Mp, p.19
MatchUp, page 19
LIZ LUNGED FROM THE HOLLOW she’d scooped from the mud under the log.
A few minutes earlier, she’d crossed the stream and entered the trees on the opposite side. There she found a dead branch that fit into the hollow grip of the knife. Then she circled back to the stream, walked through the water, and crawled under the log.
As Max descended past her, aiming toward the trees on the opposite bank, she had thrust with the rigged spear. Adding her weight to it, she pushed with all her remaining strength and plunged the blade deeper into him.
He groaned and fell facedown into the stream.
Her hands had shook. Her lungs felt starved for oxygen.
Springing toward him, she shoved the spear even deeper into his back. He raised his face from the water and struggled. Using her uninjured arm, she grabbed a rock from the stream and struck it against the back of his head. He slumped, his face partially out of the water. She struck his head again, feeling the softness of blood under his hair.
She struck a third time.
A fourth.
She heard his skull crack.
She hit him again and again.
The rock went deeper into bone.
Shrieking, she straddled his back and pressed his face into the water, holding it under until long after his death shudder had stopped.
She needed all her strength to stand and stagger backward. When she slumped on the muddy bank, she kept her grip on the rock in case she needed to use it again.
She couldn’t stop shaking.
Finally, she decided to head back to the lodge and stop her bleeding. She placed a foot on his back and tugged the spear free. The effort of using her wounded arm made her groan. Max had dropped his pistol. She picked it up. As the rain fell, the forest again seemed enshrouded by mist, but she knew that the haze was really the consequence of blood loss.
She gave Max a fierce kick just to make sure he was dead.
Then she climbed the bank and followed her trail of blood.
SIMON DROVE OVER A RIDGE and saw an asphalt lane on the right, flanked by forest. He’d seen two driveways in the past five miles. They’d looked welcoming, with signs that advertised facilities for training and breeding horses. In contrast, this turnoff led to a reinforced steel gate and a fence with barbed wire along the top. He steered off the highway and stopped in front of the gate. A number pad was mounted to a pole.
He left the car and pressed the key fob, releasing the vehicle’s trunk. After carefully raising it, he smelled the vinegar stench of carbon dioxide.
But it wasn’t enough to hide another stench.
“You son of a bitch, I pissed my pants because of you,” Nick said.
He lay on his side, his arms taped behind him.
“What’s the code to open the gate?” he asked, ignoring the rain that struck him.
“Code? Gate? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Do you want me to close the trunk again? I’ll keep it shut a lot longer. Maybe the next time you’ll do something else in your pants. Or would you rather see your sister?”
“My sister. Oh, I want to see my sister for sure. The stupid skank.”
“Your happy reunion isn’t going to occur unless you tell me the code to open the gate.”
Nick recited four numbers.
He pressed them on the pad and heard a whir.
The gate started to open.
He returned to Nick and told him, “Bye for now.”
He shut the trunk, hopped into the car, and drove through the open gate. In the rearview mirror, he saw it closing behind him. The lane continued through the forest for quite a while. Then Simon rounded a curve and abruptly came to a large clearing. Beyond a gravel parking area stood a two-story log house. A few small buildings sat next to a swimming pool that had been covered for the winter. A bermed area contained a shooting range with metal silhouettes of human-shaped targets.
A drab van was parked in front of the house.
The front door hung open, suggesting that someone had entered or left in a hurry. He stepped out of the car and drew the pistol that he’d taken from the FBI agent. Ignoring the rain, he scanned the clearing. He didn’t dare call Liz’s name, lest his voice attract whoever had been holding her captive.
He took a step toward the lodge.
Movement attracted his attention to the far side of the clearing.
A figure emerged from the trees, staggering.
Whoever it was held a spear and was covered with mud so thick that the rain hadn’t dissolved it. The figure stumbled across the gravel and Simon saw blood on the right arm—and a suggestion of yellow on the figure’s legs.
Liz’s jogging suit was yellow.
He started to run toward her, only to be stopped by a gunshot and a bullet that tore up gravel in front of him. He spun toward the lodge’s porch where a tall woman, with long blond hair and Slavic features, aimed a pistol at him. She wore a beige pantsuit and a brown suede jacket.
“Drop the gun,” she told him.
He obeyed. “Marta?”
“Where the hell is Nick?”
“In the trunk.”
“Alive?”
“How else would I be able to exchange him for Liz?”
“Show me.”
At the edge of his vision, Simon was aware of Liz’s grotesque mud-covered figure continuing to stumble across the gravel. She dropped to one knee, then planted the blunt edge of the spear into the gravel and used it to draw herself up.
“Never mind about her,” Marta said, stepping closer with the gun. “Show me that Nick’s alive.”
He pressed the key fob and opened the trunk.
Peering in, he told Nick, “Your sister’s asking for you.”
Nick said something caustically angry in Russian.
He dragged him out and propped him on his feet. With legs taped together, the man had trouble standing.
“Cut him loose,” Marta ordered.
“I’ll need to reach for my pocketknife.”
“Be careful.”
He pulled out the knife and cut the tape that secured Demidov’s legs. The Russian spread them, steadying himself. Simon sliced the tape that bound the wrists.
“Now drop the knife,” Marta said.
He did so.
Demidov winced as he moved his arms slowly forward, giving the impression that his muscles were locked, then he removed the tape that remained on his wrists.
“This is all your fault.”
“I’m sorry, Nick. I admit I made a mistake. But I corrected it. I got you out.”
“The goddamned restaurants that the health department shut down. The courier you didn’t send, so I had to pick up the money on my own, which is why the feds were able to grab me at the warehouse. That stupid dry-cleaning shop. Every time I leave the office, my clothes stink.”
“Nick, I told you I’m sorry.”
“Where the fuck is everybody? Why didn’t you bring more help?”
“I couldn’t.”
“Couldn’t? What do you mean?”
“They’re all in Texas.”
“What are they doing in—”
“Hijack jobs. It’ll look like Texas gangs did it. No one’ll ever suspect that—”
“You sent everybody to Texas? On your own?”
“I thought—”
“You stupid cunt, don’t think. You’re not good at it.”
Marta shot him.
He took a step back and looked surprised.
She shot him again.
Then a third time.
Blood first seeped, then poured from the wounds.
Demidov collapsed to the ground.
Not moving.
She aimed at Simon.
Liz continued to stagger across the gravel. Except for the blood on her arm and the bit of yellow that showed on her legs, she was still covered with mud. With each halting step, she placed the blunt edge of the spear ahead, using it to support her weight. Marta switched her aim toward Liz, then back toward Simon.
The woman peered down at her brother, then lowered the pistol. “Look at what you finally made me do.”
When Liz reached them, she wavered and remained standing only because she leaned on the spear.
“Where’s Max?” Marta asked.
“Dead.”
“I’m impressed.”
“Rambo,” Liz murmured.
“What?”
“Saw Rambo use his knife to make a spear. Saw him hide in a stream. Saw him do a lot of things.”
“You’d better get her to a hospital,” Marta said. “She’s delirious.”
“Hospital?”
“You kept your part of the bargain. Not that it matters.” Marta stared down at Nick’s body. “A lot of people are going to be angry about what I just did.”
“Maybe I can help.”
“How?”
“Protect you. Give you a new start. The FBI. Witness relocation program.”
Marta laughed as if he were making a joke.
Again she stared down at her brother.
Liz’s eyes closed, then she toppled. Simon grabbed her before she struck the gravel. She was terribly cold. He held her tightly, wanting never to let her go. When Simon looked up, Marta was gone.
A few seconds later a black SUV roared into view from behind the house and sped along the lane, disappearing among the trees.
“Sorry I missed breakfast,” Liz managed to say.
He looked down.
She did her best to smile.
“Same time tomorrow?” she asked.
“On a hospital tray maybe. No more talking.”
He picked her up, carried her into the lodge out of the rain, and laid her on a wooden bench.
She closed her eyes.
“Don’t go to sleep. You’ve got to stay awake. Fight the shock.” He tore open the right sleeve of her jogging suit, exposing a bullet wound, and found his cell phone. After calling for an ambulance, he searched the house and located a medical kit in a cabinet in the basement. He washed and disinfected her wound as best he could and bound it with a pressure bandage. She shivered, perhaps the first symptom of hypothermia. He pulled off her cold, wet jogging suit and covered her with a throw that he found on a sofa.
Then he held her.
“Rambo,” she murmured again.
“What about him?” he asked, alarmed by her delirium but humoring her, trying to keep her from falling asleep.
“Died in the novel.”
“Don’t talk about dying.”
“Bedsprings. Electrocution.”
Simon couldn’t figure out what she meant.
“Bedsprings,” she repeated.
“Yes, sweetheart. Bedsprings.”
“Rambo.”
“Yes, sweetheart. Rambo.”
“They said you weren’t him.”
He held her tighter, desperate to make her warm.
“But to me, you are.”
He smiled.
Both at her compliment, and at the sirens approaching in the distance.
KARIN SLAUGHTER AND MICHAEL KORYTA
WHEN KARIN SLAUGHTER AGREED TO be a part of this anthology, she had two provisos. The first was the story would take place in the 1990s and, second, her partner would be Michael Koryta.
I readily agreed to both.
Thankfully, Michael agreed too.
The challenge here was for each writer to take their worlds back in time, to a point when their characters were much younger, just starting out in their respective fictional careers. Karin wanted to provide a look at Jeffrey Tolliver as a young man, from 1993. While writing him before, she always knew some things about his early years, but intentionally kept those close.
“It’s fun to keep secrets from readers,” she jokes.
This story allowed her an opportunity to share a few of those tidbits.
For Michael, this was the first time he’s ever written from Joe Pritchard’s point of view. He actually hasn’t written about Lincoln Perry or Joe in eight years, and those stories were always told in the first person, from Lincoln’s point of view. This story provided a chance to not only move the characters back in time but also to change the lens.
Michael notes that a pattern developed during the process. He would write something and hand it off to Karin. Then she’d write something a lot better and funnier and hand it back. It came to a point that he didn’t want the story to end, because it became a lot of fun. One of the major characters is named after a bet he lost to the novelist Alafair Burke. I won’t tell you which one, but the studious reader will know.
And here’s the best irony.
Word-wise, this is the longest effort included in this anthology.
Yet it carries a curious title.
Short Story.
SHORT STORY
HELEN, GEORGIA
FRIDAY, MARCH 12, 1993
5:46 A.M.
THIS WASN’T THE FIRST TIME Jeffrey Tolliver had stumbled around a dark hotel room looking for his clothes. His bare feet cut channels into the musty shag carpet. His hands blindly reached into the shadows. Alcohol permeated the air. And sweat. And sex.
Rustling came from the bed as the woman rolled over. She snored lightly, which might have been endearing if he knew her name.
Rebecca?
He smiled past his hangover.
Delta flight attendant. Ex-cheerleader. Long blond hair. Five nine, which was a good height for his six three. She had good numbers everywhere else, too, but then Jeffrey remembered that Rebecca had stood him up.
For two weeks, he’d worked double shifts so he could take a long weekend off. He had made the nearly four-hour drive from Birmingham only to find a phone message waiting about a storm coming through, the airline moving planes around, and that was how a hot weekend in the north Georgia mountains had ended with him slinking off alone to the hotel bar and drinking too much, then talking too much, then ending up in bed and doing too much with—
More snoring.
She was a slip of a thing under the sheets. A waist he could almost wrap both hands around, which had its pluses and minuses. Not as tall as Rebecca. Not as smart. Did smart matter? He’d like to think not, but then after a while, you needed someone with an imagination.
Shayna.
That was the woman in the bed. She was so country sticks came out of her mouth when she talked, but she knew that the hotel’s name, the Schussel, was missing an umlaut—and she knew what an umlaut was—and that Schussel was German for “key.”
Jeffrey found his boxers by the closed curtains. He slipped them on as he rustled the curtains, looking for the rest of his clothes. A sock made itself known. His sock? He made like a stork and shoved his left foot into the tube. He wriggled his toes. Definitely his sock.
This was what guys in his business would call a clue.
Jeffrey widened his search pattern from the last known sock. Bed, dresser, TV, chair. The Schussel Mountain Lodge was like every hotel room he’d ever awakened in, but done in a Bavarian style. Or Georgia’s idea of Bavarian style, because for reasons unknown, the whole town of Helen was made to look like an Alpine Village dropped down in the foothills of the Appalachians.
His fingers brushed his wallet on the dresser. His keys. His pager. ChapStick. His shiny new detective’s badge and somewhat older gun were locked in the wheel well of the trunk, though he’d had both out on the drive up from Birmingham in case of cops or robbers.
“Shit.”
He hissed out the word a split second before a searing pain shot through his big toe, which had caught on one of the metal bed legs. He leaned heavily on the mattress. His hand gripped into a fist, and he realized that his fist was holding something that wasn’t part of the sheets.
T-shirt.
“Y’all right?” the girl asked.
“Yes,” he told Shayna.
Not Shayna.
Shayna was last weekend.
Jeffrey remembered a necklace with the name spelled out in script. Custom made, she’d told him, given to her by her stepfather to commend her high school graduation. He’d pretended this was a normal conversation for a twenty-six-year-old man to have with an eighteen-year-old girl in a downtown bar, and that he wasn’t a cop, a newly minted detective, who should arrest her for underage drinking instead of having sex with her in the backseat of her Cadillac.
Her stepfather’s Cadillac.
He fumbled for the switch in the bathroom, shutting the door as the fluorescent light flickered on. He checked his reflection in the mirror. He looked slightly more hungover than he felt. Or maybe he was getting better at being hungover, which was a skill that twigged off all the branches of his family tree.
He turned on the faucet. The handle came off in his hand. Water squirted sideways, up, down. He fumbled to fit the handle back on the nut. He watched the stream turn from brown to yellow to something close to clear before splashing his face with cold water.
Jeffrey looked up at the mirror again.
His T-shirt was soaking wet. A wet Maginot Line cut across his boxers where he’d leaned against the sink basin. His underwear was bright orange with blue-and-white AU’s all over it.
Auburn University.
Rebecca the flight attendant had been a Georgia cheerleader. He’d worn the boxers as a joke but now the joke was probably on him because he hadn’t packed a lot of clothes for the four-day retreat and he was pretty sure he was wearing his only underwear.
“Y’all right in there?”
She said “there” like “thar,” which wasn’t an indictment, especially to a man from south Alabama, but something in her tone set his teeth on edge.
He said, “Just gonna take a shower.”
Before she could offer to join him, he reached behind the lank shower curtain and turned the handles. He stood in the middle of the small bathroom with his eyes closed. The hangover tapped at the bridge of his nose like an accusatory finger. How long could he keep doing this? He wasn’t a kid anymore. It wouldn’t be too long before his youthful indiscretions turned into full-blown, irreparable mistakes.
