by Simon Wood
the fridge door.
Josh followed Bell into the kitchen after a moment.
His face was long, stretched by a more powerful gravity than that experienced by anyone else on the planet.
Bell saw the sad expression and moved toward him.
She wrapped her arms around him. The condensation from the bottle soaked Josh’s shirt where it touched it.
Its coldness burned against his flesh. She raised herself on tiptoe, bringing her head close to his. The instability made her teeter on her toes and Josh steadied her, putting his hands around her waist. Taking that as her signal, she kissed Josh, her tongue seeking entry to his
mouth.
Sickened by the intrusion, Josh’s face contorted in disgust. He twisted his head to break the kiss. He tasted the sharp bite of alcohol from her in his mouth and its odor filled his nostrils. She’d been drinking, and more than one beer. It wasn’t a good sign.
Bell leaned into him, applying more pressure. Her heat marked an outline against Josh’s body. Although slight, her weight seemed heavy on him and resistance was difficult. Finally, he broke the cloying embrace with a powerful shove that almost made him topple.
The force propelled Bell backward. She lost her hold on Josh and her balance. In an attempt to save herself, she let go of the bottle of beer. The bottle slammed into one of the overhead cabinets before striking the vinyl flooring without breaking. The spilt contents fizzed on the floor. Bell crashed into the cupboards and grabbed onto them to save herself from falling.
Josh dragged the back of his hand across his mouth and looked at it, half expecting to see blood.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he demanded.
“You still don’t get it, do you?”
“You’re right. I don’t.”
“I love you. I want you back. Why do you think I’ve been doing this?” Bell answered her own question.
“Because I want you free from all things so you have only me left.”
Bell’s motives shocked and abhorred him. She was
crazy. She had to be to think destroying him would drive them together. It was a madness he never thought possible in Bell. Did she expect him to thank her, flattered by the lengths she had gone to? Josh shook his head.
“Do you honestly think I would come back to you? I broke up with you because I made a choice. I chose my family. And even though you’ve taken that away from me, I still wouldn’t come back to you.”
Josh stopped. He had expected a tirade of verbal
abuse fueled by disappointment and rejection, but there was silence. There was nothing further to be said.
Bell had stopped looking at him. Her gaze was aimed over his shoulder. A blank look took over her face, as if she didn’t understand what she saw. Josh turned his head to the point of interest.
A flash of colors was all he saw. At the speed it was moving, Josh didn’t get enough time to focus on the object, only its blur, before it hit him. He felt it, though. It smashed across his head, numbing him with its force. Josh fell forward, out cold before he hit the ground.
Josh came to. He had no idea how long he’d been unconscious.
An intense ache emanated from the back of
his head. It rippled outward from its epicenter like waves in a millpond. He raised a hand to the ache, but the briefest movement drove knives through his skull.
He found a lump the size of an egg on the back of his head and the pain forced his eyes closed. He left the bump alone, but became aware of his sore cheek,
which must have broken his fall.
Bell looked very concerned with her head cocked to one side, her face so sad, so disappointed. For the first time since her return, she looked human, possessing a weak as well as a strong side. She looked like a nervous child waiting her turn to go into the doctor’s office for her shots. She spoke, but the words came out as an inaudible murmur.
He saw the knife. Not the whole knife, just the handle, its blade embedded in her chest below her left
breast. He noticed the blood. Too much blood. It
stained the white teddy; the harsh crimson made more vivid by the pale silk. The material clung tightly to her punctured body. The blood, still oozing from the
wound, ran down her onto the floor and formed a pool around her legs. His slow-witted brain hadn’t registered that she was sitting. Before the blow she had been standing, but now she was slumped untidily against the cupboards. He tried not to entertain thoughts of who had done this to Bell, but failed. He had to get out, but he couldn’t stop staring at the blood.
Slowly, the pool expanded across the floor in Josh’s direction. He recoiled on hands and knees from the creeping mass like it was scalding lava. Josh had seen deep cuts before and there’d been blood, but he had never seen a cut so deep or with as much blood as this.
Doctors dealt with these sights every day, but he couldn’t cope. Josh slunk further away from the injured woman.
Bell raised her right arm with her hand outstretched and beckoned to him. Blood trickled between her pale lips. “Josh.”
Josh stopped moving. He stared at the pool, the light reflected on its smooth surface. He got to his feet. His head swam. He wasn’t sure if the blow or the bloody sight caused it. He came as close as he could without stepping in the mess. Still, it wasn’t close enough for Bell. She called to him. He had no choice. He walked in her blood and crouched at her side.
Bell looked at him with sad eyes. The color of her rich Asian skin had drained to a jaundiced yellow. “I love you, Josh,” she whispered.
“I know you do.” Josh honestly believed she did and though he didn’t return that love, this wasn’t the time to be brutally honest with her. She was dying and he wasn’t going to give her cause to curse his name with her dying breath, even after all she’d done to him. He had possessed feelings for her once.
Josh’s eyes flicked between her face and the wooden knife handle poking out from her chest, disconcerted by its movement. The handle shifted back and forth with the weak breaths she took. He found it hard to concentrate on Bell with the knife moving in time with her breathing, as if the blade were part of her body.
Should he remove the knife or leave it? Josh didn’t know what was best, but watching Bell die wasn’t the answer.
“I’ll get help,” he said.
He went to get up, but Bell snapped a grip on his arm with a strength that terrified him. He looked at her bloody hand on his wrist. He sneered as the fluid squeezed out either side of her palm and between her fingers. Her bloodstained handprint on his forearm was his first physical contact with the stabbing. Up until then, he’d been a witness to the wound, but the
blood on his arm made him part of it, tainted him by its contact.
“No. I want you to stay. I want you to be near me,”
Bell said.
Josh hesitated. He nodded to her and shifted from a crouch to kneel beside her, so he was better positioned to comfort her. As his knees dipped into the blood, he felt its lukewarm heat soaking through the fabric of his jeans. He clasped a hand over hers and squeezed out a thin smile.
He wanted to tell her everything was going to be
okay, the doctors would sort her out, but the lies didn’t come. Instead, he watched Bell die, the blood slipping from her punctured body taking her life with its flow.
“Josh,” she called. She didn’t look at him, but directly ahead into the dark of the living room.
“Yes, Bell?” Josh couldn’t take his eyes off her, not out of lust, which he once held for her, but out of a bizarre compulsion to see this woman die.
“I’m so sorry, Josh.”
“It’s a bit late to be sorry. We’ve done what we have done and there’s nothing we can do to change that.”
“I’m sorry about what I did.”
“I know you are.” He slipped an arm around her,
and being careful not to push the knife any further into her, he half-hugged her.
Bell
coughed and flecks of blood speckled her mouth and chin and landed on Josh’s face. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I need to tell you.”
“Only if you have to, but it doesn’t matter now.”
“I’m HIV positive.”
A blow, as powerful as the one to the back of his head, slammed him. His arm trembled around Bell’s shoulders in shock. He stared at the pool at his feet, teeming with the killer virus. It was invisible to the human eye, but it was there. He was kneeling in poison.
This woman’s blood had the most devastating disease of the last thirty years. He’d had unprotected sex with this woman.
Am I infected? Is Kate infected? Abby? His thoughts scared him. The ramifications of his possible contraction of HIV were horrific. His death sentence would be the death sentence of the people he loved.
“I was diagnosed in San Diego. I was never going to tell you, but…” Her final words trailed off before she finished them.
He held another dead woman in his arms. He withdrew his arm from around her and got to his feet. His
shoes made sticking noises on the vinyl. He turned to leave.
“I’d prefer if you stayed for a while, Josh.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
James Mitchell stepped out from the shadows, a gun in his hand. “A murdered woman and that blood all over you. That wasn’t very smart, was it now?”
“I suppose you killed her,” Josh said.
Josh wasn’t only angry with Mitchell for killing
Bell, but with himself. It had never occurred to him that Mitchell was at the core of this carnage, but it should have.
“Why did you kill her?”
“Because I need her for this.” Mitchell waved the gun in the direction of the slaughter. “To make your murder more convincing. It would be totally understandable if your blackmailing ex-mistress confessed
your sins to the TV news and your wife, driving you to kill her in a fit of rage. Makes total sense. Don’t you think?”
“How did you know her?”
“Oh, Bell and I have become, or I should say had become, good friends. We had a lot in common—you, for
instance.” Mitchell jabbed the gun at Josh. “She was pissed at you for dumping her. A lot of unresolved issues there.”
“And you call that resolved?” Josh pointed at Bell’s corpse.
“You could say that. You two certainly had a touching farewell.” Mitchell cut Josh off before he asked another question. “What I need before we go any further
is for your fingerprints to be on that knife handle. Then I can get all this wrapped up.”
“What if I don’t?” Josh asked. It was a feeble attempt at resistance, nothing more than a schoolyard
boast lacking any power or muscle to support it.
“I’ll shoot you, drag you over there and stick your hand on the knife.”
Josh studied the floor. It wasn’t much of a choice.
The killer would shoot him anyway. It was just a matter of when. He could either make the hit man’s job
easy or difficult.
“Why did you kill Jenks?”
Mitchell laughed and shook his head like he’d heard an old joke for the hundredth time. “That wasn’t his real name. He was a competitor of mine employed to do my job. Career infighting—you know how it is.”
Josh didn’t. He had no concept of what internal conflicts were encountered in the professional killing industry.
Nor did he want to.
Mitchell’s tone turned cold. “And I’ll be damned if one of my contracts will be taken away from me.
That’s why I killed Jenks. You were lucky you got away, otherwise both of you would have made it on the six o’clock news.”
Josh had guessed right about Mitchell’s intent to kill him along with Jenks, and it still made his gut churn.
Another realization did little to help settle his troubled stomach. If he hadn’t fled the derelict factories, Bell wouldn’t be dead. There would have been no reason to kill her. She’d been a bitch, but she hadn’t deserved to die so violently. Was his life more valuable than Bell’s?
Was it better he lived and she died? Only if he lived through this night and stopped Mitchell from killing anyone else. It was also the only way he could ever forgive himself for Mark Keegan and Margaret Macey’s
deaths. Josh couldn’t let himself be the victim tonight.
“I don’t see your fingerprints on that knife yet,”
Mitchell said.
“So, who’s your employer—Pinnacle Investments?”
“Yes.”
Bob was right. Josh smiled.
“Happy that you know?” Mitchell asked.
“Yeah. It makes sense of all this,” Josh said.
Mitchell indicated Bell with the gun. “So can we get on?”
“Sure,” Josh said, “I just needed to know.”
He turned his back on the killer and faced Bell. He hoped that Mitchell didn’t shoot him in the back of the head before he had the chance to do anything. He took a deep breath before he stepped into the bloody mess to grab the knife in Bell’s chest. He gripped the blade with his right hand. The wooden handle felt comfortable in his grasp. It was the sight of the knife buried up to the hilt in his ex-mistress that was uncomfortable.
“That’s it, Josh, get some nice thick prints on that handle. Come on, do it like you mean it,” his killer said, peering over Josh on tiptoe from the kitchen doorway.
“Are you sure you can make this look like a convincing lover’s disagreement turned murder, story at
eleven?”
“Oh, you wouldn’t believe how I’ll make this look.
You’d be impressed. It’s a shame you won’t see it.”
“So how did you make Margaret Macey’s death
look?”
“Margaret Macey, Jesus.” Mitchell blurted out a
laugh. “I didn’t do a thing. You did it all for me. I wasn’t expecting that, I can tell you. It was a dream come true. I saw you running out and I was worried. I thought you had screwed everything up, but instead you finished my job just as I wanted. It was beautiful.”
Josh glanced over his shoulder at Mitchell. Mitchell’s focus was on the recollection rather than him. His guard was down. He hoped Mitchell thought he was a willing victim who was going to roll over and die for him. Josh pulled on the knife embedded in Bell’s chest.
“What did you do to scare her?” Mitchell asked.
“She thought I was you.”
Mitchell laughed again.
The knife was stuck tight and required more effort than Josh expected. He’d forgotten the blade was in a person until he looked at Bell. Her eyes didn’t register Josh’s desecration. He felt nauseated.
He glanced back at Mitchell. He hoped the killer
wouldn’t see him tug on the handle. If Mitchell saw him, the hit man would put a bullet in his head without a second thought. Josh’s brains would be splattered all over the wall, game over. The resistance broke, the blade slid from its human scabbard.
“That’s enough. You don’t have to hold the thing all night,” Mitchell said.
Josh snapped around in a heartbeat with the knife in his hand and threw it at Mitchell. Slipping in Bell’s blood at the moment of release, Josh fell backward onto the blood-soaked floor. He crashed into the cabinet behind him, knocking his head on its door.
Mitchell reacted in an instant. He aimed and fired the gun.
The knife hit Mitchell in the chest as he squeezed the trigger on the semiautomatic. Josh’s slip caused the thrown knife to skew its trajectory and the blade batted flatly against the killer before it clattered to the floor.
The knife did knock Mitchell’s aim off and his shot went wild into the ceiling.
Josh clambered to his feet and rushed the hit man.
Before Mitchell could aim again, Josh smashed into the smaller man, driving him into the kitchen door fr
ame. Mitchell yelped, but brought his knee up into Josh’s gut. Josh lost his grip on the would-be killer.
The hit man brought his knee up again, this time into Josh’s face.
The force of the blow jerked Josh’s head back and he released the hit man and clutched his nose, surprised to find it intact. The pain was nauseating. He stumbled backward, trod on Bell’s discarded beer bottle and fell again.
Mitchell steadied his aim at the falling man and fired the weapon.
Josh fell and struck the floor, the bottle slithering across the vinyl. He saw the flash of flame and a two inch hole appeared in the particleboard door to the left of his head. The odor of burnt wood and hot glue from the door’s wound smelled like a sawmill.
The bottle banged against the skirting board and ricocheted back across the floor toward Josh’s outstretched
hand. Acting on reflex, he grabbed the bottle
by the neck and threw it at Mitchell.
This time Josh’s aim was true. The bottle hit
Mitchell in the head, thudding into his left eyebrow.
Smashing on impact, fragments of glass sprayed over the man’s face. He yelled through gritted teeth, his free hand to his eyes. His gun hand pointed in the general direction of Josh. The killer tottered backward into the living room.
Josh got to his feet and charged the hit man. He knew he had to disarm the killer before he had the chance to recover. Throwing household items was no defense
against a gun. Charging at the blinded Mitchell, Josh grabbed the wooden chopping block from the countertop.
Raising the board above his head, Josh brought the block down, edge on, onto Mitchell’s gun arm.
The resulting sharp crack told both men Mitchell’s arm was broken. The hit man screamed in agony and the pistol went flying from his grasp.
Driven on by his initial success, Josh swung the
wooden board like a major league batter. This time the board smashed into Mitchell’s face just as he removed his hand from in front of it. The resounding thud echoed like the crack of a baseball going out of the park.
Mitchell careened back, clipping an armchair, and fell to the floor. Blood spread between the hit man’s fingers covering his nose and eyes, spilling down his face.
