Her trigger-killer. Was it working? It had to be by now, hadn’t it? Daddy promised.
She turned on the lamp by the bed and it hurt her eyes, making her squint. She sat up and folded her arms, her face feeling puffy. Pouting, she reached for her hand mirror on the end table next to her cell. She had those sheet-line impressions on her right cheek and her hair looked like shit. She sighed. Her trigger-killer couldn’t be working yet because there were no flashes whatsoever, and suddenly she had a horrible thought.
What if Daddy’s theory was wrong? What if her patchwork wasn’t buried in a blown circuit, but gone forever?
Marissa grabbed her cell and looked at it blankly. No messages, but she hadn’t expected any. She got up and the floor creaked. She was still wearing the jeans and Chase Utley Phillies T-shirt she’d put on earlier, and she suddenly had the feeling the killer was waiting for her out in the hall.
But he couldn’t be. One of her parents would have set the downstairs alarm before coming up here; it was so ingrained in them to do so floor to floor it had become ritual, like flushing the toilet or hanging up your coat or sticking your cell in your back pocket so you could jump right on it if something came up.
Marissa pushed out into the hall and felt for the light switch. Usually it was one-two-buckle-my-shoe, but she hadn’t been here for long enough that she had to paw around. If a hand closed over hers she’d scream to wake the dead. If the lights came on and there was a man standing there by the linen closet she’d have a heart attack. If there was a figure waiting in the downstairs closet . . .
She found the switch, padded down the short flight of stairs, and set off the motion detector, the beeping keypad giving its gentle countdown they were all so used to hearing in the distant background that if one of them got up in the night for a drink of water it didn’t even wake the others anymore. She walked over to the pad by the front door, put in the code, took a step back toward the den, and something changed. It was the lighting, the visual tone of the shadowed living room.
There was something coming across the carpeted floor now, something off-kilter, and it took a second for Marissa to register that it was a mechanized illumination going on and off, lighting part of the space and then leaving it in darkness.
She ran into the den.
Her trigger-killer was there on the table blinking red, and she stood before it, mouth ajar, strange light playing on and off across her face. It would be any second now. Like so many things in life, the decisions that would affect it the most had to be made on the spot, like right now, no tomorrow.
She reached for the contraption, ready to rip it apart and take her chances with the beast. Yes, that was the answer. The patchwork had indicated she would win, and maybe it was just her assumptions and faulty projections that made her think she needed a psychic aid to beat this bastard. She would defeat him somehow and then continue on as a “normal person,” dating Jerome, getting to know him all over again, loving him, immersing herself in him.
But then again she just couldn’t.
In the end, she hated living inside what felt like a cloud, as if one of her senses had been taken from her. Without the patchwork who was she? Who exactly did Jerome want?
The flickering upped in tempo and Marissa Madison was staring into a strobe light. Her eyes widened. She was frozen where she stood, and the rapid blinking suddenly stopped.
The tiny light turned solid green.
Patchwork burst into her so hard she sat down with a thump right there on the carpet. It was almost too blissful, as if the flood had been building behind a dam and here was the glorious torrent.
She saw in her mind that Daddy had taken a glass of warm milk before bedtime because he’d had an upset stomach worrying so much about his daughter’s future. Mother had it on her list to call Marissa’s landlord first thing about severances, deposits, and refunds, though she was holding off on Widener because she was sure she could get Marissa to change her mind at least about that part.
Nothing about a serial killer.
Marissa stood up and actually swooned with the next thing that hit her. It didn’t make a bit of sense, but it was the strongest premonition she’d ever had.
No. Not premonition. Instructions. Spelled out letter for letter.
Marissa made for the basement, digging her cell out of her back pocket. It didn’t hold together in any way, shape, or form, especially since there was no reason to contact Jerome at this point, but everything in her being cried out to her in an absolute urgency to do this thing.
Now.
She keyed in the alarm code for the first floor there on the pad by the basement door and heard the muted sixty-second countdown on the other side of it as she hustled down the stairs.
She was compelled to send Jerome Anthony Franklin a text.
And the words were nothing but poetic gibberish.
Despite all this, Marissa stood at the edge of her television area and typed in the words, letter for letter as they had appeared in her mind. She checked it. Hit send.
Something was wrong, something moving at the edge of the basement, there by the wall where there was bare space for all but the rug Daddy had set down for the poker table he’d never got around to setting up.
The rug was moving. Something was pushing it up from underneath, which was impossible. This was a concrete floor, and from over the lip of the rug there was a hand pawing up and over, a yellow gloved hand feeling about, doubling the piece of rug backward on itself, and then an arm making a flat L-shape over the fold, and then another hand and arm doing the same, and he pulled himself through and Marissa was frozen there where she stood.
It was the rubberized flying dude from the Pacifico Ford, yellow head squared off with small pieces of torn caution tape like streamers dangling from the top and sightless cartoon eyes staring above that wide apple-slice grin.
After planting his feet he straightened and grew and grew, seeming to rise clear to the ceiling, and his long shadow played across half the basement. He was humongous, six foot five at the least, and as he came for her the patchwork slammed home, giving her splintered pictures of who this guy was, his cold evil, his terrible genius.
His name was Deseronto, and he was wearing a hazmat suit (hazardous materials for you dumb fucking homeowners), and he’d done a complicated dance over the last twenty-four hours, all based on the storm drain he’d noticed out in front of the Madison residence and the twin brother he’d discovered back on Dartmouth, where they were renovating that house and the job had been stalled. When Marissa was worrying about tumbling trash cans, he was busy creating an apparatus that could manually cut through concrete, a big diamond screw thread in a roll cage, you just needed a man strong enough to turn the crankshaft and a distraction loud enough to cover the wrench and grind, like a rattling heater coming up intermittently.
The ADT stickers hadn’t bothered him in the least, since it wasn’t often folks rigged their basements where the egress windows were always padlocked. Everyone thought the access was covered upstairs, so once the hole was cut he’d camped out there in the storm drain, listening to Marissa make her phone call, learning her secret “get-away” and waiting for nightfall. If she hadn’t come down to sneak a communication tonight, he’d known there was always the weekend. He was smart and he was patient.
His strides covered a lot of ground, and he was on her in an instant. Marissa recovered from her phobic shock and terror just enough to try for that mask, but she wasn’t tall enough. Her nails clawed at his chest area, and he reached out with those huge yellow mitts that palmed both sides of her head in what almost appeared a gesture of affection. They smelled of the rust and decay of the storm drain, and he gave a sharp twist, snapping her neck.
She heard it pop, felt herself break in what felt like two pieces. Her head lolled and she crumbled, and he yanked her under his arm, walking her back to the wall like a sack of meal.
Marissa was pinned to him and her head was bobbing, but she was alive.
For a bare second he had to stomp on the fold in the rug to keep it from yawning back and covering the hole, but it was only a second, and he was swift about shoving her down through the opening, banging her head on the rim with a meaty thump she heard more than she felt.
He laughed from under the mask and Marissa heard him think to himself, “That’s gonna leave skin and hair tufts,” and she felt him loving the idea that her DNA didn’t matter worth a shit, and even though he was leaving behind clues with this one, there was no one in the great wide world who could connect all the dots. Not unless things went suddenly unlucky. And luck had always been his favorite bitch.
She landed in a heap and had a sideward, tilted view of the storm drain while he pushed through above her with a boot propped on either side. The long cylinder was dank and filthy and flaking, and she was lying in a runnel of ice-cold water that wasn’t quite as big as the maroon stain on both sides of it cutting down the center of the pipe. It stank of corroded steel and rotted leaves, and just past a small nest of twigs was Deseronto’s apparatus.
She kicked at it just as he crouched down, the rug slowly folding back over above them, and the bulky mechanism was heavy as hell and it was stuck on something, it had to be, for she had connected with it hard enough to send it rolling down the pipe. She concluded that he must have put a stick or a rock as a stopper in front of the wheels, and she heard him grunt in frustration, amazed that she was still alive and more amazed that she’d had the power to kick at his machine. Marissa was impressed too. Even in this dire circumstance she was still joking with herself just as Mother would if it were her down here in the pipe, thinking she had to Google this immediately and add somewhere in Wikipedia that you really could move significantly with a broken neck.
She kicked again, and the wheels stumbled over their obstructions, whacking and stuttering and taking that evil contraption down the rusted chute.
“Fuck!” she heard, and he struggled to jump past her, a thicket of arms, legs, and torso scrambling over her in the dim glow that was shadowing over as the rug settled up there.
“Yes, fuck,” she thought, “fuck you!” This could screw him big-time. Through the patchwork she saw that it was hell getting that thing up here to start with. It fit through the manhole cover up on Dartmouth well enough, and he’d ridden it like a sled down through the back end of the ravine, but dragging it up at the halfway point had been a chore even for him. It was only half a block or so, but the streamlet of storm water was gritty as hell, like sandpaper, and while he did indeed manage to haul his creation up to New Ardmore Avenue, there was no way he was going to backtrack it, hit the T-joint at the halfway mark, make the hard right, and doggie-crawl all the way to the park creek blocks away even though it was all on a downhill slope, not in these tight quarters with a dead body, no sir.
Suddenly he was back, and he was straddled over her and she hadn’t heard him coming. He ripped off his helmet, a chalky blur with black eyes.
He let out a guttural roar and clamped his teeth to the meat of her face. He was sunken to the gums all around her nose, and he snapped his head back and forth like a mad dog. She felt pain and a hot greasy wetness, and he ripped free and she was cold and he reached down and wrenched her head around so hard her neck dishragged and her chin twisted straight back between her shoulder blades in a straight 180. It was a bright bolt of agony, and she thumped face first into the churning water. Then she was removed, watching the scene from the side in third person. It was the patchwork providing her a dissociated view, fading at the edges as it slowly shut down.
She saw him drag her rumpled form down the pipe to the apparatus he’d retrieved. She saw him settle on it, position himself on his back and pull her atop, next strapping the both of them tight. Next he was grunting, pushing with his palms, starting the toboggan, or more accurately, the two-man luge.
She watched Jonathan Martin Delaware Deseronto lying back, holding her like a small child, rolling through the storm drain, banging the hard right at the “T” and clattering down the long stretch cutting through the hills of the neighborhood. They were picking up speed he could barely control now, thundering down for the creek that zigzagged through the park five blocks away, deep in where he’d pulled off the drain grate and parked his Toyota just off the bank.
They shot through the opening, and the final descent was longer than he’d remembered thinking it would be. They landed in a foot of water with hearty splash and shuddered with the impact, sliding and stopping by some big polished rocks. He hurt his back, but not that much. He’d banged an elbow, but not all that bad.
It was all fading, the scene getting smaller as the circle of perception was shrinking at its circumference.
He hauled the apparatus up the bank, pressing it overhead so it wouldn’t leave marks though he knew the cops would have his boot size. Tiny loss for a greater gain. By the time he got it in his trunk with his hazmat suit and went back for Marissa, the entire vision was down to the size of a basketball. She knew he had one more stop before hitting the road back to the shop for the cutting phase, and she also knew he doubted very much that anyone on Dartmouth Avenue at midnight was going to notice a guy wearing sunglasses, a hard hat, and a reflective vest stopping to gather up the blue nylon tent structure propped around the manhole cover of the storm drain.
Deseronto got in the car and put on the reflective vest and the hard hat. Sunglasses could wait: after all, he had to drive out of here with his lights off and it was dark as shit. He started up the vehicle, thinking himself ultimately clever for backing in here with the trunk side facing the bank of the creek. It had made the loading far easier.
He pulled out slowly and didn’t hear the crunch and tinkle of the broken beer bottles Gary Fey and Danny Santo had scattered at the edge of the creek, smashing them after partying hard a week ago Thursday. Deseronto had backed over the litter of glass with his rear tires coming in, and he ran over all of it again on his exit, the latter rendezvous more profound than its predecessor. The rubber didn’t puncture immediately; he had good Firestones.
He pulled off the curb at the edge of the park and did so carefully so he wouldn’t scrape a fender. Then he sped back to Dartmouth. It was going to be another long night, and the moon was suddenly buried in cloud cover.
Chop, chop.
There was a rain coming on.
PIT
STOP
That’s right, asshole. All things considered it was a good stalk and kill, chock-full of chance cards, community treasures, positioning, and playing pieces like a live fucking Monopoly game. Enough twists and surprises for ya? Scared to pass “Go” now?
Speaking of which, it’s my turn. Didn’t want to see Mama’s ghost up there in room 457, I’ll give you that much, but now that I’ve relived the moment for moment in Marissa Madison’s head as Marissa Madison we’ll call it dead even.
So why do I keep talking to you, the nobody? I guess it’s something I’ve always done, as if you were my private little audience member bound and gagged and tied to your chair, forced to submit and witness my gospel. But time’s a wasting and, to be real, I’m still standing here in the Motel 6 archway holding this icy-cold dead-alive thing face to face like a Siamese twin connected at the forehead, and I’m tired of it. I smell something familiar and realize my nose ain’t been bit off, it was just some symbolic bullshitty payback that was part of the package, part of living in Marissa Madison’s shoes for a hot minute, and to tell you the truth the chomping was the only thing she did that had me half interested. At least it took some balls, and don’t fucking laugh ’cause I ain’t in the mood for your punning.
So what now? The rewind is dead because Madison is, and like her dear sweet parents might have said, “It’s time to move forward.”
Tell you where I’m headed, asshole.
I’m gonna find a way to get off this jobsite and I’m gonna make my way across the street and up the hill to that BP gas station. I’m gonna find me two tires, roll on out of here,
bury this bitch stitched or in pieces, and go home to get a good sleep.
“Not quite yet,” she croaks from behind that wet hanging hair, and her breath is thick and smells awful familiar.
And then I get it. It’s the smell. Pungent and specific and familiar as hell. Symbolic bullshit, but this time with meaning, with punch, and a huge set of balls.
See, the cutting phase at the shop went well (except for that moment her hair bunched up in the mouth guard of the Sawzall skidding the wood-cutting blade straight up her cheek), and in a matter of minutes I had her sectioned and packaged like chicken parts in one of those big aluminum-loaf flimsy-tins we used to soak gears in. I had the tools cleaned, rinsed, and sanitized before you could say “boo,” and even though I had to refill the sprayer’s gun reservoir with another dose of concentrated industrial acid cleanser to blitz the floor and squeegee all the waste down the drain, I was resetting the warehouse alarm and locking up by 1:15. It was smooth sailing until I pulled out of the parking lot, reached in the glove compartment just to check, and brought out the crinkly bag that was empty for all but some shitty busted-up crumbs at the bottom.
See, we all know the other stuff, asshole. I drove to the usual entry point for the dumping phase back in the cul-desac where Skinny Jimmy Whalen used to live, but there was an Upper Darby cop sitting there with his lights off parked at the curb. Come to think of it now I didn’t even see anyone there in the cab, but I wasn’t gonna take any chances.
Don’t you get it? I blamed the sudden bad luck on the fact that I didn’t have my munchies. ’Course we all know I wound up on 476 with two flats in a rainstorm, but the part I forgot to connect here was that I made a small pit stop before heading up to the highway. For luck. And I was in the neighborhood.
I stopped at the 7-Eleven on 69th Street.
For my El Sabroso Hot and Spicy Pork Rinds.
CHAPTER
Phantom Effect Page 22