He concluded it was extremely unlikely this door was locked.
All of this went through his mind in two or three seconds, but it was enough time that the woman’s demeanor changed from mild city-dweller suspicion to growing alarm. She opened her mouth as if to say something else—Milo had still not uttered a word—and then seemed to think better of it and retreated back into her house, stepping clear of the storm door and swinging it closed in his face.
So the decision was made for him. It was now or never. Milo reached out and turned the handle and pulled on the screen door and thought, open sesame, and as he had hoped, it flew open, light as a feather and about as effective, security-wise. He slipped the steel toe of his left work boot inside the doorframe and the storm door rebounded like a basketball off an iron hoop, clipping the woman on the shoulder and knocking her to the floor where she fell with a surprised “Oomph!”
Milo’s smile widened and he walked into the house, stepping over the body of his host, who lay sprawled on the floor, too surprised even to scream. Yet. He nudged her clear of the doorway with his foot and eased the storm door closed, making sure to lock it behind him.
“So, how are you?” he asked.
The woman came to her senses and began scuttling backward down her hallway, looking up at him with an expression of growing fear on her heavily lined face. And there was something else as well. It looked to Milo a little like resignation, as if she had been expecting his arrival but had been unsure exactly when he would show up. She moved surprisingly well for someone who appeared so frail.
She continued crab walking backward, apparently forgetting the hallway wall was behind her. She slammed into it with a loud crash and a small handgun toppled out of the right pocket of her sweater. It dropped to the floor next to her and her eyes instantly darted up to his, the fear that had already been etched on her face morphing into all-out panic.
Milo leapt forward. The woman grabbed her gun and flicked off the safety—Milo could see it, plain as day, right on the side of the handle—but before she could bring the weapon to bear on him, he wound up like a football placekicker and booted it right out of her hand. It sailed through the air and then bounced into the living room where it disappeared. A second later, Milo heard a muffled thud as it came to rest against something hard.
The fucking bitch was going to shoot me! Milo tried to wrap his brain around the thought that this old bat could have come so close to putting a bullet in his head. He would never have seen it coming.
This was unacceptable. She would have to be dealt with, and in the strongest possible manner. But first things first. He had a job to do.
“I already called the police,” the woman said, interrupting his train of thought, her voice unwavering and stronger than he would have expected, given the situation.
“No you didn’t. Only the most paranoid of crazy bitches calls the cops just because someone knocks on their front door. And you’re not the most paranoid of crazy bitches, now, are you? You might be close, but you’re not the most paranoid.”
She said nothing, slumping to the floor, taking the weight of her body off her arms and legs. Milo took a step toward her and she flinched as if expecting to be hit. Her eyes were locked onto his hands, growing almost comically wide.
“I have no desire to hurt you,” he said, wondering whether the lie sounded as transparent to the old bitch as it did to him. “In fact, you have to do just one thing to ensure your safety and if you do it, I promise you will not be harmed.”
“Wh-what’s that on your hands?” she asked as if he hadn’t even spoken.
He glanced down at them and saw faded remnants of Rae Ann the Schoolgirl Hooker’s blood. He had scrubbed them conscientiously at the Y, but with the kind of close work he had been doing back at the tenement, it was damned near impossible to wash all traces of the incriminating stains away. And he had been in a hurry. He thought he had done a fairly decent job removing the worst of the blood, but maybe he hadn’t been that thorough after all, since it was the first thing the old lady had seen.
“What is it?” the gun-toting bitch repeated as he stared down at his hands as though they belonged to someone else.
“I’m a butcher,” he said, pleased with his little private joke. “Occupational hazard.”
Now the panic exploded in the woman’s eyes, and Milo flashed back to his fun with Rae Ann. The expression on this old lady’s face was remarkably similar to Rae Ann’s. The bitch rose up as if to scuttle backward some more before clearly coming to the conclusion it was pointless.
“Anyway, as I was saying,” Milo continued, “I want you to do one simple thing for me and then I’ll leave you alone. I can’t promise I’ll let you go, but I can tell you that you won’t be harmed. And that’s a hell of a lot more than you deserve after what you were going to do to me with that little peashooter you had in your pocket. If you ask me, it’s a pretty good deal. It’s certainly the best offer you’re going to get out of me.”
“What do I have to do?” The woman’s voice trembled as she spoke and Milo felt a surge of excitement, the kind he always got when he demonstrated his dominance. The old bag wasn’t as tough as she seemed to think she was.
“You’re going to call the young woman who visited you earlier—”
“I can’t—”
“And you’re going to tell her to get her pretty little ass back here,” Milo finished, ignoring the interruption.
“I can’t do that.” The woman was shaking her head obstinately. It was as if Milo had asked her to negotiate world peace. Or change the oil in his fucking car. Did this dim bitch not understand that he was in charge?
“You can and you will.”
Tears welled up in the woman’s eyes. “I don’t have her number.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“I don’t have it.”
“I SAW HER GIVE IT TO YOU!” Milo screamed, dropping to his knees next to her and shouting into her face, spittle spraying, rage bubbling up inside him.
The woman groaned and buried her face in her hands. “I can’t do it.” She began to cry, obviously expecting to be hit or kicked.
Milo nodded, saying nothing. This was ridiculous. Time was passing and he wasn’t any closer now to getting that fucking little whore back here than he had been when he walked through the old bat’s door. He shrugged his backpack off his shoulder and it fell to the floor with a metallic clank.
The woman cringed like a dog that had been beaten its whole life and peeked through her spread fingers. “What’s in there?” she whispered.
It seemed to Milo as if she had a pretty good idea what was inside his backpack and was simply awaiting confirmation, although how she could know was beyond him, and in any event he wasn’t going to play her little game.
“You need to stop asking so many fucking questions and start answering a few. I’m running out of patience and if we don’t begin making some progress—and I mean NOW—I’m going to hurt you, and in ways you can’t even begin to imagine.”
The woman covered her face with her hands again like an ostrich burying its head in the sand. Milo almost laughed. The biddy was stupid as well as old if she thought that was going to make a damned bit of difference. He unzipped the main pocket of the backpack and retrieved one of his favorite tools. The pliers felt comfortable in his hand and he immediately began snapping them briskly, confident the staccato beat would get the woman’s attention.
He was right. She dropped her hands and her eyes snapped open, focusing on the pliers like they had been focused on his hands a moment ago.
”Get the phone number,” he said softly, his voice barely a whisper. It contained a menace that didn’t need volume to be understood.
She shook her head mutely, terror in her eyes.
Milo reached out, the movement lightning-quick. He grabbed her hand and held it like this was some perverted May/December Hollywood love scene. Harold and Maude for the twenty-first century. He selected a finger at random, no
ting with amusement that her nails were short and stubby like a dude’s. But it didn’t matter. He wasn’t concerned with aesthetics. Effectiveness was the goal.
He dug the nose of the pliers under the nail of her pointer finger, pushing hard, burrowing into the tender flesh, making sure there was plenty of nail to grip. The woman sucked in a shocked breath and began to scream as Milo yanked, ripping the nail from the tip of her finger in one smooth motion.
He clamped his hand over her mouth—he was pretty sure the neighborhood was empty, but why take chances?—and said again through gritted teeth, “I want that telephone number.”
31
The knob turned and the door opened with a muted squeal, and Franklin Marchand stepped into the mess that constituted Strange Dude’s “home.” Trash was everywhere: fast-food burger boxes, crumpled-up candy wrappers, and empty cans and bottles were strewn over virtually every inch of the floor’s surface. It was disgusting, enough to make even a homeless man used to sleeping in a garbage-strewn alleyway retch.
But it didn’t make Franklin retch. In fact, he barely noticed the mess, his gaze passing over the trash in the blink of an eye, settling instead on a strange contraption erected in the middle of the room. It was a chair, big and blocky, and it had been bolted to the floor with steel bracing straps.
And secured to the chair was what looked like—
Oh, God, it looked like—
Oh good Lord, Franklin thought, because although he had stopped believing in a benevolent God just about the time he lost his job and his home and his family and his future, for the life of him he couldn’t think of another phrase that fit the situation. Oh good Lord, he thought, that’s a girl, or at least it used to be a girl until she was stabbed and slashed and, oh good Lord, skinned alive, but now she was not alive, no, she was quite obviously dead and had just as obviously died in a tremendous amount of pain, in gut-wrenching pain, in agony really, Franklin could see that as plain as day, and he took two staggering steps toward the chair without thinking because the girl, oh good Lord the girl, she was skinned alive and—
And Franklin’s legs gave out. He collapsed to his knees and puked up an acidy yellow concoction of partly digested chicken sandwich and the burning remains of the Mad Dog he had drunk last night. The mixture erupted out of him in a chunky spray, splattering the fast-food cartons and the empty cans and bottles and the legs of his jeans.
He didn’t notice.
And if he had noticed, he wouldn’t have cared. Franklin Marchand had a daughter roughly the same age as this girl, this poor, suffering soul who was once a living, breathing being and was now barely recognizable as human. She was barely recognizable but not completely unrecognizable, and Franklin knew she was the girl he had seen being forced into this piece of shit tenement building at knifepoint last night.
And how had he reacted? What had he done while this young victim was being marched to her terrible fate? He had made a solemn promise to investigate the situation later, because he had been tired and, let’s face it, drunk off his ass and in no condition to investigate anything but his stolen wool blanket last night. And while he was working on his latest buzz, while he was busy drinking himself into a drunken stupor, this defenseless girl who could have been his daughter was being brutally tortured by Strange Dude inside the rotting building not fifty feet away.
And now she was dead.
Tortured.
She might have died this morning while Franklin sat smoking cigarettes and waiting for Strange Dude to leave. And he was too late! He was too late, and this girl had died and it was mostly Strange Dude’s fault—he had tortured and killed her, after all—but it was also at least partly Franklin’s fault because he had known something was wrong and had done nothing about it until it was too late to make a difference.
Franklin hung his head. He thought about Samantha and how this could have been her and almost puked again but swallowed hard and choked it back.
He stood shakily, suddenly very tired, and forced himself to look at the torture chair and the fresh human corpse fastened to it. Strips of skin hung off her body where they had been peeled, presumably while she was still alive, some of them eighteen inches or more in length. Bones were visible beneath the oozing pinkish mess, an ulna here, a kneecap there. A hint of pubic bone.
Veins and blood vessels and unidentifiable gore crisscrossed the areas where the strips of skin had been carved and peeled away. Blood still dripped obscenely off some of the longer strips of skin, pooling on the clear plastic tarp placed around and under the chair. The blood was beginning to congeal around the outermost edges of the puddles, appearing almost black in the dim light struggling through the filthy windows of the apartment, a ghoulish lake lapping at a horrifying shore.
Franklin stumbled to his feet, suddenly sure Strange Dude would return at any moment and find him here. And he now knew who Strange Dude really was. Mr. Midnight—Franklin had heard the name whispered hundreds of times over the last several months, all over the city and by all classes of people, and he knew immediately he was looking at Mr. Midnight’s handiwork—would walk through the door and pull a knife, blood and gristle and human tissue still hanging off it, and he would hold Franklin at knifepoint while he unstrapped the dead girl from the chair. Then he would roll her mutilated corpse onto the floor, and he would replace her with Franklin and he would begin, oh good Lord he would begin peeling, and oh, good Lord he would—
Franklin forced himself to slow his breathing, to choke back the rising tide of panic like he had choked back the vomit a few moments ago. He had to get ahold of himself. If Mr. Midnight did come back right now, Franklin would rush him before he could get his knife out of his pocket or his scabbard or wherever the hell he kept it.
If Mr. Midnight came back, Franklin would deal, as Samantha would say. He would deal somehow.
Right now, the priority was getting to a telephone. He had to get the police here. The very same authorities Franklin had developed a serious mistrust and even hatred of since becoming homeless now looked to him like angels of mercy, like the very guardians of sanity.
He took one last look at the girl—he didn’t want to, wanted nothing more than to drink the memory of the last few minutes out of his brain, to wash it into oblivion with a fifty-five-gallon drum of Mad Dog, and he promised himself he would do exactly that as soon as his task was complete—but he just couldn’t help himself. He took one last look and then he turned and stumbled out of the killing room. He had to get to a phone, to call the police, and he certainly didn’t own a cell phone anymore and there was no earthly way the telephone lines into this piece of shit building were still active.
He staggered into the dingy hallway and realized he was holding his breath. He breathed deeply and yanked the door closed behind him with much more force than was necessary. Then he moved blindly toward the stairs, determined to find someone, anyone, a passerby or maybe a fellow vagrant who had stolen a cell phone. He would grab it and use it to dial 911.
Franklin paused at the top of the stairs as another wave of nausea overtook him. He bent over, hands on his knees, and somehow managed to avoid losing what was left in his stomach, if anything even was left, and then he ran down the stairs, moving much too fast for a shaky homeless alcoholic who had just seen a mutilated dead girl, taking them three at a time, risking a violent fall and a broken neck.
He burst out of the cursed tenement at a dead run—that’s a good one, he thought crazily, a “dead run,” I’ll have to remember that the next time I stumble onto a carved-up human corpse—and turned into the alleyway. It had never looked as inviting as it did right this minute. He sprinted the length of the crumbling pavement toward the front of the building, panting and gasping, trying desperately not to puke again.
32
Patience had never been one of Cait’s strong points, and it was especially hard to maintain now. The crush of travelers waiting to board the plane was almost as massive as the line for the metal detectors had been. S
he was tired and dispirited and wanted nothing more than to be back in Tampa, where she could begin to resume a normal life, or at least what passed for a normal life for someone blessed—or cursed—with the ability to receive Flickers.
They had waited seemingly for hours, shuffling forward a couple of feet every few minutes, just for the opportunity to empty her pockets and step through a metal detector while some TSA drone leered at her underwear as her bag rolled through the X-ray machine. That humiliating experience would be followed by hours inside a crowded airplane with a bunch of other tired, dispirited people. The prospect seemed almost too much to bear.
She sighed and leaned against Kevin. “What’s taking so long?” she said, not really expecting an answer.
His arm was draped over her shoulder and he hugged her tightly. He seemed immune to her mood and was making an obvious effort to raise her spirits. “I know you’re vertically challenged, but I can see over the crowd and believe me, we’re getting close to our goal. At least our short-term goal. Before you know it, we’ll be snuggled up with a good in-flight magazine, chomping on our complimentary bag of stale peanuts, winging our way down the East Coast back to paradise. Or at least Tampa.”
“Hmmph. Sounds so romantic.”
Kevin laughed. “Maybe not romantic, exactly, but at least you’ll be getting where you want to go.”
“I suppose,” she said morosely. Cait felt badly for raining on Kevin’s parade, but she just didn’t have the energy to put on a happy face. This trip had been a disaster from the get-go, and at the moment it felt like it was never going to end. Dinner at the airport steak house had been good, better than she had expected, but it had also been exorbitantly expensive, and Cait had felt extra guilty when Kevin picked up the check. She knew his salary as a Tampa police officer, knew what a strain this ill-fated trip had put on his wallet, and yet he refused to complain.
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