Thank God the window’s locked
, Patricia thought.
Then Ernie’s and Sutter’s cheesy-dead fingers began to open the window. First they’d reveled just to see her, but now they were coming to touch. . . .
When the stench poured into the room, Patricia wakened and screamed loud as a truck horn.
Oh, God, oh, God, oh
,
God . . .
Was she going insane? Her hand shot to her chest; her heartbeat felt like something exploding in her. But at least her clothes were on—at least now she knew it had been a dream.
The grainy dark hung before her, a veil. The hall clock ticked but was back to its normal, quiet pace. When the house frame creaked again, she actually found it comforting—because she knew it was real.
The window seemed to beckon her, though. Of course its curtains remained closed, just as she’d left them. But . . .
Her paranoia raced back to snare her.
Damn it,
she thought.
Damn it,
damn
it!
She needed to know, just to be sure. . . .
She swung her feet out and rose, giving herself a moment to fully come awake. When the time came to move, she faltered.
Come on
,
Patricia. What are you thinking
?
What
was
she thinking? That she’d pull the curtains back to find a cluster of dead faces leering in?
Ridiculous
.
But still, she had to prove it to herself; otherwise she’d get no sleep at all.
There! See?
She was almost ecstatic when she looked behind the curtains to find nothing there. The backyard faced her exactly as it had earlier. No movement, the night flowers standing open, moonlight shimmering.
Then her heart slammed once.
Wait a minute
. . . .
There was one thing outside that hadn’t been there when she’d looked before. At first she hadn’t seen it.
Ernie’s pickup truck.
The first foot of its front end protruded into her view.
That’s impossible!
She closed her eyes and took several deep breaths.
Ernie’s dead
.
I saw his
dead
body. And his truck wasn’t there before
!
She was certain, absolutely certain it hadn’t been there before.
And next the thought exploded:
Oh, my God, maybe it’s Judy! She must’ve borrowed his truck earlier and gone off somewhere! And she came back but didn’t wake me up when she came in!
Now it was joy that propelled her out of the bedroom. “Judy! Are you back?” She raced down the hall, out to the foyer, and up the stairs. She swung into her sister’s bedroom and snapped on the light.
“Judy?”
The bed lay empty, neatly made.
Then she’s downstairs somewhere
! Patricia felt convinced.
She has to be! That’s the only thing that could explain Ernie’s truck being in the backyard. She’s downstairs right now in the kitchen, getting something to eat
!
Patricia collapsed when she burst in and flicked on the light. Her knees thudded to the floor. She shrieked.
Judy was in the kitchen, all right. But she wasn’t getting anything to eat. A cane chair lay tipped over on the floor, along with two sandals. Judy was hanging by the neck from a kitchen rafter.
The rope creaked, a sound not unlike the house frame. Judy’s face ballooned, bright scarlet tinged with blue, tongue sticking out. She wore the flowered sundress Patricia remembered her wearing at the clan cookout. To make it worse, the process had snapped the neck entirely, and now beneath the noose, the neck stretched a foot. Lividity had turned her sister’s bare feet something close to black, and the lower legs too, veins bulging fat as earthworms.
Oh,
Judy
. . .
Oh, my God, my poor sister . . .
She’d never been that stable to begin with, and she’d never liked change. That was why she’d stayed with Dwayne so long, even in the midst of all that abuse, and that was why she’d never left this house.
She was happy only when things were the same.
But suicide? Patricia dragged herself up, the horror replaced by the reality of the despair.
Squatters betraying her, selling drugs while they took a paycheck from her? Police on the property every other night for murders and burnings? Yeah, things have definitely changed around here
.
It was inexplicable, but it happened every day: people killing themselves. It was the only cure to a horrid symptom they had to live with for God knew how long, and with nobody else even knowing there was a problem.
I have to call the police right now
, Patricia realized. Knowing that her sister’s body hung dead behind her couldn’t have been more distressing, but Patricia simply didn’t have the strength to take her down herself. She turned for the phone—
—and almost collapsed again.
Sergeant Trey stood in the doorway to the laundry room, as if he’d just come in through the back. He seemed as startled as she.
“Damn, Ms. White. Ya scared the bejesus outa me.”
Patricia looked at him, confused.
“I just come in from outside. About an hour ago I was looking out the station window and thought I saw Ernie’s truck drive by, with Judy drivin’ it,” he explained. “So I run out and jump in the cruiser, but the damn gas tank was on E, so I had to fill up at the station pump. By the time I was done with all that, Judy’d already got back to the house and—”
He looked up the the body.
“You . . . saw her driving?” Patricia’s question faltered.
“Yeah, and I’m really sorry. If my damn tank hadn’t been empty, I probably coulda gotten up here in time to stop her.”
“But . . .” The information bewildered Patricia. “But what were you doing walking in just now? You didn’t seem surprised to see that she’d committed suicide.”
“I already knew. I found her about five minutes ago.” He explained more details. “So I went back out to the cruiser to call the state cops on my radio. Then I walked back in and found you standing here.”
“Oh.” Patricia continued to look at him. Something wasn’t right. “But . . . your radio’s right there on your belt.”
Trey’s eyes darted down to his gun belt, the Motorola heavy in its leather holder. “Well, yeah, sure, but that’s just my, uh, my field radio.” Trey’s eyes shifted. He bit his lip a moment, but by then his cool delivery was falling apart. “S-see, this radio ain’t got the, uh, the state police frequency on it. Just the station frequency and the county.”
“Why the county and not the state?”
Trey blinked. “That’s . . . just the way the . . . bands work.”
Patricia didn’t consciously decide to say what she said next. She simply said it. “I don’t believe you. You’re acting like you’re lying. You’re acting like a prosecuting attorney who knows his case is bullshit.”
Trey blinked again, blank faced. Then he sat down in the chair by the kitchen table, but by the time he did so, his gun was drawn and pointing right at her. “Holy ever-livin’ shit, Patricia. Why couldn’t ya just leave it?”
Patricia’s heart hammered so loud she could hear it. “You killed my sister, didn’t you?”
“Fuck,” Trey muttered. The expletive was directed toward himself, not Patricia. “Yeah. Wanna know what I did? I snatched her after the Squatter cookout, kept her tied up for a day at one a’ old shacks way out at the Point. Fucked the daylights out of her a couple of times, then hung the bitch in the woods.” He shrugged non-commitally. “Then I throwed her in the back a’ Ernie’s truck and brought her here and just threw the same rope over the kitchen rafter. Easy. And who ain’t gonna believe it? Alcoholic and a head case to begin with, been depressed since Dwayne got offed. Looks like a typical widow who just couldn’t stand to live no more without her man. Happens every day.”
“She wasn’t the only person you murdered, was she?”
Trey snorted. “These hayseeds out here? Squatters? No-accounts like Ernie? They don’t mean shit. But you’re different. You can’t just disappear. You can’t wind up dead with a pocketful a’ dope. No one would believe it. You ain’t no redneck; you’re a big-city lawyer. Someone would come snoopin’ around.” He shook his head in the chair, suddenly exhausted. “You fucked everything up.”
Trey’s attentions seemed diverted inwardly; he wasn’t really looking at her. Patricia had backed up against the wall, the entranceway to the foyer only a foot away. But when she edged aside an inch . . .
Trey cocked his pistol. “Don’t think I won’t do it. Shit, I been killin’ folks for a month.”
“You and who else? Sutter? He must have been helping you.”
“Naw, the fat ol’ boy just wouldn’t turn crooked, even as bad as he needed the money. It was me ’n’ Dwayne at first. The idea was to make a few Squatters disappear—to scare off the rest of ’em. But it wasn’t enough, so we had to start gettin’ rougher. We did the job on the Hilds and flaked ’em with the crystal, started makin’ it look like two dope gangs in a turf war. Then we burned up the Ealds with enough shit in their shack to look like a meth lab.”
“So the state police would think the Squatters were one of the gangs?” Patricia asked.
“Sure. And it was workin’. It was Ricky ’n’ Junior Caudill we paid for the rough stuff. They come on after Dwayne got killed.”
Patricia somehow kept her fear in check. “And let me guess. Gordon Felps is the ringleader.”
Trey looked up, duly impressed. “Yeah, the money man. Don’t you get it? Agan’s Point is a shit town full a’ shit people goin’ nowhere, and I’m one of‘em. But Gordon Felps was gonna turn this place all around, turn the Point into somethin’ special, with some big payoffs for whoever helped him. Shit, all your sister had to do was sell the land to Felps and everything woulda been fine. But no, the dumb bitch couldn’t turn her back on the fuckin’ Squatters—like they were her fuckin’ little sideline family, her orphans. Like one a’ these crackpot old ladies ya read about, takin’ in all the stray cats.” He pointed up to Judy’s hanging body. “Well, this is what she gets for her loyalty to the fuckin’ Squatters. We couldn’t let her stand in our way. When little folks stand in the way of big things, they get run over. I’m tired of small-time. I’m tired of bein’ town clown on a no-dick two-man department in a shit-for-nothing town. But once Agan’s Point booms, gets all full-up with rich folks buyin’ Felps’s fancy waterfront condos? I’ll finally be a big-time police chief. It’s still gonna happen. Don’t think it won’t. We just have to adjust the game plan a little.”
“Because of me,” Patricia realized.
“Uh-huh. I think tomorrow you’ll be drivin’ back to Washington.”
“What?”
“You’ll be drivin’ back to Washington, and you’ll have an unfortunate accident in that nice Caddy of yours. Far enough away from here that your people in D.C. will believe it.”
“They’ll
never
believe it, Trey. And I’ve already told my boss and my husband that I suspected you and Felps of having something to do with all these murders.”
Trey smiled. “I know shit when I hear it, and what just came outta your mouth is a crock of it.” He took a breath and stood up. “Come on. Fun time first.” He stepped right up to her.
Patricia’s heart began to slug in her chest. “I have a lot of money, Trey.”
“Not enough.”
“Don’t be stupid. If you kill me, someone will find out.”
“No, they won’t.” And that was when his hand blurred upward and smacked the side of his pistol across her temple.
Was it the dream again, the nightmare? Patricia lay on the bed, naked, splayed before the window. The curtains were open now, the moonlight pouring in.
It’s the dream again,
she felt sure,
the dream I had before I found Judy’s body. . . .
But in the dream there’d been no curtain at all, and the clock had been ticking madly, whereas now it ticked normally. In the dream she’d been lying paralyzed on the bed, but now . . .
She craned her neck in four directions and saw that her wrists and ankles had been lashed to the bedposts. She felt as if she were drowning in dread, remembering the scene from the kitchen. Trey had murdered Judy, then staged the appearance of suicide. He and his cohorts had been doing all the killing, not a drug gang, to frame the Squatters, to get them off the land, thinking Judy would finally sell out to Felps.
But Judy didn’t, so they killed her too. . . .
Patricia gulped, nauseous.
And now it’s my turn.
Trey would probably strangle her here, then stage some kind of car wreck. But not before he had some fun with her first.
He’d been standing there all along, hidden in the shadows of the corner of the room. He took several steps until the darkness expelled him into the blaring moonlight. He was shirtless, and unbuckling his gun belt now. Then he took his pants off. Patricia was grateful there was only moonlight and not the lamp; it reduced the details. Trey’s body was lean, like a jackal’s. The thrill of murder—and of what was to come—had already erected his genitals.