by Doug Johnson
Dylan emerged from the shadows holding a trenching spade. With its long handle and pointed blade, it resembled some sort of medieval polearm weapon. Dylan certainly saw it as such. He swung at Lazarus and the pole swished through the air. Lazarus threw up his arm in defense and the flat of the blade smashed against his arm.
It was well-oiled and freshly sharpened. Lazarus had done it himself only days ago and he knew he didn’t want to be on the business end of it. Had Kitty remembered the stun gun tucked into her belt, she could have easily dispatched Dylan and sent him shrinking to the ground like a watered witch, but she’d suffered a mild concussion in the crash. Her thoughts were thick and imprecise. Her head throbbed and there was an ache behind her eyes that made it difficult to focus. She forgot all about the stun gun and found another weapon.
Dylan swung again and Lazarus managed to grab the spade handle just above the blade socket. A rock flew threw the air and smashed Dylan’s knuckles. He cried out in agony and spun his head toward Kitty just as she had released a second rock. He ducked instinctively and Lazarus yanked the spade from his hands.
A primal screech shot out from the darkness and Sian attacked Lazarus. She leaped onto his back, cuffing a forearm around his neck to choke him. Kitty grabbed her around the waist and tried to pull her off.
Dylan grabbed Kitty and flung her away like doll. “Enough!” he shouted.
For some reason, the call to end the farce registered. Sian slipped off Lazarus and Dylan ripped the spade from his hands. He tossed it away into the shadows and pulled a handful of zip ties from his pocket.
“Put your hands behind your back,” he said to Lazarus.
Lazarus looked at him as if he’d just told him to kiss his own ass. “Fuck you.” He bolted straight into the house and Dylan went after him.
CHAPTER 15
Lazarus ran for the main staircase. He took the first three steps in one athletic leap then stopped short like a dog that’s reached the end of its chain. Dylan had him by the waistband of his jeans. He snatched him backward off the staircase and slammed him to the limestone floor as if he were no more than a dry scarecrow. Lazarus just lay there groaning in stunned defeat. He felt like he’d run into a flagpole.
Kitty lay on her stomach outside the front door in a similar state of just-got-my-ass-handed-to-me. Sian poked her with her toe.
“Oi… get up.”
Kitty didn’t move. Sian nudged harder.
“I said move!”
Kitty stared straight ahead. She pushed herself up onto her hands and knees, and as she did so, her fist closed around a rock the size and weight of a billiard ball. Sian grabbed her by the hair and hauled her to her feet.
“Light a fire under that skinny arse.”
Dylan shoved Lazarus into the parlor and led him to the sofa.
“Have a seat.”
Lazarus sat down and leaned back, reluctantly grateful for a moment of physical comfort and rest.
“Sian! Get a move on! We haven’t got all night.”
“So you’ve been watching me.”
“Aye,” Dylan nodded gravely. “You sick fuck.”
“Made you curious, did it? Made you wonder what it was like?” Lazarus leaned forward. “How the knife feels when it slides through the flesh. How the blood flows—”
“We’ll find out soon enough, won’t we?”
Dylan walked to the parlor door, but didn’t take his eyes off Lazarus. “Dammit, woman! What’s taking you so long?”
There was a rapid burst of snapping static and a blue halo flickered behind him. His muscles locked up and convulsed as the voltage rippled through his body, a hoarse groan pulsing out of him like an engine that wouldn’t turn over. Seconds passed. His teeth began grinding together with a sickening squeak. Lazarus could hardly watch. Jesus, it’s worse than I thought.
Finally, Dylan went down and he lay in a spasmodic, liquid heap on the parquet floor. Kitty stood in the doorway.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Yeah. Where’s Sian?”
“In the hallway. It was a lot messier than I expected.”
Lazarus nodded as he stood up. “It’s not a pretty thing.”
Kitty stepped over Dylan’s twitching body. “No… it was pretty… Beautiful, actually.”
Lazarus knelt beside Dylan and pulled the zip ties from his pocket. He looked up at Kitty, but his mind was blank. Quite honestly, he was at a complete loss as to how to respond to the highly disturbing words he just heard come out of her mouth. He turned back to Dylan and crossed his arms behind his back.
Kitty held the stun gun at her side. She raised it up silently behind him. She pressed the trigger… but nothing happened. She looked down and saw the maddening flash of a “low battery” indicator light on the side of the black case.
Lazarus bound Dylan’s wrists and pulled the tie tight with a quick zip. Kitty dropped the stun gun back to her thigh. She hadn’t been nervous when she was about to zap him, but for some reason was absolutely terrified now.
Lazarus stood up and walked over to the scrap pile that used to be the grandfather clock. He reached down and retrieved the double-hooked fireplace poker from the debris and walked back to Dylan. He racked the poker back over his head like a saber.
“You might not want to watch this part,” he said gravely.
There was a baseball cap shoved under the driver’s seat in the Fiat along with wads of greasy chip wrappers and empty Mayfair packs. Lazarus slapped the cap on top of his head.
“What are you doing?” Kitty asked from behind him.
“We’ve got to get rid of the car. Come on, let’s see if the Aston still runs.”
Fifteen minutes later, he was driving the Fiat down the road toward town and Kitty shadowed behind in the Aston Martin, one headlight, chugging roughly and beat to hell, but at least it was moving. The headlights of a truck shot over the crest of a short rise and Lazarus pulled the baseball cap down a little further.
Clive Collins steered the truck with his knees so he wouldn’t have to set his beer down while he was handed a joint. He saw the headlights of two cars approaching and squinted to try and make who it might be. On this road at this time of night, this was about the closest thing to gridlock one might ever expect to see.
Lazarus ducked down in the Fiat as the truck barreled past in the other direction. He watched it in the rearview mirror, and caught sight of the absolute last thing on earth he wanted to see right now.
Brake lights.
“What fresh hell?” He kept his eyes on the rearview, pulse rising in his chest. The truck was now making a sloppy u-turn in the road. Lazarus squelched the impulse to floor it. He stayed cool. The rattling truck caught up and overtook them. It sped past and Lazarus slowed a bit as it did. He took a quick glance in the rearview. The Aston was still behind him. Kitty was holding it together.
The truck screeched to a skidding halt ahead of them, blocking the road diagonally. Lazarus tugged the baseball cap down as far as he could while maintaining the ability to see.
“Shit.”
Clive rolled his window down and hung his head out. Lazarus recognized this one as a piss-artist of the highest order.
“Oi! Dylan Daly!” Clive called back. “What gives? You don’t say ‘ello to your mates?”
A second piss-artist hung out the passenger side. “Getting too good for us, eh?”
Back in the Aston Martin, Kitty gripped the wooden steering wheel until it squeaked in her burning hands. Her eyes drifted down to the socket of a tire iron poking out from under the passenger seat.
Lazarus did the only thing he could think of. He rolled his window down.
Kitty reached down and wrapped her fingers around the tire iron.
Lazarus thrust his arm out the window and pumped his fist into the air.
“Rock on, mates!”
There was silence.
Lazarus held his arm in the air. He felt the jetstream surge around him. Bad timing.
The
n the cab of the truck erupted with cheers. Smoke billowed from the windows as the truck lurched forward and rounded a second u-turn. Lazarus wasted no time in getting moving himself.
“Have a good one, Dylan!” Clive called down from the truck as they passed by again.
“Aye!” Lazarus shot back. It was a pitiful imitation of Dylan’s voice, but it was met with a chorus of hoots and hollers from Clive’s mates.
Lazarus watched the truck in his rearview one more time. No brake lights this time. He caught a glimpse of Kitty smiling at him. He smiled back.
They found a suitable spot to ditch the car off another, even less frequented road that was a fair trek from the manor house. It was carved into a hillside. Parts of it had even been washed away by runoff.
Lazarus stopped in the middle of the road and Kitty rolled up behind him. She pulled the handbrake and waited for Lazarus to get out. Under the eerie light of the Aston’s single working headlamp, he put the Fiat’s transmission in neutral and rocked the car to get it moving. It rolled off the low side of the road and gently crept through waist-high grass until it wanted to go no further. Lazarus tossed the baseball cap back through the window onto the front seat and started walking back.
Kitty watched incredulously. That’s it? She was expecting something a little more dramatic. Who would hide a car in plain sight like this? She rightly supposed that was the point.
She reached for the handbrake, but Lazarus darted around to the driver’s side door and pulled it open. Startled, Kitty’s hands jerked back to the steering wheel.
“Move over,” Lazarus said.
“I can drive.”
“That door’s stuck, remember?”
She did remember, but it also felt as if she was relinquishing control. There was suddenly something quite reassuring about the fact that he still thought she had a working stun gun at her fingertips. She crawled over to the passenger seat and Lazarus slipped behind the wheel.
They rode in silence for what seemed a very long while, and the lull in action was a welcome respite for them both. Kitty had killed another human being, and the gravity of that fact had begun to creep over her conscious thoughts like a veil. She couldn’t identify any dominant feeling attached to it though, not any that was familiar to her at least. It wasn’t that she felt nothing, but rather as if she felt everything in small portions. It was emotional dim sum. Kitty stared out into the darkness. It occurred to her that she had absolutely no idea where they were.
“I have to say, of all the girls, Kitty… you’ve got to be my favorite.”
Kitty turned to him and snorted. “Seriously?”
“I mean it. It gets so repetitive. The spark goes. It gets harder and harder to get that thrill.”
She turned her gaze back out the window. A minute passed.
“Did you kill Lacey? I need to know.”
“Honestly? No idea. I wasn’t lying when I said I couldn’t remember her.”
It was a disgusting revelation, but Kitty breathed a sigh of relief as the manor house lights came twinkling into view ahead.
“There were so many girls. So many cities… and they made it so easy.”
They pulled around the circular driveway and the single headlight swept across the stone garden wall where they’d met that afternoon, but of course, that was a hundred years ago.
“Here were are,” Lazarus said. He smiled at Kitty. “Home sweet home.”
CHAPTER 16
Lazarus swung the carriage house doors shut and looped the chain through the handles. He fed the padlock shackle through the links and locked it with a snick.
Kitty stepped away but kept her eyes on him. Two can keep a secret if one of them is dead.
Lazarus turned to face her. “Want to learn how to clean up a murder scene?”
It was such a surreal question that Kitty wasn’t entirely sure he was serious.
“Sure.”
Dylan Daly might have made something of himself had he spent more time practicing and less time pouring lager and grease down his gullet at the pub and chip house. Well, maybe that was giving too much credit, but it certainly would have made the task-at-hand considerably easier.
Lazarus grunted as he dragged Dylan’s dead body into the basement kitchen, and for some reason started wondering what the poor chuffer’s music was like. Probably rubbish. After all, it had been Sian who’d been the Black Ryder fan, hadn’t it? Lazarus couldn’t quite remember at this point. It had been one hell of a long day.
“Help!” Kitty called from the hallway. “She fell on me!”
Lazarus dropped Dylan with a chunky thud and hurried out the door. Kitty sat at the bottom of the servants’ stairwell with Sian lying on top of her. Her face was turned sideways and resting on Kitty’s stomach as if she were listening to some fetal heartbeat inside. Sian’s legs were bent backwards over her own shoulders like a circus contortionist, though. In fact, Lazarus thought she looked quite like a human “at” symbol.
Together, they carried Sian’s limp body down the hall into the kitchen. Carrying was always better than dragging if it could be managed. No clothing fibers to worry about scraping along the floor.
“How much further?” Kitty asked exhausted.
“Just to the island.”
With one final, cooperative grunt, they heaved the body onto the long, wooden prep table. The poor slag couldn’t have weighed more than nine or ten stone, but it always felt like more.
“All right,” Lazarus said. “Strip.”
No rest for the wicked, Kitty thought. She reached down and started to unbutton Sian’s top.
“No,” he clarified. “You.”
Lazarus pulled his tee shirt off over his head. Kitty’s eyes darted around the room. The roll of knives was back and lay at the other end of the table. Dylan sat propped against the wall with his head slumped down into his chest. Very polite, considering.
She started to undress and Lazarus handed her a square, plastic packet about the size of a magazine. “We have to burn your clothes. Put that on.”
Inside was a disposable, plastic coverall suit. The plastic wasn’t quite see-thru, but it was definitely see-enough.
Lazarus dropped his pants.
With a cleaning caddy in one hand and an abrasive pad in the other, Lazarus lectured Kitty on the art of crime scene cleanup. This wasn’t about traipsing through with a mop. Behind goggles and respirators, they removed all visible traces of blood from the walls and baseboards. Kitty was their spotter and wiper, Lazarus the spritzer and scrubber.
The floor was another story entirely. The porosity of stone made it ridiculously susceptible to stains, and the limestone in the entry hall was an especially phenomenal bitch to clean once any foreign material had time to absorb. Procrastinating with stone was not advisable.
That porosity was also the reason stains can be removed from stone, however. You don’t scrub limestone clean. You have to reverse the staining process by re-absorbing it into another material. That other material was called a poultice, a paste blended of powdered whiting and hydrogen peroxide that was spread over the offensive stain and allowed to work its magic overnight. It was a bit like applying calamine lotion to a poison ivy rash, or using wads of napkins to soak up excess pizza grease.
“Remove, absorb, clean and sanitize,” he preached. “In that order.”
The addition of oxalic acid to a poultice was especially effective at removing blood, and through trial and error, Lazarus had discovered his favorite source of it to be a powdered cleaning product called “Bartender’s Friend.” He’d stumbled upon it after one of his early plucks while on tour in the States, and what a find it had been! The best part about it was that its purchase aroused no undue attention. In fact, he always stored several canisters under the kitchen sink alongside the drain-cleaning crystals.
“Avoid buying anything in bulk,” he told Kitty. She listened with rapt attention as Lazarus went on and on. “Use cold water instead of hot to avoid setting the stain… br
ing a putty knife for the jellied bits, an enzyme solvent for the crusties… and for fuck’s sake, never mix bleach and ammonia.”
Luck had been on their side. Nearly all of the blood spilled in the vestibule had been absorbed by the large Tabriz rug there, and the thick jute felt pad beneath it had been all the extra barrier they’d needed to avoid an entire day of cleanup. The rug was now trash of course, but sometimes expediency trumped economy. Lazarus never did any wet work in the entry hall. He knew better, and now Kitty knew it too. She was an enthusiastic student with no fear of hard work. In fact, she seemed to Lazarus downright earnest.
He snapped off his respirator and cringed at the smell of the solution in his spray bottle. “I’ll never get used to the bleach,” he said. In point of fact, the bleach was not a detergent but a disinfectant. This was his home, after all. He wanted it not only clean, but sanitized.
Kitty took offher respirator and goggles to inspect their work.
“So did we miss anything?” he asked.
She looked all around. “Nope. Spotless.”
Lazarus picked up a small, garden pump sprayer and wet one of the wainscoting panels that Kitty had wiped down, but Lazarus hadn’t yet scrubbed. He dimmed the chandeliers and a scene worthy of an abattoir fluoresced with a striking blue glow over the wood. Trace dots and splatters appeared, even handprints of smeared blood trailing along the wall like streak-tailed comets.
“Even when the blood’s gone, it’s still there. You must be vigilant.”
Duly noted, she thought.
The cutting jaws of the pruning loppers had a three-inch cutting capacity that was perfect for most dismembering tasks, especially considering the petite victims Lazarus most often chose. Professional tools were always worth the investment.
The extra-long handles provided superior leverage, and when Lazarus squeezed them, the clean cut made by the radial-arc bypass blades splattered him with a fine mist of blood. That crisp apple bite was music to his ears.