Helltown (17 page)

Weasel was still a kid, twenty-one next month, ferret-faced and thin as a rail. God knew why he grew that long-ass goatee, because it made him look all the more feral. He was bushy eyed and eager to please and more times than not dumber than a bucket of coal. He wasn’t a retard like Earl or Floyd, but he was prone to doing stupid shit—like what he did earlier this evening. Cleavon didn’t think Spencer should have given him so much responsibility in the first place. But nobody else wanted the job of skulking Stanford Road for does. High speed chases were dangerous, even if you were the chaser.

Weasel’s folks ran a café and restaurant over in Peninsula. It was successful enough they opened another larger restaurant in Akron, where they moved to a few years back. Weasel remained behind in the family house, receiving a comfortable allowance every month for doing nothing but sitting on his ass all day. Why someone so stupid got such a lucky break in life, Cleavon didn’t know. Cleavon himself had worked like a son of a bitch for most of his miserable life, and he’d never once been given a break.

“That them?” Jesse said, looking at the bodies lying on the ground some twenty yards away and illuminated by the fire from the blazing wreckage: Cueball, the mocha-skinned girl, Cherry, and the handsome cripple. The way they were lined up side by side, they resembled corpses waiting for their coffins.

“’Course that’s them,” Cleavon said. “Who the fuck else they gonna be?”

“What I meant is, where’s the rest of them?”

“Already gone when me and the boys arrived.” Cleavon scowled at Weasel. “You see how you fucked up, Weasel? You see what you did now?”

Weasel stared at his boots. “I know I fucked up, Cleave, and I said I’m sorry.”

“Sorry, huh? They get to town, if Lonnie don’t stop them and they get to town…” He shook his head. He wasn’t going to entertain that thought right now. “Jess, you bring the fire extinguisher?”

“Ayuh. On the back seat.”

“Weasel, go put out the fire. You can do that, can’t you?”

“Yeah, Cleave.” He started toward the burning car.

“You gonna put it out with your fuckin’ hands? Get the extinguisher!”

Weasel blushed. “Right, Cleave.” He opened the back door, grabbed the red fire extinguisher, and trotted toward the burning car.

“That boy got about as much sense as God gave a goose,” Cleavon muttered.

“Ayuh,” Jesse said, though he was still looking at the three bodies. Given the hungry glint in his eyes, Cleavon suspected he was looking more at Cherry than the other two. Sprawled how she was, her denim skirt pushed up her thighs, she was showing more than leg.

Just then Earl and Floyd emerged from the forest, their flashlights pointed at the ground ahead of them, their heads lowered. They knew they were in trouble and trying to play ostrich. Fucking retards.

“Earl!” Cleavon shouted, cupping his hands around his mouth. “Get your ass over here.”

“The hell they doing in the woods?” Jesse said.

“Looking for the one that got away.”

Jesse raised his eyebrows. “The one that got away?”

“I had the bitch by the throat, I
had
her, then she goes and kicks me right where it hurts and got away.”

“Shit, Cleave, how we gonna find her?”

“We’re not, not now,” he said. “Where she gonna go? It’s the others we need to think about right now. We gotta deal with them first. Then we can worry about finding the bitch.”

Earl approached in his lumbering size-sixteen-boot gait, red-faced and out of breath. Floyd was behind him, also huffing and puffing. Unless you gave Floyd a direct order—one he could understand, mind you—he’d simply follow Earl everywhere.

“We couldn’t find her, Cleave,” Earl said shyly, staring at his boots. “She took off like a rabbit, and we couldn’t find her. If you didn’t let her go, if you didn’t do that, we woulda had her, we woulda had everyone. Why’d you let her go, Cleave? She’s nothing but a girl.”

Cleavon wanted to kick Earl in the nuts and see how quickly he reacted afterward, but he didn’t dare. Earl had a temper like you’d never seen. You get him worked up, you better be faster than a striped-ass ape. It wasn’t that Earl got it in his head to kill you; he simply might do it unintentionally. He didn’t realize his own strength, or if he did, he forgot about it when he got worked up and emotional.

Back when Cleavon was twenty or thereabouts he’d been feuding with Earl over some fucking thing and had gone into Earl’s room and took his pet mouse from the aquarium and cut off the thing’s head with a straight razor. Earl, only fifteen but already huge, caught Cleavon red-handed and went crazy, tossing the bed out of the way to get at him. He slammed Cleavon against the wall hard enough to knock all the pictures to the floor. Then he heaved Cleavon up like he weighed nothing and launched him straight out the second-floor window. Luckily it had been winter then, and a couple feet of snowfall had cushioned Cleavon’s fall. Still, he’d broken his left arm and split open his chin against his knee. When Cleavon came back from the doctor’s with a cast on his arm and stitches in his chin, Earl had been profusely apologetic, said he hadn’t meant to hurt him, wouldn’t do it again. Since then he had lost his temper only a few other times. This wasn’t due to discipline on his part as much as everybody else having the good sense not to provoke him. You could call Earl a shithead all you wanted, but you didn’t go kicking him in the nuts, no matter how much he was smarting off, not if you wanted to be walking the next day.

“Shut your yabbering and listen to me, Earl,” Cleavon said, feeling as though time was getting away from them all too fast. “You, Floyd, and Weasel are going to take those three there back to the house. Then you come back here with the wrecker and get what’s left of the bimmer to the garage. You got that?”

“Sure, Cleave. That’s easy. And back at the house, can I, I mean, I’ve been thinking, and I’m wondering, I know you’re gonna say no—”

“Spit it out, man!”

“Can I give the bucks to Toad and Trapper.”

Cleavon stared at him. “To your
snakes
?”

“Can I, Cleave, please? They just shed, they’re real hungry—”

“Judas Priest! You must be dumber than you look! There ain’t no way those snakes can eat a full-grown man.”

“Sure they can, Cleave, they can easy. Trapper’s twenty-six feet now. Toad’s only a bit shorter, I just measured them last month. They can eat the bucks easy.”

Cleavon frowned, thinking about that. They were damn big snakes. Monsters. If they could eat fully grown humans, well, that would be two less graves to dig.

“Also,” Earl went on, “it’d mean they don’t need to eat no rabbits for a couple months, and more rabbits equals more money for us, that’s what you always say—”

“All right, all right, enough yabbering, for fuck’s sake! You wanna feed baldy and the cripple to your snakes, feed them to your snakes. Just don’t lay a hand on the girl. That means no ‘playing’ with her either. I swear to God, Earl, I find one mark on her when I get back, I don’t know, but I’ll tell Spence it was you this time, no more covering, and he’ll kick you out of the club forever. You got that, Earl?”

Earl nodded solemnly. “I won’t touch her, Cleave. I promise.”

“Your promise ain’t worth shit,” Cleavon said. “You just remember, you touch her, no more does, never.” He turned to Jesse. “C’mon.”

They climbed in the cab of the El Camino just as a light rain began to fall, and within moments they were speeding north along Stanford Road, on their way to Lonnie’s place.

CHAPTER 13

“Be afraid… Be very afraid.” 

The Fly
(1986)

When Jenny came around on the back seat of Noah’s Jeep, she couldn’t make out whether what she was hearing was animal or human. It took her a good fuzzy three or four seconds to realize it was the latter—the warbling, forlorn cries of a man suffering great anguish. Thinking of Jeff, his broken back, she sat up quickly and cried out herself as a bomb seemed to go off inside her head. She moaned and sank back in the seat, afraid to move for fear of setting off another bomb. She remained like this, stationary, until the pain receded and her vision cleared.

The horrible wails, she noticed, had ceased. She leaned forward gingerly and peered through the rain-specked windshield. Steve stood next to Noah on the veranda of some house. A grimy little man pushed between them and stomped down the porch steps. Jenny barely had time to wonder who he was before he reached into the car parked next to the Jeep, retrieved a rifle, and aimed it at Noah.

Jenny didn’t scream a warning, didn’t jump out of the Jeep and tackle the man from behind. She didn’t do any of this because everything inside her had ceased to work. Fear and confusion and disbelief had shut her down, made her a spectator in what was about to play out.

The man fired the rifle. The report was a toneless bang, like a firecracker. Noah collapsed. Steve shouted his name. The man started toward them.

Jenny broke her paralysis and fumbled with the door handle. She thrust the door open and fell out of the vehicle, landing on her hands and knees on the damp gravel driveway. The air reeked of cordite smoke. Light raindrops plinked off the nape of her neck. For a split second she considered turning toward the road and fleeing, running as fast and far as she could, because she didn’t know what was going on here, only that it was bad, really bad, and Noah might be dead and she might be too if she stuck around. Yet even as she contemplated this she was scrambling forward. She hit the porch steps on all fours and used the banister to pull herself to her feet.

 The man had stopped a few feet ahead of her, oblivious to her presence, rifle pointed at Steve. He was saying something, but Jenny didn’t know what, couldn’t make sense of words right then, and it didn’t matter, because he was about to shoot Steve in cold blood.

“No!” she cried, throwing herself at the back of the man. She grabbed him by the shoulders and used her weight to drag him backward off balance. The rifle swung skyward as he fired. The bullet spit a chunk of wood from the porch roof.

Jenny crashed to her side. The man came down on top of her. He elbowed her in the gut, knocking her down the steps. She brought her arms up to protect her head, but still smacked her cheek against one tread hard enough to see stars and taste blood in her mouth. At the bottom she rose on her knees, expecting to hear another gunshot and to feel a round tear through her.

Instead she found Steve grappling with the grimy little man for the rifle. Bellowing like a caveman, Steve tore the gun free, shoved the barrel into the man’s stomach, and squeezed the trigger. The bullet passed straight through the man, exiting his back in a jet of blood. The man clutched his gut and fell facefirst to the deck.

Jenny scrambled up the steps toward Steve. He jerked the rifle at her. His eyes were glassy and sightless, like a doll’s, empty of whatever made him him.

“Steve! It’s me! Jenny!”

Steve returned his attention to the now dead man, who lay on his stomach, blood pooling around him. He tossed the rifle away, as if it had burned him.

“He killed Noah,” he said softly.

Jenny glanced at Noah, crumpled against the wall, his head bowed against his chest, as if he were snoozing. But he’d never be snoozing again, would he? He’d never be doing anything again. She hadn’t known any of Steve’s friends well, had met them for the first time this evening, but Noah had seemed most normal of the bunch. Jeff was a shmuck who thought he was God’s gift to women. Austin was immature, and from what Steve had told her, a borderline alcoholic. Mandy was funny but an airhead. And Cherry, well, she was named “Cherry” and dressed like a prostitute to boot. It was only Noah—soft spoken, dark, brooding, Noah—whom she had thought she would be happy getting to know better in the future, especially if he found a nice girlfriend and the four of them could double date.

“Are you sure he’s dead?” she asked, the words coming out wooden.

“The fucker shot him right in the forehead.” He drove a foot into the man’s side.

The man groaned.

“He’s alive!” Jenny said, and felt his neck for a pulse. “Steve, he’s alive!” She slipped her hands beneath the arm closest to her and flipped the man onto his back. His red T-shirt was saturated with blood. “Give me your pullover.”

“Why?”

“To stop the bleeding!”

Steve came back from wherever he’d been. “Stop the bleeding?” His brow knit. “Let him bleed! Fuck, Jen! He killed Noah! He tried to kill us!”

“You’re a medical student, Steve. You have a duty to—”

“Don’t give me that bullshit.”

“You want to have his death on your hands? Is that what you want?”

“It was self-defense.”

“That’s not what I meant. Christ, Steve!” She tugged her black elastic top over her head. She had nothing on beneath but her bra. The cool air bit her bare skin.

“Okay, Jesus, okay, Jen, here…” Steve removed his pullover and held it out for her.

She put her top back on, accepted the pullover, and pressed it against the man’s abdomen. “This is only going to give him a bit more time. You have to go call an ambulance.”

“There’s no phone.”

She stared at him. “What?”

“Noah and I already checked. That’s what started all this…” He shook his head. “Anyway, we checked. And the kid said they didn’t have one—”

“The kid? Where—”

“He’s dead. It was an accident.”

Jenny felt as if she’d been slapped.
A dead child?
But she didn’t have time to wonder about this. The medical student inside her had taken over. The man before her was still alive. He could still be saved. He was the priority. It was her duty to help him.

“Get Noah’s keys,” she said. “We’ll drive him to the hospital ourselves. We’ll tell them about this child, and Jeff, and— Jesus, just get the keys!”

Nodding, Steve stood and said, “Oh shit.”

“What?” But she saw what he did.

A car had turned off the highway and was bumping down the driveway toward them in one heck of a hurry.