Deeper Than The Dead (36 page)

“He should have more respect for you.”

“My record is spotless! Spotless! And that’s not going to count for a goddamn thing because I stopped that stupid little whore and gave her a speeding ticket!” he said. He looked stunned, shocked at the idea that something so meaningless could have such an impact on his life.

“I know, Frank. It’s not fair,” his mother murmured.

“Dixon took me off the investigation,” his father said to the whiskey in his glass. “Because of Dennis having that finger. And because I wrote that stupid slut a ticket. She was a whore. Bad things happen to whores.”

He turned and looked at Dennis’s mother. “Isn’t that right, Sharon?”

“Yes, Frank.”

“They have it coming.”

“Yes, Frank, you’re absolutely right.”

“And now you make me look bad. All because you can’t keep your stupid mouth shut.”

“I’m sorry, Frank. I was stupid. I didn’t think.”

“You never think.”

His mother was so stupid. His father was very proud of who he was. He was proud of being chief deputy. People respected him and looked up to him. His mother should have known better than to make him look bad.

His father poured more whiskey into his glass and sipped at it.

“‘Standard procedure,’” he muttered. “‘Don’t take it personally, Frank. It’s just standard op.’ ”

He pushed back from the table and got up to pace back and forth, his too-full glass in his hand. The whiskey sloshed out of it as he moved, spilling onto the hardwood floor.

“Standard operating procedure,” he said. “Fucking spic. I don’t want you
ever
talking to that fucking little prick again. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, Frank.” His mother’s voice was so soft and trembling so badly, it was hard to hear.

“What?” His father cupped a hand to his ear, sloshing more whiskey onto the floor. “I can’t hear you, you stupid fucking cow. Answer me so I can hear you!”

“Yes, Frank!”

“That little bastard is going to try to pin that murder on me. You wait and see,” he said. “Do you think I’m murderer?”

“No!” she said on a gasp, her eyes going round as she stared down at her plate.

“Look at me and say it,” he ordered. “Do you think I’m a murderer? Huh?
ANSWER
ME!”

She looked at him, shaking and afraid, tears streaming down her cheeks. “No!”

There must have been something about her face that wasn’t right, because Dennis’s father cursed and went to backhand her. He took a step toward her, stepping in the whiskey he had spilled. His foot slid out from under him, and he went down hard on the floor, banging his elbow and his head. His glass crashed and shattered.

“FUCK!
FUCK
,
FUCK
, FUCK!” he raged.

As he lifted his head, he looked straight into the kitchen—right at Dennis—and saw him plain as anything.

“What are doing in there?” his father snapped, struggling awkwardly to get to his hands and knees. He never took his laser gaze off Dennis. Dennis seemed frozen to the spot.

“What the fuck are you doing in there?”

“N-n-n-nothing.”

“Are you spying on us?”

“N-n-n-no!”

Dennis was shaking his head so fast he felt like the bobblehead doll he got the time he went to the Dodgers game with his cousins. He was scared now. He knew that look in his father’s eyes when they got dark and flat and cold, like a shark’s eyes.

His father got to his feet and came toward him.

“Don’t lie to me, you rotten little shit. You’re standing in here listening. What the hell’s the matter with you?”

“
I-I-I
don’t know,” Dennis stammered, tears running down his face. He wanted to turn and run, but he was afraid to. Maybe if he stood very still, his father would calm down. Maybe if he ran, his father would chase him down and beat him to within an inch of his life.

“You good-for-nothing little smartass brat. I try to set you straight, and you take the finger off a dead woman. What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Dennis didn’t answer him fast enough. Or maybe it wouldn’t have mattered. His father was past calming down. The rage was in him now. There was no stopping him.

“I asked you a question!” he shouted. “Answer me!”

But he didn’t let Dennis even try to answer. He slapped him across the face so hard it knocked Dennis off his feet, then kicked him once, twice, the toe of his boot like a sledgehammer against Dennis’s back and buttocks.

“Frank! Stop it!” Dennis’s mother yelled. “He’s just a little boy!”

His father spun around, redirecting his fury.

Dennis scrambled to his feet and ran out the back door. He was trying to run faster than his legs could go, and he tripped himself and went sprawling down the concrete back steps.
BAM! BAM!
His chin bounced off one step and then another, skin scraping off. He bit his tongue hard and tasted blood as he landed at the bottom.

From inside the house he heard his mother cry out and the sound of plates crashing off the dining room table to the floor.

Dennis didn’t move for a minute. He lay there in the damp grass, thinking he would start to cry. But it was like something had broken inside of him, and he couldn’t feel anything. He got to his feet and limped around the side of the house to the oak tree.

It was harder to get up into the tree than it was to get down. He tried three times to jump up and catch hold of the lowest branch, finally getting hold of it with his fingertips. Groaning and twisting he struggled to get a better grip and pull himself up. If his father came out of the house now he would be dead.

Fear helped launch him up to where he could get his leg over the limb. Then he was in the tree and climbing. It didn’t matter that it was dark. He knew every branch.

He needed to disappear. He needed to go to a place his father couldn’t find him. He would go to his safe place and wait out the storm.

He had to stretch out over space to get hold of the windowsill into his bedroom. If he slipped and fell he would probably die. He didn’t know if he cared.

Flopping through the open window like a seal, he fell to his bedroom floor with a thud. The sounds of a beating came up through the floor. His father yelling, his mother crying.
SMACK! SMACK!

Dennis scraped himself up and went into his closet. In the ceiling was a trapdoor with a pull-down ladder leading up into a section of attic. He climbed up the ladder and pulled it up behind him, closing the trapdoor. From the attic he could go out a dormer window onto the roof.

Finally he made it to his hiding place. He could sit behind the old brick chimney, tucked up against the slope of the roof, and no one could see him from below. His father would never think to look there. At least he never had before.

Dennis sat there for a long, long time, cold and shaking. He had wet his pants when his father hit him. His lip was split and his chin was bleeding, but he didn’t care. He didn’t think about anything. He didn’t think about what was going on inside the house below him. He just stared at the moonlit speckles in the shingles on the slope of the roof.

After a long while he heard the back door, then heard his father in the backyard, calling for him and cursing at him. Then his father went back inside the house, and a few minutes later Dennis heard him moving around in his bedroom, still cursing.

Dennis could hear the thumps and crashing as his father searched through his room, tipping over furniture, breaking things, screaming at him to come out. But Dennis never moved, and he never made a sound. He never thought, and he never felt. He never wondered why his mother didn’t come looking for him.

The noise in his bedroom died down. Time passed. He heard the back door slam and, a moment later, a car start in the driveway. His mother’s minivan. The engine sounded like a toy compared with his father’s cruiser. Maybe she was leaving and would never come back. What would it matter to him? Nothing.

When the car had gone, and silence fell and everything was still at last, Dennis climbed a little higher to the ridge of the roof where he could see as far as he could see, and wish himself just as far away.

The world was a pretty place at night and from far away. You couldn’t see bad things happen. You couldn’t see what was ugly. When you looked in people’s windows at night every family looked happy, and every child loved.

If only . . .

Saturday, October 12, 1985

1:47 A.M.

Karly had crawled around and around the perimeter of the room so many times she had long ago lost count of the corners she had turned. The space seemed to be one large square. Left turn, left turn, left turn. She had crawled around and around—crawling, then passing out, crawling some more, then passing out—in search of the way out of this hell, only to learn there was no way out.

She was exhausted, dizzy, emotionally drained, and so, so cold. The concrete floor had sucked every drop of warmth from her naked body. It felt as if she had grown into the floor, as if tissue and sinew had sunken down and taken root. She thought she might not be able to move from where she lay. And maybe it wouldn’t be the worst thing if the next time she lost consciousness it simply never returned.

The despair was overwhelming. She lay there imagining that she was crying, imagining that Petal came to her and licked her tears away.

Thirst nagged at her. It felt as if the walls of her throat kept closing and sticking together. Then instinct would kick in and she would cough and choke and struggle against the feeling of not being able to breathe.

If her tormentor didn’t kill her soon, she would die of hypothermia and dehydration. She wouldn’t last long enough to starve to death.

If only she had the strength to stand, maybe she could feel her way to a faucet or a container with water in it. Maybe if she could get a drink, she would think more clearly. If she could think more clearly, maybe she could at least fight her tormentor when he came back. If she could fight him, maybe he would kill her outright, and she would at least die trying instead of wasting away like an abandoned caged animal.

Gathering every last ounce of will in her, Karly curled herself into a ball then rolled onto her hands and knees. She pulled one foot up under her and started to rise up, doing her best to shut out the pain that cut through her like a thousand razor blades along her nerve endings. The screwdriver still clutched in her right hand, she reached out to find the wall.

As she gained her feet, she put her left arm out in front of her, and touched evil.

He watched her struggle, amused at her will to survive. The last one had given up too easily. This one had been more sport.

She got to her feet and stretched her left arm out in front of her, the fingers of her hand spread wide.

He stepped closer, leaned down, and licked her palm with his tongue.

She tried to scream, her voice too hoarse to make much of a sound. But then she wouldn’t know that because she couldn’t hear.

She jerked her hand back as if he had burned her. She turned in a panic and ran into the wall. When he grabbed hold of her shoulder, she turned back toward him, swinging at him with her right arm, a screwdriver clutched in her hand.

He jumped back in the last instant, the flat tip of the screwdriver just missing cutting across his chest.

Amused no longer, he pulled the silk scarf from his pocket and wrapped both fists into the ends of it.

She was stumbling blind, running into the table, tripping over a chair, swinging the screwdriver out in front of her as if she might get lucky and strike him. But her luck had run out.

As deliberately as a tiger stalking its prey, he went behind her and moved in for the kill.

At 3:23 in the morning Jane sat bolt upright in bed, awakened from an exhausted, restless sleep by an unearthly, blood-curdling howl. For an instant, she thought her heart would explode, it was pounding so hard, so fast.

Violet, her pug, launched herself off the bed and ran barking from the room.

Jane got up, grabbing the Lady Smith & Wesson from her night-stand. She had left every light in the house on every night since Lisa’s body had been found. Her outdoor lights blazed bright. A county cruiser prowled past every hour. And still she kept the gun handy.

Petal and Violet were both at the back door, barking incessantly, Petal jumping up and hurling herself at the door again and again in a vain attempt to break out.

“Girls! Girls, calm down,” Jane said, setting her gun on the washing machine.

She caught hold of Petal’s collar and nearly had her arm pulled out of the socket as she tried for three seconds to restrain the pit bull. The dog was like a torpedo of solid muscle.

“Calm down, sweetheart!” Jane shouted, her ridiculous words falling on small deaf ears.

Petal lunged at the door again and again, snapping, fangs bared, ready to tear to pieces whatever—or whoever—was outside.

Jane stood back, shaken by the dog’s ferocity. She looked out the window above the washing machine, seeing nothing in the arc of lighted lawn. Taking her gun with her, she went into the kitchen, cut the light, and went to the window above the sink. She opened the window and strained to listen, hearing only the barking of the two dogs in the laundry room at first. Then came an eerie accompaniment in the distance: Coyotes yipping wildly down in the arroyo behind her property, celebrating the death of some unfortunate creature.

She hated that sound. It was not the semiromantic howl of the wild people most often associated with the animals. It was a frenzied, hysterical cacophony of voices that preceded prey being ripped apart and devoured by the pack. It made the hair stand up on the back of her neck and ran goose bumps down her arms.

The dogs went wild to hear it, but Jane never allowed them outside at night off leash. Violet would have made a nice appetizer for a coyote. Even Petal wouldn’t have been a match for a pack of them. Bold and criminally clever, coyotes routinely lured dogs away from safety with one member of the pack dancing and bowing, inviting the dog to play, only to draw the dog into an ambush by the rest of its cohorts.