C. Box - The Highway

There was the sharp report of a bolt being thrown, metal on metal. Then the door opened inward and there was a flood of light silhouetting two figures. Not two, she thought. Three of them. One after the other. Their bodies melded together into a single wide mass but three heads stuck out at the top. The first one wore a cowboy hat with the side brims bent up sharply. The middle one wore a peaked cap of some kind.

The last man to enter was hatless but the blocky shape of his head was familiar. He was the trucker who’d brought them here and the man who’d pulled Krystyl out of the room by her hair. Gracie saw the glint of a badge on the second man, and for a brief electric moment her heart soared. The police had come to rescue them . Then she realized the man with the badge was in the middle of the three, not in back where he should be. He wasn’t prodding the men into the room-he was one of them.

A voice she’d not heard before, high and twangy, said, “Hello, girls.” Then: “Gimme that flashlight.”

A few seconds later Gracie was blinded by a beam. He’d shined it directly into her eyes. She raised her hands up and covered her face. Even through her closed eyelids she knew the bright light was still on her.

“That skinny little one looks like a damned boy,” the first one with the flashlight said. He was describing her. The beam left Gracie and swept to the left.

“Now, that’s what I’m talkin’ about,” the man said, his voice rising again until he sounded giddy. “That’s what I’m talkin’ about. Ha!”

The light, of course, was on Danielle.

“I was getting bored with them whores,” the man said. “You done good this time, Ronald. You keep this up and we won’t have to call you the Lizard King no more.”

Now that the light was off her, Gracie spread her fingers so she could see between them. The tall skinny one had come further into the room and now stood above them about fifteen feet away. She didn’t have the nerve to look up toward the flashlight or his face. In the reflected light she could see his scuffed pointy-toed cowboy boots, tight jeans, and an oval bronze belt buckle. The two men behind him, the trucker and the one with the badge, were still in shadow.

“Woo-eee,” the skinny old man said, dragging the word out.

She raised her eyes. The man with the badge behind the cowboy bent over, stood back up, and extended his hand toward the cowboy’s neck and she saw the outline of a gun in it.

The bang was concussive in the closed room and the skinny man dropped straight down. She heard the thud of his knees on the concrete and he was directly in front of her. The flashlight rolled away from him toward her, strobing across the side wall.

She got a glimpse of his face in the flashing light: long and horselike, sallow cheeks, unshaven skin sequined with silver whiskers like some kind of backwoods hillbilly type from the movies. His mouth was open slightly to reveal long yellow teeth and his eyes looked right at her but there didn’t seem to be anything intelligent behind them. He looked surprised.

The big man in the uniform stood behind him and pressed the muzzle of the gun to the back of the cowboy’s head and there was another explosion. The cowboy stiffened and fell over face-first.

Something hot and viscous landed on her bare leg but she didn’t look down to see what it was. She could smell gunpowder, blood, and burned hair.

“Dumb son of a bitch,” the man with the gun said. And to them, he said, “Sorry you had to see that, girlies.”

Gracie asked, “Are you here to help us?”

“Hardly,” the man with the badge said. Then, to the man behind him, “Ronald, help me drag this dumb son of a bitch into the corner for now.”

10:23 A.M., Wednesday, November 21

Ronald Pergram watched it happen; Jimmy striding into the room blathering and whooping, asking for Legerski’s flashlight and reaching back for it, clicking it on and shining it on the girls in the corner, the beam playing on them like an evil eye. Then down and to the right, in the corner of his eye, he saw the trooper squat down surprisingly quick for a man of his bulk and tug up on his pant leg to reveal the butt of a revolver jutting out from an ankle holster, pulling it, and with one motion raising it up so the muzzle was four inches behind Jimmy’s ear. Jimmy never sensed it coming or looked around.

When the man went down, he watched Legerski fire the kill shot into the back of Jimmy’s stupid head.

Pergram didn’t make a move to stop the sequence. He just watched. There was no fear whatsoever that Legerski would turn on him.

Because he was the Lizard King, he had insurance, and right now he was bulletproof. Legerski turned and brandished the gun.

“The throwdown I used earlier,” he said, meaning it was the same untraceable weapon he’d used on Hoyt.

The trooper said, “Don’t worry. I’ll get rid of it soon enough.”

* * *

Jimmy’s body was light. Pergram grabbed a leg and dragged it toward the wall. He could feel Jimmy’s muscles twitch and quiver beneath the denim. Jimmy’s broken head left a wide spoor of black blood behind him like a wake behind a boat.

They got the body into the corner and Legerski kicked the stray flung-out limbs into some kind of order.

“Get the flashlight and help me.”

Dutifully, but resenting the hell out of following any man’s orders, Pergram closed his hand around the barrel of the flashlight on the floor. It was sticky from rolling through the blood. He carried it over to where Legerski was bent over Jimmy’s body. The trooper was looting his pockets of change; a folding knife, his wallet, and a wad of credit cards, receipts, and notes to himself Jimmy kept bound with a rubber band in his shirt pocket. Legerski unbuckled Jimmy’s belt and pulled it free through the loops.

“So they don’t have something to use as a weapon or to hang themselves.”

Then he took Jimmy’s cowboy boots off and tossed them through the open door into the hallway.

The act made Pergram remember the door was still open and it seemed to do the same to Legerski, because the trooper pivoted on his boots and pointed his finger toward the girls in the corner.

“Don’t neither of you even think of running through that door. There’s no place to go and we’ll stop you before you even get there. You seen what happened here, what I’m capable of. You have no idea what my partner is capable of. So just sit there quiet until we leave.”

Pergram turned and hit them with the flashlight. They hadn’t moved, but he saw something flash in the younger girl’s eyes. She’s been thinking about it, thinking about trying to dash by them toward the door. He smiled but he knew she couldn’t see him do it.

The girl with the dark hair said, “You’re going to leave him in here?”

“For a while,” Legerski said. “Until we figure out what to do with him.”

Pergram watched as Legerski looked around, saw the old blanket on the floor, and snatched it up to cover most of Jimmy’s body. “There,” the trooper said, “now we don’t have to look at him.”

Pergram didn’t want to talk, even though Jimmy, the stupid old coot, had actually said his name. So had Legerski. Even so, he doubted the girls would remember it, given what happened. They’d heard his voice before, but why push it now?

The older one buried her face into her hands and Pergram heard a sob. He looked at the younger one. She looked back, grim, her face a mask of defiance.

He thought, She’ll be fun to break. All that misplaced attitude based on nothing he could see. She was just another one of those overachiever types like his dead sister JoBeth. She didn’t know how the world worked. How could she, when she’d spent her life being coddled, being told how smart and special she was? At least the older was crying. Maybe, on a gut level, she understood. If not, she’d find out soon enough, he thought.