Clean Burn (31 page)

Two figures lay opposite James. I recognized Cassie’s white and pink sneakers and the jeans with a hole near the ankle. She lay still, whether asleep or something worse, I didn’t know. I assumed it was Brandon lying beside her covered with a blanket. I couldn’t see Enrique, had to hope he was in one of the corners I couldn’t see.

James tried to struggle to his feet. I shook my head, waving my hands in the window to indicate I wanted him to stay put. Michele might be somewhere else in the cabin, could enter the basement at any moment. I didn’t want anything James did to alert her to our presence.

I snagged the radio from my back pocket. “Ken? The kids are here.”

A jay squawked, sailing from tree to tree above my head. A squirrel chattered in outrage. But no answer from Ken. I called into the radio again. “Ken?”

Something caught my eye inside the window and for a moment, I saw Tommy standing there in the basement, waving his arms, shouting at me. I gawked at the familiar hallucination, then shut my eyes to clear the brief insanity.

Metal pressed against the back of my neck. The bore of a Glock 22.

I froze. “Easy does it, Michelle.”

The barrel dug a little deeper. “Drop the gun,” she said.

I set the 9mm down beside me. Keeping Ken’s Glock pressed against my skin, Michelle stepped around behind me and kicked the 9mm out of reach. “Get up. Slow.”

Keeping my hands spread wide, I pushed to my feet. Michelle never let up the pressure. I tried not to think about the mess that Glock would make of my skull. Talk about a bad hair day.

I studied her out of the corner of my eye. I don’t know what I expected – long, scraggly hair, missing teeth, red-rimmed eyes? But her dark brown hair was a tidy shoulder length, her dental work looked good and her blue gaze seemed calm and steady. The palm-sized burn scar on her right cheek had healed fairly well, the taut skin a slightly darker pink than her natural color.

A poke of the Glock’s barrel turned me away from her. “Keep your eyes to yourself.”

Michelle lowered the weapon to the middle of my back. Now I had a new mental image – my chest splattered all over the cabin’s rough-hewn log walls. A nudge with the Glock propelled me toward the front of the cabin.

I hadn’t heard gunfire, so however Michelle had incapacitated Ken, there was hope he was still alive. I forced myself not to think about the myriad of noiseless ways she could have killed him.

He was sprawled on the porch, under the cracked window. Blood stained his sandy hair, dripping from the side of his head down into his ear. A hefty four by four-sized chunk of tree limb lay beside him.

If he was bleeding, he was still alive. I shut my mind to any other possibility, keeping my focus on Michelle as she unlocked the cabin’s door.

With Michelle’s enforcer urging me on, I stumbled over the uneven threshold into the dim interior light. As I struggled to get my bearings, Michelle closed the door. Now the room was nearly dark, the broken-down sofa and chairs faint silhouettes in the shadows.

She grabbed a handful of my T-shirt and pulled me over to the cracked window. The Glock still against my spine, she yanked the covering from the window. Light filled the room, too bright after the dimness. The ugliness of the place wasn’t improved with illumination now I could see the cruddy dishes in a wash pan, mouse droppings on the floor, layers of dust on everything.

“Hold this.” She stuck the piece of stained dirty sheet in my hands, then guided me to the second window for the other scrap.

My arms full of disgusting percale, we wove our way through the obstacle course of detritus. Down a short hallway, she stopped me at a closed door. She reached around me with her ring of old fashioned latch keys and jabbed one into the lock.

“The sheriff has backup coming, Michelle. They’ll be here any minute.”

Michelle opened the door. “Mama was busy last night. She left a blessing on three houses.”

“You burned them down.”

“I purified them of their sins.”

She nudged me through the door onto a small landing, then down the steps. I surveyed the dank basement – mattresses on the floor, a playpen in the corner, a candle burning between them. Enrique huddled in a corner on one of the mattresses, James beside him. The baby whimpering in the playpen. Brandon’s body covered by a blanket on the other mattress. Cassie beside him, asleep, unconscious or dead, I didn’t know, her insulin kit beeping its warning.

I could already smell the kerosene from the open can, but it didn’t look as if she’d poured it yet. Three large mounds of rags were lined up between the kids’ makeshift beds.

Michelle’s funeral pyre for her beloved children. Born again to die again.

“Put them on the floor,” she told me. I dropped the sheets beside the stairs.

The Glock pressing into my back, she turned me to face the cinderblock wall. One hand keeping the firearm in place, she dug through the jumble of crap under the stairs. She came up with a pair of gardening shears and a handful of plastic cable ties.

Michelle herded me over to the mattress where James sat. She cut James’s restraints, then tucked the shears into a back pocket. “Hold out your hands so Junior can tie them.”

I kept my hands to myself. “Is this how you burned your own kids, Michelle? Tied them up first? Or were they sleeping in their beds when you killed them?”

Michelle directed the Glock at James’s head, those cold blue eyes on me. “Do as you’re told.”

I held my hands close to James, keeping my wrists angled to prevent him from tightening the ties too much. His head bowed, he fumbled with the cable tie. When he pulled the end of the plastic, he left it loose.

“Feet, too, Junior. Then tie them together.”

He wrapped two long ties around my ankles. When he was done, he glanced up at me. I shrugged a shoulder in Michelle’s field of view, blocking James’s hands. He ran a tie through both the wrist and ankle restraints, but he only poked the tip through the locking mechanism. A good strong push with my feet and it would pop free.

Michelle wrapped another tie around James’s hands, then snugged up the wrist and ankle ties. I held my breath, waiting for her to check the other tie, the one tethering hands to feet. But her gaze strayed to my wrist where my shirt had ridden up.

She tugged the sleeve farther up, exposing my scars. “It’s hard to burn the sins away like that, one at a time.”

A creepy little prickle danced its way up my spine. Not the sort of woman one wanted as a kindred spirit. “I’m a real klutz with a match.”

She stared at me, that no-one’s-home look in her eyes. “It’s better to toss them on the fire all at once.”

That might be exactly the kind of punishment I had coming, but these kids had done nothing to deserve that kind of agony. As Michelle turned her back on me to pick up the kerosene, I torqued my wrists, searching for some give in the plastic ties. There was none. But the ankles... I felt a slight give when I pushed my knees apart.

It gave me something to work on while I waited for her to put down the Glock, to figure out she couldn’t start a fire with one hand. But for the moment, she seemed to have no difficulty adding the sheets to the rag piles and pouring kerosene onto them.

I fell back on my only option for the moment. Keep her talking while I worked on the ankle restraints. Pray that Ken might return from la-la land and rescue us. Or that the cavalry would arrive.

“Why’d you kill them, Michelle? Why’d you kill your babies?”

“I didn’t kill them.” She emptied the can in the third pile, then turned back toward the stairs. “I killed the sin. It was the only way I could send them to heaven.”

“But they’re not in heaven. They’re here.”

She brought out another can of kerosene. “God sent them back to me.”

“To burn them again? But it didn’t work, Michelle. Not if they’ve come back.” Reasoning with a psychotic was a lost cause, but maybe it would keep her hands off the matches.

“The fire wasn’t hot enough the first time. It didn’t cleanse all their sins.”

Cassie moaned and shifted on the mattress and relief shot through me. Still alive, then. I pushed harder on the cable ties around my ankle.

Michelle sprinkled the holy water of kerosene on the floor. “I have to be sure they stay in heaven this time.”

The kerosene in one hand, the Glock in the other, she hesitated. I could see the fervor in her face, as if her gaze sought out the glory of her tyrannical god. It wasn’t the one my mother had worshipped all those years ago, but a being entirely of Michelle’s creation.

Finally, finally, she set the Glock down on the stairs. Her hand free, she pulled a lighter from her pocket. Using my thumbs, I’d worked the ankle ties down around one of my cross-trainers. Squirming, I pushed the shoes from my feet and the ties off my ankles.

Michelle clicked the lighter.

My left leg collapsed when I tried to stand, the pain in my calf shooting clear up to my molars. Scrabbling across the floor, kerosene wetting my shirt, my jeans, I head-butted Michelle off her feet. She dropped the lighter and it hit the concrete floor, the flame doused when the safety released. I rolled, knocking the lighter away. It skidded under the junk beneath the stairs.

I rolled back toward Michelle, catching her before she could get to her feet. Using both hands as a club, I punched her face, bloodying her nose. She struggled free, throwing me off her, scrambling away.

She stumbled into one of the rag piles, got her feet tangled in them, fell to her knees. I levered myself up, ignored the agony in my left leg and limped toward her. Stretched out on the floor, she reached for the candle. James flung his body down and blew hard at the flame. It shifted in the gust of air.

I grabbed Michelle by the waistband of her jeans and tried to pull her back. James squirmed closer, trying to get near enough to extinguish the flame. Michelle reached out, got her fingers on the candle, tipped it just as James blew hard again.

As the candle fell, it flickered out, a wisp of smoke trailing from the wick. The wick still glowed, but extinguished in the liquid kerosene.

Michelle dug another lighter from her pocket. I shook her, but she kept her grip long enough to hold the flame against a pile of kerosene-soaked rags. They burst into flame.

I kicked the rags aside, but the flames licked higher. My fingers still hooked in Michelle’s waistband, I snagged the garden shears and tossed them at James.

Michelle got to her feet and kicked behind her, knocking me to the floor. My head whacked against the concrete, the pain stunning me. I stared at the flame burning in front of my nose.

And remembered that plastic melted. I held my bound wrists over the rag fire, let the flame burn the cable ties, felt it sear my skin. The ecstasy of exquisite pain distracted me for an instant, the sickness of my bliss not lost on me. For an eternal microsecond I considered the merits of death by fire. Then the cable ties parted and I rolled away from the flame.

Beside me, James had cut the ties from his hands and feet. “Get the others!” I yelled. He used the shears on Enrique, then turned to Cassie.

Using the wall for balance, I rose. And found myself again facing the bore of Ken’s Glock 22.

“The fire will cleanse us all.” Wild-eyed, Michelle waved the weapon in my general direction.

The flame that had freed me from my restraints had reached the closest mountain of rags. “I’m taking these kids out of here, Michelle.”

“Your pain will be burned away.”

“The hell it will!” I kicked the flaming rags toward Michelle, creating a path of fire between us. I dove for Enrique, grabbing him up.

Michelle pulled the trigger, the shot going wild and caroming off the cinderblock wall. “James, get the baby!” I could carry Cassie, but we’d have to leave Brandon’s body behind.

As I bent to pick up Cassie, Michelle fired off another round. The bullet whistled past my ear and took another chunk of cinderblock from the wall. I didn’t know what would get me first, fire or gun. The temperature in the room had risen from dank to unbearably hot and Michelle was going to figure out that Glock sooner or later.

I rose with Cassie slung over my shoulder, James behind me with the baby, Enrique beside him. Michelle was nowhere near being out of ammunition and I presented too damn wide a target. The fire had reached the mattresses and my escape path was dwindling fast.

She lifted the gun, held it steady. Beside me, James wound up like an all-star little league pitcher and flung something at Michelle. Her hands flew up to protect her face.

“What the hell was that?” I asked.

“Nails,” James said.

Recovered from James’s surprise attack, Michelle lowered the Glock again and aimed. An instant later, she hit the floor, writhing in pain.

Ken, taking the stairs two at a time, ripped the Taser wires from Michelle’s back. He snatched up his Glock on the way down.

Dodging flames, he ran toward me. “I’ll take Cassie. You get Enrique.”

“I’m not leaving Brandon.” I relinquished Ken’s niece to him and scooped up the dead boy. With the body over my shoulder, I crouched to pull Enrique up to my hip. “What about Michelle?”

“I’ll come back. We get the kids to safety first.”

Ken went up the stairs first, James next. I followed, got up three steps. A hand clutched my left ankle, nearly pulled me off my feet.

I twisted and fell on my butt to keep from falling over. “Ken!”

He stopped at the top of the stairs. “Send Enrique up!”

I let him go. “¡
Corres
!”

He ran up to Ken. I kicked at Michelle, trying to dislodge her. She wouldn’t let go. The fire had nearly reached the stairs.

I let Brandon’s body slide onto the steps and swung at Michelle with both fists, striking the side of her head, her face. She dug her fingers in like claws and pulled me toward her.

Damned if I was going to burn to death, let her take me into her hell. I kicked hard with both feet, punching my left heel into her chin, my right into her chest. She flew backwards, bouncing off the wall then stumbling forward into the fire.

The flames enveloped her body at once and she screamed, a hideous, blood-chilling sound I’d heard only in nightmares. I grabbed up Brandon’s body and scrabbled up the stairs, my left leg barely holding me, my socks catching on the splintered wood as the steps collapsed behind me. I hit the top step running, my path through the cabin a blur.