Head Wounds

by Dennis Palumbo

  “Still do. I’m even in the same office on the same floor. Three doors down from where Barbara’s was. We used to grab coffee or lunch together sometimes.” A pointed look. “Barbara was a brilliant linguist. A pioneer in her field.”

  “Yes, she was. And I hope you know how much she admired your own work. As do I. She gave me one of your papers to read.”

  “I trust you weren’t offended. My writing was pretty strident in those days. Some people feel it still is.”

  I smiled. “So was Barbara’s.”

  I could tell that Angie didn’t know how to gauge the tenor of my conversation with Liz Cortland. Truth is, neither did I. Other than being aware of the tension below the surface.

  Angie spoke up. “I’m so glad you two got a chance to meet again. How ’bout we all amble over to the buffet table?”

  “Not for me, thanks,” said Liz. “I took one look at the obscene amount of choices available and became, frankly, disgusted. This damned country. The one-percent keep living like feudal lords, while the rest of the world goes hungry.”

  No doubt Angie was somewhat put off by this, but she did her best to hide it. I touched her shoulder.

  “I’ll have to beg off, too, Angie. I had a pretty tough day. I think I better head on home.”

  I was about to say goodnight to Liz when she stopped me with a look. Reaching into a clutch purse, she gave me her card.

  “Give me a call, will you? Now that we’ve run into each other, there’s something I’d like to discuss with you. It concerns Barbara.”

  This took me aback, but I slid the card in my pocket. Then her frank gaze found mine.

  “I’ll look forward to hearing from you. Soon.”

  l l l l l

  Dr. Langstrom had provided valet service for his party guests, but I’d bypassed it to park my car a couple blocks up the street. For one thing, the night was pleasantly cool and cloudless, and it felt good to stretch my legs. For another, I was reluctant to hand over my reconditioned ’65 Mustang to some underpaid and easily distractible high school kid. My poor chariot had been dinged enough in recent years.

  As I approached it, half in shadow beneath a leafy oak, I thought about my encounter with Liz Cortland. Strange running into someone from Barbara’s professional life, especially now. Probably just a coincidence, but still…

  I’d just unlocked my car when I was aware of two things.

  First, the muffled scuff of a shoe on the pavement behind me. Then, before I could turn around, a sharp, stabbing pain at the back of my neck.

  I gasped, muscles instinctively tensing. But a powerful pair of arms was already wrapped around me. Within seconds, I felt a rush of warmth course through my body. Felt my legs begin to buckle, my own arms go slack.

  My vision clouded. I struggled to maintain consciousness, but my efforts were futile. Then, just before I sank into a swirling sea of darkness, I heard a cold, harsh whisper in my ear. The words unearthly, hollow. As though echoing from somewhere far away…

  “I hope you’ve enjoyed living in your world, Danny. ’Cause from now on, you’re living in mine.”

  Chapter Eleven

  When I came to, I was staring at a large monitor screen.

  A wide-eyed, frozen stare.

  I tried to blink, but couldn’t. The lids of both eyes had been pulled apart, and held there by some adhesive. Tape, glue. I had no idea.

  As this awareness hit me, a real panic rose in my chest. Adrenaline spiking, I tried to move. But now I realized that I was strapped into a hard-backed chair of some kind. My forearms were bound to the chair arms with belt-wide leather strips, my ankles attached to the wooden legs. When I struggled against my bonds, the chair didn’t budge. It was bolted to the floor.

  Frantically, I tried again to blink my eyes, willing my lids to close. But whatever was holding them open didn’t give.

  I swallowed deep mouthfuls of air, trying to calm myself. At least enough to focus on my surroundings. To the extent that I could. I started to look around—

  My head didn’t move. Couldn’t. It was only then that I registered the dull ache on either side of my skull. The pressure of some kind of pincers. At least that’s what I imagined they were. Cold metallic discs, probably attached to the top of the chair-back. Exerting enough pressure to make it impossible for me to turn my head.

  Another wave of panic flowed over me as I tried to accept the reality of the situation. Fathom its surreal, terrifying contours. That this was actually happening.

  Slowly, with effort, my mind acquiesced. Accepted the facts, incomprehensible as they were. I’d been bound tightly to a chair, my eyes painfully taped open, head immobilized, so that I was forced to gaze only at what was in front of me.

  But all there was to see was that blank monitor screen, hanging about four feet away from me on an otherwise featureless wall. The size of a flat-screen TV, it had been situated at my eye level. Yet all I saw was a profusion of pixels dancing across its broad face.

  Using my breath once more to quell my anxiety, I finally let my aching limbs relax and stopped straining against the leather straps binding them. Tried to get my bearings.

  The room itself was concrete-cold and eerily dim, its corners shrouded in shadow. What little light there was came from somewhere above me. Soft, faint. Just enough for me to gauge how small the chamber was.

  Which was how it felt to me. Like some kind of chamber, or dungeon. Something out of Grimm’s. Out of a lurid bedtime story.

  Or a nightmare.

  I swallowed again, and felt my lips part. I was almost surprised to discover that my mouth hadn’t been taped shut. Or stuffed with some kind of gag.

  I could speak. So I did.

  At first, my words were a series of muffled croaks. Then, with each passing second, my voice grew in strength.

  “Where the hell am I?” I shouted. “Who did this to me?”

  Silence. Accompanied only by the multi-colored pixels gyrating in a kind of Brownian motion across the big screen.

  I called out even louder.

  “Dammit, who the fuck did this? Why am I—?”

  A hard, raspy voice echoed off the walls. Tinny, as though from small, inlaid speakers. But unmistakably male.

  “Welcome, Danny. Welcome to the rest of your life.”

  I fell silent. Ludicrous as I found the words, I couldn’t deny the cold malice in his voice nor suppress the shiver that coursed through my arms.

  “I assume it’s okay to call you Danny? Since we’re going to be quite intimately involved with each other.”

  “Who are you?” I managed to ask again.

  “You know exactly who I am. Or, at least, should know.”

  “Trust me. No fucking idea.”

  His tone darkened. “Damned unpleasant attitude for a man in your position. But I don’t mind. It makes what’s coming all the sweeter. For me, that is. For you…well, not so much.”

  I strained to move my head, to look around me. Something about the acoustics in the room made it seem that the man was standing nearby. Behind me, or to one side.

  It was maddening being constrained this way. Able to do nothing but stare, opened eyes going dry in the dead air, at the screen in front of me. Those erratic pixels. Dancing. Mocking me.

  Steeling myself, I spoke again.

  “Look, whoever the hell you are—”

  “No, Danny. You look.”

  Abruptly, the pallid overhead light flickered out, plunging the room into total darkness. At the same time, a blurry image appeared on the monitor screen.

  It took only a moment to realize I was looking at the view from a camera, hand-held, moving into a night-shrouded room. The person with the camera breathing hard. Short, excited breaths.

  This room, I thought. I’ve seen it before…

  Suddenly the camera’s lens f
ell onto a king-size bed, and revealed a person sleeping there. Under a swath of covers, curled into a half-fetal position. Like a child’s slumber.

  A spray of rich dark hair cascaded onto the pillow, masking the sleeper’s features.

  Though I knew whose face it was.

  Unthinking, with a choked cry, I tried to bolt up from my chair. To do something. But I was helpless.

  As helpless as Joy Steadman, who woke with a scream as the man filming her used his free hand to roughly pull aside the covers. Naked, shrieking in terror, her hands came up, clawing at his face. But he stayed out of reach. Then, with one blow from the back of his hand, the cords of his muscled forearm thrusting into view, he knocked her back onto the bed. Her head lolled, eyes rolling up into their sockets.

  She was dazed for only a few moments, but that was enough time for the man to move to the end of the bed and position the camera on some flat surface. Maybe a bureau of some kind. Now the image was static, a mute witness. Frozen in place, ready to record what was about to transpire.

  The big man had aimed the camera at the carpeted floor, and for a moment I couldn’t tell what was happening. Suddenly, he came into frame again, though his back was still to the camera.

  He was pulling the semi-conscious girl by her hair down the length of the bed, her naked body twisting helplessly as it was dragged over the rumpled sheets. Then, roughly, he threw her onto the floor.

  “Jesus Christ!” I shouted out, my voice choked with frustration and rage. “No!”

  I wanted to look away. To turn my head, or close my eyes. But I could do neither. He’d seen to that.

  And now I knew why.

  Joy had come awake, her face white with fear as she stared up at the man looming over her. She started screaming again as the man, oblivious, pulled off his short-sleeved tee-shirt, revealing a well-muscled back covered in grotesque tattoos.

  Most of the inked figures were indistinct, but one seemed to be a winged serpent. Writhing as if alive as he bent and peeled his black jeans from his body. Revealing his own naked body, coldly white, smooth. Completely shaved.

  His face still hidden from view, he fell on her with a guttural howl and slammed her head back against the carpet. She struggled, but could barely move beneath his crushing weight. Could only cry out in panic as he pawed her breasts with his huge hands. A cry that turned into a gasp of pain as he entered her and began to thrust. Repeatedly, savagely.

  To my horror, I watched him rape Joy Steadman.

  Again, I tried to close my eyes. Look away. But I couldn’t. Nor could I stop up my ears against her piteous screams, his obscene, grunting laughter.

  “Shut it off, you sadistic fuck! Shut this thing off!”

  A clipped laugh came from the hidden speakers, its cruel edge echoing that of the sounds from the man on-screen.

  “But we’re getting to the best part, Danny. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it. The only thing missing is the popcorn.”

  It seemed to go on forever. Until Joy’s cries of pain and protest had fallen to a barely audible whimper, even as her attacker reared up, ready to climax. Then, suddenly, his powerful hands were around her throat.

  Joy’s eyes whitened with a renewed panic, and she began to struggle again. Gasping, choking. At one point raking her nails against his shoulder. But his hands only tightened their vice-like grip, his fingers digging into the soft tissue of her throat. Squeezing the life out of her.

  “Here it is, Danny.” The voice from the speakers could barely contain its excitement. “The moment we’ve all been waiting for.”

  “Listen, you piece of shit—”

  “There!” He shouted gleefully. “See it? Beautiful! So fucking beautiful…”

  It appeared to be simultaneous. Her eyes glazing over in death at the same time her rapist emptied his hate into her.

  I had no words.

  “C’mon, Danny.” His tone smooth, assured. “You have to admire the symmetry. Just as I came, she went.”

  Tears of grief edged my burning, swollen eyes as his laugh echoed in the small, dark room. Eyes that could only watch as the man’s orgasmic shudder quieted, and he slowly climbed back to his feet.

  He looked impassively down at Joy’s pale pink body, at what he’d wrought, and then turned to the camera lens.

  For the first time I saw his face.

  The shaved head. The dark green eyes, fiercely intense and yet oddly opaque. The thin, patrician nose and jutting jaw. Though his strong, handsome features were coarsened by the grin widening his cheeks.

  “Recognize me, Danny?”

  It wasn’t a voice coming from the speakers. It was his voice. That of the man on-screen. Talking directly to me.

  He took a step forward, filling the screen with his body. Beneath the sweat glistening on his hairless chest was another tattoo, directly above his heart. It was some kind of standing cup, or chalice, with rays emanating from it. The Grail…?

  He leaned in closer. Smiled.

  “It’s me, Danny. Surely Barbara told you all about me.”

  Barbara? Did he mean—could he mean…?

  “What? I don’t—What are you saying?”

  He didn’t answer, of course. Though it took a few seconds for my fevered brain to remember the reason. I was watching a video that had been taped two days before.

  “That’s why this bitch here had to die,” he was saying. “After I had my fun with her first. Only fair, after all.”

  The grin faded from his face.

  “Once I learned that Joy Steadman was your lover, I knew what I had to do. What my first act would be.”

  Foolishly, I cried out. “But we weren’t—”

  As though the man on-screen could hear me. Half-crazed as I was with grief and anger. With virulent, impotent anguish.

  “See how it works, Danny? You took what was mine, now I’ve taken what’s yours. And I’m just getting started.”

  He flashed that arrogant, self-assured grin once more. And then the screen went blank.

  The room fell dark again, leaving me encased in a numbing silence, broken only by the rasp of my quickening breaths.

  Desperate, buzzing with anxiety, I tried to think. To comprehend what had just happened. And start figuring out a way to free myself, to escape. If there was one…

  I’d never find out. Because even in the utter darkness I could feel the presence of someone standing behind me.

  Him.

  “As much fun as this has been, Danny boy, I’m afraid it’s time for you to go home.” ”

  I gasped, as once again a needle jabbed into my neck.

  “But don’t worry.” A grim chuckle. “I’ll be in touch.”

  Chapter Twelve

  When I awoke, I was again sitting up, though this time behind the wheel of my Mustang.

  In my driveway.

  A harsh mid-morning sun glazed the windshield, sending needles of pain into my eyes. I blinked against the glare.

  Blinked, I thought dumbly. I can blink.

  I drew some deep, cleansing breaths. Trying to bring order to my chaotic thoughts.

  Had I dreamed it all? No, because my neck still hurt from where the needle had gone in. And my eyes ached, throbbed.

  Hands shaking, I reached up for the sun visor and pulled it down. Blocking the insistent light of day.

  Strange, after the darkness of that room, that I’d need to protect myself from a punishing sun. Then I found out why.

  Shifting in my seat, I peered up at the rearview mirror. There was deep discoloration at the edge of my eyes, the lids a raw, roughened red, as though sandpapered from where the adhesive had been applied, and then none-too-gently ripped off.

  It had happened, all right. I’d seen Joy’s killer, and it wasn’t Eddie Burke. Dead or not, he hadn’t been guilty. So, no matter what Harry Polk thought,
or how convenient it was for all concerned, it wasn’t “case closed” on the Joy Steadman murder.

  Realizing this had the effect of abruptly snapping me back to attention. To the present moment. I started thinking more clearly now. Putting things together.

  Like the fact that he—whoever he was—must’ve driven me here. Which also meant that he knew where I lived.

  As soon as that thought struck me, I turned around and looked through the side windows to the street. But if I’d hoped to catch sight of the man fleeing down the sidewalk, I was disappointed. Grandview Avenue looked the same way it did every bright, clear morning. Cars parked in driveways, or at intervals up and down the street. Some I recognized, some I didn’t.

  One thing I knew for sure. The man was long gone. Either on foot, or, perhaps, driven away by an accomplice.

  No matter. The thing to do now was get in touch with Polk, let him know what happened to me last night. And that Joy Steadman’s real killer was still at large. I’d seen his face clearly in the video, as well as his distinguishing tattoos. I could give the police a detailed description…

  I searched my pocket for my cell. Then, ironically, I heard its familiar buzz. I hadn’t noticed it had been lying on the passenger seat the whole time. I reached for it, but before I could answer, an image flickered on the screen.

  It was him. The hard, chiseled face. That serene smile.

  “About time you woke up, sleepyhead. And, yes, I’ve hacked into your cell. More like a long distance ’bot, if we’re being technical. I see all, hear all. Spooky as hell, I know. How do you think I heard the cop and you talking about your affair with Joy Steadman?”

  I grabbed up the cell. “But that wasn’t true—”

  “Right. Whatever.” He massaged his chin, eyes glistening. “Listen, Danny. When you turn on the news, I’m afraid you’re going to learn about another tragic death. Someone else who had the misfortune to know you.”

  My breath caught in my throat. Stayed there.