Next Victim

by Michael Prescott

  Dodge worked his mouth under the tape, as if he could gnaw through it and then sink his chops into Mobius himself. This was great, just fucking great. Not only was he going to get offed by this piece of shit, but he would have to listen to a goddamn philosophy lecture first.

  But Mobius seemed to have said his piece. He moved around the bed, and in the chancy ambient light Dodge saw the glint of a knife.

  He cuts their throats. That’s how he does it.

  Fear flashed through him like a punch of nausea, and he released it the only way he could, by shaking his arms wildly, tugging at the duct tape, and when it didn’t break, he thrashed his legs, kicking like a petulant kid, and distantly he felt his bowels loosen and he knew he had crapped himself.

  God damn it, he didn’t want to die.

  He exhausted his strength and lay quivering on the tangled sheets. Mobius just watched him from the shadows. The guy didn’t look very big. Tall, maybe, but not pumped up the way ex-cons usually were. One on one, Dodge could take him, no problem.

  Come on, shithead, untape me and we’ll see which one of us is the alpha dog.

  He tried to force out the challenge past the tape on his mouth, but all that emerged was a grunt, low and plaintive and humiliating.

  It sounded like a plea. He hated that sound. He’d made many men plead, men he’d stomped and pounded, men whose fingers he’d broken and whose ribs he’d bruised, and although he enjoyed it when they begged for mercy, he was always secretly embarrassed for them, dismayed by their show of weakness.

  Now he was the one being weak. He shouldn’t let things play out that way. He should be tough, go down in defiance, not give an inch.

  Should, but couldn’t. He was forty-four. He wasn’t ready for this. It was too soon. He had plans. He had the money he was making on the side, his retirement money, and what he meant to use it for—the islands, every day spent beachcombing, every night a visit to a different island bar to bag a different island girl. Sun and sand and sex—decades of it—fuck, he was only forty-four.

  "Are you ready, Detective? I don’t like to start until the subject is ready."

  Bite me, you faggot asshole.

  "Usually I see a kind of resignation. It makes things easier."

  Dodge wouldn’t make it easy. He was not through living. He would not let this scumbag take his future away.

  "Of course, some people simply lack the proper temperament."

  Eat shit. Dodge wished he could scream it at him.

  He’d never really believed he would die. Never believed in a point of termination. Not for him. Other people died. He was forever. Other people left the world, but he…he was the world.

  Dodge shook his arms once more against the duct tape. The headboard rattled, banging on the wall. The mattress creaked.

  "There, there," Mobius said. "There, there."

  Everything blurred. Dodge thought Mobius had done something to his eyes. Then he realized he was crying.

  They would find him—someone would find him—and he would be dead in his own shit and piss, with dried tears on his face, and people would make remarks and get a laugh, and then he would go under Winston’s knife—his second trip to the morgue this weekend….

  A gloved hand on his face. Pushing up his chin. He fought to twist free of the hand. Couldn’t.

  In the other hand—the knife.

  Let me out of this, let me out….

  Like it was a bad dream and he could wake up. Like it was a TV show and he could change the channel.

  "There, there," Mobius said, and the knife flicked—a hot wire of pain in his neck, then something warm and wet, which was blood.

  35

  When Tess could move again, she got to her feet and staggered to the door and flung it open, leaning against the door frame to inhale the warm, dry breeze.

  She didn’t know how long she stood there, letting the uncontaminated air refresh her body and dilute the toxins in her blood.

  The sluggishness left her muscles, and the flulike symptoms that had been her first warning signs finally abated. She was still exhausted and shaky, sore where her arms and legs had seized up in convulsions, and her heart was running too fast and too hard, but she knew she was past the worst of it. She would be okay.

  Looking down, she was surprised to see that her purse was in her hand. She must have picked it up without conscious thought. The cell phone was gone, of course, as was the antidote kit, but she still had her gun, her FBI credentials, and her car keys. She wondered if she ought to drive herself to a hospital for observation, or use the phone in the manager’s office to call the police, or—

  Thinking of a phone call reminded her of using redial on her cell phone, trying to reach Dodge…and getting no answer.

  It was his cell phone number, the one he handed out to informers. He would have answered it—if he could.

  "He’s in trouble."

  Her own voice startled her, coming raspy and thick.

  She’d been working with Dodge. If Mobius had been following her or watching the arson site, he might have seen them together. Having targeted one of them, he might also have set his sights on the other.

  Dodge had told her his address. It wasn’t far. She could be at his place in ten minutes.

  She shook off the lingering effects of the gas, then closed and locked the door of room 14 so nobody would venture inside. Her bureau car was parked only a couple of yards away. She felt steadier on her feet as she walked to it, and when she started the engine and pulled out of the lot, the sense of purpose revived her further.

  Speeding down Ventura Boulevard, she lowered all the car windows and shut off the air conditioner and the vents. She thought it would be a long time before she used the AC again.

  The night air felt good, rushing in on her face, and by the time she headed up Coldwater Canyon Avenue into the Hollywood Hills, she was feeling almost strong again.

  That was good. The night had just begun—it was only 9:25—and she would need to be strong for whatever was to come.

  Tess parked down the street from Dodge’s house, on a turnout where her car was half hidden by eucalyptus trees. She’d driven the last quarter of a mile with her headlights off, in case anyone was watching from the windows.

  The Sig Sauer felt reassuringly solid in her hand as she left the car and prowled past hedges of oleander to the driveway. At the end of the drive was a carport, with Dodge’s car inside.

  No other vehicles were in sight. If Mobius had come, he’d either left already or parked elsewhere.

  Dodge’s house was old, small, single-story. It stood on a small, untidy lot against a stand of trees. From the front stoop, the lights of the LA basin would be visible. That was the view Dodge had bragged about.

  No lights were on. The curtains were shut, and the place looked empty, but it couldn’t be, not if the car was here.

  For a moment she wished she hadn’t fried her phone back at the motel. She would have liked to call for backup, especially since the queasiness and blurred vision brought on by the nerve agent hadn’t entirely dissipated. Maybe she should’ve stopped at a pay phone along the way.

  Too late now. She was on her own.

  Both the front and rear doors were probably locked. Most likely she would have to force a window. But she decided to try the front door first.

  Quickly down the slate path, the stones uneven from the seismic shifting of the earth in the decades since the bungalow was built. Up the two front steps to the door, then crouching low, huddling for cover in case she’d been spotted. A wave of dizziness quivered through her, another aftereffect of the gas.

  Silently she grasped the doorknob, and it turned—

  Turning freely under her hand…

  The door opening…

  Briefly she was disoriented in space and time, and she was entering the house she and Paul had shared, hearing the hiss of running water in the kitchen.

  She almost called Paul’s name, as if he might be here.

&
nbsp; Then reality snapped back, and this was LA, and it was Dodge she was looking for, and Paul was two years dead.

  Probably it was a mistake to go in alone. Probably she was walking into an ambush or another gas chamber like room 14.

  She entered anyway, moving fast through the doorway, then stepping to one side and hunching down as her vision adjusted to the space around her.

  Living room. Very small. Reflective surface of a TV set, and the faint greenish glow of a VCR’s clock underneath. A low shape that was a sofa, and the sharper rectangles of end tables.

  The room was empty. She was almost sure of it. If anyone was here—anyone alive—she would find him elsewhere.

  She listened to the house. A creak from somewhere in the rear. Wood settling? Scrape of a tree limb against the roof? Or a footstep on a floorboard?

  Another creak.

  Footsteps. Back of the house.

  She crossed the living room, treading silently, and peered through an open doorway into a dining area. Beyond it lay the kitchen and a hallway. The kitchen was barely larger than a closet, and she could see its complete interior from where she stood. No one there. And no water running either—

  Water running in the sink…

  Hissing through the pipes…

  Pile of dinner dishes…

  She fought off the memories and the new attack of vertigo that came with them. Her stomach twisted. A greasy, sick feeling rose in her throat, and she thought she might vomit. With effort she forced down the sickness.

  Then she headed into the hallway.

  The bedroom would be down there.

  Mobius’s execution site.

  Halfway down the hall, a bathroom provided the only illumination in this part of the house—the fifteen-watt glow of a nightlight. She detoured into the bathroom, whisked open the shower curtain.

  No one was hiding there. But from down the hall came another creak—different in quality from the first two—then a soft click.

  She thought of the sound a pistol’s slide might make as it was racked back.

  Mobius had never used a gun, but she drew no comfort from that fact.

  If he was out there and armed, she would have to face him. To stay in the bathroom was suicide. He could draw a bead on her from the darkness of the hall, and she would have nowhere to hide or run.

  Before exiting, she jerked the nightlight out of the wall outlet, darkening the hall. Then she pivoted through the doorway and jumped to the far side of the corridor. She braced herself against the wall and waited.

  No shots were fired.

  Still, she’d heard someone. She was certain she had.

  Slowly she approached what must be the bedroom, the last door in the hall other than the door to the backyard. Mobius could be just inside the doorway, waiting for her to enter.

  Her left hand still carried the nightlight. She pitched it into the darkness of the bedroom.

  As it dropped with a clatter, she ducked into the room and took cover behind the open door.

  Her diversionary tactic hadn’t drawn any fire. Either Mobius was cool under pressure, or he wasn’t here at all.

  She sidled along the wall, staying low, and felt a light switch poke her between the shoulder blades. The switch might control an overhead light or a lamp on a bureau or bedside table.

  She needed light. Darkness had given her an edge as long as her intrusion had been undetected. Now it worked against her, giving her enemy too many places to hide.

  She flicked the switch, then swept the room with her gaze as a lamp on a table came on.

  The bed and what was on it registered instantly, but she refused to take it in until she had looked into the closet and behind the bureau.

  Then another glance into the hall.

  Mobius wasn’t here.

  But he had been.

  She turned back to the bed where Dodge lay in his cheap suit, fully dressed, wearing even his shoes, his wrists duct-taped to the headboard, mouth sealed against a cry, throat opened in a gout of drying blood.

  His eyes stared, empty.

  She touched his neck, impelled by her training to check the carotid artery for a pulse, but of course there was no pulse. The blood had stopped flowing. It was already becoming tacky and dark.

  But not very tacky. Not yet.

  And Dodge’s skin was warm, his eyes moist with their last tears.

  He had died only minutes ago.

  The noises she’d heard. That third creak, that soft click.

  It had been the creak of the back door opening. The click of the latch sliding into place as the door eased shut.

  Mobius had escaped out the back while she was searching the bathroom.

  He couldn’t have gone far.

  She ran out the back door, the gun leading her, and scanned the shadowy trees. A spotlight mounted on the rear wall threw a pale glow over the grass.

  Moving through the trees, she found herself at the edge of a steep hillside sloping down into a canyon. She looked down, and there he was, limned in starlight, a tall, masculine figure slip-sliding through the chaparral brush fifty yards away.

  She didn’t know if her voice had come back until she heard herself shout, "Stop, FBI!"

  Her cry echoed and reechoed across the canyon, scaring a bevy of birds into reckless flight. The man on the hillside didn’t even slow down.

  She pointed her gun at him, but he was far away and there was too much darkness and ground cover and her arm was still shaky from the effects of the VX. She knew she would miss, so she conserved ammunition, slipping the gun into the waistband of her slacks as she scrambled down the slope.

  She expected him to continue descending into the canyon, but he surprised her, veering to his right, where a second hillside intersected with the first. He crossed over to that slope and began climbing toward the ridge. His movements were assured, confident, and she realized he must be retracing the route he’d taken when he arrived. He had parked somewhere in the maze of cul-de-sacs off Mulholland, then crossed the hills and sneaked onto Dodge’s property from the rear.

  She was yards behind him, hampered by the lingering weakness of her muscles and her unfamiliarity with the terrain. She couldn’t catch up to him, not in time.

  But, damn it, he was practically in her sights. She could see him, see Mobius, or at least his faint silhouette, his progress marked on the far hillside by a shifting wake of brush.

  She yanked the Sig Sauer free of her waistband and fired off a round, aiming high, leading the target.

  Whip-crack of the bullet in the air, thud of impact on sandstone, but the figure didn’t stop moving, wasn’t hit.

  From the rising plume of dust, she judged that the shot had been wide of its mark by a yard. She adjusted, fired again.

  This time the figure stopped—she thought she’d nailed him—no, he’d only frozen momentarily when the shot landed close.

  She’d come within a foot of him. Next time…

  A scrub oak beside her swayed as a bullet made a soft thwack in its branches.

  He was shooting back.

  She threw herself behind the tree, using its slender trunk as cover. Another shot went off, kicking up dirt and gravel near where she’d lain a moment earlier.

  The bastard was armed, and a good shot too—better than she was.

  When she glanced out from behind the oak, she saw him disappearing into a copse of eucalyptus trees halfway to the ridge.

  The trees provided perfect cover. She had no chance of hitting him now. Her best opportunity was to get back to her car, try to cut him off before he could drive away.

  She ran uphill, bending almost double at the waist to form a smaller target in case he decided to pick her off from the safety of the trees. She wondered how it would feel to be shot in the back, or if he was a good enough marksman to place the round directly in her skull—no warning, no awareness, no time even to hear the gun’s report—just a shattering impact and lights out.

  But she didn’t get shot, a
nd now she was scrambling into Dodge’s backyard, clear of the hillside, safe.

  She kept running, her heart working hard, breath coming in explosive gasps. If there was any VX left in her system, she must be sweating it out, purifying herself.

  Fast around the side of the house to the front, then down the street to the turnout where she’d parked—brief, frantic fumbling in her purse for her car keys, and then she was at the wheel, cranking the engine, flooring the gas as she slammed the gear selector into reverse and backed into the street. She popped the lever forward, putting the car into drive, and sped east on Mulholland, in the direction Mobius had been going.

  Side street ahead. Car pulling out. Blue coupe. Moving fast.

  Him.

  It had to be him.

  He must have made it to his vehicle just when she’d reached hers.

  She gunned the motor, the bureau car bouncing on the road, spraying dirt as she swerved into the shoulder on tight curves. She flicked on her high beams. The fleeing car bobbed in and out of the light. Camaro or Firebird, California plate.

  Another rough curve, her tires wailing as she fought with the steering wheel to prevent a skid, and then the road straightened out and so did she, and she was closer to Mobius’s car.

  The license plate. Read it.

  Two-two-three…

  He put on a burst of speed, racing out of the range of her high beams, challenging her to keep up. She floored the gas pedal. The sedan shook, bounding over ruts and potholes, each impact nearly banging her head on the ceiling. She realized she wasn’t wearing a seat belt.

  Closing in again.

  Two-two-three-XK…

  He swerved left, and it took her a split second to understand that he was taking a hairpin curve in the road.

  She spun the wheel, too late.

  The road switched hard to the left, and then there was no road, only a tangle of brambly weeds that scraped the hood and windshield, clawing at her through the open windows as she stood with both feet on the brake pedal.

  The car shuddered to a stop a hundred feet off the road, on a gentle downward slope that became a precipice not more than fifty yards farther ahead.