And now Steve and Gordon were breaking up in laughter again as David and Scott carried the homeless guy out of the SUV. “Shut the fuck up!” David hissed. He glared at him. At six foot one with a lean build, David could be intimidating when he had to be. A lock of brown hair fell over his forehead.
“Okay,” Steve said, his laughter quickly stopping. Gordon averted his eyes from David and turned away.
“Open the fucking door,” Scott said. He was dragging the homeless guy, pulling him from beneath his armpits.
Gordon went to the guesthouse that was situated at the rear of the Bradfield property and opened the door. Scott had unlocked it earlier. Scott and David carried the homeless guy inside and the rest of them followed.
The light was turned on and Scott turned around. “Turn the goddamn light off!”
More laughter from Steve and Gordon. The light was turned off. Gordon sounded bored. “I bet your girlfriend wishes you’d behave like that,” he said.
“Fuck you, Gordon!”
“Girls, girls,” Scott said. Despite the pitch dark inside the guesthouse, David knew his way around. It had once served as a real guesthouse by the former owners, but Scott’s parents hadn’t had much use for the extra living space since buying the estate. The guesthouse itself was approximately twelve hundred square feet of living space. The carpet had been torn out years earlier, the furniture removed, and the living room was now a bare room with wood floors. Scott’s dad once used it as a workroom, but Mom had made him move his stuff to the basement. Probably so she could keep an eye on him. Guy was always working anyway. If David had a wife as good-looking as Scott’s mother, he wouldn’t be working so much. He’d be banging the old lady more often. Maybe that’s why Scott’s mom was such a bitch most of the time.
“Girls, girls, yourself,” Gordon said. He was Scott’s height, but slightly stocky with dark hair and a wide face. When he wore his glasses he looked like a scholar. He knelt down on the floor by the unconscious homeless guy. David saw him check his pulse by putting an index finger to his neck.
“He still alive?” Steve asked.
“Yeah, he’s alive.”
“We aren’t going to fucking beat on him anymore, you got it?” Scott Bradfield said. His blue eyes reflected the intensity they were obviously all feeling. David could see sweat dot his brow and gleam in his blonde crewcut. “We beat him too damn much in the SUV coming back here. I want him to last a long time, okay?”
“You got the ropes?” Gordon asked.
“Here in the corner,” David said. He took two steps toward the wall and knelt down, feeling for them. Four coils of rope lay nestled there, ready to be deployed.
“Let’s get him tied up,” Scott said.
They did it. Despite their teenage dysfunction, they could work together very well when the task called for it. Like tonight’s abduction. That had gone off without a hitch. In fact, it had been downright perfect.
They’d been planning this for weeks. It had been Scott’s idea to go to downtown Philly and pluck a homeless person off the streets and bring him back to the guest house where they could have some fun with him in relative seclusion, and it was a damn fine idea. Scott’s house was on ten acres of land that bordered against the woods. His nearest neighbor was down the road a ways, but far enough away that they wouldn’t suspect anything. Scott’s parents surely weren’t going to suspect anything because they were never around.
The plan was to grab a homeless person, get him to the guesthouse and keep him there for however long it took him to die from whatever injuries he sustained from repeated beatings administered by Scott and his friends.
There was no use in doing any of that happy-slapping bullshit, or going on a wilding spree. Too many idiots got caught doing that and wound up going to prison for it. And the ones that filmed themselves doing it — well, they deserved to go to prison. Stupid fucks. That wasn’t going to happen with Scott and his friends. If you do everything in private, nobody will know. And they could still have fun.
And besides, they could bury the body when they were finished. And they would do it the right way, too. Wrap it up in garbage bags so it wouldn’t leak and the animals wouldn’t get the scent, and they would bury it four, maybe six feet deep.
Scott inspected the ropes when they were finished. They’d tied the homeless guy up tight, binding his lower legs and thighs, his arms. Guy wasn’t going anywhere. If he woke up, no way was he going to be able to lift himself into a sitting position, and if he did, he couldn’t go anywhere. Door would be locked from the outside, and the guest house was far enough into the back yard that nobody would see anything through the windows anyway.
“Think we should find something to tie him to?” Gordon asked. They were standing around the unconscious man.
“Why?”
“Suppose he gets to his feet and bashes his head against the window or something?”
Scott had thought of that but didn’t think it was likely. “I don’t think that’ll happen. Besides, if he does, he’s only going to hurt himself worse. Maybe even kill himself.”
“Still, he could try.”
“You could board the window up,” Gordon suggested.
“Then I’d have to board the others up and my dad’ll wonder why they’re boarded up!”
“Yeah, and it’ll take him six months to notice,” Steve said.
True. Still, Scott felt they could get away with leaving the windows un-boarded for now. “He’ll be fine for tonight. Come on, let’s get out of here.”
And with that, Scott Bradfield led his friends out of the little guesthouse set off deep in his back yard, leaving an unconscious Neal Ashford alone and trussed up.
Chapter Two
Tim Gaines was sitting by himself on a bench in the quad at Spring Valley High School reading a book — Back From the Dead by Richard Long — when Scott Bradfield and David Bruce walked by with those two losers they hung out with, Gordon Smith and Steve Downing.
Ever since that day six years ago when Scott, David, and Steve had beaten him up in that field off Cedar Street and tried to force him to eat a dead possum, Tim had done everything he could to avoid them (and the reason they’d tried to force-feed a dead possum to him was because they were moronic pricks who thought that if you read vampire novels — Tim had just discovered Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot and had been reading it in study hall that day — you were probably a vampire yourself. Complete idiocy, but that was how people who lived in this goddamn town seemed to think). Naturally, he’d told his parents what happened when he arrived home. He’d still been sobbing and throwing up in the bathroom when his mother arrived home from work and he’d collapsed in her arms, barely able to speak. When Dad got home from his job as a Web Designer in Lancaster and learned what happened to his only child, he’d been furious. He’d called the police. Ten minutes later, a squad car was parked in front of their duplex and an officer was taking a statement. “I want that little sonofabitch arrested!” Dad had said, his voice shaking.
Tim and his friends were arrested that evening. But then a strange thing happened.
They were released to the custody of their parents and the next day, when charges normally would have been filed, the Township declined to move forward on it. Steve, David, and Scott received warnings from the police and the school district had suspended them for three days. Dad had been furious and threatened to complain to the Pennsylvania State Police, but then Scott’s parents stepped in. They’d threatened to sue them if they continued pursuing what they claimed were “erroneous, false, and libelous charges” against their son. Only then had Dad backed down. The Bradfield’s were one of the wealthiest families in Spring Valley. They lived in a seventeen room mansion on ten acres of land just north of the little airport that mostly serviced private planes and the occasional corporate jet; Tom Bradfield was the CEO of a Financial Planning firm in Lancaster; his mother was a high ranking executive with a construction company. They had the available legal and financial resources to ruin the Gaines family, Dad explained to Tim a week later at the dining room table. “We can’t afford a lawsuit like this, Tim,” Dad had explained. He’d looked defeated and angry that night. So had mom. “Even though we can probably prove our case and win, the cost of doing it would be prohibitive. We’d lose everything in the process, but if we lost the case…”