Ruthless (14 page)

Five Years Ago

“YOUR VICTORY LAP,” THE MAN
says. He's jut fastened a blue-and-red ribbon with gold fringe around the black horse's neck.

“What?” The girl is dazed, borderline nonresponsive.

“Your victory lap. They've started the music.”

“Oh, shit,” she says, giving her horse a too-sharp kick in the ribs, as though it was his fault they missed their cue. The horse jumps forward awkwardly, and a little laugh ripples through the audience.

At first she doesn't even feel the people in the stands. She is in numb disbelief, and it takes a good hundred yards before she even looks up. Her vision blurred with tears, she can't find her mother. There's a bit of anxiety and a wash of regret that she didn't ask where they would be. She wants to share this with her family, but she sent them away, and now she doesn't know where they are. She's in this all by her lonesome.

Despite the shock, something filters through. People are standing. She
doesn't know why, but she thinks it must be dinner break, that everybody must be leaving.

Then it hits her. The crowd is standing for her. The crowd is giving her a standing ovation. The twelve-year-old in the pink shirt has pulled off something almost impossible, and they love it. Even in the political world of horse shows, everybody loves an underdog.

Her emotion evaporates like rain in the desert.

This is a golden opportunity that can't be wasted. She has the whole world in her hand right now, all those rich horse owners and the famous trainers, and it's time to tighten her fist.

She asks her horse to gallop, and the crowd responds with whoops and hollers. Then she puts the black gelding into the biggest, longest sliding stop he's ever performed. It's better than the one he did during her performance, and the people go insane. Spins, rollbacks, and one more stop. The people want more, more, more.

So this is the perfect place to stop. Stop while they're wanting more.

She nonchalantly collects her trophy and the blue ribbon for her horse's bridle on her way out of the arena. The prizes are nice to look at, but there is something else waiting for her. A check for forty thousand dollars. She has just won forty grand.

That money means so much. Not because of what it can buy, not because of the economic problems it can solve, not because of anything less than the power it gives her. There will be no more fighting, because she won't allow it. Who will contradict her? Who would dare say a word? No one. Because she's the winner, the breadwinner, the champion, the one with the killer instinct. The girl in the pink shirt who won over the crowd, made them her own.

She thought she knew what it was to be a winner. It has a new definition now. It is a great and terrible thing, to know just what one can do. From now on she will live with the knowledge of what she can accomplish and the oppressive weight of expectation.

This is what it is to win.

She feels the cost even before she leaves the arena. But she thinks,
Bring it.
She thinks,
I can handle it.
She thinks,
I am tough enough for anything.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THERE ARE NO GOOD OPTIONS.

I could try to follow Wolfman, who has disappeared into the forest, silent as a ghost. When I went on my mission to steal his truck, I found the occasional footprint and broken branch, but really that was more a matter of recognizing landmarks. This is a place I've never been before. Tracking would mean searching for evidence he's left behind. That feels like a tall order, and he's so much faster than me out here. He's a woodsman, he's got boots, and his feet don't have holes in them. He knows where he stashed the truck. There's no doubt in my mind he's got his handgun in there, and probably zip ties in the glove box and who knows all what else.

Hunting down the Wolfman, in the hopes of taking him out with my single bullet, would mean walking straight into a trap, one
he will have restocked with the tools of his trade. Thing is, I didn't do too well with either of my first two bullets. It doesn't give me much confidence I can do anything too useful with the third.

I could go back to the mansion, using it as shelter until a search party finds me. But I'm scared of that house. I think he'd find me there, and he knows the place as well as or better than I do.

There's the Logans. Maybe after their visit from the cop things would be different. Maybe the cops are still there. But maybe they aren't. Maybe the Logans decided I was a meth addict after all; maybe none of them found my message on the garage door. Mr. Logan should have seen it before he found me eating his garbage, but what if he was too out of his mind to register anything at all? What if the cops came and nobody ever lowered the door?

On a purely rational level there's a case to be made for going back to the Logan Family Lodge, but on an emotional level it's a bitter pill to swallow. One that won't go down right now.

Out of the mire of my thoughts rises one solid fact: I am exhausted. I'm exhausted beyond all reason. I am exhausted to the point I can't think. I have no idea what to do, and everything is starting to feel dangerously hopeless. Hopelessness is not an emotion to be indulged. On the heels of hopelessness comes defeat, and even though everything seems pointless and impossible, I still want to win. Underneath my confusion and utter, bone-crushing fatigue, even though I don't know much of anything at all, I still know I want to win.

I want to win, but first I just want to sleep. It occurs to me that it might not be the smartest idea, but in the end, the call of sleep
is too powerful to ignore. A couple hours of rest would let the antibacterial salve do some good work on my wounds; it would give me back some energy; it would let my traumatized brain heal. At least a little bit. Before I search for a sleeping spot, I take two more Tylenol to fight back fever.

At first I'm looking for something on the ground. Ideally, something like the overturned-tree hole I hid in before stealing the truck. Ten minutes of walking later and there are no holes to speak of. Frustration is hard to fight off this tired, and the hopelessness starts creeping up again. It's lapping against my throat, looking to take me under and drown me altogether, when I spy an almost-downed tree.

It catches my eye because some of its roots are torn up, but the tree isn't actually dead, and there's not enough room to hide under it. It fell halfway over, got caught up in some other trees, and then kept on living. I follow the length of it, and there's a nice place, high up off the ground, where the slanted tree hooks into two giant oaks. It might be like a little tree house up there, a place to hide and to sleep.

Walking the ramp of the slanted tree is harder than it looked from the ground. It's a big, broad tree, but as impaired as I am, it feels like a balance beam. Once I'm ten feet off the ground, I get nervous and crawl on all fours. It takes a while, but in the end I make it to the hooked oaks. It's not a big space by any means, but it's one I can wedge myself into. Probably twenty feet up at this point, I'm scared of falling from the tree while I sleep, so I take my arms out of the jacket and tie the sleeves to a limb, making it into a blanket-slash-security harness.

There are enough autumn leaves up here to give me cover, and luckily they're a dull brown that matches my camouflage coat. Even my long white athletic socks hide me, thanks to all the mud they soaked up as I chased Wolfman. My hat is good too. Keeps my red hair and white forehead from showing. I don't feel safe, but I feel almost safe, and that's the best feeling I've had in a long, long time.

As the sun rises over the ridgeline, I fall in and out of sleep, shifting slightly now and again, never comfortable but too tired to really feel discomfort. Every time my eyes open, the sun has ­traveled another hour higher in the sky, and at a certain point I think about how I need to will myself into consciousness. It's not enough to open my eyes for two seconds and shift around; it's time to get back to the business of survival.

But then the deep, deep mud of sleep sucks me back into the bog. It pulls me all the way down into the soft silt of the bottom, the place where eyes don't open anymore, where there is no awareness of time or place or life outside the quiet murk of unconsciousness.

I don't know how long I'm resting in that bog bottom of sleep; I only know I go from black nothingness to a ballroom at the Westin Poinsett in Greenville. It's homecoming. Which makes no sense, because our homecoming was lame and held in the school gym. Not that I know for sure that it was lame. I didn't go. Caleb asked me to homecoming, but I said no, said I had a horse show to go to, one I couldn't miss. The truth is I could have missed the show, but I
didn't want to go to a dance with Caleb. He said we'd go as friends, but he didn't really mean that, and he probably knew I knew he didn't really mean that.

Now that I'm here, I'm so glad that I must have changed my mind. The ballroom is beautiful. I've been here once before, for Caleb's sister's wedding. That wedding was magic for me, magic for Caleb, magic for Caleb's whole family. The groom's side paid for it, and I know Caleb's mom and sisters felt like they were in some sort of glamorous southern Tinseltown. From start to finish, the whole night was lovely and fun and filled with joy. It was the kind of night that made me hope for the future, made me think that maybe one day there'd be a wonderful night for me. It was my first real wedding, my first time in a ballroom, the first time I saw Caleb in something other than jeans.

I look over, and Caleb's wearing the same rented tux he wore at his sister's wedding. He looks amazing, better than anyone else. He looks like he'd more than fit in with the Carver clan; he looks like he'd be the star of the show.

Everybody from our school is dressed to the nines, and all the girls wear striking, spangly, sophisticated gowns. I'm wearing the same simple white cotton dress from my wildflower meadow dream, but for some reason I don't feel self-conscious. I'm just happy.

Caleb takes me by the hand and leads me over to the dance floor. He hasn't shaved in a couple of days, which is the way I like him best. It makes him look older; it makes him look like the tough, competent farmhand that he already is. We begin to dance, and I see he's wearing cowboy boots. Normally, that's the kind of
thing that mortifies me about Caleb, but not tonight. Tonight I find it charming.

“Cowboy boots?”

“Hey, at least they're new.” He twirls me away from him and then back again. “Count yourself lucky I didn't wear my usual shit kickers.”

“Classy.”

He smiles in a way that is a little bit teasing and all kinds of confident. It's the kind of smile that says he doesn't really care all that much whether or not I disapprove, and I find myself laughing.

“Besides,” he adds, “they give me a couple inches.”

Caleb has always had an inferiority complex about his height, which I've never understood. He's five nine, which is average enough. More importantly, I'm tiny, so I like it that he's the size he is. I say to him, “I think you're the perfect height.”

“Nah, I'm short.”

“But look,” I say, leaning my head against his chest, “we fit just right.” And we do. My temple rests in a perfect spot, and I can hear his heartbeat. Caleb doesn't say anything, but holds me close.

It is perfect.

Then I feel him tense.

I lean back. “What's wrong?”

“Mr. Plumber. He's staring at us.”

Mr. Plumber is the principal. He's an annoying man, a stuffy man, very uptight and rigid, but harmless to the point it's hard to take him seriously. I don't understand why the sight of him would make Caleb anxious.

“Where is he?” I ask.

“He disappeared behind those people over there.” Caleb tilts his head toward a crowd.

Now I feel it too. Tension. Danger. Looking around, I find Mr. Plumber emerging from the crowd. On his face is an expression of malevolence I've never seen before.

“He's circling us,” I say.

“I think he wants to kill us.”

“Why does he want to kill us? We haven't done anything.”

And now, despite the music and the crowd and the dancing, I can hear Mr. Plumber's footsteps. They sound like the crunching of dead leaves. The crunch of dead leaves is louder than any of it. Then that's the only thing I can hear, and the ballroom and Caleb and everything else disappears into blackness.

Blackness. Footsteps. That's all I know. Except I also know to be afraid.

Opening my eyes, I see leaves. Dried, dead, brown leaves. I feel bark under my fingers. I smell a forest in autumn, the smell of decay, of leaves turning to soil.

Then, in the distance, movement.

Reality is back now. It's fully with me. The sun has crossed the apex of the sky and has turned the morning into afternoon. My tongue is dry with thirst, my body is statue stiff, and my little bit of the woods is no longer mine alone—it also belongs to the Wolfman.

His head is down. He's searching for footprints, moving in a sweeping motion across the forest floor. There's no rifle, only a handgun in a holster. He must have gone back to the truck, and
maybe even the cabin, because not only does he have the gun, he's now wearing a fancy hunting vest with a ton of pockets. Those pockets look full. More zip ties, more elements of torture.

He also has something in his left hand, something like a stick, but from this distance I'm not sure what it is.

The sight of him makes me want to cry. He is like the tide. Always returning, relentless, unbeatable. He's getting closer to my slanted tree. How does he do it? How can he track so well? The leaves beneath his feet look like every bit of ground I've seen. How can he look at those leaves and see a story I've told with my stocking feet? I don't know how he does it, but I know that he does, and that he'll keep doing it until I stop him.

Despite everything, despite my own survival on the line, despite the terrible things this man has done, it is with sick dread I pull the Colt Python from my pocket. Shooting at him while he raced for a weapon, while on the run, that was one thing. This is another. This is fueled by a different sort of adrenaline, an adrenaline mixed with a cold intellectual knowledge that I am about to try to take another human being's life. I don't want to do it. I don't have the energy for it. But it's something that has to be done.

He's right under my tree now.

Although the process of silently withdrawing the pistol and lining up my sights takes only a couple of seconds, an entire memory runs through my mind. I remember when we had to put Tucker's mother down. She had foundered and was in a slow decline. It was hard to find the right time. She was such a good horse, the first world champion my mother trained as a professional out on her
own. She was family. We called her Lucy, and she was the horse I learned to ride on. It was the right thing to do, but that didn't stop it from being impossibly hard.

I look at Wolfman and I think of Lucy. Lucy lived a good life, was loved and loving, but there was a moment, a moment I was there for, when one second Lucy was alive and the next second Lucy was dead. That's what's about to happen to Wolfman, and as far as I know he has never loved or been loved. He's going to die without the benefit of having lived.

All of this takes less than a second to run through me. As I'm thinking these things, he turns away to examine the base of my tree, and God help me, it feels easier to shoot him in the back than in the front. I line up my sight to a spot between his shoulder blades, and I pull the trigger.

As I squeeze, he turns his head, and there is the tiniest, slimmest of moments when he sees me. I look into those wolf eyes, and even though they are empty, they're still alive. In that split second he is alive and looking at me. I am alive and looking at him. Then the moment is over, the trigger is pulled back, and the gun is empty.

The bullet punches him in the back and he falls. He falls in slow motion, down to his knees, then tilting toward the earth. He goes to catch himself, but his hands fold up, useless, and crumple underneath his weight. There is the crack of his skull hitting a rock. Then all is quiet.