Beware

west. Keep my hands to myself, don’t leave a trail for the fuckin’ Group.First thing you know, I’m in Phoenix. I figure, hey, how about paying a visit to my old friends in Oasis?

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

“Give us Hoffman!”The voice startled Lacey awake. She raised her head off the couch and saw Dukane crouched by the front window.“Give us Hoffman,” the tinny voice continued, “and we’ll let you live.”Lacey rushed to Dukane’s side. Looking out the window, she saw the black Rolls Royce stopped in front of the house—perhaps thirty feet away. The doors on its far side stood open, but the body of the car hid what ever was being done.“I warn you,” said the amplified voice. Lacey spotted its source: a man on a distant rise of land, speaking into a megaphone. “Give us Hoffman, or you will all be annihilated. There is no escape for you unless you do as we ask. You have seen what we do to our enemies. Each of you will meet a similar end, if you continue to ignore our request.” The megaphone was lowered.Lacey heard the bathroom door open. Scott rushed across the floor and knelt at the other window.From behind the car came a heavy clank. A hammer striking metal? The pounding continued with a slow, even rhythm.“What’re they doing?”Scott frowned at Lacey, and she saw anguish in his eyes. He backhanded speckles of sweat off his upper lip. “Maybe you shouldn’t watch.”“You think it’s Nancy?”“Yeah.”Dukane suddenly rushed from the room.The pounding stopped for a few seconds, then started again. Lacey scurried over to Scott’s window.“Sounds like they’re driving in stakes,” he said.“Oh God.” Lacey sank down. Turning, she sat beneath the window with her back against the wall. She brought up her legs, hugged them to her breasts, pressed her mouth to one knee.The slow pounding kept on.Dukane returned to the room, crouching low, a wine bottle in hand.“Nobody’s moving in,” he said, and squatted near the other front window. “Can you tell what they’re doing?”“Driving in stakes, I think.”“Shit,” he muttered. He took a handkerchief from his pocket, tore it in half, and twisted one of the pieces into a strip. He stuffed it into the bottle’s mouth, and drew it out. The pungent fumes of gasoline stung Lacey’s nostrils.He reversed the rag and stuffed it into the bottle again. Three inches hung out like a wick.The pounding outside continued.“Anybody got a match?”Lacey hurled herself forward, scurried to the coffee table, and grabbed a lighter. She raced back to Dukane.“When I open the door, light the rag.”Lacey nodded, suddenly excited, eager to be striking back.Dukane jerked the door open.Lacey lighted the wick. As fire bloomed from the dripping rag, Dukane pitched the bottle. He slammed the door shut and dived into Lacey, throwing her to the floor as bullets burst through the wood above them. Splinters rained down.Dukane rolled off, and scrambled to his window. Lacey saw Scott take aim. She rushed to his side as the flaming car lunged forward, its far doors still open, leaving two men behind. One raced after it, yelling, his open Hawaiian shirt fluttering behind him like a cape. He turned a somersault as Scott’s bullet smacked the back of his head. The other man, on his knees with a hammer when the car left him unprotected, sprang to his feet. He ran toward the house, waving the hammer overhead like the tomahawk of a demented Apache.“Let him come!” Dukane yelled. “We can use him.”His naked body, as bony as a starved man, was streaked with blood. Not his own, Lacey assumed. What had he been doing? She was afraid to look away from him. He ran toward the window, shrieking, and looked about to dive through when a dozen bullets hit him from behind.Scott threw Lacey back.The man’s head drove into the window as if trying to squeeze itself between two of the flat, open slats of glass. They burst, tearing his scalp, ripping the sides of his face and neck. His chin came to rest on the sill. Blood slid down the inside of the wall.Lacey scooted backward, unable to look away from the ghastly man’s head. “Get…get him out of here!” she stammered. “Get him OUT!”“Oh good Christ,” Dukane said. He was staring out his window. “My God, those…!” Leaping away from the window, he took quick strides toward the dead man’s protruding head.“What did they…?”“Bastards!” Dukane swung up his leg in a vicious kick, catching the man in the face. The head bounded upward. Lacey glimpsed its torn, mashed face. The eyes seemed to glare at her with hatred for an instant as the head smashed through three more louvers. Then it dropped backward out of sight.Scott ran to the window. He knelt beside it and looked out. “Oh no,” he muttered. He turned to Dukane, his face ashen. “What’ll we do?”“Nothing.”“Nothing? ”“We can’t get to her. They’d nail us before we got a yard.”“We can’t just leave her like that!”“Want to put her out of misery?”“No! My God, Matt! I don’t think she’s even hurt.”“Hard to tell.”“I think she’s all right. But my God, we can’t just…Stop!” he told Lacey, raising his hand like a traffic cop as she crawled forward. “You don’t want to see it.”“What? What did they do to her? You said she’s all right.”“They’ve got her staked down. With Jan.”“Jan?”“What’s left of her,” Dukane muttered. “They’re tied facetoface.”

CHAPTER THIRTY

I’m in the camper, right? I’m not gonna take it to Oasis, though. Suppose somebody digs up the old farts? I don’t want their RV popping up where I’m at. So I ditch it at the Phoenix airport, along with my clothes and make up, and don’t take nothing with me but my four beans. I’d lost two, by then. But the one I’d eaten was still doing its job. Still is. That’s close to two months, right?Okay, I take a Greyhound to Oasis. Leave the driving to them. The thing was nearly empty, so I didn’t have no trouble.First thing I do when I get there, I look up my old pal Lacey in the phone book. Only her name ain’t in it. I figure she’s either unlisted, or she’s got herself married, or she’s moved on. I can’t exactly stop someone on the street and ask, right? If she’s in Oasis, though, I’m gonna find her.So what I do, I head for the old lady’s market. To o much going on in the Safeway, people gonna be tripping over me. The market’s quiet, I know my way around. Hell, I damn near lived in that dump when I was a kid. After school, weekends. Beat the shit out of me if I gave’em any lip about it.Well, this is my chance to pay the old lady back. Spook her up, and do her. But first I’m gonna lay low. If Lacey’s still in town, she’s gonna pop up in the market sooner or later. Everybody does. Even the Safeway regulars, they show up for a frozen pizza or aspirin or some kind of odds and ends. So I’ll just hang out and wait.Only trouble is, the old bat’s got ears like a hawk. I don’t even make it through the first day, and she hears me moving around. It’s night, about an hour before closing time, when suddenly she perks up and starts acting scared and looking all over for me.Well, I like seeing her scared. Gives me a kick, throwing a fright into folks, but she’s special. I’m thinking of all the times she used to slam me around, whip me with the ironing cord. Her and the old man both. Too bad he kicked off before I got a chance at him, the old turd. Anyway, she’s plenty scared’cause of the noises, so I throw another one into her by opening up the cash register. That does it. She closes and high tails it.I’m pissed, right? There goes my big plan for laying low and waiting for Lacey to show up. So I’m eating a steak and soaking up a bottle of red to make myself feel better when some asshole starts pounding on the door. I toss a fuckin’ meat cleaver at him. Too bad I missed.So what happens next? A whole troop comes piling into the store. The old lady, the jerk that was at the door, some other gal, and guess who? My old pal, Lacey. Things are looking up, right? Only they take one look at the cleaver stuck in the door, and run off like the joint’s haunted.I go after’em. By the time I get to the door, though, they’re packed in this car and taking off.Well, at least I know Lacey’s still in town.A cop shows up, a little later. I just stand around and watch him search. When he takes off, I sack out in the storeroom.That was Friday night. I figured the old cow’d be back in the morning, but she didn’t open up all weekend. Spooked her good, I guess. Anyway, she comes in Monday morning and sees the mess I’d made. She always did hate messes. She wasn’t so scared, this time. Just pissed off. People came in, she’d tell’em it was vandals, probably kids. If they come back, she says, she’s gonna fix their wagon.So that night, some pal of hers shows up with a fuckin’ watchdog. I get out of there till they leave,’cause the dog’s gonna go for me, you know. Well, once they’re gone I sneak in again to take care of the mutt. It damn near got me, but I opened up its head with the meat cleaver and ripped the thing apart. Then I skinned it. Even tried some. I figure, shit, it tried to take a bite out of me. Turnabout’s fair play. Didn’t taste bad.I figure all hell’s gonna break loose when they find what’s left of the dog, so I get out of there before morning.Head over to the high school. Forgot school’s out for the summer, till I got there. But it turns out they’ve got summer school going, and most of it’s athletic stuff. So I’m okay, after all.Guess where I go? Where else, the girls’ shower room. I’ve got a thing about shower rooms, huh? When I was a kid, I used to always dream