Striking Back

by Mark Nykanen

  He was waiting for her as the dumbwaiter settled to a stop. “They get you yet?”

  She lay still as a rail and refused to answer, not that he appeared to care. He kept talking, apparently assuming she’d survived the trip and that his plans for the next few minutes would force her to reveal the very life he intended to destroy.

  “This is my office, rented courtesy of L.A.P.D. so we could keep an eye on you. But I hated to give it up, especially when I could stay this close to you. I did some decorating of my own. Open your eyes and take a look.”

  No answer from Gwyn, no movement, either, despite the torture of her leg and the presence of those snakes draped across her body, sucking up her heat.

  “These things are nasty creatures. I know a guy who cut off the head of one of them with a machete, and when he tried to pick it up, it bit him. Goddamn thing had three inches of body, that’s all, and it bit him so hard he could hardly get it off his hand. It made him sick as hell.”

  She barely heard him above the Beach Boys. But even under their high-decibel beat she became aware of the rattling, as if he’d brought the burlap bag and it had started to bubble over.

  “I can’t tell if you’re playing possum with me, but I know a way to find out. This time I’m going to stick your face in the bag.”

  She swung her legs out of the box, felt a stabbing pain by her knee and knew she’d been struck, but had no idea if she’d been hit by the big snake or the baby. The cramp continued to contort her hamstring and made her stumble as she stood. She squeezed it and experienced a small measure of relief.

  The light in the room strained her eyes after the deeply shadowed shaft, and reflected brightly off the polished glass used to frame posters. In a squinty-eyed sweep of the room she saw photographs of classic cars—Chevelles and Novas and Mustang convertibles—side by side with photos of pristine beaches, towering seaside cliffs, and beautiful, tan women smiling radiantly. And then in a flash she saw the rattlers from inside the dumbwaiter now moving across the floor.

  He stood in front of her holding the sack of snakes closed with one hand while a furious sidewinder twisted its long, sinewy body around the other. The door to the hallway was shut about eight feet behind him, the room configured with more direct lines than her studio.

  Rattling haunted every one of these seconds. So did the Beach Boys. So did everything she’d ever done to lead her to this heinous moment.

  Jamison peered at the spot where she’d felt the stabbing pain. “You got a bad bite. You ever have a chance to watch one of these things strike?” He took two short steps to the edge of a scuffed, wooden table, a move that didn’t open a path to the door.

  While she watched him, gauged his every move in terms of her own escape, she never lost track of those snakes from the dumbwaiter. Scared, sidelong glances every second or so made them appear to be slithering everywhere at once, and when she glanced back she spotted the one that had ridden atop the box unwinding into the room. A really big snake. A diamondback that must have been seven feet long.

  Jesus God.

  Jamison kept his eyes on her, apparently unconcerned with the creatures stalking them. Then she saw that he wore tall black boots, like the ones favored by motorcycle cops. As he aimed the angry sidewinder’s jaw to the edge of the table, he said “I want you to see how it bites, and then I’m going to make it bite you.”

  The snake’s tail rattled and cracked the table loudly. It bit the edge so fast its head blurred, baring its fangs as it struck. It tried to strike a second time, but Jamison had already pulled it back.

  She knew what this foretold and a roar rose from her, a simple hopeless, “Help!” that she wished would shatter all the glass frames in the room and impale him in a thousand places in a coruscating explosion. But her plea emptied nothing but her lungs, not the walls, not his pleasure, nor the room of snakes.

  “Your turn.”

  “Fuck you, Barr Onstott.” Her voice shook horrendously, and tears flushed down her cheeks.

  “Scared, are you?”

  The seven-foot diamondback had stopped inches from her heels. Sickness surged through her, but she had no idea if it was from venom or fear or both.

  Jamison stepped toward her, holding out the wriggling sidewinder. She noticed the horn-like growths over its eyes, and tried to tell herself that the creature had released its venom on the table, and that as a species they weren’t as poisonous as many other rattlers. But then she realized she was standing there trying to brace herself for another bite.

  And how many more after that?

  In a fury of panic and pain she swung her fist into the burlap bag and tore it from his hand. It landed about five feet away, scattering snakes across the floor like the glass shards that had exploded from the door of her studio upstairs.

  He jammed the sidewinder into her arm and the snake bit her and hung on when he let go, its tail twisting and ringing. She ripped it from her flesh and saw a blotch of blood the size of an egg. She hurled the creature aside, bouncing it off a framed car poster. It dropped to the floor and snapped up on two points along its lean, S-shaped body, sizzling with fury and darting for the darkness of the dumbwaiter.

  She knew Jamison would shoot her but death seemed preferable to another second in this hell. She lunged for the door through snakes that now appeared to fill every square foot of floor space. Fully expecting another savage strike, she reached for the handle—Don’t be locked, don’t be locked—and spotted Jamison digging out his gun.

  The door flew open before she could touch it, almost knocking her onto the writhing carpet of snakes. As she gained her balance, another rattler struck her, this time in her calf. She screamed as an explosion of light engulfed Jamison and her.

  He tried to cover his eyes as Blanche Gable yelled, “Hey, you two, what’s going on? Is—” The cable queen shrieked. Blanche also blocked Gwyn’s immediate escape.

  Jamison tried to shield his lash-less eyes and aim at Gwyn at the same time. A gunshot exploded, missing her but deafening her ears. A second shot hit the huge diamondback, which snapped its head and tail repeatedly in a macabre display of torture.

  The diamondback’s death dance was Gwyn’s parting view of the snake-filled room. The gunshots cleared the path she needed, and she slammed the door shut as a third bullet ripped through the bottom panel, just missing her leg. That’s when she spotted the rattler with its fangs still in her calf. In an adrenaline driven rage she tore the snake from her body as Blanche yelled at her cameraman, “Did you get it? Did you get it?”

  Gwyn hurled the snake at her. The cable queen shrieked even louder this time.

  Another shot ricocheted through the door about an inch from the floor, and Gwyn realized that Jamison had started aiming at the snakes.

  Blanche shouted, “Come back, come back” as Gwyn ran insanely down the hall with the cameraman, no longer videotaping, right behind her.

  Three more shots rang out before the gun fell silent.

  “Give me your cell,” Gwyn told Blanche when they made it down to the street.

  “You threw that goddamn snake at me.”

  Gwyn reached for her neck, but Blanche stepped back and handed over her phone.

  It didn’t take thirty seconds for sirens to rise in the distance, and not a minute more for police cars to come racing up. A uniformed officer ran over to them and she told him what had happened.

  “Rattlesnakes? You’re sure?”

  Gwyn felt faint now. Nauseated. “Lots of them.” She tried to describe Hark’s position and condition.

  An ambulance turned down the street, and a few moments later an officer told her that the paramedics wouldn’t rescue Hark until the building was secured. They did rush over and begin to treat Gwyn, though.

  “You got to go get him,” she pleaded with the commanding officer as a husky paramedic started to suction her snakebites, although she was certain it was too late to draw out the venom. “He’s on the third floor,” she repeated, “the one wi
th the broken glass in the door.”

  “We’ve got a shooter in there and a bunch of rattlesnakes, so we’re waiting for the SWAT team.”

  Gwyn rolled off the gurney. “My boyfriend’s dying up there.”

  The officer shook his head and walked away.

  “I’ll go with you,” Blanche said.

  Gwyn hadn’t noticed her by the side of the ambulance. “You will?”

  “Sure. You got your guy in there, we’ll go get him, carry him out if we have to. But we’re bringing him.” She nodded at her cameraman.

  Gwyn brushed aside the protesting paramedic, who yelled for the commanding officer.

  He rushed back over and stood with his arms akimbo as he spoke. “I told you we’re not going in right this second, and that’s that.”

  “What’s going on?” Trenton said as he and Warren bulled their way up to them.

  The officer briefed them and Trenton said, “No one’s going in till the SWAT team clears this.”

  “That could be hours, and Hark could be dead by then,” Gwyn yelled.

  Trenton studied her, taking in the obvious bite marks. “You’re sure he was alive?”

  “He was breathing.”

  Trenton looked at Warren, who nodded. “I’ll take two officers and the paramedics to get Doctor Harken,” Trenton said to him. “You want to deal with SWAT and Jamison?”

  “And the snakes?” Warren asked.

  “Yeah, them too.”

  Warren nodded. “I’ll make sure the perimeter’s secure. And I’ll check with Animal Control, make sure they’re coming.”

  But the paramedics balked. The husky one asserted himself right away. “She says the place is crawling with rattlesnakes. You know the rules. You clear the scene and then we go in.”

  His younger partner, consciously or not, had stepped up on the back of the ambulance.

  “He needs help now,” Gwyn screamed as she bolted for the entrance, nauseated and dizzy. She threw open the door and made it halfway up the first flight of stairs before Trenton and the two uniformed officers caught up with her. Blanche and her cameraman appeared in their wake.

  “Hold on, Sanders. You could fuck this right up,” Trenton yelled.”

  She turned on him, her vision dimming. “This is already so fucked up, and it’s your goddamn guy who did it. Yours.”

  Trenton rubbed his bald head furiously and turned to the uniformed officers. “Come on.” He pointed to Blanche and said, “You guys stay.”

  “No, she’s coming, too,” Gwyn said. “Come on, Blanche.”

  Blanche looked more shocked by these words than she’d been by the flying snake, but one clear thought remained in Gwyn’s mind. She needed a video record of every development from this point on, and if Blanche Gable had refined one skill in her monomaniacal life, it was getting video.

  Trenton didn’t fight it. He lugged his huge body up the stairs with his gun drawn, as did the two officers, all of them scouting anxiously for snakes. They didn’t encounter any until they turned the corner on the third floor to go down to Gwyn’s studio. A three-foot Mohave rattler, one of the most poisonous snakes in North America, fried their nerves with a fierce rattle.

  Trenton shot twice. The second bullet was unnecessary.

  Only feet from her studio, Gwyn spotted a bouquet of yellow roses on the floor. Hark’s. That’s what he’d been bringing to her, not snakes.

  When she looked through the shattered door, she could have collapsed from grief. Blood had puddled on the floor in a wide oval from the bullet wound in Hark’s back. And at their approach, two snakes, not a foot from his head, coiled and rattled, ready to strike.

  Blanche poked her cameraman and snapped, “Roll-roll.”

  He snapped back, “What the fuck do you think I’m doing?”

  Trenton raised his service revolver and aimed at one, then at the other. In the next half second he shot the head off the first snake and killed the second one too.

  They still entered the studio carefully, eyes all over the floor, desktop, legs of the easel. The cordite was thick enough to chew.

  Gwyn put a hand to Hark’s neck, felt the slow heartbeat, and started weeping openly. “He’s alive,” she sobbed.

  Trenton, by her side, nodded to the uniformed officers, who lifted Hark’s legs and arms while Gwyn cradled his head. Trenton walked point, checking for snakes and for the man who’d turned them loose.

  They carried Hark down to the gurney as the SWAT team prepared to storm the building. The two paramedics strapped down the doctor and rolled him right into the ambulance, closing the doors on Gwyn. She stood in the street pounding them with her failing strength.

  Trenton slammed the flat of his thick hand against the window, and the doors opened. He didn’t say a word, just helped her up the steps as the siren sounded and the emergency lights swept over a sea of patrol cars and heavily armed officers.

  Gwyn crawled up beside Hark before beginning to vomit convulsively. Blood spilled from her nose and she toppled to the floor.

  Chapter 14

  Delagopolis chased Gwyn down in the lavish lobby of Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Beverly Hills. She didn’t see him coming, and when he tapped her shoulder she jumped and spun around, still haunted by the snake attack four days ago.

  “I’m sorry, Gwyn. I didn’t mean to alarm you, especially with good news. Sheriff Hastings dropped the case in Big Bear. There won’t be any murder charges or anything else.”

  “What gives?”

  “He said he doesn’t want you charged.”

  “He doesn’t want me charged? What’s your take on that?”

  “I think he sees that there’s no political gain in going after you. He’s up for reelection, and what’s he going to run on? That he’s got a do-gooder woman being prosecuted for killing a vicious wife-beater twenty-three years ago? And not only that, but he’s making her go through it right after she’s just survived a horrifying snake attack by a cop? Never fly. He’d be better off raiding the county kitty for a Manson family reunion.”

  She squeezed his arm. “Thanks for everything, George. Can you tell Mommsa for me?”

  “Sure. What are you going to do?”

  “Get back upstairs.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  “Better.”

  Delagopolis took off, and Gwyn headed for the elevators, where Blanche Gable ambushed her. The cable queen thrust a microphone in Gwyn’s face and said “I want that one-on-one interview.”

  “You got it,” Gwyn said.

  “I do?”

  “You earned it.”

  Blanche responded by conducting the Q and A with uncommon grace, and let Gwyn go after about five minutes.

  She headed right up to see Hark. He’d been rushed directly to Intensive Care and had remained there since he’d been rescued. The bullet had ripped a hole in his right lung, which had filled with blood and almost asphyxiated him. He’d also suffered cuts to his abdomen from falling on the shattered glass in the door, but no snakebites, unlike the woman who’d fallen in love with him.

  Gwyn had been fearfully sick for about thirty-six hours. Doctors had determined that she’d been struck three times, which was consistent with her memory of the horror. She’d recovered well enough to have been released yesterday morning, though she’d remained in the ICU waiting room all day and had slept there. She’d just gone down to the lobby to stretch her legs when Delagopolis had caught up to her.

  Hark had been almost coherent last night, a cruel tease for a woman who wanted desperately to hear his voice again. When she walked back in his room now, he was fully conscious and about to be moved out of ICU.

  A large nurse named Belinda was joking with him, telling him he was taking up too much space. “We got to move you on down the road, get your shot-up self out of here.”

  Hark waved Belinda off with a weak smile, then brightened enormously when he noticed Gwyn standing just inside the doorway. She hurried to the bed and hugged him carefully.


  “You’re okay?” he said.

  Tears were already falling from her cheeks to his hospital gown. “Yes, it’s you we’ve been all worried about.”

  “The Doc?” Belinda said in her gently familiar manner, “he’s just been putting on the dog.”

  She and an orderly were helping him onto a gurney when Hark’s doctor appeared. He joined in the jokey mood, which didn’t relent until they wheeled Hark into a private room filled with Mylar balloons and flowers. Belinda opened the drapes to a view that framed the famous Hollywood sign, its primary school penmanship white as innocence and stale as the scent of celebrity itself.

  When the staff left, Gwyn brought Hark up to date, providing an understated summary of the snake attack, and the news that Detective Paul Jamison had died from five snakebites; two Mohave rattlers had been recovered, and the medical examiner, in consultation with a renowned herpetologist, believed their venom killed him.

  “Animal Control is still working their way through the building. They found a sidewinder yesterday.”

  Hark took her hand. “Think you’ll set up shop there again?”

  Gwyn smiled and sat beside him. “Not a chance in hell.” She also told him about the news from Big Bear.

  “So you’re cleared,” he said.

  “So it would appear,” she smiled.

  The future, she thought, often was no more than a roughshod recapitulation of the past, remembering Hark’s counsel after she’d told him about killing her stepfather. Simple enough. But hardly harmless. It didn’t occur to Gwyn how chilling Hark’s words could prove till days later.

  Detective Trenton called her on Monday morning to ask if she’d help them reconstruct the crime scene “for research purposes.”