Total Victim Theory (17 page)

Get sucked into them.

Like the jittery crew of some wayward Star Fleet vessel. At this very moment, I’m like just such a ship, drifting near a giant green quasar.

Watch how the craft shrinks as it nears the hazy vastness. Becomes a white pebble. Then a speck.

Then is diminished to a thing so infinitesimally tiny it’s indistinguishable from oblivion.

In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.

I have disappeared in the black pupil hole at the center of her.

If I never returned, what would happen? What would it mean?

The night is shattered and she is not with me.

I hear a loud, metallic sound.

The butcher knife has slipped from my fingers and clattered to the ground.

My hand is trembling.

It has not happened like this before.

Courtney bats her eyes. But I am not thinking about Courtney.

I am not ready to tell you what I’m thinking about.

20

El Paso, 1989

“Hi, Rose,” said Garrett in a soft, taunting tone.

Rose turned and saw her son's rangy shape framed in the doorway. His figure seemed to sway slightly from side to side like a poised cobra. He was little more than a silhouette in the final rays of evening, but her mind filled in the details—the lazy eye and the soulless smirk—that the dimness obscured.

Without realizing she was doing so, Rose took a half-step back. Shards of the crushed aquarium crunched underfoot. Her rage, still simmering, was tempered by the shock of Garrett's sudden appearance. She realized the situation with Roscoe would have to be dealt with right here and right now. There was no putting it off.

It wasn't that she feared her son. He was twelve years old, for God’s sake. She was a grown woman who outweighed him by thirty pounds. And one who was armed with a shovel, for that matter. No, she wasn’t afraid. Yet, her heart must have its own reasons for pounding the way it was.

When Rose finally discerned the details of her son's face, she saw that he was smiling. It made her sick. That wicked smile seemed to say that he was taking off the mask. Setting it aside, so she could peer into his bleak recesses. At the malignancy, swarming like a mound of millipedes where his soul should be.

She’d exposed him for what he was. And for what he’d done to Roscoe, and for whatever else the graves behind the shed were proof of. The jig was up. She'd outed him and he'd never forgive her for that.

And she knew from that smile he'd kill her the first chance he
got. He would focus every ounce of his patient cruelty on dreaming up the surest and most horrible way. He might poison her with Drano. Or mess with the brakes on her car. Or stage a fake suicide and press a gun into her mouth. And he was a persevering little shit—you had to give him that. If he failed the first time, he'd keep trying till he got it right.

Unless of course, he wasn't given the opportunity. . . .

A picture of Roscoe flashed through her mind, and anger flared again. All her reason and self-control seemed to dissolve in its venomous red waters. She raised the shovel and held it in both hands, the way one might brandish a shotgun. This was going to end here. There would be no remorse for the remorseless.

Just then, Rose detected movement behind Garrett in the open doorway. Two shorter, slighter figures lingered just beyond the threshold. It dawned on Rose that not one, but all three of those mouths who called her mother were in attendance. Squinting, she discerned ten-year-old Tad holding a pair of pliers and seven-year-old Luke toting a large silver flashlight. So these were Garrett’s little assistants. And from the looks of it, they were apt pupils.

Their six eyes rested on her, like the gaze of a single entity. For a moment she hated them all as one. “You brought them along to help?” Rose said. She could feel her lips trembling.

Someone snickered.

She’d misjudged things in assuming their innocence. In blaming it all on Garrett. Maybe he’d nurtured in them his same sickness.

But, no. Surely the other two were not just like Garrett. Tad, maybe, but not Luke. She'd seen goodness in her youngest son. A soul. Unless Garrett had managed to snuff it out.

“So, what brings you 'round to these parts?” Garrett asked, imitating the stilted drawl of a Southern gentleman.

He took a step forward.

“Don’t move,” Rose said, waving the shovel in front of her as if warding off a demon. She took another step back and found herself at the rear of the shed, with no room left to retreat.

“Am I under arrest or something?” Garrett said with a laugh.

Heckling laughter from one or both of the confederates.

“I found Roscoe,” she said.

The toe of Garrett’s sneaker was inching forward. And was it
just her imagination, or were the other two creeping up on her as well?

“Was he missing?” Garrett's voice was full of mock innocence.

“He was.” She clinched the muscles in her jaw and tightened her grip on the shovel. She was already picturing what she would do to him. God, it was going to feel good.

“And what all was he missing?”

And that was all it took. “You son of a bitch,” she wailed, spewing spittle from her lips. Her vision all went red, like the lens of a periscope. With a powerful swing, she brought the shovel down hard on Garrett’s head. The impact made a crisp thwack that was followed by a dull metallic ring.

Garrett collapsed down on all fours, stunned but conscious. Not far from his left hand lay a hacksaw—probably what the son of a bitch had used on Roscoe. He was looking up with a dizzy, stupefied gaze, as if not grasping or believing what had just been done to him. He made a series of weird, convulsive blinks. A trickle of blood seeped from the corner of his mouth.

“Do you like that? Do you like how that feels, Garrett? That's one one-hundredth of what you put that dog through.”

Garrett reached his hand up and touched the top of his head. Then he brought his arm down and stared at his red palm. There was a horrible kind of wonder on his face.

“There's more where that came from, you little shit,” she whispered.

She raised the shovel and held it aloft so Garrett had a chance to see it coming. His body wavered. He stretched his right arm blindly out above him, as if to fend off the next blow.

“No, Mom. No!” Garrett cried, the words reduced to a gurgling sound by the blood in his mouth.

“You cut him up and left him in a fucking box,” she screamed.

“I didn’t do it. Mom, it wasn’t m—”

The shovel fell again.

It was Garrett's forehead that took the brunt of the second blow and Rose watched his skull sink in, like a circle of frozen lake giving way beneath an ice skater.

Garrett toppled forward onto his stomach, lanky limbs sprawling in every direction, his feet spasming and thumping against the floor.

A final flash of Roscoe in her mind’s eye. As he’d looked up at her in his last moments.

This swing would settle the account for good.

The shovel rose again and fell, and Garrett's body was still.

Rose leaned over and whispered in her son's dead ear, “Where is your smirk now?”

She rose to her feet and stared down at what she'd done. Her mind was sealed off from the world in some horrified and exultant haze, where everything was silent and still.

But soon she became aware of sounds. At first it all sounded garbled and far away. Curses and pleas. Scurrying and screaming.

Breathing hard, she let the shovel fall over and hit the ground.

There was a ring of spittle around her lips and on her chin. She wiped it away. Then she noticed that her lips were moving, as if of their own accord, muttering who-knows-what. She stared at her hands, opening and closing them, as if they were someone else's. As if a stranger had borrowed them like a pair of gloves to do what had just been done.

Now the room was quieter. Tad and Luke weren't shouting anymore. She glanced at the open doorway, but they were no longer there. Where were they? She had an impression of movement. Little footsteps. Scuttling. Were they behind her?

Just as she was about to turn around, Rose perceived, not through sight but touch, a pressure on her back. A forceful but indistinct sensation that invaded her trance-like state. It seemed to move outward from some central point on her body, expanding like a reverberation. Like a gong had been struck within her. It had a heaviness, a density that she could not ignore. And yet, she didn't have the slightest idea what it was.

All this was happening in a split second. Before she had time to turn around. But then the feeling started to change. It took on more acute edges, as a sharpness mingled with the bland sensation.

And then, in the next instant, there was pain.

Lightning bolts of crackly and electric agony radiated out from her neck. And then it was everywhere at once.

Then, at the very center of the pain, a tinge of cold. A sleek, moving coolness, from a point on her left shoulder. As if an icicle had been pressed against her.

Out of the corner of her eye, a blurry shape was withdrawing something long and shiny from her shoulder. The world suddenly regained its sound, and Rose realized she was screaming.

She tried to turn around. To defend herself, before she even knew what she was defending herself against.

It was happening so fast. A second streak of silver. Then a second wave of pain.

A blade. That much she understood.

The tip pierced her skin midway down her back, wedging its way into her spine, prying two close-knit bones apart. It was in her spine itself. She could feel it tearing through the thick ribbon of nerves.

Then, suddenly there was no pain at all.

“You’re killing her,” a voice said.

“Shut up, Luke. Just stay still and shut up,” she heard Tad say. His voice sounded calm and icy.

Meanwhile, the floor was accelerating toward her. Legs she could no longer feel, but which she saw, buckled cleanly beneath her. She plummeted to the floor landing on her right side, her head plopped down not far from Garrett's body.

She tried to scream, but no sound came. She willed the words a second time. A second time, nothing. Not even a huff or a rush of air. Except for her face—which squirmed, contorted, and blinked—her body was motionless. She heard the sound of the knife being withdrawn from her back. Her mouth opened and closed, as silently as a dying fish, as she desperately tried to draw a breath into her lungs.

The ground in front of her—that was the only place her paralyzed head could gaze. A hammer and a roll of tape. Then, on the floor just inches from her face, she saw several of the baby spiders, whose exodus she’d unleashed moments earlier. The creatures were creeping about on tiny cautious legs. Her eyes darted frantically from side to side as a single, intrepid spider approached and began to scale her nose.

The floorboards creaked beside her ear and a horizontal version of Tad’s lower half came into view. He crouched down and looked at her. There was amusement in his eyes, when he saw she was alive and aware of what was happening. He smiled a tall vertical grin and drew his head close in to hers. In his hand he
clutched a knife, blade pointed down. His left hand appeared before her face and floated there. Then, he extended his index finger and brought his fingertip so close to her eye his fingernail almost touched it. Her lids at first fluttered and then she held them closed.

When she opened them again, Tad was holding the blade exactly where his finger had been, the tip a blur of silver, a hairsbreadth from the lens of her eye.

“No, Tad. No. There’s no time for that,” Luke said from somewhere behind her.

Tad looked annoyed. He turned and gave a scowl, but then lowered the knife.

A moment later, he brought his lips to Rose’s ear. She could feel him breathing on her cheek. Then he whispered, so softly that Luke couldn’t have heard, “Garrett didn’t kill your dog, you stupid bitch. Garrett hasn’t killed a dog in years. But I’ll give you one guess who did.”

Head motionless, she tracked the knife as it rose into the air, vanishing in the lofty heights beyond the periphery of her vision. For a moment it hung out of sight somewhere above her. It reminded her of one of the rides at the fair. No, at Six Flags. That one ride they called the Parachute Sky Jump. Rose had gone with her parents the first time in Dallas when she was just a kid. The passengers went up in little baskets a hundred or more feet into the sky.

She remembered how they'd all held hands, the three of them, she and her mom and her dad. They didn't say a word all the way up, as if observing one of those moments of prayer at church. And when you eventually reached the top, you could see the whole wide world. And you hung, dangling, for what seemed a terrifying eternity.

And then, finally, you fell.

21

Austin

It’s 5:58 a.m. The sun is supposed to come up at 6:34, according to an Internet site I consulted. That gives Courtney and me a little over thirty minutes to wind things up.

Courtney is writing her letter. Still in the bathtub. I untied her hands, but not her feet. I gave her a calculus textbook from her desk to write on. She’s placed the book and paper on the upward slope of her thighs. An awkward setup, but she manages.

I can hear the pen moving on the paper. Even beneath the drone of the fan. She’s getting close to the bottom of the backside of the page—which is all the space she gets. She writes quickly.

You’ll have to excuse the lack of humor in my reflections. I’m not feeling myself.

There have been a number of irregularities in the process tonight. Irregularities in me. I don’t know where to begin.

There is, if I’m feeling this right, moisture on my fingertips. Tiny tingling drops of perspiration. Unless I’m just imagining it. But no. I close my eyes. I feel it. There are voltages. There are droplets.

But the irregularities are in my head too.

Before now, the whole process—Movie Time—was like, if you will excuse a risqué analogy, sleeping with someone with a condom on. You’re inside the person. It’s intimate, but it’s filtered, blunted.