Quarry's Choice (21 page)

Tire rumble and engine noise.

I lay my head back on my spare-tire pillow and wept for a while. I wasn’t feeling sorry for myself and falling into despair or some such shit. I was fucking hurting. Never once did I wish I was dead. Never once did I stop wishing to make the fuckers dead who were taking me on this ride. In fact, I wanted them to suffer. I am not by nature a sadistic person. I take no relish in the suffering of others.

Normally.

But I had been pulled out of bed mid-fuck to get the shit kicked out of me and tossed naked into a car trunk and driven off in the night, God knew where. This earned some people a very nasty goddamn death, if I didn’t suffer one first.

I twisted around onto my back, though that required turning my knees toward the rear of the trunk. This hurt no more than pulling your eyelids back over the top of your head and making a knot. My fingers explored the underside of the trunk lid. The metal had some curves and nooks and crannies that seemed promising but gave up nothing helpful.

But then I remembered:
there would be a trunk light
.

I searched over toward the center left of the lid, where it curved down, near the latching mechanism. Living there, within a metallic hood, like a little glass nun, was a small light bulb.

Holding onto the outer metallic protective piece with my left hand, I tried to unscrew the precious little thing. It didn’t give, and I quickly realized it must not be threaded—had to be a pop-in, pop-out kind of item.

It popped out.

I held it tight, but not too tight, in my right hand. I never smiled wider or probably more grotesquely either, if anybody could have seen me. I opened my hand slowly and carefully, as if I’d caught a butterfly and wanted a peek before it flew away. Of course I couldn’t see a goddamn thing, but the fingers of my left hand could, in the sense that they explored the tiny object with a respectful delicacy. The rounded metal shaft was maybe an inch long, the glass bulb maybe an inch tall, and slightly plumper than the base.

Tire rumble, engine noise.

I held this prize in my palm, in a loose fist, and I knew that this little metal-and-glass baby dick was all that stood between me and nothingness. I thought about what to do with it. Would my captors open the trunk, notice the light was off and know what I’d done?

No. Not likely.

Was it best that I break the glass now, turn it into a tiny weapon, and wait till we’d stopped and then leap out of the trunk at whoever opened it, weapon in hand? I considered this seriously for maybe five minutes, practicing holding the thing by the short metal shaft in my fist.

At first I was liking it, then I considered that the idea of me leaping out of this trunk in my condition was laughable—in an it-only-hurts-when-I-laugh kind of way. And while I might do damage to the guy closest to me, there were two other men in this thing, and I was in no condition to emerge from my Cadillac womb and immediately deal with all three.

Somebody would surely shoot me.

It’s what
I
would do. Although I would never do to anybody what had been done to me tonight. Mid-fuck, kicked to shit, stuffed in a trunk, driven to nowhere. That kind of sick shit just did not go down with me.

Tire rumble, engine noise.

How long had I been out?
I wondered.

My stiffness indicated quite a while. Hours, maybe. Though I was operating from a whole new perspective, I judged we weren’t speeding—doing fifty? And the road was fairly rough but not torn up or anything. Not interstate. Poor condition highway or secondary road. Air was coming in from somewhere, thankfully not carbon monoxide-flavored, so this was a less stuffy ride than you might expect. Like the little light bulb, a small blessing.

I moved my head toward the rear of the trunk, toward the back seat, not to get closer to that God-awful country western but to try to pick up on the occasional conversation by the driver and rider. And it did seem to be just two people—if the third man was in the vehicle, he was either sleeping or staying quiet. Or maybe he didn’t make the trip. Or possibly he was in another car. If this weren’t a Caddy, I’d think they might dump it and me in a river, and drive off in another vehicle.

Tire rumble, engine noise.

For maybe an hour—or ten minutes or half an hour, who the hell knows?—I went over various scenarios in which I took down two men, maybe three, with my little tiny trunk light. I will not bore you with these pathetic plans of action. But it did finally come to me that my best chance would be to palm my tiny potential weapon and allow my captors to remove me from the car trunk and transport me to wherever they might have in mind. Probably inside somewhere, but not necessarily. Maybe to a stream in the piney woods where they could kill me and dump me.

If I played dead, or that is unconscious, I might find a moment to act. But I would have to do that before anybody tied my hands, because I didn’t think being bound and then somehow breaking the bulb would provide me with anything sufficient to cut rope or even duct tape, at least not with any efficiency or haste. This might mean acting as soon as they got me up and out, and again my physical state would be less than ideal.

So I breathed evenly and I began to utilize my limited space to move my limbs, lifting my knees up and then back, working my arms, stretching muscles that wanted to be left the hell alone, flexing joints, rotating my shoulders, my neck, even working my feet and toes. I might be on my side with my head on a spare tire, but goddamnit, I needed to limber up.

Tire rumble, engine noise.

Now and then the vehicle would decelerate and my breath would accelerate and I would do my best to control and slow my breathing, readying myself for the car to stop and that lid to come up. But apparently we were only cutting speed as we moved through towns, small ones I’d judge, and then we would be back on rough road, going fifty.

After many false alarms, however, came something that immediately seemed real. The turn signal came on and a red glow filled the trunk. The vehicle slowed way down and I felt it make its turn and heard the tires crunching on gravel, then roll across what might be a parking lot and finally come to a stop.

Inside myself, I braced for what lay ahead, but I made my body go limp. If they knew I was awake, I might be dead so fast a semi-load of little light bulbs wouldn’t help.

Throughout my ride, I hadn’t been able to make out any words in the muffled conversations drowned out by the country-western radio that added insult to my injury. Now I heard doors open on either side and feet hit gravel, and somebody said, “
You
haul ’im out, Buck. I’ll keep you covered. He’s a tricky fucker.”

“Hell, he’s probably already a dead fucker. We worked him over good, Chuck.”

So these two were Buck and Chuck.

In other circumstances, that might have struck me as amusing or maybe pitiful. Right now all it meant to me was that Buck was probably bigger and that Chuck had a gun.

A key worked in the trunk lock—there was no doubt an automatic release up front, but they probably wanted to prevent me from leaping out and running away like a jackrabbit, which showed how little they knew. The lid raised and fresh air came in and hovering over me was a big guy in blue-jean coveralls and no shirt with a bushy beard and a bald head and a grizzly build and a grisly face. There was hair on his shoulders and he was shod in clodhoppers. My eyes were almost shut, just slitted enough to barely see, since I was supposed to be out cold, but I got that much of a look at Buck, anyway.

Nothing of Chuck yet, because Buck blotted most everything else out. Or the third man, either, if he was anywhere around.

Buck leaned in, said, “Come to daddy, baby boy,” and took me and all my bruised and battered nakedness in his arms like I really was a baby or maybe a bride on her way to a threshold. I stayed limp, my head hanging to one side, arms dangling, the little glass bulb curled in the fingers of a hand that wasn’t quite making a fist.

My slitted eyes finally showed me Chuck. He was big, too, just not a bear like Buck. He was in a short-sleeve white shirt with blue stripes and blue denim flares and tooled cowboy boots. His hair was long and greased back and up in an Elvis pompadour with the requisite sideburns. He had a .38, a snubnose, in his fist and he apparently didn’t trust babies or brides, either, because he was pointing it right at me. He followed alongside Buck as the bigger man lumbered like the Frankenstein monster with a victim toward some double doors.

Until we were inside, I didn’t realize where we were. Now my slitted eyes told me: this was the Dixie Club. We were on the gambling-den side, and the lights were mostly off, but a few neon beer signs provided scant illumination. I was beginning to suspect who Buck and Chuck were, or anyway who they represented.

Buck carried me between and past green-felt-covered tables through a door into a cement-floored storeroom. Boxes of beer and liquor were stacked along the walls. It reminded me of the Bottoms Up storeroom, but smaller. A chair borrowed from the restaurant side waited for me more or less in the middle of the open space.

In my line of slitted vision was an ancient-looking workbench—against the only wall that lacked boxes of booze and beer—loomed over by a pegboard display of pliers, hand saws, screwdrivers, chisels, wrenches, hand drills and other do-it-yourself implements. A few items were scattered on the workbench itself, notably a very old-fashioned-looking brass-based blowtorch, a coil of clothesline, and a big ball-peen hammer that I may have seen before.

After carrying me so gently to this destination, Buck dropped me hard onto the dining-hall chair. Maybe he meant to wake me up. I didn’t. I sat there slumped to one side, arms dangling, the bulb still tucked in my curled fingers.

Buck and Chuck went over to the workbench. My slit-eyed view of them gave me more details. Bald, thicket-bearded Buck had a pie-pan face with big dumb half-lidded eyes, a button nose, and a tiny round mouth that formed a permanent “Oh.” Despite the greasy pompadour and sideburns, Chuck resembled Margaret Hamilton more than Elvis, with his narrow face with its sharp features and prominent chin.

Chuck said, “Tie him up.”

“What for? Fucker’s out.”

“Jesus! What if he’s fakin’?”

“I
hope
he is. I hope he comes flyin’ out of that chair and mixes it up, all fucked-up and naked, I would
love
that shit. After what he done to cousin Dixie? Fuck.”

Suspicions confirmed.

Chuck set his .38 snubnose on the workbench and picked up the ball-peen hammer. “Who you tryin’ to impress, shit-forbrains? She was
my
sister. Tie him up.”

Double confirmation.

“Ah come on, now!” Buck blurted, and he turned the spigot on the blowtorch, sending a tongue of orange and blue licking at the air. “You afraid of this half-dead Yankee sumbitch? What are you, a little girl? I say if he’s got some fight left him in, more power to his sorry ass.”

Buck started toward me, taking his time, the blowtorch breathing flame like a lazy dragon.

Chuck frowned and took a step in my direction, but lagging behind his bear-like kin. “What you gon’ do with that thing?”

“I’d gon’ roast him like a marshmallow. I’m gonna smores his dick and balls.”

“Me first.” Chuck hefted the hammer. “This is the fucker that killed Dixie! I wanna get my licks in, Dixie-style.”

“No, maaan! You’ll kill him with that thing. Let me have
my
fun first.”

Chuck scowled. “Okay, fine, but let’s tie him up first. I’m tellin’ you, bastard killed Dixie and Dix and Bubbah, bing bang boom, so you never fuckin’
know
.”

Buck, about four feet away from me, turned toward Chuck, who was just a step back from him, and said, “Okay, okay, you pussy. But
you
get the rope.”

I broke the bulb on the side of the chair and lurched forward and with my right raised fist jammed the jagged glass into Buck’s left eye, then reached down and gripped his hand on the handle of the flamethrower, turning its flame toward Chuck. Buck was screaming, the metal shaft of the bulb sticking out of his mangled socket, blood streaming like tears, his hands coming up to cover his face, and I had the blowtorch now, turning the spigot higher and shooting a wide hissing tongue of flame that licked Chuck’s narrow face from chin to hairline, turning the flesh red then orange then black. The hammer tumbled from his fingers and clunked on the cement as the whites of his eyes bulged against the crackling blackened flesh and he was already shrieking when the oily hair ignited. I tossed the still-fire-belching blowtorch like a spent match and scooped up the hammer just as Buck was recovering enough to come charging at me, howling in rage and pain, and I sunk the head of the ball-peen into his forehead and he froze there. When I pulled it out, the hammer made a sound like a boot freeing itself from mud, and when he dropped to his knees as if to beg or maybe pray, I swung three more hits onto the top of his bald head. Those didn’t sink in as far but they made impressive dents. Chuck, his screaming as shrill now as a fire-engine siren, was running from one wall to another like an Indian in a burning headdress, waving his hands over his head as if they were what was on fire. Keeping the fallen Buck between me and the careening Chuck, I knelt over the bigger man and gave the back of his head enough blows to prove there actually was a brain in there. Just as I was finishing up, Chuck fell on his face, almost certainly dead, though the fire the oily hair had started was still alive, dancing orange-blue devils having a party.

I considered using the snubnose to put a bullet in the back of Chuck’s head, but I figured maybe that was overkill. Anyway, there was a third man who might still be around and the sound of a gunshot might summon him, even if the screaming hadn’t. The frustrating thing was that I could salvage no clothes off either of these pricks. Chuck’s shirt was scorched down past the shoulders and he’d pissed his pants. Despite the nasty moisture, I checked his pockets for car keys, but there weren’t any. The keys weren’t in Buck’s coveralls, either, and as for harvesting those denims to wear, the things were bloody and anyway far too fucking big for me. And I wouldn’t be caught dead in coveralls.