CRIME THRILLERS-A Box Set (54 page)

Flap whispered, "I think that's a light."

A thin unreal glow flickered from thirty-five feet above their heads. Suddenly as they watched the light went out. "Candle, most likely," Flap whispered into his ear. "He's up there."

"Carla..."

"Not tonight, Sully. Ain't no way to scale that rock face. We're gonna have to move back, lie down, and wait till morning."

"Why?"

"For him to come down to us."

"What if he doesn't?"

"Then we find a way up to him regardless of what happens."

Flap pulled at his arm, and they moved softly back into the cover of the forest. Flap sat down cross-legged and watched the black ribbon of rock ledge the way a hypnotized volunteer would stare at a watch fob swinging back and forth. Sully pulled off his backpack and withdrew a blanket. He lay on his belly, his arms and head resting on the pack. They sat watching that way for a long time, neither of them speaking. The moon was haloed and smoky as yellow quartz. The tinkle of water running over rock lulled them with rhythmic music. The ground gave off a smell of must and leaf mold.

"Flap, you think he's killed her?" Something forced Sully to ask.

"Nope. But who can know?"

"Do you think the sheriff's men will get here in time to help?"

"Hell, no. No doubt by now ole Banks is in bed snoring and sent the search team home just like last night. He's a pinhead, our Sheriff Banks."

"Well, we agree on one thing." He felt the old man's hand slip over his shoulder and squeeze it affectionately.

"Don't worry." Flap lowered his voice to a sibilant rustle. "We got him now, Sully. He ain't going nowhere."

Sully stared into the somber ash-gray darkness until his eyes stung from lack of moisture. He imagined Carla alone with Lansing on top of the ledge, in a cave, cold, bound, perhaps near fatally wounded, one of her eyes plucked from her head. She had to be afraid. She had to wonder if she was going to live through the next few hours. She might be thinking of him now, wishing he could find her.

"We got him," he agreed with Flap. He craned his head back on his shoulders looking up the sheer rock face to the overhang above. It was almost as if he could see Carla and Lansing up there peering down at him. "He won't get away this time. You have to help me. We can't let him get away again."

Silver-rimmed clouds obscured a pale misty moon. Trees shivered, their branches shuddering from unseen hands. Sully stared straight ahead now at the rough rock wall blocking his way. He was glad Flap had forced Carla's old .38 revolver on him. He could feel the hard outline of the barrel beneath his fingers in the backpack. If he got Carla back alive he promised himself he would never remind her of her naive refusal to deal in modern day weapons. By now it should be obvious to her she had gone up against Lansing unprepared to match his cunning. She had made a grave mistake and though he and Flap both tried to tell her, she had been too stubborn to listen.

Although he, Sully, was not a sharpshooter or master gun handler, he felt safer knowing the revolver was accessible. What did one have to know about guns to use them? You pointed the damn things and pulled the trigger. You made sure the safety was off, and you just pulled the fucking trigger. If you were close enough, it didn't matter whether you could strike a bull's-eye in a hundred-yard target. If you were close enough you used the gun and watched the results bloom before your eyes. That's all. It couldn't be that hard, even for a novice. This situation had left him without time to learn firearm safety or practice shooting. He had to trust when and if it came to the point he had to use the gun, he'd do it right.

Thinking of Carla, one side of her face ravished, an empty socket peeking out from destroyed flesh, turned him deathly cold. Then in Carla's place in his imagination he saw Frannie the day he found her on the bedroom floor. Her perfectly beautiful body mutilated beyond recognition. The vision flicked aside like a slide replaced by a new one clicked into place. He saw himself tied hand and foot, scooting desperately across the length of the kitchen and den to Carla's door, and he heard her weeping. Then Lansing's voice returned, goading him to reveal intimate areas of his life with Frannie and Carla. What had he made up and what had been the truth? He had been whipped into simpering submission by a man who should have rightfully been sitting in a cell on Death Row. A man who deserved torturous, prolonged death, nothing quick and painless. He should crawl, Sully decided, playing his private revenge scenario just as it pleased him. Crawl around on his hands and knees leaking vital fluids, tearing at the hole in his gut, begging for help or relief or the endless security of sweet death.

Had Frannie crawled, begged, sought after the last precious moment of life the way a channel swimmer will put on a burst of exertion to make it to shore? Couldn't God this once let Sully have his revenge, let him taste it, withdraw and clinically, calculatingly dissect it as it occurred? Would not that be justice and final recompense for what Lansing had done to his family? What he had done to the women in his life?

Even that would not be enough, but it was all Sully could hope for. He had made up his mind the instant he found the cloth-wrapped flesh in the garden that if he had any say-so in the matter, Lansing would never make it back to jail in the protective custody of the law.

Not this time.

Flap did not know of these murderous plans, of course, and Sully didn't think it wise to tell him. It did not matter if they caught Lansing with his pants down and helpless to protest; Sully knew he'd kill him. The thought of cold-blooded murder did not shock him in the least. There was an unabated well of vengeance inside him. He stirred the waters and saw himself reflected there without flinching.

Without mercy? Kill without mercy? came the unbidden question on the heels of these thoughts.

Oh, yes, he was quick with rebuttal to the conscience's query. Oh, yes, without mercy, with forethought, with deliberation and premeditation, without thought of punishment or fear of hellfire or hope for forgiveness at Christ's knee.

It is too late, Sully reflected, for clemency. I'm going to take Lansing out of this miserable world in the only way he deserves to go, amen and forever.

CHAPTER 2

Carla opened her eyes to daylight that resembled watery tea. The sky looked thick and coated with a layer of dust. Her bones hurt as if she had been beaten. Seeping cold from the dank dirt floor of the cave jellied her marrow and slowed the warm flow of blood in her veins. She felt sluggish and afraid.

Alone. And afraid.

Lansing roved around the back side of the rock walls looking for something and muttering below his breath. Carla took the time to inspect the skeleton propped on top of an upended wooden box placed next to the stacked crates of canned goods and supplies. The hair was gray and stringy, as if grease had been rubbed into it. It hung in lanky ropes down from the skull, patches of it missing. The corpse's skin, left out in the natural elements, had shrunken to the very bone structure,, gone leathery brown and wrinkled as an Egyptian mummy. The skin of her hands had shredded away until the chalky white bones showed. Lacking cartilage and muscle, some of the finger bones had fallen to the cave floor directly below where her hands dangled at her sides.

Lansing had told her he brought the old witch with him when he left Ohio after her murder. He carried her in the trunks of cars, put her into damp basements, abandoned buildings, always sure she was protected from discovery. When he began detailing how at first her flesh putrefied and poured bodily juices, Carla cringed and shut her eyes against the vision he was painting. She tied to imagine a man hauling around a secret decaying corpse for fifteen years. And there she sat, originally overweight, her body a burdensome thing, and now skeletal, bones gleaming from between scraps of disintegrating cloth that was so old the pattern had faded into one gray color. There she sat on a bony pelvis, her face mummified into a rictus from a nightmare, the eye holes staring emptily at an eternity the living could not see. And the worst sight of all, on the clay earth below her hands, the bones of her fingers where they had dropped. Carla imagined those hands in life soothing the forehead of the young Martin. Lot of good it had done her to entrust her love to a child who was already psychotic before he ever came into her care.

Oh, God, Carla pleaded silently, don't let me end up that way. If I have to die, don't let it be now, left to the grotesque mind of Martin Lansing, who will watch over my decay and add my bones to a grisly collection. I don't want to be sister to the poor woman who first tried to help a maniac. How could I have been so wrong when I called him back? How could I have known I was outclassed and would end up his prisoner, his partner in preparations for my own death? He has murdered his way into my life and stolen from me every vestigial shred of hope, God, and it's not fair, it's not fair at all...

She bowed her head and repeated prayerful verses from the Talmud. God had deserted her, but she was not willing to desert Him or the idea she might have earned a place with Him were she to die. True she had carried the sin of vengeance in her heart for a long time, maybe before she lost Frannie, perhaps seething with wellsprings of unmitigated rebellion after her parents died. But her faith had never died even as fury stoked the fires and revenge became the uppermost objective. Her role as avenging angel failed, but God forgave human frailty. He would forgive her.

"Are you ready for something to eat?" Lansing asked softly from the shadows.

"Why are you whispering?"

"If Sully called out help, they could be on the mountain by now. I don't want them to hear us."

"What if I start screaming?"

He shook his head as if he'd just heard the saddest story in all the world. "I'd have to gag you. You don't want that, do you, Carla? Now, I ask again, do you want something to eat?"

"I don't care." She was downcast and not thinking of him, but of herself and how close her death hovered overhead like a giant bird flapping its wings, shielding both light and life.

"I've got fruit cocktail. That's good for you. I love fruit cocktail, don't you? Those little halved cherries, so sweet and..."

"If you're going to kill me, why bother to feed me?"

He looked surprised at her reasoning. "I don't see how my plans for you have anything to do with fruit cocktail."

"You wouldn't." Her protests, she knew, were feeble, and she had given up trying to free herself from the ropes. She lay on her side with miserably aching muscles, her wrists and ankles raw and bloody from her efforts to work loose. Her hair was dirty and tangled with sticks, leaves, and tiny bits of gravel and clay. Her stomach felt shrunken in on itself. All desire for sustenance had fled.

In some part of her mind she accepted the fate that loomed before her. This place was the end for her if Sully didn't find them soon. She thought before she might stay alive by learning what it was that drove Lansing. But finding out only convinced her he could not be manipulated or tricked into letting her go. There was no appeal she could think of to make him change his delusional mind.

"Here, open your mouth." Lansing squatted over her. He lifted her head from the floor, his hand cradling the back of her stiff neck. He proffered a spoonful of fruit floating in thick transparent syrup.

She opened her lips and took the food. It should have tasted sweet and revived her, but revulsion crept up her throat, and she almost spit the sugary concoction onto the ground. With great effort she finally swallowed it, choking a little.

"Here, take another bite."

She let him feed her what was in the bowl. She sucked in her stomach muscles and forced herself to swallow the canned fruit. When he had scraped up the last of the liquid and a bit of ragged pear from the bowl's bottom, the spoon grating loudly in Carla's ear, he smiled and stuck the spoon in his own mouth to lick it clean. This minor intimacy of sharing a spoon set her teeth on edge. The idea of her saliva mixing with his made her sick.

"You see," he said. "That wasn't so bad. You'd be surprised at how long you can stay healthy without fresh meat or vegetables. I've done it for months without any trouble."

"Where did you get that cough and the chills, then?"

"I don't know." He sounded troubled, and Carla suddenly knew his answer was evasive. He moved away from her to the rickety table.

"Gangrene in your eye and on top of that some kind of lung disease. You're not going to make it, Lansing, you know that? I wish I could say I was sorry, but I can't. It sounds too easy for you. I'd much rather have witnessed one of my arrows lodged in your heart."

He ignored her and opened another can from the crates for himself. He sat on the floor and ate directly from the can, the slurping sounds he made cannibalistic and repellent. She abominated the sight of him, the way he ate, the way he moved, the very look from his one eye when he stared at her.

She glanced from him to the female skeleton. "Did you know she's coming apart?"

Lansing had the spoon halfway to his mouth. He looked up. "Who's coming apart?"

"
Her.
Your 'witch.' Her finger bones are falling off."

He set down the can and spoon and moved quickly to the corpse. He cocked his head, studying the objects on the ground. "I keep gluing them back on and they keep falling off. She does that on purpose to torment me."

"You glue them back on? My God."

He looked over his shoulder. "If I didn't, I'd lose her fingers. I don't want to lose her fingers, Carla. I've tried every kind of glue on the market. Nothing works for long. It's the damp in here. And maybe little animals that come to nibble at her."

Sheets of depression descended over Carla and obscured her view of the man and his skeleton. It was impossible to understand him. He seemed to give more care and solicitude to a dead thing than to living beings, himself included. He was sick; she knew by the way he breathed so laboriously, by the way he fell into a hacking, phlegmy cough. His lungs were diseased, his eye torn from its socket, he had a slight wound on his arm from her arrow shot, and a goose egg knot on his chest from her ball bearing. Yet he worried about gluing together the finger bones of a long dead nemesis when he had so little worry about his own deterioration.