CRIME THRILLERS-A Box Set

by Billie Sue Mosiman

  He threw back his head to consult the ceiling. "You're insane," he said finally. "It's you who's gone crazy, Carla. If you hadn't given up the last time I cut you, if you hadn't ruined it---we wouldn't have to do it all again."

  "How did I ruin it before?" She cringed from the touch of his fingers on her face.

  "Can't tell you, can I? You might do it again. Quit trying to trick me."

  He returned to the heated soup and poured it into two bowls. He allowed a coughing spasm to pass before offering to untie Carla's hands so she could eat. He was not surprised she refused to cooperate.

  He slurped the liquid. "They won't find you. You're never leaving here."

  "Lansing, I want..."

  "Shut up. I'm tired of your talking. Close your eyes. Go to sleep. I don't want to talk anymore."

  When she did not obey, he turned himself on the pallet of leaves until his back was to her. He ate all the soup, drank a can of pineapple juice, relieved himself against the back wall, and curled beneath the blanket once again. He was too cold, too tired to change the bandage. He tinkered with fantasies until he had them the way he wanted in his mind, and then he drifted off to sleep.

  He did not hear Carla's uncharacteristic sniffling in the growing evening dark. He did not hear her faintly whispered imprecations against the evil that had seized hold of her destiny.

  CHAPTER 3

  In the nighttime he had to be careful. He woke with his heart racing, afraid. He sat upright. Despite how high and protected the cave was, someone might see light from inside drifting outside to the dark and discover him there.

  He permitted one candle and huddled in its small, projected circle of illumination. Carla lay off in the shadows where he could not see. She was a voice coming out of nowhere.

  "Your eye's infected." Her words lacked any real concern.

  He unwrapped the bandage round and round the left side of his head. He didn't have to talk. It was his place. His mausoleum, as she called it.

  The soiled wrapping fell to the cave floor, and he reached up to touch the packed cotton. His image in the small pocket mirror he used wavered whenever a draft of air blew the candle flame and sent his face spinning off into crooked shadows. He could see the reddish black cotton soaked through and the swelling that lifted his eyebrow strangely, contorting the upper part of his cheek, ballooning his temple. "It'll be fine." He gritted his teeth.

  "It's going to kill you," she persisted. "The blood poisoning is so close to your brain, you'll die quick. And hard. Not a pretty ending to think about, is it Lansing?"

  "Bullshit." He struggled against the pain brought on by movement and the stinging caress of night breezes. He picked at the cotton stuffed into the empty socket. He removed the gummy saturated material bit by bit, wincing as he did so, relegating the throbbing horror of it off into an icy cold wasteland where it couldn't touch him.

  "Doesn't that hurt?" Her disembodied voice floated over him. "How can you stand to touch it?"

  He ignored her and methodically removed what he could of the cotton. He had to pick at it to get the bloody wisps stuck to his raw flesh. He had a clear view of the damage now in the yellow flickering mirror face. Droplets of blood and clear liquid oozed from different points in the distended flesh. At the center it was black and pitted like the bottom of a rusted barrel. It looked as if there was a black olive where his eye had been.

  He gently lowered his head to find the box of cotton balls and the iodine bottle, cocking his head to be able to see with the one good eye. He had already soaked a large handful of cotton balls. He reached for the orange-red conglomeration, missed it, tried again. He knew what was wrong. His brain was trying to see it with both eyes, with the old wide-angle two-eyed range of vision, and his depth perception was off. He finally walked his fingers over the square of waxed paper until he managed to get hold of the iodine-soaked cotton and, looking in the mirror again, saw his hand move slowly to fill in the hole in his face.

  Carla's grunt made him jerk and his short, blunt fingernails sliced into the wound. He cried out, holding both sides of his head with his hands. Go away! he mentally commanded. Leave me alone! Oh God, leave me alone!

  Control was slow in coming. Hot pulsating vibrations washed over his head from the back to the front and returned, front to back. He waited. Imagined distances of white featureless frozen plains. Saw himself walking there alone in the icy silence, in the wasteland where other men could not venture.

  He steadied, brought up the medicated cotton again. Before he neared his eye, however, he admonished Carla. "Don't do that again. Don't make a sound. Don't look if you're going to make noises."

  This time he succeeded in stuffing the socket and held the packing in place with his palm while he reached for a fresh roll of bandage. He now felt nothing at all in the area of the damaged eye. His whole face felt made of wood.

  "That's...that's impossible, what you just did," Carla said from the darkness. "How can you bear it?"

  "We have ways." He began to swath his head, looping the bandage around and around.

  "We who, Lansing?"

  "Haven't you ever made friends with the people in your head?" He was genuinely curious.

  "People? In my head? There's no damn people in my head."

  "Sure. Don't try to deny they're there. Accept it, Carla, we all have people inside us we can call on for help when we need it. Mine live behind the palace window."

  "What is the palace window?"

  He tied off the bandage and made it secure. He found the plastic Bayer aspirin bottle on the table behind the propped mirror and shook five tablets into his palm. He groped for the water glass.

  "You may not have a palace. I have one. It's made of this heavy gray stone and it stands five stories high. There's a moat around it--that's for the enemies who try to get inside. In the moat are crocodiles and huge lizards with teeth and dragons with fire to keep people from swimming across. I stay in the top front window. From there I can see the whole world. Nothing can get me when I'm there."

  "Is that where you go when you're in pain?"

  "No. It's my refuge from enemies, I told you. Don't you listen? I go to the Arctic to get rid of pain."

  Carla's voice faltered as she spoke next. "You have...two places...and people in your head to consult when you...need help?"

  "Naturally. You have them, too, if you'd only look. You never talk to yourself in your head? Really?"

  "Well, sure, but..."

  "Okay, then." He was satisfied. Even the old witch and the doctors he had to see agreed everyone talked to themselves in their heads. He merely talked to the others he found there, too. No difference.

  He swallowed the bunch of aspirin after a couple of tries. He put away the mirror and turned his attention to the front of the cave, where he could see the starry sky gleaming. He blew out the candle and breathed the waxy hot scent into his nostrils. He needed to get back to sleep. Morning always came too swiftly, swallowing the calm night.

  "Lansing, tell me how I remind you of the old witch. You told me that's why I'm special."

  "I don't know how to do that."

  "Try. It doesn't matter what you say. Pretend I'm not here. You can't see me in the dark. I'm not here, okay?'

  He leaned his head to the side to contemplate the Big Dipper in the night sky. He couldn't see the Little Dipper, supposed it was above the overhang. Maybe he should kill Carla tonight when she least expected it. Then he could sit her with her back against the wall and prop her next to the old witch. The smell of her decay would eventually run him off, and he would have to stay out in the world for a time until the maggots and insects did their hard work, but when he came back and his eye was healed, he would have two of them to watch over.

  "She didn't look like you," he began cautiously, trying to find the explanation he sought. "She was fat, like I said, big around as a washtub. And you're little, a lot littler than she ever was, probably even when she was a girl." He drew a breath and leaned against t
he cool rock of the cave wall. It made him shiver and he had to sit forward again. "But she was always talking to me, trying to find out about 'the troubles,' she called it, why I was always 'sulling up,' the way you did that night I cut you. I was going to finish it then, but that old man came running in. And the things you asked, like you're doing now, reminded me of her all those years ago." He sighed, dreadfully tired. "She would ask me, 'Martin, why did you turn on the burners and do that to your hands?' and I would stare at her until she'd break down and cry. You cried that night, remember, Carla? But you weren't afraid and the old witch was never afraid, either. She was ready for me, for whatever I decided to do.

  "When I stabbed her, she leaped up in her bed screaming, but when she got tired and had lost so much blood--it was everywhere, just everywhere--then she got real sad looking and said, 'Go ahead, Martin, I knew this might happen. You hurt yourself and it wasn't enough and now you want to hurt me. You poor soul.' That's what she called me that night; You poor soul. Can you imagine? Even when I told her about the palace and how no one could enter to bother me, she just kept saying what a poor soul I was and how sorry she was she couldn't change it, how wrong she had been to try because now her trying had ended her life and she'd never get to try helping anyone else, ever."

  He felt his shoulders slump, and he wriggled on the bed to lie down. Sleep was a good thief, slipping up on him all the time. He didn't feel like talking to anyone. They all said the same things anyway, and no one understood him.

  "Lansing?" Carla called, a tinny edge of fear in her voice.

  "What?"

  "Can't I change your mind? Can't we talk some more and work this out?"

  "No." He crawled up the outside wall of the castle and loosened the tall stained-glass window. He reached over the stone sill and pulled himself inside. He lay on the bare floor to catch his breath, and then he came onto his knees, and leaning his arms on the windowsill, he stared out over rolling green grassy hills, the shadowed vast forests, and in the distance the twinkling lights of a metropolis.

  Safe now. All alone. Sheltered.

  "Lansing?"

  A faraway voice rose from below, from beyond the palace gates and the raised moat. He did not bother to look for who it belonged to.

  Wars fought on in the east, animals prowled through the wood, jets droned overhead, winged creatures on their trails, and in the distant city humans ran thither and yon yanking on their sacks of skin to find oblivion, killed one another in rage until the streets ran slick with the gamy scent of blood.

  Lansing stood above this nightmare landscape unscathed. He slept blissfully secure from any and all danger.

  SULLY AND CARLA

  First they ignore you; then they laugh at you; then they fight you; then you win.

  ~Mahatma Gandhi

  CHAPTER 1

  It had been a day like no other, a day incomparably costly in terms of physical expenditure. His resolution to find Carla had not diminished, but Sully thought he might be losing his mind to tackle Burdock Mountain in the company of the inexhaustible Flap. It had begun just before dawn with Flap banging on the door, chiding him for sleeping in when important matters were at hand. He then rushed him through gathering the supplies and dressing for the trek. Sully felt as if he'd boarded a cross-country express with all the stops pulled out. As soon as Sheriff Banks and the men arrived, Flap took over with true authority.

  "Now, listen close." Flap gestured everyone into a tight circle around him as if he were a famous orator whose words they dare not miss. "Sully called me in and we're going on up Burdock. Sheriff, you go ahead and order your men to do what it is you were gonna do. We won't be with you, and we won't be coming back here tonight to meet again 'cause we’re gonna find that girl's whereabouts right to the source. So that's about it. I wanted you to know what was happening so you wouldn't worry about us. I'd also 'ppreciate it if none of you men shot a hole in my ass thinking I'm your quarry. You come up on us from behind--'cause I figure we'll be up above you most of the time--and you call out first, you hear?" He had turned to Sully then. Let’s get started. It's late."

  It had been gratifying to watch the expression on Banks' face. He looked confounded to see Flap emerge from the house and begin to give orders to the group of men. After he had heard the plans, anger flashed across his face like a brush fire, his eyes narrowing down to little gray slits. He looked like a mole caught out in noon sun. It was testament to Flap's reputation that the sheriff failed to argue.

  It took Flap most of the morning to get them through the bogland north of the house and to the foot of Burdock where the search party had stopped the night before. Sully never thought of himself as a particularly athletic person, and true to his misgivings, an hour into the walk he knew he was going to have to draw on everything he had to keep up. Flap moved swiftly, but not so fast they were winded and had to rest. He simply bulldozed forward, silent, his wary eyes flickering everywhere to note the vegetation, the trees, even the wind and the gyrations of the clouds overhead for all Sully knew. Flap was much too immersed in his surroundings and his passage to the mountain to pay any attention to a tag-a-long companion.

  By noon they were scaling the mountainside and the pace slowed, Flap looking for signs to track. "Dogs didn't get up here," he explained. "We're on our own now. Gotta follow their footsteps, crushed weeds and grass, fallen rock, bent saplings and branches. We lose their trail, we lose our ass. Could spend the next year wandering around up here trying to pick 'em back up again."

  Sully felt like a new artificial limb on an amputee, attached, but not yet useful. He brought up the rear and kept all questions to himself. Flap wasn't one for uninspired small talk. Whenever Flap spoke to him, it was to point out evidence of a man's passing or else to warn him of ruts or jagged outcrops of rock that might harm him.

  They did not rest for eight solid hours. Sully's stomach growled before they stopped for the few minutes it took to eat the food Flap had packed--boiled eggs, heavily doused with pepper and salt, tough strips of jerky. Sully would have preferred the sandwiches Janice made for them, but he kept his tongue. When Sully stopped to urinate, it seemed to frustrate the old scout. Sully imagined Flap's bladder to be twice normal size, for it seemed he never felt the need to take a whiz.

  By nightfall Sully was clenching his jaws from tiredness and determined not to show it. He thought he might look like a big tire inner tube with a slow leak. Soon he'd be flat on his back, and he presumed the old man would crouch over him to say, "What the hell you doin'? You think you're vacationing at the beach, boy?"

  After the sun had set and again Sully felt the emptiness beginning to roar in his innards, he thought they would stop for some real food. Janice had packed him a thermos of hearty soup, thick ham and cheese sandwiches, grapes, apples. He could do with a bracing cup of black coffee.

  But Flap pushed onward, the mountain incline increasingly steep and difficult to maneuver. Trees crowded their path, ropey vines clogged the way, sudden drop-offs and hidden crevices loomed beneath their feet unexpectedly. Sully grunted to himself and kept going, too, unwilling to let a man thirty years his senior outdo him. He didn't have to eat if Flap didn't. He didn't have to have coffee or find time for pissing. He could go on, too, moving upward in the descending dark, following in Flap's footsteps picked out by round yellow beams from the flashlight.

  Hours later Flap called for a pause. He halted and Sully thought they might have to go around another deadfall or drop off. But a bar of light washed over his haggard face and lowered.

  "You're out of shape," Flap commented without rancor. "We best slow down a bit. You want to grab something to eat?"

  Sully sank to the ground with a sigh. Who was he fooling? "Yeah, I'm beat," he admitted. "I didn't know mountain climbing was this hard. You think Carla made it up here?"

  "She made it. Good thing, too. She didn't make it, he might've killed her where she quit."

  Sully looked up through the shadowed standing trunks toward t
he mountain peak. "He took her pretty high."

  Flap looked, too, and considered, his words as always chewed over before he let them out. "He's got hisself a place up there somewhere. He run to ground like he did in the lean-to you told me about. He ain't no different from a gopher."

  "You think?"

  "Yep. He's like an animal, got animal instincts."

  Sully pulled out two sandwiches with slabs of ham and cheese and bit into one. "Want one of these?"

  "I got some jerky left."

  Sully could not imagine sustaining his strength on a few piddling strips of dried beef. And he wished he did not smoke. His breathing was a whistling, heaving chore. He knew Flap disfavored vices, did not smoke or drink hard liquor. Hell, he didn't even have to rest or eat or pee.

  "How old did you say you were, Flap?" Sully spoke around a mouthful of ham and cheese.

  "I didn't say that I can remember."

  "Oh."

  "You're wondering how I can tackle this here old mountain bitch, ain't you?"

  Sully nodded, swallowing down his food with water from a canteen. He tried not to think about hot coffee, cold beer, iced tea, the good taste of clean, refreshing milk. There was the coffee in the other thermos, but after this many hours he knew it would taste old as dishwater. His tongue was already sending up flares over the flavor of the sandwich. Water was fine with it.

  "Well, see, I spent my youthhood up here. I helped cut back some of this timber. When I was young these stands you see now weren't more than knee high. I guess this mountain and me know each other pretty good. Besides...I stay in shape doing one thing or another..."

  Sully made a sound, hoping the old guy would take it as approval and not a comment on his own sorry condition. He kept eating, knowing at any minute Flap might command they persevere another round of interminable miles. What was that old saying? The spirit was willing, but the body weak? Something like that. Anyway, his body sure did not match his spirit for this rescue mission.