“Really?” He grinned. “Hey, yeah, I bet you’re right.”
“Everybody have your ear plugs in?” Sharon called. “Okay. See that dried stump of wood sticking up, way out there? There, just in front of the hill?”
Jody spotted it. Not a very large target, and quite a distance beyond the farthest of the cans that Sharon had set out. To Jody, it appeared to be less than a foot high, and not much bigger around than her arm. It looked like the remains of the trunk of a small, dead tree.
“Do you see it?” Andy asked her.
“Yeah, do your
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Okay,” Sharon said. “Here goes. I’m gonna let her rip.”
Taking a few steps back, Dad yelled, “Rock ‘n’ roll!”
Sharon’s gunshots hammered the air.
She seemed to be firing as fast as she could pull the trigger.
The brown stump shook and pieces flew off as the storm of slugs tore into it. Every shot seemed to chew off a hunk, then speed on and blast the hillside and throw a plume of yellow dust into the air.
Dad wasn’t watching the target. His eyes were on Sharon.
Jody checked; that’s where Andy was staring, too.
Watching her there, NRA cap turned backward so its bill stuck out behind her, the rifle jumping with each shot and throwing out flashes of brass as its muzzle spat fire and white smoke, her whole body absorbing the recoils that hit her with quick hard jolts and shook her shirt and made her thighs vibrate even though Jody knew her legs must be almost as solid as wood.
She does look great, Jody thought. No wonder the guys are staring like a couple of nuts. They’re probably wishing they were on the other side so they could watch what the recoils are doing to her boobs.
The shooting stopped. The silence sounded huge. Sharon lowered her rifle and frowned into the distance.
“We’re gonna have to call you Rambo,” Dad said.
“I guess I nailed it pretty good.”
“You destroyed it!” Andy blurted. He sounded very excited. “Can 1 try it?”
“Maybe later,” Sharon told him. “Right now you need to practice with the pistol.”
“One step at a time,” Dad added.
“But I want to really blast something.”
Jody shook her head. “We’ve created a monster.”
Chapter Thirty-nine
Jack came back from the pay phone at the Arco station on the outskirts of Blythe. He climbed into the driver’s seat. Pulling the shoulder harness across his body, he looked over at Sharon. “Nothing.”
“Nothing at all?”
“Did you get through to Nick?” Jody asked from the back seat.
“Yup. Got him at home. He said to tell you hi.”
“They don’t have any leads?” Sharon asked.
“They’re checking out the components of the fire bomb that the shooter left behind in the Zoller house. Doesn’t look promising, though. A mayonnaise jar full of gas, with one of those timers you can buy for turning on your lamps when you’re on vacation. Common stuff. Zero chance of making any headway trying to trace stuff like that. There were also some shoe prints. The shooter stepped in blood and tracked it around the house. He’s probably about six-foot-two.”
“Six-two and bald,” Jody said.
“Yeah,” Andy said. “They were all bald.”
Dad nodded. “If the shooter was one of the men from your house...”
“He had to be one of the guys from Andy’s, didn’t he?” Jody asked. “Why else would he try to kill me?”
“He almost had to be one of them,” Sharon agreed.
“It’s not a hundred percent, though,” Dad said.
“And it’s not for sure that he runs around bald all the time,” Sharon added.
“Yeah,” Andy said. “Maybe he wears a wig all day, and only just takes it off when he gets together with the gang to go out and massacre people.”
“Anyway,” Dad continued, “the shoes are a fairly good indicator of his size, at least. But they were a garden variety of Nikes you can buy in every mall in the country, so they’re basically a dead end as far as making the guy.”
Sharon raised her eyebrows. “If we do find him and get our hands on the actual shoes ...”
“Yep. If we find him, we’ve got him.” Dad started the car. Before putting it into gear, he looked over his shoulder at Andy, then Jody. “Keep your eyes open for a decent motel,” he said. Then he drove out of the filling station. After turning right onto the road, he glanced at Sharon. “There were some fluids, too. You know.”
“Oh?” Her expression changed from surprise to revulsion. “Oh,” she muttered. “Yeah, I know.”
“Based on that alone, we’re almost sure to get a conviction, but ...”
“No idea who he might be.”
“None.”
“What about witnesses?”
“Nobody saw anything. Most of the neighbors were at a big barbecue at a house down the block when the guy tried to cap us. Get this one. The victims were invited.”
“You’re kidding,” Sharon said.
“They RSVPd their regrets a few days before the party, claimed they had a previous commitment. The way it looks, though, there wasn’t any previous commitment. The people giving the party have a German shepherd that apparently jumps up and slobbers all over everybody, and it’s well known around the neighborhood that the wife—the gal who ended up dead—couldn’t stand the dog. The party started at three in the afternoon, so if they’d gone ...”
“Oh, wow,” Andy said.
“They wouldn’t have been home when the shooter showed up.”
“The woman was pregnant,” Sharon pointed out. “You can’t really blame her if she didn’t want to get mauled by somebody’s pet.”
“It’s just the irony.”
“Yeah,” Sharon said. “Good old irony. The controlling force of the universe.”
“What?”
“Irony. The controlling ...”
“I’d hate to think so.”
“Me, too. I can’t help but wonder, though.”
“What are they talking about?” Andy whispered.
“Irony. Like God pulling nasty tricks all the time.”
“With everybody except the dog haters at this damn party,” Sharon said, “how come the bastard didn’t break into an empty house?”
“Maybe he didn’t know who was home and who wasn’t,” Dad told her. “It had to be a rush job—choosing which house, anyway. Once he was in it, he had plenty of time on his hands. They think he was ... with the woman ... for at least a couple of hours after he got there.”
“She was alive all that time?” Sharon asked.
“Maybe not the whole time.”
“I suppose nobody heard her scream for the same reasons nobody saw or heard ...”
“He stuffed something in her mouth.”
There was something about the way Dad said that. And there was something about the way Sharon looked at him.
“What was it?” Andy asked. “What’d he use to gag her with?”
Dad shook his head.
Sharon twisted her head around and said, “It doesn’t matter.”
“Wow. It must’ve been something really gross.”
“Just drop it,” Jody told him.
“Do you know?”
“No, and I don’t want to.”
“Let’s just drop it,” Dad said.
Andy grimaced and sank lower in his seat.
Jody asked, “Did Nick say anything about ... have they found out anything about the ones from Friday night?”
“You and Andy are still our best sources on that. Nothing new has turned up. Basically, we’ve got little or nothing to go on.”
“So what’re we gonna do?” Jody asked. “Just keep driving around and staying in motels forever?”
“It won’t be forever,” Dad said. “There’s bound to be a break in the case before long.”
“I kind of like i
t,” Andy said.
“What if there isn’t?” Jody asked. “A break. What if they never figure out who did this stuff?”
“Let’s just take things a day at a time, okay?”
“Speaking of a day at a time,” Sharon said. She cast an annoyed or frustrated look at Jack. “Did you ask Nick about extending my time off?”
Dad nodded. “They won’t go for it. They’re stretched so thin...”
“Damn it.”
“What’s going on?” Andy asked.
Sharon frowned over her shoulder at him. “I’m afraid I’ll have to take off, tomorrow.”
“No!”
“She has to get back to work,” Jody explained.
“No! She has to stay with us!”
“I wish I could,” Sharon said. “But look, I don’t need to leave until tomorrow afternoon. So let’s not worry about it, right now. We should make the most of the time that’s left. How about it?”
Andy looked as if he were about to start bawling again.
“How will you get back?” Jody asked.
“Rent a car, probably. I hope this town has a car rental place.”
“I hope it doesn’t,” Andy blurted. “I hope you can’t ever go back till we do.”
“Thanks, pal.”
“I want you to stay with us, too,” Jody told her. “But I don’t want you getting fired, either.”
Dad looked at Sharon.
“Keep your eyes on the road, Dad.”
He returned his attention to the road. “Everybody should just cheer up,” he said. “Nobody wants Sharon to go back without the rest of us. But she has a job to do, and ... anyway, maybe there’ll be some sort of major break in the case and we’ll all be able to go back tomorrow.”
“Fat chance,” Andy muttered.
“You never know,” said Jody.
“That’d sure be nice,” Sharon said. “But I think we’d better not hold our breath. Let’s just have the best time we can tonight, and worry about tomorrow, tomorrow.”
“You can at least phone Nick again tomorrow, Dad. Before Sharon goes and rents a car. At least call him and make sure we have to keep hiding out.”
“Good as done, honey. In fact, I’ll be phoning him every day till this is over.”
“I hope we find a motel pretty soon,” Jody said. “I feel like I’ve been holding it forever.”
“Should’ve gone at the gas station,” Dad told her.
“Thanks, anyway. Gas station johns are the pits. I can hold it till we get to a motel.”
“Let’s make sure we pick one that has a pool,” Sharon suggested. “I’ve had my heart set on diving into a nice, chilly swimming pool ever since we left Indio.”
“They probably all have pools,” Dad said.
“I think we should also hold out for a place with cable TV,” Andy said.
“If we hold out for too much,” Jody muttered, “I’m gonna explode. It won’t be pretty.”
Part Ten
Simon Says
Chapter Forty
Okay. Okay. If the fuckin’ bitch busted it, I’m gonna make her wish she was never born.
Ho! Bet she already wishes that!
“Testing, testing—one. two. Testing, testing—one, two.”
Hey, bravo! It works. The way she whacked me in the head with the damn thing, I figured sure she must’ve busted it. But she didn’t. That’s the good news. The bad news is, the batteries got dislodged while she was pounding me, so the recorder shut off and missed out on all the fun and games we had. Would’ve made some very interesting listening, if you know what I mean.
Too bad for you.
Me, I didn’t miss a thing. I was there.
The first thing that happened, she clobbered me three good ones on the side of my head with the recorder. That’s when you heard me shouting. It must’ve been the third whack that killed the thing.
Before she did any more damage to me, I got hold of her wrist. With my other hand, I gave her a pinch that made her squeal and let go of the recorder.
She turned out to be a real squealer. A real screamer, too. And a fighter.
She was terrific.
All sweaty and slick and hot. The fighting made her breasts jump around, and also made her squirm and slide around under me, rubbing me.
The best part was how her eyes bugged out each time I really hurt her. No, maybe that wasn’t ... the best part was when I gave her spasms of pain that made her clench up and grab me with her inside muscles.
It was great.
I called her Jody while I worked on her.
She never denied it.
Hell, maybe her name is Jody. I doubt it, though. It’d be too much of a coincidence. I might ask her when I take her out of the trunk. I’m sure she can’t talk, but she might be able to nod yes or no.
Anyway, calling her Jody made it better. I called her that mostly when I didn’t have a view of her face, and I pretended it was Jody under me. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t.
What did work every time was telling myself I’d have Jody under me just like this—the real Jody—soon. Maybe in a day or two, maybe in a week. And the real Jody would be exactly like this, only better.
She’ll have to go some to beat this gal. On a scale from one to ten, this gal was a nine.
Ho! Reminds me of our old Joy Scale. I’d forgotten all about that. For a while there, we rated every kill on the Joy Scale, but then we just sort of stopped doing it for no special reason.
The scale rates a combination of things, but mostly it takes into account how she looks and feels, plus how she responds to torture and rape and so on. (There was a scale for rating guys, too. It was started up by the fruits in our group. They called it the Joe Scale.)
As I recall, we originally made up the Joy Scale one night when we were in Tom’s garage. It was about a week after we did Denise Dennison and her family. Somebody—Minnow, I think—said that on a Joy Scale of one to ten, Denise rated a fifteen. We gave him a lot of shit about it. I mean, if a scale is from one to ten, you can’t go any higher than ten unless you’re some kind of a witless dork.
Actually, we later broke our rules and gave one gal a twelve on the Joy Scale. That’s because we all agreed that she was way far better than all the others. It’s true she was older than a lot of our kills, but she was in a class by herself. Partly because of how gorgeous she was, but a lot of it had to do with how she acted—her terror and shame, the way she was so incredibly sensitive to pain, and how in spite of everything she seemed to relish every minute of the sex. She begged us to stop hurting her, but she was always hot to have us fuck her. She would go for three of us at one time. She was so incredible that we kept her alive in the garage for about two months before we finally killed her. That was a record. Later we stripped off all her skin.
We cured and tanned it.
Tom got first pick of which sections he wanted. He took the best parts for himself, of course.
But I got a good section, myself. We all got at least something—keepsakes to remember her by.
In the wreck room, we sat around and partied and made whatever we wanted to out of her hide. I won’t get into what everybody made. For one thing, I don’t have all the time in the world. For another, I might gross you out. Wouldn’t wanta ruin your appetite, or anything. What I made, though, was a nifty little mini-skirt which I dubbed my Connie Kilt, after Connie Baxter who had kindly provided the material.
Anyway, that’s about all I have to say about Connie, our one and only twelve.
It wouldn’t be fair to say we gave her the twelve because she was Tom’s mother. That’d be taking away from her. She deserved the twelve.
Let me think. That was about two years ago.
We haven’t had a twelve since, and it was only a while after Connie that we sort of forgot about the Joy Scale.
Maybe Jody will be another twelve. Or higher.
Hell, maybe she’ll be a major disappointment. I’ve built her up so high in my mind
... There’s something about her, though. Something. Just those few seconds with her on the grass Friday night—and then by the back wall. And being in her bed last night. And wearing her clothes. I don’t know.
It’s more than just how she looks. She has ... a quality. A freshness. Maybe it also has to do partly with how spunky she was when we were after her.
Anyway, I can’t wait till she comes back from wherever she’s gone to.
I have to wait, of course.
Can’t very well nail her when I don’t know where she is.
I just hope she comes back soon.
I’ve gotta admit, there is something to be said for the joys of anticipation. Every time I think about how it’s gonna be, I get a boner that doesn’t quit.
From the feel of things, it’s just as well that Jody is out of town for a while. I have some recovering to do.
I did take a nap after getting done with the girl. I needed it in a bad way. In fact, I needed it so bad that I actually conked out right in the back seat of my car, and right on top of her. A very stupid move. But I was too worn out to care. With me pinning her down, she couldn’t go anywhere. Also, I figured she was in no condition to cause trouble. My main worry was that somebody might come along and find us, but that wasn’t a big enough worry to keep me awake.
I zonked.
As far as I know, nobody came along and looked in the car while I was dead to the world.
If the girl woke up, she was smart or scared or hurt enough to behave herself. I mean, she could’ve taken out my eyes. Could’ve chomped my neck the way I did Henry back there in Indio. Could’ve done a lot of things to me.
But I woke up in no worse shape than I’d been in when I finished with her.
Except that I was pretty damn shocked to sit up and see how low the sun had sunk. I looked at the dashboard clock—7:35.
Great, huh? Too bad I didn’t sleep a little longer.
Maybe it is too bad, at that.
I mean, what if I’d slept another couple of hours? As it turned out, I got here with time to spare. Time to sit in the car and monkey with my recorder and get it working, with still plenty of time to play a little catch-up with my true-life adventure. And time left over.