The Red Scream (48 page)

“Oh, Mrs. Cates.” Alison was weeping so she could barely get the words out. “It’s you. Thank God. Mark threw me out of the car. My car,” she wailed. “I think my elbow might be broken. I landed on it. Can you drive me to a hospital?”

Molly put an arm around the girl’s narrow waist. Alison looked ghastly. Her skirt was torn. Her blouse had mud stains and a few bright red blood drips. Tears were mixing with the blood which was seeping from her nose. Molly supported her to the passenger side of the truck, but found the door locked when she tried to open it.

“Hold on to the handle. Here,” Molly said. “I’ll go around and open it.”

“Hurry,” Alison gasped. “I’m afraid he might come back. Please hurry.”

Molly ran around, hit the automatic lock, and hurried back around to help the girl in. Alison let out a little squeal of pain when she brushed her arm against the door getting in. “Okay,” Molly said. “I’m sure there’s a hospital right in Huntsville. We’ll find it. Hold on.” She closed the door, ran around, and got in. The first thing she did was hit the door locker. The engine was still running, so Molly shifted and turned the wheel sharply and drove forward onto the shoulder. As she was shifting into reverse and looking behind her, she felt it—cold metal digging into her neck, right under the jawbone.

It was a surprise so total she felt the blood in her veins stop flowing.

chapter
26

A monster, a beast,

A devil at least.

No human being,

They’re all agreeing.

He has taken life

Shed blood with his knife.

We’ll show him his error.

Make him taste the terror.

Suck out his last breath.

We’ll put him to death.

LOUIE BRONK
Death Row, Ellis I Unit,
Huntsville, Texas

I
n the coolest voice Molly had ever heard, as if she were giving a stranger directions to the nearest service station, Alison McFarland said, “We’re going to continue on the way you were going, for one mile. Then you take 19 west. If you take a hand off that wheel for anything, I will shoot—like this.” She pressed the gun under Molly’s jawbone and jabbed upward to illustrate. “Up here, into your head. It’s already cocked. The smallest twitch of my finger will fire it.” All this was spoken in a drone. No emotion.

Too shocked for real fear, Molly drove the mile in silence.

“Here’s the turn,” Alison said, “19 west. Take it.”

Molly made the right turn onto the dark two-lane road. Her hands clenched the wheel. She struggled to regulate her breathing. Get calm. Think straight.

For two miles they drove in silence, without passing another car. Beyond the strip of road illuminated in her headlights lay total blackness. If she was going to die out here in the dark, at least she wanted some answers first. “Where are we heading, Alison?”

“Lake Livingston, a place called Point Blank,” Alison said. “In six more miles we come to the turnoff. Don’t worry, I’ll tell you.”

“What would I have to worry about?”

“That’s right. Just drive.”

Molly kept her hands on the wheel and held the truck steady. She tried her daddy’s old calming trick—listening to her own breathing. Breathe out, breathe in. She heard it deep inside—in, out, in, out. But some other noise intruded itself—a tiny almost imperceptible noise, like … like a mouse gnawing. Molly’s eyes flicked sideways. It was Alison. Chewing. She was turned toward Molly, pressing the gun against Molly’s neck with her right hand and chewing furiously on her left thumb.

As though a shot of painkiller had suddenly worn off, Molly felt the muzzle bruising her skin and, worse, the pressure of hot panic simmering in her chest. Her nerves couldn’t take any more silence, or gnawing. “Bad habit,” she said.

“What would you know about anything?” Alison snapped.

“Good point,” Molly said. “But I sure would like to know.” She waited to see if Alison would reply, but there was only silence. “Mark didn’t kick you out of the car.”

“Of course not. He wouldn’t have the balls. I forced a big fight. It wasn’t hard since he’s so mad about me moving back home to be with Daddy. I said I was going to take the bus back. And I will take the bus back.” She pressed harder with the gun. “There’s one leaving Huntsville in two hours.”

“Two hours,” Molly said. Whatever Alison was planning to do, she thought she could do it and get back to Huntsville in two hours. Molly began to let up on the accelerator, very gradually. Slower was better here. Alison didn’t seem to notice.

Only the hum of the engine and the whir of the heater broke the silence inside the cab.

“Sure is one dark, lonely stretch of road.” Molly tried to glance sideways without moving her head.

There was no response.

“How did you feel tonight, Alison, when you saw Louie die? Any misgivings?”

A long exhale of disgust was the only response.

“You might as well tell me the story,” Molly said. “It will keep me calm.”

There was only silence.

“Well,” Molly said, trying to keep her voice low, “I’ll start it off. I think that first one was an accident. Your mother must have been a difficult woman to have as a mother, neglectful and self-absorbed. But what happened was really more an accident than anything else, wasn’t it?”

The only response was a resumption of the gnawing sound. Molly felt her palms getting slick on the steering wheel. She wanted to wipe them off, but remembered Alison’s warning and believed it. She gripped the wheel tighter.

“Let me see how close I can get.” Molly kept her eyes straight ahead, on the dark ribbon of road. “You wanted to go with the boys that morning. Poaching rabbits. But they wouldn’t let you. So you went out to shoot targets. When you got back to the house you wondered where your mother was. You looked for her. Felt a little panicky at being alone. She wasn’t in the house or the garden, so you decided to see if her car was in the garage. The door was closed, so you poked your head in the side door. It was dark inside and you must have been scared when you saw them there together, confused. I can imagine how upsetting that would be.”

Molly tried to see her out of the corner of her eye but in the dark she could make out only the shape of the bent head. Alison was chewing on her finger again, as if she were intent on consuming herself. Like those animals that gnaw their legs off when they get caught in a trap.

“You had your gun with you, one of those little .22 rifles kids often learn to shoot with. And in a moment of panic you shot. It hit her in the back and killed her. An impulse. An accident. Am I close, Alison?”

There was no response. This time Molly kept silent, too.

Finally Alison spoke. “She knew I hated being left alone but she did it all the time. That’s why Daddy got David to come live with us, because she was always going off somewhere. Then Stuart called. From Mark’s house. He was upset, crying so hard he could barely talk. He said he wanted to talk to her. I called and called and looked out in the garden, but I couldn’t find her. Stu told me what had happened. Mark had just told him that Mom was doing all these dirty things with David. Mark said he’d watched them. He told Stu all these disgusting details and Stuart told them to me over the
phone. I didn’t believe people I knew would do things like that. Stu said he was coming home to ask her about it.”

Alison kept the gun muzzle pressed hard against Molly’s neck. “After he hung up, I thought about looking in the garage to see if her car was there. They didn’t even notice me. They were half undressed and making all these weird noises. I didn’t know if he was hurting her or she was hurting him, or what. It was dark. I don’t know how, but the shot got her in the back. Just that one shot. When David backed away, and she dropped to the floor, it was a moment so … well there was never anything like it. One second, and she was dead. All it took was a tiny movement of my finger. I hadn’t even willed it. Not really.

“It was so easy. That was the thing. I think about it all the time, how easy it was. Like tonight. People consider it this huge dramatic thing, but really it’s easier than switching a light off.”

“Yes,” Molly said softly, “I got that feeling tonight, too. But what happened next must have been hard.”

“Oh, no. That was easy, too. I’d been reading about the Scalper in the paper and watching it on television. I knew all about it—the shaved heads and the car they thought he might be driving. I told David what to do and he did it. I should have done it all myself. If I’d done the shaving, there wouldn’t have been any of those cuts.”

“Because David was scared and you weren’t,” Molly said.

“David was more than scared. He was a sniveling wreck. The thing he feared most, though, was my father finding out what he and Mom were doing. So he did what I told him to do.”

“Where did you put all the stuff—her watch and earrings and the things from the house?”

“Oh, we buried everything, way out past the house, in this cedar thicket where no one ever goes. Her hair, too.”

“And the gun?”

“That, too. I hated to. I wish I still had it.”

“You must have been scared while you were doing that.”

“No. Really. A little hurried because Stu was on his way home. That’s all. It was like a wonderful adventure. I never had such a good time. Like while the boys were out doing this silly stuff, shooting at rabbits, I was doing something real, far more important and exciting. Something I would never ever tell them about.”

Molly kept her eyes fixed on the yellow stripe unwinding in her
headlights. Alison was not so different from Louie Bronk, she thought. Both lived down the same sort of rabbit hole, where killing people was the best sport.

“Stuart didn’t know, did he?”

“No. By the time he got home, we were all finished and David had called the police.”

“Does he know now?”

“I don’t think so. But he doesn’t want to know.”

“Mark?”

“God, no. You’d never tell Mark something like that. He’s such a blabbermouth. Such a baby.”

Molly moved her eyes sideways, straining to see Alison’s face in the dark. “When did your father find out?”

Alison sucked in her breath. The gnawing sound filled the cab again and Molly clenched her teeth against it. Her own fingers could feel the flesh being ripped away from the nail.

“That was the bad part,” Alison said. “I hated that, and it was so unnecessary. He never had to know. For the first few days, he didn’t. But then David broke down and told him. By that time, he was more scared of the police than he was of my father.”

“And then Louie confessed. That must have been a surprise.”

Alison made a small popping noise that sounded like an exclamation of delight. “It was the most wonderful moment of my life. It was magical. Like I’d made it happen. Like there was this invisible connection between me and him. Like it was all meant to turn out that way. He came along at the right time and he’d done so many murders it didn’t matter if he took on one more. He was just perfect.” The girl’s voice was more animated than Molly had ever heard it.

“Especially after your father got Frank Purcell to supply Louie with the essential information about the murder so his confession would stick.”

“I guess. I didn’t have anything to do with that. Daddy did that, for himself, I think. To avoid scandal. Maybe a little for me. He believed it was an accident.”

“It was an accident,” Molly said.

“Mmm. It’s hard to remember exactly,” Alison said in a dreamy voice.

Molly started to nod, but the gun jabbing into her jawbone
stopped her. “How about David? I guess the execution was just too much for him.”

“Oh, he was a gutless old woman. He was thinking about telling. After all this time.” Alison’s voice dripped with contempt. “Conscience. Religion—those aren’t real things. And who cares whether some scummy lowlife like Bronk gets executed?”

“I do.”

“You and that fat church woman.”

“And David, of course. He cared. So you shot him.”

“I had to. I did it Tuesday night, with his own gun. And put him where he wouldn’t get discovered for a while.”

“I can certainly understand why you had to kill David to keep him from telling. But Georgia—that’s another matter. To kill for money, Alison!”

“No.” The gun ground into Molly’s neck. “Not for money. If you think that, you don’t understand anything.” Her voice was earnest, fervent.

“Tell me,” Molly said, “so I will.”

There was such a long pause that Molly thought Alison had finished talking. But finally the girl said, “My father and I were happy together. Close. Georgia ruined that. She made him act like some silly adolescent. I didn’t want to leave home. I wasn’t ready. I wanted to stay there with him, but she drove me out. She spent all this money making our house ugly and they were like these stupid moony honeymooners. I couldn’t stand it.” The gun muzzle prodded Molly’s jaw. “There. Turn right on 980. Right here.”

Very carefully, Molly made the turn onto the narrow road. They were getting close to the end of this trip. She had to grip the wheel hard to keep her hands from shaking. She glanced down at her bunch of keys dangling from the ignition. In the light from the dash the little tear gas canister Grady had given her gleamed among the jumble of keys, just inches from her right hand.