WEBCAM

by Jack Kilborn

  Tom didn’t think. He ran.

  When he saw the van, parked on the street in the distance, he ran even harder.

  • • •

  Kendal blinked.

  It was never easy to come back from the safe place. But she returned, bit by bit.

  Hearing came first. Someone yelling at her.

  Then sight. It was a woman yelling. A woman wrapped up in duct tape.

  Then realization.

  I’m in a van.

  A psycho has me.

  The woman was named Joan, and she was shouting something.

  “The glass! Pick up the glass!”

  The glass? What does that even mean?

  The back door of the van swung open and Kendal turned to gape at the strange man standing there.

  “Tom!” Joan cried.

  Then the man fell backward as two gunshots rang out.

  • • •

  Tom hadn’t seen Erinyes hiding under the van. He hadn’t even stopped to look.

  Love is blind.

  Erinyes waited for him to run right up, open the back door, and see the woman he loved.

  Then he shot Tom once in each leg.

  • • •

  Tom dropped like a marionette with its strings cut, his legs no longer supporting him. He managed to hold onto his gun, but there wasn’t anyone to shoot at. For a moment he locked eyes with Joan, sitting on the floor in the back of the van, her hands behind her and her legs wrapped in duct tape.

  “He’s wearing black!”

  Tom cast frantic looks in all directions. To his left, his right, behind him, under the van.

  He didn’t see anyone, anywhere.

  The pain came. Like he’d been hit in the shins with a sledgehammer. Tom grimaced, yelled.

  Then a gun pressed against the back of his head.

  “If you even breathe, I’ll kill you. Put the weapon down.”

  Once again, Tom stared at Joan. He tried to tell her, with a look, that he wasn’t going to give up. That he was going to make a move, even if it was his last.

  Joan said, “I love you.”

  And then Tom was pistol-whipped so hard that his whole world went sideways, then winked out.

  CHAPTER 57

  As Tom flops over, Erinyes kicks away his gun, then hurries to retrieve his bag, which he left alongside the bait shop. He puts his Taurus inside, doses the mask with ether, and holds it to Tom’s face until he’s sure the cop is out.

  Then he turns his attention to the van.

  The aquarium is smashed.

  Rather than beat the bitches to death, he uses a bit of ether on each of them. Joan tries to hold her breath, so he kicks her in the stomach to make her inhale.

  Then he needs to regroup. Take a little breather.

  His arm has stopped bleeding. He looks at the wound in the dashboard light.

  Nasty. He probably needs stitches. He settles for an injection of local anesthetic, and some Tylenol 3.

  As the drugs kick in, Erinyes considers his next move. He’s tired. Very tired. It’s easy to make mistakes when you’re exhausted. The smart thing to do is to make sure Tom is secured, then drive someplace safe and sleep. The suffering can start in the morning, after Erinyes has rested.

  He uses more of the blood clotting powder on Tom’s legs. The wounds aren’t too bad, but it would be a tragedy if Tom bled to death after Erinyes put in all this effort.

  It isn’t easy to get Tom into the van. He’s a big guy, and dragging him is difficult. Lifting him inside, impossible.

  Then the codeine takes effect, giving Erinyes use of both arms. Using a spoon he crushes and sniffs four methylphenidate tablets, and then drinks a whole liter of water. While he waits for the pills to work their magic, he wipes off the vantablack make-up, then cleans the van, using an old tee shirt to sweep all broken aquarium pieces out into the street. Many of his Eratigena agrestis have gone, escaping into the night. But he’s pleased to see that some have stuck around.

  The amphetamines kick start his metabolism, and Erinyes finds he can easily pull Tom inside the vehicle. He duct tapes his hands behind him, but tapes his legs to the floor of the van, spread-eagled.

  They’ll all stay put until tomorrow.

  But Erinyes doesn’t want to wait for tomorrow. He’s wired and pain-free and ready to dish out Penance.

  So he snaps on some latex gloves, everyone gets a big whiff of smelling salts, and then the show begins.

  “You up, Tom?” he slaps the man, hard, as Tom blinks rapidly.

  “Joan? How about you? You don’t want to miss this.”

  Joan shoots arrows at him with her eyes.

  “How about you, Kendal? You ready to atone for your sins?”

  Kendal has that far away stare again. But knows many interesting ways to get a person’s attention.

  “First things first. Tom, you made me a promise earlier. Remember? You told me you’d castrate yourself. And then you went back on your word.” Erinyes waggles a finger at him. “A man is only as good as his word, Tom. So I’m going to help you keep it.”

  Erinyes unzips Tom’s fly.

  Then he freezes.

  This isn’t right. It’s not right at all.

  I shouldn’t be doing this.

  This isn’t my job.

  Erinyes backs away from Tom, then goes to his medicine bag and finds the vial of spironolactone.

  This job belongs to my better half.

  He gives himself a dose in the thigh.

  “It isn’t like Jekyll and Hyde,” he tells his captive audience as he peels off the top of his unitard. “I don’t transform. Women have testosterone. Men have estrogen. It’s the proportions that give us traditionally masculine, or feminine, characteristics.”

  He stares down at his own chest, then tweaks his nipples. “With hormones, I once got up to a B cup. But I missed my beard. So now I go back and forth, as the mood strikes.”

  Erinyes goes into the duffle bag and puts her falsies on. They’re already stuffed into a bra, and both look, and feel, extremely realistic.

  “I wasn’t born gender-fluid. I’m not trans by choice. My father made that choice for me, when I was five.”

  She kicks off her shoes, then pulls down the rest of the unitard, and then her boxer-briefs, exposing…

  “Nothing,” Erinyes says, touching the scar tissue between her legs. “Just a hole to piss through.”

  The sinners are silent. All that can be heard is the spiders crawling around, but Erinyes knows she might be imagining that because of the uppers she just snorted. Thank you, Ritalin. The amphetamine also makes her chatty, but there’s nothing wrong with that.

  She’s not even bothered that the conversation is one-sided. Erinyes feels like she could gab all night.

  “I’m sorry,” Tom finally says.

  “No need to be. You’re going to see how it feels to be like me, soon enough. Well, not exactly. I never went through any sort of traditional puberty like you did. Or like the biological ladies here. I hit puberty thanks illegal drugs ordered off the Internet. When my mother left… wait… I’m getting ahead of myself.”

  Erinyes digs through the duffle bag, finds some pink panties, and her butcher knife. She sets the knife aside and pulls on her underwear.

  “So, when I was little,” she continues, “I thought my mother left. My father told me stories, about what a bad person she was. He told me she took—and in retrospect, this is pretty funny, but I was really young and didn’t know better—that she took my penis with her. Dad raised me as a girl. He called me his little Ken doll.”

  Erinyes shoots a look at Kendal. “Get it? Barbie’s boyfriend doesn’t have any junk. It’s all smooth. So I became Kendal, Daddy’s good little girl. He did me a favor, really. Men start wars. Men rape. Men destroy everything they touch. Thank you, testosterone.” Kendal gave a military salute. “Dad spared me all of that. He was my hero.”

  Kendal kneels next to Tom, and pulls out his man parts.

 
“Or he was. Until I found out that Mom never left. He had her chained up in the basement. I used to hear her scream at night. He told me it was Erinyes down there, punishing sinners.”

  Erinyes laughs.

  “He was lying, of course. It wasn’t Erinyes. It was my mother. I caught him, late at night, burying her in the backyard after she died. I could barely recognize her. Dad had kept her down there for years. Cut all of her fingers and toes off. Her tongue. Her nose. Whipped her a lot.”

  Erinyes stretches out her hand, staring at it.

  “You know, he even used to carry one of her fingers around with him? And then the stupid son of a bitch dropped it. Anyway, when I saw him with the shovel and my dead mother, he insisted that Erinyes wasn’t a monster. Erinyes was a deity of vengeance, who punishes sinners. It’s a good thing, really. Sinners are given Penance through suffering, so their souls are cleansed. But he was full of shit. He wasn’t Erinyes.”

  Erinyes smiles. “I’m Erinyes.”

  Then she grips Tom firmly and brings the butcher knife up under his testicles.

  CHAPTER 57

  Kendal wasn’t paying much attention to the psychopath’s rant.

  She was too busy sawing away at the duct tape with the piece of glass she’d grabbed before Erinyes brushed it all out of the van.

  And then, suddenly, she was through. Her hands were free.

  Now she needed to grab the gun. Erinyes had put it in the duffle bag, just a few feet away.

  Kendal was terrified. But her fear wasn’t as strong as her resolve.

  She’d had enough.

  Had enough of being victimized.

  Had enough of being helpless.

  Had enough of being just a thing, rather than a person.

  When Erinyes was occupied with Tom, Kendal moved.

  In one smooth motion, she bent forward, dug into the bag, and came up with a gun.

  Erinyes went wide-eyed.

  Kendal pointed the weapon at her head and squeezed the trigger.

  Nothing happened.

  Erinyes began to laugh.

  “You stupid little girl. You’ve never used a gun before, have you?”

  Her father had taught Kendal a lot. Some of what he taught her was terrible. Things little girls should never have to know.

  But not everything he did was terrible.

  That was the thing that fucked with Kendal’s head the most; that her father wasn’t a complete monster. He raped Kendal. But he also did all the things that other fathers did. He taught her how to tie her shoes. How to read. How to ride a bike.

  How to shoot a semi-automatic pistol.

  Erinyes lunged.

  Kendal thumbed off the safety and shot the crazy fucker twice in the face.

  Erinyes went down.

  Bits of skull that had gone airborne came down a moment later.

  Kendal didn’t like the number two. She preferred things in threes.

  But somehow, for some reason, she was able to resist shooting Erinyes again.

  There was no need to.

  No person, male or female or anywhere on the gender spectrum, could get any deader than that.

  CHAPTER 58

  As soon as Kendal cut her free, Joan rushed over to Tom, took his face in her hands, and kissed him.

  “I do,” she said, half into his mouth. “I do I do I do…”

  EPILOGUE

  The drugs wore off.

  The pain came back.

  But Walter Cissick is no stranger to pain. He has endured more than any other.

  And it has cleansed his soul.

  He looks around his hospital room, then stares through the open doorway, into the hall.

  There have been no cops since that one who questioned him about Dennis.

  It’s funny. Really funny.

  Those dumb pigs have no idea. None at all.

  His son/daughter told him about the people he gave Penance to. The men and women. S/he described every detail. Including the whores from that sorority house that Walter saw on CNN, and those baby rapers he castrated, Dennis still had only punished forty sinners.

  Such a small number. True, the boy/girl was young. But s/he lacked discipline. Always had. Even when s/he’d grown enough to drug Walter while he slept, and chained him up in the basement, s/he’d still shown weakness.

  Forty is a small number.

  Walter Cissick has given Penance to over ninety sinners.

  And no cop ever came sniffing around. No suspicion was ever leveled at him. Even after he dropped that finger in the street and reported is wife missing. The police had been sympathetic, not inquisitive.

  Cissick sits up. He’s dizzy. With pain. With medication. With possibility.

  He will be healthy again. Soon.

  Healthy, and ready to punish more sinners.

  For he is Erinyes. And he shall make them suffer.

  THE END

  RUM RUNNER

  Twenty years ago, a young cop named Jacqueline “Jack” Daniels arrested one of the most sadistic killers she’d ever encountered. She has since retired from the Chicago Police Department in order to raise her toddler daughter.

  While on vacation in the Wisconsin north woods, Jack learns—too late—that her old adversary is out of prison. He has revenge on his mind. And he’s bringing an army with him.

  Outnumbered, outgunned, and cut off from the outside world, Jack Daniels is about to learn the meaning of last stand.

  This is the 9th Jack Daniels novel, after STIRRED. More than 1 million Jack Daniels novels have been sold worldwide.

  RUM RUNNER by J.A. Konrath

  That which does not kill you, keeps trying…

  WATCHED TOO LONG

  Small town Wisconsin cop Val Ryker is about to move in with her longtime firefighter boyfriend when her old boss asks for a favor. Former Chicago Homicide lieutenant Jacqueline “Jack” Daniels, needs Val to babysit for a few days.

  Val isn’t comfortable around toddlers, but she accepts.

  Then one baby becomes two, and some criminals from Jack’s past come calling with child abduction and arson on their agenda.

  Val might not know babies. But she knows a whole lot about putting up a fight…

  WATCHED TOO LONG by Ann Voss Peterson and J.A. Konrath

  Some would kill for a good babysitter…

  LAST CALL

  A retired cop past her prime…

  A kidnapped bank robber fighting for his life…

  A former mob enforcer with a blood debt…

  A government assassin on the run…

  A wisecracking private eye with only one hand…

  A homicide sergeant with one week left on the job…

  And three of the worst serial killers, ever.

  This is where it all ends. An epic showdown in the desert, where good and evil will clash one last time.

  His name is Luther Kite, and his specialty is murdering people in ways too horrible to imagine. He’s gone south, where he’s found a new, spectacular way to kill. And if you have enough money, you can bet on who dies first.

  Legendary Chicago cop Jacqueline “Jack” Daniels has retired. She’s no longer chasing bad guys, content to stay out of the public eye and raise her new daughter. But when her daughter’s father, Phin Troutt, is kidnapped, she’s forced to strap on her gun one last time.

  Since being separated from his psychotic soulmate, the prolific serial killer known as Donaldson has been desperately searching for her. Now he thinks he’s found out where his beloved, insane Lucy has been hiding. He’s going to find her, no matter how many people are slaughtered in the process.

  All three will converge in same place. La Juntita, Mexico. Where a bloodthirsty cartel is enslaving people and forcing them to fight to the death in insane, gladiator-style games.

  Join Jack and Phin, Donaldson and Lucy, and Luther, for the very last act in their twisted, perverse saga.

  Along for the ride are Jack’s friends; Harry and Herb, as well as a mob enforcer name
d Tequila, and a covert operative named Chandler.

  There will be blood. And death. So much death…

  LAST CALL by J.A. Konrath

  The conclusion to the Jack Daniels/Luther Kite epic

  JOE KONRATH’S

  COMPLETE BIBLIOGRAPHY

  JACK DANIELS THRILLERS

  WHISKEY SOUR

  BLOODY MARY

  RUSTY NAIL

  DIRTY MARTINI

  FUZZY NAVEL

  CHERRY BOMB

  SHAKEN

  STIRRED with Blake Crouch

  RUM RUNNER

  LAST CALL

  SHOT OF TEQUILA

  SERIAL KILLERS UNCUT with Blake Crouch

  LADY 52 with Jude Hardin

  65 PROOF short story collection

  FLOATERS short with Henry Perez

  BURNERS short with Henry Perez

  SUCKERS short with Jeff Strand

  JACKED UP! short with Tracy Sharp

  STRAIGHT UP short with Iain Rob Wright

  CHEESE WRESTLING short with Bernard Schaffer

  ABDUCTIONS short with Garth Perry

  BEAT DOWN short with Garth Perry

  BABYSITTING MONEY short with Ken Lindsey

  OCTOBER DARK short with Joshua Simcox

  RACKED short with Jude Hardin

  BABE ON BOARD short with Ann Voss Peterson

  WATCHED TOO LONG short with Ann Voss Peterson

  BANANA HAMMOCK

  CODENAME: CHANDLER SERIES

  EXPOSED with Ann Voss Peterson

  HIT with Ann Voss Peterson

  NAUGHTY with Ann Voss Peterson

  FLEE with Ann Voss Peterson

  SPREE with Ann Voss Peterson

  THREE with Ann Voss Peterson

  FIX with F. Paul Wilson and Ann Voss Peterson

  RESCUE

  THE KONRATH/KILBORN HORROR COLLECTIVE

  ORIGIN

  THE LIST

  DISTURB

  AFRAID

  TRAPPED

  ENDURANCE

  HAUNTED HOUSE

  WEBCAM

  DRACULAS with Blake Crouch, Jeff Strand, and F. Paul Wilson