Vile Blood (14 page)

“No.”

“Well then, please have this.” He dug into the pocket of his shirt and emerged with a crucifix pendant hanging from a strand of rosary beads. “I hope you don’t mind that it’s pre-owned?”

Skye’s eyes found the little Christ figure that dangled there, twisting, catching the light, and she fought something inside her that kept her hand at her side.

She shook her head. “It’s yours, I can’t take it.”

“Oh, don’t be silly. I have more. One of the perks of the job.” He held it out to her. “Take it, please. You would be doing me a kindness.”

“How?”

“You’d make me feel that I’ve done a little good today. And that, I’m afraid, is the limit of my ambition.”

“It’s okay, as ambitions go.” She took the rosary, feeling the warmth of the priest’s body on it. Then she felt something else, a terrified
shuffling
in her cells, a silent shrieking from within, and her hand trembled and she nearly dropped the beads
.

“Skye?” The priest stared at her. “I think you’d better tell me what’s going on.”

She shook her head, getting to her feet, almost knocking over the plastic chair.

“Thank you,” she said, already walking away, the rosary stowed in her jeans pocket where the crucifix seemed to burn a hole in her hip bone.

29

As Junior was wheeled out into the garden the sunlight tore at his eyes, his pupils still dilated from the subterranean murk of the shadowy corridors, and he had to fight the impulse to let his lids close. In an attempt to cut the glare he allowed his head to loll, but Alfonso pushed the chair directly toward the sun, a molten ball in the cloudless sky and Junior felt tears well up and spill down his cheeks.

The orderly didn’t notice, keeping up his monologue as they progressed along the paved walkway that carved its way through sun-bleached grass and parched trees.

“Oh, she be
fine
, my man. Fine. A spicy little snack for Alfonso. Oh, yeah. Mmmmm—
nnnnnnnh
.”

This monologue had provided the soundtrack to their journey out of the building—the minor panic of the commissary brawl long over—past a series of blank-faced guards who prodded at the red buttons that released the electric locks on the barred doors, barely glancing at Junior and his charge as they moved by and were finally, with one last buzz, released into the sunshine and the fresh air.

They stopped behind a stone wall, a threadbare creeper clinging to it like a skein of arteries. The institution was hidden from view. Alfonso set the brake on the wheelchair and delved for a pack of cigarettes in the pocket of his white uniform, his huge frame shielding Junior’s face from the sun as he fired up and took a long drag, exhaling, releasing little grunts of satisfaction.

Junior scoped as much of the landscape as he could: a high chain-link fence and the hard shine of car windshields at the very extreme of his peripheral vision. The parking lot, with the road beyond. The road to freedom.

The orderly consulted a massive timepiece sunk into the fat of his wrist—a dazzle of fake diamonds surrounding a face the color of pond scum.

“She’d better not be standing Alfonso up. No, no. Uh, uh.”

The big man took a step away from the chair to peer around the wall and the sun lazered Junior’s eyes again, causing a fresh fall of tears.

Alfonso squinted down through the smoke. “Damn, son, you’re cryin’. That won’t do. No way. Not on Alfonso’s watch.”

He clamped the cigarette between his teeth and stepped in close, wielding a handkerchief the size of a table cloth, his paunch
like an airbag
against Junior. As the orderly dabbed at his face, Junior saw the Taser, its Smurf-blue handle sticking free of the holster that hung from Alfonso’s utility belt, and knew that this was it. The moment.

The strap that held the Taser in the holster had worked free of its Velcro patch, so it required no strength or dexterity, all Junior had to do was snake an arm forward and free the device, point it up at the orderly’s sweating neck and press the trigger.

A dart-like electrode, tethered to the Taser by a spiral of conductive wire, took Alfonso beneath his jawbone and he chicken danced for a second, then collapsed in on himself, ending up lying on his back on the pathway, the heels of his Nike’s drumming against the paving.

Junior allowed the scalpel to slide from his sleeve into his waiting fingers and fell
upon
the orderly, drawing the blade across the man’s throat. Skin and flesh parted and blood pumped out in geysers that diminished as Alfonso’s heart stuttered and stopped.

Junior felt for a pulse in the man’s neck. Nothing.

Panting, hands slick with blood, he dragged himself off
the body
and back onto his chair, hearing the staccato tap of heels as the
Latina
nurse appeared around the wall.

She stared down at the orderly and gasped, her hand flying to her glossed lips as she knelt down.

“Alfonso? Alfonso!”

Her head was level with Junior’s hand and it was all too easy to edge forward and place the bloody blade against her throat, letting the tip dent her skin.

“Take one of the cable ties from his belt,” Junior said in a whisper.

“Please,” she said. “Don’t hurt me.”

He pressed a little harder with the blade and a red droplet broke her skin. “Do as I say.”

She freed one of the plastic-strap handcuffs and Junior extended his left arm. “Tie us together,” he said.

She stared at him, mute. He jabbed her again and a bead of blood ran down her neck and dropped onto the white collar of her uniform.

“Do it,” he said.

She put her left arm against his and battled to lasso the cable tie around both their wrists. He could smell fear beneath her sweet perfume.

Junior, still holding the scalpel, fed the cable tie through the eye of the ratchet and dipped forward, gripping the tie with his teeth and pulled it tight with a little zipping sound, feeling it bite into his flesh, hearing the nurse whimper.

“Do you have a car?” he asked, laying the blade against her throat again. He jabbed her when she hesitated. “Don’t lie to me.”

“Yes, I have a car.”

“You’re going to wheel me to it and drive me away from here, do you understand?”

“Yes,” she said, Junior’s arm manipulated like a marionette as she clutched the handles of the chair and started wheeling it toward the car park
where windshields dangled starbursts of light from the thirsty cottonwoods.

30

When the man in the suit produced the wood saw from beneath the desk, Gene knew they were in the deepest kind of trouble.

The man, staring out the window at a distant range of purple mountains, bent the blade like a bow and when he released the metal it quivered and sang out a high, plaintive note, before he stilled it with a fingertip and lay the saw on the desktop beside the sidearms taken from Gene and Drum on their arrival.

The man was as anonymous as this tract house built in one of the new suburbs that spilled out of the city into the desert. He was in his early fifties. Not dressed well or badly. Needed a haircut. If not for the faint trace of a foreign accent—Eastern European? Russian?—that blunted his vowels, there would be nothing remarkable about him.

He turned to Gene and Drum, who were seated side by side before the desk. “One of the men you killed was the son of my cousin. And because of the manner of his death, there are certain expectations. Do you understand?”

Gene understood well enough to stay silent but Drum lifted a huge paw and said, “Now just one goddam minute, friend. We didn’t kill nobody and we came here with a business proposition.”

The man ignored Drum, holding out the saw to one of his soldiers who wasn’t much smaller than the sheriff, a tattooed power lifter with a shaven head and a goatee.

“Do the cowboy first.”

The skinhead took the saw and moved into position behind Drum. Two other men, squat and dark, sandwiched the giant. The remaining two soldiers,
lanky rednecks
, stood over Gene.

Drum tried to stand, an act rendered comical when the two brown men (all sinew and compact power) pressed him down into his seat, and he only managed to lift the legs of the chair free of the floor for a moment before the skinhead buried a fist in the giant’s midriff and the chair clattered to the wood, Drum’s breath leaving him in a mighty gust.

The sheriff sagged forward and the muscle man swiped Drum’s Stetson from his head, letting it settle bowl up on the floor as if awaiting contributions from an audience.

The bald man laid the saw against the base of Drum’s skull, cocked his elbow, and began to hack away, the teeth of the blade stirring up a confetti of flesh, blood welling from the sheriff’s neck and a high
wail
escaping his throat.

Once more Drum tried to gain his feet, knocking the saw aside. And again the dark men dragged him down like a
rogue hot air balloon. T
he skinhead stepped back and swung a boot in a roundhouse kick that connected with the giant’s chin and left him slack-jawed and dazed.

“I want him conscious,” the man in the suit said, stopping the powerlifter in mid-pirouette as he wound up for another kick.

The two men guarding Gene shifted a little to improve their view as the big man applied the blade once again to Drum’s flesh.

One of the men held an Uzi. He’d been their guide, meeting them at the bar in the city and driving with them in the Town Car, a Mercedes SUV on their tail. He had something of the look of an actor who’d appeared in DVDs Skye had brought home from Blockbuster before it expired with most of the town. Gene, glancing back at the man as they drove—the blond guy gazing out the window at the sunstruck city, ignoring all of Drum’s attempts at conversation—had failed to recall the name of the actor.

It came to him now, as he stared into the snout of a chatter gun: Owen Wilson. Then he wasn’t seeing the weapon any longer, he saw Timmy and Skye on the sofa giggling at dumb comedies that he’d failed to find funny. And he saw Skye lifting Timmy from the sidewalk that morning, staring at Gene with eyes filled with something he could not name, and before Gene
thought long enough to stop himself
he sprang from his chair and hit the man with the chatter gun, knocking the barrel upward, the gunman stitching a useless line of bullets up the wall and into the ceiling.

Gene ripped the weapon from Owen Wilson’s hands and fired a short burst into him at point-blank range, a gout of blond hair, brain matter and bone flung to the far wall where it splattered a Russell print of a cattle drive. The wind of a round passed Gene’s face and he spun and shot the other man in the chest.

The two brown men, weapons holstered to allow them to wrestle Drum, were easy targets and Gene emptied the Uzi into them. The skinhead swung the saw at Drum who felled him with a single blow to the sternum that stopped his heart.

The man behind the desk had hold of Drum’s weapon and shot him in the shoulder. Drum, all sweat and blood and piss-stained suit pants, grabbed the desk and tipped it, pinning the man against the wall. Gene’s Glock slid down the desk top and bumped to the floor.

Drum lifted the Glock and leveled it at the pinned man, who said nothing. Drum killed him with two shots to the head.

Silence and the stink of propellant.

Drum sank to his knees, blood leaking from the wound in his neck and the gunshot in his shoulder.

Gene dropped the spent Uzi and dipped a hand into the Siamese-twin heap that was what remained of the dark men, emerging with a .44. He held the weapon on Drum and cocked it.

Drum, sweat and blood staining his shirtfront, said, “Kill me and you kill your boy.”

31

Skye lay on Minty’s bed hiding from the world, the curtains drawn against the afternoon glare. She was alone in the apartment, hadn’t seen Minty since the episode in the bathtub that morning and knew she owed the kindhearted woman an explanation. She’d have to lie through her teeth, in other words.

Sleep was impossible—as soon as she closed her eyes she was back across the border, seeing the torn flesh and eviscerated innards that had so aroused The Other but had left Skye feeling polluted, her digestive system straining to process what she’d gorged upon.

What am I?

That question again. As a teenage girl in the ultra-dorky
Twilight
era, Skye knew she was no vampire. She wished she were—she’d run out into the sunlight and be done with it. If The Other didn’t turn her feet to lead. She was more like a werewolf, she supposed, but even those lupine beasts seemed restrained compared to her, feasting on human flesh only on the full moon, while she’d consumed
five men in two days.

Skye imagined having this conversation with Minty: I ate local on Tuesday, then hopped across the fence for something exotic last night. Even Minty, the most permissive of people, would be shocked to the roots of her dyed hair. Or think her a total whack job.

Where did I come from?

Now that was the question.

Skye lifted the rosary from the bed and held it up, letting the crucifix catch the one ray of light that poked through a gap in the drapes, dust motes dancing in it like chorus girls. Twisting the beads she set the silver and wood cross twirling, the crucified figure rendered in exquisite detail.

The movement of the cross was hypnotic and Skye was lulled into a kind of stupor before she stumbled down a rabbit hole in time and was a child again, maybe six years old, walking with her adoptive mother along the sidewalk in the main road (the town thriving, the storefronts aglitter with merchandise) Skye skipping happily ahead, ignorant of the people around her, all her attention on avoiding the cracks in the paving.

A giant of a man in white gumboots and coveralls, carrying an animal carcass from a truck that exhaled dry ice, blocked Skye’s path as he entered the butcher’s. She darted around his legs, not wanting to see the headless animal, its ribs like hard bars against its torn pink flesh.