Highways to Hell (19 page)

Melinda, a child abuse and rape victim with a long history of mental illness, said, “Here’s your truth, Kyle. I am the great avenger. I am the equalizer. I go here and I go there, hither and yon, and everywhere I go, I punish men for the sins of mankind.”

But Kyle didn’t care about her psychosis.

All that mattered to him was that his suffering was nearly at an end.

About that, though, he was mistaken.

She was very skilled, very practiced.

She worked on him for a long, long time, slicing him with her knife long past dawn. Then she took another shower and left him before the maid arrived. When the cleaning lady entered the room, she loosed a shrill scream that brought her fellow workers running.

Several people crowded into the room.

A desk clerk vomited.

A guest from the room across the hall said, “Oh, that poor man.”

Somebody else said. “Christ, call 911, he’s still alive.”

When the duct tape was stripped from his face and the gag removed from his mouth, Kyle pleaded with them to kill him.

“He’s delirious,” somebody said.

“The pain’s making him crazy.”

“God, I hope the paramedics get here soon.”

Kyle cried out in agony.

He pleaded with them some more.

And he went right on living.

While all these strangers kept gazing upon this hideous, nasty, ugly, inescapable truth.

His nightmare revealed.

By the time the stolen Lexus swerved to the side of the dark back road, Mitch MacCaffrey was a broken man. Every ounce of false bravado was gone. He was done with the flippant remarks and the impotent, pseudo-tough guy threats. The barrel of Logan Caine’s Glock pushed harder against his side.

Mitch screwed his eyes hut and waited for the explosion.

For that horrible moment of mind-bending agony.

He heard a door open, the front passenger door from the sound of it. Then a crunch of shoulder gravel beneath booted feet. The door to his right came open and he was yanked out of the car.

Logan Caine scrambled out after him.

So they wouldn’t do it in the car. Of course they wouldn’t. The Lexus wouldn’t be a known stolen vehicle for some time, but they wouldn’t want to drive around in a bloody mess of a car. Too conspicuous.

So Mitch had a reprieve.

Probably a very short one.

A few precious seconds, maybe. The notion that his time on earth was down to that terrified him. The unfairness of it was too much. He wasn’t a bad guy. He’d made a few mistakes, errors in judgment, but he didn’t deserve this.

Nobody should know this kind of terror.

This helplessness, this total, soul-baring emasculation.

Mitch opened his eyes are saw Derrick Mullins aiming the barrel of a Sig Sauer at his forehead. Mitch cringed and saw it happen in his mind, saw the muzzle spit fire and saw this bullet punch through his forehead and blow his brains out the back of his skull. Tears streamed down his cheeks and a snot bubble swelled out of one nostril and popped.

“Please…” His voice was horse, thick with sobs and desperation. “Please…don’t kill me…I won’t testify. I swear. You don’t have to kill me.”

Logan Caine laughed.

The fine-tuned engine of the Lexus revved. A window rolled down and Dal Higgins, the man behind the wheel, said, “Don’t fuck around. Do it and let’s get out of here.”

Mitch squealed.

An embarrassing sound.

The sound a spoiled child makes when his favorite toy is taken away as punishment for misbehavior. He reached out with groping, pleading hands for the front of Logan Caine’s guayabera. “Please…have mercy…I have a daughter…”

Logan groaned. “Aw, not that shit.” He snorted laughter. “Christ, I hate it when they start in with that ‘I’ve got a kid!’ shit, like that’s gonna help ‘em.”

Mitch managed to snag a handful of smooth fabric with one fumbling hand. “Please…”

Logan clubbed him upside the head with the Glock.

Mitch yelped and pitched sideways. He was off-balance and his arms pinwheeled wildly in a desperate effort to restore his equilibrium. But Derrick Mullins drove a booted foot hard into his stomache and sent him reeling into the ditch. The back of his head struck a rock and pain exploded in his head and arced down his body like forked lightning. His vision went away in a burst of white light.

When he could see again, he saw only darkness.

Then he saw the white crescent of a quarter-moon suspended high in the sky above him. For a moment, he forgot about his predicament, forgot he was about to die. He was overwhelmed by the loveliness of the rural sky at night. Jesus, you could actually see the stars out here. He lifted a shaky hand to the sky, reaching for the moon, imagining he could hook his fingers around one indented edge of that white sliver.

But the moment of mysticism passed.

He saw Logan Caine and Derrick Mullins looming over him. They looked like giants standing at the edge of the ditch. Cloaked in the shadow of the nearby forest, they looked like Satan’s own foot soldiers, leering harbingers of doom.

The guns pointing down at him looked like hands of judgment.

He heard Logan Caine’s guff voice one more time. “Say goodbye, Mitch.”

The Glock and the Sig Sauer discharged several times. A bullet whizzed by Mitch’s throat and embedded itself into the soft earth.

It was the only shot that missed.

A slug punctured his stomach. So did another, popping beer-gut flesh like a potato bag. The large caliber rounds punched all the way through him, creating holes in his lower back that pumped blood into the ground. Another bullet shattered a rib and lodged inside him. Two more entered the region just slightly north of his groin. The high-velocity invaders stung like bees, but that initial snap of pain was nothing compared to the wash of agony that engulfed him once his nerve-endings responded to the damage. There was little conscious thought at this point, just perfect awareness of total pain, but he did manage a prayer for a bullet to the head.

For an end to his suffering.

But the guns fell silent.

Logan Caine said, “That oughta do it.”

Mitch wailed.

Derrick Mullins glanced at Logan. “He ain’t dead. I’ll put one in his head.”

He raised his arm to aim again, but Logan gripped his wrist. “Nah, fuck it, man. He’ll die in a few minutes.” He chuckled. “Let the asshole get the full experience.”

Mullins smiled. “Sure. Whatever.”

They got back in the car and Dal Higgins stepped on the accelerator. The Lexus pulled away from the shoulder, then he heard the car gathering speed as it zoomed away from him. The engine noise swelled for another moment, then quickly receded.

They were gone.

Mitch McCaffrey’s eyes filled with tears. He was all alone. He was going to die here in this ditch. Unnoticed. With nobody to comfort him as he slipped into the abyss—or stepped into the light, or whatever it was that really happened when you died. He thought of his father, who’d made it to eighty-two and had died in relative peace on a hospital bed. An image from that night taunted Mitch, the face of the friends and family gathered around the dying man’s bed.

God, how he wanted someone with him now.

He was terrified of facing this alone.

He cried out for his mother.

Who was in a nursing home hundreds of miles away. Lois McCaffrey had advanced Alzheimer’s and wouldn’t recognize her youngest son if she saw him.

But there were other people who cared for him. Sally, his seven-year-old daughter. Karen, his ex-wife, with whom he’d still harbored hope for a reconciliation. No chance of that now. His siblings, Jeremy and Heather. Some of his closer friends and business associates. Yeah, there were still people who would mourn his passing. Despite the series of fuck-ups that had steered him toward this sorry end, people liked him.

What would those people make of the manner of his death?

No point contemplating that.

Mitch knew what they would think. That he’d brought it on himself. That it was what you got for doing business with people like Logan Caine’s boss.

And they would be right.

Mitch blinked and again saw the crescent moon. It was so beautiful. There was something…spiritual about his perception of it now, a feeling totally removed from his internalized images of lunar landings and men in bulky spacesuits bouncing around a grey, rock-strewn landscape. He stared at it now, seeking to transcend the pain through a focus of will. He imagined his soul, his spirit, slipping free of its physical moorings and rising high above the earth, ascending not to heaven but toward the moon. He saw it in his mind, his essence rising skyward, glancing back to see his body getting smaller and smaller until it disappeared.

Until the earth itself became a floating globe below him.

He smiled at the sense of freedom he would have. He was gripped by a fervent wish that it really be this way. He prayed for his soul to be liberated from this ruined shell. He wanted to exist on that other plane, that place where spirits were free of human frailty and avarice, a place of perfect peace.

The mental diversion was lovely for a few moments, but the reality of his corporeal senses overwhelmed the vision. He felt the salty tang of blood at the back of his throat. He tilted his head sideways and a stream of blood spilled from the corner of his mouth. Pain lashed him like a bullwhip and he twitched in the ditch, crying out again for his mother.

Dear, sweet old Mom.

The lights are on, but nobody’s home.

Mitch tried to laugh, but more blood rushed out of his mouth.

Christ, why wasn’t he dead yet?

It occurred to him that with the proper medical care he might stand a chance of surviving the damage inflicted on him. A slim chance, sure, but a chance nonetheless. The bullets had missed his heart and his head. His lungs didn’t seem to have been punctured, which, considering where most of the shots had been aimed, was nothing less than a miracle. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that a good trauma team and a skilled surgeon could save him. He’d heard of other people surviving multiple gunshots, so he knew such things were possible.

He also knew that survival hinged on receiving immediate treatment. Which just didn’t seem to be in the cards for him. He cursed those assholes for dumping him in the middle of nowhere. It might be a long time before another vehicle came along. Even if somebody came by, they wouldn’t be likely to see him down here, anyway.

Maybe if he could crawl out to the road…lie there flat on the asphalt.

Somebody would have to stop.

He turned his head to look at the road. It was just a few feet away, no more than a dozen. But it might as well have been on the other side of the world. Pain wracked his body every time he tried to move.