Josh Bazell - Beat the Reaper - A Novel

It worried me. Skinflick was as immune to shame as anyone I knew, but even he had his limits. And the journey from shame to resentment is the shortest one there is.

But as Skinflick shook his dick, he just said, “Fuck. I hope the FBI can’t DNA-test for urine.” [39] It turns out they usually can’t, since healthy urine doesn’t have cells in it. And if you dropping so many cells that a lab as bad as the FBI’s can strain them out of mud, prosecution is the least of your worries.

A moment later he said, “Holy shit. Look.”

I went over and looked. They were almost invisible in the greenish gloom, but there were footprints all over the mud floor. All over—even where I’d been sitting.

Adolescent-girl-sized footprints. From many different feet.

It wasn’t evidence, but at least it was creepy.

Then the front door opened, and a teenage boy’s voice yelled, “Dad—I’m letting the dogs back out!”

Given the slowness with which some things reveal themselves, it’s amazing how fast other things become clear. Like how, if someone has dogs but has to keep them inside when a plumber or the grocery guy is there, then those must be some pretty bad-assed dogs.

The feeling of surrealism, and passiveness, and fogged stupidity, lifted from me instantly. I had placed myself here. Now I had to survive.

I pulled my gun out of one pocket and my silencer out of the other, and heard loping sounds as I screwed them together. Two enormous, Doberman-shaped shadows appeared on the fiberglass wall.

I later found out they were something called “King Dobermans,” which you get by crossing a Doberman with a Great Dane, then backcrossing it until all that’s left of the Great Dane is the size. “Fuck,” I said at the time.

Like all sane people, I love dogs. A dog is a hell of a lot harder to make vicious than a human. And it was clear we’d have to kill them.

The dogs started sniffing along the base of the wall that Skinflick had just pissed against. Then one of them started to push against the fiberglass, and the other stood back and started to growl.

The front door of the house slammed. That meant that either whoever slammed it was now outside, and should be taken out as fast as possible, or else was inside, and maybe wouldn’t hear what was about to happen.

Either way, it was time to do something.

The dog that was standing back woofed. Prelude to a bark. I shot it twice in the head through the wall, flipping it backwards, then shot the nearer one twice in the chest. It went down squealing.

I quickly switched magazines, listening. The shots had been silenced, but all four of them had made a loud impact noise going through the fiberglass, and the walls of the shack were still rattling. The bullet holes had frayed edges, like cloth.

The front door of the house opened up again.

The same teenage-boy voice said, “Ebay? Xena?”

I started toward the tarp-covered doorway at the back of the shack.

“Ebay!” the voice screamed, much closer.

“I’ve got this one,” Skinflick said.

“No!” I hissed.

But Skinflick was already running toward the wall of the shack, with his gun in his hand.

“No!” I shouted.

It was action movie bullshit. Skinflick jumped, and hit the back wall of the shack high with one shoulder, parting two sheets of fiberglass outward far enough for him to see, and shoot, through the V-shaped gap. Then the wall recoiled, flinging him back into the middle of the shack.

In a movie, though, he wouldn’t have missed. Or forgotten to put his silencer on.

The gunshot sounded like a car crash. If you’re in the trunk. It rang in my ears as I swung through the tarp-covered doorway and around to the front of the shack, almost slipping in dog blood, just in time to see the door to the house slam shut.

“Did I get him?” Skinflick said, as he came up behind me.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “He’s back in the house.”

“Oh, shit. What should we do?”

Like his fucking us like this was something I had planned for.

“Get moving,” I said.

And not into the back yard, either. With the exception of their drywalling, these guys knew their house a lot better than we ever would.

I ran back into the shack. Kicked in the wall around the spigot and stomped the painted cardboard to the ground.

The opening it left was ridiculously small. Eighteen inches diagonally, maybe. And that was after I bent the spigot out of the way.

I could barely compress my shoulders enough to squeeze, head first, into the hole. And when I did, I blocked out all the light. I grabbed onto some pipes in the darkness and used them to pull myself into the mold smell.

My face knocked over a bunch of half-filled plastic bottles, and the smell turned to chlorine and dish soap. I almost laughed. Then I pushed open the cabinet door and squirmed out from beneath the kitchen sink.

The light was blinding. There was a wide stove on one side of me and a butcher’s block on the other. I got to my feet quickly.

The butcher’s block was no yuppie accessory: it was gore-stained and had a giant meat grinder screwed to one end. Also, there were two women standing on the other side of it, staring at me.

One was about fifty, the other maybe half that age. Both of them had that look you get after every bone in your face has been broken at least once and then allowed to set without medical attention. Though the older one’s was worse.

They were armed, sort of. The older one held out a carving knife two-handed, and the younger one had a raised heavy iron grate from one of the stove burners. Both women looked terrified.

I kept my gun on the women and helped Skinflick to his feet as he came through the crawlway. “Careful,” I said to him. “We’ve got two bystanders. Don’t shoot them.”

When Skinflick saw them he swung his own gun up. “Bystanders?” he said. “One of them’s got a knife!”

“Put your silencer on,” I told him. To the women I said, “Where are all the girls?”

The younger one pointed to the floor. The older one scowled at her, then saw me noticing and stopped.

“In the basement?”

The younger one nodded.

“How many people in the house besides them?”

“Three,” she said, hoarsely.

“Including you two?”

“Three besides us.”

“Are you the police?” the older woman asked.

“Yes,” I told her.

The younger one said, “Thank God,” and started to cry.

“Time to go,” I said to Skinflick. To the women I said, “Both of you stay here. If you move, we will kill you.”

Not too police-like, but whatever. I backed into the carpeted hallway that led out of the kitchen, then turned and ran down it.

The hallway was claustrophobic, turning twice under shelves stuffed with crap like plaid sleeping bags and old board games. It smelled like cigarette smoke. Near the end there was a cork bulletin board with yellowing photographs of family vacations and, I think, people fucking, though I didn’t stop to examine them.

The hallway opened into a cluttered foyer with the front door at one end. There were two additional doorways and a staircase leading up. The doorway on my right was just an arch, but the one on the left had an actual door, which was closed. Skinflick came up behind me.

I covered the open archway and the top of the stairs with my gun and backed toward the closed door. Pulled it open in a crouch.

Coat closet. Lots of rubber boots. I pushed it shut again.

Between the closet and the front door there was a painting of Jesus that seemed so incongruous I lifted it up. Controls for the intercom and the front gate.

I considered just running for it. Opening the gate from here and trying to make it to the woods on the other side of the fence.