Jack Ketchum

The Passenger

2001

It wasn’t the best of days even before her car died.

She’d fallen asleep the night before at her desk in the study and awakened from a dream of Micah Harpe, all three-hundred-plus pounds of him, crashing through the picture window and spraying her with shards of glass, slamming up against her desk and scattering papers and cigarette butts everywhere and then laughing, leering up at her, saying, troubles, counselor? and she rode that sudden wakefulness for a moment like a bucking steer.

Then Alan walks in from his shower wrapped in a towel, carrying a manila file folder, drops the folder on the end table and asks her not to let him forget these briefs tomorrow, please. Sure, Alan, thanks, no problem. It took him a full two minutes to really see her there, pale as chalk, and yet another to ask what was wrong.

“Dream,” she said.

He glanced at the desk littered with paperwork.

“You been down here all night?”

She yawned, nodded.

“So? How’d it go?”

“So I think I’m screwed without Micah Harpe, that’s what it comes down to.”

“I could have told you that.”

“All I can do is argue insufficient evidence.”

She watched him throw the towel over his shoulder and turn and walk toward the kitchen.

“Uh-huh. You want some coffee? I need some coffee.”

“I want some sleep. I want a case I can win, goddammit.”

He said, “Settle for the coffee.”

***

Then later she and Milton Wendt, the prosecutor, before the bench and Judge Irma Foster- another stunning excuse for a conversation.

“We’re not arguing,” she said, “that my client wasn’t at the Willis home that day, your Honor. They were old friends and he had every reason to be there. The prosecution has placed my client in the house and we allow that he was, in fact, present. But Big was there too and there is nothing…”

“Big?” Judge Foster squinted at her.

“Micah Harpe, your Honor, the defendant’s older brother.”

The judge looked past her to Arthur “Little” Harpe at the defense table. Arthur was looking pretty good today, Janet thought, all told. As good as he could look, anyway. A new suit and tie off the rack at Burton’s and a shoeshine in the courthouse lobby. But Janet still knew what the judge was seeing-a chubby pasty-faced country-ass snake watching them through idiot eyes. She just hoped he wasn’t using the eraser end of the pencil to clean out his earwax again.

“ Big and Little?’’ she said.

“Yes, your Honor.”

“Good God.”

She tried to move on.

“The prosecution has presented no physical evidence whatever to suggest that it was my client and not, as we contend, my client’s brother, who was responsible – without my client’s knowledge or cooperation-for the murders of these two people. I move to dismiss.”

“He confessed, Counselor.” Wendt sighed.

“He’s since recanted and implicated Micah as the shooter. That confession was taken under duress and you know it. The police went at him for over twenty- two hours. All because they couldn’t find his brother.”

“They still can’t.”

“That’s simply not true, your Honor.”

Then the judge sighed too. “Let’s take this into chambers,” she said.

***

In chambers she fared no better than expected. The trial was set for Monday morning. She had the weekend to prepare. But to prepare what? She certainly wasn’t putting that little weasel on the stand. The best she could hope for was to shake the detectives who’d handled the interrogation, or to pull off a miracle in summation. It wasn’t very promising. Harpe had confessed to the shotgun murders of Joseph and Lilian Willis over a drug deal gone bad and that was probably that. In the hallway she gave it one last try with Wendt, though.

“It should have been postponed,” she said. “It should never have come to trial.”

“Come on, Janet. We don’t know Big’s even in there.”

“And you don’t know he isn’t.”

“Nobody’s placed him there. Not even his brother has definitively placed him there. What do you want the cops to do? Remember probable cause, for god’s sake? We’ve gone onto that estate half a dozen times. The place is an armed camp-safe house for half the psychos in the state. But every gun in the place is registered to its owner. You know what the locals call it.”

“I know. Hole-in-the-Wall.”

“That’s right. We’re talking Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid right here in quiet old Adderton County. But it’s still private property. These guys have influence. They’ve got bucks. Big bucks. With a cleanup crew to dispose of their disposables as good as any in the U.S.A. And we don’t have probable cause.”

“He’s in there. And he did the crime.”

She stopped and opened her briefcase and pulled out the folder second from the top. She handed it to Wendt. “Look at this.”

“Big’s rap sheet. I’ve read it.”

“Read it again. Arrests for arson, rape, armed robbery, another rape-this one a man, sodomy-murder, attempted murder, assault…”

She was aware that her voice was rising, echoing through the nearly empty halls, turning a head or two. She didn’t give a damn.

“You can do something, Milton. You can send them in there after him.”

Wendt shook his head. “Wish I could. Look, nobody’s saying Big’s a sweetheart, Janet. I’ll even grant you that they could have done it together. But the point is we’ve already got your boy. So I think I’ll go right ahead and fry him if that’s okay with you.”

***

The Turtle Brook Inn was all amber lights and dark wood paneling and tables and chairs upholstered in burgundy-a steak joint with romantic aspirations. Seven- thirty on a Friday night and not half the tables full, nor even half the bar, a testament to northern New York State’s fundamental lack of any real trickle-down prosperity. She was halfway through her second glass of wine when Alan finally made his appearance. There was no point scolding him. Alan was late. Fact of life.

“So?” he said.

So again. She took a sip of wine.

“Alan, you can be boring as spit sometimes. You know that?”

“It didn’t go well.”

“No, it didn’t.”

He reached across the table and gave her hand a squeeze. His own hand was warm and dry and despite herself she always found comfort in his touch.

“I love you, honey,” he said.

“Alan, you damn well cheat on me.”

“That doesn’t mean I don’t love you. Don’t worry about the case. You’ll think of something. Listen, I’m staying at the apartment in town tonight. I have to take a deposition first thing in the morning. You mind?”

“No, that’s okay.”

Behind him their young pretty blond waitress was approaching.

“I do,” he said. “I mind. I may be boring as spit sometimes but I know one or two sex crimes we haven’t committed yet that I’d rather try tonight.”

The waitress froze.

“It’s all right,” Janet told her. “He’s an officer of the court.”

***

She was on her way home when the Taurus started shuddering and then died, cresting a hill on the dark slice of two-lane country road that was Route 605 northeast of Meville. She managed to pull over to the shoulder and tried to start it up again but the ignition only screeched at her like an angry cat. She stepped out onto black macadam and a warm still moonlit night. Below and far away across the valley she could see the lights from a single farmhouse. She walked to the front of the car and then the back and looked at emptiness in both directions.

She’d been meaning to get a new cell phone for nearly a week.

This could take a while, she thought.

It did.

Nearly twenty minutes passed with her standing there smoking Winston after Winston and listening to the frogs and crickets and she was seriously considering the trek down to the farmhouse before she at last saw a pair of headlights moving north in her direction. She was relieved but apprehensive too and wondered why in hell she hadn’t had the sense to take the tire iron out of the trunk when she had a chance to. It would be nice to have it on the car seat where she could reach it through the window in case of trouble.

Especially when the moonlight revealed the outline of a pickup with a wooden frame.

By then it was too damn late.

She thought of the old joke, What’s the difference between a good ol’ boy and a redneck? A good ol' boy throws his empty beer bottles in the back of the pickup- a redneck heaves ’em out the window.

She was hoping for the former.

The headlights washed over her. A pickup wasn’t what she had in mind. Not at all. She waved anyhow.

And the truck rolled right on by.

“Jesus!” she said.

She couldn’t believe it. How the hell dare he?

She whirled and ran to the front of the Taurus. “You asshole!” she yelled.

The truck slowed.

Stopped.

Sat there idling thirty feet away.

Oh, shit, she thought. Now you did it. He fucking heard you.

You better get that goddamn tire iron after all, she thought, and started digging in her purse, watching the compartment of the cab, a man’s silhouette inside, waiting for the driver’s door to open and the light to come on, which would mean he was coming out to god knows what purpose and praying that he’d just start moving again, get moving and go the hell away and then she had the keys out and was headed toward the trunk fumbling for the right one. As the truck moved slowly into reverse and started rolling back, taillights stalking her like glowing eyes.

And then suddenly she was stabbed into bright light again and a horn blared long and loud behind her.

She turned to see a station wagon in the process of slowly passing, pulling up alongside the Taurus and stopping, and she glanced at the pickup and saw it start to roll again-this time forward, this time in the right direction. Inside the wagon the driver leaned over and pushed open the passenger-side door and she saw that the driver was a woman smiling at her and she damn near leapt inside.

“God! Thanks!”

“No problem. Car died on you, huh?”

She shut the door. “That truck. He was coming after me.”

“He was? The sonovabitch. You want to go after him?”

“God no.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Okay. We’ll just drive.”

Janet looked at her. A woman of about her own age. Tight jeans and a tight pale yellow short-sleeve blouse, braless, her long hair pulled back in a lush dark ponytail. Rings on every finger of her right hand and hooped costume-jewelry bracelets, at least half a dozen, dangling from each wrist. A good strong profile, a little too much mascara maybe but still, she thought, quite attractive in her way. And then the woman turned to her and smiled again as they pulled away, and she saw the slightly crooked left incisor.

“Marion? Marion Lane?”

It was the woman’s turn to stare now.

“I’ll be good-goddamned! It’s Janet, right? Janet… wait, don’t tell me. Don’t tell me. I can’t believe this… hold on a minute… Harris! Janet Harris!”

“Close. Morris.” She smiled.

“Morris! You lived…?”

“Plainfield Street.”

“That’s right, Plainfield Street! Up where the money was. Hell, where the money still is. God! I mean, look at you! Jesus, what’s it been?”

“Since high school? A long time. A very long time.”

“No, really… I guess it’s got to be, what…?” “Seventeen years.”

She laughed. “Oh my god. Seventeen years. Seventeen goddamn years ! You know how long that is? Hell, we were only what? eighteen when we graduated? I mean, that’s half a lifetime ago!” She laughed again. “Damn! I think I need a drink,” she said. “Maybe a few drinks.”

She gave Janet’s leg beneath the skirt a light slap. “Hey, it’s good to see you!”

“Good to see you too. You don’t know how good. That guy was starting to scare me.”

“Forget the bastard. Someday he’ll pick up the wrong lady, know what I mean? Where we headed?”

“You know Ellsworth Road? Just outside of town? I’m living over there now.”

“Sure I do. No problem.”

She watched the road ahead wash away beneath their wheels. The pause between them was only momentary but still a little awkward. She really hadn’t known Marion well in high school. They’d traveled in wholly different circles. Janet was definitely college-bound. Marion hadn’t been. She wondered whether or not she’d ultimately made it there anyway but decided that at least for now it would be wrong to ask.

“Listen. There really is half a bottle in there.” She pointed to the glove compartment. “That jerk give you the willies? Open it up and have a hit or two. Good for the nerves.”

“No, thanks.”

“Go on.”

“Honestly. I’m fine.”

“You sure?”

“Yes, really.”

“Well, dig it out for me then, okay?” She laughed again. “Seventeen years! Jesus!”

She really didn’t want to. Not only was it against the law but it was dangerous as hell. She’d seen the results of drinking and driving plenty of times. Enough to know what a fundamentally stupid thing it was to do. But Marion was saving her ass here, for all she knew in more ways than one. And she hadn’t smelled any liquor on her breath thus far so this one might well be her first. It was still illegal but she guessed it was safe enough so long as she kept it down to one or two. She pressed the button to the glove compartment and watched the door fall open and the light come on inside.

She saw the flat pint bottle of Kentucky Bourbon. And behind it the. 22 revolver.

***

When Ray Short leaned back in his chair and neatly lifted the wallet from the baggy jeans of the passing Saturday Night Cowboy, Emil Rothert was almost finished with his fifth beer and just drunk enough not to be seriously pissed at him for waving it around the table like some kind of goddamn trophy, smiling, looking for Emil’s approval, and Billy’s too, he guessed. Even though the barman could have seen him or any one of the five guys sitting at the bar or the four in back by the pool tables. Not seriously pissed but still pissed.

He had to give him his due, though. Ray was good with his hands.

“Put that goddamn thing away,” he said.

“Yeah. Jeez, Ray, you want to get us comprehended? ”

Rothert sighed and shook his head. Sometimes Billy amused him and sometimes not. Sometimes he thought Billy Ripper was a spaceman only just learning how to appear human.

Ray’s smile faded. “You guys are no damn fun at all.”

“We’re drunk, Ray. What do you want from us?”

He finished his beer.

“I’ll have another, though. You’re buying.”

Rothert watched him walk to the bar. Sitting to his left was a guy in a rumpled gray suit drinking what looked like whiskey neat. The guy was facing straight ahead into the rows of bottles but he still hoped Ray had sense enough not to pay out of the stolen wallet.

“Three more,” he heard him say to the bartender, and then the bartender said something back that must have been three more what? because Ray said beers and then the bartender must have asked him what kind of beers? because Ray turned around with a look of annoyed confusion just as the girl walked in. He saw her register on Ray’s face- one helluva looker -and he turned and she was a looker all right and too young he thought to be walking into a place like this alone, probably underage in fact, long blond hair and cutoffs and tank top straining across her tits. Yet here she was, alone, moving past his table toward the back like she owned the joint.

Willie Nelson stopped singing “Blue Hawaii” and the place went silent so that he could hear the bartender and Ray.

“… we got Bud, we got Schlitz, we got Miller, we got Miller Lite. We got Heineken, Heineken lite, we got Coors. We got Tuborg, Becks and I can piss in this bottle for you if any of this don’t interest you.”

“Huh?” Ray still had his eye on the girl.

“Forget it.”

The bartender started to move away and Ray finally got it together.

“Buds. Make it Buds.”

‘Three Buds.”

And then it was Elvis singing “Blue Hawaii” good god as the bartender opened the beers and put them on the bar and sure enough, Ray pulled out the stolen wallet and started counting out the bills. I got me a reckless fool on one side of me, Emil thought, and a complete fool on the other.

Ray handed them their beers and sat.

“See that?”

“I’m still seeing it,” Emil said.

“I think you should go over,” said Billy. “Buy her a drink. Talk to her. I think she looks like someone who’d appreciate to talk to you.”

“I’m thinking about it.” He drank from the bottle.

Billy smiled. It wasn’t a nice thing to see.

“I’ve always liked a girl like that. Y’know? Somebody who can exist themselves to a function where they can manipulate.”

Emil and Ray just looked at him.

Emil thought that sometimes this boy just plain scared him.

***

The pint bottle rested between Marion’s legs and she’d only had two sips, but Janet still wished she’d put the thing away. She was driving slowly though, and carefully. She had no real reason to complain.

“Your parents still live in town?” Marion asked her. “No. Florida. My dad retired, sold the house. My mother says she’s a golf widow now. Yours?”

“Passed away.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thanks. It’s okay. They were never much with us anyhow. So who do you still see? Anybody?”

“Nobody. I used to call Lydia Hill once in a while.” “Lydia Hill?”

“Tall? Blond? Always wore long-sleeved white cotton blouses and minis? You know, the kind with the button-on suspenders.”

Marion laughed. “Sure, I remember them. Ran along the sides of your boobs and made ’em look bigger. And I remember Lydia Hill too, I think. Wasn’t she a cheerleader or something? Prom committee or something?” “Lydia? No, she was more debating team. We both were.”

She drank from the bottle. “You were popular though. You weren’t just some damn egghead.”

Janet shrugged and smiled. “I guess.”

“Sure you were. You dated that guy Wilder for a while, and Kenny Whatsisname, big Irish preppie. What was his name?”

“Coughlin.”

“Coughlin. Kenny Coughlin. Right. Real sonovabitch that guy was to me. You know that?”

“No. I didn’t even know you’d gone out with him.” Kenny and Marion? Before or after us? she wondered. Kenny was about as straight arrow as they come.

“See, you and me didn’t hang out with the same crowd. Guys I hung with, they expected you to put out, and maybe at first you didn’t and maybe later you did. And that was seriously fucked because as soon as you did their friends would know, so from then on you pretty much always did, and by the time a guy like Kenny comes along your cunt’s Grand Central Station and everybody knows it. So what’s Kenny do? He comes on like he’s going to save me. You believe that?”

Marion drank again. Not good, she thought. It was starting to worry her. That and the fact that she was accelerating now, just a bit over the speed limit. But the woman would be in trouble if some cop pulled her over.

Then she thought, what cop? We’re out here in the middle of nowhere.

“At least with one of those other guys it’s right out front, know what I mean? At least he doesn’t do the movie-and-dinner routine so he can excuse his own sorry butt for wanting to screw you in the backseat later on. And then never calling you again. At least with those other guys, they call again. Kenny Coughlin. What a bastard.”

She’s using the present tense, Janet thought. Like she’s still there. Back in high school. She knew that some of them got stuck in time-she’d seen it before. The same old town, the same jobs, the same old friends growing older. Some simply got trapped there and it looked as though probably Marion was one of them. She was starting to get very unhappy about the whole conversation and it didn’t help at all when Marion pounded at the steering wheel.

“Who the fuck is Kenny Coughlin not to call me?”

She watched her take a deep breath and hold it and expel it slowly, and then she seemed to calm again.

“I mean, you dated that guy?”

Janet nodded.

“How’d he treat you?”

“Okay I guess. It didn’t last that long, not really.”

In her look Janet seemed to read a barely concealed hostility. And not toward Kenny, but inexplicably, toward her. As though this whole business with Kenny Coughlin were somehow Janet’s fault. And she held that look too long-considering she was the one doing the driving. And then she reached suddenly for the glove compartment and Janet couldn’t help it, she jumped.

She glanced down and saw the gun in there and then she saw her slide the bottle in and slam it shut.

Her heart was pounding. She wondered if Marion had noticed the overreaction.

For a moment I thought… my god…

But no, Marion had done the right thing-not the crazy thing. She’d put away the bottle. And maybe it was the bottle that had been talking all along. Maybe there was nothing to worry about here at all.

“Not too long, huh?” she said. “Well, good. Good for you. Myself, I could have killed the little prick.”

She laughed. “Don’t mind me,” she said. “I was always too serious. Y’know?”

***

Emil watched the girl take her beer back into the poolroom, stand and watch one of the games. From what he could see the game wasn’t much. The players were just a couple of skinny kids in their twenties who thought that if you didn’t hit the fucker hard you didn’t hit good. He got more interested when he saw her reach into the pocket of her cutoffs and pull out a quarter and set it down by the left comer pocket.

The girl was a player. Or wanted to be.

He was surprised the bartender hadn’t carded her. She was just a kid.

“How’s your game these days, Bill?” he said.

“Oh, imperative, Emil. Imperative.”

“Fine.”

***

“So I guess you got married, huh?”

“No,” Janet said.

They were about twenty minutes from home now. Still in farmland, all gentle rolling hills and dark two- lane blacktop. They’d be coming up at a Kaltzas’s service station soon though, in about ten minutes or so. She wondered if she should tell Marion to stop there instead of taking her home. It was probably a good idea. If Dean was on, he’d give her a lift the rest of the way, drop her off and then go deal with her car. Dean had a massive crush on her that she didn’t exactly discourage. It helped if your local service-station guy happened to like you.

Besides, there was the matter of that gun.

“You got a boyfriend?” Marion said.

“Yes.”

“Fiance, right?”

“That’s right.”

“Been together a while?”

“Almost eight years, believe it or not.”

“What is he? Doctor? Lawyer? You got a congressman tucked away somewhere?”

“Lawyer, actually.”

Interesting, she thought. She hasn’t asked me what I do for a living.

“Lawyer. Actually. ” She nodded. “Well, I guess you really made something of yourself then, didn’t you.” And the hostility in that little zinger was loud and clear. Jesus! It was definitely going to be the service station now, even forgetting about the gun. She didn’t want this woman in her life any longer than she needed her to be.

“So how come you don’t marry the guy? What is he? Lousy in bed?”

“Marion… listen…”

“What? I can’t ask a question, now?”

“I’m not up to having a personal discussion right now, that’s all. My car’s dead, I’m exhausted, I’ve got work to do. You know what I mean?”

She laughed. “You’re not up to it. Having a hard night, are we?”

“Now that you mention it, yes. I didn’t need a broken-down car right now, that’s for sure, and…” “And you don’t need me asking personal, friendly questions of an old girlfriend, right? Well, pardon me!”

“God, Marion. I only said… look, there’s a gas station coming up on your right. Why don’t you just…”

“You want out? Is that it? You fucking want out? You want out of the car right now?”

Where the hell is all this coming from? she thought. What in god’s name did I do?

"Okay, yes. I think I do.”

"You think you do?”

"I think that’d be best.”

"Right here.”

You’re angry and… yes. I think that’d be best.”

“It would, huh?” She looked at her, lips pressed tight together. “Yeah, maybe it would at that.”

Her foot went to the brake and the car slowed and Janet could finally breathe again. Then she hit the accelerator. Tires screeched beneath her and jolted her back in her seat. Marion was grinning.

“Nah,” she said. “I want the company.”

***

They were standing behind her a little to the left by the jukebox along with three other guys watching her make her shot, the girl leaning way over the table to reach the cue ball so that her ass punched the cutoffs from within like a blast of helium into a balloon. She was wiping the floor with this kid. She made the comer shot and then lined up the seven to the right side pocket and sunk that too. Gently easing it in so that the eight ball was directly opposite. The kid was shaking his head and scratching distractedly at his pimples while Patsy Cline sang “Faded Love.”

“Side pocket,” she said.

Her voice had a hint of country twang to it.

Not a New York State kid.

She took her time. Aimed low for the backspin and got it right. The eight clattered home and her cue ball stopped on a dime directly in front of the pocket. She smiled and the skinny kid smiled and shook his head again and somebody applauded and Billy and Ray and one of the other guys across the room laughed along with the kid’s former partner. She picked up the quarter off the table. Her fingernails were cut short and flat.

“Who’s next?”

“Me,” Billy said and stepped over with his cue.

“You any good?”

“I am the best.”

Emil couldn’t help it. With Billy sometimes you just had to smile. She put the quarter in and when the balls dropped gathered them to the table and racked them efficiently and perfectly over the head spot while Billy chalked his cue halfway to death. She rolled him the cue ball over the foot spot. Directly over the foot spot. “Your break.”

“Side wager, miss?”

“Sure. Ten?”

“Ten will be fine. May I buy you a beer?”

“Thanks. I got one already.”

She lifted it and drank.

***

By the time she sank the fifth ball he was ready to make his move. Billy’s break had sunk nothing but scattered everything as was typical of Billy, who was decidedly not the best and she was popping them in all over the place. Guys were hollering encouragement. The girl was smiling. Billy looked like he was about to blow any minute but you had to know him like Emil and Ray did to see that.

He moved behind her and when she drew back the cue took hold of the hilt and held it. The girl turned around. Annoyed with him.

“Guess that’s it,” he said.

“Huh?”

He reached into his back pocket, fished out his wallet and flashed her the phony shield. Then returned it to his pocket.

“Got any ID?”

“Hey, come on. What is this?”

“I think you’re underage. I think you’re drinking in a public place and hustling my buddy here for pocket money. I’ll take the cue now, miss.”

She handed it to him and he set it against the wall.

“Lean over on the table. Hands on the table. Spread your legs, please.”

And yeah, he’d been right all along. She was underage and she was scared now and humiliated and she did as she was told so he proceeded to pat her down, thinking it was too bad about the cutoffs because he’d have liked to give those good smooth thighs a squeeze but there was no excuse for that with the girl bare-legged, though the ass was fine and the tits were especially fine and those he did squeeze and when she gasped and the two burly men who saw him do it started forward he reached for the pool cue and pointed it at them.

“Don’t even think it, gentlemen.”

The room was quiet now except for Patsy Cline and the girl, who had started to cry. Emil stepped away from her toward the men and watched them back down in front of the cue and move silent and sullen back to the wall.

“Okay, miss,” he said. “Get your purse. Officer Short here and I will escort you to the station. Billy? Officer? Let’s go.”

Again the girl did as she was told and bent and retrieved her purse, and Ray had her by the arm and was starting to move her along when the kid she’d just beat muttered something to his buddy across the room.

“What’s that?”

“I said you guys ain’t cops. You didn’t read her her rights.”

“You’re interfering with an officer of the law, sonny. Put your quarter on the table and let somebody else whip your ass before I take you along and read you your rights.”

He took her other arm and Billy trailed along behind while they marched her out of the room and into the bar, weaving their way through the tables and only then was he aware that the barman and some of the guys at the bar were watching all of this, so he stopped in front of the barman and pointed at him.

“ You I’ll be seeing a little later, friend,” he said. “Don’t go anywhere.”

The barman frowned and turned his head away, all of a sudden paying very close attention to the glasses in the sink.

Offensive action. Worked every time.

Lieutenant Paul Wellman picked up his Dewars and finished it and turned to the bartender.

“You know those guys?” he said.

“Nope.”

“That’s interesting. Neither do I.”

He tapped the three singles in front of him. “Yours,” he said. “And thanks. They’re right about one thing though. You shouldn’t have served her.”

He got off his stool and walked out of the bar, stood on the porch steps and lit a smoke. They’d moved fast. He could hear them laughing across the lot, but at first he couldn’t spot them. If they were cops at all, which he doubted, they were not from around here and thus had no jurisdiction. He knew that because he did have jurisdiction. Then he heard more laughter caught in the warm summer breeze and muffled screams and protests from the girl and by the light of the moon saw them standing in a tight half-circle around her behind a beat- up Jeep.

Christ, he thought. Right here out in the lot. When he was a boy his dad had talked about how stupid criminals were, but he hadn’t really believed him because there had always been their behavior on television and in the movies to contradict him. It was only when he followed in his footsteps and became a cop himself that he realized what he should have known all along.

Father knows best.

He moved off the stairs and casually across the lot as though he were headed for his own car, the Colt unholstered and held to his leg slightly behind him. He tossed away the Marlboro, wondering why in hell he’d lit it in the first place. Nerves, he guessed. At cigarette prices these days I can’t afford nerves.

The guy who’d spoken to the bartender had one hand inside her tank top and the other cupped over her mouth and must have been squeezing pretty hard because she was wriggling and pushing at him and trying to yell, her back arched against the hood of the Jeep and the other two were watching, leaning against the Ford Maverick parked beside it as he approached them. Waiting for sloppy seconds, he guessed. So that at first they didn’t see him. And then of course they did.

And then everything went to hell all at once because a car pulled into the lot and flooded all five of them with sudden rolling light.

“Police!” he said and raised his shield and Colt together.

The one with the girl grabbed hold of her by the hair and threw her headfirst into the passenger-side window of the Maverick. He saw blood splash the window and the girl slam down to the tarmac like a sack of rocks and the other two men were piling into the Jeep when he fired his warning shot into the air. But that stopped none of them – nor whoever had pulled into the lot, because the car stopped right the hell between them.

He ran around behind it and saw the fake cop lurch into the driver’s seat and heard the Jeep turn over and saw it start to pull away and fired for the left rear tire and fired again. Sparks scattered across the tarmac, but marksmanship had never been his strong suit so he ran to the driver of the car, an old guy in T-shirt and suspenders who from the look of him finally was aware of what kind of shitstorm he’d just driven into. He pointed at the girl.

“Go inside and call Nine-one-one. Tell them you need an ambulance. Tell them it’s an emergency!”

Get to your fucking car, he thought. And then he thought, Where? Jesus, where? Where the hell did I park it?

***

Inside the Jeep Emil was having his own goddamn problems. The piece of shit kept slipping out of gear, lurching forward, stopping, lurching forward. Through the rearview mirror he saw the cop running around through the parking lot like a confused dog who’d lost the scent and wondered briefly what the hell that was all about.

“Better move it, Emil,” Ray said.

Emil shot him a look in the mirror and tried again.

***

Wellman flung open the door to his car and slapped his cherry on the roof, hit his siren and slammed the door. He knew something was happening with the Jeep. He had that window, thank god. The Jeep kept stopping and starting and then as his own car roared to life he saw that the driver had finally got it right. He was headed for the exit and seconds later they were out on the road together and Wellman was riding up his tail pipe.

***

Emil felt the jolt from behind and then something went terribly wrong and he was swerving back and forth from one lane to the other, the Jeep nearly impossible to control and he glanced into the rearview mirror and saw the cop fishtailing all the hell over, their rear and front fenders locked together.

Then ahead of him he saw the headlights.

***

Wellman saw them too, headlights coming on fast, much too fast goddammit and reflexively hit his brakes. His tires locked, screeching, the car whipping back and forth like a trailer gone berserk. No belt again, you fool, he thought, smelling rubber smoke off the braking Jeep ahead as it veered suddenly and finally into the oncoming lane.

***

“ Marion!” Janet screamed.

Her hands slammed the dash and the harness scraped her breastbone as Marion hit the brakes and wrenched at the wheel but for a moment she was absolutely certain it was much too little much too late, the headlights were almost on them, so close she could see the Jeep’s tires smoking and then it jerked suddenly off to the right and they were tumbling down a low shoulder, Marion struggling for control, and the last thing she saw was the tree.

***

The cop’s car hit them like a cargo tank on a tanker braking without baffles, when what’s behind is a shit-load heavier than what’s in front, jackknifing ninety degrees and slamming into the driver’s-side door and throwing Emil clear across the seat. He was aware of Ray and Billy piling out of the back on the passenger side and through the webbed broken window of the cop’s car could see him slumped against the wheel, bleeding from a head wound but at just that moment beginning to move.

He opened the door and got out onto the tarmac, sprinted to the passenger side of the cop’s car just as the cop’s head disappeared from view and thought, Gun, you want to bet he’s going for his goddamn gun? and pulled open the door and there it was, tumbling out onto the scruffy grass in front of him. He picked it up. Pointed it at the cop. The cop was mopping blood out of his eyes with his fingers.

“Head wounds,” Emil said. “They’re a bitch.”

Marion watched him pull the cop from his car and drop him to the ground. She knew it was a cop because she’d registered the cherry. Her tits hurt like hell from the steering wheel but otherwise she was fine. Poor Janet seemed to have bumped her head. Poor Janet wasn’t moving. She just lay back in her seat with her head lolling and except for the nasty cut across her forehead you’d have thought she was sleeping.

Well, she’d said she was exhausted.

She saw the three men surround the cop and the gun glint in the moonlight and then heard him howl and yelp as the smaller of the men began kicking him in the shoulders, in the legs and ribs. She could hear muffled voices.

She watched all this with interest.

Then the man with the gun looked up, looked directly at her. Stared at her in fact, directly into her eyes.

Marion looked right back.

Behind them she saw headlights coming up fast, bathing them all in light. She watched the three men freeze, trapped there beating on a wounded cop for godsakes should the driver decide to play Angel of Mercy and stop. The car slowed, the curve of the road throwing its lights on her too for a moment. Then it accelerated and moved on. She realized she’d been holding her breath all the while.

“ What…?”

Beside her Janet was moving, pressing her hand to her forehead, aware of the wetness there and looking down into her glistening hand.

“Shhhh,” she said.

“What…?”

“Shut up.”

The man with the gun had returned his focus to the cop. She saw the little guy kick him in the ribs again and heard him cry out and then moan and she guessed that got Janet’s attention too.

“Marion…” she said.

“I told you to shut up.”

“Marion, get us out of here!”

But by then the man had raised the gun to the cop’s head and she watched and saw him fire and heard the flat report of the gun, felt its impact deep within her, and the cop jerked to the side and rolled over on his back and lay there and the man looked up and over at her again and she looked back.

“My god, will you get us out of here?”

“We’re fine. Relax.”

And they were fine, she knew that, but she guessed Janet didn’t believe her because she turned and reached for the door handle and Marion had to grab her by the arm and haul her back.

“You try to leave here and they’ll see you. And you’ll be dead. You get that? Look. Watch.”

They were piling into the Jeep. The man with the gun was trying to key the ignition but all he was getting was a metallic grind. Obviously the cop’s car was useless- there was smoke pouring out from under the hood. She could see the two men in back were starting to panic now, could hear their voices raised and the little one hopping up and down in his seat and then the driver turned and looked at her a third time.

That was when she smiled.

The man stared back, expressionless.

“Oh my god, ” Janet whispered beside her.

Then her hands were at the glove compartment, Bloody palms pounding at the button, leaving bloody palm prints all over the thing. The compartment popped open and she pushed the pint bottle aside and groped for the gun. Marion waited until she had it out waving around in front of her and then reached over and simply wrenched it from her slippery hands.

“ Unh-unh,” she said. “Nope. Not today you don’t.”

She leaned out the window.

“Guys!”

At first they just sat there watching her. Then she turned the ignition key and the car fired up nice and easy, so she backed away from the tree and shifted and pulled forward to the roadside and waited.

The driver got out first and started across the street. The others followed. And that was when Janet went for the door again so she had to whack her on the head with the gun barrel and hit the automatic lock.

“Hey, prom queen. Stay the hell put.”

He was a good-looking guy, this one with the Colt. Reminded her of some actor. Scott something. Craggy face, thin sandy hair, deep blue eyes that stared at them now through the open window. And then moved down to her gun.

“Oh, this?” she said. “It’s not loaded.”

She handed it to him and he broke it open, inspected it and handed it back to her. She hit the automatic lock again.

“Hop in, fellas,” she said. “My friend and I were just out for a little ride.”

***

Alan didn’t know why he was doing this. He was younger than Janet by nearly five years-too young, maybe, to be stuck with just one woman-and he guessed that was one reason.

Though being stuck with Janet was hardly being stuck.

He’d have to cut it out though once they got married. He’d emulated his father by going into criminal law but he didn’t have to emulate the rest of his behavior.

Does the word satyrasis mean anything to you, buddy?

She was a cute one, though, this little blond waitress from the Turtle Brook. Cute and so young and firm he’d lay odds her breasts didn’t even bounce when she jogged and he’d lay more odds she did jog, and if her apartment was the kind of godawful mess a high school kid would be proud of, you didn’t notice that under the sheets where he was, doing what he was doing. He listened to her groan and then suddenly he remembered.

“ Shit,” he said into her pubic hair. He threw off the sheets.

She sat up against the headboard. He looked at her and guessed he’d been pretty good so far. Her breastbone was glistening with beads of sweat.

“I’m sorry. I don’t believe it.”

“What’s the matter, honey?”

“I left my briefs at the house. They’re sitting on the goddamn table.”

“So?”

“I can’t stay. Sorry.”

“I don’t get it. Who cares where you leave your underwear?”

Yeah, he thought, he was going to have to cut this out.

***

She felt as though she were trapped inside a kind of living thing, Jonah in the belly of a speeding whale that hurtled through a lonely electrified night. She couldn’t seem to wrap her brain around the fact that a trio of killers were riding along behind her or that Marion was doing this or that she’d just watched one man kill another the way you’d put down a wounded dog. She’d represented killers before. She was representing one now for godsake-Arthur “Little” Harpe. Yet she’d never seen or felt the impact of what they did.

She was feeling it now.

The little man-the one sitting in the middle- seemed nervous, the others calm. How could they be calm?

“Where we going, Emil?” he said.

“Don’t know.”

The killer’s name is Emil, she thought. You remember that.

“I could use a drink I guess.”

“There’s a package store ahead,” Marion said. “Or do you want a bar?”

“Package store will do.”

He was sitting directly behind Marion and she saw them exchange glances in the mirror and Marion’s was amazing and simple to read. She’s turned on by this, she thought. Jesus. She’s crazy. Hell, they’re all crazy. Either that or stupid as they come. Driving around like nothing had happened back there at all. When a cop was dead. It frightened her but it made her mad too. Stupidity disgusted her.

“You’re going to a package store?” she said. “What about the car? I can’t believe you people.”

“What car?” said the man sitting behind her.

“The Jeep you left behind. Don’t you think somebody might be looking for you?”

“Well, that Jeep ain’t actually ours, ma’am. Sort of a loaner. You don’t have to worry about the Jeep. It was nice of you to ask though.”

“Your fingerprints will be all over it.”

“Fingerprints don’t work. They never get anybody on fingerprints. That’s TV.”

He wasn’t exactly right there but he wasn’t exactly wrong either.

“I’ve got a police band here,” said Marion. “We can turn it on if you want. Just in case.”

“Later, maybe,” the man called Emil said. “Police band’s a godawful noisy thing.”

Marion slowed and turned into a gravel lot with two cars parked in front of a squat stucco building and a neon sign saying WILEY’S LIQUORS over the door and even before they stopped Janet wrenched at the door handle, her heart racing as the door opened and the impulse was irresistible, the gravel was going to hurt like hell but damn the gravel she was about to leap and roll when a hand gripped the back of her neck and pain shot through her head like a sudden migraine.

“When you got up this morning,” the man behind her said, “did you get up this stupid?”

She could barely hear him, the pain was so bad. Some pressure point or something.

“ Please… let… go. ”

“You gonna scream?”

“No!”

“Nobody around to hear you anyway. Couple frogs maybe. They build these stores like concrete bunkers. I guess I could let up a little.”

“Pu… please do.”

The man did but still held on to her with one hand so that the pain wound down to a dull throbbing ache while he leaned over and closed the door with the other and settled back in his seat.

“Better?”

“Y… yes.”

“You’re welcome.”

The man called Emil opened the door on his side and climbed out of the car.

“Ray, stay with her. What’s your name again, honey?”

“Janet.”

“Stay with Janet here. Billy, come on along with me.”

The man who had her was Ray and the little one was Billy.

He turned to Marion and smiled.

“C’mon,” he said. “You’ll see something.”

***

“Wait here,” Emil told her so she stood by the counter like she was interested in the magazine rack and listened to some old duffer in a white T-shirt and suspenders bend the balding store clerk’s ear with some ragtime about plaster dust and sawdust just pullin ’ the moisture right out of his hands, just pulling it outa my hands, look at them hands, just pullin’ it right on out, i’nt that awful? and the clerk looking at the upturned palms of his hands and saying Yeah, Bob, that’s terrible, the customer paying for his bottle of Old Times and the clerk brown-bagging it while Billy set the two six-packs down on the counter just to the left of her and Emil his fifths of Makers Mark and J amp;B next to that.

The old man shoved his wallet into the front pocket of his baggy tan pants, hefted the bag into the crook of his arm and started to leave.

“Excuse me? Sir?” Emil said.

The man stopped and squinted at him.

You’ll see something, he’d said. She guessed this was going to be it. She had to work to keep from smiling.

“Pay for this for me, will you, friend? I’m short on cash.”

The man glanced at the whiskey and the beer. He shook his head.

“Crazy sumbitch,” he muttered.

He moved toward the door again, and Emil flung his arm across her shoulders from behind and pulled her between the man and the door. When she felt the gun against her cheek the gasp was real.

“Pay for it. Or I shoot the lady and then I shoot you.”

“He means it,” Billy said. “He’s not facetious.” “And you behind the counter. Don’t move.”

You could see the old guy sizing up the situation. She wondered what war he’d served in. He wasn’t particularly rattled. Tough old bird.

She was doing all right so far though, she thought, playing the victim, eyes wide and mouth hung open in what she hoped looked like sheer terror though she was practically coming in her pants here for god’s sake- and then Emil made things worse by sliding his hand down over her breast and squeezing and the old guy seemed to get the picture all at once. His face changed, hardened. And Emil must have seen that too because that was when he turned the gun and fired and the old man dropped to the floor howling and clutching his left foot, the Old Times bursting beside him.

“I forgot to mention that I could just as easily do it reverse order,” Emil said. “Bag it. Ring it up,” he told the clerk. He caressed her breast and she couldn’t help it now and didn’t try, she moaned. “Soon as he can, I know he’ll be happy to pay up.”

Which was exactly what both of them did.

***

They’d come whooping out of the package store like schoolkids at a panty raid but she’d heard the muted gunshot and now Billy was driving, with Emil and Marion in the back with Ray and she glanced around and saw the two of them kissing and his hand between her legs, so that she wasn’t at all surprised when he told Billy to pull onto the narrow dirt access road and then to stop and cut the lights. They got out, a bottle of scotch in Emil’s hand, and went running, laughing, for the woods.

They didn’t go far. Just behind a stand of pines. She could hear them over the drone of crickets through the open window. Marion giggling and then groaning. Emil grunting like a goddamn animal. Brush crackling beneath them in the still air.

They were animals. So was the one Ray with the gun against her cheek, running it along first one side of her face and then the other so that each time she had to pull away and finally rapping her head with the barrel to make her sit still-rapping her lightly but her head was taking such a beating tonight it still hurt like hell-and then she could feel him lean over her, could smell the beer on his breath as he ran the barrel down over her neck and collarbone, heading for her breast and she could feel Billy’s eyes on both of them.

You’ve got to stop this, she thought. Now. Already she felt bathed in filth.

“You’d better be ready to kill me,” she said. “Just one more inch.”

“Who says I’m not?”

“You didn’t do the cop. He did the cop. You get caught, I can say that. You kill me, I can’t. You’ve heard of state’s evidence?”

“Uh-huh.”

“ Course he has,” Billy said. “Everybody has. It’s where you angle in on somebody and you get impunity.”

The little guy was short a few major cable stations. She’d keep her pitch to Ray, who at least appeared to be somewhat sane-and she’d damn well have to hurry. The sounds from the bushes had all but stopped now.

“If you don’t hurt me and you don’t abuse me I can help you. I know what I’m talking about. I’m a lawyer. It’s my job to know.”

“A lawyer?”

“A defense attorney.”

“Bullshit.”

She’d expected that. She dug into her purse for the wallet, opened it and flashed the laminated card at him.

“See that? That’s a court pass. They don’t come in cereal boxes, Ray.”

He took it from her. The gun no longer pressed her flesh.

“I’ll be damned.”

He studied it a moment and handed it back to her. “Well,” he said, “I probably wouldn’t be the one to shoot you anyway, truth be known. ’Less you started something. I’m a family man, you know. Want to see?” She heard him digging into his back pocket, pulling out his own wallet and flipping through the plastic inserts. He couldn’t seem to find what he was looking for.

“I had a lawyer once,” he said. “I kinda liked the man. I appreciated his efforts on my behalf.”

Then she heard him slap the wallet closed and abruptly shove it back into his jeans and turned and saw Marion and Emil come thrashing through the brush. Marion leaned in through Janet’s window and smiled. “Nothing like the great outdoors, hon. Shove over.”

***

Alan was already thirty yards past it and headed along the downslope, briefs for the Mohica case foremost on his mind, when he registered Janet’s blue Taurus, warning lights blinking like fireflies, dark and silent by the road. It wasn’t safe to pull a U-turn here on the hill so he continued to the bottom and turned and drove back up again. He crossed lanes and parked into her dead headlights and got out of the car and peered in through the window. He didn’t know whether to be relieved or not to find that there was nobody home.

He got back into his car and tried her on his cell phone but all he got was the machine and that definitely didn’t relieve him. The gas station, maybe? Arranging for jumper cables or a tow truck? Could be. He got Kaltzas’s number from Information but when he tried it the line was busy.

The anxiety really didn’t hit him until he reached the roadhouse and saw the side of the road swarming with cops, saw the jackknifed car and the Jeep and the crime- scene tape and the forensics team working over the body of a man and then it really hit him when he saw the paramedics wheeling a woman into an ambulance. Janet? My god, he thought. He didn’t know why he thought it-the woman could have been anybody-but it came unbidden and pounded through his blood. He slowed and then stopped even as the officer waved him on. He flashed his ID. The officer frowned at him anyway.

“What happened? Accident?”

“Shooting. One dead. One of ours, dammit.”

“The woman?”

“Girl. Can’t be more’n seventeen. Concussion, fractures, god knows what else. It’s a helluva mess.”

He nodded. “Thanks, Officer. Good luck. Hope you get the bastard.”

“Bastards,” he said. “Three of them.”

Alan guessed it was just his night to be corrected. He pulled out and tried her again on the cell phone.

“ Leave a message,” she said.

***

“Vehicle described as a late-model four-door Buick station wagon, light blue. Suspects are assumed to be armed and..

“Dangerous,” said Emil.

Billy reached over and flipped off the police band and pounded once at the steering wheel. “Shit,” he said. “How’d they make the wagon?” said Ray.

“The car that passed us by back there. While Billy was toyin’ with the Man.”

“Shit!” He pounded the wheel again.

“Called us in as an accident, probably. Good citizen. Well hell, we are an accident. An accident waitin’ to happen!”

It seemed to break the tension and they laughed. Broke it for them, anyway, if not exactly for Janet. They were all too damn matter-of-fact about this. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t normal. And Emil. Couldn’t anything shake Emil?

“We’ll just find us another car, that’s all,” he said. “Meantime we better get off the road awhile.” He turned to Marion. “You know a place?”

She looked at Janet.

“Do I know a place? Hell, yes.”

She draped her arm over Janet’s shoulders and gave her a squeeze.

“ ’Course I do,” she said.

***

She’d chosen the house because, unlike the Justice Building, where every footfall echoed like pistol fire across the marble floors, where even the walls were polished on a weekly basis, where the air was processed and always traced with disinfectant, the house was as much of nature as in the midst of it. Over 120 years old, it stood surrounded by tall untended grass atop a hill at the end of a two-lane dirt track that wound past a small country graveyard and an abandoned church of even earlier origin. Its beams were hand-hewn. Both fireplaces worked. The occasional bat still fluttered upstairs in the attic.

Her nearest neighbors were over a mile away. The house was quiet. It was private.

Now it was remote.

“How many phones?” Emil said. He’d walked in with his gun drawn. He shoved it in his belt.

“Just the one in the kitchen.”

“Truth, now.”

“Just the kitchen.”

“Ray? You want to take care of that?”

“Sure.”

Ray walked into the kitchen, put the paper bag containing the whiskey down on the counter and the beer in the refrigerator and unplugged the wall jack. The blinking light on her answering machine blinked out.

“Any guns?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure. You want to hide the carving knives? I promise not to look.”

Emil smiled. “I just might do that.”

Billy plopped down in her armchair like a man after a hard day at work. Emil went to the refrigerator to get himself a beer. He popped one for Ray and handed it to him, then another for himself and closed the door.

“Hey,” said Marion.

“Oh, right.”

He got her a beer, opened it and stepped out of the kitchen and handed it to her.

“Sorry, Marie.”

“Marion.”

“Sorry. You care for one?”

“No,” Janet said.

She needed something a whole lot stronger. Not too much, god knows she had to keep her wits about her. But Jesus, something. She went to the kitchen cabinet and took down the fifth of Glenlivet and a glass and uncorked the bottle.

“Scotch?” Ray said.

“Uh-huh.”

“Hey, we got scotch too. Have some of ours. Be our guest.”

“No thanks. This is scotch. You bought rubbing alcohol.”

She poured herself a double. Ray took the bottle from her hand.

“So educate me,” he said.

She got him a glass. He poured and drank.

“Smooth. What is it?”

“Single malt.”

“Good stuff,” he said.

“Where’s the bathroom?” said Marion.

Janet pointed. “Through there. Through the bedroom.”

“What’s over there?” Emil said.

He was pointing to the closed door to the study. Neither Emil nor Marion knew what she happened to do for a living yet and for some reason she didn’t want them to. So far the others hadn’t said anything. But if he went browsing around in there he could probably figure it out for himself.

“A study. Books and papers.”

He moved to the door and opened it and flicked on the wall switch and his eyes went to the cluttered desk.

“You work here?”

“Sometimes.”

“You some kind of writer or something?”

“I write.”

She walked over and as she turned the light off again and closed the door in front of him she saw Alan’s forgotten briefs on the end table.

He needed them tomorrow.

He’s supposed to be staying in town tonight.

“Please,” she said. “This room’s private.”

He shrugged and smiled. “Sure. Okay. You figure on writing about me?”

“Would you want me to?”

She glanced at Billy, slumped in the armchair, opening and closing a big sharp-looking folding knife, his brow furrowed as though deep in thought. Billy’s got a knife, she thought. You damn well remember that too.

“Sure I’d want you to. Farm boy makes good, right? You know I’m the seventh son of a seventh son? Supposed to be magic or spiritual or something, real powerful. Now Billy here’s a preacher’s son. A very spiritual being in his own right. And Ray..

He turned to Ray, who was drinking Glenlivet straight out of the bottle.

So much for a second one for me, she thought.

“Hey, Ray, what’s your story anyhow?”

“No story, Emil.”

He laughed. “That’s what I thought.”

Then the door to the bedroom opened and Marion appeared and her anger at all four of them flared from dull to blazing. She was wearing the black Versace nightgown, the one Alan had more than splurged for in Manhattan last Christmas, the one she’d worn just four times since-that night and then on his birthday, her birthday and the Christmas following and the garter belt was hers too and the panties and the black silk stockings.

“I borrowed some things,” she said. “Hope you don’t mind.”

Oh, I mind, she thought. You bitch. You bet I mind and you damn well know I do.

“Lord, Maria! Look at you!”

He went to her and Janet had cause to wonder exactly how much jealousy was floating around here in the room just then between these guys because Ray moved toward them too from the kitchen, the expression on his face unreadable as Billy stood up gawking while Emil ran his hands over her, showing off for them and for Janet too, Marion laughing and wrapping her arms around him as he dragged her back through the doorway to the bedroom and pulled her down on top of him across the bed, hips already grinding.

She saw Marion break the kiss, his big hands roving her breasts, and saw her turn and stare at her and knew that Marion was showing her something at that particular moment too. It was something about power and spite, she thought, that the girl from the wrong side of the tracks was all grown up now and somebody to be reckoned with. She got that message clearly. And never broke the look as she purposefully and calmly walked over to the bedroom and closed the door.

Billy slumped back into his chair. Began fiddling with his evil-looking knife again. She crossed to the couch nearby and sat. He wasn’t going to scare her. Damned if he was. In the kitchen she could hear Ray swilling at the bottle. In the bedroom she could hear them. They all could. She had the feeling that it bothered each of them in one way or the other. She reached into her purse.

“You mind if I smoke?”

“Unh-unh. It’s your domesticity.”

She lit it, crossed her legs and tried to relax.

“Your TV work?” he said.

“Remote’s right over there.”

He took it off the table and pushed the power button. Some innocuous family comedy sprang out at them and the sounds from the bedroom disappeared beneath canned laughter. He started surfing the channels. His attention span seemed to be just about what she’d expect it to be: nil.

“Cinemax? HBO? Showtime?”

“No.”

She saw him take in the furnishings-the Boston rocker, the rows of hand-carved decoys, the country primitive desk and pie safe and chairs and table, the 1821 children’s sampler, the hundred-year-old map of the Hudson River, the heavy carved-oak shelving, the Tiffany-style lamps.

“I wouldn’t think you were that penurious,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“I wouldn’t think you were that penurious. That you’d just have basic cable, I mean. You have so many encumbrances here.”

She sure did.

***

It seemed forever sitting there with Billy flicking his goddamn knife open and shut with one hand and the channels with the other but it was probably no more than fifteen minutes because she was only on her second smoke when the bedroom door opened and there was Marion, this time draped in a bedsheet. Her bedsheet.

“Janet? Come on in a minute, would ya?”

Her bedroom seemed sullied to her now. Foreign. Enemy territory. She didn’t care for the notion of going in.

“Why?”

“Got to ask you something.”

“Ask me here.”

“It’s girl talk, honey.”

She stubbed out the cigarette. As she passed she saw Ray seated in the kitchen, the bottle in front of him, pulling cards out of his wallet and shoving them back again, frustrated. Still looking for that family photo. She wondered if it even existed.

At the door Marion took her arm and led her into the room and there was Emil on the bed lying sprawled beneath her coverlet. Marion closed the door behind her and stood there and Emil smiled.

“ Next,” he said.

It was a gut punch that turned instantly to rage and fear.

“Fuck you!” she said, and turned and saw Marion blocking her way and didn’t hesitate for a moment- her two elder brothers had taught her to fight way back when and damned if she’d forgotten. She threw her right to the side of her jaw and Marion went down against the pinewood door like so much raw meat. She shoved her out of the way and her hand was on the doorknob when Emil lunged naked off the bed and she felt the warm sweat of his arms around her waist straight through her clothing. He pulled her down on top of him and she turned in his arms, kicking and squirming and trying to pull free but he was too strong. He shoved and rolled her so that he was on top of her straddling her hips, his hands pinning hers to the mattress near the foot of the bed. Then she felt other hands on her wrists, not as strong but strong enough and she heard Marion spit the word bitch and looked up at her naked and looming over her and holding her down, Billy and Ray standing in the doorway behind her and she knew she’d get no help from either one of them.

“Don’t do this. Please, Marion!”

Marion smiled. And there was so much wrong with that smile that she knew she’d never understand it as long as she lived.

“Oh, honey,” she said. “It ain’t nothing. I had boyfriends used to give it to me rough all the time. You lay back, watch the ceiling. You’ll get used to it.”

Emil’s fingers went to her blouse, to the buttons. Billy had his pocket knife in one hand and was poking its tip to his opposite thumb as though testing it while he and Ray moved to the bedside, watching them, an impossible drift of soulless motion and for the first time she really did fear for her life, knew that this might be the end of her right here on this bed, knew it so deeply and well that when her skirt went down and her panties went down and she felt his cock, hard and still beslimed with Marion against her thigh the room swirled and she nearly fainted in the knowledge, but she didn’t, she wasn’t going to be that lucky. She just looked away from them, from all of it and heard him spit on his hand and felt him wipe it across her and then the bright pain of entry like a thousand needles sinking all at once into her flesh and she cried out and heard the drone of Marion’s voice above.

“ There, there, darlin’. You might as well know it. Life’s nothing but a trail of tears for us girls. You might as well know. ”

***

And then later, Billy demurring but not Ray. Ray the family man, solemnly stripping off his clothes. She turned away again.

And again that voice above her. Dreamy and cooing evil at her.

“ You’ve never seen what I’ve seen. There’s so much you’ve just been protected from. Had a guy once, beat me morning, noon and night, regular, pretty much every day. And people used to say, why do you stay with him? He beats you! And I’d say I love him. He's mine. And I did, and he was. He may be crazy drunk nights but days he’s mine, I said. What’s a woman to expect from a man, anyhow? So don’t you worry about any of this, honey. A woman can get over near anything. And I’m the living proof. ”

***

When it was over they left her alone but did not completely close the door and she knew they could hear her sobbing so she stopped sobbing and wiped away the snot and tears and got up and used the bathroom, gave herself a whore’s bath in the sink and washed away the blood across her face and hairline, then left the water running so they could hear and went back to the bedroom and opened the bedside drawer and silently as possible took out a pen and notepad, thought hard and began to write.

***

Emil leaned into the room just as she was zipping up her skirt and asked if she was ready. She said she was. She guessed they weren’t going to kill her quite yet. He looked strangely hesitant for a man who’d just finished raping her.

“You’re pretty much okay, right?”

“I’m… (going to fucking get you)… yes. (Somehow I’ll see you dead for this.) I’m all right.”

“Good. That’s good.”

She walked past him, fists clenched, on into the living room and saw the other three standing set to leave but ignored them and walked straight to the kitchen, took the half-empty bottle of Glenlivet off the counter and poured all that was left into a tall tumbler off the dish rack and drank prodigiously- an old magician’s trick, a little slight-of-hand, fellas -because as she drank they were watching that and trying to gauge her. So that they did not see her set down the bottle on the small square of paper she’d slipped onto the counter beside it.

She drank most of what was in the glass. It wasn’t only to complete the illusion. She needed it.

She slammed the glass to the counter.

“Let’s go.”

***

“Janet!”

Ever since the crime scene back on the highway he hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that something was seriously wrong. Something wrong with Janet. He’d phoned Kaltzas’s garage and got through this time and no body had heard from her. It was the most likely place in go for help and she hadn’t.

Why?

Inside the house was silent. Living room, study, silent. Just as he’d left them.

But not the bedroom.

The sheets were stripped off the bed and piled on the floor and that wasn’t like her at all, they’d be in the hamper if she was planning to do a laundry when she came home tonight and that was troubling enough but then he saw the pair of beer cans on the dresser. She never drank beer. Hated the stuff.

So that now he was really worried.

Phone the police.

In the kitchen he saw more beer cans in the garbage and two more on the counter along with the empty bottle of Glenlivet.

Jesus. The Glenlivet was fucking empty. That was wrong too. They’d had a nightcap last night before bed and the bottle was still nearly full when he put it away. Then he saw the scrap of paper beneath it and pulled it out from under.

NY TA45567

blue Dodge wagon regist Marion Lane

Emil? Ray? Billy? murder, Rt 605-8:30 p.m.?

HELP!

The handwriting was shaky but hers. He reached for the phone and heard nothing but dead air so he followed the line down to where they’d pulled it out of the wall socket- Who? Emil? Ray? Billy? -plugged it back in and dialed 911. What if I hadn’t come back for the goddamn briefs? he thought. What in god’s name if I hadn’t? Then the cop was on the line.

“Officer Hutt speaking. How can I help you?”

He put on his most businesslike, no-nonsense voice. A little amazed that he could do so.

“Listen carefully. My name is Alan Laymon and I’m an attorney. I have specific information regarding the murder of a police officer on Route Six-o-five at approximately eight-thirty this evening. 1 have a plate number for a blue Dodge wagon. The killers are holding at least one hostage, maybe two. I have names or partial names for all of them. Do you understand me?”

He did.

***

All told, Emil thought, things were looking good. He’d had two pieces of ass in a single night. He more or less preferred the one he hadn’t raped. Which was fine since it was simpler. He had both of them here in the front seat beside him right where they ought to be.

He’d shot a cop-dangerous as hell, sure, but something he’d seriously wanted to do since fucking prison.

Not a bad night at all.

They were headed along a narrow dirt access road toward a farmhouse. Margaret or whatever her name was had spotted it, one light burning in a window in the valley below. She’d killed the lights when he told her to but the moonlight was plenty bright enough.

“Go easy,” he said.

To the side of the farmhouse he saw a rusted-out Ford pickup that looked like it hadn’t been on the road in years but beside it in front of the porch, a light-colored, four-door Chevy. It would do.

“Pull up here,” he said. “Keep her running.” They were about three car lengths away.

“Chevy looks just the ticket. Ray? You want to do the honors?”

Ray, the one with the hands. He nodded.

“Billy, go along and keep an eye on the house. Real quiet.”

They opened both doors and stepped outside. He didn’t have to tell them not to shut them. He turned to the woman beside him.

“You too,” he said. “ Real quiet. Are we clear about that?”

“Yes.”

He watched them move to the driver’s side of the Chevy and saw Ray open the door and duck in, Billy a little in front of him watching the house and already jittering like he had the shits, looking back at Ray as though willing him to hurry. He heard the engine sputter and die and sputter again through the still night air and thought, damn! just as the living room window flew open and the shotgun appeared and let fly and the Chevy’s windshield exploded. He saw Billy hit the ground and start crawling toward the back of the car, Ray nowhere in sight.

“Get outa there! Goddammit! I’ll blow your goddamn ears off!”

An old man’s voice. One very pissed off old man.

The shotgun sparked and roared again and punched a hole in the grille. The car shuddered and the hood flew up as he fired a third time and then the left front tire was down and hissing. He saw Ray bail out of the seat and stumble for cover toward the rear of the Chevy and crouch beside Billy.

“Aw, shit,” he said.

He put his arm out the window and fired at the same time the old man did and this time the blast kicked the hood off its hinges entirely and back against what was left of the windshield. The bastard’s sure doing a fuck of a job on his own car, he thought. Doesn’t seem to give a fuck either. Only now he’d discovered that there was somebody in the station wagon firing back at him, and Emil saw the shotgun glint and shift in the moonlight.

“ Hit it, Maggie!”

He got off three fast ones toward the window and saw wood fly off the sill as she slammed her foot to the gas pedal and sent the car screeching into a turn behind the Chevy, spraying dirt and gravel as the goddamn woman beside him tried to haul herself over the seat, making for the open rear doors so that he had to reach for the back of her blouse and grab hold of her with one hand and fire at the farmer with the other and the farmer was shooting back. He felt the impact thump and quiver through the right rear body of the wagon. Ray and Billy were up and running for the wide-open backseat doors as she pulled the car through the full 180- degree turn, getting them the hell out of there, yes! and picking up speed, the two of them racing for the car and catching it right and left just as the shotgun roared a final time and they finally slammed the doors.

“Whew! That was one single-minded guy,” Ray said.

“Disreputable,” said Billy.

***

The detective-the bigger of the two, Frommer his name was-was seated on the couch flipping through his notepad, frowning. Alan sat across from him on tin edge of the armchair and waited. He heard the toilet flush and finally the smaller cop came out of the hath room so that then they could begin.

“What we’ve got here’s kind of unusual, Mr. Laymon,” Frommer said. “Three out-of-staters and a local girl.”

“Why unusual?”

“The boys turn up easy on the computer. Emil Rothert, Ray Short and Billy Ripper. Rothert and Short originally from Dead River, Maine. High school buddies, what little they had of it. Mostly they had Juvenile. Assault, arson, skin the neighbor’s cat, that kind of thing. Graduated to armed robbery, rape and aggravated assault. No convictions. Both did time in Jersey-annul robbery again. And we figure they linked up with Rip per there because next we got all three of ’em booked for auto theft in Bristol, Connecticut, charges dismissed This Ripper’s a total fruitcake. Went after his mom eight years ago with a straight razor and damn near killed her. Lady sixty-six years old. Imagine that? Bui the real puzzler’s this Lane woman.”

“How come?”

“Let’s just say the consensus is that she ain’t got all her cookies in the jar,” the smaller cop said. Frommer shot him a look that went from hot to cold. Then he shrugged.

“It’s true,” he said. “I wish I had a buck for every time she’s called the station with some lame news or another. First she says she’s being followed by some guy in a white Mercedes. Then she’s getting obscene calls every night and she can’t be sure but she thinks the caller’s a woman. She can tell by the breathing. She calls us at least a dozen times on this one. Then somebody breaks in and cuts the wire to her window fan in the dead of summer. Then somebody breaks in again and cuts her phone line. Finally somebody sets fire to her garage.

“Well, there was a fire. Burned up an old sleeping bag and some old clothes and papers. We got no proof but two guesses who set the thing. She was all right I guess until her boyfriend ran off and dumped her. Since then, whacko.”

“So you’re saying…”

“So I’m saying we don’t know if she’s with ’em or against ’em. We figure she wasn’t in on the killing. The driver who called it in said their car was off the road trying to kiss a tree. But other than that? Could easily be the one as the other. So the point is..

He knew what the point was. “Jesus,” he said.

“Right. We could be talking three bad guys and two hostages, or three bad guys, one hostage and one crazy. And I got to be honest with you. Either way it could get very nasty here.”

***

They’re up against it now, she thought. The police band had them made. Not just the car but them. She didn’t know whether it made her feel frightened or elated. Maybe both.

“… suspects identified as Emil Rothert, thirty-four, white male, six feet two inches, two hundred fifteen pounds… Ray Short, thirty-four, white male, five feet eleven inches, one hundred seventy pounds… William Grant Ripper, thirty-one, white male, five feet nine inches, one hundred forty pounds… ”

Emil reached over and turned it off.

"I don’t like this,” Ray said. “This ain’t good at all.”

"We’re fine. All we need’s a car.”

His voice was different though. Maybe she was seeing the first cracks in the great Emil Rothert bravado. She could hope so.

"They got the names, Emil, they got the plate number, the registration…”

"Which is why we need the car.”

"And maybe here she comes,” said Marion.

Headlights gleamed in the rearview mirror.

"Go for it, Mags,” Emil said.

Marion got out and slammed the door and Emil inched across and locked it. His look said she had better not move, locked or unlocked. He turned and offered Marion’s. 22 to Ray and Billy.

“Who wants it?”

"I’ll take it,” Billy said. “Thank you very much.”

“Everybody down.”

In the mirror above she could see Marion waving frantically at the car’s approach and she thought how he’d been doing exactly the same thing a few hours ago, just looking for a lift and then watched the car slow and stop directly behind them, the driver, a man in jacket and tie, leaning out and Marion walking over and leaning down, pointing back at the wagon, the man opening his door and getting out and his car’s courtesy light blinking on so that she could see that there were other her people in the car too, a woman in the front passenger seat and two smaller figures in back, Marion gesturing with fake exasperation as they walked toward the wagon, heard their footsteps approach and stop and the man say what the…? in surprise as the two left-side doors swung open and Emil and Billy stepped out. She sat up. The man’s eyes were going back and forth from gun to gun.

“Oh god. Oh, Jesus. Listen, please… my family. Whatever you want. Anything you want. Please…” “Sir,” Emil said. “We won’t hurt your family. Just walk back to your car nice and slow. We’re not gonna hurt anybody. Just take it easy, now, okay, sir?”

The man was clearly terrified but he did as he was told, turned and started walking. Emil, Marion and Billy followed.

Emil called over his shoulder, “Hey, Ray!”

“Yeah?”

“Bring her.”

“Ray, you don’t have to do this,” she said. “Let me help you. Remember our talk? I can help you.”

He sighed. “Listen, lady, I don’t want your help. And I’m not so stupid that I’m gonna trust you either. Now get out of the car. Nothing’s gonna happen to those people except we take their wheels.”

“You can promise me that, Ray? Really?”

He couldn’t. Only Emil could.

“Damn right I can promise you.”

He dug into his shirt pocket and pulled out a wallet-sized snapshot, creased and worn. He handed it to her. “Look,” he said. “I found it.”

She was looking at a color photo of a scrawny dishwater blonde and two scrawny kids of indeterminate sex, barely smiling, standing in a miserable yard in front of a broken swing.

His family.

“Now would you please get the hell out of the car?”

He held out his hand and she gave him back the photo and opened the door. He got out behind her.

“Listen,” he said. “I want you to know I feel bad about… what happened back there. At the house I mean. Sometimes a guy… you know…”

“I know,” she said and started walking.

She guessed the man and woman to be in their late twenties, early thirties. The woman had seen the guns and was out of her seat already and had gone around back to the little girl. The woman was pretty and her left eye had let go of one long tear that streaked her cheek but her arms were around her little girl and you could see she was trying to be brave and stay calm so as not to panic her and you could see that it was working. The girl was only five or so and looked confused by all this activity and her mother’s sudden urgency but she didn’t cry but only sat silent, wide-eyed and tense.

Beside her sat a teenage girl who looked much like the woman. She guessed they were sisters because the girl was too old to be the woman’s daughter. At first glance she seemed frozen with fear. Then Janet saw something pass across her face and her lips set tight as she took the girl’s hand in both of her own.

A family with grit, she thought. They don’t deserve this.

“Let’s go,” said Emil.

He waved them out of the car. She noticed that it was another station wagon. Another fake “woodie” like Marion’s, only a later model.

“Like I said, it’s just the car we want, ma’am.”

The man’s arm went around his wife’s waist and his hand down to his daughter. The sister held the girl’s other hand as Emil and Billy walked them back to Marion’s car. Marion lit a cigarette with a wooden match that flared brightly in the still air and then diminished. She leaned back against their car.

Somewhere in the distance frogs bellowed out their longing.

“I think you can all squeeze together in the backseat there, right?” Emil said. She could hear every word. “I mean, for all I know, your wife might be an expert at hot-wiring. This is your wife, right, sir?”

He was trying to be reassuring. Janet wasn’t reassured.

“Yes,” the man said.

“Your daughter?”

“Yes.”

“Kid sister?”

“Yes… well, no. My wife’s sister.”

“Well, sir, you’ve got a real pretty family here.”

“Thank you.”

“What I want you all to do is to stay in the back right where you are till we’re ready to leave, okay? Then I’ll toss you the keys as we go. Oh, and I might as well take yours now, sir. Good now as later, right?”

The man dug into his pocket and handed him the keys.

“What we’re going to do is, we’re going to have a little conference, the three of us, and then we’ll be moving on.”

They walked back to Ray, Janet and Marion.

“Give Margaret the gun, Bill,” he said. “I don’t see any problem coming from these people, Maggie, but you might want to watch your friend here. Ray, let’s us talk.”

They went off onto the shoulder a bit. Janet nodded toward the gun.

“Would you really use it on me?”

She seemed to consider.

“I don’t know. I might. I think, probably. I mean, old times only goes so far, you know?”

“Jesus, Marion. He can’t even get your name right!”

And then she shut up because she could hear what they were saying, talking the way other men might discuss some ad campaign or product or corporate merger, the way she’d heard herself talk in conference rooms and chambers with judges and lawyers and witnesses, all matter-of-fact and bottom-line and so much more terrible for that to hear hell, they’ll remember all of it, everything… how many guns we’ve got, what we look like, what we’re wearing… sure they will… I don’t see that we’ve got a choice, then… neither do I… we have to kill them… we’ve got to kill ’em… okay then, so what about the kid? because if Janet could hear, then so could the people in the car, the windows were all wide open and they could hear their deaths discussed like three guys splitting the check in a restaurant and she could see them all huddled together, heard somebody openly crying now, saw them through the rear window embracing tight and frantic and the woman stroking her sister’s hair and thought, so tender! my god! this can’t be happening! and the man leaning over and wrapping his arms around them as though to ingest and swallow them up safe inside him and his back moving, sobbing or trying not to sob, she couldn’t tell which and then she looked at Marion.

Marion standing there still and cold as a snake. The gun pointed casually in her direction.

Marion, who could and would let this happen.

She might be the worst of them, she thought. At least the others have their twisted evil reasons.

Then the men were moving, Billy toward Marion, taking the gun from her hand and following Emil who was headed straight for the car and Ray stopping beside Janet saying, you want to be very smart now and then watching them walk to the wagon and Janet watching too still unbelieving and wholly unable to speak as though that power was shut down tight in her as Billy and Emil turned their guns to the backseat of the car, flashes of muzzle fire and raw sharp clapping in her ears and bodies jerking, twisting, falling inside the car, blood and glass suddenly everywhere and the sharp tang of cordite assailing her and she turned and tried to run, needed to run, run anywhere, fighting Ray with all her strength and Ray simply turning her, his grip on her arms shearing deep into her muscles, turning her and forcing her to see the final volley, the sullen punch of bullets into limp flesh.

“Bless our loved ones,” Billy said.

And when she heard the whimpering into the silence that followed, the little girl’s voice, the first she'd even heard that voice take breath, her legs gave way beneath her. Oh dear god no, she thought. Alive. Amid all that frightful death.

Ray held her to her feet while the firing began again and Janet closed her eyes.

When she opened them and cleared them of tears the first thing she saw was Marion, her hands clutching hard at her breasts, the sheen of perspiration on her face and the wild light skittering in her eyes-a woman shattered in the wake of revelation and probably the orgasm of her life. She saw the men staring through the window, watching for further movement. She turned and saw Ray. And there was nothing there to see at all.

In the distance behind them headlights crested a hill and began to roll toward them deep into the moon- drenched valley.

Emil held up his brand-new set of keys.

“Let’s move!” he said.

***

They’d driven a mile or so before she thought of it. Until then she’d felt empty inside as a propped-up wooden manikin sitting between Billy at the wheel and Ray riding shotgun, aware only of the straight smooth tarmac hissing beneath their wheels, the sound of flight, of movement. And maybe it was that which served to bring her back to herself and back to what she’d actually seen these people do just moments before. Because finally she thought of it.

She reached over past Ray to the glove compartment. Popped it open and reached inside. A can of de-icer. A pair of sunglasses. A cracked plastic windshield scraper. Half a roll of Five-Flavor LifeSavers.

The papers were scattered at the bottom atop the owner’s manual. There weren’t many. Insurance papers for the car. A dog-eared state map. Somebody’s old shopping list on folded paper. Penciled directions to somewhere or other tom off a yellow legal pad.

That was all.

She almost wanted to laugh but laughter was still not even remotely possible.

“He was one of those,” she said.

“Huh?” said Ray. “One of what?”

“He was somebody who kept his license and registration together. In his wallet. Did anybody get his wallet?”

She sat there and let that sink in.

Emil pounded the car seat behind her. It didn’t even startle her. She’d figured he’d be the one to get it.

“God-fucking- damn it!”

“I didn’t think so. So it was all for nothing,” she said.

“What?” Ray said. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Shit!” said Emil. “God dam mit! We gotta go back now.”

“ What?”

“We gotta go back!”

“Are you fucking out of your mind?”

“You wanted to get lost again,” she said. “Switch cars. Lose the APB. Problem is, as soon as they find him they’ll find the registration for this car in his wallet. So you didn’t get lost again, did you? It was all for nothing.”

“Jesus H. Christ.”

“You killed a five-year-old girl for nothing.”

“Turn here!” said Emil.

They were coming up on a turnoff to the right, a narrow strip of two-lane blacktop winding higher up the mountain. Billy slowed and made the turn.

“Pull up some and kill the lights, Billy. I want to see that car go by. Whoever it is can’t be very far behind. There weren’t any other turns off the road between here and there. If they didn’t stop they’ll pass us real soon. We’ve got to go back there but I want to see them pass first. That’s it. Kill the goddamn lights.”

They waited and Billy fidgeted beside her, tapping at the wheel with his thumbs to some music unheard by them while Emil, Ray and Marion watched through the rear window and Janet sat there staring straight into the dark, feeling strangely calmer now as though something had changed between them, some reconfiguration of their tableau and the odds against her. Though nothing had changed, really.

They waited and nobody came. The road behind them dark and silent.

‘They stopped, didn’t they,” said Billy. “They stopped back there. They’re viewing the whole image.” “Shut up, Billy.”

“Shit! Shit! Shit!”

“I said shut the fuck up, Billy.”

“He’s right,” said Marion. “They’d have passed by now if they hadn’t stopped. Billy’s right.”

“I know he’s right for chrissake. I just want a minute 10 figure this thing, okay?”

“What do you suggest, Counselor?” said Ray.

“ Counselor?”

“She’s a lawyer.”

“What?”

“She’s a lawyer. She told me.”

“No shit. And you knew this how long?”

“Since before we went to her place. While you and her lady friend here were out in the bushes.”

She could feel the rush of anger behind her, then just is quickly sensed him gain control again.

“You ought to have told me, Ray.”

He sighed.

“Well, we got maybe two more hours till dawn, three to the state line. So I figure the state line’s out for tonight. And yeah, she’s right. We’ve got to assume they’ll make this car once they find him. For all we know whoever the asshole is is already calling it in. So we need another car or a place or preferably both. Maggie’s is out because they know she’s with us and her place is probably out for the same reason. So your question’s pretty good, Ray. What do you fucking suggest, Counselor? And don’t say give yourselves up or I’ll figure you’re too damn stupid to be a lawyer.”

“You think I should help you?”

“I’d say it’s in your goddamn best interests, yeah.” – And she knew he thought she was considering his threat. But she wasn’t.

She was considering something else entirely.

So that when she spoke the hesitancy in her voice was phony but not the least untrue. She was a trial lawyer and part of lawyering was about performance and the correct and useful stance so she knew damn well it wouldn’t show.

“Okay… all right. I know a place. It might work anyhow.”

“So tell.”

“You ever hear of a place called Hole-in-the-Wall?” she said, and then turned toward him.

He was smiling.

***

The night was awash in artificial light. Police flashlights slow-arced through the scrub and field along either side of the road. Flashbulbs burst sudden and stark against the human ruins in the wagon. Six sets of headlights set to high poured off the cruisers and the Volvo of the guy who’d called it in. Alan leaned against one of those cruisers and tried not to puke.

He’d seen what was inside.

Hee was shaking like it was zero degrees out, clammy with sweat at the same time. All he kept thinking was at least she wasn’t one of them. At least that.

Frommer stubbed out his cigarette on the center line n| the tarmac and then carefully policed his butt into his jacket pocket and walked over.

Alan shook his head. “I never… Jesus, Frommer, that little girl…”

“I know,” Frommer said. “But I’ll tell you, I think we can still hope for the best here, Mr. Laymon. I don’t think we’ll find her out there. I think she’d have been in the car with these poor people. These guys don’t seem to take too much trouble hiding what they do.”

He glanced toward the car and then back to Alan.

“I told you you shouldn’t have looked,” he said. "Hell, I shouldn’t have either.”

***

“How far?” Ray asked her.

Ray was nervous, Emil could see that-almost as nervous as goddamn Billy driving. It wasn’t like Ray. It wasn’t the guy who could lift a wallet in plain sight or steal a car in broad daylight on a busy street. Billy, on the other hand, was probably born nervous. He wondered if maybe he should be doing the driving but then thought no, it was better back here with his arm over whatsername’s shoulder and his hand playing with her tit. Irresponsible but what the hell. They’d be all right.

“Just a few miles or so,” she said.

“They’re not gonna do this for free,” he said.

“I know,” Emil said.

“So?”

He’d already thought that out. He didn’t answer though. There was no way he was going to let that out of the bag just yet. But he knew about Hole-in-the-Wall from the joint and didn’t think it was going to be a problem. Ray obviously did. He dug into his pocket and pulled out some wadded bills and change and counted it. Emil watched him and almost had to laugh.

“I got a total of seventeen dollars and seventy-eight, cents.”

He grabbed the lawyer lady’s purse out of her lap and flipped open her wallet and started counting the cash inside. She didn’t make any effort to stop him.

“She’s got fifty-nine. Makes sixty-six, seventy-eight. What about you, Billy?”

“Exactly twenty-five dollars. Exactly what I came out with-you and Emil being kind enough to entail me my drinks for free.”

“That’s ninety-one, seventy-eight. Shit. Not even a hundred bucks. Emil? Maria?”

“Marion.”

“Marion, sorry. What’ve you got?”

Emil pinched her nipple and she jumped and smiled, then reached over for her purse.

“Forty-three dollars, fifty-two cents, hon.”

“Okay, okay. Shit, forget the cents. Forty-three dollars. Forty-three dollars and… what?”

“I believe we were up to ninety-one, Ray. Ninety-one dollars, seventy-eight cents, when you bash your groupings,” said Billy.

“Forget the seventy-eight cents, all right? Forget the goddamn cents! That’s… one hundred thirty-four. Emil?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Huh? Don’t worry about it? Jesus, Emil! We’re asking them to get us outa state here, you know? And so far we haven’t got fifty bucks apiece!”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ve got plenty.”

“You got plenty. Fine. What’s plenty?”

“Your turn’s right here,” the lawyer said. “Road to your left, just ahead.”

“Goddammit, Emil,” Ray said. “ What the fuck’s plenty?”

***

She’d driven by one day, curious, but as an Officer of the Court and “Little” Harpe’s attorney of record, she’d been restricted from going any farther or seeing any more than she was seeing now-a wide dirt strip maybe twenty yards across cut through open, uncultivated fields on either side, rising up the slope of a mountain. No house in sight and no gate. No structures at all. But any approach observable from above.

They drove slowly and in silence until they crested the hill and that was when the first guard appeared along the side of the road, a big man almost comically dressed in nightfighter makeup and combat gear, his assault rifle held at port arms. There was nothing comic about the rifle.

“Slower, Billy,” said Emil. “Stop if he tells you to.” But he didn’t. He didn’t look interested in them at all. Didn’t even bother to wave them on.

Nor did the second guard a quarter-mile up, the field narrowing around them by then, gradually being swallowed by scrub and pine.

At the top of a rise, with dense forest pressing close now on either side, narrowing the road to a single lane funneling them up the mountain, she saw a third guard dressed in biker’s colors talking into his cell phone, saw him shove the phone into his utility belt and raise his automatic rifle. The guard checked their license plate but didn’t even glance at them.

It was eerie. As though they didn’t matter.

And maybe they didn’t.

The road narrowed even more. The woods drew closer.

At the top of another rise two more guards in military gear stood across from one another on either side of the road, one black man and one white. Each had a sleek black Doberman on a short leash.

“I hate those doggies,” said Billy. He pronounced it dawgies.

“Shut up,” said Emil. “Slow down.”

Because this time the guards were stepping toward them. The men stopped and turned their flashlights into the car and then the black guard on Billy’s side motioned them on.

“This is pretty fucking weird,” said Ray.

Nobody contradicted him.

The road sloped downward and narrowed yet further as though the woods were a fist closing in on them and at the bottom of the hill stood a tall bald black man in dark neatly pressed suit and tie with his hand raised and his assault rifle cradled in the crook of his arm. Billy stopped the car. The man walked over to his side, taking his time. He stooped and peered in, smiling.

“Welcome to Hole-in-the-Wall, gentlemen,” he said.

The man had no trace of an accent at all. The black man in the dark expensive suit was from Anywhere, U.S.A. Their welcoming committee. Very civilized. Uh- huh.

“Directly on top of the next hill there. Can’t miss it.

You can state your business to the gentleman at the bar. Have yourselves a pleasant evening.”

He stepped aside and watched them pass and Janet turned and looked back.

The man was following them on foot, his rifle slung over his shoulder, moving at a graceful, easy pace.

***

Marion thought, Humpty Dumpty.

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men, couldn’t put Humpty together again.

It was something about the tree, something about the huge ancient solitary oak tree in front of the house- the mansion, really, Hole-in-the-Wall was a three-story, gabled, corniced, fucking bay-windowed porched-in old mansion, some hole! some joke!-something about that tree and the tire hanging from the chain that depended from a limb, the skeleton of a big openmouthed dog or maybe a wolf, the wolf-dog grinning, arranged seated on the tire with hind legs dangling, another fine joke, the four thick nooses swaying in the wind hanging from another limb higher up, the nooses not so funny, something about the tree had put that stupid old nursery rhyme into her mind.

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall…

A marching song. A drum cadence. Her dad had been VFW all the way. Dat-da-dat-da-dat-dat-dat-dat…

As Marion herself marched along behind Emil, as l hey all did, past the hogs and pickups and Land Rovers and Jeeps and Mercedes and black stretch limos and Rollses. Marched up the stairs to the porch, the suited black guard with the rifle ambling along behind, dat -da- dat, to the dimly lit porch with heavy chains hanging from the eaves like a thick metal curtain, parting them, chains ringing in her ears like strange dull wind chimes and the scent of oil and metal on her hands as she touched them, stepping onto the porch hung with mobiles-inverted bone crosses and rusted knives and studded belts and weathered leather collars-where six wooden barrels filled with what looked like old automobile and motorbike parts stood in an orderly row to her left and a smashed-in Wurlitzer jukebox lay on its side to her right beside a broken plough propped up against the siding, its handles carved into knobbed human phalluses and flanked by two painted wooden signs- TREE FROG BEER and DWARF SNUFFING STATION NUMBER 103.

Somebody around here’s got a real strange sense of humor, she thought.

She saw Emil hesitate at the door and heard the black man behind them tell them to go on in, folks in his calm soft voice and so they did.

They walked into a fucking party is what they did.

She could feel her heart thud all of a sudden fast and heavy, making her tits tremble, was aware of her eyes going wide and her lips pulling up into a smile she had nothing to do with at all.

Daddy, she thought, if you could see your little girl now. You’d be fucking floored by this.

Beyond the heavy oak door was an enormous open space and the goddamn place was swarming. Motorbike headlights slung from the rafters handled the lighting, streaming down on them like spotlights. She saw bikers, skinheads, longhairs straight out of the goddamn Sixties, men in tuxes and women in gowns all mingling and laughing. She saw a male tattooed hand go to a female pearl-draped breast. She saw steroid freaks dressed for combat and guys naked and limp-dicked and emaciated all to hell. She saw martini glasses and Budweisers and joints and in the comer to her left, the sharp glitter of needles. She saw crude prison tattoos and elegant multiple piercings. They had weapons all over the place. Handguns in shoulder holsters. Shotguns and automatic rifles propped against the wall while their owners roamed and drank and did whatever the hell they were doing.

The whole first floor had been completely gutted, the walls knocked down to expose rough support beams that reached twenty-five feet all the way to the ceiling-a ceiling draped and webbed thick with a canopy of chains. At intervals they dangled to the floor. Six feet or so up one of the support beams a naked brunette dangled too, suspended by ropes wrapped around her wrists and elbows. She looked drugged out of her fucking gourd and like she’d been up there quite a while. There were bloody welts along her tits and thighs and the blood was already drying. Everybody just ignored her.

They moved through the crowd toward the bar, Emil first with her behind him and then Ray and then Billy behind Janet bringing up the rear. Some asshole head- banger music was pouring off the speakers. The floors were long wide slabs of polished hardwood, expensive as hell she bet. By contrast the bar was crude and cut of rough naked oak with the bark still attached where it wasn’t planed down smooth and it crawled the whole length of the room all the way to the open staircase in back like a living thing. The six beefy guys who were working it were dressed in formal white starched shirts and black ties. Directly across from the bar a fire blazed in an open stone grate cut into the wall like the huge open mouth of hell. It must have been over a dozen feet across. Considering its size it didn’t seem to throw much heat, just the smell of wood smoke.

She guessed that on the air-conditioning bill alone this place could probably buy and sell her.

She saw bright primitive murals on the walls, scenes she recognized right away from Revelations. Daddy? Momma? You’d just love this shit! The Dragon. The False Prophet. The Great Whore. The Beast. The Woman in Scarlet. Religion? In this joint? Between the murals meat hooks polished to a high sheen, dozens of them, substituted for what-in someplace less bizarre than this-might have been stuffed moose or deer or bobcat. Somebody’d painted the words BILGE RAT next to one of them. Under another, MEN ARE NECESSARY FOR THE GODS. Huh? Beside a third, the numbers 666. She sure as hell knew what that meant.

Jesus, she thought, who are these people?

She glanced back at Janet. Janet was looking decidedly twitchy and tense, eyes darting around the room as though she expected somebody to come out after her with a goddamn meat cleaver. Poor baby.

Their bartender was a neatly dressed Jabba the Hut made flesh.

“Heineken,” said Emil. “Five of ’em.”

The bartender reached for the beers and popped them.

“We need a car,” said Emil. “First we need a place to stay tonight and tomorrow we need a car.”

The bartender shrugged. “You don’t get anybody too pissed off at you, you can stand right where you are till you drop dead or hell freezes over, whichever comes first. I could give a shit.”

“What about the car? We need a car.”

“You can pay? Got money?”

“We can pay.”

She wondered how much Emil did have. Billy and Ray seemed freaked about the whole money thing.

She watched the bartender walk the length of the bar and stop in front of a black man who looked like the twin of the suited guard who’d pointed them toward the house-right down to the shaved bullet-shaped head and the assault rifle slung across his shoulder. The bartender spoke to him and the man nodded and turned toward the staircase and the bartender waddled back to his post.

“You’re Rothert, right?” he said.

“How the hell do you know that?”

“You’re the news tonight. Shot a cop. That gives you three whole minutes of glory. Enjoy yourself. I could give a shit.”

She heard a sudden commotion behind them, raised voices and heavy footfalls and clanking, grating sounds and felt the crowd shift around her and turned and saw two big men in studded boots and leather pants and vests hauling a woman off the floor by a chain attached to a pulley twenty feet away. The woman wore police cuffs and nothing else and the look in her eyes was drugs and fear and then pain shooting through her wrists as the men tugged the chain through the pulley and she could see that somebody’d shaved her completely, both head and cunt too.

They hauled her five feet or so off the ground and then slipped a link of the chain through a hook set into the floor and she hung there and the men were smiling and saying something to one another and then they weren’t smiling, they were all pissed off all of a sudden. With the pounding tide of music she couldn’t hear what it was they were saying but they were pissed off all right and the crowd was moving back in her direction even though some were laughing as though the two men arguing were the center of an oncoming twister.

One guy had a short goatee kind of thing and the other didn’t but they were matched pretty well physically, she thought, big raw biceps and beer bellies so goddamn hard that when the bearded guy gut-punched the other she could hear it over the music like a basketball smashed down from a hoop. He doubled over and the man kicked him in the face and sprayed the crowd with blood and spit. The man went over backward and scrambled across the floor and came up with a length of chain, stood and started flailing, catching the bearded guy across the back and then the shoulders and then the head as he fell, going for the head over and over again-and the crowd was wild by then and so was she. She could barely fucking breathe. The bearded guy’s head was a mess but he must have had something amazing left inside him because his hand swung up from the floor and he took the other guy’s balls in his great big hand and squeezed. Then they were both rolling groaning along the floor.

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, she thought and she couldn’t help it, she giggled like a goddamn little kid and as the pair of guards in combat gear parted the crowd and dragged the two men away across the bloody floor a skinhead with tattoos of a swastika and a bolt of lightning on his arm prodded the shaved naked woman hard in the ribs with his rifle as though it were her fault all this had happened so that she jerked away in pain, more pain, and Marion finished her beer and set it on the bar and turned toward where she hung and started forward.

***

Janet watched her move through the crowd. The others didn’t seem to notice she was gone.

“You want this?” Emil said.

He pointed to her beer on the bar. She shook her head. The last thing she wanted was a beer. He upended it and she watched his throat move. The man is nervous, she thought. Fine.

“Just four this time,” he said to the bartender. The bartender set them on the bar. He passed one to Ray and one to Billy and only then did he realize they were missing somebody.

“Where’s Whatsername?”

He sounded more annoyed than she’d have expected and there was something else there too. Fear? From Emil? If so, fine again. The only question was as to why.

“Let’s go,” a voice behind them said.

The black man in the suit. The first guard’s twin.

“Where to?” said Emil.

“We got to go deal for your transportation, my man.”

Not quite so well-spoken, she thought.

“Wait a minute. I can’t… listen… just hold on a second, okay? Have a beer.”

He handed the man his beer and started pushing his way through the crowd.

“Hey! What the fuck? Fuck you, asshole! ” The man slammed the beer down on the bar and moved after him. Ray took her by the arm and then they were moving through the crowd too with Billy trailing behind. They heard somebody scream ahead, throaty and then shrill. Marion?

I should be so lucky, she thought.

She spotted Emil and the guard at the edge of the crowd and then saw Marion standing beneath the woman, staring up. A thin line of blood ran from the woman’s rib cage to her navel. The neo-Nazi skinhead had his arm around Marion’s waist boyfriend-and-girlfriend-style and was gesturing toward the woman with a broad, sharp-looking knife like an instructor working a blackboard with his pointer. Like the woman was some sort of math problem.

“See?” the Nazi said. “You cut her here and it don’t hardly hurt.”

He sliced the top of her foot just above the second toe.

“You cut her here though…”

He moved the knife across the sole of her foot and the woman screamed again. Emil grabbed Marion’s arm.

“What the hell you doing?”

She didn’t answer. Just stood there watching the blood drip off the woman’s foot along either side.

“Hey, Maria. We got to go.”

“Damn right,” said the guard.

“Fuck off,” said the Nazi. He pointed the knife at Emil. Emil let go of Marion’s arm and backed off, hands in the air.

Now this was interesting.

“Got nothing to do with you, friend,” he said. “We got business, that’s all.”

“I told you, fuck off!"

He jabbed with the knife and as Emil darted back and away the black guard stepped forward easy as you please. He placed the tip of his index finger against the lip of the blade and smiled.

“ Play nice, ” he said.

The Nazi didn’t seem to know what to make of that.

“Like the gentleman says, it’s business. This what you came for?” he asked Emil.

He nodded. The guard looked at Marion.

“Come on, sweetcakes,” he said. “She gonna be hanging around awhile.”

“Not yet.”

She turned to the Nazi and put her hand out, palm- up. The Nazi didn’t seem to understand at first and then he did. He handed her the knife. Marion looked at the guard.

“Is this okay?” she said. “I can do anything I want, tight? I mean, that’s true, isn’t it? Hell, I can kill her if I want, right?”

“ Excuse me, lady?”

“Suppose I killed her, is anybody going to mind or what?”

“Jesus, Marion!”

“Oh, shut up, Emil.”

She turned back to the guard. He smiled again and hook his head.

“Nah, can’t kill her, honey. She belongs to somebody. You could hurt her a little, though. Nobody going to bother you about that.”

You don’t need to see any more of this shit, Janet thought. You can just turn away. But it seemed important to know exactly how far this goddamn woman was willing to go. So she watched her as she reached up and traced a slow deep line across the woman’s thigh from hip to knee with the point of the knife, the woman trembling and moaning, and watched the blood well up thick over the blade of the knife onto Marion’s white- knuckled hand. Watched the hand draw away and poise to cut again and then the black man’s bigger hand close over it gently and take the knife away and hand it to the Nazi.

“Come on, baby,” he said. “Leave a little somethin’ for later.”

As he moved her away she was smiling.

“You’re not entirely a real nice person,” said the guard as the music welled and boomed again. “You know that?”

They followed him through the crowd to the stairwell at the end of the bar.

***

At the top of the stairs he led them down a long dark oak-paneled hall, empty but for half a dozen vases on pedestals from which dozens of long-stemmed red roses sprouted and scented the still air, rioting away the odor of cigarettes and stale beer below. He opened a set of double doors to a stark, brightly lit room with a single long table and chairs around it the only furnishings-a boardroom not unlike those back at the courthouse except that this table and these chairs must have cost a lot more than the taxpayers were going to put up with. Closed glass doors beyond the desk led to an open porch-a widow’s walk. Beyond them she could see moon and stars.

The man at the head of the table was middle-aged and small and thin, his wrists wiry in his rolled-back shirtsleeves. He looked like a businessman who’d just spent a rough but eventful evening coming up with whole new ways to hammer the competition. Papers fanned across the desk in front of him. Behind him stood an immaculate gentleman with manicured fingernails and a rose in his wide lapel and the word thug writ plain all over him.

“Mr. Thaw?” said the guard.

“Fine. You can leave now.”

He backed out of the room and closed the door.

The man looked up from his desk.

“Harold Thaw,” he said. “This is my associate, Mr. Coombs. And you are Rothert, Short and Ripper. You want a car, I’m told. Is that all?”

“That’s all, Mr. Thaw,” Emil said.

“Fine. Ten thousand cash.”

Ray looked stricken. “Ten thous…?”

“You killed a policeman, Mr. Short. It’s a very good price.”

“I was thinking of something else, sir,” Emil said. “Were you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What were you thinking, Mr. Rothert?”

“I heard that… I understand you do… a certain business. With certain parties. Foreign investors, sort of..

For the first time Thaw smiled. “What business would that be, Mr. Rothert? I have any number of businesses and you’re interrupting all of them. Please do get on with it.”

She saw that Emil was distinctly uncomfortable now but determined to do as the man said and get on with it. And even before he opened his mouth again she knew exactly where he was going with all this. It was rumored at the courthouse. She’d heard it a dozen times. You goddamn son of a bitch, she thought.

“ Women, sir,” he said. “I understand you… that you deal in women sometimes.”

For a moment Thaw just stared at him as though he was speaking in some unknown tongue. He looked at Marion and then at Janet and when his eyes went back to Emil again he laughed and his hands went wide and spiderlike across the table. Behind him, Coombs smiled.

“You’re offering me these? In exchange for a car?” “Uh, yes, sir.”

Thaw laughed again and shook his head.

“Rothert,” he said, “these parties you’re talking about are interested in twelve-year-olds. Twelve-year-olds, Rothert. Do you understand me? Do you see the problem here?”

Emil nodded toward Marion.

“Sir, this one in particular. Have somebody try her out, that’s all I’m asking. She’s a little crazy, see? She’ll do anything. You don’t think you can use her? Fine, no car. We’ll figure out something in the morning.”

“Hey, Emil,” Marion said, “screw you!”

“That’s all I’m asking, sir.”

“Fuck you, Emil!”

She turned on her heel and went for the door, turned the knob. Twisted it. Shook the door and pounded it. “What have you got to lose, sir?” Emil said.

“You fucking prick! Open the fucking door!” she yelled to the guard outside. She turned to Emil. ‘Tell him to open the fucking door! ”

Thaw leaned back in his chair and sighed. Marion twisted at the knob one last time and then she was moving fast across the room to the glass double doors to the widow’s walk beyond, and to Janet it looked like she just might kick the damn things in in order to get out of there. Thaw stood up from his chair and shouted.

“ Big!”

The glass doors parted and Marion stopped dead in her tracks. The man standing in front of her was big all right-as big as a goddamn bear and looked easily as dangerous. She recognized the long square jaw and scraggly beard. The arms beneath the cutoff sleeves of his faded denim shirt were easily as wide as her thigh. A massive chest tapered down to an almost graceful waist. Six-foot-six, 320 pounds, she remembered. “Big ” Micah Harpe. In person.

He didn’t move.

He didn’t have to.

And seeing him there finally after having searched for him ever since arriving scared the hell out of her and made her heart leap all at once. With Micah Harpe it would be all or nothing. She’d known that from the very start.

Thaw sat down again and leaned back in his chair.

“You heard?” he said.

“I heard a talking asshole, sure. How about you?”

Harpe’s voice had a Kentucky twang to it that surprisingly was not at all unpleasant.

“About the same, Big. About the same. I’m wondering, though. Is Mr. Harrison still here?”

“Downstairs, I think.”

“Downstairs?”

“Think he was planning to stay awhile.”

“You might try him, then. If he’s happy, perhaps we can accommodate these gentlemen. If not…”

“Will do.”

He took a single step toward Marion, reached out and wrapped his huge hand in her hair and pulled her toward him. Then he turned to Emil, released her hair and shoved her at him like a kid would pass a basketball and with no more effort.

“You’re the one trading here,” he said. “You handle her.”

***

The waiting was making Alan crazy. He guessed it wasn’t doing Frommer a lot of good either. The man kept lighting one cigarette after another. A couple of puffs and he’d stub it out and a couple minutes later light another. It was as though he wanted to smoke but was determined to be smokeless if and when any news came through. The roadblock was one of dozens throughout the area but standing at this one felt like being all alone in the world, cut off from everybody and everything, waiting for a train that was never going to pull on in.

“I don’t get it,” Frommer said. “Homes are pretty few and far between around here and we’ve pretty much covered them all. We’ve got the roadblocks set and we’ve checked the access roads for miles damn near to the state line. We’ve got enough highway patrol units working these mountains to flush out a jackrabbit. They can hide overnight in the woods but the car sure can’t. So how come I’m doing everything right and they’re still not showing?” He lit another smoke. “You maybe thinking what I’m thinking?”

He was.

“Hole-in-the-Wall,” Alan said.

“We’ll need a warrant. Know any judges who are early risers?”

“As a matter of fact I do,” he said.

A year ago he’d slept with her. Janet never knew.

***

Now, she thought, it’s got to be now.

Ahead of her on the stairs Emil was hauling Marion down, cursing and fighting him all the way but Janet knew his strength firsthand and knew it wasn’t going to do her a damn bit of good. Billy was smiling, having a fine old time with all this, laughing and poking her with his index finger from behind. Ray ignored him but seemed to consider Marion with something like regret.

In one way or another each of them was focused on Marion. She stopped and turned.

“Micah Harpe,” she said. “Big.”

He looked puzzled. How would this woman know his name? So did the black guard behind him.

“Yeah?”

“Two things. My name’s Janet Morris. Does that ring a bell?”

“You been on the bands all night. I know who you are.”

“You don’t understand. I’m a lawyer. I represent your brother. And our defense is based solely on you, Mr. Harpe. We’re saying it was you who killed George and Lilian Willis and not Little. That’s the first thing.”

She was talking for her life now and she knew it. She also knew learning of her defense strategy wasn’t going to make him happy.

“I’m interested. The second?”

“I read your rap sheet. The attempted murder, the one in prison.”

“Uh-huh.”

She glanced down the stairs. The others had reached the bottom and Emil was staring hard at them, suspicion knotting his brow.

“The man was your cellmate. He’d been there just three days. You beat him into a coma. Why?”

“I didn’t like him.”

The guard was smiling.

“You didn’t like him because he’d murdered his wife and children. His children. You seemed to feel very strongly about that.”

“Nobody on the inside likes a baby-killer. Maybe me less than most. So what?”

“What if I told you what you haven’t heard on the police bands yet?”

She looked over her shoulder. Emil had handed Marion off to Ray now and was climbing back up the stairs. He was already halfway there.

“What if I told you I just saw these people shoot a four- or five-year-old girl to death in her parents’ car, just to steal the car ? Would you still let them walk on out of here? Because that’s what they did. A man, a woman, a teenage girl and a five-year-old child, Mr. Harpe.”

She was aware of Emil right behind her now and knew he’d heard that last part but she didn’t give a good goddamn what or how much he’d heard and her anger was real when she whirled on him.

“ Tell him!” she said.

Emil looked too damn surprised to answer.

“That true?” said Harpe.

Emil just looked at him.

“You a pimp and a baby-killer, asshole?”

Then suddenly his confusion seemed to resolve itself. He threw his arm around her neck and yanked her off the stair she was on and slid the gun out of his belt and jabbed the barrel to her forehead, his breath hot and sour against her face.

“ Fucking bitch!”

The guard behind them raised his rifle.

“Go ahead,” said Harpe. “Shoot her. And then I guess you’re gonna shoot your way outa here, right?”

She glanced down at Billy and saw him draw Marion’s. 22. Harpe saw it too.

“Looks like you are,” he said. “You are one bunch of stupid people, you know that?”

“Back off!”

He slammed her forehead with the gun barrel. His arm was choking her. She saw stars and tried not to fall.

“Back off, goddammit!”

He hit her again, harder this time, exactly where she’d hit the windshield hours ago so that she was bleeding again, yet even through the bright spreading pool of pain she could feel him trembling, fear or anger or both, and that drove her own anger, keeping her afloat above the pain. She was aware of all the people watching them below and that the place had gone practically silent, that somebody had finally killed the chaos they’d been listening to all night. So that the third time he hit her it thundered in her ears like a single blow on a drumhead.

“ You want a dead lawyer here? I’ll damn well give her to you! ” Emil screamed.

“You already did that, remember?”

“What?”

“I said you already did. You’re damaging your own merchandise. Fool.”

And that was true enough. She could feel the warm blood crawling down her cheek. Emil didn’t seem to understand.

She did, though. Hope seemed suddenly to fly away down those stairs.

“Did I say what you did or didn’t do changes anything?” Harpe said. “Mr. Thaw says to try Harrison, I try Harrison. You get it now, you ignorant sonovabitch?”

Then he did get it finally and lowered the gun and let go of her and she fell to her knees against the stair. Harpe held out his hand. Emil hesitated and then handed him his pistol. Then turned to Billy downstairs.

“Put it away, Bill.”

“I don’t have any accord with this man,” Billy said. The gun was pointed directly at Harpe.

“The man don’t like you either. Put it away.”

“It’s all right,” said Harpe. “Let him hold it if he wants. Don’t matter.”

He nodded. Just once. And suddenly the room exploded in gunfire, all of it pouring across the floor at Billy, at least a dozen guns at once, Ray and Marion pitched flat-out beside him with their hands covering their heads as Billy danced and twitched like some boneless thing erupting flesh and blood, muzzles flashing and bullets tearing into him from every which way keeping him on his feet until he dropped like a sodden sack, the gun still clenched in his bloody right hand.

She smelled cordite thick and vile for the second time that night and thought of the little girl again. She felt nothing at all for Billy-not even satisfaction. It was no surprise to her at all.

She looked at Emil. His face was white, his mouth slack. Without his own gun he seemed smaller, diminished down to just another weak aimless man. Harpe moved on past them down the stairs, saying nothing to either of them, past Marion and Ray peeling themselves up off the floor and past Billy’s pooling blood, and Emil stooped and helped her up and they followed, Emil’s legs just as unsteady as her own, she thought, the guard a step behind them. Followed him as he moved through the crowd and gunsmoke like a walking boulder or some living, breathing god past a biker leg-wounded in the crossfire, patting him on the shoulder, the man grinning at that, followed him to the back of the room where he opened a door and led them down to more stairs and darkness.

***

Billy was there one moment and not there the next and that was the way of it, the way it always was, Emil thought, for the cop and for that family back there and for all the others, nothing too fucking astounding about that, nothing to worry a man particularly. So he had to figure it was the fucking room and what was going on in it that was troublesome, the dark of the room and the long moving shadows against the rough stone walls as they came off the stairs, the room dark except for some candles and a flickering fireplace way down at the end. So the room was bothering him? The fucking room?

Or maybe it was the fucking altar?

Because that’s what it was all right, a goddamn altar, three long wide slabs of what looked like solid granite- these assholes and these rich bitches gathered around it a bunch of weirdo zombies going about their business crowded around the altar toward the back, the word RISE painted across the ceiling, some dumb-ass pentagram thing on the wall behind them just like in the horror movies, diamond necklaces and formal ties showing above black robes, diamond earrings and Rolex watches, no bikers or Nazis in this neck of the woods, no sir, all these rich-fuck weirdo zombies moving along one by one, washing their hands and faces out of a great big copper bowl and toweling dry and throwing the towels in the fireplace.

All that was bothering him. Yes it was.

The six big Dobermans prowling around were bothering him too. Their eyes gleaming by firelight, their wet panting. The chattering sounds their toenails made against the fieldstone floor.

And the one he guessed was the Big Kahuna, the only one facing him, the one with the hooded robe and the upraised bloody hands and the goddamn blood streaked all over his goddamn bony face, he was sure as hell bothering him.

“Who the fuck are these guys?” he whispered to the guard.

“Ever hear of the Church of Final Judgment? Meet your basic pastor.”

And then he was coming toward them, smiling, face and hands washed and dried now just like the others who parted to let him pass and Emil could see what else besides the bowl was on the altar.

It had been a guy once. Now it was naked body parts. A hand here. A leg there. A cock and a pair of hairy, bloody balls.

“Jesus Christ,” he said.

“Healthy, Mr. Harpe?” said the man.

“Depends on your point of view,” said Harpe. “Healthy enough, I guess.”

And then the goddamn fruitcake was walking around inspecting them. All of them. He took a while checking out Whatsername’s tits in particular.

“Seedy,” he said. “I like that.”

“The price is ten thousand,” said Harpe. Whatsername had already begun to cry. Fuck her. Two black-robed women took her by either arm. “All right. They’ll do,” said Harrison.

“Hey. We’re only talking about the ladies here, remember?” Emil said.

“Really?” said Harrison.

He looked at Harpe and Harpe looked at Emil.

“Not really,” he said.

***

She watched them bolt up the stairs and hit the door at a dead run. The door wouldn’t budge. Ray stumbled and lull and Emil backed off and tried again.

“This one’s excepted,” Harpe said.

“Why?” said Harrison.

“She’s a lawyer. A defense attorney.”

Harrison laughed. “Quite right, Mr. Harpe. No policemen, no lawyers and no Supreme Court justices. I suppose I can live with the other three.”

There was considerable strength in numbers and it didn’t take them long to pull them off the stairs-Emil’s furious terror, his flailing feet and fists be damned. Ray put up practically no resistance at all. Maybe he really it us sorry about what he’d done to her. Maybe he figured he deserved this. Whether he felt that way or didn’t, she couldn’t care less.

On the floor they surrounded them and began to kick and as though that was some signal the Dobermans began to bite and growl and shake. Ray’s calf, blood flying off it, his right hand. Emil’s arm and then his shooting hand. Over the howling of the men and shrieks from Marion she heard Harrison tell Harpe he could take her now.

“You want to watch?” he said.

“No.”

They started toward the stairs. Behind her Marion screamed her name and she turned.

“Janet!” She was struggling to get free of the women behind her. There were three of them now. One of the women clenched and squeezed her breast, her diamond ring catching the firelight, just as she’d done to herself not so very long before. She wondered what passions Marion was feeling now.

“ Jesus, Janet! For Christ’s sake, please! You got to help me! I didn’t kill anybody! You know I didn’t kill anybody!”

“I know,” she said.

They’d hauled Ray and Emil up off the floor to the cinderblock wall, to the shackles there. The family man was sobbing. Someone was stripping off Emil’s belt and tugging down his pants while another took his head between both hands and pounded it against the wall to make him stop his bellowing. She supposed it annoyed him.

It worked.

She looked at Marion again. The women were already dragging her toward the bloody altar.

“But this way,” she said, “you never will.”

***

The naked woman in the main room was still swaying from her chains as they passed. Three men were gambling, throwing dice beneath her. Another was snorting something white-coke or speed or heroin.

At the door Harpe stopped her.

“You want to know,” he said. “Little’s full of shit. He shot those people and he was all by himself when he did it. My brother always was an asshole. You tell him for me that if and when you get him off he better slit his own fucking throat because I’m coming after him and what I do to him will be a whole lot worse.” She nodded and turned and walked into the half light of the coming dawn.

***

Micah Harpe closed the door behind her and thought that you never did know what the day was going to bring. When he was a young man he ’d quietly slit some lawyer’s throat in his very own office because of a padded bill for services rendered on a chickenshit DU I rap and here he was letting another lawyer go-and this one was defending his idiot little brother. Forgetting the generally damaged condition of her, a damn good- looking lawyer too. Under other circumstances he’d have poked her all night long into the morning. Life was full of surprises.

He walked over to the bar and Edwin the bartender- not Eddy, never, the man was one vain sonovabitch- looked up at him and smiled.

“You guys downstairs missed the good part, ” he said. “Oh yeah? What part was that?”

“Guy got up and walked right out of here. See that trail of blood over there? Guy went for a little stroll. ”

***

She walked slowly, half-dazed in the clean open air and head pounding and reflected with grim humor that her head had taken a whole hell of a lot of abuse for a single night. The dog skeleton on the swing swayed on a breeze that wasn’t there and with so little light she saw too late in her approach the bloody hand that moved the chain and saw him slide around from behind the tree, Billy grinning and covered with so much blood that it could only be craziness keeping him alive and standing. The hand that darted out at her and closed over her wrist was cold and slimy red. All of him was red. Only the knife blade in his other hand glinted clean at his side.

“ You swayed your charms with him, didn’t you?” he said. “You did.”'

Blood bubbled over his lips and slid over his chin and she tried to jerk free so that he staggered toward her but somehow kept his stance and pulled her toward him with improbable, impossible strength and then he raised the knife.

And then screamed.

Harpe’s hands were over his wrist. She heard it snap like a dry twig in the forest and the knife fell to his feet. Billy clutched at the wrist, wailing, Billy suddenly gone boy soprano as Harpe lifted him off his feet bear- hugging him chest-to-chest and walked him from the swing and grinning remains of dog or wolf and then lifted him high to the first of the nooses hanging beyond and slipped his head through and then dropped him like a log.

The snap of neck was louder than the snap of wrist had been. She could hear bone grind bone inside him. His legs jerked and spasmed and then he was quiet, swaying, drooling pulsing waves of blood and pissing the length of his jeans.

Harpe turned to her and smiled. “Hole-in-the-Wall,” he said. “A little frontier justice.”

***

She was nearly to the turnoff to the main road when she saw the headlights coming toward her-on a night filled with blazing headlights searing into her, two more now, like lasers burning through the most awful headache of her life and she fell dizzy to her knees before them.

Too much, she thought, too damn much and then she heard car doors slam and feet pound the dirt and then he was calling her name.

***

So that’s it,” Alan said. The Turtle Brook was busy with the lunch crowd for a change. He wiped some burger juice off his chin and wondered why they had to make these things so thick no normal mouth could close over them.

“Thanks to you and your late friend Marion they finally got to close the place down. Harrison gets indicted on four counts of murder for the kid, who turns out to he your basic runaway by the way and for Marion, Short and Rothert, with Thaw and Coombs as co-conspirators since they run the place. Thaw and Coombs? They may very well beat the rap or take a plea. Hole-in-the-Wall’s a big place to supervise and you can’t be everywhere at once. You know, that kind of thing. The Church of Final Judgment keeps no records and it looks like takes no prisoners and nobody thinks Harrison will do a whole lot of talking, so that’s probably all they’ll get. Too bad it took a day to get that goddamn search warrant.”

“Why couldn’t you get the warrant?” she said. “I thought you and Judge Lardner were thick as thieves.” You should only know, he thought. He hadn’t called her in months, that was why. It pissed her off. Simple as that. She wouldn’t even talk to him. And he couldn’t do much begging with Frommer standing by. He shrugged and bit into his burger.

“So there’s nothing at all on Micah Harpe.” “Nothing,” he said. “Vanished.”

“Good,” she said and smiled.

She looked terrific in the turban, he thought. Hell, she’d even looked terrific in the bandages last night. The bandages and nothing else. Stark white against tanned smooth skin. She was quite a goddamn woman to have gone through all of that and come out of it the way she did. He was going to have to marry her soon before somebody else beat him there. If he didn’t know that before, he sure did now.

“Good? Why’s that?” he said.

Her smile broadened. “Don’t worry. You’ll see.”

***

Arthur “Little” Harpe sat on a bench in the hall flanked by guards on either side. He got up when he saw Janet and her new co-council Linda Morrison striding in his direction and smiled that shaky, snaky little smile of his that she used to wish she could dissuade him from using in the courtroom.

“Hi, Janet,” he said. “Feeling better today?”

“Much better, thank you.”

“What was the problem? I mean, if you don’t mind my asking. All’s they told me was you weren’t so hot.” “Nothing to worry about, Arthur.”

He didn’t need to know about the nightmares. God, no. Certainly not Arthur Harpe. He didn’t need to know about that poor little girl twisting in a sudden gale of gunfire.

“Come on,” she said. “We’re going to see if we can’t get you out of here today.”

The smile this time was absolutely genuine. The little worm probably had never hoped for such luck. The fact that it wasn’t luck-that she’d be lying when she got up there on the witness stand and told the jury that Micah Harpe had confessed to the Willis murders to her back in Hole-in-the-Wall-that was something he didn’t need to know either.

Linda opened the door to the courtroom for them and they stepped on through.

“By the way,” she said, “I have a message for you. From your brother.”

The look of alarm on his face nearly made her smile. But it wouldn’t do to smile. Instead she put her hand on his shoulder and turned him toward the defense table. “But that can wait for now,” she said, “can’t it?”

Content

Jack Ketchum
The Passenger

2001