CRIME THRILLERS-A Box Set (35 page)

Hey, I'm off, you stupid hick!
he yelled silently at the rear view reflection of the Cadillac.
I'm off and I'm walking, so get out of my life.

It had been a close call. If the little town desperadoes had been on top of it, he knew he'd be facing life at the minimum, the chair at the max. Georgia loved capital punishment. If he had done Francine Torrance in Atlanta or even Macon, they would have nailed his ass to the jailhouse door. But Jamison, Georgia, sported three thousand poor souls and two deputies who must have learned their law at Montessori preschool. The judge--what could he do?--he had to throw it out. No legally obtained evidence, no case.

Mr. Virtuous Prosecutor stood there with his yap hanging open when the judge made his decision. Sullivan Torrance looked like he was going to shit a brick. And the girl, Carla, was apoplectic. Spots rose on her cheeks and her eyes, had they been shooting bullets, would have riddled him dead.

Lansing hung a right and coasted into the parking slot before cabin number 5 of the Hi-Way Motel. He saw the Caddy pull smoothly to the curb across the street and park.
Followed me, the dumb freak
.

If I flip him the bird, will he come tear out my throat? he wondered. I would if I was him and any kind of man.

Because that Frannie, boy, must have been some hot rocket, all fire and spark and sizzle like she was.

Inside cabin 5 with the door locked and a chair back forced beneath the doorknob for extra security, Lansing pulled off his fifty-dollar sport coat and flung it on the bed. Too bad he had to look good in court. He could use that fifty now.

He was hungry, but no time for that. Who could eat with a cobra corkscrewed nearby, its beady eyes a mirror of hostility? That Torrance. Fucking hick. Crazy hayseed dickhead mother.

No, no time to eat. Pack his shit and get the hell out of Jamison. He could be in Waycross by nightfall, get to Valdosa, and hit the Florida line by suppertime. Then he'd eat. Juicy steak, baked potato, green beans, hot biscuits. Yeah, he'd eat when he was safe. Little men like Torrance could get away with trailing him in Jamison, but he wouldn't cross the state line.

Yet if he did...

Lansing paused in his packing and cocked his head as if listening to an eerie wind that swirled unfettered inside his skull.

If Torrance followed him much longer, the solution was simple.

Slice him.

The switchblade appeared from his pocket and flicked into a deadly shaft of polished steel. His best friend. The illegally obtained evidence. The reason for his freedom and his sanity.

CHAPTER 3

Sully used the pay phone outside the Hi-Way Motel.

"Carla, did you see him leave?"

"Sure, everyone saw him walk out like he owned the world. They let him go, Sully, what the hell!''

"Mike took you home, no problem? Is my stuff packed?"

"Told him I was in a hurry to get out of there. Your stuff is packed."

"You ready?"

"I've been waiting for your call."

"You've got your revolver?"

"Right here, Sully. Loaded."

"Okay, let's go. I'm at the Hi-Way. He might leave any minute, so hurry."

He hung up and walked back to the car. Before he opened his door, Mike Dalamas drove up alongside him, having returned from taking Carla home and then knowing him so well, driving by the Hi-Way to check the situation out. Sully sighed and wouldn't look the prosecutor in the face.

"What are you going to do?" Mike asked. Direct sunlight caused him to squint through his eyeglasses. Sully noticed his tie was askew. He looked more like an over-worked insurance salesman than a criminal attorney.

"Don't worry Mike, you did your best."

"He's a killer, Sully. You can't fight a killer."

"I said don't worry."

"You're going to stay on him, aren't you? You're going to bring Carla in on this and maybe get her killed, too, you know that, don't you?"

"You know everything, Mike. Why ask?"

"For Pete's sake, Sully, she's only eighteen. You're acting irrationally. Just because you have a death wish doesn't mean you should drag Carla along with you. I wasn't fooled by that hurry up, got to get home crap she fed me."

Sully got into his car and stared straight ahead. Mike sat wiping a hand over his weary face for some seconds, and then he drove away.

What Sullivan Torrance planned to do could not be wrong. He didn't invite Carla in: She was in from the day Lansing murdered her sister, Francine. She wanted to see Francine's murderer burn in the state's electric chair; she wanted to witness it. Carla was the first to find Frannie's body, and she wanted to be the last person Lansing ever saw in his life.

By the time the sheriff had called Sully, Carla was already composed and sitting quietly in the living room. Eustus Banks, Jamison's slow-witted, fat, public servant, had suggested Carla was in shock, but Sully knew better.

Carla's big sister, her beloved Frannie, her only family except for Sully, was sliced to ribbons on the bedroom floor, but Carla had searched and found a cold, featureless, emotionless room deep down inside herself, and she had gone there to wait for justice to run its course.

Sully reacted the way Banks had expected he would, the way normal people react when a loved one is slaughtered like a cow or a pig. Worse. Tortured and mutilated like a victim of a warped mind. Sully grabbed the door leading into the bedroom and slid to his knees. He crawled to the covered corpse of his wife. He withdrew the dark green sheet spotted with her blood. He clenched shut his eyes and opened his mouth to wail in grief. When the pain was out into the room--their room, their double bed, their dresser, chest, shelf of old stuffed animals Frannie saved from childhood--when the pain dripped thick as amber honey from the walls, Sully opened his eyes and forced himself to look again. He wanted to know. He wanted to remember what had been done, the sacrilege performed on the body of his beautiful dead wife.

Stab wounds in chest and stomach and abdomen. Blood coagulated there in pools. In a plastic bag nearby the towels used to mop up the blood waited for the coroner. On Frannie's nude body further desecration had occurred. Beginning at the right shoulder blade--her ivory skin too pale--a strip of flesh had been carefully excised. The strip ran down between her smeared breasts to her left hipbone. Then on either side of this flaying the killer had taken more strips, shorter ones, all of them one inch wide. Lifted, sliced, from the body meticulously. Then on her legs. Straight down from groin to kneecap, then front knee to ankle, more one inch strips had been taken. It looked as if the killer had blotted the wounds so that he could see them clearly. Mutilation beyond comprehension.

Sully fell onto one arm and looked up at the sheriff. "Where are...? What did he do with...?"

"Christ, Sully, cover her up."

"Where is the rest of my wife, Goddamn you?"

Banks pointed to the floor behind Sully. Another clear plastic bag contained the skin strips taken from the body. They curled beneath the clear plastic like red and white snakes tangled together.

"Come on, get up, Sully. Let us handle this now. Go see about Carla, she needs you."

But Carla didn't need anyone. She and Frannie had been alone since Frannie's youth. The elder sister had become a substitute mother to her. Their parents had died in a twin engine Cessna on the way to Atlanta when Frannie was twenty and Carla ten. A year later Sully married Frannie and took Carla into his home to be his little sister, too, the sibling he had never had. He loved her almost as much as he loved his wife. Carla was tough as a block of cement and unyielding as a sheet of steel.

A beat-up gray Volkswagen parked behind Sully, and Carla got out carrying a big blue satchel over her shoulder, a smaller blue bag in her hand. She climbed into the passenger's seat beside her brother-in-law and shut the door.

"He come out yet?" She looked at Cabin 5, saw Lansing's green Monte Carlo. "Guess he didn't," she added.

"This is going to get bad, Carla. Unless I have to do it in self-defense, I can't know if I can stop him."

"I can."

She probably could, he reflected. The gun he had asked her to bring along was one she had talked him into buying for her fifteenth birthday. She wanted to learn how to target shoot. She had been reading about Israel's kibbutz system and how young Jewish girls were trained as soldiers. "I'm Jewish," she had said. "I want to know about my people. I might want to emigrate, Sully. They won't let me be a soldier if I'm a JAP with rocks in my head." That's how she said it, what she called herself when she thought she might be reacting like a weak female. JAP, Jewish American Princess, good for nothing but baby making and house cleaning. "Me, I'm a good JAP, but I'm going to be more."

She cleared her throat now and looked at Sully. "We going to let him know we're on him all the way?"

"I don't see why not," Sully said. "He's not stupid. He knows we're here."

"He'll try to lose us."

"l know. I hope he won't succeed."

"Do you think they gave him back his knife?"

Sully nodded. They gave Martin Lansing back his switchblade knife, his life, his freedom to leave the courtroom, the town, and the state.

Why couldn't someone give Frannie back to him?

CHAPTER 4

Outside of Valdosa, Georgia, Martin Lansing tired of the chase. The black Caddy dogged him every mile of the way. Torrance had the kid in the car, Carla, the girl with long dark hair parted down the middle. What was Torrance doing with the kid?

Lansing took the off-ramp and drove into a Holiday Inn. He couldn't afford a room, but he had to eat. He ordered a T-bone steak and watched the door. Presently the girl came inside, shot him a furious dark glare, ordered to go from the counter. She kept her back to him while she waited.

Pretty girl, too. Straight spine, shoulders held back, firm legs and ass encased in skintight blue jeans. She wore a baggy gray sweatshirt, no logo. Her hair was walnut and glinted in the light from the recessed fluorescents. It was cut blunt, swung just above the curve of her cute ass. He couldn't see her hands. He imagined them to be as lily white as her pure young face. He had watched her in the courtroom during the brief trial. She was Frannie's kid sister, and from the way she always looked at him, it was obvious she would like nothing better than to bury a dagger deep into his heart. He didn't know if he'd ever seen such pure hatred.

She had the same skin color as Frannie's. Translucent almost, here and there faint blue veins showing through on the breasts, the inside of the thighs...

She wore hiking boots, the heavy kind made of creamy yellow leather with rubber-cleated soles. An outdoor girl. A Jamison, Georgia, woodcutter, all hundred pounds of her.

She took the white paper sacks, paid, and startled him upright in his chair by walking toward his table. Out of some anciently buried instinct he reached for the steak knife and grasped it tight, the serrated tip pointed slightly up from the table. What was the bitch going to do?

His muscles locked, his calves tensed to spring.

"You know who I am, don't you?" She stared straight into his eyes.

Lansing looked around, licked his lips. Other diners paid no attention to them as they finished their dinners. "You're the kid sister, yeah, I know you. So what?"

"I am
Carla Cohen
. My sister was
Francine Cohen Torrance
. We have names. You killed Francine and walked free.
I
say you don't get away with that."

Her eyes blazed a moment, her stare pinning him to the booth. Her knuckles showed white as the paper sacks she clutched in her hands.

Lansing began to enjoy the confrontation. His hand relaxed on the knife. He reached for his water glass and drank slowly, his eyes never leaving hers. "So what are you going to do about it?" he asked in a conversational tone.

She loosened her grip on the sack and snaked one hand to her waist beneath the baggy sweatshirt. His gaze followed and saw the unmistakable outline of a gun beneath the cloth. He set the water glass down. A glaze of cold ice slipped over his body from head to foot. "No one gets me," he said. "Not the cops, not the courts, and not you. Remember that, kid."

"Watch me." She turned on her heel and left the restaurant without a backward glance.

Lansing finished his steak and sipped a second cup of coffee. He smiled to think of them eating in the darkened Cadillac, the windows rolled up, the doors locked. Breathing one another's air. Choking on a bone. Scrabbling at the window for help...

Okay so this was the way it was. State line up ahead. A pair of amateur misfit hicks were following him. No money for a room, hardly enough left--he opened his wallet and checked: twelve dollars--for gas. The fucking defense attorney made him pay upfront.

First thing was change direction. Too obvious he was heading for Florida. Lose the crazy girl and Torrance, rob a country service station for some cruising money, drive west rather than south. Maybe stay in the state, think this over. The girl's threat had put something into his mind. No one had ever threatened Lansing as strongly as Carla and Sully. Intriguing. Kid carrying a piece like she knew what she was doing. Cool about it. Passionate. Kid like that needed more than one lesson to learn how powerless she truly was.

He left the exact amount on the table for his meal, no tip, and went outside. A plan was taking shape in an empty corner of his mind. He waved at the Caddy and grinned.

He wished Carla would wave back, acknowledge their surfacing relationship.

He put the Monte Carlo into reverse and backed out of the parking space. The Caddy did the same. At the on ramp he took the freeway. When the next exit came up he saw a sign for a farm road, swerved off the freeway doing sixty and turned at the junction's yellow blinking light without slowing to more than forty. The Monte Carlo squealed around the curve, and his left-hand tires hit the opposite curb, bouncing him back to centerline.

He hit it. Behind him the Caddy was just making the turn.

"Wahoo!" Lansing yelled, barreling through the night like a flaming comet. Walls of trees loomed up on each side and zoomed past. There were no cars except for the one trying to catch him from behind. The speedometer needle jiggled past eighty. He was going at least a hundred, he knew, though it didn't register. The farm road was paved blacktop and hilly. He swooped down the valleys, a streak of green lost in the darkness, his high beams cutting a swath out of a whole cloth. He managed a quick glance in the side view mirror. The lights behind him dwindled to pinpoints. He yelled once more and hit a straightaway that he knew was going to liberate him.