Deathgrip

by Brian Hodge

  She frowned across the kitchen to her counter, at his own culinary offering, now obsolete. “How can you eat that stuff first thing in the morning?” Nurse Edie, nutrition on her mind.

  “It took years of intensive training.”

  A mock shudder. “I pity the doctor who does your autopsy.”

  “I’m immortal.” Very matter of fact. “I’ve got so many additives and preservatives in me, I figure I’m good until at least the twenty-third century.”

  “Be careful, you’ll wind up in your own newspaper.” A smug smile. “The world’s only human being with a shelf life.”

  She had a deep nurturing streak in her. It was obvious in the way she’d set him down at the table, whipped those eggs into a froth with a wire whisk. Like it was second nature, and he some soup-kitchen derelict. She probably brought in stray kittens and puppies, fed them, found them homes. He glanced around for a little feeding bowl; eureka, around the corner from the stove.

  “Did you always want to be a nurse?”

  She nodded emphatically. “In my neighborhood? When I was a kid? Whenever somebody scraped their knee or something, I was in heaven. I had the toy stethoscope, and bandages, and bottles of sugar pills — I had it all.” Edie cocked her head. “What about you? Nobody wants to grow up and write for The National Vanguard.”

  “Baseball player, that was my big goal. When I was a kid, my dad used to run me all across the state on weekends, and we’d see all the teams down in Florida for spring training. I thought, hey, that’s the life for me.”

  “So what happened?”

  Mike shrugged. “A little thing called mediocrity. I was barely good enough for second-string college, let alone the pros.” He was laughing to himself, laughing at himself; had done it so long, it no longer bothered him. “Luckily I had a talent for embellishing on the truth.”

  The change on her face was night from day. “I need to ask you a serious question.”

  “Sure.”

  “Today? Amanda Dawson? What kind of approach are you going to take with it once you get back to your office?”

  “I’m not sure I follow.”

  “I mean, is it going to be all hype and flash and scandal? You know. Like you’re gloating over all the dirt you’ve dug up on these people?” Her eyes, so fretful, so concerned.

  “It’s not up to me.” As honest an answer as he could give. “But personally, I just want to play it straight.”

  “And what will it be in there with? I got to wondering this last night. I mean — will she be in there with a bunch of pictures of freaks and murder victims and things like that?”

  He couldn’t help but laugh. “You haven’t read a tabloid lately, have you?”

  “I look at the headlines in the grocery store. Doesn’t everybody?”

  “You don’t see much of the hard-boiled approach anymore. That was the old days, when the buyers were mostly men, getting them in tobacco shops and newsstands.” Finally, a topic about which he could wax authoritative. “Ever since they started selling through supermarkets, the buyers got to be mostly middle-aged white women, and nobody wanted to gross them out. So the contents shifted. Celebrities, psychics, diets, all that garbage.”

  Edie was grinning. “You don’t take it very seriously, do you?”

  “I don’t take much of anything seriously. Just a few things.” He shook his head. “At the Vanguard, we have this mental profile of our typical reader. Somebody even hung a name on her, we call her Aunt Hester. The lady’s our yardstick for what gets printed. Would Aunt Hester like this? Would Aunt Hester be really offended by that?” He finished his coffee, set down the mug. “You can’t take anything seriously when it’s geared around some make-believe woman who sounds like she was named after a milk cow.”

  Time to leave. They piled dishes into the sink; she grabbed her purse, he grabbed his camera, and that was that. Odd seating arrangements down at her Nova, Edie insisting he ride in back, all the easier to hunker down and hide later on. Morning drive time, the commuters of Oklahoma City. It felt as if he were being chauffeured in the lowliest of limos.

  Mike had been half expecting to find her ready to back out of it this morning, second thoughts about showing him the truth behind the Dawson facade. But she was resolute, no hesitation, and he found this admirable. It took true courage, even with anonymity as a part of the bargain. Hence the camera, a 35mm Nikon, ASA400 film with Amanda’s name on it. One picture is worth a thousand signed affidavits.

  How very weird. Sixteen hours ago, they had been strangers, Edie known to him only through voyeurism. Now she was an ally willing to stick her neck out for him and potentially drape it across the chopping block. How very rare.

  Mike had lost track of how many women he had known carnally. A plundering cocksman who sheathed his sword at every available opportunity, with time for neither conscience nor afterthought. Dancers and models, fellow reporters and television anchorwomen, stenographers and pediatricians and lawyers and so on — he had humped a swath up and down the eastern Florida coastline. Not a one of them could he count on for the quiet reliability of Edie Carson. And somehow, he didn’t think it was their fault.

  You get what you pay for. He’d opened himself up this time as he rarely had before, out of necessity, with an objective to be accomplished. And rather liked the results. A few vulnerabilities weren’t such anathema after all.

  He studied Edie’s profile from the backseat. He’d written her off too soon. She was very cute, in her own way, you just had to wait for it. Invest a little in her to bring it out and see it for yourself. Once there, unmistakable, and he would not be at all surprised to learn it ran soul deep.

  “You better duck down now, we’re almost there,” she said once they were on South Squire Road.

  Mike squirmed into the floorboard. Between his height and the Nova’s negligible width, this was no fun at all. He tugged a light blanket over himself, all the better to disappear under. Edie reached back with one arm and did some rearranging.

  “There you go,” she said. “You look just like dirty laundry.” A wicked giggle. “Appropriate, don’t you think?”

  He grumbled. This abuse had to be worth a Pulitzer.

  As good as blind, he gauged their progress by sound, by movement. Off South Squire onto the compound grounds, the main lot. Dawson’s drive, and a pause at the gates. She retrieved a digitally encoded card from the glove compartment, used it to punch in and open the gates. On down the private drive, forever, then cutting a tight circle to the left. Stop. She killed the engine.

  “Sit tight,” her voice soft. “See you in a few minutes.”

  He listened, eyes closed, sensory deprivation in stuffy darkness. Every sound took on added significance, Edie’s fading footsteps toward the house, her entrance, then nothing but the mundane ambience of a suburban morning. Florida never sounded this boring, did it? Maybe it did.

  He didn’t move until he heard the slower footsteps of Alice Ward, fresh off the midnight shift. He counted off two minutes after her engine ground to life and she rolled away, then pronounced the coast clear. He shucked his wrapper and rose up slowly, and something rolled off him to thump on the seat beside him. What the hell?

  He sighed. One of those annoying fabric softener teddy bears. Dirty laundry indeed. How dare she.

  Mike left the car with the Nikon slung around his neck, the morning air newly cool and fresh. He stepped toward the Dawsons’ front door with light nonchalance. This was like revisiting his teenage years, infested with hormones and creeping toward a girlfriend’s house after dark.

  He lurked at the doorway another minute or so before it swung open and Edie dragged him inside.

  “Are you sure your parents are asleep?” He couldn’t resist.

  She huffed. “Just don’t break anything.”

  While Edie relocked the door behind him, Mike took it all in, this foyer that went beyond elegance. If it fell, the chandelier alone would kill him. Bury him with the Persian rug as his shr
oud. Parlor to the left, TV den to the right, complete with one of those six-foot screen monstrosities. This was obscene. Just when he’d been thinking his own Florida dwelling wasn’t such a pit after all. Thanks a lot, Donny.

  Edie pointed to the bottom of the stairway, wide as a loading-dock ramp. “That’s where Doctor Preston says she fell.”

  He inspected, ran a hand over the heavy dark banister. Solid, it could really do a number on anyone’s skull. If Amanda had begun her fall from the very top, it was a wonder she’d survived at all.

  “Just look at this place!” He could hold it in no longer. “Aunt Hester would shit.”

  “Come on,” Edie, tugging at his sleeve. “I don’t like leaving Mrs. Dawson alone.”

  Mike allowed himself to be pulled along like a child reluctant to leave a toy store window, then fumbled with the camera and snapped a few shots of the stairway. The film roll was thirty-six negatives strong, with another in his pocket, so might as well go for some variety.

  The day could be a gold mine, prowling for a feel for the Dawsons’ private life. Would Amanda’s closet hold fifteen hundred pairs of shoes, a la Imelda Marcos? Would the bathroom fixtures be plated in gold, as had those of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker? He would have eight hours to find out and soak it all up until running to hide in the Nova before the next shift change.

  Third floor, a hallway of guest quarters, then stop.

  “This is her room.” Edie’s voice had dropped to a reverent hush, a voice worthy of a sepulcher.

  Mike followed her inside, paused several feet from the bed. One hand toying with the Nikon hanging against his belly. He could only stare, frozen, thinking of contrasts.

  Amanda Dawson was a fraction of the vibrant woman he’d become accustomed to seeing in the ministry literature. A shattered fragment, a wasted specter, curled onto her right side and facing him. Her face, once so pretty in a guardedly sensual manner, had somehow gone tight and slack at the same time. Deathly pale, and damp. Her fingers were brittle sticks. Permeating the room was the underlying odor of bowels voided time and time and time again.

  Sleeping Beauty expectations, dead on arrival.

  “This … this isn’t what I thought she would be like.”

  Edie nodded. “It takes some getting used to.”

  Mike couldn’t take his eyes off her, this motionless woman, fascinating in the same perverse way as were the morbidly obese, the malformed. To stare was rude, but so very human. Except in this instance, he could stare until his eyes glazed over, and she would never notice.

  And Edie dealt with her, this living dead, eight hours a day, no days off, one on one, solitary confinement. And to think he had pegged her as having the insides of a marshmallow. What a colossal error in judgment. She deserved some kind of humanitarian award. All three of them did.

  Sudden second thoughts, his own — surprise. What kind of sleazeball took advantage of someone so completely helpless? Amanda Dawson had already been reduced as a human being. Now he was ready to mark her down even lower, into a commodity. A spectacle for mass-marketing and distribution to a public that could never consume enough.

  Oh hell, why this attack of scruples, anyway?

  “Mike?” Edie’s hand, from behind, on his shoulder. He could swear she’d just read his mind. “Remember what you’re here for. Remember what you want to accomplish with this.”

  He nodded without looking back. Yeah, right, there was that, wasn’t there? Dirty pool, sure. But if Dawson was disgraced in the public eye, then maybe the world could be a little safer for all of the Allison Lancers out there. All those who were still left.

  He lifted the Nikon, opened its aperture for more light. Chose his beginning vantage point and started to click away. One angle, then another, and another, and it got easier with every snap of the shutter.

  Plenty of natural lighting, no need for a flash. The window, overlooking the cul-de-sac on which Edie had parked, gave a northern exposure. Ramon had once told him that north light was the best light.

  Still life through a Nikon viewfinder. He must have clicked off fifteen shots by the time the warped humor began to surface, purely in reflex defense against the ghoulish nature of the situation. Mike Lancer, photographer to the living dead. Work with me, baby, beautiful, work with me, let’s have some drool now.

  Gallows humor, repugnant. Laugh or scream.

  Scream. He very nearly did when he heard it from off to the side, a single soft word: “Oh.”

  Bad trouble, he knew it even before his eye left the viewfinder. The voice had come from the doorway. And it had been male.

  “Mister — ah, Mister Matthews,” Edie stammered, and his heart had gone into a sickly flutter. Weak in the knees. It was the most brutally awkward moment of his life, of that there was no doubt. And this to a man who had experienced no end of awkward moments.

  Mister Matthews, Edie had said, and Mike performed a mental scramble. Matthews, Matthews, all the evangelists and their staffs were lumping together, no distinction among them, and then he had it, coming up a winner. Gabriel Matthews, Donny Dawson’s right-hand man. Seldom photographed, though Mike had never concerned himself with that. Maybe he should have, and oh shit, didn’t all this paint just the loveliest picture?

  “Oh no,” Gabriel whispered, voice and eyes equally barren, shocked by this sight, and Mike didn’t know who was more blown away at seeing the other. Wide grim mouth, trembling a moment, then a taut line. He gulped air, then suddenly yanked his collar open as he sagged a moment in the doorway. A gold chain around his neck, disco Gabe. He stared at Edie. “I’m disappointed in you. I really am.”

  Edie’s head hung at a shameful half-mast, and then she rolled her gaze back to Mike, full of queasy dread.

  “And you,” Gabe said to him. “I don’t even know who you are. You don’t belong here.”

  Terribly mesmerizing in a sick way, watching him straighten in the doorway, swallow thickly, then curl his hand toward his face, fingernails poised, and what’s this? He struck himself just above the right cheekbone, mouth wide in a silent scream, then a high warbling ahh ahh ahh, trembling, slowly dragging his nails downward, four ragged furrows opening red red red red, shaking so hard spittle flew from his open mouth, and worst of all he never blinked once.

  While Amanda slept on.

  Composed, all at once, implosively so, and he folded his hands tightly together. “Are either of you familiar with the Book of Matthew, chapter twenty-four? And the story of the unfaithful servant?”

  The Book of Matthew — was he speaking of the Bible or himself? Gabe, eternally patient, waited for an answer, got none. The silence was excruciating, and Mike could not move. Mind games, he was playing mind games with them.

  “I didn’t think so. Donny taught me this.” The unblinking eyes began to leak tears. “Fascinating passage, verses forty-five to fifty-one, this is the kind of loyalty he expected of me. Let me recite the pertinent parts for you.” He cleared his throat, stared them down the entire time. “‘Who, then, is a wise and faithful servant? He is the one whom the master has placed in charge of the other servants to give them their bread at the proper time.’” A hurried, quavering recitation, no inflections, one run-on sentence. “‘How happy is that servant if his master finds him doing this when he comes home. But if he is a bad servant, he will tell himself that his master will not return for a long time, and he will begin to beat his fellow servants and eat and drink with drunkards. Then that servant’s master shall one day return when the servant does not expect him and at an hour he does not know.’”

  A pause, Gabe looking close to hyperventilation, the blood on his cheek like war paint, and for a second his eyes rolled back, white in the sockets, and he let his jacket drop to the floor.

  “‘And the master will cut him into pieces.’”

  Mike could barely register seeing him move, it was that fast.

  “I’M SORRY I’M SORRY!” he screamed, Gabriel Matthews, a coiled spring suddenly released of tension,
and the nearest target was Edie. He went twisting around her, locking her head in the crook of his arm, the hand clamping atop her skull while his other hand seized her by the chin, and he executed a smooth, graceful pirouette of horrid speed. Huge wet crunch, oh dear lord save us, and Edie was suddenly staring back at Mike with eyes bulging and chin draping over her shoulder toward her spine, and then Gabe released her and she was crumbling to the floor with no control, no grace, no life.

  Gabe was coming, target number two, and he had snatched up a bedpan, an unlikely bludgeon but it would do the job. Mike knew he could never fight his way past this madman, nor slip around him. Edie, sorry, so sorry, but false heroics would get him killed and no one would be left to tell the tale.

  Mike launched himself around and back toward the multi-pane windows, almost jubilant that the gauzy drapes had been pulled aside, and he crossed arms before face and shut his eyes and hoped for the best and let his forearms lead the way.

  Then the world was shattering glass and crystalline shards and open space of free fall, and he was granted eternity to ponder his body, so heavy, denser than lead, than iron, and every snapshot frame of the green grass below coming close closer closest—

  Impact, and again he heard the now-familiar snap of bone, can’t mistake that one, and his left leg imploded into a white quasar of agony, and he felt that he’d been yanked to a stop as if on the end of a tether. The dangling camera whipped down into his middle with the force of a club to drive the breath from his lungs, and he gladly would have gagged if only he’d had the wind. The rest of him collided with the lawn a split-second after his leg, and he went rolling through a rainstorm of glass and broken bits of wood.

  Alive, though, somehow still alive after three stories of dead drop, and he realized the trip might not have had such a jolly ending had he landed on the asphalt ahead.

  Edie’s car.

  He was at the bottom of a sea of trees and mansion, ocean floor rippling with grass, and he began to swim for the car, his life raft, every movement requiring the exertion of ten. Lungs wouldn’t work, leg wouldn’t work, they were wreckage holding him back, and as he struggled across the lawn, he knew what it meant to drown in air.