The Red Hunter(96)

“This time tomorrow,” he said, breathless when he put her down. “We’ll be in Anguilla.”

This time tomorrow, I promised silently, you’ll be in the ground.

I watched as he went around to the trunk of the car and retrieved red cans of gasoline, a pile of rags. He stowed the bag in the back of the car, pulled the girl into a long, passionate kiss. They were both dark, clad in denim, both thin in a wiry, tough kind of way. Against the black of the car and the gray of the sky and the ash of the trees shedding their leaves, there was a kind of beauty in the scene, a dark beauty.

“Wait here,” he said. “Keep the engine running.”

He took the cans inside. I calculated.

Do I need to kill her first? I wondered. Since I didn’t know her or who she was or if she deserved to die, I guessed not. Maybe she was just some small-town fool, one who fell for the wrong guy because she didn’t know any better. Maybe she was only guilty of poor judgment. I’d only killed one person in cold blood, and I didn’t like the way it had changed me. Could I follow Beckham into the house without her seeing me? But her head was bent over her cell phone—like everyone’s. Every free moment, no matter what, people reach for those devices. Such a blessing for someone who doesn’t want to be seen. Lucky for her, she didn’t even look up as I slipped from the barn and took the long way around the far side, and up the tree line to the back door.

I stood there a moment, remembering how I looked inside that night and saw them, how confusing it was, how I didn’t understand what I was seeing at first. It was all still there, memories as vivid as photographs in my hand.

The door opened easily, unlocked, waiting for me.

I walked through the laundry room, into the kitchen. I could hear him banging around upstairs, and already I felt the tickle of smoke on my sinuses. I pulled up my hood and walked down the long hallway and came to stand at the foot of the stairs. I felt it rise up, all of it, all my anger and all my pain, the throb of adrenaline and, yes, the thrill of the pending fight.

He stopped halfway down the stairs, frozen, confused, his face sloping into surprise.

“Hi, there,” I said, tilting my face up so that he could see me. Slowly, recognition dawned and I couldn’t help but smile.

“Remember me?”





thirty-nine


There are two different worlds, two different versions of me. There’s the girl I used to be, the one who went to the mall and the movies with her friends, the one whose mother was still reading to her, still tucking her in at night, right up until the night she died. In that Zoey’s world, it was a big deal to sneak out and meet a boy. That Zoey would be upset if she got anything less than an A on her biology exam.

The night my parents died, I became a different kind of girl, and the world I inhabited afterward was a strange, frightening place full of dark alleys and trap doors, where strangers lurked in the shadows looking to do harm. A part of me died that night; a part of me came alive. This girl is stronger than she was—broken, twisted, but sharper and more dangerous for it.

Rhett Beckham kept coming down the stairs, stopping at the bottom, his dark eyes on me. He’d aged badly, raggedly like Didion. I was taken aback by the deep lines on his face, the gray in his hair. He didn’t seem as tall as I remembered; he was thinner.

“You,” he said, like Didion. Surprised. As if I only existed in some vague ugly memory he had of his own life. As if I wasn’t the person who bore the scars of his misdeeds. I moved in front of the door.

“You knew it was here,” he said. He held me in an almost amused gaze. He wasn’t afraid of me. He thought I was small, weak, just a girl. Always better to be underestimated. The smell of smoke was strong and growing stronger; it tickled at the back of my throat.

He wasn’t wrong. I did know there was something down there in the basement. I didn’t know what or where. Just like I knew that there was something wrong with my dad, that he was distant and far away, more than usual. Or that there was something wrong with my parents. Whispered arguments behind closed doors, my dad on the couch in the mornings. But it was white noise in my consciousness; I was aware, but it wasn’t affecting me in any real way. I was that other girl, in that other world. There was nothing dark in that place. I was sheltered, protected, and loved.

He moved in fast, tried to knock me aside with the back of his hand. I easily caught his wrist with my left hand and pulled. He was tall, strong, but I immediately determined that he was inflexible, with bad balance. I used the momentum of his swing to lead him off center. I came in close, grabbed his shirt with both hands, and drove my knee up hard into his groin. Then I used my elbow to strike him in the jaw—an ugly crack, a spray of blood and saliva.

He crumbled, curling up in pain too great for noise. Then he lay at my feet, helpless. And I stood looking down.

It was too easy. I wanted a fight, I realized. I wanted Didion and Beckham to be the monsters I imagined them to be. I wanted to fight them and win, emerge victorious from battle with the titans that destroyed my life, that killed my parents, that broke me in two. But in the end, they were just men, weak and dirty, criminals greedy and base. They could only do what they did to me because I was an innocent girl, because my father was surprised and bound, unarmed, because my mother never knew what hit us. There was almost nothing to either one of them.

I dropped to straddle Beckham, turning him on his back, pinning his elbows with my knees. I withdrew my father’s hunting knife, the same one I’d driven into Didion’s heart.