Ruthless (8 page)

Five Years Ago

SHE IS TIRED AND SWEATY
and covered with dust and mud when she sees him.

“Caleb!”

Always quiet, he answers with a grin.

She leaves her horse cross tied in the wash rack and runs toward him. He knows what she's up to and turns tail, sprinting away from her. They make some rich people in a golf cart mad, but they don't care. The chase lasts until the end of the barn aisle, where the girl snatches him up and makes sure she transfers as much filth onto the boy as she can.

Slapping his back in a fake hug, she says, “It's so good to see you!”

He gives in and returns the hug. “It's good to see you, too, Ruthie.”

And then the hug isn't a friend's method of good-humored torture. The hug is something else, something that makes the girl feel uncomfortable, and she lets go.

“C'mon,” she says. “I don't want Tucker to freak out without me.”

“Tucker ain't never freaked out a day in his life,” the boy rejoins.

The girl tenses at the use of “ain't.” She looks over at him as they walk side by side. As usual, he's wearing those damn Wranglers. The girl almost shakes her head. They're going to a new middle school next year. It was barely acceptable to wear Wranglers at their old school in the country, and the new school is pure suburbia. She tried to talk to him about it once, but he wouldn't listen. Insisted he was who he was and he wasn't going to change for anybody. She feels bad about it, but if he wants to dig his own grave, it's on him.

“What are you looking at?” the boy asks.

“Nothing,” she says. “Just glad you're here.” Once she says it, it becomes true, and she forgets the Wranglers. No one important is here to see his cowboy jeans anyway. She throws an arm around his neck, back to the game of smearing dirt on him.

They walk out into the sunshine, and the boy pauses for a long look at the Jim Norick Arena. It looms over the grounds, its rounded contours smooth and polished. It's a place for professionals.

“Damn, Ruthie. You're here.”

“I know it.”

“Are you scared?”

“Oh, hell no.” She looks at him, reproachful. “I don't do fear, Caleb. You know that.”

He smiles, impressed, and she forgives him the transgression.

CHAPTER NINE

I NEED TO THINK THROUGH
my situation, but standing out here in the open is doing my nerves no favors. I retreat back to the Logans' detached garage and sit on my haunches, knees to chest. It's cold tonight. Colder than before. Or maybe my body is losing its ability to fight the elements.

Okay.

Number one. I'd come to hate that truck, but that was before I found the gas can, before I found this road with at least one house on it. They say you don't appreciate something until it's gone. The truth of this strikes me in a whole new way.

Number two. Wolfman has his truck back. He's fully mobile again, but that's not the worst of it.

Number three, the worst of it. He knows where I am.

My guess is he'll park the truck in the woods somewhere nearby and return to the hunt.

I look at the Logan Family Lodge, hating it, hating them. I'm right here, right next to what should be safety. It's bizarre, but as disgusting and evil and terrible as the Wolfman is, I can't help but feel he's unable to control himself. It seems to me he makes up bizarre excuses to make it okay for him to kill and rape, because he can't stop himself from killing and raping. Whether born or made, the Wolfman is more creature than human. He's a monster. These people pretend to be decent people, with their fancy mountain cabin and their all-American good looks, but their core is just as rotten as the Wolfman's.

Then I realize my back's up against a wall. Figuratively, but also literally. On the other side of that wall is the Logans' car. If I'm lucky, I'll be able to steal my second vehicle of the day. I decide that I won't ever give it back, either.

I check the perimeter of the garage, and it's apparent there's no easy way in. I'll have to break the glass in the side door, reach in, and unlock it. That's going to suck, mostly because they might hear it and do Lord knows what.

But what choice do I have?

Time to grab a nice, sturdy stick from the woods.

The panes in the door are small squares, and hopefully they won't make nearly as much noise as the window in the Wolfman's cabin. That sound shocked the hell out of me. I watch the windows of the Logans' house for a while. There's no movement; it's impossible to tell when might be a better or worse time to do this. Ultimately, the idea of Wolfman somewhere nearby gets me to push the stick through the glass.

The glass is cheap, thin, and doesn't make much noise.

Pausing, I wait to see if anything happens inside the Logan house. After counting to five, I reach through and open the side door. The autumn moon helps me out. The light is dim, but it's more than enough to see by.

Inside the garage is a brand-new Lexus SUV. Clearly, they need an SUV for their adventurous mountain lifestyle. On the plus side, they are neat and tidy to the point of OCD, and it doesn't take long for me to determine there are no keys inside the garage. In the soft light I see the car, a leaf blower, a trash can, and interestingly, some inflatable tubes. There must be a nice-size river somewhere nearby.

I am getting closer to civilization.

The Lexus is locked, and a blinking red light tells me the alarm is on. I shake my head. Out in the middle of nowhere, they have their house locked, their car locked, the car alarm on, and the garage dead bolted. What do they think? Somebody's going to come steal everything they own or something? Granted, there's a sexual predator down the road, but they didn't know that when they parked the car this morning.

Increasing my aggravation is the continued smell of food. I can't get away from the smell of meat and corn on the cob. At this point it's cruel and unusual punishment, the scent of the Logan dinner.

Then I register what I'm looking at.

A trash can.

If I know the Logans, and at this point, I feel like I know the worthless sons-a-bitches pretty well, they'll have thrown away a lot of perfectly good food.

I pop open the trash can lid, and the smell of food intensifies. The reek of garbage is there too, but all I care about is the food. Tearing open the tidy white plastic trash bag on top, I hit the mother lode. There's balled-up napkins and other gross things, but I don't even have to dig to pluck out an uneaten half rack of ribs.

They've thrown away ribs!

Sitting cross-legged on the concrete floor, I tear into the meat. It's beef and it's fresh. They must have thrown it away right before I got here. The power of food overwhelms me. It's been so long since I've eaten, it feels like a whole new experience. It absorbs me completely, takes over me. All I want is this food, to eat every single morsel on every single bone. Fear, rage, pain—all of it is hidden by hunger and the act of satisfying that hunger.

Even as I eat, I can't believe I'm eating something so good. My family has money, but maybe because we're country people, we know better than to throw away food. Especially quality beef ribs like these.

The bad thing about ribs, they require a lot of work for not so much meat. When I finish the half rack, I dig back into the trash bag and find something even better. A whole baked potato, still wrapped in tinfoil. Returning to my seat on the floor, gnawing on the potato, I think of nothing but getting as much food down my throat as I can. This potato doesn't taste as good as the ribs; it's plain and dry. But it's a big chunk of food, and it's a ton of carbs.

Protein and carbs, some sugar from the barbeque sauce. Simple things transformed into a magical potion that can give
me energy, give me strength, let me live to see another day.

Back into the trash bag, there are no more easy pickings, but there are still things to eat. I'm chewing on a half-eaten corn on the cob when I hear footsteps.

My first fear is the Wolfman.

But these footsteps are stupidly loud on the concrete driveway.

I think,
This is Logan
. Like an animal, a growl rises in my throat. I'm not finished feeding. This ridiculous, hateful man needs to wait for me to finish feeding.

My suspicion is confirmed by the heavy, mechanic jolt of the garage door coming to life, complete with overhead light turning on. I doubt the Wolfman has the Logans' garage door opener.

The side door waits for me. I look at it, and it seems to look back and say, “You need to run now. Run through me, out into the woods.” But something inside me snaps, and I say to the side door, “No, I'm finishing my corn first.”

And that's how Mr. Logan finds me, leaning against his trash can, eating his corn on the cob. At my feet are the bones of my victims, plus some tinfoil.

His arm is extended; in his shaking hand he holds his big-boy gun. It's way too much weapon for him. My guess is, he's never fired it. Has no idea the kind of kickback he's going to get. If he did, he'd have both hands on it. A bigger idiot I've never met.

“You're a menace,” I say, as if I owned the place and he was the intruder. Somewhere deep, deep down a little thought bubbles up.
You've gone crazy
, it whispers. I respond,
Yes, yes I have
.

“You need to leave,” Mr. Logan squeaks.

Instead, I pluck out an uneaten rib from the trash and begin to strip it of its flesh.

“You need to leave!”

“Why?”

“You're either on meth, or you're telling the truth and you'll bring that man here!”

“I've already brought that man here. Didn't you see that truck drive away? That was him.” I drop the bone onto his nice, clean, concrete floor and grab another rib. “He knows where I am now. I'm guessing he's parked the truck and is on foot.” I gesture with my rib. “He's probably right behind you.”

Mr. Logan swings around, pointing the gun toward the road.

“That's smart,” I say. “That's where you need to be pointing that thing. Toward him.”

There's some movement off to the left. It's nothing but the shadow of a limb swayed by the breeze, but Mr. Logan fires. One-handed. The recoil almost knocks him off his feet. He drops the gun and clutches his ears. My ears are ringing too, but I just keep eating.

“Surprising, isn't it? The first time you fire one.”

Trying to recover, he picks up his gun and points it at me.

“You!” There's a new level of fear in him now. His eyes bulge from their sockets. “It's
you
he wants. He'll leave us alone if you're not here. You need to leave!”

Right before it happens, I sense Mr. Logan has hit his breaking point, and I bolt for the side door.

I'm one stride into my escape when he starts shooting up the
place. He can't aim, and so the first thing he shoots is his own car. The alarm blares into the night. The second thing he shoots is the concrete floor. By the time he gets to the third shot, which I think goes sailing off into the woods somewhere, I'm out the side door and into the forest.

I don't really hurry. For one thing, I can't. My feet are in a new kind of pain, one I haven't figured out how to deal with yet.

For another, I know Mr. Logan's beating a fast retreat back to his house. He accomplished what he came to do, and now that his car alarm is screaming the news of my presence to the Wolfman, I have to get away.

On the other hand, maybe the car alarm will lure Wolfman to the Logan Family Lodge, and he can work out some of his aggression on them.

A girl can hope.

Oh my,
the little whisper bubbles again
, you
have
gone crazy.

“Damn straight,” I mutter aloud to no one, and then laugh.

Thirty-One Years Ago

THE CASHIER DOESN'T WANT TO
touch his hands. She halfway throws the change at him, leaving the man to scoop up the coins from the counter. His fingers leave dirty streaks on the white Formica.

It's not the dirt the woman is afraid of, but the red-yellow stains on the palms, along the nail beds. He wants to tell her it's just iodine; it's nothing to be scared of. The summer rains have hit harder than usual, and the whole herd has hoof rot. He's the new guy, so he's the one who gets to wrestle the dairy cows one by one, applying the burning unguent to their sore feet. It's a hell of a job, one he won't even get to keep. The dairy farm is up for sale. Developers are already circling, ready to create a subdivision filled with cookie-cutter homes the likes of which the man will never be able to afford, and would really like to set on fire.

He likes that thought. Setting those homes on fire. The crackle, the smoke, the pretty embers. But those homes don't even exist yet, so he can
hardly set them on fire. He settles for giving the lady behind the counter a nasty look and hunkers down with his corn dogs.

The Stop and Go has five little booths inside it, and the man eats lunch here almost every day. It's the kind of gas station/convenience store/diner combo he grew up with, feels comfortable inside. The Stop and Go even has the benefit of being surrounded on three sides by a rundown farm. The muddy pastures hold a strange assortment of livestock collected by an old kook of a man. Emu, alpacas, pigs from Vietnam. Farms, even weird ones, make sense to the man.

The big downside is that the Stop and Go is the only gas station for miles. He's had to learn to ignore the electronic dings as the people come in to pay for their gas, buy their candy bars and their sodas. He keeps his head down and his focus on his corn dogs and his Coca-Cola.

But then a voice reaches through his protective bubble.

“I want it. I want it, Daddy.” Her father mumbles something the man doesn't hear, but he hears her reply. “I said I want it.”

That voice slices through his defenses, into his ears, down deep into his brain.

More male mumbling and then: “But I love the
Dukes of Hazzard
!”

Somehow, he knows. He knows before he raises his head what she looks like. He knows how rotten she is. How spoiled and evil and terrible. He knows what she's going to spend the rest of her life doing, how she is going to treat her children. He knows all of this, and he knows he is not wrong.

He looks up, and she is precisely as he expected. Tiny little body wearing daisy dukes cut so her ass cheeks show. Fourteen if she's lucky, but the kind who already has an eighteen-year-old boyfriend. Her red hair is parted down
the middle and put into two cute little pigtails. God, how he wants to rip those pigtails straight out of her head.

She's putting on a
Dukes of Hazzard
baseball cap. Her father looks downtrodden, weak, destroyed. A neutered man. Once upon a time someone told the man to blame the fathers in such situations, but he never bought into that idea. It's not the father's fault. It's her fault and no doubt the mother's fault too. The mother isn't around, but the man knows she is just like her daughter.

The girl shifts the ball cap to a jaunty angle. She looks into the small mirror next to the sunglasses and lets her mouth hang open a little, trying to look sexy. She is disturbingly successful. Pleased by the results, she whips the hat off her head and hands it to her dad. “Buy it,” she says.

Slump-shouldered, the father takes the ball cap to the counter.

“Ooh! Look!” squeals the girl, pointing out the back door of the Stop and Go to the countryside beyond. “There's a llama!” The girl skips away from her father. “I'm going to go pet the llama!”

“I'll be in the car,” he says.

The man gets up from his corn dogs and his drink. He doesn't finish them or even bother to throw them away. He doesn't even wait until the father leaves the building.

The man wants to create that feeling of his brain being popped into place, and he believes he knows how he can make it happen. He's thought a lot about it and then, without warning, she came into his life to tell him it was time to try. Time to find out if he's right. He's not the least bit worried about any of the particulars. Just as he knew what the girl looked like before he laid eyes on her, he knows all of this will go smoothly. All he has to do is let his brain pop into place.

For three whole days it was beautiful. Everything stayed aligned; everything was free and perfect and the way it should be. Now it's something else. His brain is sliding back into its original position, the cockeyed place where it sits wrong, like bone-on-bone arthritis.

He's washing blood and dirt off his hands in a cold mountain creek. A dirty shovel lies beside him. It was more difficult than he had anticipated, digging underneath the cabin. So little room to maneuver. If he ever had to do it again, he would make a good-size hole in the floor. That way he could stand up and dig. It is a nice idea, but it fills him with unease as he envisions it.

At no point in the process was he afraid. That was good; he felt proud of that. But now that it is all over, uncomfortable feelings start to bubble up. There aren't many good people in the world. The girl wasn't good; he knew that much. But what if her grandfather is good? What if he suffers because of this? The man doesn't like thinking about it, and yet the little thoughts of “what if” keep rising to the surface.

By the time he gets into his red truck to go home, his stomach seems to be sitting somewhere around his feet. This is a high price to pay for three good days. A very high price to pay.