The Devil Makes Three (2 page)

Martins would have trembled if he’d had room to move, but as it stood he could only gasp for air when Pure Evil released him. Then he stared up at me with pleading eyes. “Please,” he said. “She didn’t suffer.”

I stared. The whole experience bordered on surreal. She didn’t suffer? She, Maren, the poor little eight year old girl who’d been used as a human shield and then shot at point blank range in a dressing room stand off, didn’t suffer? No, of course she didn’t, because since when did fear cause suffering?

 Before I realized my actions Pure Evil seized me around the waist and dragged me away from Martins’ captive body. I kicked and fought, trying to land a blow, screaming until my shredded throat could take no more. Martins began to cry fresh tears, his chance for mercy shot to hell with his absurd lie.

Pure Evil backed me against a wall, and pressed his hard body against mine. “Calm down. Just breathe. Don’t worry. We’ll make him pay. He’s going to suffer like he can’t even imagine. But I need you to just chill out for one minute, all right?”

My chest heaved with ragged breaths. Tears dripped from my chin and my nose ran. Crying had never been a pretty thing with me, but tonight I didn’t care. I didn’t need to impress anyone here. What I needed was justice.

Soft fingers caressed my chin and I pulled my eyes from Martins’ to meet Pure Evil’s. They tugged at my soul like a black hole. “He’s going to die soon,” Pure Evil said. “Let me ask him a few questions, and then we’ll finish him off together.”

I swallowed. “Okay.”

He let me go. The void of his body pressed against mine made me stagger forward, away from the wall, but he reached out to support me, holding my shoulder with strong hands.

“Why did you do it?” Pure Evil asked, letting go of me and stepping back towards Martins. His question made fresh tears spill from my eyes once more, but I kept my gut-wrenching sobs as quiet as I could so I could still hear. 

“I—I didn’t mean to. She was an accident.”

“An accident? Oops, you just took a little girl hostage?” His tone threatened violence.

“It wasn’t supposed to go like that. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. I just wanted to scare her.”

“Her? Not the little girl, I assume.”

I sniffed and wiped my nose on the back of my sleeve, completely oblivious to everything but his weak excuses.

“No. The other woman.”

“Why were you supposed to scare her?” Pure Evil’s voice took on a flat tone that sent a chill through me.

“So she would keep her mouth shut.”

“Maren was collateral damage,” I said, reality sinking in. “You killed her for nothing.”

Gunfire filled the room. Not ten seconds later I stood next to Pure Evil staring down at the lifeless body tied to the chair. I had done it. I’d killed him. Pure Evil had joined in the fun once I’d gotten the party started, emptying his own gun into Martins. But I instigated it.

“I wish you hadn’t done that” Pure Evil said after a full minute of silence.

“Couldn’t contain my anger.”

“Feel better?” he asked.

“I expect it will take time.”

“Don’t be shocked when you wake up with nightmares.”

I glanced at him. His jaw twitched like my father’s when he felt intense anger. “So you’re not going to kill me?”

He considered me for a moment then shook his head. “Normally I would. But I kind of like you. So I’ll let you live.”

“Are you going to rat on me?”

His lips curled in a Grinch-like smile. “What could I possibly gain from that?” Reaching out he motioned to my Smith and Wesson. “You’re not going to keep that, are you?”

“No. I’ll get rid of it somewhere.”

“Give it here.”

I handed him the gun, fighting that little voice in my head telling me not to. His fingers brushed mine as he accepted the weapon, and he finally relaxed. He smiled sweetly for the first time since he’d come in the room. The change in expression threw me. For a moment, I wondered if Pure Evil had left me, and I now stood with a completely different person.

“No sense in throwing it out where some kid could pick it up. You’re wearing gloves.” Taking out a handkerchief, he gave the gun a good once over and then tossed it on the body of the dead dealer. His own gun landed at Martins’ bloody feet a minute later. “We’ll let the police scratch their heads over this one for a while. Don’t worry. I won’t let them find you.”

I swallowed, wondering exactly what that meant. Maybe he was a cop and just didn’t want me know. “I guess this is goodbye then.”

“Goodbye.” His voice sounded like the taste of chocolate mousse.

At the door, I turned to watch him lean over the dead dealer’s body, studying it.

“There’s got to be a moral in all this,” I said, feeling the weight of my soul ruin my posture.

He didn’t look up at me. “If there is I wouldn’t know it. Morals of any situation stopped coming to me years ago.”

#

I stepped out of my apartment building’s elevator and glanced at the ficas plants and ferns decorating the third floor hall. Hawkeye, my cat, sat in the largest pot staring at me like I had sprouted a rat’s nest on my hair.

“What are you doing out of the apartment?”

I asked it every time and every time I got the same response. He mewed back at me and jumped down from the undergrowth, then sauntered down the hall. He knew my arrival meant he once again had access to his cat foot and his fat gut wiggled back and forth as he strolled.

I unlocked the three deadbolts on my front door and entered my hidey-hole of a home. Walking through my door always felt like a release from the world around me. I felt completely free of threat. What I felt threatened by when out in the world I wasn’t sure, but the feeling permeated me enough to make me realize the blessed void it created when crossing my threshold.

Closing the door behind me, I let out a deep breath and slid down the wall, allowing myself to contemplate what I’d done. Reaching up, I snagged a framed photo off the desk next to me and stared at my dead twin sister’s image.

Maren and I had just turned eight when Martins killed her. Her and some other woman. He’d taken them hostage in a department store dressing room during a drug induced rampage and killed them both when the cops wouldn’t let him walk away. Of course, then he had lost his bargaining chips and the SWAT team took him down.

The murders got him 80 years in prison, but the system shortened his term when he turned state’s witness and puked up a bunch of names, aiming the police at much more threatening criminals. Or so the courts deemed it. This, to me, seemed a miscarriage of justice. Not that I could claim innocence either. I had my flaws that would make society cringe and scream for my head if they knew about them. But the egregious nature of his crime could not go overlooked. Not if he got out so he could do it again. Hence my bloody solution. Vengeance had little to do with it.

Or so I kept telling myself.

I pushed off the door, getting to my feet and setting the picture back on the desk. With numb limbs and threatening tears I stumbled to the bathroom and stripped down for a cleansing shower. I hoped it would take away the rotten taste in my mouth, and the filthy feeling on my skin, before I had to go to work at my family’s funeral home that night.

Chapter 2

In which Gretchen visits dead people.

The intense January cold froze the ground solid. Testing it with the toe of my shoe I decided it wouldn’t pose a threat. After all, what tracks can a backhoe make that my toe can’t, I thought wryly. I knew this logic wasn’t exactly sound, but I didn’t care. If I hadn’t gotten busted before now I probably never would. Not unless I grew abundantly sloppy.

I stepped away from the grass of the cemetery and walked across the gated parking lot to the detached garage where my father, the most prominent mortician in Jamestown, kept the grave digging supplies. I followed the same routine every time and it began to border on tedious. And yet, I still continued to do it after all these years.

I became the night watchman for the family mortuary when I graduated from Jamestown High four years before and had no clue what to do with myself. As the only living child everyone assumed I would inherit the family business one day, but soon after I joined the payroll we figured out I had no interest in embalming corpses and little skill in comforting the grieving.

I simply did not possess the necessary qualities.

Instead I rambled about for two years, becoming a nocturnal creature. I slept during the day and arrive at the funeral home at night, just as the viewings ended. My father and I would walk the premises, lock up, then he would go home for the night and I would hold down the farm, making sure no burglars, necrophiliacs or boogey men came after the corpses. A more pointless job never existed and we all knew it. No one, in all my time, had ever tried anything. No burglar had broken in and no corpse had reanimated. But one could always hope.

In my first two years on the job I took to filling the hours with a lot of bad TV. Then, in the midst of a financial crunch - I had vacated my parents’ basement for my own apartment and found it a bit more than I could afford - I had caught sight of a beautiful diamond ring going into the ground with Mrs. Sherman. I’d overheard people at the funeral discussing it. The appraisal came in at over seven thousand dollars, and I figured it a waste to leave it in the ground. So, once the cemetery cleared, I employed my reluctant knowledge of the trade, pulled out the backhoe, and dug her up.

I remember the night well. Not so much the surroundings, but the emotions. Grave robbing is, to say the least, despicable. To say the most, it’s evil. The desecration of a grave? Who would do such a thing? I cried the whole time I had the ring in my possession, which wasn’t very long. My guilty conscience saw to a quick solution of a short sale and a much lower pay off than anticipated, but the money came in and the ring went out, so the effort paid off. Since then I had become much more detached about what I do.

And anyway, what did the corpses need the stuff for? It might as well go to a good cause, like putting me through school.

It’s not like I murdered children or something.

My parents, of course, thought I paid for my new found hobby of a higher education through student loans. While most parents paid for their children’s educations, my parents claimed a need to help me build character, and thus felt perfectly happy letting me go it alone. They paid me just enough to keep me in my own apartment and at first it hadn’t even amounted to that much. Hence the dirty solution. But they weren’t cheap, either. They sprang for the occasional dinner out and spoiled me on my birthday and Christmas. I felt pretty sure my mother just used the strain on my finances as a way to keep track of me.

Opening the garage door, I stepped around one of the four hearses to the back wall, where cupboards climbed from floor the ceiling. Bending down, I dug through the corner cabinet, coming out with a trash bag filled with other trash bags. Separating them one by one, I created my makeshift space suit. It wasn’t pretty, but it kept my clothes and winter coat clean and free from evidence. Once outfitted, I pulled out the large planks used to protect the grass from the damaging treads of the backhoe, and carried them out to the grass. Just behind a small mausoleum I began laying them on the ground, and continued all the way out to the grave, as done originally when the caretaker dug the hole. Backhoes were hell on grass and the last thing I wanted to leave behind was clues. Once certain the grass wouldn’t spill my little secrets, I went back to the garage and grabbed the rest of my supplies, shoving them into the cab of the backhoe.

I loved turning on the gigantic machine. The rumble of the engine always calmed my nerves and dulled my senses. It freed me from my usual depression in a devious sort of way. It also drowned out the sounds of the neighboring businesses and traffic. The funeral home was located in a high-traffic area of the city of Jamestown, which sat nestled between two mountain ranges. Jamestown amounted to just under two million in population, so the funeral home wasn’t altogether unfamiliar to the sounds of sirens and car stereos. Not to say that it was a bad part of town. It was actually a very good part of town that attracted undesirables as the day dimmed. The decent folks of the area took to their beds or molded their bodies to their couches at night, leaving the city to their children and whomever their children dug up to fraternize with.

These factors, combined with the seventy-five acre lot of the cemetery in the rolling foothills of the mountain, helped buffer the world from my work and me from detection as I rumbled towards Mr. Kline’s freshly covered grave. Mr. Kline’s good widow left a ruby studded tie tack and a Rolex watch on her husband. These would add nicely to my horde of items and would fetch a pretty penny on eBay, when I deemed it the right time to sell. I didn’t know how much money they could pull in. But I knew someone would pay something for them, and that made them worth grabbing, since the other alternatives for my evening’s entertainment amounted to purchasing next semester’s books online and playing Risk on the computer.

I stopped the backhoe just short of his grave and reached behind the seat, pulling out a tarp. Getting out, I spread it on the ground next to the grave then remounted and began to work the controls, digging up the casket. When a metallic scrape sounded I knew I’d gone far enough and stopped. I got out and brought a shovel and a rope ladder with me. I secured the rope ladder to the front of the backhoe and tossed the end down into the grave. Then taking a reinforced strap, I secured it around the backhoe’s shovel and tossed the other end into the grave as well. The shovel went next, and then I climbed down.

The lights from the backhoe shone brightly, but the moon helped as well, illuminating my work. I uncovered the rest of the vault with the shovel then tossed it up on the grass. The smell of cold dirt permeated my every pore. Securing the strap to the vault door I climbed back out and went to the backhoe controls. Lifting the shovel, the sound of the vault lid pulling off the vault walls met my ears like the ching of a cash register.