On The Edge

by Daniel Cleaver

  “What the hell are you doing?!” yelled the captain over the radio. “I’ll have your badge for this. Do you read me, over?”

  I ignored the message. Mia went to pick up the radio mic but I shook my head and she smiled as the captain blasted out a string of threats in my direction. It wasn’t the first time and I was sure it wasn’t going to be the last.

  We drove in a staggered formation so no one heading toward us could ignore the sight of three cop cars on the wrong side of the road. We were making good time as the clock on my dashboard ticked around to the witching hour. I fishtailed out onto the Sunset Boulevard, as did George, who spun one-eighty, before turning around and falling in behind the captain.

  The clock read five minutes to the hour but we were still going to be late. There was nothing else for it: I flipped on the nitrous oxide and stamped on the accelerator and the car lurched forward, pushing our heads back into the seats. We shot along the Strip until we came up to another bunching at a stop light. Some of the cars tried to maneuver out of our way but we were stuck by the red light. There was nothing for it, I pulled out onto the wrong side of the street and floored it. I saw the first car, spin out of control in alarm but the rest managed to get out of my way. Once again, the captain and George McGinty fell in behind me and staggered the formation to give a wider target to oncoming traffic, making a formidable sight.

  It was four minutes to the hour and we were still too far away. I hammered the engine and narrowly avoided a head-on collision with a Mack truck; he blared on his air horn and gave me the bird. Maaan, we get no respect. Not until, of course, something happened to one of his nearest and dearest then he’d be begging for our assistance. Begging and pleading until they would turn and start with the questions: why weren’t we doing more? why were we sitting on our asses? etc. As I’d said before, we just can’t win. I swerved around him and was startled to see Mia flip him the bird back but probably not as surprised as the truck driver was. She burst out laughing and I joined her. You need moments like that to break the tension and then I concentrated on the task in hand, as the clock clicked around to one minute before midnight . . .

  CHAPTER 23

  Disused warehouse, 9980 Wilshire Boulevard, L.A., CA 90036 – midnight.

  The flat dissecting table was almost upright, at about ten degrees less than vertical. Candy was tied spreadeagled once more, the wound around her neck a vivid purple bruise spotted with scarlet-colored dots where the blood had burst under the skin. She had petechial hemorrhaging of the eyes, from being strangled into unconsciousness, then revived before final asphyxiation occurred.

  The Hangman stood in front of the camera and said, “Ladies and gentlemen,” the voice distorter making the voice sound a deep metallic. “As promised, the drawing and quartering stage of this deserved volunteer’s execution. You are eyewitnesses to a legally sanctioned execution, albeit sometime ago: it was a not uncommon procedure in Europe. An execution reserved for the most heinous of crimes and on the statute books for several hundred years, you’ll be watching not a re-enactment but an actual execution, an exact copy of a historic event, one that’ll make those barbarians in the Middle East with their stonings and beheadings look enlightened. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the hanging, drawing and quartering,” he said with the flourish of a showman. He moved away from the camera to show Candy sagging against her binds on the upright table. He waved the jar of ammonium carbonate – smelling salts – under Candy’s nose and she jerked awake. The Hangman used a remote to zoom the camera up close to her face wanting to catch the moment when Candy realized she was still alive. She let out a low, pitiful groan when she realized that she was back in her living nightmare. “No . . .” Emitted quietly from her lips.

  “Not so brave now, are you, dear?” said the Hangman and used the remote to close-up on her eyes that darted left and right, still even now trying to find an escape. The whites of her eyes had hemorrhaged a classic sign of someone hanged but usually the person was dead, their torment over, unlike Candy, whose suffering was only just beginning.

  The Hangman looked at a tray of implements assembled near to the table. Candy saw them from the corner of her eye and thrashed against her binds. She could see what looked like a collection of bizarre instruments and guessed that the Hangman had gathered the original ancient tools that made for the task of drawing. She shook, shuddered, and then passed out in fright. The Hangman held up a highly sharpened dagger and it glinted in the light. He gently slit open Candy’s dress, from top to bottom, looking like a medical procedure, and the dress flopped open. She was not wearing underwear. The Hangman turned to the camera and muttered, “Look, no undergarments. Whore.” He tutted. “She’d gone commando, secreting her whore-like stink to attract mates, inflicting it upon the rest of us.”

  He turned back to her, noticing that she had passed out. He used the salts once again. She became conscious and sobbed. “No!”

  “Look at this, ladies and gentlemen.” He used the remote to concentrate on her genitalia. He used the scalpel to click across the metal rings pierced through her labia. “Look what she does to herself to attract the slavering dogs.”

  She screamed as she watched him select a vicious-looking tool from the tray, a curved hook, not dissimilar to a miniature garden scythe. He showed it to the camera, then to her, and she trembled in fright. He stuck it into her and she murmured a low groan of pain; he swiftly dragged it down, finding the skin surprisingly thick and hard to cut with the medieval instrument and when he hit the pubis bone Candy howled in agony. The Hangman showed the tool to the audience, as blood dripped to the floor. He stood back so that the camera could get a good view as he sliced her, opening her up. The jagged cut parted, giving a glimpse of the organs inside. Her intestines bulged and pushed themselves through the wound and uncoiled a few inches, looking like a live creature, a snakelike movement as gravity took over, and they slipped and slimed from her stomach cavity, as the first three feet of her small intestine spilled onto the cement floor. Candy screeched so loud it became inaudible.

  The Hangman addressed Candy. “If you were a man you would now be emasculated, your member would be sliced off and shown to you before being burned in front of your very eyes. The law was very clear on this and considered a vital part of the ceremony. Can you imagine what that would have felt like?” the Hangman asked her and she murmured deliriously. “It’s amazing how cruel our ancestors could be, how they knew what they could do while the prisoner was still conscious: it seemed to be an important part of the rite that the traitor was most definitely alive. As are you, of course.”

  The Hangman went over to the tray and picked up the next item, a three-pronged weapon, resembling a garden claw. “This tool’s sole purpose is the removal of the entrails.” Candy’s eyes widened in terror at the wicked-looking implement and she fought against her binds in one last futile attempt to break free. The Hangman turned on a gas-fed bar-b-que-type grill. “The burning of the entrails after you have been eviscerated was written into law.”

  Her head thrashed from side to side as she screamed, which echoed around the cavernous storage facility. The Hangman said, “It’s recorded that the prisoner is still conscious while they watch their entrails burn. Fascinating, isn’t it?”

  Candy was beyond a conversation. The Hangman gave a semi-shrug, dug the weapon-like instrument into her stomach cavity, yanked out a mixture of organs, comprising the liver and kidneys, and tossed them onto the grill.

  She had a whiff of her own entrails before thankfully her heart gave out and she blissfully died.

  CHAPTER 24

  I cornered practically on two wheels into the Miter Storage’s weed-strewn parking lot. If the Hangman yapped away for a while, we might just make it. He had a habit of talking and talking to his awaiting audience: he certainly loved the sound of his own voice. I made a beeline for the main doors, bumping over the poorly maintained potholes and screeched to a halt in a cloud of dust by the main entrance. I leaped from
the car, Mia close behind me as we threw caution to the wind and burst through the main doors. We dashed down the main corridor, covering each other as we passed any open doorway, knowing it could not be any of the offices, having determined from the recording that Candy was in the main storage area, somewhere near the loading bay. We had checked on satellite and street views that the back would not be an alternative attack point as the loading bay doors were metal shutters that were locked securely. We knew the Hangman would be aware of our approach and that a surprise attack was out of the question. We ran as fast as we could in an attempt to save Candy. We’d worked all the angles on the drive up and had decided that speed was of the essence.

  Although we might alert the Hangman, who might flee the scene and would probably evade us for the third time, we had agreed this was preferable if the extra seconds might save Candy’s life. There was a dogleg turn in the corridor, which slowed us, as we had to cover each other around this point. It would be a perfect place for the Hangman to wait and take us out as we rounded the corner. Our caution had given the others time to catch up. I turned the corner first but it was empty. We charged en masse up the remaining corridor where we could see the double swing-doors that led to the enormous storage areas. We met with row upon row of tall, metal shelving, which obscured a clear view to the other side of the warehouse. Without thinking we each took a row and ran down it. The shelves were half-empty as the building had been abandoned long ago but it meant we could not see each other and kept our radio mics open for the first person to come across them to alert the others. I found myself at the end of my row of shelves and in the wide loading area where the table sat center stage; it was blood-soaked and gory. Mia practically ran into me and I tried to shield her from the scene: she gasped and buried her head into my shoulder, until we heard the running feet of the others and parted, remembering to keep our romance a secret. The captain skidded to a halt and stared in disbelief at the blood-covered detritus that had soaked into the cloth that covered the table, along with the contents of her bladder and bowel, which slowly dripped onto the floor with an annoying monotony that was breaking the silence. “How?” he started. “How did he get so far? We were here in minutes.” It was a rhetorical question and he threw his arms in the air in despair.

  George McGinty, ever the professional, radioed it in and we knew the scene of crime guys would be there soon along with our replacements as we scanned the area, looking for anything the Hangman may have left behind, but we were doubtful knowing how thorough he had been.

  Milo said, “If we were only five minutes earlier. . .”

  Ferdy said, “This would have taken some time. She died a while ago.”

  “Then how?” said the captain. “I don’t understand, why did he post on the internet and give us that chance?”

  “The Hangman’s screwing with us,” I said.

  Ferdy clicked his fingers. “We’ve been had.”

  “How so?” asked the captain.

  “It’s on a time clock; he just put it on a simple time delay. This could all have happened hours ago.”

  “We never stood a chance?” said Mia, her shoulders slumped in anguish. I wanted to go to her and to comfort her but did not dare. We were about to be pulled from the case as a team: the last thing I wanted was for our partnership to be broken up, too.

  I forced myself to look at the remains on the table and I became aware of a smell. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, then realized that I could smell burning and turned to see the sizzling flesh on the grill. I noticed bizarrely that it smelled of pork. I’d seen many things in my time but to see the entrails roasting of a person I cared for, had worked alongside and a former lover, was almost too much to bear, even for me. The gruesomeness I knew was one of the Hangman’s flourishes. The cruelness added another layer of torment for me and he was doing an excellent job.

  “Don’t move around too much,” said the captain. “We don’t want to contaminate the scene.”

  George found a fire extinguisher and went to put out the roasting flesh.

  The captain said, “Halt! That’s evidence.”

  “Not if it’s burnt to a crisp it ain’t. Besides, we all know what it is.”

  “Nevertheless, let’s do this by the book. Ferdy, grab your camera and document it all before the evidence is ash.” The captain let out an enormous sigh. “Where’s the body?”

  Ferdy came back and snapped off photos of the organs on the grill, the fleshy parts on the table and the scene in general. He coughed in the way that he did when he had bad news to impart and didn’t know where to start.

  “What do ya know, Ferdy?” I asked.

  “Well, I looked up this particular torture online and if the Hangman followed it to the letter, then after the disembowelment, he would have beheaded her, then it would have been the quartering, which, er, literally means that the body would have been dissected into four.”

  “So, where is it?”

  “Well, again, if he’s doing it properly, it used to be sent to outposts in the kingdom as a warning to others that may have similar ideas.”

  “And the head?”

  “That would’ve been displayed on a spike on London Bridge.”

  “Well, I think we can be safe in the knowledge that that won’t be happening,” sneered George.

  I looked around the evidence. The blood splatter was unusual and looked higher up the shelving racks, along with the odd globule of flesh. One by one, my colleagues followed my sense of direction until we looked up and saw a mechanism, not unlike a jaw of a bear trap; it, too, was dripping blood and there looked to be a foot inside it ripped off at the ankle.

  Ferdy took a snap and the captain gave him a frosty look. I spun one-eighty and saw a corresponding device high up in the shelving. I looked up to where the other two contraptions should be and they were present.

  Ferdy cleared his throat again. “Out with it,” I said.

  “Again, he’s following the procedure pretty accurately. I would suggest that he severed the body into the four segments, the limbs were already fastened and we now know attached to those.” He pointed up to the four corners and I could see her hand in one with her trademark garish nail polish, and wanted to weep.

  “But how do they get from here,” the captain pointed at the dissection table, “to up there?”

  Ferdy said, “Well, it olden days they would have used four horses pulling at the same time but I’m sure we’ll find some sort of apparatus that can replicate that and pull on her four extremities.” He contorted his face as if under extreme pressure and demonstrated his body exploding. “She would have been literally torn apart.”

  CHAPTER 25

  As expected, we were relieved of duty with regard to Candy’s murder and given some time off to grieve. Upper management was not that thoughtful as a rule but, as George McGinty pointed out, that they were probably afraid of being sued by us for some newfangled stress disorder. Anyway, I didn’t want a vacation and there was no way I was not going to investigate Candy’s brutal murder, even if it had to be unofficial. We all agreed and arranged to meet the next day with a plan.

  I lit a cigarette as I drove Mia away from the crime scene. We were jaded by the whole experience. Candy was one of our own and we were helpless. She was under our protection and somehow the Hangman entered her locked and guarded apartment, forced her to leave, passing the police undetected, then murdered her in the most heinous fashion. “Who would devise such a torture?” Mia finally asked.

  I was the resident know-it-all concerning medieval torture and of man’s inhumanity to man in general. I explained. “Hanged, drawn, and quartered was reserved for the very worst crimes; attacks on high clergy or heads of state, that sorta thing. Certainly for attacks on the King, or parliament. You may have heard of the Gunpowder Plot? It’s still celebrated every November 5th in the UK. They burn an effigy of the ringleader and let off fireworks; they treat the event like our July 4th. We celebrate independence from their tyran
ny and they celebrate the hanging, drawing, and quartering of a failed assassin.”

  “What happened?” Mia asked. I didn’t know if she was interested or just wanted to take her mind off the bloodthirsty scene that we’d encountered at the storage facility.

  “The Gunpowder Plot was conceived by a bunch of disgruntled Catholics; they managed to get into the cellars of the Houses of Parliament with kegs of dynamite, and had it worked would have killed the King and his parliament, all the leaders of the day. Thirteen of the conspirators were condemned to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. It drew quite a crowd, as all public executions did.”

  “Do,” she corrected.

  “Of course,” I agreed. “You’re absolutely right, still ‘do’. Plenty of countries around the world still execute publicly.”

  “It’s barbaric.”

  “If ya gonna be killed by your State, I doubt if you care if there is an audience or not.”