waistband as she completed the slightly more complicated task of removing the connecting ends of the wires and cords from the various electronic devices.
She carried the cords over to William and knelt next to him, dropping all but one of the cords on the floor as she yanked his arms up behind his back. She was rougher than she needed to be, eliciting a yelp of pain. It didn’t bother her to hurt him. She figured it would keep him intimidated. And an intimidated man was less likely to offer resistance. She wound the cord around his wrists multiple times, looping and winding it in opposing directions again and again. She gave the cord a twist after she was done. It was secure. Perhaps an especially determined man could get free of it after a lot of struggling, but for now it was more than good enough. She grabbed another cord and secured his ankles in similar fashion. She pulled his legs up toward his ass and used the remaining cords to tie his hands and feet together.
When she was done, she stood up and rubbed her hands briskly together. “There. I don’t think you’re going anywhere for a while, William.”
He didn’t say anything, just stared up at her bleakly.
She frowned. “Anyone else live here?”
He shook his head. “It’s just me. My wife left me last year.”
“No chance of her coming by?”
He shook his head again.
“Good enough, I guess.” She pursed her lips as she thought. “I should probably gag you anyway.”
She went back into the kitchen and searched through the drawers until she found a roll of duct tape. She returned to the living room, and Larry whimpered as he saw what she was holding. “Please don’t. I have panic attacks. I won’t be able to breathe.”
“Well, you’ll just have to try your best not to panic, William.”
She tore off a strip of silver tape, knelt next to him again, and slapped it over his mouth. She pulled more tape loose and wound another long strip of it around his head for good measure. She tossed the roll of tape aside and stood up.
“Hang tight. I’ll be back to check on you in a bit.”
She went to the front door, started to pull it open, and pushed it shut again immediately. There was a car parked on the street outside Larry’s house. She couldn’t make out much in the way of details from here, but something about the shape of it unsettled her. She moved to one of the living-room windows, slipped two fingers between plastic blind slats, and took a longer look. This time she recognized the streamlined shape of a modern Crown Vic right away. She was even able to dimly discern what had to be the shape of a law-enforcement emblem on the side.
Her heart started racing again.
Fuck.
She just couldn’t catch a goddamn break. Every time she thought she had things under control. Every time she
believed she was about to finally slip free of this shit stain of a town. Every goddamn time some new roadblock of one kind or another got in her way. It was frustrating enough to make her want to stamp her foot like a spoiled child. But that wouldn’t do her any damn good. She’d come this far on pure guts and determination alone. Now was not the time to start unraveling. Besides, in a way she was still at least one step ahead of the game. Maybe two.
Yeah.
There was just one cruiser out there.
And she’d spotted them first.
These things alone weren’t enough to guarantee things would break her way yet again, but they were enough to grant her a little bit of an edge. But she couldn’t afford to hesitate. More cops could show up soon. It could all come crashing down on her in the blink of an eye. She had to be primed and ready to act at the very first hint of real opportunity.
The cruiser’s dome light came on.
Jessica held her breath.
Then she saw a big man heave himself out of the other side of the car. Big was a gargantuan understatement. The cop was even larger than the trussed-up wimp on the floor behind her. Yet another little tick on the list of things in her favor. She could move like the wind, even with a set of banged-up ribs. Porky there probably couldn’t go more than ten, fifteen yards without getting winded.
The big cop went up to Larry’s Nova and shone a flashlight beam inside. He walked all the way around the vehicle, keeping a cautious distance as he meticulously inspected the interior. It occurred to Jessica to wonder why he’d stopped at this particular location to inspect this particular car. It seemed pretty random. Then a bit of
knowledge gleaned from watching too much trashy TV late at night clicked in her head. Didn’t most cop vehicles these days have on-board surveillance video equipment?
Jessica groaned.
A scenario developed in her head. This cop here had happened across the abandoned cruiser she’d hijacked. He played back the videotape and saw everything. Her getting out of the cruiser. Leveling the gun at Larry. Driving away with him in the Nova, the camera getting a clear glimpse of the license plate before it was gone. Or…wait. That equipment wouldn’t be on all the time, would it? Surely it was only turned on whenever a traffic stop was made. Or…shit. Maybe it had been running from the moment the aborted chase had started. She wouldn’t have thought to look for it or turn it off in the aftermath of the crash, not when her only concern in the whole fucking world was getting far away from there. She didn’t know how any of that really worked, but she did know a few other things right away.
She had to get out there and face down that cop.
Then search his cruiser for damning evidence.
And then maybe go back to the other cruiser to conduct a similar search.
The cop knelt to look under the Nova, then heaved himself back to his feet again. He stood there huffing and puffing for a moment. Then he pulled a handkerchief from a jacket pocket and mopped sweat from his brow. After he wadded up the handkerchief and returned it to the pocket, he turned in a slow semicircle and played the flashlight beam over the lawn.
Jessica’s mind screamed at her.
GO!
She went back to the door and eased it open, flipping the interior lights out an instant before she slipped outside. She hurried down the steps and stayed low to
the ground as she hit the lawn and hauled ass toward the street. The moment the cop discovered the bodies was marked by his startled exclamation. By that point Jessica was in the road and only a few long strides away from the cruiser.