Uncharted Territory Ryan #2
“I’m not trying to turn you in. I’m just curious about one thing. When I met that guy Hunter on a smoke break, he said that Sarah Powers was apparently working for Frank. Should I be worried about that?”
“You mean did I kill her? No. Did you?”
Ryan shook his head. It was the God’s honest truth: he hadn’t laid a hand on Sarah Powers tonight. He hadn’t even spoken to her.
He’d tried, but he hadn’t had the chance.
“It’s like I told Stanley in the office earlier,” Ryan said. “I was asleep until the screaming started. I went straight back to my room after that smoke break and dozed off.”
Fernanda pulled back the hammer of the gun. Its click cut straight through the air of the room. “That is a lie. I heard a man speaking with Sarah in her room next door at seven thirty. It was you.”
Ryan blinked. He said, truthfully, “It wasn’t. I never said a word to Sarah all night. It must have been Stanley you heard.”
Fernanda leveled the gun at Ryan’s face. “It was not, and I know it for a fact. It also could not have been Ethan or Hunter or Thomas. That only leaves one person.”
“Hold up—”
Her finger started to tighten on the trigger. “I think it is lucky you are still alive right now. Would you like to change this?”
Fernanda closed the door in his face. Ryan was losing his touch.
A bitter wind sliced across the motel. A SHRIEK rose in the dark.
Ryan felt an awful certainty that something was wrong, that it was staring him in the face.
He looked at his watch and found the time was 9:25.
That didn’t feel possible; he thought for sure the mechanism was running fast, but when he stepped into room 4 and looked at the alarm clock, he found the same time on display.
He also found Sarah Powers, but that wasn’t exactly the right way to put it.
He’d been in this room once already this evening (but again—and he couldn’t stress this enough—he hadn’t killed her).
That had been at 7:50, shortly before all the screaming started, and Sarah looked now exactly the way she had then.
Nothing about the room had changed except for a plate of food that had fallen, face down, from Tabitha’s hands.
Everything else here was exactly as Ryan had last seen it.
Again, he hadn’t killed Sarah. He’d had no interest in doing so.
But he had wanted to talk to Sarah, earlier in the night.
Had needed to talk to her. For the last six weeks, Ryan had been haunted by a memory that refused to be ignored.
An old Native dude used to sleep alone in the cell next door to Ryan and Hunter, back in the penitentiary.
Everyone around Huntsville had called the old man The Chief.
Ryan used to think this was racist, but The Chief only shrugged.
I’m the last man left of my tribe, The Chief used to say. I guess that makes me chief by default.
Ryan couldn’t think of anything sadder.
The night he died, The Chief had said some very strange—
terrifying shit your pants scary
—things. Had made some very strange requests. He’d urged Hunter to pass along a message to the beautiful young woman who’d lately taken to visiting the old man every few weeks.
You have to tell her. You have to tell her!
Tell her what? Hunter had said through the bars of the cell.
Tell Sarah, the mountain—
Here, in room 4, Ryan looked at the sprawled corpse of Sarah Powers and shook his head.
He searched the room quickly, unimpressed by what he found.
There were some ashes in a dinner plate on the corner table with bits of burned film poking out.
Under the ash, he found a curious silver substance melted to the plate’s surface, brilliant as liquid chrome.
He didn’t know what to make of that. He wasn’t a chemist.
In the bathroom, he found where the burned pictures must have come from.
A roll of film was tucked away in a black plastic cylinder on Sarah’s bathroom vanity, right next to a fancy-looking camera.
He held the pictures to the light, found where the last six shots had been sliced away neatly.
A pair of nail scissors rested next to the sink. Probably their work.
Stowing the film in his pocket, Ryan searched the room once more, stood back, shook his head at the chaos. Sarah’s unbuttoned pants, the tossed luggage: child’s play.
Instead, to Sarah’s corpse, he said aloud the question he’d come here to ask earlier in the evening, just to get it off his chest. “ ‘The mountain is getting restless.’ What the fuck was that supposed to mean?”
As if in response, the motel’s generator stuttered. The lights dimmed down to nearly nothing, dark washing over the motel. The SHRIEKS came from very, very close by.
Ryan stood completely still, his back against the door, his heart in his throat. It sounded like those things were in the parking lot.
The generator came back. The things dispersed, shrieking all the way.
Ryan looked at the bulb burning over his head. He wasn’t stupid.
They’d be lucky if they made it until midnight.
Back in the office, he found Stanley Holiday still unconscious.
The boy, Ethan, had moved from the floor to a chair, the Colt Python still in his hand.
The pool of blood around Hunter’s corpse had stopped spreading right at the edge of Ethan’s boots.
The grooved rock that Kyla had dropped earlier still rested in the gore. Hunter was still very dead.
The twins were still standing behind the desk, stone-faced. Ryan said, “You guys have any fuel for that generator?”
They said nothing.
He ignored them. Crossing the room, he said to Ethan, “Do you think you could do one more thing for me? There’s a supply room down the porch. I’d like to get us some privacy, Stanley and I.”
Ethan blinked. He rubbed his head like he was fighting off a hell of a migraine. “What are you going to do to him?”
“Just talk. What? You think I was going to work him over?”
Ethan studied him. Ryan had the uncanniest impression the boy was measuring the dimensions of his heart.
Ethan said, “You look like the kind of man who could.”
Ryan said, “Torture’s more trouble than it’s worth. People lie the minute you start hurting them. It takes days to get anything useful.”
“You still sound like you know a lot about it.”
“I’ve known some pretty bad people in my life. I’m not one of them.”
Before he’d returned to the office, Ryan had found a sturdy chair in the cafe and taken the liberty of relocating it to the supply room.
He’d also taken the liberty of wiping away some bootprints he’d left, earlier in the night, on the room’s dusty floor.
Anyone with half a brain could figure out Ryan had been lying when he said he’d been asleep from the time he’d finished his cigarette with Hunter to the moment Tabitha had started screaming, but he also didn’t see a reason to make it easy to figure out what he had been up to.
Old habits die hard.
From a shelf of gardening supplies, he’d dug out a length of old rope and brought it with him to the office, where he laid it, now, along the front desk.
Ignoring the twins, he reached over the desk to pluck a pair of scissors out of a cup of pens.
He measured lengths of rope against his forearm. He made some cuts.
Ryan said, “Keep the gun trained on Stanley, would you? Careful you don’t aim it at me.”
Ethan did as he was told, holding the gun level as Ryan took two lengths of rope and tied Stanley’s wrists and ankles.
Ethan said, “What were you talking about earlier? Some motel in Fort Stockton Stanley wouldn’t want people to know about?”
“Stanley takes women there. He likes to rough them up. Sometimes badly. He’s got a nasty streak, Mister Holiday.”
“But everyone knows that. He pays those girls. It doesn’t mean he killed Sarah Powers.”
Ryan’s head snapped up. “How do you know that?”
Ethan blinked. “I-I’m not sure.”
Ryan finished tying knots. He left a few more lengths dangling over his neck, ready for use once they got the big man moved. He didn’t know what to make of this kid, he really didn’t.
He asked Ethan, “You want his arms or his legs?”
In the supply room, Ethan helped Ryan ease Stanley into the chair. Stanley snorted, coughed: he was starting to wake up. Ryan worked quickly, undoing the knots he’d made earlier, pulling Stanley’s arms behind his back, tying his hands and ankles to the legs of the chair.
While Ryan worked, Ethan said, “Where’s that girl, Penelope?”
Ryan didn’t look up from his work. “A fantastic question.”
“Aren’t you worried about her?”
“I’m worried about everything.”
“I’m surprised you’re bothering with this jerk when you could be looking for her. Who cares who killed Sarah? There’s worse going on here than just a murder.”
That made Ryan glance over his shoulder. “Like what?”
Ethan touched his forehead. “I don’t know. It’s just… this feeling I’ve got.”
“Yeah. I feel it too.”
“So why don’t you find your stepdaughter and get somewhere safe?”
“Because I don’t think there is anywhere safe.”
Ethan said nothing. Ryan wondered if the boy had picked up the tension in his voice, the way he didn’t quite want to meet the question.
In truth, Ryan wasn’t looking for Penelope because he wanted to keep her out of this mess as much as possible.
The longer Ryan considered the timeline of the night’s events, the more he suspected that Penelope might be more involved than he would ever want to admit.
Ryan changed tack. He asked Ethan, “How’s your head?”
“It hurts.”
“You want a cigarette? They helped your man.”
“I’m good.” He hesitated. “I guess I’ll just go back to my room.”
Ryan gestured to Stanley. He grinned. “Want to get in a few punches before you go? It’s only fair.”
A SHRIEK cut through the desert. Ethan shivered. He looked, suddenly, exhausted.
“Knock yourself out,” he said, and headed out the door.