Viper

by Unknown

‘Ma che cazzo è? What the fuck was that?’ Rosa pushed Filippo away.

  They froze. Stared silently at each other. Afraid to move. Then another chilling cry ripped the night apart.

  ‘It’s a woman screa–’

  Filippo never finished. The next noise was even more distinct and terrifying.

  It was a bullet.

  Gunfire.

  Filippo slid naked into the driver’s seat and turned on the engine and the lights. Whatever was going down was happening close, real close. Too close.

  The car’s wheels spun on the soft wet grass. There was no traction. Mud sprayed as the old Fiat lurched forward. The wheels wallowed in the earth as he tried to make a full U-turn. Tried desperately to head back the way they’d come. The car carried on drifting. He straightened her up and turned the beams on full.

  Right ahead he could see something. A light of some sort. Safety!

  Another gunshot rang out.

  A God-awful loud bark. So loud it seemed to bite a lump out of the sky.

  It had come from near the light, now less than twenty metres ahead of them.

  Filippo slammed on the brakes. The car went into an uncontrollable slide.

  ‘Fuuck! ’ shouted Rosa as she was thrown against the back of the driver’s seat.

  He wanted to reach out and help, but he couldn’t. The car was skidding towards a deep dip in the field. Sliding into a pit filled with fire.

  Filippo jerked the handbrake up as hard as he could. Rosa crashed into a rear window. He twisted the steering wheel as far as it would go. The skid seemed to last an eternity.

  Finally, the old car rocked to a stop. They were less than a metre from the edge of the pit.

  ‘You okay?’ He put his hand on his girlfriend’s naked shoulder.

  Rosa rubbed her head. She’d have an ugly lump there in the morning. ‘Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. Let’s get out of here. I’m scared.’

  Filippo nodded. The car had stalled. He jammed it into neutral and quickly turned the key. The engine chugged but didn’t catch. ‘Flooded. I’ll try again.’ Clutch in, foot flat on the accelerator. He did everything he’d seen his father do. Turned the key again and prayed.

  The roar was loud. Rosa thought the engine had exploded. Must have been a backfire.

  Then she saw the blood. Filippo’s blood. All over the passenger seat and the window.

  And then she saw him.

  His face in the broken window.

  The gun in his hand.

  That look in his eyes.

  And he saw her too. Saw her beauty and her vulnerability.

  Rosa was terrified.

  She felt transparent, like a puddle that someone was about to stamp in.

  ‘Buon sonno,’ he said politely.

  ‘Don’t hurt me. Please, don’t hurt me.’ She covered her naked breasts with her arms and pressed her knees together.

  His eyes vacuumed her skin. Hurt. A wonderful word. So short, yet covering a multitude of possibilities.

  Rosa saw his teeth flash. He was smiling.

  She could see the gun even more clearly now. See it and even smell it. It had the acrid stink of death. Filippo’s. She glanced at his slumped body, blood pouring down his side, half of his beautiful face torn away by the bullet.

  Fear choked her as she tried to speak again.

  She started to cry. ‘Please, don’t. Oh, God no, please, don’t.’ She pulled her knees up in a foetal position.

  He watched her for a second, thrilled by her growing fear, excited by her suffering. Then he levelled his gun at her forehead.

  ‘Oh, God. No, no, no!’

  ‘BANG!’ he shouted.

  Rosa screamed.

  He laughed. ‘BANG! BANG!’

  This time she didn’t move. The warped trick no longer worked.

  She stared straight into his eyes.

  Cold.

  Cold as ice.

  He pulled the trigger.

  He knew what the shot would do. Knew it would spread her face and brains all over the inside of the car. He didn’t want to be covered in the mess. He stepped back just before the hammer fell.

  Live and learn, he told himself. Less mess means less trouble.

  He looked back into the car.

  The windows were streaked in a fatty grey and cherry red.

  The top of the girl’s skull was gone.

  There was no need for a second bullet.

  37

  Grand Hotel Parker’s, Napoli

  Jack was tired but didn’t go to bed after Sylvia had dropped him at the hotel. It was still too early, and anyway his jet-lagged mind was still buzzing like a wasp in a jam jar. Instead, he persuaded a receptionist to give him some privacy and unlimited access to their latest dual-processor computer. As he fired it up, he remembered an old Quantico lesson: ‘How plus why equals who.’

  He opened a search engine and a blank Word document. Then he opened his own stream of consciousness. A complete download of his thoughts.

  How? – burning, chopping, moving, burying.

  Why? – sex, sadism, control, power, inadequacy.

  Who? – stranger, lover, family, friend.

  Slowly but surely he covered all the key factors – the type of weapon used, the killing scene, disposal site, offender’s risks, likely methods of controlling the victims. He thought long and hard about the personality of the killer, the geography of the area, whether the crime indicated any kind of compulsive or impulsive behaviour – the fire was certainly indicative of the former. He considered the ritualistic aspects. Wondered whether the killer would have taken trophies, and what kind. But he dwelled the longest on the burning. The burning was linked to gratification and that made it the killer’s behavioural signature.

  The pages soon filled up. So did his mind. To the point of overload.

  Jack stopped and sipped at some coffee that he’d ordered ages ago and had ignored when it eventually arrived. Now it was cold, but he drank it anyway.

  He Googled Vesuvius. Much of it he knew. Some of it he didn’t.

  Known – major eruption in 79@C, still live and continuous eruptions this century. Last blew in 1944. Officially rated as one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world.

  Unknown – three million people live within close proximity of it. Thought by the Greeks and Romans to be sacred to Hercules, the son of Zeus, and named in his honour.

  He finished the last of the coffee and Googled Hercules. The guy came out as pure alpha male. Warrior, sex god, inspiration to warlords like Mark Antony. That he knew too. He read on. Death and sex ran throughout the storyline. Ran through the whole region. He spent some moments looking at a painting – Hercules and the Lernaean Hydra. He vaguely remembered the story. A snake with dozens of heads, and every time one was chopped off another one grew. From what he’d heard, it sounded like the Camorra. From what he knew, it also reminded him of the worst of the serial killers he’d hunted – always a fresh body, always a new horror.

  Jack did another search.

  Hercules triumphed over his enemy by the use of fire.

  He burned the hydra to death. Then he buried it beneath rocks.

  Burning and burial so close to a site held sacred to Hercules. Coincidence or connection? Rational or rubbish? He was almost too tired to tell.

  Was someone killing their own demons by burning and burying people? Did the killer have a specific enemy that he’d declared a one-man war on?

  Jack stretched and yawned. His eyes stung from jet lag and his body cried for sleep. But not yet. There were more questions to answer.

  Did the insignificant and inadequate Creed see himself as some kind of Hercules? Or was Jack making connections that simply didn’t exist? Sometimes people don’t kill for deep psychological reasons; they do it just because they like it. Because it turns them on.

  Tiredness kicked in and his thoughts wandered. Images of home. Nancy, Zack and Casa Strada in the rolling Tuscan countryside. Sunshine and laughter. Long hot days in the Val
d’Orcia. Cool nights in the hotel gardens perfumed by lavender and roses. And then he thought of Nancy. Making slow love to her in the morning. Lying close together afterwards, her head on his chest. Her breathing making him sleepy.

  Jack’s eyelids grew heavy. The warm room and the toll of the day made him drowsy. Within seconds he was asleep at the computer. But there was no sweetness in his dreams. No room – or time – to think about the good things in life. Thoughts of serial murder seeped from his subconscious. Bubbled up like toxic waste from the barrels the Camorra dumped on the ocean’s floor.

  Relentless killings. Horrendous burnings. A cold-blooded killer on the loose and poised to strike again. It was a wonder he could sleep at all.

  Jack’s mind continued the struggle to make sense of it all. To understand the links between the murders, the legends of Hercules, the local crime gangs and the strange young man who’d crossed continents to get him involved in all this.

  Deep down – way down among all that waste and poison – was the answer. And he knew he’d find it. Whatever it took. Whatever it cost him.

  38

  Campeggio Castellani, Pompeii

  Franco wondered whether anyone would come. He hung back in the bushes. Cradled his grandfather’s Glock. Wait. Part of him wanted to run. Part wanted to be with Rosa. Dead Rosa. Naked Rosa.

  It was cold and he was shivering. Rain fell noisily through the trees and bushes. Spiky hawthorn branches dug into his face and neck as he hid among them.

  Naked Rosa. The pull was too strong.

  He opened the car door, barely looking at Filippo’s corpse. The harsh interior light made Rosa’s flesh look bleached white. Or was it death? Did death take your colour so quickly?

  Franco didn’t notice her blood and brains sprayed all around the interior. His eyes focused only on her nakedness. Her vagina was shaved, like ones he’d seen on the websites he’d visited. Fascinating. Exciting. He reached over Filippo, careful not to get his blood on his clothes, and touched her thighs.

  Cold.

  Cold, but also smooth. And beautiful.

  He leaned further into the car so he could run his hand between her legs.

  Warm. Still warm.

  The intimacy exhilarated him. He stood mesmerized, his hand glued between her thighs. Afraid to let go. Afraid to end the experience.

  Reluctantly, he withdrew. Tried not to touch anything as he left. He knew the dangers of doing that.

  Poor Rosa.

  Poor dead Rosa.

  He stopped at the door of the car and looked back inside. A thought struck him. A way of keeping her with him alive forever.

  Paolo was asleep in his bunk when Franco got to the van. He was still excited by what he’d just done. Rosa had changed everything. Things were going to be different. He just knew it. His body was filled with mutant genes and he could feel them now, moving around inside him, distorting his DNA, making him do things he shouldn’t. ‘Paolo,’ he called lightly, squinting into the darkness.

  Unless he was mistaken his eyesight was going too. His doctors had warned him that would happen. Cataracts, they’d said.

  ‘Paolo!’ he called again, this time in a pitch somewhere between normal and shouting. His cousin was out for the count. That was good. Franco didn’t want him to wake. He just wanted to be really sure that he was asleep.

  He knelt down by his own bed. Not so he could pray, but so he could go to heaven. Tucked into the springs of the mattress he found what he was looking for. He unwrapped an old cotton flannel. Inside was a small sachet of heroin, the bottom of an old Coke can and a syringe that he’d found in a waste bin at the hospital where he went for his check-ups. He looked at the slightly bent and dirty needle and smiled. He knew the risks that went with second-hand spikes, but hell, compared to all the other shit in his life, why should he care?

  He used the spike to suck fifty units of water from a bottle he had. He squirted it in the can and fired up his lighter to dissolve the heroin. He paused and checked that Paolo was still sleeping. Better than that. He was now snoring. He stabbed the spike into one of the blue veins in his left forearm. As he squeezed in the heroin he realized that he’d also pumped in about a quarter of an inch – ten units – of air. Others might have been worried. Franco didn’t give a fuck. He thumbed in the rest of the H. Rolled back on to the bed. Waited for it to kick in.

  It did.

  First a little dizziness. Then nausea. Finally a warm mellowness. A gentle calm. A soft summer breeze flowing through his body.

  His beautiful young body. The way it should be.

  The way Rosa would have liked it.

  THREE

  39

  Santa Lucia, Napoli

  The early morning sun burned gold on the balconies of the rich and famous along the Santa Lucia seafront. In a fit of pique, Bernardo Sorrentino slammed his morning newspaper on to the glass breakfast table. The exclusive he’d given Il Giornale di Napoli hadn’t even made the front page. The days when murder had been a forty-eight-point bold-font lead in Naples were long gone. Worse than that, the photograph they’d used on page sixteen was terrible. He was bending in undergrowth and looked like he had a double chin and a fat stomach. What was the point of a hundred sit-ups a day, if the media made a fool of you like this?

  He paced uncomfortably by the apartment window and stared east across the bay. Dark rain clouds gathered in the distance like a flotilla of grey ships readying themselves for battle with the weak winter sun. There would be only one winner. He returned to his paper and read the story again. Six paragraphs, that was all he’d got. And he suspected that if Francesca Di Lauro hadn’t been pregnant then he might not have got any at all. Merda! He poured himself orange juice while his ego feasted on the few words that praised him – The scientific expert had reconstructed skull fragments to make up Francesca’s lower jaw and enable identification from dental records. Sorrentino’s painstaking labours are making him a law enforcement legend.

  Legend. He liked that bit. Okay, so these days murder was no longer big news, but Il Grande Leone was a legend and still warranted newsprint. He was starting to feel much better when his gold-plated cellphone rang – a ringtone of music that he’d personally composed. He looked at the caller display and grimaced. ‘Buon giorno, Capitano. I have been trying to call you.’

  On the other end, Sylvia Tomms erupted. Her language would have shamed a Neapolitan docker.

  Sorrentino protested the best he could. ‘Sylvia, it wasn’t me! It was a leak. Truly, a dreadful leak.’

  Sylvia’s swearing continued to scorch the phone and Sorrentino had to wait for the abuse to die down before adding, ‘My assistant Ruben was responsible for it. I have fired him. He’s cleared out his desk and gone back to his precious Catalan friends in Barcelona. Treacherous snake! I am so angry and so embarrassed. I tried to call you as soon as I found out but I was told you were unavailable. And as you know, you refused to give me your private cellphone number when I asked for it.’

  Sylvia Tomms felt furious and sickened. His comment about her private number reminded her of the awful day when Sorrentino had hit on her. He’d told her how exciting she would find it to spend an evening – and maybe a night – with him. The memory stoked her anger and she imagined what a good punchbag he’d make if only she were near him and had a spare half-hour to let off steam.

  ‘I really am very sorry about this leak, and I do hope it doesn’t personally cause you too much trouble.’ Sorrentino made little effort to sound sincere.

  Finally she hung up on him and he allowed himself a smile. He was happy there had been no need to tell her what else he’d discovered. What vital information he’d held back from the press, and from her. Something far more significant than Francesca being pregnant. Something that would teach her not to treat him as though he weren’t good enough for her. Something that might even make the front page.

  40

  Campeggio Castellani, Pompeii

  Martina Novello snorted contempt
uously at the bed her daughter had clearly not slept in. ‘Idiot.’ Surely she could have waited. No, of course not. Rosa was never one for waiting. No waiting to have sex. No waiting to spend the night with a man who wasn’t fit to clean her shoes. That girl – she’d been born early and been impatient ever since.

  The sheets on Rosa’s small bunk were pulled tight and tidy, just as Martina had made them, but she still couldn’t help freshening them up, turning back the top sheet and re-creasing it. She smiled as she moved Benni, a tiny teddy bear, given to Rosa at birth and now losing his fur in several places.

  Cristiano, her lump of a husband, lumbered into the caravan’s awful chemical toilet, clutching yesterday’s newspaper. Damned paper. These days he spent more time looking at newsprint than he did at her. When had that all changed? More memories tumbled in – Cristiano back in his twenties, with the body of a boxer, a twinkle in his eye and a permanent hard-on. So long ago, and yet still so vivid.

  Martina wriggled her feet into blue slippers and padded outside to the neighbouring caravan. She’d give them hell for letting her daughter sleep over with that no-good Filippo. She rapped her knuckles on the cold thin metal of the Valdrano camper and a thought hit her. Rosa had never stayed out before, not all night, so why now? Martina could hear voices, mumblings inside, the scraping of furniture and the patter of feet on the thin floor of the cheap van.

  ‘Buon giorno.’ Filippo’s mother had bags under her eyes and no make-up. Her cream dressing gown was pulled tight to reveal a pale neck and fatty legs.

  ‘Claretta, is Rosa here? Is she with Filippo?’

  The boy’s mother sensed worry rather than anger in her friend’s voice. ‘No, I don’t think so.’ She walked towards the back of the van, slid open a wooden door. The empty bed told its own story. ‘He’s not there, Martina.’ Fear creased her face as she stated the obvious. ‘He’s not at yours – not with Rosa?’