The Sexiest Man Alive (30 page)

“Then you have no right to judge Shayla,” Mazie said, raising her voice to make it carry. “If she wasn’t a member of the gang, then she couldn’t have broken the—what did you call it—the
covenant? Killing her isn’t justice, it’s flat-out, cowardly murder!”

Papa Yatt’s eyes bulged. He wasn’t accustomed to having females question his authority, much less his logic. “You’re an insolent little whore,” he grated out, stepping off the platform, raising a meaty hand to slap her.

Shayla leaped to her feet. “Wait. I got something to say, Papa.”

“Don’t expect mercy. Too late for that. Sentence has been pronounced.”

“I got to tell you something.”

“You got nothing I want to hear, girl.”

“It’s a secret. Something Ricky Lee told me about you. It’s important.”

“Oh, well, in that case, you just tell Papa the cheating little weasel’s secret.” Eyebrows upraised, playing to his sniggering audience, Papa Yatt bent toward Shayla, a mocking smile on his lips. Only Mazie, glimpsing something bright blue clamped in Shayla’s small fist, guessed what was about to happen.

“Here’s the secret,” Shayla hissed. “Papa—you’re flammable!”

In a startlingly swift motion, Shayla gripped Papa Yatt by his beard, flicked the Zippo lighter hidden in her other hand, and set his beard on fire.

Dry as steel wool, his beard flared up instantly, and suddenly his face was wreathed in fire, the stink of burning hair filling the room. It took the old man precious seconds to react, to belatedly beat at the flames with his hands, but now his long, greasy head hair was on fire, too. Stunned into immobility, the gang members watched, dumbstruck, as the patriarch of the Skulls tribe, his head on fire, screeching in agony, blundered into the curtains bordering the stage. The curtains—a hundred years old, brittle, and woven in an age that had never heard of fire-retardant fabric—burst instantly into flames.

But Mazie and Shayla didn’t see this; they’d already leaped up onto the platform and sprinted for the door at the rear, leaving uproar and confusion in their wake. Someone fired a gun, and then a volley of gunshots sounded, mixed with shouts and bellows and contradictory orders.

“Someone get the goddamn fire extinguisher.”

“Stop them women.”

“Why ain’t the sprinklers turning on?”

“There ain’t no sprinkler system, dumbass. Get the hell out.”

The door at the back of the stage opened into a corridor. Mazie chose a direction at random and simply ran, Shayla pounding alongside. A bullet whizzed past Mazie’s head. Someone was shooting at them from behind. It sounded like firecrackers:
pop pop pop
. They were ducks in a gallery here, she thought, expecting a bullet to slam into her at any second.

Then, blessedly, a corner. Turning right, they careened down another hallway, found themselves out in the central lobby. The elevator was back in service. As they approached it, its doors creaked open, and out spilled Brimstone and Sonny.

“You!” Brimstone yelled, face contorted with fury as he caught sight of the women. He had a swollen eye, a badly split lip, and a wide gap in his bottom teeth. “I’m gonna kill you.” He rushed at Mazie and Shayla, and now they were trapped—large, drunken mad man ahead and shooter behind.

Someone stepped out from behind a gun cabinet—a tall, well-built man holding a snow shovel. He took a single lunging stride toward Brimstone and, with the fast, powerful swing of a man known for his thirty-yard hockey goals, smashed the shovel into Brimstone’s face. Brimstone stayed upright for a second, wearing the shocked expression of a man who has suddenly discovered that the basement stairs aren’t there, took a single tottering step, was thumped again, harder, and went down. Sonny took a terrified look at the advancing grim-faced man, and then did the only sensible thing: turned and ran.

Ben Labeck
. But it couldn’t be! At that moment Mazie came closer to fainting than at any time since her ordeal had begun.

A gang member rounded the corner, gun in hand, and opened fire, shooting wildly. Ben threw the shovel at the gunman, grabbed Mazie and Shayla, and dragged them at fifty-yard-dash speed toward the building’s front door. They burst out—and Mazie received her second shock as Eddie Arguello jumped out from behind a motorcycle.

“Take the girls,” Ben ordered. “Find Lester. I’m going to make them chase me.”

“C’mon.” Eddie grabbed Mazie’s hand, but she broke free and dashed after Ben, who was angling down the driveway toward the outbuildings. “Go!” she told Eddie. He hesitated a moment and then he and Shayla, holding hands, sprinted around the side of the building and out of sight.

The entire west wing of the building was burning, the rows of barred windows glowing fiery orange, the flames rampaging up toward the second story. This was a fire’s Thanksgiving feast: wooden floors, beams, stairways, cabinets, shelves—everything tinder dry and coated with varnish, and with no modern sprinkler systems to slow things down.

Hidden behind a shed, Mazie watched as the Skulls boiled out of the building. Half a dozen gang members, straining under the weight, lugged Papa Yatt out of the building and heaved him into an SUV parked at the building entrance. The vehicle took off, honking its horn to clear a passage through the throngs of Skulls now fleeing the scene on their choppers, fighting for position on the road.

But not all the gang members were bugging out. A good number of them were pursuing Ben, who was about a hundred yards ahead of Mazie, zigzagging between trees. She understood what he was doing—trying to get the gang to chase him instead of Shayla or Mazie, but it was a crazy-dangerous thing to do and it was going to get him killed; the Skulls were all armed to the teeth and were taking potshots at him.

Luckily, most of them were laughably inept marksmen. A man suddenly screamed, apparently shot by friendly fire, and a violent argument broke out among the gang members. A moment later another shot rang out—retaliation from the first guy’s buddies.

Mazie’s hopes that a war would break out between rival factions were dashed when the Skulls regrouped and resumed the hunt for Ben, fifteen or twenty of them fanning out to sweep through the grounds. She had to find him and help him get away before they killed him. She’d almost lost this man once, and she was not about to let it happen again.

Cautiously Mazie began picking her way through the weedy underbrush beneath tangle-branched old trees. Something squished beneath her bare feet and the odor of rotting apples filled her nostrils. She must be in the old orchard, its trees gnarled and twisted after being left to grow wild for half a century. Something moved to her right and she froze. A gang member was moving through the orchard, hunched nearly double beneath the overhanging branches. If he looked her way he was going to spot her because she was as visible as Casper the Ghost in the
white skirt she’d had on for her date with whatshisface a million years ago. The rain had stopped an hour ago and now a stiff wind was blowing away the clouds, allowing a three-quarters moon to poke through.

Sliding the skirt down over her hips, Mazie took it off, wadded it into a ball, and stuffed it into the crotch of a tree. Some archaeologist in the future would puzzle over it and probably conclude that pagan rituals had taken place here. Now it was her thighs she had to worry about—curse the Irish ancestry that had bequeathed her pale, Celtic skin.

As the Skull passed barely three feet away, crashing through the brush with the stealth of a tank battalion, Mazie silently crouched, smearing mud and glop and apple guts over her face and here-I-am thighs for protective coloration. Her top was lilac-colored, which came across as gray in the dark, and her underpants were black grannies.

Mazie waited until the Skull lurched off in another direction, cursing as brambles raked his arms. Warily rising to her feet, she padded along as stealthily as a panther in her bare feet. She could hear the others close by, calling back and forth, hacking at the undergrowth, bragging in blood-curdling detail about what they were going to do to the guy who’d yanked the Skulls’ victims right out from under their noses.

Sled Dog was in charge; he’d organized the gang into a kind of beater line across the orchard, one man spaced every ten feet or so. Where was Ben? He could be anywhere in this undergrowth, but Mazie thought she knew what he was going to do: angle off, then double back. In this case, angling off meant moving gradually uphill until—

Yeow! A red-hot needle jabbed into the sole of her foot. She’d stepped on a wasp, a late-nighter out feasting on fermented apples but still alert enough to sting. The yelp of pain ripped out of her mouth before she could choke it off.

“There’s one of the women!” yelled a sharp-eared Skull.

As they stampeded in her direction, Mazie broke into an all-out run, scarcely feeling the thistles and stones that cut into her soles. A gun cracked and a bullet shattered a branch above her head. Gasping for breath, lungs about to burst, she aimed for the row of scrubby trees growing along a stone fence. Forcing her way through a thorny thicket, Maze clambered over the fence and dropped to the other side. At first she thought she was in a field, but as the moon sailed out through clouds, she saw that this was the old asylum graveyard.

She was at the bottom of the cemetery, where the inmates who’d died in the county’s care
were not even given the dignity of a name, just a number on a flat slab of stone. Dropping to her belly, Mazie crawled commando-style, worming her way uphill through weeds and tall grass. Peering back over her shoulder, she saw that the Skulls were surging over the stone wall like an evil black tide and thronging into the cemetery. As she moved higher on the hill, the gravestones grew larger, the headstones sprouting from the ground like uneven teeth: some tall, some short, some missing altogether, toppled over and lost in the obliterating grass. They were very old, she saw, dating from an era when stone was cheap and stonecutters were even cheaper. She was near the crown of the hill now, and the monuments crowded close together, large enough to conceal her as she darted desperately from stone to stone.

Something shot out from behind a gravestone and seized her, stifling her scream with a hand clapped across her mouth.

“Mazie.” Ben Labeck breathed in her ear. “It’s me.”

She made an incoherent sound, then Ben felt her rigid body slowly relax against his. “You were supposed to go with Eddie,” Ben whispered, taking his hand off her mouth and turning her around to face him, holding her so close, he could feel her rapidly beating heart. “But when have you ever followed directions?”

They were hidden in the shadows of the seven-foot-tall tombstone of Ida Luckett, 1845–1897.
MAY FLIGHTS OF ANGLES SING THEE TO THEY REST
.

Gently Ben tilted her face toward him, looking for something in her eyes that would tell him how badly they’d damaged her. She answered without his having to ask, her voice trembling. “I’m fine, Ben.”

He thumbed away a smudge of dirt on her cheek. Her eyes looked enormous in a mud-smeared face. Without releasing each other, they sank down, until they were huddled at the base of the tombstone in damp grass that gave off a fragrance of wild mint.

“How did you—were you in that helicopter?” Mazie asked.

He nodded, although she couldn’t see it, since he had her cradled against his chest and was holding her as though he would never let her go. “We landed in a pasture about a half mile from here. Scared the hell out the cows.”

“A police helicopter? But where—”

“No, a private chopper. Lester—remember him—your Roller Derby date? He chartered a helicopter.”

“Chartered? But that must cost—”

“Turns out the guy is loaded, Mazie. You missed your chance to marry a millionaire.”

“Lester isn’t here, too, is he?”

“Unfortunately, yeah. He was the guy paying the two-thousand-buck deposit, so he got to come. Then Juju informed Lester that she was coming, and what Juju wants—”

“Juju gets.” Wriggling closer, Mazie pressed her mouth against his neck.

The touch of her lips made Ben instantly hard, and he wondered if there was something
wrong with him that he could think about sex when their lives were in danger. Of course, he’d thought about sex in the middle of slapping a shot into the net, or cutting lumber in his dad’s workshop with his fingers a hairbreadth away from a circular saw—so yeah, this was not completely out of character.

“Why is Eddie with you?” Mazie whispered.

“The other idiot’s here, too.”

“Rico?”

“Not my fault, okay? I didn’t want them, but they followed us to the heliport and tried to get on the chopper. I shoved Eddie out, but while I was doing that, Rico climbed in—it was Three Stooges time there for a while. Finally I said to hell with it, told them they could come, and if they broke their stupid necks it was what they deserved. Oh, and Magenta is here, too—in case anyone needs an emergency manicure.”

“But how did you know to come here?”

Ben pointed to the sky.

“God told you?”

“Spy drones. They’re all over the place. It’s a wonder they aren’t having midair collisions.”

They both stiffened at the sound of footsteps. Someone was coming up the hill, huffing and grunting with effort. He came into sight, a heavyset guy whose gut spilled out over his belt. “Fuckin’ creepy place,” he growled, kicking a gravestone. “Ow! Shit.”

Ben tensed, ready to jump him. The guy was so clueless—his gun dangling limply from one hand—that Ben knew he could take him. But then three more Skulls clumped up the hill and began stalking through the markers and he decided it wasn’t such a good idea.

“Sonny thinks he saw something up here,” one of them said.

“Sonny’s full of shit,” snarled the guy with the big gut.

They were going to be caught any second, Ben thought; they might only have a few precious seconds left together. If they survived this, he was going to make every second with Mazie count. Why had he ever wasted time on anything else when he could have been spending time with her? Gently he turned her face toward him. In the dark, he could just make out the gleam of her eyes, the curve of her cheek limned by pale light, the swell of her lips. He couldn’t get enough of looking at her; he never would.