Psycho Save Us (29 page)

“Why?”

Porter shrugged.

Leon glanced
over at the house, saw the medics still huddled calmly around David Emerson. 
Leon hadn’t spoken with him yet, but the man had looked more pissed off than
scared when he first got here.  None of David’s injuries were serious, he said
he just had a lot of stuff in his eyes.  The medics were insisting that he go
and get checked out for a serious corneal abrasion, but he was still refusing
them.

“Jesus,” Leon
said.  “This guy’s a fucking maniac.”

“Yes,” said
Agent Porter.  The word had the ring of a man who was hearing a theory of his,
long held in contempt or at least doubted by his peers and/or upper echelons,
finally vindicated.  “He passed through the system slick enough in his youth,
and obeyed and disappeared frequently enough to become forgotten.  But he’s a
killer.  His psych eval in prison and those he underwent in the reformatory
point to extreme narcissistic personality disorder, undiagnosed all these
years, and coupled with a highly volatile temper.  The fights he got into in
prison, and the shit that happened with the kid Hoover, were all reportedly over
relatively mundane things.

“He tends to
build things up in his mind, sees aggression everywhere and in anyone,
depending on the weather and the day o’ the week, and reacts violently.  One of
his old pals in Biloxi that we talked to said that Pelletier once said to him,
‘I like killing.  It makes me feel better about myself.’  End quote.”

“So what’s he
doing here?”

“We don’t know,
really.  Running from retribution in Baton Rouge?  Maybe he’s finally flipped
for good?  Going on one last final rampage?”  Porter shrugged.

“What exactly
happened
in Baton Rouge, Agent Porter?”

“A hit.”

“A what?”

“A contract
killing.  The AB put it out on him for what he did to one of their guys in
prison.”

“The AB?  You
mean the Brotherhood?”

Porter nodded.

Leon was about
to ask him what exactly their psycho had done to the Aryan Brotherhood when
Agents Mortimer and Stone came hustling around the patrol car.  “Yo, boss,”
Mortimer said.  “Forensics found a twisted wad of ethnic hair in the back room
with the space heater. They said it looks recently pulled out.  All of the vics
here have short hair.  They say its length and the smell of the shampoo used,
probably a girl’s wad of hair.”

“They were
here,” Leon said.  “God damn it, the girls were
here
!”  They all
absorbed that truth for a moment.  Leon looked at the El Camino and the Expedition. 
“What happened, then?  The buyers show up and kill the kidnappers?”

“Hard to say,”
Porter said, looking around the street.  “Seems likely.”

Leon turned to
him.  “What about this…this Rainbow Room, or whatever?  You ever heard o’ these
guys?”  They hadn’t really had time to discuss it all at the Yeti’s place
before they each took off for Townsley Drive in their own vehicles, and the
fury that Leon had felt over his car being stolen (and now discovering that it
had been Pelletier who’d taken it) had temporarily pushed the Yeti’s words from
his mind.

Agent Porter
shook his head.  “I’ve never heard of the Rainbow Room before, but I’ll be very
interested in seeing where this leads.  ’Scuse me a sec,” he said, reaching
into his pocket and pulling out his cell.  Someone was sending him a text
message, and he sent one straight back.  “Well,” he sighed.  “Fuck me. 
Just…fuck me. 
That’s
anticlimactic.”

“What is?” Leon
asked.

“Spencer
Pelletier.”

“What about
him?”

“I think your
boys just shot and killed him five blocks up.”

8

The
foundation of every society, Spencer had decided long ago, was the same.  The
Weak had gathered in great numbers in resistance against the Strong.  The
Strong, formerly in power because of their obvious advantages, were suddenly
out in the cold because even a lion can be torn apart by a bunch of mangy
dogs.  But then, something had happened that had irrevocably changed all
societies forever.  The Strong-
Minded
had found ways of ruling the Weak,
ruling without real physical strength or power or any willingness to get their
hands dirty themselves.  This left the Strong even more isolated, and gave the
Weak a sense that they were truly protected from the Strong for all time.

But the Strong
still lived.  In pockets and alleyways, at the edge of a city or deep in its
heart, hidden away in a chamber where few ever glanced. 
Forgotten Places
. 
Dead spaces
.  In accordance with the laws of evolution, the Strong had
adapted a sense besides the basic five.  This sense helped them find these
Veins, these lanes and arteries that moved through a city built by the Weak and
forgotten.

Even though it
had been years since Spencer had really driven the streets of Atlanta, she was
still a city.  Her curves were the same as all the others.  Certain amenities
could be found in all the same places.  The arteries through which the city’s
blood (the people) flowed were the same, some were just small and neglected. 
He found these easily.

Spencer’s heart
was racing, but only from the run, not from any real adrenal dump.  He had
dropped the shotgun in the middle of the woods and kept running.  He was still
tittering to himself.

He paused at the
edge of the housing development to allow the patrol car to go past.  Only its
headlights were on when it passed him, but halfway down the street a spotlight
switched on and grazed over the very ditch where he was hiding.  The ditch was
shallow, but Spencer was confident that as long as he didn’t move, he wouldn’t
be found.  The human eye caught movement before it caught color or pattern;
that much he remembered from his days studying wilderness survival.

The patrol car
slid on by, and once it had turned down another street Spencer hopped up and
jogged across to the other sidewalk.  He jogged through the back yard of a
house that wasn’t finished yet and had three squatters sitting in the back over
a small fire.  Spencer nodded to them amiably, and the three homeless waved
back, watching him with incurious eyes.  He scaled a chain-link fence and ran
through a short patch of trees and sages until he emerge in another Forgotten
Place.

There was a park
bench to indicate this place had once been inhabited, and an
UNDER
DEVELOPMENT
sign
to show that it no longer was.  Little more than mounds of dirt and flat
grassless earth covered this area.  There were three large stacks of
two-by-fours that looked like they’d been left here since time immemorial. 
Spencer decided to rest a spell.  He pulled up a truncated piece of wood and took
a seat in between two of these stacks.  He pulled out his cell and pulled up
directions on Google Maps.

His stomach
groaned.  He hadn’t eaten since he’d had the burger at Dodson’s Store.  Cursed
with a high metabolism, Spencer was already growing hungry.

Thunder rolled
someplace off in the distance, a reminder from a monster in retreat.  A few
specks of rain fell on him.  Spencer checked the time on his cell.  2:32.

Somewhere far
off, a gunshot rang out.  Then several more in return.  He thought,
Somebody
else is havin’ a bad night
.

The house was a great
deal more furnished than the one they’d left.  But it had creaking wooden
floors with a dark-brown finish had scrapes and chips that lent more than just
character...some of them, at least one long, wavering scrape, looked like a
drag mark.  Paintings of no particular design,
impressionistic
one might
say, hung from the walls, most of them canted to one side or another.  A large,
widescreen HDTV was on in the living room, through which they passed.  A fat,
shirtless man was sitting on the ratty couch, acknowledging them only by
showing his annoyance when they marched in front of his view of some sci-fi
series.  It looked like
Battlestar Galactica
.  One of Kaley’s friends at
school, Paula, really liked that series.  It was weird watching it now under
these circumstances.

There was tattoo
across the fat man’s voluminous belly:
Мир
ненавидит
нас
.

“
Prastite
,”
Oni muttered to the fat man on the couch.  The fat man waved a dismissive hand,
and when he did Kaley spotted the same red, roaring bear tattoo on his arm as
Oni had.

Down a hallway
with black-and-white pictures hanging a bit straighter on the walls, they
encountered a younger-looking kid, this one blonde-haired and blue-eyed, maybe
seventeen or eighteen years old.  He looked at Oni and asked, “
Chto ty
delayesh?
”  Oni laughed and hollered something at the kid, then reached out
and messed up his hair.  Kaley wanted to ask the teenager for help, but had the
strangest feeling that everyone inside this house was okay with kidnapping
children. 
It’s a family business
.

The teenage boy
then regarded her, very briefly, with hungry eyes.  It was so brief it could
scarcely be said to have happened at all, and then he moved on down the hall,
out of sight.

They passed
through a kitchen, where yet three more men waited, playing cards and smoking
cigars.  One of them spotted Oni and said, “
Dmitry!  Kak tvaya mama?
”

“
Takzhe
,”
said Oni.

Dmitry
, Kaley
thought. 
Oni’s real name is Dmitry
.  What she would do with this information
was quite beyond her, but it was something to cling to.  She knew something
else about her abductors.  It gave hope.

Just outside of
the kitchen was a door.  Olga was moving to open it.  Kaley knew what was on
the other side without having to see it.  She could almost feel the dark
shadows creeping up the narrow stairwell.  She could almost see them moving
under the door.

The men backed
off a little and Olga turned to face all three children.  She bent over to look
the smaller ones in the eye.  “
Skolka vam let?
” Olga asked, with cloying
sweetness.  Then, she laughed.  “Sorry, I forget myself.  They don’t teach
Russian in your schools here, do they?  A pity.  They should.”  Kaley said
nothing.  Shannon said nothing.  The nameless girl looked down at the ground
sucking her thumb and holding the cross about her neck.  “I’m Olga.  What are
your names?  Let’s start with you.”  She snapped her fingers, and just like that
knives were in the hands of her captors.  Kaley was tugged at the back of her
head.  Then, all at once, the pressure was off her face.  Her jaw popped as the
tape was ripped from her face and the sock fell from her mouth.  “Your name,
sweetie.”

Olga made it
sound like a command, not a polite request. 
She’s done this before
. 
It’s
old habit for her
.  Kaley still couldn’t believe she was here, now,
experiencing this with her sister. 
How many times?  How often do they do
this kind of thing? 
Then, her eyes drifted to the dark chasm beyond the
door. 
What’s down there?

Olga moved her
head so that she blocked Kaley’s view of the stairs.  “Now there’s nothing to
be scared of, my girls,” she said.  “You’re safe now.  You’re in my home.  Now,
I’ve told you my name.  What’s yours?”

“I wanna go
home,” Kaley said.  It sounded like the most logical request in the world, yet
in these circumstances it also sounded like the dumbest.  There was no way it
could go that way.  No way at all.

Olga,
predictably, took on a hurtful frown.  “Now, why would you want to go home? 
Your mother isn’t very kind to you, now is she?  No.  She’s very neglectful,
isn’t that right?”  Olga turned her frown upside-down.  “Here, you’ll be
very
prized.  Very valued.”

Kaley’s nostrils
flared automatically.  “How do you know our mother?”

“We know.  We
pick little boys and girls up all the time who we see having problems at home. 
We know, sweetheart.  We know your pain.  We know you—”

A wad of spit
smacked Olga in the face.  It took Kaley a moment to realize it had been hers. 
She’d done it before even planning it.  “Fuck you!” she said, just as involuntarily. 
“You fucking cunt!  You’ve been watching us?  How long?”

“
Olga
,”
said one of the men beside her.

“How long?!”
Kaley demanded, tears welling up.

Olga didn’t
blink.  She had never blinked, not once since Kaley had been watching her.  She
reached up and pushed the spittle away with her sleeve and said, “Very well,
you little bitch.  Let’s cut this shit.  I know your names already.  You are
Kaley Alexandria Dupré.  And this is your sister, Shannon Alexis.  The girl on
your right is Bonetta LeShanda Harper.  You were brought here unharmed out of
the kindness of my two brothers’ hearts.  That’s Mikhael and Dmitry there.  You
will all get to know them very well.”  She reached out and touched Shannon on her
head.  “
Ti takaya privlekatelnaya
—”