Fear itself: a novel (43 page)

Eight down, four to go.

A sense of rising, of swimming upward through blackness, shedding dreams as he rose to the surface. The swimmer, the dreamer—he had no sense of himself
as
himself yet—heard a voice, echoic and distorted. For a moment he was a boy again, playing a joke on his mother, holding his breath at the bottom of Little York Lake to frighten her.

With the memory came identity; when Pender knew who he was, the rest came flooding back. It was the second time in four months he had been separated from his senses. Back in July, a blow to the head had launched him on one of those so-called near-death experiences, white light, tunnel, a visit from his dad in dress blues—the whole nine yards. This time, there’d been only chaos, and his dreams were not so much dreams as swirling fragments.

Pender opened his eyes, found himself lying in a contorted position on his side on the kitchen floor, with his left arm drawn painfully behind his back and cuffed at the wrist to his right ankle. Looking up sideways, he saw Childs sitting on a straight-backed kitchen chair.

“Sorry about your sister,” Childs said in a conversational tone.

Pender assumed he’d read the letter; he mirrored Childs’s tone—stay calm, keep the hostage-taker calm. “She had a good life.”

“I didn’t mean I was sorry she was dead—I meant I was sorry I had to kill her.”

“No shit? Did you off Judge Crater and the Ramsey girl, too?”

“No—neither of them had killed my sister.”

“I didn’t kill your sister. The doctor said she died of a congenital heart condition.”

“Congenital—that means she had it for forty-nine years. Why is it, do you think, that her heart gave out while she was struggling with you?”

“Struggling? She was trying to save me from getting my brains bashed out by you.”

Simon let it pass—he wasn’t here to argue. “Almost biblical, don’t you think? The retribution, I mean—my killing your sister in return for your killing mine. I have to tell you, though, I didn’t really want to kill Ida, fitting as it might have been. I thought she was a very nice lady, right up until the moment I broke that blue capsule into her hot toddy. If it’s any consolation to you—it was to me—she was dead by the time she hit the floor. As I say, I didn’t want to do it—but I couldn’t take a chance on her telling you about our conversation. Would you like to hear about our conversation, Eddie? Or should I call you Pen, like that hooer waiting for me in the bedroom?”

Pender wanted to kill Childs of course—he wanted to kill him as badly as he’d ever wanted anything in his life. Instead, he reminded himself that the most important thing he could do at the moment was to work the problem.

And the problem—how to get loose, at least long enough to dial 911 on the phone in his pants pocket—was in the present. If Childs had killed Ida, that was in the past—nothing he could do would bring her back. And Childs’s threat about Dorie belonged to the future, and was of no account. When your enemy threatens you, he’s either lying, which means he’s scared, or he’s stating his intentions, which gives you more data to work with. The more data, the more better. “Call me anything you want. And, yes, I’d like to hear about your conversation.”

Childs leaned back, laced his arms behind his head, and crossed his legs casually at the ankle—not an easy thing to do in a straight-backed chair. “It was very illuminating. For some reason, Ida was under the assumption that my name was Bellcock.”

The name hit Pender like a slap. Ida had been a tough old bird—she wouldn’t have told Childs squat, no matter how much he’d threatened or cajoled or even tortured her. But Pender himself had given her permission to talk to Bellcock—maybe Childs wasn’t bullshitting about killing her after all.

“She told me all about Stanley, and Dr. Walt—this is Dr. Walt’s gun I’m holding now,” Childs continued. “She also told me all about what a naughty boy her little brother Eddie was. How he threw a firecracker down the chimney and nearly blinded himself. How he never got over it. How as a boy, he wouldn’t let himself be blindfolded for a game of pin the tail on the donkey. And even at Stanley’s birthday party, grown man, big-shot G-man, he wouldn’t even play bust the piñata.”

You wanted data, you got it, thought Pender, as Childs began removing an assortment of implements from the drawer next to him, and showing each one to Pender with a stage magician’s flourish before setting it down carefully on the table—folding Buck knife, which he ostentatiously unfolded, apple corer, box cutter.

More data, Pender told himself. Keep working the problem. So Childs knows. About your fear. So what? Pain, darkness, death—one way or another it was going to be pain, darkness, death. Nothing else has changed. The phone is still in your pocket. Six inches away—might as well be six feet.

But there was still the possibility that Dorie had heard him and found the handcuff key under the mattress. If she’d already freed herself and called 911 or gone for help, all Pender had to do was hang on awhile longer. Just hang on. And stall like a mo-fo. A fearless mo-fo from the Eff Bee Fucking Eye. And keep on collecting data: “What have you done with Abruzzi?”

Skairdykat! Thanks for reminding me, thought Simon, as he tested the point of the Buck knife on his thumb—he’d been so caught up in the moment, so dialed in to Pender, that he’d almost forgotten Skairdykat. He’d also almost forgotten that the game, the doubleheader, would have to take place in the cellar, where no one would hear them scream—no one except Dorie, that is. “Nothing, yet. Would you like to see her?”

“Yes—yes, I would.”

“She’s in the cellar—all you have to do is hump your way across the floor and down the stairs. I’ll hold the door for you.”

Dorie had rattled the headboard until her wrists were sore. Leave it to Pender, she thought. The house looks like it’s going to fall down any minute, but the bedstead couldn’t be sturdier. She kept picturing Childs coming through the door, covered in Pender’s blood, and throwing himself on top of her. Horrible as the image was, she knew that would be her best—and last—chance to kill him before he killed her.

But this time, Dorie promised herself—and Pender, and all the others—if she did through some miracle survive this second attack, there would never be a third. She’d kill him first, with her bare hands if necessary.

And as she waited on the bed to kill or be killed, with absolutely no idea that the key to her survival was only inches away, under the mattress beneath her head, Dorie found herself thinking back to the first time she had met Simon Childs. It was at the convention, in the welcoming suite of the Olde Chicago. The name tags had been specially prepared: a blank space for your name on the first line, the printed words
A Person With
on the second, and on the bottom line you were supposed to print the name of your phobia, using the
-ia
suffix, not the
-ic.
Like the name PWSPD, this was all in line with current thinking: a phobia was something you had, not something you were.

And although romance was the last thing Dorie’d had in mind when she got up the courage to leave the central coast for the first time in three years, the moment she saw the tall, handsome, silver-haired man standing behind the registration table, she was prepared to revise her expectations.

Simon Childs

a person with

Katapontismophobia

read his name tag.

“That’s a new one on me,” said Dorie.

“Fear of drowning,” he explained. “The verb
katapontidzo
means ‘to hurl into the sea.’ The noun
katapontidzes
means ‘pirate,’ but I guess there were more people who were afraid of drowning than of pirates.”

“I
like
pirates,” Dorie declared.

“Aargh,” said the handsome Mr. Childs, squinching up one eye. It was the worst Long John Silver impression Dorie had ever seen, but hilarious in context—she’d laughed so hard her boobs bounced. And it turned out, when he saw her name tag, that Simon was the first person she’d ever met, not excluding her current therapist, who knew what prosoponophobia meant without having to be told. She thought she might have found a lover; she
knew
she’d found a friend.

Honey, you sure can pick ’em, Dorie told herself; a moment later a shot rang out, and the screaming began.

Eleven down, one to go. Linda heard Childs tell Pender he’d hold the door. She was still on her knees—no time to stand up, even if she’d had the strength; as it was, she barely had time to hide the coral behind her back before the door opened.

Childs looked down at her in surprise; behind him, through his legs, she could see Pender on his side on the kitchen floor. “Well, would you look at that, Eddie Pen,” said Childs. “Would you look what gnawed itself loose?” He raised one foot as if to shove her back down the stairs.

Linda flinched but remained upright. She would take the leg if necessary, but she wanted the face, or at least the neck.

“And what’s that behind your back, Skairdykat? Biiiig scairdykat knife? It’s not a gun—I know, I searched the cellar.” He knelt, extended a hand; the gun was in his other hand, out of reach. “C’mon, fork it over.”

Closer, thought Linda, as the coral thrashed frantically behind her back; the face—I want the face.

“C’mon, Skairdykat, give it to Simon before he has to take it away from you and stick it where the sun don’t—”

Close enough.

One thing all criminal defense attorneys (along with a majority of cops and the few prosecuting attorneys who are willing to admit it) will tell you is that the only thing most eyewitnesses are good for is impressing juries. The truth is usually quicker than the eye, and the assumption is quicker than either, even for a trained observer like Pender.

He didn’t know, for instance, that Linda was on her knees—he’d seen her through Childs’s legs from the torso up and assumed she was standing on a lower step. He saw Childs kneel, heard him taunting her, heard the word
knife,
and assumed that’s what she had for a weapon. He saw Linda lunge, heard the gun go off, saw her topple forward, and assumed she’d been shot. When Childs rocked backward and the Colt went flying, Pender continued to assume that Abruzzi had somehow slashed him, and it wasn’t until Childs, still on his knees, turned blindly toward Pender, that Pender began to understand what had happened.

Or perhaps
understand
is too strong a word. A gun, a knife, a billy, even a sharp screwdriver—those were items commensurate with understanding. But a man on his knees, clawing with both hands at a thrashing snake dangling from his left eye? You don’t understand something like that; you just accept it.

Or reject it—doesn’t matter. What matters is Dr. Walt’s Army Colt under the table, less than six feet away. Pender braced his left leg—his only free limb—against the cabinet and shoved off, bellowing to Dorie, over Simon’s shrieking, that the handcuff key was under the mattress, as he began hump-crawling his way across the splintery plank floor of the kitchen.

*   *   *

The shot, the womanish shrieking—Dorie assumed the worst. The next few seconds were as bad as any she’d experienced in the last week—and that was saying something. When she heard Pender shouting that the key was under the head of the mattress, it was like whiplash, emotional whiplash. She recovered quickly, tried to puzzle it out. Easier to say that the key was under the mattress than to reach it, if you were lying on your back with your arms cuffed through the headboard.

Guess what, though: it’s possible. You have to scooch way up, and contort yourself as far onto your side as you can, and pronate both wrists no matter how tight the cuffs are, and slide your fingers under the mattress, which is pressed tight against the box spring by your weight, so you have to scooch even farther to the side, which puts more strain on your wrists—but it can be done. If the key is less than a finger’s length from the edge, you can find it, you can slide it out. And then if you crane your head at an angle that would break an owl’s neck, so you can see what you’re doing, and get the key inserted in the keyhole without dropping it—whatever you do, don’t drop it—and turn the key, you’ll hear the sweetest sound you’ve ever heard.

Click.

Dorie followed the sound of the bellowing and shrieking into the kitchen, quickly knelt behind Pender, unlocked his cuffs. As Pender scrambled to his feet, he saw Childs rising to his knees, moaning, one hand still clapped to his eye, blood leaking out between the fingers; his other hand was flailing the air as if he were blind. Pender punted him in the ribs to knock him over, then kicked him in the head a few times, until he lay still. Subduing the suspect, it was called.

As Pender cuffed Childs, Dorie knelt by the woman lying across the cellar doorway. “Are you all right?”

“I’m bit.”

“You’re hit?” Dorie had heard a shot, not a snake.

“Bit. Coral snake got me,” said Linda. “It got Childs worse, though,” she added—there was a world of triumph in those five words.

Pender was already on the line with the 911 operator. “What kind of snake, did you say?”

“Eastern coral.” Linda raised her head wearily. “Tell ’em Animal Control had the antivenin at Conroy Circle.”

“Eastern coral, antivenin, Conroy Circle—got it,” said Pender, who had no idea what she was talking about.

Dorie hauled Linda—she assumed it was Linda Abruzzi—the rest of the way up the steps into the kitchen. The woman looked like hell—her thin face was dark and puffy and both eyelids were drooping. Dorie glanced over at Childs, who hadn’t moved since Pender had “subdued” him. “Is he dead?” she asked Pender when he got off the phone.

“Not yet.”