The Playing Card Killer

by Russell James

  Brian forced in another mouthful and chewed. He faked a smile as he swallowed and it slithered down his throat. He was hungry as hell, and this stuff beat starving to death.

  “See, told you.” Tyler shoveled in the rest of what was on his plate at a rate Brian couldn’t match, even if he had liked what he was eating. Brian mentally committed to forcing down as much as he could stand since he couldn’t count on Tyler giving him a regular feeding schedule.

  Brian had a minor epiphany. Tyler’s hair was artificially white, the food artificially yellow, the whole mood artificially congenial. Even the house they were squatting in wasn’t really theirs. Everything was fake in a situation that was all too real.

  Tyler looked up with a big grin when he finished. A dab of cheese hung at the corner of his mouth. “Now, the best part.”

  He grabbed the almost-full plate off Brian’s lap. Brian reached for it too late, and it then was gone. Tyler rushed out of the room. Plates clanked into the sink and he returned with two floating red balloons tied to a metal spatula. His other hand was behind his back. He set the balloons on the coffee table.

  “We’ve missed so much together,” Tyler said. “But there’s one thing, one most important thing we’ve missed, something only we can share.” From behind his back, he revealed a sparkling blue, conical, cardboard party hat. “Birthdays! We’re twenty shared birthdays behind, twenty years of parties with kids and games and fun.”

  He reached down and jammed the hat on Brian’s head. He stretched the elastic band under Brian’s chin and let it snap back in place. The rough little cord bit under his jaw. It reminded him of the strangled murder victims and made him shudder. Tyler rushed out of the room, right foot dragging a bit even when he tried to hurry.

  Something clicked on and off several times in the kitchen, then Tyler returned. He had a red version of the party hat on, and carried a white-frosted, circular layer cake. He placed it on Brian’s lap. Twenty canted, burning candles were shoved in the top in an irregular pattern, breaking up the phrase ‘Happy Birthday Ty and Bri’ in loopy red letters. Brian pulled his face back from the flames’ rising heat.

  “So here it is, bro. Twenty birthdays rolled all into one. Time to make a wish.”

  I wish I was free and you were dead, Brian thought.

  “Wait, bro,” Tyler said. “Here’s our wish. That these two brothers never be separated again.”

  Before Brian could do anything, Tyler took a deep breath and blew at the candles. All but three at one corner extinguished. An irritated look twisted Tyler’s face. He grabbed at the candles and crushed the flames in his bare fist. He registered no pain. He yanked the offending candles from the cake. They pulled a clump of frosting with them and left a patch of exposed golden cake, as if Tyler had scalped the thing. He threw the handful against the couch, where it made a gooey splat. His face relaxed, all now right with the world again.

  “Cake time!” He whipped out his big pocketknife and snapped it open. With three violent thrusts, he chopped free two oversized wedges. He sat down on the edge of the coffee table, facing Brian. He pulled two forks from his back pocket, one plastic, one metal. He handed the plastic one to Brian. “Dive in, dude. The slice is just, like, a guideline. No limit!”

  He drove his fork into the closest wedge and pulled free a hunk. Brian took a far smaller section of his wedge. It ended up being mostly frosting. Once inside his mouth it tasted like pure gritty sugar, flavored with coconut. He forced it down and took a forkful of mostly cake for the next mouthful to even out the experience.

  “Good shit, huh?” Tyler said as he downed a third or fourth forkful. Brian had lost count.

  “Sure is!” It actually was good cake. Wherever Tyler got it, they knew what they were doing. And any food now was better than hoping for food later.

  Tyler pulled the cake from Brian’s lap and set it on the coffee table. He yanked the fork out of Brian’s hand. Before he knew what happened, Tyler had his wrist zip-tied back to the chair.

  “Oh.” Brian sighed. “You don’t need to do that.”

  “Better safe than sorry, dude. Idle hands, devil’s workshop, something like that.” Tyler pointed to the cake. “We’ll save the rest for later. Like breakfast or something? That would be excellent!”

  He wheeled Brian back into the bathroom and positioned him over the toilet. He yanked his shorts down to his ankles and tossed a fresh towel across his lap.

  “See,” Tyler said. “Look at all the bonding there. We’re a natural fit. You’ll see. I’ll get you off your rabbit-food diet and onto eating real food, get you schooled in how to live to the max, and you’ll be as awesome as me in no time flat. Gotta chore to do now, be right back after.”

  Tyler closed the door and left Brian alone to process the whirlwind he’d just survived. Tyler had concocted some TV-ad-driven outline of what brothers should share and wedged it all into twenty minutes, checking a mental box as they started each event, not caring if the event accomplished anything in the end.

  Then again, maybe he didn’t know that his miniature three-act play didn’t create any fraternal connections. This emotionally stunted version of himself seemed to lack all empathy with, or understanding of, other people. Maybe Tyler really thought they had accomplished something.

  Brian’s own empathy kicked in and for a fleeting second he felt sorry for Tyler. Anger quickly snuffed that emotion. Anger at being kidnapped, anger at being manipulated, anger over the string of corpses across Florida, corpses Tyler had everyone thinking were Brian’s victims.

  The delayed stress of the evening made itself known. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been awake, or even what day it was, but exhaustion rolled over him like a thick fog. The heavy food in his gut added its own additional call to slumber. His eyelids slid closed, his head lolled to one side, and he was asleep.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  He walks through silent, grayscale scrub brush. Distant parking-lot floodlights turn the night into murky dusk. Bits of trash litter the ground. Some, like the beer cans, no doubt left there at the end of some clandestine party; others, like the faded, shredded wrappers from roofing shingles, blown in from somewhere else. A spent hypodermic needle crushes under his boot.

  Dread wells up within him. Brian knows this killer’s-eye view, knows he has no control over his brother’s actions, and worse, knows he will experience every second of it.

  He approaches a chain-link fence. In one section, the links are cut halfway up from the bottom and the split in the metal mesh forms an inverted V. Beyond the fence rises a shadowy wall of steel. Tyler’s anticipation thrums through him like a hard-rock bass line. Brian’s stomach turns at sharing Tyler’s twisted emotion, knowing what will transpire at the end of this hunt.

  * * *

  In the real world, his head jerked back up as his neck twisted to a strange, uncomfortable angle. There was a flicker of brighter light, a flash of his bathroom prison, barely long enough to register, and then he dove back into sleep.

  * * *

  He stands in his apartment. Daniela comes through the front door. The concerned look on her face melts away as she sees him. She rushes into his arms. He pulls her close.

  “You’re safe, you’re free,” she says.

  Her little body radiates a warmth that can only be kindled by love. He holds her tight.

  “I’m so glad you’re here,” he says.

  “I always knew you didn’t do it,” she answers. “Now hurry, I have everything we need in my car. In a few hours we’ll be two states away from here.”

  The idea of leaving all this mess behind and starting a life with Daniela fills him with joy. He smiles so wide that it hurts. “Let’s go.”

  Daniela turns soft in his embrace, then insubstantial. She vanishes, and with her any wisp of happiness floating within him. His arms collapse in, and he hugs his own bony elbows.

 
* * *

  Another bob of his head summoned him back to reality. Uninterrupted sleep in the hard, upright chair was impossible. His banana-yellow jail cell passed by in a flash bright enough to make him wince and he submerged back into unconsciousness.

  * * *

  A playing card fills his field of view. A six of diamonds. The sight sends a chill through him.

  Confusion sweeps him. Does he see this in preparation for the kill, or afterwards? Is he really seeing visions through Tyler’s eyes, or is this vision all the fruit of his subconscious, like his disappearing Daniela?

  The view pulls back from the card. The fingers holding it are thin as pencils, and nearly as long. The view expands and Mr. Jitters grips the card. He waves it before Brian, his whole body swaying with rubbery flexibility. His eyes glow bright from their darkened sockets. He smiles and exposes ruby-red gums and pearl-white teeth behind the painted smile on his white skin.

  “He’s going to deal again,” Mr. Jitters says. “One card will follow another.” His screeching, maniacal laugh pierces the air. “And they’ll all say it was you. The cops won’t even try to take you alive.”

  Jitters stops swaying. He slams the playing card against Brian’s forehead. It feels slimy and sticks there. Mr. Jitters grabs Brian’s face in both hands. “You and I are going to dance the night away!”

  The terror builds in Brian. A full-blown anxiety meltdown is seconds away.

  * * *

  A ring of fire around his right wrist called him to a fuzzy consciousness. He slouched in the chair as the zip tie threatened to amputate his hand. Brian shifted right to relieve the pressure, then closed his eyes again.

  * * *

  He stands over an open, metal, fifty-five-gallon drum. Something sits in the shadow below the rim, dark and motionless. Brian senses fulfillment at the sight through the eyes he’s borrowed, and hopes that the view does not shift and afford him any details of what lays inside. A pair of hands with covered fingertips places the metal lid back on the drum. An inch-wide screw top covers an off-center drain hole. The hand unscrews it and tosses it away. It is as if what is inside needs to breathe, but Brian is certain that isn’t true.

  * * *

  The vision vanished behind another flare of the bathroom light and another painful twist of his sleeping body. He clamped shut his eyes and descended back to sleep.

  * * *

  He is at his parents’ house, in the middle of the front yard. He stands naked except for the police ankle monitors, one on each leg this time. A circle of people surround him: his parents, Detective Weissbard, Sidney, Daniela, his sister Ariana, and Mr. Wickett, a hated high school phys ed teacher. They all laugh at him, trading barbs about his nudity, his guilt, his impending punishment. The abuse comes hot and heavy, louder, sharper. The individual taunts overlap until they all meld into one audio maelstrom. He screams and covers his ears.

  The sound cuts off. He now wears a dark robe, with a thick cowl pulled back behind his head. His ankle monitors lay on the ground before him, smashed, their electronic guts sparking and sizzling.

  His detractors still circle him, but now all sit tied in duplicates of the dining room chair in his bathroom prison, facing away from him.

  Tyler appears at his side. In his right hand is a red velvet rope, the only color in this black-and-white vision. He whips the end around and into his left palm. It slides through and he keeps repeating the process.

  “They all need to die,” Tyler says. “We’ll kill them all. Together. A deck has fifty-two cards, you know.” He leans in nose-to-nose with Brian. “That’s a whole future full of fun.”

  * * *

  Brian jolted awake. He snapped his head back and slammed into the top of the chair with a crack. He was alone in the bathroom. Sweat ran down his forehead and across his chest. He yanked both hands against the zip ties until pain flared around his wrists and he was certain that he was back in the real world, and not in yet again another deluded dream.

  Reality, dreams, seeing through Tyler’s eyes, he now couldn’t tell what was what, which was real, which imagined. Had he witnessed part of a murder? Lack of sleep, dehydration, drug withdrawal. He felt adrift in a perfect storm of psychological chaos.

  He wondered if that storm would sink him. Or worse, if it already had.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Weissbard’s day had started way too early and way too lousy. A day into Sheridan’s escape, the whole department had a dragnet out, but Weissbard had taken it to a very personal level. He’d worked his ass off to bring in Sheridan, and he wasn’t about to let him slip away. Francisco was running the big show of roadblocks and neighborhood sweeps. But Weissbard knew Sheridan better than anyone. While Francisco focused on locking things down on the outside, Weissbard was going to start his personal search from the inside, Sheridan’s inside.

  Sheridan had limited means and damn few friends. His apartment was under surveillance, but he wasn’t stupid enough to go there. He’d need to find somewhere else to lay low, and only the people who knew him might have an idea where that might be.

  Sheridan’s phone records were so sparse that only Sheridan’s weirdo loner status kept Weissbard from assuming the guy had a second phone. But there was one person he’d called pretty regularly, up until recently. Daniela Schiavetta. She’d be his first stop.

  After two hours dismissing useless tip-line leads, he reenergized himself with an enormous sugared coffee and two donuts that would have sent his wife into a rant about his health. It was just after 9:00 a.m. when he entered the veterinary clinic where Daniela worked. A very nervous receptionist ushered him into one of the small, empty exam rooms, barely large enough for the stainless-steel exam table and the Formica counter tops. A heavy dose of antiseptic didn’t do much to cover the musky, acidic smell of animal waste. He leaned against the wall to wait.

  Daniela entered. She wore a pair of wrinkled scrubs, all wet along one edge. She looked scared. Weissbard liked that in a witness. That kind talked a lot. He pulled out his note pad.

  “Oh, my God. You’re here about Brian. I knew it.”

  “You knew what?”

  “That you’d eventually come question me.”

  Weissbard had hoped she was about to say that she’d known he’d been a killer all along. Well, he couldn’t win them all.

  “How long have you known Brian Sheridan?”

  “Ten months, maybe. We dated for the last few.”

  “When was the last time you spoke to him?”

  “Days ago, when I got back from my mother’s. He’d gotten off his meds and started acting really strange.”

  That confirmed his hypothesis, and matched the timeline of when the Playing Card Killer murders started. “What do you mean, strange?”

  “Like having hallucinations, nightmares. He couldn’t sleep, got angry pretty quick. I told him he needed to get back on meds or I was out of the picture.”

  “And you haven’t spoken to him since?”

  “Just one phone call, and I told him the same thing I told him in person. No meds, no me.”

  Just to eliminate a few more potential holes in his case, he named the dates of the four murders. “Were you with Brian any of those nights?”

  She looked at the floor, thinking. “No, I don’t think so. We were broken up by then.” A look of concern crossed her face. “Hey, he’s out on bail, but the news said he had one of those ankle bracelet things on. I don’t have to worry about him dropping by, right? You cops know where he is all the time?”

  Weissbard marveled that this supposedly most-connected generation seemed to rarely be informed about the news. “As a matter of fact, that’s why I’m here to see you. He’s jumped bail.”

  “But he had one of those ankle-tracking-things. How could…” Her face went white. “Oh my God! He wouldn’t come to me, would he?”

  “
Would he think you’d protect him?”

  “No! I stormed out last time I saw him. Gave him the ultimatum.”

  Her face fell. She sighed and gestured to the walls around the room. “See where I work, what I do? Broken animals come in here and I take care of them, help them get better. It’s my weakness, with people, too. I thought I could help fix Brian. Someday, I’ll learn that animals are much better patients.”

  “Is there any place you think he might hide out?”

  “He only spent time at home and at work. It was a big deal if I got him to a movie. I don’t have any idea where he would be.”

  Weissbard scribbled a few notes. He put away his notebook and handed her his card. “If he calls you, you call me.”

  She snapped the card from his hand. “Are you kidding? In a second. You’d better pick up, too. I don’t want to end up dead with a playing card stuffed inside me.”

  Weissbard nodded and walked out. She was genuinely scared, and genuinely convinced of Sheridan’s guilt. If Brian contacted her, she’d be in touch in seconds. All that was good news.

  The bad news was he wasn’t any closer to finding Sheridan. It was time to see if co-worker Sidney had any more insights to share.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Weissbard never made it to Sidney’s. And it wouldn’t have mattered if he had. A call from coroner Cal Cambridge diverted him to Orange Star Trucking. Someone had found a body in a drum.

  A police cruiser and two officers guarded the main entrance. They waved Weissbard in through the open gate. The coroner’s van was at the far end of the lot, so he drove down and pulled up next to it.

  As soon as he got out of his car, a middle-aged man in a white short-sleeve shirt and a red tie approached at a brisk walk. He had the top-heavy physique of a guy who used to spend a lot of hours in the gym. Used to. Worry creased his broad face.