Read Online The 13th by John Everson - Free Book Online Page A

didn’t get to? You want me to pull over and you can have your turn?”
    “That’s not it,” the other man said. “We’re supposed to be delivering her for testing and experiments. We don’t know if she’s going to be back on the street in a week, and if she is…we’re fuckin’ toast, man!”
    “You know Billy, you worry too much,” TG said. “How you gonna run a bar, where shit happens virtually every night in the bathroom or the brawl room, if you’re such a worrytit? I mean…think about it. The doctor, he’s paying us to deliver him healthy, young females, ain’t he? And he’s PAYING us to pick them up, tie them up and deliver them to him. Do you honestly think these girls have a chance in hell of getting out of whatever the hell he’s doing to them? Shit, Billy, what I just did for that girl is a favor. Probably the last good time she’s going to have. You need to lighten up.”
    “Pull up to the back,” Billy complained, as TG powered down the Mustang at the front door of the Castle House Asylum. “The doc said to bring ’em to the back.”
    “I know what he said,” TG growled, ripping the gear shift into park with an audible crack. “But I’m going to let him know we’re here. It’s late, and I’m not sitting around the back of this haunted house throwing rocks at the windows and hoping someone hears.”
    TG left Billy in the car and stomped up to thetwin torchlights that framed the oak door of the asylum. They were the remnants of another era, not the sort of entry that you’d expect at the crazy house, but someone had obviously polished and pimped them up to serve again. TG tried the knob before knocking, but it didn’t open.
    So he pounded a few raps with a beefy fist and waited. In a moment, the door cracked open, a chain obviously still securing it to the frame. Billy couldn’t hear what was said, but a moment later TG was back in the car and throwing it into reverse.
    “We’re going to the back,” was all he said.
    Billy didn’t ask questions. It was best that way.
    The back of Castle House was dark, except for a single light high up on the third floor.
    “They could at least put on a light,” Billy said. The darkness stretched unbroken from just beyond their car headlights to probably the outskirts of Castle Point, almost twenty miles and several steep bends away.
    “It’s right here,” TG said, and aimed the car toward a small white door set amid the brown brick. There was a gravel path that led past the door and opened to a circular parking spot in front of an old metal shed.
    “Utility entrance,” TG said. “C’mon, help me get her out of the trunk.”
    TG reached in and hefted her half out of the trunk by her legs, while Billy reached in to hoist the rest of her out by her armpits. They shuffled toward the door, but when he felt something warm on his arm, Billy cried out.
    “Jesus, man, you hit her too hard. There’s blood all over me.”
    “She’ll be fine,” TG promised. “They got a doctor in the house.”
    But the bigger man could see even in the slight illumination from the third floor that the girl had blood all over her head. Maybe a tire iron hadn’t been the best blackjack.
    “Bang your heel on that door and let’s get her in.”
    Three quick kicks was all it took to get a reaction from inside. The white door opened and a woman in a white smock went wide-eyed when she saw the cargo. The door opened wide and she demanded, “Come in, come in. What’s happened to her?”
    She led them down a short hall to an exam room, and motioned for them to lay the body on the paper-covered table.
    “Where’s the doc?” TG demanded. “Did you call him like I asked?”
    “He’s on his way,” she said, but refused to meet his eyes. She wet a towel in the stainless-steel sink across the room and then used it to clean the blood away from the back of the unconscious woman’s skull.
    TG stood at the girl’s feet, arms crossed, frankly just enjoying the