Stuart MacBride - Sawbones

After a couple of minutes Laura swings her legs over the edge of the bloody table then drops to the floor, her legs give way and I have to catch her. There’s a chunk missing from her left leg, surrounded by teeth marks. She hisses in pain, holding onto the edge of the table to stay upright.

She’s shivering, so I offer her my jacket. Laura smiles as she puts it on, but it’s not a nice kind of smile.

“Henry, Mark,” she says, “get the Bastard on the table. And chain the fucker down.”

I shake my head. “Can’t do that, Laura, your dad wants him alive.”

She stares at me, and suddenly she don’t look like Laura no more — she looks like her old man when he tells Henry and me someone’s stepped outta line and we gotta go whack them. . “He say he had to be in one piece?”

“Laura — ”

“Look at that leg, Henry. We don’t get him some medical attention soon, he’s going to bleed to death.”

“But — ”

“Best thing for him,” she says, picking a big knife off the tabletop, “is ampu-fuckingtation.”

We manage to talk her down to just the one leg. And when the screaming’s stopped and the guy’s passed out, we drag him and his amputated limb out to the car and bundle him in the trunk. He looks like shit, but he’ll survive the trip back to New Jersey. I ain’t saying how long he’ll live after that though. Let’s just say I wouldn’t want to be in his shoe when we get there.

I make sure Laura’s comfortable in the passenger seat, then go join Henry in the graveyard of dead cars.

“How long before we’re back home?” he says.

I shrug. “Thousand miles. . what’s that, about seventeen hours? I could do it in fourteen, but no way in hell I want some cop pulling us over for speeding with Long John Fucking Silver in the boot. Should be back in New Jersey about six tomorrow morning.”

Henry nods, then looks out at the cars and their terrified inhabitants. The one nearest to us is in an ancient Cadillac — she’s rocking back and forwards in her chains, the stumps where her arms and legs used to be moving in little circles, crawling with flies. Her eyes are tight closed and I swear to God if I’d known what Henry was about to do I’d have stopped him.

But I don’t know.

Not until he pulls his gun and puts a single bullet through her head.

BANG!

“Fucking hell, Henry! What you do that for?”

He watches as her torso twitches then hangs still against the chains. “Rule number one, never leave witnesses.” He bends down, picks up the brass casing from his bullet and puts it in his pocket — that’s rule number two, never leave any evidence. We’ve already picked up all our brass from outside the concrete barn. “Besides,” he says, “what kinda life she going to have, no arms and no fuckin’ legs?”

He turns his gun on the next one, chained to the seat of a rusty Volvo.

“Henry!”

“What?”

I bring my gun up and point it at Henry’s chest. “No.”

He stares at me for a second, then goes back to the girl in the Volvo. “I don’t make the rules.”

“Henry, look at her — she’s sixteen, for fuck’s sake. She’s scared, she’s done nothing wrong.”

“Never point a gun at someone you’re not prepared to kill.”

He points the gun at her head and the girl closes her eyes, sobbing behind her gag.

“Don’t fucking do this!”

“God,” he says, “you’re just like Jack — ”

And that’s when I shoot him.

We’re already halfway across Illinois when the news comes on the radio — ‘Following an anonymous tip-off, police raided a farm on the outskirts of Polk County, Iowa this afternoon and discovered what’s being described as something out of a horror film. Sheriff Oswald and his team found the bodies of five dead women chained inside abandoned automobiles on the farm of plumber Frank Williams.’

I turn the volume down a bit, because Laura’s finally fallen asleep and I don’t want to wake her. She’s got a cardboard box in her lap, and every now and then I can hear that kitten shifting about in there, mewing.

‘Williams — a chaplain in the National Guard,’ says the news reader, ‘is missing, but police now believe him to be the serial killer “Sawbones”. A nation-wide manhunt is now underway.’

Not that they’re ever going to find him. By the time Mr Jones has finished with the son-of-a-bitch there won’t be enough left to fill a lunchbox.

‘Three young women, abducted earlier in the week, were discovered in Williams’ home, suffering from trauma and shock.’

Which only leaves. . ‘A fourth woman was dropped outside Mercy Medical Centre in Des Moines. Hospital sources say surgeons are battling to re-attach her arms and legs, but the outlook is bleak. .’

I listen for a bit longer, making sure they don’t say anything about Jack and Henry — then I switch over to something a bit more cheerful. I’m going to miss Henry, but it’s nice not to have to put up with his shitty taste in music.

As I flick through the stations I hope that Mr Luciano’s men got Henry to a doctor in time. He was bleeding pretty badly when Laura and I left. The guy in the Hawkeyes jacket said, ‘Anything you need, you give me a call.’ So I asked for a good doctor who don’t ask too many questions, like, ‘Who the fuck shot you in the back?’ If the old bastard doesn’t die on the operating table he’s going to be fucking pissed when he gets out.

And I hope they buried Jack somewhere nice, not just fed him to the pigs. Yeah, he was an asshole, but. . well, you know. You look after your own.

Two hundred miles later I’m humming along to some old Elvis Presley number, sticking to the speed limit, when I see the red, white and blue flashing lights in my rear-view mirror.

Fuck.

Laura yawns and sits up in the passenger seat, her face a confusion of fuzzy sleep and not knowing where the hell she is. For a moment it’s like she’s still a sixteen-year-old girl, a nice kid who loves her parents and respects her elders. Then she remembers what’s she’s been through since she was snatched from that alleyway in New Jersey and her face goes hard. Like it was when she took that guy’s leg off.

She reaches into the box with the kitten in it and comes out with Jack’s Glock nine mm.

And that’s when I know we’re fucked. .