We all clinked and started to sip, but Robert held up a hand. “I hate to be a party pooper, but isn’t there a teensy hole in all this?”
Terry glared at him. “Yes?”
“Where is it? The flesh, I mean.”
Terry took a second to answer. “We don’t know,” she admitted.
“Well, then. Mightn’t it be in the possession of someone else? Someone you haven’t considered? Mightn’t there be another blackmailer out there still?”
Terry and I frowned at each other.
Reba pursed her lips.
Eli scratched his nether regions.
“And come to think of it,” Reba said, “who the devil has the Bacon?”
“And,” Terry put in, “we still don’t know who killed Suzie Magnuson or how she was connected to all this. Sergei said he didn’t kill her, and he had no reason to lie. He was about to stab us to death.”
“Well, okay. These are good questions,” I said, pulling out my steno pad.
Terry kicked the pad and it went flying across the room, pages fluttering. Fortunately for her, she’d kicked my good hand.
“Why don’t you go to bed?” she said.
“I believe I will.”
I realized for the first time how wrecked I was after this week. I’d been drugged and arrested, I’d come within inches of being stabbed to death, my hearing had been blown out by a gunshot next to my ear, my wrist had been shattered, and all I wanted in the world was to snuggle up with one of the dogs and go to sleep.
I left them all in the living room arguing the fine points of the case, snatched Paquito from the kitchen, and made my way up the marble staircase to one of the guest bedrooms. On the way, I stopped and borrowed one of Robert’s silk pajama tops.
“’Night, everybody,” I called down from the landing.
“Sweet dreams,” Reba called up to me.
“Yeah, right,” I muttered.
I crawled into bed, situating Paquito on the pillow next to my head. Then I pulled the covers up under my chin and drifted off into oblivion.
Blades. Sharp and deadly. Slashing at me, stabbing at my chest, my hands, my face. I tried to turn, to roll away, but I was stuck in something wet and slimy. Sinking, the more I struggled.
Quicksand.
My arms strained for the rope that appeared just beyond my reach. My hand closed around the knot at the end of the rope. I got it!
Paquito was on solid ground with the other end of the rope in his mouth, trying to pull me to safety. But he was too tiny. I was too heavy. It was hopeless.
His paws slid toward the quicksand, toenails digging little ditches in the dirt. He was getting closer, closer . . .
I released the rope. I wouldn’t drag him into the killer sand with me. Couldn’t stand the thought of that trusting little soul being smothered as I myself would be within seconds.
The quicksand reached my mouth. I tried to spit it out, but hundreds of pounds of pressure forced the granular muck between my lips.
Glub.
Glub glub.
I gave myself up to my fate.
Then I hit the floor.
I woke instantly, a stabbing pain in my wrist. It took me a minute to remember that I was in Reba’s guest room. The bedcovers were entwined in my legs, snagged under my armpits, and wrapped around my neck, strangling me.
Paquito! I thought desperately. I’ve killed him!
Then I heard little claws hitting the floor next to my head and a wet tongue snaked out and kissed me on the eyelid. “Baby! You’re alive!” He gave me another kiss, this one on the underside of my nose.
“Sor-r-r-y,” I moaned, reaching out and pulling him to my chest with my plastered hand. “Go to sleep, honey.” I loosened the sheet around my neck with my good hand, and curled up on the floor.
I had no intention of getting back on the bed. I was too tired, and I thought if we slept here on the floor, Paquito had a better chance of surviving the night. He could run for his life if it looked like I was going to squash him with my huge, thrashing body.
That was my last coherent thought before I heard a slerghhh sound coming from my own mouth. Then I slipped behind the curtain of unconsciousness, wedged between the bed and the wall.
When I awoke Paquito was gone. I didn’t know the time. There was a cast where my watch should have been.
My forearm was throbbing. I unwrapped the sheets and blankets and pulled myself up by means of the bed. I peered over the side to look for Paquito. The door was open, so he’d probably gone downstairs for kibble.
I myself had no thought of kibble, although coffee might be nice. But first I had to find aspirin.
I stumbled down the hallway, looking in the empty rooms. Had I slept right through breakfast? No one was in Robert’s room. Reba and Eli weren’t asleep in her canopied bed. There was no sign of Terry anywhere.
I looked out the window. Still dark, couldn’t be past six o’clock. Where was everybody? Why were they up so early?
Aspirin. I had to have aspirin before I could think.
I went into the guest bathroom and opened the cabinet. Toothpaste, hand cream, a perfumed soap from the Dauphine Hotel, but no Bayer, no Excedrin, nothing.
Terry was right. I hurt like a mother. I’d been rash to throw away those drugs, but after all the death and indignity heaped on those who’d been addicted to them, I hadn’t wanted any part of the painkillers. Seemed to me they should be called peoplekillers.
I went across the landing to Robert’s studio at the top of the stairs. I peeked in, thinking he might be at work. He wasn’t there, but the portrait of Lenore smiled out at me from its cracked golden frame like the Wicked Queen peering out from her dastardly mirror.
Reba had given Robert the portrait to use as a canvas for one of his abstract artworks. He hadn’t even bothered to remove it from the frame, but had already begun to obliterate Lenore’s satin gown with bold strokes of yellow paint.
It made me think of that other painting.
Where oh where was the Bacon?
Which reminded me of breakfast. Which reminded me of coffee, which I didn’t smell wafting up to my nose at the top of the stairs.
I looked down the staircase expecting someone, Grizzie most likely, to scurry by. I was just about to call out when something caught my eye.
The front door was open a crack, and there was a cable running the length of the foyer into the dining room, plugged into a socket by the front door. It was thick, like those used for lighting equipment on a movie set.
Huh.
I tried to make sense out of this but the pain was clouding my mind.
I padded down the stairs in my bare feet. Was there a repairman in the dining room with a drill or an electric sander, waiting for a decent hour to start his work? Reba hadn’t mentioned any pending repairs.
I shuffled to the dining room door, and there everybody was, seated around the dining room table: Reba, Robert, Eli, Terry, Grizzie. I opened my mouth to say hello when I realized they were all staring at me, their eyes like saucers . . .
. . . their bodies tied to the chairs and their mouths gagged!
Terry made little hitching motions with her head toward the living room. Someone was in there. Someone who had kidnapped the whole household and tied them up while I slept. Someone on the other end of that cable—
BZZZZZZZZ!
Omigod! He was revving a chain saw!
BZZZZZZZZZZZZ!
I ducked back into the foyer and crouched behind a planter with a blooming hibiscus. My heart jumped into my throat and pounded on my thyroid gland. Cortisol surged through my bloodstream causing my teeth to clack like castanets. I had to get to a phone but I didn’t think I could move.
Oh sure. Get to a phone and call the police. They’ll be here in three to four minutes. In that time your aunt could be missing a finger, your sister could be minus a leg, the dogs could be tailless.
Where were the dogs?
I looked at the cable. I could unplug it
first, then rush upstairs and call 911. Or I could go out the front door and run down the street screaming my head off.
I’d never even make it to the gate.
I had to unplug the cable. But if I did, he would simply come out and replug it, then proceed with the dismembering. But if he came out here into the foyer, I’d have a chance to brain him with—
What?
I tugged on the lip of the planter. It weighed two hundred pounds at least. I looked around frantically for another weapon and saw nothing but the Ming vase sitting pricelessly on its pedestal. I could break it over somebody’s skull but would that really knock him out?
It always worked in the Three Stooges episodes.
Jesus Christ, Kerry! This isn’t the Three Stooges, this is serious!
BZZZZZZZZ!
A man’s voice: “Tell me where she is, or I’ll take a pinky from the fat guy over there!”
Which fat guy? I wondered irrationally.
Then I recognized the voice with a start. Sidney Lefler of Whitechapel Mutual. What was he doing here, holding everyone hostage?
No time to wonder.
I dashed out from behind the planter and grabbed the cable, yanking it out of the wall socket.
BZZZZzzz-phut-phut.
The cable was still in my hand when I leaped up the stairs, slipping on the slick marble, scrabbling at the banister. I pounded up to the landing where the cable ran out. I dropped the plug and dived into Robert’s studio.
I snatched up the phone. The line was dead. He must have cut it and disabled the alarm before he broke into the house.
“Hey, Kerry!” a voice yelled downstairs. “That you . . . ?”
I heard him coming up the stairs, and looked around desperately for a place to hide, then slipped behind Lenore’s portrait. I held the sides of the frame with the tips of my fingers, turning my face sideways so the portrait wouldn’t protrude, giving me away.
His footsteps came to the door.
A gun was cocked. I waited breathlessly for the shot.
No shot.
After a few seconds, the footsteps receded down the hall. I sweated it out, trying desperately to think without the aid of caffeine, my nerve endings screaming in pain.
No phone, no phone, no phone.
But there is a computer.
The computer had a DSL Internet connection. Could you dial 911 online? I thought you could, I’d seen it in a movie.
I didn’t dare come out from behind the portrait.
I lifted it with my fingertips. Pain streaked through my arm but I ignored it, shifting the portrait a foot to the left. I peered out from the side of the canvas. The computer was a few feet away. Only a few feet.
I inhaled and picked up the portrait again, moving it toward the computer. I gained another foot, then—
“Well, what do you know?” Sidney’s voice came from the doorway. “The portrait’s moving.”
I swallowed hard.
“That’s not you back there, is it, Kerry?”
He grabbed the top of the frame and something took over in me. Pure adrenaline-driven instinct. I picked up the sides of the portrait with superhuman strength, impervious to the pain in my wrist. I charged him with it, holding it in front of me like a giant shield.
I heard an Oouf! and a Shit! on the other side of the painting but I hadn’t succeeded in knocking him to the ground, I knew, because I could hear him shuffling and stumbling in front of me.
I pushed with all the strength I had, blindly plowing ahead. I passed through the studio door—thank God for the tall doorways in the house—and if I was through the door that meant the staircase was directly in front of me and that meant—
“Aieeeeyeeeee-eee-eee!” Sidney screamed.
I heard tumbling noises and snapping sounds, which I hoped were bones, and feet hitting walls, and a head bonking on marble steps, and then I lost my balance.
I toppled onto the stairs, the portrait beneath me, and sledded down the staircase at eighty miles an hour, bouncing right over Sidney like he was a minor mogul. I slid straight to the bottom, then zipped across the marble foyer and into the kitchen, where I sailed right past the service island and slammed into the refrigerator headfirst. Birds twittered and bells rang, and I was sucked up into a vortex of colored lights, traveling through space toward a distant pinpoint of white light. I succumbed to an indescribable sense of peace and well-being as the light drew nearer. Endorphin City. When at last I reached the source of the light, a group of angelic beings approached me.
A beautiful woman told me without speaking that I was in the place whence all life originated. She held out a scroll of luminescent parchment, the words Secrets of the Universe inscribed on it in gold.
I took the document, trembling with awe. I was holding the Secrets of the Universe in my unworthy hands! But I had one tiny question before proceeding.
“What about my sister?” I asked the beings of light. “Is she coming?”
They sent the answer back, their voices like celestial music playing in my head.
“No, not for another fifty years. She has many karmic issues to work out on the Earth plane. And personality problems such as anger, self-loathing, and a propensity toward violence. It will take her a long time to work through them.”
“But, shouldn’t I . . . shouldn’t I be there to help her work through these issues?”
“As you wish.”
Before I knew what was happening, I was sucked back into the vortex at a violent speed, colors racing past me like streaks of neon.
“Wait!” I yelled back at the angels. “Don’t I get a second to think about it?”
Then I was shot back out through the end of the tunnel with a rude expulsion of cosmic air. And my head hurt like a sonofabitch.
I opened my eyes on the world. Or the kitchen, as it were. And I remembered what had brought me to the kitchen, plowing me into the fridge in the first place. I got up and stumbled into the foyer.
Sidney lay motionless on the marble floor. Eyes staring sightlessly, chest still. I wondered if it was his fall or my sledding over him that had caused his death.
It didn’t matter. Dead, he was. Probably holding my Secrets of the Universe at that very moment.
Read ’em and weep, Sidney.
I limped into the dining room to untie the victims. “It’s okay, everybody,” I said, feeling rather macho. “He’s dead.”
“MMMMmmmmPhhhhhhggggg!” they said in chorus, which I took to mean Way to go, Kerry! Way to save us!
But I was wrong.
What they were trying to say was, Look out! He’s right behind you!
I figured it out when I felt the hard gun barrel jammed into my back.
“Hold it!” Sidney snarled. “Don’t make a move!”
“Who are you, the Terminator?” I cried. “What do you want?”
“I just want a life! I’m tired of sitting in my car getting hemorrhoids while other people live in fabulous mansions, lining their pockets with stolen money!”
“How can I help you?”
Ouch. The barrel nicked my spine.
“You can help me by dying. Then I’m going to walk out of here with the Bacon.”
“We don’t have it,” I said through clenched teeth.
“Oh, yes you do,” he said, jabbing my kidney.
“I get the point, you have a gun! But we don’t have the Bacon!”
“Freeze!” a male voice boomed from the foyer.
I spun around at the same instant as Sidney and saw Lance crouched in a firing position, his arms out in front of him aiming his—
Empty hands?
“You don’t have a gun, asshole!” Sidney yelled.
Lance looked down at his hands, then back up at Sidney.
“Right,” he said.
Sidney fired off a shot and I watched in horror as Lance flew backward, his enormous bulk smashing against the wall, spraying it with red.
“You bastard!” I yelled, jumping on Sidney’s back.
“He’s an innocent actor!”
I grabbed Sidney around the neck and squeezed as hard as I could, strangling him as I sank my teeth into the top of his head.
Sidney lurched around, howling—trying to dislodge the rabid orangutan from his back—and somehow while he was trying to shake me off, the gun in his hand discharged with a deafening report.
The bullet pinged off a marble step and ricocheted, lodging in Sidney’s shinbone. He screamed and fell, taking me with him as he hit the floor face-first, his forehead cracking on marble. My upper lip split on my own tooth as my face slammed into the back of his skull.
I lay on top of him, breathing heavily. Waiting for his next move.
But this time Sidney was truly down for the count.
I stood up and kicked him, just to be sure.
“Okay, who else?” I screamed. “Bring it on! Anybody else want a piece of me?”
Lance looked up from the floor. “Um, no. But would you mind calling 911? I’ve been shot.”
“Sure,” I said, running into the living room to find a cell phone. “Sorry, Lance. I got a little carried away.”
Well, who’d have thought I’d be the girl of the hour? The one who wiped out a bad guy single-handedly, saving my whole family and three others in the bargain?
I could hardly believe it myself. I hadn’t really been courageous—just impulsive. But at least now I knew that blind instinct would serve me in a crisis, even if I was scared stupid. And that would be enough to give me confidence if Terry and I continued to work as investigators.
And why wouldn’t we? Now that we were flush, we could pick and choose our cases for a while. We still had the twelve thousand dollars, plus a generous reward from Whitechapel Mutual for returning the painting. (The Francis Bacon would go to Suzie’s estate, and ultimately be sold in order to liquidate some of her debts.)
Terry and I planned to pick up where we left off as soon as we got back from our trip to Hawaii. She had it all planned out. We would go shell collecting and parasailing and deep-sea diving and speeding around in those little rafts and hiking through the jungle . . .
I let her think we would, anyway. But actually I had a secret agenda.
The Butcher of Beverly Hills Page 30