In Laymon's Terms

Keyes shook his head, thinking about the crazy Mexican...and the fishhooks set in Murdock’s skin.

Keyes wouldn’t have trouble killing that nutty little bastard.

He wouldn’t have trouble at all.

All right. There it was. Those long cool breaths whispered over Keyes’ lips as he waited with a knife clutched in his hand. His breaths were even and steady, but he was the only one who heard them.

He waited two minutes. Maybe three, but Morales didn’t show.

Keyes couldn’t afford to wait any longer than that.

He started moving.

Keyes hadn’t done much moving in the last four months. The cop’s shotgun had torn him up good. Even if he could have hobbled around on his injured leg the first couple of weeks—which he couldn’t—it wouldn’t have mattered. The wound in his belly had put him flat on his back.

That stitched-up mess felt like a black hole of misery hollowed out inside him, and it hurt worse than anything Keyes could imagine. It felt like someone had taken a rusty trowel and shoveled out a pound of his guts, and he’d lie there at night listening to Danni’s sister chanting outside under the stars while he tossed and turned, sweating through fevers that left him delirious, imagining that he could hear that missing part of himself laughing there in the shadows of the dark little room where he made his stand against death and fear.

The room didn’t have any windows. It was actually a shack that stood behind Elise’s ramshackle house, which was halfway up the side of the mountain on a dirt road no one ever bothered with. Keyes spent his nights alone there because he couldn’t lie still, but Danni always joined him in the morning. She took care of him, and so did Elise.

Elise was an ER nurse. Or she had been once. Life in the city had burned her out, and so had the prescription drugs she’d stolen and abused for years.

After a couple of failed stints in rehab, she ended up back on the north coast reservation where she and Danni grew up. It wasn’t that far from anywhere as the crow flies, but it was far enough if you needed more than a twelve-step program to stay away from drugs. The way Keyes saw it, Elise had traded one dead-end addiction for another. She spent most of her days performing rituals and chanting prayers, but they hadn’t gotten her anywhere but the same damned shithole where she’d started out.

Elise claimed that some of the rituals were for Keyes’ benefit. A couple times she nearly smoked him out of the shack with some nasty-ass smudge stick ceremony. Keyes went along with most of it to humor Elise. He figured it was just so much new-age bullshit, even though she claimed her rituals had been old when Columbus set foot on these shores.

Keyes didn’t give a shit about Columbus, but he had to admit that Danni’s sister knew what she was doing when it came to tending his wounds. Soon he was up and walking. And a little while after that the night fevers started to go away, though the empty feeling in Keyes’ belly never did.

And then Danni started pushing him to meet up with Murdock and Morales. He knew she was right, but he couldn’t get himself to make a move. He kept thinking about the cop who’d ended up a red smear on the road, how the guy had gotten the drop on him. He kept remembering the sound of the shotgun, the big empty boom that still echoed in his nightmares.

It got so he liked it in the dark little room. He felt comfortable there. The room was an empty space, like the hole inside him carved by a dead cop’s buckshot and Elise’s scalpel. Sometimes Keyes wanted to take a big needle and stitch up the doorway, the same way Elise had stitched up his wound, but he knew he couldn’t do that. He knew he couldn’t stay in that little room, not if he wanted Danni to stay in his life.

“Trust me,” Elise said. “Let me try those other rituals.”

“Are they the same one’s you’ve tried on yourself?” Keyes asked too sharply. “The same ones that keep you up here on this mountain, living like a hermit?”

“We’re different, Keyes.”

“You bet we are.”

Her eyes flared at the slight, but she swallowed it. Instantly, Keyes regretted his words.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“You don’t have to be. I know how things are. What I’m missing is something I never had, but that’s not your problem. You lost something. Maybe I can find it for you.”

Keyes only laughed at that. And it was strange, because his laughter sounded like the shadowy laughter he’d heard in his fever-dreams. And that made him laugh some more.

“You can’t let this thing get to you,” Danni said. “You do that and all of a sudden you’re someone else, and everything’s different.”