Tough titties for him, Dillard thought. Got my own problems. He glanced back down at the bodies. Like how the hell I’m ever gonna cover up this clusterfuck? Again, he felt his heart speed up, that pain in his chest. Wait. I’m overthinking it. Maybe I don’t need to cover anything up? Might just be the blessing I’ve been praying for. He nodded. Solve a lot of problems. Especially one big one by the name of Sampson Ulysses Boggs. Don’t have to worry about his erratic behavior no more, about him blowing everything and taking me down with him. And . . . and since every dumbshit he had working for him is laying down there with their guts torn out, there ain’t a soul left needing to be shut up. All I gotta do now is . . . shit . . . no. He shook his head. “Jesse. There’s that goddamn Jesse.” And Jesse will talk. Oh boy will Jesse talk. Tell them everything he knows about me and then some. Of course that’s assuming they bring him in alive. What are the chances of that? Dillard didn’t know, but he didn’t like loose ends. He liked things all tidied up, just like his color-coordinated Tupperware bowls—bowls on the shelf, lids in the lid drawer.
“I gotta find that boy. Gotta get to him before someone else does. Gotta shut him up for good.” Dillard headed out, made it to the bottom of the stairs, and stopped, his face clouded. There’s two other complications, aren’t there? If they brought Jesse in alive and Linda and Abigail collaborated his story. Hell, even if they didn’t bring Jesse in. Linda could hang him. With the General gone, she might just come forward on her own. If they called in them Internal Affairs boys, he’d sure have a lot of explaining to do. He just couldn’t afford to have anyone raising suspicions, period. Can’t just make Linda and Abigail disappear, not that easy. No, he’d managed to get rid of one wife without raising a stink, but having two women mysteriously disappear from his life wouldn’t sit well with folks. Add a little girl to that and someone was bound to catch on.
Dillard’s eyes raced back and forth across all the carnage. “Fuck.” His chest began to tighten again. He found Ash staring at him, staring on and on without blinking, his mouth torn into something resembling a smile, not a mocking smile but the smile of someone who knows the answer to a riddle before you do. “What? What is—” Dillard’s mouth clamped shut. He nodded slowly. He got it, and it was a doozy. All at once he found himself smiling back.
“So, Ash, correct me if I’m wrong, but the last I heard was that Jesse’s running with a bunch of murderous maniacs. If, say, Linda and Abigail turned up dead, victims of a savage home invasion. People would have no problem believing that, would they? Whaddaya say, Ash? Makes perfect sense don’t you think? An estranged husband full of jealous rage.” Dillard nodded. “Then all I got to do is lead them to you and your dead pals here. Folks will make the connection real fast. Why, it’ll all fit together like a pretty puzzle. No one would suspect my hand in any of it. Nope, they’d be too busy feeling sorry for me.”
He slipped on his gloves and headed back down to the shop. He found a plastic bag and gathered a roll of duct tape, a knife, a few tools, and left, wiping down the doorknobs, careful to smear his boot tracks as he went, to clean the blood from his soles in the slush. He planned on coming back, to be the one to call it in. Because it would be best for him to be the one that discovered the crime scene, the easiest way to explain any evidence he might’ve left behind. But it never hurt to be too careful, to keep things tidy, just like his Tupperware.
He opened the door on Jesse’s truck, popped the glove compartment, and added a few of Jesse’s things to the sack, some evidence to leave behind for the forensic team. He climbed back into his cruiser, got the engine running, sat there until the window defrosted, then drove off, heading for home.
IT WAS APPROACHING dusk when Jesse awoke. He sat up fast, surprised that he’d slept so long, so soundly. He found Isabel and Lacy sitting at a makeshift table with a bag of oranges, a lump of cheese, a jug of milk, and a few king-size biscuits before them. Lacy peeped out from beneath the panda cap, wearing a milk mustache and munching away on a biscuit. Jesse guessed Krampus must’ve snatched the food from someone’s kitchen using the sack, probably someone they’d visited. He wondered if by chance that someone had been lucky enough to witness Krampus’s disembodied arm plucking food off their counter. Jesse looked for Krampus, but saw only Chet and Vernon curled up on the pews, and the lame wolf over by the potbellied stove.
“They went to bury him,” Isabel said.
Jesse nodded and hoped that getting your chest blown wide-open wasn’t the only way out of this madness. He tugged his boots back on, feeling the deep ache in his hands. He wiggled his fingers. They were almost back to normal. He sucked in a deep breath, felt a twinge in his chest and back from the knife wound, but was breathing fine now. He noticed that his skin had grown darker, that as the healing effects of Krampus’s blood took hold, so, too, did the outward changes. He crawled to his feet and strolled over, noticing a pie pan full of bloody lead pellets sitting next to the stove. “They get ’em all out?”
“What?”
“The buckshot . . . from Krampus’s shoulder?”
Isabel followed his eyes to the pan. “Think so.”
A bright red bow sat atop Isabel’s head. Jesse noticed two more stuck on the back of her jacket, one on the milk jug, and at least half a dozen all over Lacy. He spied a couple of bags of peel-and-stick bows, along with several rolls of old wrapping paper spilling out of one of the cardboard boxes. Jesse smirked.
The little girl regarded him timidly. She looked better, her eyes alert, some color to her face, but Jesse knew that such emotional scars ran deep, wondered if this girl would carry them the rest of her life, hoped she’d be lucky and her mind would suppress the worst of it. He sighed, knowing that was rarely the case, that more often than not the cycle of abuse and dependency just kept going round. Jesse slid a box over and took a seat next to her.
“Hey, kiddo, how you doing?”
The girl shrugged and scooted closer to Isabel. Isabel put an arm around her, gave her a squeeze. Jesse noted the way Isabel looked at the girl, wondered how well she would take it when it came time to give her up. Jesse tugged one of the furry panda ears, pulling the cap down over Lacy’s eyes. “Like that cap, don’t you?”
The girl pushed the cap up and nodded shyly.
Jesse plucked the red bow off the milk jug and stuck it on the tip of his nose. “You got any kin around?” he asked. “Y’know someone who might take you in?”
The girl glanced up at Isabel, her face troubled.
Isabel gave Jesse a warning look and rubbed the girl’s back. “Don’t you worry, doll. No one’s gonna be taking you anyplace you don’t wanna go.”
Jesse shrugged. “All right then . . . that settles that.” He plucked the bow from his nose, sat it atop his head. “Lacy, any chance you’d be willing to share one of them gi-normous biscuits with me?”
Lacy nodded and handed him one.
“Hey, Lace, watch what I can do.” Jesse opened his mouth as wide as he could and crammed the biscuit in. He stared at her with his cheeks puffed and lips taut about the girth of the biscuit. She gave Isabel a quick, unsure glance, then Jesse began chewing, snorting, grunting, and making piggy noises.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Isabel asked, her nose wrinkled in disgust. To which Jesse burst out laughing, blowing biscuit crumbs across the table and into Isabel’s lap.
“Oh, yuck,” Isabel cried, but Lacy’s entire face lit up and she laughed and giggled the way a little girl was supposed to. A good laugh, Jesse thought, and felt there just might be hope for her after all. Isabel’s scowl softened to a grin. “He’s real funny, huh? A real Bozo the Clown.”