Devil's Oven (25 page)

Fifteen minutes and two dull stories about fishing equipment passed before he spoke again. This time into the radio.

“Kenny, what’s your ten-twenty?”

“Second floor down,” Kenny replied. “One of the boys had him a bad dream. Raised all kinds of hell. Need me to come up?”

Fowler cleared his throat. She glanced over at him to see that his cheeks and ears were lightly flushed.

“Nah. I’m going to take a break, though,” he said. “If anybody shows up, they can wait outside for five.”

“Ten-four,” Kenny said.

Fowler took his time making a show of setting up the space for his absence, and then ambled to the waiting area, absently tucking in his shirt and adjusting his belt. Jolene looked up and gave him a hopeful, innocent smile. He wasn’t looking for real innocence. That was the last thing he wanted.

“So you want to see your daddy in a bad way?” he said. What he was really asking her was in the flush of his skin and the way his voice had dropped a throaty octave.

She nodded. “You just tell me what to do,” she said.

“Let’s go,” he said.

•  •  •

The storage room was larger and neater than the one Dwight maintained at the club, with the labels of the cleaning supplies carefully facing out of their shelves, and boxes of paper towels and toilet paper stacked so that their corners met in perfect lines. She had a moment to look around while Fowler shifted a stack of boxes to reveal a folding chair and a stained, square pillow.

“No reason we shouldn’t be comfortable,” he said.

 She tried to pretend surprise at his preparations; this was obviously something he did all the time. Or did he usually just come back here to nap?

He held a stainless steel flask, engraved with some kind of lodge insignia, out to her. “You like sloe gin?” he said.

Staying in character, she let herself look surprised, and waited until he gestured with the flask a second time before taking it. The gin passed over her lips and coated her tongue with sweetness. She took several sips before passing it back to him.

“I like that,” she said. She ran the tip of her tongue over her lips, making him smile.

“Bet you were expecting ’shine.” He shook his head. “That stuff will mess you up. There are plenty of sloeberry bushes around here if you know where to look. Every one of the berries that went into this was pricked with the bush’s own thorns.” He held up the flask. “Never metal. That’ll sour the batch before it’s even started.”

She smiled.

By the time he was settled on the chair, with Jolene standing close enough to look down on the freckled skin between the gelled clumps of his salt-and-pepper hair, they had passed the flask back and forth three or four times. She was careful to let the syrupy liquid press against her tongue for just a second at each turn.

He set the flask on a nearby shelf, all the while staring at her chest.

“Why don’t you take off that jacket?” he said.

She shrugged off the jacket, letting it drop to the floor. He grabbed her sleeve to pull her closer and slid a damp hand beneath her sweater. When he pushed her bra up over her breasts, the underwire pinched as it caught on his wedding ring, but he didn’t pause and his wheezing breath didn’t change. Closing his eyes, he began kneading her breasts. His jowls slackened with perverse serenity.

“Sweet amen,” he said. Now he shoved the entire sweater up to her neck and filled his mouth with her.

His gray viscous aura enveloped her, and the tang of his sweat invaded her nostrils and lungs. But she let it pass through her—away, away—so that she could barely feel his beard against her skin.

When he seemed to have had enough of both breasts, he fell back onto the chair, fumbling at his fly.

“Why, lookee here,” he said. “Treat time.” His voice was breathless as he revealed himself.

Jolene unhooked her bra and slipped it off with her sweater. She pulled them over her head, glad to be able to hide her revulsion for those few seconds.

“Oh, you better start now,” he said, gripping his penis in one hand. “Daddy’s not going to make it.”

“Sure you will,” she said, straddling his lap and pressing close so he could feel her skin and hair against his face, her breasts against his chest.

“It would mean so much if you would kiss me first,” Jolene said, close to his ear.

When she leaned back, he looked in her eyes. She thought he might demur—then what would she do? Kill him? No. She could hurt him, and she
was
going to hurt him. Murder had never been in her nature. God knew if it had, she wouldn’t be here in this closet. She wouldn’t be anywhere at all. She would have lived out her natural life decades and decades earlier. She might even have married back then and had children, sweet children. Her descendants, and those of her brother, would have covered Devil’s Oven with goodness. But she hadn’t been brave enough to kill back then.

Was she brave enough now to kill the creature who had Ivy in his grip? She told herself that killing the already dead wasn’t killing at all.

Fowler’s eyes shone with a brief spark of compassion, but it disappeared as quickly as it had appeared. When he crushed his mouth against hers, she tasted ash and coffee and damnation.

Reaching deep inside him, she opened the gate that held back the darkness every human tries to keep hidden. Fowler’s darkness flowed with a ferocity that washed over them both. He struggled, trying to pull away from her. But she held him fast, held their kiss until she felt him weaken then stop struggling altogether. Between her legs, his member melted back into its cotton/poly hiding place, and the flood of darkness revealed his soul—a crusted, barely-breathing thing that cowered in a corner of his mind. She showed him how close it was to death, how his every vile thought killed it a little more.

Was this what her own soul had become? Did she even have one anymore?

Fowler jerked once in her embrace. His tongue went rigid in her mouth.

She let him go.

•  •  •

Bud stood up quickly from the lower bunk, almost banging his head on the steel frame of the one above him.

“Jolene!”

“Here are your shoes and stuff,” Jolene said, whispering. She was weak, though not as weak as the man who stood in the doorway behind her. Fowler faced the hallway, unwilling—or unable—to look at either of them.

“We have to go,” she said. “We have to go right away.”

Bud’s aura was a confusion of blue and yellow. He tried to ask her questions, but didn’t seem to know where to start. He finally gave up and slipped on his shoes, put his wallet into his pocket without looking into it, and threaded his belt onto his pants.

She hated to see how much pain he was in. Lila didn’t deserve all the love he felt for her.

How much does any of us deserve?

“Don’t look at him as we go out,” she whispered. Bud’s face held no understanding, but he nodded.

She touched Fowler’s arm so he would move out of the doorway.

Staring down at the floor, he took a single plodding step sideways. His aura was translucent, gaining slow strength to a peaceful, healing green.

•  •  •

“You need to drive,” she said, opening the passenger door of Charity’s car. “We have to hurry.”

Bud cast a doubtful glance at the tiny car, but hardly hesitated before folding into the driver’s seat. His head only cleared the interior roof by an inch or two. He grunted as he felt for the seat adjustment lever, and there was the
prrrong
of a spring breaking as the seat jerked backward.

“Holy hell,” he said. “This your car?”

“No,” Jolene said. “It’s Charity’s. Come on, we have to go.”

But he just sat there. Confused.

“Bud,” she said. His aura surged a passionate red through all the murk that had collected around him. He was ready, she knew, if he would just let himself act instead of think.

“What if Lila’s dead?” he said. “What Dwight told me…I think he’s lost it. None of it makes any sense.” His face sagged with helplessness.

She touched his hand. Her strength was fading, but she closed her eyes to try to pass some of what she had left to him. She felt his sadness. His fear.

“Not dead,” she whispered. “Not yet.”

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

Tripp sat in the truck watching the drunks go in and out of The Twilight Club. Trouble always seemed to come back around to this place. No one had wanted the club here when he was a kid. The Cornerstone Baptist Church had organized a letter-writing campaign to the county supervisors and the big state newspaper to stop it from being opened. They had even bought space on a billboard out on the highway and put up a picture of a sweet little girl with an unshaven man looming behind her. The sign asked what kind of life would she have when her daddy started to “drink himself to death and fall at the door to hell.”

But the land had been unincorporated, the club builder’s brother-in-law on the supervisor’s board, so nobody could stop it. Tripp’s own father had never gone inside. In fact, his parents hadn’t been back to Alta in twenty years, preferring to stick close to the tiny condo they had bought on a southern beach. But there were plenty of other men who made the club their home.

Jolene had almost talked him into trusting her, but now just picturing her face caused a slicing pain deep inside his head. She was poison. But she was also the key to finding Lila, and she would lead him to her if he had to break her head off her skinny shoulders to look inside it to see what she knew. If Lila was dead—and he was truly afraid that she was by now—Jolene was responsible, no matter if the creature had killed her with his own hands. But all would come full circle when Tripp gave Jolene what she deserved. She had some kind of kinship with the creature. He had felt it on the mountain.

Jesus Christ, what’s wrong with me?

He took a long drink from the liter bottle of water he had picked up at the Git ’n’ Go, and unzipped his coat. He had begun to sweat, his body burning with energy. The mountains were barely visible against the black sky, but he felt like he could get out of the truck and run the miles between him and them without tiring.

It was
her
. Jolene had done this.

There’d always been talk of witchery on Devil’s Oven, and now he felt it inside his body, like death itself had taken up residence there. He rubbed the heels of his hands against his eyes to relieve the sting they had developed staring at the club’s entrance. He was falling apart.

He came back to himself when something smacked against his window. Dwight’s sickly white face looked back at him, his eyes bloodshot behind the thick lenses of his glasses. An awkward white bandage covered one of his ears.

It’s got him, too.

“Open the G.D. window!”

The glass between them muffled Dwight’s voice, but Tripp heard him clearly enough.

“What the hell?” Tripp said. Dwight was a particular flavor of crazy, and he wasn’t in the mood.

Dwight hit the window again with the side of his fist and bounced away on his toes like a deranged bantamweight.

Tripp shut off the truck and took a good look at Dwight before getting out. For a second, the malaise that had gripped him for hours lifted, and he thought he might laugh. Dwight looked the fool—so like Dwight, but funnier. Tripp opened the door.

Dwight rushed at him, his greasy head bent, ready to butt his chest. Tripp responded automatically, turning sideways to aim a kick at Dwight’s oncoming shoulder. When it landed, Dwight fell, skidding backward onto his ass and ending up on his side, curled up like a baby.

Damn, it feels good.

Tripp dragged the stunned man to his feet by the front of his windbreaker.

“You really don’t want to mess with me tonight, buddy,” Tripp said. “Let’s keep this friendly.”

Dwight’s glasses balanced awkwardly on his nose and a thick bubble of blood hung on his mustache. “You screwed her,” he said. “You screwed Bud’s wife, you hillbilly sonofabitch. I saved him and you screwed everything up.”

Tripp shoved Dwight away, causing him to stumble again on the asphalt.

“Get away from me, douchebag,” he said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Sheryl Dixon and her big-ass mouth.

A man and a woman on their way into the club stopped a few yards away.

“Bud knows, you asshole,” Dwight said.

“What’s your point?” Tripp said.

“They’ve got him locked up.”

“Not my problem,” Tripp said.

“You know he didn’t do anything to Lila.”

Tripp, breathing hard, addressed the couple staring at them. The woman—a girl, really; he would have bet a hundred bucks she had a fake ID on her—was leaning forward, obviously more interested than the guy, who had a forefinger in his mouth, digging something out of his teeth.

“Law enforcement,” Tripp said, letting his wallet drop open to expose his badge. “Just go on in.” The girl seemed reluctant, but the man nodded, unperturbed, and started for the entrance. Tripp was pretty certain the girl winked at him before she turned around.

“You owe him,” Dwight said. “You owe
me
!”

“Right now, I’m just looking for Jolene,” Tripp said.  “I don’t have any business with you.” The guy was out of his mind. Tripp started to walk around him to get to the club.

“You’re screwing the kid, too?” Dwight said. He spat blood onto the asphalt. “Figures.”

“I swear to God, Dwight. Shut the hell up! You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

How is it possible that it’s suddenly all about Jolene?

 “I thought you were a human being, not just another randy asshole.” A chunk of gelled hair fell down into Dwight’s eyes.

“Get out of my way,” Tripp said.

“Jolene’s not here.”

“Bullshit,” Tripp said. “She said she was coming in with Charity.” But the words sounded false in his ears. She had lied to him. Everything she had said about wanting to help him, about how she actually cared about Lila, was total bullshit. He had been fooled once, and now she was playing him all over again.