Devil's Oven (31 page)

Sliding from beneath her, Tripp rested her head gently on the carpet. He couldn’t stop staring at the blood on his hand. Lila’s blood. Now her wound was bleeding into the carpet, the floor, the ground. Now a part of her would always be a part of his home, his bit of earth. His bit of mountain.

Somehow, that feels right.

He touched his hand to his face, smearing the blood over his cheek, and down to the edge of his mouth and lips until his hand was dry.

“Lila.”

The blood felt warm on his lips and he touched it with his tongue. It tasted of metal. Not so different from his own. They were alike, the two of them.

Should he leave her there, bleeding? Part of him wanted to lie down beside her and put the barrel of the .44 into his mouth and pull the trigger.
The metal barrel, the taste of blood. So alike.

But he couldn’t do it. He wasn’t ready to give it all up. Not just yet. There was still a chance they could get away together and start a new life. Their new life didn’t have to be in death.
No
.

“Come on, baby,” he said, gathering her into his arms. She was so light, as though her body had already cast off everything that weighed it down. Was that dawn breaking through the front windows? It couldn’t be. If they were going to get away, they needed the darkness.

The sunlight breaking through the forest to touch her face.
That day, it had been Jolene’s face he saw instead of Lila’s. But he’d broken the enchantment that bitch had cast over him.
This is Lila’s face. It would always be Lila’s face.

He laid her on the sofa and tucked a blanket around her. Again, he tried to wake her, thinking that his voice should be enough to call her back. But she just lay still, like a princess needing to be awakened. He bent to kiss her lips, and felt her breath.
Thank God you’re still alive.

If it hadn’t been so quiet, if they had still been arguing or hurrying to pack up, he wouldn’t have heard the cars in the driveway. Tripp dropped to the floor and crawled to the desk. Keeping his eyes on the door, he felt for the switch on the desk lamp and turned it off. He went to the window.

It hadn’t taken the cops long to find them. He should’ve killed the creep in the Git ’n’ Go lot. What would they have thought, then? That the creature had found Lila again, and killed the bastard who thought he was her hero. Then no one would know that he and Lila were together; they would be free by now. It was all so clear. So obvious. He had screwed it up, and now it was too late.

•  •  •

“Not such a great time for a visit, Detective,” Tripp shouted from the porch.

Burns kept walking up toward the cabin. The cars behind him had turned on their headlights so he appeared in dull silhouette. The porch was flooded with light.

 “I’m not here to make nice with you, Officer Morgan,” Burns said. “I’m here to make sure Lila Tucker gets the medical help she needs.”

Tripp knew he was supposed to find the headlights intimidating, but instead he felt liberated, like everything was unfolding just as it should.

“Probably you know you shouldn’t get any closer.” He turned slightly so that Burns and whoever else was watching could see the gun he held. It would have been so satisfying to take Burns out right then, but it wasn’t time for that. “And don’t give me any of that bullshit about how you just want to talk.”

Burns stopped, his hands stuck deep in his coat pocket. “I hate this back and forth crap. You’re law enforcement. You know how this is going to go.”

“It goes however I want it to for the next hour—maybe two.”

“I don’t have that kind of patience, and Mrs. Tucker may not have that kind of time.”

Behind Burns, behind the cars, there were shouts, warnings to
stop!

“Bring her out here, you bastard, or I’ll kill you myself!”

Bud Tucker’s immense form broke out of the miasmal light and ran, hell-bent, for the cabin. Before two equally large uniforms tackled him, Tripp saw that Bud’s normally placid, friendly face was a caricature of rage.

Too bad. Lila is mine.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

Crazy-ass, bullshit hillbillies and their lame-ass mountains.Bud Tucker, the weakest son of a bitch I’ve ever known. A big, dumb kid of a man who thinks he can take care of everybody.

For the first time in eighteen years, Dwight opened up a bottle of Black Label, poured three fingers of it into a glass, and raised it to his lips.
Bud Tucker.
He closed his eyes, inhaling the perfect scent of the whiskey. He liked the sweet, sweet nose of it, the way its subtle charcoal burn seeped into his brain.
Bud Tucker.
He was going to die because of Bud Tucker. As the whiskey spread over his tongue and down the back of his throat, he was able to ignore, for just those few seconds, the steady pounding on the club’s kitchen door.

There had been only three people in his life he had given a shit about: his mother, his niece Angela, and poor, stupid Bud. His mother was dead, Angela had run away at the age of sixteen from her too-strict father—such an asshole; Dwight had warned him not to be so hard on her—and disappeared into the churning maw of the country’s largest city, and Bud was as good as dead. Just like he was.

Bud Tucker.
Dwight knew if he ever told anyone how he felt about Bud, they would probably call him a fag because they wouldn’t understand. Love wasn’t always about sex. Sex wasn’t something that plagued him like it did some people. It entailed way too much personal involvement and exchange of bodily fluids. He’d had sex a few times with an ugly girl—Rowena something—who had begged him to take her to dances in high school. She had been good about regular blow jobs, too, but after a while, he began to think too much about being in her mouth, worrying that she could bite him and cripple him at any time. Plus, she always begged him to return the favor. It was one thing to launch his prick into the cavernous slop that was her pussy, but no way, no sir would he have put his face in there. He thought about her sometimes, wondered if she was still as ugly and if she had found someone to make ugly children with.

Bud Tucker.
He just liked to be around Bud. Bud made you feel like everything was going to be all right. Forever. Bud was the guy you wanted to please because nothing truly bad could happen in the world if a guy like Bud was around. He liked the way Bud depended on him, counted on him to keep the girls and bartenders honest, to make sure he had cash when he needed it. It embarrassed the shit out of Dwight when he thought about it, but he lived for those days when Bud would ask him to drop by the trucking company or call him into the club’s office, saying,
Dwight, buddy, I’ve got a hell of a mess. What do you think?

Bud Tucker had needed him
.

Dwight poured another two fingers of whiskey. The pounding had stopped, but he knew it was just some kind of trick to make him think he was safe. Nobody was safe in this place anymore. And it was his fault. He had brought this on Bud; he had brought it on that silly cunt, Lila; on Claude Dixon; and God knew who else; because, like Bud, he had wanted to help.

He drained the glass of the whiskey, not noticing the burn so much now. He had heard that the longer you were away from the stuff, the quicker the buzz would be. He was like a whiskey virgin. The thought brought a wry smile to his lips.

At the back door, there was a new sound. Dwight didn’t have to be standing outside to know that the doorknob was being hacked off, courtesy of something large and very sturdy. Those violent blows were about to come his way. It didn’t matter that there was also a deadbolt on the door. As he liked to say to Bud,
No worries.

The Anthony guy they had sent down to collect from Bud was as dumb a dago as Dwight had ever met. Anthony had been told to find Dwight first, and he did, walking into the club like he owned the place, even though with his tailored lambskin jacket and gold pinky ring, he might as well have been from Mars. He didn’t even have to ask for Dwight because Dwight knew right away who he was and why he was there.

He had introduced himself as Anthony, his voice higher and softer than his size indicated. Even though Dwight himself wasn’t very tall, he wouldn’t have described the guy as a giant, though he was big enough, with hands that were easily twice the size of Dwight’s. Dwight had made sure to smile a lot, and asked if he wanted to have a seat and check out the girls for a while. When the guy gave the girls a tired glance, Dwight understood they weren’t the class of girls he was used to, and suggested that they go into his office.

Anthony told him he would be hanging around for a few days to see how business was going. There was an investment to protect, he said, and he would be visiting Bud’s trucking company as well.

There was something in Anthony’s eyes that Dwight didn’t trust. Big surprise there. Dwight trusted no one. No. One. Despite Anthony’s subtle manicure, Dwight instinctively knew he was into wet work and had been sent to get Bud’s attention.

Understood
, Dwight told him. He even went so far as to dial a bogus phone number and pretend to leave a message for Bud to come straight to the club as soon as he got the message. Dwight made it clear he wanted to be helpful. When Anthony got settled in the overstuffed leather chair and sat turning the pages of an old rock and roll magazine, Dwight even offered him some blow. Anthony refused with a surly
I don’t do that shit
, but he didn’t turn down the drink that Dwight said he could get him from the bar.

•  •  •

The back door thudded open against the wall. No, the deadbolt hadn’t been any kind of deterrent.

•  •  •

Anthony’s imported sedan took the mountain curves with real assurance, though Dwight got concerned when he turned off onto the fire road, thinking it might get too rough. Anthony slumped sideways, resting his drugged-out head on Dwight’s shoulder until they completed the turn and Dwight could push him away. The guy’s hair had smelled like flowers from some kind of hair product or girly shampoo. He had been a pain in the ass to get into the car, far heavier than Dwight had imagined. But they were almost there.

What made me decide to kill the sonofabitch?Hell, what makes anyone decide to do anything?

Then there was the big question: What had made him want to strip the guy naked and cut him up into parts like he was a side of beef or  some kind of sacrificial ox out of the Bible? The answer was
habit
. Funny how an old habit came back when you needed it.

He had grabbed the fire ax and shovel out of the club’s storage closet, and shoved them, along with the big-ass hunting knife a local beer distributor had given him that Christmas, into the sedan’s backseat before dragging Anthony on a tarp from the club to the car.

Sticking the guy had been easy, almost too easy, like shooting a running man in the back. It wasn’t game, he knew, to stab a guy in the neck when he was passed out so that he only jerked and groaned for a half-minute before sighing and falling back, as into sleep. But he more than made up for it with the work he did after the guy was dead: dragging the tarp-wrapped body through the scary-as-hell moonlit forest, where wolves could’ve pounced on him in a minute. Or a mountain lion. It was a good thing he had the body as barter if he needed it. No self-respecting mountain lion would turn down fresh kill.

Dwight wasn’t sure how far into the woods he actually got. Anthony’s size and the rough terrain meant he could drag him only twenty or thirty feet at a time. The sweat pouring off Dwight soaked his shirt and groin, so that he could only think of being back at his clean, warm apartment, standing beneath a full-blast shower.

Did he not bury the guy deep enough? No, that wasn’t the answer. Nothing should have found him up there on that mountain in the middle of nowhere.

That mountain.

He wasn’t a superstitious man. He never worried about ladders or black cats or spilling salt or opening umbrellas indoors. But now he realized he should have been. He should have been a lot of things.

Bud fucking Tucker.

Dwight looked down to see that both the whiskey bottle and the glass were empty. Warmth filled his stomach and his head felt blessedly light. The swinging door that led to the kitchen moved in the dim glow from the wall sconces.

Dwight reached beneath the bar and felt for the coach gun. No one at the bar had ever had to fire it, but he checked it regularly to make sure it was loaded and ready. He liked an orderly workplace.

Anthony—or what had once been Anthony—was crossing the room slowly enough that Dwight could get a good look at him. Oddly enough, he was dressed like Bud, in a polo shirt and khakis as though he were off to the country club for eighteen holes. The look didn’t really suit him. In life, he had probably never picked up a golf club except to beat someone with it. But he was a handsome guy, even dead. Even with a ragged hole in his throat.

What Dwight had never seen before, though, was Anthony’s smile. This smile was hideous, devoid of pleasure. It was simply teeth, exposed.

“Get the hell away from me, you G.D. freak,” Dwight said, pointing the shotgun at Anthony’s chest.

Anthony kept coming, as Dwight had known he would, his smile unchanged.

Dwight pulled the trigger. The report filled the air, momentarily deafening him. A hole erupted in Anthony’s sport shirt and Dwight saw—or imagined he saw—a spray of flesh erupt from behind.

Anthony hesitated a step, but then kept walking forward.

So long, Bud Tucker.

Dwight put the barrel of the shotgun against the stubbled underside of his own chin and pulled the trigger again.

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

He left the building through the broken kitchen door, carrying a bottle of something he had found behind the bar. He’d had to step over the man whose insides dripped from the mirror above the bottles. Another Claude Who Wasn’t Food. He had come to do to him what he had done to Claude, but the man had cheated him.