I eased behind Bolton, .357 in hand, finger on the trigger ready to explode a bullet into the fat redneck's brain. I was reaching for the cuffs dangling from his belt when he lurched back and tried to knock me off my feet, but he didn't go for my gun. I simply took a step backward and he tumbled, hitting the ground and rolled. His hands lashed out at me in a last ditch pistol to the ground just out of his reach and the bastard crawled, a maniacal and malevolent grin crossing the whole of his fat round face, reddened with pain but fearless in its fury. Like a worm on his belly, knowing he would never make it, his mind broken if not his cursed spirit and I watched him and Chaplin watched him with her friend's head in her arms looking like a Madonna and child.
Po slept soundly, couched a little from the drifting smoke and cinders, but I'd wait until hell froze over to see what I was seeing—Bolton rooting like a pig through the mud, treading on his hands and knees to get to that pistol. He was a man eager to carry out his own death sentence, but I didn't let him have the satisfaction. He was dreaming hard enough to sleepwalk into his grave and came to his knees pawing the weapon, too eager to get his sausage like finger on the trigger. The Magnum's bore pressed into the perspiring furrow between his eyes and I squeezed the trigger.
"Barry!" Chaplin screamed in tears, rocking on her haunches.
The shot resounded throughout the woods and the hollow point shell drilled past Bolton's eyes and split his skull down the middle like a white-hot rock. His brain looked like two halves of a sliced and squeezed grapefruit and the sides of his head fell to either of his shoulders. I slapped the Glock's muzzle down as the dead man's fingers locked on the trigger and sent the automatic round spraying into the ground. There wasn't anything left of Bolton's mind. His face had torn in two and blood came out of each half, veins and arteries spraying it by the quart and gallon. Only his fat belly was left intact, on bent knees and the belly was blistered with bullet scars and bleeding. Green bilge bubbled out of pulp that had been his neck. It was sickening to see a man vomiting without a head and I took another step back and kicked over the upright corpse, planting my boot in the boiling gut and shoving.
"Barry—," Patricia weeped, voice urgent and cracked and I went to her.
The burning woods were collapsing in on themselves, the fire spreading and leaping onto every plant and tree. I holstered the pistol and pulled Sukowski by the hair from Patricia's arms, placing one arm under the burn mottled flesh of her wide back and the other beneath her knees, carried the big woman to the car. Patricia picked up Po the same way; Po who weighed nothing came awake and rubbed the soot from her over sensitive eyes. Chaplin let Po get her feet, supporting the girl's weak and halting steps and opened the car's rear door.
I laid Sukowski across the back seat and slammed the door, then looked Chaplin sternly in the eye. Her lips parted and it was a second before she spoke, but before she could utter a word, Po threw herself from Chaplin's shoulder, falling into my arms, which instinctively folded around her small shoulders. Her body was cold but mine was hot and her small fingers and arms clawed and gripped at my chest pulling closer.
"With the evidence you gave me, Barry—and with what I've seen here I think I can prove beyond reasonable doubt that you are innocent of the crime for which you were originally convicted."
I smirked sardonically, with unintended black humor. My holding the girl like that seemed to be the place where she belonged all along; needed to be and should've been from the very start.
"The 'original' crime. The way you say it, it sounds like the original sin. What about all the sins that followed? Are you going to say that all of the murders I've committed were justifiable homicides," I sneered.
She straightened her back and asserted with a straight face: "Yes."
Her eyes dropped with what looked like regret to the silently sobbing Po, delicately wrapped and protected by my pumped and flexed bicep.
"Then go ahead and prove me innocent—and when they fry me you can appeal to the Pope to have me made a Saint. That way all the kids in catholic schools can get to wear little electric chairs on gold chains around their necks. No thanks, Chaplin."
She pursed her lips, eyes squinting with irritation. The fire was turning the world black and yellow with thick suffocating smoke and harsh blazing flames. We'd be choking on our own words after not too long, the air growing arid and congested, crowding our lungs.
Po coughed like a child, little fist covering her wet lips, small cheeks blowing and sucking what little Oxygen was left as the tall trees were staring to crash down around us.
"Okay, Barry—but what—what are you—and Po going to do?"
"For starters, get the hell out of here alive and I advise you to do the same—Seeya, Chaplin— It's been real."
I snatched Po completely off the ground, her body curled in a ball nestled in my arms and bolted. Chaplin dived behind the wheel of her car, gunned the engine and peeled out backwards along the bogged road until she reached the highway seconds ahead of the burning hedge of sizzling woods. The Mercedes skidded onto the tarmac and sped as fast as she could get away from the hellish place.
The sky was invisible above the dense shifting smoke but darkened of its own accord. The sun no more than a red stain in the black expanse that itself vanished as the calumnious black clouds moved in and collided overhead, lightning exploding, thunder raging and rumbling, the rain smashing the hot knife-like flames like big stone fists beating a soggy bag of burnt bones.
It was late evening when Chaplin learned that the Von Schwartz's had been found dead in the isolated mansion; Eva had suffered massive blood loss on account of deep multiple lacerations and Victor had broken his neck in the fatal fall down the spiraling flight of marble steps. She also learned that the sole beneficiary of the Von Schwartz estate was their only daughter who was also the sole surviving next of kin. However, Po Von Schwartz was never seen or heard from again.
Barry Electric was exonerated of the original crimes of rape and kidnapping, but tried in absentia for multiple murders, was found guilty in connection with the string of brutal cold-blooded killings. The sentence thus handed down was seventy-five consecutive life sentences, but Electric's whereabouts were also never discovered. He and Po had struggled, on their own and each in their way to break free of the nightmares that encircled and enchained them, holding them prisoners. Together at last, they made sure no one would ever lock them up and throw away the key again.
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