The Stake Page 7

  Just too damn close.

  Dad had reminded them about a family gunned down by mistake a few years earlier. It was a drug hit. The killers had gone to the wrong house, the one next door to the residence of their intended victims.

  “We’re getting out of here,” Dad had said, even while the street outside was still jammed with police cars.

  Two weeks later they were on the way to Mulehead Bend.

  They knew the town from having vacationed there just a month before the shooting. They’d spent a night in a motel, followed by a week in a houseboat on the river. They’d all enjoyed the area, it was fresh in their minds, and it seemed like a good place to find sanctuary from the mad, crowded hunting grounds of Los Angeles.

  Sometimes the wind and heat were enough to drive you crazy. You had to watch out for scorpions and black widow spiders and several varieties of poisonous snakes. But the chances of catching a bullet in the head or getting abducted by a pervert were mighty slim.

  Lane looked upon L.A. as a prison from which she and her family had escaped. The freedom was glorious.

  She swung her car onto the dust and gravel in front of Betty’s place and beeped the horn once. Betty lived in a mobile home, as did the majority of Mulehead Bend’s population. It was firmly planted on a foundation. A porch and an extra room had been added on. It looked pretty much like a normal house from the outside, though the interior always seemed narrow and cramped when Lane visited.

  Betty trudged down the porch stair as if laboring under the burden of her weight — which was considerable. She managed to raise her head and nod a greeting.

  Leaning across the passenger seat, Lane opened the door for her. Betty swung her book bag into the backseat. The fabric of her tan shirt was already dark under the armpits. The car rocked slightly as she climbed in. She shut the door so hard that Lane winced.

  “Well, look at you,” Betty said, her voice as slow and somber as always. “What’d you do, mug Dolly Parton?”

  “Who’d youmug, Indiana Jones?”

  “Yucka yucka,” she muttered.

  Lane steered onto the road. “We picking up Henry?”

  “Only if you want to.”

  “Well, is he expecting us?”

  “I suppose.”

  “You two aren’t fighting again, are you?”

  “Just the usual grief about my culinary preferences. I told him he’s no prize himself, and if he thinks he can do better, he should go ahead and try, and good riddance.”

  “True love,” Lane said.

  She swung around a bend and accelerated up the road to Henry’s house. He was out in front, sitting on a small, white-painted boulder next to the driveway, reading a paperback. When he saw them coming, he slipped the book into his leather briefcase. He stood up, ran a hand over the top of his crew cut, and stuck out his thumb as if hoping to hitch a ride with strangers.

  “What a dork,” Betty muttered.

  “Oh, he’s cute,” Lane said.

  “He’s a nerd.”

  That was a fact, Lane supposed. In his running shoes, old blue jeans, plaid shirt, and sunglasses, he could almost pass for a regular guy. But the briefcase gave him away. So did the rather dopey, cheerful look on his lean face. And the way his head preceded the rest of his body made him look, to Lane, like an adventurous turtle.

  He was a nerd, no doubt about it. But Lane liked him.

  “Good morning, sports fans!”

  “Yo!” Lane greeted him.

  Betty climbed out, shoved the seat back forward, and ducked into the backseat. Henry got in after her. Hanging over the seat, he managed to pull the door shut. Then his head swiveled toward Lane. “Foxy outfit there, lady.”

  “Thanks.”

  “ ‘She had a body like a mountain road,’ ” he said. “ ‘Full of curves and places you’d like to stop for a picnic’ ”

  “Mike Hammer?” Lane asked.

  “Mack Donovan, Dead Low Tide.” He dropped backward, or was yanked by Betty.

  “You never talk to me that way,” the girl grumbled.

  He whispered something that Lane couldn’t hear over Ronnie Milsap. She turned the radio down, and heard a giggly squeal from Betty. Making a U-turn, she headed down the hill.

  “So, you have a big weekend?” Henry asked after a while.

  “Okay,” Lane said. “Nothing special. I went shopping yesterday.”

  “No dream date with Jim Dandy, King of the Studs?”

  “He had to go out of town with his parents.”

  “Toobad. And I bet he didn’t even have the courtesy to leave you his biceps.”

  “Nope, I had to go without.”

  “Rotten luck. Should’ve come to the drive-in with us. Saw a couple of dynamite films. Trashedand Attack of the S.S. Zombie Queens.”

  “Sorry I missed them.”

  “Sorry Isaw them,” Betty said.

  “Well, you didn’t see much of them, that’s for sure. Between your forays to the snack bar and the John...”

  “Hush up.”

  “We think she got a bad hot dog,” he explained.

  “Henry!” she whined.

  “On the other hand, could’ve been a bad burrito or cheeseburger.”

  “Lane doesn’t want to hear all the gruesome details.”

  “What’s going on with your dad?” Henry asked, leaning forward and folding his arms over the seat back. “Have they started filming The Beast?”

  “Not yet. They just renewed the option, though.”

  “Terrific. Man, I can’t wait to see that one. I’ve got rubber bands holding that book together. Read it five, six times. It’s a classic.”

  “I would’ve liked it better,” Lane said, “if it hadn’t been written by my father.”

  “Ah, he’s cool.”

  “And apparently somewhat demented,” Lane added.

  Henry laughed.

  At the bottom of the hill Lane turned onto Shoreline Drive. Most of the shops along the road weren’t open yet, and the traffic was light. The station wagon ahead of her was filled with children on their way to the elementary school, which was across the road from Buford High at the south end of town. Quite a few older kids were on the sidewalks, hiking in that direction.

  Henry, still resting on the seat back, swung his arm toward the passenger window. “Isn’t that Jessica?”

  Lane spotted the girl on the sidewalk ahead. Jessica, all right. Even from behind there was no mistaking her. The spiked hair, dyed bright orange, was enough to give her away.

  Her left arm was in a cast.

  “Wonder what happened,” Lane muttered. “Anyone mind if I offer her a lift?”

  “Yeah, do it,” Henry said.

  “Terrific,” Betty muttered.

  Lane swung the car to the curb, not far behind the swaggering girl, and leaned across the passenger seat. “How about a ride?” she called.

  Jessica turned around.

  Lane winced at the sight of her.

  “God,” Henry muttered.

  Jessica was generally considered the foxiest gal in the junior class, maybe in the entire high school.

  Not so foxy now, Lane thought.

  From the looks of her now, she might’ve gone ten rounds over the weekend with the heavyweight champ.

  The left side of her face was swollen and purple. Her cracked lips bulged like sausages. She had a flesh-colored bandage on her chin, another over her left eyebrow. Lane guessed that the pink-framed sunglasses concealed shiners. The girl usually wore huge, dangling rings in her pierced ears. Today the lobes of both ears were bandaged. The low neckline of her tank top revealed bruises on her chest. Others showed around her shoulder straps. Even her thighs were smudged with purple bruises below the frayed edges of her cutoff jeans.

  “How about it?” Lane called to her.

  She shrugged, and Lane heard a quiet intake of breath from Henry — likely at the way the gesture made Jessica’s breast move under the tight, thin fabric of her top. Only one showe
d. The other was discretely hidden under the cloth sling that supported her broken arm. The visible one jiggled as she stepped toward the car.

  Maybe she got herself gang-banged.

  Nice, Lane. Real nice.

  Would’ve been her own damn fault.

  Cut it out.

  Leaning across the passenger seat, she unlatched the door and swung it open.

  “Thanks,” Jessica said.

  Henry dropped away from the seat back — no doubt with Betty’s help — and lost his chance to watch the girl climb in. Too bad, Lane thought. He would’ve enjoyed seeing Jessica’s leg come out through the slit side of her jeans. The bruises might’ve dampened his enthusiasm, but not by much.

  She pulled the door shut. Lane checked the side mirror, waited for a Volkswagen to pass, then swung out.

  “Are you sure you want to be going to school?” she asked.

  “Shit. Would you, ib you looked like this?”

  “I guess I’d probably call in sick.”

  “Yeah,” Jessica replied through her split and swollen lips. “Well, better than habbing by old lady in by face all day. She’s such a bain.”

  Lane rubbed her lips together, licked them. Listening to Jessica was almost enough to make them ache.

  From the backseat came Betty’s voice. “So, you going to let us in on it, or do we have to guess?”

  Scowling, Jessica peered over her shoulder.

  “It’s none of our business,” Lane said.

  “Yeah. Well, I got trashed.”

  “Who did it to you?” Henry asked.

  “Who the buck knows? A couple guys. Real asswibes. Beat the shit outa be and stole by burse.”

  “Where’d it happen?”

  “Ober backa the Quick Stob.”

  “Behind the Quick Stop?” Betty asked. “What were you doing there?”

  “They dragged be there. Saturday night. I went in bor cigarettes, and they got be when I cabe out.”

  “Bad news,” Henry muttered.

  “Yeah, I’ll say.” With one hand she opened a canvas satchel and took out a pack of Camels. She shook it, raised the pack to her mouth, and caught a cigarette between her fat, scabby lips. She lit it with a Bic, inhaled deeply, and sighed.

  “Did they catch the guys who did it?” Lane asked.

  Jessica shook her head.

  “I didn’t think stuff like that happened around here.”

  “It habbens, all right.”

  Lane pulled into the student parking lot, found an empty space, and shut off the car.

  “Thanks a lot bor the ride,” Jessica said.

  “Glad to help. I’m awfully sorry you got messed up.”

  “Be too. So long.” She climbed out and headed away.

  “Wouldn’t you just die to know what reallyhappened?” Betty said.

  “You think she lied?” Lane asked.

  “Let’s put it this way. Yes.”

  Henry shoved the seat back forward. “Why would she lie about a thing like that?”

  “Why wouldn’t she?”

  Eight

  Larry drank coffee and read a new Shaun Hutson paperback for an hour after Lane went off to school. Then he set the book aside, said, “I’d better get to it,” and rose from his recliner.

  “Have fun,” Jean told him, glancing up from the newspaper as he strode past her.

  He shut his office door and sat down in front of the word processor.

  He had already decided not to work on Night Strangertoday. The book was going well. Two more weeks should take care of it.

  Then what?

  Ah, he thought, there’s the rub.

  Normally, by the time he was this close to finishing a novel, the next was pretty well set in his mind. He would already have pages of notes in which he had explored the plot and characters, and have several of the major scenes worked out.

  Not this time.

  Gotta get cooking, he told himself.

  When the day came to write “The End” on Night Stranger, he wanted to slip a fresh floppy disk into his computer and begin Chapter One. Of whatever.

  Two weeks to go.

  That should be plenty of time.

  You’ll come up with something.

  You’d better.

  Eighty, ninety pages to go. Then he would find himself facing an empty disk, a void, a taunting blank that would push him to the edge of despair.

  It had happened a few times before. He dreaded going through a period like that again.

  I won’t, he told himself.

  He formatted a new disk and brought up its directory; 321,536 bytes to play with.

  Let’s just use up a couple thousand today, he thought.

  A page or two, that’s all it’ll take. Maybe.

  He punched the Enter key and the screen went blank. A few seconds later he had eliminated the right margin justification, which would’ve left odd spaces between the words, spaces that drove him nuts when he tried to read the hard copy. He punched a few more keys. “Novel Notes — Monday, October 3,” appeared in amber light at the upper left-hand corner of the screen.

  Then he sat there.

  He stared at the keyboard. Several of the keys were grimy. The filthy ones were those he used least often: the numbers, the space bar except for a clean area in the shape of his right thumb, some keys at the far sides that could apparently be used to give commands for a variety of mysterious functions. He didn’t know what the hell half of them did. Sometimes he hit one by mistake. The consequences could be alarming.

  He spent a while cleaning the keyboard, scratching paths through the gray smudges with a fingernail.

  Stop screwing around, he told himself.

  He scraped Saturday’s ashes out of a pipe, filled it with fresh tobacco and lit it. The matchbook came from the Sir Francis Drake on Union Square. They’d had lunch there during a vacation along the California coast two summers ago. The vacation he thought of as the “wharf tour.”

  He set the matchbook down, puffed on his pipe, and stared at the screen.

  “Novel Notes — Monday, October 3.”

  Okay.

  His fingertips tapped at the keys.

  “Come up with something hot. Original and big. Try for at least 500 pages, more if possible.”

  Right. That accomplished a lot.

  He typed in, “How about a vampire book? Ha ha ha. Forget it. Vampires are done to death.

  “Need something original. Some kind of a NEW threat.”

  Good luck, he thought.

  How about a sequel? he wondered.

  “Maybe a sequel. The Beast II, or something. Worth considering, if you can’t turn up anything better.”

  Come on, something new.

  Or a new variation on an old theme.

  “Nobody but Brandner’s done anything decent with werewolves. Come up with a fresh werewolf gimmick? Forget it. That TV show’s got the whole thing covered. But that’s not a book.”

  Larry scowled at the screen.

  “Forget werewolves.

  “What else is there?”

  His pipe slurped. He twisted the stem off, blew a fine spray into the wastebasket beside his chair, put the pipe back together and lighted it again.

  A few minutes later, he had a list:

  werewolves

  ghosts (boring)

  zombies

  aliens

  misc. beasts

  demonic possession (shit)

  homicidal maniac (done to death)

  curses

  wishes granted (“Monkey’s Paw”)

  possessed machinery (King’s realm)

  crazed animals (see above, and BIRDS)

  haunted house (possibilities)

  “How ABOUT a haunted house book?” he wrote.

  He’d always wanted to do one, and always reached the same stumbling block. By and large, he didn’t consider ghosts sufficiently scary. Something else had to be in the house. But what?

  That question took him back to the list
.

  He stared at it for a long time.

  “Something horrible inside the house,” he wrote. “But what?”

  How about a vampire under the staircase?

  Right. Just thinking about it made his insides crawl.

  He was on his knees beside the coffin again, staring at the withered corpse. Feeling fear and disgust.

  He wanted to forget he ever saw the thing, not spend the next few months dwelling on it.

  Wouldmake a good story, though.

  “A blond corpse under the hotel stairs,” he wrote. “A stake in its chest. Found by some people exploring a ghost town. Could tell it just the way it happened. Fun and games.”

  He wrinkled his nose.

  “But they don’t run off, scared shitless, like we did. Maybe some of them do. But one is fascinated. Is this a vampire, or isn’t it? A character like Pete, but a little crazier. He hasto know. So he pulls the stake. Right in front of his eyes, the thing comes back to life. Changes from a hideous brown cadaver (use Barbara’s line about looking like salami?) into a gorgeous young woman. A gorgeous, naked young woman. Pete character is enthralled. And turned on. He wants her. But she has a different idea, and bites his neck.

  “They don’t come out, and don’t come out. The others get worried, go back into the hotel to see what’s keeping the guy. Nobody under the stairs. The coffin is empty.

  “Little problem, bud. Vampires don’t screw around in the daytime. So how come our merry band is exploring a ghost town after dark?

  “Easy. They’re driving through town, on the way home from an outing in the desert, and the van breaks down. Flat tire, or something.”

  Ah, he thought, the old car-breaking-down-in-just-the-worst-possible-place gag.

  It could work, though.

  And it had a nice bonus: that wasn’t the way things happened yesterday.

  “Make it different enough from the truth,” he typed, “and maybe you can handle it.

  “How about taking One Big Step, and changing what’s under the stairs? Not a dead gal with a stake in her chest, but a... a what? (A crate with a monster in it? Been done.) Could be anything. The body of a creature from outer space? A troll? Have open spaces between the stairs, and it reaches through and drags people in by the feet. Gobbles ‘em up. He he he.