Josie narrowly avoided the full beer can as it smashed into the wall above her head, leaving a gash in the drywall and spraying liquid all over her. He advanced on her, again pointing accusingly. “I told you to shut the fuck up. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Sherri had a tumor when she was nineteen. They had to tie up her female parts. There’s not a goddamn thing wrong with me.”
She felt a small kernel of sympathy for Sherri, which was quickly pushed aside by fear and disgust as Nick freed his penis from his pants and pumped it a few more times. He climbed onto the bed. On her knees, Josie shrank back, away from him. “I’ll show you how good it works,” he said. “No more talking. Now you’re gonna do what I tell you.”
She hoped he couldn’t see her trembling. She was staring into his good eye. She would have to let him get close again. It was the only way. If he couldn’t see her, he couldn’t catch her. From a drawer in one of the end tables he pulled a length of rope, which he used to tie her hands to the nearest bed post at the head of the bed. She struggled, fingers flying at his face, trying to reach his eyes, then balled into fists trying to hit any soft or sensitive target she could. He slammed her head into the wall until she stopped, stars floating in front of her eyes. Then he finished tying her wrists and started yanking her pants down. A gateway in Josie’s mind creaked open. The place she went when bad things happened. She hadn’t needed it for many years. She never thought she’d need it again. As Gosnell climbed on top of her once more, she stepped through it.
A pounding on the door froze them both in place.
Chapter Sixty
“Nick Gosnell,” a loud male voice boomed from the other side. It sounded familiar, but she couldn’t place it.
He glanced back at the door. The pounding intensified, rattling the door in its frame. “What the fuck?” Nick muttered.
“Gosnell,” came the voice again. “Answer the door. I know you’re in there.”
He looked back and forth from her to the door, as if trying to decide what to do.
“Gosnell, get out here right now, goddamn it!” the voice growled. It was then that she knew who it was. The chief.
Nick zipped his pants up as he moved toward the door and stopped at the refrigerator, reaching deep into its recesses for something her addled brain couldn’t process right at that moment. Then she heard the sound of a round being racked into a chamber. A pistol. He opened the door a crack. Daylight flooded in.
“Help you, Chief?” he said.
Chief Harris’ voice came back low and furious, the way he sounded whenever one of his officers did something monumentally stupid. “I know what’s going on up here, Gosnell.”
Nick said, “I’m not sure what you’re implying, Chief.”
She saw Nick lose his footing momentarily and then brace his body against the door. The chief was trying to get in. “Let me in, goddamn it.”
Nick said, “I don’t know what you’re playing at, but you better get the hell out of here. This is private property.”
The struggle with the door continued. She could hear the chief throwing himself against it. “I’m the police, Gosnell.”
“The law don’t have no jurisdiction here. Get off my land.”
“You’re in my town, Nick. You think I didn’t know something was going on? I couldn’t prove anything until today.”
“If you got something on me, where’s your team? Why’d you come alone?” Nick taunted, trying to keep a handle on his pistol and keep the chief from bursting through the door.
“There’s only two people in this town I know I can trust. One of ’em’s me and I’ll bet my kidney you’ve got the other one in there. Now let me in!”
Josie’s heart sailed. “Chief!” she screamed.
The door snapped off its frame as the chief burst through, shoving Gosnell to the side and onto his back. He lifted his department-issue Glock 19 and swept it across the room. Josie had a glimpse of the chief’s furious red face in the second it took for him to turn and spot Gosnell on the floor. Gosnell kicked the chief’s knee with a booted heel, causing the gun to go off, the shot missing Gosnell high and wide. The chief fell, nearly toppling onto Gosnell as he rolled away and found his own gun, whipping it back toward the chief. The chief fired again. The bullet grazed Nick’s arm, sending slivers of the fabric from his shirt flying. Gosnell fired and the chief went down.
“Chief!” she shrieked again, but he lay face down and limp.
She pulled desperately against her restraints until she wore away a layer of skin on her wrists. She couldn’t hear above all the screaming, screaming like someone was stabbing a woman to death. It took Josie a moment to realize it was her before she stopped. She heard Gosnell moving around, muttering every curse there was under his breath as he propped the door back in place and surveyed the mess. Now her only hope was to get her hands free.
Then he was behind her, pushing her against the wall so he could untie her. She screamed again. “Will you shut the fuck up,” he barked.
But she wouldn’t. She couldn’t. The chief was clean, and Gosnell had shot him right before her eyes. He could be dead. Luke, Ray, the chief. How much more was this man going to take from her?
“You’re going back in there with your boyfriend until I get this shit cleaned up,” he told her.
She started to kick at him until she realized that it was to her advantage for him to untie her. She would have a few precious seconds to try something. He was larger than her and armed. She was shackled and injured. She couldn’t put herself in a position where he could overpower her or injure her so badly that she couldn’t fight back or escape. She needed the upper hand.
She heard Ray’s voice then, as surely as if he were standing at the foot of the bed. Calm down, Jo. The darkness can’t hurt you.
She stopped struggling and took a long, shuddering breath, allowing Nick to free her hands. He reached for her hair again, his preferred method of moving women from place to place. Without hesitation, she reached up with both hands and grabbed the sides of his face, as though she was going to draw him in for a kiss. For a split second, his face registered delighted surprise. Then she drove her thumbs into the soft orbs of his eyes, holding onto his head while he howled and bucked and swung his arms, desperate to get away from her.
He fell away, off the bed and onto the floor. She leapt over him, landing painfully on her knees, and found his gun discarded on the floor. She stood, pain shooting through both her kneecaps, and trained the gun on his writhing form. He held his palms against his eyes. “My eyes!” he screamed. “My eyes!”
“Gosnell,” she shouted.
“My eyes! You bitch. My eyes!”
“Stop moving,” she told him as she stepped closer to him.
“You fucking bitch!” he shrieked.
“This is for Ray,” she said and fired a shot into his left kneecap.
More howls. His hands scrambled for his obliterated kneecap. He curled onto his side. Following his jerky movements, she placed the barrel of the gun against his right kneecap—steel against bone—and fired again. Blood and bone sprayed up into her face. She used her forearm to wipe it away. The sounds coming out of him were like nothing she had ever heard before—not from a human—but she was dead to it. “That was for the chief.”
She kicked him, rolling him until he was flat on his back, grinding her heel into the crushed knee closest to her. She leaned over so that she might be heard over his cries. “This is for the girls,” she said and fired a shot into his groin.
She tossed the gun away and ran to where the chief lay, face down. She touched his shoulder and he coughed. “Josie,” he choked.
She dropped to her knees. “Chief!”
“Don’t move me,” he said, his voice raspy. Every word seemed a monumental struggle. She strained to hear him. “I think the bullet severed my spine. I can’t feel anything. It’s hard to… hard to breathe.”
She lay down next to him, her face inches from his, so he could see her eyes. He tried to smile, but a tear slid out of his eye and rolled off the bridge of his nose. They stared at each other for a beat. The relief that Josie felt was subsumed by the grief that was already overwhelming her. Nothing would ever be the same again.
“Listen,” he whispered. “This is important.”