B00IZ66CZ8 EBOK

by Unknown

  Tonight we hunted. Tonight we killed. Tonight we carved.

  |||||

  Shane waited in a posh restaurant just off Broadway. Jillian sat across from us. She was a very expensive hooker. She was from Ukraine.

  “So where are your friends?” she asked in an accent that sounded like a bad actress on a soap opera.

  So maybe she wasn’t from Ukraine. Maybe she faked it. Maybe she said that to heighten her value for customers looking for a foreign girl.

  Whatever.

  Shane didn’t care. He just wondered where the hell Sandy and Townsend were.

  He changed the plans for them at the last minute, I thought. I slithered around, dragging the ridges of my tail against the inside of Shane’s neck. He felt the sting from this move and cracked his neck backward in an abrupt manner.

  Jillian tilted her head in a most peculiar way, as if she studied his movement with the utmost interest.

  She must have thought, what the hell are you doing?

  She sensed his frustration.

  But she hadn’t questioned it. She had been in her business long enough to know when to say nothing.

  Shane looked at his watch and finally answered her, “Yes, they are late.”

  “Can we go ahead and order then?” she asked.

  Shane looked at his watch again. They were almost an hour late.

  He nodded at Jillian. She opened her menu and began surfing the listings with her eyes.

  Shane decided to give them fifteen more minutes; then he was going after them.

  I hope that it isn’t too late, he thought.

  I knew that it was. We had set a trap for Townsend and somehow he’d sniffed it out.

  |||||

  The Gables was a luxury modern living community for some of New York’s most prominent citizens. The main building reached upward into the Manhattan skyline.

  Townsend lived in the penthouse apartment, similar to Shane’s penthouse back in D.C.

  Shane took over an hour to reach the Gables after we’d left the hooker back at the restaurant with nothing but a few hundred dollar bills and a fake name. So she had no real idea who Shane was.

  Unless she recognized him, a mistake that we had both overlooked. But that didn’t mattered. We were going to save Sandy’s life. If the fake Ukrainian hooker recognized Shane from magazines, then what difference did that make?

  Lots of people who are into criminal enterprises claim to know Shane. Just a part of the culture.

  He defended a famous serial killer, so of course everyone who has a rap sheet wanted to know him.

  Shane had to make a pit stop at our new home so he could pick up our kill-case.

  The wind picked up around us. Shane stood outside the building. We knew that Townsend owned two properties: his penthouse apartment and his office, which was miles away.

  I imagined that he would use his home as his lair, not the crowded office. Of course, he did own the small building that his office was in. That made it easier for him to construct hidden rooms. Being an architect certainly had its advantages over being a lawyer.

  Shane’s thoughts were with Sandy. Mine were with the dissected pieces of the Woodsman’s corpse after we were through with him.

  We have to save her. I just hope that we are not too late, he thought.

  Shane looked up at the full moon. It was time for his beastly transformation into the devil, into me.

  Like a demonic light switch that hung from a fiery corridor deep inside of him, I clicked on.

  I looked around the street. No one was around. I smiled and lifted Shane’s blood-red scarf. I wrapped it around the bottom of our face, hiding his identity.

  The scarf waved in the breeze. It was long. It acted as a part of us, like it was a part of Shane’s features.

  Shane wanted me to save his new girlfriend, so I had no time left. The Woodsman was going to kill her tonight. It was a strange sensation knowing that her life was in my hands. I could save her, and I’ll admit that on some level, I wanted to save her.

  I walked into the main entrance of the building. One resident passed by me on his way out. He did a double take after he exited the building. I supposed that in his peripheral vision, he had been alarmed either that my face was covered or by how inhuman I appeared. Either way, he was wise to shake it off and continue into the night.

  Past the lobby, just in front of the elevators, a tall security guard lingered near a reception desk.

  He had not yet seen me, so I jumped to the nearest wall, placing my back against it. Slowly, I peered around the corner.

  The guard had his face buried in an iPad. Sensing that something was wrong, he quickly glanced up, but he saw nothing.

  I reached my hand around the corner. I had to reach out as far as Shane’s arm would go. I searched for a light switch to the lamps nearby.

  I found it. Then I flipped it off.

  The room turned much darker than I had anticipated. The switch shut off all of the lamps, even the ones along the opposite wall.

  “Hey! Who’s there?” the guard asked. He lunged from his chair. He had a large flashlight in his hand.

  The only other light in the room came from a chandelier. It had been set to a low setting, probably to create a hotel-like feel.

  Even with the chandelier still illuminating the lobby, the room had turned quite dark.

  So the guard turned on his flashlight.

  His eyes traced the beam across the room.

  “Who’s there?” he demanded again.

  No answer. Silence.

  The guard slowly walked to the light switch. First he looked down the hallway, but nothing was there.

  I already stood behind him.

  The guard flipped on the light switch. As the lamps lit up and brightened the dark room, I injected a tranquilizer into his neck. He swung the flashlight back toward me as a weapon, but I caught it just before it could swipe across my face.

  The guard jerked at it, trying to retrieve it from my grasp, but it was too late. The tranquilizer caused his knees to buckle. He went limp and then passed out.

  I reached down and procured the elevator keys from his belt.

  I dragged him back behind the reception desk and propped him up in the chair. Whenever he awoke, he would assume that he had simply dozed off. He would remember me as a bad dream.

  I walked down the hall. I stopped at the elevator and pressed the up button.

  One elevator dinged and opened immediately. It had already been on the first floor.

  I stepped in, inserted the skeleton key, and pressed the button.

  I rode the elevator up to Townsend’s penthouse apartment.

  It was enormous. It took up the entire top level. The elevator opened up right into it.

  Inside, we saw the most deranged pieces of art. Violent, sadomasochistic sculptures and paintings decorated the apartment. Long, thin pillars reached from the floor up toward the ceiling like manmade stalagmites, stabbing into the roof of the Woodsman’s cave.

  I crept slowly through the Woodsman’s home. I heard the crackling of fake fireplace. Classical orchestra music played over hidden speakers. A bottle of Cristal was open and sat on top of the coffee table near the fireplace. One glass rested in front of it. The flute was still full of bubbling champagne. As I crossed the room, I saw that a second glass had spilled onto the rug beneath the coffee table.

  A shade of light red lipstick was smeared across the top of it. It was Sandy’s lipstick.

  I was too late. Under Shane’s skin, and below my lair, I felt Shane’s panic. It rumbled and festered to the point of explosion. He’d genuinely wanted to save the detective.

  I tightened my grip on the reigns and regained control over him. His panic and desires to save this woman were subdued, for now.

  Then, I continued to look around the apartment.

  I studied the living room. Above the fireplace was a painting of Cronus, father of Zeus. He devoured his children. The painting was so magnifice
nt that I considered stealing it for our home back in D.C.

  The apartment was devoid of sounds, besides the crackling fireplace and Beethoven’s Ninth playing softly over the speakers.

  No sign of Sandy Parks or the Woodsman appeared anywhere.

  Deeper into the bowels of the Woodsman’s home, I discovered more evidence of just how twisted he was. The artwork and sculptures only grew more depraved as I descended farther into the winding hallways and empty bedrooms.

  After a thorough search, I found no signs of life beyond the empty champagne glass. It seemed that was my only clue.

  Then a thought raced through Shane’s mind.

  He thought, this is not his lair. The equipment he uses for making his sculptures of dead people isn’t here.

  He was right. To do the work that the Woodsman did, he must have had a workspace somewhere else. Where was his lair? That was the question that I needed answered.

  The only place that I could think of was his firm’s office building downtown. It was the only other property that Townsend owned, according to his records.

  That was our best shot.

  |||||

  Although I didn’t know it, in a room nearby, where Shane and I stood a woman had only begun to wake up from a drug-induced sleep.

  The same strong fumes that Jessica Long had smelled were now all around her.

  The boiling smell stung the inside of her nostrils like bees flying into the catacombs of their hive, their stingers scraping the honey-covered walls.

  “Wha...Where am I?” she asked the blurry figure that hovered over her.

  All she could make out about him was the dark gloves that clung tightly to his hands.

  He stood near her, motioning his hands back and forth. He held something, but she could not tell what it was.

  Whatever he was doing made a familiar sound. Her head pounded as she tried to control her faculties. She knew she needed them to figure out what that sound was.

  Everything was confusing. Her sense of gravity seemed completely off. Trying again to regain her sense of what was happening, she shook her head until her vision came into better focus.

  Suddenly, a foreboding sense of terror overcame her like the fiery embrace of the devil’s arms. She realized that she was bound and hanging completely upside down.

  That smell intruded her nose again as she peered straight up, or rather down for her. Below her she saw bubbling, churning liquid. It reeked of rotten wood and sulfur.

  The boiling liquid shot out a heat that swept up and across her face as if she were standing too close to a large bonfire on a windy beach, a place that she would much rather be.

  She tried to scream, but she was gagged. She shook her head violently, attempting to loosen her gag, hoping that she could get off a single scream that would be heard.

  She stretched her mouth as wide as she could and rapidly bit down. She chomped repeatedly on her gag.

  She hoped that doing this in rapid succession would free her mouth. Finally her intense effort worked. A hole formed.

  She didn’t think about how close her captor was. She didn’t let the singeing fear burn through her hopes of escape. So she sucked in deep, collapsing her lungs as far in as humanly possible, and then she let out the loudest scream that she could.

  |||||

  Several stories below, I rode the elevator, completely unaware of the woman screaming above me.

  The black holes that were my eyes jetted upward as I thought I heard something. The sound had been faint, but I was sure that it was there.

  I waited for a second sound, but there was nothing.

  The elevator doors opened and I continued toward my destination.

  I passed the guard on the way out. He was still slumped over his desk, sedated.

  |||||

  The woman spit blood from where her captor had punched her. She was given only one chance to spit it out before he replaced her gag, making it ten times tighter than before.

  Still he said nothing, not a word. Even when she’d startled him with her attempt at rescue, he’d remained calm.

  He returned to the same movements that he had started earlier. He used his gloved hands to handle some blurry objects, which she now realized were shiny and reflected the dim lights that hung from the ceiling.

  The familiar sound returned. Only now she realized what the sound was. This realization brought a second, much more terrifying realization: She was going to die.

  Her captor was the Woodsman. The sound that had terrorized her was the sound made when a knife was sharpened against a rock. The object in his left hand was a sharpening stone. The object in his right hand was a large knife. It was the knife that he used to skin his victims before he covered their filleted bodies with the liquid wood.

  The woman peered at the boiling liquid below her. It was the heated wood concentrate that she had seen before on the Woodsman’s hideous human sculptures.

  She closed her eyes and held her breath. She was about to experience what Jessica had experienced. She was about to die. And I was nowhere to save her.

  4

  Deadly Client

  “It is far more difficult to murder a phantom than a reality.”

  ––Virginia Wolfe, Author

  |||||

  I couldn’t sleep. Shane slept, but I stayed awake. I tossed and turned in his skull, trying not to disturb him with the violent whipping of my tail. At first he did not sleep. At first he worried about Detective Sandy Parks, but I switched off his light. I had descended the staircase in his brain and manually pulled the fuses out of his power box. I manipulated him to fade away, convincing him that she was all right. However, I knew that she was dead. The Woodsman had killed her.

  We’d failed to save her. I didn’t want Shane’s guilt weighing us down like concrete shoes as we sank to the ocean floor. So I blocked the vision from him. I blocked it from me. I deleted it from my mental recorder. I didn’t want to know the truth. If I knew, then he would figure it out.

  Shane needed his rest. His body needed to rest. Today, we researched. We had to find Townsend.

  |||||

  Shane left the apartment in the early morning hours. He was barely awake. He skipped the morning workout.

  He wanted to get to the office as quickly as possible. He wanted to get started right away. Lasher & Associates had considerable resources. He wanted to use them to locate any other potential properties that the Woodsman owned. There had to be something. He must have had some kind of paper trail that would lead Shane to him. Tax records, aliases— there had to be something.

  If he dug deep enough he would find it.

  Shane knew something about keeping properties untraceable, but keeping properties completely anonymous and untraceable in the modern age and in a major city like New York was nearly impossible.

  No matter how well-hidden Townsend’s holdings might have been, they were not invisible. Not here. Not in the middle of New York City.

  There was no record of Townsend owning a car, so it was doubtful that he left the city. No way had he abducted someone and then gotten on the subway dragging her sedated body around.

  It just wasn’t likely.

  Shane yawned and exited the cab in front of the firm’s headquarters. He paid the driver and grabbed his briefcase. He entered the building and headed toward the staircase in the grand lobby.

  Sweeping past the security desk, he almost hadn’t noticed that the post was deserted, which was highly unusual.

  Security’s protocol had called for him to show his badge to the security guards at the desk upon entering.

  Lasher & Associates had on the premises very valuable papers, files, and contracts of some major clients. So security was highly important.

  Confused by the absence of security staff, Shane stopped and walked to the desk. He investigated the scene. He peered over the countertop and noticed something even odder. The guard’s chair slowly swiveled as if he had just been seated in it and had quickly bolted
away from it so fast that it spun behind him.

  Wherever the guard was, he’d left in a hurry and only moments ago.

  Emergency bathroom break, he thought.

  Then he shook his head, fighting off the image.

  It was very early in the morning. No one was up yet. The guard probably didn’t imagine that anyone would walk in while he was away from his post.

  Still there was supposed to have been two guards.