Bed of Nails

by Michael Slade

  “To whom?”

  “The Tarot will decide. Pick a card, Inspector.”

  Zinc hesitated.

  “Come on,” Petra coaxed. “Take a walk on the wild side.”

  Selecting a card, he flipped it over. The image exposed was that of an animate skeleton wielding a scythe. The Grim Reaper stood in a pool of blood, and floating in what could be a cauldron of tomato soup was an assortment of body parts that had been hacked off by the blade.

  Number 13.

  The Death card.

  CROWN OF THORNS

  Zinc Chandler and Ralph Stein were seated at a table in the café of the Captain Vancouver Hotel. Lunch was over, so they had the restaurant almost to themselves. Ralph, uncharacteristically, had ordered a salad. From the scowl on his face, it was clear the detective wasn’t enamored with his rabbit food.

  “That looks healthy.”

  “It’s your fault, Chandler. I’m slimming down to draw the eyes of the lookers away from you.”

  “I’m single. You’re married, Ralph.”

  “What future is there in a relationship with a woman who’s always at you to slim down?”

  “Incisive logic, that.”

  “If only women would see me for my beautiful mind, and not you for your hollow shell.”

  “Yoo-hoo,” Zinc called out, waving to the waitress. “I’ve changed my mind. I’ll have a plate of fries.”

  “You wouldn’t!”

  “Watch.”

  When the fries arrived, the Canadian sprinkled them with vinegar. The American winced at the travesty.

  “I don’t understand it.”

  “What? Vinegar?”

  “Isn’t that what they fed that poor schmuck on the cross? Not the Hanged Man. The other guy.”

  “It’s better than gravy, Ralph.” Zinc patted his flat belly. “Did you get a list of those on the ghost tour?”

  “The names Mort could recall.”

  “Bret Lister?”

  “Tick.”

  “Petra Zydecker?”

  “Tick.”

  “Wes Grimmer?”

  “Tick.”

  “Yvette Theron?”

  “No. She was here, doing registration, while the bus was en route to Bundy’s house.”

  “Good.”

  “You thought she was lying?”

  “I keep an open mind.”

  “If there’s a woman in the case, I’d bet on Petra.”

  “There’s a problem with that bet.”

  “What?”

  “Alibis. On Friday night, while the severed head was being staked outside Ted Bundy’s house and the body was being hanged in the pit of the Thirteen Steps to Hell, Petra and Bret were here in her room making the beast with two backs.”

  “Conjuring?”

  “Fucking. Othello, Ralph. ‘Your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs.’”

  “Hey, speak American.”

  “Sorry. That was English.”

  “Speaking of which …” Ralph reached out and snaffled one of the fries. “By the way, we have an ID on our Hanged Man. His name is Bev Vincent. A businessman from Texas.”

  “Here for the convention?” Zinc asked.

  “No, he’s a scientist. Crystal technology. He flew into SeaTac late yesterday but never reached his hotel.”

  “This one?”

  “No. The Hilton downtown.”

  “How’d you make him?”

  “Security prints on file. They matched those of the body at the foot of the Thirteen Steps to Hell.”

  “Someone picked him off between the airport and the Hilton?”

  “Looks like.”

  Ralph attacked Zinc’s fries with lip-smacking relish. The vinegar had no effect in keeping him at bay. Catching their server’s attention, he ordered a side of gravy.

  “If not for their alibis,” Zinc said, “Bret and Petra would be in the glue. He was her lawyer before all this started. Bret defended her against an obscenity charge brought by her father. Petra’s a Tarot obsessive into outré art. Sex and violence. Her dad’s a minister. A Bible-thumper and his wayward daughter. Get the picture, Ralph?”

  “Did Bret win the case?”

  “He routed Petra’s dad. The white knight syndrome. But then Bret broke down.”

  “How bad?”

  “He went crazy. And was committed.”

  “Know the cause?”

  “I was there.”

  It was several years ago, the Mountie told the detective. Having been shot in Hong Kong, Zinc was on sick leave. The Supreme Court of Canada had ordered a new trial in one of the inspector’s cases, so, to give evidence, he had to return to Vancouver from the farm in Saskatchewan where he was recuperating. That’s where he was when a deputy sheriff burst into the courtroom to announce that a riot was shaping up in the case going on next door, and that the presiding judge had hit the panic button.

  Bret Lister was a crusader. A lawyer on a mission. A Don Quixote tilting at windmills that other lawyers avoided. A self-appointed scourge of the justice system, Bret was a feisty scrapper who reveled in fighting unpopular cases for the little guy. He accused the government of stealing Native lands, and cops of systematically undermining civil rights, and doctors of using their patients for quack experiments, and churches of actively recruiting pedophiles. A renegade who refused to play by the rules, Bret argued with judges, displayed contempt for opposing counsel, and embraced the eccentrics that others dismissed as hopeless causes. In the end, law became his entire life. Sixteen hours a day and seven days a week. Amphetamines kept him going, and booze put him to sleep. Overworked, over-fatigued, and chronically sleep-deprived, Bret plunged into a paranoid state and ultimately conjured up a vast conspiracy that cast the entire judiciary and the Law Society as traitors out to thwart him and his beleaguered clients.

  “He hit the wall and crashed?”

  “But not without a fight. Bret filed a lawsuit alleging that the courts and every lawyer but him was corrupt. When the Law Society brought an application to dismiss the suit as frivolous and vexatious, he packed the gallery with a mob of supporters: the eccentrics, leeches, and malcontents gathered by his practice. What brought them out was a promise from Bret that he would expose the corruption responsible for their tragedies.”

  “Did he?”

  “He tried, Ralph. In a filibuster speech.”

  “What happened?”

  “The Battleax took the case herself.”

  “The Battleax?”

  “Chief Justice Morgan Hatchett.”

  As Zinc described that legal donnybrook to Ralph, the one-on-one between the no-nonsense judge and the paranoid lawyer had degenerated like this:

  “Sit down, Mr. Lister!” the chief justice ordered.

  “Stand up, Judge.”

  “You’re a disgrace to the bar.”

  “And you’re a carbuncle on the ass of the law. I demand that you disqualify yourself for bias.”

  “Shame! Shame!” shouted the chorus in the gallery.

  Chief Justice Hatchett was ready to spew lava. With iron-gray hair chopped in a severe cut, eyes tough enough to drill through diamonds, and a mouth permanently pursed from years of reprobation, she looked to Zinc like Maggie Thatcher’s wicked stepsister. He and the deputy sheriff had just entered the court.

  “You’re in contempt, Mr. Lister.”

  “I’m way beyond that. Contempt falls short of the disrespect I have for you.”

  “Arrest him,” Hatchett ordered.

  A court security officer moved toward Bret, who stood defiantly at the counsel table, but the deputy sheriff failed to reach the lawyer. As he was sidling along the rail that separated the counsel area from the public gallery, a fist flew out of the mob.

  Whap!

  Down went the deputy.

  Another sheriff grabbed hold of the offending arm and hauled the man who threw the punch over the barrier.

  “Rescue him!” Bret incited, vaulting over the
rail into the gallery. “Follow me!” he shouted, like a First World War sergeant trying to coax his troops out of the trenches. His troops were having second thoughts about the waiting machine guns.

  “You have no power over me!” Bret shouted, spittle flying, at the judge. “I’m standing among comrades!”

  A wedge of deputy sheriffs stormed the gallery.

  “Scum! Scum!” Bret yelled.

  The court security officers grabbed hold of him.

  “You fucking Nazi!” Bret screamed at Hatchett.

  There was pushing and shoving on both sides before the deputies could snap on the cuffs. As they trundled Bret out of his mob of die-hard disciples and away to jail, the last words the firebrand lawyer heard from the hard-assed judge were these: “You’re remanded to the Forensic Psychiatric Hospital on Colony Farm for a thirty-day assessment to determine if you are fit to be charged with contempt of court.”

  “Lawyers!” Ralph scoffed, shaking his head as the Mountie finished recounting what he had witnessed several years ago in the Battleax’s court.

  “That’s the last I saw of Bret until today,” said Zinc. “Later, I heard that he had slashed his wrist with his fingernail in jail and used the blood to scrawl a petition for his release on the wall of his cell. So convinced was he that authorities would try to poison him that Bret refused to eat until a nurse or guard had tested the food in front of him.”

  “Now that’s how to diet,” said Ralph.

  “It was shortly after Bret’s breakdown that the Ripper and I fought it out on Deadman’s Island. He was motivated by symbols hidden in the Hanged Man to attempt to control the occult realm by signifying them in blood. He made a mistake in the signing and went completely mad. I was stabbed in the back and nearly killed. DeClercq landed on the island and made the arrest. Unfit to stand trial, the Ripper was sent to the Forensic Psychiatric Hospital on Colony Farm—”

  “Where he met Bret,” Ralph completed.

  The waitress brought his gravy. Stein dug in. A drip dribbled onto his belly and stained his tie.

  “While Bret was being psyched, the Law Society had to appoint a lawyer to oversee his practice. Wes Grimmer was a brash up-and-comer who could handle Bret’s mishmash of oddball clients and the tough legal issues they clung to. Out of that assignment, Wes got a high-profile case of serial and multiple murder when Bret referred the Ripper to him from inside the hospital.”

  “Cozy,” said Ralph.

  “Therapy, supposedly, patched up Bret. After he was declared fit, the contempt proceedings advanced. Bret apologized to the judge for his behavior. Grimmer, who acted for him, offered psychiatric evidence to the effect that Bret had suffered a psychotic episode. Acute paranoia brought on by mental exhaustion from stress and burnout caused by a crushing workload. The court imposed a fine and barred Bret from practicing law for a year. The Law Society agreed. With four hundred B.C. lawyers seeking help every year for alcohol, stress, and marital problems, it sees mental illness as a disease.”

  “So Bret began writing?”

  “Horror,” said Zinc. “He joined the long line of lawyers who jump ship from trials to novels.”

  “Fiction to fiction,” said Ralph.

  The cops shared a laugh.

  “The last I heard, he and Wes had formed Lister & Grimmer. Bret didn’t return to practice. He was the silent partner. With Wes working a client base fanatically loyal to Bret, it was worth his while to have Bret’s name on the letterhead. And as for Lister, he could tap the files for story ideas and promote himself as a courtroom insider who still had a finger on the pulse of crime.”

  “Including the Ripper.”

  “So it seems.”

  The waitress brought them cups of coffee and a bowl of creamers. Sugar and artificial sweetener were already on the table. Zinc took his java black. Ralph took the works.

  “A year and a half ago, when we found Cardoza strung up like the Hanged Man, I wondered if the Ripper had escaped from Colony Farm. I called the psych hospital and was assured not only that he was still there, but also that no one except his legal representatives had been out to visit him for years.”

  “You left it at that?”

  “The M.O. was different from that in the Ripper’s crimes. The Ripper’s Tarot motive was out there for everyone to read in Deadman’s Island, Alex’s book on the case. And I had the pimp and the hooker.”

  “Who were dead.”

  “Running from the law. Besides, they fit the M.O. to a tee. Cardoza was the victim of a sex crime. The nimbus of nails was pounded in while he was the sandwich meat in a two-on-one. A woman in front and a man from behind was one scenario, and that was a service that the hooker and the pimp were known to offer.”

  “Case closed.”

  “Until your call. And when I arrive in Seattle, what do I find? Not only that your Hanged Man mirrors mine, but also that Bret and Wes are here.”

  “Theory?”

  “Sort of. Consider this: Bret knew Petra from defending her on the obscenity charge. Petra is a hard-core goth, into the Tarot. Sex and blood. Bret broke down in court and was sent to Colony Farm. There, Bret met the Ripper and was told the secret in the Hanged Man. Bret got together with Petra after his release and fell under her sexual spell. Bret told her what the Ripper had told him, so Petra seduced Bret into killing Cardoza to sign the Hanged Man symbols properly in blood. Their joint sex crime inspired Bret to write Crown of Thorns and inspired Petra to illustrate it with The Antichrist. The death wish is part of being a goth, so perhaps they came to Seattle to flirt with your death penalty. Bret and Petra were on the bus that drove past Ted Bundy’s house, and they had a copy of the WHC program that located the Thirteen Steps to Hell in Maltby Cemetery. They killed your Texas businessman in a manner that would draw attention to Crown of Thorns at the convention, then gave each other an alibi for the overall time of the crime.”

  “Sounds good,” Ralph said. “It fits the evidence. The three young vics died because they, too, followed the X-Y coordinates in the program out to the cemetery, and they interrupted the killers in the act of stringing up their Hanged Man.”

  “In the wrong place at the wrong time,” said Zinc.

  “The three could identify Bret and Petra for the police. They were all at the same convention.”

  “Our problem is that there wasn’t enough time for Bret and Petra to be the killers. As guest of honor, Bret was on a panel at the convention last night. Countless horror fans heard him talk. There wasn’t time for him to spike the head upside down outside Ted Bundy’s house. Assuming Petra did it alone, there’s another problem: Bret and Petra swear they were in her hotel room having sex all through the night. Room service confirms they were in the hotel at both one-forty-five and four in the morning. I don’t see how they could have driven the distance to Maltby Cemetery to string up the headless corpse and ax the three young men.”

  “I’ll have someone time it.”

  “So that leaves Wes. Lister and Grimmer had a falling-out, and the partnership broke up. Did the up-and-comer get too big for his britches in Bret’s eyes? Not only did Wes get the Ripper and the rest of Bret’s client base, but he had the nerve to write a thriller that rivals Crown of Thorns, and one that attracted a mainstream publisher. Is Wes feeding off Bret’s Hanged Man murder of Cardoza, or was Halo of Flies inspired by Wes’s own crime?”

  “He knows the Ripper,” Ralph said. “He was on the ghost tour. He has a copy of the program. And—thanks partly to the Hanged Man crime down here—he and his novel are a hit at the convention.”

  “It says here in the program”—Zinc held it out—“that Bret Lister and Wes Grimmer are about to do round two in their bareknuckle bout. ‘How to Write a Horror Best-seller: Is There a Demon You Can Sell Your Soul To?’”

  “I wonder,” said Ralph.

  “Wonder what?”

  “If there is. And if one of them did.”

  LONG PIG

  Thanks to the Ripper’s having provided
the key to the occult realm, the Goth had thrown the gates of time wide open. For the past seventeen months, the Goth had wormholed at will through the astral plane, experiencing the cannibal horrors currently on display in the painting Morlocks, which hung in the Morbid Maze gallery at this hotel. As the Tarot killers had discussed the last time they met at the mental hospital on Colony Farm, it had taken a year and a half for the Goth to set up the Ripper’s revenge. But now the trap had been baited with the new Hanged Man victim in Seattle, and the Mountie had been lured to the horror convention.

  First, the bait.

  Next, the hook through Zinc Chandler’s cheek.

  The Goth sat at a writing desk that faced a mirror that could have been the looking-glass to Wonderland. On the surface of the desk lay a blank sketching pad. The rancid odor of insanity began to fill the hotel room as the Goth’s psychosis slipped out of hiding and into a florid state. Curtained windows along the wall that looked out at the swimming pool hid the antics of children in the water from the psycho’s eyes. Slowly, the spark of consciousness in those eyes dulled, until their stare was as blank as the sheet of drawing paper.

  The Goth was time-traveling.

  Back …

  Back …

  Back …

  Cries from the horizon announce the return of war canoes. Some of the double-hulled drua in the Bauan war fleet are so big that they carry 250 warriors along with cargo. The cargo this morning is bakola from a raid on the Rewa, a rival coastal clan. The anticipation of glutting themselves on “long pig” at the victory feast brings the islanders running joyously to the beach. What brings the reverend to the door of his small Christian mission on this side of the narrow stream that separates it from the god-house of the cannibal king are the screams of captured children hanging from their heels atop the masts.

  The year is 1838; the place, the Fiji Islands.

  I’ve traveled back to get ideas for the Odyssey.

  Time travel is nothing like how it was described to me. No doubt that’s because the Ripper signed the symbols in the Hanged Man wrong, and consequently he has to cope with the cosmic glitches that result from an incomplete cycle of occult manifestation. But for me, it’s like casting a mental yo-yo into my personal wormhole through space-time. Unlike the Ripper, I can go wherever and whenever I want. Nothing but my free will determines whether I stay there physically forever or pull my consciousness back to the here and now.