The Closer

by Donn Cortez

  She pulled out the GPS tracker and checked it. Looked like the package was at the airport; it’d be moving downtown soon enough. She poured herself another cup from the motel coffeemaker and peered out between the drapes again. She hadn’t slept all night—she kept thinking Jack would walk through the door any minute.

  But he hadn’t.

  She tried his cell phone again. She’d been getting a no-carrier signal for the last two hours—he’d either turned it off, his batteries were dead, or he was out of range.

  Something was wrong, she was sure of it. No matter what he was going through, Jack wouldn’t just walk away. Maybe he was in jail, or the hospital. Maybe he’d been mugged—Reno wasn’t quite as family-friendly as Vegas yet.

  Which was why Nikki had gotten two guns, not one.

  She hadn’t told Jack because he wouldn’t have approved. They avoided guns whenever possible; killing the target would defeat the purpose of capture. Tasers, Mace, pepper spray, anything nonlethal was how Jack preferred to work. The fact that he’d asked Nikki to procure firearms at all showed how off his game he was…so the second gun was Nikki’s insurance.

  And it looked like she was going to need it.

  “Fuck it,” she said. She could do the tail without Jack. Once she had the Gourmet’s location nailed down, she’d play it by ear.

  She put the gun in her jacket, grabbed the GPS tracker and left.

  One hour in.

  “Give me the access codes,” the Gourmet said.

  “Go fuck yourself,” Jack hissed through clenched teeth.

  He was terrified his cell phone would ring. It was the disposable kind you bought in airports, with a preset number of usable minutes. It only worked in the area you bought it in, was made out of cheap materials and wouldn’t operate at all under some conditions—even the charge from the stun gun’s capacitor might have disabled it.

  None of that mattered, though—because if Nikki called, the Gourmet would know Jack had a partner. If he’d been watching the motel he might already know; the only thing that gave Jack any hope at all was the fact that the Gourmet hadn’t brought it up yet. If Jack had been doing the interrogation, he would have crushed that hope right off.

  But then, Jack was much more experienced.

  “You will tell me,” the Gourmet said. He’d used the butcher’s shears to cut the clothes off Jack’s body, though he’d left his underwear on. When he was done, he’d put down the shears and picked up a wooden mallet, the kind used to tenderize meat.

  He’d started on Jack’s arms.

  Jack couldn’t move either of them now, but he was pretty sure no bones had broken. Jack thought the Gourmet was holding back, but that might have been because Jack was seeing everything through a haze of endorphins.

  “Fucking pussy,” Jack said hoarsely. His voice was nearly gone; he’d yelled his lungs out while the Gourmet worked him over. Jack had noticed that the screamers seem to last longer, as if they were somehow riding the pain instead of fighting it. “That the best you can do? You don’t deserve to lead The Pack.”

  “If you tell me now, I’ll let you go,” the Gourmet said. “Just like one wolf exposing his throat to another, submitting to his authority. I’ll let you slink away into the night.”

  Jack grinned through bloody lips. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding. You don’t know the first thing about torture, do you?”

  “Oh, I’m just getting started.”

  “You’ve already fucked that up, Magoo. The beginning is important; it establishes the entire fucking relationship.”

  “Oh? How so?”

  “You know the expression, to ‘give someone the third degree’? Know what it’s from?”

  “Third-degree burns, I assume. Which reminds me…” The Gourmet walked past the head of the table, moved to where Jack couldn’t see him.

  “No, asshole. That’s what everyone thinks, but they’re wrong. It’s from the Inquisition. There were three degrees of torture—the first one was just showing the subject the instruments. Letting their imagination do the work, you know? But you rushed it.”

  “And the second?”

  “Asking the questions. Giving the subject a chance to confess. You couldn’t wait, though—just jumped right to number three. Hey, I don’t much give a fuck about tradition, but only an amateur shows that kind of impatience.”

  “Maybe. But I do learn from my mistakes.”

  “Well, at the rate you’re making them, you should be a genius pretty fucking soon. Oh, no, wait—you have to chow down on somebody else’s brainpan for that, right?”

  “At least I adhere to my principles. That prostitute I saw going into your room—she wasn’t exactly a baby boomer, was she?”

  Jack snorted. “Fuck you. I’m in a different town, I set up another sheep for the next initiate. See, it looks like The Pack is going to need some fresh blood pretty soon.”

  “Your bravado is transparent. There’s no point in stalling.”

  “Right. Because as soon as I give up those codes, you’re not going to turn my frontal lobes into a casserole.”

  “I was thinking more of barbecue….”

  Jack could suddenly smell hot metal. The Gourmet returned to Jack’s line of sight. The tool he held was a simple loop of metal attached to a black handle with a cord trailing from it. Thin wisps of gray smoke were beginning to rise from the metal.

  “This is used to light charcoal,” the Gourmet said. “Not as common as they once were, with so many people using gas grills.”

  The metal was beginning to glow red hot. “Still,” the Gourmet said, “it’s a useful instrument. As I’m sure you’ll agree…”

  Three hours in.

  “You know why this is happening to you?” the Gourmet asked.

  “Because I deserve it,” Jack mumbled.

  “No,” the Gourmet said patiently. “Because I want it to. My will is supreme. Your will is nothing.”

  “I am nothing,” Jack managed. “Djinn-X …is nothing. Heh.”

  “That’s right. Djinn-X is nothing.”

  “Just a shell,” Jack whispered. “Can’t hide behind it anymore.”

  “No. You can’t.”

  “Good,” Jack rasped. “I’m the one who should suffer. Me. Me.”

  The Gourmet frowned. “Explain.”

  Jack raised his eyes. There was no defiance in them.

  “Make me,” he said.

  Five hours in.

  “I may have made a mistake,” the Gourmet said. “Your endurance is impressive, but it shows little intelligence. Eating you would be a step down.”

  Jack didn’t answer. He had passed out.

  “Ah well,” the Gourmet said. “I suppose we can continue this later. It’s almost time to get ready for the delivery, anyway.” He turned out the lights and locked the door behind him.

  Jack came back to consciousness in the dark, burns on his torso screaming at him to wake up. His head swam and his body ached, but he knew where he was.

  “Nikki,” he whispered. The Gourmet still didn’t know about her; she was his last hope. His last chance.

  All he could do was make sure he was ready.

  “I’m gonna fucking kill him,” Nikki said. She wasn’t sure if she was talking about the Gourmet or Jack.

  She was driving down a two-lane highway through the desert, through a landscape dotted with low, yellow-brown hills and dusty clumps of scrub. The smell of sage underlined the car’s air-conditioning. She hadn’t been there for the actual hand-off—Jack was supposed to have done that—but if everything had gone as planned, the Gourmet was no more than a mile ahead of her. The GPS signal was supposedly good for up to forty, so unless he jumped in an airplane she should be all right.

  Except she didn’t know what had happened to Jack.

  What if the Patron had somehow gotten him? She didn’t know how that was possible, but her gut kept telling her it was. But then, her gut told her a lot of things about the Patron—and for once in her life
, she was trying not to listen.

  The Patron terrified her.

  Out of all the monsters they’d hunted, she knew he was the worst. Any of the postings Jack had shown her had sent gooseflesh rippling down her back. Nikki had faced evil in more than one guise, from explosive craziness to cold, methodical sadism… but the Patron was something else entirely. She had no doubt he was both highly intelligent and clinically insane, but what bothered her the most was his imagination. His ability to take something sweet and pervert it, twist it through horror and so far beyond it took on a kind of striking surreality all its own—one that was somehow more sickening than the act itself. Like two mirrors facing each other, one beauty and one horror, with his victims throwing endless reflections back and forth between them…

  He wasn’t just a monster. He was alien, something as far beyond murder as a computer was beyond an abacus; she was afraid of him in the same way some people were afraid of spiders. She would die rather than fall into his hands.

  Unless, of course, someone else killed her first.

  She had to consider the possibility she was heading into a trap. Jack gone, the Patron claiming he knew Djinn-X was dead—things were spinning out of control. Maybe it was time to just leave, stay on this highway and keep driving. Hit Vegas, or maybe California. She still had a few good years left in her….

  Sure. Wind up just another old hooker, turning cracked and brown under the West Coast sun. Live in a run-down motel and crack a beer first thing in the morning to make the day go by faster. The days, the weeks, the empty months and years.

  The GPS showed a change in direction: her target had turned onto a side road. She spotted it a minute later by the dusty cloud still hanging in the air, kicked up by the Gourmet’s tires.

  She slowed to make the corner, but never gave the highway a second glance.

  The road led to a mobile home in the middle of nowhere. Nikki pulled off onto the shoulder as soon as she spotted the place; fortunately, the rise of a low hill blocked her from sight.

  She got out of the car, taking a pair of binoculars with her. A lizard scurried away and into the meager shadow of a clump of sagebrush. The sun was still low, but the heat was starting to climb.

  She crouched down and peered over the crest of the hill. A few hundred yards away, a white trailer sat at the end of the road. A black Jeep was parked in the front; to the rear, the rounded bulk of a quonset jutted like a barrel on its side, half-submerged in a flat and sandy ocean. Other than the slowly settling dust, she could see no movement at all.

  “Okay, fuckwit, which building are you in? Eeny meenie, miney moe…”

  Time to make a decision.

  “Damn you, Jack,” she muttered. “If I wait, he’s gonna find that tracking unit and rabbit. If I go in alone…”

  She could what? Die? Wind up an entrée for a psychopath?

  “Least I don’t have to worry about funeral expenses,” Nikki said. “And who knows, maybe I’ll wind up giving the fucker heartburn.”

  She went back to the car and got her pack. She left the car where it was and struck out deeper into the desert, keeping the hill between her and the buildings. When she was a hundred yards out, she started angling to the side, staying low and behind the sage.

  The Gourmet could hardly wait.

  It had gone perfectly. The courier delivering the package had been more than happy to give it to him in the elevator; no more than a business card had been necessary for ID. He had driven straight home, considering recipes all the way. Perhaps he would pickle the tongue….

  Once he got in, he took the package straight to the workshop. With Djinn-X captive in the next room, he hardly thought he had anything to worry about—but still, there was no excuse for sloppy security.

  His metal detector was an old model, a disc the size of a dinner plate mounted at the bottom of a five-foot handle. He put the package on the floor and passed the disc over it—to his surprise, something registered immediately.

  Fillings? Or something more dangerous?

  He moved the box immediately to his workbench. He wasn’t terribly worried about explosives—any-thing traveling on an airplane would already have been checked for chemical traces. But that still left many, many possibilities.

  He was excited, rather than afraid. He’d laid and sprung many traps, and no one ever suspected a thing until the very last second. He’d often wondered what would happen if the roles were reversed; now was his chance to find out. Was he clever enough to figure out the package’s secret without it destroying him?

  He considered options. He believed in the inviolability of the Stalking Ground; the system was a good one, and he didn’t think the authorities could crack it. Even if one of The Pack were caught, it was in their own best interests to keep the website a secret.

  So the surprise was courtesy of a member of The Pack. Road Rage had no motive that he could see—but maybe the motive wasn’t his. If Djinn-X had detected his attempts to track the location of the Stalking Ground, perhaps this was the webmaster’s try at a preemptive strike. He could have offered Road Rage some sort of deal to take him out.

  But Djinn-X would want to recover the head himself, without destroying it. Which meant…

  A tracking device.

  He got a box cutter, and slit open the top of the package.

  Nikki approached the quonset from the rear. There were no windows that she could see, but there was a door. As she got closer, she could smell animal manure, though she didn’t hear anything that sounded like livestock.

  Gun out, she cautiously tried the doorknob. Locked.

  She thought for a second, then crept around the side of the building. When she got to the corner, she peered around the edge toward the trailer. It had windows, but shades blocked the two she could see.

  The front of the quonset had two doors, a big double-sided one in the center and a regular-sized one next to it. She took a deep breath, then moved cautiously toward the smaller door. She tried very hard to keep her feet from crunching on the gravel underfoot.

  The door was unlocked.

  She pushed it open.

  Inside the box was a plastic bag, sealed with a strip of tape. The Gourmet examined it from the top carefully, then slit the box down the sides. There were no wires he could see.

  Inside the bag was a human head. He studied it without touching it, looking into the glazed, bulging eyes. “Hello, Closer,” the Gourmet said.

  When he was satisfied there was nothing attached to the outside of the bag, he opened it. The head was still fresh, so the only odor was a slight coppery smell. He lifted it by the hair out of the bag and onto a plastic sheet on the table. He picked up the metal detector and waved it over both the remains of the box and the head; as he’d suspected, the metal was in the head itself.

  He pried open the mouth—nothing obvious there. But when he upended it and used a penlight to peer down the stump of the neck, he spotted a slit in the upper palate.

  He reached in and poked a finger into the slit. Where he should have felt the soft resilence of brain tissue, there was something hard and angular.

  He withdrew his hand and considered.

  Abruptly, the perfect solution came to him. A wide smile on his face, he picked up the head and took it into the kitchen.

  “Well, fuck me with a wire hairbrush,” Nikki said under her breath.

  The inside of the quonset looked like one of those roadside zoos, the kind where you paid five bucks to see a cage full of sleeping snakes and an old, toothless alligator. A large tank—five hundred gallons, easy—against one wall contained dozens of octopi. Empty jars and lids littered the bottom. Nikki had always thought of the creatures as being gray or pinkish, but these specimens rippled with bands of color, from a deep blue to an orangey green. Many were attached to the glass by suckered tentacles, while others pulsed through the water, disembodied lungs trailing ropy guts.

  A face stared out at her from behind a metal mesh. For one queasy second she thoug
ht it was a child, dressed in black and somehow disfigured; then her perception adjusted and she recognized it as a chimpanzee. It gazed at her silently with sad brown eyes, its wrinkled fingers hooked around the wires of its cage.

  And of course, there was the elephant.

  It was blithely stuffing hay into its mouth, and hardly spared her a glance. It wasn’t in any sort of pen—only a thin cord attached to one of its hind legs tethered it to the wall, a cord that looked barely strong enough to restrain a large dog.

  She had only a moment to take it all in—and then the two poodles in the large pen beside the chimp started barking.

  The Gourmet flicked on the fluorescents. “Look what just arrived!” he said cheerfully, dangling the severed head by its stringy brown hair.

  Jack blinked, tried to focus. “No, thanks,” he managed. “I had Italian for lunch.”

  “Oh, you’re not going to dine. You’re going to be the sous chef—that means you help prepare the ingredients.” He placed the head squarely on Jack’s crotch, so the dead eyes seemed to be looking down the length of Jack’s body disapprovingly.

  The Gourmet rummaged in a drawer, brought out an old revolver. “Genuine six-shooter,” he said, holding it up for Jack to see. “Old, but perfectly functional.” With his other hand, he took a long, thin filleting knife from a rack.

  He put the gun to Jack’s head—then cut the ropes binding his wrists.

  The Gourmet stepped back, returned the knife to its slot while keeping the gun trained on his prisoner. Not that Jack was in any shape to jump him—his arms were all but useless.

  “Sit up,” the Gourmet said.

  “I can’t,” Jack replied. “You tenderized my arms, remember?”

  His captor leaned forward, grabbed Jack by the hair and pulled him upright. Jack tried to support himself with his arms, but they wouldn’t take his weight; when the Gourmet released him, he crashed back onto the table, crying out as pain lanced from his wrists to his shoulders.