Malevolent (10 page)

Vincent opened a jar of sauce and plopped it in a pan. “All right, I give up. Who was it?”

“Step aside,” she said, dropping a double fistful of chopped-up produce and parsley into the sauce pan. “I forget…who are we talking about?”

“The young guy coming out of the house as I got here. Blinding white shirt, cruise-ship tan? Anything ring a bell here?”

She turned and stared into his face, tantalizing him with her perfume. He couldn’t remember Sandy wearing this much of the stuff to work in the past. “I haven’t the faintest,” she said.

He stepped away, watching for the knowing smile that would give away the joke.

It didn’t happen.

He stepped out of the kitchen and returned to his son in the breakfast nook. He sat, glumly staring at his open textbook.

“Jason, how long have you been home?”

He looked up and shrugged. “Hour or so. Why?”

“Tell me about the man who left here as I pulled up. He came out the side door.”

The blank look he’d seen on his wife’s face matched that of the boy.

Vincent didn’t await an answer. He walked briskly to the short flight of stairs off of the kitchen that ended at the side door. What was he thinking—that a man could have entered and left the premises through this door without his wife and son knowing?

He heard Sandy and Jason filing down the half flight behind him.

“Vincent, what is it?”

“Is Lisa home?” he asked quietly, not turning.

She wasn’t. She was out with friends.

“What’s going on, Dad?”

“What is it?” Sandy again. An edge of concern or…what?…in her voice. Tension? Her scent tugged at him, tried to pry his attention from the side door. He had very definitely seen a strange man leaving his home. In the broad daylight. He wasn’t crazy.

Vincent stared at the door. It had a dead bolt, and right now it was in the locked position.

So someone inside had to have let the man out and locked up after him.

Sandy placed her hand on his shoulder. Dangling from her delicate wrist was a scarlet bracelet he’d never noticed before.

Chapter Fourteen

If he hadn’t mispronounced Emily Koontz’s last name, Tim’s gig might not have sunk as far or as fast as it did. But after the tittering had died down following his presentation of the maid of honor, the crimson-faced girl’s mother—also the mother of the bride, naturally—had gotten in his face like she thought he’d done it on purpose.

From there, the whole night went to shit. It was like everyone could smell blood in the air. The uninvited children—a staple of virtually every wedding he’d ever worked—got louder and more obnoxious as the evening wore on. Free liquor seemed to bring out the worst in everyone and the best man became an insufferable bore who just didn’t want his fascinating toast to the new couple to ever end. It felt like it didn’t.

Tim hated working wedding receptions. On what other occasions would he be forced to bring along renditions of the “Chicken Dance,” “The Macarena” and the “Hokey Pokey”? He sure wouldn’t be wasting his Saturday afternoon and most of the evening here if Patty hadn’t all but demanded he take the gig.

“They’ll pay you three, maybe four, times what you’d get from Charlotte,” she’d told him when he hadn’t jumped at the chance to work a coworker’s wedding. “How could you even consider turning this down?”

So here he was, spinning a scratchy vinyl version of the “Beer Barrel Polka,” presumably because it was the
Sturvinski
-Koontz nuptials. Polacks, get it?

Roll out them barrels, folks. We’re having some fun now
.

“Excuse me.” She was back, the wide-shouldered mother. “This music is unbelievably loud,” she screamed at him. “There are elderly people here, and to them this music is just annoying.”

God, he hated weddings.

He twisted volume controls. At times he imagined his console to resemble a jet dashboard with all of its buttons and switches and knobs, its meters and blinking lights. Now it just looked tacky. “Yes, ma’am. How’s this? There might have been fewer complaints if the older folks had been seated farther from the speakers than the younger ones.”

He forced himself to smile pleasantly, but it didn’t dissolve the sour look on her big face. Mrs. Cunts, indeed. “Maybe next time
you’ll
remember not to set up your speakers so close to the old folks.”

He almost suggested an ideal location for his speakers, but she huffed away before he got it out. Good thing.

Sensing that the exchange hadn’t gone exceptionally well, Tim decided on a token peace offering. He found an MP3 file with a medley of nostalgia he’d put together for just such an occasion. Tony Newley, Vic Damone and the Andrews Sisters. How could he go wrong with that?

“Hey, Chief. Got a flame?”

Tim shook his head and the thin man patted down his tight tux jacket one more time and said, “Ah! Never mind. Got one right here.”

It was the groom’s best man, he of the endless toast. He was in his early thirties, very slender with dark bags under dark eyes, pale skin, black hair thinning at the forehead. He was leaning against one of Tim’s speakers, braced with an elbow propped high.

“If you ask me,” he said, “you got it just right. Emily Cunts. As if you know her.”

Tim felt his face flush all over again. “I guess it’s a name I wasn’t too familiar with.”

The thin guy—Tim couldn’t for the life of him remember his name—waved him off. “Who cares? But what we have to talk about is this music, Chief.” He made a face.

Some best men have to be shoved to their feet to mumble a modest couple of lines, but Tim had nearly been forced to pry the microphone from this jackass.

“This set is about as decrepit as the crowd,” the best man was saying. “You want to place bets on who gets the first coronary out there.” Smirking, he nodded toward the dance floor, filling up fast with senior citizens. Though his mockery pretty much reflected Tim’s thoughts of moments before, it sounded harsher spoken out loud.

“I think we have to bring people back into the music,” the guy said. “Keep the young folks from slipping into comas.” He looked like he was rapidly nearing the point of too much party.

“I’m trying to please everyone,” Tim said. The effect he’d been going for was seething indignation, but it sounded petulant even to him. “The bride’s mother,” he added, not sure where he was going with it.

“What a whore,” said the best man, smirking again. “But I wasn’t implying you’d play this yawner medley by choice. I can tell you got hipper tastes than that, Chief.”

Every time he called him Chief, the asshole gave Tim a lazy smile, like he knew exactly how well it was going over.

Tim leaned in to close what little distance remained between them. “Here’s the thing,
Bub
. The mother of the bride’s going to hand me a check sometime before the end of this evening. So if she wants to hear Slim Whitman doing ‘Purple Haze,’ I’ll check to see if I’ve got it.”

The other man laughed easily. “Good point.”

He snaked his lithe body off of the speaker and onto the dance floor where the Andrews Sisters were putting the oldsters in the mood for stiff jitterbugs. He did a slow solo grind, throwing out his crotch and grinning. That and the rebel yells of his drunken friends heard all the way from a back table sent the elderly pairs shuffling to the sidelines.

“No problem. I took care of it, Chief,” the best asshole yelled to Tim.

Catching the expression on the face of the bride’s mother as she made her way toward him, Tim knew he was in trouble again. He got momentarily distracted by a thunderous crash that sent shudders down his sound system, and its instant transition to mono.

“What the hell,” he said.

He wheeled in time to catch the guilty expression of the little boy tangled in speaker wire and leaning heavily against the toppled speaker. The kid, who was about nine, worked frantically and hopelessly to free himself.

“Shit,” Tim said just as the Andrews Sisters faded.

The kid’s eyes grew wide. He was a porker of a kid, the slowest and most uncoordinated of the pack of uninvited little monsters who’d been running around underfoot.

“You used a bad word,” he said.

“For heaven’s sake, it was an accident,” the bride’s mother sputtered. “I won’t have you cursing my grandson like that,” she bawled like a cow calling out helplessly on behalf of its barbwired calf as she made her way up toward them.

 
“Sorry,” Tim mumbled as he leaned into his toppled speaker and began to disentangle the kid. He wondered how many times he’d have to apologize to the woman before the nightmare gig was over.

“Kill him.”

Tim and the boy both yanked back their hands as if they’d come in contact with a live wire. Tim stared at the face of the speaker.

“What?” asked the kid. His eyes were wide with terror.

“Take the speaker wire and strangle him.”

“See, you’ve frightened him,” the mother of the bride snapped as she moved in closer.

Still far enough away that she obviously hadn’t heard. Tim and the boy stared at the speaker propped under the kid’s heavy prostrate body. Tim yanked a wire out to keep it from erupting again.

“Follow him into the bathroom and break his fucking neck.”

“Grandmaaaa!”

There was no mistaking the source of the guttural whisper. It came from the decommissioned speaker. Tim stared at the pulled wire in his hand.

“You’re scaring him. Are you going to help him up or just stare at him?” the mother of the bride demanded as she came up behind them.

“Grandma, he’s gonna kill me,” the kid wailed as Tim pulled free that end of the wire that had ensnared him. He scuttled away as quickly and nimbly as if his big ass had wheels. “Grandma, don’t let him kill me in the bathroom.” The boy thundered out of view, throwing fearful backward glances until the crowd swallowed him.

Tim remained squatting before his silent speaker. It looked and sounded as dead as it was supposed to sound. He slowly, hesitantly, plugged the wire back in and was rewarded by a blast of 1940s horn section. His hands shook as he set the big speaker back upright.

“I want to know what that child was talking about,” said the big woman who’d sign his check.

He ignored her, letting his mind race. He’d heard what he’d wanted to hear because he was so angry, that’s all. Which made no fucking sense whatsoever.

But it worked for him. Or would have if he could forget how the fat-ass little fuck had obviously heard the same thing.

The music played on.

Chapter Fifteen

“Hi, I’m Vincent,” the tall man said as he moved through the small crowd and extended a hand.

He had a face she liked, a bit too long to be handsome, but ruled by soft, intelligent eyes and a shy but warm smile. His voice had a gentle, comforting rumble to it that put her instantly at ease.

He turned to the others in the room. “Everyone,” he said in that gentle, pleasantly modulated voice, “meet Patty.”

The evening had started with a stroll. Just something to melt a little tension. There were people everywhere in her neighborhood. Walking, driving, biking. Kids chased each other around the feet of teenagers and young couples with strollers. As the shadows grew, Patty wondered how a woman could have possibly been attacked on the same street she now found herself and at virtually the same time of day.

She looked around and found herself staring at the Utica Lane Church of Redemption. The same modest, nondescript building where Tim, the man she was on course to share the rest of her life with, had insisted he’d spent much of the previous night.

What was
she
doing there at nine o’clock on a Saturday night? More to the point, had it been her destination all along? Had the Kayla Cosgrove incident so stripped her of trust in Tim that she was actually following up on his alibi?

“Shit,” she told the dusk.

The windows of the place were open. If she’d expected to hear anything from within, it would have been voices lifted in prayer or pipe-organ-propelled gospel music wafting out.

What she actually heard, quite surprisingly, was laughter. Party chatter.

She walked in the open front door. The people she saw were dressed in shorts or jeans, T-shirts and blouses, summer-weight sweaters. They were fat and thin, short and tall, old and young. Some she recognized from the neighborhood, others she didn’t. In the small kitchen at the opposite end of the vestibule,
 
its swinging door propped open, she glimpsed church members talking and laughing, women shoving food into a hulking oven. The air smelled of ham and casseroles.

“Oh,” she said, “sorry.” Not sure what she’d done to require an apology, or whom to direct it toward.

She was backing out the front door when her arm was hooked by a slender and attractive woman who said, “Don’t worry, hon. You’re not crashing. I’m Sandy Applegate. We’ve got white wine, lite and real beer, diet and real cola. Who are you and what can I get you?”

And that was it.