The Passenger by Jack Ketchum Read Free Book Online

was so much
wrong with that smile that she knew she’d never understand it as long as she lived.
    “Oh, honey,” she said. “It ain’t nothing.
I had boyfriends used to give it to me rough all the time. You lay back, watch
the ceiling. You’ll get used to it.”
    Emil’s fingers went to her blouse, to the
buttons. Billy had his pocket knife in one hand and was poking its tip to his
opposite thumb as though testing it
while he and Ray moved to the bedside, watching them, an impossible drift of
soulless motion and for the first time she really did fear for her life, knew
that this might be the end of her right here on this bed, knew it so deeply and
well that when her skirt went down and her panties went down and she felt his
cock, hard and still beslimed with Marion against her thigh the room swirled
and she nearly fainted in the knowledge, but she didn’t, she wasn’t going to be
that lucky. She just looked away from
them, from all of it and heard him spit on his hand and felt him wipe it across
her and then the bright pain of entry like a thousand needles sinking all at
once into her flesh and she cried out and heard the drone of Marion’s voice
above.
    “ There,
there, darlin’. You might as well know it. Life’s nothing but a trail of tears
for us girls. You might as well know. ”
     
    * * *
     
    And then later, Billy demurring but not
Ray. Ray the family man, solemnly stripping off his clothes. She turned away
again.
    And again that voice above her. Dreamy
and cooing evil at her.
    “ You’ve
never seen what I’ve seen. There’s so much you’ve just been protected from. Had
a guy once, beat me morning, noon and night, regular, pretty much every day.
And people used to say, why do you stay with him? He beats you! And I’d say I
love him. He's mine. And I did, and he was. He may be crazy drunk nights but
days he’s mine, I said. What’s a woman to expect from a man, anyhow? So don’t you
worry about any of this, honey. A woman can get over near anything. And I’m the
living proof. ”
     
    * * *
     
    When it was over they left her alone but
did not completely close the door and she knew they could hear her sobbing so
she stopped sobbing and wiped away the snot and tears and got up and used the
bathroom, gave herself a whore’s bath in the sink and washed away the blood
across her face and hairline, then left the water running so they could hear
and went back to the bedroom and opened the bedside drawer and silently as possible took out a pen and notepad,
thought hard and began to write.
     
    * * *
     
    Emil leaned into the room just as she was
zipping up her skirt and asked if she was ready. She said she was. She guessed
they weren’t going to kill her quite yet. He looked strangely hesitant for a
man who’d just finished raping her.
    “You’re pretty much okay, right?”
    “I’m . . . ( going to fucking get you ) . . . yes. ( Somehow I’ll see you dead for this. ) I’m all right.”
    “Good. That’s good.”
    She walked past him, fists clenched, on
into the living room and saw the other three standing set to leave but ignored
them and walked straight to the kitchen, took the half-empty bottle of
Glenlivet off the counter and poured all that was left into a tall tumbler off
the dish rack and drank prodigiously— an
old magician’s trick, a little slight-of-hand, fellas —because
as she drank they were watching that and trying to gauge her. So that they did
not see her set down the bottle on the small square of paper she’d slipped onto
the counter beside it.
    She drank most of what was in the glass.
It wasn’t only to complete the illusion. She needed it.
    She slammed the glass to the counter.
    “Let’s go.”
     
    * * *
     
    “Janet!”
    Ever since the crime scene back on the
highway he hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that something was seriously
wrong. Something wrong with Janet. He’d phoned Kaltzas’s garage and got through
this time and no body had heard from her.
It