Fear itself: a novel

by Jonathan Lewis Nasaw

  “Great, a ghost story,” said Dorie with a mock shudder that turned real at the end, as mock shudders often do. “Remember one thing, buster: I don’t sleep, you don’t sleep.”

  Pender reached across his body with his good arm, and patted her shoulder. “You don’t have a thing to worry about. They say she only walks on Halloween night.”

  “Pender.”

  “What?”

  “Halloween is this coming Sunday.”

  “Is it really?” Wide-eyed and innocent; butter wouldn’t melt…, as his sister Ida would have said.

  “Yeah—and you know what’s amazing? For the first time since I can remember, I don’t care—it doesn’t matter.”

  “I remember you telling me Halloweens were always tough on you.”

  “And Sunday ones were the worst. ’Cause if it fell on a Sunday, that’d be three days I’d have to hide out in my house with the curtains drawn. Couldn’t go shopping on Friday, because the store clerks might be in costumes with masks, on Saturday night people in masks might be coming and going from parties, and then of course the trick-or-treaters on Sunday.”

  “No trick-or-treaters out where I live.”

  “But don’t you see, it doesn’t matter anymore? I’d almost like to give it a try.”

  “Ask and you shall receive. Pool, the Liaison Support secretary, she and her roommate always do Halloween up real big, costume party, haunted house and all. If you want me to take you, I have a standing invitation.”

  “I’ll have to get back to you on that,” said Dorie. She suspected it was an idea that was going to seem less and less attractive, the closer to Sunday they got.

  8

  It was close to two in the morning when Linda let herself into the house. She hung her coat on a peg in the vestibule; as she limped past the answering machine in the living room, she saw the message light blinking, and stopped to check it out.

  Mr. Pender, this is Judge Heinz. I hope you’ve received my letter by now. There are a few matters we need to go over. Please give me a call at your convenience.

  He’d left a number. The machine was on a small table near the vestibule, along with the wire basket full of mail Linda had been saving for Pender. She found a letter from Noble J. Heinz, Attorney at Law, LaFarge, Wisconsin, jotted the telephone number on the back of the envelope, and left it on the top of the pile. Pender was due back late tomorrow afternoon—Linda had no intention of getting out of bed until then.

  Or answering any Bu-calls. She retrieved her cell from the pocket of her coat and called her own office to leave a message for Pool, to the effect that she would not be coming into work tomorrow, and that if there were any calls from media or brass or especially OPR, could Pool possibly, please, stall them, hold them off, tell them she was dead, anything—Linda would call her on Monday to explain. And, oh yeah, thanks for the invite, but she’d have to pass on Halloween, because she was going to bed now and intended to stay there, not just through Halloween, but probably through Thanksgiving as well.

  And exhausted as she was, it was only the knowledge that she really could sleep in as long as she wanted tomorrow that gave Linda the incentive to prepare for bed, instead of just throwing herself across the bedcovers and collapsing in the rancid clothes she’d been wearing for over eighteen hours.

  Linda undressed in the bathroom, while seated on the toilet, pulling her slacks down over her shoes and tossing her dirty clothes into the mildewy rattan hamper. Then she washed up a little, brushed her teeth, and crossed the hall to her bedroom wearing only her shoes and braces, and leaning even more heavily than usual on her cane. Tomorrow, she reminded herself, she’d have to start wearing a bathrobe for the trip across the hall. Tonight, though, she was too tired even to pull on a nightie—she untied her shoes, slipped them off along with the braces, crawled under the covers naked, closed her eyes, and was asleep within minutes.

  A dream. It had to be a dream. Simon Childs standing over the bed, holding a revolver in one hand, hiding the other hand behind his back. But not the Childs from the elevator video, with the self-assured manner and the easy slouch, nor the groomed and handsome Childs of the DMV photo, looking better with his silver hair and dapper ’stash than anybody has a right to on their driver’s license.

  No, this was a ragged, haggard caricature of Childs—no hair, no mustache, wearing an unzipped black leather bomber jacket over a hideous sport shirt of mustard yellow and dung brown.

  “Where’s your boyfriend, Skairdykat?”

  Still clinging to the hope that it was only a dream, Linda tried to open her eyes. They were already open. She closed them instead, heard the springs creak and felt the mattress shift. When she opened her eyes again, he was sitting on the edge of the bed, grinning like the happiest madman in the asylum.

  “I asked you where your boyfriend was. If you don’t answer me, you’ll have to answer to my friend here.”

  Slowly he drew his hand from behind his back. Linda was not surprised to see that he was grasping a snake by the neck. This was her dream: what else would he have had in his hand? She tried to draw back, but with his weight atop the covers, she found herself pinned beneath them. Not very dreamlike, she thought, trying to wriggle free—not very dreamlike at all.

  “You’re dead,” she told him. “They found your body.”

  “Keep telling yourself that,” he replied, slipping the revolver into the waistband of his high-water slacks. “It’ll make the game more fun. But until we get started, you can avoid a good deal of unnecessary suffering by simply telling me where your boyfriend is, and when he’s expected back.”

  Unnecessary suffering. Dream or no dream, Linda didn’t like the sound of that; dream or no dream, she decided to play along. “I don’t have a boyfriend, but if you mean Agent Pender, he’s on vacation—I haven’t heard from him in nearly a week.”

  “My misunderstanding. And when is Agent Pender expected home?” There was nothing in Simon’s voice to suggest sarcasm—or that he had tugged the covers down to Linda’s waist.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I find that hard to believe.” He looked up from her naked torso, searched her eyes.

  Linda held his gaze. Though those were not a pair of eyes you wanted to be looking into while you were trying to hold on to your sanity, neither were the snake’s—she could see its tongue flickering in and out at the edge of her peripheral vision.

  He brushed his fingers across her stomach. “I’m still finding that hard to believe.”

  “Listen,” she said, angered by the intimacy of the touch, “if I were expecting him momentarily, do you think I’d tell you?”

  The hand began traveling up, past her chest; his long fingers gripped her chin and turned her head toward the snake. “Eventually,” he said.

  9

  Simon triumphant! But even he was a little surprised by the ease with which all the pieces were falling into place. He shouldn’t have been, he told himself: the great ones always make it look easy. Naturally the cops had bought the charred-corpse scenario. The key was suggestion, the planting of an assumption that became a fulfilled expectation. He didn’t have to convince them that the body was his—they’d convinced themselves.

  Nor did Simon deny there was an element of luck in all this. He was lucky the Harley had been available—it would have been a lot harder to hide the Lexus in the woods. He was lucky, too, that Skairdykat had failed to lock the front door behind her—but luck favors patience as well as preparation. Arriving before she did, having the patience to wait, to watch the empty house, instead of just breaking in, meant there were no signs of forced entry that might have alarmed her into locking up—or not entering in the first place.

  As for the game itself, Simon had never doubted his abilities. Unnecessary suffering…eventually: more suggestion, gentle guidance. Simon’s theory, Simon’s genius: fear comes from within. You can’t drive it in like a railroad spike; you have to plant it like a seed and nurture it until it blossoms.


  True fear, however, is a bloom that demands time, patience, attention, and concentration, none of which Simon could provide until he knew when and how Pender was expected to return. And yet the traditional mainstay of the torturer—the infliction of pain, either gross or subtle—was not available to him. Not only was pain itself anodyne to fear, but the fear of pain was a mere avoidance reflex, like a worm shrinking from a hot needle, and as such, relatively uninteresting to Simon.

  Still, he reasoned (and despite his having logged only a few hours of sleep since Ogallala, thanks to the crosstops he found his mind was as sharp as it had been all night), if the man wasn’t home at two in the morning, he probably wasn’t coming home. Even if he did, Simon would hear the car coming down the long drive, and still have the element of surprise on his side.

  More likely, though, he’d have all night to play with Skairdykat. So he let her slip on a bathrobe—naked, she looked like a concentration camp victim; Simon much preferred Dorie’s type—and helped her into the living room, where he laid a crackling fire with last winter’s dry logs. Once again, it was all so easy: no need to tie her up; she wasn’t going anywhere without her cane and braces. He didn’t even have to gag her: this time of night there wasn’t a living soul within a mile of Tinsman’s Lock.

  “Kind of chilly tonight,” he said, sitting down next to her with the canvas travel bag on his lap, and the snake in the bag. “Does it ever snow around here?”

  “I don’t know. I just moved here, myself.”

  “I know—Gloria told me. By the way, do you know how she died?”

  By the way? By the fucking way? Linda ignored the question, stared into the fire. How sane and casual he sounded when she wasn’t looking at him.

  “When I ask a question, I expect you to answer it. Remember what I said about unnecessary suffering?”

  “Oh, that’s a crock. You want me to be afraid of what you might do, so you don’t actually have to do anything.”

  Simon was impressed. He was also beginning to suspect he was in for a tussle. She would fight him every step of the way, this FBI agent. He didn’t mind—it was his game, and they had all night. “I’ll tell you anyway. She was in the bath. We’d been together all night—just like you and I are going to be. Hot bath. No suds. The—”

  “Yes!” Linda hadn’t meant to shout.

  “Yes, what?”

  “Yes, I know how she died. Coral snake, neurotoxin, respiratory failure. So you can save yourself the trouble.”

  “But it sounds so clinical, the way you put it. It wasn’t clinical at all. For one thing, the coral didn’t want to bite her—I had to hold it up against her neck, press it right up tight against her jugular, then let its tail droop into the hot water. They have short fangs, the corals—they have to—”

  “Shut up. Just shut the fuck up.”

  He boxed her ear. It was a trick he’d learned from Grandfather Childs. Very painful—even prizefighters hate to get whacked on the ear. One way or another, it seemed, the old man was always with him. “To be continued,” he said. “Where’s the kitchen?”

  Linda felt as if she’d won a small battle—at least he’d dropped the pretense of civility when he slapped her. She resisted the temptation to provoke him further, though. She let him help her into the kitchen, kept her mouth shut while he made coffee.

  Then he poured them each a cup, sat down across from her at the kitchen table, and it began again. Linda did her best to tune him out, but you can’t close your ears like you can your eyes; you can look away, but you can’t listen away. So she heard most of it, the worst of it, as Childs recounted in meticulous detail how Gloria had died.

  And he was right; it wasn’t clinical at all. He made Gloria’s death throes come alive; he acted out the pain, and how she’d gradually gone numb, how her eyelids had drooped, how a look of surprise had passed over those half-hidden eyes at the end, when she tried to draw a breath and her lungs would not respond.

  A lousy way to die, thought Linda. But she could have guessed all that, extrapolated it from the condition of the corpse and the fax from Poison Control, if she’d wanted to. So all Childs had really accomplished, she realized, was to take the incentive out of the surrender-and-get-it-over-with option for her. Which left the fight-to-the-last-breath option. Physically, she told herself, she was no match for him—physically, she was no match for the Pillsbury Doughboy—but maybe she had a shot at outwitting him.

  As in any fight, it was always a good idea to get your adversary distracted. “So how’d it go in Atlantic City? How’s your mom?”

  “A drunken hooer—a dead drunken hooer. How’s yours?”

  Touchy, touchy—that told her she was on the right track. “Did you mean to kill her, or was it an accident?”

  Simon almost answered, then caught himself. Wrong game. “That’s neither here nor there—I still haven’t finished telling you about Gloria.”

  “You got to where Gloria’s dead. That’s pretty fucking finished. What’d you do, kill her twice?” When you were trying to convince somebody you were tough—when you were trying to convince yourself, for that matter—it helped to be an Italian from the Bronx. Swearing helped, too.

  “Watch your language.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Simon was momentarily at a loss. He couldn’t let her attitude stand, but if he let things get heated, he might find himself playing the game with a bloodied corpse; not much satisfaction there. “In case you’ve forgotten, Skairdykat, I do have the power of life and death over you.”

  “Big hairy deal. Every strunz’ with a loaded gun has the power of life and death.”

  In a contest like this, Linda was beginning to realize, it also helped to have a fatal disease. She watched the steam curl lazily from her coffee, then took a tiny sip—still a little too hot to drink, but not bad for the Safeway house blend. Linda was starting to appreciate little things—that was also supposed to be one of the pluses of having a fatal disease. Yeah, right. Then it occurred to her: in the last hour or so, the odds of her dying from MS had dropped considerably.

  “You’re really asking for it,” said Childs. “You understand that, don’t you?”

  Linda decided there might be a way to steer the conversation to her advantage. “Mr. Childs, I want to live. But sometimes it just isn’t in the cards. You of all people ought to know that—you don’t have much longer to live than I do. Oh—but I forgot. You’re rich. You’re mentally ill, at least by most people’s standards, and you’re rich. They don’t execute sick, rich people in this country. If you give yourself up—if you let me handle your surrender—you’ll be living the high life in some country club asylum, like that du Pont guy who killed that wrestler, long after this damn MS sends me to my grave.”

  “Excellent point,” said Childs. “How’s your coffee?”

  The pleasant tone should have alerted Linda; instead she thought for a moment she had succeeded in getting him to consider another option. “Very good. I was just waiting for it to cool down.”

  He picked up her mug, dashed the contents in her face. “There,” he said. “That’ll cool it down a little quicker.”

  As if to show his contempt, Simon left Linda alone in the kitchen while he returned to the living room to fetch the travel bag. Unfortunately, he hadn’t allowed her to put on her braces or bring her cane into the kitchen with her. Her face still stinging from the hot coffee, Linda was inching her chair backward toward the counter, bound for the knife drawer, when Simon returned. Without breaking stride or even glancing at Linda, he grabbed the top rung of her chair and dragged it back to the table; it might as well not have been occupied.

  “I think it’s time.” He dropped the travel bag into Linda’s lap. “Do you think it’s time?”

  “You’re gonna do what you’re gonna do.”

  “Well, yes. But you mustn’t give up hope.”

  “Why not?” It might have been an attempt at irony—then again, it might not. Childs seemed to take it seriously
enough.

  “Because it will spoil the game,” he said.

  No surprises here, Linda reminded herself, as Simon slipped on the heavy leather gauntlet and reached into the travel bag. He frightens them, he custom fits their deaths—we knew all that. She braced herself, and if it’s possible to shout at yourself in your interior monologue, she shouted.

  Okay, asshole, I’ll play your fucking game. Lord knows, I can’t die any younger. Come on, whip it out, let’s see what you got. Fuck, is that all? Not a very big one, is it? Kind of skinny, too. Black nose, black head, pretty bands, red-yellow-black-yellow-red-yellow-black down to the black tail. Yeah, that’s right, a little closer, bring it a little closer. I love this, I want a better look. I love this snake I love this fucking snake. Forked tongue, flickering out. That’s how they smell, it’s just smelling me. Smelling the coffee. Wake up and smell the coffee. Good snake pretty snake I love it observe observe observe the red and black bands are wider than the yellow ones the red bands have little black flecks the pupils are round not slits like I thought yeah sure bring it right up to my fucking eye I love it I—

  When she made her move, Linda went, not for the snake, and not for Childs, though she wanted to rip his face off, but for the glove. She reached around the snake, grabbed the gauntlet at the wrist with both hands while simultaneously throwing herself backward, and held on to the rough leather for dear life as her chair tipped over; she hit the floor still throttling the empty glove at arm’s length.

  Okay, I played your fucking game, thought Linda, as the snake slithered rapidly but gracefully through the kitchen door, with Childs in clumsy pursuit. Now, where’s my lovely parting gifts?

  One advantage to having been raised in his grandfather’s house—Simon had learned to handle disappointment. Or at least to disguise it. It didn’t matter whether your birthday presents consisted of a savings bond and an itchy sweater, or if your dinner was liver and onions with brussels sprouts, you’d better not let an expression other than stupefied gratitude cross your mug or Grandfather would have your hide. (None of this applied to Missy, of course—Missy always got away with murder.)