“Come help your old man get her stowed away?”
“Sure.”
“Make you a deal, Sweet-Sweet,” Maxine says. “You boys clean up that mess, I’ll clean the dinner table.”
“You got a deal.”
Rufus and Luther start down the steps.
The girl has gone quiet, lost consciousness.
“Now you watch yourself, son,” Rufus warns as they approach the bottom. “That string of razorwire runs over the third step up. You see it?”
Luther does.
Not the wire itself, but the blood glistening on the blades in the soft, white light of the Christmas tree.
Into the underbelly of the house, and down the dirt-floored passageways the Kites have only begun to explore, Rufus and Luther drag the girl into a musty-smelling room of old, stone walls.
“You already dug the hole?” Luther asks.
“No, I made her do it yesterday when I started to get the feeling she wasn’t going to work out. Here, help me. One…two…three.”
They swing her toward the hole and let go.
“From downtown!” Rufus says.
“What are you talking about?” Luther asks.
“Basketball? Like we just made a shot?”
“Oh.”
Rufus kicks her arms in and the one leg still hung up on the lip of the grave.
“You can finish this up, son?”
“Yes.” Luther tries to hide the sniffle.
“What’s wrong, buddy? You look sad.”
Luther wipes his eyes, nodding slowly as he stares at the other mounds of dirt that mark the three other graves. There’s only room for one more, maybe two if they make perfect use of the space.
“I miss her, Dad.”
“I know. Me, too. Tell you what. January first, we’ll take the ferry over to Hatteras and drive up the coast to Nag’s Head. Think of all the families vacationing over the holiday. Celebrating. Ringing in the New Year.” Rufus grabs the shovel leaning against the wall, puts the handle in Luther’s hand. “Look at me son. I promise you. We’ll find the perfect Katie.”
Cuckoo
North Carolina Outer Banks, 1986
“Hit him again, son.”
“Dad—”
“Right now. Hit him in the head.”
“But Dad—”
“Hit him in the head!”
Tears streaming down the boy’s face.
“What are you waiting for?”
Luther looked down at the man—bound, bleeding, gagged, his eyes begging for mercy.
He strained to raise the sixteen-pound sledgehammer.
“Hit him in the FUCKING HEAD!”
Luther hit the man in the head.
And liked it.
A Wake of Buzzards
Sublette County, Wyoming, 1991
Donaldson contemplated pulling over, but there was no place to pull over to. The desert road that ran straight off into the horizon as far as he could see was nothing more than two, faint tire tracks.
He pressed the brake pedal and eased to a gradual stop, not concerned about blocking traffic, because he hadn’t seen another car in over an hour.
The falling sun threw chevrons of red and orange over the burnt landscape, sagebrush fringed with light and glowing like they were ablaze.
A tumbleweed tumbled across the dirt road, thirty yards in front of the bumper.
Donaldson squinted at the fold-up map he’d bought at a gas station in Rock Springs, seventy miles south. He’d thought of it as a bumblefuck town at the time, but it was Manhattan compared to this.
The road he was on was represented by a faint, yellow dash—mapspeak for an unimproved piece of shit. He glanced at his odometer, attempting to judge how far he’d come, and wondering if he should turn back. Open spaces made him wary—and he’d never seen anything like this.
But the money for this particular job was good. So good, that Donaldson was suspicious about his cargo. Drugs maybe. Or guns. But he couldn’t check—they made you sign a contract upon hiring at the delivery service, attesting that you would never, under any circumstance, inspect the cargo you were delivering. A violation of customer confidence, they’d called it, or some shit he couldn’t have cared less about if there hadn’t been the implied threat of getting fired over the slightest customer complaint.
He eyed his rearview mirror, scoping the box in the back seat, sealed with yellow tape along every edge and corner to discourage tampering. It was maybe a foot long, a few inches in diameter.
He thought, for the hundredth time, about opening the box. But Donaldson liked his current gig as a courier, and didn’t want to lose it over something as stupid as curiosity. Being paid to travel was like having a license to kill folks nationwide. He knew that serial killers got caught because they left trails. But cops from different states didn’t compare notes. Hell, cops from different towns in the same state didn’t even talk to one another. Since taking the job six months ago, he’d disposed of bodies in four different time zones. No one would ever link his victims together, and Donaldson wanted to keep it that way.
Still, something about that box, and this job, was suspect. And it didn’t help matters that he’d been driving for almost four hours and still had no idea how close he was to his destination. Whatever was in that box must be worth a fortune. The delivery fee alone was almost three hundred.
He wiped his forearm across his sweaty brow—even the air conditioning couldn’t keep the desert heat at bay—and drained the dregs of lukewarm coffee from his thermos. Dispatch had instructed Donaldson to bring a jug of water in the event his car broke down, and Donaldson was beginning to realize he should have listened. Especially since he hadn’t been able to raise Dispatch since leaving Rock Springs. This place was so remote not even radio waves got through. Donaldson had considered investing in one of those cellular phones, but it probably wouldn’t have coverage way out here either. Besides, they were too big. He’d heard of a case in Chicago where a female cop escaped from a recreational killer by bashing him in the face with his own phone. Donaldson wanted to wait until the technology got better, and the phones got smaller.
He punched the gas.
The eddies of dust kicking up behind his rear tires looked like afterburners in the rays of fading sunlight. Ten more miles, and if he wasn’t there by then, he’d turn the hell around, and tell his boss the client was a no-show. Or maybe arrange for a pick-up in the nearest town. Might cut into some of the profit, but there was a little shit-kicker bar in Pinedale that Donaldson had passed through a few years ago, and he was certain he could pick up some little honey who wouldn’t be missed.
It had been three weeks since his last murder, and Donaldson was feeling the itch.
The sun was blinding in the rearview mirror.
Another scalding day in hell.
But he loved hell.
Through the windshield, he watched the Wind River range growing impossibly larger as he approached at forty-five miles per hour.
God, he couldn’t wait.
Three months ago, he’d placed the order.
Three. Long. Months.
He almost hadn’t sprung for it. $600 was half a month’s salary at Woodside College. Almost half of that was the delivery fee, due to the illegality of the contents. But this was worth it.
In the distance, he saw a cloud of dust.
That had to be his package.
Right on time, too.
He wondered how closely the delivery drivers of Failsafe Transportation were tracked.
It’d be so much fun to use what was coming on the driver. Bring him (or her) back to the shed. Getting rid of the car would be easy enough, though if the driver never showed back up for work, they’d probably trace them back to this western Wyoming desert. To his or her last delivery. But he’d paid with an anonymous money order and had used a false name. If a cop came to question him, he could simply play dumb. Say the driver never showed. But was it worth the risk? On the other hand, how often had someone actually driven themselves to him? Placed their life at his feet?