Rob Cornell - Ridley Brone 02 - The Hustle (15 page)

His jaw jutted as he clamped his teeth. A crazy thought crossed my mind upon seeing the shadow pass over his face—
He looks like a killer.
“Because what I did to Amanda? It’s Warren’s fault.”

Eddie laid it out for me. He gave me all the details and I didn’t stop him.

The night in question, Eddie rode his motor scooter home from a friend’s house. The spring had only just started, but on this night the humidity left the taste of the coming summer on every breath. His parents weren’t home and he was looking forward to a solid few hours of Nintendo. A junior in high school and his parents still treated him like a middle school kid, rationing his time playing video games and watching TV. They’d probably flip if they knew Amanda had given him a hand job. Not a full one. Just enough to get him so riled up that it felt like his balls were choking.

He didn’t think of Amanda that way, though. Not all the time anyway. He was only seventeen—which, according to Frank Sinatra, was a very good year—but he was pretty sure he was falling in love. He could see himself in ten years, married to her. Maybe even having kids. Okay, gross. No kids. But if she wanted them, he knew he’d give in. He would give her anything she wanted if he could.

He pulled his scooter into the garage and locked the side door on his way out. Crickets chirped like a hundred pairs of squeaky shoes. Despite the humidity, a cool breeze curled around him and carried the smell of damp grass from the rain shower that afternoon. Smells like that were what made spring his favorite time of year. He resented today’s intrusion of summer’s humidity.

After his pause in the backyard, he headed inside. The back door led straight into the kitchen. All the lights were out in the house, which was strange. Whenever his parents went out and didn’t plan on returning until after dark, they left the lights on. While the night still carried dusk’s powdery orange light, shadows sat perched like gremlins on the kitchen counter below the cabinets, crouched under the kitchen table, dangled from the shelves where Mom displayed her collector plates featuring Normal Rockwell reproductions and a few odes to the King, Elvis Presley.

A shiver tiptoed up his spine. He grunted at his fear. What a big baby, afraid of the dark. Easy solution, he slapped the light switch by the entry.

The lights stayed out.

That was weird. He backed out the door and checked the neighbors’ houses. Both had windows illuminated from inside. So it wasn’t a power outage. A blown fuse then?

He crept back into the kitchen, leaving the door open behind him. This let in a crew of mosquitoes that followed Eddie into the family room and down the hall to the basement door. The winged bloodsuckers swirled around his head like the planes around King Kong on the Empire State Building. Eddie had watched that movie with his dad only a few days before. Dad loved old movies, and he loved sharing that passion with Eddie. Lucky for Eddie, Dad’s tastes leaned toward the dark edge—old Hitchcock,
Dracula
, any flick with a mummy or werewolf. Mom liked old movies, too. But she liked musicals with some tap-dancing guy who always seemed to play the same character in every movie.

Feeling a little shaky about going into the basement without any lights, he hesitated after opening the door to the stairwell. The musty smell that always reminded Eddie of the days he used to play down there wafted out at him. A mosquito
weeeeened
in his ear. He smacked at it, but the insect dodged easily.

The smell reminded Eddie of something else. Amanda’s basement, even though it was finished with carpet and paneling on the walls, had a touch of that smell. He and Amanda spent a lot of time in her basement. He was supposed to see her again tomorrow. He hoped she didn’t want to go out to the mall or a movie. He’d rather put a movie on her downstairs TV and not watch it while they made out. But he wouldn’t push the issue. He didn’t want to come across as a perv that only wanted her for one thing.

Thinking about Amanda calmed his nerves. He shook his head at himself. Imagine what she would think if she saw how scared he was to go into the basement. But even if he
was
scared, he wasn’t an idiot. He went back to the kitchen and picked out a flashlight from the pantry. Flashlight on, he returned to the stairwell and descended.

Shadows curled like smoke around the beam of light. The eerie effect made the back of his neck tickle. He scratched at the ticklish spot, but the sensation came from below the skin. One of those damn mosquitoes buzzed him again. He swatted reflexively, knowing it wouldn’t do any good.

He reached the bottom of the stairs. Only a few narrow windows along the tops of the basement walls let in the remnants of dusk light. Beyond that feeble reach, darkness turned the contents of the basement into shadow puppets, their forms obscure but still decipherable by their shape. He swung the flashlight beam in a slow arc to get his bearings. There was Dad’s workbench and the pegboard on the wall above it, tools all neatly hung from the pegs. Mom’s old sewing machine parked in a corner, a layer of dust so thick on the machine it looked furry. Eddie’s old toy box, now his little brother’s, filled with a mix of hand-me-down toys and fresh from the
K-Mart
toy aisle toys. A few of those toys lay scattered on the floor as if the toy box had gagged on too many action figures and thrown up.

Then the light found the fuse box. The thin metal door hung open, exposing the switches inside that looked like crooked black teeth. He wasn’t sure if Dad had left the box open like that. Eddie never paid much attention to things like fuse boxes. Seemed strange to leave it open. They didn’t blow fuses very often. There were a million different explanations, the most likely that Dad had simply failed to close the box the last time he needed to get in there.

The dark has a way of fueling the imagination, though. His mind skittered across all manner of impossible scenarios:

A serial killer had broken into the house, switched off the power, and now hid, waiting, in the shadows. No, wait—

A burglar had slipped through an unlatched window and ran downstairs when he heard Eddie come inside. He cut the power so he could escape, unseen, through the darkness. No, that’s not right—

Eddie choked off his overactive—and completely irrational—imagination. Starve it with reason, and it had no chance. With the pieces of horror and thriller movies strained out of his thoughts, he returned to his original theory. Dad had just left the stupid door open.

He swiped the beam through the basement once more.
See? No crouching beasts or crazed psychopaths waiting to get you. Get over there and get the lights back on.

Cutting a path with the flashlight beam, he crossed the basement and examined the double rows of switches. None of them had snapped to the off position like he thought they were supposed to when a fuse blew. The stickers on either side of the switches labeling each with a location in the house made him think of something else strange. When a fuse blew, didn’t it only affect one section of the house? Not the whole house?

He lifted the light a few inches, illuminating the main switch in the box.

Switched off.

Which meant…? What? That it had been switched off by hand?

Cold waved through his body. His hand shook when he lifted it to turn the switch back. The switch’s resistance was stronger than he thought it would be. He had to put some effort behind flipping it.

Finally it snapped home.

The basement remained dark, which in any other circumstance would not have carried the relief it did that night. Then he noticed the low hum. A sound he recognized, but forgot about in its absence. He turned the beam around and highlighted the squat box freezer tucked in under the hollow made by the staircase.

Well, duh. He hadn’t bothered turning on the basement lights before he came down because they wouldn’t have worked anyway. That’s why they hadn’t come on. But the freezer. That was plugged in. That had fallen silent until Eddie had flipped the switch.

More cold sidled through him as if he had climbed into the freezer.

He shook himself, trying to exorcise the chill without success.

He didn’t know what to think. All the crazy ideas he’d had a moment ago suddenly held a whiff of possibility. Maybe not a knife-wielding psycho, but could have been a burglar. Maybe armed. If that were the case, what was the best strategy?

A burglar would want to get out of the house unseen. So Eddie’s best course of action was basically no course of action. Stay down in the basement, give the intruder time to leave.

He backed up beside the workbench and swiped a hammer off the pegboard. Then he switched off the flashlight and waited. Listened. The freezer continued its old-man groan. A tick and crack sound came from above which quickened Eddie’s heartbeat even as he realized it was only the house settling. When he was little, he had asked his dad about that occasional noise. Eddie had been worried little trolls or something worse lived in the walls. Dad had explained it—no trolls—but it hadn’t totally eradicated his fears. Even now, some of that childhood fright worked its way back from the past.

The next sound he heard had nothing to do with the house relaxing its bones. Footsteps, right at the top of the stairs.

His throat tied into a knot. He gripped the hammer’s handle a little tighter, sweat oozing between his fingers. A wet sensation at the back of his shorts was followed by a rotten smell. His nervous stomach had forced some bad gas out the tailpipe.

Then the footsteps creaked their way down the stairs.

Eddie had no idea where his life was headed, but he knew one thing for sure—this was no burglar trying to escape. It was someone after him. He bit back a whimper. Amanda’s face wavered up in his mind’s eye. He wondered if he would see her again. An instinct from a primal place Eddie had never touched until now told him he probably would not.

He clenched his hands hard around the hammer and flashlight, the flashlight’s plastic casing creaking at the pressure. A cord of heat strung through his body’s chill. He lifted the hammer.
Let him come. I’ll kill him.

Tough thoughts, but Eddie had never faced off in a fair fight. There was no pushing this intruder down the stairs.

Wait. Could the intruder be Warren, taking his turn in their back-and-forth game of vengeance? It seemed more likely than any other possibility. He thought about the knife Warren had put to his throat the day he broke Eddie’s arm.

I should fucking kill you
, he had said.
If you fuck with me ever again, I will.

But Eddie hadn’t fucked with him. Hunter had. Warren wouldn’t see it that way, though. If Eddie wanted to get out of this unscathed, he had to stop cowering and fight for himself.

As the slow footsteps continued their way down the stairs, Eddie snuck to the staircase and crouched underneath, next to the freezer. He tested the weight of the hammer in his right hand. He positioned his thumb on the flashlight’s button. He waited.

The intruder stepped off the end of the staircase, the soles of his shoes softly tapping the concrete floor.

Eddie licked his lips, muscles wound like the spring in the barrel of his little brother’s toy dart gun. He strained to hear the soft pad of the intruder’s steps as he came around the staircase into the basement. Dusk had given way to night by this point, thickening the dark. But Eddie’s eyes had adjusted with the dying light. He could see the intruder’s form as he walked past.

Eddie hesitated at the last second, wondering if he could carry out the violence he planned to meet. If he didn’t, equal or greater violence would crash over him like a steel tidal wave. In this second he had a choice to make. He made it.

The dark shape of the intruder crept deeper into the basement, giving Eddie his back. Eddie launched himself out from under the stairs. The intruder heard the movement and turned. Eddie lifted the flashlight and mashed the button with his thumb. Light stabbed the intruder in the face. He threw his hands up to protect his eyes.

The time for hesitation had ended, so Eddie swung the hammer at the same time he turned on the light. When Eddie recognized the face in the light it was too late to alter the hammer’s trajectory. The business end of the hammer struck the intruder at the temple. On impact, Eddie heard a sickening mix of cracking skull and squishing brain.

He shouted, releasing the hammer, dropping the flashlight, scuffling away. A second later came the
whump
of the intruder’s body hitting the concrete floor accompanied by another squishy crackle that reminded Eddie of an egg dropped from its carton.

The flashlight clattered to the floor and spun, the light strobing, offering glimpses of the fallen body on the floor, eventually slowing like a roulette wheel until the beam stopped just right, casting light across the intruder’s face.

Eddie staggered away, sobbing. He wanted to close his eyes or look away, but he couldn’t keep from staring at that face. A face he knew. A face that didn’t belong here. A face that did not belong to Warren.

An acid taste washed over the back of Eddie’s tongue. He forced himself to move toward the body—