“All right, maybe kidnapping the monster’s mudder is a wonderful idea, gain some leverage of him, twist the knife in his back for a change, but are you then willing to kill the old lady, too? Muther? ‘Cause you’d have to keep her quiet.”
“It does bring in a whole other element we don’t need,” she conceded. “I suppose you’re right.”
“I usually am.” He inwardly smiled at her saying, ‘I suppose you’re right’ rather than simply saying, ‘You’re right’.
“You are cocksure of yourself, aren’t you?” she sputtered.
“Generally someone expert and experienced in a field can be that, yes.”
“Step aside for genius, heh?”
“Something like that, yeah.”
She frowned. “A little humility wouldn’t hurt, Marcus.”
“Humility?” He laughed derisively at the word. “That’ll get you killed fast. Humility goes by the boards ’longside naiveté first year as a rookie.”
She changed the subject. “You hungry?” she asked, changing the subject. Getting toward eleven and you really didn’t eat much at dinner.”
“I’ve had a beer since.”
“Are you hungry,” she persisted.
“I’m OK for now. I’ll rummage around for a sandwich later.”
He’d earlier put the porch lights and deck lights on a timer, and now with darkness complete, the deck formed a small cocoon of light against the black emptiness beyond the reach of light. A skittering animal noise in the brush started up like a chorus, the first sounds startling Katrina.
“Hey, it’s just the nocturnals again. What Dracula called the Chlldren of the Night,” he reacted. “Take it easy, kiddo.”
“Sorry. Didn’t realize how ahhh . . . jumpy I am.”
“Actually, you really oughta hold onto that jumpiness; in fact, embrace it. Could keep you alive through this.”
“Gift of Fear – yeah, read it.”
“Everyone should, especially women.”
“Waiting for the sequel.”
“Hey, it’s non-fiction; you’re not going to get a sequel.”
“Oh, I dunno, maybe the author gets enough fan mail then—“
The sound of a single twig snapping off in the woods not only silenced them with its decidedly different pitch, but it had also silenced every other sound in the surrounding dark void that the pine forests had become.
“Hit the lights, now!” he ordered in a hoarse whisper.
She rushed just inside the ornate screen door and slapped the switch to the off position. “Who’s nervous now?” she said to herself.
Outside, the inky midnight darkness gobbled up the deck the moment the lights went dead. There were no lights on inside the cabin as neither had been inside for hours. They were surrounded in black night when he joined her just inside.
“You think he’s found us, don’t you?” she asked.
“I dunno. Could be a deer, a bear. Lotta black bears out here.”
She shakily added, “Could be a man just as surely as a bear.”
“Whatever it was or is…it has some weight and heft.”
“Don’t hear it now. You?”
“Not a thing.” In fact, to his way of thinking, everything got too quiet, too quickly. There was indeed a large animal of some sort prowling about out here; he only hoped it wasn’t human.
T E N
At the same time, back in Atlanta, Detective John ‘Atlanta Jack’ Thomas and his partner Stuart ‘Stewy’ Harriman stood staring at the dangling body of a fire-blackened man in what appeared a sack cloth or fishnet package. The horrendous crime had been called in when a citizen walking his dog noticed the “thing” dangling from the school yard flagpole about half way up.
“Talk about half mast,” said Harriman to Thomas.
“You mean half baked.”
While the victim’s hair, eyebrows, even eyes had given themselves over to the fire, his general features remained intact, as if the killer meant to “bake” it and not burn the victim to a crisp. Just a quick burning accelerant to flashover the broken-limbed body that’d been trussed up so tightly—indicating many a broken bone and joint. In fact, all the major joints had been dislocated, and expertly so, to create this package.
“God, I’ve never seen anyone so brutally tortured,” said Thomas, holding his stomach, wishing now he’d not had that big meal at the 5 Seasons.
“This…hell, this is some kind of sick-o-weird, maybe satanic shit here, Jack,” replied his partner, Harriman.
Just what we need, another serial killer with an MO he’s gotten out of Marvel Comics, heh?”
“You think this is something the killer saw at the box office?” asked Captain Paul Brunner, stepping between the detectives. “No, this is Native American Indian magic.”
“Magic?”
“Indian shit?”
The two detectives stared dumbfounded at their leader. Brunner added, “I’ve seen it done with animals—shamanism stuff, cannibalism when done with humans, but I’ve never witnessed it with a human sacrifice.”
“You ahhh Native American, Brunner?” asked Atlanta Jack.
“Can-Can-nibilism?” asked Harriman.
“Fact is, men, I’m an honorary member of the Cherokee Nation. Have been for thirty odd years. Did some investigative work for them early in my career—off the record.” He pointed to the dangling victim. “This? This is how the Cherokee cook up a rabbit or a duck or a pig for a festival, trussed up in exactly this manner and smoked over a campfire.”
“You say the Cherokee do this to people?”
“In ancient times, a lot of tribes did it, yeah. But this,” he indicated the dangling, smoldering body half-way up the pole. “Whoever our boy is, he’s giving us a head’s up. He wants us to know he’s only getting started, I fear.”
Harriman scratched his ear. “Then you think maybe our killer is Cherokee?”
“Maybe…maybe not.”
“Know anyone else who would use this kind of ahhh…god awful technique for ahhh…cooking a man to death?” asked Jack.
“Marines.”
“Say what?” Harriman’s eyes widened.
“Marines as in American Marines?” asked Jack.
Both junior detectives looked at the veteran, Brunner, as if he were mad. Brunner went on, lighting a cigarette as he did so. “Marines historically are the first to go in, and they do so without provisions—no food except what they can catch and eat.”
“And ahhh so?” asked Harriman.
Jack, nodding, replied for Brunner. “They’re trained in Native American survival techniques.”
“We’re talking about cooking the occasional rabbit, right?” Harriman didn’t want to grasp it.
Brunner calmly replied, “Right, that’s the training but things happen in war, in combat.”
“But this is a man,” said Harriman, shaken, still disbelieving.
Harriman, blinking at the sight, asked, “Captain, you think parts of him…when we—they—get ’im unwrapped will’ve been, you know, cannibalized?”
Brunner’s not answering was a loud, clear answer. “Likely will find the heart missing.” Brunner then dared get nose to nose with the foul-smelling corpse. “The victim is a black male, maybe in his early to mid-forties, and he was wearing an expensive suit and a bow tie.”
“Bow tie?” asked Jack.
Harriman laughed and said, “The guy looks like he’s gone through a shredder.”
Jack asked, “You sure that’s a bow tie?”
“Was a bow tie, Jack, yeah.”
All three stared at the victim with a deep sense of helplessness hovering about them when Brunner asked, “You men find any ID on him?”
“We’re ahhh…waiting for the ME.”
“CSI unit,” added Stewy Harriman.
“So you don’t wanna touch him, is that it? Worried you might taint the crime scene, hey? Huh?” He stood waiting for an answer. They replied with lies:
“That’s corre
ct, sir. Protocol.”
“Preserve the evidence.”
“Wouldn’t have it any other way, hey, men?”
“Exactly,” added Harriman.
Brunner exploded. “Since fuckin’ when?”
“We’ve been getting your memos on it, sir.” Harriman squirmed.
“You two pansies just don’t want to touch him, right.”
“Ahhh…no, sir, Captain,” defended Jack Thomas. “Not sure we can get at the wallet the way things are.”
“We’d only make a mess of it,” added Harriman.
“It’s already a damn bloody mess, Stewy.” Brogran took a step back. “Like some god awful lunatic escaped straight out of Edgar Allan Poe. “Some whack-o-shithead in our midst to first kill a man in so elaborate a fashion, to torture to the ninth degree, and to dangle the results at eye level in the middle of our city? This is leveled at us, gentlemen. This creep has thrown down the gauntlet.”
“Like maybe he wants to be caught, you mean, sir?” asked Stewy. “Like the shrinks say, a cry for help.”
“Shut up, Harriman,” replied Jack. “This creep isn’t interested in getting help from no one.”
“Don’t hold back, Jack,” said the captain. “Spill it.”
“I think…worst case scenario, sir…”
“Out with it! That’s an order.”
“It’s the work of Iden Cantu.”
“No way, Jackie!” shouted Harriman. “Captain, we got no evidence that supports any such notion.”
“JT’s instincts are usually right on, Stewy,” countered the captain. Go with your gut, Jack. What’s going on here?”
“Is this a test, sir?”
“Damn it, man, I just want you to tell me if it’s him or not. Want you to look me in the eye and say it.”
“It has the smell of Iden Cantu about it,” said Jack. “If not the man in the flesh, then someone who wants to be him.”
“My thoughts exactly,” began Brunner, taking a deep drag on his Marlboro. “Which means Marcus Rydell’s going to be sniffing around, soon as he hears about this.” Again he indicated the victim.
“I imagine so, sir.”
“You just keep him the hell away from the body, from your case, JT, and for God’s sake, keep him the hell away from me.”
“That goes without saying, sir.”
“And keep him away from me too,” added Stewy.
“I’ll do my best, Captain.”
“You do better than that, Detective.” Brunner fell into a strange reverie, as he was not a man given to reverie. “Called that man a friend once.” Brunner then sauntered back to his unmarked police car where he leaned over the hood, shook his head, rolled his eyes—no doubt over the thought of dealing with Marcus Rydell as well as Iden Cantu again, and finally lit a second cigarette, calming, awaiting the ME.
Jack Thomas wanted to turn off his cell phone. Last thing he wanted to hear right now was Marcus Rydell’s depressed and depressing voice, but he must keep his cell on. Too many other pending cases; people who must reach him when needed, people who could help him break cases. Marcus Rydell no longer fit into the win column, not in JT’s book, and likely never would again.
*
The big blue lake had become a ghost—a shadowy reflection of itself against a matte-cloud sky. The darkness had crept in with startling ease, silence, and surprise.
Again the sound. Someone or some thing coming through the brush, and it sounded distinctly determined to make its way to the house. A kind of shared thought that something evil this way comes ping-ponged between Marcus and Katrina where they huddled at the entryway from deck to house.
“I don’t have a weapon on me,” he whispered to her.
“Where’s your Glock?” she replied, punching his arm. “How could you be without it?”
“I can’t believe the creep found us.”
“Believe it.”
“The gun’s in my room, on the nightstand next to the Mickey Mouse alarm clock.”
He heard her patter into the interior, making her way in the dark to his even darker basement room for the gun. He imagined her tripping on the stair and shooting herself in the foot, when suddenly she was at the door again, slipping quietly back to his side. Gun in hand, he stepped out onto the porch with a weapon not his. She’d located her stash of weapons, packed for her own use. She’d gone upstairs instead of down, knowing it better.
She’d handed him Terry’s Smith & Wesson, the weapon she’d held on him at O’Dule’s, while she now held onto a frighteningly huge German automatic pistol, a Lugar.
“Didja hear it anymore?” she whispered.
They’d both taken a crouching position behind the slats of the deck, slats that barely hid them. “Nahhh…either he’s trekked off in another direction, or he’s drawn a bead on me. Do you see a red dot on my forehead?”
“No! Stop talking like that. Marcus, how could he’ve known we’d be here?”
“He must’ve followed us.”
She shivered. “When we found nothing at your parents’ gravesite, I was feeling safe here.”
Rydell could literally feel her heart thumping—palpable fear—as she leaned into him. Else it was his own pulse he was reading. “I think we should retreat indoors. Least we’d have some cover there. One shot from a high powered rifle, he’ll shred this porch.”
They eased back toward the sliding glass doors the other side of the deck and into the house again where each let out a breath of air. “Lock the other door,” he told her as he bolted the glass doors, making a target of himself as he did so, half expecting an explosion of glass and horrible pain.
Nothing, aside from Marcus’s adrenaline rush, came.
They inched back into the darkness of the interior, now their friend, their cloak when each picked up a noise the other end of the cabin, just outside. The intruder lurked now on the front entry porch, possibly peeking into windows.
It made it doubly frightful to have heard no one drive up the gravel road, to see no evidence of a car having arrived, and seeing no lights, not so much as a handheld lantern, only increased their apprehension. And to hear no one call out a friendly word as any neighbor might.
No, this was no neighbor with a welcome wagon basket.
Marcus rushed toward the front door, his gun extended, finger twitching. “You! You outside! I’ve got a gun and I damn well know how to use it.”
“Ahhh…Marcus,” Katrina hissed. “Shut up.”
“No, it’s time whoever is out there announce himself.”
“It’s not that, Marcus.”
“What?”
“I didn’t put any bullets in the guns.”
“What?”
“No bullets.”
“Why the hell not?”
“I couldn’t find the shell boxes in all the clutter in the dark.”
“Christ.”
“You know how it is when you’re traveling. Everything packed. Can’t find a thing.”
“How can you pack everything and not know where anything is.”
“Have you located your toothbrush?” she challenged him.
They now crouched below the front window, peeking out into the night. “You wanna chance finding my damn Glock, fully loaded, beside the Mickey Mouse clock now?”
“Sounds like a plan.”
He gasped.
“What?” she asked. “What is it?”
“Just saw movement out there.”
“Movement? What sorta—”
“Black shadow, low to the ground. Need that loaded weapon now.
“Where? I don’t see anything.”
“Just below the freakin’ window opposite us.”
“The other side of this wall?”
“Yes, and if he decides to open up, his cannon could go right through this wall. Don’t move and keep silent.”
“But your gun.”
“Shhh . . . stay.”
Perspiration beaded her brow. “I’m sorry about the bullets, but—”<
br />
He again shushed her.
Their noise and talk seemed to trigger the killer into scratching at the window, as if trying to get on their last nerve or as if jimmying it open from the outside.
Rydell saw his father’s 12-gauge pump-action shotgun hanging over the fireplace mantle. This long-barreled monster came with a huge roaring blast and made for a great squirrel scattering. He rushed for the shotgun, grabbed it, loaded it from cartridges in a box inside another box, finally turned, took aim and almost fired at the still scratching shape behind the drapes and the window, when he saw the spindly black, hairy arms were not human after all.
“Damn it all!” he muttered and walked straight to the window, yanked back the curtains, and found himself eye to eye with a black German Shepherd, its tongue waving at him like a red bandana. “It’s just a goddamn dog,” he muttered.”
“Just a dog?” She gasped. “ He’s beautiful—a beautiful sight.”
“Beautiful? He scared you into tomorrow.”
“Be happy, Rydell! God, we’re lucky we had no bullets. We might’ve killed him.” She went on a non-stop twenty questions rant over the dog. “I wonder where he came from. Think he’s hungry? Looks hardly more than a pub. Think he belongs to someone down the road? Let me check for a tag. Wonder if he’s hungry. How would you’ve felt if you’d killed him? Oh, my God. When I think of what might’ve happened.”
“And you think you’re prepared to kill a man?” he asked, but she either ignored this or was so caught up in the four-legged visitor that she didn’t hear him.
He opened the shotgun to empty it of shells when he thought better of it, leaving the thing loaded. Again she said, “You came so close to shooting this nice doggy!”
“Serve him right,” he muttered. “Sneaking up on us like that.”
“He’s probably been abandoned out here, poor thing. Lost maybe, turned around out there, maybe hungry.”
“Speaking of which, I’m going to make that sandwich now,” he replied, his nerves shot, thinking how dead they’d’ve been had it not been a dog but Cantu out there. “We need to have an emergency contingency plan here, kiddo, one that includes loaded weapons at hand.”
But she’d flicked the porch lights on again, and she was tearing open the door and going out onto the porch, greeting the black dog. They were already old friends.
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