Free Endless Night by Richard Laymon

didn’t like at all; if they left me behind, the cops would get me. Almost for sure.
    There I’d be, cops crawling all over the place, me on foot and miles from home, with nothing on except my shoes and my Connie kilt.
    That’d sure be a sweet fix to be in.
    It’d be especially sweet because of the fact that we aren’t allowed to let the cops take us alive. If we get caught, we might talk. That’s the problem. So we can’t let ourselves get caught. We’ve either got to commit suicide or go down fighting.
    The penalty for getting taken alive ... never mind, I’m getting sidetracked. The thing is, Mitch wanted me to stay and take care of the witnesses.
    “You wanta leave without me?” I said.
    He goes, “Somebody’s gotta stay.”
    “Then let’s all stay. Go on back and get the others, tell ’em what happened. If we all search, we might stand a chance of finding those two before ...”
    “All right,” Mitch said.
    He’d said it awfully fast, as a matter of fact. But I was too relieved, just then, to let it worry me.
    “You stay here,” he said, “and start looking.”
    He turned away and started walking.
    “Can you hurry?”
    He twisted sideways and raised his arm and shook his old Rebel saber at me. “You better find her, man. You better find ’em both, or you’re ...”
    “Just get the others over here, okay?”
    “Tom’s gonna have your ass.”
    “Oh, fuck off. I’m the only one who even got close enough to grab her. You and Chuck were useless.”
    Just when I said that, Chuck came out a back door of the house. He had his ax propped up against one shoulder and the old lady’s body hanging over the other. He was bloody all over.
    Mitch saw him and picked up his speed a little.
    When they met, they said some things I couldn’t hear. Then they turned around and went into the house.
    I perched myself on the wall. Sitting up there with a leg hanging over each side, I’d be able to watch for the others to come, and I could also look down the hillside.
    Nothing showed down there, just bushes and weeds and a lot of trees. The moon made some things look dirty white. A lot of places, shadowy places, were just plain black. At the bottom, the ground leveled out for a while. Then came a row of houses with big, fenced back yards. Plenty of the back yards had pools. Most of the houses were dark, but a few had spotlights. The pool of one house was all lighted up, but I couldn’t see anyone swimming in it. Fact is, I couldn’t see anyone anywhere.
    Out past the fronts of the houses, there were some cars parked in driveways and also on the street. I could see a long stretch of the street between the ending places where it curved around the hill and vanished. Not a single car was moving on it. Not a person was walking on it. I did see a cat scurry across and hide under a parked car. Nothing else, though.
    I sure couldn’t see any trace of the girl or the kid. Couldn’t hear them moving around down there, either.
    Maybe if I kept still, though, they might do something to give themselves away. That’s what I hoped for. Because if they didn’t, our chances of finding them were slim to zilch.
    The girl’d put in a call to 911, but she hadn’t gotten through. She’d tried to fake us out, but Mitch checked the phone in the bedroom and it was still ringing at the cop end of things. So we’re okay on that score.
    Which didn’t mean that somebody hadn’t called the cops.
    But it was a good sign that none had shown up yet.
    Sitting on the wall, I tried to put myself in the girl’s shoes. (Not that she was wearing any, because she wasn’t. Had nothing on at all but that loose nightie. All bare underneath it. Bare and smooth and slim and—coutdn’t have been any older than fifteen, sixteen. Young stuff. Young, fresh stuff. Maybe even a virgin. Right. Not hardly likely. I don’t think there are any virgins anymore. We live in crummy times. Nothing crummy about this gal, though. I can’t wait to get my