Thicker Than Blood - Crouch Blake (лучшие книги онлайн TXT) 📗
Her breath steamed.
Leaves crunching somewhere in the distance.
She wondered if the man with long black hair would kill her in the woods or take her back to that awful house…
Beth woke colder than she’d ever been, the sky starblown, woods gone quiet, her bleeding stopped. She sat up, staggered to her feet, and limped along through the thicket.
After an hour she broke from the trees into a field of marsh grass, her feet sinking every step in the cold mud. She tramped on, so delirious with exhaustion that she hardly noticed when her eviscerated foot touched the pavement of Highway 12.
Beth stepped bewildered into the middle of the road. To the north it ran into darkness as far as she could see. Southward, it extended toward what could only be the nighttime glow of civilization.
The moon was rising.
Sea shining.
She stumbled along toward the village.
Rufus’s wound was long but shallow. He sat in a chair in the kitchen while, in lieu of stitches, Maxine used a strip of duct tape to close the three-inch slice to the right of his bellybutton.
The left side of her jaw was swollen but the pain was sufferable. There was little she could do about it anyway. They didn’t have much time. People would be coming soon, looking for the men their son had murdered.
While Maxine packed suitcases, Rufus took a lantern down into the basement.
The good news was that the project was nearly finished. He had only to install the power supply and wire it to the chair. He would work all night if he had to.
Flicking on the overhead light bulb, he rolled the generator from the passageway into the death chamber.
Rufus hoped Luther would return soon so they could put the finishing touches on their beautiful chair together.
At midnight Beth came to a dirt road. It branched off to the soundside of Highway 12, crossed a hundred yards of marsh, and terminated on a piece of dry land, upon which sat a modest saltbox, its porchlight beckoning.
The name on the nearby mailbox read Tatum.
She could see the warm glow of the Ocracoke Light in the distance, a comforting presence above the dark trees. The village was less than a half mile down the highway, but everything was sure to be closed at this hour. Besides, the sole of her foot was shredded. She doubted she could stand the pain of walking much farther.
Her wound started to bleed again as she trudged down the dirt road. The closer she got to the house the more lightheaded she became and the deeper the cold bored into her. She wondered how she’d lasted this long, felt a brief tinge of pride.
Live oaks massed behind the saltbox, blocking a view of the sound. But eastward the dunes were just low enough to offer a glimpse of the sea—shinyblack in the strong moonlight.
She neared the house. An old sailboat foundered in weeds on the edge of the marsh, like something washed up after a hurricane, stripped of sails, its hull cracked.
A Dodge Ram gleamed in the yellow porchlight, parked parallel to the garage, "BOATLUV" on the license plate, a fishing rod holder mounted to the front bumper, the rods standing erect in their PVC pipes.
Beth climbed five brick steps to the front door.
Moths loitered above her head, bouncing off the porchlight, over and over like maniacs.
Nausea hit her but there was nothing on her stomach.
Through slits in the blinds, she saw the shadow of a man lying on a couch, blue light flickering on the walls around him.
Beth opened the screen door and knocked.
The man did not move.
She banged on the door, saw him sit up suddenly and rub his eyes.
He staggered to his feet.
She heard his footsteps coming.
The front door opened and a whitebearded man gazed down at her through glassy eyes. He cinched his robe and she smelled gin when he said, "Do you have any idea what time…"
He rubbed his eyes again, blinked several times, and squinted at her, Beth crying now, the warmth of his home flowing out onto the porch, reminding her what safety felt like. The man saw the blood pooling at her feet, traced it to the hole in her stained and ragged lingerie.
She heard audience laughter on the television.
Cold blood trailed down her leg.
"Help me," she whispered.
Her knees quit and she fell forward.
He caught her, lifted her off her feet, and carried her inside.
61
RUFUS pushed the Generac Wheelhouse into a corner of the death chamber, fired up the soldering gun, and proceeded to fuse the no. 4 copper wire to the copper plating on the chair’s front legs, the room filling with the sweet sappy odor of the melted alloy.
When the soldering was done, he took the hacksaw he’d found in a corridor near the alcove, and cut two four-foot lengths of no. 4 copper wire from the dwindling coil. With a hammer, he beat out the ends of the wire until they were flattened enough to fit into the two legs of the generator’s 220 volt outlet.
Behind the toolbox he found Maxine’s contribution to the project—a homemade skullcap. She’d taken a North Carolina Tarheels baseball cap, cut up one of her thin leather belts, and sewn the pieces into the sides so the buckle could be tightened under the condemned’s chin.
Maxine had drilled a hole through a square-inch of copper plating and put a brass screw through it. She’d then superglued a square-inch piece of sponge to the copper plate, removed the button from the top of the baseball cap, and bolted the electrode to the inside so it would rest flush against the condemned’s head.
Rufus grabbed one of the four-foot copper wires and hammered its other end so that it had enough surface area to accept a screw. He drilled a hole through it, then took both the wire and the skullcap and sat down in the chair.
Unscrewing the bolt that fastened the electrode to the cap, he slipped the copper wire onto the brass screw, tightened the bolt back into place, and grinned.
He now had his own personal electric chair, and though he had doubts about whether it could actually deliver a lethal jolt, it would certainly be fun to try.
Rufus came to his feet.
His side was hurting again.
He walked upstairs to tell Maxine that everything was ready and see if Luther had come home.
Charlie Tatum was sobering up fast. He set the broken creature down on the soft leather sofa where he’d been drifting in and out of sleep for the last two hours, and called out to his wife down the dark hallway:
"Margaret! Come out here!"
The woman was still unconscious.
Charlie knelt down on the carpet and straightened the lingerie so her nipples didn’t show. He lifted her satin chemise to see where all the blood was coming from.
The wound was located just above her hipbone, like a small black mouth, open with surprise, blood oozing from its corner, down the woman’s side, and onto the leather sofa.
"What in the world are you yelling about, baby?"
Margaret emerged from the hallway and stood in her flannel nightgown, a woman with heft, her dyed red hair in turmoil, sleeplines down the right side of her face.
"Are you drunk?" she asked, pointing at the empty tumbler and the half-empty bottle of Tanqueray sitting on the driftwood coffee table between the sofa and the television.
"Just put your glasses on, Mag," he said.
Margaret pulled a pair of thick-lensed frames from the patch pocket on her nightgown, slipped them on, and gasped.
"My God. What in the world happened to her?"
"You tell me. She just knocked on the door. When I opened it she said ‘help me’ and fainted right into my arms."
Margaret moved a step closer across the carpet. She turned on a stained glass lamp sitting on an end table.
