Animosity (25 page)

“She… what? No. It’s not… she…
listen
, Jason—”

Whispers rolled through the mob between us, like static on a weak radio. Murmurs of impatience.

“Jason, you’ve got to—”

“Where
is
she? I’m serious, Andrew—if she’s inside, just tell me she’s with you and I’ll walk away right now. I won’t get in your way.” His eyes scanned the crowd on my lawn again, taking in the chaos before him. “I don’t have to know what’s going on here. I don’t
want
to know.”

“The cunt is dead!” Mitzi Pastorek shouted, from somewhere within the mob. “Get over it!”

The others laughed.

Francine Beecham yelled, “And good riddance, I’d say!”

Jason Burke stared up at me. His lips quivered as he waited for me to confirm what he had just been told. “
D-dead?
Andrew, what are they—”

I shot a hateful glance over at Floyd Beecham, then stared down at my shoes. I swallowed a massive lump in my throat, shuddered when it went down.

“What are they talking about?” Burke shouted up at me, his hands balled into tight red fists. “You’d better tell me what’s going on right
now!
”

His voice sounded whiny. Like a spoiled child about to cry. And I could not blame him in the least.

I glanced across the yard, grimaced at the sight of Karen’s brains dried in a crusty red-black swath upon the street.

“It’s true,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“
No
…”

“Karen’s dead.”

“Oh my God.” He swayed back and forth where he stood. Reached out for something to hold on to, but grasped only air. “Oh, dear God…
no…”

“They killed her, Jason.”

“It was
his
fault!” Sal Friedman bellowed. He pointed one of his prized nine-irons at me, shook it as if wringing my neck from afar. I noticed it was crooked, bent, a side effect of the vandalism he had helped inflict upon my property.

“You’ve got to get help, Jason,” I said. “Call the police!”

“You couldn’t let us be happy, could you?” he screamed up at me. “If you can’t have her, no one will—is that it?”

The crowd watched me, as if they wanted to know the answer to that question as much as Jason Burke.

“I… what? No… it wasn’t anything like that, Jason.
They
did it. They all think… they think I—”

Then, before I could say anything else, something in my peripheral vision demanded my attention.

I spotted a flash of gold inside Jason’s SUV…

A glimpse of blond hair and pink barrettes.

The earth seemed to drop out from under me as the passenger-side door fell open, and I heard: “Daddy…?”

“Oh, Jesus!” I gasped. “Samantha!”

My daughter slid out of the SUV to stand behind Jason in the driveway.

The crowd turned toward her as one.

“Get back in the car, baby,” Jason told her.

But she did not listen. She eyed my neighbors and the weapons in their hands with a mixture of curiosity and naïve suspicion.

“Daddy?” she said. “Are you okay? What’s going on? Where’s Mom?”

“I told you he likes ’em young,” someone mumbled at the foot of my steps.

“J-just… do as Jason says, sweetheart,” I told Sam. “Get back in the car. Now.”

Sam singled out Ben Souther in the crowd, tilted her head to one side as she made eye contact with my next-door neighbor.

“Mr. Souther?” she said. “Are you mad at my daddy for something? What did he do?”

“Your father is a bad man,” Ben replied.

“Samantha, get back in the car,” Jason told her again.

“I’m scared, Jason. Where’s Mom?”

“Enough of this horseshit,” Floyd Beecham said, turning to rouse the crowd. “We’ve got business with Holland!”

“Damn straight!” shouted Joe Tuttle. “Let’s get that bastard, Floyd!”

The mob surged forward, their weapons clanking against one another, their shouts of derision sounding like little more than wild animal grunts.

Floyd raised his leather strop in the air as he stepped toward me on the porch.

I saw it in his eyes, then, in that last second or two before he went to work on me, and it sent an icy chill down my spine: to Floyd Beecham, I was the man who had stolen his daughter away from him so many years ago. This wasn’t about Rebecca Lanning, or the child who was murdered behind the bookstore. To Floyd and his wife, this was personal.
I
was the one who had murdered their little girl, long before Rebecca Faye Lanning was even born. The faceless killer from their past was faceless no more… now, to Floyd and Francine Beecham, he looked just like me.

At last, they had their shot at vengeance. It had been a long time coming.

They
all
needed someone to blame. And I was their sacrificial lamb.

“Court is in session, fucker,” Floyd snarled at me through clenched yellow teeth. A wiry mess of unshaven whiskers crawled across his chin like silver kudzu. His eyes were bloodshot, crusty-looking, and rimmed with dark blue bags, as if he had not slept since this all began. He smelled like a walking bottle of 190-proof vodka.

We stood there glaring at one another. Unmoving.

“Don’t you even think of goin’ anywhere,” he said. “This ends today.”

“I know it does,” I said, gripping the hammer so tightly my knuckles turned bone-white.

Floyd swung his leather strop as hard as he could. With every ounce of strength in his skinny frame.

I brought the hammer up to block his attack, but he got me in the ribs.

I yelped in pain, and he hit me again across the neck.

“Get ’im!” I heard Sal Friedman cheer Floyd on. “Whip the shit outta that sumbitch, F.B.!”

I lunged forward, striking Floyd with the hammer. It got him in the chest. He squealed like a little girl, recoiled, but only for a second or two.

“You’re dead meat,” he said.

I moved to hit him again, but suddenly he had help. A sharp rock struck me in the center of my chest. I staggered back. Another bounced off my collarbone. My left arm. My hip.

“Daddy!” Samantha wailed.

I dropped the hammer. It clunked down the porch steps like a fairweather friend trying to distance itself from me and my dilemma. I held my arms in front of my face, crashed into my storm door as a blizzard of pain pelted me from every direction.

“
Stop it!
” Samantha shrieked. “You’re hurting my daddy!”

“Go, Sam! Jason, get her out of here
now!
” I screamed again as another sharp stone carved a deep gash across my left cheek.

And then, even as their jagged missiles tore my flesh, as Floyd Beecham’s leather strop thrashed again and again at my shoulders and his liquor breaths exploded in my ear with every lash, I was aware of Samantha moving toward me, through the crowd.

“Sam, no!”

“Please… stop it!” she cried.

Blood filled my eyes. I fell to my knees, wiped it away…

. . . and I saw their hands on my daughter.

Samantha’s terrified wail reverberated across my property: “
Daddy!
”

In the middle of the yard, Donna Dunaway’s hands were entangled in Sam’s long blond hair. Sam kicked at the bitch’s shins, struggled to get away. Sal Friedman gripped her left arm in one gnarled, liver-spotted claw.

I knew I was outnumbered. Knew there was no way I would ever make it through that roiling mass of bodies alive.

But they had my daughter. Dear God…
they were going to hurt Samantha
…

At the rear of the mob, Jason Burke fought to reach Sam, but Joe Tuttle slammed an elbow into his face. A fountain of bright red blood gushed from Jason’s nose, and he collapsed against his SUV with a startled yelp.

“Jesus… oh, my Lord,” I heard him babbling beneath the river of gore streaming down his face.

Through the blood in my own eyes, I watched Jason fumble through the pockets of his fancy suit-coat. He pulled out his cell phone, nearly dropped it. Flipped it open with hands that trembled worse than those of a man twice his age.

But before he had a chance to use it, the phone was torn from his grip.

It flew into the air above the mob, and a second later—BANG!—it clattered into the street and exploded into a hundred pieces, batted like a home-run softball off the end of Darren Pruitt’s lawnmower blade.

Jason tried to stand, but someone’s heavy black boot collided with his abdomen, and again he went sprawling against his Jeep Liberty.

“Samantha,” he cried.

At last, Floyd Beecham ceased flogging me with his leather strop.

The leather squeaked as he wrapped it tightly around his left wrist.

“What comes around goes around, Short Eyes,” he whispered in my ear, before punching me in the face. I noticed a big, hairy wart sprouted from one of his knuckles. It had busted during our one-sided melee, and its tiny black seeds were smeared across the back of his hand.

Then Floyd was gone. He left me alone with my pain, leapt over my porch railing to join the bedlam in the yard.

“Let’s see you write a book about
this!
” raved Donna Dunaway, and she looked nothing like herself now. As she glowered up at me, her dirty brown hair hanging in her wild eyes, her stretch-marked belly hanging half out of her rumpled maternity blouse, Donna resembled something swollen and possessed, alien and obscene.

“Get your fucking hands off my daughter!” I roared.

I dove headfirst into the crowd, into that swarm of murderous faces and flailing limbs and deadly, swinging weapons.

“Die, motherfucker!” someone screamed in my ear.

“Get the pervert! Don’t let him get away!”

“Watch out! There he is!”

“Stop him!”

“Kill him!”

“Save some for me, goddammit!”

Hands slapped and punched and clawed and scratched at my body. Fingers stabbed into my throat, gouged my eyes. Pipes, crowbars, rolling pins, and fireplace pokers crashed against my skull and banged into my spine and pummeled my torso. A rusty bicycle chain lashed across my chest, ripping open my T-shirt as well as my flesh. My collarbone cracked beneath the splintery handle of a broken pick-axe. Francine Beecham’s metal cane slammed into my face with the impact of a small pickup truck. My mouth filled with blood, and bright bursts of color danced before my eyes like Fourth of July fireworks spiraling out of control. Still, I pushed onward, onward, with every last shred of strength I could find within myself. The sour stench of perspiration, of bodies gone unwashed for days, filled my stinging nostrils as I swam through that sea of animosity, fighting to reach my daughter. The agony my neighbors inflicted upon me during those few seconds when I dared to plunge into the horde brought back awful crimson memories of the beating I had suffered at the hands of Bridget Prescott’s father and her two brothers almost twenty years before. But I did not stop. I
wouldn’t
stop. Not for anything. The bastards would have to kill me first. I could focus on only one thing now—saving Samantha. Bleeding and bruised, I forced myself to keep moving, because I knew if I slowed down for even a second my assailants would crush me beneath their overwhelming numbers. They would rip me apart. I collided head-on with their weapons, absorbing the impact of each as best I could, taking the offensive in order to drive them back…

Somehow, I made it through.

When Donna Dunaway and Sal Friedman saw me coming, they slung Samantha aside. She crumpled on top of Jason Burke as if she weighed no more than one of her beloved dolls.

Friedman pointed his crooked golf club at me. “What are you gonna do, boy?
Huh?
What are you gonna do?”

Donna stepped back, made a ghastly, unladylike sound in the back of her throat, and spat a thick green wad of phlegm my way. It landed in the grass at my feet.

“Daddy!” Sam cried. “Oh, Daddy!”

She ran to me, threw her arms around my neck. Her face glistened with tears.

I held her tight, sobbed, “It’s okay. Shh. I’m here now. D-Daddy’s here. I’m not gonna let them hurt you anymore—”

A shard of searing, white-hot pain lanced through my left shoulder.

I screamed.

Sam’s mouth fell open in a horrified “O.”

Protruding from my chest, just two or three inches below my heart and even less from my daughter’s right eye, was a long silver crochet needle.

It wiggled in its place, rotated in a twitchy circular motion as whomever had stabbed me with it churned the needle around in my flesh. Widening the hole. Trying his or her damnedest to push it all the way through.

“Gahh! Aghhh, Jesus!
Jeeeeezusss!!!
”

Nothing in my life had
ever
hurt this bad.

Samantha fell back, out of my arms.

“Daddy!” she wailed, staring at the gore-streaked spike in my chest.