Who in Hell Is Wanda Fuca? (35 page)

Before I could say anything, her face turned back into a stone mask.

"Wesley. You and Frank take care of Mr. Waterman. Be quick about it, I
want to be out of here within fifteen minutes."

"Fifteen minutes?" whined Wesley. "I need - " She cut
him off, cold. "Fifteen minutes is plenty of time for your fun. I'm
limiting. Eunice to a similar amount of time with Miss Nobel here. Now get to
it, young man."

Eunice grunted as she yanked a cluttered collection of ominous-looking
crochet hooks and knitting needles from the bag. Several pieces of yarn were
caught up in the hooks. She frowned as she worked to free them. Her eyes burned
with the same anticipation that made her bony fingers tremble.

It was now or forever hold my peace.

I threw my head back. I heard Frank's nose break under the impact.
Half-turning, I clamped his gun arm under mine and swung him back into Wesley.
We hit the door in a tangled heap. Caroline, suddenly a snarling tiger, went at
Wesley's eyes with her thumbs. He screamed, a high-pitched, inhuman sound,
flailing with his arms, trying both to protect his eyes and to get some room to
maneuver. Frank and I had him pinned against the door.

Frank, who I suspected had had his nose broken before, staged an immediate
recovery. He clamped his free arm around my throat and began to apply ungodly
pressure. My own pulse drummed in my ears above the sounds of Wesley's
screams."

"Bad move, pilgrim," he grunted.

Mustering one last burst of oxygenated energy, I brought Frank's gun hand
down hard over my left knee. The gun clattered to the floor somewhere behind
me. No go. The pressure on my throat increased exponentially. I could feel my
movements going into slow motion, like I was running underwater. I began to
float. Only Wesley's hysterical keening kept me conscious. A muffled shot burped
in the tiny doorway. The pressure behind my eyes again increased.

For a second, all sound and movement ceased, as everything waited for the
pain that follows the impact. Nothing. Pound by pound, the pressure on my
throat began to lessen. Frank began to drop to his knees; his belt buckle
caught on the back of my belt as he slid down. Before he could fall, I turned
and shouldered him back into Wesley, who was pinned in the doorway, staring
disbelievingly upward at the smoking nine-millimeter, now held high above his
head. I lunged for the gun, pinning his arm to the wall.

"She touched meee. She touched meee," he slobbered.

My left shoulder caught fire. A searing cramp ran down the length of my
body, knotting my hamstring, putting my foot to sleep. Out of the corner of my
eye, I could see Eunice using both hands to stir the bright blue knitting
needles around in my back. I felt it scrape bone. I opened my mouth to scream
but came up dry, empty, and dark.

Wesley, in his fever to escape Caroline, bowled both Frank and me over
backward. Our combined weight broke Eunice's grip on the needle. I fell to the
floor at her feet, banging the embedded spike on the linoleum as I rolled over.
My vision swam and then refocused in time to see Blanche pick up the gun and squint
myopically down the sights. I waited for the tearing.

Without Frank to muffle the sound, the second report was horrendous. The
sound waves seemed to lodge themselves in the yellowed softwood walls.

The shot took Frank high in the forehead, painting the door behind him with
a ghastly collage of hair and tissue. His face didn't register surprise, only a
sense of wonder as the impact bowled him over.

Blanche turned the gun on me. Wesley hopped over and filled the space
between the sisters. "I didn't mean to shoot Frank."

He stayed partially behind Blanche while he gazed beseechingly up at Eunice.
"It was her fault," he said pointing at Caroline. "She touched
me. You saw her. You'll fix her, won't you?"

"Never mind, Wesley." Blanche kept the gun steadily aimed at my
midsection as she spoke. "Accidents will happen. We were going to have to
do something about Frank anyway. Get that tape we were using on the boxes from
over by the stove."

Wesley hurried over and returned with a full roll of dull silver duct tape.

"Tape Mr. Waterman's hands behind him. He's proven to be quite a
distraction. We can't be having any more accidents, now can we?"

As Wesley came around behind me with his tape, Caroline came off the
doorjamb like a missile. "You - you - " she screamed. She never made
it.

Wesley roundhoused the nine-millimeter up beside her head with a crack,
catching her coming forward, midstride, dropping her to the floor. Raising the
gun high overhead, he made a move to smash her in the face while she was down.
I was paralyzed. Eunice growled like a bear. He stopped.

"Okay, I won't," he said contritely.

Wesley made it a point to scramble the needle in my shoulder around in a
wide circle before jerking my hands behind me and taping them together.

I briefly blacked out. From the bottom of a deep fog bank, I barely heard
Blanche Hammer's next instruction.

"Drag Miss Nobel out of the way over into the middle of the floor, so
your mother has a little elbow room, and then take Mr. Waterman out to the
maintenance shed and dispose of him. We've wasted too much time here already.
Put him in a barrel when you've finished with him."

My vision blurred back in time to see Wesley take Caroline by the feet and
drag her to the center of the room. Eunice picked up her purple knitting bag
and followed. Blanche held up her free hand.

"I know how much this means to you two, but I'm afraid we're going to
have to hurry. Five minutes is all you get."

Wesley skittered over in front of her. "Nobody heard, Miss Blanche.
Five minutes isn't enough time."

"Five minutes," she insisted, wagging a chubby finger at him.

"Not fair," he bellowed. "Not again. You let Frank shoot that
old bum before I even got a chance."

"Don't sass me, Wesley. If five minute is good enough for my sister,
it's good enough for you. Now hustle, young man. Time's a wastin' ."

Wesley hustled. Grabbing me by the hair, he dragged me out the door and
lobbed me off the little porch into the frozen grass.

"Get up," he screamed in my ear. I stayed down. I'd already made
up my mind. I was willing to die here. While he was trotting over to kick the
door shut, I'd come to the realization that I was prepared to beg. Tears
streamed down my face, without the act of crying. In that moment, I had become
middle-aged. The imagined invulnerability of youth seemed absurd. I tried to
speak, to plead for our lives, but nothing came out. Without intending to, I
vomited into the sparkling grass.

"Get up," he screamed. I stayed down, watching white spires of
steam rise slowly from the pile of effluent in front of me.

He kicked me in the small of the back, rattling the needle, sending red
waves coursing through my head. I fell over on my left side. Wesley knelt
beside me. He was breathing heavily. He set the gun down behind him in the
grass and fished out a knife. He tilted the fluted blade in front of my eyes,
letting the moonlight glint of the surface. "I'll cut you right here
then," he breathed.

"I'm gonna feed you your cock and balls," he whispered in my ear.
"Heeeeee. They're gonna find you that way. Have you ever tasted your own
cock? Heeeeee. When I was young, I used to - "

He stopped babbling and suddenly went on alert.

I saw it coming for me. When the shadow first emerged, tiptoeing out from
the darkness at the back of the little building, I nearly called out to it. I
flashed that this was one of those compensatory escape scenarios that a dying
man goes through at the moment of his death. I'd seen a movie like that once.

The specter raised both hands above its head. Something about a rod and a
staff comforting me ran through  my mind. The staff came down with a
metallic thud, taking Wesley full across the back of the neck.

He fell onto his side, his face a couple of inches from mine, jumping and
shaking uncontrollably, his tongue lolling, his mismatched eyes wide with
amazement, and then he was still.

I stared into his lopsided face. "Where's Caroline?" he said,
without moving his lips. His body convulsed once more and then repeated the
question.

I wondered how he was doing that. Neither his unblinking eyes nor his lips
moved when he spoke. He shifted hands with the knife. I saw one hand take the
blade from the other. I was stupefied until the blade began sawing at the tape
binding my wrists. With a snap, my hands came apart.

Using my tingling arms for support, I got to my knees. I thought I might be
dead. Bobby Warren stood above me, holding Wesley's gravity knife in one hand
and a length of pipe in the other. "Where's Caroline?"

With my right hand, I gestured toward my should.

"Pull it out," I croaked.

The kid wasn't squeamish. He never hesitated. Bracing one hand around the
entrance point, he jerked the needle from my back in one smooth motion. I felt
as if my life force had followed the needle out, as if the air filling my body
had whooshed out with a long, earsplitting "Ahhhhhhhh."

My whole left side was numb. I tucked my left arm in and scrambled over to
the gun. I used it to point at the little building. I had to struggle to keep
up with the kid. He had the door open and was standing frozen in the
entranceway when I slid by him.

Blanche Hammer was contentedly tending the fire with a hooked brass poker.
Caroline, her blond hair spread out on the floor toward us, was still
unconscious. Her slacks and underwear dangled from one ankle. Eunice knelt by
her side, her hands full of shining implement.

"What - ?" was all Bobby got out of his mouth before Eunice sprang
to her feet and in three amazingly long, mechanical strides closed the distance
between them, her needles and hooks thrust before her, her eyes filled with
impassive blankness as if she were knitting, her narrow mouth wide open.
"Not nooooow," she screamed. I shot her in the face.

Her gaunt frame slid to a stop head to head with Caroline. A pool of red
began to form, halolike, around her head, sliding along the linoleum, soaking
Caroline's hair. I stood and stared. I'd never shot a woman before.

Without Bobby Warren's "Look out!" Blanche would have gotten me
with the poker for sure. Hindsight tells me he could have handled her. He was
young and strong. She should have been no problem I guess I just wasn't
thinking. Something snapped.

As Bobby stepped forward, holding the piece of pipe in both hands toward off
the blow, I mindlessly turned the gun on Blanche Hammer and kept pulling the
trigger until it clicked empty six or seven times.

We stood in the reverberating little office with the smell of burnt powder
in the air. "Jesus," was all he said before rushing over to
Caroline's side.

I leaned back against the door frame. "Are you real?" I asked.

He was patting her cheeks, checking her throat for a pulse.

"I'd better get a doctor."

"You're supposed to be dead. Burned up."

"I was pissing off the back porch when the place went up. I'd had a lot
of beer. One minute I was standing on my back porch with my dick in my hand.
The next thing I knew, the back of my shorts was burning."

He shuddered at the memory. "I ran off into the woods. I thought for
sure there was going to be an explosion. By the time I got back to the house,
man, there was this ghost thing running around in my driveway. I took off. I
was scared shitless."

"Call a doctor," I said. "Call the cops." I slid down
the wall into a sitting position. "Call everybody."

He started to rush out. I waved the gun at him. He stopped.

"Is she bleeding?" He went back and shyly checked her over.

"Not that I can see," he said finally.

"Then put her clothes back on her."

He did the best he could. Her slacks weren't exactly on straight, but it
would have to do. He gently rubbed her cheek.

"Get some help," I said. "If you don't mind, I'll wait
here."

He didn't mind.

If it hadn't been for the way his fingers kept picking at the arms of the
wicker settee, I would have thought Tim Flood had gone to sleep. When I
finished, he opened his predatory eyes for the first time since I'd started to
talk. Thin gray filaments connected his lips as he spoke.

"Sounds like if I was going to pay the ten-grand bonus to anybody, it
ought to be this Warren kid. Sounds to me like he saved everybody's ass."

"No doubt about it," I said.

"Tell me again how he knew where to find you."

"He followed me from the EPA office. He'd spent a couple of days camped
out in this old abandoned cabin across the road from the last dump site. He'd
been sleeping rough, in some clothes he stole from a neighbor's yard. He lost
most everything he had in the fire. Figured it was best if whoever was trying
to kill him thought he was dead."

"Not a bad idea," rasped Tim. "Used that trick once myself,
back in thirty-five, I was - "

I was in no mood for stories. I kept talking.

"When it turned so cold on Tuesday night, he went into town and got
himself a motel room. When he came back Wednesday morning and found the whole
area cordoned off, crawling with toxic cleanup teams, he knew that the shit had
already hit the fan. He figured he didn't have to worry about anybody making
another attempt of his life. The cat was already out of the bag, so he went to
see his grandmother. She filled him in on what was going on. They put their
heads together and decided that the best thing they could do was to spill
everything he knew to the EPA."

"This Charles Hayden jerk?"

"Right."

"Why in hell didn't the punk go to the heat to begin with?"

"It was tribal business. Some folks don't like their laundry done in
public. Some folks don't go running to the authorities when they've got a
problem. Some people like to handle their own problems."