An electricity of excitement crackled through the crowd. They surged forward, eager to be first. No way did I want to go, but I was carried along with them. As the tidal wave of people shoved me forward I saw Lynne begin to struggle, her head twisting from left to right, her legs kicking. In a second men and women pounced on her to hold her still.
I yelled. In some way I thought I’d yell myself awake. This had to be a nightmare.
But with remorseless momentum events rolled forward. Men and women were handed bricks, they stood in line, they climbed the steps, they walked up to where Lynne lay on the table, her long hair hanging down. There, they placed the bricks on the door that the two men balanced on her chest.
To me, in that shocked state, the procedure didn’t make sense. Why were they doing that? Why weigh the door down on Lynne’s breast?
By the time the tenth brick had been placed there I heard her scream. “Take it off! It’s heavy. You’re hurting me. Do you hear? It’s hurting!”
So, that was it.
Brick by brick, the door lying across her chest would become heavier. Neighbor after neighbor would play his part in her death.
My God, yes. Miss Bertholly the lawyer would be right. Everyone would remember this. They’d remember when bit by bit they crushed the life out of the mother of two children. The beautiful woman whose crime it was to be the daughter of Charles Finch.
Shouting in fury, I forced my way through the crowd to the stage. Lynne’s face had flushed red. Her eyes narrowed with pain. Her head turned, slowly now, from left to right as the crushing pain made her squirm. She was no longer screaming; she was whispering. “No… please… stop it. Stop it.” Already she found it hard to inhale. Her lips appeared to swell with the pressure. I saw her tongue emerge to lick the dry skin.
“Stop it!” I yelled. “Let her go!”
By this time the bricks had formed a neat stack a foot high and occupied a good half of the door area. The downward pressure must have been immense.
Finch stood between the two guards looking down on his daughter’s face. His expression tore something in my heart.
“Let her go,” I yelled. “You don’t know what you’re doing!” I shouted this at the people laying those threepound bricks on the door balanced on her chest-and now balanced with difficulty by the two guys who had to sweat to keep the door level.
But of course the people did know what they were doing. They lusted for revenge. Here was revenge in a huge meaty heap. And, Christ, were they going to gorge themselves stupid. The good folk of Sullivan eagerly collected their bricks, climbed onto the stage, then placed them on the woman who lay squirming and panting on the table. Her face had a dark, congested look to it. Her facial muscles contorted beneath the skin. Her limbs writhed so much it took all her captors’ strength to stop them thrashing against the table.
Suddenly I was free of the crowd. One of the cops in the cordon reached out to grab me, but I swung a punch hard enough to knock him clean off his feet. Another cop lunged at me. I got ready to slam him, too, but I saw the canister in his hand. A second later a stream of pepper spray hit me full in the face.
Instantly the sensation that two white-hot spikes were being plunged into my eyes slammed through me. I went down choking. Blinded. My hands were pinned roughly behind my back. I felt steel tightly encircle my wrists. Hell, my eyes burned so much I wanted to claw them out with my fingernails but, now handcuffed, I couldn’t even touch them.
More hands pushed me. I felt myself shoved up onto the stage where I stood gasping, blinded, my hands manacled behind my back.
“Lynne,” I shouted. “Lynne, I can’t see you!”
Then I heard her voice through the swarming voices of the mob.
“Greg, I’m here. Help me.” The weight must have been crushing down on her chest. Constricting her lungs and heart. But I heard her all right. Spinning blindly, eyes burning, I began this sheer idiotic search of the platform to somehow find her.
“Greg. Please, help me, I’m-”
Simultaneously I heard a popping sound. Muffled yet frighteningly loud. “Greg, please, it’s hurting so much, I don’t think I can…” A loud crunch. Really loud. The sound of some delicate structure giving way under pressure.
“GREG!”
The force of that final shout of hers exploded inside my head. I stopped spinning ’round, blindly laboring to find her. I dropped down onto my knees, my head bowed. I was shaking through and through.
I knew Lynne was dead. The good people of Sullivan had their sweet justice.
Thirteen
My turn. The weight pressed down on my chest so hard I couldn’t breathe. My heart began to crush, forcing the dark blood that pools there out through ruptured arteries. When my ribs collapsed with the sound of snapping sticks that’s when I woke.
The dream left me dripping with sweat and panting so hard that it had dried my tongue like an old leaf. For a moment I wondered why my bed had become so hard, but as I reached out for the blankets I felt wooden sides.
Coffin walls.
They’ve buried you alive, Valdiva. Those smiling men and women of Sullivan with their polite manners, their big houses and swimming pools, have drugged you, stuffed you in a coffin and buried you six feet down. They wanted you out of their lives, Valdiva. Now you’re going to choke on your own dirty air in this box. Choking in a lungful of air, I punched up into the darkness at the coffin lid.
Only air, Valdiva. You’re punching air, my man. I turned my head, and the whiskey bottle rattled against my forehead. When I sat up the earth tilted under me.
Christ. That whiskey had tasted like water. It seemed as alcoholic as water, too. Shit… My mouth tasted like I’d been licking a dead ass for the last twenty-four hours.
My world tilted again. Then turned slowly. But this was no funky special effect courtesy of a hangover. I remembered now. I’d done what I’d be promising myself for days. I’d taken one of the battery-powered cruisers across the lake.
Even with a gutful of whiskey I’d not been so dumb as to make the trip in daylight. I’d untied the boat in the dead of night; then, with the electric motor humming softly as a purring cat, I’d slipped across here in secret. I’d be back before dawn. No one’d ever know. Of course I’d never even climbed out of the damn boat. I must have slithered down to lie on the duck-boards, where I’d slept like a dead thing for God knows how many hours.
This was the first time I’d slept since Sullivan’s smiling bastards had killed Lynne. Good grief, was the whole town crazy? That had been two days ago. After macing me, then piling the bricks onto Lynne until her ribs caved in, they’d cleared every sign of the execution… No, it was no execution; they’d simply murdered the woman out of sheer revenge because her father had taken in a bunch of refugees.
The day after the killing had been like a dream; everything seemed unreal. Even my cabin, where they’d dumped me, seemed a place of odd angles and weird dimensions. The kitchen looked bigger than it had before. There were more stairs, a whole mountain of them to climb. All the color had leeched from the walls and rugs and drapes. Maybe that was the effect of the chemicals that had been sprayed into my eyes (sprayed with vicious pleasure, no doubt). I figure, also, it was the shock of not only knowing Lynne was dead, but the aftermath as well.
Now that was weird.
Like I said, they cleared the Peace Garden where they’d killed her. I took a walk up there as soon as my stinging eyes would allow. And with my eyeballs burning like a couple of baked rocks in my head I saw that all the bricks had gone, as had the table on which they’d laid her. And they’d put tubs of flowering plants on the raised platform. The entire area smelled of disinfectant, too. They must have sloshed gallons of the stuff all over the
