The Complete Cooper Collection (All 97 Stories)

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The Complete Cooper Collection (All 97 Stories) Page 271

by Bernico, Bill


  “Ehhhh,” Norman says, making that wrong answer buzzer sound again. He turns to his invisible audience again and says, “So, let’s see how our contestant did on this three-part question. For the years, he said 1963.” He spins on his feet and points to Weasel. “That’s right, Wezzle. It was November 22, 1963. Let’s see how he did with the second part.” He pauses for effect and then points his finger in Weasel’s face. “You said Chicago. Let’s see if that’s correct.”

  Weasel’s breathing is coming in spurts now as sweat runs down his face.

  “Oh, sorry,” Norman says. “The correct answer was Dallas. Dallas, oh so sorry, Wezzle. How about that third part. Wezzle says John Dillinger. Let’s see if the studio audience agrees.” He pauses again and then slowly turns to Weasel. He smiles slightly and then says, “Oswald, Lee Harvey Oswald is the correct answer. For you folks watching at home, I guess you know what that means. That’s right. It’s penalty time.” Norman turns to the work bench and grabs the box cutter and spins back toward Weasel again.

  “No!” Weasel screams. “No, no, no, no.” His head shakes violently back and forth.

  Norman pauses in mid-step. “No, you say?” Norman tells him. “Tell you what I’ll do, Wezzle. I’ll give you a choice. I can either cut and pull off one tattoo while you’re awake, or I’ll put you under again and remove three tattoos. Which will it be, Wezzle? You have ten seconds.” Norman begins whistling the Jeopardy theme song. When he gets to the last note, he turns to Weasel and says, “Which will it be? One while you’re awake, or three while you’re out?”

  “Put me out,” Weasel says. “Please put me out.”

  Norman lays the box cutter down and grabs a cloth from the work bench. He pours a little more chloroform on it and clamps it over Weasel’s mouth. Weasel struggles and then falls limp. Norman steps over to the sink against the far wall and washes his hands before returning to the bench to retrieve his box cutter. He outlines three tattoos on Weasel’s arm and pulls them all off with the pliers, tacking them on the wall next to the first one. Weasel is still out, so Norman takes that time to throw in one bonus removal for no extra charge.

  Norman knows it could be a while before Weasel comes around again so he washes his hands in the sink again and then climbs the basement stairs, stepping into the kitchen. He makes himself a sandwich and pours a glass of milk. Norman turns on the television set and watches Wheel of Fortune as he finishes his lunch.

  “Buy a vowel?” Norman screams at the screen. “What kind of moron are you? There’s only two letters left unturned, you idiot. The answer is ‘Nothing To Sneeze At’, come on.”

  The woman on the television turns the last vowel over, revealing the A. The contestant smiles and says, “I’d like to solve the puzzle. ‘Nothing to sneer at.”

  “What?” Norman yells at the television set. “There’s no extra ‘e’ in sneer. It’s sneeze. Nothing to sneeze at.” Norman switches off the TV and finishes his sandwich and milk. He walks away from the living room, shaking his head and mumbling about the decay of civilization.

  Norman descends the basement stairs again just as Weasel starts to regain consciousness again. As Weasel comes around again, he begins to moan and twitch in his seat. His nostrils wiggle up and down and he takes a few whiffs of the air around him. Was he in a diner? Did someone make dinner while he was out? He definitely smelled meat cooking. Then he looked down at his arm and noticed that three more tattoos had been cut off his arm and the exposed flesh underneath had been cauterized, probably with the hot poker that he’d noticed earlier on the bench.

  Weasel’s eyes shifted from his arm to his chest. There was another large area that had been seared black with the hot poker. The six large letters that had spelled out Wezzle were gone. He looked up at his captor. “You said three,” Weasel yelled.

  “No charge for the fourth,” Norman said. “Consider it a bonus. It was spelled wrong anyway. Hey, I did you a favor.”

  “If I recall,” Norman said, “Just before we went to commercial, you still had one more category to finish and that was spelling. Oh oh, Wezzle. If I recall, that wasn’t your strong suit, was it?” He points to the patch of skin tacked to the work bench wall that spelled out WEZZLE in a fancy script font. “But this is your lucky day,” Norman says. “Even if you get this one wrong, I promise I won’t remove another tattoo.” He crosses his heart with two fingers and holds them up at his side, like a Boy Scout. “Shall we continue?”

  Weasel tries his restraints again. His wrists are still held fast. “Go on,” he says.

  Norman block prints a word on an index card and turns to his left again, pretending to show the card to the non-existent audience. “We’ll show the audience and the folks at home, the correct spelling and see if Wezzle can redeem himself.” He turns back to Weasel. “This is for fifty points, Wezzle. Your word is RECEIVE. I’ll use it in a sentence so you understand which word we want you to spell. ‘If you get this question right, you will RECEIVE fifty points’. RECEIVE. Spell it. You have fifteen seconds.” Norman begins making popping noises with his mouth, simulating the ticking of a clock.

  “RECEIVE,” Weasel says. “R-E-C-I-E-V-E. RECEIVE.”

  “Oh,” Norman says, disappointed. “So close yet so far away. Wezzle, the rule is I before E.”

  “I spelled it with the I before the E,” Weasel says in protest.

  “I before E,” Norman repeats, “except after C. I’m sorry, Wezzle, you missed it, and that brings us once again to the penalty portion of our program. But, as I promised, I will not be cutting off any other tattoos and I always keep my promise.”

  Norman turns to the work bench and picks up a pair of pruning shears with curved blades and steps up to Weasel, who goes into a panic and vibrates his chair so badly that he falls over onto his side. It is only then that he notices the sheet of plastic that had been laid out beneath him and the chair he was attached to.

  Norman rights the chair again and holds the blades of the pruning shears less than an inch from Weasel’s eyes. “Don’t worry, Wezzle,” Norman says. “I promised that I wouldn’t take any tattoos if you missed the spelling question.”

  “Then what?” Weasel starts to say.

  “You know, Wezzle,” Norman says, “If there one thing I hate almost as much as tattoos, it’s body piercings. What the hell were you thinking when you put those big holes in your ears with spools big enough to see through? You look like some fuckin’ savage from Africa. And those rings in your eyebrows. What possible purpose could those serve? That had to hurt, so I guess what I have in mind for you won’t be that far off from your original experience.”

  Norman holds the pruning shears up to Weasel’s left eyebrow. Weasel bucks in the chair, his head flailing back and forth. Norman stands upright and takes one step back away from Weasel. “I guess it’s time for Deal or No Deal, Wezzle. Here’s the deal. You move your head again and I’ll cut off your nose. Deal or no deal?”

  Weasel closes his eyes and tries to hold still. Norman leans in again and gets each of the pruning shears blades on either side of the eyebrow ring and brings the handles together. Weasel screams in agony as the silver ring, eyebrow and all, fell to the floor. Norman quickly grabs the cauterizing iron and touches it to the fleshy exposed area where the eyebrow had been. Weasel screams again and again and again. Norman gives him a few minutes to compose himself again. He lets Weasel see him purposely lay the shears back down on the work bench before he slowly walks up to him again. He gently tugs at the silver spools in Weasel’s ears, removes them and leaves the spools lying on the work bench.

  “There,” Norman says. “That wasn’t so bad, now was it?”

  Weasel doesn’t respond. Norman grabs Weasel’s chin and lifts it until their eyes met. “Was it?” Norman repeats.

  Weasel weakly shakes his head.

  Norman returned to the work bench and comes back to Weasel holding a spool of nylon fishing line. He loops one end of the filament through the other ring in the right eyebrow
and ties it tight. He reels off five feet of fishing line and cut the off the spool. Norman ties the other end of the line to one of the heavy motorcycle boots he’d taken off Weasel’s feet earlier. He threads the string through the buckle on the side of the boot and ties it tight and then holds the boot up so that Weasel can see it.

  “Did I mention that I didn’t like body piercings, Wezzle?” Norman says. “Well, these damned shit-kicker boots are just as disgusting and I don’t want them near me.” Norman tosses the boot toward the opposite wall. When the slack line runs out, it stretches taught until the ring rips out of Weasel’s eyebrow with a tearing sound.

  Weasel screams again, surprised that he even had anything left in him to scream with. His right eyebrow was still in better shape than his left, but it bleeds nonetheless. Before he can voice another objection, Norman is on him with the cauterizing iron. The remaining eyebrow hair sizzles and smokes, along with the red, exposed flesh above his eye. A small wisp of smoke rises from Weasel’s eyebrow.

  “Almost finished,” Norman says, retrieving the garden shears again. “Don’t make me have to remind you about your nose, Wezzle.” Norman grabs the flabby loop of skin that was once Weasel’s left earlobe and stretches it out as far as it will go. With a single snip of the shears, the earlobe comes off in Norman’s hand. He turns back to the work bench, taps a nail into the wall and hangs the loop of flesh from it before returning to his spot in front of Weasel again.

  “Just one more lobe left and you’re free to go, Wezzle,” Norman says sarcastically.

  Before he tugs at the right earlobe, Norman touches Weasel’s left earlobe with the cauterizing iron, sealing the leak. Weasel screams again and tries to shake off the pain by shaking his head violently back and forth. He starts to cry again, as much in frustration as in pain.

  Norman grabs the right earlobe and without further ceremony, snips it off and hangs it in the same nail as the first one. He turns back to Weasel and sighs. “All done,” he says, sealing the wound with the hot iron. He reaches for the shears to snip the restraints from Weasel’s wrists. At the last second, he stops and stands upright again. Norman lays the shears on his work bench again and stands in front of Weasel, his arms folded over his chest.

  “You know, Wezzle,” Norman says. “Funny I hadn’t noticed this before, but you have another whole arm full of tattoos. What are we going to do about that? Let’s see, what’s left? Current events, reading, literature, art, music…”

  Weasel’s eyes go wide again and he starts screaming uncontrollably, his head flailing from side to side. “No! No, no, no, no…”

  “Okay, okay,” Norman says. “Calm down, I was just kidding. There won’t be any more tests.” He walks around behind Weasel and pulls a large serrated knife from a shelf Weasel couldn’t see. With his left hand he grabs Weasel by the hair and jerks his head back. With a single slice of the knife in his right hand, he severs Weasel’s carotid artery and then quickly steps around in front of the man again. “I told you, I’m a man of my word. No more tattoo removals.”

  Time for another trip to the dump, Norman thinks as he snips Weasel’s hands and feet from the bindings and rolls him up in the plastic.

  *****

  Lieutenant Eric Anderson gets the call at eight-fifteen. A man from Burbank, Herbert Simmons, was dropping off an old sofa at the dump when he noticed a strange smell coming from the burning pile of debris. Simmons poked at the edge of the fire and recoiled when a charred, bony hand flopped over in the ashes. He rushed away from the dump and called the police. Anderson and the county medical examiner, Andy Reynolds converged on the dump, accompanied by two black and white units.

  The four uniformed officers found various articles in the trash pile that they could use to push away the burning part of the trash heap. When they had exposed enough of the debris underneath, the officers donned gloves and pulled the plastic-wrapped bundle out from under the rest of the garbage. They dragged it away from the fire and stood back as the coroner carefully unwrapped the plastic, exposing more of the young girl’s body.

  “Careful with that plastic,” Anderson said. “We may get lucky with prints, but I’m not going to hold my breath.”

  Andy pulled back the last of the plastic, revealing an image straight out of a horror movie. Even with all his experience, Andy Reynolds had to look away and catch his breath. “What kind of animal could do this to another human being?” he said, turning the victim’s head to the side to get a better look at the damage to her ear. “This poor girl must have suffered eight kinds of hell before she died. And unless I’m mistaken, someone poured liquid metal of some kind into her ears and onto her legs and hands.”

  Eric pointed to the girl’s mouth. “Might want to take a look inside her mouth,” he said. “From the looks of her lips, she had some of that same liquid poured down her throat.”

  Andy pulled at the girl’s jaw, forcing the mouth open with a crackling sound. He pulled a small pen light from his pocket and shone it into the chasm. “Poor thing,” he said. “If that was the last thing he did to her, she was alive for all the other torture. What could she possibly have done to make someone this mad at her?”

  One of the uniformed officers leaned in to get a better look at the corpse. When he saw the damage to the girl’s body, he quickly turned away and vomited into the trash heap.

  “You men stand back,” Lieutenant Anderson told the other officers. “We can’t have anyone contaminating the scene.”

  The other three officers took several steps backwards. Andy motioned to his attendants, who rolled a gurney up next to the body and lifted it onto the white sheet. They rolled it back to the ambulance and slid it inside, closing the double doors.

  “In all my years as county medical examiner,” Andy said, “I’ve never seen anything as gruesome as this. I don’t envy you your job on this one, Eric.”

  “The hard part is going to be indentifying her,” Eric said. “There’s nothing on the body, no I.D., no pictures, nothing. And can you imagine running a picture of that in the paper? I don’t think so. We’re going to need a break in this case if we expect to get anywhere with it.”

  *****

  Norman watches from a distance as his next target goes about his business, unaware that his days are numbered. Norman has his reasons for selecting this particular victim. As far as Norman knows, the man has no tattoos or piercings. He may know his geography and his math and he even may know how to spell correctly, but Norman has another reason for selecting this man as his next toy. Three months earlier Norman had hired the man to install new countertops in his kitchen. The man claimed to be an expert in his field and had underbid three other installers in the area.

  Shortly after he had finished the installation of the countertops, Norman noticed that the area over his utensil drawer had been cut too short. He also noticed that the place where two pieces came together showed an obvious seam where it was supposed to be seamless. And where the countertops met the wall, there were gaps that had been covered with a brown calk that stood out like a newcomer in a nudist colony.

  To make matters worse, Norman had to have the newly installed countertops torn out and new pieces installed. The first installer, a man named Christopher Gunther, not only refused to refund his money, he refused to do anything about the poor installation at all. When Norman saw what Gunther had done, he tried to take the man to court to get his two thousand dollars back.

  Norman hired a lawyer and a court date had been set. Gunther hired his own lawyer and managed to get delay after delay for a court date. Gunther and his lawyer finally offered fifteen hundred dollars to settle the case. By now, Norman had spent nearly five hundred dollars on his own lawyer to fight this case, so even if he got the fifteen hundred, he’d still be out more than a thousand dollars when all was said and done.

  Just when he thought he could collect the settlement and put this whole thing behind him, Norman got a notice from his own lawyer that Christopher Gunther had declared bankrupt
cy and there would be no settlement. That was the last straw for Norman. Gunther would have to make a visit to Norman’s workshop, whether he wanted to or not. Norman was familiar with the saying, ‘There’s more than one way to skin a cat’ and before he was finished with Christopher Gunther, he would make sure that this countertop installer would also be familiar with it.

  Norman had stalked Gunther for nearly ten days before he found the opening he was looking for. When he saw Gunther coming out of the home improvement store and get into his pickup, Norman followed at a safe distance. Gunther drove out of the parking lot and down the county road toward his home. Gunther’s truck wasn’t hard to find with Gunther’s name stenciled on the front door along with a phone number. Norman still had half a bag of sugar left over from the job he’d done on Stacey’s car and the now empty bag lay on the seat next to him along with the funnel. Now it would just be a matter of time before Gunther’s truck rolled to a stop in the middle of nowhere.

  Norman bided his time, following Gunther and when he saw the pickup truck roll to a stop at the side of the road, Norman pulled up behind him and hurried out of his car before Gunther had time to use his cell phone to call for assistance. He ran up to Gunther’s door, pulled it open and yanked Gunther out by his shirt, throwing him to the pavement with a thud.

  “What the hell?” Gunther started to say. He stopped when he looked up and saw Norman glaring down at him. It didn’t immediately register who this guy was who had assaulted him. Gunther reached for the phone in his shirt pocket, but Norman quickly kicked it out of his hands and stepped on it.

  Norman grabbed Gunther’s shirt again and hauled him to his feet. He pulled a leather-covered sap from his back pocket and laid it behind Gunther’s left ear, knocking him unconscious with a single blow. Norman quickly looked both ways on the back road and noticed they were alone. He dragged Gunther’s limp body to the back of his car and dropped him into the trunk. Norman returned to the truck and pulled the shifter down into neutral, turning the wheel hard to the right. He got behind the truck and heaved with all he had. The truck left the shoulder and rolled down into a thicket of bushes, completely obscuring it from the road.

 

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