by Bryan Smith
Pete stopped pacing.
He took the phone away from his ear and scowled at the screen in disbelief a moment before again putting it to his ear. “Why not?”
“Because I fucking said so.”
Pete grunted. “This is a frame job, isn’t it? You’re gonna make me sweat for a while and then tip off the cops.”
“This is nothing so simple as an ordinary frame job, Pete. You have my word on that.”
“Your word isn’t worth shit.”
A brief silence.
Then Mary said, “You should probably refrain from insulting me. Apologize.”
Pete’s face twisted with barely suppressed anger as he bit back a silent curse. He forced himself to calm down before responding, drawing in and letting out a big breath. “I’m sorry.”
Mary laughed. “Apology accepted, but don’t push me. I want only sniveling obsequiousness from you. That shouldn’t be a problem. Just be yourself.”
Pete didn’t respond to that, just gripped the phone a little harder.
A sound he recognized as the flicking of a cigarette lighter came from the other end. “Later today, you’ll receive a text with instructions regarding what to do with the item. Do nothing until then, little man.”
The line went dead.
Pete tossed the phone on the coffee table and put his hands over his face. He groaned and, in a moment, took the hands away. He looked at the dead woman and said, “How in God’s name do I get out of this?”
She had no answers for him.
SEVEN
Pete spent some time unsure of what to do with himself after Mary hung up on him. Not for the first time that day, he felt utterly helpless, like a man stuck in limbo. Unless a better option unexpectedly materialized, all he could do was wait around until he received the promised text, a message he knew might never come. The promise of it might be nothing more than another tactic in the campaign of psychological torture Mary was waging against him.
But he believed he would hear from her again.
It might be hours from now, though. Perhaps many hours.
What was he to do with himself until then?
With no immediate answers springing to mind, he wandered into the kitchen, where he paused for a moment and stared at his coffeemaker. If his Saturday morning had proceeded in the usual way, he would already be halfway through his first pot of the day. He considered putting on a pot now, but opted against it. Once he got started on the java, he could see himself going through pot after pot. Too much coffee would give him the jitters and he felt twitchy enough as things stood.
There was the opposite end of the beverage spectrum to consider, though. He went to the fridge, pulled open the door, and peered inside. Pete didn’t drink alcohol much. He still had three bottles of Budweiser left over from a six-pack he’d purchased two weekends ago. Maybe the beer would calm his nerves. He hesitated, thinking about it. Three beers might do that job nicely, but it might also impede his ability to think clearly. That would be bad. There was also a single bottle of Diet Coke. He made a face. The soda wasn’t an option that pleased him, but it would have to do for now.
He took the Diet Coke out of the fridge and walked back out to the living room, where he slowly twisted off the cap and stared at the feminine form hidden beneath the blanket. The prospect of spending untold hours with only a brutally murdered corpse for company was not an enticing one.
Pete took a big swig from the soda bottle and winced. He’d forgotten how much he disliked diet soft drinks. Come to think of it, he couldn’t remember having bought a Diet Coke any time recently. Now he looked at the bottle and tried to remember having seen it there in the past. Perhaps it’d been a random, forgotten purchase from weeks or months ago, something he’d snagged from a convenience store after stopping to put gas in his car after work. No. There was nothing like that—not even the vaguest hint of it—in the foggiest corners of his memory. Not only that, but he was certain the soda bottle hadn’t been in his fridge last night. Now he was thinking about opening the bottle. His heart started hammering faster as he realized he couldn’t remember hearing the sound of the seal breaking when he twisted the cap.
“Oh, shit.”
Pete ran into the kitchen and dumped the bottle in the sink. He then bent over and shoved a finger down his throat, probing hard until he made himself gag. A liquid mix of bile and something dark that might have been traces of the soda dripped into the sink. Realizing that most of the soda would not be coming back up made him whimper with fear. In that moment, he was convinced the soda had been left in his fridge as an insidious trick on the part of his tormenters. It was laced with poison or some strange psychoactive drug that would cause him to hallucinate and make him feel like he was going crazy. He stood shaking above the sink for several minutes, his hands braced on the edge of the counter as he waited to either die or start freaking out.
Neither of those things happened.
He did, however, begin to feel drowsy. His eyes felt bleary and his eyelids began to droop. A deep yawn came out of nowhere. He stepped back from the sink to rub at his eyes and yawned again. This was disconcerting. He shouldn’t feel this tired, not this soon after having slept so solidly through the night. There was no denying the physical reality, though. He felt an almost overwhelming urge to go lie down and close his eyes, maybe take a long nap.
He glanced at the now-empty plastic soda bottle sitting on the counter by the sink. The soda had been laced with something, but not with poison or hallucinogens. Instead it had been dosed with some kind of powerful knockout drug. He started trying to puzzle out why Mary might have done such a thing. It didn’t seem necessary. He was already caught in her trap, a prisoner in his own home, his future subject to her sadistic whims. The randomness of it also made it odd. He was convinced now the soda had been dosed. The sleepiness was intensifying seemingly by the moment, with yawn after deep, jaw-cracking yawn repeatedly prying his mouth open. He had definitely been drugged. And yet there had never been any guarantee of him drinking that soda. That he had done so was, in fact, highly unusual. So why dose the bottle and put it in his fridge?
Turning away from the counter, he stumbled over to the fridge and hauled the door open again, peering inside through eyes that had never felt so bleary. He looked at that half-empty six-pack of Budweiser, trying to remember whether it had been that close to the edge of the top shelf last night. He didn’t think so. And, unlike the fancy craft beers so many of his acquaintances enjoyed, those Bud bottles had twist-off caps. Mary could have opened them, dosed them all, and then put the caps back on. He frowned as he continued to stare at the six-pack. There was something else off about it, but his increasingly foggy thinking made it difficult to pinpoint what that might be.
Then it came to him.
The brown bottles were all in slots along one side of the carton. He was sure the bottles had been arranged differently in the carton before last night, with one open slot on one side and two open slots on the other. That clinched it for him. The beer had been dosed, too. He had to assume the same was true for the carton of milk and bottle of orange juice, both of which sat inside one of the door shelves. He stepped back from the fridge, allowing the door to swing slowly shut as his gaze went to the can of Folgers next to the coffeemaker. He took a shaky step toward it and nearly fell over. His movements felt sluggish now, as if he were walking underwater at the bottom of a swimming pool.
He slapped himself in the face and tried to force his eyes to open wider. This had no discernible effect on the steadily deepening mental fogginess. He bit down on his bottom lip nearly hard enough to draw blood. Oops. Check that. There was a slight tang of saltiness in his mouth. He had drawn a little blood, after all. The sharp sting of pain helped a little, making him slightly more alert as he arrived at the coffeemaker and reached for the can of Folgers. He pried off the plastic top with fumbling, numb fingers, slapping it down on the countertop. His head wobbled on his shoulders and he felt close to falling over,
but he garnered a few more moments of semi-awareness with another, much harder slap across the face. While the sting of this second blow was still fresh, he dipped a finger down into the coffee grains and began to swirl them around. It didn’t take long to spy faint traces of a white powder mixed in with the brown grains.
The bitch had dosed everything. She was thorough, if nothing else. He had to give her that. His finger caught against the rim of the Folgers can as he pulled it away, causing the can to slide off the counter and fall to the floor, spilling coffee grains and white powder all over the tiles. He saw now that there’d been more of the mystery drug hidden in the grains than he’d originally suspected. He believed the drug was some kind of strong sedative rather than a poison, but it seemed possible an overdose of it might put him in a coma or even kill him. He didn’t believe that was Mary’s intent. She’d gone to a lot of trouble to mess with his head and put this scheme together. But she wasn’t a medical professional. She could have made a mistake with the dose.
Pete knew he should feel much more alarmed by this possibility than he did, but he was feeling more detached from his emotions and the world around him with each passing second. He staggered out of the kitchen and went into the living room. His phone was still on the coffee table, where he’d left it. He picked it up with his numb fingers and cradled it in both hands to keep from dropping it. As he stood there and worked as hard as he could to stay on his feet, he tried to think who among his acquaintances might be able to speedily procure him some cocaine. It stood to reason that a heavy-duty stimulant like coke might counteract the effects of whatever Mary had used to drug him. Or would it? He didn’t know for sure if it would work like that. He wasn’t any more of a drug guy than he was a booze guy. He’d never snorted coke in his life. It seemed like he probably knew one or two people from work who were fiends for the stuff, but he was having trouble dredging their names up from the murky depths of his drug-fogged brain.
The phone slipped from his fingers and landed with a sharp slapping sound on the hardwood floor. A few seconds later, the remaining strength seeped out of Pete’s legs, his eyes rolled back in his head, and he dropped to his knees, remaining partly upright another moment longer before pitching over onto his side. Within a few more moments, he was snoring deeply while drool dribbled from the corner of his mouth.
EIGHT
Pete’s eyes remained closed as he began to drift back toward consciousness. His thoughts were still fuzzy from sleep and the drug he’d inadvertently ingested, but he dimly sensed a significant amount of time had passed. In those initial moments of gray semi-consciousness, he didn’t remember much about what had happened before he passed out. There was a vague sense of things being seriously amiss in some way, but that was about it.
Mary.
The name was the first word that formed clearly in his head as he began to wake up. The only Mary he knew was Mary Wilson from work. An image of her face came into focus in his head. Her expression was a strange one, with a hint of something sly and devious. At first this only confused him. He dreamed of Mary sometimes, which was only natural, given that she was the last woman with whom he’d been semi-intimate. He found the dreams vaguely annoying because of the cold way she had dumped him, but they had never been outright troubling.
Until now.
Pete’s eyelids began to flutter and he yawned as they rose to half-mast. He still wasn’t really seeing anything, just blurred colors and shapes, but he soon realized he was no longer on the floor. He was at a higher elevation now. Above the floor, but not in his bed, because what was beneath him wasn’t quite as comfortable as his soft mattress. Was he on the couch in the living room?
He thought he probably was.
And hold on a minute … why had he been passed out on the floor in the first place?
The vague sensation of dread sharply intensified. He realized he was not lying flat on the cushions of the couch itself. There was a lumpen something else beneath him. Something that felt like the flesh of another human being. Only there was something off about it. Physical sensation sharpened. There was definitely another body beneath his own. He sensed it was a woman. And he was lying naked between her splayed legs.
Pete’s eyes snapped all the way open and he stared directly into the unseeing eyes of the dead woman. He screamed. Then it all came back to him in an instant. The discovery of the corpse in his living room. The visit from Mary. Her threats. Drinking the drugged soft drink and passing out on the floor.
He trembled as he began to see in his head what must have happened. Mary had returned to the house while he was unconscious, letting herself in with the duplicate key she’d mysteriously acquired. Shane Watson had probably been with her this time. He couldn’t see her doing the heavy physical work of undressing his unconscious form, lifting it off the floor, and arranging it in this hideous parody of a carnal coupling. Not because she couldn’t, but because she wouldn’t have wanted to do it. And why bother when she had a musclebound lackey in tow to do her bidding?
He had been set up to look like he was having sex with a corpse, but to what purpose? Was it just another way of messing with his head? That was almost certainly a part of it, but he thought there was more to it than that. He pictured Mary standing over him with her phone aimed at the couch, smirking as she took a series of compromising photos. Photos that made him look like the worst kind of sick bastard. Like a necrophiliac. The instant the possibility occurred to him, he became certain it had happened. There was no reason she wouldn’t have done it, given the circumstances. And that meant she now had in her possession blackmail material that could ruin him if he failed to do anything other than precisely what she told him to do from here on out.
Pete groaned.
I am so fucked.
He pushed himself up and glanced at the blind covering the large window above the couch. Only blackness was visible through the small gaps between the slats. It was night now. As he’d sensed, a lot of time had passed. His gaze returned to the body of the woman beneath him, who was lovely even in death. The body was entirely nude now, the lacy black bra and panties having been removed. A part of him wanted nothing more than to get off the couch and away from her, but he became briefly entranced by the sight of her bare breasts. They were a nice size and shape, exquisitely rounded, the nipples large and pink. His gaze drifted down to her flat belly and then moved even farther down, toward her shaved vagina. He stared at her exposed genitals a moment before beginning to feel uncomfortable, more like a real pervert rather than just a poor schmuck who’d been drugged and duped into looking like one. It made him feel dirty and inhuman. Like the worst kind of creep. It was a feeling he hated.
Even so, a slimy impulse rose up from the darkest, foulest depths of the most primitive part of his brain, what head doctors called the lizard brain. An impulse to reach out and cup those beautiful breasts in his hands. He swallowed hard as he envisioned himself doing it. The way the breasts would feel against the soft flesh of his palms was something he sensed so palpably it felt close to tactile reality. He could almost feel the spongy resistance of her nipples as he pressed the balls of his thumbs against them. He let out a breath and felt a touch of heat in his cheeks. His cock twitched and began to swell.
What the fuck is wrong with me?
Pete abruptly got up off the couch and staggered backward into the center of the living room, horror at the awful thing he’d been contemplating rising up inside him like a rapidly spreading sickness. He was filled with disgust and self-loathing. But there was also anger. This wasn’t the real Pete Adler. He wasn’t a scumbag. Never in his life had he entertained such repulsive thoughts. Not until today. This was a product of stress and manipulation. He was a victim, too, just like this woman. Well, not just like her. She was dead, after all, and he was still alive, at least for the time being. In a way, though, she was lucky. For her, this was over. He was still being victimized, with no end to his ordeal in sight.
He decided the first thing he
should do was cover the naked corpse. That should at least help dull the sick necro-erotic impulse still whispering to him from the back of his tortured brain. The blanket he’d covered her with earlier in the day had been swept to the floor. He was about to kneel and reach for it when he belatedly took note of something else at the edge of his peripheral vision.
No. Please, no.
He let out a breath and turned slowly toward the recliner. What he saw there elicited a high-pitched shriek, followed by a quieter whimper of helplessness. He felt like crying. Seated in the recliner was the body of a second dead woman. As with the corpse on the couch, a lot of bare flesh was exposed. In this woman’s case, however, her private areas were still covered by lacy underwear garments. A red pentagram adorned the crotch of her black panties. She was also wearing a pair of stiletto platform heels similar to the shoes worn by the first woman. Some tattoos were visible, but she wasn’t quite as profusely inked as the woman on the couch. Her big mane of hair was a shade of blonde that clearly came from a bottle. An open handbag sat on the floor next to the recliner. Clues to her identity were probably inside it.
Pete had resisted investigating the contents of the first woman’s purse out of fear of smearing his DNA all over her belongings, but his body had been mashed against the corpse of the black-haired woman for an unknown period of hours. Traces of him were all over her corpse. Contaminating the second woman’s belongings with his DNA seemed inconsequential now. He decided he would dig through both bags and find out as much as he could about these unfortunate women. Knowing their names might not benefit him in any meaningful way, but some information would be better than nothing. At the very least, it would allow him to stop thinking of them as “Dead Woman No. 1” and “Dead Woman No. 2”.