Psycho Within Us (The Psycho Series Book 2) (10 page)

Kaley sighed, and sat back down to let the other kids shuffle past her.  “Not when the laughing man can help.  That boy, he’s got nobody.  Just like you and I did when we…I can’t just leave him.  He needs help.  You unnerstan, chil’?”  Nan again, coming out in her.  Shan shook her head, but inwardly she understood.  Kaley
felt
her understanding.  It was agony for Shannon, having to let her sister go on to school, never knowing if this was going to be the last time they ever spoke.  Shan was that afraid that the laughing man might find a way to hurt her.  “I have to go, girl.  I have to help.”

“But the laughing man won’t help!  He won’t help anybody!”

Kaley gave it some thought.  “He will if I speak his language.  I have to…”  She searched for the right way to express it.  “He’s like a dog.  A pitbull, like you told him in the car, remember?”  Watery-eyed, Shan nodded.  “And a pitbull is mean, especially if it’s brought up wrong, but if you give it the right bait…maybe you can aim it at the right bad guys.  I can try, Shan.  I
have
to try.  You understand that, don’t you?  Deep down inside, you understand.”

Shannon was out of excuses.

Kaley stood up, and this time Shannon’s hand fell from hers limply. 
She has no more strength left to fight
. 
They took that from her, too
, she thought angrily.  Kaley turned, shouldered her book bag, and was shoved ever so slightly by Laquanda Everest.  There was a flash of anger, but Kaley suppressed it.  Still, the slight remained, and, though she didn’t know it, it was like an aggravant to a clam, destined to form a pearl.

The bus would go on down the street, and drop Shan off at Cartersville Elementary School.  Kaley took one look back at her little sister, gave her what she hoped was a reassuring smile, and stepped out of the bus, and out of the
log cabin.

The blizzard had eased up, but that wasn’t saying much.  If he wanted to get out of here, he would have to move fast.  A few more hours, and he estimated the roads back to Chelyabinsk would be impassable.

The shed was open, Spencer was glad to find.  It would have been a real pain in the ass to have to pick the locks or smash his way through one of the tiny windows
—he’d peeked inside it earlier, and saw that there were cramped shelves filled with tools hugging the walls beside every window.  The snow had piled up around the double wooden doors considerably, and it took a minute of yanking and pulling to get them open.

The wind was the real bitch. 
It kept trying to slam one of the doors shut, while forcing the other open so wide that its hinges were crackling.  It also pushed around at him and bit deeply into his cheeks. 
Should’ve gotten one o’ those wool balaclavas from Zak’s dresser
, he thought.  There was still time to go back and do that, after he’d secured a way out of here.  He was in no real hurry to leave, because it certainly appeared that Zakhar had liked and maintained his privacy.  Still, he’d rather not just lay up here for too long.  The
vory
might be putting things together as fast as Interpol, maybe faster, and they might want to come out to warn their boy Zakhar personally.

Interpol was certainly onto him, though they had all the events and the timeline screwed up.  According to their website, where his face occasionally made an appearance in the updates section, Spencer Pelletier was “known to associate with elements of Russian organized crime,” and was “believed to have been involved in the monumental human trafficking case that shocked the world, as it spanned from Atlanta, Georgia, to far parts of Europe and even Asia.”  There was a description of how he might look now, a computer rendering that added in the facial scar that came to him courtesy of Dmitry Ankundinov.  He’d gotten
out of the U.S. ahead of the story, but had accelerateed his plans once Interpol started getting more public with their search.  Hence, why he’d gone ahead and done Andrei in before quickly finishing up his search in Derbent.

Spencer
tugged on a piece of string dangling from the shed’s ceiling and the lights came on.  Tools were arrayed all around.  The black Subaru Forester, though new, looked like it hadn’t been driven recently.  A sheet was flung halfway over it, not completely covering the backside, and dust had collected.  As he’d noted when peeking through the window that morning while Zakhar was still asleep inside, only the front two tires had chains on them.

He followed Zakhar’s instructions.  There was indeed a pegboard with a poster of a large bear hanging from it, saying, in large English,
THIS IS SIBERIA
. 
Yes, it is
, he mused.  Spencer knocked all around it, found it hollow, then searched for the edges.  It didn’t take long.  At the edge of the poster there was an indentation.  He forced his fingernails into it and pried it open.  Inside were a few hooks hanging from the pegboard, and from those hooks dangled a strange assortment of tools that seemingly had nothing to do with one another: a few electric drills, a kinky ball-and-gag, some bungee cords, keys to the Subaru and the ATV (he’d planned on hotwiring the car, so keys were welcome), a strap-on dildo (of all things) that hadn’t been taken out of the package, and, of course, the snow chains.

Spencer reached inside to take the chains, then cleared a space on the floor so that he could lay the chains out and remove any twists or kinks.  He made sure the V-bars were
straight and would make contact with road surface, and made sure the cross and side chains were all straight.

“Spencer?”  Such a teeny voice.

He looked up, half startled.  Part of him had already started convincing himself that he’d imagined every bit of it.  It didn’t really matter to him whether or not it was really happening, it just quietly surprised him that it
was
happening.  “Beat it, chick-a-dee.  I ain’t listenin’.”

“Just listen!”

“If you want the kid out, start walkin’.  I’m sure you’ll find somebody that’ll come back to get him out of—”

“He could be dead by then.  We’re…we’re out in the middle of nowhere!”  Tears again. 
Always with the fucking tears
, he thought.  “Spencer, just…just please hear me out.”

“Nothin’ to hear,” he said, blowing into his hands to warm them up and then checking the cam tighteners on the chains.
  He started moving about the Subaru, very carefully placing the chains on the rear tires, centering them, making sure they were all good and squared away before he snagged the keys from the pegboard.  Kaley, the little phantom girl, watched in sullen silence.

Finally, she said, “You need to help him, Spencer.”

“I told you before about tellin’ me what I need to do.”

“What I mean is
, he can
help
you
.”

“How is some seven-year-old gonna help me?”

Kaley walked over to him, and as she did, it didn’t quite look right.  That is, she put one foot in front of the other, but she tended to slide forward, gaining a bit more space that she ought to.  And, of course, she left no tracks in the snow that was blowing in from outside.  She stopped just a foot from him, just as he was opening the driver’s side door.  “He knows things.”

“Yeah?” he said, hopping inside and driving slightly forward
so that he could fasten the bottoms of the chains.  He drove slowly, keeping the driver’s side door open so that he could look at the back tires and make sure he wasn’t going so fast that the chains came off.  Once he’d gone far enough, he put the car in park.  “What does he know that could help me?”  He knelt down, and went to tightening the fasteners.

“At-ta Biral,” she said.  Spencer looked up at her. 
“Eight Cats.”

He paused amid his work
and considered.  In his pocket, Zakhar’s iPhone rang again.  He ignored it.

After a moment,
Spencer stood up and walked over to the pegboard, retrieving a few bungee cords to tighten the chains across the wheel.  While kneeling and at work, he said, “Do you remember what happened that night?”  The little girl said nothing.  “Your silence tells me everything.  You do remember, don’t you?  No repressed memories?”  He nodded, stood, and walked around to the other side to address that tire.  “Do you recall everything I said to you before, when you were floatin’ around inside my head?”

“I remember a lot of things about that night.”

“Do you remember the bet we made, about me showin’ up on yer twenty-first birthday if it turned out that some Atlanta PD cops had helped those pricks that snatched you?”

“I remember
you
made a bet, but I never accepted it.  That doesn’t matter right now, though.  That boy has got to—”

“I only bring it up because I was right, of course.  I’m always right about people,” he
declared, tugging on the bungees, making sure they were secured.  He stood up and put his hands on his hips, huffed, watched the warm clouds come out of his mouth, and tried to think if he was forgetting anything.  “People are fuckin’ pricks, and if they get the chance, they’ll take any opportunity to get what they want.”

“Spencer, I’m begging you—”

“Opportunity makes the thief.  Every priest in the world will rape a drunk fifteen-year-old girl if she’s passed out in front of him, an’ if he hasn’t had enough pussy in a while, an’ if all other sorts o’ stars are in alignment.  Opportunity makes the thief, never forget that.”

“What does any of this have to do with—”

“Ya say the kid knows somethin’ about the At-ta Biral,” he said.  “How do I know you didn’t just pry that right outta my own mind?”  Spencer rounded the Subaru, and as he approached her he watched her take a step back.  Half of Kaley’s right leg passed through the vehicle’s driver side headlight, and she didn’t seem to notice.  “You know you have a power I can’t track, a power I can’t keep up with, so you have an opportunity right now.  An opportunity to lie, to bluff me.  I think ya pulled that name outta
my
head, and you’re trying to get me to go and see what the boy knows so that I’ll open those three locks on that basement door, let him out.”  He smiled.  “I’m never wrong about people.”

Kaley shook her head.  “I’m not lying.”

“That’s a lie.”

“It’s
not
!” she shouted.  Her breath didn’t come out in any great tufts of cloud.  Spencer figured she didn’t need to breathe in this form, whatever it was.  “The boy knows something, I can
feel
it!”

“And if he doesn’t?  If I go down there and the boy just looks at me blankly, and has no idea who the At-ta Biral are?”

The apparition girl swallowed.  “He won’t.  He knows something, I know he does—”

“Nothin’ useful to me—”

“He
does
,” she insisted.

“I asked you how much you remember about that night.  Do you remember what I am, what I do to people that f—”

“He
does
!” she screamed.  “And if you don’t help, I’ll…I’ll haunt you!”

He laughed.  “You’ll
haunt
me?  What’re you, Casper the Bitchy Ghost now?  You gonna rattle some chains, little nigglet?”

“You know I can.  You see what I can do now.  I can do that to you, point you out in public, scream, ‘Hey,
everybody look, this guy’s name is Spencer Pelletier!  There’s a reward out for him!’ There is, you know.  Fifty thousand dollars, a reward set up by Interpol through the FBI.  I read about it on the Internet—”

“Ooooh, the Great and Powerful Internet!”

“I could turn you in.  I could do that.  Even if I can’t touch you, I can do that much.”

Spencer snorted, more clouds came out of his face. 
“Bitch, if you tried that, you know what I’d do?  ’Course ya do.  I’d go right back across the fuckin’ ocean an’ strangle the life outta you
and
your sister.  You see how far I’ve come just to keep my promise to Dmitry, right?  We’re in Russia, by the way.  Let that sink in for a moment.  That’s no walk down the street from where you live, and I didn’t fuckin’ swim here.”

Kaley glared daggers at him. 
“Don’t talk about my sister like—”

“Like what?” he taunted further.  This was fun.  “How is she, by the way?  Ever mention me?  She miss good ol’
Uncle Spence?”

“She won’t even say your name.”

“Yeah?  What’s she call me?”

“Monster,” Kaley said hatefully.  “Laughing man.  Anything
but your name.”

“Helluva way to treat a hero.”

The apparition girl glowered at him.  Spencer liked that; the look of impotent rage.  It was delicious, and he couldn’t say why.  “Let’s talk about the boy.”

“There’s nothin’ to talk about.”

“He knows something that could help you to—”

“You’d better know what the consequences are
here if that boy knows nothing,” he stipulated.  “If you continue on like this, just know that, while I can’t touch you, if you’re fuckin’ with me I’ll hurt that boy just to spite you.”  Kaley flinched as if slapped.  “That’s what
I
am, that’s what
I
can do.  This is a dangerous fucking game you’re playing here.”  Spencer hopped in the driver’s seat, cranked up the Subaru’s heat, then hopped back out and shut the door.  “I’m gonna leave the engine runnin’, get her warmed up.  Then I’m gonna go check this kid out, an’ if it’s all square like ya say, I’ll let him be.  But if that boy’s a blank…”  He chuckled, and headed back to the house.