The Perfect Smile

by Blake Pierce

  Pulling herself to her feet, she advanced on him. He rolled over onto his stomach and pushed up onto all fours just in time for her to kick him square in the chest. He toppled over backward, his now-longish hair falling forward to cover his forehead and part of his eyes. He flailed wildly in the sea of mannequin limbs that lay on the ground all around him

  She stepped toward him, anxious to take advantage of his diminished state but still wary that he might have a hidden weapon somewhere. To Xander Thurman, being without a knife was like most people being without clothes. She found it hard to believe he didn’t have one.

  “Wait. Please,” he groaned as she approached. “I only want to talk. That’s all I ever wanted.”

  She hesitated for only a half a second, processing the comment and almost immediately dismissing it. After all, that exploding mannequin he’d shot up moments earlier could have been her. But Thurman took advantage of that half second, swinging at her with the leg of a mannequin she hadn’t realized he’d been gripping.

  It collided with her left knee and her leg gave out. She dropped to the floor right in front of him as he swung the leg the other way, slamming the heel into her temple. She sprawled onto her side, briefly stunned by the impact.

  She heard him clambering to his feet and tried to do the same. But as she stood, her leg wobbled and gave out again, She dropped to her knees and felt a rush of pain as her kneecaps slammed onto the concrete floor. She looked up and saw that Xander was on his feet now, still holding the mannequin leg. He pulled it back behind his head like a baseball bat and took a step toward her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

  Jessie Hunt, injured and disoriented, stared at her father as he moved toward her.

  Her mind flashed back to another time, many years ago, when she thought she had escaped her father. She was called Jessica Thurman back then. Six years old, she’d been tied to a wooden chair with her eyelids taped open in an isolated, snowbound Ozarks cabin. Her mother stood in front of her, her arms strapped to an overhead wooden beam.

  While he made Jessica watch, her father used his hunting knife to gut her mom. Then he left the room, making his daughter sit there, unblinking, as the life slowly drained from her mother’s body and she went limp, her arms dangling uselessly above her head.

  At some point Jessica had escaped, running out barefoot into the snowy woods. She ran for a long time. Eventually her feet grew numb. But still she ran, trying to stay ahead of the heavy, booted footsteps not far behind.

  Finally she came to a cliff’s edge and looked over to see a raging river fifty feet below. She knew, even then, that jumping off that cliff would be suicide. But it felt preferable to the alternative.

  And yet, when the moment came, when her father’s arm reached out to pull her back, she found that she couldn’t take the leap, couldn’t move at all. So he dragged her back through the snow, re-strapped her to the chair, and left her in that cabin with the body of her mother. Only a couple of hunters passing by three days later saved her from certain death.

  There was no forgetting, and there were no hunters here to save her now. As her father got closer, she knew that there was no one left to protect her from the monster who had tortured her in both life and dreams. There was only her.

  So she stood up.

  Ignoring the pain in her leg, she forced herself to her feet in one swift deliberate motion. When her father reached her, she was upright, her fists clenched, her body taut and ready, her eyes trained on his. He stopped moving forward, his own eyes betraying his uncertainty.

  “Come on!” she screamed.

  But he didn’t. Instead of continuing forward, Xander Thurman tossed the mannequin leg at her, turned, and ran toward the exit, his right leg dragging slightly.

  Jessie stood frozen for a moment, not sure what had just happened. Then she stepped forward to chase after him.

  She had to stop immediately. Her leg hurt but that wasn’t the real problem. She still felt woozy from the blow to her head. She bent over slightly, trying to keep the room from spinning. She watched, frustrated and helpless as her father pushed open the exit door and disappeared from sight.

  She allowed herself five seconds to recuperate, taking in several deep breaths, hoping that her head would clear. It helped. She didn’t feel totally lucid but she no longer feared that she would topple over if she tried to walk.

  She took one step. Her leg held steady. She took another. The knee was sore but she could put weight on it. She took a third step. And then, confident that she could stay upright, she broke into a run, out the door, in search of the father who wanted to kill her.

  *

  She was getting close now.

  After leaving the warehouse, she briefly thought she’d lost him. But then she saw the limping figure about fifty yards ahead of her. He was moving away from the business district and toward the adjacent residential area.

  As she ran, Jessie pulled out her phone and auto-dialed Dolan’s number, trying not to lose her grip in the downpour. It went straight to voicemail.

  “Dolan,” she yelled breathlessly into the phone. “I’m chasing Thurman. He hit Murph with a car and chased me into a warehouse. I disarmed him but he got away. He’s currently running westbound on West 25th Street into the West Adams residential zone. My ringer is off but you can track my location.”

  As she tried to shove the phone back in her pocket, her fingers slipped and it fell from her grip. It hit the ground and slid along the asphalt until it ended up in the gutter, where it was carried along by the torrent of water.

  Everything after that seemed to happen in slow motion. Jessie watched as the fast-moving current tugged the phone swiftly toward a storm drain. Realizing she couldn’t catch up in time, she dove to try to snag it. But as she leapt, her left leg buckled and she landed well short, crushing her ribs and knocking the wind out of herself. She could only lie helplessly in the rain as her phone disappeared from sight.

  When she managed to get to her knees and crawl over, she reached her hand in, hoping the phone had lodged against the grate but knowing it hadn’t. Finding nothing, she looked up and saw that her father was now a good hundred yards ahead of her, even with his pronounced limp.

  The phone doesn’t matter. Get up. Get him.

  She pushed herself upright, pretending not to notice her throbbing knee or her screaming ribs. As she started to get some momentum again, she saw Xander round the corner north onto 2nd Avenue. She picked up the pace so as not to lose sight of him.

  He was still visible when she got to the intersection. She had made up some of the distance, even at her slowed pace. He looked back at her and, seeming to decide that a chase on open streets was ultimately a losing battle for him, ran up the sidewalk toward one of the expansive manor houses on that street.

  As Jessie hurried to catch up, she saw him reach the door and grab the knob. She willed it not to open. But it did. He looked back down the street at her, gave a malevolent grin, and stepped inside.

  By the time she reached the house almost a minute later, Jessie knew her advantage was gone. Xander could be just inside the door, waiting with a fireplace poker or a butcher knife. But at least he was trapped. Dolan would get her message and in just a few minutes, this street would be swarming with cops. All she had to do was sit and wave them down when they arrived.

  Then she heard the scream.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Jessie ran up the steps.

  She couldn’t wait. That wasn’t the scream of someone who was simply scared. It was a person in unrelenting pain. Another scream cut through the night air. And she had to make it stop.

  Even as she reached the top of the stairs and saw that the front door was ajar, she knew she was being manipulated, that she was doing exactly what Thurman wanted. And yet she couldn’t stop herself. She couldn’t just stand on the street and wait for backup. Her father’s victim would be dead by then.

  But just because she had to enter didn’t mean she had to be predi
ctable about it. She dove at the door, extending her arms to push it open, before tucking her head into a roll at the last moment, just as her FBI field instructor had taught her. She somersaulted into the house and used her momentum to pop right up and spin around quickly, looking for any immediate threat. There was no one in the foyer.

  Then she heard another scream. It was coming from somewhere in the center of the house. She rushed down the closest hallway, and as she approached the entryway to the large room ahead of her, used the same move to roll into it rather than run in upright.

  When she popped up, she whirled around the room to look for threats. What she saw made her mouth drop open. Across the massive living room, in front of a crackling fireplace, was a girl. She was sitting in a chair, her arms strapped to the armrests, her feet bound to the chair’s legs. Her eyelids were taped open.

  But her mouth was stuffed with a rag. The screams weren’t coming from her. Instead, they seemed to be coming from the woman in front of her, whose arms, tied to an overhead roof beam with bungee cord, dangled above her head. Jessie saw that a steady stream of blood was seeping onto the floor from her midsection. Next to her, a man dangled limply, a huge pool of blood at his feet. He looked to be dead.

  Jessie glanced around for any sign of Thurman. He was almost certainly around, as evidenced by the recent screaming. But he wasn’t immediately visible. Though she had no choice but to move forward, something felt off about the situation to Jessie. How had her father prepared this elaborate setup so quickly?

  Her eyes fell on the poker to the right of the fireplace. Moving cautiously, she edged toward it, hoping to secure any weapon that could even the odds. As she reached the couch, she peered around it in case he was hiding behind it. There was no sign of him.

  She continued toward the fireplace, passing the dangling man and the moaning woman to his left. She wanted to help, but refused to even look over at them. Any distraction might give Thurman, wherever he was, a chance to make a move.

  She got around the couch and was within feet of the poker when she allowed a passing glance at the girl seated within reach of her. Closer now, Jessie realized that she wasn’t so much a girl as a young woman. She looked to be in her late teens.

  Despite her best efforts not to, Jessie looked at the girl’s eyes. Taped wide open, they looked terrified. But there was something else in them too. There was intent. She seemed to be trying to convey something to Jessie, who studied her more closely.

  The girl’s eyes were moving, darting to a spot to Jessie’s right and then back to her. Jessie glanced to the right, expecting to see Thurman crouched there. But what she saw instead was a pair of shoes. Just beyond them were the sock-covered feet of someone lying face down on the floor.

  Another dead body, just like the man dangling behind her?

  And that’s when it clicked for her. The girl’s eyes weren’t bouncing between the body on the floor and Jessie. They were bouncing between the body on the floor and the man dangling behind her.

  She turned around to face him, knowing it was already too late. She was right. The man behind her was no longer dangling and his arms were no longer above his head. One of them, the one injured from the gunshot to the shoulder a few ago, rested at his side. But the other one, already swinging a candlestick holder toward her head, worked fine.

  The arm moved smoothly and quickly as the candlestick holder connected with the side of her skull, just a millisecond after she recognized the person holding it as her father.

  CHAPTER THIRTY ONE

  Jessie was pretty sure she wasn’t dead, though part of her wished she was.

  As she slowly returned to consciousness, her body began to throb. It was hard to discern exactly where the pain was coming from, there so many sources of it. As she waited for her vision to unblur, she did a mental rundown of her personal injuries.

  Her head throbbed relentlessly where the candlestick holder had smashed into it. Her ribs ached from diving onto the street after her phone. Her hip was sore from landing on it when Murph had thrown her out of the path of the oncoming car. Her knee felt swollen, like a balloon that needed some air let out.

  And there were her arms. She hadn’t injured them as best she could recall. So why did they sting so bad?

  As her eyes slowly cleared, she realized the reason. They were tied to bungee cords and wrapped around the overhead beam, just like the woman next to her, who was now clearly dead.

  Jessie quickly closed her eyes, trying not to let the sight linger in her brain. She was still too hazy to be truly scared yet. But she knew that feeling was coming. And being inches from a dead woman in the same position as her wasn’t going to help fight that off.

  She could hear movement somewhere in front of her and assumed it was Thurman, since everyone else in the room was either dead or tied up. She tried not to move, hoping that the longer she could make him think she was still out, the more time she would have to come up with a plan.

  Based on the fact that her arms weren’t totally numb but still tingled with pain, she gathered she hadn’t been out more than a few minutes. Despite the discomfort, she preferred this. Once her arms became completely numb, they’d be mostly useless—unable to grip anything that might help her escape. She needed to find a way out of this fast, while her body still had some capacity to function and before her father began the inevitable cutting.

  “I know you’re conscious, Junebug,” Thurman said mildly from what sounded like only a few feet away. “Your breathing changed when you woke up.”

  Since her ruse was now pointless, Jessie allowed herself to swallow. It turned into a hacking cough as her throat was dry. The shaking of her body made every injury hurt exponentially more.

  “I don’t normally do this,” Xander said, his voice getting closer. “But since we’re kin, I’m going to give you a little liquid refreshment.”

  Suddenly her head was being tilted back and water poured down her throat. She almost choked but still managed to gulp a bit down. Her vision grew crisper, enough that she could see the man standing directly in front of her. He smiled.

  “Of course, there’s a price for every blessing we receive in life,” he continued as he pulled out a long butcher knife already caked in blood and swung it casually at her mid-section, slicing into her side. “This is yours.”

  She gasped at this new unexpected pain. She knew the cut wasn’t very deep but that didn’t make it hurt any less. It felt like someone was pressing a hot pan against the left side of her stomach. Despite that, she refused to scream. Instead she inhaled deeply and then tried to breathe the agony out with the carbon dioxide.

  “I have to say,” she muttered when she was sure she could get out a sentence without crying, “I thought our reunion days were over. I was getting all geared up to mourn you.”

  Jessie waited for his response, hoping desperately that his vanity would at least temporarily take precedence over his thirst for vengeance. If she could get him to talk about how he’d survived what everyone assumed was his death, he might delay whatever awful plan he had in store her.

  “You did jump the gun on that one,” he said, taking the bait. “I thought if anyone would figure out my little subterfuge, it would be you, Junebug. But, as ever, my own daughter disappoints.”

  He took another casual swipe with the knife, this time getting her in the right thigh. The material of her pants was thicker than her shirt so the cut didn’t go quite as deep. But it still required enormous effort for her to stay quiet and deny him the satisfaction of seeing her suffer.

  She tried to focus her attention on something other than his contorted smirk. Looking down, she noticed that his left hand, the one not holding the knife, was bandaged up. Specifically, his middle and pinkie fingers were tightly wrapped in gauze. She nodded at them.

  “I guess that explains how they found your fingers at the scene.”

  He smiled proudly.

  “I had to make it believable,” he said. “Sometimes that requi
res a bit of personal sacrifice.”

  “But it wasn’t just the fingers, Xander,” she reminded him through gritted teeth. “They found your DNA in the blood in the courtyard. I don’t think it was crazy to assume those chunks of flesh were yours.”

  “Of course it might have looked that way to the untrained eye,” he conceded. “But all it took was little creative thinking to uncover the truth.”

  “Humor me, Pa,” she said sarcastically. “You know you want to tell me how you did it. And I’m really the only one who would appreciate it. So you may as well just spit it out.”

  She glanced over at the teenage girl tied up in the chair across from her, whose expression was one of bewilderment at this crazy woman baiting the man with the knife. Jessie smiled to herself. At least that meant she was doing a solid job of it.

  “I’ll make you a deal,” Thurman said devilishly. “I’ll tell you how I did it if you promise to keep it a secret. Oh wait, what am I saying? You’ll be keeping everything a secret soon enough.”

  He chuckled quietly at his own joke before continuing.

  “So I guess I can share. After all, sharing is caring, right, Junebug?”

  “If you say so.”

  “No,” he growled. “I want you to say so.”

  Jessie gulped hard.

  “Sharing is caring,” she muttered.

  “Good job, little one,” he said happily. “So here’s the great thing about hospitals—they bring in unconscious people. So if you find a homeless person who matches your size, age, and general looks and poison him very near the hospital you want to access later, they’ll admit him. Then all you have to do is sneak into the hospital before the big security clampdown, collect the unguarded unconscious man, and take him to a little-used basement storage room where you now have all the time you need to do a total blood exchange, which is a massive transfusion, replacing all his blood with your own. And if you’ve been accumulating and storing your blood in a refrigerator at that very hospital over several weeks, the entire process is actually very efficient. The machine that does it is mobile and everything. Modern technology is a marvel, Junebug.”