Pray To Stay Dead (41 page)

“
As far as I know, yeah.”

“
Okay, let’s go,” he said, handing Cardo his Colt Commander. “Here.”

Reggie grabbed his shotgun, slipped four extra shells into his pocket, and got out of the truck. The rocks crunched beneath his feet. A bird sang somewhere, as if nothing had changed in the world, and the air smelled like every burned-out Vietnamese village he and his platoon had passed through. There was always some asshole who said that the smell of burned human bodies reminded him of barbecues back home, and that it made him hungry. Sometimes it was funny, a laugh to get their minds on something else, but most of the time Reggie found it annoying. Most of the time, he wanted to punch the idiot cracking jokes about the smell of burning flesh or the funny look on some dead gook’s face.

As they walked to the door leading into Misty’s, Cardo said nothing. It was a dumb reason to start feeling all warm toward the guy, but there it was. With things as they now were, a friend wasn’t a bad thing to have.

“
Wait,” Cardo whispered, holding up one had and waving it at Reggie, motioning for him to move to the left of the door. “Just wait right there.”

Standing to the right of the door, Cardo rapped the knuckles of his left hand on the glass, rattling the orange SORRY, WE’RE CLOSED sign. The Colt’s safety was off. Misty and Crate may not have been
like that,
but Cardo wasn’t taking any chances.

“
Misty, open up. It’s Officer Cardo.” He looked at Reggie, frowning, head cocked. “You okay in there?”

A finger parted the blinds. Cardo nodded and smiled, and both gestures seemed lunatic.

“
What do you want?” Someone said, and Reggie assumed it was Misty.

“
We just need to rest for a little while, Misty.”

Another hand came into view, widened the part in the blinds. Reggie could see eyes now, and they looked right at him, assessed him, and looked away.

“
How many are you?”

“
Just the two of us, Misty.”

“
I have a gun.”

“
I’m happy to hear that,” Cardo said. “I hope you have more than one.”

“
Ma’am,” Reggie said. “I’m just trying to get home to my daughter, and I want to use your phone and your bathroom and maybe watch some television, if you have one.”

“
The phone is dead,” the woman behind the door said. She kept looking past Cardo and Reggie, as if she were looking for something.

“
Even so, ma’am.”

Her eyes were on him again, but only for a second. She stared at Cardo for a little longer, and then her fingers retreated and the blinds snapped shut. There was the sound of a key sliding into a lock, a click, and then the old gal opened the door and looked both of them up and down. The gun in her left hand was pointed at the floor.

“
Officer Cardo,” she said. “Shit, I’m sorry. Things are bad.”

“
Yeah, I know,” Cardo said, glancing back at the bodies upon the burn pile. “Is that Charles?”

“
Yeah,” she said, her face tightening into a sour knot. “And Karlatos and Baker.”

“
And Clarence Shaw?”

“
Was that his name?” she asked. “I couldn’t remember.”

“
What happened?”

She looked at Reggie again, nodded toward him. “Who’re you?”

“
My name is Reggie,” he said. “I’m just passing through.”

“
He saved my life,” Cardo said.

Misty stared harder at Reggie, and then her stare broke and she nodded.

“
Misty?” Cardo asked. She looked at him, eyebrows raised.

“
What happened here, and where’s Crate?”

“
Come on,” Misty said, motioning with a single nod for them to follow her. The bell above the door jingled, and Reggie trailed Cardo into the store. It smelled harshly of a pine-scented cleaning solution. Beneath it, the stink of blood. The corpse of an obese man lay sprawled upon the ground near a shopping cart half-full with a mix of candy bars, bread, and canned goods. There was a rolling mop bucket. A dingy mop was fanned out upon the bloodied floor, its handle leaning against one of the shelves.

“
Is that Greg Haggarty?” Cardo asked.

“
It is,” the woman said. She looked to be in her mid-sixties, and was cut from the same coarse cloth as a thousand women Reggie had seen waiting tables and working grills at truck-stops across the country. Treat her right, she was sweet as syrup. Step on her toes, you’d be eating your balls.

“
Where’s Crate?”

“
Out getting a chainsaw.” She looked at the dead fat man.

“
What?” Cardo asked.

“
He’s too heavy for us to carry,” She said, annoyed, as if it were obvious.

“
Oh,” Cardo said. He looked at Reggie, who shrugged. He was starting to wish they’d just kept going.

“
What happened here?” Cardo said.

She extended a hand toward three tables. “Sit down. Want something to drink?”

“
No, thank you,” Cardo said, taking her up on her offer to sit down. Reggie followed him, easing into a chair that creaked beneath his weight. Three shelves containing bagged rice and bagged beans and assorted boxes of easy-to-make meals and cake mix blocked his view of the fat guy facedown in his own brains, and he’d never been happier to see a box of Rice-A-Roni.

“
You?” She asked Reggie.

“
No, ma’am,” Reggie said. “I’m good. But thank you.”

“
Help yourselves if you change your minds,” she said, sitting down at the table farthest away from Reggie and Cardo. She placed her gun on the table, resting her hand atop it.

“
Stacy is in the back,” she said, lifting her hand from the gun and rubbing her eyes. She looked tired. Her hair was a mess, and the flesh around her eyes was dark.

“
Stacy?” Cardo asked.

“
Starshine,” Misty said, rolling her eyes.

“
Oh,” Cardo said. “Is she okay?”

“
She’s fine, but they tried to rape her, and Crate killed them.”

“
All of them.”

“
Yeah. He shot them all,” she said, half-smiling again. She looked a little crazy, and Reggie wondered if maybe that’s the way things would be from here on. “He can be a mean son of a bitch.”

“
No,” Cardo said. “They all tried to rape her?
Charles
tried to rape her?”

Reggie listened, the shotgun resting across his lap, his eyes moving back and forth from Cardo to Misty.

“
No,” Misty said, looking down at the gun on the table before her. She traced a finger along the barrel, and Reggie realized that his hands were sweating. “But it was his idea.”

“
His idea?” Cardo asked.

“
Did you know Charles?”

“
Only a little,” Cardo said. “I’d seen him here sometimes, and in town, and we’d talk every so often. That’s all.”

“
That’s all,” Misty said. “Well, he was a coward. They showed up and started filling that shopping cart, and he told them that she was in the back, told them to take her instead. Crate was in the back, too, hiding and listening, and when he came out…”

“
He shot them all,” Cardo said. “Even Charles.”

“
Yeah,” she said, looking down, folding her hands together upon the table.

“
And Clarence?” Cardo asked, looking at Reggie. “He was involved?”

“
No,” she said, and glanced back at the door.

“
What happened?”

She took too long to answer.

“
We were out there, Crate and I,” Misty said, making an attempt to look Cardo in the eyes for more than three seconds. “We were trying to get Charlie onto the burn pile when he drove into the parking lot. He got out of his car and before we knew it he pulled a gun and started shooting.”

Reggie watched Cardo’s face. If he’d noticed her lie, Reggie could not tell. Cardo’s look didn’t change. A poker face. A cop’s face.

Misty looked at them, and there was pain in her expression, pain and sadness. She wasn’t telling the truth, not entirely, but that didn’t change the fact whatever had happened had taken its toll on her. She shrugged.

“
Crate shot him. It was horrible. It’s all horrible.”

“
You got that right,” Reggie said, trying to sound as warm as possible. Reggie could tell that Cardo was watching him, but he kept his eyes on Misty. “You see many of those things around?

“
Not today,” she said, and Reggie wasn’t sure if he was imagining things or not—she seemed to relax, just a bit, with the previous topic of conversation behind them. “A few this morning, I think. What’s it like in Beistle?”

“
Hundreds of them,” Cardo said.

“
Jesus. The Army really gas the town?”

“
Someone did.”

“
Can I ask two favors, ma’am,” Reggie said, moving to drain the remaining tension from the air by asking two wholly normal questions, the kind this tough old gal no doubt heard several times a week.

She looked at him. “Can I ask you for one?”

“
Sure.”

“
Enough with the ma’am nonsense,” she said, and Reggie caught the glimmer of a look in her eye, a look he’d gotten used to, living so much of his life on the road. Older white women got a little stupid around him. “Call me Misty.”

“
Okay, Misty,” he said, leaning back in his chair. Cardo continued watching him. “May I use your telephone, and can you please point me to the bathroom.”

“
Phone is dead, like I said, but you’re welcome to try. Bathroom’s right there. If it were a snake, it would’ve bitten you.”

The door to the left of the deli was visibly labeled RESTROOM with a gold foil sticker, and it had been one of the first things his eyes had fallen upon after entering the store—the dead fat guy lying beneath the candy shelf had been the very first.

“
Oh,” he said, trying to sound a little surprised. “Yeah, look at that. And the phone?”

“
Behind the counter. Go right on back. I trust you not to rob the register.”

Reggie stood. “Can’t rob nothin’ without this,” he said, placing his shotgun upon the table. Not wanting to, he left it behind. He was standing behind the counter, looking out at the store with the receiver in his hand, when a pretty white girl—Stacy, he assumed—stepped through the door to the left of the drink coolers.

She was a hippie, that much was obvious, and while Reggie didn’t think highly of hippies, he’d been with his share of hippie broads. They talked all sorts of spaced-out shit but they put out like it was the end of the world, and when they looked like this girl, a guy really didn’t mind putting up with an avalanche of spaced-out shit.

She saw Reggie and froze, jerked left and right, just a bit, like she wanted to run but couldn’t because her feet were rooted to the floor. She opened her mouth.

“
Hey, hey,” Reggie said, setting down the receiver and raising both hands to chest level, palms outward. “Everything’s okay, baby.”

“
He’s okay, Stacy,” Misty said, standing up. “He came with Cardo.”

“
Cardo?” Stacy asked, but then Cardo stood up and the confusion on the girl’s face turned into recognition. “Oh, Officer Cardo. What’s happening?”

“
Uh,” Cardo said, looking a little perplexed. “Quite a bit. Are you okay?”

“
No, no,” she said. “But they didn’t hurt me, if that’s what you’re talking about. They didn’t get the chance to.”

“
I’ve heard.”

“
Yeah,” Stacy said, folding her arms across her chest. “Thanks for asking.”

“
This is Reggie. He saved my life.”

“
Wow.” She looked at Reggie and almost smiled. It was little more than a shy twitch at the corners of her mouth. “That’s far out.”

Reggie, resisting the urge to look her up and down, picked up the phone again and brought the receiver to his ear. There was a hiss, steady and faint, broken by some distant clicks.

“
Told you,” Misty said, walking up to the counter. She’d left her gun at the table, too. “It’s been like that since, oh—the second or third day.”

“
Can I turn this on?” Reggie asked, indicating the television.

“
Sure,” Misty said. “That’s three favors.”

“
I’ll have to return one of them,” Reggie said, smiling. Either she was playing along, or Misty didn’t see him as a threat. Which meant that they might get out of here without anyone shooting at them.

“
Oh, God,” Stacy said. “He’s still here.” She looked at the dead fat guy.

“
Yeah,” Misty said. “Crate’s still looking.”

“
We’ll get him,” Cardo said, looking at Reggie with raised eyebrows. “Right?”

“
Sure,” Reggie said. “No problem. Just give me a second.”

In the bathroom, he splashed water onto his face and stared at himself in the mirror. His skin, usually a healthy shade of milk-chocolate brown, looked ashen and puffy. The flesh around his eyes was darker than usual, and his eyes were bloodshot. His teeth were filthy, and his breath smelled like dog shit. He was vile.

He sat on the toilet but nothing happened. He’d crapped in the woods behind the abandoned bakery that morning, and had eaten precious little since. And he was tired, damn it. Despite the sleep he’d gotten, he was exhausted to his very bones.