“Can we do this later?”
“And you’ll probably get food poisoning just from the fumes of the crap you have to cook! You’ll have your stomach pumped, and the doctor will say ‘Oh, shit, it’s cancerous!’ But it won’t be the good kind of cancer that you can get rid of with chemotherapy, George, it’ll be the kind where your whole body decays inside, where your guts turn into this big goopy blob of rot!”
“I think I should hang up now.”
“Yeah? Well, I think you should not. Are you on your way to 7151 Pegg Avenue yet, you jerk-off?”
“I’m hotwiring a car.”
“Oh. Need me to talk you through it?”
“No.”
“Did I tell you about when I hotwired this guy’s car and drove it into a lake?”
George hung up on him. The couple finally got into their car, started the engine, and backed out of their parking space. As they did so, their car scraped against the one next to it. They stopped.
“You have got to be kidding me,” George muttered.
The man got out of the car to inspect the damage. He ran his finger along the spot where the two vehicles had scraped against each other, looked nervously at George and Lou, did a double-take at their grotesque appearance, then hurriedly got back in his car, backed the rest of the way out of the space, and sped away from the restaurant.
George opened the door, returned to his previous position, and began to strip the second red wire. His phone kept ringing, but he ignored it.
“Are they going to exterminate us?” Lou asked.
“It doesn’t sound like it.”
“Well, that’s good.”
“Yeah. They want us to tell the reinforcements everything we know about Ivan.”
“Should we do it?”
“Tell them about him?”
“No, meet up with them.”
“I don’t know. Ricky was having a meltdown yelling at me, so I doubt that he was trying to be sneaky about anything. I think we’ll get our asses chewed out--and for what it’s worth, I’ll make sure I take the heat on that--but I don’t think there’s any reason for them to kill us.”
“What about pure anger?”
“What I mean is, we won’t give them a reason to kill us. We’ll just make sure we don’t give up all of our information right away. Keep ourselves needed.”
“Are you sure that’ll work?”
“Do you want to spend the rest of our lives as fugitives from the law and from other criminals?”
“I guess not.”
George finished stripping the second wire. He wrapped the two stripped wires together. “I’m going to let you make the final decision on this one. My choices today haven’t worked out so well.”
“I don’t know. We should at least return the case of money, so they’ll stop looking for us eventually.”
The phone had gone to voice mail three times, but Ricky kept calling. George pressed “talk.” “Give it a rest, will you, Ricky?”
“What happened to the girl?”
“What girl?”
“Don’t be coy with me. The girl you had with you. Did you create a Wikipedia page for our whole operation and drop her off at the CNN studio?”
“The werewolf killed her.” George assumed that the lie would be exposed before too long, but for now he just wanted Ricky off his back.
“Well, that’s one good thing to come out of this. Didn’t I tell you not to hang up on me?”
George stripped a brown wire. Now that he’d gotten some practice with the claw hammer, the process was going more smoothly. “We got disconnected.”
“The hell we did. Did you finish the car yet?”
George touched the brown wire to the red wires. The engine roared to life. “Just got it.”
“I could’ve done it in half that time.”
“Can I hang up now?”
“Are you going to 7151 Pegg Avenue?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to create any more disasters on your way there?”
“No.”
“Then you can hang up. Jerk.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
An Unpleasant Conversation
And, just like that, Michele was screwed again.
Honestly, it wasn’t all that surprising that Ivan had snatched her, but she would have expected it to be when she was being stupid and hanging around the tavern, not when she was being smart and going to the hospital.
They’d been driving for a few minutes. Ivan hadn’t said anything, though she caught him glancing at her in the rear-view mirror several times, and she made no effort to start a conversation. Thus far she’d successfully forced herself not to cry. He could carve the entire Bible into her skin before she’d give him the satisfaction of watching her cry.
She wouldn’t beg, either.
There was nothing she could do about the trembling, though.
God, she was scared. She didn’t want to die. She considered lying and telling him that she was pregnant, to see if she could appeal to some tiny shred of goodness, but she didn’t think he had any. He’d probably love it if he thought she was pregnant. She could just hear him: “Oooooh, then I’d better save your belly for last!”
She adjusted her position. Her only solace was that he’d have to open the cage to kill her, at least if he wanted to do it with his teeth and claws, and she’d have an opportunity to escape.
“How are you holding up?” he finally asked.
“I’ll be honest with you: not so well.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that. You can still talk, can’t you? A lot of my prey gets so scared they can’t even do that.”
“Then I’m honored.”
“You should be. Mute people just aren’t much fun.”
“Are you going to kill me?”
“Do you think I should?”
“No.”
“Why not? Appeal to my sense of reason.”
“I never did anything to you. I tried to help you.”
“I don’t recall that.”
“I guess I was being too subtle, then. We were both victims.”
“Correction. I was no victim. I had George and Lou exactly where I wanted them the entire time. There’s evidence of this back at the tavern we just left. How many people do you think I killed? Guess.”
“Six.”
“Higher.”
“Twelve.”
“Lower.”
“Ten.”
“Lower.”
“Nine.”
“This is going to take all night,” said Ivan. “I killed seven people. Murdered two people earlier today, for a twenty-four hour total of nine so far. Messed Lou up in a big way. Shredded two cops. Got a lady shot. Let two people go on purpose, and believe me, that’s the only reason they’re not dead.”
“What about George?”
“I didn’t kill him yet.”
“Why not?”
“He comes later. Got to save the good stuff. Are you impressed by the seven people I killed at the tavern?”
“Sure.”
“I think you’re just humoring me. I’ll bet you’ve never killed nine human beings in a day. I bet you haven’t even killed two. Am I right?”
“You’re right.”
“You know what sucks about the number nine? It’s not a monumental number. Nobody celebrates the ninth anniversary of something. It’s all about those nice round numbers. That’s what people like. If I went around telling everybody that my body count for today was nine, they’d be amazed by my awesomeness, of course, but they’d feel that something was missing. It just wasn’t quite at the next level. You can’t really have a party for nine. Do you see what I’m saying? Can you think of any possible way for me to fix my little quandary with the whole number thing?”
“Just lie and say you killed ten.”
“Hmmmm. I never thought about that. I hate to be deceptive, though. There has to be a better way. Thinking...thinking...thinking...”