Tamara was on the floor, her knees digging deep into the carpet, holding on to her daughter’s left elbow and right forearm, locked in a horrible tug-of-war with the thing beneath Janie’s bed.
She’d long since lost any ability to disbelieve what she was seeing. Her doubt had been dealt a heavy blow in the rest stop bathroom and then been outright slaughtered with the events in Monterey. What was happening now was real. It wasn’t a nightmare. It wasn’t a movie. She would’ve happily given almost anything to make it so but, as her daughter’s screams pierced her ears, Tamara knew the thing pulling her beneath the bed was real and deadly.
“Janie! Hold on to Mommy! Hold on!” Tamara struggled, almost going over face first before dropping to her right hip while simultaneously jamming her left foot against the bed frame. The good news was that this halted Janie’s progress; the bad news was that it pissed off whatever that thing was, peering out with its crazy eyes from beneath the bed skirt.
“Mommy!” Janie screamed, her eyes two bowls of terror, her face pulled back in a grimace of pain.
The creature’s claws, which had been clutching her daughter’s ankles, now worked their way up, first to her calves, and then finally one hand, black and bony, grabbed ahold of one of Janie’s thighs.
Perhaps it was the sight of her child’s anguish, or maybe a point in her had finally been crossed, but Tamara was engulfed in rage. She quickly let go of one of Janie’s elbows, her daughter’s body contorting a bit to the right as she did so.
“No!” Janie screamed. “Don’t let go of me, Mommy!”
But Tamara had no intention of letting go. She had every intention of grabbing hold.
Of the creature.
Locking ahold of the wrist of the hand that was dug into Janie’s thigh, she felt its disgusting leathery skin in her grip. Tamara squeezed as tightly as she could, wrenching her arm back and forth violently, putting as much of her weight into the motions as she could, until she finally heard something crack.
The creature shrieked, its hand twisting loose of Tamara’s grip with ungodly speed, forcing her to release it before the torque of the motion snapped her arm.
This gave Tamara the leverage she needed, ever so briefly, to launch forwards and wrap her arms around Janie’s chest, and pull with all her strength.
The claw on Janie’s calf slipped and then re-gripped, eliciting a new round of screams.
“Hold on, baby. Don’t let go!”
Tamara leaned back forcefully, straining until her lower back was flat across the carpet. It almost worked. Janie was nearly freed. But the move had brought the undesired consequence of bringing Tamara eye level with the bottom of the bed. She saw it there, writhing in the darkness beneath the box spring, its face fixed on Tamara’s. It shot its wounded hand out at Tamara’s face, barely missing her left eye and cheek, before Tamara reestablished her position on her hip, providing her with just enough distance from the creature’s reach.
“Let go!” Tamara demanded through gritted teeth.
Instead, the creature grabbed Janie’s pajama top, the fabric ripping and tearing before it held, giving the creature another handhold. Tamara seethed and grunted, holding her position. With Janie now firmly against her chest, Tamara countered again by releasing her grip with her right hand, forming it into a fist and beating at the creature’s hand repeatedly until it again let go.
The bed shook and rattled, rising nearly a foot off the carpet, as the creature unleashed a scream that was so forceful it shattered the mirror over Janie’s dresser.
Stunned, Janie and Tamara fell silent. Then, seeing the creature try to crawl out from under the bed, they both let out cries of desperation. Janie kicked at it viciously with her free foot, hitting in in the bicep and shoulder.
In the dim light from the hall, the creature’s face became clearer as it tried to emerge from its hiding space; if it were human, it would’ve easily been mistaken for a junkie with long, greasy hair. But it wasn’t alive. With its white and rotting flesh, it had obviously been dead a long time, the smell that emanated from beneath the bed giving further testimony to this fact. Its teeth were rotted yellow, and from time to time, a long tongue would protrude from its mouth.
Janie was writhing in panic. “Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!” But her efforts were hindering Tamara’s grip as well as the creature’s.
“Let go of her! You son of a bitch! Let go!”
Finally, Tamara had an idea. She waited for the creature’s next attempt to struggle forwards and get a firmer grip on her daughter. When it did, Tamara rolled off her right hip and on to her butt, and then shot her right leg out at the creature’s face, feeling with no small sense of satisfaction the heel of her foot catch it square in the jaw.
The creature cried out and recoiled just enough for Tamara to reach down and pull its hand loose from Janie’s thigh, freeing her daughter completely. The hand shot back out but only caught air. Tamara needn’t have told Janie what to do next. Her daughter, sensing a chance at survival, immediately scrambled backwards in terror, up and over Tamara and against the wall behind them.
Good. She’s safe.
From beneath the bed Tamara and the creature locked eyes again. It was bleeding a black tar-like substance from its nose and mouth, and she could see that she’d managed to kick a few of its teeth in. The hate in its eyes was nearly an airborne thing, as real as a touch could ever be.
“C’mon! What now, you bastard?” Tamara screamed.
The creature rattled beneath the bed, its head moving from one end to the other, its body contorting in the confined space in ways that were beyond comprehension, letting loose with grunts and screams of frustration.
Bracing for another attack, something suddenly dawned on Tamara. It can’t come out from underneath the bed.
But how could that be?
It can’t. I guess it’s not allowed to. But why?
Tamara suddenly remembered a trip to her cousin’s ranch one summer. Bored one day, they’d gone on a drive around the property and Tamara had noticed some flat, man-made sheets of wood draped with dried out grass. “What are those?” Tamara asked.
“Hunting blinds,” her cousin, April, told her. “For hunting deer. You hide beneath them, at the ready, until your prey is in sight. You can’t come out from underneath practically the whole morning” April laughed. “Or else you spook the deer away.”
Keeping her eye on the creature the whole time, Tamara scooted cautiously backwards. First five feet. Then ten.
“Shit,” Tamara uttered. “You’re some kind of hunter.”
Having backed up to the wall alongside Janie, who was now inching her way, petrified, towards the bedroom door and the hallway beyond, Tamara watched as the creature poked its head out once more, eying her daughter’s escape with anger before it turned its gaze back to Tamara.
“You can’t come out from underneath there, can you?” Tamara said, her breathing still heavy.
“Mom?” Janie squeaked, as if she were sure her mother had lost her mind. “Don’t talk to it.”
The creature smiled and spat two jagged pieces of its shattered teeth across the carpet towards Tamara.
Tamara glared back at it. “Get out of here,” she demanded, having no idea where the words were coming from, or her ability to think them.
As its head and arms began a slow and measured retreat into the darkness beneath the bed, its mouth seemed to be working at something. It struggled for a bit before it managed to croak out two, raspy words: “Next time.”
Then it was gone.
Janie was crying again. Still eying the bottom of the bed, Tamara stole a quick glance to the hall, first shocked and then relieved to see Seth standing there, his pillow pulled up to his chin.
She had to move sooner or later, so Tamara jumped up, grabbed Janie, and rushed them both out into the hall, while simultaneously slamming the bedroom door behind them. Once there, she grabbed Seth and the three of them ran to the living room, where Tamara snatched up her car keys, determined to flee the house.
“Don’t go outside! Don’t go outside!” Seth screamed, clutching onto his mother’s leg for dear life.
It was dark outside. Pitch black. Seth had always been afraid of the dark, but this was something else. Tamara stopped cold and tried to take measure of the situation as Janie whimpered in her mother’s arms.
“Please, Mommy! Don’t go outside,” Seth cried.
Neither of the kids would let go of her, and who could blame them?
No matter how hard she tried, Tamara couldn’t let go of the image of the creature, which was now burned into her mind.
How many times had her kids been unable to sleep because they’d thought something was under the bed?
How many times had she thought that when she was a child?
And how many times had it been true.
Something was under there.
A hunter.
A hunter of children.
Parker stood in Jasmine White’s bedroom and chewed on his lower lip as he looked around. It evidently had been quite a struggle; the mirror over the vanity was partially smashed, a smear of blood etched in part of the glass, and the chair in front of it was overturned and partially broken. Two towels were on the floor, one near the bed that had a small patch of long hair attached to it, and the other bunched up in front of the closet. Makeup from the vanity was strewn across the carpet; a stray compact had evidently been stepped on and crushed. A half-dozen tubes of lipstick were scattered about, one having rolled against the baseboard clear across the room.
“Jesus,” Parker said.
Conch was standing near him, between the bed and the bathroom door. He nodded. “Normally I would refrain from taking the Lord’s name in vain, but I’ll give you this one.”
“She put up a solid fight.”
“Yes. She did.”
Kendall was in the living room with Sandy Allen, who was evidently a friend of Jasmine’s, and who from the sound of things was beginning to throw a conniption fit. “What’re you guys doing just standing around?”
“Please, calm down,” Kendall countered.
“What? Calm down? Oh… my… God! You need to be out looking for her. You need to find her!”
“I understand, miss, and we’re—”
“This can’t be happening. You have to do something.”
It was the forlorn, tortured way in which she said “do” that was nearly unbearable to Parker. Desperation was a horrible thing. Mix it with terror and it was one of the worst sounds in existence.
He briefly thought of Cortez and Taylor, pinned down on that hillside in Afghanistan, trapped. They had sounded the same way. He shook off the memory before it could overtake him. “You want me to switch out with Kendall?” he asked Conch.
Conch shook his head. “No. I go with my gut on things, Parker. You’re the one who rolled into town with that matching business card, and you’re the one who saw those initials carved on that fence, which means you’re the one with the hot hand right now. So let’s hear it.”
He was disappointed with Conch’s decision. Parker couldn’t lie, even to himself anymore. A part of him felt heavy with dread, so much so that he wanted to just get back to his car, drive home, wait out a decision on his suspension and put this whole quagmire of cascading disasters behind him.
Again he remembered that Napoleon had warned him, back in San Diego, point blank, to get out. He should’ve listened to him.
Instead, Parker sighed and tried to add up what he could. “Whoever came in did so through the back door—you saw it, it was jimmied—and they didn’t even bother to close it on the way out. From the looks of the two outfits laid out on the bed and the towels on the floor, she probably just got out of the shower.”
“Yep. Tub and tile in there are still a little wet. Soap bar is sitting in a pool of water too.”
“Okay. So he attacks her at the vanity, right?”
Conch nodded. “Most likely from behind. She was seated and he came up from behind…”
“Then he tried to incapacitate her… probably by smashing her head into the mirror?”
“It would look that way. There’s blood in the glass, probably from a facial cut.”
“Mm-hmm,” Parker agreed.
“Well,” Conch said as he folded his arms, “if he was trying to incapacitate her? He did a piss-poor job of it.”
“They went at it, from the looks of it.”
Conch shook his head. “Poor kid. You remember her, right?”
“Yeah. About five-six. Thin as a rail.”
“Probably didn’t stand a chance.”
“But she didn’t see it that way.”
“All she saw was a stranger in her home who’d just attacked her.”
“While she was in a towel, no less.”
“So what next?”
Parker looked around again. “The fight breaks out. She probably had this towel on her head.” Parker pointed at the towel by the bed. “At some point he ripped it off, taking some of her hair with it. After that I’m guessing he wins somehow. Not enough blood here for a stabbing or a shooting.”
“So, in the end, he incapacitated her anyways.”
“That, or convinced her with a weapon to come along without any further resistance.”
“We’ve got blood on the carpet there by your foot. Be careful not to step in it.”
“Forensics coming?”
“From Bakersfield. Again. Twice in three days. That’s as many times as all of last year.”
“And both of them were drunk drivers,” Kendall said from the doorway.
“Where’s the Allen girl?” Conch asked, looking at Kendall.
“On the front porch calling Jasmine’s family.”
Conch uncrossed his arms and reached a hand up to rub at the back of his neck. “This is too much.”
“And still not all,” Kendall said ominously.
With Parker and Conch looking at him, Kendall motioned his head back towards the living room and added, “Out back. You’re both gonna wanna see this.”
They carefully exited the bedroom and made their way down the hall, Parker noticing a few drops of blood in the hallway as well and pointing them out along the way.
“Ms. Allen says she has a key. She crashes here sometimes. Came in through the front door, saw the place and fled right back outside and called us,” Kendall reported.
Once outside it was too dark to see much, so Kendall clicked on his flashlight and walked them slowly across the grass in the backyard until they were near Jasmine White’s bedroom window. “Hold up here,” Kendall said. “Just so we don’t mess anything up.”
Conch and Parker stopped.
“Now, over here,” Kendall said, sweeping his flashlight across the dirt patch along the side of the house, “we have someone’s shoe prints, clear as day, just working his way along.”
The tracks led in nearly a direct path to right beneath the bedroom window.
“Work boots,” Conch said matter-of-factly.
Kendall nodded. “Looks like it. Maybe. Yeah. But it also looks like our boy was a peeper.”
“Why?” Parker asked.
The three of them watched as Kendall combed the beam from the ground below the window in a slow pattern up the stucco of the house to the outer windowsill. The stucco was splattered with something.
“What is that?”
“What it is,” Kendall said, “is from that.” He swung the light beam to the right and illuminated a bottle of Clorox. “Can’t you smell it a bit?”
“Actually, yeah, now that you mention it,” Parker replied.
“Bleach. To cover up evidence of some kind,” Conch mused.
“Usually blood though, right?” Kendall said, and returning his flashlight to the area below and around the window, he added, “Why would he be bleeding out here? I mean, why be near the window at all, after the fact?”
“He was watching her from the window, ahead of time, Kendall,” Conch said. “I think we can all agree on that.”
“Pretty safe bet that he wasn’t bleeding before he went in. I mean, possibly, but unlikely.”
Parker cleared his throat and put his hands on his hips. “So. What was the Clorox for then?”
Kendall brought the flashlight back to the ground in front of them. “Well. I think our boy got a little too excited.”
“What?” Conch asked.
“Sheriff, I think he jerked off, plain and simple, right against the wall.”
This time it was Conch’s turn. “Jesus.”
“Guy’s pretty brave,” Kendall said.
Parker looked around the back yard. “Not really. The fences are high and the garage blocks the nearest neighbor’s view.”
“Still,” Kendall countered.
“Yep. Bold may be the better word. And smart, I’ll bet.”
“How so?” Conch asked.
“No semen sample out here. I doubt we find any of his blood inside. We may get lucky with some hair samples, if she got a piece of him. Odds aren’t good that we’ll get prints on the door either, and I’m willing to bet the Clorox bottle is print free too.”
“That just shows he’s careful, at least on the back end, but not so smart,” Conch replied. “If he were so smart, this place wouldn’t be such a mess.”
Kendall joined in. “Can we even assume it’s the same guy? I mean, the liquor store gig was so clean it squeaked. This place is a mess.”
“Good point, Kendall,” Conch agreed.
“Could be a coincidence.”
“Never believe in coincidences,” Parker said aloud without realizing it.
Conch turned to him. “What’d you say?”
“My partner. He said never to believe in coincidences.”
A somber look came over Conch’s face. “I’ve lived by that one myself. For many years.”
“So?” Kendall asked. “If it was the same guy, why such different looking crime scenes?”
“He’s getting reckless,” Conch answered.
Parker disagreed but said nothing until Conch seemed to see something in his face and called him out. “Detective?”
Hesitating a bit, Parker finally replied, “I think he did this on purpose. I think he wanted us to see this. The whole thing, maybe save with what happened with the Clorox bottle. That’s all that he really tried to cover up. Everything else? He just didn’t give a damn about.”
Kendall shook his head. “Great.”
“Maybe,” Conch said with a nod. And then, looking again at Parker, he said, “But it still doesn’t tell us one thing: why this girl?”
“What do you mean?” Parker asked.
“What’re the odds that one of the girls you and your partner interviewed ends up being his next target?”
Parker looked at the ground. “I guess we can’t call that a coincidence either, can we?”
Conch grunted. “No, Detective, we can’t.”