Chapter 12

 

 

Krom washed his face in the bathroom sink and rinsed the bird shit taste out of his mouth. He was barely thirty, but right now he felt closer to twice that age. He had scoured the town looking for a starting point, but no matter how many garages or sheds that he’d searched, nothing turned up. Even that rice burner of hers was out of sight.

He sat on the steps of an abandoned church and studied the situation.

Diva would know that if he scrapped it out for parts, the money would be decent. But none of the scrap yards or the surrounding area’s salvage yards had been sold the bike. Since the fucker was dead and gone, he didn’t hold out a lot of hope for finding the machine.

He missed seeing Trixie’s face; it didn’t matter if she was smiling, frowning or snarling at him. He missed her. She had been missing for ten days now, and Dillon had dragged him away from some of the worst rat infested and dangerous places in the city. Hell, he hadn’t even known that half of the places were there. If they were not located on a road that he traveled on, then he didn’t bother looking them up before now. He had ridden a grid pattern over the city, and still had no idea where she might be.

Twice he had been approached by fuckin’ toothless crack whores, and if he wasn’t so disgusted, he might have laughed at the bag of bones that offered to give him a blowjob for a hit. She didn’t know or care what kind of hit it might be. Any man that was desperate enough to stick his dick inside a mouth with sharp looking stubs of teeth and sores surrounding her lips had to be as bad as she was.

Krom had seen some nasty shit as a biker. Hell, he had watched and laughed at a captive’s misery as they were tortured and worse. He had carried out the fate of a couple of those problems himself. He was not perfect, and he didn’t claim to be, but he was tired.

Trixie’s smile stayed with him, and he even swore to stop hanging onto his stubborn belief that all women were whores. She was no whore; it had just fit his life to label her with something to remind him not to voice tender emotions to a woman, even a woman that he would only admit to himself how much he cared about.

He headed back to the outskirts of the city where the Halo Lodge sat in the middle of orchards and fields. It was an old building that resembled a western saloon more than the rich man’s hunting cabin that it had originally been. The wide wooden planks were stained a medium dark brown, and the swinging front doors were brought outward to keep the old charm of the place. The old bulletin board that had been both a social calendar and the spot that held public announcements in years past was still in use with several posters and ads for various items for sale.

The best thing about the place, other than the women, were the bedrooms that could be rented for the night. The working girls had rooms in the back of the Lodge for entertaining their paying customers, but once in a while when the spartan rooms were busy, he had enjoyed the big beds on the second floor. The beds were modern adjustable types, and until you found and used the controllers for the adjustments. The headboards and furnishings appeared to be period pieces.

He recalled lying back in that old iron tub with the walnut edging covering the rim of the one hundred gallon tub. Trixie had been in his arms, and it had been one of the few times that he had held an actual conversation with her that hadn’t involved sex in any form. The sex had been fast and satisfying before he had seen the tub. Once he saw it, he wanted to relax in the depths of heated water.

He shook his head and looked around at nothing in particular. He was so fucking tired, but each day that passed without even a clue to help him find Trixie made it almost impossible for him to sleep.

The wide porch had several spots for people to sit and pass the time on any given day if they had time and wanted to relax for a bit. He walked inside of the building and knew that he was one man that wasn’t exactly welcome. Sitting on the padded barstool, he signaled to Friendly to bring him a beer.

She was obviously still in a snit and still grieving her friend. Her eyes were red and dark circles surrounded the sockets containing the stark brown eyes staring accusingly at him. He had to say something. She was breaking his heart.

“Oh hell, baby, I’ve been under and in every building in this fucking city. I’ve checked every barn and shed within a five-mile radius.” He waved her to him, and she rounded the bar to be held tightly in his arms. He was so damned tired that he wanted to cry with her, but he couldn’t do that.

Once he found Trixie, there would be a lot of time to cry. It had been ten long days, and almost everyone else had given up looking for her. Oh sure, Hilda and the ladies were still searching. Dillon had his volunteer army of people searching the woods and fields for her body, but no one had found any trace yet.

The window of finding her alive was getting smaller.

He rocked Friendly back and forth and asked her why she was holding down the fort on her own. “Why would they leave you here when Hilda knows that you’re upset like this?”

Friendly shook her head and rubbed her cheeks on the material of his shirt.

“Hilda has a special project and asked me to take care of the place. Gypsy and Colin are cleaning the upstairs and Hop is off tonight. Peanut is staying up at the house with Talia, and June and May are cleaning the kitchen because the health inspector is due for one of his surprise visits and they want to be ready. Nan was around to wait tables, but she got a better offer from some guy that walked in, picked her up and carried her out while she was laughing in his arms. I believe that there is history there.

“I miss Trixie so much, Krom. I still think that she’s alive somewhere and that she will show up even if she has to crawl to get here.”

He nodded his head and hugged her again before letting her go and resuming his seat at the bar.

“The club has been out three times this week trying to find someone that knows where Diva’s mother and sister took off to. We find them, they should be able to tell us what happened.”

Friendly was not happy with him, and he knew it. Her bitter words iced his shit cake today.

“It’s nice of you to drop everything and help search for a woman that isn’t anything but a whore for you to screw. Did you know that up until you called her a whore, she was buying into all that love and devotion shit?

“I see you looking tired and hear what you’re saying. What is it that you think should make me think that you suddenly love her and want to find her? The day that she went missing we were making plans to move to Iowa, I told you about that right? Well, Trixie was all for it, we looked for places and have a list to look at when we get there.

“Hilda told her about your garage getting blown up, and she left without telling anybody that she was going to see you for herself. She needed to make sure that you were alright.” Friendly grimaced and smiled at him through the tears falling from her eyes. “That’s standard actions for whores though, isn’t it? They make sure that they keep up with the men that they fuck. We have to make sure our sugar daddies are in good shape so they can fucking pay us, isn’t that right, you self-righteous fuck?

“Don’t think that because I happened to need a shoulder to cry on that it means I like you. I blame you and those brothers of yours. Fucking men. You should have let Hilda shoot him or done it yourself. That mother and sister of his should have been exterminated at the same time just like rabid fucking dogs.

“I can’t sleep. I hold her pillow and tell her to hang on, we’ll find her, but it doesn’t matter how many prayers that I say, she isn’t home where she belongs.”

She turned and walked away, leaving him sitting there.

*****

At eight o’clock in the morning, Hilda received the call that she had waited for.

The black rust bucket with the leaking exhaust was waiting for the special delivery at the county line out by January road. The delivery was made, and the trunk was slammed shut before there was a tap on the top of the metal signaling that all was ready to go.

The driver never took their eyes off of the road. They were focused and only slowed down to turn into the path in a corn field that was used mostly by tractors and combines. Tonight was special. The car drove up to an old open shed. The roof was caving in, but the beams were still holding, and in a few hours the building wouldn’t be a concern anyway. Three sidewalls were still intact, and the old sorting table legs were gone, but the table top laid on the dirt floor of the shed and was quickly put to use.

The trunk was opened, and the package coughed and made screaming noises as it was being hauled out.

Diva’s mother was trussed like a turkey and Hilda felt nothing as she rolled the woman out of the beater’s trunk. She hated driving junk, but tonight it was necessary. She had no choice. As soon as Dillon let it slip where they thought Delores was hiding out, she got the ball rolling for this little get-together.

She pulled and rolled Delores until she was on top of the flat table top. She pulled her legs apart and wrapped a stripped bungee cord around the first ankle and fastened one end to the wide headed nail that was sticking out of the corner of the smooth wood. She treated the other ankle the same and moved up to shine her L E D light into the old bat’s eyes.

“It’s like this. You have someone that I care about, and I have you. I’m not going to fuck around with you. You’re going to tell me what I want to know, or I will force you to tell me, and don’t bother to think that you will make it out of my clutches. I will kill you when I get what I want. How you die will be up to you.”

Hilda yanked the duct tape from Delores’ lips and pulled the old carpet bag that she tossed close earlier, towards herself. She pulled a bottle of water out and opened the top before pouring half of the water over the captive’s face.

“I would try to drink some of that if I was you. It is the last kindness that I plan to do for you.”

Delores opened and shut her mouth like a beached fish, and her last mouth full of water got spit back at Hilda.

“I’m not telling you one fucking thing about nothing. I don’t know anything about anything. You will go to jail for assaulting an old lady like me.”

Hilda laughed. She took a wicked looking blade from the carpet bag. It was not a classic stiletto, not at all. The blade was a twelve-inch butcher knife, and even in the limited light, the shine of the blade was frightening.

“You know, I was really hoping that you would act like this. I knew that you would be a pain if I tried to be nice.”

Hilda laid the wide blade on her victim’s cheek and pressed the sharp edge into the flesh. She drew the blade down, and her captive screamed until the tip of the blade entered between her teeth.

“Scream like that again, and I will slice your tongue in two. Right. Down. The middle.” Hilda smiled and pinched the bleeding cheek. “Look at that. I wonder if your kids figured that you had ice running in your veins instead of blood. I’ve heard about the way that you treated your kids, you know. Remember a lady named Wren? She was all too happy to tell me how you locked your own children outside while you laid up with your john inside. That was one of the nicer things I’ve heard about you, so it’s really a public service for me to eliminate you.”

She used the knife to slice through the woman’s pullover sweater.

“This is such a pretty color, and it really goes with your coloring. I will try not to damage it too much so you can die in something pretty.”

Delores was trying to make Hilda mad enough to kill her and get it over with because the younger woman was even crazier than people had told Delores that she was.

“You might as well go ahead and do what you brought me here for. I’m not telling you a thing, and I know that you’re a busy woman. You’re a crazy, cocksucking bitch and a crazy whore. All of this bringing me to the country to kill me? You are just trying to scare me, and it won’t work. Go ahead, do your worst, but your whore will still be gone, and you will be in jail.”

Hilda cocked her head sideways and then onto the opposite shoulder, and shook her tense muscles out.

“So you want me to go ahead and do my worst?” Delores nodded.

“You think that I will kill you before you tell me what I want to know?” At the nod from Delores, Hilda grinned and stood up to walk to the back seat of the sedan. She pulled out a live trap and set it under Delores’ feet. She turned around and brought a second cage and set it near Delores’s head. If Delores turned her head at all, she would feel the steel bars on her cheek.

The captive woman was starting to worry for the first time since she realized that she might die tonight. “What is that?”

The shoes were removed from her feet, and she felt a sharp pain slice down the top of her foot and around the bungee cord holding her ankle to the table top. She heard Hilda making kissy noises and began to cry. She jerked her legs to get away and screamed louder as the knife stabbed the thick flesh of her thigh.

Hilda came into her sight as she felt something furry rub against her calf.

“It’s like this. I offered to be a decent person and kill you clean in exchange for the whereabouts of my friend Trixie. You refused to cooperate, and you were right about one thing, I am a busy woman. I have too much to be doing to deal with a deranged sociopathic cunt like you. Now, I will be sitting in the car listening to the radio while you spend a few minutes thinking about telling me what I want to know.”

Hilda grinned and nodded towards Delores as the woman screamed when the bite on the top of her foot proved that the blonde was crazy. Hilda shoved a cloth inside of her mouth while she continued to scream as the bites increased and tore tiny chunks of flesh from her feet.

Delores tried to roll away from the creatures and found herself face to face with a beady-eyed rat. The critter had his nose pressed against the steel bars of the cage, and Delores couldn’t believe that this could be happening.