"You just keep turning up like a bad penny, don't you, Chick?" I said to the man across the room.
His self-satisfied expression instantly changed to one of rage. When he spoke, his raspy, nasal voice was even more high-pitched than usual, sharp and almost petulant, like a child's. I didn't like the sound of it at all. "Don't call me Chick! My name is Sacra Silver!"
"All right, Sacra Silver, what's the story here? You trying to graduate from accessory to mass murderer? As far as I know, you have yet to manage to kill anyone on your own. I'd think you'd want to keep it that way, quit while you're ahead."
"Shut up! Come in the room!"
"I am in the room."
"Come further into the room! Do as I say, you dwarf fuck, or I step on this pedal and turn your brother into a French fry!"
I walked to the center of the room, stopped beside Garth, looked over at April. "Are you all right?" I asked quietly.
"Shut up!" Carver barked as my witch friend nodded slowly. "Raise your arms to your sides and turn around very slowly!"
I did so-and was very happy I'd left the Beretta behind.
Carver continued in his angry child's voice, "Now open your shirt. Pull it all the way up."
"What's your problem, Sacra?" I asked as I began to unbutton my shirt.
"You're late!"
"I had business with a client, and I said so over the phone. Weren't you listening?"
"I didn't hear your car pull into the driveway."
"I just got a new muffler."
"Open your shirt and pull it up. Turn around."
"Listen, Sacra," I said, holding my shirt open and slowly turning, "if I'd known you were here, taping our conversation wouldn't exactly be high on my list of priorities of the things I'd like to do with you. Now, I asked you what was going on. Why all these other people? I thought this was between you and me."
"Who are you to talk?" he screamed at me, spittle flying from his thin lips. His face had suddenly gone crimson, and he was leaning so far forward that I was afraid he was going to lose his balance and fall, killing Garth by accident, or shooting me, or both.
"Just take it easy, Sacra," I said very quietly. "Calm down, and we'll talk about what it is you want."
Suddenly, in a sea change of emotion that both astounded and terrified me, his features wrinkled up, and he burst into tears. "You thought this was between you and me?" he sobbed. "You brought my family into this! You went to see my mom and dad, and you talked about me behind my back. You had no right to do that! You made me lose my job! Now I'm supposed to go to Europe and never come back, or I'll lose my inheritance. I don't even know anybody in Europe. Now even my mom doesn't want to see me anymore, and it's all because of you. It isn't fair!"
So that was that, I thought with a decidedly sinking feeling. Chick Carver aka Sacra Silver had skidded right around the bend. Garth had been absolutely right in insisting that I not invite the police to the party; this man was now more than ready to start doing his own killing, at the slightest provocation, and his first victim was only a footstep, or a twitch of his trigger finger, away.
"Where's the girl, Sacra?" I asked softly.
"Vicky's safe."
"She's not safe," April interjected in a low, dignified tone laced with anger and defiance. "She's unconscious in the trunk of this man's car. He made her drink some milk on the way down here, and it must have been drugged. She could suffocate in there. At the very least, she's going to be terrified out of her mind when she wakes up and finds herself locked up in a small, dark space."
"We're not going to be here that much longer," Carver said. He had stopped blubbering, and had undergone another mercurial shift in mood, this time to gloating.
"Sacra got April's name and address out of my address book when he was here before," Mary said in a curiously mild, wooden tone that made me wonder if she might not also be drugged. I looked over to where she was sitting behind the white piano, and found her staring off into space at a spot somewhere above my head. "Vicky was here then, and I told Sacra about her situation."
I sighed. "What do you want with Vicky and April, Sacra? They have nothing to do with any of this."
"You stuck your nose into that girl's family business too, didn't you, you little shit? After Mary told me about Vicky, I did some reading in the library. I know all about what happened. That's why I brought Vicky here, along with the woman who's been helping you to turn the girl against her parents. If I knew where your parents lived, Frederickson, they'd be here too. I'm going to teach you a lesson you'll never forget about sticking your nose into other people's private, family business and involving their parents. Now let's see how you like it!"
"You've already taught me a lesson I'll never forget, Sacra. And if I hadn't interfered in Vicky's family business, as you put it, she'd be dead. What do you plan to do with her?"
"She can't go back to her parents; thanks to you, they're both in the loony bin, and probably will be for the rest of their lives. So I'm going to be her father, and Mary will be her mother. If I have to go away, I'm not going to be alone. I'm tired of being alone, with nobody to love me. It's time I started my own family anyway."
There was no telling precisely what was going on in Chick Carver's decidedly deranged mind at the moment, the same as there was no telling what he was going to do from moment to moment, but the prospect of at least two lives being saved was infinitely better than a zero score, and so there was no way I was going to pose the unasked question.
Mary answered it anyway, speaking in the same wooden tone. "I've agreed to go with him, Mongo. Sacra's been right all along. He's the only man who's ever really understood me, and the only man I've ever really loved. Now that I realize that, I don't want to die."
Looking at Mary's face, listening to her voice, I didn't believe her at all-except, naturally, for the part about not wanting to die. I didn't think Garth believed her either, and I was surprised Chick Carver did. But the fact that the man had apparently bought her story could only be good news, of a sort; her ploy, if that's what it was, had at least gained her freedom of movement, even if at the moment I couldn't see what good it was going to do. She couldn't very well attack Carver with her piano. If I could get close enough to her to whisper, I'd tell her about the gun on the bookshelf outside the door, but I doubted whether Carver was going to let me do too much moving around. I had to find a way to stall and look for some kind of opening before killing time began, and the only weapon I had close at hand, in a manner of speaking, was my mouth. Sooner or later, Carver was going to tire of whatever game he was playing, and I had to make my move before then.
"Sacra," I said evenly, "take your family's money and split. If you kill us, the police are going to be after you no matter what country you try to hide out in. Considering the fact that you've already killed one man, some people would say that you're getting off easy."
"I didn't kill anybody!"
"You caused a man to be killed; you ordered his death. It's the same thing."
"Sacra," Mary said in a more animated tone, one that had become companionable and soothing, "tell Mongo what happened the same way you told us before. Explain why what's been done to you is so unfair."
Carver turned his head slightly to look at Mary, but the barrel of his pistol didn't move away from its dead aim on my chest. Mary gave him a reassuring smile, and he looked back at me.
"The whole business of using empty tankers to haul water to the Middle East was my idea," he said in a whiny voice that was laced with both rage and self-pity. "I put it in the office suggestion box. They loved it! The chairman himself took me to dinner to tell me what a wonderful idea it was. I got a five-thousand-dollar bonus, and they told Wellington to put me in complete charge of making sure that the plan was carried out."
"Do you know why they did that, Sacra?" I asked quietly, my gaze fastened on his trigger finger.
"To make me the fall guy if something went wrong!"
"Good thinking, Sacra. You'd be the
fall guy if things went wrong-if charges started to go up the ladder. So far, that hasn't happened; everybody seems to have bought the story about the rogue captains. But things could change. That's another reason why you should leave now without doing something very stupid that's sure to draw attention to you, and make people start asking questions again."
I thought it was pretty good advice, but Chick Carver wasn't listening to anything but the twisted, emotionally stunted voices in his own head. He said, "Everything would have been fine if that son-of-a-bitch Blaine hadn't started messing around! He deserved to die! The company was making millions of dollars in extra profits on that water. Nobody else cared! Kuwait needed the water after all the fires, the company was happy to provide it for them, and I know I was due for a big promotion. And then it was all threatened because some jerk from some jerkwater river town was ready to make trouble just because the ships were dribbling a little oil in his precious river! What kind of sense does that make?!"
"It didn't make sense to you, so you gave the order to kill him. Tom Blaine was taking samples from all the ships, but you waited until he got to that particular tanker, because you knew you could bully its sorry liquor bottle of a captain into doing what he did. In the eyes of the law, that makes you equally guilty. Like I said, you should quit while you're ahead."
"He got what was coming to him, the same as you're going to get what's coming to you! Nobody gave a thought to that man's death until you and your brother started nosing around. And then you turned my parents against me. Now I don't have anything, and you're going to pay for what you did!"
Chick Carver was getting himself really worked up. Killing time was getting nearer, but I didn't have the slightest idea what to do to stop it. With my quickness, I was pretty certain I could dart to one side and start rolling. The chances were good that he'd miss me with his first shot, and by the time he tracked me and got off another I would have pulled the Seecamp from my ankle holster and put a bullet in his head. But Garth would die. I had to wait, keep hoping that something would happen that would give me at least a slim chance of saving my brother's life, along with April's and my own.
"You've already got me in your sights, Sacra," I said, suppressing a sigh. "You're taking Mary and Vicky with you. Why threaten April and Garth? What more do you want?"
"I want to hear you say you're sorry for turning my parents against me, and I want to hear you beg for your life!"
"Okay. I'm sorry I turned your parents against you, and I'm begging you for my life. Can we go now?"
It was obvious I should have chosen my words, or tone of voice, more carefully, for now blood rushed to the other man's face, and spittle appeared at the corners of his mouth. I certainly didn't want to play games with Chick Carver, but statistics showed that sincere pleading can just as easily trigger a psychotic episode as passive defiance, which can delay execution because it denies gratification. But the fact of the matter was that, with Garth's death only a footstep away, I just didn't know what to say to the other man, nor how to act. I could only play percent ages and hope that Carver would stand still and talk instead of walk.
"Say it like you mean it!" he shrieked.
"I can't, Sacra. You're making me too nervous."
"Then let me hear you beg for your brother's life!"
Garth, who had seemed almost bored throughout my exchange with Chick Carver, now spoke for the first time since calling me into the music room. "If you beg for my life to this skinny bag of shit, Mongo," my brother, who'd always had a way with words, said, "I swear I'll come back from the dead to break your scrawny neck."
"You heard him," I said to Carver, watching him, again thinking of the gun strapped to my ankle. Now I was trying to gauge how long it would take me, without ducking away, to simply reach down for the gun and snap off a shot. That would still take too long. He might or might not miss the stationary target I would present, but he certainly wouldn't miss the pedal with his foot; even if I managed to bore him right between the eyes, he would still fall on the pedal, and Garth would die. "He won't let me."
"We know you're going to kill us anyway, Mr. Silver," April said, her tone calm, quiet, and dignified. "It won't make any difference what Mongo, Garth, or I say to you. But it also doesn't make any difference if we die. Everybody dies." She paused, looked at Garth, then at me. She smiled warmly, and her limpid gray eyes glowed with affection. "I'm happy to die with friends I love and respect. As for you, Mr. Silver, your life is miserable now, and will only become more miserable after you kill us. You will only become more twisted and bent, and that is the only kind of love you will ever be capable of giving or receiving. It's 'rebound,' Mr. Silver, and I'm frankly surprised that a student of the occult like yourself shouldn't have perceived the dangers of the path you chose to take."
"I can see that I have to get your attention!" Chick Carver screamed as he lifted his right knee to an exaggerated height, almost to his chest, and then proceeded to stomp on the foot pedal in front of him.
Despite the fact that I'd been anticipating, dreading, just such an action, Carver's movement was still so sudden and unexpected-so unthinkable-that I didn't even have time to cry out. Now I screwed my eyes shut and screamed inside myself, expecting to hear the crackle of electricity over my brother's brief scream, then smell the burning of his flesh. But nothing happened. I opened my eyes, looked at Garth-and found him looking back at me. I glanced across the room at Chick Carver, who was staring at Garth in astonishment. And then we both looked down at the foot pedal under the sole of his boot. The lights on the pedal were out, as was the light on the amplifier.
Mary, sitting at her piano-which incidentally happened to be flush to the master console that controlled every piece of equipment in the music room and recording studio-had shut everything off at precisely the right moment.
Chick Carver started to swing his pistol around in my direction, then stiffened in shock as his own voice boomed throughout the room, at ear-splitting volume, from two huge floor speakers on either side of him.
WHO ARE YOU TO TALK?
It seemed Mary had been doing even more than keeping her right hand close to the off switch on the master console while she played her piano; she had also been taping the entire proceedings. This time I hadn't had to bring my own recording engineer with me; she'd been here all along, waiting for me to show up so that the show could begin. I wondered if Garth had known, or suspected. YOU BROUGHT MY FAMILY INTO THIS!
The high-decibel assault, combined with the realization of what had been done to him, momentarily froze Chick Carver. I dove to one side, snatched the Seecamp from my ankle holster, rolled over, and came up on my feet with the gun aimed at Carver's head, ready to fire. But Mary had already beaten me to the punch, in a manner of speaking.
There had been a twelve-string guitar resting on a high stool between Mary and Carver, and as her tormentor had started to turn toward me, she had jumped up from the piano, grabbed the guitar by the neck with both hands, and smashed its face into Carver's face.
EVERYTHING WOULD HAVE BEEN FINE IF THAT SON-OF-A-BITCH BLAINE HADN'T STARTED MESSING AROUND! HE DESERVED TO DIE!
Six of the twelve strings on the guitar were steel wire, strung under high tension, and they acted something like a cheese cutter on Mary's hapless target. The first blow flayed the skin from Carver's nose and left cheek, sending blood spraying in all directions. The second blow to his face broke the neck of the guitar and sent the man crashing back through the plate-glass window behind him onto the outside deck.
"I'll kill him!" Mary screamed, and, still holding the broken guitar with its tangled, bloody strings by the neck, leaped headfirst through the broken window after her intended victim.
"Uh, I'll be right back," I said to Garth and April as I quickly headed for the open space in the wall of glass.
"Take your time, brother," Garth said drily. "I think Mary has the situation under control."
That was a matter of opinion, I thought as I hopped over the
sill with its necklace of broken glass onto the deck and found Mary kneeling behind the blood-soaked and wildly flailing Chick Carver. She had one of the steel wire guitar strings wrapped around his neck and was tugging on it with both hands. Blood was welling from her palms, where the wire was cutting into them, and from Chick Carver's fingers as he desperately pulled at the wire that was threatening to choke the life out of him if it didn't sever the carotid artery first. His face, or what I could see of it behind a shimmering mask of blood, looked like something a very large cat had been playing with. His gun was lying beside him on the deck, and I kicked it away.
"I'll kill him," Mary said in a very low, purposeful tone as she pulled even harder on the wire. She kept repeating it, like a mantra. "I'll kill him. I'll kill him."
A neutral observer would have to say that whatever spell Sacra Silver had cast over Mary had been broken. Apparently unhappy with her lack of progress, she shifted her position, sat down, and put both her feet in the space between Carver's shoulder blades for added leverage. She was just getting ready to give the wire another, really serious tug when I stepped between Carver's flailing legs, reached forward, and grabbed her wrists.
"Whoa, sweetheart," I said. "You've got him reined in nicely here. Take it easy. Nice job, incidentally-what you did in there."
But Mary wasn't going to be mollified by any of my sweet talk. She was still tugging on the wire, at the same time pushing on Carver's back with her feet, and threatening to pull me off balance. "I'll kill him, Mongo," she said through bloodless, trembling lips. "I swear I'll kill him."
It was April who, having freed Garth and mercifully turned off the blaring tape recorder, now saved the day, along with Carver's life and my dignity. She and Garth had come out on the deck, and now April quickly stepped behind Mary and put her hands gently on Mary's shoulders, while Garth gripped my forearms to help steady me. "Let go, Mary," April said softly. "It's over now. Let go. Let Mongo and Garth handle him."
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