“Here,” she said.
Broome took the flashlight and flicked it on. When he aimed it straight down the hole—when the beam first hit—the sight stopped Broome’s heart for a second. He may have made a sound, some kind of groaning, but he couldn’t be sure. Samantha came up next to him, looked down, and gasped.
KEN SAT ON THE LAST stool and watched the barmaid.
Her name was Lorraine, and she was good at her job. She laughed a lot. She touched the men on the arm. She smiled, and if it was an act, if underneath it all she detested what she was doing, you never saw it. The other girls, yes, they tried. They smiled but it never reached beyond the lips and often, too often, you could see the blankness on their faces and the hate in their eyes.
The regulars called the older barmaid Lorraine. Regulars at a strip club—Ken tried to imagine anything more pitiable. And yet he understood. We all do, really. We all feel the pull. Sex, of course, had one of the biggest. It didn’t hold a candle to control, but most of these men would never know that. They’d never get to experience it and so they’d remain naïve to what could really tear at a man’s soul.
But Ken had learned that the secret to combat anything that pulled you like this was to understand that you really could not stop it. Ken considered himself a disciplined man, but the truth was, human beings were not built for self-denial. It was why diets rarely worked in the long run. Or abstinence.
The only way to beat it was to accept that it was there and thus channel it. He looked at Lorraine. She would leave eventually. He would follow her and get her alone and then… well, channel.
He swiveled on the stool and leaned his back against the bar. The girls were ugly. You could almost feel the diseases emanating from their very pores. None of them, of course, held a candle to Barbie. He thought about that house on the end of a cul-de-sac, about children and backyard barbecues and teaching his kid to catch a baseball and spreading out the blanket for July Fourth fireworks. He knew that Barbie had serious reservations. He understood her pessimism all too well, but again there was the unmistakable draw. Why, he wondered, if that family life leads to unhappiness, are we all still drawn to it? He had thought about that and realized that it wasn’t the dream that had gone wrong but the dreamers. Barbie often claimed that they were different and thus not meant for that life. But in truth, she was only half right. They were different, yes, but that gave them a chance to have that life. They wouldn’t enter that domestic world like mindless drones.
It wasn’t that the life people longed for was inherently bad or unworthy—it was that the life for most of them was unobtainable.
“What can I get you, handsome?”
He spun around. Lorraine was standing there. A beer rag was draped over her shoulder. She had dangling earrings. Her hair had the consistency and color of hay. Her lips looked as though there should be a cigarette dangling from them. She wore a white blouse intentionally buttoned too low.
“Oh, I think I’ve had enough,” Ken said.
Lorraine shot him the same half-smile he’d seen her give the regulars. “You’re at a bar, handsome. Gotta drink something. How about a Coke at least?”
“Sure, that’d be great.”
Without taking her eyes off him, Lorraine threw some ice in a glass, picked up a soda gun dispenser, and pressed one of the buttons. “So why are you here, handsome?”
“Same as any guy.”
“Really?”
She handed him the Coke. He took a sip.
“Sure. Don’t I look like I belong?”
“You look like my ex—too damn good-looking for your own good.” Lorraine leaned in as if she wanted to share a secret. “And you want to know something? Guys who look like they don’t belong,” she said, “are our best customers.”
His eyes had been drawn to the cleavage. When he looked back up, she met his eye. He didn’t like what he saw, like this old barmaid was somehow able to read him or something. He thought about her tied down and in pain, and the familiar stirring came back to him. He maintained eye contact and tried something.
“I guess you’re right about me,” he said.
“Come again.”
“About my belonging. I came here, I guess, to reflect. And maybe to mourn.”
Lorraine said, “Oh?”
“My friend used to come here. You probably read about him in the paper. His name is Carlton Flynn.”
The flick in her eyes told him that she knew. Oh my, oh my, she knew. Yes, now it was his turn to look at her as though he could see inside and read her every thought.
She knew something valuable.
33
MEGAN SAW THE KNIFE ARCHING toward her.
She didn’t have any martial arts training, and even if she had, it probably wouldn’t have helped. There was no time to duck out of the way or block the wrist or whatever would be appropriate for a situation like this.
They say that in moments like this, when violence and destruction are upon you, that time slows down. That wasn’t really true. For that brief moment, as the point of the blade got closer to the hollow of her throat, Megan became something other than an evolved human. Her brain suddenly worked at only its most base. Even an ant, if you step near it, somehow knows to run the other way. We are, at our core, all about survival.
That was what was working here. The primordial part of Megan, the part that existed long before cognitive thought, took over. She didn’t really think or plan or any of that. There was no conscious thought, not at first, but certain defense mechanisms come prebaked into our nervous systems.
She snapped her arm up toward her neck in an attempt to stop the blade from penetrating her throat and ending her life.
The blade sliced deep into her forearm, traveling freely through the flesh until it banged up against the bone.
Megan cried out.
Somewhere again in the deep recesses of her brain, Megan could actually hear the grating sound of metal scraping bone, but it meant nothing to her. Not now anyway.
It was all about survival.
Everything else, including reason, was taking a backseat to man’s most primitive instinct. She was literally fighting for her life, and so one calculation dominated all others: If the attacker pulled the knife free, Megan would end up dead.
All her focus now was on that knife, but somewhere, in the corner of her mind, Megan spotted the blond hair and realized that her attacker was the same woman who’d killed Harry Sutton. She didn’t bother wondering why—that, if she lived, would come later—but there was a fresh surge of anger now mixed in with the fear and panic.