CRIME THRILLERS-A Box Set (46 page)

Mao Tse-tung

Carla came to in a world splotched with green, blue, and white. She felt herself whirling around on a planet spinning through limitless blue space. She had felt this sensation as a child when she lay on her back on the lawn and contemplated the sky and her place on the round globe of the twirling earth. Now overhead she gazed through sparse foliage of a pecan and a mighty pin oak tree. Beyond the vivid greenery lay a vault of azure sky, where ragged bits of white cloud raced across a blinding white sun.

Comprehension slowly returned to her numb brain. She lay on her back on scratchy rough ground, pebbles grating against the small bones of her back, and she was gazing at the summer sky zipping past green swaying treetops.

She turned her head slowly to the side in order to still the dizzying effect of moving too rapidly through space. Red-topped clover and wild purple verbena curtained her face. She could smell the black, rich soil that momentarily reminded her of the backbreaking, but spirit-enhancing work she did in Israel. The stalks of purple verbena parted and a hand swam into focus. A male figure, emaciated and stubble-bearded, sat beside her. Carla found her tongue. "What will you do with me?"

The emotionless tone of voice chilled her. "I will kill you soon." He spoke hardly above a whisper. He began to cough and withdrew his hand from the wildflowers to retrieve a handkerchief from his back pocket. He covered his mouth, the cough stronger now.

Though she knew the answer to her question before asking, she shivered involuntarily at the thought of her own demise. She believed she had prepared herself for this eventuality, but she had not. Could anyone, came the fleeting thought, really prepare and accept his own passing from this life? Courage was taking action in the face of dire threat to bodily welfare, and she had done that. Bravery was toiling forward when all was black and hopeless, and this, too, she had done. But to die without revenge or recompense, to die mercilessly, perhaps tortuously--no, she could never have prepared herself for it.

Though her head pounded with spikes of pain, she struggled into a sitting position. She heard pebbles tinkle to the earth from where they had been stuck to her back. She leaned over drawn-up knees and stared at the mossy ground between her legs. Remembering her weapons, her right hand snaked from her lap to her waist. They were gone, as was her belt that secured them at her side.

"I have your junk," he said, his coughing spasm lessening enough for him to speak. "I like that bow thing. Never seen one like it. Where that arrow got me in the shoulder, it hurts like hell. If you'd been more on target like you were in the backyard at Sully's with the bull's-eye, I'd be dead now."

Carla refused to meet the stare burning into the side of her face. She concentrated on breathing and regaining the lost center of her inner balance. She still felt as if her body were but a mote tumbling loose in the sunlight. She tried to remember what happened at the stream. She had fallen backward into the water when she ran into him at the top of the bank. Then he had scrambled down after her, and she remembered her eyes rounding until they stung. Then...

She couldn't remember. He might have struck her, pushed her back until she hit her head on a stone, tried to drown her beneath the rushing clear water. Her jeans were wet and the material of her long-sleeved shirt clung to and delineated her small breasts.

"You were gone a long time," he said conversationally.

Carla remained silent. She ground her teeth together and glanced surreptitiously around the ground for something she could use to fight him.

"Do you still have the scars?" he asked.

She heard him scoot closer to where she sat, and her spine tightened down like screws hitting home in a chunk of wood. Her fingers worked, wishing to move to her shirt buttons, to caress the mementos he had given her four years before. Dear God, why hadn't she killed him? Why hadn't the arrow pierced his heart or the ball bearing broken through his skull to his sick, impossible brain?

"I bet you still have the scars." He sounded like a schoolboy, a bully who liked to push smaller children around with taunts and fists. "You're the only one I never forgot," he was saying in that singsong child's voice. "All the others are just blurs in my head. They looked the same. Same arms, legs, breasts, asses. But you, Carla...you I have never forgotten. There's a little brown mole on the cheek of your ass. There's a pink birthmark just inside your left knee."

She cringed at the intimacy of the words and drew her legs tighter to her chest. He violated her, robbed her of humanity and dignity and love. He marked her as his own plaything, remembered her and came back again to finish what he had begun.

"We'll stay here a little while, but then Sully will come looking, it won't be safe." His voice was silky, like a lover's in the dark. "I don't know yet when I'll kill you, Carla. But you know it has to be done. You know I can't let you go a second time. But when it happens, I won't warn you, okay? It will be easier that way, for you and me both."

"You slimy prick." Her hate for him was an all-consuming thing that made her want to retch. She balled her fists and turned toward him to beat him in the face. He jerked away in time.

"You called to me, Carla. You did this to yourself. You came out here searching for me with your kiddie toys, your little slingshot and bow and arrow. You asked for it, Carla. I am only obliging a friend."

She was on him without thought, without measuring chances or weighing the outcome. She was a tigress flailing at him with sharp nails bent into claws and teeth bared for rending flesh. She smelled his scent in her flared nostrils and leapt from a sitting position onto his body.

Their limbs tangled, and Lansing fell onto his back with her abrupt charge. He allowed her to hit him in the chest and in the face, and he laughed until tears squeezed from the corners of his eyes.

Suddenly she reared above him, her legs straddling his middle and in her right fist she raised the handle of the ax. The blade descended in a blinding, shining arc.

"Shit!" Lansing screamed. He never saw her move to reach for the weapon where it lay at his side. He grappled with her upraised arm, momentarily staying the motion that meant to kill him. He rolled her onto her back, and he was on top now, his weight pinning her flat. The hand gripping the ax trembled with power. His wrist hurt as he tried pushing it away from where she aimed the sharp edge at his gut.

Seconds before her free hand clawed into his face, half blinding him, Lansing drew on the discipline he had perfected over a lifetime of physical pain. He put his mind into a cold silent place, and as an observer, he looked beyond the pain that threatened, looked to the other side of the pain into a void of nothingness.

Carla's long, unpainted nails ripped down his forehead and into the socket of one eye. The orb's bursting did not faze him. He wrenched the ax from her other hand and threw it as hard as he could into the forest. Then with both hands he grasped the killing fingers solidly buried in his torn eye socket, and with a grunt of great effort, forced her digging fingers down and away from his instantly bloodied face.

In Carla's closed bloody fist which she opened, the fingers snapping back one by one, lay half of an eyelid and the dripping remnants of a once perfect brown and gold-flecked eye.

"SULLY"

CHAPTER 1

Sully woke to find Carla gone from her neatly made bed, absent from the echoing house. He scratched his head in confusion and settled in the kitchen with a mug of hot coffee. While stirring grits into boiling water on the stove for breakfast, he remembered the primitive weapons she had shown him. He turned off the gas flame and went again to her room. Only the sapling javelins lay on a wall shelf. She took the other weapons with her. She had gone on a hunt. For Lansing. Incredible.

Sully lost his appetite, turned off the flame under the boiling water, and nursed a second cup of coffee. A war raged in his thoughts, and he was divided about what he should do. Should he call the county sheriff or should he wait? He did not really believe Lansing was in the woods. Carla's revulsion on her last trek into the wild part of the forest might have been psychologically triggered by the old bad memories or simply occurred as the result of finding the snaky marshland north of his house. He had known that section of the woods existed. The lumber company left the undergrowth and scrub pine alone, the untamed vegetation too much trouble to clear for profit; too much trouble and too dangerous. There were quicksand bogs and, it was rumored, even alligators in that stretch of woods. The area stunk to high heaven from the decaying remains of small animals who wandered into the area only to be trapped in briers or bogs to die slow deaths.

He let Carla think the atmosphere she had stumbled upon meant it was the hiding place of Martin Lansing because she so wanted it to be. But he had no such faith. It was a wickedly uninhabitable haven for everything except bats and hawks, moccasins and gators, but not necessarily where Lansing had gone to ground, indeed if he had even returned at Carla's newspaper reward lure.

Sully smiled slightly and set his cup on the table. Carla was such a serious young woman. His smile vanished. She was a victim, and like him, she would always be a victim. It was not something that went away with time. Once victimized, always damned. Always afraid of shadows and rustlings and dark woods abandoned to the wild.

For his part, he had tried to convert his modest home into a jail cell to keep out the boogeyman. Carla, with her military training and Chinese theorists and silly weaponry, was doing the same thing. She was trying to find security in the only way she knew how. When he could not talk her out of such a defensive stance, he had to give in to it.

He turned the burner on beneath the pot of grits again and stood watching the cloudy white water boil. Carla's obsession at this point was harmless, and he must let her move freely, work the poisons out of her system. So she had taken her things and wandered into the woods before he woke; he had no reason to get unnerved about it. Carla was capable of caring for herself. The weapon demonstration had assured him of that. And there was nothing to find in that brier tangle she searched but a snake or roving bobcat, maybe. She could take care of nature's vicious beasts.

Let her go, he advised himself, pouring the grits onto a platter. He salt-and-peppered and buttered his breakfast meal before sitting down to devour it. His unease and worry seeped away into the morning light while he ate. Mentally loosening his tether on Carla, he felt lighter and happier already. She was all right. Of course she was all right.

After breakfast and straightening the house, Sully put a load of clothes into the washer. He dumped in a double handful of detergent, dropped the washer lid. He spent the rest of the day in a trance-like state as he hoed and pulled weeds from the garden. The day was bright enough so that he wore sunglasses against the glare. Before noon his shirt clung wetly to his sweaty body. It was good to work with living things in the earth. It cleansed his mind, acted as a mild tranquilizer on his thoughts. He became more and more like the vegetables he tended, mindless, swept along through time with the wind at his back and the sun fiery above in a cloudless sky.

Though he stopped around one o'clock for a quick sandwich and a beer, he ate standing over the rows in his garden, deciding what next chore he would tackle. When the sun lowered into a blood-red sunset, he stood leaning on the rake where he had finished smoothing out his weeding efforts between the rows of pole beans. Now that he was done for the day, he noticed the stitch in the small of his back and the tightness of his arm muscles. Those creeping symptoms of age again. He wiped sweat from his brow and stared off into the wood line where darkness gathered early.

It was his first thought of Carla since morning. Where was she? Shouldn't she have returned before now?

He took the rake, hoe, fertilizer, and hand trowel with him to store in the shed at the far edge of the garden. Again he caught himself staring at the woods, expecting Carla to step out with a wave, a tired, sheepish smile on her lips. She would call to him, "He's not out there, Sully. I looked and couldn't find him. I guess I was wrong, you were right."

He waited, feeling foolish, fantasizing until a cool breeze ruffled the damp hair over his forehead, causing him to shiver.

He bathed and made a dinner for himself and Carla consisting of fried okra from the garden, a pot of snap beans cooked with a slab of bacon, and two medium-sized catfish he had saved in the freezer from his last fishing trip. He arranged the food on the table and drank coffee while the meal cooled.

His glance often strayed to the screen door, a block of impenetrable black that beckoned him to fantasize more, to fantasize fearful things. Where was she in that dark new night? Why would she frighten him this way?

The meal sat untouched, cooling. Sully paced the kitchen floor. Every moment Carla was missing he spent remembering the night Lansing made them prisoners in their own home. There was a dent in a lower cabinet door where he had kicked the wood, on the wall a scrape in the ivory paint where he had pushed the table edge in corrosive fury at his impotence.

He suddenly ceased his pacing and went to the food spread over the table. He stacked the empty plates and put the silverware in the center. He took a tablecloth from a drawer and shook it over the supper. The idea of eating alone ruined his appetite. Except for breakfast, his appetite was fickle at best, and Carla's absence gnawed at his stomach like a trickle of acid. He went to the screen door to gaze at the dark.

Carla, where are you?

#

Lansing watched Sully for some minutes pacing the kitchen at the rear of the house. With the back door standing open and only a screen between them, he could have come right to the porch steps without being detected. But he stayed near the garden, his thoughts, which had earlier been in disarray, congealing into sanguine intent.