And There He Kept Her (Ben Packard #1)(17)

Carl took cigarettes from his shirt pocket and lit one as he surveyed the scene in front of him. Emmett had taped the girl’s mouth and cuffed her hands behind her back while she was still unconscious. She had a lump on the back of her head as soft as old fruit. Since coming to, she hadn’t moved much beyond rolling on to her side. One of her ankles was chained to a steel pole holding up the floor above them.

“You got a red Pontiac sitting up the road just past your place,” Carl said. “I grabbed this out of the front seat.” He unshouldered the backpack and left it on the workbench.

“Find the car keys,” Emmett said. “They gotta be on one of them.”

The boy’s very dead body was awkwardly crumpled on the landing at the bottom of the stairs. Carl pinched the pants pockets and felt inside the front of the boy’s sweatshirt. He turned to the girl, his rubbery clown face and the dangling cigarette as close to the side of her face as he could get without burning her. She closed her eyes and tried to curl up tighter. “You sure this one ain’t a boy, too? Gots awful short hair. Tiny titties.”

Carl stuck two thick fingers in the front pocket of her jeans, pulled the keys out, and jangled them in the air. “What’s the plan?”

“What makes you think there’s a goddamn plan?” Emmett asked. “You think I was expecting something like this?”

Carl smoked and towered over the girl, chin pinned to his chest. She rolled to one side to look up at him. “This one’s your problem,” he said. “It would have been better if you killed ’em both.”

“I didn’t know there were two of them until after.”

“It’s not too late. You could just…” Carl made a trigger-pulling motion with his finger.

Emmett imagined putting the shotgun to the girl’s head. She turned to him, pleading with her eyes. He looked away and rocked. “I can’t kill a girl cuffed to a pole.”

“You sure as shit killed that one over there,” Carl said, pointing with his cigarette.

“That was an intruder. I was protecting myself.”

“What about that one gal way back? Shot her point-blank while she was chained in that room.”

Emmett stared at Carl like he had no idea what he was talking about. The girl was sobbing now, louder and louder behind the tape over her mouth. Wanda cried like that, too, but I never shot Wanda. The hell is he talking about?

His memories from the time before he started taking so many pain pills were slow to come back. Sometimes it felt like the last six, seven years of his life—trapped in this house, in this body with every kind of pain imaginable—was the only life he’d ever lived. Sixty years of this, not six.

Then he remembered the jogger.

“That was different. I was cleaning up your mess. You wrecked that woman, coming back here day after day.”

Carl shook his head and hitched up his pants. “So what are you gonna do? You can’t call the cops. You get one of those K9s snooping around, it’ll find them three you got buried out there.”

“One of ’em belongs to you,” Emmett said. “I had nothing to do with that third one.” He squirmed in his rocker, trying to get his hand down in the pocket of his pants for the handcuff key. He tossed it to Carl. “I’m not calling anybody else.” He regretted calling Carl, the sonofabitch. “Lock her in the room until I can think of something.”

At the mention of the room, the girl started thrashing. The handcuffs around her ankle rang against the steel pole. Carl put a big boot on her shoulder and pressed it to the ground so she was flat on her belly. The boot was almost the same length as her back. “Now you got her going,” he said. He stepped on his cigarette, then got down with his knees in the girl’s back, almost all his weight on her as he uncuffed her from the pole.

She was breathless, sobbing soundlessly when he got up, flung an arm around her neck, and dragged her backward. Emmett turned in his chair as far as he could to watch them go. One of the girl’s shoes peeled off and lay sideways as she was carried away.

Carl came out a minute later, asked Emmett for a rag or a towel of some kind. Emmett pointed him to a box above the washing machine. Another minute and then Carl shut the door on the room and ran the bolt. The volume of the girl’s cries went down by more than half. Emmett took a deep breath and slowed his rocking.

“You winged her on the right side. She’s bleeding some from her hip and thigh. Her hand is pretty tore up,” Carl said. He took off his hat, wiped his forehead.

“Get me a beer outta the fridge. Get yourself one if you want,” Emmett said.

They drank and filled the basement with cigarette smoke. The sun had come up, turning the sky gray-blue. Emmett was thinking about the view his neighbor Ruth would have of his place if she happened to look this way. Plenty of trees between them but no leaves out yet. They should have moved the car and the body while it was still dark.

Carl started laughing to himself as he tipped the last of his beer back.

“What’s so goddamn funny?” Emmett asked.

“Just thinking about how you got a new bird in your cage. She just flew through the window. Not like them other two. It’s like my wife tells our daughter—you don’t find love, love finds you. You lucky bastard.”

Emmett rocked in his chair and seethed. He’d never been lucky a day in his life. He didn’t feel lucky now.