The Outlaw Stinky Joe (Baer Creighton Book 4), page 20
After a long moment, the dog was limp. Then it convulsed. Retreated with power Joe couldn’t match. Its breath had ended, and its blood spilled unabated, but somehow the dog moved backward, out. A man grunted beyond the entry. The old man cursed with the violence of all the world’s evil in one vocal blast.
The dog slid out of the opening and the old man’s syllables rushed in.
I’m a murder ya!
Joe shrank back and to the side, as far from the opening as possible.
The gap flashed orange, and a blast of deafening, eye-singeing force blew through. The percussion pressed a yelp from his lungs without his permission.
Another blast followed. Joe whined. Threw himself against the wall, away from the opening, and the stinging echoes from the back. The blasts kept coming, over and over. Rock fragments zinged. His ears pounded with ringing. He tasted blood. He felt small stings on his skin, but none of the body-rolling impacts, as he had on the plain.
At last the explosions ended. The noise in his mind roared; the ringing sang high and loud. The many fragmented insults on his body morphed into the agony of his again-opened chest wound and overtaxed, half-destroyed rear tendon.
The old man’s voice penetrated his ringing ears.
God I hate you.
Joe waited where even the distance-killer could not reach him.
He placed his head between his paws and watched.
Warm blood pooled below his chest.
Chapter 43
Shirley squatted, steadied herself, moved El Jay’s pants to the bed. She pulled keys from his pocket and tossed them to Ulyana.
“Back his car up to the door.”
Ulyana held the keys. “No.”
Shirley regarded her through slitted eyes. The Russian had been helpful. Played along within the confines of her skillset. Now that their partnership was moving to a more cerebral plane, Ulyana’s place was less secure. Truth was, if Shirley could have lured El Jay to bed without Ulyana, she would have. But where Shirley had rolls, Ulyana had curves.
Not all men dug rolls.
“Are you a partner, Ulyana? Or a witness I have to deal with?”
“I didn’t ask for this. I was out for a run. That’s all.”
The cause must go on. Shirley would adopt the revolutionary mantra: any means necessary.
She’d start with inspirational logic, and if it didn’t work ... cross that bridge later ...
“Your face,” Ulyana said, her eye whites round. “What are you thinking?”
“You ever get fed up with the crap?” Shirley said. She stepped to and pushed Ulyana. “This is my day. I’m done. Stepping outside myself and the world around me. I don’t want any of it, and by God I’m not gonna put up with it. This asshole turned my house upside down ‘cause he got the power. I’m just some fat, dumb, old white girl. No pimp. No protection. No police. No body. So, all my life, assholes like this one force me to make a calculation. Do I fight for what’s mine and probably lose everything? My life? Or do what I’m told? That’s how they push you—until someone has enough. Well, I’m that someone. I was hoping maybe you’d be too.”
Ulyana stepped wide of Shirley, kept partly turned, with her eyes locked. “You didn’t tell me you’d kill him.”
“We had no choice.”
“Not we.”
“Okay. I had no choice. He’s a killer. He threatened my son. And he’d have come back for both of us. You know that.”
Ulyana dipped her head. “You seem so calm.”
“Me? Are you kidding? My heart’s a jibber-jabber. I’m about to freak out my mind. We got a drug dealer’s body on my bed. Probably pissed it too. But there was nothing else to do, and I’m just at that point. I’ll take any tomorrow but the one fate has lined up. Nobody is ever gonna make me decide between my dignity and my life. I’ll kill anybody that tries.”
Ulyana nodded. Tiny, then bigger.
Shirley said, “Yeah?”
“Yes.”
“No. I said yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“All right. Let’s deal with this prick. Besides, if the world had any justice,”— she pointed at El Jay’s head, still in plastic— “this is what it would look like. That FBI man should have taken him into custody, and then they’d fry his ass. But there’s no law but what we make. I’m sick of it. You wait around for other people to uphold the rules that matter, the ones that protect little people, you’ll wait your whole life. They only go after the people who get in their way. No such thing as law and order, unless you make it on your own damn authority.”
Ulyana stood at the door. “Where will we take him?”
“He told us. The warehouse.”
Ulyana went outside to move the car. While Shirley unfastened the handcuffs from El Jay’s wrists and ankles, she heard Ulyana start the engine.
She’d have to think of another way to dispose of the electric stim devices—certainly couldn’t bundle them up and put them in El Jay’s trunk. If law enforcement connected them to the body—if they ever found the body—it’d be easy to track down someone buying thirty E-stim devices in an afternoon, even if she’d visited six drug stores. Every one of them had ten cameras. In fact ... it’d be best if there weren’t any markings on El Jay at all.
It’d be even better if El Jay didn’t exist.
She looked at him. Purple welts, oval, five inches long and three wide. All over his front. Dick shriveled like a thumb after someone pulled out the bone.
Shaved.
Damn. That hair was a lot of DNA, and it would be near impossible to vacuum all of it, without missing any.
The screen door slapped closed. Ulyana was back inside the trailer.
Shirley dragged El Jay to the edge of the bed and, surprised by his relative lack of weight, threw him over her shoulder.
“You want to grab the door for me? And open the trunk before I get there.”
Ulyana raced ahead, back outside. She pressed the key fob and the trunk popped as Shirley descended her deck steps. She dropped El Jay on the spare tire and closed the lid. Wiped off where she touched the paint.
“This is his car? An Impala?”
“Shitty for a drug dealer, right?” Ulyana said. “Maybe it belongs to his father.”
“Either way, precious cargo. Let me find my jacket and a couple things. I’ll follow you.”
“What?”
“Yeah. You got to drive.”
Ulyana exhaled. Slumped.
“Viva the revolution,” Shirley said.
She went inside, stripped the bed and stuffed the blankets and sheets into the pillow cases. Grabbed her coat and keys. A jug of citronella oil for the torches she never used. A lighter.
Outside, she dumped the cargo on the Impala back seat. Again, wiped off the handle.
“You know where the warehouse is?”
“No.”
“Follow me. I’ll go slow but you need to stay close. And if the cops pull you over, flash them your titties or something. Don’t forget you got a body in the trunk.”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Let’s go.”
Shirley led through back streets. Stop signs and red lights. Easy does it. Nodding when she saw people. Smile big. Wave. Best day of her life.
Free.
She’d started a one woman revolution. No more man-shit. She felt like Che Guevara—except a woman Che. She’d butcher anybody who interfered with her vision.
Howdy, just out for a drive. Don’t mind me. Or the stripper with the corpse in her trunk.
Exhilarating.
She pulled into the warehouse parking area and cut across the lot, toward a dock with closed garage doors, where they used to load freight onto trucks. At the end, a concrete ramp led to an open bay door.
Maybe where El Jay left his murder victims?
Wouldn’t it be a history—dammit!—herstory—worthy irony to leave him beside them?
Talk about a mindbender. What would he have done if the ghost of murder future could have shown him his own body there, just a couple days later? To be a fly on the wall ...
Shirley eased up the ramp. Turned on her headlights. As she passed into the building, it was like driving into night, close and tight. The engine rumbled loud.
The Impala’s high beams glared in her mirrors as Ulyana followed.
Ahead, a parked vehicle. She studied it: the color was dark. The side window reflected jagged light—maybe it had been shattered. Nothing was moving. As she neared, the masses became blood on the windshield.
Shirley’s stomach turned. Anticipating the smell of several-day old bodies, she considered stopping right here.
But the setup seemed better if the cars were side by side. More like a drug deal where, as they said on television, the shit went sideways.
As Shirley pulled forward, space seemed to close in around her. Viewed from outside, the warehouse was gigantic. Inside, with all the metal racks arranged in rows, and the claustrophobia-inducing darkness, it felt like the kind of place where zombies could climb out of the shadows.
A chill moved up her back.
Fine. It’s supposed to be creepy when you kill people.
She cut the wheel a little and crept to the other vehicle.
Closer now, she saw smashed glass, two bodies, blood all over.
Strange though, each body was in the front seat, and the side windows were shot out, not the windshield.
El Jay had an accomplice.
Paul?
Ulyana?
That was crazy.
Shirley drove around the vehicle and stopped when hers was pointed back at the entrance. Ulyana parked the Impala beside the shot-up mule car.
Shirley twisted the key to shut down the engine, but left on the lights. She stepped out. At the Impala she drew a line across her neck, and Ulyana turned off her engine.
“Come on, get out.”
Ulyana removed her hands from the wheel. Placed them on her lap.
“We don’t have all night.”
She remained in the driver seat.
“Oh, dear. Shit. You think I’m going to leave you here? Sister? Nah, you’re part of the revolution. Get out the car so we can burn it.”
Ulyana turned off the Impala’s engine. Cracked the door open. Shirley pulled it the rest of the way. “I have to admit, it’d be a tighter crime scene to leave you here. But you’ve been dealing with the same shit as I have. Sisters! You got to help me so we can get out of here.”
She offered Ulyana her hand. Yanked her out of the seat and into a hug. “We got to be sisters from here out. One of us goes down, we both go down. It’s you and me forever.”
Ulyana seemed to stare off. Whatever. Benefit of the doubt. She was still a little in shock, perhaps. Ergo per se.
“Pop the trunk, would you?”
Ulyana leaned into the car. Shirley watched.
It would have been easy to knock her on the head. But sisters didn’t clock sisters.
Until they needed to.
She moved to the back seat door, opened it, and to the trunk. As it sprung open she heard the sound of shuffling feet, far off, like sand under slippers. Bunches of them, off in the dark beyond the metal pallet racks.
“Oh no! It’s the junkies. Let’s go!”
She grabbed the corpse and heaved, felt a muscle in her back twitch, pull all the way to her feet. Not good.
Shirley jerked El Jay’s body clear of the trunk. Shifted a few feet and dropped him to the back seat, on top of the stuffed pillow cases and torch oil. She lifted, pushed. Wrestled him to the seat.
“Why move him?” Ulyana said.
“Don’t you watch TV? Better air flow.”
With El Jay across the back seat, she opened the bottle of citronella and dumped it over the upholstery. She emptied the pillow cases and spread out the blankets over the front seats.
Stage set, Shirley pulled a Zippo from her pocket and turned to Ulyana.
“What the hell?”
Ulyana pointed a pistol at Shirley’s face—it looked like the same one Shirley had borrowed.
“Do it,” Ulyana said. “Light it.”
Shirley thought fast.
Had Ulyana been El Jay’s co-conspirator from the start—along with Paul?
Or was she acting now out of fear and self-preservation?
Shirley opened her heart. Dove in, reached down for the revolution to bring it up through her soul, up into the world through her mouth, released like a scream from the underbelly of the primordial soup, stinky the way sex sometimes stinks, the way men sometimes sweat and get raw, the way treachery arrives from nowhere even though it’s been there all along. For that was the world. That was the rotten ugly world. Even a sister in crime would turn in a heartbeat—and a girl who’d do that wasn’t a sister whether they played the same tune or not. Ulyana provoked the lust and Shirley put it down. They were farm girls working the same crop. But they were sisters no more.
“Go ahead,” Shirley said. “Pull the trigger.”
She stepped closer to Ulyana.
Ulyana backed a step.
“I said pull that trigger.”
Nothing.
“See, I knew you were a chickenshit coward who couldn’t be trusted, so I took out your bullets before I gave the gun back to you.”
Shirley lurched. She swiped with her arm the way a grizzly might bat down a small tree. Caught Ulyana on the side of the head with her paw, driving her into the Impala.
The pistol fired.
Ulyana screamed. She dropped the pistol, and Shirley dove, driving her chest into the cement. She tore open her first chin, the one with bone. Grabbed the pink .38 and pointed from the ground up to Ulyana, who leaned stunned on the side of the car.
“You said you unloaded—”
“Like I had time to unload your gun!”
Shirley looked down. Growled. Life agony stirred in her lungs and came out blowing. She screamed from the vast pit of her stomach, and the sound issued like a blast from an industrial horn:
Shift, over.
She swung her pistol arm to Ulyana.
Ulyana lifted her hands. A tear pressed from her eye.
Shirley stared into her eyes. “Viva the REVOLUTION!!!”
Chapter 44
Tromp along easy like I’m looking mushrooms. Mosey. Gander a bit. Keep headed for where the sound came from—though with the echoes I’m not sure I got the right vector.
Wood smoke.
Ah. Light’s about gone, and I want to make an introduction before my fellow man gets skittish in the dark. Follow my nose and the breeze, and in twenty feet I spot the flame, not a hundred feet off. He’s lower than me. There’s a rock wall. I’m on top.
How the hell I get down?
Cut left, as the slope says maybe that’s the way. Move from the fire but keep it in my sights, then hold the angle fast in my mind when the fire disappears. Dark comes quick under the trees. After a hundred yards or so, the rock wall is just a nest of boulders. I circle the last and head back.
Come up on the campfire, hands out front. Old feller sit there, face like meat left on the grill. Hands folded together, elbows on his thighs, with a Remington behind them.
“I guess you came to see about the commotion.”
“I heard it.” Approach to fifteen feet, and no closer until he says.
“It was nothing.”
“Did you hit it?”
“What?”
“The dog.”
“It wasn’t a dog. It was a mountain lion.”
Got the juice on my arms, but his eyes are regular. Cold. “No shit.”
“It isn’t a hundred yards that way, you’re inclined to see.”
“He attack?”
“Come on me from behind. He made his noise up front and circled. Clever animal.”
“But you was cleverer.”
“Something like that.”
“Well—that’s a sore dick.”
“What?”
“You can’t beat it. Never seen a mountain lion up close.”
“Tell you what, mister. I’m old enough I’ll let you walk yourself.” He lines his arm straight, waves it up and down. “You follow that angle. See that sycamore with the lightning-cut—right there, twenty feet. That’s your angle.”
“Appreciate you.”
I turn and the hackles go up.
“Hey,” he say. “You got a camp somewhere about here? Where’s the rest of your party?”
“No party. I’m passing through, is all.”
He nods. Doesn’t believe me. I don’t neither. He smiles. I smile. I point thataway. He nods.
The rifle on his lap already has the barrel my direction. Just a matter of him lifting straight and pulling the trigger. He can do that pretty quiet I bet, while I crunch leaves and twigs. From the black in his eye and the set of his face, and the questions, and the half lies, I get the sense this fella’d do me harm, I let him.
“I got an idea.”
Drop my pack. Watch him stiffen. I hold out my hand, the stop signal. “You’ll like this. You watch.”
Pull out a Turkey. Crack the seal and offer.
He squints. The woods turn a darker shade of gray. “I want your opinion, before I move along, and it’s only right I pay for it. You mind sharing the fire a couple minutes while we jaw this over?”
Slow, he lifts his chin.
From way off comes the sound of barking dogs—that throaty stork sound comes from a pack of beagles. Some of the most talented dogs ever sucked air. They’re a considerable ways off, but dogs move fast, and this dog hunt, with Cinder’s logic, is an FBI-top-ten-most-wanted hunt. Expect helicopters any minute.
Something troubled me since I spotted this old man. When I was on the hill, him down here shooting, I wasn’t maybe seventy-five feet. But it sounded distant.
Maybe someone else? More deception?
At the fire I reach him the bottle and warm my hands while he sniffs it, takes a pull.
“Let’s do something the old way.”
He coughs the Turkey. Flashes the bottle north again for another quick sip.
“There’s a white pit bull in the news. Goes by Joe. That’s his name. That’s my dog. I’m after him. And you was doing your level best to shoot him.”
“Don’t think I got him. Would he answer to you?”
