The Beast in the Bone

by Blair Lindsay

  I really need a hit.

  A keening sound was audible now over the diesel growl of the idling ambulance, and she realized fear and adrenalin were colliding in her body and the noise was her, screaming.

  Call it in. Call it in. Call it in.

  Her bloodied hands were shaking but she eventually managed to get a grip on her radio. She tried to still her fingers long enough to press the orange button on the unit, the I’m in fucking trouble button that would summon immediate help.

  But another lightning explosion of agony in the back of her head threw her to her knees again, fumbling at consciousness as it slid like oil through her fingers. The flashing lights and the ambulance and even the scent of blood all receded into a long grey tunnel.

  She rolled onto her back, staring up into the encroaching darkness. The shadowy figure was back, pale face staring down at her, blurred and indistinct.

  Then it was fading and the night opened up and welcomed her into its black womb.

  Three

  Keller woke to a thunderous pulsing pain in her head so powerful she thought her skull might explode. She had the vague sense she was seated on a chair, but when she tried to open her eyes they were gummy, glued nearly shut.

  Blood.

  The coppery tang of it was in her nose, nearly overwhelming the subsidiary layers of body odour and whiskey in the background.

  She groaned, then thought she heard an answering chuckle from the depths of the darkness around her. Fear washed through her and she tried to move, but her hands were immobilized and straining against the bonds spiked the pain in her skull toward agony. The taste of vomit came into her mouth and she swallowed hard against it.

  Deep breaths, one at a time.

  She was well acquainted with pain, even with agony. After the skiing injury, she had come to know pain intimately, to think of it as a rapist, in fact. Too much?

  Yeah right.

  Pain staked itself inside you and didn’t leave until it was goddamn good and ready. Pain said, “I’m in you, baby… for as long as I want.”

  Rapist.

  But the pills the surgeon gave her did make the pain go away—and, she’d discovered, not just the physical pain. The old agonies from long-ago calls, the slivers of sharp memory that had wedged inside her psyche when she wasn’t looking, the nightmares of dead women and children, the sudden anxiety attacks. The Oxy took them all away.

  But eventually the docs had told her she was better, had stopped writing her scripts for Oxy… for anything.

  Leaving her to her agony.

  Leaving her to find her own way to get relief.

  If tonight had gone as planned, by now she would be home with a full glass of wine and half a pill—maybe three-quarters—from the stash she’d bought from Glasgow, her dealer, the week prior.

  Quit reminiscing about getting high, idiot. Wake up.

  She blinked hard, ripping eyelashes as she forced her eyelids apart despite the clotting blood.

  Sticky, not dried.

  She hadn’t been unconscious long. Such details were important when you were trying to figure things out. Her father, a homicide cop, had said it dozens of times. “The little things matter. They all add up.”

  She was in a small, dingy room that looked to have been decorated circa 1950 but not cleaned since the Beatles broke up. A ceiling lamp with a broken cowl flickered like an arrhythmic heart. Beneath it a mattress lay on the floor, stained with dirt and what looked like long-dried blood. A bottle of Old Crow whiskey, three-quarters full and the cap nowhere to be seen, sat beside a pile of rags on a cracked laminate counter near a rust-stained sink.

  She wriggled her arms. Plastic zip ties circled her wrists, holding them tight to the metal backing of the chair in which she sat.

  Fear clawed into her muddled brain, and she swallowed hard against both it and the persistent nausea.

  You’re concussed and Jonas is dead. No help coming. You’re fucked unless you stay alert.

  Blank walls and no windows, though she sensed a larger room beyond the dark mouth of the doorway to her left. Under the lingering smell of B.O. and whiskey, she caught the faint scent of something cooking in some other part of the house. And sounds from nearby, the next room maybe. Muffled whimpering? The girl from the road?

  Footsteps now, coming closer. A shuffle. Maybe a slight limp.

  The man who appeared in the doorway confirmed all her fears about how much trouble she was in. He was tall and stocky, like an aging boxer, with an eerie smile cracking an unshaven face. His mop of greying hair looked to have been spun by a spider. Hard, capillary-marbled eyes fixed her with a stare as he paused in the doorway. The track pants and white T-shirt he wore bore forensic evidence of several recent meals, and when the smile widened, similar evidence lingered on his teeth.

  But her gaze locked on his right hand. A cobra tattoo coiled around his wrist, but it was the shotgun that attracted her attention. A feeling like ice water slid down her spine and sweat popped to the surface of her skin. She bit her lip to keep her cry of fear on the inside.

  Don’t. Suck it up. Screaming won’t help.

  The shotgun was a scarred and dusty thing, but it looked workable enough. Her father had taught her to use guns as soon as she hit her teens, and long before her paramedicine career, she’d seen pictures of shotgun injuries in homicide files her father left on the dining room table when he was working a particularly vexing case.

  After she’d started working ambulance, she’d seen a few such injuries live and up close: the duck hunter careless enough to prop his weapon against a fence while he climbed over it, a boyfriend angry enough about the new boyfriend to shoot the other man’s arm off, and a man who’d decided to end his time on earth with a double barrel in his mouth and lead pellets flying through his brain.

  Shotguns were easy to use, and at close range, aiming was pretty much optional. And they didn’t just kill—they destroyed you.

  The stocky man—Pigpen, in her mind—seemed to guess what she was thinking because he sniggered and licked at his lips, but he said nothing as he continued his shuffle into the room and over to the bottle of Old Crow. A paroxysm of coughing overcame him as he neared the whiskey and he half collapsed into the rickety chair. The hand unoccupied with the gun reached for the bottle and he took a long swig.

  Keller tried to think but it was difficult with her head pounding. A thousand late-night discussions with her father had taught her many things about crime and criminals. So much so that by the time she was sixteen, he was asking her about crime scenes, showing her photos, discussing theories. An incredible compliment, coming from a man of such exacting standards. He thought she was smart. It had made her proud.

  But how to be smart here in this insanity, with panic and concussion battering at her brain?

  Neutrality seemed like a compromise between anger and hysteria, so she tried that first.

  “I need to get back to my ambulance. My partner…” She grimaced at the thought of Jonas, his brains poured out on the gravel road, and she shook her head to clear the vision. Bad idea. A sudden wave of dizziness threatened to overwhelm her, as if someone had turned the gravity off and set the room spinning.

  Definitely a concussion, though it might be worse. There was always the possibility she had a basal skull fracture brewing and blood seeping into her brainpan.

  “No need to be worrying about your partner.” Pigpen coughed and wiped something greasy from his mouth, then took another long gulp from the whiskey bottle before setting it down again, and Keller recognized that whatever universe of differences separated them, they had at least one thing in common. Alcohol and fentanyl, apples and oranges.

  Choose your poison, folks.

  Pigpen began tapping the large ring on his left hand against the chair’s arm, a harsh rapping sound. What had her father said once? “Ring-tappers. Always trying to remind you they’re better than you. The need to do it proving they aren’t.”

  “You’ve got a litt
le brown in you, don’t you?” He gave her a lopsided smile that was half a sneer. “Paki or wagon-burner?”

  Belatedly Keller realized he was referring to her skin tone. Her father had been Israeli and her mother Parisian—not French, mind you, Parisian—not that Keller was about to explain this to Pigpen. Her parents had moved to Canada at least partly to escape people who were overly concerned about such things. She had few clear memories of her mother, who’d succumbed to cancer when Keller was only six, but her father had often told her she was a spitting image. The full dark hair, the aquiline nose, and what he called a “soft, elfish face.” Craggy-faced and weather beaten himself, he’d often said he was glad that the tint of his skin was all she’d inherited.

  “You’re not really my taste.” Pigpen slurred it like a man turning up his nose at an inferior menu item, and Keller wasn’t sure whether to feel offended.

  Then go back to sucking your thumb.

  But Pigpen wasn’t finished. “I’m sure we’ll have a lick or two of fun with you, though.”

  She shuddered at that but tried to speak without letting the fear crawl into her voice. “I need to go see about that girl on the road, too. She was hurt, right? I’m a paramedic. I can help if you let me loose.”

  Pigpen laughed, a grating sound muffled by another swallow of Old Crow, then he leaned in close and sniffed at her, grinning.

  “You smell nice.” With booze riding him, it came out Yoush shmell ni-i-i-sh. “You’re not going anywhere. Just ’cause I don’t want to twist your titties don’t mean they won’t… palace cunt.”

  “Palace cunt” had to be about the weirdest thing she’d ever been called, but given the quantity of whiskey Pigpen had imbibed in just these few minutes, she wasn’t completely surprised.

  “Is someone there? Please help me!” The cry echoed from the next room, sharp and shrill.

  This provoked more yells, from farther away. At least three other voices, Keller decided. From the echo, it seemed to her she was in a basement or the lower level of a house.

  More captives.

  What the hell did we stumble into?

  It didn’t matter. All the possibilities were just different shades of terrible, but if the girl in the road was an escapee, then escape was possible.

  Another cry from the adjacent room. “Help me!” The wail was small and hollow, a child’s shriek. Less hope in it this time.

  “Sounds like she got her gag off.” Pigpen wiped red-brown rivulets of whiskey from his chin, looked toward the hallway, then back at Keller. “My taste!” He grabbed at his crotch and laughed. The irregular gaps in his teeth put Keller in mind of a de-fanged dog, not that there was any comfort in the thought. Any dog was dangerous, after all.

  “Please, my leg,” the girl sobbed. “Please...”

  Pigpen swore and lurched to his feet, wavering before setting the bottle of Old Crow down on the counter with the exaggerated care of a true drunk. He grabbed the shotgun, pointed a finger at Keller, and cocked an eyebrow. “Don’t go anywhere.”

  He staggered out of the room, and the voice that had been crying for help soon began to shriek. Keller heard a slap, and the shrieks turned to sobs. Then more fleshy slaps and heart-wrenching pleas for Pigpen to stop, that he was hurting her.

  Keller leaned forward and levered her wrists back and forth, igniting pain as her flesh abraded. The motion got her head pounding and blurred her vision. She paused, breathing slowly, trying to stay conscious.

  The noise of bodies moving against each other had ceased and was replaced by desperate choking sounds. With new horror she realized that Pigpen was strangling the girl he had just raped.

  Four

  After dragging the dead paramedic’s body off the road and into the field, the Fixer pulled a tarpaulin over the corpse and paused, panting like a racehorse and considering next steps.

  Sometime during the process of moving the corpse, the dead man’s bowels had let go and now the stink hung in the air, souring the Fixer’s stomach. He decided he would demand a bonus for tonight’s work… well, the extra work, more properly. After all, his contract had ended when he’d delivered the girls to Oakes. And now the man had let one slip away and—unforgivably—gotten witnesses involved while recapturing her. It was one thing to kidnap foster children and underage prostitutes—many of them disappeared every year anyway—but this?

  Idiot.

  The Fixer realized he was most angry with himself. Oakes had been staggering when he dropped the girls off, with a yard-wide whiskey miasma surrounding him. He should have realized the man was too drunk to do his job properly.

  He checked his watch. 0325. It would be light in a few hours and there was still a lot to do.

  He donned latex gloves before climbing into the ambulance. He located and disabled its onboard GPS, then started it up. He drove at a conservative speed, and when he judged the distance from Oakes’s farm sufficient, he turned off on a quiet side road and extinguished the headlights. Another few miles, moving slowly and cautiously in the darkness, brought him to a side road framed by trees, and he turned into it.

  This was the most dangerous part, but he was heartened by the fact that he’d heard no urgent calls for an ambulance to report themselves to dispatch. His own radio was tuned to police channels and he’d heard call-outs for two traffic wrecks, a burglary, and a fight at bar in Hanna, but not a word about a missing ambulance… not yet. All he needed now was a few more minutes and a little luck.

  He walked briskly away from the ambulance and consulted the maps app on his phone. It showed him two different routes back to Oakes’s farm and he chose the same one he’d taken there. One hour and twelve minutes to the farm by foot, so Google said. He decided that would be the price of his bonus. Seventy-two thousand dollars—one grand for every wasted minute.

  At least it was a nice evening and the walk would give him time to consider his options. Best to kill them all, really. Oakes included. It would tie up all the loose ends. Hunt might not like it, but there were other girls and Hunt had a better place to hold them now that the “renos” were complete at his rural property.

  As the Fixer walked, he checked his pistol. Oakes first, then the girls—too young for anything but a bullet since the Fixer had decidedly different tastes from his employer. The paramedic was a different matter, though. She had a nice body, even if she was a little bloodied up.

  Maybe he’d have a little fun with her before he put a bullet between her eyes.

  Five

  Keller blinked and realized she had passed out.

  For how long?

  Head throbbing, she struggled to think as the world swam into focus, then clenched her teeth and willed herself to full consciousness.

  Some of her father’s cases had involved women who were kept alive for some time after they were captured, but nothing lasted forever. These next few minutes might be her only chance to get out of this alive. She glanced around, her head still pounding but the volume now at a level she could deal with, barely.

  The room looked the same, but with no windows she couldn’t know if it was high noon or still night. Hours might have passed.

  No. That wasn’t true. Every ambulance in Alberta had a GPS transmitter. Certainly, dispatch would have noticed by now that hers had made an unscheduled stop in the middle of nowhere. They would have tried contacting her and Jonas. Eventually they would send cops. She would be found.

  Unless.

  Unless Pigpen had been smart enough to move the ambulance. Even five kilometres might be enough to throw police off his trail. Or he might have found a way to turn off the GPS. He didn’t seem particularly inventive but she couldn’t afford to bet on his stupidity.

  “Why didn’t she try to get away?” A fifteen-year-old Keller had asked it of her father once while he was investigating the murder of a woman taken into the wilderness by her boyfriend, who then strangled her and burned her body.

  Her father had looked pained. “We don’t always know. Sometimes th
ey just don’t think the person who says they love them could do something so bad. Sometimes—and I know this sounds strange—they’re afraid trying to get away will upset the person more. That resisting will make things worse. They think the person will calm down, come to their senses. Most people aren’t used to fighting, sweetheart. They’re used to the police rescuing them. I wish it always happened that way, but it doesn’t.”

  By then, there had already been many discussions with her father about cases and she was keenly aware that heroes rarely showed at the last minute and that victims taken to secondary crime scenes—as she had been—nearly always died.

  Time to fight. Time to get away.

  Keller might have one advantage. She was different from the other girls Pigpen had taken. She realized what he was and what he would do. And she would do whatever she had to.

  She shifted around, moving her hands, experimenting with her ties. As a teen she’d often played with her father’s handcuffs, experimented with using hairpins to unlock them. She’d been overjoyed to find it wasn’t a myth. With enough practice, it could in fact be done. It wasn’t even that hard.

  She’d never tried to get out of the kind of zip ties binding her hands now, though she knew the principles. Cops used zip ties sometimes, usually when they were dealing with large numbers of suspects, but they never depended on them for long. Even the toughest plastic bindings could be broken when the right kind of force was applied.

  These restraints were resting against her belt at the small of her back, right where her trauma scissors still lay in her belt pouch, the blades and handle half-exposed for an easy draw. A rough cutting surface, but it just might do.

  Pigpen had taken her radio and cellphone but not her scissors. Just tied her up, thinking he’d de-fanged her.

  All dogs are dangerous.

  Pigpen lurched back into the room, pulling his pants up by the belt, that asymmetric grin on his face again. “Miss me?”