Ultimate Thriller Box Set (119 page)

“And this is for Jolene,” I hissed into his ear, right before I slammed his face into the floor a couple of times. “The rest of your punishment I’ll leave up to the law.”

I straddled his back, pulled his arms behind him, and bound his wrists with duct tape. Then I taped up his ankles together, grabbed him under the arms, and dragged him into the living room. I propped him up against the couch, set my gun on the table, then pulled out a chair and sat down so I could take a good look at him.

I was momentarily repulsed, not so much by the man in front of me, but by what I’d done to him. Before that guy tried to rob me on the Interstate, I’d never beat up anybody before. I didn’t think I could do it. I certainly never thought I’d enjoy it. But I’d never imagined I’d be in a place like Deerlick, stuck in a cabin alone with a murderer.

It wasn’t even a fair fight. If it had been, I had no doubt I’d have been the loser. I prevailed because I ambushed Arlo, then kicked the shit out of him when he was down and couldn’t defend himself.

It didn’t say much about me as a man.

Travis McGee and Spenser would be ashamed of me. More importantly, I suspected Carol would be, too.

Not that it mattered, but Arlo wasn’t going to give me a chance to defend myself either, stabbing me to death as I slept. And what I did to Arlo was far less brutal than what he’d done to Jolene or Lauren. Violence was an inherent part of his character; it wasn’t in mine.

Maybe it would be now.

Arlo’s head lolled on his chest and he drooled blood and mucus onto himself. After a few minutes, he began to groan. He lifted his head up slowly, spat out a big glob of blood and teeth, then tried to focus his eyes on me.

When he spoke, it wasn’t easy to understand him, what with his smashed nose and mouthful of teeth.

“You’re the guy who pissed on my money,” he slobbered.

I’d hunted him down, uncovered his scheme, foiled his attempts to kill me, and ultimately captured him, and that was all he had to say. He’d murdered his wife and drove Lauren to suicide and this was how it was going to end.

So much for my evil adversary. My Moriarty.

I looked at him and found it hard to believe that someone so stupid and pathetic could cause so much misery and death. It didn’t say much for me, if this guy had met his match.

I thought about terrorizing some answers out of him, like I’d originally planned, but the idea had lost all of its allure. I’d captured him and given him a beating. That was enough. Suddenly, I was tired of the whole damn thing and just wanted to go home.

“I’m going to go and call the police now,” I said. “But first I want to know if Little Billy is out there waiting for you.”

Arlo didn’t say anything.

“You better tell me if he is,” I said. “Because if I see him, I’ll shoot him dead and say it was self-defense.”

I picked up my gun and aimed it at him, so he’d get the point.

“With a BB gun?” Arlo slobbered.

I could have hit him again and felt good about it.

Instead, I taped his mouth shut, tipped him over on his stomach, and hog-tied his arms and legs together. I didn’t want him slithering back to his Rambo knife or finding some other way to cut his bonds while I went up to the phone booth.

I looked at my handiwork. It was a good thing I’d had that highway robber to practice on. The police might not be so impressed, but I couldn’t see how they could call me anything but a hero.

I wished I’d felt more excited about capturing Arlo, but I figured that would come later, once I’d put some time between me and everything that had happened, once it didn’t seem so ugly and it became just a story I told.

I eased open the front door and peered out into the darkness. If Little Billy was out there, he was doing a good job of blending into the surroundings.

My gun held at my side, I closed the door behind me and cautiously stepped off the porch, careful to peer around the edge of the cabin first.

Then something grabbed me by the ankles and the ground came rushing up to my face. I instinctively reached out my hands to break my fall and my gun flew out of my grasp.

I slapped against the ground hard, my arms taking most of the impact. I was about to scramble for my gun when my head exploded and I died.

Chapter Twenty-Three

You don’t dream when you’re unconscious. It’s not like sleep. And when you wake up, you wish you hadn’t.

It was still dark.

At first that was all I was aware of, beyond the pulsating pain in my head. Then I was aware of being alive, which confused me and gave me an incentive to get past the agony and focus my eyes.

After a minute or two, I was able to sharpen the blur enough to tell I was lying on my back on the cabin floor. I was afraid to lift my head up, because it felt like the floor was the only thing holding my brain inside my skull.

I turned my head a tiny bit and saw my gun on the table, beside the roll of duct tape. Neither Arlo nor Little Billy seemed to be around.

So I lay there, waiting for some sensation besides pain to return, pondering my predicament.

The last thing I remembered was going outside to call the police. Someone was hiding under the porch, knocked me down, and hit me on the head with something.

My guess was a large baseball bat.

What I couldn’t figure out was why I was still alive. Arlo came to kill me, and I’d given him a beating and trussed him up with duct tape. If anything, he had more reason to kill me now than he had before.

So why didn’t he finish the job?

Maybe he was getting ready to. Maybe this was the only chance I’d have to escape.

I lifted my head up. My brains didn’t spill out, but the pain made my eyes blur again, almost into unconsciousness. Using my feet and my elbows, I slid across the floor and propped myself up against the couch, roughly in the same spot Arlo had been in before. I know that because I was sitting on the glob of blood he’d coughed up.

Supposedly, if my TV education in private detecting was to be believed, all I had to do was rub my neck a few times and I’d be revived enough to ambush Little Billy and Arlo when they came through the door. The problem was, I couldn’t lift my arm and didn’t have the strength to do any rubbing.

So I resigned myself to the reality of the situation. I rested my head against the couch cushion, in case I’d jarred a chunk of my skull loose, and waited for the Pelz brothers to come back and finish what they’d started.

If, by some miracle, I survived, I was going to write a very nasty letter to the executives at TVLand about the inaccuracies in their detective programming. I was glad I’d learned this lesson from a concussion rather than a gunshot wound in the shoulder, not that it was going to make much of a difference now.

A moment or two later, I heard footsteps on the porch and turned my head to face my executioners. Only one man came in, and it wasn’t who I expected.

Cyril Parkus was wearing one of those Body Glove wet suits that surfers use, and was carrying a pair of flippers and goggles. His hair was soaked and beads of water were dripping from his suit.

He’d been swimming.

“Still with us, Harvey?” he said as he padded past me in his bare, sandy feet and dropped his stuff on the table.

“Where’s Arlo?” I asked, my voice raspy and weak.

“At the bottom of the lake.” Cyril replied and walked into the bedroom.

I knew now that it was Cyril who’d been hiding under the porch, and that I’d made things a lot easier for him by pummeling Arlo and taping him up the way I had. The fact that Cyril was wearing a wet suit meant he’d come here planning to do exactly what he did.

When Cyril came out of the bedroom again, he was toweling his hair dry with one hand, and holding the big, serrated knife with the other.

I said, “In the morning, I suppose they’ll find a boat floating in the middle of the lake without an anchor.”

Cyril sat down in the chair I’d pulled out earlier and looked at me, much the same way I’d looked at Arlo.

“Can you blame me?” he asked.

I don’t think he cared about my opinion, and I didn’t offer it.

I thought of Arlo, his mouth taped shut, his arms and legs pinned behind him, knowing exactly what was going to happen to him as Cyril rowed the boat out into the middle of the lake. And then Cyril stopped, tied the anchor rope tightly around Arlo’s ankles, and pushed him into the water. I could see Arlo wriggling helplessly as the anchor pulled him down into the murky, cold depths.

I shivered for him and for myself.

I suppose you could say Arlo deserved what he got for what he did to Jolene, but I was pretty sure Cyril didn’t know about that and if he had, it wouldn’t have mattered. There was only one thing that did, and that’s what I asked him about.

“When did you find out that Lauren was your sister?”

Cyril stared at me. I wondered if he was going to answer me, or gut me with the Rambo knife. I think he was wondering the same thing.

“I felt it almost immediately. Every time I looked at Lauren, I saw Kelly. She was in her voice, her laugh, her eyes. It haunted me,” Cyril said softly, wiping the knife blade with his towel. “I tried to tell myself I was seeing things that weren’t there, but the more time I spent with her, the more certain I became. If Lauren wasn’t Kelly, then she carried her spirit. I knew I was deluding myself, but I didn’t care. Lauren loved me, and I loved her; it didn’t matter if I imagined she was Kelly or not. Then one night after we made love, she just looked in my eyes and whispered, ‘Yes, it’s me.’ She told me everything. And when she was done, I asked her to marry me.”

I could barely lift my head, what with the pounding pain, the double vision, and waves of nausea, but I did. I stared at him, trying to bring the blur into focus.

The guy finds out that the sister he thought was dead is alive, and that he’s been fucking her for weeks, and what’s his first reaction?

He asks her to marry him!

It didn’t make sense to me.

I mean, I could think of a lot of reactions to news like that, but a marriage proposal wasn’t one of them.

“I wish I could say we lived happily ever after, but she was tormented by guilt,” Cyril said. “I told her if there was a price to pay, she’d paid it long ago. She’d earned her happiness. She didn’t believe it, so she threw herself into to charity work, thinking that would make the guilt go away. It almost did.”

How could he not understand her guilt? Didn’t he think there was anything wrong, anything unusual, about marrying his own sister?

Apparently, he didn’t feel the least bit uncomfortable with the arrangement.

The only thing I could figure was that the shock of finding out who she was must have turned his brain to Cheese Whiz.

What other explanation could there be for his bizarre reaction?

And then I realized there was another one, and that it explained everything.

My vision was still a blur, but for the first time since I got involved in this case, I saw everything clearly.

“You were sleeping with your sister before,” I said. “Here, at the lake, when you were teenagers.”

Cyril nodded without a trace of shame. “Arlo saw us in the woods. He was going to tell, unless Kelly slept with him, too. That’s why she killed herself. Only she didn’t, did she? Not then, anyway.”

The rest of the story I already knew or could guess. After staging her suicide, she somehow made her way to Seattle and started another life. After the car accident gave her a new face, there was nothing stopping her anymore from searching out her brother and reuniting with him as lovers once more. No one would ever know the truth about who she was.

But once again, Arlo Pelz discovered her secret.

That’s what I meant about fate being cruel and inescapable. Twice Kelly Parkus had killed herself to protect her brother, only this time, she wouldn’t be coming back.

I almost felt sorry for Cyril.

Then I remembered what he did to Arlo and what was probably in store for me, and he lost my sympathy.

That’s when I should probably have instigated my cunning escape plan, only I didn’t have one. But at that point, I couldn’t even stand up on my own, much less wrestle the Rambo knife away from Cyril. There was nothing stopping him from dragging me to a boat and tossing me overboard the same way he did with Arlo.

“I guess you underestimated me, huh?” I said.

He looked up at me as if he’d forgotten I was there. “What do you mean?”

“I wasn’t just the jerk in the guard shack, the clown with the iron-on badge, was I? You paid me to do a job and I did it, and then some. You sure as hell didn’t expect that, not from a guy you thought couldn’t pick his nose without illustrated instructions. But I found Arlo Pelz and I figured out who your wife really was, didn’t I?”

I was reciting my own epitaph and I knew it.

I wanted him to know how wrong he’d been about me, how smart and capable I’d been. I wanted him to acknowledge it, if only with a nod of his head.

“You’re right, Harvey, I made a big mistake hiring you.” Cyril said. “I was afraid a professional detective might find out who Lauren really was. I never thought you would. Then again, a real detective would have stopped working when I fired him and wouldn’t be sitting here right now.”

“So what happens now, Cyril? Are they going to find two boats tomorrow morning drifting without anchors?”

Cyril rose to his feet, clutching the knife and the towel, and looked down at me. “I’m not a murderer, Harvey.”

“Let’s ask Arlo about that.”

“That was justice. He killed my sister and I made him pay for it,” Cyril said. “I’ve got no reason to hurt you.”

“Except to stop me from going to the police and telling them what you’ve done.”

It was only after I said it that I realized how I stupid I was to say anything.

What the hell was I thinking?

Did I want him to kill me?

“I haven’t done anything,” Cyril said. “At least nothing that can be proved. The only person you’d be causing trouble for is yourself.”

“I didn’t push Arlo out of a boat with an anchor tied to his feet.”