Blood Brothers (27 page)

“No, no. I don’t think so. I plan to take a
nice little drive and I think you’ll make great company.”

“What are you, crazy?”

“Now, now, Stephanie—you don’t mind if I call
you that do you—that’s no way to speak to an old friend of the
family.”

“This is kidnapping. That’s exactly what this
is.”

“If you say so. I’m not about to argue the
point.”

Though traffic was sparse, they were still
well within the city limits. Stephanie pulled on the door handle
but found it locked. Likewise, the windows.

“Child safety measures. You got to love
technology.”

“Listen, whoever you are, the best thing for
you to do is stop this car. Stop it this instant.”

For the first time the driver looked up so
Stephanie could get a good look at him in the rearview. He was
rugged and the muscles beneath his facial skin looked strong, taut.
From just his face, Stephanie could tell he was a very powerful
man, but not in any kind of sexual or attractive way. No, it was
more along the wife-beating redneck ways. “I don’t know what you’re
doing or what you want. But kidnapping is a federal crime.”

“Let me ease your nerves a bit, Stephanie.
Kidnapping is the least of my plans for you.”

That sent her over the edge. She leaned up
and reared back to strike the side of his head, but something big
and shiny stopped her. A very long, very sharp-looking knife.

“I have a pistol as well. However, that’d be
the last resort. A blade is so much quieter. Draws far less
attention. So sit back and think about it. You may, perhaps, get
one good swing in on me. One hard enough to make you feel like
you’ve actually taken control of your destiny, of your life. But
what happens after that? Huh?”

The driver turned his head then. She caught
his profile. It looked just as rugged as it had in the mirror,
except even more so. “I’ll tell you what,” he said as he held the
knife up for her to inspect again. It was a fixed blade weapon, not
a hunting or pocket knife, but a true weapon. The blade had to be
over six inches long. The sunlight glinted off the steel, blinding
her. “I’ll carve your ass up like a Christmas turkey. That’s
what’ll happen. You see,” he went on, “I’ve always had an affinity
for knives.”

The driver paused, letting that sink in.

Stephanie was finding it harder and harder to
breathe, like there was an elephant standing on her chest. She
would have thought it was the onset of a heart attack if she wasn’t
so accustomed to anxiety.

She reached for her purse, her phone, but it
wasn’t there.

How had she forgotten her purse? And then she
remembered she’d left it in her car. Carrie had followed her from
home to Michael’s office and she’d been so ready to confront her
husband that her purse and even her phone were at the bottom of her
list of priorities. Now, that forgotten cell phone could mean the
difference between life and death for Stephanie Cole. And she knew
it. Besides the phone, the purse also contained her pills. Not full
prescriptions of her various medications but a few of each, from
Prozac to lithium. And if she had no way to defend herself, no
weapon, no phone, the pills could have made everything okay, or if
not okay, at least seem better.

“What’s wrong, Stephanie? Itching for a
high?”

With that her eyes shot up. She was taken
aback that he had picked up on her thoughts so easily, it was
disturbing. “What did you say?” she asked, a little too
defensively.

“A high, Steph, a buzz. It’s been what, a
couple of hours since you last swallowed a little piece of heaven?
According to your habits, you’re due. Especially considering the
circumstances.”

“You don’t what you’re talking about.” She
turned away from him, looking out her window. She breathed in
deeply as the business section of Benedict faded away, and with it
the little traffic that had remained. Things were getting worse by
the second.

“Denial. Haven’t you heard that admitting you
have a problem is the first step on the road to recovery?”

“Fuck you.”

“How eloquent.”

She lost it then. She started kicking against
the back of the front seats, banging against the windows the back
glass. She thrashed as if she were fighting an invisible foe.

“Stop it,” the man shouted. Stephanie barely
heard him, for now she was in a world of her own. Apparently the
glass used to construct car windows was made of very stern stuff.
As hard as she smacked it, it just didn’t give.

“Did you hear me? I said stop it.” Stephanie
fought against the glass, against the door, even against the seats
with all the fire that burned within her. It just wasn’t
enough.

The car pulled to the side of the road. It
wasn’t a curb; they were already outside the town limits. As he
threw the car up in to park, the man said, “You know, the smart
thing would have been to throw a show like that when someone might
have been looking.” He unlocked the door locks and just as
Stephanie was about to take advantage, he pulled open her door and
reached in for her. “Out here, no witnesses. Good for me, bad for
you.” The man grabbed her by the collar of her blouse. Despite
flailing her arms and trying to make contact with her sharp
fingernails, he was undeterred. Yanked towards him, Stephanie
barely had enough time to glimpse the balled-up fist coming her way
before the impact came and she saw stars dancing in front of her
eyes, and then…only darkness.

Then

The water burned Mike’s lungs as he breathed
the green, icky water as if it was pure oxygen. He had no choice.
His body screamed for air and its natural instinct to simply open
the mouth and take it in overpowered his common sense.

Though his eyes were closed tight against the
pond water, pinpricks of white-hot light shimmered behind his
eyelids and he felt his body, even in the buoyancy of the water,
grow heavy. Michael knew not only his lungs but by proxy, his blood
was being deprived of oxygen, and he had but scant seconds left
before he drowned.

He had one simple thought: I will not die a
coward.

His feet touched down on the slimy bottom,
the mud instantly sucking in his shoes. Michael made a desperate
move then: bending at the knees, using what little energy he still
possessed, he jumped as hard as he could. Surprisingly, instead of
continuing to sink down into the muck of the pond floor, he began
to rise. He worked his arms, scissored his legs, and opened his
eyes. Darkness surrounded him, but up ahead, above him, the
darkness was broken by sunlight shimmering through the water’s
surface.

Maybe a foot before he reached the water’s
surface, the line between life and death, the fear that he wouldn’t
be able to make it taunted him, but then dissipated as he broke
through. Once atop instead of below, he purged the nasty green
liquid from his lungs, gagging horribly. He dogpaddled to the edge,
drinking in the warm air and sunshine as if it were golden honey,
which it wasn’t, it was something much, much better: it was
life.

Michael swam—if you could really call it
that—as far as he could. When his elbows and knees hit a shallow
bottom, he started crawling, scratching into the soft ground with
his fingers, and actually pulling himself from the water. Once he
made it to the pebbled edge, he collapsed face first onto the
ground, thankful that for just this once his prayers had been
answered.

Which, as it turned out, was a bit
premature.

One kick rolled him over on his back and both
boys were on him. Cliff, straddling him, began punching while Dale,
to the side, pulled something from his jeans pocket.

A fist to the cheek, the chest, and the ribs.
The punches weren’t all that hard, true enough, but Michael knew
his body was close to the breaking point. And then he saw what Dale
had fished from his pocket. The sunlight danced off of it like a
knife blade, but no, this was no knife. With a flick of his thumb,
Dale popped back the top of a Zippo lighter. One more flick of the
thumb ignited a flame from the lighter.

“Let’s fry some fat, Cliff,” Dale
laughed.

“Better than bacon,” the other boy huffed, in
between punches.

Despite his struggles, Michael couldn’t knock
the boy from off of him. Dale moved closer, malice dancing in his
eyes just like sunlight on his intended weapon of torture.

Mike, whose hands had been deemed safe and,
therefore, not held down, made a fist of his own and swung toward
Dale. Miserably, the strike didn’t even come close.

“Fucker,” said Cliff and pinned his knee in
the crook of Mike’s left arm, leaving only his right free. Dale
brought the Zippo so close to the Mike’s face that he could see the
logo, worn by age and use, across its front, could see the flame,
almost an inch high, swaying lazily in the little breeze that
blew.

“Face or dick?” Dale asked his
partner-in-crime.

Cliff, who had taken a small break from
clobbering Mike, seemed to consider the options, but only briefly.
“I would say burn his pecker off, but I doubt he’ll ever use it
anyway. So we might as well give him a burn everyone can see, even
though I don’t think we can make him any uglier.”

“You got a point there, good buddy.”

As the conversation continued, Mike, with but
one free arm began struggling anew, trying to somehow scratch
himself free of this predicament as he’d done in the pond. He
didn’t move an inch, but his fingers found something useful and
clenched on.

Cliff put a strong hand up under Mike’s chin
and squeezed his jaw with a thumb and forefinger. “Hold still you
little faggot.”

“Yeah,” Dale said, “we’re going to make you
pretty.” And the lighter came closer.

When the flame was so close to Mike’s face
that he could feel the heat, actually feel the sting of the fire,
he took action.

The rock was the size of a large, ripe
tomato. Unlike the red vegetable, it didn’t mush when slammed into
the side of Cliff’s head. It was more like Cliff’s head did the
mushing. Swear to God, Michael thought he could actually hear the
side of the bully’s head give way as he finished the arc of his
swing.

Surprised by the retaliation, Dale jumped
back, lost his footing and slammed down hard on his rear, the
lighter flying from his grasp. Cliff was nothing but a big rag
doll. The rock had instantly knocked him unconscious, but he still
straddled Mike, only now his upper body was leaning over onto the
ground. A hard shove corrected that and Michael was on his feet. As
he moved towards Dale, he gave Cliff a kick to the ribs, one just
like he’d suffered so many times. He found that the click of his
shoes against the bastard’s side gave him a satisfaction unlike any
he had ever known before. He so desperately wanted to deliver
another, but at this exact moment, there were more pressing
concerns.

Dale was fighting his shock from seeing his
friend defeated so swiftly. But he wasn’t on his feet yet and
Michael was quick to use that to his advantage. With the rock still
gripped as tight as a lifeline to a drowning swimmer, Michael made
short work of the distance between them, and before Dale could
raise even one arm in defense, Michael cracked the rock down on the
top of his head.

Then the side of his head. He bludgeoned the
back of his skull as the second strike knocked his face the
opposite way. That third strike knocked him face first to the
ground. Blood oozed from an open cut in Dale’s left cheek. Michael
fought like a boy possessed. He waged a war on these two. It was
like a lifetime of frustration had finally found release. Later, he
found out that he’d beaten Dale to within an inch of death.

Michael only stopped after exhaustion had
taken hold of him.

Both boys lay flat on the ground, blood
oozing from this place and that. Michael, breathing hard, let the
stone fall from his hand. It bounced twice on the ground and then
laid still.

He heard the sound of hands clapping.
Surprised and a bit nervous about anyone finding him at the scene
of the crime, he turned quickly. Jerry faced him with his trademark
wide but crooked smile spread across his face. The wind had blown
his black hair wildly and there was a look of sickness in his
eyes.

“Jerry, what are you doing here? I thought
you were running a fever.”

“I am. My dad drove down to the pharmacy to
get my medicine filled. I saw those two bastards heading to the
park. I thought I’d come check on you.”

“Wish you’d been here sooner,” Michael
said.

“Oh, I’ve been here about ten minutes. Saw
you take that swim.”

Michael was flabbergasted. “What?” He stepped
a little closer to Jerry. Apparently, his newfound courage knew no
bounds. “You watched the whole thing? They could have busted my
ass. Hell, they tried to set me on fire, and all you did was
watch?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah? Yeah? Is that all you can say?”

“Cool your jets, bud. You kicked their
asses!” Michael was about to say something else when he realized
that, yes, he had kicked their asses. Not one freaking bully, but
two. At the same time. “I knew you could do it, Mike. I just didn’t
know when you would.”

Michael was trying to think of something to
say to that, but he couldn’t think of anything. Then, “We need to
get you back home.”

“Not yet,” Jerry answered.

“What do you mean?”

“There’s something we need to do first.”

“What’s that?”

“Come on,” Jerry said, looking over his
shoulder. “Let’s take a walk.”

“Where we going?”

“You got to ask so many questions?”

“What do you mean?”

“Aww, hell. Just come on. I promise you, you
won’t be disappointed.”

And as it turned out, Jerry was absolutely
right.