Neil, it was Neil. Of all people. He was dead.
“Keeping you company,” Joan said. “Wake up, Ali, naptime’s over.”
“Shh.” That was Brenda. “She doesn’t look so good.”
“That’s because she didn’t have a chance to put on her makeup,” Kipp remarked. Alison ventured another peek. Except for Neil and Tony, the whole gang was present, each bound as she was, each with two sets of interlocking handcuffs. Both Brenda and Joan looked miserable, and Fran, looking thinner than she had ever seen her, appeared to have been crying. Kipp, on the other hand, wearing bright green pajamas with an embroidered four leaf clover on the shirt pocket, seemed perfectly at ease.
“My God,” Alison breathed.
Kipp smiled. “I told you she’d think that she’d died and gone to heaven.” He spoke to her. “Do you feel well enough to start worrying again?”
“How’s your head, Ali?” Brenda asked, concerned. Alison tried to touch it to be sure it was all in one piece, but her hands stayed stuck down by her calves. Flexing her jaw, she felt dried blood along her right ear.
“Wonderful. How long have I been here and where is here?”
“Almost two hours,” Kipp said. “You’re in a house down the street from your own. Would you like to hear our stories? We’re tired of telling them to each other.”
She reclosed her eyes. If she remained perfectly still, it wasn’t so bad. “The highlights,” she said.
“You go first, Fran,” Kipp said, playing the MC.
“He’s going to kill us!” Fran cried. “He’s going to take us out to where we hit the man and dump us on the road and run us over.”
“Now, now,” Kipp scolded patiently. “Don’t ruin the story for her. Start with how you were kidnapped.” Fran tried to speak but only ended up blubbering. Her outburst didn’t initially faze Alison. That the Caretaker wanted to kill them sounded like old news. But as the information sunk past the layers of bodily misery, she decided that whatever they had to tell her had already been ruined.
“Fran’s story isn’t really very interesting,” Kipp picked up. “She was in Bakersfield at her grandmother’s house when her sweetheart Caretaker dropped by for a friendly visit. She was so flattered that when he asked her for a walk and offered her a spiked carbonated beverage that tasted like a codeine float, she didn’t think twice. At least I had an excuse, I was drunk when I downed the drugs Neil must have slipped into my beer. Naturally, this is only Fran’s version of the story. Personally, I feel Neil simply kissed her and she swooned at his feet.”
“I did not kiss him!” Fran said, indignantly.
“But did he kiss you?” Kipp asked. “All those hours you were unconscious in that van he stole, he might have done all kinds of nasty things to you.”
“Neil would never have . . . ” Fran began, before realizing that defending Neil’s personal integrity at this point would be a losing proposition.
“Kipp,” Alison groaned, “just the facts, please.”
“But aren’t you happy to see that I’m still alive?” Kipp asked. “Joan wasn’t, but Brenda gave me a big kiss.”
“I’ll give you a kiss later, if we don’t all end up getting killed.”
“Actually,” Kipp said, thinking, “none of our stories is very interesting. I went to sleep one night in my bedroom and woke up the next morning in this bedroom. Fran and I have been keeping each other company ever since. She’s not the girl I thought she was. Did you know she once painted a nude poster of Brad Pitt?”
“Kipp!” Fran whined.
“Neil’s been feeding us,” Kipp went on without missing a beat. “For lunch this afternoon, we had apples, and for dinner last night, we had apples. He’s not big on condemned prisoners enjoying delicious final meals. Last week, though, he brought us a bunch of bananas. He even lets us go to the bathroom whenever we want.”
“Neil flagged us down a few hours ago about a block from your house,” Brenda said. “Joan was driving. She almost ran him over. Man, we were spooked. I practically peed my pants.”
“You did pee your pants,” Joan growled. “All over my upholstery. But I wasn’t that scared, not till he pulled out that damn gun.”
“He has a gun?” Alison asked, her alertness growing with each revelation. She did not have to ask why Joan had used the same line as the Caretaker. When she thought about it, Joan was always talking that way. Neil could have swiped any of their remarks for his chain letter.
“Yes,” Kipp said. “Didn’t he show you the nice black hole at the end of it? Tell us how he captured you. We heard him play the music and people tape. I bet you thought you were coming to a party.”
“I thought I was coming to a party,” she muttered.
“We heard a shot,” Brenda said. “What happened?”
“I missed, twice. It’s a long story.” It struck her then that her room, minus the furniture, was identical to this one. A pair of binoculars lay discarded beneath the cardboard-covered windows, and even before the arrival of the first letter, she had felt as if someone had been watching her. “How did you survive losing all that blood?” she asked Kipp.
“Brenda told me about that,” Kipp said. “What a dramatic exit! A trail of blood reaching to the street! You got to grant Neil one thing, he’s got style. But to tell you the truth, I didn’t lose any blood, not as far as I know.”
“Interesting,” Alison said. The police had verified that the blood had definitely been human. With his illness, it was relatively easy to understand how Neil had obtained the drugs. And he had probably picked these cuffs up at a swapmeet or an army surplus store. But where did he get the blood? From his own veins? Siphoning it off over a period of time? If that were so, it provided a unique insight into his madness. He would torture himself as readily as he would torture them. “Has Neil talked to you much?” she asked.
“Brenda has explained his cancer,” Kipp said, catching her drift. “Watching him these last couple of weeks, Fran and I had pretty much figured on something like that. He doesn’t complain but that guy is really hurting. I think it’s obvious that the disease is to blame, the malignancy has gone to his brain. I don’t hold any of this against him. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, the poor guy.”
She nodded, though that sounded a bit pat to her: tumor in the head and the sick boy goes on a rampage. It also sounded self-serving, The Caretaker—she couldn’t quite interchange Neil’s name with the villain’s—had repeatedly spoken of their evil. Was it possible he had a—granted perverse, but nevertheless—consistent motivation for what he was doing? If that were so, and she could understand what it was, perhaps she could get through to him. “Where is he?” she asked.
“Downstairs,” Fran said. “He’s got a terrible cough. I think he’s dying.”
“Pray that he hurries,” Brenda said.
“What a terrible thing to say!” Fran said.
“You’re the one who’s worried about getting squashed out on that desert road,” Brenda said.
“Well, so are you!” Fran shot back.
“My point exactly,” Brenda said. “He’s nuts. He’s . . . ”
“Would you two please shut up,” Alison said, and it seemed when they had first received the chain letter, Brenda and Fran had been arguing and she had had a headache. “Kipp, has Neil spoken to you using the Caretaker’s style of language?”
“Not exactly, but he has said things like having to ‘balance the scales,’ ‘purge our filth,’ and ‘pay for our crime.’ ”
“Have you tried to talk sense into him?”
“Endlessly. And he sits and listens to every word we have to say. Neil always was a good listener. But he doesn’t let us go, doesn’t even argue with us, just brings us fresh bags of apples.” Kipp stopped suddenly. “But maybe he will listen to you. He’s brought you up a few times, not in any specific context, just muttered your name now and then.”
“Favorably or negatively?”
“Both ways, I would say.”
/> “Do you really think that he intends to kill us?” she asked.
Kipp hesitated. “I’m afraid so. I think he’s just been waiting to get us all together. The guy’s gone.”
“But could he kill us?”
“Alison, anybody who could pull off what he has could probably do anything he damn well pleases.”
“But we’re not all together,” she said. “Where’s Tony?”
“Dead,” a sad and worn voice coughed at the door. To say that Neil did not look well would have been the same as addressing such a remark to a week-old corpse. His yellowish flesh hung from his face like a faded and wrinkled oversized wrapper. His back was hunched, and it was obvious that his right leg was painful. The once irresistible green of his eyes was a pitiful blur, and the left shoulder of his dirty leather jacket was torn and bloodied. Back at her house, when Alison had thought she was giving Joan her due, he must have shoved open her bedroom door and then jumped back, but not quite quick enough. That she had wrestled him and come out the loser was a testament to how driven he must be. An ugly black gun protruded from his belt.
Tony, she wailed inside. No matter how badly she had been flattened tonight, each time, her strength had returned. But if Tony was gone, she was gone. Mist covered her eyes, and she heard crying, not Fran’s, but Joan’s.
Neil limped into the room. In one hand he carried a hypodermic needle, in the other, a medicine bottle filled with a colorless solution. Obviously, he intended to sedate them before dragging them down to the van and driving them out to the desert road. He knelt unsteadily by her side and, it would have been funny in another time and place, pulled a small bottle of rubbing alcohol and several balls of cotton from his coat pocket. His breathing was agonizing. He refused to look her in the face.
“Neil,” she whispered. “Did you really kill Tony?”
“He killed himself,” he said quietly, arranging the cotton balls in a neat row, as a nurse might have done.
“Is he really dead?” she pleaded. Neil nodded, his eyes down. A pain, bright like a sun rising on a world burned to ruin, overshadowed the injuries in her body. All that kept her from giving up completely was that Neil might be lying. “You would not,” she stammered, “have killed your friend.”
He didn’t respond, just kept rearranging his cotton balls. She leaned toward him. “Dammit, you answer me! Tony was your best friend!”
Endless misery sagged his miserable face. He sat back and stared at her. “He killed himself,” he repeated.
He was speaking figuratively, she realized, and it gave her cause to hope. “Neil,” she said patiently, “when Tony and I were at your funeral—when we thought you were dead—he told me how you felt about me. He said that I was important to you. Well, you are important to me, too.”
He glanced at the covered window. In the lower right hand corner was a bare spot, probably through which he had watched her. “I wasn’t,” he said. “Only the man cared for me.”
“The man? Neil, the man was a stranger.”
“He was somebody. And he was wronged, and he never complained. How could he? He was never given the chance.” Neil lowered his head. “He would have been my friend.”
The emotion in his voice made her next step uncertain. Even as she sought to reach his old self, her eyes strayed to the revolver in his belt. Her hands and feet were bound, but her fingers were free and the weapon was not far. “I am your friend,” she said carefully. “We are all your friends. Hurting us will not bring back the man.”
“That’s what I told him,” Kipp remarked cheerfully.
“We don’t want to bring him back, I just want all of us to be with him.” Neil nodded, a faraway look in his eyes. “You’re very pretty, Alison, and you see, he’s very lonely.”
She thought she saw perfectly. She shifted position slightly, angling on a clean approach to the gun. The maneuver made her next words sound hypocritical to her own ears. “He’s not lonely. It’s you, Neil, who’s lonely. Let us go. We’ll stay with you.”
“You would?” he asked innocently, mildly surprised.
“Yes. Don’t be afraid. We’ll help you with the pain.”
A shudder ran through his body. “The pain,” he whispered dreamily. “You don’t know this pain.” His eyes narrowed. “You never wanted to know me.”
“But I did,” she said, striving for conviction. This was not going to work. She was having to use half truths and he was, even in his deranged state, extraordinarily sensitive to deceit. “I thought about you a lot. Just the other day I was telling Tony that . . . ”
“Tony!” he yelled scornfully. “Tony knew how I felt about you! But he didn’t care. He took what he wanted. He took the man’s life. He took you. He took and took and gave nothing back. He wouldn’t even go to the police.” A spasm seemed to grip his stomach and he bent over in pain. She squirmed closer. The gun, the gun . . . if she could just get her hand on it, this would all be over.
“He was afraid, Neil. He was like you. He was like me. You can understand that.”
He shook his head, momentarily closing his eyes. “But I don’t understand,” he mumbled. The gun handle was maybe twenty inches from her fingers and the interlocked handcuffs had about ten inches of play in them. If she could keep him talking . . .
Good God, be good to me this one time.
Unfortunately, just then, Neil sat back and picked up the hypodermic. “We need to return to where all this started to understand, to the road,” he said, regaining his confidence, sticking the bottle with the needle, the clear liquid filling the syringe. He pulled up her pants leg and picked up a cotton ball.
“But you promised to tell me your dream,” she said quickly, playing a desperate card. A drop oozed at the tip of the needle, catching the light of the naked bulb, glistening like a deadly diamond. It was very possible be would simply finish them here and now with an overdose. Yet Neil hesitated, and the play went on.
“When?”
“When we were standing on Kipp’s street in the middle of the night. Before Tony came over, we were alone, and I told you about my nightmares and how they were frightening me. You tried to cheer me up. You started to tell me about a wonderful dream full of colors and music and singing.”
“What a night that must have been.” Kipp sighed.
“So?” Neil said. He lowered the needle.
“I asked you if I was in it,” she said.
Neil winced. “No.”
“Yes! I started to ask. Remember, just when Tony interrupted us? I wanted to know if I was that important to you that you would have dreamed about me.” She swiveled her legs around, disguising the overt movement with an expression of pure sincerity. Neil was listening and she prayed that Kipp kept his mouth shut. At Neil’s next solid blank spell, she was going for the gun.
“I dreamed about a lot of things,” he admitted. “You were one of them. But I can’t see that mattering to you.”
She held her tongue. In spite of his words, she could see that he wanted to believe her. His madness and sickness aside, he was just like everyone else: He wanted to know his love had not been wasted on someone who couldn’t have cared less. He ran an unsteady hand through his tangled hair, fidgeting. “You were always too busy,” he said, raising his voice. “I tried to talk to you. I called you up. But you always had things you had to do. That was OK, I could understand that. I could wait. I could have waited a long time. But then . . . I saw I couldn’t wait forever; not even until the summer when you would have had more time . . . I saw I was going to end up like the man.”
“How was it different in your dreams?” And surely her soul would be forever cursed, for as she asked, she leaned forward, gesturing that he should whisper his answer in her ear, stopping at nothing to get next to the hard black handle. Neil was too much of a child to succeed as a murderer. He did exactly what she wanted.
“I was never sick in my dreams,” he began. “We were . . . ”
I’m listening.
She
grabbed the pistol. Next to the shotgun, it was a cinch to handle, and she had her finger on the trigger and the barrel point between his eyes before he could even blink. “Sorry,” she whispered.
He absorbed the deception silently, sitting back, his sore leg jerking once then going as still as the rest of him. Before, he had been ashamed and had had trouble looking her in the eye. Now the roles were reversed. He said nothing, waiting.
“I want the key to these handcuffs,” she said. “That’s all I want.”
“That’s all you want,” he echoed.
“Don’t shoot him!” Fran cried.
“Neil,” she said firmly, “I’ve shot at you twice tonight. I won’t miss a third time.” She shook the gun. “Give me the key!”
“No.”
“Don’t be a fool!”
He raised the needle. He was not afraid of her. In her rush to get the gun, she had never stopped to consider that she might have to use it. He squeezed out what bubbles may have been in the syringe, a couple of drops of the drug dribbling onto the floor. “I don’t have it,” he said.
“Get it!”
“The man has the key.”
“Listen to me, you’re going to be as bad off as the man if you don’t get it!”
Neil nodded. “That’s what all this has been about.” He unscrewed the cap of the alcohol jar and dabbed one of the cotton balls.
“Kipp?” she moaned.
“Don’t give him the gun, whatever you do,” Kipp said in his most helpful manner. Unreality rolled forth unchecked. Using the moistened white ball, Neil sterilized a spot on her calf. He was asking to be killed, she told herself. She could close her eyes, pull the trigger and never see the mess.
He’s going to die, anyway. It would be quick.
“Neil?” she pleaded, trembling.
He shook his head. “I’m not listening. Everything you say is a lie. You don’t care about me.” Like a nurse administering an injection, he pinched her flesh.
Chain Letter Omnibus Page 16
