Liquid fear f-1

by Scott Nicholson

  Roland had only been to Wendy’s apartment three times. Once, he’d helped her move. The second time, they’d had a serious replay of the breakup, ending up reminiscing and engaging in awkward lovemaking before a final argument. The third time, he’d personally delivered the signed separation agreement.

  They’d bumped into one another occasionally because they still shared some of the same haunts, and the awkwardness lingered, as if something had gone unsaid.

  And now here he was, turning to the one person who had the least reason to help him. And he wasn’t even sure why he was there.

  She answered on the third knock, but from behind the closed door and with suspicion. “Who is it?”

  He hadn’t meant to scare her. He tapped gently this time. “It’s Roland.”

  “Roland who?”

  He fought off a rush of anger. “Come on, Wendy.”

  “Who is this?”

  He was about to punch the metal door in frustration, but he couldn’t afford to draw any attention. Someone might report his erratic behavior and then he’d be explaining himself to the cops while his brain was peeling itself like an onion. “It’s your husband, Wendy. It’s important.”

  He was just about to knock again when the deadbolt clicked. The door parted a few inches, a thick security chain in place. One of Wendy’s onyx eyes and half her face appeared in the gap.

  “My husband?” she said.

  Oh, fuck. They got to you, too, didn’t they?

  Instead of explaining, he simply held up the orange bottle and showed her the label. “We need to talk.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Kleingarten peeled off the latex gloves.

  Hand rubbers. I hope she wasn’t carrying anything.

  He’d left her in the cell in the back of the Monkey House, a few doors down from David Underwood’s hellhole. Anita’s walls were tricked out with the same kind of freakish collages, except hers were more colorful-photographs of autopsies, gaping flesh wounds, and invasive surgeries.

  Mixed in with the gore were lewd images of every conceivable kind of coupling, including one that looked like two women and a hairless dog, but Kleingarten hadn’t checked closely enough to be certain.

  Anita had felt damned good in his arms, despite her being a slut, but entering the room had sickened him enough that he’d dumped her on the cot and backed away. Briggs must have been watching from the monitors, because he immediately started a syncopated overhead light show of red and orange bulbs.

  A soundtrack started, and it took a moment for Kleingarten to recognize it. He’d heard his share of porn voice-overs, where the actors pretended to groan and grunt in pleasure, and this sounded like a dozen of them stacked on top of one another and mixed together into one huge orgy.

  Kleingarten hurried through the main alley toward Briggs’s cage, anxious to get paid and get the hell out of there. As he reached the opening of the cage, he was struck by the impression that Briggs was just as much a monkey as the others, except Briggs was in his cage voluntarily.

  “That thing about fear,” Kleingarten said. “I’m starting to figure out your game.”

  Briggs looked away from the bank of video monitors, which were now divided between images of Anita and images of David Underwood. Briggs seemed annoyed at the intrusion, but like a true egghead, he never passed up a chance for a lecture.

  “We each have a greatest fear,” Briggs said. “And in some ways, your fear is also your greatest strength. When you overcome it, then you are ready for a higher purpose.”

  “You make people scared with your joy juice, and then you hook them on the pills so they forget they’re afraid. Sort of like crack. The first hit is always free.”

  Briggs narrowed his eyes in a gesture of consideration that might have signaled respect. “If you can both induce fear and eliminate fear, you could help people control themselves. But fear is also our friend, a survival mechanism. Take Anita Molkesky here.”

  Briggs pointed to the screen that showed Anita sprawled on the cot, undulating in a faint but clearly sensual motion. Her eyes were closed and she seemed lights-out oblivious, and Kleingarten wondered how many brain cells Briggs’s medicine chewed up and spat out in the process.

  “Anita is afraid of abandonment,” Briggs said. “It’s so classically Freudian that it’s too easy. Father left when she was seven, mother had a string of bad boyfriends. She wasn’t molested, which was truly a miracle given the opportunities and cast of characters, but she formed an unhealthy need to seek attention and approval from this revolving cast of losers.”

  “So she started screwing for money?”

  “You don’t understand. This isn’t about sex or pleasure or reward of any kind. In her pornography work, she doesn’t display any enthusiasm.”

  Kleingarten recalled the disgusting scene in Patti Cake Patti Cake where two men and a woman had rubbed chocolate batter all over Anita’s body and licked half of it off while plugging every hole in her body with different kitchen implements. Anita had uttered a few grunts and groans, although she might just as well have been complaining about a headache. But she went through the motions just fine and everybody got their money shots.

  “No, Mr. Drummond, to Anita, it’s all about acceptance. She is an exhibitionist because she expects to be rejected. She was a model who took her clothes off because her body was the one thing that no one rejected.”

  “She’s sweet stuff, all right,” Kleingarten said, then laid out his bait: “But the Sla-I mean, Wendy Leng-she’s a lot hotter.”

  Briggs glared at him, and then glanced at the nude charcoal drawing. “Wendy’s beauty radiates from the inside. She has the soul of an artist.”

  Kleingarten wondered why Briggs simply didn’t have him just kidnap the Slant, drug her, and then tie her up in one of those cells where he could work his magic.

  This game was getting way more complicated than the pay was worth. Still, it was tax-free, and if not for this gig, Kleingarten would probably be working as a bodyguard for some rich-kid drug dealer.

  Movement on one of the corner monitors caught his eye. “What’s that?”

  Briggs huddled over the keyboard and clacked until the camera zoomed in. The monitor showed the outside perimeter of the lot, and a guy in a jogging suit was huffing and blowing, moving through the pine trees on a narrow trail that followed a creek.

  “Penetration,” Briggs said.

  “Is that one of your people?”

  “I don’t have any ‘people.’ Except you.”

  Kleingarten wanted to lecture the egghead for a change, tell him that you didn’t go engaging in double-crosses and setups unless you had a few layers of insulation. Instead, he touched the 9mm in his shoulder holster. “Guy must not be able to read. He just ran past a ‘No Trespassing’ sign.”

  “And the gate closed after you came through?”

  “That’s what you told me to check, right?”

  “It’s probably nothing.”

  Some egghead. The way Kleingarten did math, probability was measured on a scale between “Dead certainty” and “Don’t take the chance.”

  “Want me to check it out for you?”

  “Okay, but act like you’re a security guard patrolling the property. Don’t make him suspicious. I’ll unlock the back door.”

  Briggs bent over his series of switches and buttons, hitting a couple.

  Kleingarten wended through a series of wenches with hooked cables, once used for lifting motors, until he came to the emergency exit. The inside of the door had no handle, which probably worked great at keeping factory workers from playing hooky back in the old days.

  He oriented himself to determine the location of the jogger and began strolling as if he were a bored plainclothes guard. Most real security guards wore little uniforms to make them feel good and to intimidate those who equated a brass badge with authority. Kleingarten had a few like the campus-cop uniform hanging in his closet back home, but today he’d just have to fake it.<
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  The spring air was crisp but not cold, and pine needles squeaked under his new leather shoes. He reached the creek, which was little more than a drainage ditch with a slimy green trickle of fluid ruining through it. A path meandered parallel to it, probably used by the wildlife that was fenced in on the twenty-acre compound, unaware they were imprisoned.

  Kleingarten transferred the 9mm to his jacket pocket in case he needed a quick response. By his calculations, the jogger should be visible between the corrugated brown tree trunks any moment now.

  After an enforced casual stroll of more than a minute, Kleingarten was antsy. Ease up. The guy probably was winded and needed to catch his breath.

  Yeah, and he also accidentally climbed over a ten-foot fence topped with barbed wire.

  Kleingarten gave it another minute, picking up his pace, before he decided to hustle back to the Monkey House. He reconstructed the image of the jogger in his mind, searching for possible clues. The man wore one of those hooded gray tops, a little baggy, so he could be packing. His jogging pants were the faggoty, snug sateen kind with no bulges in the wrong places, so no weapons were stuffed in there.

  He was a little out of breath by the time he’d looped back through the trees, leaving the path so he could take cover. The jogger was standing outside the back door, running in place, the way those adrenaline junkies did when they were punishing themselves for taking a little break.

  Kleingarten wasn’t sure how to play it. If he let the guy run away, then Kleingarten would have to give chase, and his feet were already killing him. Best-case scenario, he’d get the guy’s car tags, but if the jogger was a pro, the plate would be stolen or forged anyway.

  Option Two was to see if the guy tried to break in, which meant he knew a little something, but probably not enough, or else he would have taken a different avenue into the factory. Like maybe getting a job like Kleingarten did, asking around, doing a little research.

  No, this guy knew just enough to be dumb. And therefore he was dangerous.

  On the other hand, the guy could be on the Home Team, paid by the same handlers as Kleingarten, except without Briggs’s knowledge. That made the most sense, because somebody obviously had a lot invested in the Monkey House. And if that investment was riding on a wild card like Briggs, it was good business to see which other cards were in the hand or up the sleeve.

  Okay, so we play it “pro to pro.” That will cut the bullshit about me having to pretend to be a security guard and him having to pretend to be a lost jogger.

  Kleingarten emerged from the woods. “Howdy,” he said, trying to sound like a dumb-ass Southerner instead of a California ex-con.

  The jogger quit with the leg-pumping-in-place and let out an exhausted pant. “Hey. I was running through the woods and saw this old building. What was it, a school?”

  Yeah, right, a school that only has windows thirty feet above the ground.

  “Nah.” Kleingarten kept approaching, steadily, the nine in his palm but still tucked into the jacket pocket. “It’s a secret research lab.”

  The jogger gave a “just guys” grin and wiped sweat from his forehead. “Ha, that’s a good one. Like on that TV show, Twenty-Four, right? Kiefer Sutherland?”

  “Yeah, just like that.” Kleingarten had never seen the show, but it sounded stupid as shit.

  A drop of sweat slid down the jogger’s nose and dangled at the tip. “Nice day to be outside, huh?”

  “Nice day to be on private property.”

  The jogger frowned. “CRO?”

  “Hell, no,” Kleingarten lied. “I’m with the Feds.”

  “Then you shouldn’t know this is a secret research lab.”

  “And neither should you, I reckon.”

  The man made his move then-or maybe he was just reaching up to wipe that itchy drop of sweat from his nose-and Kleingarten reacted at the first twitch. If he was a Fed, he was poorly trained, and if he was a lone op like Kleingarten, he wasn’t cut out for the job anyway.

  Kleingarten had his nine out and smoking in less than a second, and the jogger gave a girlish squeal as blooms of red erupted on his chest.

  Kleingarten knelt over the corpse, wondering what sort of gun the amateur was carrying in the pouch of his hoodie. Probably a. 357 Magnum. That’s what guys pack when they watch too much TV.

  All he found was a water bottle.

  “I’ll be damned,” Kleingarten said.

  At least he’d discovered that the secret research lab was not so secret, so it wasn’t like the murder had been a total waste.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  “These are the same pills,” Roland said, avoiding looking around Wendy’s apartment because he was afraid of how much she’d changed without him.

  “How the hell do you know?” Wendy said. “A green pill is a green pill. Unless you want to have the cops run a test.”

  “Be cool, Wendy,” Alexis said. “If this is what we think it is-”

  “No. If we go down that road, we don’t come back.”

  Alexis, sitting on the sofa beside Wendy, took a tight grip on Wendy’s forearms and pulled her hands from her face. “We can’t hide anymore.”

  Wendy was nearly in tears, and Alexis was afraid if the dam burst, there would be no patching the pieces back together. The friends had drifted apart after Susan’s death, but that had been an instinctive act of survival, not a conscious decision.

  They had all stayed aware of one another, bound by the understanding that they held a collective fate in their hands. Any of them could break the code of silence at any time. But none of them seemed to remember it in exactly the same way.

  Roland, standing by the locked door, shook his head at Alexis. His sudden appearance had served to unsettle Wendy even more. And, just like during the trials, Alexis now felt responsible, as if she’d let things go too far through her own fascination with untapped landscapes of the brain.

  “All right, Wendy,” Alexis said, hating herself for lapsing into the cold, academic bitch she knew slept inside her. “Let’s look at the facts. We each got the same vial with the same pills and the same prescription. And you said Anita got them, too. That makes four of us.”

  “Where’s David Underwood, then?” Wendy said.

  “Right here,” Roland said, and they both glared at him. He fumbled in his back pocket and pulled out his license and flipped it toward Alexis. It knocked over the three pill bottles they had placed on the coffee table.

  Alexis retrieved it from the carpet and studied it. Roland’s face and David Underwood’s name.

  “He’s back,” Alexis said.

  “But why?” Wendy said. “He’s got more to lose than any of us.”

  “You know why,” Roland said.

  Wendy burst from the couch and lunged at him, delivering a solid slap to his cheek. He reacted in time to catch her wrist as she began clawing at his eyes.

  “Don’t blame me because you fucked him,” Roland said. “I forgave you, remember?”

  “Oh, hell, no, you didn’t,” Wendy said, shrieking and kicking. “If you forgive, you’re supposed to forget!”

  Alexis hurried to help Roland restrain her, but Wendy seemed to have the strength of ten, just like the drug-war horror stories about arrests of criminals high on angel dust. But Wendy was fueled by an even deeper toxin: her own rage, fear, and shame.

  Alexis took an elbow in the abdomen before trapping one of Wendy’s arms, and by then Roland had wrapped her in a bear hug and was carrying her to the bedroom. “Grab something to tie her with, quick!”

  Alexis opened the hall closet and found a couple of scarves dangling from a coat rack, along with an Ace bandage on the shelf. She carried them to the bedroom, where a wailing Wendy was now pinned to the bed by her ex, who straddled her and dodged her kicks. Heeding an unspoken command, she secured Wendy’s feet at the ankles with the Ace bandage, then helped Roland bind her wrists.

  Wendy let loose a stream of expletives loud enough to be heard outside the apartme
nt.

  “You fucking bastard,” Wendy yelled at Roland. “I knew I should have got a restraining order.”

  “Like a piece of paper’s going to undo the past?”

  “Roland, please,” Alexis said, pissed off at having to be the responsible one. “She’s vulnerable right now and everything’s raw. You know what the trials do.”

  “‘Do’? You say that like they’re still going on.”

  Alexis ignored him, leaning over Wendy to stroke her hair. “Hush, honey, or we’ll have to use this scarf on your mouth, and we don’t want to do that.”

  “Bitch,” Wendy said, and spat.

  Alexis wiped the gob of saliva from her forehead, triggering a flash of recollection: Susan, nearly biting her face when Alexis had tried to calm her down.

  “Do it,” Roland said. “She’s no help in this condition, anyway.”

  Alexis wrapped the scarf around one palm and aimed toward Wendy’s thrashing head. Roland was still perched atop her in an odd position that suggested sexual domination, but Alexis shook the image away and concentrated on her task. Wendy emitted one last scream before Alexis wriggled the impromptu, clumsy gag in place.

  “Okay, now get me some duct tape,” Roland said. “Look in her art stuff. She always has some around.”

  By the time Alexis had found the roll of gray tape and returned to the room, Wendy was a little more subdued. Roland took the tape from Alexis and held it close to Wendy’s wide, dark eyes. “You know I’ll use this if I have to,” he said, a startling menace behind his words. “I’ve done it before.”

  Wendy closed her eyes and fell still, her chest rising and falling rapidly in her exertion.

  “God, Roland, it’s all happening again,” Alexis said. “We’re not like this, are we? Please, God, don’t let us be like this.”

  “That never happened,” he said, getting off the bed. “No matter what anybody says, we could never commit murder.”

  “She fell, didn’t she?”

  “Sure. That’s what I heard. What about you?”