And There He Kept Her (Ben Packard #1)(57)

Emmett looked at Carl and looked at the girl. His breath came in ragged, wheezing gasps. The girl had a wild, dazed look in her eyes. She fell to her knees on the cot. The old springs went ehhh-ehhh, ehhh-ehhh.

“You should’ve waited for me,” Emmett said. He had a laugh inside him he knew needed to stay there. Humiliating Carl would mean the end of the girl, right here, right now. There’d be nothing Emmett could do to stop him.

“I think she broke my fucking cheekbone, Emmett.”

“What was she supposed to do? You attacked her. You wanted to see her and you saw her. Now get up and get out.”

Carl pushed himself up and half turned in Emmett’s direction. Just as quickly, he turned again and lunged for the girl. He got her throat in one hand and her bandaged hand in his other. He was close enough that long strands of his hair fell over his eyes and brushed against her face. “You and me are gonna have a good time together,” he hissed at her.

Carl rapped the girl’s bandaged hand hard against the wall, then let her go. She collapsed on the cot like she’d been shot dead. He and Emmett stood shoulder to shoulder in the doorway, both facing opposite directions. “I’m coming back for her, Emmett. And next time I’m going to do more than look.”

A second later he had disappeared through the basement door into the night.

***

Emmett didn’t have the strength to follow Carl back up the slope so he waited and watched from the corner of the house until he saw Frankenstein’s headlights back up and heard its muffler recede as Carl drove away. Emmett limped to his rocker and stared out the open door at the moon rising over the mud lake while he lit a cigarette. Behind him he heard the girl vomiting in her bucket. He smoked and studied the dirt caked to his feet from walking outside. The bare skin on his shoulders and arms was damp against the chair’s leather back. He worked his hand beneath his undershirt and scratched in places where his fat overlapped.

Carl had a lesson coming to him. You didn’t treat another man’s property like that. It reminded Emmett of when Carl was just starting his shop and couldn’t afford the equipment he needed for certain jobs. Emmett loaned him tools a few times but stopped in short order because Carl never brought things back. Or if he did, something was wrong with them. No apology. No respect. No sense of obligation. If that sonofabitch thought he was going to ruin this girl, he’d better think again.

Emmett stabbed out the cigarette, heaved himself up from the rocker, and opened the door to the room. The timer on the lamp had clicked it off. In what little light got by him from the basement, he saw the girl on her side, head hanging over the bucket. He saw her convulse in pain and retch again. She had nothing left in her to come up.

“How bad are you hurt?”

She didn’t respond.

“How’s your hand?”

She twisted her red face in his direction. “It’s fucking killing me!” she yelled. “What do you think? He smashed it.”

Emmett flinched as she retched again. He tried to think of something to say to her—about Carl, about keeping him away from her, about anything—but couldn’t find the words. He had a whole pill he’d meant for himself in his pocket. He went into the room and pushed the pill into her good hand until her fist closed around it. “Take it when you’re done throwing up. I’ll check on you in the morning.”

As he locked her in, he knew he wasn’t going to let her die by running out of insulin. For selfish reasons, he needed her alive and well enough for Carl to think he had something waiting for him once the car was gone. If Carl insisted on looking in on her again before loading up the Grand Am, the whole deal would be off if she was dead or dying. And yes, maybe he was growing attached to her. She was a lot of work. She was also someone to talk to. It had been an eternity since he’d had anything close to that.

“I’ll get your insulin tomorrow,” he said through the door. He waited for a response.

Nothing.

“And I’ll look for David Copperhead at the library,” he added.

As he went up the basement stairs, the pain in his back knifed him with each step. He had to stop halfway and catch his breath while he held the rail. In the kitchen, he took two pills and rinsed them down with a glug of beer. He belched and looked out the kitchen window at the moon and its reflection on the still lake. He thought about everything he needed to get the girl tomorrow. Insulin and better food to eat. That didn’t bother him. If there were two places in town Emmett knew front to back, they were the grocery store and the pharmacy.

The library, though.

What the hell do I know about getting a book at the library?





Chapter Nineteen


Sunday morning

Packard called the station to find out about the calls that had come in after the first news reports went out. They were pretty much exactly what he expected. People who saw a maroon Grand Am or what they thought was a Grand Am. Might have been a Taurus now that I think about it. Didn’t see a license plate. Didn’t see who was driving. I have a neighbor who has a red Grand Am and I don’t trust the guy. You should check him out.

Nothing concrete. No positive ID or even a pretty good ID of the two kids. He assigned a deputy to make follow-up calls but he didn’t expect anything to come of it.

He found the piece of paper from yesterday with Dan Gherlick’s phone number on it and called.