CRIME THRILLERS-A Box Set (40 page)

Lansing curled his fingers around the knife and raised his arm to a maximum height so the plunge would pierce her through the heart. At the split second before he carried through with a downward slash, he heard tires on gravel out front, the sound of a car motor die, the clack of a car door closing.

Footsteps on gravel.
Goddamnit!

His hand stayed suspended, paralyzed above the victim. He looked at Carla's eyes and thought he saw triumph written in the brown depths. He hissed knowing he had waited too long, knowing he had been cheated. "Damn you," he whispered.

#

The sound of car tires crunching over gravel made Sully stiffen where he lay. His thrashing ceased and a silence descended that boomed in his ears. Lansing had been with Carla only a couple of minutes. If the person outside was Mike Dalamas' girlfriend or his father or if it was one of Sully's neighbors, rescue was on hand. It couldn't be too late, couldn't be.

"In here!" Sully screamed as loud as he could. He thumped his legs on the floor. "Someone help us! Break down the door if you have to, but help us, please! Be careful, there's a man in here with a knife!"

He heard the front door open. A baritone voice called, "Sully? Mike?"

"Flap! I'm here on the floor. Lansing's in Carla's room. Stop him, hurry, hurry!"

Flap hurried into the den and was almost upon Mike Dalamas' corpse before he saw him. He ran past Sully on the floor and through the open door of Carla's room. He was growling like a wounded bear, fists held before him in fiery rage.

Sully heard Flap's cry. "Carla! Girl, what's been done to you? What's going on here, in Christ's name?"

Sully squenched his eyes and ducked his head. He was afraid to hear Flap tell him Carla was dead. He was afraid Lansing might pounce and kill Flap, too. He was rolled into such a tight little ball of fear that he did not know when Flap came to kneel beside him and untie his bindings. It was as if his mind had skipped out for a while and left behind a slick, indifferent shell.

#

Sully sat in the Macon Hospital waiting room to speak to Carla's doctor. She had been brought by ambulance from Jamison, and Sully rode with her, Flap following in his rusty El Dorado.

The physical wounds were not very much worse than superficial. Lansing had made two lateral cuts on her an inch apart running from right shoulder blade to left hipbone. It was what he had done to Frannie except that he did not excise the skin on Carla. He left the two cuts deep enough to leave a scar, but not so deep that she would bleed to death. It was as if he knew precisely what he was doing.

There were no other signs of mutilation or abuse. The major problem of concern seemed to be mental. Carla, after they had removed the tape from her mouth and unbound her legs and arms, could not speak. She simply stared into the distance in a sort of frightening catatonic trance.

"Mr. Torrance?"

Sully rose to meet the bespectacled doctor. "Yes."

"I'd like to keep your sister-in-law under observation for a few days. It's not unusual for this kind of hysterical reaction after the trauma she's been through. It was your wife, her sister, who was murdered a few weeks ago, wasn't it?"

"Yes. By the same man who did this."

"I thought I recognized the name from the papers. I'm sorry about your wife, but I hope we can do something to help Carla."

"Can I stay?"

"Why don't you get a room in town, come back in the morning, Mr. Torrance? Carla's perfectly safe here with us. There's going to be a policeman guarding her room, and the nurses are instructed to look in on her every half hour."

"Sure, fine. Thank you, doctor."

Sully watched the man walk away before he sat back down in the waiting room chair. While time passed as they waited for the doctor's prognosis, Flap had not spoken once. He sat down next to Sully, his fingers templed before his grizzled old face. "You leaving?" Flap asked, breaking the silence.

"No. Not with Martin Lansing on the loose. You can leave, though. No reason both of us should stay."'

"Mind if I stay anyway? It's my general principle to stick around until things get settled."

Sully thought he knew what Flap meant. He was Frannie's and Carla's great uncle. He was an old-timer who lived secluded in the mountains outside of Jamison. He had not been on hand to prevent Frannie's death, but luckily he had saved Carla the same fate. He felt he owed his last living relative something more.

"Stay if you want. I could do with the company."

Flap fell back into a watchful stillness. Sully liked having him nearby. The smell and looks of a hospital were depressing enough without someone along to help take off the edge. Flap in his denim overalls and work boots looked out of place, a farmer at a country club dance, but he was rock solid. Real. Unerringly steadfast. And he seemed to prefer silence, something Sully needed for a time. Lansing had forced him to talk. He never wanted to talk again without good reason.

Sully picked up the tuna salad sandwich he had bought in the hospital cafeteria and offered half to Flap. It was accepted and together they began to eat, both of them with thoughts on other things.

Sully couldn't help wondering what was going through Carla's head. What was she thinking about now that it was over?

And where was Martin Lansing? When would he be back?

CARLA

CHAPTER 1

Israel

Guerrilla Unorthodox Tactics:

. . . protracted harassment by subtle, flexible tactics designed to wear down the enemy while gaining time. A strategy for the morally strong and materially weak.

Carla Ben Gev, as she was known in the kibbutz, closed the reference book on warfare and sat thinking about what she had read. "For the morally strong and materially weak." Yes, her cause was right and just. She was poor by the world's standards. She was a guerrilla fighter. It was as if all of her life had led up to the specialized training she had received here in Israel. She was
born
to be a fighter. It only surprised her that the fighting she envisioned would necessarily be played out on a physical battlefield and not in the theoretical arena of human rights.

As a child she had been a scruffy tomboy with a propensity for showing off to her male companions. She dared the uppermost tremendous heights when climbing trees, laughing down at the boys who had jeered at her when she pleaded to join their rough and tumble play. She ran the hardest and longest, wrestled the fiercest competitors, opted for the part of sheriff rather than the Indian maiden in cowboy games. Other girls shunned her while secretly envying her hard-won camaraderie with the opposite sex. The boys at first ridiculed her, and then grudgingly extended their admiration.

She stopped showing off when she entered junior high where she realized physical prowess in game playing had become a thing of the past, of childhood lost now to adolescence. Besides, she had proven herself. She was wiry and strong from the years of competition. She had grown determined and unafraid of either men or circumstance.

At thirteen she asked Frannie to enroll her in gymnastics, where her body was further toned to perform precise commands. At fourteen she was the smallest but the best softball pitcher the girl's league had ever seen. At fifteen she asked Sully for a gun as a birthday present and learned how to handle a weapon with intelligence and skill. At sixteen her uncle Flap took her into the mountains, his stomping ground, and over two weeks that summer taught her tracking, hunting, and the rules of living in tune with the outdoors.

Now she was here, in her ancestral homeland, a disciplined and experienced soldier, an elite member of the finest fighting forces in the modern world.

No one could ever have predicted that her whole life and natural inclinations would come in handy preparing her for revenge. For that was her sole purpose. Revenge, sweet and fatal. She had hoped the law courts would extract vengeance on her sister's murderer. When they did not, her entire concentration turned toward personal gratification. Even if Martin Lansing had never come to Sully's house that night, even if he had disappeared and she'd never seen him again once he walked from the courtroom, her quest would have been to find him, to see him pay the debt owed Frannie.

She shivered, goose bumps rising along her arms. She set aside the book on warfare and hugged herself to still the trembling. In this position, knees drawn to her chest on the bed, arms holding her torso tight, she could feel the pull of her old wounds. Wounds made by Lansing the night he tied her to the bed. Wounds he had made with the accuracy of a surgeon.

The scars were white and stood out as puckered twin ridges running from shoulder blade to hipbone. When she stretched as she was doing now or swam or reached high, the long scars pinched the healthy skin running alongside each old cut so that she was made aware of them.

She smiled grimly into the gathering shadows of her room. In a way Lansing had given her a gift. One of remembrance, one that would never leave her, never allow her to forget her mission. She brought one hand to her bosom and traced the double welts down to her waist where they were lost beneath the elasticized band of her khaki shorts.

In the drifting evening shadows, she remembered more than the night of terror in Jamison, Georgia. She remembered she must soon make a choice. A recruiter from Shin Bet had been to see her the week before. They had been watching her, he said--during training, during her stint as a soldier for the Israeli army, during her quieter days working on the Kibbutz. It was clear to them she would make excellent agent material for their organization. She had time to decide, he said. Her two years were almost up on the cooperative. When her obligation was over, then they would like to speak to her again. She must think about it. She must decide. They were eager to have her, but only if she was absolutely certain she belonged.

Shin Bet, one of five Israeli counterintelligence organizations, often scrutinized the young people who flocked to the communal kibbutzim. Potential young people were evaluated as agents to go after potential saboteurs, Arab terrorists, and political security infiltrators. They were a celebrated corps of dedicated men and women. Carla knew of Shin Bet, of course, but it was a covert association, one mark of the professionalism of Israeli agencies. She had no idea they recruited anyone except nationals and was extremely proud to have been considered.

In less than four months she must decide to either join Shin Bet and be of use to her people, or return to Jamison and pursue the man who had killed her sister. When working in the fields, her hands buried wrist deep in the earth, the questions did not nag at her. But when she was alone contemplating the future and when she was totally honest with herself, she knew the answer. The scars pulling at her otherwise unblemished skin spoke the answer with a slicing sound. The nightmares that plagued her and woke her in a cold sweat screaming in the dark night told her the way. She would be misdirecting her vengeance and simmering deep anger in the Shin Bet. It was Martin Lansing she wanted. Her entire life had been in some way focused toward forging a warrior ready to battle the devil.

The devil who walked the earth in the guise of a man.

She reached to the night table and took up the folded month-old Atlanta newspaper. It was smudged and wrinkled from much handling. The murder had made the front page. The victim, found on the outskirts of the city in the trunk of her car had been stabbed and sliced. Strips sliced and separated from the woman's body. Carla had watched the Georgia papers she'd subscribed to for three years without seeing the handiwork of Lansing. She was about to conclude he had truly vanished from her home state. But this report was her evidence. He was back again.

He was in action, murdering and getting away with it.

Again.

After rereading the article, she opened the table drawer and brought out another folded newspaper. It was from only last week. Lansing's work. Undeniable. She could not imagine where he had been during the interim or what he had been doing, but she was now convinced he was back and he was killing innocent people. It had been so long since Frannie's murder, they had not even mentioned her death in the articles, or perhaps the reporter had not made the connection. But Carla knew. And it was what she had been waiting for.

She swung her feet to the floor. There were sounds of dinner being prepared by the women and of babies crying.

She took up the book she'd been reading,
Warfare Tactics Throughout the Age
, and put it carefully away in a waiting suitcase on the end of her bed. She was sure they would let out of her kibbutz contract. She would promise to return and finish her obligation later on. She would make them understand the urgency of a trip home to the United States.

Carla was a fighter. Born, trained, and ready. She was going to war and determined to be the victor. This time she would win against the monster who ruined her young life.

#

Carla was twenty-two and had been away from Jamison, Georgia, four years. Sully sent her the
Jamison Enterprise
weekly newspaper along with the
Atlanta Journal
all the time she was gone. It had been her one request.

As she flew from Athens, Greece, to New York, she once again went over the collected file of news articles from the past six weeks. There were two definite stories she attributed to Lansing's activities and a third possible one.

Item:

WOMAN IN NURSING HOME FOUND MURDERED

----------

By Dora Sheeney

Atlanta Journal

---------

Seventy-seven-year-old Sarah J. MacWilliams was found murdered in her bed last night at the Golden Wings Nursing Home at 9502 Haines Street.

Authorities say nursing staff found Mrs. MacWilliams at six A.M. when they went to wake her for breakfast. No one could say how the intruder entered the facility and reached the victim without being seen.

Captain Dwight Laramie of the Atlanta Police Department says the killer stabbed MacWilliams at least three times in the chest, and then "he left mementos ...he took off strips of her skin."