Then the animal shot through the doors and crouched in front of us, baring his teeth.
“We ain’t through with the old lady,” Dracula said.
“Come on, Samson,” he said, snapping his fingers.
He brought the dog over to the old lady and said, apparently to me, “You interrupted us. We gotta finish our business.”
In the dying light the two looked comic — and all the more ominous for the comic aspect — their masks cheap and gaudy and very unreal-looking.
The dog had no problem seeming real. His coat was shaggy and dirty and his breath was bad. His eyes were red, as if he had a hangover, and his snout was slick with snot.
Nothing about him suggested what came next. It happened so quickly I scarcely noticed.
The mutt banged his head against the old woman’s leg and ripped a long, clean gash into the flesh.
The dog started barking and the woman started screaming.
Frankenstein came over and slapped her once, hard, across the mouth.
“Now, I want to know where the strongbox is that Eve gave you.”
But Frankenstein had overplayed his hand. The woman was in such agony that she seemed not to hear him. She moaned, pitching from side to side inside the constraints of the rope.
Donna’s eyes filled. I wanted to hold her. Reassure her. Hard to do with your arms cinched by rope.
“The strongbox,” Frankenstein said again.
The mutt had moved back a few feet, waiting his call.
“I don’t have it,” the woman said miserably.
“Bitch,” Dracula said.
He said “Beefsteak” and the dog lunged at the woman. This time he raked his teeth down her other leg. He had begun to smell. A kind of lust.
This time the woman put her head back and started to shake it from side to side. I wondered how long Frankenstein and Dracula had been here. They seemed like patient boys. Maybe a long time.
We sat there twenty more minutes while it went on. The dog had a go at her three more times. The last time he got her hand. He was extremely well trained. He didn’t make a mess. He just inflicted very precise pain, making holes in her skin, blue where puckered, red where the blood came slowly forth. The dog cleared up any doubts I’d had about Frankie and Drac. Not punks at all. Pros.
“Stop it!” Donna screamed at them toward the end.
But they were having too much fun with the old woman to pay any attention.
Then above all the noise — the dog growled steadily, like a beast in a slasher movie — and the two thugs kept up steady cursing beneath their masks — I heard the car.
As daylight waned in the parlor, tires crunched on gravel outside. I felt an idiotic relief. A movie formed in my head. The florist back in Tanrow hadn’t trusted us and had sent the local cops to check us out. Here they were now. Boy, were these two bastards going to get theirs.
For what seemed an hour or two there was no further sound from outside.
Had I imagined the car crunching on gravel?
The dog went on snarling, hunching, ready for another lunge; Frankenstein and Dracula kept up their demands; the old woman said “I don’t have it, I don’t have it,” in a kind of rosary of pain; and I let my mind wander to the strongbox and realized that it was probably the key to everything, from the murder of Stephen Elliot to the deaths of the motel clerk and the hooker.
Then I heard footsteps on the front porch and the rusty hinges of the door squeaking open.
The thugs heard the noises too.
They snapped a command to the mutt, “Ease, boy, ease.” He went into a state of suspended animation. The one with the Dracula mask jerked a Luger from the belt inside his jacket and started toward the sliding doors. The other came over to us. We knew better than to talk.
“Shit, it’s you,” Dracula said in the hallway outside. “Scared the shit out of us.”
Frankenstein waved his gun at us, glanced at the mutt crouching by us, then went out into the hallway too.
The shots came very quickly.
Four of them.
As abrupt and final as an execution.
Two bodies collided with the floor.
Donna looked over at me as the steps started toward us.
We were next. Or at least I thought we were, but then there was the sound of an oncoming car on the lonely road.
Steps retreated from the hallway. Down the front stairs. A car motor was twisted to life. Tires on gravel. The whine of a transmission in reverse.
Gone.
“My God,” Donna said. “My God.”
There wasn’t much else to say.
30
The oncoming car belonged to Ab Windom, the florist. He came in, took a startled look at our bonds, and proceeded to set us free.
“Did you get a look at the car?” I asked.
“Afraid I didn’t,” he said. “I was listening to the Cash Call Contest on the radio. I was pretty engrossed.”
“Why’d you drive out here?”
He flushed. “Well, to be honest, I got to thinking that maybe I shouldn’t have trusted you as much as I did. No offense. I just wanted to make sure everything was all right.”
Later, after we had rubbed some circulation back into our arms and legs, this is the story Mrs. Rutledge told us.
In the early sixties a very beautiful but frail high-school teacher named Eve Evanier came to Tanrow. The eligible bachelors of the community were enchanted, if a little frightened — her honey-blond hair, her curiously gentle manner, her melancholy silences confused them. If she’d been a carhop, they’d have had no problems with her. But, given the fact that she was so shy, given the fact that she never seemed to go anywhere but to work and church, they didn’t know what to make of her.
The women of Tanrow did, of course. Eve Evanier’s mailman told everybody that she received The New Yorker and Evergreen Review by subscription, which marked her as slightly sinister in the eyes of the women. Then a local sheriff’s deputy named Sale told of stopping her one evening while she walked and finding her absolutely drunk. This was all the nervous men and the jealous women needed — some objective proof of her moral shortcomings. Now they snickered at her openly, and many housewives talked of going to the school board and getting her fired.
Which was when Eve and Gil Powell began spending time together.
Gil was, like the Evanier woman, an outcast. His father, a handyman, was long dead and his mother spent her nights dancing in the plastic glow of big Wurlitzer jukeboxes and sleeping with traveling salesmen. Gil possessed only one real virtue — his looks. It was widely said that he could go out to Hollywood and become a movie star. The problem was he had nothing to put with his looks — he wasn’t intelligent or sensitive or funny. He was, in fact, more a mannequin than anything. He stayed by himself. You saw him most often watching TV and shooting baskets in his driveway. He was a terrible basketball player.
In his senior year Gil happened to take an English course taught by Eve Evanier. On the first test he got the lowest grade she’d ever given out to anybody not retarded. She called him into her office. That was the day it all started. Within a week Gil Powell drove his 1953 Chevrolet fastback out to Mrs. Rutledge’s rooming house, where Eve stayed, nearly every night. Everybody knew what was going on. Gil seemed amused by the affair. Eve took it desperately seriously. Gil’s mother called the Evanier woman several times, threatening her; she even sent a beefy used-car salesman named Dolan out there to call the Evanier woman a slut; but Gil and Eve Evanier became inseparable.
She was good for him. He’d been dull — now at least he made a pass at reading and developed something resembling a sense of humor. She bought him clothes and taught him how to dress. The snobby girls of his class, who’d always avoided him before, started writing him notes and working him into their more lurid conversations.