When I looked over at Eunectes, he was rhythmically rubbing his crotch against the corner of the workbench. He’d clamped his left hand into a bench vise and his right hand was gradually turning the crank as he stared rapturously at Courtney. Slowly, she reached for the lever to lower the press. With her vulgar monologue flowing like the riff of a demented jazz musician, she looked into the audience and our eyes met. Her desperation had transformed into horror. Again, I nodded.
I needed to know what Eunectes and the others would allow to happen. I needed to know the depth of their evil and depravity. I needed to justify the smoldering rage in my gut and burning violence that was about to erupt.
CHAPTER 38
Lengths of iron pipe were stacked against the workbench, providing me with a show stopper. I grabbed a two-foot section, slammed it against the entryway counter, shattering the Formica, and yelled “Stop!” The outburst froze everyone for a moment, except for Courtney who pushed the lever on the metal press to halt the imminent, grisly spectacle. From his vice-gripped position, Eunectes commanded her to continue, but she didn’t move. He unclamped his hand and raged at the interruption of his grand fantasy.
“Think of your junkie sister and your cinematic debut in a snuff film,” he snarled to Courtney. “There are much worse fates than being crushed while high on smack.”
She looked horrified with her options but was unwilling to restart the press.
Eunectes shook his head in disgust and stepped into the semi-circle of crush freaks, his acolytes in homicidal perversion. “This is merely a minor interruption from a disloyal coward,” he said coldly and then angrily addressed Redbug: “I told you we shouldn’t take on a new member so late in our voyage.”
Redbug looked around, hoping the others would come to his rescue. “It was Luis,” he said, trying to shift the blame.
“No matter,” Eunectes said with a malevolent smile. “We will simply restart the proceedings once we’ve dealt with this traitor. Take him—and we’ll have a double feature this evening.”
I slapped the pipe against the palm of my hand. Nobody moved.
“If you allow this gutless bastard to leave, he’s sure to snitch to the police.” Eunectes left a dramatic silence and then continued, “And he knows what each one of you looks like.” I could sense the collective anxiety as heads turned from Eunectes to me. But still nobody rose.
“Redbug, this man will destroy your life when he sends the cops to the museum and you’re arrested for lewd and lascivious acts and sexual abuse of animals. Imagine the humiliation, my friend, as you’re judged by the hypocrites of this great state.”
Evidently, Eunectes didn’t figure that Luis was behind my crush interruptus. While Luis remained frozen, Redbug grabbed a length of pipe. The audience pushed aside their chairs to create space for him to stalk me. I saw some of the others eying tools and scraps of metal, as if screwing up the courage to join the fight. I considered calling out to Dennis and Larry for backup, but figured that three against fifteen was still bad odds. Even with experience in the projects of San Francisco and the jungles of Vietnam, they’d wind up a bloody mess—and I might end up a human pancake if the melee didn’t go our way.
So, I opted for smart over tough. I dropped my pipe and pulled the .38 from the holster inside my waistband. Redbug paused when I took what my police academy instructor called a tactical stance and aimed the gun at him. This posture avoids the downsides of alternative positions which look more cop-like but provide less stability and impede movement.
“I will shoot you,” I said, “and anyone else who brings a pipe to a gunfight.”
Redbug must have figured the odds were still in his favor or I wasn’t serious or maybe he was just desperate. In any case, he continued to advance. I didn’t feel like playing games, but neither did I feel like killing the dumb shit. At the academy we were told that if you draw your gun, you do so with the intent to shoot. And if you shoot, you do so to stop a threat—not with the intent to kill. This latter caveat always struck me as bullshit to appease the public. Cops aim for center mass to stop a threat, which means a good chance of hitting a vital organ and killing somebody. The best way to stop a threat is to stop his breathing.
Redbug moved slowly, closing the gap to eight feet. I figured a shot into his shoulder would shift the group psychology in a constructive direction regarding the outcome of the evening. I pulled the trigger.
The Treasury load provided an impressive explosion in the confines of the shop. The slug spun Redbug around, and he crumpled to the floor. His screams of surprise and pain broke through the ringing in everyone’s ears and did a fine job of adjusting the attitude of those gathered. Now, rather than rushing me, they decided scrambling for the exits would be advisable.
Some pushed their way to the front door and onto the street, while others realized there was less of a throng trying to get through the back door and into the alley. From the crowd jostling at the front, Luis turned to me and mouthed “thank you.” I was in a piss poor mood, disgusted that he and the others had allowed themselves to fall under Eunectes’s spell and let the insanity develop to the point of passively watching a drugged, street kid get put under a twenty-ton metal press to gratify their sexual fantasies. I mouthed “fuck you” in reply. His face fell momentarily, but then he gave an apologetic nod. I almost felt bad.
At the same time, Eunectes had shoved his way through the front door and reached the sidewalk. Larry had no problem picking out the ringleader and based on a dull, meaty thump, followed by violent retching, I surmised that the perverted puppeteer had been subdued.
~||~
With the party over and the puppets scattered, Larry dragged Eunectes back inside and Dennis brought Stefan into the room, now filled with overturned chairs, abandoned coats, and powerful machines. I told Stefan to tie Eunectes’s hands in front of him, and my weasely client applied his bondage skills to something worthwhile. As he worked the knots, I raised the metal press to release Petey, who curled into a fetal position on the concrete floor. I stuffed one of the leftover coats under his head.
Courtney was sobbing softly and Larry draped his coat around her shoulders in an uncharacteristically chivalrous move. He led her to a chair, where she crumpled and clung to him. Meanwhile, Redbug was bleeding and blubbering his innocence, insisting that he’d been duped by Eunectes. I told him to shut up or the next shot would put him out of my misery. I tossed him a discarded denim jacket and suggested that applying pressure would stanch the bleeding.
Eunectes looked at me with contempt. Whatever he thought meant nothing to me, but I wanted to know the rest of the story—as Paul Harvey would say. When I muscled Eunectes’s bound hands onto the lower plate of the metal press, his arrogance became tinged with fear. I directed Stefan to lower the machine’s upper plate and Eunectes clenched his fingers into fists—as if that would help.
“The truth, you sick bastard,” I said as his hands became pinned and Stefan stopped the machine. “Tell me what happened with Michelle,” I demanded, figuring his reply would fulfill my obligation to Stefan who’d paid very well for the answer. Eunectes sneered, so I lowered the press until his face twisted in pain.
“Stop, enough,” he groaned. “Here’s the deal. When Michelle started wavering, I gave that cunt a choice. She could either be the crush mistress for the kid or she could buy him from me.”
“Let me guess, the asking price was a hundred grand,” I said.
“Yes, an entirely reasonable sum, I’m sure you’ll agree. And either way, I came out on top, so to speak.” For a man whose hands were pinned between two slabs of steel, he was doing a remarkable job of recovering his pomposity.
“How so?”
“Either I ended up achieving the ultimate sexual fantasy. Or I ended up with enough money to allow me to pursue my passions without having to work some shitty job.” His voice had become increasingly throaty with pain, as the pressure on his hands took its toll.
“But she failed to pay
up, eh?”
“Yes, and I began to sense that she was becoming dangerous to my voyage of carnal delight. Morality can be such an impediment to achieving the peak of pleasure,” he sighed. “I was worried she’d go the cops about what was in the works, even if it meant she’d be sacrificed on Grant Roberts’ altar of righteousness.”
“So?
“So, with Redbug’s assistance, I switched spiders for the little game that Michelle played with her sorry excuse for a husband. There are upsides to having bootlickers and weaklings when executing grand ventures.”
Dennis had to restrain Stefan as he described Eunectes in the most colorfully profane terms I’d heard strung together in a very long time. Meanwhile, Redbug dragged himself into a sitting position and leaned against the workbench. From there, he interrupted Stefan’s harangue and insisted that he didn’t know what Eunectes had planned for the deadly arachnid that he’d provided from the museum.
“It was, dare I say, a devilishly elegant murder,” Eunectes said with evident pride and then exhaled with a ragged laugh to mask his discomfort. “Rather more complicated than necessary but poetic in its performance. I replaced Michelle with Courtney, who was readily convinced that her role as crush mistress was better than the alternatives.”
“How’d you get access to this place?” I asked. The answer didn’t really matter, but Eunectes’s sliminess held a kind of dark fascination. The man wasn’t stupid by any means. Evil, but not stupid. And I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with him or the others, so I was stalling for time while trying to figure out my next move.
“Quite simple. The proprietor, Mr. Hoffman, enjoyed socially unacceptable amusements. A photograph of the corpulent fellow stripped naked while Courtney stood next to him bearing a whip and baring her lovely breasts was a problem for him. Add a swastika armband and jackboots to complete her minimal costume and trading the negatives for a key to the shop seemed entirely reasonable.”
“And finally, what did you give to Petey to sedate him?”
Eunectes groaned softly and shifted his weight. “Heroin. And probably his first dose from what I can tell. The kid’s naturally dimwitted, which I initially took to be evidence of his being an addict. So now he’s just a drugged cretin. But no matter. An imbecile wandering the streets of the city has a life expectancy of a junkie or prostitute.” He took a shuddering breath. “I gave him his best chance to bring something interesting into the world, something memorable. He wouldn’t have felt a thing while my people would’ve had the sexual experience of a lifetime.”
“You figured heroin would’ve made the whole process of having his head crushed like a grape under a woman’s heel painless? Let’s give you a dose of what you were going to make Courtney deliver.” I felt a monstrous fury, a depraved desire to inflict pain. I’ve beaten and killed people who deserved it, but I never sought to create agony as an end in itself. I grasped the control lever and watched the steel plate descend another inch. Bones snapped and ligaments popped, like the meaty sound of breaking apart raw chicken. A gurgling scream lowered the red curtain on my rage, and I stopped the press.
~||~
Eunectes had passed out and now hung limply from the machine. The room was quiet except for a weeping dominatrix and a crush freak whispering, “Holy fuck,” over and over in response to the condition of his former master. Larry and Dennis were silent, wondering what I’d do with this shambles of humanity—and inhumanity. I was wondering the same thing.
Who deserved what? I could reveal the whole demented story to Lieutenant Papadopoulos, who would turn the case over to Grant Roberts, who would call a press conference to reveal how he’d scrubbed moral slime from the filthy streets of San Francisco. Eunectes would throw Luis and other crush freaks under the bus—or the metal press, as the case may be. They’d be trotted out as exhibit number one of the prosecution’s case against deviancy. The Moral Majority would declare a major victory over sin. But why does God’s lawyer get to decide who is a sub-human degenerate and deserves to be punished? The only thing more revolting than a woman crushing innocent animals would be the government stomping on citizens, including harmless perverts—harmless, unless you happen to be a cricket or a kitten.
And if the front page headline was going to read Linford Case Reveals Blackmail, Perversion, and Homicide, then a story on page two of the Chronicle would drag Goat Hill Extermination through the mud. We’d be implicated in the murder for having provided the poisons. The tabloids would have a journalistic orgy describing my company’s role in the moral mayhem that concluded with naked, delusional geezers using our products to unwittingly off themselves with the encouragement of their sicko grandkid.
The whole mess had begun with Lane Linford, who abused his grandparents to get the money he needed to pay Michelle, who had blackmailed Lane with an insect porn video to get the hundred grand she needed to buy Petey from Eunectes. And then there was Stefan, a furry freak who killed his wife by accident, courtesy of Redbug’s pathetically misguided devotion to Eunectes. Off to the side sat Courtney, who was trying to keep herself from being portrayed as a killer and her sister from being provided with a contaminated needle by Eunectes. Every sick path through weakness and perversion led back to this one man—and to my solution.
I told Dennis to haul Redbug to San Francisco General, drop him off at the emergency room entrance, and get the hell out of there. I told Larry to drive Courtney to Carol’s house with instructions for her to take care of the feminine wreckage however seemed best. That left an agitated Stefan wanting justice and an unconscious Eunectes dangling by his mashed hands from the metal press.
I thought back to a job involving an infested basement a couple months ago. A guy can learn a lot about the world from vermin.
CHAPTER 39
I decided to let nature takes its course. That is, to the extent that whatever the hell Stefan and Eunectes did in their private—and not so private—lives bore any resemblance to nature.
My decision emerged from remembering how I’d solved a problem in the dank basement of a customer who was upset by her creepy boarders. There were a dozen wolf spiders and a passel of silverfish scampering around the baseboards. It struck me that a batch of hungry predators wandering among a bunch of tasty prey was a “problem” on its way to solving itself. Sort of like the comedian who riffed on seeing a wanted poster that described a notorious criminal as being both armed and suicidal—maybe the FBI could just wait for this case to resolve itself.
Likewise, I suggested to the lady of the house that rather than spraying poisons, she had the makings of a built-in solution if she just let things unfold in their own way. I assured her we’d check back in a couple of weeks to see if the spiders had taken care of the silverfish and, owing to a shortage of food, might’ve headed back outside for better hunting. Sure enough, when I returned, there was nary a silverfish and just a couple of spiders. I caulked some cracks in the foundation to keep out moisture and wildlife, helped her clean up the old books, cardboard boxes, and potting soil that had fed the silverfish, and wished the basement spiders well with whatever slim pickings were left as an errant earwig wriggled under the washing machine.
That’s how I figured that Stefan would do a fine job of working out whatever resolution would be befitting a pervert seeking justice from a deviant.
“I’m outta here,” I told Stefan.
“What should I do with him?” he asked, gesturing to his unconscious foe.
“Up to you,” I said. “You’re the one who wanted in on the action and now the ball’s in your court. Press the flesh, call the cops, leave him here for Hoffman to find in the morning. Be creative.”
“He’s a serpent, a poisonous viper,” Stefan said half to himself, trying to either figure out a course of action or justify whatever he had in mind. I couldn’t tell which, although his allusion to the cold-blooded nature of his wife’s killer reminded me of a Saint Patrick’s Day toast.
“He calls himself ‘Eunectes’ which i
s the genus of the anaconda. Clever, eh? As an Irishman, I’ll leave you with this little ditty: St. Patrick was a gentleman; who through strategy and stealth; drove all the snakes from Ireland; here’s toasting to his health.” I lifted an imaginary glass toward Stefan and said, “Looks like you’re San Francisco’s St. Patrick.” He was no saint and no gentleman, but the snake was at his mercy.
Stefan stood staring at Eunectes’s unconscious body draped beside the metal press. I knelt down and nudged Petey, who responded with a drowsy protest and mumbled a question about where he was. I dragged him to his sneakered feet. He was dopey but able to walk with my support. We made our way through the clutter of chairs, out the front door, and staggered down the sidewalk like a couple of drunks. Petey seemed to be coming around by the time we got to my truck and I stuffed him into the cab. As I slid behind the wheel, he flopped against the door with his head resting against his bony chest.
I drove aimlessly, the rain having created a sheen on the streets that complemented the drops accumulating on the windshield between beats of the wipers to turn the city into an expressionistic painting of neon lights. The rain ramped up to bucketing and reached hooring by the time I cruised through the Tenderloin. The thrum on the truck’s roof provided a soothing cocoon of white noise, masking the traffic sounds and the wet shush of my tires. I didn’t know where I was going, but I figured I should be ready to get Petey medical attention if his trip took a bad turn. He started lifting his head every so often and his breathing seemed less shallow, so I was hopeful.
I turned on KDFC which was featuring Wagner’s entire Ring Cycle in their evening Opera Tunities (classical music lovers not being renowned for their humor or marketing prowess). The announcer broke in to remind listeners that we were coming to the second scene of the first act of the second opera—Siegfried. This meant the program was not quite a third of the way through the seventeen hours of opera that the station was spreading across two weeks of nighttime broadcasts.
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