Blue Tears

by Ninie Hammon

  Dobbs was in the kitchen and the smell that wafted her way … was he? … Could it be …?

  Yes! Dobbs was concocting a pot of his legendary chili. Any other time, the smell of that chili would have transformed her in an instant into Pavlov’s dog. Now, there was nothing in her stomach but a cold rock.

  Opening night of The Nutcracker. Tonight at 8 p.m.

  María wouldn’t be there, of course, not because Bailey had been able to bring her safely home to West Virginia, but because María had been kidnapped by a madman. Still … María wouldn’t be at opening night. The future painting would not come true. How could it?

  She felt weak at the thought, had to fight off a wave of despair that threatened to roll over her and carry her away, leaving a bare beach with all the debris swept out to sea.

  While Bethany slept, Bailey had a chance to grab a shower and get cleaned up, so she stuck her head into the kitchen where Dobbs stood with what looked like twenty different ingredients in various stages of concoction before him.

  “Listen for Bethany, would you?” she said. She almost couldn’t form the next words. Such a simple thing to say. So ordinary. How she’d longed for ordinary so many times, yearned for ... let it go. “She’s napping on the couch in the parlor, should sleep for hours. I’m just going to run upstairs and take a quick shower. Fifteen minutes, tops.”

  He waved her on with a spoon dripping tomato sauce.

  “I’ll check on her … oh, maybe every three minutes or so.” He smiled and she smiled back. Well, she pulled back the corners of her mouth into the correct position, but he wasn’t fooled. Of course, his own smile looked like he’d learned how from a Smiling for Dummies book.

  Sparky had curled up on the floor beside the couch where Bethany slept. Dobbs had Bundy in the kitchen with him — so he could pop out into the back yard with the almost-but-not-quite house-trained puppy. If he were allowed in the parlor with Bethany, he’d hop up on the couch beside her and slather her face with puppy-licks before anybody could stop him.

  Bailey reached down and lifted Bundy — Bethany called him Bunny — into her arms and nuzzled her face into his soft fur. The little golden doodle puppy was probably the best birthday present she’d ever gotten. On the birthday that had started it all.

  When she got to the top of the stairs, the phone in her pocket rang. She heard Dobbs’s phone downstairs ring at the same time. Maybe this was a coordinated telemarketer attack.

  Then she looked at the caller ID, sucked in a breath and touched the green icon.

  If there had been a wire like those on old-fashioned phones that connected the receiver to the phone itself, the voice that came through it would have been slithering like a snake. Like an oiled worm with sword teeth.

  “If you are nodding your head, I cannot see,” said the voice. “So you must answer me, or I will have to hang—”

  “Don’t hang up! Please don’t … Yes, I am who you think. I’m Jessica Cunningham.” Even now, even standing there so shocked the breath didn’t want to come back in, even now, she wanted to cry out. “And I know who you are. You’re the man who murdered my husband.” But she didn’t say that, of course. She didn’t say anything more.

  What should she do? In all the police shows on television, the kidnapper called and the police were all set up to trace the call, find out where—

  “There is no need to wonder where I am,” he said, as if he had read her mind. “I will tell you so you do not have to track me down. I am at the Nautilus Casino, that floats in a body of water I believe is called Whispering Mountain Lake. And your lovely sister, María, is my guest here.”

  Mikhailov wanted so very badly to laugh. It took all his strength to keep his voice level and emotionless. Inside he was full of merriment and glee. Oh, to see the look on her face right now! He had seen the woman in pictures on her sister’s phone, taken before she went into hiding—

  Into hiding.

  Lying in wait.

  Ready to pounce.

  The universe inside his head, the one that existed as a world unto itself behind his lone, remaining eye, began to change colors. It turned red.

  The color started at the top of his vision and ran down it like paint dripping off the side of a building. No, like blood. All the way to the ground. Soaking into the dirt until it was spongey, made a squishing sound when you stepped on it.

  The world was obliterated by swirling, bubbling, boiling red fog and if he looked at it closely, he could see the individual water droplets in the fog. No, not water. Blood.

  The sight made him want to scream!

  Without thinking, he put his knuckle into his mouth and bit down on it to keep from losing his grip, his hold on … everything. He felt blood dripping out the cuff of his black glove and looked down. He had bitten into his finger, through the leather and the flesh all the way to the bone.

  A lone hysterical thought to make a break for it flashed bright and then was gone: he only had nine fingers left — if he wasn’t careful, he’d be scratching his nose with a stump.

  The pain brought him back from the edge and everything righted itself, like setting one of those old-fashioned videos in reverse. The blood stopped flowing out of his glove. The flesh of his knuckle knit back together, the leather reformed, the droplets of blood mist became smaller and smaller, too small to see. Then the fog was gone and he was in the library of his mind where the volumes appeared crisp and so clear they almost looked over-exposed.

  The voice in his ear was saying, “Are you there? Hello. Oh, please don’t hang—”

  “Why would I hang up when it was I who called you?” His voice was as cold as an arctic ocean. This woman had been out there all these months, waiting, lying in the tall weeds ready to pounce. She would pay for that.

  “Is my sister all right? I want to talk to her. Put her on the phone so—”

  “Don’t talk to me as if you were the one in charge!” A verbal slap in the face. “I am in control here. Do not believe for a second you have any power over me. I can lift a finger and your sister will have her throat slit … though that is a far more merciful death than I have planned for her.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Why you, of course. I want you dead.”

  He heard the intake of breath on the other end of the phone when she gasped and he had to stifle a wave of hysterical giggling.

  “The two of us have no time or energy for playing games. I took your sister. Now, I want to trade her for you.”

  “You’re here?”

  “Were you not listening to what I said? I will not waste time repeating myself. First, I should tell you to forget all the plans that are spinning like spiderwebs in your head. He is here, you think, I will call the police, the federal marshals. They will find him. They will arrest him.”

  When he laughed, it was a genuine laugh.

  “Don’t be absurd. I will vanish, as I have vanished before. Marshal Bernard Jordan has not a clue where to look for me. Your sister will vanish with me. Are we clear?”

  Silence.

  “Do not nod.”

  “Yes, we’re clear.”

  “Here is the deal I am offering. I will trade your sister for you. You come with me; she walks away free. End of story. Well, the end of the story for you.”

  “What …? You’ll trade …?”

  “I will tell you the terms of this arrangement and you will see that they are the only options you have. If you trade yourself for your sister, I guarantee she will be unharmed. She will walk free. I will further guarantee that I will not harm the little girl … what is her name? Bethany … Bethany Nicole, age three and a half — is that not right?”

  She made some kind of inarticulate sound that he supposed was a strangled sob but it could just as easily have been a grunt of surprise, or a growl of anger.

  “I guarantee the safety of your family if you accept the terms of this arrangement.”

  He paused, then sighed for effect.

  “Do I
have to explain this part? Surely, the federal marshals and the other law enforcement officials have told you about me. Who I am. What … organization I represent. If they have told you, then you know that Sergei Wassily Mikhailov never breaks his word. He does what he says he will do. He always keeps his promises. Is that not what they have said of me?”

  She said nothing.

  “If you are nodding …”

  “Yes, that’s what they told me.”

  “Excellent. Then you know you can trust me to uphold my end of the bargain. But should you strike a deal with me and not uphold your end, your sister will die a particularly painful and gruesome death.”

  The sound she made when he said that was something like a muffled scream, so he knew he had her full and undivided attention as he described in some detail the drug-induced horror he would inflict upon her sister.

  “The deal I am offering is the one and only chance your loved ones have for survival.” He felt red rage seeping into his mind and his effort to restrain it pulled his vocal cords tight, made his voice strained and breathless. “The moment you told the police what you saw that day in the rain, you signed a death warrant for every member of your family and there is absolutely nothing you can do to keep me from … executing that warrant.”

  He paused for a beat, changed his tone from threatening to instructive, a professor explaining a particularly thorny math problem to a recalcitrant student.

  “Surely, you are aware of how the American legal system functions, how long criminal proceedings can be postponed. With the proper legal representation — and I will have a team of the best lawyers money can buy — you can delay a trial for months … years.

  “Do you know how long is the average stay on what you call Death Row? Seventeen years. You should google it, check to see if I tell you the truth. In other words, my dear, it will be years before you have a chance to testify against me and I will live for years after you do.”

  His voice dropped then to a dry, rasping whisper.

  “Should you be so foolish as to come out of hiding like a jackal in the weeds, stand before a jury and point a finger at me, you will never live another moment of your life in peace. I will hunt you down, no matter where you go, no matter how long it takes.”

  In his own ears, his voice sounded like sand blowing across rocks in a desert, the scrabbling claws of scarabs scratching.

  “I will pick my timing. I am in no hurry. Perhaps, I will kill Bethany on her wedding day, yes? Slit her throat so her blood stains her beautiful white dress. Or no, I will wait even longer. Ah yes, that’s it — I will wait until she bears a child. I will be there when she brings the suckling babe home, and I will kill the baby in front of her, dismember it while she watches. She will die an even more brutal death than the infant.”

  He stopped, allowed a few seconds for the images to form in her mind’s eye.

  “You will not know a moment’s peace as long as you live. You will wonder every day if it is the day someone comes in the night with a garrote, the day your little girl does not come home from school. Do we understand each other?”

  She said nothing, but he was certain he had so thoroughly knocked the breath out of her she could only nod.

  He told her the specifics of the deal he wanted to make with her, what he had meticulously planned that morning as he had wandered around the restaurant in the Nautilus Casino — selecting just the right sites and promised that compliance would secure for her a “merciful death.” A bullet in the back of her skull.

  He said nothing else. Waited. He could hear that she was gasping for air. Then her breathing steadied. When she spoke, her voice was shaky, but level.

  Chapter Forty

  Bailey was sitting on the edge of her bed, the phone to her ear. She had been at the head of the stairs when it rang, when she answered it, when she heard the snake voice crawl out through the not-cord and into her ear, a serpent that slithered through her eardrum into her brain.

  It was the most horrible voice she had ever heard.

  For the first few moments he spoke, she couldn’t concentrate on what he was saying. She was seeing him standing with that stupid Fedora hat in the rain, pointing a gun at Aaron. The firecracker sound.

  Jessie, run!

  Another firecracker sound.

  The voice was talking through the phone but she couldn’t grab the words with her mind. It was merely a serpent in her head, eating her thoughts with jagged teeth.

  She heard silence then, and didn’t know how long it had lasted. Had he stopped talking a minute ago, two seconds ago, an hour? Had he hung up?

  “Are you there? Hello? Oh, please don’t hang—”

  “Why would I hang up when it is I who called you?”

  The voice went on then. She listened. At some point she had walked into her bedroom and sat down on the bed. She had no memory of moving. Her mind seemed so very, very small.

  The words he was saying, they were huge, each one too big to fit between her ears in her skull. And all of them … it was ludicrous to think she could jam them into her head and hear them, listen to them, understand them, assign them significance.

  She caught fragments as the monstrous behemoths slammed into her mind through her ears. Heard pieces and listened to them.

  He told her not to call the police. That he would vanish with María if she did. When he asked if she understood, she nodded.

  “Do not nod.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  He offered her a deal. He would trade María for her. If she accepted, he guaranteed that María and Bethany would be safe.

  “Sergei Wassily Mikhailov never breaks his word. He does what he says he will do. He always keeps his promises. He always keeps his word. If he says it, he will do it.” The federal marshals who’d played the informant’s tape for her in the anonymous room in the anonymous police station had said he kept his troops in line by always keeping his promise to kill anyone who crossed him and all the members of their families, too.

  That’s what had kept her cowering in hiding for two years.

  Though her mind could not process all that he was saying to her, it was meticulously examining some of it.

  Mikhailov always kept his promises to kill … therefore she was supposed to trust him to keep a promise not to kill?

  No.

  Every fiber of her being and soul understood with absolute certainty that this man could not be trusted about anything. He would kill when, where and how it suited him and it would make no difference to him that he had said some words, made some promise, some guarantee. Men like this monster had no rules of conduct except what got them what they wanted.

  He guaranteed María and Bethany would be safe if she took his offer. No, they wouldn’t. He would kill them out of spite.

  If she refused his deal — “your sister will die a particularly painful and gruesome death. Clean and quiet on the outside, but an unimaginable horror from within.”

  “Do you know what is ketamine? It goes by many names — Kit Cat, Super Acid, Vitamin K. In small doses, it is an hallucinogenic drug used for recreation. In large doses, it will hurl you into an alternative universe from which you can never escape, where there are only crawling monsters, teeth and blood and fire. You have heard of PCP, too, yes? Angel dust causes bizarre, violent and psychotic behavior. Should you be so foolish as to combine the two, they will literally dissolve your brain matter and kill you with a cataclysmic stroke. But first, they will drive you completely mad.”

  He paused. “Crazy people are capable of anything. A … former associate of mine ate himself. He chewed off his own fingers, gnawed the meat and muscle and tendons from the bones of his arms, pulled out his eyeballs.”

  She gasped again.

  “Another man I know set himself on fire. We provided the lighter fluid and matches, of course, but he was more than happy to do the deed.

  He continued to describe horror but Bailey was not listening. She was remembering being in María’s bo
dy as she burned to death. Perhaps María had hallucinated the whole thing — she had seemed drugged — and the sudden darkness at the end was the blood vessels in her brain hemorrhaging, stroking out.

  Or perhaps she had set the fire herself.

  It made no difference, though. Whether physically real or imagined horror, the effect was the same. María had experienced burning to death. Bailey believed she — or Mikhailov — had saved María from The Nutcracker opening night fire Bailey had painted. But it didn’t matter because Mikhailov would conceive a death for her that was equally horrifying.

  If she remained Mikhailov’s prisoner, María would die.

  And she would raise Bethany on the run, constantly looking over her shoulder, always afraid. In the end, he would find them and kill them both.

  He probably thought he was terrifying her with the description of what life would be like running from him. He could have saved his breath. She’d been living some variation of that for the past two years. The difference, of course, was that for the past two years he had not been trying to find her.

  Nobody looks for somebody they think is dead.

  Now he would go to the ends of the earth following her trail.

  While he continued to hurl too-big words at her that would not fit into her head, she thought her own thoughts, smaller ones, a train of them.

  They were quite simple thoughts, really.

  As long as Sergei Wassily Mikhailov drew breath, she and Bethany and María would remain a single heartbeat away from discovery and death.

  Only one thing would ensure their safety — Mikhailov had to die.

  Bailey would have to kill him.

  Some of the water-spider thoughts in her mind, that flitted around so fast it was almost impossible to think them, considered that the terrified woman hiding in the mud under a dumpster two years ago would not even have been able to entertain the thought. But Jessie Cunningham had died there along with Aaron, the homeless woman and the two innocents in the white Blazer. Bailey Donahue could do more than merely entertain the thought, she could perform the deed. Sergei Mikhailov wouldn’t be the first man she’d killed. She had beaten a man to death with rocks in the absolute dark of a coal mine. It had been self-defense, of course. But killing Sergei Mikhailov was self-defense, too.