Held, Pushed, and 22918 (3 Complete Novels)

by Kimberly A Bettes

  “Is that so?”

  “It certainly is. To show my appreciation, I’d like to cook for you. Dinner tonight, perhaps?”

  “You want to cook dinner for me?”

  “Certainly. I believe you’ll agree that I’m a fantastic cook. I’ll whip you up anything you want. Anything at all.”

  “And then what?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “In order for you to cook for me, I’d have to unfasten those straps and let you off the table. I imagine the first thing you’d do is attack me.”

  “I most certainly would not.”

  “How do I know that for sure?”

  “I give you my word.”

  “Okay. Let’s say I take you for your word. I let you up, you don’t attack me, we go upstairs together, and you cook the dinner. We eat. Then what? You just come back down here, get up on that table, and let me put the straps back on you?”

  “If that’s what you would want me to do, then yes. That’s what I would do. For you.”

  “Right.”

  “I’m being honest here, Nicole. If you wanted me to come back down here, I would. But I would hope that after seeing what a pleasant time we can have together, you’d change your mind about it. About me.”

  “All right. So let’s say we have a nice evening and I change my mind about you. I suddenly decide you’re a great guy. Then what happens? Are we supposed to just go on our merry way, living our separate lives as if none of this has ever happened?”

  “That’s one possibility.”

  “Is there another?”

  “Of course. It’s possible that we would have such a good time together you’d want to stay. The both of us could live here, together. We can be happy, Nicole. I’ve known this from the moment I saw you. You can make me every bit as happy as I can make you. We can love each other as no two people have ever loved each other before. What do you say?”

  For a moment, she was silent, hopefully mulling over his words and considering his proposal.

  “I say you’re crazier than half the people in Alpine Grove.”

  “Maybe I am. But what about you?”

  “What about me?” She unfolded her arms and placed her hands on her bony hips.

  “You’re just as crazy as I am. If not as much, then at least half as much. I mean, you’re here, in my house, doing the same thing to me that I did to others. Which, by the way, is exactly why you say you’re upset with me. Does this make any sense to you, Nicole?”

  “It makes perfect sense, asshole. I don’t enjoy hurting other people. You do. I don’t enjoy watching others bleed. You do. I’m only here to show you how it feels and to serve justice.”

  He chuckled. “What gives you the right to dole out justice? Who gave you the authority to deliver a punishment unto me or anyone else?”

  She stepped closer to him. “You did. On a Tuesday afternoon, you wrapped your arm around my shoulder, pressed the barrel of a gun against my ribs, and forced me into my own car, where you drove me to your house and locked me away from the world, away from my family. I don’t have to tell you what happened inside that house. You were there. You know. It’s not my right to give you a punishment. It’s my duty. I’m the only one who got away. The only one you didn’t kill. I have to do this. Not only for myself, but for all the others who weren’t so lucky.”

  So that was it. That’s what all this was about. She felt obligated to be here, torturing him, making him remember things he’d done. Well the joke was on her because he loved remembering those things. He purposefully thought back to all those days and nights, hurting each and every one of those dirty whores. He liked it. It made him happy. Everyone had a ‘happy place’ that they’d go to in their mind when times were tough. For some, it was a beach. For others, their grandmother’s house. But for Ron, it was a dank basement with a naked bitch tied up and bleeding, her screams echoing all around him.

  “If you start a life with me, Nicole, all that is over. Never again will I even look at another woman. I’ll seal up the basement, if you like. Block it off. Nail the door shut. Better yet, we can move. We’ll get a house that doesn’t even have a basement. We’ll leave the past in the past, where it belongs, and we’ll start fresh. We can begin a whole new life together.”

  He still hoped to sway Nicole, to change her mind and convince her to let him up from the table. However, the steely look on her face told him he wasn’t getting anywhere with her.

  “I am going to start a new life, Ron. I have to because you ruined the one I had. You have no idea the trouble you’ve caused me, the damage you’ve done. And you don’t care. I could tell you about the nightmares. The panic attacks. The endless string of sleepless nights. The agony of losing my family. But it wouldn’t do me any good. You’re a heartless prick who would only find pleasure in my pain.”

  “Nicole—”

  “Shut up. There’s nothing you can say. You can’t change who you are any more than I can change you. My only option is to do the world a favor and see that you can never, ever hurt anyone again.”

  She turned away from him, leaving him stunned that he’d been unable to manipulate her with his words. Never before had he failed to talk his way into or out of a situation. He was charismatic, and he had a way with words. He could make people happily do whatever he wanted them to do simply by saying it in a way that gave them the impression it was what they wanted too. Not this time.

  He didn’t dwell on his failure for long, though. He soon began to worry about what her plans were for him. As he stared in silence at the back of her thin body, he wondered what she was thinking, what she was doing.

  It was no surprise that Nicole would be the one on whom his charms didn’t work. She was special. He’d always known that. But the fact that she was too smart for his wiles meant only one thing.

  He was in trouble.

  21

  I turned my back on Ron, leaving him speechless. That was fine by me. I was sick of hearing his bull shit. It was amazing that he honestly thought I was going to believe that load of crap. There was no doubt in my mind that if given half the chance, he would kill me. I wasn’t about to let him off that table while he still had a pulse.

  Ron kept a lot of stuff in the basement, all neatly organized and labeled. Afraid of what I would find but curious to know what he had that I might able to use against him, I searched through the cardboard boxes and plastic containers, being careful each time I opened one. There was no telling what I would find inside.

  I took great care to ignore the jars of feet on the shelf above the work table. It was disturbing enough to know they were there; I sure didn’t want to see them.

  While I rummaged, Ron found his voice. The sound of it annoyed me to the point that I considered turning on the television that hung on the back wall in order to drown him out, but I didn’t do it for two reasons. One, I wanted to be able to hear him in case he got loose and tried sneaking up behind me again. And two, I was curious as to what he might possibly have to say.

  Turns out, it was nothing important. It was the same old lines as earlier, said using different words. I let him blather on uninterrupted about how great our life together would be, which he did for nearly twenty minutes. I wondered if even he was starting to believe the nonsense he was saying.

  On the top shelf above his work bench—several feet away from the jars of feet—I found a small wooden box. I pulled it down and opened it, removing the lid and setting it aside. At first, I didn’t know what it was I was seeing. The container was filled with shiny things, all mingled together. I shook the box gently, and then it hit me.

  The box contained body jewelry of all types. Earrings, nose rings, tongue studs, lip rings, eyebrow rings, as well as rings for female genitalia. Some of them appeared to be rusty, but when I looked closer, I realized that what I thought was rust was actually blood. And worse, most of the pieces of jewelry still had pieces of flesh clinging to them, some of which were shriveled up and dry, others still pale
and fresh.

  Remembering what he had done to Crystal while forcing me to watch, I became furious. There was no doubt that the very pieces of jewelry he’d so cruelly ripped out of her body were laying in this box, blended in among the jewelry torn from the bodies of so many other women.

  Using the back of my hand, I wiped the tears from my eyes. When my vision cleared, I saw all the tools lined up neatly before me and I had an idea.

  A minute later, I stood at the foot of the embalming table glaring at Ron as he stared at me with wide eyes, trying to hide his fear by talking. His mouth moved. I saw it. But I didn’t hear what he was saying. All I could hear was Crystal’s cries, her screams and pleas for him to stop, to please stop. But he didn’t. She screamed and screamed until her throat gave out and stopped producing sound, while he kept right on going.

  He was going to pay for what he had done to her, for what he’d done to all of them. Including me.

  With the knife in one hand and the pliers in the other, I began.

  I used the knife to pop up the scab on Ron’s left foot, just beneath his big toe. When there was a large enough piece of it bent back, I locked the pliers onto it and yanked once, twice, three times, ripping off the majority of the foot-long scab in one large piece. I opened the jaws of the pliers and dropped the scab onto the table between his ankles. Then I moved on to his right foot, performing the same task. Less of the scab came off of his other foot—only about half of it—but that was okay. It would be enough.

  As soon as the scabs were torn off, Ron’s feet began to bleed once more, but I paid no attention to the dark red goo. Instead, I focused on the job at hand, driven by my anger.

  From the box of disgusting mementoes, I pulled the biggest pieces of jewelry and shoved them one at a time into the raw and bleeding flesh of Ron’s feet. I pushed them hard and fast, burying each as deep as it would go. Often times, I’d push the ring in so far that once I pulled my hand away, the metal was lost amidst the mangled mess.

  Feeling that it wasn’t enough to simply push the jewelry into the soles of his feet like pushpins on a corkboard, I used the hammer to drive in each piece even further, like nails into a two-by-four.

  I didn’t stop until the box was empty.

  Tink, tink, tink.

  Over Ron’s caterwauling, I could barely hear the sound of the hammer as it clanked against the metal. When I could no longer see any of the pieces of jewelry or hear the sound of the hammer pinging against them, I realized I was just pounding the raw meat of his feet, which by this time resembled raw ground beef.

  Still running on anger but with no more jewelry to embed in his feet, I threw the empty box across the room and picked up the biggest scab from the table.

  If I lived a thousand years, I would never forget the things I’d witnessed while I was held in Ron’s basement. Not the sick things he did to the women he kidnapped or the agony and terror on their faces as he did it.

  Maybe it was because Crystal was the last woman I’d witnessed murdered at his hands, or maybe it was because what he’d done to her was the worst of them all, but in my mind—as fresh now as the day it happened—I saw Ron cut off the girl’s tattoos one at a time and force-feed them to her.

  With his eyes squeezed shut and his head thrown back, mouth open wide as he screamed, he didn’t realize that I had approached his head.

  It was perfect.

  Moving quickly, I crammed the hard, crusty scab into his mouth and clamped my hand over it to prevent him from spitting it out. With my other hand, I pushed up on his chin, trying to keep his mouth closed so he couldn’t bite me.

  For a few seconds, I succeeded. But then his adrenaline kicked in, giving him the strength he needed to fight me off and open his mouth. He jerked his head back and forth as he spat out the scab.

  Then he retched.

  To avoid getting any of his vomit on me, I jumped back and stood a few feet away, watching as he heaved again and again.

  When he was finished spilling the contents of his stomach—partially digested dog food and water—I sprayed him clean with the water hose. His puke washed away easily enough, but the scab didn’t. It stuck to the steel table, lodging itself between his head and shoulder, which is where I left it.

  I’d considered leaving the vomit there for him to wallow in as well, but I didn’t want to see or smell it later. I didn’t have the iron stomach that Ron did. So I washed it away, but left the scab as a reminder to him of what I was capable of doing.

  I left him in the basement alone, yelling and cursing in agony.

  Embedding the body jewelry into his feet had been a bloodier mess than I’d realized. In my rage, I didn’t notice and I didn’t care. But once I was back upstairs and had calmed down, I noticed the blood covering my hands and forearms, as well as the smears of blood and drops of vomit that had splattered across the front of my shirt.

  I took a hot shower, scrubbing my skin until it hurt, and then I changed back into the other set of clothes I’d brought with me. Just as before, I washed the dirty clothes and tried to put the event out of my mind.

  In Ron’s office, I read the next few chapters of his novel, stopping only when I realized that I was crying.

  While it was true that what I was doing was cathartic in many ways and absolutely necessary, it was also true that it was taking a toll on my emotions. I wasn’t cut out for torturing another person, even if that other person was Ron. Every time I thought about what I’d done to him already, my stomach rolled and a wave of nausea washed over me.

  Reading about what he’d done to those women was nearly as bad. Seeing the words, accounts of things that had actually happened, saddened me deeply. It took me to a place I didn’t want to be, a place I’d already been. I felt their pain and sadness, and I wanted to take it away for them. Of course I couldn’t because they were dead, killed by the man in the basement.

  All I could for them now was make the son of a bitch pay.

  And he would pay dearly.

  22

  I didn’t return to the basement until the next day after breakfast. Instead of spending the evening dealing with Ron, I chose to drink wine, eat popcorn, and watch television. While he suffered in the basement, cold and in pain, I relaxed upstairs, comfortable and warm.

  When I entered the room, he was awake and staring blankly at the ceiling.

  I approached him.

  “Geez, Ron. You stink. It’s really unbecoming of a man to smell so terrible.” Using his own words against him was funny to the point that I almost laughed. “What is that smell?”

  Without moving his head or eyes, he replied, “It’s feces.”

  “Shit?”

  “Yes, Nicole. It seems I’ve defecated on myself. Or shit, as you say. Would you be a dear and clean it off? Thanks.”

  I thought about not cleaning it at all, just leaving it lay there in soft clumps under his testicles and between his thighs, but it really did smell. The thought of that odor lingering in the basement day in and day out was enough to make me get the hose.

  As I used the force from the stream of water to push Ron’s shit into the trough of the table, I noticed that his hands and feet had turned a pale shade of blue. It seems I’d pulled the leather restraints too tight when I’d strapped him down. It must’ve cut off the circulation. I wasn’t about to loosen them and give him a chance to get away. In a day or so it wouldn’t matter anyway. The circulation would be cut off from far more than just his hands and feet.

  “Do your hands hurt, Ron?” I asked out of curiosity. They certainly looked like they might.

  “Not as much as my feet.”

  I could see that. After all that I’d done to his feet, I imagine he was praying to lose the feeling in them.

  “Would you like some water while I have the hose out?”

  “I suppose.”

  After Ron drank, I returned the hose to its place and leaned against the work table, facing him with my arms folded across my chest.

  He s
till didn’t look at me, just continued to stare at the ceiling.

  I wondered what he was thinking, but then realized I probably didn’t want to know.

  Another minute ticked by slowly, and then finally I broke the silence.

  “I tore the flesh from her bones, saving the feet as a souvenir of my handiwork,” I quoted. He didn’t turn his head my way, but I saw a flicker of recognition on his face. I continued. “Her screams were shrill, deafening to a normal man. But I was no normal man. My ears were used to the screams of a terrified and desperate woman much like a construction worker’s ears grow accustomed to the sound of a jackhammer tearing through concrete, or the way a lumberjack’s ears grow accustomed to the sound of a chainsaw ripping through wood.”

  “Buzz.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s buzz of a chainsaw. Not sound.”

  “Oh. My apologies.”

  “I see you’ve been reading my novel.”

  “I have.”

  “I don’t appreciate you snooping through my things.”

  “Well I don’t appreciate you ruining my life, so I guess we both have boundary issues.”

  For a moment, neither of us spoke. He continued to stare at the ceiling and I continued to stare at him. When the silence was finally broken this time, it was him that spoke first.

  “It’s fascinating, you know.”

  “What’s fascinating? That I haven’t killed you yet? That the tables have turned on you? That the citizens of this country let the government get away with so much? Or perhaps you’re referring to the price of gasoline. Or maybe America’s love affair with guns. There are a lot of possibilities here, Ron. You’re going to have to be more specific.”