Outburst (36 page)

“Come on, your other pal back here isn't going anywhere,” he said.

What did that mean, silently begged Janice, that Kris was in fact dead?

“Out—now!”

Janice felt herself pulled sideways. Then she herself swung her legs around until they dropped out the door. She sat up, perched there for a second, her hands achingly bound behind her back, her mouth stuffed with silence, her eyes wrapped tight like a package bound for a long, bumpy journey in the U.S. post. And then she stood. She thought for a second that she might fall, not because she was faint, not because of the oppressive humidity that seemed to bear down on everything, but because her feet, which had been bound so tightly just above the ankles, had gone to sleep. Hobbling, she took one shaky step, another.

“You know why you don't want to do anything stupid?” he asked. ” ‘Cause I got a gun. Just don't make me use it sooner than later.”

She of course couldn't say anything, and with her fingertips she felt the side of the van behind her, then leaned against the vehicle. If this was it, if the end of this journey—and her life—were near, she just wanted one thing: to get rid of the fucking gag. The heat wasn't so bad. It was the humidity, the dew point, whatever. Here in the countryside that spread so wide and far, it was as if she needed gills because everything was so close, so clammy. And all she wanted was a few good, deep breaths.

Janice felt tears come to her eyes. No, you can't lose it now. Somehow, someway, there might be a chance. You gotta stay sharp. You gotta butch it up, babe. You gotta search real hard and find the bull dyke in you. Don't give up, don't let the bastard do this to you!

At first Janice didn't know what he was doing. Above the beat of approaching thunder she couldn't really tell. But she could hear him moving. She could hear the sound of material shifting this way and that. A zipper. He was, she realized, changing clothes.

And then he laughed and said, “And now for a totally new look.”

Listening to him approach, Janice's body went rigid, every muscle tightening, every limb locking. Whether he was going to shove her to the ground or merely punch her again, she didn't know, but perhaps this was it. Perhaps he was simply going to execute her right up against the side of the van, gangland style.

“Oh, baby, baby,” he said, sounding like the devil—and knowing and loving it too. “This is going to hurt!”

Expecting a blast of a gun or a slash of a knife, Janice bit down on the gag, her teeth clenching the folds of material as hard as if she were birthing a baby. He grabbed her by the head. She screamed, but of course next to no sound emerged. She tugged with her neck, tried to pull away, but couldn't. He grabbed at her hair. And ripped. Dear God! Her body blistered with sweat and pain. Her eyes blistered with light and tears. She stopped biting on the gag, opened her mouth in some impossible way, and emptied her lungs.

Yes, light …

He'd torn off the blindfold of packing tape. Torn away hair and skin, eyelash and eyebrow. But, yes, through the shrieking pain she could see light. Or more precisely, squinting, she could see black sky.

And, yes, she could see him.

Raising her sullen head, she saw some guy who was about her height. More than that, however, she couldn't really tell, for he wore not only dark old gloves, a long-sleeved plaid shirt, and blue jeans, but also a navy-blue face mask, the likes of which nearly every Minnesotan possessed for the depths of winter. Everything about him was hidden by clothing, as if it were twenty below instead of ninety-five above.

Janice took a breath, closed her eyes. Opened them again. Yes, she could see. Him. A field of corn as thick as the one she'd once gotten lost in as a child. A sagging, faded red barn with a decrepit concrete silo clinging to one end. An old farmhouse, once white, now raw with age. And sky, one half rich and blue, the other as black as a death curse. Was it, she wondered, about to start pouring any second, or was this the kind of storm that lingered for an hour or two before pouncing, a death cloud as patient as a cat caging a trapped mouse?

Telling her the answer, the thunder growled. Not one quick rumble. No, long and deep and continuous, on and on. Janice turned, gazed past a decapitated windmill—the blades of the fan long blown away, surely by some previous storm—and saw the black sky pulsing with strobelike lightning. It would be upon them within minutes.

Janice turned and stared at the masked head, saw sweat bleeding through the wool. And thought, Die, you fucker.

He reached back into the van, picking up what he'd momentarily set aside—a gun—and said, “We're going up to the house. And nothing funny, all right?”

Janice turned, quickly glanced into the vehicle, and saw Kris's lifeless body lying on its side, her hands taped together.

“Move it!” he ordered, shoving her on.

It suddenly became clear why he'd removed her blindfold, for it would have been next to impossible to drag her through this maze of ruin. The farm was old. And long abandoned. Surely a once-thriving homestead, it had obviously been cannibalized by either hungry neighbors or corporate giants, every square inch of the prized black soil planted, and everything else—house, windmill, that leaning barn out there, silo, outbuildings too—left to die. Her feet and eyes now free but her mouth and hands still bound, Janice led the way around the van, up the rutted drive, and through a graveyard of farm life. Walking around the skeleton of an ancient combine—half collapsed in a death kneel—she passed a disc plow, a hay chopper, a seeder, all of them once mighty and hulking machinery, now all of them rusted and sinking into the fertile earth.

Surrounded by splintered and half-dead elms, the farmhouse stood on a small rise to the right, a ghostly two-story clapboard Victorian house, tall and narrow with the delicate remains of fretwork half clinging to the eaves of the steep roof. Surely once painted a proud, clean white by either the German or Scandinavian immigrants who had taken over this area like locusts, the elements had scoured it of paint. The front porch, where families had once gathered on hot summer days such as this to shell peas or drink lemonade, was a wreck of its former splendor, the vine-covered columns doing Herculean effort to hold the porch roof, which was sagging like a broken wing. Almost every window was broken, surely by neighboring farm boys. And the red-brick chimney was all but gone, truncated either by moisture or tornadoes or both.

These things end somewhere, thought Janice. And looking at the dismal house, she saw that hers was to end there. He was going to lead her in there and pose the murder as carefully as a Hollywood director. One very dead lawyer, all posed for Todd the reporter to discover. And broadcast. But why? And what did it mean, that this masked jerk was the one who'd killed Mark Forrest? That he'd been rigging things all along, even the California murder of Dave Ravell?

What Janice feared, of course, was that she would never find out.

Catching a vision of what was to come, her stomach heaved. Okay, call me vain, she thought, but I don't want to go like that, splattered all over hell. I don't want Todd to find me like that either. No, God, no! Walking through weeds, her vision became dappled with memories. Todd and her at college, struggling to date, struggling to emerge sexually. Christine, her onetime partner. And the family—Zeb, the son she had long ago given up for adoption, and his baby—she had so recently rediscovered.

“Go up to the side of the house,” he ordered.

Janice looked for a path, but it was gone, long sunk beneath a sea of daylilies, all of which were now blooming orange and yellow. Certainly once a nice, cherished perennial patch, the lilies had gone mad, Janice now saw, taking over not only the path but the yard, flooding everything and encircling the house, which, like an ark, barely floated above it all. Wading through the sea of green leaves and colorful flowers, winding around a fallen elm, she glanced over, saw the remains of a bicycle, strands of green lilies poking and pushing through every spoke. And a couple of those old metal lawn chairs, the seats rusted and crumbling, shoots of yellow flowers poking through. Mosquitoes too. This was Minnesota. This was summer. It was as hot and humid as hell. And as the two of them traversed this bizarre sea, swarms of blood-hungry mosquitoes swirled up and around them. Janice ducked to the right, rubbed her cheek on her shoulder, got one off. But with her hands strapped behind her back, she could do nothing about the two or three on her forehead or the handful feasting on her neck. She squirmed and twisted, hurried her pace, realized what she was running toward, but didn't care.

A sharp noise cracked, not something dulled with distance, but something close and definitive. No question, they were going to get dumped on.

“Hurry up!” he shouted. “Go to that side door.”

Emerging from the daylilies, Janice clambered up the slope and approached the house, then stopped at three wooden steps that led to the porch. Her heart thumping, she realized she was a fool to go any farther.

“Move it!”

A tornadic gust of wind whirled out of the fields and around the edge of the house, blasting them. Sweat swelling from every fiber of his wool ski mask, her captor gazed toward the death-star clouds that were descending upon them, then turned and grabbed Janice.

“Go on!” he said, jabbing her in the ribs with his gun.

Janice climbed the half-rotted steps, circled a hole in the porch floor. The screen door was half torn off, the rusty screen curled and hanging, and the main door shut.

Janice's heart gurgled into her throat and she stopped. Don't go in there. Her mind started leaping ahead, maniacally leaping from scenario to scenario. Just how was he going to do this? And how much time did she have? Was he going to kill her now, outright? Or would he wait until Todd was here?

Think!

Her hands felt numb, and she wiggled her sweaty wrists, the plastic packing tape crinkling. The noise of it flashed her back not simply to the last time she moved and had packed countless boxes of crap, but to just last month when she'd put together one very special package of gifts and silly things for Zeb and the baby in New Mexico. This shit, this tape, was stronger than hell, for sure. But it did have an Achilles' heel: As untearable and indestructible as it seemed, one little chink on the side and it ripped as easy as sandwich wrap. Sure. She hadn't been able to find her scissors when she'd fixed the package and hence had been forced to break the tape simply—and easily—with her teeth.

He shoved past her to the door, and Janice stepped back. Her bound hands collided with the rusted, torn screen, and she seized the chance, desperately trying to saw the fine metal wires against the tape. As she stood staring at him, watching as he kicked in the door, she lifted and lowered her hands behind her back. The screen, though, was much too fine and therefore much too weak, simply not strong enough to take a bite out of anything.

“Come on!”

He grabbed Janice by the arm, shoved her into the house. Stumbling across the threshold, she entered some sort of dark hall. She glanced to the left, saw a faded yellow kitchen with an old electric range—an aluminum coffeepot still perched on the back burner—then green plaid linoleum and a small wooden table with four chairs perfectly arranged around it. He pushed Janice to the right, next steered her into a living room. Her feet stirring up a lunar coating of dust, Janice quickly apprised the situation, seeing not a deserted space stripped of every and any sign of life, but a quaintly arranged—albeit grayed with dirt and spiderwebs—collection of furniture. An ancient brown davenport sat in front of one window, in front of that a coffee table replete with a large glass ashtray, then two armchairs to the side, both with tidy little doilies on the backs. But there was something even more bizarre than a well-furnished house that looked as if it hadn't been inhabited for twenty or thirty years: a tangle of vines. Her eyes quickly flashed to the broken windows, saw that the vines, like the day-lilies, had gone mad, crawling inside and climbing not only up the legs and arms of the furniture, but slithering up the walls and across the ceiling, from which they hung here and there. Even a standing lamp had been gobbled up and stood encrusted and strangled with the snake-like plant. Studying this bizarre time capsule of life on the farm, Janice surmised that someone's grandfather or grandmother—the last of a family who'd tended the land for generations—had died, and the kids, who'd surely escaped to the city, perhaps the coasts, hadn't come back for anything, not a single stick of memory, perhaps not even the funeral. They'd just put the family homestead on the market, had a lawyer handle it all, hired someone else to straighten up and dump the clothes—unless they, too, were still packed in drawers upstairs—and sold the old place. But the new owners hadn't wanted the house. No, they'd only been after the rich soil that was so capable of producing bushels and bushels and bushels of corn.

But there was nothing, Janice realized, surveying the soft, lumpy, upholstered furniture, on which to even nick the tape.

Wait.

She saw it.

Two springs.

They were poking out of the davenport, right out of the corner of it. Not a couch or a fancy city sofa, it was a true midwestern davenport, the likes of which no farm would be without, for it could be converted into a bed. After all, before the days of cars and highways, guests didn't just come for dinner and then bop on home. They stayed the night. And then there was family that came from afar for Thanksgiving. Christmas as well. And when there was a blizzard, friends and family, even strangers, stayed and stayed. Or when a barn was raised, the old auntie or widowed granny would come to help with the cooking. And this was where they slept, on this old rotting piece of furniture.