After Midnight

19
THE SEARCH

Soon, I began to think it was a waste of time. I might search till dawn and never find Judy.
How could I find her? Miller’s Woods went on for miles, and she might be almost anywhere. Maybe I’d already missed her. I might’ve walked on past her and left her behind. With any step I took, she could’ve been a hundred yards away to the north or south. Or sprawled unseen in the darkness five feet away.
It would take a huge stroke of luck for me to find her.
And maybe that wouldn’t be so lucky.
Maybe I’d be luckier not finding her.
If she’d faked the outcries, a trap was waiting for me. If she hadn’t faked them, I might have to face whatever had torn those shrieks out of her.
Even if I couldn’t find Judy, it might find me.
It or he.
Probably a he.
Most monsters are.
At any moment, he might jump me from behind. Take me down and drag me away. Do things to me so I would cry out in terror and pain just like Judy.
The pistol might not do much good if he caught me by surprise. Or if there turned out to be more than one guy.
I knew what it was like. All of it. To be jumped from behind. To be outnumbered. To be beaten and tortured. To be raped, gang-banged, sodomized and all the rest.
No, not all the rest.
I hadn’t been killed.
Not yet.
I’d been left for dead, but not killed.
I’ll tell you about it. I hadn’t planned on getting into stuff like this, but what the hell. Why should I keep it a secret?
It happened when I was eighteen, and got a flat tire on a highway outside Tucson. I was alone. Alone, I tried to change the flat. But three guys in a pickup truck stopped to “help.” They helped me, all right. Drove me off into the desert and spent all night “doing” me, doing everything that popped into their sick ugly heads. By the time they were done with the fun, I apparently seemed to be dead. So they dug a grave for me, rolled me into it and covered me up. Then they drove off and left me. I would’ve ended up dead for real, but I’d landed at the bottom of the grave with an air pocket under my face. I also would’ve ended up dead if they hadn’t been such lazy bastards. They’d dug the grave too shallow, hadn’t bothered to pile some heavy rocks on top, and so I managed to crawl out. Then I was picked up by a family of off-roaders who happened to come along in a Jeep.
You might think nothing would scare me, after being through a deal like that.
But guess what.
It’s the opposite. Everything scares me.
You’ve probably heard the saying, “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” It might be true, as far as it goes. I have gotten stronger and stronger from all the bad stuff. But I’ve also gotten more and more afraid.
So even as I crept through the dark woods hoping to find Judy, I shivered with fear and felt ready to scream and wanted to run for home.
If the fear wasn’t bad enough—and it was plenty—I also had accidents. I was trudging through rough wilderness, not hiking on a path through a park. All I could see were a few bits and pieces of moonlight, dim gray blurs that might be anything, and blackness that might be nothing.
I hated walking into the black places. I might drop into a pit or step on a body or get leaped on by a madman. And the gray places weren’t much better.
Three or four times, I tripped and fell down.
Twice, I scraped the top of my head against low limbs.
Countless times, I was whipped across the face by unseen branches or bushes.
Only once did I get the real shaft. Striding through a black place, I walked straight into the end of a large, broken limb. I never saw it coming and didn’t even slow down. Just plowed into it. It slammed into me above my belly button. It probably would’ve plunged all the way through and killed me if it hadn’t been so thick. Instead of skewering me, though, the branch gouged me, caved me in, punched my breath out and knocked me backward. I fell sprawling.
For a while, I twisted and squirmed and couldn’t breathe.
When I was able to catch a breath, I curled onto my side and clutched my belly. The wound felt raw and seering hot. Not very deep, but awfully painful. I held it with both hands and cried.
Finally, I was ready to get up. I found the pistol on the ground beside me, then struggled to my feet.
Judy no longer mattered much.
I really had no hope of finding her, anyway.
And so what? With or without me, she probably wouldn’t leave the woods alive. Not unless she’d faked those cries, which I doubted.
Even if she gets away, I told myself, she doesn’t know who I am or where I live.
She knows my face.
So what? Unless she bumps into me at the supermarket…
What if she describes me to a police artist?
That could be bad. Sometimes, those drawings turn out to look exactly like the suspect. I might be watching the TV news in a few days and end up staring at my own face. Most of the people in Chester would see it, too. Even though I pretty much kept to myself, I wasn’t a total recluse. I’d be recognized, for sure.
On the other hand, maybe Judy wouldn’t be able to describe me. Though we’d spent time together in her well-lighted apartment, she hadn’t gotten a good look at me after I shot her in the head and pounded the daylights out of her with a stick. It’s very common for head injuries to screw up your short-term memory.
That’s what I’ve read, anyway.
In my own experience, I’ve always been able to remember every detail no matter where I got injured, in the head or otherwise.
I wouldn’t have minded a little memory loss, here and there. Especially if I got to pick which memories to dump.
Memories can be a real pain.
While I was thinking about all this, I kept on sneaking through the woods. I’m not sure, though, whether I was looking for Judy or for a way out. I just kept moving along, trying not to get hurt again. I still couldn’t stand up straight or take a deep breath because of ramming into the branch.
Every now and then, I imagined how it would feel to catch a branch that way in the middle of my face. That was almost enough to make me sit down and wait for dawn. But I kept moving, anyway.
I needed to finish with Judy and get back to Serena and Charlie’s house before daylight.
The lawn might have some Tony on it. The saber was still hidden in the bushes. I needed to do a whole slew of other chores, too, like make sure nobody would ever hear Tony’s voice on the answering machine, and burn his wallet and…
Firelight!
In the distance ahead of me and off to my left, I saw bushes and low-hanging tree branches that trembled with yellow-orange light.
This is it! Has to be!
I made my way slowly toward the glow, trying to be quiet.
Let this be it! Let it be Judy!
I walked as close as I dared to the firelit clearing, then crawled even closer and peered through a gap in the bushes.
And found her.
Found a tent, a campfire, and Judy.
The green tent was pitched a few yards to the right of the fire. The fire, burning brightly, cast its glow far enough to shine on Judy.
Nobody else seemed to be there.
But someone belonged to the campsite. Someone had pitched the tent, built the fire, and captured Judy. Someone had put her this way.
She stood under a tree limb, her arms high, her wrists tied together. The rope went over the top of the limb. I couldn’t see where it came down, but the other end must’ve been tied to a tree somewhere behind her. She wasn’t dangling, or standing on tiptoes, but she didn’t have enough rope to let her slouch. She looked as if she were stretching for the ground. Her back was arched. Her skin was pulled so taut that all her ribs showed. Her breasts were drawn high. Her belly looked flat and long. She stood with her legs pressed tightly together. Her feet, flat against the ground, weren’t tied.
When I’d left her on the picnic table, she’d been wearing her shoes and socks, her skirt, and her blouse. The skirt had been rucked up around her belly and her blouse had been pulled half off, but she’d still had them on. Now, they were gone.
All she wore now was a hat and a gag.
An old, felt hat covered her head all the way down to the eyebrows. Her upraised arms pinned the brim up against its sides. The strange hat must’ve belonged to her attacker. Maybe he’d jammed it on her head to hold a bandage against her gunshot wound. Or maybe he liked how she looked in it.
The hat made her look like some sort of beautiful hillbilly girl. Maybe the Feds had stripped and tortured her, trying to make her give up the location of her moonshine still.
Of course, she couldn’t tell any secrets with the gag in her mouth. It looked like a red bandana. The sort of thing you might see tied around the forehead of Willy Nelson or around the neck of a too-cute-for-words dog. In this case, it was stuck in Judy’s mouth and tied somewhere behind her neck.
A gag like that could suffocate someone. But Judy seemed to be okay. From where I watched, I could see her ribcage expanding and contracting. She was able to breathe, if only through her nose.
Her eyes were shut. She couldn’t be unconscious, though, and still stand that straight and rigid and hold her head up.
Probably just resting.
She’d had a hard night.
Mostly because of me. Well, all because of me, in the sense that I’d dragged her into the whole mess.
Just goes to show what a wrong address can do.
But I’d also been the one who shot her and beat her with a stick. From my hiding place behind the bush, I could see plenty of bruises and scratches and swollen places on her body. Most of them had been put there by me.
Maybe all of them.
Some bastard had grabbed her, brought her here, stripped her, tied her under the tree, shoved that silly hat onto her head and gagged her mouth, but I wasn’t sure he’d hurt her.
Don’t forget the shrieks.
He’d probably raped her. He must’ve raped her. You don’t grab a gal and strip her naked and hang her by a rope that way, and not rape her. Logic tells you that.
I couldn’t tell by looking, though.
This may sound funny, but I hoped he hadn’t done it.
Judy didn’t deserve that kind of treatment. She was a beautiful, fine, sweet girl, and I liked her. I never saw her as my enemy. Only as my problem.
She could “finger” me.
So she had to go.
But not like this?
I hated it to be like this.
But in part of my mind, I knew it was perfect! This was like a best-case scenario. I wouldn’t be murdering her at all. And therefore, nobody could ever pin it on me. They’d nail this bastard for it, or nobody. And they’d likely figure he’s the one who chopped Tony into little pieces, too.
Because of this guy, whoever he might be, suspicion would never fall on me. I ought to be cheering him on.
But I couldn’t.
I didn’t want him to rape her, kill her, touch her.
Weird, huh?
I’m not sure how to explain it. Maybe I’m not even sure why I felt that way. It wasn’t that I wanted to save her, or spare her the pain, or anything like that.
I mean, I did and I didn’t.
I would’ve loved to spare her, but she had to go.
The thing is, I had to be the one to do it.
Not this guy, whoever he might be.
Not this stranger, this interloper, this thief.
She was mine, not his.