Killing Hour - Lisa Gardner [145]
But there was something. In fact, she had learned it straight from him.
She pulled out the bottle of eyedrops. Then from the inside of her hiking boot, she found the long needle slipped between the sides of the rubber sole. It took her only a moment longer to retrieve the plastic syringe from her bottle of shampoo.
She assembled the needle first. And then, very carefully, she squeezed out the liquid from the bottle of Visine. Once the tiny bottle had contained genuine eyedrops, but she had replaced the contents just last week.
Now, it held ketamine. Fast acting. Powerful, and in the proper dosage, quite deadly.
The man was dreaming. He thrashed from side to side. Waved his hands and kicked his feet. He hated this dream, fought to bring himself back to waking. But the dream memory was stronger, sucking him back into the abyss.
He was at a funeral. The sun burned starkly overhead, an unbearably hot day in an unbearably hot graveyard, while the priest droned on and on at a service no one else had bothered to attend. His mother gripped his hand too tightly. Her only black dress—long-sleeved and woolen—was too heavy for this weather. She rocked from side to side, panting pitifully, while he and his younger brother fought to keep her standing.
It was finally done. The priest shut up. The coffin sank down. The sweaty gravedigger moved in, looking relieved to get his task under way.
They went home, and the man was grateful.
He used the last of the coal to light their oven when they returned to the cabin. The air was too stuffy for the heat, but without electricity, it was the only way to get supper on the table. Tomorrow he’d have to find wood to feed the stove. And tomorrow after that, he’d have to think of something else. That was okay. This was now, and he just wanted to get food on the table and see some color in his mother’s cheeks.
His brother was waiting with a saucepan to heat broth.
They fed their mother wordlessly. Didn’t take a drop for themselves, but spooned beef bouillon past her bloodless lips, while tearing up chunks of stale bread. Finally she sighed, and he thought the worst had passed.
“He’s gone, Mama,” he heard himself say. “Things will be better now. You’ll see.”
And then her bloodless face came up. Her lifeless eyes turned vibrant, snapping blue, and her cheeks filled with a color that was frightening to behold.
“Better? Better? You ungrateful little bastard! He put a roof over your head, he put food on the table. And what did he ever ask for in return? A little respect from his wife and kids? Was that too much, Frank? Was that really too goddamn much?”
“No, Mama,” he tried to say, already frantically backing up from the table. His nervous gaze darted to his equally nervous brother. They had never seen her like this.
She rose from the table, too pale, too thin, too bony, and stalked her older son across the room.
“We have no food!”
“I know, Mama—”
“We have no money!”
“I know, Mama—”
“We will lose this house.”
“No, Mama!”
But she would not be placated; closer she came and closer. And now he had backed up all the way across the room, his shoulders pressed against the wall.
“You are a bad boy, you are a filthy boy, you are a rotten, ungrateful, selfish little boy. What did I ever do to deserve a boy as bad as you!”
His brother was weeping. The broth grew cold on the table. And the man-child realized now that there truly was no escape. His father had gone. A new monster had already arisen to take his place.
The boy lowered his hands. He exposed his face. The first blow didn’t even feel that bad, nothing like his father’s. But his mother learned very quickly.
And he did nothing. He kept his hands at his sides. He let his mother beat him. Then he slid down, down, down to the hot, dusty floor while his mother went to get his father’s belt.
“Run away,” he told his brother. “Run now, while you still can.”
But his brother was too terrified to move. And his mother was back soon enough, snapping the strip of leather through the air, and