Extreme Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

  “Sorry, sir...” muttered the clerk into the phone. “I'm afraid that Dr. Coran has not yet arrived, but our records show that she has made reservations and is expected.”

  “Expected when?”

  “We can't precisely say, sir, but her room has been guaranteed for late arrival.” A glance at the clock radio on the bedside table told Feydor it was nearing six thirty-five. Again, the woman on the bed painfully, mournfully moaned, her legs kicking out as if a bad dream were chasing her.

  The clerk, hearing the moan, asked, “Is everything else all right, sir?”

  “Yes, yes . .. thank you,” he told the clerk and hung up.

  He removed the handkerchief gag from the woman's mouth to allow her to breathe easily. The gag no doubt had his prints on it from earlier touching, but this mattered not. The fire would obliterate any hint of it.

  He had earlier laid open the Samsonite bag he'd carried to the room, and he began preparations, laying out all the tools he'd brought in his case. Lifting a Polaroid Instamatic camera, he took a before shot and mumbled, “The right tool for the right job.”

  The sight through the camera lens gave him a slight rise in the heat of his body, the red returning, a volcanic, liquid fire below the epidermis. His penis hardened but little, se­men stirring slightly, sluggishly with his blood, but that part must await the burning flesh as promised by Satan, his reward.

  It was a feeling he had not had in many, many years, not since childhood. He knew now that the Antichrist had likely spawned him, fed a fiery liquid mush to him as a child, coddled and nurtured him. That it had been Satan in his head all those times he'd burned things both inanimate and animate. A bit of fear along with anticipation and re­morse rose in him along with his sexual organ.

  After having been caught and punished many times, young Feydor had simply stopped burning things when he became older. The consequences were too great, the suf­fering at the hand of his earthly father too much. He'd become interested in psychology and psychiatry largely to understand himself. In college and graduate school, he'd excelled and had come out a practicing psychiatrist, be­lieving he now could control the fire that raged within. He'd practiced medicine for only three years when the voices inside him began. It was the voices of the phantoms behind the irises of his eyes. Next came the years of hos­pitalization and treatments, all amounting to nothing. No one could help him. Not even Wetherbine.

  No one until now... Satan would be angry with him if Coran was a no-show.

  He tried to shake off the fear that Satan would punish him, but a sense of dread overwhelmed as he pictured the spread of the red rash to all parts of his body and brain.

  It wouldn't matter to Satan that it wasn't his fault that Coran hadn't arrived. Wouldn't matter if she canceled and was a no-show. The punishment would be the same. It didn't matter that it wasn't his fault.

  He busied himself with the materials he'd brought for the occasion. Wasting no more time, he dug around for the screwdriver, located it, and laid it on the dresser along­side the pint-sized can of petroleum he'd brought, and be­side this, the small canister of butane with its praying mantis-like wand. The torch would set off the fire instantly and quickly, and it would be over, and Feydor would once again feel some relief from his demons, and he'd be a step closer on the journey, saving his soul from the everlasting tortures already assaulting him.

  As for the girl... he truly didn't want to think about the girl, but Satan had selected her, not him; and he had said she was a traitor, and so punishment must be meted out. And if not her, it would be Feydor branded as a traitor and someone would come after him with petrol and butane and a plan that would return him to the Devil's Well....

  The hotel was jam-packed with not only forensics ex­perts but also two other conventions going on simultane­ously. The hallways were littered with men in hats and name tags. On the elevator going up, Jessica gave a thought to the Forensic Science Association of America, the FSAA. She'd been a member for nearly twenty years and had never actively participated as a board member, nor did she wish to now. She wondered how people as busy as she could possibly find the time to be treasurer or secretary or to steer such a cumbersome organization down a direct path to such a thing as a successful convention. She believed there was no more cursed a thing on earth than the possibility that someone would ask her to direct a committee of forensic people to organize such an ex­travaganza. Obviously, now, she had gotten what she de­served. Some committee of her peers had decided that Vegas, of all places, would make for a great place to hold their annual convention. Like complaining over an election when she hadn't voted, she had no right; she had gotten precisely what she and the other hands-off members de­served, because she had not gotten involved.

  But now that she was here, she would make the best of it, she scolded herself.

  When she settled into her room atop the Flamingo Hil­ton, Jessica did as always when entering a hotel room. She immediately turned on the air-conditioning unit, flooding the place with as much cool air as possible, and she tore back the drapes over the window to take in the full view of the city from atop the skyscraper. She felt as if she were a mile above the city, overlooking the busy, frenetic world that money and gambling had built, this modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah.

  The entire city paid homage to P. T. Barnum's famous line “There's a sucker born every minute.” Watching the comings and goings of the air traffic, Jessica said aloud to the now winking lights of the city, “And the airline industry would add, 'a sucker flown in every minute....' “

  Barnum would be on his knees at this altar, his eyes welling with tears, his wildest schemes eclipsed by this town. It was a city where Mafia gambling was not only tolerated but also how the city got its payroll. It gave her pause, recalling poor little Grand Cayman and its graft problems, so inconsequential to this.

  Vegas was gambling's greatest temple, the world's larg­est roulette wheel, and perhaps that was its greatest ap­peal—the fact that it imitated life as most people felt it, knew it, believed it to be: a boundlessly huge, universal gamble. The gamble might one day pay off; in the meantime, you kept coming back to drink of it, always hoping that one day your “luck” would change before life simply crushed you. The gamble might be fun in and of itself, but no one was getting out of the game alive. Consequently, the more dangerous, the higher the stakes, the more the payoff in feeling for those otherwise dead nerve endings; the higher the stakes, the deeper the fall, the pain, the suf­fering when you lost your gamble with relationships, with life.

  Cars, trucks, moving vans, trains on tracks—industry was moving far below her now where she stood, all those working machines and people twenty stories below her. She wondered how many, at the end of the day, blew their hard-earned cash at the massive casino downstairs, which filled a football-field-sized lobby with wildly flashing Christmas tree colored lights, slots, and gambling tables.

  Jessica turned from the window, inspected the place where she intended living for two nights. She'd best un­pack, hang out her things, especially what she intended to wear tonight, and ready herself for a shower. As she did so, she found her thoughts returning to life's ever-changing game of chance.

  In her line of work, gambling often meant taunting death itself, and while she had been lucky on many occasions, Jessica believed in luck only insofar as she could control it, make it work for her, create it by action and deed. In her worldview, there was no such thing as some entity called Luck sitting out there like a Rumpelstiltskin to be tapped into, or to fall in debt to. Chance, coincidence, the roll of the dice all occurred independent of personality and action, just as one molecule chanced into another. But when a person put faith and self-reliance and confidence on the line to assert herself, she became lucky—lucky even to be around.

  It wasn't luck that befell any hapless one. This regard­less of the housewife who steps into a 7-Eleven, purchases a ticket, and wins the lottery. There was no luck involved, only random chance. Jessica believed
luck to be a con­scious lifestyle, a choice.

  She finished her unpacking and checked the time: six- forty. Still a good hour remaining before the registration and reception downstairs. She returned to the window and stared out beyond the Strip to the gorgeous, fire-red moun­tains in the distance.

  On the plane and on their way in from the airport, she and J.T. had seen how the city sprawled and crept like an octopus from this central crown, how an entire world of schools, hospitals, malls, neighborhoods, housing devel­opments, and suburban areas now filtering into neighbor­ing valleys and snuggling amid the outlying mountain ranges had grown up around Bugsy Segal's Flamingo Club. Here, as in any city in the United States, there were buildings given over to governmental affairs and offices, politicians, judges, lawyers, doctors, teachers, and “nor­mal” people leading “straight” lives but whose jobs, while on the surface independent of both the casino trade and the tourism industry, were inextricably entwined with these trades. For underlying every brick of public improve­ment, every referendum, every move made, if you were a Vegas homeowner, franchise owner, doughnut salesman, or car mechanic, gambling was not only in your face, it also represented the elixir—as important as water—that kept this town alive amid a desert. Gambling purchased and brought in more electrical power and water than any city in the United States, and here, in the midst of one of the driest deserts on earth, every man, woman, and child had more water to waste on their lawns, cars, and them­selves than any other place on the planet—all due to the mighty dollar and the thing that brought it here, greed and a healthy dislike for laws that attempted to legislate against human nature and addiction.

  Jessica's mind's eye took in the cityscape, the shapes and the florid lights, and it said to her, “This is a city created on the premise that if you are artful and a dodger, if you can play exquisitely well on the weaknesses of the human animal, then you can become rich beyond all rea­son, and if you can convince those you are fleecing that they are having a good time in the bargain, then all the better. It is a city where the hotelier puts you up for a price, allows you to gamble within his walls, to shovel over any funds you'd like for the privilege, feeds you at a price then and there, and finally offers you a grand Broad- way-style musical or revue, again for a hefty sum, all un­der one roof. A thing of beauty for those in control, and the house never loses, for even when it might lose, like some pagan god, it wins on....”

  In fact, there was nothing in Vegas that didn't carry a price tag, but millions of Americans a year were convinced that anything in Vegas was worth its price, including the fun of losing.

  Cabbies depended on the good graces of those whom they carted between gaming tables and big-ticket shows. And gambling table people depended equally on tips. No one working in Vegas at such jobs was making a killing; most were barely eking out a living, in fact. Neither show­girls nor hotel clerks, hairdressers nor prostitutes, were paid well. It was a right-to-work state—no unions; those who lived and worked in Vegas did so at the mercy of employers, and there was always someone waiting in the wings, anxious for your job.

  Jessica kicked away her shoes. She continued to un­dress, trying to get the dust of this evolving city off of her, and trying to get its problems out of her head. But even as she tried, her concerns beat an anthem in her brain.

  Beneath the surface of the blinding neon rivers over which she again looked, of light-fed mosaics and facades, she saw the poverty-stricken and the homeless out there, while inside this hotel everyone else fed the slots. This fantasy-world denial of so much misery even beneath the flood of light and golden crowns, silver columns, rainbow arches, pink pinnacles, and onyx pyramids simply bothered Jessica to no end.

  And it was to no end that she worried about such mat­ters. Nothing short of a new species of Homo erectus would ever change people, and any attempt to legislate smoking, drinking, or gambling or drugs—what people loved—was doomed to failure, even in the face of facts such as those telling people about the connection between heart disease and cigarettes, about black lung, or that more than half of all vehicular fatalities came about by drugs or drinking and driving. Gambling, even if it was with their children's lives at stake, in one form or another, existed in every state, in every household, in every life. People gam­bled with the rent money in D.C., with their brains on drugs in Chicago, with the last vestige of clothing on their backs in Seattle.

  The U.S. government couldn't do a damn thing about such people, and had in fact sanctioned preying on the weak, the deluded, and the poor with its own brand of gambling. State governments had long since bought into lotteries to raise revenues, doing exactly what Bugsy Segal and every gangster since him had done, preying on weak­ness. What man or government could stand in the way of progress? And who or what could stem the tide of human ignorance, with its underlying cousin, avarice, and sister, poverty, and brother, powerlessness?

  Like pornography, it all fell under that umbrella catch- phrase that Jessica saw as a ridiculous oxymoron, adult entertainment. Yet here was an entire, brazen city depend­ent on all of this. If it existed anywhere else in the world, Americans would scream out for an air strike against the immorality of it all. But here it was king, and it was proud; the most famous monument to gambling, greed, and so- called adult entertainment ever known to man, sprawled across the desert landscape like some giant Babylonian whore.

  Maybe she was getting too moralistic in her old age, she gibed herself. Maybe J.T. was right; maybe she should lighten up, if only she could.

  It still seemed an odd place for a scientific gathering of the minds, with or without her moralizing. Certainly it was the last place on earth she would have placed a convention of her peers, but the Forensic Science Association of America wasn't always gifted with precognition or simple foresight, and like any cross section of America, it was not without its share of gamblers, drinkers, druggies, and womanizers.

  She now located and unlocked the dry bar and sampled a wee bottle of wine, which she sipped from a plastic cup. She then returned to the window again, standing there in her bra, her alone time fleeting. She again located her best evening gown, which she intended to wear tonight at the reception, and upset with the fold lines still clinging to it, she took it into the bathroom and hung it on the door. A hot shower would do both her and the dress some good, she reasoned. Half undressed for her shower, she was star­tled by her ringing telephone.

  Jim, she wondered, hoped, her heart leaping.

  Who else knows I'm here? she silently asked on the second ring, making her way toward the phone. Or was it J.T. already calling her to go downstairs? She'd asked for a little time, some privacy. On the third ring, she lifted the receiver.

  “Yes?”

  “Is... is'sis Doc-tor... Doctor Jess-i-ca Cccor- Coran?”

  “Yes, it is. Can I help you?” She didn't know the stri­dent, panting female voice on the other end. The caller sounded tearful, as if she must choke out every word.

  “Doctor... I... I'm suppose' to tell you... tell you...” The woman sounded as if she were on some­thing, every word labored. “Yes?” Damn it, girl, Jessica thought, spit it out.

  “... my name.”

  “Please do.” Was she dealing with a child?

  “It's... it's... C-Chris...”

  “Chris? Chris who?” She didn't know anyone by the name.

  Gasping as if unable to breathe, whimpering as if hurt, the girl's voice replied, “Lor-en-tian.”

  “I'm sorry, but I—”

  “Gotta help me… Stinks like hell…”

  “I don't know you or anyone named Lor... Loren- tian?” It sounded like a stage name. “Are you hurt? In some sort of trouble? Are you trying to reach your par­ents?” Jessica wondered how this Chris person had gotten her name and number, what the stranger wanted, even as she wondered at the girl's age, if she were a runaway. But why had she dialed Jessica? She'd asked for Jessica by name, and now Jessica grew impatient at the silence on the other end, unhappy that she wa
s getting no answers to her questions.

  “He's taken my clothes off. .. going to... to kill me.”

  “Who, Chris? Give me a name. Who're you talking—”

  “Tied me... to the bed....”

  “Where are you? Tell me where!”

  “Doused gasoline all over me... go... go... going to burn me!”

  Suddenly there was no more.

  “Hello, hello?” Jessica asked.

  But she got no answer. All that Jessica heard now on the other end was a garbled, keening sound, the noise of a wholly frightened animal. Then came a scream, which was immediately followed by a sudden violent whoosh of what sounded like forced air, a soft explosion, intermin­gled with a strangled cry of excruciating pain; then fol­lowed the crackling roar of what sounded like a raging fire. The fiery sound was mixed with female screams, and simultaneously a cackling laugh, deep and throaty, seem­ingly male.

  “What the hell's going on there?” she shouted into the receiver.

  And the line went dead. The dial tone like a death knell.

  Jessica stared at the receiver for a moment, wondering what in hell it had all been for, wondering if some of the raunchier forensics men in the “club” might not have got­ten together to pull a prank call on her, thinking her an easy target, gullible. Oleander, Mac, any one of them could easily have gotten her number simply by checking with the desk. Some of those old whiskered grunts were not above it, scientific standing and professional bearing not­withstanding. Hell, her mind raced, the lot of them were always anx­ious to break the tedium of their profession with anything that might relieve stress, anything that smacked of fun, and by far, the worst of the bunch was Karl Repasi, but he had his cronies, too, and he was quite the persuasive bastard, easily convincing younger colleagues into participating in such pranks.