Velvet Rain - A Dark Thriller (29 page)

“I could do it blindfolded.”

“Prove it. Come on.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Then neither am I.”

The boy turned with a grimace, but there was something there: he seemed to be weighing the intriguing offer.

“You’ll leave? Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

“And if I don’t … not that I won’t … what then?”

“Then … then we have business.”

The boy turned back to him.

“Here’s the deal, Ryan. If I get a hit off you—and I’ll tell you, the odds are way in your favor—you’ll get back on the team. You’ll do whatever it takes.”

The teenager chuckled. “I don’t think so. Besides … what’s the point now?”

“There’s still time. The season’s almost over, but the Tigers can still make the district finals.”

“Yeah? Who cares?”

“You afraid? Afraid of facing the team? Facing Jones?”

“I’m not afraid, Ghost.”

“Three strikes. Can’t be that tough.”

The boy straightened. The brash arrogance evaporated. He looked cold and flat and grim. He brooded a moment, and just when Kain thought he might turn away, Ryan Bishop nodded. And slipped his hand into the glove.

~ 31

Thinking he should have just kept his big mouth shut and hit the road—it occurred to him he could still salvage his situation, simply take a dive with three half-assed swings and be done with it—Kain found himself listening to a second voice in his head, a smaller yet entirely coercive one, a voice that would not allow him to deny the potential he saw in this troubled young man. It was the same voice that had nearly compelled him to speak to the coach, right after the kid had stormed off the mound for a crack at Jones. It seemed far too easy to walk away, to let the boy be someone else’s problem.

Lynn’s
problem.

He walked several yards ahead, Ryan following sluggishly with his head down, as if he were on his way to the gallows. Kain scooped up the bucket by the handle, waited for him, offered it, and the boy regarded it dourly, his eyes hovering over the contents as if they were radioactive. Ryan glanced suspiciously at him and then frowned as he took the bucket, and then simply turned about and headed out to the roughed-in pitcher’s mound.

Kain positioned himself beside the guesthouse, roughly in line with the painted box outlining the strike zone. With no plate to orient him, he used the butt of the bat to hollow a square into the dirt. Ryan, standing flaccidly on the mound, the bucket tipped over and a dozen balls spilled out beside him, rolled his eyes.

Kain dug in with his boots and gripped the bat firmly. He choked up on the handle and let his fingers find their grip. He gave two soft half-swings that were clumsy and graceless in their rustiness. There was some pain in his lower back, but not so throbbing he couldn’t shake it off. A kind of sweet recollection swept over him. He didn’t realize he was smiling. It felt good to swing again. He hadn’t picked up a bat in a good twenty years, not since his stint in the Eastern League playing Class A ball. He wasn’t a long-ball hitter by any measure, but he wasn’t a strikeout king, either; he had held his own against some pretty good hurlers in those days. Yeah. The bat felt good in his hands, as it always had back then. It was like reaching up to the sky and touching that first fine day of spring, when the sun is just right and winter is a dream long lost, and everything seems impossibly possible.

He eyed the pitcher. “Anytime you’re ready.”

Ryan shook his head, grumbling something that sounded like,
Yeah, right.
He was thin and unimposing. He placed the ball in his glove, the ball he’d been rolling in his fingers so nervously. He set his place on the mound, and the batter, as ready as he was going to be, offered a simple half-swing.

The young thrower fell into his wind-up, gangly and awkward as he brought his leading leg up. He paused briefly, his head tilted down just so … and fired raw heat. The ball blazed straight for Kain’s head, and the drifter felt a sharp rush of air brush his hair as he slipped back and away. The ball thumped the side of the guesthouse with a solid thud and struck him in the right leg on the rebound. He lost his balance stumbling back and landed hard on his ass in the dirt.

He got up slowly. The boy was looking right at him, his expression stone cold. He could have been seated at a poker game, holding all the aces. Or zilch. You just couldn’t tell.

“Little rusty,” Ryan said impassively, reaching down for another ball.

Was there a hint of a grin there? Kain didn’t want to believe the kid had tried to bean him, but he didn’t discount it. He’d only seen him in one game, but he’d seen enough. The boy had a cannon of an arm, yet about as much accuracy as a blind man in a shooting gallery. Was it rust? It could have been a wild pitch. But then again, it could have been a less-than-subtle message.

“Anytime you’re ready,” Ryan deadpanned. His nimble fingers were really rolling the ball now.

Kain dusted himself off and glanced back at the farmhouse. He half expected to see Lynn and Lee standing there laughing. Relieved that they weren’t, he settled into place and gave the kid two more half-swings.

Ryan slipped into that graceless wind-up again, paused, dipped his head, and let fly. This one was a touch softer, certainly hittable, the ball sailing straight and hard. Kain let it rip by with a check swing. The ball struck the wall just outside the painted box. It left a good dent in the wood, buried among a thousand others.

“One-and-one,” the batter said.

“I don’t need your help,” Ryan retorted, and picked up a third ball.

“Two-and-oh, then.”

Ryan kicked up some dirt on the mound. He folded his head down, muttering to himself. His glove hung at his side, his arm practically dangling there dead. In his pitching hand, he started to roll the ball in his skinny fingers. He set himself carefully and waited for Kain to give him a spot. The batter obliged with two crisp swings, and then he started into his delivery.

Kain grandstanded. He raised his left hand in the air, as if calling time, and stepped back from the crude plate he had drawn in the dirt.

Ryan followed through without releasing, his inertia sending him stumbling off the mound. He whipped round in a complete circle and took the batter to task.

“What the heck is that? This isn’t Yankee Stadium, for cryin’ out loud.”

Kain made a point of not looking at the pitcher. He had intended to test the boy to see if it would shake him. Mission accomplished. He probably shouldn’t have, given the stakes, but it was some small payback. He was almost certain the boy had tried to stone him on that first pitch. Besides, no one had said he couldn’t have fun with this.

“Are you ready, or what?” Ryan barked. “I got a life to live here.”

Kain ignored him. He took his sweet time, gently resting the bat between his legs. He rubbed his hands together. He gripped the bat, altered his grip up, up … down a bit … a little more. Stepping up to the plate, he tapped the end of the bat on the far side and then dug himself in to a comfortable position. He waggled his ass a bit, a little too much, but what the hell.

“All sizzle,” Ryan grumbled, stealing a line from Ben Caldwell. “Would you hurry up?”

Kain kept his head down, teasing ever more intolerable seconds out of their showdown (he had to admit, he was rather enjoying making the kid squirm) and then finally surrendered a slight nod toward the mound. He looked squarely into the boy’s eyes. The young pitcher stirred uncomfortably. Concern there. Good. Slowly, almost mechanically (it was all coming back to him), he brought the bat up over his shoulder, delayed with another small waggle, and then signaled his readiness with a single, definitive swing, down low. Two decades and a Binghamton Triplets championship ago, he had infuriated pitchers with his audacity (and yes, more than once he’d been beaned on the next pitch because of it). It was his version of Ruth’s legendary “Called Shot” against Cubs hurler Charlie Root in the ’32 World Series. The kid could choke on it.

Ryan scowled. Still, not to be outdone, he gave a subtle shake of his head, as if reading a sign from some imaginary catcher—maybe he saw Rudy Burridge, the bunt king, crouched behind the batter—but then his eyes suddenly widened.

He glared at the drifter.

Glared at the small swirl of the bat.

Ryan dropped back from his perch. His face reddened. Hardened. At first Kain feared he had gone too far, had pushed one too many buttons (he’d come up with the trademark Jones Swirl at the very last instant, and hadn’t he laughed silently to himself at his cleverness), but then, just as he figured the boy would either storm off or hurl a flurry of hardballs at him, Ryan surprised him by stepping up on the mound. His head stayed low, no surprise there, but then it whipped up suddenly, and Kain found himself facing a pair of dark eyes boiling with intensity. The glove hand came up next, and in the pitching hand, the ball spun slowly but steadily. All bets were off.

Ryan slid into his delivery with all the grace of an elbow to the face. Still, he hurled a perfect fastball. Slower. Controlled. Down low.

Kain stepped into it. He was all over it. He swung hard and swung well, and an unforgiving
crakkk
seemed to resonate clear across the plains. It was the sound your head tells you when something’s precisely right: the sound of
YES
in your mind. The ball took flight—one of those rare beauties that grew the wings of the wind and you thought would never come down—and finally struck terra far beyond an unturned field a good two hundred and fifty feet distant. It bounced hard and long on the cruel parched earth, coming to rest beside the road in a ditch. Kain was not so much pleased as he was astonished. He couldn’t remember hitting one so sweet.

Running a replay in his mind, he forgot himself in the moment, and as he turned to the mound he had to wipe the grin he didn’t know he had off his face.

Ryan hadn’t bothered to follow the ball’s path. He stood there stunned, his head down, his arms dangling without purpose. He held this limp stance for what felt like minutes, and then, as if the world had suddenly fallen cold and black, he simply turned and walked off the mound.

“Ryan.”

The boy kept walking.

“
Ryan.
”

Ryan Bishop stopped. Didn’t turn.

“Drop dead,” he said, and lost himself inside.

~ 1

Imagine a dark place where even dreams cannot escape.

Imagine you are dreaming.

~

Sarah-Jane Metherell—a perky part-time waitress at The Fire Pit, a greasy spoon just a stone’s throw inside Columbia, Missouri—uttered a crude, sobering cry. The rawness of it held the blackness of death. She looked like a sickly child neglected and abused since birth. The cold chain round her throat tightened, and she coughed up more blood. The same hard shackles that bound her by wrist and ankle, suspending her in madness, cut ever deeper as she struggled. She did not struggle long. She was naked. Days-old excrement, the result of the castor oil forced down her throat with a cold metal funnel so thick and so deep it had nearly choked her to death, lay caked on her legs and the floor. Dried blood, streaked along her shrinking breasts and abdomen, ended somewhere between her spread legs. Three men had shaved her down there, under orders, always under orders they had joked, and one, a brutish ape named Strong, had more than probed her with a fist. New blood overran old where the chains cut into her, yet these fresher wounds barely registered, for her entire body ran thick with agony. Her skin, once a healthy cream, was now ashen and shriveled and starved of moisture, as fractured as baked earth. Her unfinished nails wore like long, bloodied talons on her thin hands and even thinner feet. She had been sitting up in her bed dressed only in panties, doing them up, sex-pot red, part of her promise to herself of the new S-J that was never going to be, just before her bedroom door had blasted open and her dreary little world had turned inside out. Three of those unfinished nails had been ripped from the roots, one from the left big toe, hours or days or weeks ago; there was no way to know, not anymore. Dark blisters ran her arms and thighs, betraying the burns she had endured; these were garnished with delicious grape welts and bruises that had also been served “under orders.” Pinhole punctures formed a small uneven circle on the right side of her throat, others lay scattered along her left forearm, all tells of the syringes that had violated her. Her dark brown hair, once long and lovely (on those really good days, few and far between as they were, when she got it just right), had been cropped like chaff and shaved to the scalp. She mouthed something unintelligible, gibberish, really, found herself doing that more and more as time forgot her, and even when real words, real thoughts, came, she was not certain she had conjured them; they seemed impossibly distant, mere whispers from the dark. She’d had plans, Big Plans,
FUCK-IT-I’VE-HAD-IT-I’M-JUST-GONNA-DO-IT
plans—that was, until that night, when the four smiling black-suited G-Men she had served at The ‘Pit had followed her home, forcing her into that enormous trunk of their enormous car, that night that now seemed so very long ago—plans of catching the last train out of stinking, dead-end Rocheport, and finally moving in with her big sister in New York City. Her big sister, a flight attendant who could land her a good-paying job with Pan Am, her big sister who had always urged her to come, her big sister who had begged her to get out of there before she died there like their parents had years before their time, her big sister who had always looked after her and who was all she had left in the world, did not know of her plans. Her big sister might have called on the first of the month as she sometimes did, and when the call was missed as it sometimes was, she might call again in another month. Sometimes, she did not call for months.