by J. A. Jance
The money was good. In fact, the money was great, better than he would have dreamed possible. The only problem was taking Mitch Johnson up to the cave.
The prospect of doing that left Quentin almost sick with fear. There must be a way around it, he thought as the bartender delivered his next drink. There just has to be. All he needed was a good solid shot of whiskey to clear his head.
Not long after that, Quentin left the bar. He was afraid that if he stayed around too long, he might shoot his mouth off and tell somebody about the money. In this neighborhood, walking around with a wad of money on you was almost as bad as being handed a death warrant.
Glancing warily over his shoulder, Quentin staggered the block and a half to his alley-fronting apartment. It would have been a crying shame if somebody had hit him over the head and rolled him on his way home.
A hell of a crying shame!
Brandon waited until he and Diana were getting ready for bed before he brought up the subject of Fat Crack's visit. They had been having so much fun together out chopping and stacking wood that he hadn't wanted to spoil things by bringing it up. And then again, during dinner, he hadn't wanted to mention anything at all about Andrew Carlisle in front of Lani.
He was just gearing up to say something when Diana beat him to the punch. "What did Fat Crack want?" she asked.
"It drives me crazy when you do that," Brandon told her.
"When I do what?"
"When you read my mind. I was about to tell you, and then you asked me before I had a chance to spit out the words."
"Well?"
Brandon Walker took a deep breath. "He came to talk to us-to me, really-about Andrew Carlisle."
Diana finished slipping her nightgown on over her head. "What about Andrew Carlisle?"
"Fat Crack says he's coming back."
"Andrew Carlisle is dead."
"That's exactly what I tried to tell Fat Crack when he was here," Brandon explained. "It didn't make any difference. He says he's read your book and it convinced him that, dead or not, Andrew Carlisle's still after us. That he's after you."
"That's ridiculous," Diana said at once. "It doesn't make any sense."
"Maybe not, but I can tell you Fat Crack is serious as hell about this. He wanted me to call up the department and ask Bill Forsythe to send more patrols out this way."
"To protect us from a dead man," Diana said.
"Right."
"What did you tell him?"
"That Bill Forsythe would laugh himself silly at the very idea."
"Good, because that's exactly what would happen."
"But still," Brandon cautioned, "maybe it would be better if you didn't run around by yourself too much for the next little while. What are you doing tomorrow?"
"I have that interview, the one New York set up out at La Paloma, but first I go to the beauty shop for hair, nails, and makeup. There's a photo shoot along with the interview. And then in the evening, there's the dinner. You're already going to that."
"If you want me to, I'll be happy to go along in the morning as well," Brandon offered.
"To the beauty shop and the interview?" Diana asked incredulously. "Have you lost your marbles?"
"I love you, Diana," Brandon said. "Sure it sounds crazy, but Fat Crack scared the hell out of me. If anything happened to you…"
"Nothing's going to happen," Diana said firmly. "And if you wouldn't go with me to the damn Pulitzer banquet, you sure as hell are not going to come hold my hand in the beauty shop or bird-dog me through an interview. That's final."
"But-"
"No buts," she said, shaking her head. "I could have used you at the ceremony, but the beauty shop is absolutely off limits. I'd say that's true for both of you," she added with a smile. "You wouldn't be caught dead there, and neither would Andrew Carlisle."
Back home in his RV on Coleman Road, Mitch Johnson tried to sleep but couldn't. He was too excited. He felt like a little kid again, and thinking Christmas Eve would never end, that morning would never come, and it would never be time to unwrap the few presents that his impoverished parents had somehow managed to put under their scrawny tree.
His own son, Mikey-Michael Wraike, as he was now called-had never known the kind of grinding poverty that had shaped his biological father. Raised in the affluence provided by his hotshot developer stepfather, Mike was now a tall, handsome, rangy kid, a student at the University of Arizona, who had attended his stepfather's funeral service with no idea that his natural father-his real father, as Mitch liked to think of himself-was standing in the fifth row only a few yards away.
Mitch had known that going to the funeral was risky, especially since Lori's relatives would be there right along with her dead husband's. But using the makeup techniques Andy had taught him, Mitch had taken great pains to disguise himself. Obviously it had worked. He had held his breath when Lori's Great Aunt Aggie had plopped her ample butt down on the pew beside him.
Even though being so near her made him nervous as hell, he nonetheless had to smile to himself at the realization that after years of good living, Lori had gone to fat as well, just like her well-fed auntie.
Aunt Aggie had given Mitch the benefit of one of her cursory and universally disapproving glances. Then, with no hint of recognition, she had sighed and settled back in the pew, turning her attention to the beginning of the service.
Larry Wraike's funeral was, of course, a closed-casket affair. That may have been a surprise to Aunt Aggie and a few of the other attendees. It was no surprise to Mitch Johnson. He had made a very conscious effort to make sure that would be the case.
"Greedy targets are easy targets," Andy had told him once. In Larry Wraike's case, that had proved absolutely true. Using a simple electronic device that altered his voice, Mitch had called his wife's second husband at his plush office at Stone and Pennington in Tucson to give him some unwelcome news.
"The problem is, Mr. Wraike, that the land you've developed wasn't yours in the first place."
"Now wait just a goddamned minute here!" Larry had sputtered. "I don't know who the hell you think you are, but-"
"I think you'd better hear me out," Mitch interrupted. "As I understand it, there's been a mistake of some kind, back in D.C. Kiser Ranch Estates is actually supposed to be part of the reservation."
"But that's impossible. It's been in my wife's family for years."
"Illegally," Mitch said.
"But the Kiser land isn't anywhere near the reservation. This doesn't make sense."
"Since when does anything that happens in Washington have to make sense? Here's the deal. A few people out on the reservation-a very few-are aware of this situation. And they're prepared to forget it-for a price, that is."
"For a price?" Wraike protested. "They can't do that. That's blackmail!"
"My principals would prefer you didn't call it blackmail," Mitch Johnson said smoothly. "They'd like me to meet with you to discuss a possible settlement. If I were you, in advance of that meeting, I'd make damned sure I didn't mention a word of this to a soul."
There was a long silence on the phone. "A meeting where?" Wraike asked at last, and Mitch Johnson knew he had him.
They had met in a darkened bar in Nogales, Arizona. It had been an easy thing to slip a dose of scopolamine into his drink. Larry was so upset at the thought of losing his real estate empire that he never suspected a thing, never saw through Mitch's simple disguise that made a much older man out of a middle-aged one.
It was only later when the makeup was gone and as the drug started to wear off that he recognized who Mitch was. Even then Wraike didn't tumble to the full extent of his danger.
That was something Mitch regretted now, as he sat looking up at the stars over Kitt Peak. He had rushed things. He hadn't made sure Larry Wraike was fully aware of what was going on before it happened. Mitch had only himself to blame that he hadn't taken time enough to savor the moment.
"So whaddya want, Mitch? Money?" Larry had asked. "I have
plenty of that. We can make a deal."
Mitch shook his head. "No deals," he said.
Larry Wraike's mumbled, half-drugged offer of a deal constituted his last words. Moments later, Mitch shoved a fist-sized gag into the man's mouth. Looking down at his trussed and helpless victim, Mitch peeled off his own clothes and set them out of harm's way. That was another piece of Andy's sage advice. No sense in getting blood anywhere it wouldn't be easy to wash off.
When Mitch turned back to the bed, he was holding the knife. As soon as he saw it, Larry's eyes bulged with fear. He thrashed on the bed, trying to get loose, but Mitch's expert knots held firm. It would have been fun to tease him with the knife for a while, to prick the son of a bitch here and there, just to get his attention.
That was where the scheduling problem came in. Without realizing how long it would take for the drug to wear off, Mitch had hired a young prostitute to show up later in the afternoon. Now her scheduled arrival was less than an hour away. By the time she showed up and let herself in with the room key Mitch had thoughtfully provided, Mitch had to be finished with Wraike-finished, cleaned up, and long gone.
"It can be a beautiful thing if you do it right," Andy had said. "It's almost like a dance. All you have to do is touch them with the tip of the knife, and you can watch their flesh try to crawl away from it. A knife has far more nuances than a gun.
"Given your history, I can understand your peculiar fascination with what an exploding shell can do to the human anatomy. But let me ask you this: When you shoved the barrel of your rifle up that little gook girl's twat, you couldn't feel her heart beating, could you?"
Still shocked that Andy had used the effects of the drug dose to trick him into revealing his darkest secret, Mitch Johnson had shaken his head.
"I didn't think so. With the tip of a knife, though, if you hold it right here in the hollow of someone's neck, you can feel their pulse," Carlisle said. "It comes right up through the handle with a vibration that's so faint you can barely feel it. And the more scared they are, the better you can feel it. There's nothing quite like it," he had added, twisting his distorted lips into what could only have been a smile of remembrance.
"There's nothing like it at all. And then, after you let them know that you own them, that there's nothing they can do, that's when it gets personal. You stand there and you're God, and all you have to decide is where to cut them, where to draw the first blood. Just wait," he added. "You won't believe how great it feels."
"Like getting your rocks off?" Mitch asked.
"No," Andy Carlisle had said. "Better than that. Much better."
And so, with his rival lying naked on the bed, Mitch tried touching the tip of the knife against the hollow at the base of Larry Wraike's throat. The thrashing stopped. Larry lay there still as death beneath the weight of the knife. The only thing that moved were his eyes. They swung back and forth between Mitch's face and the slightly trembling blade.
Mitch held the knife delicately. The vibration that came through the bone handle reminded him of a time long ago when, as a twelve-year-old, he had plucked a tiny baby bird out of a nest. He had held it in the palm of his hand for several minutes, feeling the frantic beating of its heart and wings against his skin. He didn't remember how long he held it. What he did remember was that eventually the damned thing pecked him, bit him so hard that it drew blood. When that happened, he simply closed his fist around it, crushing out that little bit of life as if it had never existed.
That had been a very clear and simplified lesson in the ethics of crime and punishment. The bird had hurt him, so he killed it. This was the same thing.
Moving the tip of the knife away from Wraike's throat, Mitch was gratified to see the man's heartfelt sigh of relief. As the stark tension drained out of Larry's body, Mitch felt a sudden stiffening in his own. He almost laughed aloud at the sensation. Some idiot psychology major had once done a series of interviews at the prison, asking some of the more violent offenders if there was any correlation for them between sex and violence.
If Mitch ever ran into that broad again, he'd have to be sure to tell her that for him the answer was a definite yes.
"You do know why I'm doing this, don't you?" he asked.
Larry shook his head frantically.
"Would you like me to tell you?"
This time Larry's answering nod was equally frantic. Mitch wasn't so much interested in having this one-sided conversation as he was in stretching the moment. He could not, in his whole life, ever remember having anyone listen to him with quite such rapt attention.
"You cheated me," Mitch said with no particular animosity. By the time they reached that point, Mitch Johnson had moved far beyond anger. He was simply delivering information, allowing Larry to understand the gravity of his mistake. Maybe, in another lifetime, he wouldn't make the same fatal error a second time.
"The deal was all set," Mitch continued reasonably. "All either one of us had to do was wait for old man Kiser to kick off. He was already sick, so it wouldn't have taken long. Once he did, we both would have made out like bandits. Instead, you waited until I was locked up and then you moved in and took your share and mine as well. To top it all off, you ended up fucking my wife, too. That wasn't a nice thing to do, Larry. It just wasn't right."
Around the gag and behind it, Larry's lips and tongue tried vainly to form words. He might have been agreeing with Mitch's assessment. He might even have been trying to say he was sorry, but as far as Mitch was concerned, it was far too late for apologies. After eighteen years, sorry didn't exactly cut it.
In the end it was the sexual injustice of Larry Wraike's actions that ruled the day. That, even more than the money, dictated the final result. That was why the first cut-the one that bled the most-was directly between Larry Wraike's legs. Mitch stood back and watched for a while, watched the man writhe and squirm and bleed and try to scream. And then, when Mitch lost interest in that, just as he had with the bird, and because he was worried about the time element, he went ahead and finished him off.
Larry Wraike was dead long before Mitch took the knife and began carving up his face. Andy would have called that gratuitous. It might even have been more than Andy himself would have done. If so, it was a way for Mitch to prove to himself that he had graduated, that he had moved beyond being Andrew Carlisle's student. He was, in fact, a talented killer in his own right, out to get a little of his own back from those who had wronged him in the past.
It took only a matter of seconds to mangle Larry Wraike's face. Afterward, while Mitch was showering, he laughed to think of Lori being called into a coroner's office to identify the bloody remains. Other than Lori and a few cops, not many people would see what he had done, but the thought of Lori seeing her husband that way made Mitch happy.
She was, after all, the only one who mattered.
As expected, Mitch himself was miles away from the motel when the teenaged prostitute from the other side of the border let herself into the room and discovered the body. Despite her frenzied screams and her subsequent protestations of innocence, she and her pimp would be going on trial soon, down in Santa Cruz County, for the savage murder of Larry Wraike.
Mitch Johnson had made it back to his RV on Coleman Road without any questions asked. And if any homicide cops from Nogales ever went looking for the old man who had met with the victim in a bar a few hours before his death, they never had any luck finding him.
Nope, as far as Larry Wraike was concerned, Mitch Johnson got away clean.
More relaxed now, Mitch stood up, stretched, and went inside, but he still didn't feel like sleeping. Instead, he took out a sketchbook and went to work.
"What was the author's name again?" Noreen Kennedy, the prison librarian, had asked.
"Nicolaides," Mitch Johnson answered. "He's Greek."
"And the name of the book?"
"The Natural Way to Draw."
Noreen was a firm believer in the importance of rehabilitation. "You're studying art,
then?" she asked.
Mitch smiled diffidently. "I've always been interested in art," he said. "But there was never enough time to do anything about it. Now I've got nothing but time. This book is supposed to be the best there is."
The book arrived eventually, courtesy of an inter-library loan. And it was every bit as good as Mitch had been told it would be. With a pencil and a cheap sketchbook, he went to work doing the exercises. The book contained a year-long course of study. Unfortunately, the checkout period was limited to two weeks.
"Could you order it for me again, Mrs. Kennedy?" he asked, the day he returned it to the library. "In two weeks' time, I barely got started. What I really need is my own copy."
"I don't know," she said. "I'll see what I can do."
It was a month before Mitch received a summons to the library. Noreen Kennedy, who was almost as wide as she was tall, smiled broadly at him. "You'll never guess what I found," she said, holding up a shabby volume Mitch instantly recognized as a much-used copy of the Nicolaides book.
"I got it from a used-book dealer in Phoenix who's an old friend of mine," she said. "We went to Library School together. Jack said he's had it in inventory for years and he only charged me five bucks. Can you afford to buy it, or should I just go ahead and put it in the collection?"
"I'd really like to have my own copy, if you don't mind," Mitch said.
"I thought you would," Noreen said, handing it over.
The book had been a godsend. When Mitch was sketching, the hours seemed to fly by. As the months went past, it was easy to recognize the increasing skill in the way he executed the exercises. While he sketched, Andrew Carlisle talked. It was as though he had an almost physical need to share his exploits with someone. Mitch Johnson became Andy's chosen vessel.
Andy's bragging about the tapes was how Mitch first heard about them. At first it made him uneasy that Andy had taken such pains to make a record of all he had done, but in the long run, Mitch realized that recordings were just that-mechanical reproductions. They didn't allow for any artistic license. Painting did.