by Ray Garton
When she did that, his eyes opened even wider and his blood-spattered lips pulled back over his teeth as he gurgled, "Cunt!" It hardly sounded like a word coming from his severed throat.
He made a backhanded swipe at her face, his eyes filled with hatred and anger, his lower jaw moving back and forth as he ground his teeth. Lacey took a step backward, easily avoiding his hand, which was swung as weakly as an old woman swinging a baseball bat.
A wet spraying sound came from Rex's throat as he slumped to his left against the table. His left hand clutched the white, blood-painted tablecloth and he fell onto the table as if it were a bed and he were a very tired man.
Rex lay on the table on his back, his knees drawn up as if someone were pushing on his feet. The top of his head was completely bald, except for a few pathetically thin strands of hair. He began to cough again, blood showered from his mouth and rained back down on his face as his eyes began to cross.
Lacey backed away from him, watching for just a moment as Rex began to die. Her stomach was roiling, twisting and turning inside her, and she thought she might vomit soon. She felt a little dizzy and her knees threatened to buckle ... but she thought of Zanetta, and of Samuel, that sweet little boy down there in the Dark Place. She thought of all the others who had suffered at this man's hand before her, and who would have suffered had she not done this. She felt a bit stronger and stood a bit straighter in this dreamlike, slow-motion world. And she watched him as he began to die.
With great effort, Rex lifted his hands and slapped them to his throat, trying to stop the blood flow, but his fingers merely wriggled into the opening in his throat. Blood that had at first shot as far as three feet from his carotid now made feeble little spurts that were spaced farther and farther apart. Rex's legs quivered and shook on the table, his heels clattering against the tabletop. The blood shot up from his throat like thin streamers at a New Year's Eve party, but with less and less force, weakening by the second.
There was a sudden silence among the crowd. Everyone in the room froze, staring with wide eyes, no one so much as exhaling.
One of the final spurts of blood that came from Rex's throat shot just far enough to land on the chest of a female reporter. She stumbled backward, looking down at the mess, and began to swipe at it with one hand. Then she screamed.
And suddenly the dreamlike, slow-motion universe that had swallowed Lacey was gone. Everything jerked into normal time, which now seemed, to Lacey, impossibly fast.
Two of the TV cameras moved forward to get a better view of the dying man. Rex coughed several times — wet, jagged coughs — and the blood from his mouth, along with the blood from his severed artery, shot up to splatter the cameras and those who held them.
Men and women rushed to Rex's side.
Four security men appeared out of nowhere, like aliens being beamed down from the mother ship, each one reaching into the coat of his nondescript suit for a gun.
Lacey took that as her signal. Still clutching the razor, she turned and ran ...
9
Ethan stared in horror at what had happened — at the blood splattered all over the white tablecloth, at Rex Calisto's jerking feet, the sprays and streams of coughed and squirting blood still shooting into the air — and he flinched when Ed clutched his elbow hard.
"I gotta feeling we need that girl," he hissed. "Let's follow her."
"B-but she just — "
"You wanna stay here?" Ed growled.
Ethan shook his head as the three of them hurried in the direction Crystal Daniere had run ...
10
Every muscle in Lacey's body suddenly burned with tension as she ran through the mansion. Running was not easy in the gown, but she didn't care if she ripped the damned thing in half as long as she got away from the goons she knew would be coming after her.
But she kept stumbling as she ran, nearly falling on her face twice. Her heels were even harder to run in than the dress, but she did not want to stop long enough to take them off. She was terrified of stopping. She could hear them coming ... and she knew they would be on her if she stopped, even for a moment.
After everything she'd been through for doing nothing more than being alive, she trembled at the thought of what they would do to her for this. It would probably make Hell look like a theme park.
She could still hear the commotion back there in the living room: the loud voices, the shouting, the clattering ... and the running footsteps that were growing louder.
She ran down a long corridor, through the dining room, around a corner, and down another corridor, toward the back of the house. She had no idea where she was going, how she could get away, or how she might hide. But she figured that, at this point, it didn't really matter. She had done what she'd set out to do. Now, the only thing that mattered was running and going anywhere possible ... going away.
The footsteps were catching up.
She still held the bloody razor in her right hand. She would use it on anyone who tried to stop her if she had to, and she would not hesitate. After what she had just done, what difference would it make?
They were getting closer fast, close enough for her to hear their breaths as they ran. Their footsteps were heavy and it was pretty obvious from the sound of them that there were more than one. Their guns were probably drawn and held upward, level with their shoulders, as they ran ... just like in the action movies they probably spent way too much time watching on the VCRs in their dark little quarters somewhere in the mansion.
She was getting closer to the back door, and she began to run faster, trying to run on the balls of her feet to keep her spike heels off the floor. The back door led nowhere but outside of the mansion ... and, to Lacey, that was somewhere.
The heel of her left shoe hit the floor with a clack and broke. She fell forward so hard that even after she hit, her body slid at least ten feet over the slick floor as she grunted in pain.
The fall had knocked the wind from her lungs for a moment, but she sat up immediately, gasping for breath, and began to kick the shoes off. She tried to stand, but got only as far as her hands and knees.
She couldn't breathe and she felt dizzy.
Her arms and legs gave out on her and she fell flat again, limbs splayed over the floor as she tried to catch her breath.
The running footsteps grew louder and closer, pounding down on her with the rhythm of a freight train ... and Lacey was lying on the tracks.
Suddenly there were hands on her shoulders. They turned her over and lifted her up in a sitting position.
Three men. One was an incongruently pleasant-looking black man, one a large, handsome, and muscular white man, and the third was even a bit larger and looked Asian.
She blinked several times when she realized that none of them were carrying guns ... but it didn't really matter.
"Go ahead!" she snarled at them through clenched teeth, her lips pulled back as she held the razor out defensively in her right hand. "Go ahead and kill me! What difference is it gonna make, huh, what fucking dif — "
The big white man placed one huge hand to the side of her face and clutched her right wrist in the other as he leaned close. "Shhh! Crystal, listen to me, Crystal. We're not who you think we are!" he hissed. "We're not security and we're not cops ... we're on your side!"
She gawked up at the man, confused into silence.
"We need your help and you need ours! But the first thing we gotta worry about is gettin' the hell outta here! Now!
Her eyes darted from one face to the other. She became even more breathless than before. Between gulps of air, she was finally able to gasp, "Who ... are ... you?"
The white man jerked a thumb over his shoulder toward the black man standing behind him and whispered, "We think his son might be somewhere around this house. His little boy. Samuel Walker."
Pain suddenly exploded deep in Lacey's chest and tears welled up in her eyes as she looked up at the black man. "You mean you're ... Samuel's dad?"
The bl
ack man's eyes suddenly looked very sad, but very anxious, and he nodded slowly.
There were other footsteps now, running footsteps that slapped heavily against the floor as they grew closer and closer.
Still gasping, Lacey got up on her feet with the man's help, coughing all the way. She stood and swayed a bit as she faced the three men. "Follow me," she whispered frantically. "Out back. There are some bushes. Maybe we can hide and talk there."
The heavy footsteps drew nearer as they began to run, Lacey in the lead, the three men following. The running footsteps of their pursuers grew louder and closer behind them ...
11
The security men who had suddenly come from nowhere — some appearing from the crowd, from other rooms, and from upstairs — scattered efficiently and went to work.
Three of them went immediately to Rex's side, but knew the instant they saw him that nothing could be done. It was only a matter of minutes — three at the most — before Rex would be dead.
Three more began to usher all the guests and the press out of the house as quickly as possible. The reporters, TV cameramen, and photographers were very eager to stick around and cover the whole story firsthand, maybe even catch Rex Calisto's last breath on video. But the security men were big and filled out their suits quite well. They meant business and were quite effective in letting the press people know that the party was definitely over.
The other three men, their guns already drawn from the shoulder holsters beneath their suitcoats, began talking quietly into their lapel mikes. They alerted the rest of the security team throughout and around the mansion to the fact that Crystal Daniere had just killed Rex Calisto and was running loose somewhere around the mansion, armed with a bloody razor, and that they were to apprehend her immediately, get her out of sight, and keep her out of sight. The police and an ambulance would be arriving any second — someone had already called 911 — and it was important to keep the girl under wraps until they decided what to do with her.
Rex Calisto and his invisible associates had plenty of friends in the LAPD — and in all the surrounding police departments as well — who would be very generous in handling this particular crisis, but there was always the matter of those officers who were not among his friends to consider; they were in the majority and would have to be preoccupied while those among them who were sympathetic to Calisto and his associates did what they had to do.
Within the mansion, and all around the grounds outside, security men drew their guns and left their posts without giving their orders a thought. Some of the men outside carried very small flashlights, others began to search areas on the grounds that were well lit by the colored lights of fountains and old-fashioned streetlights that flanked paths through the garden and over the immaculate lawn.
Their eyes were sharp, their movements quick and assured. Not one of them doubted that they would find Crystal Daniere and her bloody razor ...
12
Tex had finished talking. Actually, he had not finished so much as exhausted himself with words. He was covered with sweat and his entire body was shaking with fear. He'd made the cab of the car smell like the inside of a campground rest room. Earlier, while they were talking, Shockley had had to lean over and open the passenger door so Tex could lean out and vomit onto the ground. For a moment, Shockley thought the man was going to pass out, but he'd recovered and continued talking. Now he was finished.
And now, Shockley was considering leaning out of the car to vomit as well.
He couldn't believe what he had just heard. None of it. On the surface, Tex's story was fascinating ... in much the same way a Stephen King novel or a very bloody horror movie might be fascinating. But Tex was not telling him a story.
Tex was telling him the truth. At least, Tex believed it to be the truth. That alone would be easy to doubt. But apparently, Bentley Noble, Stephen Colloway, and Pastor Walker believed it to be the truth as well. And so did the handicapped man who was nearly killed by the two armed men who broke into his San Francisco apartment earlier. That list did not appear very long at first glance, but when attached to the story Shockley had just heard ... well, it looked much more important.
He turned and looked out his window, up the hill at the mansion, and blinked several times, squinting.
People were walking down that long drive. In fact, they were walking quickly. It looked like a scaled-down scene from The Ten Commandments: a crowd of people hurrying down that hill toward their cars, and the black, silhouetted figures gathered at the top in front of the mansion and its lights, beginning to follow the others down.
Shockley sat up straighter in his seat and muttered, "What in the hell is — "
The dispatcher's voice was rambling on the radio, which he had mostly ignored — but she said something that caught his attention suddenly.
" — 473 Bliss Way, Holcombe Hills area of Los Angeles," the woman said, her voice monotonous, almost robotic.
Shockley jerked forward and turned up the volume, holding his breath.
That was the address of Rex Calisto's mansion.
The dispatcher continued. "Code 3, attempt 187, perpetrator still present and armed with a straight razor."
As officers responded curtly to the call, Shockley let out a long, slow breath and stared at the radio as if it had suddenly grown breasts.
"Code 3" meant red lights, sirens, and move your ass. "Attempt 187" meant attempted murder. And it was going on right now, up there, in that beast of a house.
Shockley grabbed the mike. "This is unit 193, I am at the scene. Which units have been dispatched?"
The dispatcher replied, "Units 172, 201, and all available units in the area."
He clutched the mike hard, swallowing again and again.
If everything was true — everything Tex and all the others believed, everything Roberts had told him — that meant there was a hell of a lot more going on in there than attempted murder. Shockley began to sweat along with Tex, who was crying softly beside him.
Shockley pressed the transmission button on the mike. "This is unit 193. We'll need more units on the scene. Repeat ... requesting more units on the scene."
There was a long pause. Shockley waited. Listened. Then: "This is unit 172. Watch commander. Why are you requesting more units?"
Shockley's head fell forward until his chin hit his chest as he hissed, "Oh, ssshhit."
"Repeat, unit 193, why are you requesting more units?"
Shockley put the mike to his mouth and set his jaw. "I have reason to believe there is more going on here than the attempted 187. I also suspect there are a lot of heavily armed people in there. People who may be hostile."
In two seconds, another voice came onto the radio. A loud, shouting voice, rough and throaty. And Shockley recognized it immediately.
"Unit 193! This is your captain! What the fuck're doing? You are out of your district and you are off duty! What the fuck are you doing on the scene of a call you shouldn't even be fucking answering?"
Profanity was forbidden over the radio. Captain Berger's very presence on the radio during such a serious call was jamming communications between those involved in that call, and that was also forbidden. On top of that, Shockley had never heard the fat, completely bald captain sound this angry. Ever. And he was angry most of the time.
"Respond, 193!" Captain Berger shouted. "You respond this second, or I'll have you cleaning toilets in the station for the rest of your fucking career in law enforcement!"
A sick feeling suddenly passed over Shockley's entire body.
It was not only common for an off-duty cop to respond to a call if it was convenient — especially if that cop was on the scene — but it was required of off-duty cops to do so. Why was Berger so upset? Why was he making a fool of himself over the radio to scream at Shockley, who was simply doing what was expected of him? He turned slowly to Tex. "What, uh ... what was that you said about the police and the Sheriff's Department and ... and the judges? That kinda thing? What was that?
"
Tex turned to him as if he were afraid of being hit, his head moving like the head of a cowed puppy. "I-yuh ... I said they got, y'know ... friends. In law enforcement. In high places. People who protect 'em. People who do what they say and keep 'em from ... from gettin' in trouble. That's why they told me I didn't have nothin' to worry about. They had everything worked out. Like I said ... they told me I'd have cops workin' for me, not against me"
Shockley thought about it a moment. He slapped a hand on the steering wheel, clawed his nails at it, and chewed his lip as he thought. Then he spoke into the mike again. "This is unit 193. I repeat, more units will be needed on the scene!"
An instant after he was finished, Captain Berger was back on the radio. "That goddamned request is to be ignored! I repeat: unit 193's request is to be fucking ignored! He has no goddamned business being involved in this, he's out of his fucking district, and he hasn't even given a goddamned reason why he's requesting more units!"
There was a moment's pause, then: "This is unit 172 requesting with all due respect that the captain clear this fucking radio! We are on a call! You are blocking communications between the units responding to this call! So will you please get off the goddamned radio!"
Shockley flinched. The watch commander had just performed some serious chomping on the buttocks of a captain.
This was a red-letter night on the LAPD radio. Anyone listening to a police scanner was getting a juicy earful.
When Captain Berger shouted over the radio, his voice was even more ragged. He sounded like he was about to have a stroke.
"Fine, that's just fucking fine! I'll have you both cleaning toilets! With your goddamned tongues! And I repeat once again: unit 193 's request for more units at the scene is to be ignored! At least until he gives us a good fucking reason for it!"