CRIME THRILLERS-A Box Set (39 page)

"No."

"I got one once. It kept fucking around under the sink. One night I caught it with the hammer. Smashed it to paste. Never did get another one. Like they're smart, right?"

"Yeah, they're smart."

"Don't be agreeing with me if you don't mean it. I'm not some damn psycho with an I.Q. of twenty. You don't think I'm dumb, do you, Sully? Tell the truth."

"You've outsmarted the cops in about six states; I guess no one would call you dumb."

"Right. I know how to survive. Like that dead rat's friends, I don't go where the hammer falls."

"You came here."

"And you're the one tied up, your buddy's dead, and..."

"Carla?" Sully asked and held his breath.

"Uh-uh. We'll talk Carla later."

Sully let out his breath, shifted his weight onto his right rump.

"You want some water?"

"I...yes, I'd like a drink of water." Sully listened to him leave the room and walk across the tile floor of the kitchen. He heard the tap run, the footsteps return. "I'm not going to clean up that mess you made in there," Lansing said petulantly. He pressed the rim of a glass to Sully's lips.

Sully drank. Water ran down his chin and neck and felt as wonderful and refreshing as standing beneath a waterfall. The glass was removed.

"My hands and feet have restricted circulation," he said carefully. "Could you...?"

"Untie you? No deal. That's for your twenty I.Q.'s, remember?"

"No, just loosen them a bit, let me work the muscles."

"Sure, I guess that's okay, why not."

Sully hated Lansing's touch, recoiled from it before bringing himself under control again. The cords were retied and felt less binding. Sully flexed his hands, his fingers, felt the tingling begin, the pain following soon after. He bent and arched his feet, shook them the way a dolphin might shake its flippers.

"Better?" Lansing's voice had become truly sarcastic. "I wouldn't want you to be uncomfortable."

"What now?"

Lansing was moving around the room. It sounded as if he were looking for something. "What do you mean. 'What now?"'

"Are you going to kill me? Play head games? Torture? What? What now?"

"I'm going to kill you probably. That's what I came for. You knew I'd come, didn't you?"

Sully cocked his head to the side trying to decipher the tone that had changed from sarcastic to menacingly playful. Did he really mean to kill them? "I thought you might."

"You got some good stuff here, Sully. Nice house. You own a hardware store, right? Build this house yourself? Bet it's paid for, right? No mortgage?"

Sully didn't know which question to answer, so he answered the last one. "There's a fair mortgage on it."

"By fair you mean middling to small, is that it?"

"That's correct."

"You people sure have a way of talking, Sully, you sure do."

"What do you want, Lansing? If Carla's all right and if you'll leave without doing anything else, I'll give you what I've got. Checkbook, credit cards, the Cadillac. Frannie...Frannie had some jewelry. It's in our bedroom. You can have that."

There was a long silence. Sweat trickled down Sully's sides. Had he made a mistake? What could he say to a madman?

"No deal," Lansing said. "If I'd wanted anything in this house, I would have taken it when I did Frannie. This is the final quarter, Sully. I walk outta here and leave you breathing, then there was no point in playing ball."

Did Frannie.
Sully began to hyperventilate and then calmed himself. "Why don't we talk about it?" Sully knew he sounded despondent, hopeless. What did madmen talk about besides rats and mortgages and committing murder in cold blood?

"Right now, yeah, right, that's what I want, Sully. We're going to talk. We're going to get to know each other real good, me and you."

"Okay." He could be long-suffering. Living without Frannie proved that. He could survive, too. He was already learning how.

"I lived out in the woods behind this house, Sully, for a month. Didn't know that, did you? I came here every day.
Watched
over you. Fact is, I was out in your backyard just yesterday."

Sully swallowed his surprise, then remembered the prickling feeling he'd had sitting in the sunlight. He was going to be blank slate, let Lansing write all over him. "Where did you live?" he asked. "There's nothing out there."

"Right. I built a lean-to, know what that is? I used green saplings and bent them. I covered 'em with mud, like the Native Americans used to do. Then I covered the mud with sticks and leaves and mulch. You could have walked clean past it and never knew it was there."

Sully reflected on a mind that could go to such lengths. A mind--a cunning intelligence--that could cause a man to live like a burrowing animal in order to wait and watch a house for a month. For so many days. What kind of man was that? What kind of mind? Lansing was not sane or insane. He was not a madman, for that implied he was a "man" first of all. Martin Lansing was a
creature
. What could he do to dissuade the creature from killing them?

"What did you do for food?" Sully asked. He felt his ears crinkling against the possibilities.

"I stole," Lansing answered casually. "Your neighbors are far and scarce, but I did okay."

"Bathe?"

"What?"

"How did you wash?"

"Creek I found. Good tasting water, too. Good supply."

"I see."

"Now that you know something about me, it's your turn, Sully."

"Do we have to talk about me? Why can't we talk about killing, Lansing? How you can stop. How it can end here."

"Tell me about Frannie." Persistent.

Sully hung his head and waggled it. Desolation was not a place or a state of being or an emotion. He knew what desolation was now. He had lived thirty-four years. He had accepted kindness and goodness and understanding as a given in this world. Until Frannie was murdered, and even after, when he thought he could not go on, there had not been a time he could call by the name Desolation. But now. To speak of his wife who lay cold beneath green sod and watched over by white roses, this was desolation. It was to be alone and forsaken. It was to walk through a city devoid of human life. It was to sit in bondage with your best friend decomposing nearby and with sweet, idealistic Carla lying in the bedroom dead or destroyed or catatonic and have to tell a killer what his victim had been in life.

"Well? I'm waiting, Sully. Of course, we can always tape your mouth again, tighten the electrical wires on your hands and feet. We can always just slit your lousy fucking throat and get this business over with."

"No!" Sully interrupted. He slumped onto the floor, rested his face on the carpet. "We'll talk."

"Right. So go ahead."

"Ask me questions."

"How old was she on your first date?"

Sully sucked in a lungful of air and began to relate the past. He pretended it was someone else's and he was telling story. He could even make things up as he went along. It didn't matter what he said if it sounded believable. Lansing wanted to kill him this way, but it wouldn't work. He wouldn't get the satisfaction. He had only killed part of him. As long as there was any of him left to go on, he'd survive. And as long as he kept Lansing talking he could keep him from killing.

"What did Carla look like then?" Lansing asked next. "Who took care of her?"

Sully decided to ignore questions about Carla if he could deflect his captor from thinking about her in the bedroom. "Frannie's hair was long then, like Carla's now," he was saying, and it was the truth. "She was working as a secretary in City Hall." That was a lie. Didn't matter, who cared? Who knew?

The fabrications grew easier and he mixed them with truth. By all means Sully meant to keep the pure, good memories for himself even if they were his for only a precious little while longer.

Sully invented, added, subtracted, confessed. As a desolate man nevertheless intent on survival, and ultimately, he hoped, revenge, he felt he was sailing smoothly through the turbulent Lansing sea.

It was not until later that he knew he had been wrong.

CHAPTER 9

It was the anticipation of harm that drove them crazy. Lansing understood that as a basic. When he killed Frannie and the Bunsuns, he hadn't had the time to indulge the theory, but with Torrance and Carla he tested it and discovered how strong the
threat
of pain or death could be. It was the reverse of what happened when a man had been trained in the martial arts. In karate, for instance, a man saw
past
the pain, saw
beyond
it. He focused all his energies on the other side of the wooden board or the brick he was determined to smash through. He left no room for perception of what it took to reach the goal.

Lansing personally knew how both modes of thought worked. He had expected pain before, and when it came, the experience was ten times as debilitating. And he had also trained himself to think beyond pain so that when it came, he was absent, therefore, immune.

His victims didn't know the trick of reinforcing positive thoughts, they had no experience, that was the thing. They probably didn't realize they had a choice in the matter. Like everyone else they assumed if they were hit with enough force, pain followed. On a simple everyday level, they believed if a headache occurred, they could only endure it.

During the night while he had Sully tied in the kitchen, he talked to Carla. She was tougher than her brother-in-law. She had no less to lose, but her priorities were different. Not that she wasn't terrified of him and what he might do. He was able to make her weep, though she stopped short of begging for mercy. The problem with Carla was unusual. She was willing to accept torture or slow death and that made her less pliable for his personal plans for her. She was not as much fun as Sully. In a way it was too bad he must kill them. His other victims over the years had been nameless unknowns. He tracked them, killed them, and went on his way undisturbed until he felt he must do it again. He did not talk to his victims this way or play games with them. This was new. This was
good.

"Tell me about Frannie's habits," Lansing said now, prodding Sully toward further revelations. He suspected not all Sully told him was the absolute truth. Now and then what he said had a false ring to it, but he was willing to overlook the discrepancies. It was all prelude anyway, and he didn't care that much about a dead woman. He just wanted to make Sully hurt by forcing him to talk about her. Lies or not, she was in his thoughts, and that was the object of the lesson. Sully and Carla must suffer mentally and physically before dying. They had asked for it.

While Sully droned on, Lansing tried to decide at what moment he would finish this masquerade. It had to be soon, for morning had come and he could not be caught in the house. The longer he stayed, the more vulnerable his position was. Then there was the body on the sofa; the yellow Duster was parked outside, and someone was going to be missing Dalamas soon. Sully's house was on the outskirts of Jamison and surrounded by telephone company timberland, so there was small chance of anyone turning into the drive unannounced. It was the weekend, the hardware store closed for Sunday. Still, before long Lansing had to leave. He had calculated the time he could spend with Torrance and the girl.

That time was running out.

"Can I have more water?" Sully asked, his voice hoarse now from all the talking he had done .

"No, I've got something I've got to do."

"What do you have to do?"

Lansing detected an edge of panic in the question. It was delicious to hold such power over another man.

"It's your friend," he said. "Someone's going to come looking for him any time now."

"You won't get away with this, Lansing."

"We'll see about that, Sully. We'll just see."

"What are you doing?" Sully stiffened and leaned forward to listen.

"I'm gathering up my stuff." He had the roll of duct tape and extra extension cords in a paper sack. He dropped three apples from a bowl of fruit on top, looked around the room.

"You're going to leave?" Sully could not have sounded more incredulous.

"Soon. You think I was moving in permanently?"

"What about Carla? You said you'd let me see her.”

"So I lied. Sue me."

"Lansing, please untie me. Let me take care of her."

"I'm going to take care of her right now, save you the trouble, Sully. Say good-bye and adios to your ass while I'm with Carla, okay? You won't get any more chances."

"You won't kill her. You can't do that, you son of a bitch."

Lansing pondered this. Sully coming on tough. Amazing. He hadn't displayed that kind of venom before.

"That's interesting," he said, squatting to examine Sully's blindfolded face.

"You wanted that, didn't you?" Sully asked.

"You couldn't know what I want."

"You want me to come onto your turf. You want me on your ground, your level."

"What level is that, Sully?"

"I'm going to get you."

Lansing laughed, fell back onto his heels laughing.

"You..." he spluttered. "You're going to get me!"

The sun rose, a big, yellow disk of flame behind the pines backing Sully's house. Shadows crowded the den. The sun accented the tableau of the three men in the room. One dead man stared forever at the floor. One man bound and sightless, bared his teeth. And one man rocked back on his heels in obvious enjoyment of the moment.

"I'm going to get you," Sully repeated, struggling to get loose, to rise up and strike the killing blow. He twisted, he kicked, he clenched his teeth and his lips curled back.

Martin Lansing retreated from the den into Carla's bedroom. He had taped her mouth, but not her eyes. She stared wild-eyed at him now as he approached her side. The pale skin surrounding her eyes, forehead, and nose was blotched with smatterings of red. She knew what was coming, and the anticipation, the dread, streamed from her to fill the room.

He reached into his pocket and withdrew the switchblade for the last time. He touched the button on the ebony handle, and the blade sprung into being. Carla flung her head back and forth, grunting, lifting her torso off the bed in helpless struggle. From the den Sully screamed at him, now begging, now threatening.