Striking Back

by Mark Nykanen

  What were you thinking, falling in love with him?

  She hadn’t given herself time to think, she realized. She’d let it happen so quickly. But wasn’t that a sign of a battering personality? Move in on a woman fast, don’t give her time to think? Hadn’t she warned women about this time and again? How could she have missed the signs?

  No wonder he’d never suspected her of the killings. He was the murderer.

  The bag squirmed again before her eyes.

  “Snakes,” she said to Jamison in a voice as broken as she felt. “Rattlesnakes.” As if in response their tails buzzed electrically in the hallway.

  Jamison nodded, but he hadn’t moved, and his eyes barely lifted from that squirming sack.

  He must know why they’re here, she thought. By now half of L.A. must have known about her connection to rattlesnakes, at least the part made public in the coroner’s inquest.

  She couldn’t take her eyes from the constantly shifting sack, too frightened that they’d get out. Then Hark gripped her ankle so suddenly she screamed.

  Jamison yelled, “Get back.”

  “I can’t,” she cried, shaking, legs gone to rubber.

  Hark’s fingers clenched her like the claws of a reptile.

  Jamison inched closer, clearly reluctant to approach the burlap bag, which quivered and stilled. He kept his gun on the sack and jumped when it erupted once again in a series of violent movements and rattles.

  “Fuck,” Jamison shouted, “I hate those goddamn things.”

  She looked down where Hark still gripped her foot, and felt a fierce disgust. Right at that moment his grip softened, and she finally found the courage to jerk her leg away.

  “Don’t you touch me,” she screamed.

  Instead, he turned his face to the side, eyes straining upward to see her, and made some gesture with his head.

  “He say anything?” Jamison asked.

  ”Nothing,” but with her panic subsiding it struck her that Hark might also have been trying to shake his head no.

  What would he have been saying “no” to? she wondered. You’re doing it again, you idiot.

  She was still trying to believe in him by making chicken soup out of his chicken shit gestures. Right then she forced herself to remember a painful element of a battered woman’s psychology: how she’ll often persist in any belief, no matter how bizarre, that suggests her guy is really okay. She’d wanted to believe a whole lot about Hark, and it had all turned to dust. But he was alive, and that meant someday she’d get her own retribution—in court.

  “Call an ambulance,” she said to Jamison.

  “He’s a dead man,” the detective said softly. “I’ve seen men die, and he’s a dead man.”

  She was still looking at Jamison when Hark reached out and touched her foot again, but before she could jerk it away, his thumb caressed her for one short movement. A deeply familiar touch. Then he pressed the heel of his hand against her, like he was trying, however feebly, to push her away.

  “It’s going to save the state a bundle if he dies right now,” Jamison said. “No big trial for murder. Attempted murder, too. That’s what he was doing, coming to kill you with these goddamn things.”

  He lifted the sack and shook it before her face. The snakes burst alive as if they might wiggle their way out of the bag.

  She backed up. Jamison apologized and placed the stirred-up sack on Hark’s lower back, right above where his stomach remained folded over the bottom half of the door. Blood drooled down the green paint from the cuts he’d suffered when he was impaled on the jagged glass.

  He’s out of character, Gwyn thought, staring at Jamison. And it’s not the first time. An image of him limping into the Actors Studio of Hollywood leapt to mind, and then she recalled how he strode out of the academy an hour and forty minutes later. Out of character then, out of character now. Jamison had retreated when he first spotted the sack; and now he stood with those goddamn creatures squirming and rattling inches under his hand.

  He’s a lousy actor.

  “Call an ambulance,” she insisted. Then, in a more even voice, she added, “And call Trenton and Warren. I want them here.”

  Jamison looked at the sack, then at her, as if the writhing snakes had finally distracted him.

  “Please do it.”

  He pulled out his radio and called in his name, location, and a numbered code. “They’ll be coming,” he said. “Let me get this door open and get you out of there.”

  He placed the bag of snakes down in the hallway, and she stepped to the door. As she waited for him to force it open, questions flew at her like knives: How come he didn’t call right away? Isn’t that what they always do? Get back-up, paramedics? And how come there wasn’t some kind of radio response, a 10-4 or whatever the hell they say?

  “I want to hear them radio you back.”

  “Not on that code. We use it to keep the media away.”

  “Use another code, then, I don’t care. I just want to hear Trenton or Warren. Or a dispatcher even. That would be fine. Tell them an officer’s down. Tell them anything, say you’ve got a flat tire. I don’t care. I just want to hear them.”

  “That’s what you want? Fine.”

  He slipped his hand back into his jacket, then snapped it out, grabbing her throat as fast as he’d once grabbed her wrist in the same doorway. He dragged her so close to him that her hip pressed against Hark’s side. Her eyes, bulging from his chokehold, watched him reach down for the bag of snakes. First, he held it up where she could see its bulging shape, and then he shoved it into her face.

  Her arms flailed and she tried to get away, struggled with all her strength, but she couldn’t escape his crushing grip or the feel of those snakes, their tails rattling and buzzing against her cheeks and brow, whipping past her closed eyes.

  His fingers dug into her throat so deeply she gagged again and again. He yanked her head back. “You want too much,” he whispered sharply, a sound eerily at one with the wild hissing in the sack. “It’s been the same shit with you right from the start, right from the goddamned intake. Figuring this out, figuring that out. And now you think you’ve got it all figured out, but the one thing you didn’t figure on was me.”

  He pressed her face back against the dense burlap bag so hard the writhing fabric covered her from ear to ear, and the pressure of the powerful, twisting reptiles against her mouth and nose began to suffocate her. She almost collapsed with the fear that they’d bite right through the bag, but they were struggling as hard as she was to get free.

  Her legs buckled, and he pushed her away. She collapsed, hyperventilating from fear. A hot yellow puddle formed beneath her shorts.

  He tossed the sack onto the floor right in front of her and told her not to move. He might as well have told the sun not to rise.

  She scrambled away on all fours as the snakes, frenzied from the fall, shook the burlap bag until it looked like it would burst apart.

  Jamison lifted Hark’s legs and heaved him all the way into the studio where he landed face up, head to the door, unmoving.

  “He was coming after you with those snakes.” Jamison raised his voice to compete with the never-ending loop of the Beach Boys. “He was gonna kill you, just like he killed his wife and the other guys in the group.”

  “No, he wasn’t, you goddamned liar,” she cried.

  “I was protecting you, and I had to shoot him to save your life—”

  “You fucking bastard.” Her face shined with tears.

  “—and he fell through the glass when I shot him, along with the snakes, and the glass tore the bag open.”

  “Fuck you,” she screamed, shaking horribly.

  “And then the snakes bit you before I could shoot them all. You might have survived a single bite, but not five or six of them. And I got a lot more than that in here. I got plenty for both of you.”

  “No,” she screamed, fisting her hands.

  “I said, ‘Don’t move.”

  She ha
dn’t realized that she’d risen to her feet.

  He reached past the broken glass to open the lock. Hark’s body lay right in front of him, so the moment Jamison leaned his shoulder into the door to push him out of the way, she raced to the far corner of the studio, out of his line of fire. She shoved aside the manikin with Jesse’s head, and slammed the “down” button on the commercial dumbwaiter, the first surface her hand hit when she stabbed blindly at the controls. She curled herself into the box as it lurched and began to descend slowly.

  Agonizingly slow. To squeeze herself inside, she’d had to lie in a tight fetal position. From this awkward and strained posture, she watched the opening narrow.

  She heard Jamison swear violently as he forced Hark’s body to the side, heard his footfalls as he ran toward her, and glimpsed him racing around the corner as the last sliver of light slipped from view. At any moment she expected him to riddle the wooden box with bullets, and when he didn’t, she realized he couldn’t kill her in the dumbwaiter without foiling his plans.

  Even so, Gwyn knew the box offered scant protection, and it was horrifying to know how easily he could push the “up” button. But with each second of descent, her thoughts fled to the room below where she could escape . . . if the box beat him there. Was that what he was doing? Racing down the hall, the stairs? He might very well get lost in the old building trying to find the dumbwaiter’s destination.

  But the box stopped moving, and a telling and terrifying thump sounded on the dumbwaiter’s thin panel of wood right above her head. A second thump followed, and a third. Then she heard the rattles. Only that meager layer of wood separated the snakes from her, and she listened to them moving, slowly at first, as if stunned. Then one of them must have whipped its body around because it sounded like a brush dragged swiftly across the surface.

  “You’re not getting away from them,” Jamison said. His voice sounded calm, close, no more than five feet away. “They’ll get you in there. They sense a warm body, just like that.”

  Lying on her side, facing the open front of the dumbwaiter, she strained her neck to see if there was any room between the top of the box and the wall of the shaft.

  Jesus. She’d just spotted the two-inch gap when a rattler’s head poked down into the opening. She stared in rigid fear at the pale underside of the snake’s triangular jaw when its forked tongue flicked the air and darted side to side. It was, indeed, smelling her.

  She rocked the dumbwaiter as hard as she could to try to startle the snake back, but this proved a terrifying mistake: The motion widened the gap just enough for the four-foot diamondback to slither down into the box, landing right in front of her face. Its rattles sounded like a siren in the tight confines of the dumbwaiter, and from its tightly coiled body its head rose right before her eyes.

  She squeezed them shut, praying ferociously to be spared, yet knowing a bite was as inevitable as death itself. Okay-okay-okay, she said to herself, doing all she could not to hyperventilate again. Don’t move. No matter what, you don’t move. It bites you, YOU DON’T MOVE because it can bite you over and over if it feels threatened.

  The dumbwaiter hung in the shaft, an eternity of stillness. She dared not open her eyes, no movement at all, not with the snake coiled inches from her face. Amid the music rising up the shaft—Brian Wilson singing about fun-fun-fun—she heard the soft snap of the serpent’s tongue exploring her face.

  If he bites, grab him, she told herself. Grab him by the neck and hold the goddamn thing. But she simply couldn’t imagine holding the snake while it coiled its powerful body around her arms and used its terrible strength to squirm free of her grip. And then what?

  She knew the likely answer, knew more about rattlers than she’d ever wanted to know. But a rattler like this might also curl up on her head for hours, or remain where it was, poised to strike at her frozen face, for unending minutes.

  You’re going to get bitten before you get out of here, she told herself. So get ready for it. Don’t panic. Don’t.

  In a terrifying instant she saw what would happen if she gave in to her fear, how she could go insane in this tiny box, try to explode out of it, legs and arms and shoulders and head trying to burst through walls and boards and bricks and nails, driven by the raging dictates of madness and the ceaseless strikes of the snake, her bones snapping from the sheer unrelenting pressure of her panic, succumbing only after repeated doses of venom.

  She also saw the box in these crazed moments as Jamison would see it from above, shaking and banging, shuddering and silencing, the human inside as horrified and defeated by her circumstances as those snakes had been by the sack.

  All of these fears flashed in a period of time that could have been measured in seconds, mere blinks, had she risked even that much movement; but she dared none at all and remained focused on controlling her breath, keeping it silent and still: life disguised as death. Her only hope was to trick Jamison, the snakes, or both. She was so concerned with this single snake that she never thought of the others, until the second one dropped down.

  She endured furious hissing and rattling as both of them slithered over her. The second one, smaller, settled by her feet as the first one curled over her arm. Its head shifted by the back of her armpit, which lay exposed.

  “Can you see them? Here, this’ll help,” he said without sarcasm.

  He shined a light down the shaft, and she spied it through her lids. She opened them slowly, and saw the large snake’s vertical eye slits gleaming. Then its head poked past her armpit and under her sleeve, which lay bunched up around the top of her arm.

  Not in my clothes. Dear God, not in there.

  She felt the snake’s tongue flick. It was smelling inside her top, and gave her the most fear-frozen a moment she’d ever known. But she knew better than to try to thwart the snake because then it would strike, sink its fangs into her flesh, and secrete its deadly venom.

  The cold, scaly head paused, then slid farther under her top and across her shoulder . . .

  Christ-Christ-Christ.

  . . . and down over her breasts . . .

  Christ-Christ-Christ.

  . . . and settled against her belly.

  Christ-Christ-Christ Almighty.

  Four feet of thick snake curled up in a space so tight she could scarcely breathe; she’d sucked in her gut as far as she could, but there was no way she could flee the snake’s ungodly presence.

  “Give me a moment. I want to go get something.”

  What the fuck?

  Another wave of fear passed over her. A snake remained on top of the box. She could hear it moving around.

  What’s he going to do? Drop more of them down here?

  What he did might have been worse. He started throwing hard objects at the dumbwaiter, driving the snake above her into a rage, and jarring the one next to her belly back into movement. It felt like it wanted to escape, and she couldn’t bear to have it come out her neckline, squeeze past her face, so she swallowed slowly, drew in a breath as evenly as she could, and gently-gently-gently eased her top out of her shorts.

  The snake flooded out like intestines, so fast she didn’t have a chance to curl her fingers back, so they remained pressed against the cold scales. She had to hold them absolutely still, not let them so much as tremble, or the snake might have treated them as prey, rodents to be seized and eaten.

  Another heavy object pounded the top of the box, which set off more rattling above. She tried to see if the third snake had started to crawl down, but she couldn’t eye the opening without moving her head. The heavy objects, whatever they were, stopped falling. She felt the big snake settle by her hip, but the smaller one moved over her foot.

  She looked down, saw its tiny head lift up, and sickened over its size: a baby, which meant it was far more dangerous than its companion. When babies strike they have little control over their release of venom, so they often unleash a deadly dose. It was nature’s way of protecting its young, like the baby scorpions, which deliv
er a far more devastating sting than their much larger parents.

  A groan escaped her, as unexpected as it was unwanted, for it set off a rattle from the big snake by her hip. The tail rang against her bare thigh, and she felt every twinge of its alarm like a hot wire on her skin.

  “Here we go. This’ll help, I think.”

  He started pounding the top of the box with a pole or a stick. Maybe a stool. The big snake rattled and raised its head, and she squeezed her eyes shut again as both of them slithered everywhere at once, turning her muscles rigid from fear. Almost immediately, an incipient cramp in her right hamstring announced itself with a cruel pulse of pain. Agony was imminent if she couldn’t find a way to relax it now.

  So in the midst of the pandemonium from Jamison’s relentless pounding, and the horror of the snakes squirming over her arms and head and legs, she had to focus on trying to calm her hamstring, which teetered on the edge of final misery.

  She inched her right hand down to massage the back of her thigh, but her fingers brushed the big snake, triggering a distinct hissing and rattling. Her muscles tightened even more and the charley horse exploded, knotting her leg into a raging ball. The grotesque spasms seared her hamstring. She suffered cruelly in silence and stillness, knowing to cry out or actually massage the enraged muscle might set the snakes on a biting frenzy.

  “I can’t tell, are you still alive down there?”

  A hum sounded in the shaft as the box resumed its slow descent.

  Isn’t anybody in the building?

  Maybe not, it’s after six, she remembered. She lay paralyzed by pain and fear, the tipping point of one the tipping point of the other.

  But the Beach Boys . . . someone’s playing them. Didn’t they hear the gun?

  “If you’re dead, I want to know.”

  For the first time she noticed the meaty smell of the snakes. Also musty like a wet dog. But the grilling pain in her leg burned this sense memory to ash, and another thirty seconds passed before light appeared behind her eyelids. She became aware of the Beach Boys again, louder now, and realized they must be blasting from the room into which he was lowering her.