3 TERRIFYING THRILLERS

by Jude Hardin

  While John Rock attempted to explain, the officer’s partner walked up. Female. Same voice John had heard over the radio.

  “Hey, Marty,” she said. “What we got here?”

  “Just another psycho street bum,” Marty said. “Excuse me. Another Mentally ill street bum.”

  “Yeah? What’s his story?”

  “You won’t believe this one, babe. Motherfucker claims—”

  “Hey, I told you about that babe stuff. You can call me Christine or Officer Kelly. And Next month when I put my sergeant’s stripes on, you can call me ma’am.”

  “Whatever,” Marty said. “Anyway, this son of a bitch says he hears voices from dead people. Said some ghost was up here killing one of the whores. Ain’t that a hoot?”

  The female officer named Christine Kelly crouched down beside John. “Turn over,” she said.

  John turned on his back.

  “I already frisked him,” Marty said. “He’s clean.”

  Christine looked John in the eyes. “You on any medications for your psychiatric condition?” she said.

  “There’s nothing wrong with my mind,” John said. “When I hear voices, they really are from people who have passed away.”

  “You talk to ghosts?”

  “They talk to me. Sometimes.”

  Christine stood up, turned to Marty. “What do you think?”

  “I think we need to take his ass to jail,” Marty said. “Breaking and entering. He totally destroyed the door on room two-twelve, probably looking for something to steal. Some money for beer and cigarettes or whatever.”

  “I don’t drink and I don’t smoke,” John said. “And I’m not a thief. If you’ll get someone to open this door, I think you might find that I’ve been telling you the truth.”

  Christine knocked on the door of room 237. No answer. “So what do you think we’re going to find on the other side of this door?” she asked.

  “It’s not what I think you’re going to find,” John said. “It’s what I know you’re going to find. A bloodbath.”

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” Christine said to Marty.

  While she was gone, Marty called his girlfriend on his cell phone. John Rock stared at the ceiling, thinking what a waste of time all this was. Marty and Christine should be calling for backup and sending out an all-points on the killer. On Bryan Richardson, their own sergeant. Instead they’d spent precious minutes dicking around in the hallway trying to decide if John was crazy or not.

  Christine returned with the guy from the front desk. He opened the door to room 237 with a pass key. The three of them, Christine and Marty and the desk clerk, walked in, single file. Marty came running out first. He made it a few feet down the hallway, and then stopped and puked all over the floor. The clerk came out and darted off in the other direction, but he didn’t make it far either. Lost his lunch in front of the elevator.

  John heard Christine keying her radio and then talking to the dispatcher with a quivering voice: “We’re going to need the homicide unit here,” she said. “Room two thirty-seven at the Hawthorne.”

  “One victim?” the dispatcher said.

  Two. And one of them’s a cop. I repeat, officer down in room two thirty-seven at the Hawthorne. It’s Sergeant Richardson, Marsha. It’s Sergeant Bryan Richardson. His throat’s been slit from ear to ear.”

  “What about the second victim?”

  “Female,” Christine said. “Can’t tell much about her. She’s been carved up like a fucking turkey. There’s a knife with stag grips on the bed by the female, and there’s a straight razor on the floor by Richardson.”

  “A straight razor?”

  “Yeah, like people shaved with in the old days. A fucking straight razor.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Jana Lorry needed a ride home, but it was after midnight and she didn’t want to call and wake her parents. She decided to take a cab. It would have been easier just to stay the night in the hospital, but that place gave her the creeps. She had to get out of there.

  “Where to?” the cab driver said.

  Jana gave him the address. “It’s not going to be more than sixty dollars, is it? All I have is sixty dollars.”

  “It won’t be that much. No traffic this time of night.”

  “Good. Thank you.”

  “No problem.”

  The cabbie’s ID was mounted on the back of the seat. His name was Paul Ferragamo.

  “Like the shoes,” Lori said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your last name. Ferragamo. It’s like the shoes.”

  “No relation,” he said.

  “I have a famous last name too,” Lori said. “It’s Lorry, like the movie actor. Only it’s spelled differently. He spells his L-O-R-R-E, and I spell mine L-O-R-R-Y. I think we’re distant cousins or something.”

  “How could you be distant cousins if it’s spelled different?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what one of my aunts told me one time.”

  They rode along in silence for a while. The two-lane blacktop was deserted, and there were no streetlights. No businesses or residences for reference points. Occasionally the moon would peek from behind the clouds, and Jana would get a glimpse of her own reflection in the window beside her. She would get a glimpse of her own reflection, but the face staring back at her was not one she recognized. Her usual pretty blue eyes and meticulously-styled blond hair and flawless peaches-and-cream complexion had somehow been replaced with the portrait of a hideous monster. All her teeth were missing, and her face was streaked with blood and mucous. Her hair was matted in wet clumps against her skull.

  Oh my god, I’m a freak. What have they done to me?

  Jana’s heart started racing, and she felt as though the interior of the taxicab was running out of oxygen. She tried to take a deep breath, but could not.

  “Stop the car,” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Stop the car. I have to get out.”

  “Here?”

  “Yes!” she screamed. “Please. Just stop the fucking car.”

  Paul Ferragamo steered off to the shoulder. “There’s nothing out here,” he said. “Let me take you on home. It’s only a few more miles.”

  Jana reached into the pocket of her nylon windbreaker and pulled out the syringe she had stolen from the nurses’ cart. She uncapped the one-and-a-half inch hypodermic needle, and in one fluid motion rose and leaned over the seat and stabbed Paul Feragamo in his right eye. And then his left. Paul’s screams pierced the night, but there was no one around to hear them. Jana stabbed at him again and again, the sharp steel needle repeatedly puncturing the most delicate and vulnerable of all human tissues. Moist squishing sounds filled the cab as Paul’s eyeballs ruptured and oozed from their sockets. He tried to fight Jana off, but she had somehow acquired an extraordinary boost of strength and energy. As she choked Paul to death with her purse strap, she felt as though she could take on the whole world if she needed to.

  She felt as though she could take on the whole world.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  John Rock had been photographed, fingerprinted, subjected to a cavity search, and fitted with an orange jumpsuit and a cheap pair of flip-flops. A shiny steel chain connected the cuffs on his wrists and ankles. Two uniformed policemen, one tall and one short, led him shuffling down a long hallway and then to a room with a three on the door.

  “Have a seat,” the short officer said.

  There was a reel-to-reel tape recorder on a table, and two folding steel chairs. John’s shackles rattled as he sat in the chair on the far end of the table, facing the door. The room was quiet and smelled like sweat. The policemen waited until a man wearing a black sports coat and a white shirt with no tie came and sat across the table from John. Then they left.

  “Detective Lorne Powers,” the man said. “Homicide division.”

  The whiskey and tobacco Detective Lorne Powers reeked of was thinly veiled by a layer of cheap cologne and a
stick of Juicy Fruit. His hair was slicked back and he needed a shave. There was a trace of pink on his collar, someone’s lipstick or makeup John guessed.

  “John Rock,” John Rock said.

  Powers switched on the tape recorder. “Let’s talk about what happened tonight.”

  “What do you think happened?” John said.

  “Well, it seems pretty obvious, Mr. Rock. It seems pretty obvious. You killed two people in room two thirty-seven at the Hawthorne Hotel. You killed Sergeant Bryan Richardson of the metro police—who happened to be a good friend of mine, by the way—and you killed a prostitute known as Pammy. You not only killed the prostitute, you mutilated her body beyond recognition. You split her belly open and pulled her guts out and slung them all over the room. You sliced off her genitals and plastered them on her forehead, and then you masturbated on her face. That’s what kills me, Mr. Rock. After all that other shit you did, you had the presence of mind to jack—”

  “I didn’t do any of that,” John said. “Richardson killed the woman, and then he must have killed himself. That’s how it had to have happened, because they were the only two people in the room.”

  “You told officer Marty Chase there was a straight razor in your backpack. Do you remember saying that?”

  “Yes.”

  “But there wasn’t a straight razor in your backpack, Mr. Rock. There was a straight razor on the floor by Sergeant Bryan Richardson in room two thirty-seven at the Hawthorne Hotel.”

  Powers pulled a plastic zip-lock evidence bag from his sports coat pocket and slammed it on the table in front of John.

  “That’s my razor,” John said. “But I didn’t kill anybody with it.”

  “I guess it just magically jumped out of your backpack and walked into room two thirty-seven by itself. Is that what happened? Or did one of your ghost friends take it in there? Marty and Christine filled me in on all that nonsense. Not going to fly. You’re not skating out of this with an insanity plea. Not if I have anything to do about it.”

  “Richardson and I were together most of the day,” John said. “He must have taken the razor out of my backpack at some point. He must have stolen it. That whole deal at the Hawthorne was a trap. When the entity realized I wasn’t going to fall for it, she did the next best thing. She caused Richardson to kill himself with my razor, thereby implicating me in what looks like first-degree murder. But if it’s true about what you say is on her face, I’ll be exonerated soon enough. DNA doesn’t lie.”

  “Fingerprints don’t lie either,” Powers said. “And I’m willing to bet dollars to donuts yours are all over that straight razor.”

  “I already said the razor was mine. I’m not trying to hide the fact. I used it to shave this yesterday. Of course my fingerprints are on it. But you’re not going to find my prints anywhere else in that room. Richardson’s gone. The young woman named Pammy is gone. There’s nothing we can do about that. But the entity is not gone, and she will kill again. You need to let me go so I can try to stop her.”

  “I’m going to let you go, all right. I’m going to let you go to the lethal injection table for killing a cop.”

  “I didn’t kill anyone,” John said.

  Powers lit a cigarette, blew smoke at the ceiling. “If you go ahead and confess now, I can recommend leniency.”

  “I’m not confessing to anything.”

  “Do you know what happens to cop killers in jail? The guards are going to give you a hard time, my friend. You’re going to have new bruises every day. And that’s not even the worst of it. When seven big hairy motherfuckers with tattoos all over their bodies and dicks the size of baseball bats need a date for the evening, the guards are going to look the other way. Cop killers are only half a notch above child molesters in the jailhouse hierarchy of scumbags, Mr. Rock. You are in for a world of shit. Now, if you were to go ahead and admit to killing Sergeant Bryan Richardson and Pammy the prostitute in room two thirty-seven of the Hawthorne Hotel a while ago, I could probably arrange solitary confinement for you. That would be your best bet. Nobody can touch you in solitary. I could arrange solitary confinement, and I could recommend leniency. You’d be looking at a maximum sentence of life in prison without parole. With a good attorney—”

  “I’m not confessing to anything,” John said again.

  Powers switched off the tape recorder. “Then this interview is over. I’ll see you in court, Mr. Rock.”

  He squashed his cigarette on the floor and exited the room.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  A few minutes after Detective Powers stormed out, the shorter member of the team who’d led John Rock to the interrogation room returned and said, “I need to take you back to your cell.”

  “OK.”

  John stood, the heavy chains on his shackles clanging against the steel chair.

  “You’re not going to give me any trouble, are you?” the officer said. “We’re supposed to use two escorts anytime a prisoner leaves a cell or returns to a cell, but we’re really short handed tonight. Plus, you seem like a decent fellow. Just between you and me, I don’t think you did what they’re saying you did.”

  “I won’t give you any trouble,” John said.

  When the officer reached over to take John Rock by the arm, John head-butted him and smashed his nose. The blow took him totally by surprise, and before he had a chance to react—before he went for his Mace or his gun, before he shouted for help or sent a distress signal from his radio—all six-foot-five of John Rock was on top of him. John pressed the handcuff chains against the officer’s throat, briefly occluding his carotid arteries and knocking him unconscious. John found the keys to the shackles in the officer’s gun belt, and used them to free himself. He grabbed the officer’s 9mm pistol and his wallet and darted out of the interrogation room. He trotted down the hall, turned the corner, suddenly found himself face-to-face with Christine Kelly, the female officer who’d called in the homicide back at the Hawthorne Hotel.

  John aimed the 9mm at her head. “We’re going to walk out of here,” he said. “Just you and me.”

  Christine seemed like a tough cop, but she wasn’t stupid. She didn’t go for her gun, and she didn’t shout for help. She simply shrugged and nodded and said, “I don’t have a problem with that.”

  “I want you to unsnap the safety strap on your pistol, and then lift it out of the holster by the handle with your thumb and forefinger,” John said. “Do it slowly.”

  She did as instructed. “Now what?” she said.

  “Now toss it behind you.”

  She tossed it behind her. “Are you going to kill me?”

  “I’m not a killer, Christine. Just do what I say, and everything will be all right.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “There has to be a back way out of here,” John said. “A door that only cops and other officials have access to. You lead, I’ll follow.”

  “It’s that way,” she said, pointing in the direction John had come from.

  John motioned for her to take the lead. They took a right, and then a left, and then came to a solid steel door protected by an electronic lock mechanism. Christine swiped her ID card, and then pressed her thumb against the fingerprint scanner. The lock clicked and she pushed the door open and the two of them walked out into the night.

  There was a small parking area with a dumpster and two patrol cars and a paddy wagon.

  “One of these cars yours?” John said.

  “That one,” Christine said, gesturing toward the one on the left.

  “Let’s go.”

  Christine climbed into the driver’s side. John took the passenger’s seat.

  “Where to?” Christine said.

  John nestled the barrel of the pistol against her ribcage. “Just start the car and go. Now.”

  She started the car and took a right out of the parking lot.

  “It won’t be long until they miss you,” she said.

  “I know. That’s why we have to hurry. Is there
a twenty-four hour store around here somewhere? A Walmart or something?”

  “There’s one up at the loop.”

  “Go there.”

  At John Rock’s direction, Christine drove fast and ran every red light on the way to the discount store. They parked close to the entrance.

  “Aren’t you going to look a little suspicious walking in there with the jailhouse duds?” Christine said.

  John started stripping off the jumpsuit. Underneath it he wore a pair of black boxers and a white T-shirt. “There,” he said, slipping back into his flip-flops.

  “You’re going to walk in there like that?”

  “Have you ever seen some of the people who shop Walmart at two o’clock in the morning?” John said.

  “Can’t say that I have.”

  “I’ll fit right in. Let’s go.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Walmart was practically empty, and nobody seemed to notice that John had walked in wearing boxer shorts. Anyway, they weren’t as conspicuous as Christine suggested. They looked more like gym shorts than underwear.

  John took his new clothes and an old fashioned fold-up street map out of the plastic Walmart bags. He dressed in the police car. Khaki work shirt and khaki pants, leather belt, Craftsman boots. His usual summer attire. He kept three extra shirts and three extra pairs of pants in his backpack, but his backpack was at the jail. He doubted he would ever see it again.

  There was a hundred and six dollars in the wallet John had taken from the officer in the interrogation room, forty-five after buying the clothes and map. He took the money out and put it in his pocket, shoved the wallet in the glove box.

  “I owe him a hundred and six bucks,” John said.

  Christine slid the key into the ignition. “Not to mention whatever it cost him for a trip to the emergency room,” she said.

  “Pull around to the back of the store,” John said.

  “Is this where you execute me and dump me by the loading dock?”

  “I told you, I’m not a killer.”

  “Then what are we doing?”