“No, Beautiful.”
“She’s gonna—”
Rufus smiles, “She isn’t going any—”
A scream explodes up out of the foyer and Luther hears something crash hard to the floor.
“OhmyGodohmyGodohmyGod, oh…my….God!”
Maxine scowls at her husband.
“Rufus…what did you do?” She says it like she’s scolding a dog.
He plucks an oyster off Luther’s plate, sucks it down, and stands.
“Come see,” he says.
Luther scoots back in his chair and follows his parents out of the cupola and down the staircase.
The girl’s screams getting louder and louder as they descend.
The corridors of the House of Kite masked in shadow.
Lanterns mounted to the walls casting only the dimmest splotches of firelight on the old hardwood floors.
Every year since that day on the beach, the house had seemed to grow darker, to let a little less of the light of the world slip in.
Up ahead, Luther sees that his parents have stopped at the top of the flight of stairs leading down to the foyer.
By the light of the Christmas tree in the living room—strands of tiny, white lights—Luther sees the girl in three pieces.
Her legs below the knees still standing on the third step up from the bottom.
The rest of her crawling toward the front door, a wide puddle of blood expanding in her wake.
Rufus glances down at Luther.
Runs his hands across the boy’s head.
“Come help your old man get her stowed away?”
“Sure.”
“Make you a deal, Sweet-Sweet,” Maxine says. “You boys clean up that mess, I’ll clean the dinner table.”
“You got a deal.”
Rufus and Luther start down the steps.
The girl has gone quiet, lost consciousness.
“Now you watch yourself, son,” Rufus warns as they approach the bottom. “That string of razorwire runs over the third step up. You see it?”
Luther does.
Not the wire itself, but the blood glistening on the blades in the soft, white light of the Christmas tree.
Into the underbelly of the house, and down the dirt-floored passageways the Kites have only begun to explore, Rufus and Luther drag the girl into a musty-smelling room of old, stone walls.
“You already dug the hole?” Luther asks.
“No, I made her do it yesterday when I started to get the feeling she wasn’t going to work out. Here, help me. One…two…three.”
They swing her toward the hole and let go.
“From downtown!” Rufus says.
“What are you talking about?” Luther asks.
“Basketball? Like we just made a shot?”
“Oh.”
Rufus kicks her arms in and the one leg still hung up on the lip of the grave.
“You can finish this up, son?”
“Yes.” Luther tries to hide the sniffle.
“What’s wrong, buddy? You look sad.”
Luther wipes his eyes, nodding slowly as he stares at the other mounds of dirt that mark the three other graves. There’s only room for one more, maybe two if they make perfect use of the space.
“I miss her, Dad.”
“I know. Me, too. Tell you what. January first, we’ll take the ferry over to Hatteras and drive up the coast to Nag’s Head. Think of all the families vacationing over the holiday. Celebrating. Ringing in the New Year.” Rufus grabs the shovel leaning against the wall, puts the handle in Luther’s hand. “Look at me son. I promise you. We’ll find the perfect Katie.”
Cuckoo
“Hit him again, son.”
“Dad—”
“Right now. Hit him in the head.”
“But Dad—”
“Hit him in the head!”
Tears streaming down the boy’s face.
“What are you waiting for?”
Luther looked down at the man—bound, bleeding, gagged, his eyes begging for mercy.
He strained to raise the sixteen-pound sledgehammer.
“Hit him in the FUCKING HEAD!”
Luther hit the man in the head.
And liked it.
A Wake of Buzzards
Donaldson contemplated pulling over, but there was no place to pull over to. The desert road that ran straight off into the horizon as far as he could see was nothing more than two, faint tire tracks.
He pressed the brake pedal and eased to a gradual stop, not concerned about blocking traffic, because he hadn’t seen another car in over an hour.
The falling sun threw chevrons of red and orange over the burnt landscape, sagebrush fringed with light and glowing like they were ablaze.
A tumbleweed tumbled across the dirt road, thirty yards in front of the bumper.
Donaldson squinted at the fold-up map he’d bought at a gas station in Rock Springs, seventy miles south. He’d thought of it as a bumblefuck town at the time, but it was Manhattan compared to this.
The road he was on was represented by a faint, yellow dash—mapspeak for an unimproved piece of shit. He glanced at his odometer, attempting to judge how far he’d come, and wondering if he should turn back. Open spaces made him wary—and he’d never seen anything like this.
But the money for this particular job was good. So good, that Donaldson was suspicious about his cargo. Drugs maybe. Or guns. But he couldn’t check—they made you sign a contract upon hiring at the delivery service, attesting that you would never, under any circumstance, inspect the cargo you were delivering. A violation of customer confidence, they’d called it, or some shit he couldn’t have cared less about if there hadn’t been the implied threat of getting fired over the slightest customer complaint.
He eyed his rearview mirror, scoping the box in the back seat, sealed with yellow tape along every edge and corner to discourage tampering. It was maybe a foot long, a few inches in diameter.
He thought, for the hundredth time, about opening the box. But Donaldson liked his current gig as a courier, and didn’t want to lose it over something as stupid as curiosity. Being paid to travel was like having a license to kill folks nationwide. He knew that serial killers got caught because they left trails. But cops from different states didn’t compare notes. Hell, cops from different towns in the same state didn’t even talk to one another. Since taking the job six months ago, he’d disposed of bodies in four different time zones. No one would ever link his victims together, and Donaldson wanted to keep it that way.
