Kyle, a foot away, reached out, grabbed him from across the bar, and hoisted him high above his head.
“Hey, man, get off of me!” the bartender yelled, flailing but helpless against Kyle’s superior strength. “Hey, man, what’s your problem!?”
“I don’t like being told a bar is closed,” Kyle said slowly, his voice gravely. “I’m not going to ask you twice: I want a Guinness and a shot of Jack. Make it two. Make it now.”
The bartender looked down at Kyle as he dangled in the air, eyes wide with fear, and he held up his palms.
“Hey, man, whatever you want!” he said. “You can have your drinks.”
Kyle grinned, and slowly set the man down. He reached into his pocket and took out a fifty, which he had swiped from the wallet of one the policeman, a nice clean crisp bill, and put it on the bar.
“Keep it,” Kyle said.
The bartender looked over at it, impressed. He glanced over his shoulder at Kyle, clearly scared, as he poured the beer from the tap; he didn’t even notice the foam spilling over his hand.
“I’m looking for a girl,” Kyle said, “the girl that was here tonight. The redhead. Teenager. You know her?”
The bartender turned and set the drink down before Kyle and looked up at him, uneasy.
“I don’t know anything about her.”
“You don’t?” Kyle said, looking into the man’s eyes.
Kyle always knew when someone was lying; he considered it one of his great talents.
Kyle took both shots of Jack, took a long swig on his pint of Guinness, then, without warning, suddenly smashed the glass down on the bartender’s fingertips, crushing them, pinning his hand down.
The bartender cried out in pain.
“You sonofabitch!” he shrieked.
Kyle leaned in close.
“The next step,” Kyle snarled, “is I break this glass and cut your throat. Now go ahead: lie to me again.”
The bartender, groaning, sweating, nodded hastily.
“She goes to the local high school, man, that’s all I know,” he said in a rush, squinting in pain. “Her name is Scarlet. I swear I know nothing else. It was her first time in here. I heard the cops talking to her folks. That’s it. That’s all I know!”
Kyle released his grip, and the man pulled back his hand, shaking it in pain.
Kyle smiled wide.
“You see?” he said. “That wasn’t so hard.”
“What do you want from her, anyway?” the bartender asked. “Why don’t you just leave her alone? You had your fun. The girl is like missing or something. You really messed her up.”
Suddenly the TV blared, and over Kyle’s shoulder, he heard the news announcer.
“This just in: police are on the lookout for Kyle Vicious, wanted for the murder of two police officers on Route Nine. This, after his escape tonight from the local prison.”
Kyle turned, saw a picture of himself on the screen, and was surprised by how handsome he looked. Kyle turned back, saw the bartender looking at him with fear, mouth agape.
“Don’t believe everything you hear,” Kyle said. “I didn’t escape. My time was up.”
“You have to leave now,” the bartender said, panicked.
Kyle grinned, ignoring him.
“My last name,” Kyle said. “You probably think it’s fake, right? It’s not. Can you believe it? I was aptly named: I was born to kill.”
The bartender held up his palms.
“Look man,” he said, voice shaky, “I got no problem with you. I don’t get involved. I won’t say nothing.”
Kyle heard the man’s voice shaking. Kyle smiled.
“You know,” Kyle said, “after all those years in prison, there’s one skill I learned really well: how to tell when a man is lying.” Kyle looked right at him. “And you, my friend, are lying.”
The bartender shook his head.
“You’re going to rat me out the second I walk out that door.”
The bartender shook his head vigorously.
“No, I swear it!”
Kyle heard a buzzing noise, looked down, and saw the man’s cell phone vibrating beneath the bar. Kyle snatched it before the man could, and he read it. Kyle saw that the man had texted the police.
“Like I said,” Kyle added, “I can always tell.”
The bartender reached down behind the counter, pulled out a bat, and held it up.
“You better get the hell out of here now!” he yelled, his voice breaking. “The cops are coming! They’ll kill you! And if they don’t, I will!”
Kyle laughed.
“Will you?” he mocked.
A second later, the place flooded with flashing lights and sirens, and Kyle heard police cars screech up to the door, heard boots run across the gravel, and a moment later, the door was kicked open.
Dozens of police officers rushed into the room, guns drawn.
“Freeze! Hands on your head! NOW!”
Kyle sat on the stool, grinning, his back to them, and the bartender watched in shock as Kyle slowly drank the rest of his pint of Guinness. He drank and drank, liquid dripping down his chin and onto his shirt, until he finally set the glass down.
Kyle belched.
“Damn good beer,” he said. “Too bad it’s wasted in a dump of a place like this.”
Kyle turned around and grinned.
“Ready now,” he said. “Beer’s done.”
“I said hands up!” an officer yelled.
They all held the guns in their hands, and Kyle smiled as he could sense their fear.
“And what if I don’t?” Kyle asked.
Kyle took a step toward them, and suddenly, gunfire erupted.
Kyle felt the bullets riddling his chest and stomach and arms and shoulders, and his body shook as he was knocked down to the floor after dozens of rounds.
Kyle lay on the floor until the gunfire stopped. He could smell the smoke from the pistols, and finally all was quiet inside.
Kyle suddenly jumped back to his feet. He stood there, staring at the group of astonished cops, all with mouths agape, too stunned to react.
“Didn’t your mama ever tell you not to bring a knife to a gunfight?” Kyle asked, grinning wide.
Kyle lurched forward with a guttural shriek, and he felt more power, more speed, than he’d ever had. Before any of the cops could react, Kyle unleashed a world of pain on the room, racing through the crowd, head-butting and elbowing, punching and kicking.
In the blink of an eye, they were all knocked out on the floor, unmoving, with broken jaws, noses, limbs.
Kyle stood there admiring his handiwork, then casually reached down, picked up two of the pistols, examined the ammunition, and stuck them in his belt, smiling.
“Don’t mind if I do,” he said to the dead officer.
Kyle turned to go, and as he did, he heard the creaking of the floorboard.
He turned around, remembering the bartender.
The bartender stood there, cowering, now holding the bat limply before him.
Kyle approached him, and the bartender dropped the bat and raised his shaking hands.
“Please,” he pleaded. “I got a wife! I got kids!”
Kyle stopped and examined him from a foot away, looking into his eyes.
“There you go,” Kyle said, “lying again.”
Kyle heard a dripping noise, and looked down to see the bartender peeing his pants.
Kyle reached out, took the crisp fifty off the bar, and grabbed the other pint of Guinness.
“You poured the Guinness just right,” Kyle said. “Not too much foam. That’s hard to do, you know. Very hard. You’re a lucky man. A very lucky man.”
Kyle turned, beer in hand, and stepped over the corpses as he headed out the door, into the night, on his way to find that girl.
Scarlet, he thought.
Now things were about to get interesting.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Scarlet sat in the back of the small rowboat, rocking in th
e strong currents of the Hudson River, and wrapped her sweater tighter about her shoulders to ward off the cold breeze coming off the water. She had forgotten how cold the Hudson could be in November; she had also forgotten how strong the tides could be, and she braced herself against the spray, almost like waves in an ocean.
There were too many people crammed in—Maria, Jasmine and Becca, Blake who was rowing, and a couple of his friends—and Scarlet looked out, shivering, not trusting this creaking, weathered boat, and was grateful to see that Bannerman’s Island was fast approaching, hardly thirty yards away.
Scarlet had mixed feelings about coming here. She remembered times in the past when she used to love to come to Bannerman’s, a small, abandoned island in the middle of the Hudson, with its huge crumbling ruin of a castle, a relic of a former time, long abandoned, structurally unsound, overgrown with vines. In fact, the whole island was overgrown with thorny thickets and vines and poison ivy, a place long condemned, left to the side of history.
Scarlet used to like to imagine how it looked in its former glory a hundred years ago, when the whimsical rich owner had lived here, a man who had somehow used his force of will to dredge up and build a castle on an island in the midst of the Hudson. How romantic, she thought, even if he was a gunrunner. She would have loved to have met him, to see what his castle looked like in all its glory.
But that was another era, long dead. As she looked out at Blake and his friends, all laughing too loud, drinking beers, and throwing the empty cans into the water, she realized that there was nothing romantic left in these times. All chivalry, all grand notions of romance, seemed to have died. This castle was a testament to it. Now it was just another ruin littering the Hudson, another place bratty kids could go to drink or get high or do anything they wanted far from the eyes of their prying parents. It was a place they could party all night and not have to worry about trashing a house, or having the cops called on them. In some ways, it was a disgrace that Bannerman’s romantic ideal ended, a hundred years later, with this.
Yet Bannerman’s was also a treacherous place to go—the island covered in poison ivy, thorns, and dangerous structures ready to collapse—and it was also a dangerous place to get to, the tides taking someone else’s life at least once a year somewhere along the Hudson. And on a November night like this, it was no fun being here, being exposed to this kind of wet and cold. Especially when Scarlet felt sick to her stomach, not enjoying the company of her friends, not enjoying anyone’s company. The only thing on her mind was Sage.
Scarlet did not know why she had agreed to come. At the time she’d felt cornered in, pressured into it, and she had felt that she couldn’t go back home. Now that Sage was gone and she had no way of finding him, a part of her felt that all she had was her friends—and she didn’t want to abandon them. She didn’t feel like being left alone, not at this moment, and so she had agreed to come along. It would give her time, at least, to decide what to do next. Besides, given that it was a party, Scarlet hoped there might be people here who had seen or heard something of Sage. She had to find him. If she didn’t, she felt she would just die.
“I can’t believe he didn’t text me back,” Maria said.
Maria sat beside her, annoyed, angrily clutching her phone, staring at it as if waiting for a message from God. Scarlet could see the frustration in her face.
“Who?” Scarlet asked.
“The new guy,” Jasmine taunted. “Larry.”
“His name is Lore,” Maria corrected, snapping.
“Excuse me,” Jasmine said. “Whatever his name is. Who cares what his name is if he won’t text you back?”
Maria flushed, getting upset.
“I didn’t say he won’t text me back,” she said, defensive. “What I meant was that he said he’d meet me, but when I told him I was coming to an island, he didn’t answer.”
“Maybe he’s afraid of water,” Becca said, laughing.
“Maybe he’s a vampire?” Blake chimed in.
The whole boat chimed in with laughter—everyone but Scarlet—and Maria looked increasingly embarrassed. Scarlet sat silent, and she felt compassion for Maria, who sat there, shamed, looking down at her phone in frustration. Scarlet could see how much he meant to her.
“You really like this guy, don’t you?” Scarlet asked, compassionately.
Maria looked up at her, and her eyes suddenly, unpredictably, flashed with anger.
“Don’t talk to me about guys,” she snapped, and turned her back on Scarlet.
Scarlet was taken aback. She didn’t understand her reaction. Hadn’t they just made up? Hadn’t they gotten over their fight?
Apparently they hadn’t. It left a bad feeling in Scarlet’s chest. This night was going from bad to worse, and now she just wanted to go home.
But she was stuck on this boat now, with no way off. She wished she hadn’t agreed to go, that they could just turn back around. It had been stupid of her. She shouldn’t have trusted Maria.
There came a sudden buzzing noise, a motor whining, and Scarlet flinched as a large speedboat raced right by her, and she jumped as she got sprayed by icy cold river water. Their rowboat rocked violently, and Scarlet clasped the edge and hung on for dear life.
Scarlet heard mocking laughter rise up, and she looked over and was horrified to spot Vivian with a large group of friends in a sleek new motorboat, all the popular, rich kids of the school, all dressed in their Ralph Lauren sweaters and speeding past in daddy’s hundred-thousand-dollar speedboat. They zoomed toward the island, reaching it in seconds.
“Was that Vivian?” Scarlet asked, the words catching in her throat. Just when she thought the night couldn’t get any worse. “What’s she doing here?”
Becca sighed.
“What do you think? Half the school’s here. It’s a huge party.”
Scarlet felt a deepening sense of dread. As they neared land, she could already hear the music, coming from somewhere inside the ruins, could see the bonfires in the distance peeking through the thickets and the trees. She realized everyone was going to be here. She would be stuck on this island now even with people she hated. People like Vivian. She wanted to die.
Scarlet watched as Vivian turned her head in the speedboat and sneered directly at her. She saw the hatred in her eyes as she and all her friends, drinks in their hands, laughed at her. Vivian pulled her Burberry coat tight around her shoulders, turned her back, and stepped off the boat. Scarlet clutched her own thin, wet sweater tighter, and felt jealous. What she would do for a warm coat on a night like this.
Their rowboat roughly touched down against the shore, Scarlet jolted along with the others. Blake’s friends jumped out and dragged it onto the sand, and Scarlet got out with the others, taking the big step down to the sand, no one reaching out to help her. The boat rocked as she did, and a wave came in, and instead of stepping on dry sand, Scarlet found herself stepping into freezing water up to her ankles, soaking her socks and shoes.
Great, she thought. Now she was not only miserable and freezing, but wet.
Scarlet walked with the others, her socks squishing, as they navigated the island, heading through the thickets of thorns and overgrown poison ivy, the boys creating an impromptu path toward the ever glowing ruins of Bannerman’s, the bonfires punctuating the night. The music became louder, as did the sound of kids laughing and cheering. Scarlet saw Blake and all the others passing around a small flask.
“Want some?” he asked.
Scarlet turned to see Blake standing beside her, smiling at her, holding out the flask. She shook her head, although she really felt like she could use a drink. Anything to calm down, to forget about all her troubles, to relax.
But she didn’t accept. She was not that kind of girl.
“Thanks, I’m okay,” she said.
Blake looked disappointed, as he took another swig himself and caught up with the others, Scarlet trailing well behind.
Scarlet watched Jasmine, Maria, and Becca talking with eac
h other, moving from one topic of gossip to the next, all conversing so freely, and she wondered again what she was doing here. Once again she was beginning to feel like an outcast. They weren’t deliberately excluding her, but she didn’t feel they were including her either. It seemed that Maria was pissed about Lore, and she was blaming Scarlet and taking it out on her. Was she imagining things? Or was it even more sinister than she thought? Had Maria only pretended to be friends again? Had she invited her here only to exact revenge, to alienate her further?
Scarlet felt a pit in her stomach as they all broke through the thickets and entered the ruins of Bannerman’s, ducking beneath the low crumbling arched stone entranceway as she stepped inside the hollow shell of what was once the castle.
Despite everything, Scarlet had to admit that, once inside, she felt a bit of a sense of the magical here, with the historic walls, the bonfires inside setting the ruins aglow, lights flickering off of everything here inside this abandoned place in the middle of the Hudson. She could almost be transported to another magical place and time.
Except the illusion was ruined by all the kids, shouting, drinking, blasting music, laughing, sitting around bonfires, passing around joints. It was like any other party, just dropped down here. They might as well have all been in someone’s basement.
Scarlet followed her group over to a small bonfire, and they all sat around it, Scarlet sitting as close as possible to the fire to try to get warm, staying somewhat apart from the others. Someone was handing out long roasting sticks pierced with marshmallows, along with graham crackers and chocolate, and Scarlet took a stick and held it over the fire.
She sat there and watched the marshmallows burn. She was starving, and her stomach ached as she watched it. As it finished melting, she held it to her lips and reached out to pull a piece of it off the stick, when suddenly she was bumped from behind and she jerked forward and dropped the stick onto the dirt.
Scarlet turned to see Vivian standing over her, looking down with an evil smile.
“Sorry,” Vivian said, “my mistake.”
Vivian laughed with her group of friends, then turned and walked off from her, joining the popular kids on the other side of the ruins.