Jack of Spades

by James Hankins

  Tick, tick…

  “Come on, Peter,” Galaxo said, “I’m pulling for you. You can do it. Choose.”

  Lisbon tried to beg for mercy again, tried to ask why, why, Jesus, why Galaxo was doing this to him, but he had no breath, no voice. Suddenly, he hoped he’d choke to death or suffocate or have a massive, fatal heart attack, just so he wouldn’t have to choose, so he wouldn’t have to watch this fucking nutcase screw the lid off a bottle of acid, wouldn’t have to feel liquid fire drip over his forehead, down his face, maybe into his eyes, the corrosive eating away his nose, chewing holes in his cheeks, exposing bone, melting his lips…and then, while he was screaming in agony, he’d have to sit there while this piece of shit cut off his feet, first one, then the other. Oh God, please, God, please—

  “Damn it, Peter,” Galaxo said, his voice urgent now, “You have ten seconds left and you better fucking believe I’ll do what I say. I’ll burn your face away, then I’ll cut off both your feet. Fucking believe it.” Galaxo was yelling now. “Think, Peter! Decide!”

  Lisbon did believe him. He had no doubt that Galaxo would carry out his threat, commit both atrocities. But he couldn’t speak. He couldn’t get enough air into his lungs to make an intelligible sound. He grunted and groaned and felt tears pouring down his cheeks and he couldn’t say a word. He didn’t even know what he’d say if he could.

  “Almost time, Peter, and then it’s too late. I won’t let you choose after the timer goes off, I swear to God. I’m being fair here. I wouldn’t do it for anyone else and I won’t do it for you. So make a fucking choice.”

  Oh God, living life as a faceless monster, unable to show his ruined, acid-eaten face in public without drawing horrified stares, without seeing pointing fingers, without hearing frightened gasps or cruel insults. He’d always been a handsome man. Strong features, they told him, a nice smile, they said, and he had to agree. Oh God, to lose it all. And the pain. The pain would be unbearable. But his feet, he needed his feet, needed them to walk, to run, to play with his son, to drive, Christ, he needed them for everything. But his face—

  “Choose right now, Peter! If you can’t speak, just make a sign. Wiggle your toes for your feet, or shake your head for your face.”

  I can’t choose, I really can’t, I can’t even think with all that fucking ticking, no, no, no, please don’t make me choose—

  “Goddamn it, Peter, you’re out of time,” Galaxo said, sounding truly disappointed. “Three…two…one—”

  “My feet!” The words tore from Lisbon’s throat at the same moment the timer emitted a pleasant little ding. Lisbon rasped in a huge breath of air and let it out in staccato bursts—shameless, unmanly sobs. His head fell to his chest. Tears poured into his lap. Another deep breath, another series of racking sobs.

  “Hmm, I don’t know, Peter,” Galaxo said. “That was awfully close.”

  Lisbon looked up in horror. He forced himself to stop crying. “B-b-but I chose,” he said. “I chose.”

  “I think I heard the bell ring before you said ‘feet.’ ”

  Lisbon looked up into those huge green eyes, into the black sheer fabric covering the nickel-sized pupil in the center of the brilliant green iris, to where he thought he could detect the wet shine of real eyes in the blackness there, and pleaded into those eyes.

  “Please, please, please just take my feet.”

  Galaxo stroked his yellow chin again.

  “For God’s sake, show a little mercy,” Lisbon added. “Just take my feet.”

  He closed his eyes. He couldn’t believe he had just begged a man to cut off his feet. Nonetheless, he prayed his request would be granted. Galaxo was silent for a moment. Finally, he said, “Okay, maybe that was close enough. I guess it’s your lucky night,” he added cheerfully.

  Lisbon opened his eyes as Galaxo slapped a new length of duct tape over his mouth. He began to cry again. Then he dropped his gaze to the shark-toothed saw hanging in Galaxo’s hand and he screamed at the top of his lungs, from the bottom of his soul, the scream feeling like it was shredding his vocal cords, yet still sounding soft, even to Lisbon, muffled as it was by the tape across his mouth.

  Soon he was beyond screaming.

  TWO

  The woman beneath John Spader moved with him in perfect rhythm, her breathing in sync with his, their bodies parting slightly, then coming together again at exactly the right moment, exactly the right angle. It was like this every time with Hannah. They each knew instinctively what the other wanted, needed, and met that need without disrupting the flow of movement. It was like an extemporaneous, free-form dance that somehow managed to seem precisely choreographed. And it was like that every time. And as he did every time, Spader looked down into Hannah’s pretty, whiskey-brown eyes and thought, “Those should be blue. Those should be my wife’s eyes.” The guilt he felt every time nearly broke his rhythm tonight, but it didn’t. Instead, his cell phone did.

  Without disengaging, he leaned up on one elbow and reached for the phone on the nightstand. Hannah, breathing hard, her pelvis still rocking against his now motionless one, stared up at him in disbelief. Spader flipped open the phone.

  “Spader,” he said, realizing his voice was a little huskier than usual. “No, not at all. What’s—Jesus, so soon? What’s it been, just twelve days since Lisbon’s feet? What was it this time?” A pause. “Both ears?”

  Beneath him, Hannah ground her pelvis against his a little harder now and dug her fingernails just a bit into his lower back.

  “Where’d this happen?” A pause, then he glanced at the red numerals of the clock beside the bed. Almost two a.m. Hannah began to increase the urgency of her rocking. She also added a nice little rotation of her hips. She slid her hands lower and grabbed Spader’s naked butt, pulling him far into her as she thrust against him. She began to breathe more deeply again, back in rhythm, moaning with pleasure.

  Spader turned his head a little so he could hear better—his caller, not Hannah.

  “I can be at Ten Fed in twenty minutes,” he said, referring to Ten Federal Street in Salem, Massachusetts, where the Essex County State Police Detective Unit was located. “We can go together from there. What? Yeah, I’m leaving right now.” He snapped the phone shut and looked down at Hannah. “Sorry, but I have to go.”

  “Hmm?” Her voice was even huskier than his had been. Her face, always nice to look at, was even prettier than usual at the moment, flushed as it was with passion, several strands of her dark hair lying across her forehead and over one eye. Then just a touch of the suddenly enhanced beauty faded as her expression changed the moment she realized he was serious. “You’re leaving? Right now?” She still hadn’t stopped moving her hips.

  “Sorry.”

  She stopped moving her hips then. She looked up at him with those eyes that weren’t his wife’s and said, “Please tell me you’re kidding.”

  “Please tell me you’re kidding.”

  “Sorry, I can’t.” Spader looked over at Gavin Dunbar, with whom he’d worked in the detective unit for nine years and been friends for just about as long, and said, “You’re drifting over the line.”

  Dunbar steered the Ford Crown Victoria back into their lane and said, “Jesus, John, you stopped right in the middle? Is that even physically possible?”

  “Yeah, Gavin, it is.”

  “I don’t think I could do that. Nope, no way I could do that. It’s probably dangerous, too, like they say about holding back a sneeze. You know, supposedly your eyeballs explode or something. Only with stopping sex in the middle, it wouldn’t be your eyeballs that explode.”

  “I seemed to survive it okay.”

  “Probably just got lucky this time. So what the hell did you say to her?”

  “I told her that, judging by past experience, she was probably still six or seven minutes away from her big finish, that I felt like for some reason I’d probably be a few minutes behind her tonight, and that there was a guy who’d just had his ear cut off who probably didn
’t want to wait an extra ten minutes before things really got rolling on his case just so the lead detective could get his rocks off.”

  “You didn’t tell her that. About the ear.”

  “I did.” And he had. He did it for her sake, actually, figuring that hearing about a guy having his ear cut off might help her lose the mood, making the coitus interruptus a little easier on her. And if it didn’t, too bad, because she’d have plenty of other orgasms in the future, but the guy had only one ear from now on.

  “You know, John, I’ve known you just long enough to actually believe you. I think maybe you really did leave in the middle of a big bounce just because duty called.” Dunbar kept his eyes on the road, and added, “But I don’t think that’s the only reason.”

  “Some guy losing his ear to a whackjob who’s been going around hacking off pieces of people in the middle of the night isn’t enough of a reason?”

  “Might be, I guess, but it wasn’t your only one tonight.” Dunbar was focused on the road in front of them, but Spader felt like the man’s eyes were somehow on him instead.

  “Yeah, I was thinking of my wife, so what?”

  “Your ex-wife, John.” Dunbar meant well. He was a good guy, a dependable friend, and Spader would stop a bullet for him if it came down to it, because that’s what cops who work together do, or should anyway, but Spader wasn’t sure he wanted to open up to him about matters of the heart. “What are you?” Dunbar asked. “Four, five years younger than me?”

  “Beats me, what are you? Fifty-five? Sixty?” Spader asked, knowing full well Dunbar was forty-six.

  “Screw you, funny guy. So what are you, forty?”

  “Forty-one. What’s your point?”

  “My point is, you’re still a young guy. And not bad looking, I guess. So maybe—”

  “Gee, Gavin, are you hitting on me?” Spader asked. “I’m touched.”

  Dunbar sighed, grimaced, shook his head, and finally said, “I’m just saying, you got that thick hair women go for.” He ran a hand through his own thinning crop. “And they seem to like your eyes, all blue and everything. Anyway, some of the ladies at the office have talked to me about you.” They sometimes referred to Ten Federal as “the office.”

  “Yeah? What do they say?” Spader wasn’t overly curious about what they said. He’d heard a few things himself. And he’d been told that he wasn’t bad looking often enough to believe it. But he wanted to hear more from Dunbar, simply because he was amused by the man’s obvious discomfort.

  Dunbar grimaced again. “Shit, I don’t know. Whatever. Stuff about your hair, your eyes, your…your butt.”

  “What about my butt? Exactly, I mean. What exactly did they say about my butt?”

  “Screw it. Just forget it. Man, you try to do something nice for someone.” Dunbar shook his head. “No, wait a second, don’t forget it. You gotta stop pining away for your ex-wife. I guess I’m just saying, if Hannah’s the one for you, that’s great. But even if she isn’t, you can find someone else, someone other than your ex, you follow? That’s my point here. Olivia’s gone, man. You should let her go. That’s my opinion, anyway. And now I’m done here. I’ve made my point.” He shook his head. “I mean, it’s been what, nine months now?”

  It had been eleven months since Olivia asked Spader to move out and he told Dunbar so. “Divorce has been final for six,” he added. This conversation had quickly turned unamusing.

  “Eleven months is a long time, buddy. Too long to still be feeling guilty when you’re with another woman. Actually, with Olivia being the one who called things off, you should never have felt guilty in the first place.”

  Spader began to suspect he’d shared more than he’d meant to with Dunbar over the past few months. “I’m thinking of breaking it off with Hannah. It’s not fair to her.”

  “Hold on a sec. Didn’t you say sex with her was always a mind-blowing Olympic event?” Spader recalled saying something like that once, and now regretted doing so. And he was positive now that he’d been a bit too sharing. “And she earned a gold medal every time?”

  “I’m not sure I took the metaphor that far. Anyway, good sex isn’t always enough, you know?”

  “It is for a lot of guys.”

  And for the first month and a half of the three he’d been dating Hannah, it was enough for Spader. Then he found himself looking into her brown eyes and wishing they were blue. He looked out the windshield and said, “Anyway, it’s just not fair to her. Not right now. Take the next right.”

  Dunbar seemed as though he was about to reply, but he didn’t. As Spader guided them through the streets of Beverly, he said, “This is our guy’s third victim in just over six weeks. Only twelve days since he killed Peter Lisbon.”

  The perp they’d come to know simply as Galaxo had cut off both of Lisbon’s feet and then actually called 9-1-1 himself before leaving Lisbon’s house. But Lisbon had lost too much blood and died before the ambulance arrived.

  Dunbar nodded. “Twelve days, yeah.”

  “He didn’t wait long.”

  “Dyin’ to get that cute yellow mask on again.”

  “If the psycho ever even takes if off. That’s the street up there.”

  Dunbar turned. Spader didn’t have to point out which house they were looking for. The flashing lights of two Beverly police cruisers in the driveway of the third house on the right—along with the state police crime scene services van parked on the street in front of it—was enough of a clue. Dunbar pulled the Crown Vic to the curb behind the CSS van and killed the engine. As they got out of the car, Dunbar said, “CSS got here fast.”

  “I called them as soon as I left Hannah’s. Told them to get started and we’d be right behind them.” Spader trusted the evidence team not to move anything he wouldn’t want moved before he saw it.

  The two detectives walked up the short driveway toward the house. Spader noticed a wooden ramp leading from one end of the front porch to the driveway, where a bulky van sat. Spader recognized it as a van equipped with a hydraulic lift for passengers in wheelchairs. He and Dunbar flashed their state police badges at the uniform at the front door.

  “Troopers Spader and Dunbar,” Spader said to the cop, “State Police Detective Unit.”

  The young officer nodded and dutifully recorded their names on a pad on his clipboard. They walked up the three stairs and into the house. Inside the foyer stood another local cop in uniform, not much older than the kid outside. Spader identified Dunbar and himself again.

  “Kitchen’s back there and to the right, sir,” the cop said. “Victims are in there. Most of the action took place in the bedroom at the end of the hall on your left there.”

  “Hold on,” Spader said. “I thought this guy’s ear was cut off.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why isn’t he at the hospital?”

  “EMTs stopped the bleeding and patched him up. Told him the ear’s gone for good, so the victim didn’t think he had anything to lose by waiting for you. Said he wants to do anything he can to catch the guy who did…did what he did to him. Said he’ll go to the hospital after you tell him you don’t need anything else from him.”

  “And the mother?”

  “She seems all right. Minor injuries, they tell me. Tough lady, that one.”

  Spader nodded to the kid, then suggested to Dunbar that they see the crime scene first. As they walked down the hall, passing a couple of CSS personnel coming the other way, Spader noticed dings and gouges on the walls and the doorjambs they passed, some a few inches off the floor, the height of a wheelchair’s footrest, some higher, where a wheel or handle might hit. Hanging on the walls on both sides of the hallway were framed photographs. Spader slowed his pace so he could look at each of the pictures briefly as he passed. They were various photographs of the same two people, sometimes together, sometimes alone. One of the subjects was a thin woman with a sad face. Her face looked a little sad even when she was smiling, as if she couldn’t forget the sorrows of her
life even for the brief moment it took for someone to snap a picture of her. The other person in the photos was male. In one, he was very young, seven or eight years old, and he stood smiling beneath a gnarled, shady tree, baseball hat tipped back on his head, a glove on his hand. In the rest of the pictures, he was older. In those showing his body, he was in a wheelchair. And his face had changed. In every one, he had three long scars running vertically the length of his left cheek, starting at his temple and reaching nearly to his jaw.

  “My face had those scars,” Dunbar said, “I’d probably have my picture taken from the other side.”

  Spader looked at the pictures again and noticed that in every one the face was angled so the scars showed.

  “Course, maybe the other side’s worse,” Dunbar added.

  As they passed a bathroom, Spader saw a raised, padded seat on the toilet and a sturdy metal bar affixed to the wall beside it. Then they reached the back bedroom.

  The room was fairly small, maybe twelve by twelve. There was a single bed, unmade. A low, long dresser. A desk in the corner with a pretty nice-looking computer setup. No desk chair Spader could see. The closet door stood open, a clothing rod about four feet off the floor stretching from one side to the other. Beside the rumpled bed sat an empty wheelchair. Two members of the CSS team had obviously only recently begun working the scene. One pulled a digital camera from an equipment case and began snapping photographs. The other had already started taking distance measurements and recording them in a notebook. Spader knew that next someone would use reflective ultraviolet imaging equipment to scan for fingerprints. Spader turned his attention to a straight-backed chair—a kitchen chair, by the look of it—sitting in the center of the room. It clearly didn’t belong there. Nor did the tangle of duct tape lying on the floor beside it, or the numerous splotches of blood around the tape. The evidence officer with the camera took a few pictures of the tape and the blood from different angles, then focused his lens on the chair.

  Spader took his notebook from his pocket as a black guy in a navy suit strode across the room and stuck out his hand.