trained on the son-of-abitch’s head. Not that he’s any threat to us now, he’s too busy clutching the place where his knee used to be and screaming.
Henry says something, but I can’t hear him, I’m looking down at the woman chained to the wooden table. It’s Laura — stripped down to her underwear, rubber tubing tied around her upper arms and thighs, cutting off the blood before he cuts off the limbs. She’s covered in bruises, her face all puffy and swollen.
She looks at me with one wide, angry eye, her mouth working behind the gag, but all that comes out is this furious mumbling. I hurry over and undo the filthy rag he’s tied around her mouth.
“Agh! Jesus!” She turns her head and spits. “Fucking bastard!” I get to work on the chains holding her to the table while she swears. “What took you so long?”
“Are you OK?”
“Do I look fucking OK?” Laura tries to move, but nothing works — her limbs are slowly turning purple. “Bastard. .” Then she asks me, “Is he alive?”
I look down at the man — he’s gone all quiet, rocking back and forth, still holding his ruined knee. “Yeah,” I say, “he’s still alive.” Then I start untying the rubber tubing from her arms and legs.
She grits her teeth as the blood starts to flow again. That’s got to be one of the shittiest doses of pins and needles ever.
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.”
Chapter 17
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.
Chapter 18
We’re already halfway across Illinois when the news comes on the radio —
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.
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.
Which only leaves. .
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.
