Spilled Blood (7 page)

‘We’ve been down that road, Hannah,’ he said softly.

She stopped herself, biting her lip, as if she realized it was too tempting to fall into old habits. ‘Yes, you’re right,’ she agreed. ‘We have.’

*

Chris returned to the town of Barron at ten o’clock. He found his motel room wrecked.

The door hung ajar, splintered where someone had kicked it in. Inside, his clothes had been knifed into shreds and strewn like confetti around the room. The papers he’d gathered about the case had been stuffed into a garbage pail and burned. The room stank of melted plastic, and the carpet had a singed hole, revealing charred floorboards. Multi-colored spray paint made streaks around the walls and across the bed linens.

Someone had used a black marker to write on the bathroom mirror.

Fuck Olivia Hawk. Fuck St. Croix.

He tried to put himself inside the heads of teenagers who could feel such primal rage, and he couldn’t. He didn’t get it. All he could see was the work of animals.

The motel owner, Marco Piva, stood beside Chris. ‘I am so sorry, Mr. Hawk,’ Marco told him. ‘My house is a couple hundred yards behind the motel. I didn’t hear anything until the fire alarm started going off. I ran down here, but the bastards were already gone.’

‘It’s not your fault, Marco,’ he said.

‘I’ve called the police.’

Chris thought about Hannah’s dismissive attitude toward the police and realized she was right. There was no protection. There was nothing to be done. ‘I’ll deal with them in the morning. Right now, I just need to sleep.’

‘Of course, yes. I have another room for you. Do you need anything? I can get you whatever you want.’

‘Maybe a toothbrush and toothpaste.’

‘No problem.’ The motel owner put his hands on his fleshy hips, and his golden face screwed up in disgust. ‘St. Croix attacks Barron, Barron attacks St. Croix. Where does it end? A pox on both of their houses, that’s what I say. I wore blue for three decades in San Jose.
I saw this kind of hatred in the city, but I hoped I would never see it again.’

‘Whoever quits first is the loser,’ Chris said, ‘so no one quits.’

‘It is too bad you are in the middle of it, Mr. Hawk.’

‘Olivia’s in the middle, and I have to get her out,’ Chris replied. ‘You said you had another room for me?’

Marco dug in his pocket for a key. ‘It’s the last room on the corner. I was up half the night on Friday repairing the plumbing in there, so it’s all new. The toilet, now it goes
whoosh
. No more floods. I’ll bring you some things, all right?’

‘Thank you.’

Chris left the room without sifting through the remains of his luggage. He walked past the other motel rooms, where rain dripped from the roof into puddles beside him. The new room was sterile and empty, which was what he wanted. It smelled of lemon cleanser. He went to the bathroom sink and ran cold water and splashed it on his face and ran his wet hands back through his hair.

He stared at himself in the mirror. He thought about Hannah.

It doesn’t matter what you inject. It’s still addiction.
You can be addicted to adrenaline. You can be addicted to violence.

He heard a knock on the door. It was the ever-efficient Marco, handing him a plastic bag of toiletries. He thanked the motel owner again, then closed the door and locked it. He dumped the bag on the counter of the bathroom: toothbrush, toothpaste, shampoo, mouthwash, bags of M&Ms and pretzels, microwave popcorn, a Bible, and a clean, folded pair of XXL underwear. That was life in a small town. Someone gave you their underwear if you had none.

Back in the bedroom, he took off his clothes and lay on the bed. The room was black. The mattress was a stiff board. He stared at the ceiling, but he didn’t sleep. There was no way around it; he was a long way from home. He was an outsider, a foreigner, and the town of Barron was already sending him a message.

Get out while you can.

Kirk Watson shouldered out of the overgrown weeds near the Spirit River, bellowing ‘Fukkkkkkkkyeah’ so loudly that the curse carried across the water to downtown Barron. He tossed his shoulder-length black hair out of his face. He had a long day’s worth of dark stubble on his square chin. He was shirtless, and he carried a long-neck bottle of Grain Belt, which he tilted and swigged until it was dry. With his other hand, he tugged up the zipper of his jean shorts.

A teenage girl followed Kirk from the river bank. She was as skinny as a stick, with dirty blond hair. Her bone-white knees were smeared with mud. She wiped her mouth and shoved her grapefruit-sized breasts back inside the tight confines of her camisole. When she spotted Lenny Watson eyeing her pink nipples from the park bench, she snarled at him.

‘What are you looking at?’

Lenny’s face blushed beet-red. He stammered an excuse, but Kirk grabbed the girl’s hair and pulled until she screamed in pain.

‘Hey!’ Kirk warned, jabbing a finger in her face. ‘That’s my brother there. You got that, Margie? He wants a suck, you open your hole and give him a suck.’

Margie physically shrank as Kirk towered over her. ‘I’m sorry, Kirk,’ she whimpered.

Kirk shoved Margie toward Lenny, making her stumble in her block heels. ‘What about it, Leno? You want Margie here to swallow some squirt?’

Lenny squirmed on the metal bench, but he shook his head. ‘Nah, that’s okay.’

‘This girl’s got a tongue like a snake.’

‘No, thanks, man.’

Kirk shrugged and grabbed a beer from the twelve-pack box beside Lenny. It was his fifth. Lenny still nursed his first. Kirk dug in his pocket and pulled out a gun and set it on the bench. He extracted a dirty roll of cash and peeled off a one-hundred-dollar bill, which he dangled in front of Margie’s face.

‘You want this?’ he asked.

‘Yeah.’

‘How bad?’

‘Bad.’

‘What would you do for it?’

‘I don’t know. Like, anything.’

‘Would you lick my ass for it?’

The girl hesitated. ‘Yeah.’

‘Here, go fetch.’

Kirk wadded the bill into a ball and threw it toward the river bank. He laughed as Margie ran to retrieve it. He stretched out on his back on top of the bench, and his long hair draped behind him like a mop. His dirty bare feet dangled off the other end. He pointed his gun at the treetops and squeezed the trigger, and the revolver made an empty click. He hadn’t reloaded since their visit to St. Croix.

‘It’s like August in March,’ Kirk sighed. ‘Shit, Leno, does it get any better than this? We should be knee-deep in snow right now. Instead, we got seventy holy-shit degrees. I’d jump in the river if I thought I’d ever see my nuts again.’ He beat his chest with one hand like a gorilla. ‘FUKYEAHHHHH!!’

To Lenny Watson, his brother was a god.

He wanted to be just like Kirk, but his mother had played a mean trick on him, popping him out of the same womb like a pasty reflection of his brother. Lenny was sixteen, and Kirk was five years older. Kirk soared over Lenny by six inches and boasted an extra forty
pounds of muscle. His older brother had guts, too. No one messed with Kirk. Not sluts like Margie. Not the pussy boys from St. Croix.

Not even Florian Steele.

For three years, it had been just the two of them, Kirk and Lenny, like Batman and Robin. When Lenny was six, their mother got drunk and drove her Grand Am the wrong way down an I-90 ramp into a semi. They could have buried what was left of her in a shoe box. After that, their father used Lenny as a nightly punching bag, until Kirk turned fourteen and bludgeoned the son of a bitch to death with a hammer. Kirk sawed their father’s body into pieces and dropped him bit by bit into the Spirit River, which worked fine until his head rolled ashore near Redwood Falls. The police came calling for him, but Kirk only did two years in juvie. When he was out, Kirk rescued Lenny from a foster family that didn’t give a shit, and since then, they’d been a team.

Lenny would have done anything for Kirk.

‘Hey, I got a new package coming,’ his brother told him, as he sucked down a beer on top of the bench. ‘Should be here in a couple of days.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah, Vietnam this time. I bet we make ten K on this one.’

‘Cool.’

Margie returned from the river, shoving the hundred-dollar bill into the tight rear pocket of her shorts. Around them, the park was dark and mostly deserted. The bare treetops loomed over their heads, but the cloudy sky wiped out the stars. It was past midnight, and only a handful of Barron teenagers hid in the shadows, making out. Lenny could hear grunts and moans and the rustle of plastic tarpaulins spread over the muddy grass.

Kirk’s girl grabbed a beer as she sat down. ‘Ten thousand bucks? No shit? For what?’

‘For keeping your mouth shut and not asking questions,’ Kirk snapped.

‘Yeah, but can I get in on it?’

Kirk smirked. ‘Sure, why not. You like making movies?’

‘What kind of movies?’

‘Dirty ones.’

‘Like porno? That could be cool. How much could I make?’

Kirk stared at her. ‘What are you, seventeen?’

‘Almost eighteen.’

‘Too old. You got a little sister?’

‘That’s sick.’

His brother laughed hard. ‘The sickos are the ones who watch,’ Kirk said.

Kirk swung his legs on either side of Margie. He pulled the girl’s shoulders so that she was leaning against his bare chest, and he shoved his big hands inside her top and played with her breasts. Lenny’s palms grew sweaty as he thought about his own hands inside the girl’s shirt. He imagined them as soft and squishy as overripe peaches, except for the nubs on each end.

‘So what do you think, Leno?’ Kirk asked. ‘Did I hit her?’

‘Hit who, man?’

‘Hannah Hawk.’

Lenny shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Maybe. You got one of the windows.’

‘I heard her screaming,’ Kirk said, ‘but that doesn’t mean anything.’

‘I thought you were just trying to scare her,’ Margie said. ‘Not hit her.’

‘Hell, what’s the point of that?’ Kirk put his gun against the side of Margie’s head. The cold metal went in her ear. ‘You don’t shoot a gun unless you want to hit something.’

‘Stop that!’ she told him.

‘I thought you wanted to be a porno star.’

‘Don’t,’ Margie begged.

Kirk hooked his arm around her throat and shoved the gun
until it was almost breaking skin. As he tightened his grip, Margie twitched in panic. Her legs kicked spastically.

‘Bang,’ he whispered as he pulled the trigger.

Click.

‘It’s empty, stupid,’ he chuckled.

Maggie squirmed in his arms and hyperventilated. ‘You bastard!’

‘Don’t be a cry-baby.’

‘You scared the shit out of me!’

‘Oh, quit bitching. You got off easy. My gun wasn’t loaded. Ashlynn got her brains blown out by that St. Croix pussy.’

‘Why do you care about her?’

‘Ashlynn was a Barron girl. In Barron, we stick together.’

‘I heard she dumped you,’ Margie snickered.

‘Shut the fuck up. You don’t know anything.’

‘She was just dating you to piss off her father. Every rich girl likes to fuck her daddy’s nightmare. Although the word at school is she never even let you between her legs.’

Under her shirt, Kirk crushed Margie’s nipples between his thick fingers, and the girl wailed. ‘Shit! Shit, stop it!’ She wrenched away from him, crying. ‘You crazy asshole!’

‘Don’t talk about Ashlynn. You hear me? Don’t even say her name to me.’

Margie’s knees knocked like a baby deer’s. Tears of anger and pain rained down her face along with makeup, and strands of her blond hair lay plastered on her cheeks. Her lower lip bulged in defiance. ‘Oh, yeah? Ashlynn, Ashlynn, Ashlynn. As in Ashlynn Steele would never dream of getting banged by Kirk Watson.’

Kirk shot off the bench with his forearm cocked, and Margie ran. She fell down in her clumsy heels and got up, drenched in mud, but she ran through the park until she reached the footbridge that arched across the Spirit River into downtown Barron. They heard a frantic clop-clop as she sprinted across the bridge, arms pumping. In the middle of the bridge, under the twinkling
lights, she finally looked back and realized that Kirk wasn’t chasing her. She stopped, panting, and held out her hand with her middle finger raised. She shouted a curse at the top of her lungs.

Then she turned and ran until she disappeared into the town.

Kirk landed his fist on the bench so hard that the vibrations nearly pushed Lenny off the seat. It happened like that with Kirk sometimes. He boiled over like a pot of water, and you didn’t want to be nearby. Lenny had been hit. Burned. Choked. Kirk took an unopened beer bottle and marched toward the nearest oak tree and smashed it into popcorn against the trunk. Beer foamed white, splashing over him. Glass cut and scratched his hand, drawing blood. Lenny heard murmurings of fright elsewhere in the park.

Kirk spun back, sucking the blood from his fingers. ‘We’re not done. You got that? Ashlynn’s dead. People gotta pay.’

‘I hear you, Kirk,’ Lenny said softly. ‘What’s next?’

‘We need to teach Tanya Swenson a lesson. The little bitch ran away and left Ashlynn there. Get her out of school tomorrow, Leno. Bring her to the football field for me. We’ll make sure she gets a message to take home to her daddy.’

‘I don’t know, man.’

‘Do it!’ Kirk snapped. ‘I’ll be waiting.’

‘Okay. Sure. Whatever you say.’

‘Then we deal with Olivia Hawk.’

Lenny paled. ‘She’s in prison,’ he protested.

‘The judge will let her out.’

‘Yeah, but why bother with her? Everybody says she’s going to be locked up for life.’

‘Then we’ll give her something to think about while she rots,’ Kirk said.

Lenny’s palms were sweating again. He felt himself growing aroused at the thought of Olivia. She was the only one he wanted, with her pouty lips and the brown hair that always fell over one eye. When she talked in class, she was so intense. So sure of herself.
She was amazing. He wondered what it would be like to sleep with someone like that, but she barely knew who he was.