Four Live Rounds

  Excerpt from Snowbound…

  1

  In the evening of the last good day either of them would know for years to come, the girl pushed open the sliding glass door and stepped through onto the back porch.

  “Daddy?”

  Will Innis set the legal pad aside and made room for Devlin to climb into his lap. His daughter was small for eleven, felt like the shell of a child in his arms.

  “What are you doing out here?” she asked and in her scratchy voice he could hear the remnants of her last respiratory infection like gravel in her lungs.

  “Working up a closing for my trial in the morning.”

  “Is your client the bad guy again?”

  Will smiled. “You and your mother. I’m not really supposed to think of it that way, sweetheart.”

  “What’d he do?” His little girl’s face had turned ruddy in the sunset and the fading light brought out threads of platinum in her otherwise midnight hair.

  “He allegedly—”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Allegedly?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Means it’s not been proven. He’s suspected of selling drugs.”

  “Like what I take?”

  “No, your drugs are good. They help you. He was selling, allegedly selling, bad drugs to people.”

  “Why are they bad?”

  “Because they make you lose control.”

  “Why do people take them?”

  “They like how it makes them feel.”

  “How does it make them feel?”

  He kissed her forehead and looked at his watch. “It’s after eight, Devi. Let’s go bang on those lungs.”

  She sighed but she didn’t argue. She never tried to get out of it.

  He stood up cradling his daughter and walked over to the redwood railing.

  They stared into the wilderness that bordered Oasis Hills, their subdivision. The houses on No-Water Lane had the Sonoran Desert for a backyard.

  “Look,” he said. “See them?” A half mile away, specks filed out of an arroyo and trotted across the desert toward a shadeless forest of giant saguaro cacti that looked vaguely sinister profiled against the horizon.

  “What are they?” she asked.

  “Coyotes. What do you bet they start yapping when the sun goes down?”

  After supper, he read to Devlin from A Wrinkle in Time. They’d been working their way through the penultimate chapter, “Aunt Beast,” but Devlin was exhausted and drifted off before Will had finished the second page.

  He closed the book and set it on the carpet and turned out the light. Cool desert air flowed in through an open window. A sprinkler whispered in the next door neighbor’s yard. Devlin yawned, made a cooing sound that reminded him of rocking her to sleep as a newborn. Her eyes fluttered and she said very softly, “Mom?”

  “She’s working late at the clinic, sweetheart.”

  “When’s she coming back?”

  “Few hours.”

  “Tell her to come in and kiss me?”

  “I will.”

  He was nowhere near ready for court in the morning but he stayed, running his fingers through Devlin’s hair until she’d fallen back to sleep. Finally, he slid carefully off the bed and walked out onto the deck to gather up his books and legal pads. He had a late night ahead of him. A pot of strong coffee would help.

  Next door, the sprinklers had gone quiet.

  A lone cricket chirped in the desert.

  Thunderless lightning sparked somewhere over Mexico, and the coyotes began to scream.

  2

  The thunderstorm caught up with Rachael Innis thirty miles north of the Mexican border. It was 9:30 p.m., and it had been a long day at the free clinic in Sonoyta, where she volunteered her time and services once a week as a bilingual psychologist. The windshield wipers whipped back and forth. High beams lit the steam rising off the pavement, and in the rearview mirror, Rachael saw the pair of headlights a quarter of a mile back that had been with her for the last ten minutes.

  Glowing beads suddenly appeared on the shoulder just ahead. She jammed her foot into the brake pedal, the Grand Cherokee fishtailing into the oncoming lane before skidding to a stop. A doe and her fawn ventured into the middle of the road, mesmerized by the headlights. Rachael let her forehead fall onto the steering wheel, closed her eyes, drew in a deep breath.

  The deer moved on. She accelerated the Cherokee, another dark mile passing as pellets of hail hammered the hood.

  The Cherokee veered sharply toward the shoulder and she nearly lost control again, trying to correct her bearing, but the steering wheel wouldn’t straighten out. Rachael lifted her foot off the gas pedal and eased over onto the side of the road.

  When she killed the ignition all she could hear was the rain and hail drumming on the roof. The car that had been following her shot by. She set her glasses in the passenger seat, opened the door, and stepped down into a puddle that engulfed her pumps. The downpour soaked through her black suit. She shivered. It was pitch-black between lightning strikes and she moved forward carefully, feeling her way along the warm metal of the hood.

  A slash of lightning hit the desert just a few hundred yards out. It set her body tingling, her ears ringing. I’m going to be electrocuted. There came a train of earsplitting strikes, flashbulbs of electricity that lit the sky just long enough for her to see that the tires on the driver side were still intact.

  Her hands trembled now. A tall saguaro stood burning like a cross in the desert. She groped her way over to the passenger side as marble-size hail collected in her hair. The desert was electrified again, spreading wide and empty all around her.

  In the eerie blue light she saw that the front tire on the passenger side was flat.

  Back inside the Cherokee, Rachael sat behind the steering wheel, mascara trailing down her cheeks like sable tears. She wrung out her long black hair and massaged the headache building between her temples. Her purse lay in the passenger floorboard. She dragged it into her lap and shoved her hand inside, rummaging for the cell phone. She found it, tried her husband’s number, but there was no service in the storm.

  Rachael looked into the back of the Cherokee at the spare. She had no way of contacting AAA and passing cars would be few and far between on this remote highway at this hour of the night. I’ll just wait and try Will again when the storm has passed.

  Squeezing the steering wheel, she stared through the windshield into the stormy darkness, somewhere north of the border in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. Middle of nowhere.

  There was a brilliant streak of lightning. In the split second illumination she saw a black Escalade parked a hundred yards up the shoulder.

  Thunder rattled the windows. Five seconds elapsed. When the sky exploded again, Rachael felt a strange, unnerving pull to look through the driver side window.

  A man swung a crowbar through the glass.

  3

  Will startled back into consciousness, disoriented and thirsty. It was so quiet—just the discreet drone of a computer fan and the second hand of the clock ticking in the adjacent bedroom. He found himself slouched in the leather chair at the desk in his small home office, the CPU still purring, the monitor switched into sleep mode.

  As he yawned, everything rushed back in a torrent of anxiety. He’d been hammering out notes for his closing argument and hit a wall at ten o’clock. The evidence was damning. He was going to lose. He’d only closed his eyes for a moment to clear his head.

  He reached for the mug of coffee and took a sip. Winced. It was cold and bitter. He jostled the mouse. When the screen restored, he looked at the clock and realized he wouldn’t be sleeping anymore tonight. It was 4:09 a.m. He was due in court in less than five hours.

  First things first—he needed an immediate and potent infusion of caffeine.

  His office adjoined the master bedroom at the west end of the house, and passing through on his way to the kitchen, he noticed a peculiar thing. He’d expected
to see his wife buried under the myriad quilts and blankets on their bed, but she wasn’t there. The comforter was smooth and taut, undisturbed since they’d made it up yesterday morning.

  He walked through the living room into the den and down the hallway toward the east end of the house. Rachael had probably come home, seen him asleep at his desk, and gone in to kiss Devlin. She’d have been exhausted from working all day at the clinic. She’d probably fallen asleep in there. He could picture the nightlight glow on their faces as he reached his daughter’s door.

  It was cracked, exactly as he’d left it seven hours ago when he’d put Devlin to bed.

  He eased the door open. Rachael wasn’t with her.

  Will wide awake now, closing Devlin’s door, heading back into the den.

  “Rachael? You here, hon?”

  He went to the front door, turned the deadbolt, stepped outside.

  Dark houses. Porchlights. Streets still wet from the thunderstorms that blew through several hours ago. No wind, the sky clearing, bright with stars.

  When he saw them in the driveway, his knees gave out and he sat down on the steps and tried to remember how to breathe. One Beamer, no Jeep Cherokee, and a pair of patrol cars, two uniformed officers coming toward him, their hats shelved under their arms.

  The patrolmen sat in the living room on the couch, Will facing them in a chair. The smell of new paint was still strong. He and Rachael had redone the walls and the vaulted ceiling in terracotta last weekend. Most of the black and white desert photographs that adorned the room still leaned against the antique chest of drawers, waiting to be re-hung.

  The lawmen were businesslike in their delivery, taking turns with the details, as if they’d rehearsed who would say what, their voices so terribly measured and calm.

  There wasn’t much information yet. Rachael’s Cherokee had been found on the shoulder of Arizona 85 in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. Right front tire flat, punctured with a nail to cause a slow and steady loss of air pressure. Driver side window busted out.

  No Rachael. No blood.

  They asked Will a few questions. They tried to sympathize. They said how sorry they were, Will just shaking his head and staring at the floor, a tightness in his chest, constricting his windpipe in a slow strangulation.

  He happened to look up at some point, saw Devlin standing in the hall in a plain pink tee-shirt that fell all the way to the carpet, the tattered blanket she’d slept with every night since her birth draped over her left arm. And he could see in her eyes that she’d heard every word the patrolmen had said about her mother, because they were filling up with tears.

  4

  Rachael Innis was strapped upright with two-inch webbing to the leather seat behind the driver. She stared at the console lights. The digital clock read 4:32 a.m. She remembered the crowbar through the window and nothing after.

  Bach’s Four Lute Suites blared from the Bose stereo system, John Williams playing the classical guitar. Beyond the windshield, the headlights cut a feeble swath of light through the darkness, and even though she was riding in a luxury SUV, the shocks did little to ease the violent jarring from whatever primitive road they traveled.

  Her wrists and ankles were comfortably but securely bound with nylon restraints. Her mouth wasn’t gagged. From her vantage point, she could only see the back of the driver’s head and occasionally the side of his face by the cherry glow of his cigarette. He was smooth-shaven, his hair was dark, and he smelled of a subtle, spicy cologne.

  It occurred to her that he didn’t know she was awake, but the thought wasn’t two seconds old when she caught his eyes in the rearview mirror. They registered her consciousness, turned back to the road.

  They drove on. An endless stream of rodents darted across the road ahead and a thought kept needling her—at some point, he was going to stop the car and do whatever he was driving her out in the desert to do.

  “Have you urinated on my seat?” She thought she detected the faintest accent.

  “No.”

  “You tell me if you have to urinate. I’ll stop the car.”

  “Okay. Where are you—”

  “No talking. Unless you have to urinate.”

  “I just—”

  “You want your mouth taped? You have a cold. That would make breathing difficult.”

  Devlin was the only thing she’d ever prayed for and that was years ago, but as she watched the passing sagebrush and cactus through the deeply tinted windows, she pleaded with God again.

  Now the Escalade was slowing. It came to a stop. He turned off the engine and stepped outside and shut the door. Her door opened. He stood watching her. He was very handsome, with flawless, brown skin (save for an indentation in the bridge of his nose), liquid blue eyes, and black hair greased back from his face. His pretty teeth seemed to gleam in the night. Rachael’s chest heaved against the strap of webbing.

  He said, “Calm down, Rachael.” Her name sounded like a foreign word on his lips. He took out a syringe from his black leather jacket and uncapped the needle.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  “You have nice veins.” He ducked into the Escalade and turned her arm over. When the needle entered, she gasped.

  “Please listen. If this is some kind of ransom thing—”

  “No, no. You’ve already been purchased. In fact, right now, there isn’t a safer place in the world for you to be than in my possession.”

  A gang of coyotes erupted in demonic howls somewhere out in that empty dark and Rachael thought they sounded like a woman burning alive, and she began to scream until the drug took her.

  This bonus short is from the ebook collection Horror Stories by J.A. Konrath and Jack Kilborn, also available in the Kindle Store…

  the agreement

  Hutson closed his eyes and swallowed hard, trying to stop sweating. On the table, in the pot, thirty thousand dollars worth of chips formed a haphazard pyramid. Half of those chips were his. The other half belonged to the quirky little mobster in the pink suit that sat across from him.

  “I’ll see it.”

  The mobster pushed more chips into the pile. He went by the street nick Little Louie. Hutson didn’t know his last name, and had no real desire to learn it. The only thing he cared about was winning this hand. He cared about it a great deal, because Bernard Hutson did not have the money to cover the bet. Seven hours ago he was up eighteen grand, but since then he’d been steadily losing and extending his credit and losing and extending his credit. If he won this pot, he’d break even.

  If he didn’t, he owed thirty thousand dollars that he didn’t have to a man who had zero tolerance for welchers.

  Little Louie always brought two large bodyguards with him when he gambled. These bodyguards worked according to a unique payment plan. They would hurt a welcher in relation to what he owed. An unpaid debt of one hundred dollars would break a finger. A thousand would break a leg.

  Thirty thousand defied the imagination.

  Hutson wiped his forehead on his sleeve and stared at his hand, praying it would be good enough.

  Little Louie dealt them each one more card. When the game began, all six chairs had been full. Now, at almost five in the morning, the only two combatants left were Hutson and the mobster. Both stank of sweat and cigarettes. They sat at a greasy wooden card table in somebody’s kitchen, cramped and red-eyed and exhausted.

  One of Louie’s thugs sat on a chair in the corner, snoring with a deep bumble-bee buzz. The other was looking out of the grimy eighth story window, the fire escape blocking his view of the city. Each men had more scars on their knuckles than Hutson had on his entire body.

  Scary guys.

  Hutson picked up the card and said a silent prayer before looking at it.

  A five.

  That gave him a full house, fives over threes. A good hand. A very good hand.

  “Your bet,” Little Louie barked. The man in the pink suit boasted tiny, cherubic features and black rat eyes. He didn’t
stand over five four, and a pathetic little blonde mustache sat on his upper lip like a bug. Hutson had joined the game on suggestion of his friend Ray. Ray had left hours ago, when Hutson was still ahead. Hutson should have left with him. He hadn’t. And now, he found himself throwing his last two hundred dollars worth of chips into the pile, hoping Little Louie wouldn’t raise him.

  Little Louie raised him.

  “I’m out of chips,” Hutson said.

  “But you’re good for it, right? You are good for it?”

  The question was moot. The mobster had made crystal clear, when he extended the first loan, that if Hutson couldn’t pay it back, he would hurt him.

  “I’m very particular when it comes to debts. When the game ends, I want all debts paid within an hour. In cash. If not, my boys will have to damage you according to what you owe. That’s the agreement, and you’re obliged to follow it, to the letter.”

  “I’m good for it.”

  Hutson borrowed another five hundred and asked for the cards to be shown.

  Little Louie had four sevens. That beat a full house.

  Hutson threw up on the table.

  “I take it I won,” grinned Little Louie, his cheeks brightening like a maniacal elf.

  Hutson wiped his mouth and stared off to the left of the room, avoiding Little Louie’s gaze.

  “I’ll get the money,” Hutson mumbled, knowing full well that he couldn’t.

  “Go ahead and make your call.” Little Louie stood up, stretched. “Rocko, bring this man a phone.”

  Rocko lifted his snoring head in a moment of confusion. “What boss?”

  “Bring this guy a phone, so he can get the money he owes me.”