The 13th (10 page)

The ride would have been nice, a distant part of her cried. But the rest of her just focused on walking. And singing a little song to keep her going. She didn’t really know the words so she just hummed until she got to the chorus. “Because hell, hell is for children,” she whispered in a voice that disappeared like smoke on a bitter wind.

Sometimes the scenery got old. Sometimes being a cyclist felt terminal. In the best of times, the feeling of the summer breeze slipping down the back of his neck to riffle through his shirt, cooling the sweat and pushing him on toward a new track record…or just an enjoyable training sprint, made him feel good to be alive.

But other times, like today, David cursed himself for ever involving himself in the sport. He gasped with every press of his foot to the pedal, struggling to keep the bike in motion as he pumped his way up the steepest curve on the 190 just a mile or so outside of town.
This is what chain gangs feel like,
he thought, imagining the whip coming down on his
back to force him to one more effort. He wondered if he’d ever really get the feeling back again. When he’d first started out, almost every ride was magic, a secret place where he went in full view. It was him against gravity, and he sometimes felt at one with the machine he rode as he struggled to escape the chains of physics.

But ever since he’d washed out of the Olympic team, riding had felt different. Truth be told, it had felt different before then, which was maybe why he’d faltered on that last important ride. He hadn’t gotten into riding to win, he’d gotten into it to ride.

But it didn’t feel like riding right now…it felt like he was being punished. The bike finally reached the top of the ridge, and David stifled the urge to leap from the bike and lie down on the gravel at the side of the road. “C’mon, man,” he prodded himself. “This is the payoff.”

Because with that, he spurred the pedals a couple more times and then pulled his feet back, letting the wheels have their head. The bike careened down the long, winding road, which thankfully remained empty of traffic. He kicked his feet into it a couple times, increasing the breakneck speed until the air whistled in his ears. The rush almost felt like the old days, and he took a couple of deep breaths as he let the bike go.

The turnoff for the asylum was just ahead, and David had set that as his training mark point. It was ten miles from here back to town, so a twenty-mile round trip. Not a lot of miles, but when the hills are steep, it was a solid workout; better than any you’d get at the gym.

He skidded to a stop at the front of the asylum entry road and paused. There was a sign at the front of the drive that hadn’t been there the other day.

OUTDOOR HANDYMAN WANTED
.

CUT GRASS, TRIM BUSHES, PAINT
.

1-2
DAYS PER WEEK
.

SUMMER ONLY. INQUIRE WITHIN
.

“Hmmm,” David mused aloud. “I could use some pocket cash. And I’m already riding out this way every day. Some more exercise could only help the training…”

He punched foot to pedal and rode in toward the asylum.

“Chief, we need to get a warrant for the asylum.”

Christy shook her head, paced across the room and tried it another way.

“Chief, you were right. That Dr. Rockford is dirty. We need to do a bust on the asylum.”

No, that isn’t right either,
she thought.

“You know, whatever you’ve got to tell him, it’ll be easier if you just go in and get it over with. He doesn’t bite, not usually. And anyway, you’re making me dizzy pacing back and forth like that.”

“Sorry, Matt. I know I’m being ridiculous, but after the screwup last time…I just want to do this right.”

“Go in and just say what’s on your mind,” Captain Ryan suggested. “I find that always works best.”

“You’re right,” she agreed, and took a deep breath.

Chief Maitlin was hidden behind a tall newspaper front page, and Christy stood in the doorway for several seconds waiting to gain his attention. Finally she cleared her throat and he jumped, just a hair. Well, really the newspaper jumped…Chief wasn’t the type to move much. The newspaper slowly lowered to the desk and two scowling eyes met her own.

“Aren’t you supposed to be on the street?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “But Chief, I’ve gotta talk to you about the asylum. I think that you were…”

Just then the phone rang and he put up a hand as he answered it. “Castle Point PD. Yeah. Yeah. When? Okay. Yes, yes we’ll send somebody. Don’t do anything until we get there.”

With a groan he eased his bulk from the chair as he dropped the phone back in its cradle. He stepped right past Christy but motioned for her to follow.

“C’mon, you can tell me on the way. There’s a nutcase from your mental hospital walking around on Main,” he said.

“Chief, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” she said. “They’re not nut jobs.”

“Well, this one’s wandering around wearing nothing but a robe and a bandage on her head in the middle of the day. I’d call that a little left of center, wouldn’t you?”

“Not if you’ve been kidnapped by a Dr. Frankenstein,” Christy shot back. “Chief, we have to help her. We have to help
all
of them.”

He opened the door to the back parking lot to let her through and pointed to his cruiser. “Get in. And let’s hear it. Let’s hear it quickly.”

As he eased the car out of the lot, she told him about staking out the asylum the night before. He flinched when she talked about using her key to gain entrance to the back of the old hotel, but didn’t say anything. When she was done, he still stayed silent. Christy felt her stomach turning to ice as she awaited his verdict. But then he was pulling over just outside of Smythe’s Grocery, and as he put the car in park, said only, “We’ll talk back at the station.”

Then he was pulling himself out of the car, and Christy followed, noting the small crowd of people standing just a few yards away. She saw a white-clad figure in the middle of the throng, and groaned
as they reached the people. She knew who it was. She’d stared at the woman’s sleeping face the night before. Hell, she’d used finger snaps to try to wake her. It was Carrie Sanddanz. And she looked awful. The bandage around her head was stained a brownish red in back, and her eyes looked wild and unfocused. The group of people contained her as the woman walked back and forth, trying in vain to find an exit. She was barefoot, and Christy could see the stains of dried blood between her toes.

“Chief,” she whispered. “I saw her last night. She walked all this way barefoot?”

“And wounded,” he said. “Help me get her into the squad.”

“All right,” he called and broke into the circle. “Let us get this woman some help.”

An older man clapped the chief on the shoulder. “Thanks for coming so quick, Chief. I saw her walking down the side of the road out here when I pulled into the lot to open the store, and knew something was wrong.”

The chief nodded. “I’m guessing she’s from the new asylum outside of town.”

“Well, something for sure’s not right with her.” The man shook his head so fast his jowls wagged. “She ain’t said a word since the bunch of us came over here to try to talk to her. We thought we should try to keep her from walking anymore, but she wouldn’t go inside the store.”

Christy took the woman’s arm near the elbow. It felt thin and cold. The pale, naked skin of Carrie’s back and butt was exposed for all to see through the loosely tied gown, but the poor woman didn’t seem to notice her indecency. “C’mon, hon,” Christy said softly. “We’re going to get you some help.”

Just then, a black car pulled up in the supermar
ket parking lot and came to a stop right next to the group. Two doors popped open instantly, and a man and woman got out and ran to the woman. “There you are, Carrie,” Dr. Rockford said, pushing his way into the mob of people to take the woman’s arm as Christy still held the other. “We’ve been looking all over for you.”

The doctor surveyed the group of people and nodded perfunctorily at them, including the police. “Thank you for trying to help,” he said. “We’ll take it from here.”

Rockford started to pull Carrie away, and his nurse reached out to take Carrie’s arm away from Christy. But the chief set a beefy hand over Rockford’s arm. “Just a minute,” he said. “Who are you, and what makes you think you can waltz in and take this woman out of my custody?”

The doctor’s eyes widened, and then he gave an “aww shucks” grin and apologized. “I’m sorry, Officer,” he said. “I should have told you right away. My name is Dr. Rockford, from the Castle House Asylum down on 190. Your officer here—Christy, is it?—came out to visit us just the other day. She can vouch for me, isn’t that right?”

He looked at Christy, who nodded, but still didn’t release the woman’s arm. Carrie only stood still, eyes blinking in disorientation. She looked as if she’d simply fold up and collapse at any moment.

“Carrie is one of our patients,” the doctor continued. “Somehow she got out last night, and after we searched the grounds, we came looking for her in town. We need to get her back in her bed and on her medications. Please help us to help her.”

The chief released his hold on the doctor, but didn’t break his gaze. “I’m a little concerned about your security, Doctor. I don’t want to start seeing a
parade of mental patients roaming around this town—both for their sakes, and for the safety of my people.”

The doctor nodded. “It won’t happen again. We’re going to change our lockdown procedures today.”

Then he grinned at Christy, as he pulled the limp girl away from her grasp. “Nice to see you again, Officer Sorensen.”

In moments, they had stuffed the woman into the backseat of the sedan and pulled away, and the small crowd dispersed, murmuring among themselves a variety of anecdotes about crazy people.

“Chief,” Christy said finally when they were all out of earshot. “How could you let him take her?”

He shrugged, staring after the black car as it rounded the block to head out of town. “What grounds did I have to keep her? She’s hurt, and he’s a doctor.”

“But he is not helping her,” she insisted. “I don’t know what he’s doing to her, but it’s not about making her better.”

“We’re going to see about that,” he answered, and pointed at the car. “Let’s get back to the station. I think we need to have a short review of police procedure, Officer.”

She didn’t like the way he elongated the pronunciation, awwwww-ficer. “Yes, sir,” she answered, and hurried around the car. Christy didn’t think she’d ever had such a long drive back to the station. The chief could make five minutes feel like an hour when he was angry. And the car ride was only the start of it.

TG rolled the keg across the dirt to the steps of the mountain shack. As he muscled it up the steps and pushed it in through the bent aluminum screen door, he thought that there was maybe nothing better in this life than a cold beer. And anyone taking a cursory look at the kitchen would quickly grasp the depth of that infatuation.

Empty beer bottles sporting a variety of brand logos lined the faded yellow countertops, though they all shared one trait in common—a six-pack of any of them would set you back less than six dollars. A Budweiser beer light glowed bright red on one wall. TG and Billy had broken into a bar in Oak Falls after hours to get that light, and they were damn proud of it—kept it lit twenty-four/seven.

But the capper was the next stop for the new keg. TG had found an old beat-up refrigerator at the side of the road one day and drafted Billy into getting it onto the back of a pickup and up the hill. Then they gutted its insides and rerouted the ice water spigot line to a plastic hose. TG now tapped the keg, hefted it into that fridge and hooked up the hose to it. When he closed the door, he pulled a mug from the freezer and pushed it into the water spigot on the outer door of the unit. In seconds, the mug was full of frothing golden goodness.

Yeah…there was nothing better than a cold beer.

In fact, as he thought of that, he called out to Billy. Then he stomped fast on the floor and grinned as he ground the green guts of an inch-long cockroach into the stained white linoleum.

Billy called back from the other room. “In the middle of a game,” he complained.

“Nothing better than a cold beer, is there Billy?”

“How about a hot woman?” came the disembodied response.

TG scratched his balls at that and grunted. “Hmmm. Tough call,” he finally decided. “Be perfect if you could combine the two.”

There are times when you can almost see the thought balloon appear above somebody’s head, and if anyone had been standing in the run-down shack’s kitchen right then, they would have seen a big, electric neon sign pop into life above TG’s head. Truth be told, he was bored. He and Billy had spent the summer picking up chicks to deliver to the asylum, and while the first few had given him a rush—hell, be honest, a hard-on—he’d started to wonder what could come next. TG wasn’t the kinda guy who sat still.

Oh sure, he drank a lot of beer, and sat up here at the cabin day in, day out watching game shows on the tube and fast-forwarding through the slow parts of his porn collection. (He hated it when they tried to tack a plot onto the sex. “Show me the MILFs,” he’d complain.) But at night…TG always had a new game plan. Over the years he’d gone from robbing convenience stores while wearing a Bill Clinton mask to busting dope dealers while pretending to be a cop. He got away with some good cash AND a lotta weed on those gigs, until the word got out on the street about the false shakedowns. Billy and he had hot-wired cars, burned down buildings and forced housewives to strip naked and walk down
the center of the streets where they lived (a favorite ploy of TG’s for months running). It’s amazing what people will do when you hold a gun to their kids’ heads.

So when Dr. Rockford had come to them with the offer of kidnapping a few women and dropping them at the old hotel for a thousand a pop, TG hadn’t blinked. It was the job that was made for him…or he was made for the job, whatever. Point was, he didn’t do it just for the money. He enjoyed stalking the girls, watching that first glint of fear in their eyes when they realized that they were being snatched. When the first tears came, it was all he could do to keep it in his pants. And actually, on the last run, he hadn’t bothered to, had he?

Of course that had led to one pissed-off employer. But he didn’t care too much anymore. He’d gotten all the kicks he could out of kidnapping, and now he needed a little more. It’d felt good knocking in that split tail’s skull a few days ago. Maybe it was time to hire out as a hit man. Hell, he’d done just about everything else. You could get real creative in how you disposed of a body. And TG even had an old meat grinder tucked away in the back of the shed, something he’d nicked back when the grocery in Oak Falls was going under. Gave him a way to make all the iffy parts of the deer and cows they shot usable. ‘Cuz when you’re living on a mountain in a shack with virtually no cash, you don’t waste shit.

Now maybe, he could use the damn thing to get rid of the evidence. Knocking someone off had to pay better than kidnappin’, right? A couple bodies run through the grinder and then he and Billy could probably finally afford to open up that bar on the edge of town they’d been talking about since the first dope dealer they rolled. Had a good $15,000 in the bank at this point, but TG figured they needed
double that. And once they owned their own bar, they’d get the kegs for the fridge a lot cheaper, he speculated, pushing his glass to the door to fill it up again.

‘Cuz what was better than cold beer?

Billy poked his head around the corner, finally. “Doc called,” he said. “Wants us to do another run.”

“Pussy run?” TG laughed, tilting back the beer. “Did you tell him we’ll be happy to when he pays us for the last one?”

Billy shook his head. He didn’t smile. TG was getting worried about the boy. He always had had a bit of a stick up his ass, but he’d gotten into the game a lot more not so many months ago. These days, he never wanted to do anything off the charts. It was getting old.

“He asked what we did with the car and I told him. Then he said he’d pay us for that chick and the new one when we brought her in tonight.”

TG pulled a switchblade from his pocket, and thumbed it open. The blade slipped free with a thin swish. He poked the tip of the blade between his teeth and picked at something left over from lunch.

“Doc better not stiff us,” TG said. “I’m in a mood. And I don’t work for free.”

Billy shook his head. “He sounded all right,” he said. “But I gotta tell ya…I’m not feeling so good about doing this anymore. I mean, what’s he doing to those girls? What if he’s shooting ‘em full of weird chemicals and shit, like lab rats? He’s gotta be doing something to ‘em that makes sure they’re never coming out again.”

“Yeah, so what?” TG asked, now using the blade to make a thin paper-meets-brush sound as he scraped at the stubble beneath his chin.

“He’s gotta be killing those gals,” Billy said, his
voice rising an octave. “It’s like we’re ack-cess-tories to murder.”

TG shook his head. “You got a problem with that?” he asked. “You didn’t care when we rolled that pimp into a tarp of gasoline and set it on fire before we left the room.”

“That was different,” Billy whined. “That guy was bad news. These girls haven’t done nothin’.”

“Yeah, well I’m about ready to cut out the middle man and have some end-of-the-line fun with these bitches myself,” TG said. He held the blade out at arm’s length and then flipped it, smiling as it made a satisfying twang when it stuck in the dirty floor.

“Time for us to get serious about having some fun,” he said. “You ready to head up to Oak Falls and find us some?”

Billy’s eyes were downcast. “I guess.”

“You want to buy that bar or what?”

“I guess.”

“You’re really starting to piss me off, pansy ass,” TG said, retrieving the knife from the floor. The next twang it made was when it embedded in the wooden door frame a foot from Billy’s face.

“I’ll load the car,” Billy said.

Amelia jabbed the needle into Carrie’s arm and pushed the plunger down. She didn’t worry about the finer points of finding a vein, or making the pain minimal for the patient. This little vixen had caused them enough trouble, and she hoped the damn injection
did
hurt. Either way, Carrie was going to be sleeping soundly for the next twenty-four hours at least.

They were so close now to everything. Amelia could barely sleep at night. For years she had planned, hoped, dreamed of being where she was now. Finding Barry Rockford had been the ultimate
coup. Without him—without his connections and money—she could never have pulled this together on her own. And the fact that he was a world-renowned scientist—if a little tarnished—was perhaps the best piece of the pie. But here they were, just a few weeks from the moment that would change everything. Some had spent their entire lives waiting for such an opportunity. There were books on their experiments and failed attempts. Not books in wide circulation, obviously. But Amelia had read widely in places most had never dreamed to go.

There was a reason she had arrived at this moment. It was not an accident.

She closed the door on room twelve and walked the silent hallway slowly. No sound came from any of the patient rooms; she’d seen to that before they had left to pick Carrie up from town. It helped to have a police band scanner; that’s where Barry had first heard that Carrie was wandering around like a true loon in the middle of town. Thank God he had. Amelia had shot up the rest of the patients with a sedative so they wouldn’t add to the trouble and headed into town like a bat out of hell to reclaim their patient. Amelia liked to think of her as simply “Number Twelve.”

She opened the door to the basement and descended the wood plank steps feeling warmly pleased with herself. When she found Barry fiddling with a test tube at the far end of the cement-walled room, she placed her palms on either side of his face and wrapped her body around his from behind, pressing against him like a boa.

“Amelia,” he complained, but she only craned herself up to nibble at the lobe of his ear, breathing warmly against his neck.

“Now?” he said, his voice no longer sounding quite so annoyed. She didn’t answer, only slid one
hand between the buttons of his shirt to press cool nails against the hair of his chest. Her pelvis ground against his ass and she moaned, just a little, in his ear. That was all it took for Barry Rockford to lose his cool, and setting down the test tube in its stand, he turned to give Nurse Amelia his full attention.

Her lips were already flushed and full of wanting, and her eyes bored into his with an intensity that many would have found frightening. Rockford, however, found it sexy, and he wrapped an arm around her, crushing her thin body to him. She ripped open the front of his shirt, slipping her arms all the way around him to dig nails into the flesh of his back as she inhaled the subtle scent of him while burying lips to his chest.

Some would have called her a witch, but there were times that she preferred being the word that sounded similar.

“You’re a pushy bitch, aren’t you?” Barry whispered, slipping a hand down the back of her jeans.

“And you like it that way,” she answered. “Where would you be if you hadn’t found me? Still moping in a research lab, wishing you could keep doing the shit they wouldn’t let you do? With me, you can do whatever you want. And I won’t tell.”

She dragged him over to a bed against the opposite wall. A woman lay there beneath heavy white sheets, an IV bag hung at the head of the bed with tubing disappearing into her arm. Amelia held on to Barry with one arm, but with the other, she pulled down the sheets, exposing the naked breasts of the woman beneath. She took Barry’s hand and guided it to the unconscious woman’s chest, helping him massage the full, creamy breasts. She matched her thumb and forefinger to his and rolled the woman’s thick nipple between their fingers before turning to kiss him, tongue forceful between his lips.

He was out of breath when she pulled away, and she laughed at his excitement. “Without me, you’d still be a pawn,” she said. “Now, you’re a king. And when you’re a king”—she yanked the sheets off of the bed, exposing all of the woman—“you can do anything. What do you want to do, Barry?” she whispered, while pulling her shirt over her head, and unbuttoning her jeans. “What do you want to do?”

Then she lay down naked on the bed next to the unconscious woman and waited for his response. At the risk of a bad pun, it wasn’t long in coming.