Fear the Darkness: A Thriller Read online

  Mallory pushed the seat back into place. More time went by, but the car didn’t start up again. She must have still been in the backseat, because I was able to hear her cell go off.

  Some enchanted evening. She waited a few beats without answering it, to make it appear relaxed and normal.

  “Hi, Carlo!” she said brightly, and even I would have sworn she didn’t have someone dying in her trunk. “Oh, Gemma-Kate.” I tried to yell loudly enough to be heard through the backseat upholstery, but the most I could summon in my state was something like the sound of a newborn seal. Mallory couldn’t have possibly heard me, but I could hear her. “Uh-huh, she came over a while ago … I think she said she was going hiking. I was busy with my husband Owen and not paying too much attention … Maybe up the Linda Vista trail?… I’m sorry … You know, now that I’m thinking about it, she wasn’t looking so good…”

  I gathered all my remaining strength and battered against the back of the seat with my fists.

  Mallory said, still brightly, “Oh, you know, I think I hear the UPS guy at the door. When Brigid gets home, would you have her call me so I know she’s all right? Thanks. Bye.” Swallowing that last word with the seductively breathy swallow she always used for her good-byes. Picture perfect.

  I heard the back door of the car open and shut again, and shortly the car started up, started to move. I listened for the sound of other cars, but heard nothing. Wherever we were it was on a road well away from any traffic so Mallory wouldn’t have to worry about being seen. Maybe we weren’t even on a road at all.

  I may have lost consciousness. As it is I can’t say how much time elapsed before I was brought back by a pounding on the lid of the trunk, maybe with the butt of the gun.

  “Are you still with us?’ Mallory asked through the lid.

  The lid of the trunk opened, letting in much more light than cracking the backseat had. I still couldn’t be sure how much time had gone by; the sun was in my eyes, and I struggled to remember whether it was afternoon or morning so I could tell where in the sky the sun was, what direction I was facing. Mallory floated in front of me, or maybe it was the two Mallorys. They were both blurry.

  I tried to grip the jack, but she took it out of my hand easily. “Do you think you have enough strength to get out of the car or do I have to pull you?”

  I think I might have moved my mouth, but no sound came out. Mallory made a little perturbed sound. “I don’t want you to think I’m enjoying this, Brigid. You’ve been a good friend. It just seems like one thing follows another and options get limited. I hope on some level you understand. I’d hate to think of you thinking badly of me. Here, this cord should help.”

  Mallory balanced her gun on the fender and then, first cautiously feeling the side of my neck to make sure my pulse was as weak as it ought to be, jerked the bungee cord out from where I was half lying on it. She checked my pulse again, seemed satisfied. Wound the cord around my shoulders, bracing her hip against the back of the car, and tugged. “Come on, help me out just a little. I need to get back to the house. You’ll feel better outside the car. Better than both of us sitting around here forever waiting for you to go.”

  I tried to lift my hands to leverage against the back rim. They fell away. With a sigh Mallory pulled some more until I was sitting up, then with one hand wound around my hair that had at some point fallen out of its ponytail, she pulled my still-unresponsive body with a final heave out of the trunk. I bumped against the fender on the way down to the ground, where I lay on my side.

  “Okay, nearly there,” Mallory said. Apparently this stretch of road was so flat she could see far off in both directions. She took a careful look and, seeing no cars coming or going, leaned down to roll my body off the road into a small ditch dug out by seasons of rain.

  I heard a sound, either a bird or a cell phone. It must have been the cell phone, because I heard Mallory say somewhere above me, “Hello?” Then, “Hello, Carlo! Didn’t you talk to Gemma-Kate? I told her Brigid was over here asking if I wanted to go hiking, but I couldn’t leave Owen … Oh, I don’t know, maybe two hours ago? Does that seem long to you?… I know, I know, I told her she probably shouldn’t go by herself with her condition and all, but you know our Brigid. She didn’t look so good, just not her usual self. Would you call me when you hear from her?… That’s just me, I’m a worrywart. Bye.”

  Still unresponsive, I lay there at the bottom of the drainage ditch, my mouth and eyes grainy with the sand through which I’d been rolled. Mallory’s face floated across my field of vision, out, then back. When the face came into focus it looked like a different Mallory I’d never seen before. It looked scared. Not nervous, like before, but scared. “They’re concerned, Brigid,” she said. “It makes me wonder if you’ve been telling me the whole truth. Who else knows, Brigid?”

  I moved my lips but couldn’t get any sound out. She got down on her knees to try to hear better what I was saying, but was careful not to come too close even now. She said, more loudly this time, “Who else knows, Brigid?”

  “No. One,” I managed.

  “I want to be very clear on this. Did you tell Gemma-Kate?” When I didn’t answer, Mallory reached down to where the bullet had hit my thigh. She pushed her thumb into the wound, and I managed to get out a scream that sounded like “no.”

  She pushed again as she said, “Carlo?”

  I tried to speak but couldn’t, though I needed desperately to save them. “Wa,” I blew the air through dry lips.

  Mallory sighed impatiently. “Maybe just a little so we get this straight.” She left me in the ditch and went back to the car, returned a moment later with the water. She poured a few drops onto my lips but pulled away when I tried to get my mouth around the bottle. I pulled the drops into my mouth to wet my tongue and felt the bit of liquid ease down the back of my throat.

  I rasped, “If they suspected they wouldn’t call you.”

  She considered that. “Because I swear I’ll kill them both if you did.”

  Hearing her say that made me aware of the tremble in her voice. Her extravagant threat and the tremble meant bravado. It had just occurred to her that maybe she didn’t have everything as neatly planned as she thought. That things were unraveling and she was unraveling with them. But it was too late to change course. “I’ve gotta get out of here,” she said, mostly to herself.

  She left me for a moment, and when I next saw her standing above me she had the jack in one hand and the gun in the other. She knelt down at the edge of the ditch and raised the jack over my leg. I groaned at her not to. Surprisingly, she stopped, and sat back on her heels.

  “You’re right, they might be able to tell,” she said. She glanced around, left the jack on the ground, got up, and used the barrel of the gun to knock off an arm from a teddy-bear cholla cactus nearby. She knocked the arm across the ground with the gun until it fell into the ditch beside me. Kneeling again, she put the gun down beside her, placed the spiny appendage over my leg wound, and used the jack to tamp it down. I cried out again, still more of a grunt than a scream.

  “Did you ever notice how these things have little hooks at the end of the spines? Once they go into you it’s really hard to get them out.”

  She went back to the car and returned with my stick. It was made of light wood, so she could break it in two under her shoe. “You broke the stick, and tried to dig the cholla out with the blade.”

  She dug around in my leg, busily disguising anything that might have looked like a gunshot wound. I heard someone making high-pitched barks of agony. “But poor Brigid, you succumbed and only succeeded in making your leg a mess.”

  Mallory stopped to admire her handiwork. She had put the gun down on the ground close to her side. I suppose she had stopped worrying about my fighting back, having seen that I had trouble holding on to anything, and now I was further weakened by the pain.

  But maybe the pain helped. I thought about the girls at the women’s shelter, the one who preferred to be a victim
.

  Even if she never knew, I’d show her now what it meant to not be a victim.

  I reached up more slowly than I would have liked but had the element of surprise on my side. Sightlessly I grabbed for the gun but found my hand on the barrel rather than the grip. Mallory saw what I was doing and dropped the stick, grabbing for the gun herself.

  I was weak and wounded, and she was strong and well hydrated. What do I do now, Baxter? Got any good ideas about what to use when there’s nothing to use?

  My body, I thought. The weight of my body was all I had left.

  I rolled over onto my side, which helped pull my arm underneath me and the gun closer. That meant it was in danger of hitting me in a vital organ if it went off again, but it also put Mallory off balance. She slipped down the side of the ditch on top of me. I had the gun and her right arm under me. With her left hand she was slapping my head. At any other time it would have made me laugh.

  We thrashed about in that narrow space with as much benefit as a couple of fish on deck. I might have been almost useless given the effects of the drugs and the advanced hyperthermia. But Mallory, while a murderess, was not experienced at hand-to-hand combat and by her own admission wasn’t in the best condition. I had maybe this much of an edge. While she continued to punch me, now in my lower back, which she knew was a vulnerable area, I succeeded in moving her arm closer to my face. I bit down on whatever flesh was available and hung on. She did what I hoped she’d do. Her fingers opened reflexively. She wrenched out her arm but left the gun behind.

  I could tell she knew that the balance had tipped in my favor. Mallory scrambled backwards on her butt, trying to get up the side of the shallow arroyo without turning her back on me, as if that would protect her. There were lots of rocks lying around. If she got to one of them it would only take one good hit to finish me off, I was that gone. She was about ten feet away from me when I rolled back over on my side and aimed the gun at her. There was still more than one Mallory scrambling up the dirt. I chose one of them and fired.

  I don’t know if a round hit her, or if it did, where. She kept moving. With a small-caliber pistol it’s like that; no one shot brings them down like in the movies. I fired again, and hit the car’s right rear tire. It sank. The practice range was nothing like this.

  I got her in my sights once more. She was crawling across the top of the arroyo. Maybe I had gotten her once, maybe not. I pulled myself up the side of the arroyo after her and balanced the gun on the lip. She had managed to get up and was stumbling toward the car. Even with a flat tire she might be able to get far enough to get help, say I was crazy and had tried to kill her. I couldn’t let her leave me here. I was near death and needed her cell phone to call for help. I was ready to kill for a cell phone.

  I squeezed my eyes to control the blur and fired once more. She had gotten close to her car and sagged against it, the front of her face hitting the rear fender and dragging over the tire as she went down. Chances are that meant I had her. Mallory was far too vain to let anything happen to her face.

  I kept my hold on the gun, though, as I crawled over the dirt up to her body. I felt through her pockets for the cell phone, but she didn’t have it on her. Maybe she had dropped it. I hoped to God she hadn’t left it in the car, because I wasn’t sure I had the strength to climb into the front seat. Instead I crawled over Mallory’s legs and felt blindly around the car.

  My fingers finally touched it in the dirt not far from the trunk. I could hardly see the little icons but managed to choose one and dial nine-one-one. A woman answered.

  “Shot…” My hand dropped to the ground and I watched it lie there, still grasping the phone. I was never going to be able to speak loudly enough to be heard at that distance, so I focused everything I had on raising my hand again, trying to speak into the phone. “Track m … dy…”

  It was the best I could do. I left the signal on and slumped against the side of the car next to Mallory’s still body, listening to the now urgent voice of the emergency operator asking what were probably nonessential questions like was I hurt. Mallory’s eyes were open and staring at the mountains in the distance, so I knew she was dead. I watched the blood seeping through the dirt on my jeans and thought I should get that bungee cord that had been dropped behind the car and make a tourniquet. I also knew it would be a smart thing to get a bottle of water out of the front seat where I kept it. And if I could get myself into the front seat, I imagined I could start the car and drive somewhere. If I could find the keys. I imagine I was still thinking about how I should do all that when I passed out.

  Fifty–five

  I woke up in an ambulance, still not knowing where I was. It didn’t help my confusion when I saw Carlo’s face hovering over mine, with the expression of a man looking into a coffin. There was dirt streaking his face, and a little smudge of what was probably my blood, though I couldn’t think how it got there.

  He turned to one of the paramedics, who was sitting on the other side of me. “How are we doing?” he asked.

  We feel like hell, I thought.

  “Temperature is coming down. We’ve got her on fluids. She’s stable,” he said.

  “Good,” Carlo said. Then he looked back at me. “I’m not saying it’s a huge problem, but are you going to keep pulling shit like this?” Carlo can be salty enough, but he usually doesn’t talk that way unless he’s really upset. He was really upset.

  I shook my head no, not sure my voice would work. I felt bad but figured I had an excellent chance at survival and needed to ask a few questions. I reached down to my thigh and felt about. My fingers encountered flaps of denim where they must have slit the fabric while I was out.

  “Leg,” I asked.

  Carlo gripped my hand more tightly—I noticed now he was gripping my hand—and shushed me.

  But the paramedic nodded, possibly knowing a pro when he met one. “You’ve got a bad wound in your left thigh, but it doesn’t look like a lot of blood loss. They’ll get the cholla out at the hospital.”

  I didn’t have to ask if Mallory was dead. I lifted my right hand and with my thumb stopped an imaginary stopwatch. My private joke. “Whe—?” I whispered.

  “On your way to Oro Valley Hospital,” he said.

  I shook my head, impatient even in that state. Tried to talk again. Couldn’t. “Wa,” I managed.

  The paramedic grabbed a bottle of water and put a straw in it for me. After I wet my mouth and throat, licked my lips, and gave an extra experimental swallow, I said, “I mean … where did you find me?”

  He looked puzzled, but he answered anyway. “On the road that runs up Calle Concordia to the hiking trails on Pusch Ridge. You didn’t know?”

  Mallory had driven me around and then ended up right behind her property. That’s how she could easily walk back from the car. And she could say I’d gone hiking from her house. And I could disappear and even be found later without putting any suspicion on her.

  “Owen,” I said. “Hollinger.”

  “That’s the woman’s husband … the woman who was shot,” Carlo said to the paramedics. I noticed he was careful to put things in a passive voice, not to phrase things in a way that implicated me in wrongdoing. He said to me, “I went to the house first, and found Owen alone. I found Annette’s number and she’s with him.”

  My voice started to come back a little, and I licked my lips to get them moving. “What were you going to do at Mallory’s house?”

  Carlo grinned. “I don’t know, I wasn’t thinking clearly, but imagined things. Kicking down the door, clubbing Mallory to death with a bottle of Asti Spumante. The thought was strangely satisfying.”

  That meant he wasn’t going to stay angry at me. I held up a thumb, but when I remembered how she had a gun I put the thumb down and gripped his hand a little harder. They must have given me something, because then I think I passed out again.

  Fifty–six

  I got discharged the following day after spending the night for treatment of the wo
und in my leg, observation, and more rehydration. Carlo helped me into the front seat of the rental car, and he drove.

  “Good thing I had that cell phone so they could track me,” I said.

  “Oh, they were already looking for you before you called,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “When I got home Gemma-Kate was upset that she hadn’t heard from you in a while. She told me everything, Mallory poisoning you. Mallory poisoning you! It sounded so outlandish I got angry with her and with myself for not taking you more seriously when you told me Gemma-Kate was dangerous. But then when I called Mallory there were three things—”

  “What, Perfesser?”

  “First, before I could say anything, she said you were hiking. You always tell me what trail you’re going on when you’re alone.”

  “And second?”

  “Mallory said you weren’t looking so good. Now, if Gemma-Kate hadn’t told me what was going on I might not have been suspicious, but Mallory didn’t say anything about your bruised face. Mallory would have said something specific about that, not just use the general phrase ‘not looking so good.’”

  “What else?”

  “A linguistic anomaly. Mallory said you weren’t ‘looking so good.’ She would never have said it that way. She would have said ‘well,’ that you weren’t ‘looking well.’ Everything about the conversation—again, given the assumptions that Gemma-Kate had provided—was just wrong. Finally, when I checked your nightstand where you keep your gun, and saw that it was missing, I knew you had taken it with you, and that meant serious business.”

  “I didn’t lie to you. Gemma-Kate delayed you coming home.”

  “She told me,” he said.

  “So you called the cops?”

  “I tried that first, but it wasn’t that easy. They said not enough time had gone by to start a search. They wouldn’t listen to my crazy story about Mallory, and I have to admit I probably wasn’t making much sense. So I called Elias, who called a parishioner, someone who’s a detective on the police force.”