CRIME THRILLERS-A Box Set (38 page)

Mike shook his head and Sully looked away. Carla's thirst for revenge was almost palpable in the room. Outside the dark pressed against the windows and doors like something alive.

#

Lansing heard what Carla said and ground his teeth until they ached. The night air caressed him where he lay in the flowerbed below the open den windows. He gripped the ebony handle of the unopened switchblade until the cold metal edges of the sheathed blades warmed and bit into his finger joints.

He came onto his knees and backed away. He circled the house and jogged past Mike's old yellow Plymouth Duster. He was on the paved road running past Sully's house, jogging toward the town of Jamison. Twenty minutes later he was a mile away and headlights picked him out of the darkness. He waved an arm, jogged into the road to stop the car. It was a yellow Duster. Mike Dalamas, the creep who had wanted to shoot him in the legs and then blow out his brains, was a dead man.

#

Sully lay in bed tossing, turning, waiting for an uneasy sleep. His friend was right, they needed dead bolts and sophisticated equipment. Suspect in thirty-five murders! Jesus, Lansing wasn't just a drifter, a one-time (two, he corrected) maniac. He was a destroyer, a mindless, conscienceless taker of life. Until Frannie's death, the little town of Jamison did not need locks and bars and gun permits. The biggest excitement they had ever seen was when old man McCutchen got mad at a recalcitrant mule he called Blue and blasted him to the four winds with a double-barrel shotgun.

Well, he knew it was nuts, but he had to get up one more time before going to sleep and check the doors, check on Carla, who had returned to her room. It was Mike's warning more than any real threat that made him apprehensive.

He felt his way through the dark bedroom and opened the door. He could see shapes swathed in shadows in the den from the moonlight coming through the French doors. He started toward Carla's room on the other side. He could see...

He halted. His lower lip trembled until he had to bite it still.

He was imagining things again, like the shadow earlier when he dozed in the sun. Just his mind playing nasty tricks on him.

He went closer to the sofa, toward the deep shadow there that by all rights should not have been there. It looked as if...

...as if someone was sitting very still in the center of the sofa. In the dark.

Sully reached out with both hands still trying to hold on to the belief he was merely conjuring objects out of his fear and exhaustion.

He touched flesh. Cold flesh.

He backed away, startled, rushed for the light switch beside the doorway, and flicked it on. He whirled around.

"Oh, my god, Mike..."

Mike Dalamas sat upright on the sofa. His throat had been sliced open. Blood streaked his white shirtfront and left long bloody inroads from shirt collar to lap. His cupped hands looked like claws holding red pools. Glassy green eyes, trapped by the shiny glass lenses of his eyeglasses, stared at the floor.

Mike had left only a short time earlier. He had been alive, vibrant, engaged in trying to warn them, to save them. And now he sat here in Sully's house dead. It was as if reality had shifted. In this world people who should be alive and well were given over to death.

The smell again, the awful putrid smell of it. Blood, pints of it soaking Mike, the sofa cushions, trickling over the sofa edge to the carpet.

Sully ran for Carla's bedroom door. He threw it open so hard it banged the wall and he had to put out his hand to keep it from knocking him down on the rebound.

"Carla!"

She was nude and tied to the single bed spread-eagle, her hands and feet wrapped with brown cord. Wide gray tape sealed her mouth. She beat her head on the pillow, her eyes flashing at him.

Sully rushed to her. He flipped the sheet over her nakedness. He reached to undo the cord holding one of her hands. She shook her head furiously, and he paused a moment, confused. His fingers felt for her knuckles, for the knot on the cord, and it was then the world turned black.

He tunneled down, down, far, far down into an endless billowing passage to nowhere.

#

He was blind. His eyelids would not lift. His eyeballs rolled up and down, side to side searching for escape from the darkness.

His mouth would not open. His lips were held tight, and he breathed laboriously through his nose. He smelled strange things and tried to identify them so that he might orient himself to this new, terrifying world.
Apples
? He smelled apples. And night air. He knew night air from day air. It was colder, damper, cleaner. It carried with it scent of pine resin and wet grass.

He could hear.
Crickets
. A mechanical hum of some sort. Something like a door shutting, but not exactly a door...a snicking
swoosh
sound. A refrigerator door, that's what kind of door! Was he in the kitchen where all the windows were open? He was on the floor of the kitchen in his house?

Pain
. Head hurt from front to back. He must have fallen, struck his head. Right, right, and now if he could move a little, open his eyes, get onto his feet. He lay...on his back.

He tried to raise a hand to his eyes and found he could not. His hands were behind him. Tied. Bound with rope or wire or something that cut into his wrists.

Lansing.

It came back in a dizzying rush. He couldn't sleep so he had gotten up to check on Carla. Mike bleeding on the sofa in the dark. Carla nude on the bed, thrashing wildly about. Tied to four corners like a woman in an insane, S and M film.

Now there were footsteps near his head. "You..." The word echoed in his head, boomeranged inside his mouth. He could not speak. He grunted. His lips were sealed some way. Like Carla's had been, with gray tape. He was going to die, just like Mike. The realization spurred him to jerk and move his body around the floor.

"Cut it out, Sully. You be a good boy while me and Carla finish, you hear'?"

Each side of Sully's nose stung and his throat constricted as if a steel band were being squeezed around it. It was the urge to cry going without answer. It was despair--despair whistling out of a dark cellar up through his throat to his nose, and, finally, to his dry tear ducts.

He heard Lansing crunching and the pungent smell of apple flesh filled his pinched nostrils.

You crazy freaking murdering bastard
came out as a muttered gargle behind the binding tape.
I could kill him. If I were free, I could kill him now...

The footsteps circled him once, as if Lansing were looking him over. Crunch, chew, crunch. He is eating fruit from my refrigerator, Sully thought. He stabbed Frannie, he cut the Bunsuns into pieces, he slit Mike's throat, he bound Carla to her bed, he thumped me, goddamnit, on the head, and tied me up to lie squirming on the floor like an animal he's readying for gutting. I will not be done this way. I will not die helpless...

The footsteps receded, a door slammed. A real door made of wood, hung from brass hardware, closing away the obscenity in a walled box.

While I kick and squirm helplessly on the tile. While I listen to the refrigerator hum and the crickets chirp. While I stare into a black pit that is my soul, dear God, that is my soul...

#

He moved around the kitchen doing what damage he could until he was too tired to do it anymore. With his bound legs he hooked kitchen chairs and brought them crashing onto the tile, into the walls, onto himself. He kicked loose the bottom panel on the refrigerator and upset the drip pan beneath. Stale water soaked the cuffs of his pajamas. He found the table legs and pushed until the table scooted and hit an obstacle with a loud crash. He broke cabinet doors, knocked pans and skillets everywhere, kicked over the plastic garbage pail. When breathing was so hard it hurt, he waited for his wind to return.

He felt with his feet and determined where he was on the kitchen floor. He had lived in this house ten years, he should know his way, but he had never tried navigating blindfolded, bound, on floor level. Finally, he judged where the doorway might be leading into the den and aimed for it. He inch-wormed on his side by pulling his legs up and pushing forward. He bumped his head on the downed chairs, had his face smeared with coffee grounds and eggshells from the spilled garbage, but he found the door after an interminable time.

He did these things to make noise, to try to create a diversion, in order to save Carla. And he did them to keep from thinking. If he thought about what was going on in Carla's bedroom, he would lose the tiny string playing out his mind.

As he wormed across the carpeted den, he wondered how long it would be before he completely lost his sanity. Already he could not say what was real and what was illusion in the world he had been thrust into. He identified objects and sounds and odors, but were they real or had he been forced to make them up so that he would know
he
was real?

He felt the carpet because it burned him, and scraped his upper cheekbone and forehead and nose. The outside of his left arm burned as he scooted along. He smelled the carpet. It gave off dust and foot smell and carpet shampoo deodorant smell. But was he on the deep brown carpet of his den in a house he called home in the dark of a hellish night, or was he lost in one of those nightmares where you can't tell you're dreaming? He had dreams like that before. After Frannie--life was divided between Before and After Frannie--after a maniac walked into the house while passing through town and sliced her into strips with his switchblade, well, nightmares became very, very real for Sully. None quite so petrifying as this one, but there had been others.

Couldn't he have fallen asleep and
dreamed
he got up to check the doors once more and decided to look in on Carla? Couldn't his talk with Mike combined with the shots of Irish whiskey set him up for this horrid stage play? Maybe Mike's warning made him feel guilty he had not secured the house as soon as he knew Lansing had killed again. Maybe it was his conscience torturing him with a guilt-ridden nightmare. That would explain why he dreamed Mike sat on the sofa in the dark with his throat cut. It was Sully's subconscious wish--though pretty drastic if you asked him--that Mike pay for the reminder.

He slammed headfirst into the baseboard of the upholstered rocker and the shock jolted his spine. He laid his cheek on the carpet and counted to ten, cursing silently between the numbers to help dissipate the pain. His head was in poor shape, really poor shape. Running into the rocker shouldn't have hurt him that badly. There must be a bump the size of an orange on his head from the hit he took in Carla's room for it to be so sensitive. That is, if this was real and not a dream.

He scooted to the left and inched past the rocker. He had been concentrating so desperately on moving himself the length of the twenty-four-foot room to Carla's bedroom door, he had not been paying attention to the sounds around him.

Now that he was as close as six feet from where her door should be, he stopped moving, and lifting his head, listened.

She was crying, the poor baby was crying so piteously. His little Carla, his wife's beautiful, proud, brave little sister.

Sully tucked his head toward his groin, curled into a fetus ball, and wished fervently not to be able to hear, to be stone deaf, to be sleeping and dreaming, dreaming, only dreaming this horribly unreal godless time.

His nose clogged and he had trouble breathing. His testicles shriveled, and hair stood out on the nape of his neck. His ears rang as if sirens were blowing down the ear canals. His fingers dug into clammy palms.

Sully lifted is head and banged the floor to make the crying go away. He kept banging the floor until he passed into unconsciousness.

CHAPTER 8

"Hey, it's time to wake up. I want to talk."

Sully heard: "...to talk."

"Huh?" Sully responded, but it was little more than a grunt.

"Wake the fuck up, Torrance. Sit, sit, that's right, straighten out your legs, I'll help."

Sully snapped into full wakefulness, but the disorientation he suffered earlier in the night was not as bad as it was now. His throat was parched and raw so that he could hardly swallow. He whiffled when he breathed, as if a valve had shut down in his lungs. Everything was black. His head and body was one big mass of skyrocketing pain.

He felt rough, calloused hands on his face. Suddenly the tape was painfully ripped off his mouth, and his lips flapped like rubber. He yelped.

Lansing patted his cheek. "There, now, isn't that better?"

"Whayoudo...?" Sully tried again. "What. Did. You. Do to Carla?"

Lansing's voice moved away. "That's for me to know."

And you to find out, Sully finished for him. "Lansing, in God's name..."'

"We're not going to talk about God. I don't know one thing about the bum. No one I ever knew ever met him." He laughed aloud at how clever he thought he sounded.

Sully cleared his throat. He considered how to go about staying alive until he could see Carla. He said, "Will you take the tape off my eyes so I can see?"

"No deal."

"You killed Mike." That just popped out. He didn't mean to say it. He had to control what he said.

"Yeah, I killed Mike. He's your friend, right? Right?"

Sully nodded his head up and down. It seemed the darkness he was locked into bobbed with the motion, tiny pinpoint dots of lights, photons, he'd read somewhere, drifting across his closed field of vision, flooding his retinas like a field of stars in a miniature universe.

"So he's dead. Right over there on your fucking sofa."

He paused and Sully imagined him looking at his friend's body. "Looks good, your friend, with his frigging smart mouth shut down for the long haul."

"Did you kill Carla?" Sully wanted to hear she was alive, and then he wanted to hear she was dead. Either way it was hell.

Lansing completely ignored him. He said, "Listen, you made a goddamn mess in the kitchen, you know that? Person could get roaches and rats living like that. You ever have rats, Sully? Not little mice, even nice folks get mice. I mean those huge mean grizzly things that could take off your toes. You ever get them?"