William Kent Krueger

The Devil's Bed

La Cama del Diablo

Randall Coates turned off the Virginia highway and one last time took the narrow drive that curled through the dogwood trees toward his house. Halfway up the hill, he killed the headlights and navigated by the glow of the moon. Before he broke from the trees, he stopped the car, grabbed the night-vision binoculars from the seat beside him, and got out. For several minutes, he studied his house. From a distance, everything looked the same as it had that morning when he’d left.

But Randall Coates knew that appearances could no longer be trusted.

Keeping to the trees, he circled, reconnoitering the whole of his property. With the moon at his back, he approached the house from the east and slipped along the rear wall, peering in at the windows. He leaned against his shadow on the siding and listened. Finally he slid the key into the back lock and let himself in. He left the lights off and reset the alarm. Laying the binoculars on the kitchen table, he pulled the Glock from his shoulder holster and moved through the house, securing it room by room.

When he stood again at the back door, he turned the lights on and let himself relax. “Fuck this,” he said. “Tomorrow I get motion sensors.”

He retrieved his car, then strolled the lazy curve of flagstones toward his front door. One last time he paused on the porch steps to study the night sky. The pale yellow eye that was the moon, one last time, studied him right back.

Inside, he shrugged off his jacket, but he continued to wear the shoulder holster and the nine millimeter that were underneath. The jacket he hung in the hallway closet.

At the bar, he poured enough Johnnie Walker Black for four or five long swallows. He carried the glass to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator to see what he might have on hand for dinner. It didn’t matter. Although Randall Coates was unaware of it, he’d already eaten his last meal.

He was thinking at that moment about fear, something he knew well. He’d seen fear destroy men, turn them into blubbering idiots. He believed that if you had half a spine and kept your head, you’d be fine. If you truly hadcojones, you used the fear, turned it to your advantage. Fear sharpened you. Fear made you ready.

As he reached for a plate of cold cuts covered in Saran Wrap he said to himself, The hell with Moses. The asshole wants me, let him try something.

In the next moment, when the kitchen lights died and he heard behind him the voice of Moses speak his name, he wet his pants. The reaction was as involuntary as the quick suck of his breath or his desperate turning.

He spun. The whole house was dark, and his brain stumbled over the details that he’d noted in the light but had inexplicably failed to register as significant. The countertop, for example, on which that morning the electric toaster had sat was now empty. Or the faint, out-of-place odor in the kitchen, an oily smell that reminded him of a garage.

He’d come around less than ninety degrees when Moses pulverized the cartilage in his nose. For a while, Coates went into a black nowhere.

He came to lying on his back on the hard oak rectangle of the kitchen tabletop. He was naked and spread-eagled. The middle of his face hurt like hell, but when he tried to lift his hands to assess the damage there, he discovered that each wrist had been bound with duct tape and secured to a table leg. Ankles, too. A strip of tape sealed his mouth. His shattered nose was plugged with coagulated blood, and he breathed through a straw that had been inserted through the tape and wedged between his lips.

“Comfortable?” Moses said.

Coates rolled his head to the left, where the voice spoke out of the dark. He didn’t see Moses, only the LED time readout on the microwave. 10:15P.M. He’d been out nearly two hours.

“How does it feel? Your own littleCama del Diablo?”

Moses tapped the wood next to Coates’s head. Coates looked there quickly, but Moses had already moved.

Cama del Diablo. Coates didn’t need to translate. He understood exactly what Moses meant.

“Of course it lacks the defining finish, that unrivaled lacquer, equal parts puke and shit and blood. And you’re missing the ineffable stink of course. But we’ll do something about that in a bit.”

Coates tried to speak, to reason, but the duct tape over his mouth prevented it. All that came out was a whining mumble, pathetic even to him.

“Remember what you said to me in Agua Negra? You said, ‘David, when you die you’ll think hell is a vacation.’ Christ, where did you get that line? A Bruce Willis movie?”