CRIME THRILLERS-A Box Set (56 page)

Flap did not say a word. He was still one moment, and the next he rushed the cave brandishing his weapon. He shot into the air and yelled as loud and fearsome as a man losing his mind.

Sully was right behind, fear trilling up and down his spine like a multi-legged spider. He could dimly make out two figures in the darkness at the back of the cave. Everything ran fast, merged, light and shadow blending, time speeding up. His heart thumped against the roof of his mouth until he swallowed it down to its rightful place. He saw Flap's pistol flash, smelled the sharp aroma of cordite. Heard a high whine as the bullet ricocheted from stone wall to stone wall. Carla's anguished scream and Flap's riotous yell filled his eardrums.

Then Flap was lost in the cave's interior. Then he was on the floor grappling with Lansing.

Sully stood paralyzed over them, shaking, his vision clearing so that he could see the two combatants delineated against the brown packed earthen floor. Lansing stabbed. Flap screamed with more anger than pain. Lansing stabbed and stabbed, and Flap wrestled him over onto his back, the two bodies flipping, changing positions, and yet Lansing stabbed again. Again.

Oh, no, oh, God, no, the knife flashing up, down, up dripping blood, down, buried in Flap's big chest. Stabbing viciously like an automaton locked at high speed. Sully screamed and the world disappeared except for Lansing's knife hand looming up and down, up...

Sully stood four feet and to the side from where the two men tussled in a death dance. The reality flooded in, and he raised the revolver in his fist, aimed it at Lansing on the top position. He squeezed the trigger.

And again.

The reverberations of the gunshots rang in his ears. He could see the barrel end of his gun smoking. His nose filled with a burning, his throat constricted, he could not breathe.

The body hanging over Flap jerked as if hit with a baseball bat. Freeze frame. Sully stared incredulously at how stiff Lansing appeared to be. The stabbing motions ceased. The killer braced himself over his victim to keep from falling to the cave floor. Then he rolled to the side onto his back. So quick that Sully hardly knew it was happening, Lansing struggled to hands and knees, his face straining toward the cave exit as he moved that direction.

Sully took five steps to follow him. He lowered the revolver's barrel until it pointed at the base of Lansing's spine, and he squeezed off another shot.
This is for Frannie,
he thought. This time Lansing was flung face down, his arms crumpling beneath him. He was still a moment, and then he crawled toward the glowing incandescence beyond the cave opening. He made guttural sick sounds, a man hemorrhaging, a man fending off the death train rumbling over him.

Sully turned to see Carla huddled near the wall. Her eyes were round and circled in white. She ran to him and threw herself into his arms. "Baby," he whispered, scooping her close. "Oh, God, Carla, let me see you." He lifted her chin and saw she was unmarred. Tears flowed unchecked from two beautiful, brown eyes.

He felt something inside him crack and fall apart with relief. He let her go, hurried to see about Flap lying in an unmoving heap on the floor. He kneeled, saw the gashes in the older man's chest pumping blood by the gallon. He felt for a pulse on the side of Flap's heavily ringed throat.

"Jesus, Flap, no..." He reached out to put his hand over the pumping tear in Flap's shirt. "No!"

Flap stared at him with cloudy fixed eyes. "End it," he said. "
Now
, Sully.
End this thing
with Lansing."

Sully looked up, saw Lansing clawing desperately forward. "Hold on, Flap. Help will be here soon. Just hold on."

"
End it,
Sully."

Sully stood and crossed the cave floor to Lansing. The gun he carried hung loosely in his hand at his side. He stood over the dying man remembering Frannie, remembering the night of torture, remembering the warmth of Flap's blood against his hand. Three distinct, ragged holes gaped in Lansing's back. Sully searched himself for regret or guilt. He had done this to a man, to another human being. He recalled what he had said to Lansing the night of the kidnapping. "You want me on your level." So in that way Lansing had won. But there would be no guilt. Ever. Sully refused to accept it. Martin Lansing had done this to himself. He had sent out the black-bordered invitations to this particular funeral.

The cloth of Lansing's shirt was scorched and blackened where the bullets had entered. Sully leaned down and caught Lansing's arm. He turned him onto his back. One exit wound spread the scarlet petals of a scarlet rose across the chest. Another sprouted dramatically from the abdomen and it was this fatal wound Lansing clutched with two hands while writhing in agony.

Sully stared down into his enemy's face. Lansing would have died anyway, he realized, seeing the purplish bloating all around the dirtied bandage covering his lost eye--but he would have killed Carla first.

He leaned in close until his eye stared directly into Lansing's one good eye. "You can see me?" He didn't expect an answer. "I prayed for this, Lansing. I hope you burn in Hell. I'm glad I'm the one to send you there. I'm consigning your evil to the grave. And I want you to take this thought with you: If there's any life after death, when I get there I'll do this to you all over again. You'll never be finished with me. Never."

Carla joined Sully and slumped at his side.

They watched while the life faded from Lansing's face, watched while consciousness slipped away and his breath grew shallow and snickered in and out like a rattlesnake giving last warning.

Before Lansing closed his eye the life force flared and receded. His lips worked and convulsed around his teeth and the tip of his tongue. Carla shuddered and put her head down on her arms. Sully watched it all and wondered why he did not feel better for it.

"He loved me," Carla said in a small distant voice.

Dogs barking broke the resultant silence. Excited voices of the searchers called out from below the ledge.

Sully and Carla left the man who had stalked their nightmares for too long. They returned to Flap. Sully dropped the gun. He ripped off his shirt, the buttons flying. He wadded the shirt into a ball and pressed it over Flap's flowing chest wounds. "Flap? It's over, Flap. He's gone. Do you hear me?"

"Carla...?" Flap whispered.

With tears flowing down her face, Carla leaned her face near his lips. "What, Uncle Flap?"

"I found you again, didn't I?"

"You saved my life, Flap."

"You're a good kid. And I found you, I'm so glad I found you... Sully?"

"Yeah, Flap?"

"See about my chickens, can you? The fox and weasels might get 'em...something bad and evil might get 'em..."

Before Sully could promise, Flap shut his eyes and sighed once. The thick muscles of his neck relaxed and his head rolled to the side.

Carla lay across his body weeping. Sully stroked her back, feeling his own grief so deeply he could hardly swallow. "We have to go," Sully said after a while, taking hold of her gently and moving her toward the rope hanging from the cliff. "I'll take you home. It's over now."

#

He had heard Sully's serious threat and Carla speak the truth. They drifted in a mist beyond the periphery of his sight and were lost to him. He welcomed the coming of night and clung to the hope of oblivion. He raised his eyes to the far-off palace window, the golden lip of the sill sparkling in the sun. He began to climb with difficulty, his hands and feet scraping against the granite blocks. If he could only reach sanctuary before they caught him, he would be all right. He would survive, he knew it.

Crowds of bloodthirsty revelers down below jeered at him, catcalled, threw epithets into the sky to rain down on his head. Out of the forest rose a cacophony of monstrous growls lusting for his downfall. Dragons puffed flame, lizards with impossible teeth hissed into the sky. In the city the teeming people rushed through the streets demanding his death, killing one another to get to him.

He had a coughing fit, and it almost finished him. Blood gushed from his mouth to soak his shirt front. He lifted his gaze and could see he was not far from the window,
his window
, the one that could protect him from the inhumane rabble below.

He climbed some more, gravity pulling on his shoulders like iron manhole covers were dangling from the crooks of his arms. His legs were heavy, cumbersome pillars, unwieldy and freakish in their size and weight. His legs stiffened and then buckled. He hung suspended against the wall for a moment, and then he lost his grip, his fingernails tearing away as he fell back, the scars in the palms of his hands blossoming into blisters filled with clear fluid.

He dropped like an anchor, his arms and legs spread for flying. His body plummeted to just above the clutching hands of the murderous crowd awaiting him, and then, miraculously, all his weight disappeared and he floated heavenward out of his enemies' reach.

At the palace window he caught the sill, sighing with happiness at this unearthly deliverance. He pulled his broken, destroyed, leaking body into safety. He tumbled over the window ledge onto the floor of his most secret place.

Home. Safe. Free.

He felt a presence nearby. He turned his head. To his surprise this time, for the first time ever, he was not alone in the castle. When he raised his eyes, he saw the old witch standing with her arms outstretched to receive him. She was no longer a parchment and bone skeleton. She was full-bodied and brimming with pink, radiant health. She smiled benevolently, her forgiving eyes crinkling around the edges. She had been waiting for him all this time. Wishing for him to join her.
Had he but known this.
Had she but told him he was not truly alone here.

He came to his knees. He struggled to his feet. He, too, held out his arms to enfold her. His eyes closed, and her lush fat warmth smothered him in a rich, consuming embrace.

He had been intent on killing Carla. He understood now why.

He loved her, really loved her, just as he had loved this foster mother who had tried so hard to save him. He had just hated himself so much he couldn't admit to love. He understood that too as if it were a secret only now revealed to him. He wished he could live life over again and right all those wicked wrongs, all those insane urges, bring back all those innocent victims.

The old woman whispered in his ear, "It's done and you're here now."

He looked around the castle walls, felt the comfort they gave him and he knew this place would last until the end of all time. He was exactly where he was meant to be and he didn't feel sick anymore. He knew he would never be sick again.

THE END

A PRETTY KILLER BOY

by

Billie Sue Mosiman

First published in INVITATION TO MURDER as "A Pretty Boy," Edited by Ed Gorman and Martin Greenberg, 1991

Copyright Billie Sue Mosiman 2012

I never should have gotten involved with a pretty boy--especially one who could commit murder. Not all of them will end up doing that, but you just never know.

Grandma had married a pretty boy much to her distress. He was vain, she said years after his death. So vain about his clothes and his tortoise shell comb set, so vain, she said in her creaky old woman's voice, that when he came down with pneumonia he wouldn't let her call a doctor for it was improper anyone should see him disheveled and incontinent in the cherry four-poster bed. Being pretty, Grandma concluded, had killed my grandfather before his time.

But I didn't think about these admonitions when I met Bobby. There are some experiences in life that defy common sense and the validity of good advice.

It was the winter of 1967 and I had come to Louisville by way Atlanta where no one wanted to hire a nineteen-year-old college dropout.

They didn't much want to hire me in Louisville either so I took a job selling candy behind the counter at Stewart's Department Store. The boyfriend who had come to Atlanta to drive me to Louisville, where he attended television repair school, worked in the mail room of Stewart's. I figured he could stand it, I could stand it.

It was Christmas season and he was busy wrapping gifts and mailing them worldwide. I was busy eating all the chocolates I could stuff into my mouth when the other sales girls weren't looking.

Swiping candy kept my appetite abated and stretched my paycheck considerably.

I was content with my job until Christmas Eve. Customers flocked to the counters ordering last minute gifts of filberts, pounds of pistachios wrapped in red foil, boxes of fancy mints and divinity and bridge mix chocolates. I hadn't a moment to filch a lemon drop, my feet hurt, it had begun to snow hard and my walk home to an apartment on Chestnut Street promised to be a miserable cold one.

As if all this were not punishment enough for my sins of minor theft, Jerry, the boyfriend working in the mail room, wandered up to the counter during this mad rush and handed me a small black felt ring box.

"Marry me," he said.

Just that. No preamble, no romance, just marry me.

"I'm busy, Jerry. Please."

"Open it. This isn't a joke, I promise."

"Miss, could you wait on me? I'd like two pounds of walnut fudge and a pound and a half of the pecan. Could you wrap it?"

I gave the fudge-hog in the mink a look insuring she wait another minute. Beyond that and I'd hear from her was the look she returned. After all it was Christmas and her time was more valuable than mine.

"I can't accept it. You know that, Jerry." I pushed the little box back across the shiny glass counter top. "I'm busy, I have to go."

While weighing and wrapping the fudge I glanced twice at where Jerry stood with his hands hanging at his sides staring at the jewel box. I hadn't meant to be so cold about it, but what did he expect? He knew I didn't love him; I didn't love anyone. Besides, he was a year younger than me and his parents would kill him if he got married. Just because I let him drive me from Atlanta to Louisville didn't mean we should spend our lives together. What was wrong with his head? And then proposing just before Christmas? In the store when it was rush hour? Ye gads.