by Ed Gorman
“Make out,” she said sarcastically. “What a charming expression.”
“How about ‘fuck our brains out’?”
She couldn’t help but smile. “Equally charming.”
“So I’ll pick you up at eight.”
“What if I’m not there?”
“Then I’ll come looking for you.”
“What if you can’t find me?”
“I’ll find you.”
“Tough guy, huh?”
He nodded, thinking about the way he’d punked off that math teacher Mr. Sanders earlier today. In fact ... Dave Evans was a tough guy, and that wasn’t empty bragging.
“Eight o’clock,” he said.
“Maybe.”
“Maybe, my ass.”
“Oh, aren’t you the terrifying one?”
“A lot of people think so.”
She smiled. “I’ll be there. I guess.”
“You guess.”
She smiled again. “That’s what I said. I guess.”
With that she marched to her car.
He gave her the full effect of the Trans-Am by laying enough rubber to make several basketballs.
6
Carl Laumer hefted the grenade in his hand.
He sat in the rear of his dry goods store, his feet up on the desk, a country-western tune on the radio.
Studying the grenade.
Sheriff Wayman, who could sometimes be a fussbudget, had been against Carl’s keeping the grenade in the store.
“What happens if somebody breaks in and steals it? Can you imagine what a grenade would do to a town like ours?” Wayman had asked.
Carl Laumer had only shrugged.
The way he had it figured, if the death penalty was used more often, there would be fewer robberies to worry about.
In a country where the death penalty is used once or twice or even three times a day, the crime rate drops.
Carl knew that for a fact.
He had read it in one of the Soldier of Fortune magazines he subscribed to.
And that’s what it was coming to in Burton, capital punishment.
Take this morning for instance ...
Thanks to his training in the Korean conflict, thanks to the things he’d learned in his mercenary magazines, Carl had been able to slip in and out of the rectory without being detected.
Even with the reverend’s silly wife right at home there.
In and out.
Neat and clean.
Just the way the mercenaries performed.
And the nice thing was that Carl didn’t have to crawl through miles of jungle to reach his target, either. No, the whole thing had been easy and efficient.
Of course, there were some people in Burton who had already guessed who’d killed the reverend and disguised it to look like suicide.
And those people, Sheriff Bill Wayman included, were going to be at the meeting tonight.
They would speak their piece.
The cowards, they would chastise him for what he had done.
They would use the words they liked to use on him, that people had been using on him most of his life.
“Crazy” and “twisted” and “sick.”
There had been a time in his life when such names had bothered him.
Had made him feel angry and depressed.
But no more.
Nearing sixty, Carl Laumer realized that the world was indeed just about what Mr. Hitler had seen it as being.
A world of superior and inferior people, with very few of the former and way too damn many of the latter.
Carl hefted the grenade in his hand.
Thanks to the cowardice of the town council, their whole secret was coming unraveled.
The reverend had nearly had a breakdown.
The deputy Vince Reeves had stumbled upon the secret by accident, when he’d innocently driven out to deliver Sheriff Wayman a message at the cabin.
Now there was a half-crazed city man roaming around Burton looking for his missing daughter...
No doubt about it, Laumer thought.
Tonight he was going to take control of the meeting and tell them that, unless they wanted the whole world to come falling down around their heads after all this time of their secret’s being kept...
... things would have to be dealt with the way he’d dealt with the Reverend Heath.
That’s all there was to that.
The intercom buzzed.
Laumer leaned forward.
“Yes?”
“Mr. Laumer,” his secretary said from the other room, “the sheriff’s on the line.”
A buzz of dread raced through Laumer.
The sheriff.
Laumer had visions of things having taken yet another turn for the worse.
“Thank you.”
He picked up the phone.
Sheriff Wayman said, “We need to talk.”
“I know.”
“Things are getting out of hand,” the sheriff said.
Laumer sighed. The lawman was such a wimp. “What’s on your mind, Sheriff?”
Wayman’s voice dropped. “It’s my deputy, Reeves.”
A cold smile touched Laumer’s face. “He’s a threat to us.”
“That seems to be the consensus.”
“Meaning you don’t think he is?”
“Meaning Reeves is a decent man.”
Laumer’s jaw started to work. “You know what’s at stake here.”
“Maybe I’d feel better about things if you didn’t take so much pleasure in all the violence.”
“I do what I need to.”
The sheriff sighed. “Maybe we’re wrong, Laumer. Protecting—”
“It’s a little late for remorse, Sheriff.” Wayman was an old man now—a slob—happier to sit and drink beer and talk about his dead wife than do anything important.
“We’re starting to ruin a lot of lives,” Wayman said.
“We’re going to ruin a lot more if we don’t move fast.”
“How about the man Carnes?”
Laumer laughed. “How about him, Sheriff? You think we should just let him wander around with Beth Daye until they uncover the whole thing?”
“You going to kill them, too?”
“Like I said, I do what I have to, Sheriff.”
The sheriff paused. Then, “What’re you going to do next, Laumer?”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
“I don’t want you going crazy.”
Laumer laughed again. “That’s the trouble with you, Sheriff. You think doing what’s necessary is crazy. It’d be a hell of a world if everybody thought that way.”
“I don’t need any lectures from you, Laumer.”
“Then don’t call me anymore.”
“I’m still sheriff here.”
“Yeah, and everybody’s very impressed about that, too.”
“Just as long as we understand each other.”
“Oh,” Laumer said sarcastically, “we understand each other.”
After hanging up, Laumer went over to the glass and wood bookcase that he had inherited from his great-grandfather and took down a book on incendiary devices. He had ordered it from France. It was said to be among the favorite reading material of Communist assassins on the continent. Laumer hated Communism and Communists with unreasoning force. Yet he saw nothing wrong in stealing from their methodology, if that methodology was helpful.
He began reading, pacing as his eyes made contact with the words.
Within twenty minutes he had the whole thing planned. It was a masterpiece.
The only trouble was, he wondered if even he had nerve enough to attempt it.
Already he could imagine the screams in the night and what the flesh would smell like.
Already he could imagine what they would look like afterward, charred, their hands clawing at the fresh air they had been unable to reach.
Yes ... he wondered if even he would have nerve enough for something like that.
; 7
Finally, she could stand it no more.
Hanging from the ceiling, her wrists still lashed with rope, Deirdre had to urinate so badly that she had no choice but to simply let go.
Some of it ran down her legs.
Some of it simply fell to the floor.
She didn’t care.
Not anymore.
Finished, she let the weight of her slight body give in to the rope once more and swing freely.
Her wrists were sore ... her breasts still ached from where the man had violated her last night ... and she knew now with a dull certainty that she was never going to get out of here alive.
Wherever here was.
She had given up saying prayers. The words had become rote by now.
She had also given up fantasies about the door nearby opening and her father’s voice ringing out.
He wasn’t going to find her.
Whoever her captor was, he had opened the door and come in.
Something like a moan had issued from him as he’d stood a few feet away. Even with her blindfold she had a true and terrible sense of his closeness.
She hadn’t even worried about her nakedness this time, just assumed that he was filling his eyes with whatever parts of her gave him the most pleasure.
And then he’d gone, just like that.
Footsteps walking away.
Door creaking closed.
And then she was left to dangle in the middle of nothingness again....
She had to scratch.
Her leg itched.
It was almost funny.
Here she was hanging from the ceiling of some dungeon or something, a lunatic having kidnapped her, and something as mundane as an itchy leg was bothering her.
As she put the toes of one leg against her other leg and started to scratch, the rope above started making a strange sound.
Thrum.
As if the fibers of the rope were disintegrating.
She kept moving, swinging herself out again and again in a small arc.
The noise continued.
The sense of the rope’s weakening ...
For the first time in long hours she permitted herself to feel something resembling hope....
Once, twice, three times she repeated the arc, hearing the rope groan with her weight.
But ... it held.
She cursed, began to cry.
She kicked out as if she were swimming in deep water ... kicked out so that the rope should by rights be nothing more than threads by now.
But ... it held.
Whimpering, aware of how painful her breasts were once again, Deirdre permitted herself to fall into a virtual stupor ... the kind of withdrawal you read about mentally ill patients having.
She did not care that she could not see through the blindfold.
Did not care that her body ached.
Did not care that she could feel the beginnings of pneumonia start to constrict her lungs and chest.
No ... it did not matter.
Because there was absolutely nothing she could do about any of it.
Absolutely nothing.
8
A rabbit squatted in the shaggy hills.
The tiny animal started when footsteps sounded behind him.
A man came up.
The rabbit darted through the undergrowth.
Stopped behind a tree.
Watched.
From his pocket he took a pair of panties.
He held them for a moment, tenderly.
Then he put them in his pocket and moved on again.
Now he moved with a real sense of urgency.
Chapter Nine
1
The phone booth was located outside a 7-11 store.
Carnes sat behind the wheel of his car, staring at it.
“This is the most frightening thing I’ve ever done,” he said.
“She’ll understand.”
“No, she won’t. She’ll probably blame me. Say I shouldn’t have let Deirdre sit in the car alone so late at night.”
Beth touched his hand. “Maybe she’ll be more reasonable than you think.”
“It was my fault,” Carnes said. “I shouldn’t have left her alone.”
“You had no way of knowing.”
“I shouldn’t have taken any chances.”
“That kind of recrimination just isn’t going to solve anything.”
He smiled bitterly. “Yeah, I know. Self-indulgent behavior is the proper phrase.”
“I’m afraid it is.”
He was overwhelmed again. “The poor kid. All I can think of is—”
Beth stopped him before he could start reveling in guilt again.
“Go call her.”
Carnes sighed. “All right.”
He stared at her a long moment, then got out of the car and went up to the booth.
In moments he was back. “You have any change?”
“Sure.”
She dug in her purse, found some quarters, handed them over. “Good luck.”
“Thanks.”
Impulsively, he leaned through the open window and kissed her quickly on the lips.
“I appreciate all you’re doing for me.”
“You’d do it for me, wouldn’t you?”
“Yeah, I suppose I would.”
“Well, then.”
He rattled the quarters in his hand, set off for the phone booth.
He got a male operator who was not a prime mover in the smarts department.
The kid made three passes at getting the right connection before finally doing it properly.
All of which helped enhance Carnes’s mood of despair.
He spent the time waiting for the connection to be made, running a gruesome list of fantasies through his mind.
Deirdre dead ...
“Hello,” said Janet, his ex-wife.
“Hello.”
“Well, world-traveler, enjoying your jaunt? How’s our kid?” Janet was the perfect corporate wife. Intelligent and bubbly. But her up moods were matched by her down ones. She could get murderously depressed.
She sensed that something was wrong immediately.
“My God, Adam, tell me what’s happened.”
He had to make two passes at it before he could even get out the words.
“Last night Deirdre—disappeared.”
She was instantly hysterical. “Disappeared? What the hell does that mean, ‘disappeared’?”
In the background he could hear a male voice rumbling. Her husband had joined her at the phone.
“What the hell is going on?” she snapped.
He explained. As best he could.
About Deirdre sitting in the car. About being gone when he’d gotten back out there. About the search through the surrounding woods with the dogs. About the slim lead that somehow tied the phrase in the journal belonging to Beth’s husband to Deirdre’s vanishing.
“Oh, great, just goddamned great,” Janet said. “Our daughter’s missing and you’re acting out some bloody mystery story.” She had started to cry. “There’s no goddamn connection between now and thirty years ago, Adam. The only thing that’s happened is that some pervert has kidnapped our daughter and dragged her off somewhere!”
She disintegrated into tears.
Her husband took the phone.
“Why don’t you call back if you get any information,” he said. “Meanwhile, I’ll do what I can for Janet.”
“He shouldn’t have left her sitting in the car!” Janet screamed in the background.
The man hung up.
Carnes went back to the car, to Beth.
For a long time, neither of them said anything.
Carnes just looked around the neighborhood they were in. A nice place. Church steeples against the sky. Little kids on trikes. Two old men playing checkers on a front porch across the way. Leaves were blooming. Blossoms filled the air with perfume.
It would all be so idyllic if only he hadn’t left Deirdre
sitting alone....
He wasn’t aware of the tears coming—the tears that conveyed his anger with himself, his fear for Deirdre, his hope-against-hope for the next few hours—wasn’t even aware of Beth sliding over across the seat and gently pulling his head down to her shoulder where he rested it until he felt all his charged emotions subsiding somewhat....
“It’s time I take you home for a few hours.”
He started to protest.
“No, Adam, you need some sleep, and so do I. Then we’ll be able to think more clearly.”
He knew there was no use arguing, knew that he didn’t want to argue, that she was right.
2
Richard reached Jake Darcy’s apartment just as the sun was starting to tilt toward late afternoon.
From the sidewalk he could hear the TV set going upstairs. Richard smiled. His good friend Jake was there, after all. Richard was always afraid that he was not going to be there when he arrived—or, worse, that Jake would move somewhere else and not tell Richard at all.
Richard went up the stairs, knocked.
Jake came to the door almost immediately.
Richard went inside. The place wasn’t very big but Richard liked it. Jake usually had a tray of cookies baking in the oven, Jake being a very good cook. And the TV was usually going, cartoons or adventure shows, both of which Richard liked a great deal.
“How are you, Richard?” Jake said in his friendly manner.
Richard smiled. Jake steered him to a chair, sat him down.
“How about some cookies?” Jake said.
Richard smiled again.
While Jake fixed the milk and cookies, Richard looked around the place. The odd thing was there was nothing personal here like you saw in most apartments. Jake apparently didn’t collect anything from his past ... as if he didn’t have a past. In Beth Daye’s apartment, for instance, there were lots of pictures of her and her husband over the years ... and Richard liked looking at them, at the different hairdos and the different cars and the different kinds of expressions people seemed to have then.
But here ... at Jake’s ... there was nothing like that at all.
“Here you go,” Jake said, giving Richard his food.
Jake watched Richard eat, apparently taking a great deal of pleasure in it, because he was all smiles and laughs. The chubby little man seemed to take as much pleasure in serving food as Richard did in eating it.