Victim

by Gary Kinder

  The man straightened his knees and stepped over Carol’s body. He was now standing above Cortney, the gun still in his hand. He bent down and Cortney could feel the hot muzzle of the gun probing through his hair at the back of his head. Then the gun stopped, and the man pulled the trigger, and the air around Cortney’s head exploded, a bullet burrowing into his skull. Cortney’s body went limp and he crumpled forward.

  The man rose. The reports from his gun died among the walls, and the smell of gunpowder drifted about the room. For the next few minutes he stalked the shadows, only the measured fall of his footsteps breaking the silence. His head toward the stairs, Mr. Walker lay at the edge of light cast from the workshop into the room. The man crossed back through the light and stood with his feet at Mr. Walker’s head. He straightened his gun arm toward the form lying at his feet and jerked the trigger. The bullet ripped through the carpet next to Mr. Walker’s head and ricocheted into a wall. The man stepped to his right, over Michelle, bent low behind Stan and fired a bullet into the back of Stan’s head. Before the noise had abated, the man spun, walked across the room and ran up the stairs.

  Michelle whispered into the shadows in front of her: “Stan? Are you okay?”

  Stan was still alive. His voice was low but clear. “I’ve been shot,” he said.

  A moment later the man’s tiptoe hurried down the steps into the basement, crossed the room and stopped at Mr. Walker’s head. This time the man leaned close and took aim, and this time he didn’t miss.

  Mr. Walker’s head was jolted and a hot sting spread across the back of it. He fought to stay lucid. Two times two is four, he thought, two times three is six. He twitched his fingers and within his shoes wiggled his toes.

  Only Michelle was left. The man now stood over her with the gun in his hand, and Michelle pleaded with him not to kill her. He said nothing as he untied her feet, then her hands, then pulled her to a standing position. With his gun in one hand he led her past Mr. Walker’s body and through the sliding panel door. Despite the clamor in his head Mr. Walker heard them pass the workshop area and proceed to the far end of the basement. There the man made Michelle remove her clothes: a pair of jeans, a blouse, bra, and panties. She stacked them neatly on a table. For the next twenty minutes, as the four bodies lay motionless in the front room, the man raped Michelle.

  When the man and Michelle first left the room, Mr. Walker could hear the rustling of paper at the back of the basement, but then he heard nothing. The clanging in his ears reminded him of being in a duck blind, too close to the accidental blast of a shotgun. His shoulder ached so badly from where the caustic had dripped and burned his skin that he was about to lose consciousness. He rolled halfway onto his chest and lay still, pretending to be dead. Across the room, still tightly bound, Cortney and his mother lay side by side, sweat drying on their bodies, blood congealing around the jagged, finger-size holes blown in the backs of their heads. The skin around their mouths festered and the caustic ate holes where it had splattered on their clothes. Mr. Walker heard Stan in the other corner still breathing.

  The light from the workshop still shone through the sliding panel. Michelle’s footsteps, now only sock-clad padding on the concrete floor, dragged from the far end of the basement to the workshop. They were followed by the more distinct, gritty footfall of the short man. The bare light bulb cast their shadows ahead of them into the room.

  Michelle hesitated at the panel door. The man preceded her across the room, stepped lightly around Cortney’s feet, and opened the door to an employee bathroom adjacent to the stairs. Mr. Walker opened one eye and saw the man’s shoes and the bottom of his pants as he glided by. Michelle, now wearing only white cotton socks, followed him into the bathroom, where the man had switched on the light. Through the subsiding ring in his ears Mr. Walker heard Michelle in the bathroom urinating.

  “I sure had to go a lot, didn’t I?” she joked with the man. But her voice was strained and she was coughing.

  The toilet flushed. As it swirled, Michelle walked from the bathroom, pleading with the man to take her with him. Her forced light manner had cracked. The man motioned for her to return to her place on the floor. She edged across the room and stood where she had lain between Mr. Walker and Stan, unclothed, frightened, begging. He forced her to lie down again, her head next to Mr. Walker’s, where he left her untied, lying on her stomach, and ran up the stairs.

  When his footsteps had cleared the top and she could hear them above in the sound room, Michelle raised up and nudged Mr. Walker with her elbow.

  “Are you okay?” she said softly.

  Mr. Walker said nothing. Slowly, he opened one eye to signal that he was still alive. In the dim light he could see her bare shoulder and her bare right breast. He didn’t know if she saw his single open eye. In a moment he closed the eye again and continued playing dead.

  Seconds later the man’s shoes were heard again, tapping rapidly on the wooden stairs. He came off the bottom step, marched across the carpet, and knelt beside Mr. Walker. His thick fingers cupped Mr. Walker’s throat, searching, squeezing against the blood vessels in his neck, feeling for a pulse. Mr. Walker lay still, as the fingers crabbed about his neck.

  The fingers lifted away, and for a moment there was silence and darkness. Then a click broke the silence and a harsh beam of light glared into Mr. Walker’s eyes. His face remained limp. As suddenly as the light had shot down upon his face, it jerked away. A tube of illuminated dust particles angled now toward the ceiling, now against a wall. Then back into Mr. Walker’s eyes. And away again. And back again. Then the man whirled and the beam of light swept across Michelle’s hair, and a gunshot again shattered the silence, and before the full force of the explosion had hit, another thundered from the corner above Stan. The explosions cracked louder, more powerful than before, and as they died away, Mr. Walker heard Michelle moan lightly, and then everything was silent again. In the silence the short man tiptoed away. When the man returned moments later, Mr. Walker felt himself being raised up and a cord being slipped around his neck.

  Mr. Walker’s body hung limp, weighing heavily against the man’s efforts to lift him. As the loop closed about his throat, he carefully expanded only the muscles in his neck until he felt his skin tight. The man cinched the cord hard, then cinched it again and again, until it dug into Mr. Walker’s bulging flesh and squeezed against his windpipe. But when the man had yanked the cord tighter for the last time and finally lowered him back onto the carpet, Mr. Walker slowly relaxed his neck and found that within the tight clasp of the cord he could still eke enough air to stay alive.

  He continued to play dead, breathing shallowly, as he heard the man’s footsteps once again ascend the stairs. The basement was silent. Above in the sound room the same soft steps padded about. Soon they hurried to the back door and down the stairs again.

  Mr. Walker still lay on his side, collapsed partly forward. As he lay, not moving, he felt something brush his left earlobe. Then a ballpoint pen was wedged in his ear and jammed into his head. The man’s feet shuffled slightly. One foot shot up and stomped the end of the pen, driving it deeper into Mr. Walker’s head. Again the foot raised up and pounded the pen. The third time the pen was kicked, Mr. Walker felt the point enter his throat. It tickled there and made him swallow for the first time since before the green cup had been passed. When he swallowed, the pen rose through his ear just slightly. And then the man was gone.

  The light, quick footsteps tapped up the stairs. The naked bulb in the workshop was off. The rays of sun that once flooded down the stairway had long ago vanished, and the basement was black. Footsteps no longer clomped or tiptoed on the stairs, or moved back and forth overhead. Everything was black, everything still. Mr. Walker lay tilted on his side. Stan and Michelle faced into the carpet. Sometime in the night Carol Naisbitt had rolled onto her back.

  In the darkness of his corner Cortney moved. He twisted his body until his head was pointed toward the stairs, and began crawling. As he crawled
, his eyes were open, and from his throat gurgled the growl of an animal. His hands and feet still bound, he slid his body inch by inch across the carpet toward the bottom of the stairs.

  DISCOVERY

  It was nearing ten thirty when police officers Kevin Youngberg and Gale Bowcutt cruised down Kiesel Avenue, past the Hi-Fi Shop alley, and turned west on Twenty-third. A taciturn man, square-built with thick, hairy arms, Bowcutt had been with the Ogden Police two and a half years. That night he was training the rookie Youngberg, who had been in uniform for thirty-two days. Youngberg was twenty-two, a tall, hefty man with coal-black hair and a creamy, boyish face. They were approaching the intersection at Seventeenth and Wall, when the dispatcher radioed them to investigate “unknown trouble” at 2323 Washington Boulevard.

  Bowcutt spun the car south to Twenty-fourth, raced without siren to Kiesel Avenue, and turned north. The patrol car crept into the gravel alleyway, its headlights off. A heavy-set boy was standing near the back door. Youngberg stepped out of the car as the boy yelled, “They’re inside!”

  The young officer hurried across the gravel and entered the rear door of the shop. The doorjamb and the molding around the door were splintered. The stairs before him led down to a seeming black void, but upstairs the lights were on. Youngberg veered to his right, into a room lined with empty shelves and bare wires jutting from the walls. He saw a man and a woman walking back and forth near the front of the shop. The man’s hair was matted with blood, and Youngberg noticed what he thought was a pen on top of the man’s ear.

  “What’s going on?” he yelled.

  “They’re downstairs,” said the man.

  “Who?” yelled Youngberg.

  “Four of ‘em,” said the man. “They’re all shot.”

  Before he took time to consider that the perpetrators might still be in the building, Youngberg turned and ran to the back of the shop. As he hit the landing at the top of the stairs, Bowcutt slipped in the back door next to him. Shoulder to shoulder they descended the stairs into the blackness. Halfway down, Youngberg flicked on his flashlight. Dark shadows jumped and realigned. In the circular pool of light by the bottom step lay a blond-haired boy, his green eyes open and staring at the ceiling. Bright red scars trailed across his face. His mouth gaped open and from it emanated a sound like nothing the two men had ever heard. At the edge of light lay another pair of feet. Youngberg jerked the flashlight. The boy faded to the shadows, and in the spotlight now was the body of a woman. Eyes open, she stared glassily at the ceiling, and the same red burns surrounded her mouth. Like a horror slide show, the beam flicked to another pile of flesh, the nude body of a girl, a bullet hole in the back of her head. The beam jumped again to encircle still another body lying in the far corner, a young man with a large hole in the back of his head and bruised, purple hands tied behind his back.

  Bowcutt thought it was a joke. He was waiting for the lights to come on and the actors to jump up and start laughing and the wounded man behind them on the stairwell to clap them on the back and say something like, “We was just checking to see how fast you boys’d get here!”

  But there was an atmosphere in the basement that no staged drama could reproduce. The stench of blood and vomit suffused the plastic-metallic smell of new stereos wafting toward the stairs. The flashlight swept across the room, shadows leaping and hiding in the beam, flesh seemingly in puddles on the floor. In the darkness at their feet a death rattle gurgled in the boy’s throat. It was almost like the growl of a dog.

  Youngberg froze on the bottom step, his hands hanging at his side, saying to himself: “What the hell is happening? What the hell is happening? What the hell is happening?”

  He felt his guts tighten and his mind begin to fuzz. He heard himself saying to Bowcutt, “We’re gonna need an ambulance.”

  The wounded man was on the stairs behind them. Youngberg saw the man’s mouth moving.

  “We’ve already called the ambulance.”

  Youngberg looked back to the basement. Seconds passed as he stood still trying to blink away the smell and the sound and the people with the holes in their heads. He turned toward the wounded man and felt his own mouth moving again. “Who did this?”

  “Two Negroes,” said the man.

  A thick hand reached out and clasped the back of Youngberg’s neck.

  “See if those two are alive, then look after him.” Bowcutt was pointing to the boy at Youngberg’s feet.

  A third officer pulled his motorcycle up to the back door and started down the stairs. Bowcutt ran up and stopped him.

  “Call for assistance,” he yelled. “There’s a bunch of people dead in here!”

  The wounded man was moving past Youngberg and into the darkness. Youngberg heard the sliding panel door roll back and felt himself drifting toward it over the bodies. In the middle of the room he stopped. The girl and the boy lying side by side were still. Youngberg combed the two bodies for life signs. As he did so, his eyes focused on the girl’s right hand. On her ring finger was a tiny gold ring set with a red stone. Youngberg’s wife had once worn an identical ring. For years Youngberg would have nightmares over the image of the girl’s right hand. He rose slowly and left the cold bodies exactly as he had found them.

  In the dark the wounded man was rummaging through the tools on the workbench. Youngberg heard the clanking of metal, and then the man was talking to him, asking for his flashlight.

  Youngberg’s hand stretched toward him with the light. “What are you doing?” he heard himself say.

  “This is my boy Stanley,” said the man. “I’ve got to save him. I need a pair of dykes or a knife or something to cut him loose.”

  “Which one is your son?” asked Youngberg.

  The man pointed into the darkness with the flashlight, illuminating the body lying facedown in the corner.

  “Your son is dead,” said Youngberg, his own voice sounding like someone else talking. “There’s nothing you can do for him. Why don’t you help me with these other two?” Youngberg looked again at the man’s face. “I’m sorry, sir. Why don’t you just go outside and we’ll take care of things down here.”

  The man trudged up the steps. Youngberg crossed the room again and sank to his knees next to the boy gurgling at the foot of the stairs. Bowcutt glided down the stairs past the man going up.

  Youngberg looked up and saw him settle on the other side of the boy.

  “I think he’s been shot in the lungs,” said Youngberg. “It sounds like a sucking chest wound.”

  “Take his shirt off,” came Bowcutt’s voice, “and see if you can find something to cover the lung with, a piece of plastic or something.”

  Youngberg fumbled with the buttons on the boy’s shirt, but he couldn’t coax them through the buttonholes. Suddenly he saw his hands grab two handfuls of shirt on each side and rip the buttons off from bottom to top.

  The boy’s chest was collapsed, but clean.

  “I can’t find anything, Bowcutt!”

  “Okay, let’s turn him over. It sounds like he’s drowning in his own blood.”

  The boy stared up at them, his eyes fixed. As they rolled him onto his stomach, the bullet hole in back of his head rotated into the beam of Youngberg’s flashlight. It had stopped bleeding, and the blood was turning to jelly in his blond hair. Youngberg closed his eyes for a moment, then reached down and carefully turned the boy’s head sideways to let the blood drain from his throat.

  “Youngberg,” said Bowcutt, “roll the woman over, and see if you can find something to cut them loose.”

  As Bowcutt and the motorcycle officer checked the boy for other wounds, Youngberg stepped further into the darkness, the beam from his flashlight jiggling across the woman. The rattle in her chest was quieter than the boy’s, but she was trying to breathe and her flesh was still warm. He rolled her onto her stomach and tilted her head to the side. Then he found his way to the tool room.

  Sergeant Dave White, a gruff, long-faced police veteran of seventeen years, was
the fourth officer to arrive at the Hi-Fi Shop. He hit the last step in the basement and stopped. “My God! It’s wall-to-wall bodies!”

  Bowcutt looked up, but before he could say anything, White ran back up the stairs and out to his patrol car. He ripped the microphone off his radio and yelled: “This is a major homicide! Get people down here! Call the Tac Squad! Call Tech Services! And tell them to hurry the hell up!”

  Youngberg spotted a pair of wire cutters and plucked them from a pile of tools. Then he drifted back into the main room where he heard White and Bowcutt yelling at the ambulance attendants stopped halfway down the stairs.

  “Get the stretcher! Get two stretchers!”

  Two of the attendants ran back for stretchers. Another hurried into the basement with a first-aid kit in his hands. Youngberg was kneeling next to the boy, trying to cut through the cord binding his wrists. He heard the attendant clomping down the wooden stairs, then saw his vague outline drop down next to him on the floor. He handed Youngberg a pair of tape scissors. Youngberg snipped the cord in two. The boy’s arms slid limply across the small of his back and onto the carpet.

  Youngberg stood up slowly and surveyed the blur in the basement. Stretchers were poking down the stairwell. The room was filling with people. Short, plastic airways and rolls of gauze had popped out of the first-aid kit, and the attendants were trying to wrap the dry bullet wounds of the woman and the boy. Through the haze of flashlight beams, Youngberg saw White wave his arm and heard him yell.

  “Quit screwing around with that goddamn bandage and get them the hell outta here!”

  “This is the way we’ve been trained,” said one of the attendants.

  “Their heads aren’t bleeding!” yelled White. “They’re gonna die before you can get them to the hospital!”

  The attendant ignored White and kept bandaging the boy’s head.

  “All we can do is what we’ve been told to do in situations like this, and that’s stop the bleeding and try to establish an airway.”