Psycho Save Us (57 page)

And he didn’t
deny it.  “I do.  Talkin’ helps me think.”  He tapped his temple with two
fingers, then snapped his fingers.  “Keeps me sharp.  But let’s get back to you
guys an’ what you’re gonna do after all o’ this is over.”

“No,” Kaley
said, raising her voice.  “No!  I’m sick of this!  I’m sick of your…your…your
gloating
! 
My sister needs to get to a hospital, and…and…we’ve fucking endured
enough
for one night!  We know you don’t care about anybody but yourself, and that
you’re so fucking smart and that you did all this and still didn’t get caught! 
You must be so fucking proud!  We’re happy for you!  Now,” she screamed, tears
letting loose, “
LET US OUT!
”

The car fell
silent.  Shannon squeezed Big Sister’s hand harder, if that was possible.

In the driver’s
seat, the Monster was unmoved.  Spencer checked his driver’s side mirror,
switched on his blinker, and merged left.  He drove them another block,
checking the blood leaking out the side of his face.  He spat out the window. 
Then, finally, he said, “We’re all in this together, ya know?”  He sounded
different now.  Kaley couldn’t quite say how, but he was a little less…cocky? 
“Monsters, saints, innocents, psychopaths and telempaths.  This is the dance we
do.  The dance macabre.”

Kaley felt a
lurching inside her gut.  She felt nauseous, exactly like she had in the
basement, exactly as she had when she used to get vertigo.  Then, she realized
it was only because they were slowing down.

Kaley looked out
the windows all around her.  The car had stopped in the middle of an empty
street.  There were no cars parked on the sidewalks, no people walking, no
stores opened.  The street was somewhat familiar.  She believed it was Vernon
Street, but she couldn’t be sure.  “What’re we doing here?” she said.

“What does it
look like?” he asked.  “And remember our bet.  If it turns out a police officer
was involved with the Rainbow Room, then I’ll be back in a few years to collect
my money.”

“What if I don’t
have that much money?” she asked, stalling and she didn’t know why.

“I’m sure you’ll
find a way to raise it.”

“What if you end
up in jail?  They’ll catch you sooner or later, you know.”

Spencer
shrugged, as if to say
maybe
.  “It’ll be kinda hard.  I won’t be in this
country much longer.  I’ve got a date with the rest o’ Dmitry’s family.”

The hairs stood
up on the back of Kaley’s neck.  “What do you mean?”

He smiled. 
“Genghis Khan said somethin’ else.  ‘The greatest happiness is to scatter yer
enemy, to drive him before you, to see those who loved him shrouded in tears,
an’ to gather into your bosom his wives and daughters.’  Dmitry said he had
daughters.”

“You’re…you’re
going after
them
?”

Again, he
shrugged a maybe.

She looked out
the windows again.  “And you’re just going to let us go now?”

Spencer said
nothing.

Kaley had felt
hope rise and fall tonight, had been denied it, and now believed that if she
moved, the monster might turn and kill her and her sister. 
It could be a
trick
, she thought. 
He can’t trust us not to talk
.  The fire that
she had felt just seconds before left her.  She felt depleted again.

And the Monster
knew why.  “It’s called learned helplessness,” he said.  “A puppy gets held
inside its cage for a year.  It sees other puppies running freely, playin’ an’
havin’ fun.  Then one day you open that cage an’ let the puppy out, but when it
takes a couple o’ steps you give it a shock with a stun gun or a shock collar. 
Next time ya open that cage, that puppy won’t come out.  For the rest of its
life, it’ll stay in that cage.  It learned that it’s hopeless, that to even
try
to escape will bring pain.”  He looked at her in the rearview.  “You scared,
puppy?”  Kaley said nothing.  She felt her knees shaking.  Spencer smiled. 
“Yeah,” he laughed.  “Yeah, you’re scared.”

Then, Kaley
thought of Olga…and Mikhael…and Dmitry.  She had kindling then, and burned them
in her heart.  “
Fuck you!
” she growled, and tore open the door and
dragged her sister out onto the silent street.  The Grand Prix squealed off
before her sister’s feet had even hit the ground, and she heard the mad
laughter until the car disappeared around the corner.

And she would
hear it every night for the rest of her life.

Kaley helped
Shan to her feet.  Shan was sniffling and quivering, but as soon as she stood
up she wrapped her arms around Big Sister and squeezed.  Kaley could barely
breathe, and didn’t care.  They both fell to their knees, crying.  The Anchor
rooted them to that spot.  Relief swelled in their veins, baptized them and,
for a moment in time, they had each other and nothing else.  No pain.  No past
or future conflicts.  And, most importantly, no fear.

Kaley was the
first to pry them apart.  “C’mon,” she said, wiping Shannon’s eyes and nose
while Shannon wiped hers.

They got to
their feet and staggered down one street after the next.  Signs seemed to pass
them
. 
Jerry’s Car Titles & Loans.  Ray’s Auto.  Fancy Eats.  Cynthia’s Furniture
Store.  Kaley stopped at each of these, slamming her hand on the windows to see
if anyone was working there.  The sun wasn’t up yet, but the sky had gone from
pure-black to navy-blue.  The clouds were parted, and tearing off in different
directions.

Kaley rattled
the cage doors of each store, and cupped her hands to look in through the
windows.  She grabbed Shannon’s hand and pulled her on.  Her little sister’s
pants were soaked with blood, and Kaley had almost asked the question before
Shan said, “I’m okay, Kaley.”  These words sounded more mature somehow, not
quite so tiny.  Kaley didn’t know it yet, but those exact words would be
repeated back to her by Little Sister for the rest of her life, through many discussions. 
“I’m okay, Kaley,” she would say whenever Big Sister gave her a call in the
middle of the night for no reason.  “Really, I’m okay.  Are
you
okay?”

And that was the
question, wasn’t it?  Despite being so young—or perhaps because of it?—Shannon seemed
to be taking what had happened to her better than Kaley was.  What had scared
Shan the most was the house, and everything about it.  She’d been mostly
unconscious throughout the entire ordeal, yet still she had experienced it
somehow.  Tectonic plates had shifted, ruptured even, causing a serious
realignment of Shannon’s person.  Kaley would eventually theorize that she
hadn’t just empathized with her sister throughout the ordeal, but that she had
actually
absorbed
some of her sister’s pain, like a sponge. 
I am my
sister’s keeper
, she would come to think, and often. 
I bared the burden
to lighten her load
.

The house.

The memory came
back to her, rattling her.  It…it wasn’t so much what she’d
seen
as what
it all implied.  If the Monster was correct, then hell and punishment had no
aim, no direction, and there was no “prime directive” of heaven.  Some powerful
being had made the universe, perhaps as an afterthought, an offshoot of some
other experiment, and then had walked away from it without giving it a second
thought.

What if he’s not
even aware that we’re here?
Kaley pondered, even as she pulled her sister
farther down the street. 
What if it’s, like
…
like when you make some
clay jar for your mother in second-grade art class
. 
It sits on the
shelf a year or two, maybe you’re proud of it, but eventually
…

“Eventually
everyone forgets about it,” she said to herself.  The clay jar is not just
misplaced, it’s
forgotten
.  It’s as though the clay jar never was.  If
it falls in a garbage dump and gets shattered, who knows that it needs fixing? 
What’s worse, who
cares
?  The universe was a happenstance, a side alley
to other things, a—what had the monster called it?—a Forgotten Place.  Like
Avery Street, a place left unchecked, and now occupied by whoever took
advantage first.

Aunt Tabby, you
were both right and wrong
. 
There is a god, but he doesn’t even know about
us
. 
He’s moved on
.

“And so should
we,” she whispered.  Beside her, Shan looked at her.  She squeezed Big Sister’s
hand, this time to give reassurance, not to get it.

All at once,
Kaley knew where this thinking was coming from.  It was her brief but intense
shared link with the Monster.  Some of him had spilled over.  She hadn’t kept
all his skills at lock picking, but she had retained something.  Something in
his character was imprinted onto her, absorbed, just as she’d absorbed some of
Shan.  Something…pensive.

“Kaley?” Shannon
said.  “I think I hear a car coming.”

Headlights
coming around the corner up ahead.  The motor was getting louder.  Kaley and
Shan stood alone on the sidewalk.  She touched grabbed her sister’s hand and
pulled her close to a lamppost and a pair of newspaper stands.  They huddled
there, watched it drive past.  After it was gone, Kaley realized that the Monster
had been right.  She would never trust another car again.  Not another night. 
Not another stranger.  Not another person who looked even remotely like the Oni
family.

They plodded on,
through the streets, through their lives, searching for someone who cared, for
someone who could be trusted, for someone they could love.

The icepack was
laid across his face, and Leon accepted it gratefully.  He lay on his
stretcher, looking across to the body of Agent Porter, who was DOA when the medics
got there.  A white blanket was laid over his upper torso and head, his hands
at his side, and one of the officers saying a prayer over him.

The oxygen mask
was placed over his face, and he began to breathe.  “Detective?” someone was
saying.  “Detective, can you hear me?  Give me a thumbs up if you can—good. 
Very good.  All right, let’s load him up.”

Someone grabbed
one of his hands.  “Yo, Leon!”  It was McDevitt.  His partner Keitrich had been
taken away, but whether he was alive or dead or simply dying, Leon didn’t
know.  “Yo, man, you’re gonna be all right.  Hear me?  You’re—”

“David,”
he said.  “David went…to the house…”

“We’ll find him,
man.  Don’t you worry about that, all right?  You just focus on you right now.”

“Find him…find
David…”

His stomach
growled.

The time on the
dashboard read 6:02
AM
when he rolled
onto Blankenship Avenue, then down Donald L. Hollowell Parkway from the north. 
This one took him to another street that looked familiar.  There was a closed
car wash, two small grocery stores, and a car title pawn shop called Strike
Gold. 
Whattaya know?  Beltway Street, my ol’ friend, we meet again
.

Not a mile down
the road, there was the flashing sign, missing its letters:
D ds n’s St  e
.

Spencer didn’t
know where else to go at the moment.  He cut a few more pieces of cloth to
absorb the blood, which was still pushing out but with less intensity than
before.  The strips of cloth he’d used earlier had soaked completely through. 
He’d read somewhere that you should never remove the old blood-soaked bandages,
rather you should add new ones to the top of the old ones, to keep damming the
flow.

Spencer had been
considering Dmitry’s last words.  He already didn’t really trust his eyes with
all he’d seen, and wondered where Derbent was on a map.  He didn’t think he’d
ever heard of it.  He supposed he could get a smartphone from Hector in Memphis
and look it up on the Internet.

He pulled the
Grand Prix to a stop right in front of Dodson’s Store, and hopped out.  The sky
was lightening.  Morning was come.  The street was completely empty. 
Not a
creature was stirring
, Spencer thought,
not even a mouse
.  He
smiled, and that was a mistake.  It hurt, and more blood flowed out of his
face.  He checked himself in the mirror.  He was turning pale.  If he didn’t
find some blood clot soon and someone to stitch him, he could be in serious
trouble.  Luckily, he knew a guy outside of Atlanta, and Hector up in Memphis. 
The two of them ought to be able to hide him for a time.  It meant leaving
behind Pat and the job he’d been given, but things were too hot for him to stay
here now.

His stomach
growled. 
But first, a fucker’s gotta eat
, he thought, stepping out of
the car.  He spat a gob of blood onto the pavement.  When he stepped inside
Dodson’s, the chime over the door jingled.  The music now playing wasn’t
Akon’s, but Nicki Minaj, telling the world that if she got a certain look from
a man then her panties were coming off.  He tapped his feet to the beat for a
minute.

“What…the…?”

Spencer glanced
over to the counter.  “S’up, Mac?” he said.  The big man was standing behind
the counter, his little TV showing
Star Wars
.  By the look of it, it was
that first disaster,
The Phantom Menace
.  Mac was still wearing his Falcons
jersey, and still as fat Spencer remembered.