by Sara Reinke
EYE OF THE STORM
by Sara Reinke
Published by Sara Reinke at Smashwords
Copyright 2006 Sara Reinke
Names, characters and incidents depicted in this book are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincident and beyond the intent of the author. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage or retrieval system without permission in writing from the author.
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He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 146
CHAPTER ONE
In the dream, Paul Frances meant to cut off the girl’s fingers one by one, using what looked like a stainless steel set of gardening shears.
He could see her terror as he walked toward her. Her large blue eyes, tear-filled and ringed with smeared mascara, grew wide, and her voice escaped in high-pitched frantic mewls as she shook her head slightly back and forth.
“Vthhnnooo,” she pleaded. She couldn’t be more articulate, thanks to the gag in her mouth: a hard rubber ball held in place with straps of black leather that were belted around her head. He’d found it at a sex shop, in a fetish-toy discount bin.
Perfect, he’d thought, as he’d bought it.
The girl sat in a straight-back wooden chair that looked like pictures of early electric chairs he’d seen in criminal justice textbooks. It had arms with manacle cuffs built in so that her wrists were firmly bound. She wiggled her hands, twisting desperately enough that the edge of the cuff scraped her wrists raw and open.
“Vthhnnooo,” she mewled again. “Theeeess…!” No, please!
She was naked, her pale skin pebbled with goosebumps. He saw her clothes lying in a tumble next to the chair, the remnants of a blouse with pale blue and lime green vertical stripes, a lacy bra, khaki skirt, bikini-style panties. He’d cut them off of her piece by piece when he’d first delivered her there―the slowness of his actions, the methodical deliberateness with which he had undressed her had terrified her.
Her feet were crossed and lashed together. The end of a length of piano wire, a crude garrotte looped taut about her throat and also bound her ankles. Every time she moved her legs, the noose around her neck tightened. She’d fought him enough to that point that the wire had cut through her skin in a thin, bloody seam. It had drawn tightly enough against her windpipe to leave her snuffling for breath. Her attempts to cry at him in implore quickly waned as she struggled to suck in air.
She’d been there for days, bound to the chair. Two lanterns set on opposite sides of the large room provided dim but adequate illumination. The ceiling was covered in crumbling, ruined plaster. The painted concrete walls were faded, chipped and cracked. The floor was littered in plaster and debris; he could hear it crunching beneath the soles of his shoes as he walked toward her.
Perfect, he thought.
He had found the shears on a small metal tray resting atop a wheeled dolly, like the sort dental hygienists use to wheel their supplies around examination rooms. There had been an assortment of picks, knives, scalpels and instruments there, all immaculate and glistening in the stark white light.
Perfect.
He felt no reservations about what he was about to do. Nothing in his mind screamed at him to stop―not even the part of him that had been a seasoned police officer, a homicide detective, for more than fifteen years. She couldn’t pull her hand away, and he slipped the sharpened blades of the shears around her index finger.
She pleaded with him, her voice sodden and choked for breath, stifled around the ball. Paul flexed his hand, closing his fingers around the trigger grasp of the shears. He felt a moment of tension as the powerful blades closed, and then a sharp, wet, satisfying snict!
For a moment, less than a second, there was nothing but silence. And then he heard a soft whap as the length of her severed finger struck the concrete floor below, the faint scrape as the manicured tip of her fingernail hit the ground.
The girl began to scream. Nearly choked or not, garrotte or not, she found the breath and voice to shriek hoarsely. She thrashed in the chair, shrugging her shoulders and when she tried to kick her feet, the line of piano wire whipped tightly. Her cry immediately dissolved into a strangled wheeze.
Perfect.
Paul slipped her middle finger between the blades. There was nothing she could do to prevent him. He knew it. She knew it, too. He looked at her face just as he folded his fingers inward again, closing them around the grasp, and to his surprise, he saw it was his younger brother, Jay in the chair. The blond girl was gone, and Jay was there, his large, dark eyes glassy with pain and fright and shock, his breaths gasping and feeble, his teeth cutting deeply into the flesh of the rubber ball, his lips lined with a thin froth of frantic saliva.
“Theeeesss…!” Jay whimpered, as Paul closed his hand, bringing the blades of the shears together. Please…!
Snict!
* * *
Paul sat bolt upright in bed, his eyes flown wide, his body covered in a clammy sweat. His breath was caught somewhere in his throat, a loud, sharp gasp, and for a moment, he had no idea where he was. All he could hear was that soft, resounding snict! and all he was aware of was the sensation in his hand, the tension against his palm as he had closed the blades of the gardening shears together against Jay’s finger.
That it had been a nightmare at first eluded him. If he’d suffered nightmares in the past, his wife, Vicki, would always wake him up. He’d groan aloud or squirm too much, something to let her know his distress and she would dig her elbow into the meat of his belly or the small of his back to rouse him.
After a long moment, he realized. He remembered.
There is no Vicki. Not anymore.
He was in bed―not the bed he’d shared with Vicki for twenty years, but a different one, a new bed in a small apartment he called his home. There was no Vicki anymore. Their divorce had been finalized last month, but their separation had occurred almost a year ago.
Ten months, Paul thought, shoving the heels of his hands against his brows. Ten months, three weeks, two days and fourteen hours.
“Jesus,” he whispered, kicking the covers back from his legs. A glance at the bedside alarm clock told him it was shortly after midnight. The night had only just begun, and he wasn’t going to be able to sleep through another moment of it.
Again.
“Terrific,” he muttered. He rose to his feet and shuffled out of the bedroom. He stopped in the bathroom and relieved his bladder in the dark, with the door standing wide open, his free hand propped against the wall and his eyes closed against a monstrous headache he could feel stirring behind his eyes.
Again.
“Terrific,” he muttered once more. He realized his niece Emma was asleep across the hall, and the nosy spattering might disturb her. He flapped his hand behind him and swung the door closed just in time to muffle the flush of the toilet, and the unceremonious clang as the toilet seat dropped closed again. It had been a long time since he’d h
ad to conscientiously remember to do this, and yet he still did it everytime by habit. Vicki trained me well.
Emma was his brother, Jay’s six-year-old daughter. She was staying with Paul while Jay and his new bride, Jo, were honeymooning in the Bahamas. They would be gone for two weeks, and had left only two days before.
Paul went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door. He stood, holding the door wide with his hand, bathed in the bright, golden glow of light spilling from within. He surveyed the contents for a long moment before pulling out a bottle of beer.
Uncle Paul, you don’t have much in here ’cept beer, Emma had noted with a frown of disapproval on her first night in his company. When he’d pointed out that he had hot dogs in the fridge, and some week-old Chinese leftovers, her frown had only deepened. He’d taken her to the grocery, and, under her direction, stocked up to her satisfaction with a healthy assortment of apples, bananas, bread, cheese, turkey bologna, milk and more.
Looks like a person lives here now, he thought, nudging the door to the refrigerator closed with his hip. There’s a nice change. He twisted off the bottle cap and tossed it into the trash can in the corner. He tilted back his head and drained nearly half the beer in a few deep gulps.
His living room opened out onto a miniscule balcony onto which he could manage to stand upright and out of the rain in some modicum of comfort. A “hibachi terrace,” the apartment manager had called it, meaning it was wide enough to wedge a hibachi-sized grill on, but not much else.
Paul eased the sliding glass door open and stepped outside. He’d slept that night as he had every night of his adult life―bare-chested and in a pair of pajama bottoms. Spring had nearly waned to summer, but the night air was still cool against his skin. He lit a cigarette and drew in a deep drag. He exhaled heavily, watching the smoke huff from his lungs in a sudden, billowing cloud. Emma would scold him if she caught him smoking. He’d promised her he’d quit nearly a year ago, but hadn’t. She didn’t understand. Things went from bad to worse, and from there, they just kept getting shittier, he thought. But you couldn’t explain things like that to a kid―things like divorce and alimony and visitation arrangements.
Or cutting off people’s fingers, a quiet voice in his mind whispered, and he closed his eyes as a slight shiver slid through him. The dream had been bad tonight. Really damn bad.
Again.
He’d grabbed his cell phone from the coffee table in the living room before coming outside. He flipped it open and dialed his brother. He didn’t know if Jay could get cellular service in the Bahamas, but figured it was worth a try. After five rings and a burst of static, Jay answered, his voice hoarse and decidedly breathless. “Yeah?”
“Are you on top or bottom?” Paul asked, the cigarette wedged in the corner of his mouth.
“At the moment? Neither,” Jay replied. “We just finished with the latter, and Jo’s in the bathroom, freshening up before the former. What’s going on?”
Jay knew his brother well enough to be completely unalarmed or perturbed by his call, just as Paul had known he would be awake to receive it. “Nothing,” Paul said, dragging in on the cigarette again, listening to the paper hiss as the edges burned back, feeling the scrape of smoke against the back of his throat.
“You’re smoking,” Jay observed.
“I am, yes.”
“I know it’s moot to keep pointing this out, but I didn’t raise you from the dead so you could kill yourself with that shit.”
Thirteen months ago, Paul had taken a bullet in the chest, a straight shot delivered nearly square to his heart by a serial killer nicknamed The Watcher. Paul had died within five minutes of receiving the wound. His wife, Vicki, had been there to see it; she had watched him die.
And then, she’d seen him come back to life―even though she couldn’t or wouldn’t admit it.
Jay Frances could raise the dead. One touch was all it took to restore life to even long-since cold flesh. Paul had always known about his brother’s extraordinary ability, and on that day thirteen months ago, he had experienced it for himself.
“Emma’s fine,” Paul said into the phone, ready to change the subject, unwilling to think about that for too long, much less talk about it. Just like Vicki.
“I know,” Jay said. “You wouldn’t call me with bullshit small talk if she’d cut off her finger or something.”
His words, meant in jest, sent a new shudder through Paul. The cigarette dropped from his hand, tumbling to the decorative hedges below.
“Paul?” Jay asked. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” Paul said, closing his eyes and pinching the bridge of his nose. “I think so. Probably. Hell, Jay, I don’t know.”
He’d called Jay because he’d wanted the comfort of his younger brother’s voice. Jay was all he had left in the world. Their parents were dead, and now Vicki was gone. She’d taken Paul’s daughters with her―sixteen-year-old M.K. and fourteen-year-old Bethany.
The dream had frightened him more than he was willing to admit, and he had called because he wanted Jay to tell him it was nothing; that even though it was the third time he’d had that dream―for three nights, he had imagined torturing the blond girl cuffed to the chair―and that on that evening, he’d imagined Jay’s face as he’d cut off her fingers, that he was not going insane.
“It’s alright, Paul,” Jay told him gently, and at the kindness in his voice, the quiet measure of his words, Paul felt his eyes flood with sudden tears.
I miss you, Jay, he thought.
“Thanks for that, kid,” he whispered hoarsely. He heard Jo’s voice through the phone as she returned to the bed. “I…I’ll let you get back to your wife now. Sorry I bothered you, man. It’s nothing.”
“You didn’t bother me,” Jay said. “Fifteen minutes earlier or later and yeah, you’d have been bothering me, but for now, we’re good.”
Paul managed a laugh, shaking his head. “Talk to you later.” And then, because the image of Jay’s eyes from his dream, filled with fear, glazed with pain and shock, flashed through his mind, spearing his heart, he added, “I love you, Jay.”
I would never hurt you, Jay. Jesus, not for anything. Not for the world. I promise. I swear to Christ.
“I love you, too, man,” Jay said.
* * *
“Lieutenant Frances, do you see any patterns in the recent increases in violent crime in the city?”
Paul blinked at the pretty young reporter in front of him, snapping out of a weary, absent-minded reverie. He was exhausted; three days with less than twelve hours of sleep total were beginning to take a toll on him. And he’d admittedly been distracted by the glimpse of flesh visible where the top buttons of her blouse lay undone and open, draping her collar back in stylish but casual fashion toward her shoulders. Her white shirt was open just enough to award a glimpse of cleavage visible in that narrow margin of space, with her pert and decidedly perky breasts just beneath. He had imagined for a fleeting moment, that in the stark light from the camera nearby, that he could see somewhat through the linen of her blouse, and just make out the floral details in the lace trim outlining her bra cups.
“Lieutenant Frances?” she asked, cocking her head at an angle and raising her brows expectantly. Susan was her name. Susan…something. For the life of him, he couldn’t remember. He’d never met her before. She wasn’t the usual newshound Channel 11 sent to the municipal center to interview him.
“I’m sorry,” he said, shaking his head once. He was too damn old to be oggling. And she was too damn young. “Patterns, you said?”
The reporter, Susan, nodded. “In the recent increase in violent crimes in the city,” she offered by way of prompt. It wasn’t a live interview, or else Paul would have been in deep shit for his distraction. “You studied the same sorts of trends before cracking the Watcher case, and found a pattern no one else had identified. Do you see anything like that today?”
Paul smiled. She was a newbie, then. Probably fresh off the truck from coll
ege. The seasoned veterans of the local news scene never mentioned the Watcher case anymore. That was old hat; yesterday’s stale headlines. Every once in a great while, he still fended a phone call or email inquiry from a documentary filmmaker or Discovery Channel program director wanting to interview him briefly about it, but otherwise, it was long since a closed file.
New reporters, however, seized upon it eagerly, just like Susan. The Watcher had been the kind of case to make or break careers. It had sure made Paul’s―he’d first been promoted to the head of a task force assigned to apprehend the Watcher, and then, once the case was through, he’d been named Lieutenant.
And then stuck here, in Public Affairs, another goddamn talking head for the department, he thought, glancing beyond Susan and her cameraman toward Jason Stewart, his partner―a kid no older than Susan. Some reward.
“I think the recent homicides indicate an increase in drug-related activities in the city,” he said to the camera. Jason craned his head to catch Paul’s attention over the cameraman’s shoulder. He held up a piece of paper, waggling it at Paul. Mention the tip line again, it said.
Get bent, Jason, Paul thought, frowning slightly. “Statistically, violent crime rates rise as the weather gets warmer. We’re no different than any other major metropolitan area.”
Susan pouted in unconscious disappointment. Paul could literally read her mind from the momentary―but admittedly adorable―expression. There went my big scoop for the day.
Sorry, kid, he thought, resisting the urge to remind her that not having a serial killer loose on the streets was a good thing, by most people’s definition.
“Okay, I guess that’s it, then,” Susan said, as the camera light went out, and Paul blinked down at his toes, letting his eyes readjust without the blinding glare. When he looked up, there were still little polka-dots of shadow traipsing across his line of sight, and Susan, the pretty young reporter, was smiling brightly at him, her disappointment passed. “Thank you, Lieutenant Frances. I appreciate you taking the time to speak with me.” She held a Channel 11 microphone in one hand, and thrust out the other. “It’s really been a pleasure to meet you. I saw you on Good Morning America last year. The Oprah show, too.”
