Her Last Scream (20 page)

During their meal at the kitchen table, Rein started crossing Darleen off any threat index. The woman was too open and genuine. Her intelligence was tinged with self-conscious naïveté, saying she’d never gone past high school. Still, Darleen looked through the window into the back yard, naming the trees and plant varieties.

“That’s a pretty flower over there,” Rein had said, nodding out the window. “The blue one.”

“That’s an American Bellflower,” Darleen said. “Campanula americana.” When she heard herself, she reddened. “I don’t know why I knew that last part,” she apologized. “I wasn’t showing off.”

Darleen had a habit of walking from room to room and looking out every window, as though seeing the world anew, or maybe for the first time. Rein got the impression of a woman who’d never expected to be in a safe house with nowhere to go but forward, and was liking her prospects for the future.

Rein wrapped the food and put it back in the fridge. The scent she’d noted earlier had come and gone a couple times and she found a tub of what appeared to be forgotten baked beans, mold across the top. She scraped them into the garbage disposal and washed the tub and lid, problem solved. A wall phone hung in the kitchen and Rein listened to the receiver.

“No dial tone,” Rein said, puzzlement in her eyes. “The phone’s shut off.”

Darleen was sitting at the table nibbling from a pack of Oreos. “I guess you can turn off them types of phones when you go on a long fancy vacation, but I wouldn’t know. We never had a phone outside of cell phones and Tommy’s idea of a vacation was renting a rotting shack in the Rockies, shooting a deer, then spending the rest of the time drunk while I tried to figure out how to cut the thing into pieces and –” Darleen clamped her hand over her mouth, but her eyes glittered with a sly delight. “Whoops! We ain’t supposed to talk about real stuff, are we?”

Rein took a chance that the modest intimacy of the moment held promise of a bond. “Wanna tell real names, Darleen? Just between us?”

“We’re not supposed to tell anything about us, Marla. They kept saying that and saying that. I swear I hear it in my sleep.”

“We’re not supposed to tell
them
. We’re the
us
. Names can’t hurt, can they?”

“OK, but just first names. I still feel like I’m cheating, but …

“I’ll go first,” Rein said, not seeing harm in using her real name. “I’m Reinetta.”

“That’s a pretty name. I’ve never heard it before. Is it like –?”

Rein shook her head, having heard the question innumerable times. “Not like the weather. It’s a form of the name Regina and means queen.” She smiled. “My parents were hopeful, I guess. But friends call me Rein.”

“I’m Treeka.”

The women shook hands under the bond of truth. “How long you been gone from, uh, your start place?” Rein asked.

“Ten days,” Treeka said. “You?”

“Today’s my five-day anniversary.”

“Anniversary?” Treeka clapped her hands. “We’ve got to celebrate.” She produced a half-bottle of chardonnay from the fridge. “We got permission, right?”

“Pour on, sista,” Rein said.

They poured wine and sat in the living room.

“Have you been scared?” Rein asked.

“Until the third night. Then I started to believe that somehow, God willing, I’m gonna get a second chance. Once I began thinking like that, I fell in love with my escape, like it’s a movie called Treeka’s Big Adventure.”

“It’s great you can think like that.”

“After two years of my husband thumping my head I’m amazed I still have enough brains to think.”

Rein took a sip of wine and shifted gears. “Speaking of the journey, did you ever feel there was anything off? Like someone had an interest in you? A man, maybe?”

Treeka’s glass paused in front of her lips. “That’s a weird question.”

Rein waved it away. “I’m paranoid by nature. An over-reactor.”

Treeka stood and paced the floor, finger tracing the rim of her glass. “There was only one man along the way – Rick. I think he was gay. Tommy hates gay people, especially lesbians. But Rick was super nice.”

“I stayed with Rick for a night. I agree.”

The women compared notes on their time in the railroad system and clicked glasses again. Best keep things tight, Rein thought, setting aside the wine. And best zoom this news to Carson and Cruz. They may have known where she was, but they sure wouldn’t know anything about Treeka.

Rein went to the bathroom, pulled her cell. The charge was almost past tense. With Astra gone Rein could get Carson to drop the new phone and her weapon – where? She went to the window – out under the roses beside the driveway? He could do it tonight and she’d be resupplied.

Bingo.

Rein tapped out a message, considering what to include. Harry always said communicate everything when you get the chance, even if you think we got it all, cuz we make mistakes. Of course, that was with a full charge on the battery. Still, Rein dutifully added the license tags and what she knew of location, finally having time to do more than jab at the keys and jam the damned phone back into her underpants.

My cell rang and my hand had it out before I’d even directed my hand to move. Cruz was on the balcony and heard the first ring through the window, was inside before the second ring.

I looked down at the screen:

REIN

“Open the message,” Cruz said, my nervous fingers fumbling at the phone. “Get it in gear, Ryder.”

I tapped the button, saw a long stream of text:

Cruz laughed. “The girl’s writing a novel.”

I grabbed a pen and paper and between us we doped out the meaning in under two minutes. I read from the scribbles and mish-mash.

Cruz said, “OK, as we get it now, the message is ‘
With Astra until tomorrow night? The address …
’”

“It’s somewhere around Branson,” I said. “We can get closer from the cell tower location.”

“She’s put in the damn vehicle tag number, Ryder. The lady’s a champ! ‘
Leave things under the rosebush on the south side of the front porch and I’ll get them soon!
’”

“Shit, we can’t do it.”

“Maybe we can, Ryder. It depends on how far away she is. She’s fine, that’s the big news. She’s simply moved another step, now with a woman safekeeper. Finish the translation.”

“‘
And I’m with a second underground railroad woman, Treeka from Boulder. We’re together on the next step at least.
’”

“Seems like she’s got a traveling companion,” I said.

“I’ll run the plates,” Cruz said.

“And I’ll call the wireless service and get the cell tower location. Get ready to roll.”

We looked at each other with a simultaneous sigh of relief. We’d soon have Rein back under our wing. I called Harry, almost giddy at the chance to deliver good news.

“Where are you headed?” Rein asked Treeka. “I don’t mean exactly.”

“Southeast toward Florida. I want to look out a window and see a life that’s all different: no mountains, no snow, no Tommy.”

“You got people there?” Rein asked Treeka. “Florida?”

“No, which makes it even better, given the kind of people who make up my people.”

Rein nodded. “Gotcha.”

“There was a poster I saw in a hippie shop on Pearl Street in Boulder, saying ‘Today is the first day of the rest of your life.’ That’s how it’s gonna be when this is over and I’m standing on a beach and squeezing my toes in the sand and looking out over the ocean. The first day of the rest of my life.”

Treeka smiled and leaned back and Rein saw how her companion’s face was relaxed and smooth, beatific, as though her vision of the future had momentarily washed her clean of fear.

Then, as swift as if a switch had been thrown, Reinetta watched Treeka’s face distort like melting wax, her smile dissolving into the shape of horror.

“Treeka,” Rein asked, “are you all right?”

Treeka didn’t answer, eyes and mouth wide and unbelieving, staring at something behind Rein’s back. Rein’s head snapped around. In the doorway stood a slender man in denim jeans and shirt, his brown Stetson tipped back to display eyes glittering like wet coal. There was a ten-inch hunting knife hanging from his belt. He was holding a huge chrome revolver and grinning like a child whose every Christmas wish had been granted.

“Hey, Treeks,” he said softly. “How you been, baby?”

The man started laughing.

Blood draining from her face, Rein turned to Treeka. She was crying. And whispering a single name over and over.

Tommy.

Rein never had a chance. The man named Tommy made a weeping Treeka tie Rein’s wrists behind her back. The knots were clumsy but Tommy kept saying “tighter” until they cut into Rein’s flesh. Through the ordeal Treeka kept apologizing to the man.

Tommy went outside, gone five minutes, then Rein heard an approaching engine. The man’s vehicle had been hidden nearby, she figured; he’d been fetching it. Tommy entered with a six-pack and walked to Rein, pulling off his hat and touching her hair with the sweat-stained brim.

“You got some nigra in you, don’t you?” he said, looking at Rein with a mixture of fascination and disdain.

Rein nodded.

“Damn fuckin’ shame,” he said. He backpedaled to Treeka, now huddled on the floor. “I wanna show you something, baby,” he said. “Look this way.”

Tommy walked through the kitchen, opened the back door and pointed to a blue truck, dusty, like it had traveled a long distance over back roads. A silver livestock trailer was hitched behind the truck.

“You can’t see through the dust, Treeks,” he said. “But someone wrote some real hurtful words on my door.”

“I’m so sorry for what I did to your truck, Tommy,” Treeka whispered. “It was mean and hurtful and I’m ashamed.”

“Guess what it cost to paint my door, baby? Two hunnert an’ seven bucks. I can’t even see how the new paint looks cuz the truck’s all covered with dirt.”

“I’ll clean it for you, Tommy,” Treeka pleaded. “Get me a hose and some soap and rags. I’ll shine it so pretty it’ll be like new, just you wait and see, hon.”

Tommy tipped back his hat and studied the dusty truck for several seconds. He broke into a grin.

Cruz grabbed my computer and keyed in the password for the law-enforcement system. She waited until the information returned, stared at it.

“What?”

“Maybe I made an error … no, I typed it in right.”

“What’s the problem?”

“The license tag for Astra belongs on a 2003 Nissan Pathfinder registered to a Howard Redfeather in Medicine Lodge, Oklahoma. He’s eighty-three years old.”

“He must be a true believer.”

“Mr Redfeather has a driving restriction, daylight hours only. Kinda limits working on the railroad.”

“Astra might be his daughter,” I said, mulling over possibilities.

“Or maybe wife. You don’t look happy, Ryder.”

“I want to know exactly who Astra is.”

Cruz frowned in thought. “Gimme a couple minutes. Can you grab me a Coke?”

I snatched up the ice bucket and rummaged in my pockets, came up with a couple bills. I jogged down the balcony to the pop machine. When I returned to the room Cruz was looking at notes on her pad. Her eyes were tense.

“What’d you get?” I asked.

“I called Mr Redfeather and said I was a friend of Astra’s, trying to get in touch with her. He didn’t know who Astra was.”

“Astra’s a fake name.”

“Mr Redfeather has no daughter, and his wife’s dead. Here’s what it all came down to, Ryder: Mr Redfeather parks in the alley behind his home. I told him I was a cop, asked him to do something for me. It took a minute for him to check his vehicle. The car’s there, but …”

“But the license tag is gone,” I said, feeling the room start to whirl.

Rein lay in the corner, initially hearing wails from outside, but eventually they gave way to just an occasional sob from Treeka, or a threatening murmur from Tommy. She struggled mightily against the bindings, but they hadn’t yielded a millimeter.

When the door burst open an hour later, Tommy had a look of insane pleasure in his eyes. He was dragging Treeka across the threshold, the woman’s face brown with dirt, the front of her blouse crusted with mud.

“Learnin’ to be a woman!” he yelled, shoving Treeka across the floor. She collapsed beside Rein, sending a chair tumbling as her head banged the hardwood, coming to rest two feet from Rein’s face. Tommy walked back outside, pausing a second to click kinks from the small of his back.

Treeka moaned and vomited brown foam. It pooled between the two women like a sticky pond. “I think I’m gonna die,” Treeka said. Her cheeks ballooned again and she puked a river of brown clots.

“Oh my God,” Rein said. “You didn’t …”

“Tommy made me lick all the dirt off his truck.”

Treeka turned her head away, shame closing her eyes. A half-hour later, crows arguing in a nearby tree and yellow sunlight drowsing into blue twilight, Tommy reappeared, a gasoline can in each hand. He ignored the women and poured the liquid over the furniture, sloshing it across the carpet in the next room. He whistled as he worked, the air filling with acrid fumes.

It was over, Rein knew. All she could think of was Harry. How her being burned up would destroy him, how he’d blame himself. Rein knew him so well that sometimes it seemed like she was alive inside his head and he in hers. Harry’d stop being a cop, turn inside himself and never let an hour pass when he didn’t tell himself he’d failed his mission and let her die.

You should always be allowed a note
, Rein thought, tears in her eyes as she heard the sound of empty gasoline cans flung to the floor. When the Universe flashed alive it made a lot of laws for itself: nothing goes faster than light, objects in motion continue in motion until acted on by another force, and so forth. It should have thought things out better and made one final law: when people are going to die and that death will hurt other people so bad that they’ll never be the same, the person about to die should be able to leave a note that sets people straight.

The cell tower was in rural Missouri, a dozen miles above Branson. Cruz took the wheel and I tracked down the chief of the county police force, Larkin Teemont. There seemed a lot of commotion at Teemont’s end, a background clamor of voices and equipment, like Teemont was on a construction site.

“Could you repeat that, Detective Ryder?” Teemont said. “Pretty noisy on my end.”

“We may have a situation in your county, the potential of an officer in trouble. Can you do a drive-by of an address, just to take a look, especially at a license plate? We’ll fill you in when we get there.”

“Might help if you filled me in now, seein’ as it’s my jurisdiction.”

I laid out an edited version of the story, making sure Chief Teemont knew the operation was cleared at state level.

“What was that address again?” Teemont said. “The one you want us to check out?”

I repeated it.

“Detective, Ryder, I’m right now looking at the house at that address. Buddy, there ain’t gonna be nothin’ left but a hole in the ground when them firefighters leave.”

“You’re saying it’s burning?”

“I’m saying it’s about done burning. It was a bad-ass fire.”

“Was there anyone …” I couldn’t complete the sentence.

“Inside? That’s not confirmed yet.” A pause. “You ever been around a fire where someone was burnt up, Detective?”

“Several times.”

“You know that meat smell?”

“Yes.”

“I’m smellin’ it now.”

Cruz and I entered town after dusk. The house was a charred frame lit by the white lights of emergency vehicles, steam rising into the sky, a crew of firefighters kicking through rubble. I caught a whiff of a bad smell, lost it. Told myself it was just stuff in the fridge or freezer cooking down.

I saw one fire truck, one ambulance, two cop cruisers, and a dark blue van marked Coroner’s office. Larkin Teemont was a tall and rangy guy who reminded me of the scarecrow in the
Wizard of Oz
, except he was in a green uniform. We shook hands, I introduced Cruz, and we replayed my story, short and simple.

“I’ll git that tag number out on an APB,” Teemont said. “You don’t know the kind of vehicle?”

“No.”

Teemont nodded to the smoldering ruin. “It’s just starting to cool enough the fire guys can check inside. You know who did this?”

“We don’t,” I said, shaking my head. “That’s the problem.”

“Fire Chief says there was an accelerant,” Teemont said. “Gasoline, by the smell. A neighbor saw smoke, called the FD. The house was engulfed when they arrived.”

“Body!” someone yelled. “Down in the tornado shelter.” My heart froze to see a firefighter at the edge of the foundation pointing a flashlight downward. “No,” the man amended as he kicked aside a fallen rafter. “Not
a
body.
Two
bodies.”

Cruz and I sprinted over. A pair of local cops tried to jump in front of us, but Teemont yelled, “They’re OK, let ’em by.”

The corpses were in a room below the kitchen, a tornado shelter, brick-lined, the entry not into the house but through a steel trapdoor beside it, a tight hideaway revealed when the floor burned away, embers tumbling into the shelter and turning it into a barbecue pit.

After photos were taken, several firemen dug a corpse free of ash and charred timbers. When the cooked body was on the ground, they turned their attention to the second body, pulling it up and into the pulsing lights.

“Outta the way,” a short and bespectacled man in a suit said when both bodies were up; the county coroner. I was staring at the charred forms and shaking like I was freezing. There was something tight around my body: Cruz’s arms. I realized she was holding me up.

“Hang on, Carson,” she kept saying, the first she’d ever used my given name.

I watched numbly as the coroner used a white towel to brush char from the face of a body, a distorted mask. The smell of rotten meat was overwhelming, the coroner holding a handkerchief to his nose as he worked. It seemed wherever he touched, skin or meat sloughed from the bodies.

“You able to make an ID, Earl?” Teemont said from the far side of the house, staying upwind.

“I’m only sure of two things,” he said. “Both bodies are female …”

“And the other thing?”

The coroner stood, snapping off latex gloves. “They’ve been dead a while. No matter how long you cook meat, you can’t cook that rot smell off it.”

It took a few beats for his words to gel in my head. I grabbed his arm as he passed. “The bodies were putrefying?”

He nodded. “They might have been there a couple weeks, maybe more. It depends on how cool and dry it was in the shelter.”

“It’s not her, Carson,” Cruz said. “It’s not Rein.”