Endless Night (31 page)

I went in through a window, instead. None at the back of the house had been left open, so I just picked one at random. I stood on a patio chair. It Was redwood, so it was sturdy enough to hold me up. (Aluminum chairs half the time bend and collapse when you stand on them.) The screen window was attached pretty good. I couldn’t pull it off, so I gave the screening a smack with the butt of my Colt. It gave, and the glass behind it shattered.

More barking from the unknown dog.

Aside from that, nothing happened.

So after waiting a while, I bashed in the screening with my pistol. I basically tore my way through it, ripped it out of my way. The window was double hung. I reached in and unlocked it and slid it up. Then I used one of my shoes to brush the broken glass off the sill. Then I climbed in.

Underneath the window was the kitchen sink. I’ve had to crawl over worse obstacles from time to time. It took a while and a lot of effort, but I finally got myself to the floor.

Then I searched the house. After all the noise I’d made, I was ninety-nine percent sure it was empty. Even so, I kept the gun in my hand, ready for surprises.

I checked inside every room. Just a quick look, but enough to make sure nobody else was around. The last place I checked was the garage, which was attached to the side of the house. You could get to it through a door in the hallway. There were all sorts of tools and appliances inside the garage, but no car. The space where the car belonged was empty.

Which made me fairly sure that Jody and her family had driven somewhere.

It was a relief, but disappointing.

I went into the bathroom, locked the door and turned on the light.

You should’ve seen me.

When I saw myself in the mirror, I didn’t know whether to scream or laugh. My wig was twisted crooked and half my face was a bloody mess. The blood had come from tiny rips in the skin over my left cheekbone. That whole side of my face was smeared and stained with blood. It had run off my jaw and down the side of my neck. It had soaked the collar of my sundress and even spattered the front.

The bleeding had stopped by that time.

Later, I went around the whole house and cleaned off every place where I could find bloody handprints or drops of blood.

You can’t get it all, though.

I’ll probably burn the place, sooner or later. But I can’t bum the patio or lawn or sidewalk, so the cops are sure to find my blood.

Thanks a lot, Henry.

It’s almost like he bit me on behalf of all his brother bowwows I’ve dispatched over the years. Payback, you know?

I’d love to get my hands on him.

I guess it doesn’t matter, though. About the blood. It won’t do the cops any good without me. And they won’t get their hands on me. Cops are the least of my worries.

Anyway, all I really cared about right then was fixing myself up. I straightened my wig and washed the blood off my face and neck. Then I checked inside the medicine cabinet. What a waste of time that was. I couldn’t find any sort of antiseptic or any Band-Aids, not even gauze or adhesive tape. Don’t these people ever hurt themselves?

I ended up folding some toilet paper into a pad. I held that against the bite, and taped it there with some magic transparent tape I found on the desk in Jody’s bedroom.

It was definitely Jody’s bedroom, by the way. There had always been the possibility that I’d gone to the wrong house, but her room removed any doubts.

On a shelf were some big wooden blocks that spelled her name. Her name was all over the place, on pencils and stickers and a little fake California license plate, not to mention on pages of school work I found inside a loose-leaf binder. I also found some pictures of her.

There were a few framed photos on top of her dresser and desk. One showed her with shish-ka-sister. They looked maybe seven or eight years old, and were at Disneyland hanging on to the arms of some dopey yellow bear in a red T-shirt. There were also pictures of Jody with her folks. The gal I figured for her mother only showed up in pictures when Jody was pretty young. She’s out of the picture now, so to speak. She either dumped the old man, or kicked the old bucket. Either way, she isn’t in any recent pictures and she doesn’t have clothes in the master bedroom. It looks like Jody lives alone with her father.

And here’s a good one: her father’s a cop! She has pictures in her bedroom of him in his uniform. There’s one where she’s real little and sitting on his knee and wearing his cop hat which is about a hundred sizes too big for her.

A cop!

Life is sometimes just one big jolly surprise after another.

Of all the cute little sixteen-year-old babes in the world, I just happen to be after the daughter of a cop.

He looks like an ugly, mean son of a bitch, too.

How did Jody turn out so beautiful with a gorilla like him supplying half her chromosomes? Amazing.

No doubt, though—she’s his kid.

She probably inherited the part of him that bounced a fuckin’ baseball bat off my head the other night.

Anyway, I did more than just look at her pictures. I went through her drawers and closet. The closet had a few empty hangers, and the drawer where she kept her panties and bras had a lot of vacant space. In fact, there were only two pairs of panties and one bra. The hamper next to the dresser had nothing in it.

So, did she keep extra hangers just for the fun of it? Did she have a big shortage of underwear?

Not real likely.

I went out to the garage and looked inside the washing machine and dryer. Only thing I found was a pair of jeans in the washer.

I added things up.

One, Jody and her old man are gone. Two, the car is gone. Three, it looks like Jody has clothes missing.

You add that stuff up, and they give you an answer. Which is that Jody and her old man must’ve packed a few things and lit out.

Probably planning to lay low for a while.

Not a bad idea when you know you’ve got killers after you.

Which
I’ll
probably have, myself, if I don’t turn Jody up in time for the big ten o’clock deadline.

Deadline’s a good word for it.

It’s three o’clock in the morning right now. I had the cassette recorder in my purse, and fortunately it didn’t get broken when I fell. It was starting to sound funny, though, so I put in some fresh batteries. Found them in a kitchen drawer where there was a lot of stuff like strapping tape, glue, and about five different sizes of new batteries.

Anyway, I’ve been talking into it for a while now, since right after I checked the washing machine and dryer. I’m on a sofa in the living room.

And dead tired.

I’ve gotta flake out for a while. Might not be a brilliant idea to do it in the living room, though. No telling when somebody might show up. There’s a guest room way at the end of the hall. That wouldn’t be much fun, would it?

I think I’ll try Jody’s bed.

Yeah.

I’m sure I’ll enjoy lying in her very own bed. I’m sure I’ll like that a lot.

Maybe it’ll help me have sweet dreams.

Chapter Twenty-nine

I’m back.

Maybe it wasn’t such a great idea, trying to grab some Zs on Jody’s bed. I couldn’t get her out of my mind. I kept remembering everything about how she’d looked and felt the other night. And I kept thinking about how this was her bed, how she gets into it every night, maybe naked sometimes, and how my skin was pressing against the same sheets that had been rubbed by Jody’s body. It made me hard and achy and a little nuts.

I also spent a lot of time imagining what I would do with her. I thought about ways I might like to tie her up, and how I would hurt her, and the different ways I would fuck her.

And those were the good things that ran through my head.

There were also times when I worried about never being able to find her, what the guys would do to Lisa if I screwed up, what they might do to my sisters down the line and what they might do to me.

I spent part of the time horny, part of the time scared. And my face hurt from the dog bite and I had a headache.

It made for a very long night.

I slept just long enough to have one really horrible nightmare.

I was chasing a dog that reminded me a lot of Henry—a little white furball with an attitude. I was after the bone in its mouth. The bone belonged to me. It was my big, stiff cock. My crotch was bleeding all over the place while I chased the damn dog.

Whenever Henry had a good lead on me, he’d hunker down and gnaw on the bone and I’d yell, “Don’t wreck it! You’re gonna wreck it!”

But then he got away from me and I lost sight of him for a while. When I found him again, his mouth was empty but he had dirt all over his muzzle and paws. “You buried it!” I yelled. He wagged his tail. So then I begged him to tell me where, and he grinned and swung around and pranced on ahead of me.

He led me straight to a graveyard. Then he vanished and I was all alone in the bone orchard without a clue as to where he’d planted my dick. I started looking. It was creepy. Tombstones everywhere. Weeds and tombstones and stunted, dead trees. And the worst part was that I noticed spooks sneaking around the graves, scurrying this way and that, ducking behind monuments. I don’t know what they were supposed to be—zombies, maybe. I was afraid they might start coming after me.

Finally, I found a place where the soil looked loose and dark. I started digging there, clawing away the dirt with my fingers. It was a fresh hole, all right. And pretty soon, I found what I was looking for.

So I thought, anyway.

I grabbed it and pulled.

It was attached to someone.

All of a sudden the ground crumbled and up sat a body all covered by dirt. The dirt started sliding off, and I knew this had to be Tit Ring showing up to haunt me. But it wasn’t.

It turned out to be Jody. She was naked and grinning, and I still had hold of her cock. She said, “Suck me, honey.”

I was awfully shocked that she had a dick. I mean, she’s beautiful and has wonderful tits and she’s almost too good to be true, but here I find her in a grave and she comes up out of the dirt and has herself some male equipment. Very damn weird.

And even weirder still is that I’m turned on by the whole thing. I’ve never done any of that perverted stuff, you know? That stuff was for Mitch and Chuck, not me. But I tell myself this isn’t a guy, it’s Jody. So I go ahead and open up and slide my lips down her rod, but all of a sudden it turns cold and hard. The way it feels in my mouth, I know it’s a gun barrel.

I say, “This isn’t your cock.”

She says, “No, but it’s cocked.”

I’m thinking it’s very clever of me to have wisecracks in my dreams.

But then the gun goes off and I wake up damn fast—before the bullet has a chance to reach my brain and kill me.

It’s supposed to be very bad news if you get killed in a dream.

But I woke up in time. I’m pretty sure.

Woke up with a splitting headache and a sore face. The room was gray and chilly. I took my gun with me to the john. I helped myself to some aspirin, then went to the kitchen and got a pot of coffee started. I didn’t have any clothes on, so I was shivering. Have you ever noticed how a headache hurts a lot worse when you’re shivering?

Once I was under the shower, the headache tapered off. There’s nothing like a hot shower to take away the morning chill and relax you. The water made my face sting where the dog had bitten me, but it felt great otherwise.

When you’re in the shower, you can’t hear anything that’s going on in the rest of the house. But you think you hear things. Like the telephone ringing, like footsteps and voices. It can get to you if you let it.

It can also add a little spice to your showering.

You’ve just gotta be logical about it and tell yourself you aren’t hearing anything. I mean, the odds were very much against anyone turning up at the house at six in the morning.

After the shower, I put on a terry cloth robe that I found in Jack’s closet. Jack is the father’s name, by the way. Jack Fargo. His name is on magazine subscription labels, bills I saw in the kitchen, all sorts of things.

I took the wig with me, but didn’t put it on. I just wanted to have it nearby as a precaution. I was in no mood to wear it, not with my headache. I didn’t feel like getting dressed, either. For starters, it was too early in the morning to cope with Hillary’s bra. Even though I get a bang out of the way I look in it, the thing makes me feel like I’m wearing a harness. Maybe it’s too small. I’ll have to try on the one I saw in Jody’s drawer. Later.

For now, I’m happy just sitting here in the living room. The sofa is comfortable and I like the feel of Jack’s robe. My first mug of coffee was great.

Time for a second. Back in a second.

Okay, I’m back. Ahh, this is the life.

Maybe I should make myself some breakfast.

That can wait. I don’t feel like moving for a while.

Sooner or later, I’ll have to move. Gotta figure out a way to find Jody and Andy. Or maybe they’ll just show up on their own and save me the trouble of hunting them down.

What the hell, I’ve got till ten o’clock tonight. Plenty of time.

Right now, I want to talk some more about my adventures in murder with Tom and the gang.

I already told about Hester Luddgate, and about how we killed those two bike riders on our way up to Oregon. I guess I didn’t get into how we killed the gal, or what else we did to her. Time’s a-wastin’, though. There’s still a lot of ground to cover, so I’ll just go on. Suffice it to say we had a merry few hours with the wench, and left her in no condition to tell the tale.

After that, Private and Clement were hooked. The four of us were on the road for a total of two weeks, and killed three more people for a grand total of five. One was a guy who was hitching his way to Portland. Then there were two gals whose car ran out of gas ten miles from the nearest town. Talk about stupid! Hell, they were too dumb to live. They weren’t much to look at, but we had fun with them.

When Ranch and Minnow—God, Minnow’s dead? That’s what Tom said, but it’s hard to believe. And it was Jody that killed him. I can see it, as a matter of fact. Her killing him. All she did was give me a tap with that bat of hers, and I’ve had a lump and a headache ever since. The headache comes and goes, to tell the truth. But it’s probably from when she pounded me. If she really put some oomph into her swing, it’s no wonder she dropped Minnow.