Payback (22 page)

But that sound. What was it?

Heart racing, I started up from my chair, dropping the forgotten beer bottle, then quickly snatching it off the floor before the warm beer spilled everywhere. The house was pitch-black. When I had fallen asleep, the room had still been lit by a fading evening light. Now the blackness of the moonless night, shrouded in gathering storm clouds, made the shadows in the house impenetrable.

I switched on the floor lamp beside my chair, casting a circle of light around me. I froze in place, listening for the sound again. The sound that had woken me. When it came, I recognized it for what it was—a soft plaintive moan. A whimper. I spun my head to the front door and tried to ignore the shimmer of fear that crawled across my shoulders.

The noise had come from the porch, just on the other side of my front door.

When the sound came again, I set the beer bottle aside and moved toward it.

I switched on the porch light, but nothing happened. The bulb must have burned out. I tried to peer through the window but could see nothing.

A scratching sound coming from the doorsill at my feet made me grip the doorknob and yank the door open.

A body leaped against me, knocking me off balance. I landed hard, and a second later, I heard myself laugh.

Franklin’s kisses came fast and furious. He stood atop me with all four paws digging into my chest, his whole body twisting back and forth as he scraped his tongue over every inch of skin he could find, from my forehead to my chin, then back up again.

By the time I caught my breath and laughingly pushed him away, I had scrambled to my feet.

Franklin was tied to the railing with the same long leash he had been tethered to the night he disappeared.

I bent to untie the leash just as raindrops began to fall, spattering the sidewalk. A gust of rain-sodden wind lifted my hair from my forehead. I cupped Franklin’s stupidly grinning face in my hands and kissed him between the eyes. He reeked of dirty dog, but I didn’t care. I had never seen anything as beautiful in my life.

“You need a bath, kid. You smell like a dead goat.”

A moment later, a voice spat from the darkness. “Speaking of dead goats, how’s your boyfriend, faggot?”

Before I could react, a hand came out of nowhere and pushed me backward through the door. I landed flat on my back. The leash was yanked from my hand, and Franklin was kicked through the door behind me to skid across the floor on his side and collide with my hip.

My attacker stepped over the threshold behind us, and with a vicious scowl, slammed the door behind him to shut out the storm. And to close us in.

I didn’t recognize the man at all. But I knew immediately who he was.

I could tell by the boots.

Payback

I
TRIED
to scramble to my feet. But the gorilla who had shoved me through the door laughed and planted a boot against my shoulder, pushing me back to the floor. A feeble growl erupted from Franklin’s throat, but the moment it did, the same boot swung around and kicked him in the ribs. With a howl of pain, Franklin cowered beneath the blow, and I wondered how much abuse he had been subjected to in the months he’d been gone.

The man looming over me shook his head in disgust. “I got me a couple of stupid mutts here, I surely do. One just as dumb as the other.”

“Fuck you,” I said, and he laughed. I noticed he had an incisor missing when he did. I found myself sincerely hoping that at some point in his miserable life, somebody had kicked it out of his head.

The man who stood before me was the same man Chris had chased through the Gaslamp district a couple of weeks back. He was of medium build and medium height, and his upper lip was adorned with a scraggly-ass moustache that anybody with any brains would have shaved off at the first opportunity. He had dusky skin and a shock of thick black hair, as straight as string, framing his face. He wore filthy jeans and a leather vest with no shirt beneath, displaying a decent chest with just a spattering of hair sprinkled across his reasonably flat stomach. On his feet, the motorcycle boots. Heavy and black and adorned with chains and zippers. The very same boots I remembered seeing the night Spence was killed.

The man put his hands on his knees and squatted down until we were at eye level. He studied my face like he was looking through an aquarium wall at a new and surprising form of sea life.

“Should have killed you when I had the chance,” he said with a smirk. He had a cigarette tucked atop his ear like some 1950s juvenile delinquent, and he chose that moment to pop the cigarette into his mouth with a deft and surprisingly delicate movement, then pull a lighter from his pocket to light it.

“No smoking in the house,” I said, and that time he
really
laughed.

“You’re a cocky little fucker, aren’t you?”

His hand shot out like a rattlesnake, and he slapped me across the face. Hard. When my eyeballs stopped twirling around like marbles in a bucket, I spotted Spence’s wedding ring on the bastard’s finger.

I saw red.

A boom of thunder caused my attacker to turn toward the window for a split second, and in that time I kicked out with my foot and cracked him a good one on the shin. Since he was still awkwardly squatting in front of me, he toppled over like a house of cards, arms and legs pinwheeling all over the place.

Unfortunately, he pulled himself up and struck out in less time than it had taken him to collapse. He straddled me with his legs, and reaching down to grab a fistful of my hair, he yanked me to my feet. As soon as I was standing, his knee shot out and buried itself in my groin. I coughed up an “Oof!” and folded over like a pocketknife, hitting the floor hard for the second time. With my nuts on fire, I squeezed myself into a fetal position, groaning and gasping for air while he stared down at me and grinned.

He hadn’t even dropped his cigarette. He puffed on it as he picked up Spence’s photo from the end table and studied it, enjoying his smoke and waiting for me to catch my breath and stop rolling around in agony. While he waited, he periodically tapped his ashes over me, just to be a dick.

“This is the fucker I killed,” he said as if commenting on the weather, which, by the way, was now battering the outside of the house with blasts of wind and buckets of rainwater. Lightning flashes were strobing the windowpanes every few seconds, and the grumbling thunder was rolling across the heavens above our heads in a continual, clattering roar, making the California sky sound a little like a bowling alley on league night.

“Yes!” I hissed through my teeth, still clutching my crotch. “Coward!”

He tore his eyes from the snapshot long enough to gaze at me. I noticed he had a habit of sucking air through the gap in his front teeth when he was being pensive, which wasn’t very often.

“I don’t like queers,” he said matter-of-factly, as if that should be enough to justify his act of murder on an innocent man. “Besides, what are you bitching about? You got me back.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“My brothers,” he said. “The cops are filing charges against them in the morning. So you not only got me back once, you got me back twice. They are as good as dead, just like your little Chinese boyfriend here. They’ll probably never get out of prison.”

“Good,” I spat.

He took a long pull from his cigarette and tossed the picture across the room, where it hit the brick fireplace, splintering the glass. He nudged my ankle with his foot to get my full attention, as if he didn’t have it already. “How do you think our poor mama’s gonna feel about losing two of her boys? Huh?”

I was catching my breath now. The pain in my nuts had eased to a roiling ache that only periodically made me grit my teeth. “Probably not as bad as my husband’s mother felt when she had to bury her dead son after you beat him to death.”

He smirked and rolled his eyes. “Husband! Is that what they call it these days? Two faggots pumping each other’s bungholes and gnawing each other’s peckers? Jesus, what’s the world coming to?”

“Murder apparently,” I said, gritting my teeth once more against the pain in my groin. Again I stared at Spence’s wedding ring on the bastard’s finger.

He saw me looking and cast an appreciative eye on the ring. “Nice, huh? Faggots always buy the best jewelry. I’ll give them that.” He spit on the ring and rubbed it against the front of his vest to make it shine.

He sucked in a shot of oxygen through the gap in his teeth as if to fuel his thinking process. “I told Carlos not to pawn the other one, but the dumb shit did it anyway. That’s how they caught him, you know. Him and Trini too.” His eyes narrowed and oozed hate in my direction as he watched me writhe on the floor. “That and the fact that you pulled them out of a lineup.”

I decided to smirk back. It was about the only form of rebellion I had available to me. “Yeah, well, if you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.”

“Oh, shut the fuck up,” he growled, pulling a long knife from his back pocket. It looked like a fisherman’s knife, with serrations on the back of the blade for scaling fish and a keen edge that caught the light and sparkled in his hand. It looked sharp as hell.

I couldn’t take my eyes off it. “What are you going to do with
that
?”
As he had done with the ring, he spat on the blade and rubbed it against his leg to make it shine. When he was satisfied it was as lustrous as it was ever going to be, he scraped it along his forearm to shave away a strip of hair, demonstrating for my benefit how keen the blade really was. He grinned at me all the time he did it.

Franklin scooted up close to me and rested his chin on my arm. I could feel him trembling against me. I buried my hand in the fur on his back and wished to God I was anywhere else but where I was. Since my attacker had ignored my question the first time, I decided to repeat myself.

“I said, what are you going to do with that knife?”

He smiled wide. If the missing tooth caused him any embarrassment, he certainly didn’t show it. “I’m going to toss my brothers a ‘Get Out Of Jail Free’ card by making sure they don’t have any eyewitnesses testifying against them at the trial. And seeing as how you’re the only eyewitness, I guess that means carving off your fucking head. That way, see, I eliminate your big flapping mouth and your baby blue eyes all at the same time. You won’t be making any accusations in that courtroom when I get done with you.” He laughed. “As a matter of fact, you won’t be good for much of anything, except maybe dog food.” He clucked his tongue at Franklin. “What do you think of that, Dog? Want some minced faggot tongue for dinner?”

Franklin ignored the voice. I didn’t. “His name isn’t Dog. It’s Franklin.”

He nodded, as if he figured as much. “Whatever, dipshit.”

He gazed around the room, then stepped away far enough to peer down the hallway leading to the rest of the house. When he was satisfied we were alone, he turned back to me.

“You look like you’re doing all right for yourself. Got any other jewelry stashed anywhere? Maybe a nice pile of cash? No point chopping off your head if I can use it first to get me enough money to make this sad old life a little more bearable.”

He grinned at his own sense of humor. Stalking across the room, he approached me once again and gave me a sharp kick in the leg. Just enough of a kick to get me moving. I groaned my way to my feet, and Franklin whimpered to see me move away from him. Tail down, eyes terrified, Franklin dragged himself to his feet with me and stayed close by my side, his body pressed to my leg, as if he was terrified we would be separated. He averted his eyes from the other man in the room.

I didn’t have that privilege. As a matter of self-preservation, I kept my eyes on the fucker at all times.

He shepherded me toward the hallway. I had to limp to get there. My nuts were killing me.

“Show me where you hide the goodies,” the goon growled.

“There aren’t any goodies.”

“You’re lying.”

I had to stall for time. Chris would be here soon. If he came directly from work, he might even be armed.

Or
, I thought with a sudden burst of hope,
maybe I can arm myself.

To do that, I needed to slow down the proceedings. Give myself time to think. And act.

“Where were you born?” I asked, grabbing at the first straw I could think of.

He stopped and stared at me. “Where the fuck do you think I was born? Right here. Mercy Hospital, if you really want to know. What the fuck is it to you?”

So the hospital that dragged me back to life after the attack was the same hospital that brought my attacker into the world in the first place. Great. Nice coincidence.

“Why do you have an accent?” I asked, as if I really wanted to know. “I figured you and your brothers were born in Mexico.”

He threw his shoulders back, offended to the core. “I’m as American as you are! What’d you think I was, a wetback? If me and my brothers have an accent, it’s because our parents didn’t speak English. Still don’t, as a matter of fact. And if you’re gathering all this information to put in a book, I got news for you. You won’t be alive long enough to write it. You’ll be lucky if I give you time to kiss your faggoty ass good-bye.”

Stall him. Stall him.

“Why did you take the dog? The night you killed Spence. Why did you take the dog?”

He grabbed a fistful of my T-shirt and dragged me toward him. His breath smelled like a putrefying whale carcass that had washed ashore on some steaming hot beach. If he had ever had a passing acquaintance with a spool of floss, it must have been in another lifetime.

“What the hell is wrong with you? Who gives a shit why I took your dog? The damn mutt is worthless anyway. I never saw him wag his tail once. Not in five months. Not once.”

I couldn’t stop myself. I had to smile. “I guess he didn’t like the company he suddenly found himself in. He must have higher standards than I thought he did.”

The man with the knife pulled me even closer. With an evil grin, he slid his rancid tongue up the side of my cheek. I almost passed out from the stench.