Big Bad, page 35
What the hell is this?
She didn’t see anyone else down there. Footsteps came from overhead. The muffled sound of a man’s voice. She couldn’t make out what was being said. The floor creaked. Then a door opened, and someone came down hollow-sounding steps, pedaling quickly. Heavy footsteps. She closed her eyes again, and after a moment she could feel someone standing over her, watching her. Breathing. It felt easy to slip back into a warm, dreamless sleep if she so pleased.
“You awake yet?” someone said in a gentle, bittersweet voice that Molly didn’t recognize.
Molly didn’t answer. She tried to control the rise and fall of her chest. Tried to keep it steady. Uninterrupted. Deep and slow breaths. Footsteps moved away from her. Silence for a minute or two. Then came rustling. Rummaging. The footsteps returned.
“Wake up,” the voice said again.
This time Molly thought it sounded a little more familiar. Still, she didn’t move. Something smooth scraped against the wire of the cage. Slid along it into the cage. Then she felt pressure against the side of her right breast. She was still wearing her coat, but it had been unzipped.
Why is it unzipped?
The pressure against her breast became harder, and then the dull force became a sharp pain as something punched through her shirt and began piercing the flesh where her breast met her pectoral muscle. She kept her eyes closed. Kept her breathing steady. She took the pain.
Make him think you’re still asleep. That’s your only hope of getting out of this.
She tried to make her mind go someplace warm and yellow. But the pain was too red. Too loud. Too demanding of her attention. Instead she sicced her mind on the biggest, most obvious question she could find, something she had hardly taken a moment to even consider yet: Who is doing this to me?
Her mind returned a blank slate. She had no enemies that she knew of. Then just as quickly as it had given her nothing, her mind gave her the answer, and she couldn’t believe she had missed it for even a second. Perhaps it was because she hadn’t taken Bethany Winthrop’s warning at the Grocer Go seriously. After all, the only thing she’d done was taken some pictures. But she knew it was him.
The pressure on her breast backed off, but the needling pain remained as whatever smooth thing that had been slid between the slats in the cage and used on her slid back out. Something fell to the ground. Clattered thinly. It sounded metallic and hollow. Then came the sound of keys and the cage door squeaking open. Strong hands clasped her mid-calf and began dragging her out. The shallow lip at the bottom of the door’s entrance pushed up her jacket, bunching it around her ribs, and scraped coldly up her back. She took it. Bore it. Kept her eyes closed.
Wait for your chance.
He pulled her completely from the cage, and she dropped six inches to the concrete floor. Her coat, which had pooled up by her head, softened the blow as the back of her head impacted last. She lay limp. Calm. He took a deep breath as he bent down. Then a hand grabbed her left wrist and pulled her up to a seated position. He slung her arm over his shoulder, wrapped his arms around her, and began lifting her. He was trying to put her on his shoulder. Her head remained angled down. Then it was resting against him. He smelled of cologne. She opened one eye enough to sneak a peek. A few feet away on the floor was a green-and-black arrow with orange feathers and a black triangular tip. It had to be what he had poked her with. It was sharp. Useful.
Now or never.
What happened next wasn’t a decision, rather some instinctual and visceral reaction to perceived opportunity. She opened both her eyes fully as he started trying to hoist her up off the floor. She threw her weight sideways, pushing herself off his neck for leverage, grabbed the arrow, then torqued her waist and drove the arrow as hard as she could at his leg. It hit his hip. The momentum of her arm carried her hand down the arrow’s smooth aluminum shaft and made her cut the crease of her thumb on the razor tip at the end.
Molly looked up at Adam Winthrop. He howled and stepped back, hand grabbing the arrow. He was standing in front of her, his face screwed into a pained grimace. She doubled down on her attack, pistoning her foot forward and kicking him in the knee as hard as she could with the heel of her boot.
He said nothing, only grunted with stunned frustration, then pulled the arrow from his leg and tossed it aside.
She pushed herself backward on the smooth concrete floor, trying to get up and away, trying to find purchase, boots slipping. Her adrenaline began to overtake the drugs in her system. Clarity started to surface like clear waters in a murky pond. She saw everything in small steps. Each a little task she needed to complete.
When she got to her feet, she started for the staircase, but Adam lunged and cut her off. He wrapped her in his arms and tried to put her in a choke hold.
“Just relax,” he said softly. “It’s not a problem. Not a problem. Hold still.” He shushed her as if trying to calm a child.
“Stop it! Let go of me!” she screamed, and elbowed him in the gut. It forced a gust of breath from him that smelled sharply of alcohol, but he didn’t release her.
“Take it easy,” he whispered in her ear.
They wrestled in circles for a moment, and when they stopped, a support beam was in front of her. Without hesitating, she planted a foot against it and shoved backward with all the might she could muster. They careened into the workbench and tools rattled. He searched beside him, reaching for something on the workbench, and squeezed tighter around her neck. Then his arm cut a downward arc through the air, and he punched her in the thigh. It felt like a charley horse, but there was a vague sting beneath the aching impact. She cocked her head forward and brought it back as hard as she could, connecting with something hard and fleshy. She thought it might’ve been his chin.
He grunted again, and his grip on her loosened. Molly bit into his forearm and managed to slip from his grasp. She started toward the door, but she spotted the dull metal of a pistol on the opposite end of the workbench. It was a choice weighed in an instant: run for the stairs or go for the gun. There was a chance the gun wasn’t loaded, but it was equally possible he would catch her if she tried to make it to the stairs. For all she knew, the door at the top could be locked, and she would have cornered herself like a stupid rat.
A more primitive part of Molly that her conscious mind didn’t have access to made the decision for her. Before she knew what had happened, the revolver was in her hand, and she was pointing it at Adam, slowly making her way toward the stairs, keeping the gun trained on him.
“Stop!” she shouted. Then softer, pleading. “Just stop. I’m sorry.”
He obeyed at about ten feet out, halting and putting up his hands. “You’re sorry? What’re you sorry for?”
Shoot him! You shoot him! an internal voice demanded.
(I can’t)
Her hands were shaking. “I’m just gonna go. Okay? I’m just gonna leave. I’m sorry.”
Adam cocked his head, seeming intrigued by her. “You’re not like the others. You have wild eyes. Sad eyes. There’s not a lot of fear in you—just uncertainty.”
“Others?”
He smirked, then took a step toward her. “It’s not loaded, you know.”
“Then why did you stop?”
Adam’s grin faded and his face darkened. It was like watching a piece of fruit turn rotten in the course of a second. “You have an interest in our business? What’re you up to, exactly?”
“What business?” Molly took two steps back, and her heel bumped into the bottom step of the staircase. She mounted it carefully, keeping the gun aimed at Adam’s calculating face.
“And why did you have that newspaper clipping about me? Why am I so damn interesting to you?”
“It’s not what you think.”
“So why don’t you tell me what it is. Give me the gun and tell me.” He took a half step forward.
“Stop moving!” Molly yelled.
“Why should I? That thing’s not loaded,” he said in a patronizing tone, then lowered his hands and took another step toward her. “See for yourself.”
Her hand tightened on the revolver, her finger applying pressure to the trigger.
It’s gotta be you, she heard her father saying.
She swept the gun a few inches to the right and squeezed the trigger. The gun barked and kicked. The top of Adam’s left ear disappeared.
He shrieked and crouched down. “You fuck!”
“I’m gonna go. Just gonna. Okay? When this is all sorted out, we can talk. But right now, I’m gonna go,” she said, and could hear the shock in her voice.
She kept the gun on him and started walking backward up the stairs. About halfway up, she glanced down and saw the syringe sticking out of her thigh. She hadn’t even realized it. She pulled it out and immediately started doing the math in her head. How long ago did he inject me? A minute? Less? More? How much did he give me? What did he give me?
If it was the same thing as before, she would be out soon. She didn’t feel it yet, but she knew she would. The thigh was a big muscle, so she might have a little time, but it would get into her system fast. She needed to get out of there. She needed to get away. Just away. Her mind seemed to latch onto that word: away.
Now down on one knee, Adam looked up at her, hand clamped to the side of his head, blood trickling through his fingers and darkening the shoulder of his turtleneck.
Finish him! Why don’t you shoot him? What the hell do you think he was going to do to you? It’s gotta be you!
She turned and bolted up the stairs. To her surprise, the door opened and she found herself standing in the dark in an office. She could see by the ambient light the streetlights cast through the front windows. All the furniture was dated and dusty. Metal desks and chairs. Green accountant’s lamps. She knew exactly where she was—she had walked by the place hundreds of times. It was the Winthrops’ old rental office. It hadn’t been used for the last five or six years.
The door she had just come through had a new-looking dead bolt on it. She closed it and locked it, then went to the main entrance and pushed on the door, but this one was locked and required a key to open. She looked around, saw a round river stone sitting on top of some sun-faded papers, picked it up, and threw it through one of the giant front windows. The glass exploded, showering the ground. Wind and snow whipped in. It sounded like a freight train passing by outside.
Adam started pounding on the basement door, but then the sound stopped. He would have keys. A moment later, she heard them jingling, and Molly’s mind returned to that word: AWAY, AWAY, AWAY.
She climbed out the window and then stood on the sidewalk under the orange glow of a streetlight in the middle of a raging blizzard. A wave of thick dizziness broke inside her and washed through her head as whatever she’d been drugged with began making its way into her bloodstream.
Molly glanced left, then right. She couldn’t see more than a few hundred feet in either direction. Intuition took her to the left and she began running up the street, gun in hand, eyes down to spare them from the stinging snow. She didn’t know where to go, just that she needed to get away. To find a place to hide. A place where, when the drugs conquered her, she would be safe to ride it out and find help when she came to. For now, she just needed to survive. She kept running. Head down.
I had a phone, she reminded herself. The disposable, I had it on me when I was attacked.
She patted her pockets as she ran, hoping she might still have it by some strange turn of luck, though she suspected she wouldn’t be that fortunate. Adam would have taken it from her when she was out cold. He’d found the newspaper clipping, after all. And her jacket had been unzipped. He’d likely searched her.
She was proven right—her pockets were empty. She kept running.
When she reached the edge of Wyoma Square, she stopped and glanced over her shoulder, but the snow stung her eyes, and she was forced to turn them back to the ground. Everything started to feel slow. Her vision began to get choppy, as if someone were turning down the speed of a movie reel so she could see each frame as a still image. She started running again, passing by Aldi’s Bookstore and then through Wyoma Square. She rounded the corner and headed up High Street, where she cut left into the Stone Soup Café’s parking lot. It had not been a decision to go there—it was simply where her legs had taken her. The buildings provided shelter from the wind. But she had another problem: she had penned herself in. She was the stupid rat, after all.
At the back of the parking lot was a fence, and Molly tucked the revolver into her pocket and ran toward it. She mounted it and started climbing. Her thoughts started to echo as if they had volume. Or maybe it was the storm. It all sounded like it was blending together as one distant thing. Her muscles suddenly felt made of fine fragile threads, not strong tissue fibers.
She tangled with sharp barbed wire, straddled it, and a moment later she fell and landed with a thud in a drift of snow. She got to her feet and looked around. She was in the self-storage lot, with rows of long aluminum buildings, snowdrifts building against them. The corridors between them were lined with doors. She chose an avenue at random and started down it. About halfway down, she saw a door without a padlock and opened it. Her options were limited, and she knew—as well as her fracturing mind could know anything—that she didn’t have long before everything was out of her control.
Molly went inside and shut the door behind her. Pitch-black in every direction. It felt like it was swallowing her up, suffocating her. She found a corrugated metal wall with her hand and leaned against it. Unsteady on her feet, she collapsed to a seated position, holding the gun in her lap. It started to feel foreign in her hand, and suddenly, with only darkness as a benchmark, she was unable to draw a line between the nothingness of unconsciousness and the blackness inside the storage unit.
The distinction continued to fade. And so did she. Her last thought, before being digested by a dreamless slumber, was: My tracks. All he has to do is follow my tracks. How could I have been so stupid? I am the rat. The stupid fucking rat. And I am cornered.
Her chin came to rest gently against her chest, and she stopped breathing.
4
Emma held her expression flat as she looked at Adam, whose face shone with demented pride. This was fun for him. It was what he wanted. She hadn’t needed to strike a deal with him to find out what had happened to Molly—he would have told her one way or the other, just so he could watch her suffer.
“She was already dead when I shot her,” he continued. “And afterward, it was easy enough to put the storage unit in her name, rather than trying to move the body. Not that it really mattered. I could have sat her in the center of town and the death certificate would’ve said the exact same thing: suicide.”
“Because your chief of police is dirty,” Emma said. “Is that what you mean? You own the cops?”
Adam smiled. “So you do know a little.”
Emma shook her head in disgust. “That coward.”
“A coward? I disagree.” He wagged a finger at her. “I think you may have misjudged our noble chief. He’s quite the opposite.”
“You and I have different definitions of what noble means then.”
“Another small answer.” Adam sighed as if disappointed. “The stakes were high for him. Could you possibly know what that’s like? I doubt it. He just did what he had to do.”
“And what was that?”
“When his wife got sick, money became an issue for him. So we offered to help, in exchange for some… liberties, I guess you could say.”
“Just like the Pelkeys helped you, when your family’s real estate business started tanking,” she said, treading carefully. She didn’t want to give him too much. The more she held back, the more time she bought for herself. And if she said the wrong thing, he might figure out that all she had were guesses. “They helped you in exchange for some liberties, too, didn’t they?”
Adam looked pleased. “Go on. This is what we need to find out. What did you find under all those rocks?”
“Not yet,” Emma said. “First, tell me: why suicide?”
The truth was, she didn’t care. She was only buying time so that she could work at her hand some more. Working in fits and starts when Adam checked his phone or turned his eyes away from her, she had managed to get the rope past her thumb knuckle. If she gave it one long hard yank, with all of her strength, she knew she could get her right hand free. But one free hand did little for her. Her other was still hopelessly restricted, and her ankles were tied to the chair’s legs. The one saving grace was that the chair was an old steel office job with no crossbar stretcher between the legs. If she could tilt it back, she might be able to slide the ropes off the chair’s legs.
Adam narrowed his eyes, studying her. “Because it lasts the longest.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I know,” Adam said, and pulled in a ruminative breath before going on. “Serial killers often return to their victims to relive the fantasy, for days, weeks, even months, after they kill. But it’s risky, and eventually the body decays, or it’s discovered, and the source of the pleasure is gone. It’s too short-lived. Unsustainable. And after a while, it’s almost like it never happened.”
“Do you not think you’re a serial killer? You talk about it like you believe you’re something better or different.”
“Don’t think of me as a murderer. I’m more of a cultivator, I guess you could say. I care very little about the actual killing, if you want to know the truth. It’s simply a means to an end. What comes after is what truly interests me.”
“After?”
“Yes,” he said, and started drumming his first three fingers softly against his chin. “My first project was a waitress. Her name was Justine. Twenty-two years old. An only child. She worked at a pub in Boston—Kagan’s, it was called. She didn’t drink. Had a couple close friends but wasn’t terribly popular. There was opportunity there.” Adam’s voice had taken on a reminiscent tone, as if wading back into this memory were like visiting an old friend. “Her parents went away to their lake house for the Fourth of July, and when they returned they found their daughter with her wrists slit in the bathtub. No note. Never a note. The not knowing is what does it. It’s what destroys them. When they can find nothing to point their grieving fingers at—no murderer, no sickness, no accident—they almost always point them at themselves. Or even better, at each other. Death leaves a wake. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
