Phobias

by Ryan Horvath

  “Ye… yes!” Heather repeated.

  Miedo took her shoulders again and then guided her off the crate. She bucked a little when she was over open air, but he quickly pulled her down and set her on the floor inches from him.

  When she was down, to his surprise, Heather burst out laughing. At first, the sound shocked Miedo and he felt his fear-driven train slow down. He should have known her laughter was due to pure relief but, instead, the laughter made Miedo angry. Very angry. He didn’t have good intentions in his mind to begin with, but her laughter made them much worse.

  He reached out and slapped her hard across the face. Her laughter instantly stopped and he saw her cheek redden. He looked down at his hand and saw her tears on his palm. Miedo put his hand to his face and tasted them. They were everything he’d hoped for.

  “You shouldn’t laugh, Heather,” Miedo chastised. “There are two other people in here who aren’t going to get what you are.”

  “Oh… Oh… God…,” Heather eked out. Her trembling returned; more of a shuddering quake. Her fear accompanied it. She backed away from him on shaky legs that hadn’t been used in some time. She didn’t know she was backing herself into a corner. “N…n… not… again…”

  The fear fragrance poured off of her and Miedo drew it into his nostrils deeply. Miedo went a few paces to his right and picked up a remote control. He stripped off his shirt and tossed it onto the crate. He unbuttoned his pants and pushed them to his ankles in one quick motion. He stepped out of them and advanced on Heather. As he moved in, he said, “Well, I’m not the football player, but I’m certainly no slouch.” He pressed a button on the remote control and ear-splitting music came on from invisible speakers.

  Heather screeched.

  Miedo pounced.

  ~*~0~0~*~

  When he was finished, Miedo re-secured Heather in the straightjacket and attached it to the suspensory. He set her limp body back into the air.

  Drops of his blood fell at his feet.

  He started to feel the sting of the wounds on his flesh. He didn’t feel the injuries as they happened. He was too intoxicated by the fear he had leeched from Vale and then Heather.

  He walked away from Heather and passed Vale, taking only the time to note that the football player was still twitching in his sleep. He passed the room where his insurance policy was and then went into the bathroom and switched on the light. He studied himself in the mirror.

  Driven by the overpowering combination of Vale and Heather’s phobias, Miedo really cut loose with Heather. When he had her pinned in the corner, he snatched her and expertly extracted her from the straightjacket. She instantly fought him but, that didn’t stop Miedo. Heather got several good scratches into him and a couple of them were a little on the deep side. But that didn’t stopped Miedo. While he forced her legs open and proceeded to violate her, he was able to encircle both of her small wrists in one of his large hands and keep her hands above her head, but then she pressed her head forward and bit him just below his left nipple. That made him laugh and he slapped her so hard with his free hand that she was stunned into helplessness. Miedo continued to work on her while blood dripped down on her and, when she started to pull herself together and resist again, he seized her by the neck and proceeded to choke her. He found he could get her to the verge of unconsciousness and then release her and she would snap back. He did this twice and then finished his assault a few moments later.

  While he surveyed his injuries, a peculiar feeling came over him. He knew the feeling, of course. Every whining patient he ever had had expressed this feeling at one point or another while he treated them. But he never experienced it himself.

  He touched the bite mark and tasted the blood.

  He let their fear overtake him and he lost some measure of control.

  The unfamiliar feeling was guilt.

  He didn’t like it. Didn’t like it one bit.

  Without cleaning his wounds, he stepped out of the bathroom. He looked into the dark reaches to his right where he knew one of the C4 blocks was stationed.

  He decided his guilt was foolish. He lived to use fear.

  Miedo didn’t think there was anything wrong with letting fear use him every once in a while.

  ~~26~~

  Walt held the picture they obtained in his hand while he and Terry approached the front door of the dark house. “I didn’t think it would be so dark,” he said to Terry in a whisper.

  Terry himself thought the darkness was a little strange. There were no lights on in Chad’s house. And the fluorescent flood light that hung above the door did not kick on at their motion even though its sensor was pointed directly at them. But he didn’t want the kid to be nervous so he simply said, “It’s the middle of the night.”

  “Tell me about it,” Walt returned. “I still haven’t heard from my mom.”

  “What do you mean?” Terry said, pausing before the front door.

  “My mom’s not that old… uses a smart phone… can text and post… and even make a freaking phone call but…” He extracted his phone and waggled it in the air. “Not a peep from her in hours.”

  Terry turned and opened the door to Chad’s house. “That’s unusual?” he asked.

  “Very,” Walt said in a normal voice. “The only time she goes more than a few hours without calling or texting is when I’m at school or practice. Even during those times, it’s not unheard of her to slip a text message or two in.” He hesitated and then added, “I’m really starting to get worried.”

  With everything going on, Terry didn’t like that this was added to it. He stepped into the house and Walt followed him.

  The air in Chad Dean’s house was a little flat and stale. And it was a bit on the warm side.

  “Guy must not use his air conditioning much,” Walt said. He reached for a light switch and turned it on. They were in the entryway and, in front of them, a staircase led up and a hallway on the left of it ran to the back of the house and fed off into several rooms. To the right of the stairs was a large living room that also fed into two other rooms.

  “Where should we start?” Walt asked.

  “Let’s find the room where Mrs. Dean was taken from. I want to check out the screen that was cut,” Terry answered. He was thinking about Walt’s incommunicative mother. “Walt? Is your mom afraid of something? I mean, a phobic like the others?”

  “I don’t think so. She doesn’t like snakes but that never seemed like a phobia to me. She said they just felt weird to her, but she was never bothered when I wanted to see the snakes at the zoo or aquarium.” Walt looked into the first room off the hallway and saw it was a small office. “And then there’s my dad of course. Mom always said she was afraid he’d come back.”

  “What about your dad?” Terry asked and moved down the hall to the next room.

  “He’s a lifer over in Oak Park Heights,” Walt said with a measure of sadness in his voice.

  Terry knew what Walt meant. Walt referred to the maximum security prison located to the east of St. Paul near the Minnesota/Wisconsin border. Terry himself had more than once added someone to the population there. “Sorry, kid,” he said.

  “No big deal,” Walt returned. “He went in shortly after my mom got pregnant with me. He signed away all of his paternal rights and wanted nothing to do with me so I’ve never even met him. Aside from knowing where he is, Mom’s never said anything about him other than she hopes she never sees him again.”

  “What’s he in for?” Terry asked.

  Walt sighed as they looked into the next room. It appeared to be a den. “He’s an awful guy,” Walt said. “They say he raped two teenage girls and then killed one of their dads when he tried to stop him. I’m sure you had to have heard about it. The Greenly girls.”

  “Holy shit!” Terry gasped. He had, of course, heard of the crime. Walt’s father’s arrest and trial had been all over the news when Terry was fresh out of high school. The case wasn’t what made Terry enlist in the police academy but i
t definitely got him interested in investigating crime and studying abnormal psychology. And Walt’s father nearly got away with his crimes but, much like so many other violent offenders in history, a petty crime became his undoing. Walt’s dad got a little too drunk at a bar one night and, as he left out the back door that fed into an alley, he lit a cigarette. A few steps later and he had to take a leak. He checked the alley and saw no watchers so he tucked in beside a Dumpster and started to relieve himself. But an MPD car drove by and the cop in the passenger seat just happened to be looking out the window and saw Walt’s dad. The cops blocked the end of the one-way alley with their car and approached Walt’s father. When he realized he’d been caught pissing in public, Walt’s father joked with the cops and they joked back. The cops politely explained that they were going to have to cite Walt’s dad and would put him in the drunk tank for the night, but he’d only be fined for the public urination offense. The cops were nice enough to let Walt’s dad finish his cigarette and, when he was done, the cop who was driving the car led Walt’s dad back to the squad car and put him in the back. The other cop had a knack for forensics and recognized an opportunity. He salvaged the spent cigarette butt and sealed it in an evidence container. He knew the chance was slight but knew it was possible that the DNA on the butt could be linked to some unsolved crime. He turned the evidence in and a few weeks later, its analysis was complete. The DNA on the cigarette Walt’s dad discarded matched the DNA in the seminal fluid and saliva found on two girls who had been raped four months before. When they brought Walt’s dad in and confronted him with the evidence, he happily confessed and actually took pride in his crime. Walt’s father broke one detective’s jaw, another’s nose, and a uniformed officer’s arm following the interrogation before a swarm of officers subdued him. Terry was pretty sure the offender was in a “lock him up and throw away the key” kind of place.

  “Yeah,” Walt said. “That’s my dad.” He looked ashamed as they stepped into the den.

  “We aren’t our parents,” Terry assured. He decided he was going to tell a little about his own skeletons so Walt wouldn’t feel so bad about his. “My mother was an extremely verbally abusive alcoholic. Sometimes verbal abuse is worse than physical, you know? I can recognize the guy who owns this house is hard for the booze, but my mom was an ‘all day’ drinker. She started when she got up and didn’t quit until she passed out at night. To her, my little brother was the ‘prick who ruined her life.’ My little sister was a ‘cock tempting whore’…” He sighed and shook his head. “And she was only nine years old. Mom’s name for me was ‘the monster that started it all.’ That’s all I ever heard her call me until I was thirteen.”

  “What happened then?” Walt asked, sounding intrigued and sympathetic.

  “My dad died and my little sister lost it not long after that. She started screaming one night and wouldn’t stop. In her drunken fury, my mom switched her abuse from verbal to physical and she beat the shit out of my little sister. My little brother called the police and they took us away from our mom for good. Fortunately for us, my dad had a sister who adored us and who we were all pretty fond of as well and she and our uncle adopted us.” He paused. “We were lucky.”

  Walt nodded. “I guess we both were. Is your mom still alive?”

  Terry shrugged. “I guess so. I’ve never attended her funeral. But I’m not so sure my aunt and uncle would tell me and my sibs if she died,” he replied.

  Walt switched their conversation. “So this is the room Mrs. Dean was in right?”

  Terry nodded.

  There was a well-used chair with some newspapers on the table beside it. Walt remembered Chad’s wife had been reading but her book was no longer there. He figured it had been taken in for evidence. He approached the window and, as he neared it, he barely noticed the real estate listings on the papers that were scattered near the chair. The window that Mrs. Dean had presumably been extracted from no longer had its screen and there was fingerprint dust all over the frame of the window.

  “You’re eye catching anything?” Terry said.

  Walt shook his head. “Looks like your guys were pretty thorough. They took what she likely touched or came in contact with for more analysis.”

  Terry nodded and looked down at the papers. His eyes danced across them quickly but, as he was about the look away from them, one caught his eye. Not just because he recognized it but because he’d been there. The property listing was for a house in Plymouth and Terry knew it because he had spent some time dating… well, he wasn’t sure dating was the right word for sharing a few meals and a lot of sexual encounters with someone. But the house belonged to a young defense lawyer he started seeing after a case he had testified in. She grilled him good on the stand and, after the case settled the next day, Terry gave it to her pretty good between the sheets of her bed, in her shower that had more water-emitting heads than Terry could count, and on second floor balcony over the deck behind her house. It was on the balcony another night, while he thrust into her in the moonlight, that he caught sight of a portion of a neighboring house. As he stared down at the paper the memory of the intense copulation with the lawyer took a backseat to the neighboring house and he gasped. “Holy shit!” he fired.

  “What?” Walt said startled.

  “Walt, let me see that picture we found at Tim Rock’s place,” Terry said agitatedly.

  “This?” Walt said holding up the photo.

  “Yes!” Terry said snatching at it.

  Walt handed over the picture. “What is it?”

  “Fuck!” Terry spat out. His mind raced as memory tried to make the connection. “I think I know this place. I think I’ve seen it before.”

  “Where?” Walt questioned.

  Terry let out a slight laugh and said, “An old girlfriend lived next door.”

  “So where is it?” Walt said.

  But Terry didn’t answer. Instead he took Walt’s shoulder and said, “C’mon.”

  Back in the car, Walt was at least able to get Terry to tell him they were bound for Plymouth. “Can we stop by my house and check on my mom?” he asked with concern.

  Terry agreed.

  ~*~0~0~*~

  They stopped at Walt’s place not long after. They both went in the house.

  Lisa’s bed hadn’t been slept in.

  Her toothbrush was dry.

  Her purse was on the counter. Her phone, with all of Walt’s missed text messages and calls was inside.

  Lisa was nowhere to be found inside the house.

  Dread covered Walt’s face. Terry concealed his own anxiety, but only because he had years of practice.

  ~*~0~0~*~

  They went back to the car and Terry tried calling Chad, then Holly but he connected with neither of them.

  The air in the car was heavy. Walt was visibly trying to stay collected.

  Without needing to say so, it was clear both men felt Lisa was in the hands of whomever was behind all of this.

  Then Terry did something he wouldn’t have usually done to another man but Walt, who with his obvious trepidation, seemed more like a troubled youth. Terry put a gentle hand just above Walt’s knee and squeezed it twice.

  “We’ll get her back,” Terry said with confidence.

  ~~27~~

  Chad rapped loudly on the door, not unlike Terry had done on his own front door when this whole mess began. Even though it hadn’t been by choice, Chad was sitting on a full day of sobriety and then some. In some ways, he felt like he did in high school when he seldom touched alcohol.

  “When are you going to tell me who lives here?” Holly asked from behind him.

  “Like I said,” Chad returned. “I’m not without my resources. Back when I was a cop, this guy here was just a kid… in the eyes of the law, anyway. His name is… MITCHELL!” Chad said the last word and gave another series of loud raps on the door.

  “Criminy!” Holly hissed. “You’re going to wake the whole neighborhood.”

  Chad flashed
a disbelieving look back at her and then leaned in, turning his left ear to the door. He thought he heard a floorboard creak inside the house.

  “What’s this guy do?” Holly asked.

  “He was well on track to being one of the best computer hackers in the area when I knew him. We had to arrest him a couple times.” He paused and listened again. “After that, he helped us out on a few occasions as well.”

  “Helped?” Holly said. “Remember what happened to the last computer geek who grot dragged into this?”

  Chad knocked on the door again. “Yeah. I do,” he said. “But I think Mitchell is safe. I don’t think we are being watched.”

  “What?” Holly said. “What makes you say that?”

  Just then, the front door of the house was yanked inward. “What the fuck are you doing pounding on my door at this hour?” a young man said from across the threshold as he glared out at the front porch intruders. But then he recognized Chad. “Officer Dean?” he said, and his brow furrowed in tired confusion.

  The man in the doorway was still young by definition. Holly pitted him somewhere in his early twenties. Mitchell had bright green eyes and a perfect nose centered between them. He had thick blonde hair that, aside from a cowlick at the back of his head, looked perfectly placed. His jawline, chin, and above his upper lip were dusted with a fine shadow that outlined his face well. But as Holly looked down at the rest of him, and she was able to see a lot given that he’d answered the door wearing only a pair of small red briefs. She noted his trim muscular body was otherwise void of any hair, much like an Olympic swimmer’s. She couldn’t help but blush when she noticed Mitchell’s barely-concealed endowment.

  “It’s not ‘Officer’ anymore,” Chad said and smiled. “Just Chad now, Mitchell. Shit, kid. You really grew up!” he added. “Body finally caught up to that freaking amazing mind of yours.”

  Mitchell looked down at himself and then returned Chad’s smile. Proudly, he said, “Damn right I did. I turned eighteen and grew like a foot. Then I took up swimming and lifting. Turned me into this guy.”