A Leap in the Dark (Assassins of Youth MC Book 2) (23 page)

Pratt was outside in the corridor now. The door had automatically closed but we could hear him cursing the little quadcopter. “Get thee behind me! His coming is soon at hand!”

Once the blade sliced through one plastic cuff, I didn’t bother with the remaining one. I sliced through the plastic that bound my ankles, and now I had to get Deloy down. Surely his shoulder was dislocated. Any avid student of BDSM knew not to keep dangling in suspension cuffs more than five minutes. In addition, Pratt had idiotically used carabiners, and I had to force Deloy’s ass up off the chair for a few seconds while I unhooked him.

Meanwhile, outside Pratt was batting his arms around and shrieking at the unmanned drone. I saw him through the filmy glass waving and yelling vaguely Biblical shit. “Let my law no longer be under attack, as my holy lands have been taken from me! Let all know how they treat my priesthood on earth, so I shall be to them a savior!”

Deloy stepped into his pants as I buttoned mine, then we crept to the clean spot in the glass. The drone was making threatening movements toward him, swooping down low, then coming to within inches of his face.

“He’s going to shoot it,” whispered Deloy.

“Not if I can fucking help it.”

I opened the door quietly. Pratt’s back was to me, but the drone could easily see me, so I waved. I was still mighty groggy from the Rohypnol, so I had to blink several times to get a bead on Pratt’s stupid skull.

“I shall cause my power to be holy on thee!” Pratt screamed at the bobbing and diving toy. “My purposes are eternal. No one can stay my hand!”

“Get back,” I told Deloy, who stood at my side.

“I’m not missing this,” he said with a thrill in his voice.

I raised the
shuriken
just before the plane made a darting dive for Pratt’s throat, mid-tirade. “Let children be of most favored protecting, innocent of sin—
agh
!”

He dropped the pistol to clutch his throat. That’s when I threw the star, in the brief second before Pratt collapsed on the cement. It gave me immense satisfaction to see and almost feel it stick about an inch into the back of his neck. I ran over, first grabbing the pistol and then stabbing it into the waistband of my jeans. The drone, now hovering motionless over our heads, had slashed Pratt in the soft part of his throat with its blades.

The slashing alone wasn’t fatal, although copious amounts of blood already pooled on the cement. The
shuriken
stab was more a distraction than a wound. But now Deloy was rushing up, his face contorted with a rage I’d never seen. He whipped the pistol from my jeans before I could stop him. My own fingers were scrabbling with Pratt’s bowtie, untying it.

I had every intention on strangling the motherfucker to death.

“Deloy, no! This is on me. See that drone there? It’s recording everything we do.” I lassoed Pratt’s neck with his yellow flowered bowtie and cinched it tight around the fat throat. Pratt made those dry choking sounds a dog makes when something is stuck in its throat. “This is my payback, Deloy. I don’t want you getting involved in this.”

Deloy’s yell was blood-curdling. He held the pistol with both shaking hands. “It’s
my
payback, Levon! He murdered the boy I loved after corrupting him! I want the satisfaction of shooting him through the fucking skull.”

“That’s not you, Deloy.” I could feel the life ebb from Pratt’s body. His struggle ceased. He’d vacated his earthly abode, but Deloy didn’t know that. From the corners of my eyes I saw some fellow patch holders come creeping into the school atrium. Gideon was first, holding his piece at his side. Sledgehammer and Yosemite Sam were next, both gripping their irons too. Dingo was last, gripping the notebook up that flew the drone. The drone had a good shot of Pratt’s death throes as his tongue flopped from his mouth. My arms were bands of searing hot metal as I clenched every minor muscle to keep the bowtie tight. “You’re not a murderer.”

Deloy’s arms trembled even more. It was a wonder he could even aim the gun. “He makes me
want
to be a murderer.”

“Look, don’t shoot. You might shoot me. Put that gun in your fucking pants.”

Now Gideon came around Deloy’s side of the body. “Yeah. Hand the gun over, Deloy. It’s Pratt’s gun, so we need to agree what to do with it.”

I held the bowtie in a vise grip long after the body stopped breathing. “Yeah. You helped me bury Pratt, Deloy. Everyone knows that.”

Deloy didn’t even look at the gun as he surrendered it to Gideon. All the murderous rage suddenly drained from his face. “Really? He’s…buried?”

Dingo was there, picking up his precious drone that now had blood on its blades. “We all saw it, Deloy. Levon couldn’t have done it without you.”

“Well, ah—” Deloy sauntered over to the old gnarled leafless maple in a raised bed. Various items of clothing hung from the branches as if to dry in some long-ago stage play. “Think these’ll fit me?” He needed a shirt.

Dingo joined him. “I’m a husky boy, so yeah. Sleeves might be a little short.”

Deloy held a shirt in front of his bare chest. “These are your clothes?”

“Yes. And some of them aren’t that old either. Oh God, I remember this T-shirt!”

Finally letting my grip loose, I stuffed the bowtie ends into Pratt’s fucking mouth. He’d gone to spirit prison, that place in between heaven and hell, a sort of limbo for amoral assholes. I wandered over to the maple tree. “Really? Metallica?”

Dingo nodded with pride. “Peace, love, and metal.”

Sledgehammer ambled over, stepping over the prone body. “Really? I always sort of liked them. They still around?”

I told Dingo, “I didn’t have you pegged as a metalhead. The cargo pants and sweater vests, for one thing.”

Dingo took offense. “I haven’t worn a sweater vest since getting this cut! That would be redundant to put a leather vest on over a wool vest.”

Gideon nodded. “Not to mention bulky.”

The men argued the sartorial merits of the various looks. I knew what they were doing. They were deflating the tension from the scene. It was their way of comforting Deloy, and possibly Dingo, although he only seemed concerned about his drone.

Suddenly their words all became a blur, like the teachers yammering in Peanuts cartoons. Oaklyn peeked her head around the corner, stunning me. It seemed so incongruous, the scene before me. The mayor sprawled in the fallen leaves, as dead as Scrooge’s partner. How long had she been there? Had she seen me actually doing the deed? It seemed to only take me three long strides, and she was in my arms.

“My little lamb,” I murmured, running my lips over the crown of her head. I crushed her upper arms in my hands, probably hurting her, but she just whimpered with what seemed like relief. “God, I love you. I love you with my whole heart and soul, woman.”

Then I shut up. Had I really just said that? It was the drug talking, the Rohypnol. It was making me blather my innermost feelings! I kissed her forehead over and over, as if to erase my radical words.

“I suspected you loved me,” she said, “when I said it to you and you didn’t answer.”

I seriously had no recollection of that. I suddenly had no recollection of anything that happened before I woke up zip-tied to the little kid’s desk. “Wait a second.” I did recall Pratt throwing my shirt and cut into a pile somewhere. I found them, none the worse for the wear. Flinging the disgusting football jersey aside, I shrugged into my cut and stuck my shirt like a bandanna into my back jeans pocket. Then I went and yanked the
shuriken
from Pratt’s neck. Gideon had wiped all prints from the pistol and placed it back near Pratt’s hand.

He asked me, “Nothing else in there that can tie you to this place?”

“I don’t think so.”

We looked inside the classroom anyway. “Never a dull moment around these whackamole fundies,” said Gideon, looking at the cuffs dangling from the ceiling. “It’s gonna be a long hard row to hoe, going up against these severely challenged people.”

“Well, there’s one less to deal with,” I said. “Maximus will be a shoo-in for the mayoral slot.”

Gideon laughed bitterly. “Ah, they’ll just stick some other fundy in Pratt’s place.”

Dingo’s face was at the door. “Can we get the hell out of here? Not to sound like a feeble baby, but being back here is giving me the dry heaves.”

“Sure enough,” said Gideon.

“We just leave the body here?” I asked as we took our leave.

Gideon shrugged. “Sure, why not? He’ll be found right away, probably by Atticus Rosenkohl or his deputy, because his truck’s here. They’ll cover it all up since it’s obvious it had something to do with a kid hanging from the ceiling in cuffs. If they try to pin anything on us, we’ve got the video. That’s how shit works out here. People are so busy covering their own embarrassing tracks, justice is never served.”

“I think justice just
was
served,” said Deloy as we took our leave of the school.

I cradled Oaklyn under my arm as we walked. Mahalia was there, holding Lazarus’ leash. I took the leash from her. It wasn’t right to discuss business in front of women, so we discussed safe topics.

“What were you thinking of doing for dinner?”

Oaklyn shrugged. “You’re famous for making some kind of roast, aren’t you?”

“Oh!” cried Deloy. He was going to ride bitch behind Gideon, and he straddled the saddle. “Your roast beef with Yukon gold potatoes and carrots.”

Oaklyn pointed at him. “That’s it. Famous for it.”

I didn’t know how “famous” it was, but I could make it, all right. We just had to stop by the market first. Sledgehammer was bound to have some good cuts of meat in his butcher shop.

It was nice to talk about mundane things, to act as though nothing big had just happened. I think we wound up watching “Poltergeist” on cable TV that night and eating while sitting on the couch. I was hard pressed to notice anything different about Deloy, too. Then again, we were accustomed to going from scene to scene, acting in ways each scene demanded. We were actors, I guess. Actors without applause.

OAKLYN

June

I
had to
slide into my wedding dress inside a porta potty.

It was the only place to change up in our little chapel of nature a half mile hike up a trail at Zion. I didn’t want to get the white sundress sweaty, so I’d carefully rolled it into a daypack that I carried up the trail. Now my attendants waited on me outside my dressing room while I cinched the waist with a rhinestone-studded ostrich belt. The cowboy boots were in Mahalia’s hands, my jewelry in Kimball Manwill’s purse. Kimball had busted out of Cornucopia along with Mahalia and helped her run Save Our Baby Brides.

“Come
on
,” whined Kimball. “I have to pee!”

“Go behind that rock,” Mahalia told her.

“Mahalia! I’m not a biker chick, like you.”

I had to laugh. “Biker chick.” Never in a thousand years would I have thought I’d ever be called a biker chick. I had actually thought I’d marry Giovanni and be doomed to a life of wondering where my playboy husband was—and whether or not he’d bring home venereal disease. I had thought that all men were fallible in one way or another. The holiest of men had skeletons in their closet. Life was a laboratory and we used each other as test subjects. We all had cuts and bruises to show from what others had inflicted on us.

But when I hitched my star to Levon Rockwell’s, my wounds began to heal. He didn’t inflict new ones on me. I kept waiting for it, waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the big reveal that would show what a heartless bastard he was.

It never came.

I suppose I was still waiting for it that early summer day overlooking the enormous face of the Great White Throne, a monolith of white Navajo sandstone. Levon had told me that an explorer had said of it a hundred years ago, “Boys, I have looked for this mountain all my life but I never expected to find it in this world.” He said that’s how he felt about me. I was his Great White Throne.

“Come
on
,” trilled Kimball.

“Is anyone out there?” I shouted.

“Only
everyone
,” said Mahalia.

“I mean, I don’t want Levon to see me coming out of a frigging
bathroom
.”

“Oh. No, I don’t see him.”

“I don’t either
.”

“All right.” I stepped out in my little tennis socks. The dress was tea length, and the cowboy boots would cover the rest. The boots cost more than the dress. They were studded with eight rows of maple sugar crystals, the better to match the backdrop of cliffs behind me. I quickly stepped into them in case Levon was looking. Mahalia and I went around back of the Port-a-pottie so I could put on my jewelry.

“You’ve got your vows memorized,” Mahalia assumed.

“Sort of. Kind of. Being in the public eye always makes me nervous.”

“It
does
?” Mahalia had appeared on television a few times on behalf of her nonprofit charity. She appeared to thrive in that atmosphere, but it made me physically ill, one reason I’d never done drama in high school. “I love it. It’s fun.”

“It’s no fun for me. Does Dingo really have to make a video of this? I think I’m going to throw up.”