Ragged Man (23 page)

Her oxygen almost gone, she lay limp, and he removed his fingers from her nostrils, but not his hand from her mouth and not his other hand from her sex. He had her pinned to the bed and relished it. He’d never felt anything so soft, so fine, so tantalizing as the mound between her legs. And he could do anything he wanted with it. It was his.

“
Cooperate and I’ll leave your children alone. Deal?” he said.

She nodded.

“
Good girl, don’t fight it.” He pulled his hand away from the bliss and flipped her over, onto her stomach. He bound her hands behind her with the tape, then flipped her around again, so she could see his eyes and he could see hers. Then he wrapped the tape around her feet.

“
I like looking at you like this,” he said. Then he took his knife out of the bag and cut off her night shirt and smiled when her breasts came into view. He bent forward and squeezed them both with a heavy, but gentle hand. They’re mine too, he thought.

“
Oh and about your daughters. I lied. I want you, but the girls go first. I’m going to use and abuse them, then I’ll do you,” he said, again rubbing himself between the legs. “Then you’re all dead.”

Her eyes opened wider.

“
That’s right, I’m going to kill you all.”

She shook her head.

“
I’m going to leave you here while I hog tie those little ones of yours,” he grinned. “But first here’s a little something to think about.” He stepped up to the bed, jerked down his zipper, pulled out his semi-erect penis and urinated on her face, laughing while she shook her head, trying to avoid the steady yellow stream.

He backed away from her when he finished. “It won’t take long.” He held the knife up, so she could see it. Then without zipping his trousers, he walked out of the room.

* * *

Christina sat up the second he was through the door and started working at the tape, twisting her wrists back and forth against it, working at it, stretching it. She folded her thumbs into her palms and elongated her fingers, so that she could slide out of the tape, like it was a bracelet.

But the tape was sticking and binding her wrists. Please, God, she thought, let it come off, let my girls be okay. She hated that she’d left the gun in her handbag, downstairs. She twisted and jerked her wrists, till they were raw. Then she hooked her left thumb under the tape binding her right hand and stretched at it, but she couldn’t quite get it. She heard one of the girls scream and her heart pumped adrenaline, giving her the combined strength of motherhood and terror as she wrenched her hand free.

* * *

Leaving the woman, he moved on down the hallway. The next door was a bathroom. He spent a second and enjoyed the smell, lavender mixed with a dusky, woman odor. The joy rippled along his skin. The next door opened into a bedroom made over into an office. This was where she spent her time. He inhaled her presence and started to get hard. The fourth and final door was open. It was the twin’s room. He felt like he was fifteen, a Friday night, his first payday, his first whore.

The twins were asleep in twin beds, separated by a nightstand. A nightlight plugged into a wall socket was on. The girl on the right was sleeping on her back. He bent over and clamped his hand over her mouth, and the one on the left screamed.

Throughout history there have been stories and tales about how twins feel each other’s pain, hurt, joy. How they know what their twin is thinking, how they walk, talk and even think alike. Torry and Swell were like that. The instant the big hand covered her sister’s mouth, Swell woke with a scream. A blood-wrenching sound that gave her mother down the hall the strength to rip through the tape that bound her.

Storm shoved a handkerchief into Torry’s mouth, slapping tape over it as he’d done her mother just a few minutes earlier. Then he rolled her onto her stomach. He started to bind her hands behind her back, when Swell pounced on him, digging her teeth into the back of his neck.

He screamed, but continued with the taping as the girl pummeled him and pulled at his hair. When he finished binding Torry, he reached a hand over his shoulder, grabbed Swell by the hair and flung her back onto her bed. With his fist balled in her hair, he shoved a third handkerchief into the kicking girl’s mouth. Then he flipped her onto her stomach without taping it.

He had just finished binding her hands when Christina burst into the room, screaming. Storm turned in time to avoid a blow from a bedside lamp. He lunged for his knife as the lamp was slashing toward his head. He deflected the blow with his arm and slashed her across the stomach with the knife, but Christina was already pulling away and the cut wasn’t deep.

She was a crazed mother running on pure adrenaline when she swung the lamp for the third time. He ducked out of the way and lashed out, missing her face by the smallest margin, then he was hit in the side and knocked down himself, by Swell.

He hadn’t bound her feet. The girl rammed him with her head and kicked him while he was down, hard. She raised her foot to stomp on his face. He rolled, she missed and tripped. He smacked her, knocking her across the room. He rose, picked up the girl, threw her on the bed and turned to face Christina with the knife thrust out in front of him.

“
Why?” Christina gurgled, spitting blood.

“
Because I want,” he said with a leer.

“
Look at yourself,” she hissed.

Sam Storm turned and looked in the mirror that hung over the girl’s bureau, but Sam Storm didn’t look back. Storm was staring into the face of Satan himself. Lucifer marched right out of the old testament to the present.

He met the reflection’s gaze with his own and was lost in the bloodshot eyes, thirsty eyes, killer’s eyes, dangerous eyes. They were his eyes.

My God, what had he become? What had he done? What was he doing? What was he going to do? Facing those awful eyes in the mirror, he screamed, for he was surely damned. Then he spun with the knife in his hand. He was about to lunge, about to finish it, but something stayed his hand. A little of piece of Sam Storm still survived. He wasn’t going to kill these kids.

He screamed as pain racked his body and his eyes glowed red as the thing inside him willed him to attack, but he resisted, enduring the pain. Sam Storm had been no coward. He would not kill these children and he would harm their mother no more.

He fought the evil, turning away from the bloody, naked woman.

* * *

Christina saw a chance to attack, but something told her if she did, she’d die and her girls would die, too. She held back, gasping, filling her lungs with air, and watched as the battle raged inside of the man that had come to kill her.

“
Take your children and go. Now,” the man whispered with his back to her. “Go and hide and don’t come back. If I live, I’ll find you.” Then he put his cock back in his pants and left the room as Christina fainted.

* * *

J.P. heard the noise from upstairs. He didn’t need a program to know what was happening. Someone was hurting Christina and the twins. Probably killing them. Probably the same man that killed his dad and Sylvia, the same man who had been after them in the garage last night. Then the man was going to come downstairs and get him. The Ragged Man.

He slipped out of bed and padded across the den to the closet. He opened the door and pushed aside the shoes. He knew from the two weeks he and his mom had spent with Christina over Christmas that there was a trap door in the closet that led under the house. He pushed aside old shoes and a vacuum cleaner and opened the trap door. Then he grabbed the cage holding Dark Dancer and entered the closet, closing the door after himself. In the dark, he slid through the square hole in the floor and pulled the trapdoor down over himself. Then he crawled on his belly across the cold dirt, pushing the cage in front, until he came to the foundation wall at the front of the house. He could see the street through a small mesh covered opening in the foundation. He hoped Rick would come soon.

* * *

Storm thudded down the stairs, stopped when he reached the bottom, turned and fought the urge to go back up and finish the job. The pain was intense, his skin was on fire, his insides were ice. He took a step up and felt the pain ease. The message was clear, kill the woman and her daughters and the pain would cease. He took another step up. The pain stopped and a ripple of pleasure ran through him. He turned amid a flash of boiling cold and hopped down to the floor.

He raised the knife, faced it inward and clasped it with both hands. There was one way to stop the pain, but before he could bring the knife down into his belly, the pain quit. Whatever wanted him to kill those little girls wanted him alive more.

Pleasure zapped through his body again, the woman and girls out of his mind, but he had to find the boy. Holding the knife in his right hand, picking up his shoes with his left, he made his way into the downstairs bedroom and discovered that the boy wasn’t there.

Again the pain came and Storm dropped both shoes and knife and started to tear the room apart. He ripped out dresser drawers and emptied their contents onto the floor, then he smashed the drawers into the two bedside lamps, breaking them and breaking the lamps. Not satisfied, he put his fist into the dresser mirror, shattering the glass, cutting himself and showering the dresser top and everything he touched with blood.

* * *

It wasn’t long before J.P. heard heavy footsteps overhead. Loud. He held his breath and shivered. He was aware of his own heartbeat. He was scared. The footsteps stopped directly above him. Then he heard the front door open and he heard the footsteps stomp across the wooden porch. He peeked through the mesh opening and watched a big man cross the street to an older car that was parked under a street light.

The man reached his car, turned and looked back at the house. He seemed to be looking directly into J.P.’s eyes. J.P. wanted to turn away from that stare, but he couldn’t. The big man was the same man who he had seen at the record meet the day before yesterday. The man who had killed his dad. The Ragged Man. For a second he thought he was going to come back and kill him, too. Then the man turned away, opened the car door, got in and drove away.

* * *

“
Mom, wake up.”

Christina opened her eyes. She must have passed out. Swell was washing the blood off of her stomach and Torry was wiping the blood from her lip.

“
We heard what the man said, we gotta get outta here.”

“
J.P.?” Christina said.

“
He’s gone. The room’s a mess.” Swell said, trembling. It’s all covered in blood. We think the man killed him and took him away.”

“
J.P. might still be in the house,” Christina said. “We have to look.”

“
No, he’s not,” Torry said. “We checked.”

Five minutes later Christina and the girls quietly left the house by the back door. J.P. was gone and her heart ached about that, but she had her girls, her car and plenty of money. She’d be in Mexico by morning, sipping margaritas with Susan.

Chapter Fifteen

Rick’s plane landed about the same time Sam Storm was slipping in through Christina Page’s dining room window.

He was the first one off the plane, his only luggage, a little over twenty thousand dollars. Ten thousand, in hundreds, in each hip pocket and a wad of twenties in the right front. He moved through the concourse with a stiff stride, trying to work out the kinks and get his blood circulating as he headed for the taxi rank outside.

He inhaled the night air as he passed the shuttle busses in favor of a more expensive, but much faster cab. It was a hot night and the jet and auto exhaust fumes made it seem all the more oppressive.

“
Long Beach, The Beach Inn on Ocean. You know it?” he asked the first driver in the taxi rank, an elderly Vietnamese American.

“
Like the back of your hand.”

“
You don’t know the back of my hand.”

“
I don’t know the way to the Beach Inn on Ocean either,” he said, smiling.

“
You know the way to the Long Beach airport?” Rick smiled back at him. He liked the man’s sense of humor.

“
Yes, sir.”

“
I’ll direct you from there.”

“
You got it,” the driver said. “Just settle back and relax.”

Rick nodded and closed his eyes as the driver lurched the cab into the airport traffic. It wasn’t long before he drifted off and found the sleep he couldn’t get on the plane.

What seemed like scant seconds, but was thirty-five minutes later, the driver reached over and shook Rick awake.

“
Okay, Mister, I need you to guide me.”

Rick knocked the fog from his head and looked out into the dark.

“
Go straight down Lakewood Boulevard to the Traffic Circle, follow it around to Pacific Coast Highway and then take the first right and follow it all the way to the beach.”

They drove the next five minutes in silence, until the driver stopped the cab in front of the Beach Inn.

“
What room is Christina Page in?” Rick asked the underage boy behind the counter.