Apricot brandy (17 page)

It rumbled alive like a dream and the roof came purring up over her. She closed the windows and accelerated in reverse. It bucked and wallowed, blundering backwards, taking more scratches, then jounced out onto the asphalt. Not a car in sight for a mile ahead or behind. Karen peeled out and set the Mustang humming at a comfy country sixty.

Taking the wheel in her hurt hand, she groaned as she unzipped the gym-bag. Out wafted a funky lair-smell. Pawing through the stuff made her cringe, but she got over it— she had, after all, killed the piece of shit… . A black nylon windbreaker, some jeans, T-shirts and briefs— all dirty. A 25-box of .38 rounds, but no .38. A comb. Not a scrap of writing, or paper. An awfully clean residue. It wouldn’t have much to tell as trash scattered twenty miles away from the Fox place.

Babcock kept squaring his shoulders as he drove, each time bringing agony, but forgetting and doing it again. It was a habit of his when he was struggling to think his way out of a dilemma. It never brought clarity, but it was reassuring to remember the mass of his shoulders. Then the pain brought him back to his mission. His left hand still felt half dead. There was a sick twinge within the mauled meat of the arm itself. Carver had actually cracked his arm-bone! Just by squeezing! To do that, he had to have a grip like a
machine
.

Considering that inhuman grip, Babcock’s agony of indecision disappeared for a while. This was some deep shit Carver was dropping him in, but Babcock was a devout believer in superior force and that iceberg Carver had it. Absolutely no question that he could and would put Babcock away for twelve years’ hard time, making half the force lie under oath to lock him up— anything it took. His workmates only drank with him, and thwacked his back, because they feared him physically. He knew that and enjoyed it, but also knew that if he was tied up with a stick of dynamite poking out his ass, any one of them would gladly light the fuse.

But this was
cold
! It wasn’t the way Law Enforcement
did
things. If you wanted to punish a killer, you beefed up the evidence and lied on the stand, or made someone else lie, and then sent his— no,
her
— ass to hard time or the death house! You didn’t take her out into a walnut orchard and
cap
her! That wasn’t Criminal Justice! The whole point of being a cop was killing people
legally
!

And just where was he going to shoot her? He knew the woman and her place, had on several occasions been sent by Carver to deliver her rent money. Babcock had seen those amazing Mexican tits she had on her and he recoiled from the thought of a chest shot. Burly Babcock discovered in himself, for the first, amazing time, a kind of… humanity. Killing men was fine, but he found he felt it was, like…
cruel
to kill a woman! He’d never known this kind of depth, this
complication
in himself.

As he approached the Oak Creek Bridge, his foot came off the gas. On a dirt turnoff down there, a blue Mustang was perched on the Creek’s high bank.
His
blue Mustang! And that dyke bitch Karen Fox was standing beside it flinging clothes down into the fast-moving water.

Fury and righteous vengeance convulsed him. But as he moved to brake and throw a screeching spin-around, the movement sent agony through his shoulder— and he remembered his master, the man who had tucked the dynamite up his ass. His foot came right back off the brake and he kept on driving toward Spaith’s. After all, he knew where the bitch lived.
Her
he could kill. And come to that, could kill this Mex bitch too… .

He swung through the weathered, hinge-sprung gates and the Dodge growled down colonnades of gold-leaved walnut trees, burst walnuts gunfiring under his tires. When he pulled up to the shacks, he stepped out into a surprising silence, only the whisper of hundreds of acres of leaves and nothing more. Then the door of her shack opened. She didn’t step forward, just showed herself. That dark face, those Indian eyes that didn’t tell you anything. In her skirt and her sleeveless shirt, she was one abundant woman.

“Ma’am,” he said, “Chief Carver needs to see you down at the sheriff’s station. Just get into my car, ma’am.”

She didn’t hide her hesitation, but then obeyed. When they were seated together up front, her scent was earthen and spicy and her femininity seemed massive, seemed to make the Dodge tilt to her side as they pulled away from the shacks. He felt almost intimidated. Was the Smith Marty had given him… a big enough gun to put down this mass of brown life?

Just as he was pulling out, he realized that a tiny old woman, wearing a battered fedora over her gray curls, was standing on the porch of a shack across the yard, gazing at their departure with grave, sad eyes. A panic of lost control, sudden disaster, rippled through him, but he didn’t dare stop the car, his possession of Lupe felt too precarious, and the killing of her loomed too urgent and frightful before him. If he stopped now, he’d never do it. Should he come back and kill this old bitch? He would call Marty— but Marty had said
radio silence
.

What was happening to him here? Just keep a grip, keep driving… .

The picking lanes were spoking past them. This whole mission was insane! Why did he have to do it in an orchard? Anyone passing could look right up these corridors and see you plain as day a hundred yards off. Then, ahead, the acreage rolled into a broad depression. The carpet of gold trees sank, so that the lanes between them dropped just below view from this service road. He swerved and was suddenly jouncing along between the trees, down into the dish of low ground.

The woman recoiled, hugging the door. He looked into the tar-pits of her eyes— so huge her eyes were! “He’s not at the station!” he blurted. Babcock was having another unprecedented experience. He was improvising! “He doesn’t wanna go near your house. He’s waiting in the trees. Sheriff Carver’s waiting in the trees!”

That sounded strange. He pictured Carver up in a walnut tree, gripping the branches like a chimp. But the way she stared— did she even understand what he was saying? She was still hugging the door, but at least she wasn’t jumping out. If she didn’t jump out, he’d shortly be downslope there, invisible from the road. But was he really going to
do
this? A few seconds more and they had sunk out of sight from the service road.

Babcock hit the brakes and realized, as Lupe flung open her door and sprang out, she’d just been waiting a chance to bolt and, once she had her legs under her, this tough little bitch could
move
, could duck between the trees and dodge his fire. He got his hand on her ankle as she leapt, but the car, lurching forward again, broke his grip. He toppled out after, jarring his cracked shoulder to a blinding agony, got his feet under him and dove for her just as she had scrambled to her feet. Again caught her leg (as he heard the driverless Dodge crunch into a walnut tree) and again lost his grip, but caused her to fall more severely now, pitching her face-first against the earth, slamming the wind out of her.

He pulled the Smith as he leapt on her, was suddenly relieved to discover how easy this was going to be, done in the tumult of pursuit like this. Aimed and planted a slug in her upper spine as she scrambled to get her legs under her. In the leafy silence the steely slam of the shot seemed to nail her as much as the slug did, hammering her face-down to the earth.

As Babcock dropped to his knees beside her to plant a finisher in the back of her skull, she erupted, rose and flipped violently onto her back, fixing the black holes of her eyes on his. Her eyes transfixing him, his gun-hand froze. She lay staring up at him, her arms flung back as though she were pinned to the soil by some mighty acceleration of the earth towards the sky. Her terrible eyes seemed to be sucking Babcock’s own right out of his head.

Kneeling above her in a helpless rapture, he beheld a nightmare. Her black hair, fanned out across the thick litter of dead leaves, began to melt. It grew, writhing like black roots, into the leaves. The leaves themselves liquefied, became a golden muck into which not just her rooting hair, but her flesh, too, intertwined, for her skin was blackening into a scaly branching hide that thrust tendrils into the liquefying earth that under her.

Babcock’s own legs were sunk past his knees in the muck, but he noted it distantly, so enraptured was he by her utter transformation. Watching her clothing melt away, draining off her breasts and belly as the breasts and belly began to
swell
! Was he really
seeing
this? Her head had vanished in the steamy muck, while her breasts, thighs, even the tapering ovoids of her upper arms and forearms, bulged like baking loaves, reptilian loaves growing scaly as they grew.

Babcock was sunk to his waist in a bog that was
doing things
to his lower body. Fear for his life, already a remote paltry voice, at last roused him. He raised the gun again and emptied the cylinder into her scaly bosom. Each slug galvanized a spurt of elongation in the reptilian tentacles her body had become. Ropy with muscle, they plunged into the muck around his waist. Something was happening to his body under there, oh God! He was coming apart in the earth and she was pulling the rest of him down! Down into the earth!

There
would
be a car, just as she was ditching Wolf’s stuff in the water. It didn’t stop though. She flung the gym bag after the clothes, jumped in the Mustang, and raised a tail of dust cranking it back up onto the road. Done was done, all she could do was hide the car well and hope.

And about five minutes later, within half a mile of town and all its peripheral traffic, Karen came to the severely scary part. She passed other vehicles, half a dozen, maybe more, but none were stopped or even taking notice.

Outlying the new developments that fringed the town, there survived a few lanes of old houses sinking into their jungled yards, more than half of them abandoned. Gratefully she tucked the Mustang up the first of these lanes, eased back up to a big old derelict tucked back in the trees and sited against the wooded hills flanking the town.

She crept up the weed-cracked driveway, deep into where overgrown hedge and curtains of ivy dripping from the roof enveloped it. Though her hand was hurting big time now, cracked bone pain poking sharply through the anesthesia of Mom’s old Vicodins, she wiped down the wheel and every surface with her sleeves, spending a long, careful time doing it.

Hooking her knapsack onto her shoulder, Karen struck out through the back yard and up into the hills, going slow, because of her hand’s throbbing, and because she didn’t want to be decorated with undergrowth when she walked back out of the hills and into town. When she was a mile up into the slopes above the house, she paused by a thicket and carefully buried the wiped-down .357 deep in the black earth.

After a half hour’s careful walk through the overgrown hills, she had passed the edge of town and came down into one of the older residential zones, where empty lots gave her easy access from the woods.

Walking those thickly treed streets calmed her. She began to take stock of her escape and to exult in her conquest of Wolf, then of his corpse, and now of his gear and stolen car. All of them threatened her life in turn, all of them were behind her now. She felt strength and hope glow in her body— even her hand’s pain, a battle-wound, felt like a badge of new courage. At last she had fought back against the ancient crime… and won.

As a girl she’d liked these streets, finding it hard to leave them and take the bus back home. There was May Tyler’s house, her middle-school chum. May’s parents were sweet, but God how tired of Karen they must have gotten, the kid just wouldn’t
leave
at suppertime and catch her bus!

So unchanged, these blocks! Sidewalks buckled by the roots of the big old trees, a plastic tricycle toppled in front of a faded white picket fence, all the lawns and gardens lush, some a little shaggy.
Family
streets— how she’d envied all the classmates who lived here. Their houses didn’t stand alone in the night, solitary in a sea of trees where a monster lived.

At the bus-station she learned it was an hour till the next bus to Bushmill. Settling down to wait, she noticed Fratelli’s market, a few doors down across the street, seemed to be doing a pretty brisk business. Did that placard on one of the tables say “Fox”? She stepped out and walked over.

The old man sat at the register out under the awning. The placard in black magic marker proclaimed fox fruit. It dominated a whole table of Dad’s peaches and apricots. The flats couldn’t have been out here for more than a couple hours and they were more than half gone.

Under his ambitious hair with its shameless dye-job, Fratelli’s aging Sicilian profile grew more vivid to her. Big, thick, hairy-lobed ears, Old Country ears that caught all the rural rumors, were current on all the myths and magics muttered over a hundred hearths for miles around. Surely the old man knew more about Dad’s place than Karen did. Knew that Jack Fox’s produce had some rumored uniqueness, a rumor far wider spread than Harst’s and Marty’s clique of Jack Fox Disciples. That prickling sensation on Karen’s back was the dawning knowledge of how many thoughts, throughout this whole big valley, were weighing her, the old fox’s daughter, now alone on his acres.

“Ay. Karen. You got something for me?”

“As a matter of fact I do, Mr. Fratelli. I’m going to Bushmill to get my hand fixed.”

“Bushmill. Why doncha go see your Dad’s friend? Harst?”

“Because I don’t
like
Dr. Harst.”

So quick he’d thrown it at her, she’d answered on instinct and instantly saw she’d answered right. The tiniest crinkle of humor on Fratelli’s face. He knew that all that was Dad’s was her enemy; it was why he was sure she wanted to sell. “’S okay. I hear he’s outta town f’a while.”

“Anyway, I stopped by to tell you to pick all the rest off those trimmings from Jack’s trees. I make it at least fifteen more flats. Just pay me now and take it whenever you want.”
I’ve got nothing to hide. Walk right onto my property.