CRIME THRILLERS-A Box Set

by Billie Sue Mosiman

  As she stood inspecting the drop-off and the clear golden water running at the bottom over shallow gullies filled with stone, a sudden movement drew her attention to the trees. From out of the deep mauve shadows stepped a figure. Carla caught her breath in a gasp and held it.

  Sully.

  Her heart thrummed so hard she thought it might escape from its ribbed prison. Lightheadedness swept over her, and she swayed on the back of her heels.

  Sully brought one warning finger to his lips to insure her silence. Nevertheless, her lips formed words that came out as a low moan. She glanced down at the coiled, knotted rope lying near the edge, looked over her shoulder, saw Lansing with his back to her and immediately her foot snaked out. She pushed the rope with the toe of her boot until it flopped over the edge and dangled down the cliff face.

  She staggered back off balance and windmilled her arms to stay upright. She put a hand over her heart and walked unsteadily toward the cave entrance. Her wrists burned as if on fire, and her damaged ankles shot pains up her legs each time the cuff of her jeans rubbed against the open wounds circling her flesh. As she passed her own excrement, her nose wrinkled at the smell. Animal. He had her living like a goddamned animal. She hoped Sully would hurt him so badly, would kill him with a dagger, with a wood ax...

  Lansing was now watching. Had he seen what she'd done with the rope? Nothing showed in his face. His one eye glittered like coal struck from the earth. His lips went slack as if he were daydreaming, lost to the world.

  She must keep his attention riveted on her, provide Sully enough time to climb the ledge.

  "What is it about me going to the bathroom that bothers you, Lansing? If it doesn't bother me, why should it bother you? You have some kind of anal hang-up or what? You like to slice the girls, but not monkey with the stuff that comes down the intestinal tract? You got something against body wastes?"

  As she expected, her attack was too close to the crux of his madness. He came toward her, his mouth set in a definite line. "Turn around, I'm going to tie you up."

  "Fuck, no, Lansing, I'm tired of your game. If you're going to tie me again, you'll have to fight me to do it just like before. This time I might get lucky and take out your other eye. Or maybe I should go for your balls?" This kind of talk disgusted her, but she knew it disgusted him even more. Anything referring to the human body's functions or sexual proclivities caused him extreme anxiety. He was a prude! It made little sense to her, but she realized she could never understand what went on in this man's mind.

  She veered away as he reached for her. She was steadier on her feet, though far from nimble. She used the muscles of her legs to move her and hoped her numbed feet would follow commands.

  He came for her again, but slowly, his movement calculated and suddenly very frightening. He changed into the predator. Hunkering down, rounding the shoulders, narrowing the mean black eye.

  "I'm through with games, too, Carla." The menacing tone of his voice left no mistake that he meant it. Carla forced herself not to look behind them to see if Sully was there yet.

  "Where's your knife?" she asked, searching for something to delay him.

  His hand went to his pocket. He dipped his fingers down and came up with the switchblade. He hit the latch mechanism and the blade slid into view like the pop of a whip. He turned it this way and that to show her exactly where his knife was. The metal shaft glowed dully in the muted cave light. She wrenched away her gaze. If she stared at it too long, she would go mad with fear. She shouldn't have spoken of the knife. She shouldn't have goaded him into taking it from his pocket. Damn her, why wasn't she thinking?

  "I'm not afraid." She was afraid. So afraid she might scream hysterically any second. So afraid she was choking as the hairs rose in the follicles covering her arms. She felt behind her for a weapon.

  "I'm glad. I don't want you to be afraid. The old witch wasn't afraid, either. Just like you, Carla. She wanted to 'help' a poor soul. She was a sentimental silly old fool. She was a 'good' person, a Christian, and a lover of her fellow man. She was worthless stinking garbage. She was a sack of shit." His voice had risen with each pronouncement.

  "You gave her a way out of her delusions? Is that what you did?" Now she meant to goad him, push him, rush him toward a collision with his own madness.

  "I gave them all a way out. Now I'll give you yours."

  He was in no hurry, the stalking like a prologue to his rage, fueling it. A necessary part of the ritual.

  Carla kept moving in circles around the packed earthen floor trying to keep him at bay. Each time she had his back to the ledge, she looked past him, every fiber in her being psychically willing Sully into view. How long could it take him to climb the rope? How long?

  "Are you going to carry me around in car trunks, too?"

  "You won't know if I do."

  "You're really in love with me, Lansing." She was desperate. She would say any inane thing that came to her if it caused him confusion. She knew now she had gone too far and her life was moments from being snuffed out. In all the time she had spent with him, he had never looked so rabidly insane, so ready to commit murder. Insanity was something that came out of the eye, the one eye, and it opened into a door in Hell.

  "That's it, isn't it?" she asked. "You're actually in love with me, aren't you?"

  He stood perfectly still. He was in position with his back again to the cave entrance. He blocked most of the light from outdoors, and she could not see his expression. Had she by chance hit on the truth?

  "You do love me in some upside down perverted way, don't you? You loved her, too, and that's why you couldn't stand her because...because love scares you, love scares the Hell out of you, doesn't it?" She pointed at the old woman's corpse without taking her eyes from him.

  "I don't love you," he denied. "I don't care about you."

  "That's a deliberate damn lie, and you know it, deep down where you haven't looked, Lansing, that's where love is. You might have killed that woman over there who's turning to dust, but you loved her first. You don't carry around a ghost on your back for fifteen years if you hate it."

  "You're wrong." He moved in now rather than circling.

  "Ask the people in your head, the ones who aren't your enemies, the ones you say are behind the palace window with you. They'll tell you how true it is, Lansing. Maybe you never loved anyone else because no one else really cared. But you loved the fat woman who tried to stop you before it was too late. She was trying to save you, wasn't she? She was trying to reach you. And you didn't want to be saved. You love both of us--that's the bald truth." The whole theory revolted her, but it might be true, and if it were true she could find an escape from his knife.

  He stalled again, and confusion clouded his features. She regarded his scowling face. He blinked. His free hand came up to rub at the bandaged scalp. He broke out into a sweat even as she watched, beads dotting his forehead and upper lip. "No." It was an uttered denial without confidence. She had hit on it! She almost understood now...almost... He loved the old woman. He loved her for some reason, too. She might be able to understand finally. By accident she had sounded a ringing verity. The bell of truth. It was crazier than she could ever have imagined, and that was why it had not come to her before. A madman in love with women who fought him without fear, women who honestly wished to help him if only they could.

  He stumbled mechanically forward, and she moved away until her back was in contact with the sloping damp stone wall. The strong cloying scent of wet musty clay filled her nostrils. She was pinned, and there was nowhere to flee and nowhere to hide from him. Oh, Sully, hurry, you must hurry.

  "Lansing, don't kill me. You don't kill people you love."

  "But I have to." The hand wielding the switchblade extended itself toward her trembling body. "I have to, Carla, it's all I know. I don't want to love you. There's no room for you in the palace. I live there all alone. Don't you see?"

  CHAPTER 3

  "It is clear that as our walk
ing is admittedly nothing but a constantly prevented falling, so the life of our bodies is nothing but a constantly prevented dying, an ever-postponed death.”

  Schopenhauer

  Counsels and Maxims

  Flap insisted he climb first. He stuck the loaded hogleg pistol in the deep pocket of his overalls and reached for the hanging rope. Sully could see that climbing a rope up a rock face was not going to be easy for the older man. His forearms bulged against his shirt, ready to explode the material. He sucked air through an open mouth, and hand over hand, his boot's rubber soles flat against the impediment, he moved strenuously to the ledge top.

  If it's hard for him, how am I going to make it? Sully wondered. But he would. If he had to scale the rock with his fingernails, he would do it.

  After what seemed a very long time, Flap had made it halfway up the rope. Sully caught hold above his head as far as he could reach and lifted his weight off the slippery rocks in the running brook. He had the revolver stuck into the waist of his jeans and prayed it would not work loose. He could feel the barrel of the cold metal working its way through the tail of his shirt to press against the warm dampness of his lower abdomen.

  Above him, Flap let out a low grunt. Sully hoped the rope would hold their combined weights as they climbed. He was several feet off the ground now and catching up with the old man. If the rope were to snap, the two of them would plummet one on top the other as they hit bottom. He just couldn't let Flap face the killer up there without immediate help. He couldn't wait at the bottom of the cliff and let him take all the risk.

  The climb seemed to go on for days. The wound hemp of the thick rope scorched Sully's hands, his feet sometimes slipped from their purchase, and he dangled dead weight until he could secure another footing. He saw Flap reaching over the top, hefting his muscular upper body onto the ledge. Sully reached hand over hand faster now. If Lansing saw them coming...

  If Lansing were waiting for them...

  Then he was at the ledge top, too, and Flap's wide, strong hand took his own to lift him onto level rock. Sully tried to see into the cave, but Flap blocked his view.

  Flap turned in his squat, stood, his attention on the deadly confrontation taking place inside the cave. Sully appeared beside him. Flap removed the hogleg pistol from his pocket, squinted at the shadowy maw in the mountainside. He put one hand flat against Sully's chest to stay him.

  Flap did not say a word. He was still one moment, and the next he rushed the cave brandishing his weapon. He shot into the air and yelled as loud and fearsome as a man losing his mind.

  Sully was right behind, fear trilling up and down his spine like a multi-legged spider. He could dimly make out two figures in the darkness at the back of the cave. Everything ran fast, merged, light and shadow blending, time speeding up. His heart thumped against the roof of his mouth until he swallowed it down to its rightful place. He saw Flap's pistol flash, smelled the sharp aroma of cordite. Heard a high whine as the bullet ricocheted from stone wall to stone wall. Carla's anguished scream and Flap's riotous yell filled his eardrums.

  Then Flap was lost in the cave's interior. Then he was on the floor grappling with Lansing.

  Sully stood paralyzed over them, shaking, his vision clearing so that he could see the two combatants delineated against the brown packed earthen floor. Lansing stabbed. Flap screamed with more anger than pain. Lansing stabbed and stabbed, and Flap wrestled him over onto his back, the two bodies flipping, changing positions, and yet Lansing stabbed again. Again.

  Oh, no, oh, God, no, the knife flashing up, down, up dripping blood, down, buried in Flap's big chest. Stabbing viciously like an automaton locked at high speed. Sully screamed and the world disappeared except for Lansing's knife hand looming up and down, up...

  Sully stood four feet and to the side from where the two men tussled in a death dance. The reality flooded in, and he raised the revolver in his fist, aimed it at Lansing on the top position. He squeezed the trigger.

  And again.

  The reverberations of the gunshots rang in his ears. He could see the barrel end of his gun smoking. His nose filled with a burning, his throat constricted, he could not breathe.

  The body hanging over Flap jerked as if hit with a baseball bat. Freeze frame. Sully stared incredulously at how stiff Lansing appeared to be. The stabbing motions ceased. The killer braced himself over his victim to keep from falling to the cave floor. Then he rolled to the side onto his back. So quick that Sully hardly knew it was happening, Lansing struggled to hands and knees, his face straining toward the cave exit as he moved that direction.

  Sully took five steps to follow him. He lowered the revolver's barrel until it pointed at the base of Lansing's spine, and he squeezed off another shot. This is for Frannie, he thought. This time Lansing was flung face down, his arms crumpling beneath him. He was still a moment, and then he crawled toward the glowing incandescence beyond the cave opening. He made guttural sick sounds, a man hemorrhaging, a man fending off the death train rumbling over him.

  Sully turned to see Carla huddled near the wall. Her eyes were round and circled in white. She ran to him and threw herself into his arms. "Baby," he whispered, scooping her close. "Oh, God, Carla, let me see you." He lifted her chin and saw she was unmarred. Tears flowed unchecked from two beautiful, brown eyes.

  He felt something inside him crack and fall apart with relief. He let her go, hurried to see about Flap lying in an unmoving heap on the floor. He kneeled, saw the gashes in the older man's chest pumping blood by the gallon. He felt for a pulse on the side of Flap's heavily ringed throat.

  "Jesus, Flap, no..." He reached out to put his hand over the pumping tear in Flap's shirt. "No!"

  Flap stared at him with cloudy fixed eyes. "End it," he said. "Now, Sully. End this thing with Lansing."

  Sully looked up, saw Lansing clawing desperately forward. "Hold on, Flap. Help will be here soon. Just hold on."

  "End it, Sully."

  Sully stood and crossed the cave floor to Lansing. The gun he carried hung loosely in his hand at his side. He stood over the dying man remembering Frannie, remembering the night of torture, remembering the warmth of Flap's blood against his hand. Three distinct, ragged holes gaped in Lansing's back. Sully searched himself for regret or guilt. He had done this to a man, to another human being. He recalled what he had said to Lansing the night of the kidnapping. "You want me on your level." So in that way Lansing had won. But there would be no guilt. Ever. Sully refused to accept it. Martin Lansing had done this to himself. He had sent out the black-bordered invitations to this particular funeral.

  The cloth of Lansing's shirt was scorched and blackened where the bullets had entered. Sully leaned down and caught Lansing's arm. He turned him onto his back. One exit wound spread the scarlet petals of a scarlet rose across the chest. Another sprouted dramatically from the abdomen and it was this fatal wound Lansing clutched with two hands while writhing in agony.

  Sully stared down into his enemy's face. Lansing would have died anyway, he realized, seeing the purplish bloating all around the dirtied bandage covering his lost eye--but he would have killed Carla first.

  He leaned in close until his eye stared directly into Lansing's one good eye. "You can see me?" He didn't expect an answer. "I prayed for this, Lansing. I hope you burn in Hell. I'm glad I'm the one to send you there. I'm consigning your evil to the grave. And I want you to take this thought with you: If there's any life after death, when I get there I'll do this to you all over again. You'll never be finished with me. Never."

  Carla joined Sully and slumped at his side.

  They watched while the life faded from Lansing's face, watched while consciousness slipped away and his breath grew shallow and snickered in and out like a rattlesnake giving last warning.

  Before Lansing closed his eye the life force flared and receded. His lips worked and convulsed around his teeth and the tip of his tongue. Carla shuddered and put her head down on her arms. Sully watched it all and wonde
red why he did not feel better for it.

  "He loved me," Carla said in a small distant voice.

  Dogs barking broke the resultant silence. Excited voices of the searchers called out from below the ledge.

  Sully and Carla left the man who had stalked their nightmares for too long. They returned to Flap. Sully dropped the gun. He ripped off his shirt, the buttons flying. He wadded the shirt into a ball and pressed it over Flap's flowing chest wounds. "Flap? It's over, Flap. He's gone. Do you hear me?"

  "Carla...?" Flap whispered.

  With tears flowing down her face, Carla leaned her face near his lips. "What, Uncle Flap?"

  "I found you again, didn't I?"

  "You saved my life, Flap."

  "You're a good kid. And I found you, I'm so glad I found you... Sully?"

  "Yeah, Flap?"

  "See about my chickens, can you? The fox and weasels might get 'em...something bad and evil might get 'em..."

  Before Sully could promise, Flap shut his eyes and sighed once. The thick muscles of his neck relaxed and his head rolled to the side.

  Carla lay across his body weeping. Sully stroked her back, feeling his own grief so deeply he could hardly swallow. "We have to go," Sully said after a while, taking hold of her gently and moving her toward the rope hanging from the cliff. "I'll take you home. It's over now."

  #

  He had heard Sully's serious threat and Carla speak the truth. They drifted in a mist beyond the periphery of his sight and were lost to him. He welcomed the coming of night and clung to the hope of oblivion. He raised his eyes to the far-off palace window, the golden lip of the sill sparkling in the sun. He began to climb with difficulty, his hands and feet scraping against the granite blocks. If he could only reach sanctuary before they caught him, he would be all right. He would survive, he knew it.