And There He Kept Her (Ben Packard #1)(76)

Carl pushed the wrecker faster. They passed an intersection and kept going, both of them watching to see if the other car might slow and turn. It didn’t.

“Next intersection has a stop sign,” Carl said.

“Don’t stop,” Emmett said. He held his breath as they got closer to the intersection. He looked out his window watching for headlights approaching the four-way stop. “Clear this way,” he said.

The wrecker was going ninety as it raced through the intersection. They hit a dip on the other side. Emmett felt his stomach fall away and rise up again. The boy’s car banged behind them like it had been dropped.

Carl didn’t slow down. They both watched the headlights get smaller and smaller as the distance between them and the other car increased. The last they saw of the car was its turn signal coming on and the sweep of its headlights in another direction.

Neither one of them said anything. Carl backed off the speed and lit a cigarette. “I’ve been thinking about what I’m going to do to that girl tomorrow,” he said.

He meant later today but Emmett didn’t correct him.

“I like how you have her in those manacles chained to the wall. I’m going to get her on her knees and shorten the chain so she can only hold herself up by her elbows on the mattress, and I’m gonna loop it around her neck so she can’t back up from the wall without choking herself. Can you picture what I’m saying?”

Emmett stared out his window. “She’s not gonna be much fun if you choke her to death.”

“I ain’t gonna choke her to death, but she’s gonna have a mighty hard time breathing during some of it.”

You have to have a plan to stop him, Emmett.

He tried to change the subject. “Where are we taking the car? Not back to the junkyard at your place.”

Carl ignored him. “I like that she’s a fighter, but she’s gonna pay for hitting me with that chain. I’m going to take my time with her.”

“You’ll ruin that girl like you did the last one.”

“That’s what she’s there for, Emmett! Goddamn. Are you fucking simple? You don’t put a woman in a cage and wait for her to learn to like it. Do you still not know that yet?”

He did know that. He knew it after Wanda killed herself. He had grabbed the jogger anyway, thinking she would be different somehow. She never had a chance, thanks to Carl. Emmett knew he couldn’t keep the girl around forever. That didn’t mean he wanted to see her broken down like a deer carcass.

“I’m gonna do you a favor and show you just how to take care of that girl. I’ll come back the next day and do it again. And again the next day. When I’m not there, you can try to do like me or the two of you can have a tea party or whatever the fuck it is you have in mind for her.”

A padlock on the door wasn’t going to be enough to stop Carl, Emmett realized. He could weld the door shut with the girl inside, and Carl would bulldoze his way through the block wall to get to her. She was his now. Emmett stared at the cigarette in his hand and tried not to think about it.

They were almost back to Carl’s when he suddenly realized Carl’s plan for the car. “We’re going to the quarries,” Emmett said.

“Bingo, genius.”

***

When they made the turn onto Carl’s driveway, Carl veered to the right of the garage and picked up a dirt trail that followed a post-and-wire fence near the property line. After the small backyard lawn and a garden with an eight-foot deer fence around it, the land turned to wild prairie, still brown and beaten down from winter. Carl drove slowly. The wrecker bounced against the uneven terrain, and the chains holding the car sang like wind chimes. The trail went straight back for two hundred yards to a shelter belt of arborvitae trees hiding an unpermitted junkyard of wrecked cars lined up door to door and stacked on top of each other two high. There were giant racks built from timbers stocked with more car bodies and long, rusting parts.

They turned left, behind the vehicle graveyard. In the headlights Emmett saw skeletal chassis and old engines laid open like dissected hearts, their valve covers and pistons missing. Thick trees bordered their right where the clearing of the land had stopped. They drove another tenth of a mile and turned right. Now they were in a wide clearing, ugly as a scar on the landscape, planted with scaffold utility towers. Three electrical transmission lines hoisted high overhead hummed with the menace of a wasp nest.

The land was once owned by the Great Northern Mining Company starting in the late 1800s. Quarrying ended in the 1950s. When the pumping stopped, the two dozen granite quarries filled with groundwater. At one point, the federal government had wanted to use the site to bury radioactive waste. Now the land was owned by the state and largely neglected. In the summer, people ignored the NO TRESPASSING signs and sunned themselves on large slabs of granite and swam in the quarries’ coffee-colored water.

Carl slowed down and edged the truck through a narrow gap in the trees. Just a few yards later, a high wall of stacked spoil blocks on the far side of the quarry came into sight. Behind it, a towering pile of grout rock rose taller than the surrounding trees.

Their side of the quarry was an exposed outcrop, faceted and fractured by a fault where red and gray granite came together. There was just enough room around the edge for Carl to maneuver the wrecker around and back the boy’s car up to the rim of the gaping hole. He put the truck in park and got out without a word.