Wicked Prey

Chapter 20

Randy Whitcomb had checked himself out of the hospital against medical advice, and they drove across town to the house, the asshole guy and his girlfriend trailing behind. They got the asshole guy's cash at the house, and then Briar, leaking tears again-Whitcomb told Ranch that he'd beat it out of her eventually, dry her up-had gone off to the motel, with the assholes right behind her.

So Whitcomb had big money but no way to get downtown to spend it. Ranch woke up when Whitcomb came in with the money, and offered to walk downtown and find George, but there was no way that Whitcomb would trust Ranch with more than two dollars, and maybe not that.

So they waited, and stewed, and sweated, as hours crawled by, and Ranch even went down the hill where a pill seller sometimes set up, but the guy was not there, and he came back in a mood and he and Whitcomb had a screaming argument, because both of them were seeping back to a drugless world.

Ranch shouted, "You're a tit. You're gonna grab this cop's kid, and what do we do? Nothin." Not a fuckin' thing, you tit."

"Gonna get her," Whitcomb shouted.

"Bullshit, because you're a tit," Ranch shouted back.

"Gonna get her. Gonna suck some smoke, then we're gonna get her. You're gonna fuck her. I'm gonna beat her with my stick until she's hamburger."

"Maybe I'll fuck her, if I say so," Ranch shouted. "I'm not gonna fuck her because you say so, because you're a tit."

"This is my house…"

Then Ranch tumbled facedown into a beanbag chair and didn't move anymore, though he snored every couple of minutes. Whitcomb rolled between the kitchen and living-room windows, looking out, looking out, looking out'

Briar got back after dark. Whitcomb had whipped himself into several furies, and had gone into a half-dozen emotional slumps, looking at the two thousand dollars, right there, and not a fuckin' thing in the house, wouldn't you know it, and when the van finally turned into the driveway, he could hardly believe it.

He met Briar at the door: "You fuckin' moron, you, we needed that van. I'm fuckin' crippled…"

"I got arrested by the cops," Briar said.

Ranch woke in the beanbag chair. He was used to the disappearance of large parts of his life. Sometimes, he passed out at ten o'clock in the morning, and when he woke up, it was nine o'clock in the morning-some other morning. At first, the time changes were disorienting, but over the course of a couple of years, he got used to it. He simply gave up on time-now life was daytime and nighttime, strung along like beads on a string, and the minute, hour, and date were irrelevant.

When he woke up in this darktime, he could hear Whitcomb screaming in the kitchen, which wasn't unusual, and wouldn't normally have shaken him out. He pushed up, and a string of drool drained away from his lip. He wiped it off, heard the noise that woke him. Telephone, right under his head.

Whitcomb had backed Briar against the wall, extracting details of her arrest, when Ranch wandered in from the other room and handed Whitcomb a phone and said, "I got George, scrote."

"Who you callin' fuckin' scrote, you fuckin' douche bag?" Whitcomb shouted, and then stopped, as Ranch's words penetrated, and said, "George?"

Ten minutes later, Whitcomb was careening around the living room and kitchen in the wheelchair, waving his head-shop pearlescent-gold-twirl glass pipe over his head, shouting, "George is on the way." And he whirled in the chair and chanted it, waving the pipe as though directing an orchestra: "George is on the way; George is on the way; George is on the way."

He was rolling back toward Briar, pipe over his head, spasmodically jerking it back and forth, in time to the arrhythmic chant, and it slipped from his sweaty fingers in a long dangerous arc. Briar reached out to catch it, fumbled it, fumbled it again, and then it hit the side of the stove and shattered, and they all three stood looking at it, in all its pieces, scattered along the kitchen floor.

Whitcomb's mouth opened and closed, and, stunned, he said to Briar, "My fuckin' pipe. You broke my fuckin' pipe."

He looked around for his stick, saw it, looked back at her, hate in his eyes, but then Ranch said, "Fucked-up yuppie pipe anyway You waste half the smoke; I can make a better pipe in eleven minutes, yo."

Whitcomb said, "Make a pipe?"

Ranch had skills: there were a few ancient tools under the sink, left behind by a previous tenant. Included in the greasy, cobwebbed old green canvas bag was a pair of side-cutters and a rusty file. Ranch unscrewed a forty-watt GE Crystal Clear bulb from a sconce at the bottom of the stairs, and said, "A perfect bulb. Don't even have to wash the motherfucking white shit out."

"What white shit?" Whitcomb asked.

"Some bulbs got this white shit in them," Whitcomb said. "Tastes terrible."

They gathered at the kitchen table, and Ranch used the side-cutters to cut off the contact at the bottom of the bulb, and then carefully crack out the ceramic insulator that had held the contact in place. With the insulator gone, he broke the glass rod that held the light filament in place, and pulled the broken pieces of glass out of the bottom of the bulb by the wires that led to the filament. All that, he brushed onto the floor.

"This is the hard part," he said. "This is where you can fuck up if you don't know what you're doing."

Using the edge of the file, he scratched a line across the glass of the bulb, then went back into the scratch and drew the file across it again, and again, slowly, carefully. In two minutes, he'd opened a narrow hole to the inside.

"Really careful now, so's we don't break the glass…" He was breathing his words, holding the bulb, working the file with some delicacy. In another two minutes, he had a hole an inch long and an eighth of an inch wide. "That's where you load the shit," he said. And, "I need some tape."

They didn't have any tape, but Briar remembered that one of the seats in the van had a piece of duct tape on it, patching a rip, and she went out and peeled it off and brought it back inside, and Ranch pronounced it perfect. Using pliers, he made five small cuts in the aluminum screw-in base on the bulb, pushed the ragged tabs across the width of the bulb until they formed a small hole, and pushed a McDonald's straw into the hole and taped it in place.

"There you go," he said, holding up the bulb. "Best pipe in the world. You'll see."

Whitcomb took it, his hand shaking, looked at it, and said, "That's the greatest fuckin' thing I ever saw."

Even Briar was proud of Ranch.

Then George came.

George had the crank in little Ziploc baggies, and they bought three. Whitcomb, eyes narrowed, cracked one of the baggies, said, "Pretty fuckin yellow."

"It's right out of the coffeepot," George said. He was a short fat man with short black curly hair, most of it sticking out of the neckline of a Vikings T-shirt; and he wore cargo shorts and Nike shoes. "Just come out that way, but I got no dissatisfied customers. It's good shit."

Whitcomb dampened a finger with his tongue, stuck the finger in the bag, picked up a schmear of the crank, tasted it and winced: the taste was bitter, cutting, perfect. No sugar, no salt, no baking soda.

"Okay." He passed over the money; George looked at each bill, then tucked it in his side pocket. "Call me."

"How's business?" Ranch asked, his eyes on the baggies in Whitcomb's hands.

"Shit. Republicans don't want nothing from me," George said. "They go for the high-end stuff, no fuckin' redneck drippin's."

"This shit's better than coke," Whitcomb said. "It's like somebody sticks a fuckin' knife in your brain."

George bobbed his head and said, "Party on, men," and he was gone. George was a teetotaler.

Crank-enough of it-affected Whitcomb the way a paddle affects a Ping-Pong ball. They loaded the GE crank pipe with a spoon of the stuff, melted it down with a Bic lighter, watched it bubble and then begin to smoke. Whitcomb took the first hit, closing his eyes, letting it scream into him ' He and Ranch blew smoke at each other for a while, long snakes of black lung-leavings that held together in the air like dirigibles, and then, after a while, like the Hin denburg, fell apart. Then Ranch ripped off his shirt, backed against a wall and sat down, his eyes going goofy and red, into zombie mode, shaking with the intensity of it; but Whitcomb began crashing around in the chair, pumping with one arm, then the other, and then both, crashing into walls, chairs, the table, singing, "Oh, Black Betty, Bam-a-Lam," the words all screwed up, "Black Betty got fat lips, Bam-a-Lam," the "Bam-a-Lam" punctuated by a variety of impacts as he ricocheted around the two rooms and the bathroom that he could get at.

They went back to the pipe again, and again, and again '

Then Letty called.

Ranch got the phone again, because, again, it was under his head, as he lay facedown on the beanbag chair; he had death in a corner, and was pushing on it, hard. Then the phone rang, and his life was saved.

"Lo?"

Whitcomb, the comet, hurtled out of the kitchen and shouted, "Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you…"

Ranch listened for a moment, then said, "… this ain't Randy…"

He gave Briar a peculiar look and struggled to his feet, got in front of Whitcomb and caught the chair and when Whitcomb screamed at him, he put his face an inch from Whitcomb's and howled back, until Whitcomb stopped, and then he said, "Bitch needs to talk to you, and you needs to talk to her."

"Yeah?" Whitcomb took the phone and said, "This is me? Who's this?"

He listened, then looked at the phone, and then at Briar, then tossed the phone in the corner and said to Briar, "Bitch says you been talking to Davenport."

"No," she said, but there was a lie in her eyes, somewhere, and Whitcomb saw it.

"Don't tell me "no," bitch, I can see you lyin'." Whitcomb's face was purple with rage and the crank. "Get down. Get down, bitch. Ranch, don't let this bitch out, she been talking to the cops…"

They shouted at her, made her confess, though the confession didn't make any sense, and Randy got his stick and made her get naked on her hands and knees like a dog and he beat her until she collapsed, her back red with blood, and then he said, "Ranch: fuck her in the ass, fuck her in the ass, fuck her in the ass…"

"Randy…" She was in a haze of pain and blood, and tried to crawl away and felt a foot on her back. Not Whitcomb; Whitcomb's feet didn't work.

"Fuck her fuck her fuck her…"

Letty rode up the hill, saw lights at the house, ditched the bike, walked across the yard past the van, and listened; and heard the screaming: "Fuck her fuck her fuck her!" She ran back to her bike, down the hill and to the pay phone and she called 911.

"I think somebody's being murdered," she said. "I can hear the woman screaming'"

Ranch pulled up his Jockey shorts and Briar crawled across the kitchen to her dress, and Whitcomb, exhausted, said, "We need to get George. Everybody in the van."

Ranch: "George," and he started toward the door, but missed the door and cracked his head on the doorjamb and fell down.

Whitcomb screamed, "Get up, you fuckin' turd," and Ranch got to his knees, and then his feet, and said, "You fuckin' scrote," and Whitcomb shouted at Briar, who was huddled in a corner, trying to cover herself with her dress, "Into the fuckin' van; we find George again, into the fuckin' van."

Ranch was all for it; $250 in crank all gone. He hovered over Briar, his insane face a half inch from hers, howling, no words, a dog howl, and she struggled into her dress, the blood on her back seeping through the thin cotton, and Randy marched them out the back door and down the ramp.

Letty was there, bouncing her bike across the yard. They didn't see her immediately, and she climbed off and dropped the bike: Whitcomb, Briar, and Ranch looked like some kind of surrealist parade, something from a masked ball, a man in a wheelchair pumping a stick like a drum major, screaming unintelligibly, followed by Briar, hurt, staggering, bloody, and then Ranch, in his Jockey shorts, holding on to the ramp railing, barely able to walk, still howling like a dog.

Then Whitcomb saw Letty.

He hit the brakes, and Briar stumbled, and one of the chair's wheels went off the concrete at the bottom of the ramp. And the chair tilted and Whitcomb screamed at her, and she wrenched it upright.

Whitcomb jabbed the stick at Letty and screamed, "There she is. There she is. Get her! Get her! Ranch, get her!"

Letty crossed the yard and hit the button on the switchblade and the blade flicked out. "I'm going to cut your head off," she said to Whitcomb.

Whitcomb saw the knife and recoiled, then lifted his stick overhead with both hands and screamed at Briar, "Push me, push me," and at Ranch, "Get her, get her," and Ranch stumbled off the ramp and Letty turned the knife at him, and Ranch ran at her and she ducked away and he kept going in a straight line and then stumbled over his own feet and fell facedown.

Letty turned back to Whitcomb, who was screaming at Briar, "Push me, get her," and unsatisfied with the progress, turned and slashed at Briar with the butt of his punishment stick. The butt caught her on the end of the nose and she went down, bleeding from the nose, and he screamed at her, "Get up, you bitch; you fuckin' ' gonna cut you a new goddamn nose…"

She got to her feet and Letty shouted, "Juliet, go back, go back in the house, the police are coming," but Briar pulled the wheelchair around in a circle and Whitcomb slashed at her again and screamed, "Not that way, you cunt, not that way…"

She'd aimed the chair at the back of the yard. The last renters had had a bad dog which they kept staked out at the back of the house, and the dog had worn the grass down to hard dirt; and behind that was the bluff that led down into Swede Hollow.

Briar said, "I loved you, Randy," and then she began pushing the chair toward the bluff, faster and faster, Letty calling, "Juliet, Juliet…" Ranch staggered to his feet and Letty turned toward him, pointing the knife at his chest, but he staggered around her, after Briar, as though he were trying to catch them-no chance of that; one of his legs was working harder than the other and he couldn't keep going in a straight line, but tended off in circles.

Whitcomb was still trying to thrash back at Briar with his stick, and tried to brake with one hand, but Briar was stronger than he was and at the end of the yard he grabbed both wheels and shouted, "Oh, shit," and she ran him right off the edge and Randy Whitcomb went screaming sixty miles an hour down a seventy-degree slope into a wall of trees.

He hit it with the impact of a small car driving into a brick wall.

Briar stood, looking down, stunned by what she'd done. Letty came up and looked over the edge; then Ranch got there, well away from Letty, and he peered down the bluff and then said to Briar, "You fuck."

Letty heard a siren: still a way out, but not too far. She said to Briar: "Juliet, don't tell them I was here. Lie. Okay? Don't tell them."

Briar nodded dumbly, and Letty ran across the yard, folded the switchblade, climbed on her bike, bumped back across the yard, across the street, and headed down the hill. The cop car was a block over, on Seventh, as they passed, so she managed to get down the hill unseen, pedaling furiously, through the backstreets, to the Capitol.

There, she stopped to turn her phone on, and found a dozen calls from home, and two more from Lucas's cell.

Lucas had gotten a fragmentary story from Carey, who'd been called by Weather when Letty hadn't gotten home on time. "I don't want her to think I'm betraying her, but I'm really worried," Carey said. Lucas had tracked down Whitcomb's address in a matter of a few minutes, and had broken off from the apartment surveillance.

Letty had always taken matters into her own hands, whatever the matters might be-she tended to believe that nobody could handle things quite as well as she could. Events had never proven her to be wrong. But messing with Whitcomb and one of Whitcomb's hookers, for whatever reason-and Carey had filled him in on the reason-could be an irretrievable error.

Whitcomb was a psychotic; people who got too close to him suffered because they did not-could not-understand the sheer uncontrolled malevolence of the man. Lucas believed that Whitcomb's condition was far beyond Whitcomb's own control. He'd been broken at some point, perhaps at birth, perhaps as a child, but he was simply wrong, a devil's child. There was really nothing to be done about it, other than to put him in jail forever, or kill him. Lucas thought that one or the other of those things was inevitable, a matter of time.

Now, as he rushed through the night toward Whitcomb's place, banging down onto the interstate, then almost immediately off again at the Sixth Street exit, he saw the flashers on a St. Paul squad running parallel to him, a block over on Seventh, heading up the hill past the university. He ran the red light and turned the corner and accelerated down the block, turned onto Seventh and saw the squad make the turn over toward Whitcomb's and he knew with a cold certainty where the squad was going.

If Whitcomb had done anything to Letty '

Letty had been right about that. If he'd known Whitcomb was stalking her, or anyone else in the family, Whitcomb would have died, one way or another. The problem with a psychotic was, there is no way to deflect them, once they've fixed on a course. You can't talk to them, because they're nuts.

With fear gripping his heart like an icy hand, he went after the squad.