She was dazed by the blow, unable to think clearly, unable to make her hands work to locate the remaining gun strapped to her ankle, hidden below her pants leg. She struggled for the strength and clarity of thought required.
He came ever closer while her eyes struggled to adjust to the darkness in which he stood. He was wearing a costume that had successfully camouflaged him here, looking like he was stepping from a Shakespearean ball in Venice, his smile curling like a snake along each cheek.
“So, my sweet, my precious, my dear Jessica... at last... together again at long last... As they say, the play's the thing, and it's time for our eternal play to begin. Oh, precious one, how now does my cup runneth over....”
She was trapped with no way out, her back to the wall, and if she made a move for the gun too soon, he'd discover it, overpower her and render her powerless. She stuttered even as she formed the words to reply to him. “This time, Teach, you're going to die before we part.”
“As I am prepared to do. The question is, dear one, are you?”
Concentrate... concentrate. Kim repeated the mantra where she stood beside Alex's car, trying desperately to calm herself for Jessica's sake. She clutched a scarf belonging to Jessica tightly in her hand. Jess had left the scarf in Kim's room the night before.
Alex had left her in the car while he fought a battle with a phone book locked into a metal straitjacket below a phone outside a convenience store. Finally, he'd given up and gone inside, flashed his badge and ordered up the store's book, following the clerk to the rear office.
Kim took in a deep breath, the electric hum of the New Orleans night and a gale-force wind vying for her attention. The wind was ripping now in powerful gusts as the hurricane all of New Orleans was talking about neared, a beast on drunken paws. New Orleans herself could be the point of landfall for the killing might. And somewhere out there, alone, Jess stood against a power more sinister and evil than anything in nature.
Kim closed her mind to the store, its light flooding her, to the storm threatening her as more rain began to patter over her; she closed her sense of smell, touch, sound, taste and sight down, allowing her own inner power to surface.
She found herself in a cold, unfamiliar fog, knowing that she was searching and lost. She wandered a water-stained, water-soaked boardwalk, fearing she might any moment slip over the side and be lost forever. She heard the soft tinkle of lilting ropes against mastiffs become insistent, blaring as if an orchestra were prepared now to render an opera that would blast away the audience in an orgy of sound. It was the storm smashing against boats moored at a wharf somewhere nearby.
She sensed the odor of ancient, rotting wood and the remains of dead fish that littered this place. All was wet now, dank, eerily so, like the bottom of a casket. The salt air brought in by the storm mingled with the ancient odors of the river wharf. Yes, she told herself, this place was somewhere along the Mississippi.
Parting the wall of mists, searching the effluvium, Kim was suddenly startled by two huge, penetrating green eyes—something ugly and grotesque waiting just beyond reach, something larger than life with the ridiculous features found on a horror-novel cover. She wanted to back away from the image, but she couldn't. She must reach out toward the monster eyes, to understand their intent, to decipher their symbolic meaning, if they possessed any.
She found herself adrift in the haze and fog, however, blown by the winds threatening to take her over the side of this bizarre world created from the ether. Still, with one hand and foot firmly in the world where Alex raced through the Yellow Pages, and where her body was supported by the tangible metal of Alex's car, Kim's mind struggled to relocate the foreboding, giant's eyes—the ones which had been watching her progress through the dense nebula surrounding her in the place where she believed Jessica had gone.
A rendition of carousel music began to play somewhere in the back of her consciousness, an unrestrained, unpracticed, shabby and tinny sound, woodenlike, mechanical.
Suddenly she was shaken, the whole world around her collapsing, replaced with the blinding lights of the convenience store and Alex asking her if she were crazy. She was soaked from a pelting, stinging rain which she hadn't felt until now.
“I know where she is!” she announced over the roar of the storm.
“Whataya talking about?” he shouted a confused reply, flapping a page of the Yellow Pages in his hand.
“A place with an alligator, a giant alligator sign over the top, a place called Gatorland Storage.”
“I'll be damned,” Alex replied, crumpling the page of warehouses and shoving it into his pocket. “I know where it is. Come on... into the car!”
They raced toward the Mississippi.
30
I saw eternity the other night
Like a great ring of pure and endless light.
All calm, as it was bright; And round beneath it. Time in hours, days, years,
Driv'n by the spheres Like a vast shadow moved; in which the world And all her train were hurled.
—Henry Vaughan
Jessica's terror froze her in place while Matisak calmly took her in with that mad glint she'd come to recognize. As he towered over her where she lay, her face dirty with sawdust and grease, his laughter was cut short by his cruel words. “We're going to die here together, Jessica, with you sacrificing your blood to me and me sacrificing my life in order to go into eternity with you.”
The mad metallic, ricocheting racket of the warehouse continued as stiff mannequins marched like wooden soldiers in their suspended poses—like so many marching crosses, she thought, recalling what Kim Desinor had said about burning crosses.
Every so often, instead of a clown or masked marionette, a nasty-looking hook scurried by, winking at Jessica.
Jessica fought to regain her footing, climbing to her knees, careful to tuck her right leg behind her, careful not to alert him to the fact she still carried a gun strapped to her. She easily played the part of one completely cowed and fearful, for she was, and this only helped in her charade, allowing the madman every confidence that he had at last won.
But somehow he knew; he saw some sliver of disdain and hope left in her eyes, and so he quickly backhanded her across the face and tore at her pants leg, having seen the bulge there, and as he tore away the weapon, she tore from him, running, her life depending upon the distance she put between them. But in the dark, she ran into the fallen netting, causing her to tumble and become entangled amid the counterfeit stars and imitation planets and moons. Her heels were lost to the net.
He laughed and pounced tigerlike on her, wrenching her wrists and arms in his powerful grip, his acrid breath burning her eyes. “I've got something I want to show you, Jessica, dear.” His voice was the sepulchral sound of Hades torn open.
He forced her forward through the dark interior of the warehouse until they came to a corner where he switched on a tensor lamp, which revealed a surgical table complete with four straps, one for each of her limbs. Beside the steel table, which looked like something he'd gotten from the back room of a mortuary, stood a squat little machine with light-emitting diode numbers on a screen, its electrical humming a mewing, mild chant within the deafening sounds of the large warehouse. He'd rigged the machine and the tensor lamp to a generator, not leaving anything to chance, or perhaps because he'd cut the power to all sources but the ones he wished to use, for apparently, he also controlled the whirling parade of Mardi Gras creatures that remained spinning over his shoulder about the center of the warehouse.
“Here is where we die together, sweet Jessica,” he whispered in her ear like a demented lover, holding her tightly against his chest, speaking directly into her ear with his putrid, hot breath. “You first, and I to follow.”
“How do... how do I know you'll go through with it... that you'll follow?” She led him on, trying desperately to stall for time, but also anxious to know that he did indeed intend suicide after dispatching her. She would at least have that much, she told h
erself.
“It's a dialysis machine, like the one I used on Dr. Arnold back in Philly, you remember?”
Now she realized what the small, portable machine was capable of, drawing blood and drawing it quickly and efficiently, Matisak's favorite hobby.
“Only this time,” he continued, “it's going to pump me so full of your blood that I'm going to implode with you inside me and take us both into eternity's light together, dear one.” He laughed lightly at the thought which would soon be reality.
“Think of it,” he continued as he guided her unwilling form to the table. “You and I for all time, locked in a blood embrace, filled to the brim with one another like the lovers we are, off to explosive heights, not with my blood, not with your blood, but with our life's blood, Jessica, so that we'll always be locked together throughout the rest of eternity... like I always promised.”
“Extracorporeally transplanting my blood into you, all at once, using the dialysis machine,” she said to him. “That's no fun, taking it intravenously; it will burst your veins and you'll bleed to death internally.”
“That's the beauty of it.”
“But where's the kick in that? How're you going to enjoy my suffering when I won't suffer at all? It'll be over in seconds.” She couldn't believe herself, arguing for him to make her suffering last. But the moment he placed those straps on her and started mechanically inducing her blood from her body, she knew her chances for survival were nil.
“I can't do it any other way. Drinking it all at once is impossible. You know that.”
“Blood is a mucolytic, an expectorant. You'd be vomiting your guts out. Yeah, I know.” She tried to keep him talking, to sound as if she were on his side now, trying to help him think through the puzzle, but he was possessed, and he forced her onto the table and brought up a syringe before her eyes.
“This will help you accept me and my plans for you, Jessica. No sense fighting what fate there is which has brought us together, Jessica. We were meant to become one, you and I, all along. Now we finish what we'd begun so many years before.”
“But I'm scared, Matthew,” she pleaded. “Fear becomes you.” He tested the syringe, removing any air left in the miniature world of the vial. She tore at the restricting strap dangling just below her right hand as he did so, and she viciously brought it up in a burst of anger and desperation, the strap buckle hitting him squarely in the hand, so painfully and shockingly that the syringe soared over the table and onto the floor. At the same instant, she brought up a naked foot, having lost her heels in the mesh netting earlier, and she kicked him squarely in the jaw, so hard that she hurt the ball of her foot in the effort.
Matisak staggered back just long enough for her to regain her feet and ram the table into his midsection, doubling him over. She grabbed onto the polyethylene tubing and yanked with all her might, pulling it from the dialysis machine, sending it rolling off and out of the circle of light Matisak had created as his artificial bonfire.
She then ran, but she felt him directly behind her. He grabbed onto her shoulder, but she struggled free from her long coat, leaving him with only the cloth and cursing. He pursued demonically, as if he might sprout wings.
She wheeled and barged into a large, freestanding tank, larger than a diving tank. Unsure what was inside the unmarked metal receptacle, she nonetheless grabbed firmly the nozzle and flint attachment. She quickly snatched up the hose handle and turned the gas on—propane, she guessed. Striking the flint, she sent out a spewing gasp of fire into Matisak's eyes, suddenly blinding him, singing his bushy eyebrows and burning his left cheek. He let out a scream of pain and backed away, but she took the fire to the length of its tether, backing him further from her.
“Bloody bitch!” he screamed.
As he continued to back away from the fire, fending it off with his arms now while still holding firmly to his recovered syringe, Jessica saw her chance to put an end to him.
She tugged on the nozzle hose, keeping the fire at his face, dragging the now-toppled, rolling tank with each step she took, keeping him at bay.
Matisak might have turned and run, but he instead jousted with the fire, trying to rush into and through it to overpower her, but the heat was too intense.
“Burn, you son of a bitch! Burn!” Jessica shouted.
Matisak continued to back away. She continued to pursue, hoping the propane would last even though a blinking yellow light on the gauge indicated that it was low.
At the same moment that Matisak backed into the array of mannequins and papier-mache animals that were careening by, one of the needle-pointed, razor-sharp hooks mechanically anticipated him, and the ugly hook caught him at the base of the skull, viciously slicing into him, its upward-thrusting tip meeting the brain stem. But death was not instantaneous by any means. The robotic hook arm, feeling weight on its end, now lifted the man from the sawdust and raised him several feet into the air. One leg was caught in a pair of gripping stirruplike arms, but the other flailed wildly with his human arms, and Matisak's entire body quivered and showered blood as away he flew with the rest of the floating carnival all around her.
Jessica dropped to her knees and released the jet flow of the propane torch, the light gone with the flame. Her face now was streaked with tears as well as dirt and grime.
Overhead, a portion of the ceiling creaked, moaned and collapsed in on itself, revealing a black, roiling sky beyond, a kind of black hole that had opened up perhaps to suck in Matisak's soul, which she imagined would rise only so far as Hell.
Once again the whirling, spinning track overhead brought Matisak into her line of vision. She saw that he was still somehow alive, responding spasmodically to the pain and torture dealt him. She searched the dirty floor for one of the two guns she'd brought to kill Matisak with, but was unable to locate either without light to see by.
Finally, she pulled her flashlight from below the netting that Matisak had hoped to trap her beneath, and with the beam she found her .38 police special. She raised it now, awaiting Matisak's return trip.
He looked to be still now as he moved closer toward her, the terror of his pain clearly etched on his unremittingly grimacing face, yet the spasms had ceased. He appeared dead. He was finally dead.
But then his head fell forward and his open eyes stared down at her and he grinned.
She prepared to fire, aiming for the forehead. She squeezed the trigger inward, inward... about to put him out of his misery... but then decided otherwise.
She thought of the suffering he'd brought into this world. He had created chaos and horror, not only for all his victims, but for her as well. She was his victim.
She lowered her gun, located her coat and watched the dying man's parade of horror continue on and on and on with the tumult of metal wheels rolling about steel grooves. She then went for the exit, leaving Matisak to his death, his last scream diminished by the rattling mechanical pulleys, chains and tracks and the pounding winds further rattling the warehouse walls and exterior.
Jessica stepped out into God's breath, the storm winds now at gale force, having found landfall somewhere along the Louisiana coastline. For all she knew she was stepping into the eye of Hurricane Lois. But it didn't matter. Matisak was dead, and she was free of the ugliest human force she'd ever encountered.
She saw a light sluicing back and forth along the wharf ahead of her, and she heard the insistent shouting which came from Kim Desinor. Kim and Alex Sincebaugh parted the mists around them, racing toward her, Alex throwing a dry blanket over her shoulders. For the first time, Jessica allowed herself a moment's attention, realizing she was ill-equipped to deal with the raging wind which buffeted her about like a crumpled paper boat on the waves of a great ocean. Missing her shoes, her blouse ripped, a cut above her left eye, she still managed a broad smile, for seeing the others was like looking again on life and light. She crumpled into Kim's arms, tears coming freely. Hurricane Lois was still in the Gulf, lingering there as if to tease, as the three of them stoo
d on the wharf below the eyes of the tattered alligator in the backdraft of a roiling air pocket. Alex ushered the women toward his car, asking about Matisak. Jessica simply said, “You'll find him inside. It's finally over.”
A great cloud of closure had enveloped her, a sense of completion and wholeness and strength which even Kim with her amazing sensibilities could not begin to fathom. Kim placed a protective arm over Jessica's shoulder and guided her through the stormy night, down the length of the pier and toward Alex's waiting car, where the strobing light seemed the only beacon left in the world. Overhead, the satanic wind threatened to destroy everything in its path.
Even as she climbed into Alex's car, feeling the machine rocking left to right under the pressure of the storm wind, Jessica only felt relief, for at last she'd managed to do what she'd only dreamed of doing for so long: from the day that she had examined his first victim so many years before in that black little cabin in Wekosha, Wisconsin, from the moment he'd maimed her, from the second he'd killed Otto Boutine, and since the day of his arrest. Real revenge was rare and so long in coming in this life....
“How... how are you, Jess?” Kim asked.
She looked up into her friend's eyes as the storm whipped Kim's hair wildly about her head. “It's over at last... no more struggling with the devil of devils... I can dream again... can believe in a safer, better world... hurricanes, earthquakes, and killer storms notwithstanding... and it's already a better world without him in it.”
After a look inside the warehouse, where he'd located the power switch which illuminated the place, Alex returned to the car, a stricken look on his face, and called it in. Within minutes squad cars jammed the entryway to the wharf and warehouse area, everyone working a beat interested and curious about the latest twisting development in the Mad Matthew Matisak affair, as many as possible turning out for a look at the monster Coran had brought down, anxious to lay eyes on the sight of him dangling at the end of a meat hook.
Pure Instinct (Instinct thriller series) Page 40
