Halfway Down the Stairs

by Gary A Braunbeck

  Surgical bandages. A rubber tourniquet. Pressure tape. A mini blowtorch. Catheter tubing. A small roll of barbed wire. And a battery-powered bone saw.

  He laid everything out nice and neat. He unfolded the large rubber apron and put it on over his clothes. He removed the two pistols and double checked the silencer attachment on the semi-automatic.

  Ready, steady.

  He checked the time again. 4:48 a.m.

  He ran the calculations in his head once again.

  He’d disabled all the alarms and video cameras, but if anyone happened to glance at the equipment, they’d see all lights on and blinking as usual. If there was a secondary alarm, it would be somewhere in the bedroom. It didn’t matter. If a secondary alarm was set off, the security company would call first. Not getting an answer, they’d alert the police. This place was set far back from the main road. The drive to the house was tricky, a lot of twists and turns, not to mention the heavy foliage. You couldn’t just zoom up here. At best, even if the police cruiser were right at the entrance to the house’s private road, it would take them at least four minutes to get here. If the cruiser was dispatched from the station—and out here that would most likely be the case—then it would take them at least thirteen minutes to get here…and that was if they drove at a steady 80 m.p.h. the whole way.

  And odds were they’d be on Silent Approach.

  If there was a secondary alarm, and if the people behind the door had time to set it off before he could stop them, then once he went through the bedroom door he’d have somewhere between four and thirteen minutes.

  He’d choreographed it for twelve minutes.

  Time enough. He’d performed enough dry-runs on stolen CPR dummies and mannequins. Last time, he had it down to an even eleven-and-a-half minutes.

  If there was a secondary alarm. If it was tripped. If he had to be fast.

  He wished he could have hours.

  Days, even.

  He walked to the bedroom door.

  “Give it to me hard, baby! I like it hard. YES!”

  He took a deep breath and remembered the scent of Katie’s perfume. The way she smiled during sleep. How she organized her sale coupons before heading out for the grocery store.

  His face became a mask of granite.

  He lifted the guns, exhaled, and kicked open the unlocked door.

  The woman on the bed was on all fours, gripping the sheets in her fists and teeth. Her ass was high in the air. The man behind her was plunging a ridiculously large dildo into her.

  They both jerked up their heads in shock as soon as the door crashed into the wall.

  The man on the bed was none other than Dr. Barry Brandt, international best-selling author of Return to Romance: How To Stoke the Fires of Marital Passion, host of the popular syndicated radio show Words of Love, and recent daytime television talk-show star, thanks to the instant ratings success of his Homefires program. Add to that his always sold-out seminars for married couples—at a thousand dollars a pop—and his Romance Retreat Institute, and you had yourself a bona fide celebrity approaching pop-culture icon.

  It was doubtful most of his followers knew about his adult-film franchise.

  Brandt flung himself back against the wall, leaving the dildo inside his bed-mate.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  He pointed one gun at Brandt’s face, the other at the woman on the bed. “It doesn’t really matter now. My name’s Morgan. My wife and I were just one of God-only-knows how many couples you lured to your Romance Retreat.”

  “Just tell me what you want and I’ll—”

  “Keep your hands where I can see them, both of you.”

  “Can I take this goddamn thing out of me?” said the woman.

  “No.” He moved closer to the bed, pressing the business end of the silencer against Brandt’s upper lip. “Are there any alarms in here?”

  “No,” said Brandt.

  Morgan jerked his arm to the right, firing the semi-automatic into the mattress, just missing the woman’s knee.

  She shrieked but, to her credit, didn’t move.

  “Next one goes through something wet and soft,” Morgan said, shoving the silencer back up against Brandt’s face. “This is very important, Doctor. Extremely important. So I’ll ask again—are there any alarms in this room?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good boy. Where?”

  Brandt’s eyes moved to the right. Morgan followed the path. A small pearl button on the right bed-post.

  “That the only one?”

  “Yes.”

  Morgan took a step back, looked once at the woman on the bed, and shot her in the thigh with the tranquilizer pistol. Ten seconds later, she was unconscious.

  Morgan leaned down to check her breathing. It was fine. “Turn her over on her side in case she pukes,” he said to Brandt. “And prop a couple of pillows behind her so she doesn’t fall over onto her back.”

  “Look, w-we can…we can talk about this,” said Brandt.

  “Turn her onto her side.”

  Brandt complied.

  Afterward, Morgan shoved the silencer under Brandt’s chin; with his other hand, he grabbed the good doctor’s testicles and pulled him along, guiding him to the other room.

  “Th-that hurts!” shouted Brandt.

  “It’s supposed to,” replied Morgan, shoving the other man down onto the sofa. He grabbed the first set of handcuffs and slapped them around Brandt’s ankles. Then he grabbed Brandt’s hair and forced him to bend forward so he could cuff the man’s arms behind his back.

  Morgan noted with neither joy nor fury that Brandt’s being naked gave him 45 additional seconds to do what he came here to do.

  Of course, with no secondary alarm having been set off, he had all night.

  All the time in the world.

  Morgan reached over and turned on a lamp.

  Brandt got a good look at everything that was laid out on the table. His face turned white. He tried to speak but couldn’t find his voice.

  Morgan pulled up a chair and sat in front of Brandt, the gun pointed directly at the good doctor’s genitals. “The blowtorch is for cauterizing. You know, so you don’t bleed to death.”

  “I’ve got money. A lot of it. There’s almost a quarter of million in cash right here in the house. And I can get more within an hour. I—”

  “The thing is,” said Morgan, “we really believed in your methods, Katie and me. Fourteen years we’d been married. Not every moment was filled with the crippling romantic ecstasy that you see in movies, but we loved each other. We were happy—happy enough.” He cocked his head to one side and stared into Brandt’s eyes.

  “You have no idea what I mean when I say ‘happy enough,’ do you? I didn’t think so. How could someone like you know what it’s like to totally love someone. Not just their body, their smile, the way they smell in the morning, not just a check-list of countless individual things...but to love the imperfect whole, unquestioningly. The warmth of her lips, the smoothness of her skin, the silly way they hiccupped? I’d always felt that way about her, even if in later years I didn’t show it as often or as well as I should have. Every time I saw her, every time we kissed, every time I caught a whiff of her perfume that entered a room just before she did, I was amazed at the rush of emotions inside me. I never in my life believed I had it in me to love someone so completely.

  “Being with her wasn’t like having a fantasy come true before I was ready for it; it was like having a fantasy come true before I’d even had the fantasy.”

  He reached up and wiped something from his eye.

  “I remember, when we first met, how Katie would always ask me to tell her the story of my life. So I’d tell her, and when I finished, she’d ask me to tell it to her again, and I did. Only the second time, it was the story of our life. I—” He stopped himself when he saw the disgust lingering underneath the fear in Brandt’s eyes.

  “But you don’t give a shit about that, do you, Doc? Or should I
say, Lance Rollins? As in ‘A Lance Rollins Production’?”

  Brandt’s eyes flashed something at hearing that name.

  “You know that exit packet you give all the couples who attend your weekend Romance Retreat? There’s a suggestion in that list of—what is it, 125 tips? Buried in the middle. ‘Do not be afraid to watch erotic films together; there’s nothing wrong with looking for new fantasies to share with your spouse.’

  “Well, after our weekend at the Retreat, things were going really good. We made love like we were in our early twenties again. Katie became more ambitious. She even started taking the initiative. It was just...great.”

  Morgan rubbed his temple, sighed, then looked at Brandt and shot him in the shoulder.

  Brandt threw back his head and tried to scream but the pain was too intense. He barely managed a squeak. Morgan grabbed a small rubber ball from the pocket of his apron and shoved it in Brandt’s mouth, then used a strip of pressure tape to secure it in place.

  He waited until Brandt finished thrashing. The good doctor’s head slumped forward. His breath shot hard out of his nose.

  Morgan reached out and tipped Brandt’s head up with the edge of the silencer.

  “Not gonna pass out on me, are you, Doc?”

  Brandt stared at him with hate-filled eyes.

  “So I take it then that my narrative isn’t boring you?”

  Brandt didn’t even blink.

  “I would apologize for shooting you in the shoulder like that, but I suddenly saw Katie’s face. I don’t see it anymore, Doc, and that makes me sad. She’s gone, and it’s your doing, and what should now be the best time of our lives—mine and Katie’s, that is—is just an endless succession of dismal, empty days, followed by dismal, empty nights. She used a garden hose, in case you’re wondering. Ran it from the tailpipe through the trunk and between the fold-down back seats. She did it around 5:16 in the morning.” Morgan checked his watch. “About seven minutes from now. That’s when I’m going to start in on you, Doc. At 5:16. I think you should die as slowly and in as much pain as she did.

  “Oh, her pain wasn’t as physical as yours is going to be, but her spirit, her heart, everything that made her so loving and kind and decent—that was in unspeakable agony. Had to be to drive her to suicide.

  “Where was I?—oh, yeah, the 125 tips For Sustaining the Romantic Flame. Number 87: ‘Do not be afraid to watch erotic films together; there’s nothing wrong with looking for new fantasies to share with your spouse.’

  “Well, it was about three, four months after our Retreat weekend. God knows that time at the Retreat had helped us—put the spark back into our sex life, but Katie and I were starting to, well...run out of ideas. So we sit down with the cable guide and check out the Pay-Per-View adult movies. We decided to spend an evening watching and taping ‘erotic films.’ The first couple were pretty tame but we enjoyed them, but it was the third film—Loving Couples, A Lance Rollins Production—that really caught our attention.”

  Morgan rose to his feet. He placed the gun on the coffee table, then picked up the tourniquet and syringe. “Are you so stupid as to think that none of the couples who attend your seminars or go to your retreat will ever watch Pay-Per-View adult films? Or does your research show that they prefer to go out and rent? I checked on that, you know—your productions aren’t available for rental, only purchase through the mail. And since you have to have exact titles...well, I guess I can see why you’d think odds were none of the couples you secretly filmed would ever find out.”

  He leaned down into Brandt’s face. “Well, one of them did, Doc. There we are, sitting naked in front of the television, and all of a sudden there we are on the television. First we’re making love in the bath tub, then there we are on the bed. Then later on—after you used tape of other couples—we top off the movie with our simultaneous orgasm, the first time we’d ever tried it with me entering her from behind.

  “Do you know how that killed her? She pulled away from me and covered up her body like it was something filthy, something diseased. She wouldn’t talk to me for days. She was so afraid that someone we knew might see that movie and recognize us.”

  He grabbed Brandt’s throat and squeezed. “Sex between Katie and me was always something special and intimate, something that left us feeling even closer to one another than we had before, and in one instant you ruined it for us forever. You twisted it, made it dirty and shameful and broke her spirit. She couldn’t live with what you’d done. I wanted to go to the police but she said no. It would have been too humiliating for her. You made it humiliating. You took a weekend that was so precious to us, that gave so much back to us, and turned it into...into...God! There’s not even a word for what you turned it into!

  “You took the most beautiful weekend of our lives and mutilated it. That’s what Katie said to me. ‘It’s all been mutilated for me. My body is ugly. What we do in bed is ugly. I want it to stop.’”

  Morgan held the syringe up to the light and flicked it with his finger, making sure there were no bubbles; it wouldn’t do to accidentally burst Brandt’s heart before he even got started. He wrapped the tourniquet around the other man’s arm and pulled it tight, until a juicy vein rose up.

  “You mutilated her spirit, Doc. You mutilated her soul. Since I don’t think you’ve got a soul, I’ll have to return the favor with the next best thing.”

  Brandt’s eyes grew wide with terror and he began to thrash.

  Morgan grabbed one of the guns and slammed the butt against the side of Brandt’s skull.

  The doctor fell to the side, still conscious but not struggling.

  Morgan stuck the needle into Brandt’s vein and sank the plunger.

  “Just so you won’t be too distracted during everything, Doc, I’m going to tell you the story of our life—Katie’s and mine.

  “Maybe if there’s time, I’ll tell it to you again. You’re in the last part.

  “For a little while, anyway.”

  Morgan lit the blowtorch, then fired up the bone saw.

  He was empty now.

  Katie had taken the best of him with her. He hoped it would still be waiting for him to reclaim it after he was done. She would be there, waiting for him, thanking him for avenging her death. She would give back to him all the good things that had made him human.

  He would be with her soon.

  He was saving the Teflon-coated hollow-point round to make sure they’d be together.

  Body and soul.

  Always.

  “Body and soul, Doc. One’s useless once the other’s been ruined. Remember that. Can’t be romance without body and soul.”

  He inserted the catheter tube—none too gently—and then slipped the barbed wire into that.

  “You know,” he said to Brandt. “I almost hope you live through this.”

  Not rushing things.

  It would all come out fine in the end.

  All it took was patience.

  Always Something There to Remind Me

  “Footfalls echo in the memory

  Down the passage which we did not take

  Towards the door we never opened…”

  —T.S. Eliot, “East Coker”

  “The carpeting’s the wrong color.”

  Cindy Harris looked away from the television and said, “What?”

  Her husband, Randy, pointed to the television.

  “The carpeting’s supposed to be light blue. Look at it. It’s green, fer chrissakes.”

  “So what’s the big deal?”

  Randy looked at her with that impatient, condescending expression that told Cindy he expected her to already know the answer. That expression was one of the few things about her husband that Cindy genuinely disliked. She could feel his defensiveness rising and wondered if he’d been forgetting to take his Zoloft lately.

  “The big deal,” he said, “is that I remember the way my folks argued about the color. Dad wanted green, but Mom insisted on light blue, and like every other
time they had an argument, Mom won out.”

  Cindy watched him fiddle with the controls on the remote, then flip down the little door at the bottom of the set and start messing with the controls there.

  Sighing, Cindy said, “Maybe something went wrong with the transfer. C’mon, Randy. Those home movies were pretty old, y’know? Maybe we waited too long to have them put on DVD. That old eight millimeter film stock, maybe it started to go bad and this was the best they could do. Most of them have turned out fine up until now.”

  Randy stopped fiddling with the controls, looked at the picture once more, and then turned toward her, his face losing color.

  “What is it?” asked Cindy.

  “I, uh…nothing. Nothing.” He rose to his feet, walked across the room, and began heading up stairs. “I gotta make a call. Back in a minute.”

  “Hold on,” said Cindy, grabbing hold of his elbow. “What’s wrong, honey? This isn’t worth getting upset about.”

  He tried smiling at her but didn’t quite pull it off. “I just remembered something—I mean, I think I remembered something.”

  “Plan on letting me in on it?”

  His face softened, but remained slightly pale. “Please let me make the call and then I promise I’ll tell you all about it.” Kissing her cheek, he gently pulled her hand from his elbow and went up to his office, closing the door behind him.

  Putting her impatience on hold, Cindy went back to the sofa, sat down, and turned up the volume. Randy never talked much about his childhood—something that annoyed Cindy at times but which she respected, nonetheless—so maybe she could use this as a chance to get a glimpse of him as a child.

  She watched for several minutes as Lawrence, Randy’s father, finished setting up a plastic racing track in the middle of the room (with a running and very funny commentary), plugged in the power supply, and then put a small HO-scale car on the track and gave it a test run.

  “Think he’ll like it?” asked Lawrence.

  “Oh, he’ll just flip,” said the voice of Virginia, Randy’s mother, who was holding the camera. Lawrence grinned, obviously proud of himself for having assembled this without bloodshed, and then came the sound of a door opening. Virginia whipped around with the camera, the image blurring for a moment, and came to a stop on the face of a little boy who looked about nine years old. His face was flushed from the cold outside, and he was having trouble unwrapping the heavy wool scarf from around his neck.