Free The Passenger by Jack Ketchum Page A

this—might have been stuffed moose or deer or
bobcat. Somebody’d painted the words bilge rat next to one of them. Under
another, men are necessary for the gods. Huh ? Beside a third, the
numbers 666. She sure as hell knew what that meant.
    Jesus, she thought, who are these people?
    She glanced back at Janet. Janet was
looking decidedly twitchy and tense, eyes darting around the room as though
she expected somebody to come out after her with a goddamn meat cleaver. Poor
baby.
    Their bartender was a neatly dressed Jabba the Hut made flesh.
    “Heineken,” said Emil. “Five of ’em.”
    The bartender reached for the beers and
popped them.
    “We need a car,” said Emil. “First we
need a place to stay tonight and tomorrow we need a car.”
    The bartender shrugged. “You don’t get
anybody too pissed off at you, you can stand right where you are till you drop dead or hell freezes over,
whichever comes first. I could give a shit.”
    “What about the car? We need a car.”
    “You can pay? Got money?”
    “We can pay.”
    She wondered how much Emil did have. Billy and Ray seemed freaked
about the whole money thing.
    She watched the bartender walk the length
of the bar and stop in front of a black man who looked like the twin of the
suited guard who’d pointed them toward the house—right down to the shaved
bullet-shaped head and the assault rifle slung across his shoulder. The bartender
spoke to him and the man nodded and turned toward the staircase and the
bartender waddled back to his post.
    “You’re Rothert, right?” he said.
    “How the hell do you know that?”
    “You’re the news tonight. Shot a cop.
That gives you three whole minutes of glory. Enjoy yourself. I could give a
shit.”
    She heard a sudden commotion behind them,
raised voices and heavy footfalls and clanking, grating sounds and felt the
crowd shift around her and turned and saw two big men in studded boots and
leather pants and vests hauling a woman off the floor by a chain attached to a
pulley twenty feet away. The woman wore police cuffs and nothing else and the
look in her eyes was drugs and fear and then pain shooting through her wrists
as the men tugged the chain through the pulley and she could see that somebody’d shaved her completely, both head and cunt too.
    They hauled her five feet or so off the
ground and then slipped a link of the chain through a hook set into the floor and she hung there and the men
were smiling and saying something to one another and then they weren’t smiling, they were all pissed
off all of a sudden. With the pounding tide of music she couldn’t hear what it
was they were saying but they were pissed off all right and the crowd was
moving back in her direction even though some were laughing as though the two
men arguing were the center of an oncoming twister.
    One guy had a short goatee kind of thing
and the other didn’t but they were matched pretty well physically, she
thought, big raw biceps and beer bellies so goddamn hard that when the bearded
guy gut-punched the other she could hear it over the music like a basketball
smashed down from a hoop. He doubled over and the man kicked him in the face
and sprayed the crowd with blood and spit. The man went over backward and
scrambled across the floor and came up with a length of chain, stood and
started flailing, catching the bearded guy across the back and then the
shoulders and then the head as he fell, going for the head over and over
again—and the crowd was wild by then and so was she. She could barely fucking
breathe. The bearded guy’s head was a mess but he must have had something
amazing left inside him because his hand swung up from the floor and he took
the other guy’s balls in his great big hand and squeezed. Then they were both
rolling groaning along the floor.
    Humpty
Dumpty sat on a wall ,
she thought and she couldn’t help it, she giggled like a goddamn little kid and
as the pair of guards in combat gear parted the crowd and dragged