He looked around for the man with the knife to blow him to hell—if Rico was going to die, he would make goddamned sure he took the fucker with him—but the man had disappeared.
Then someone turned out the lights and Rico Petralli felt an instant of heartache and regret. Then he was gone.
39
Cait barely registered the sound of the ringing doorbell. She barely registered anything besides the sight of Kevin lying motionless on the floor. Then the man who called himself Milo cursed and hurried out of the room. He paused in the doorway and turned. He reached one long arm toward her and pointed the bloodstained knife blade. “Stay perfectly quiet or everyone dies,” he said, his voice low and soft and menacing. Then he disappeared.
Cait didn’t know who was at the door. Didn’t care, either. It wasn’t like the cavalry was going to come riding in on their white horses and save everyone; no one even knew they were here. And her top priority, her only priority, was Kevin.
She rushed across the floor, sidestepping pieces of broken chair, and knelt next to him. His face was white, his lips a frightening shade of pale blue. His eyes were closed and he lay unmoving and for a horrible moment Cait feared he might already be dead. If that were the case, she would rush the maniac, knife or no knife, and inflict as much damage on his murdering soul as she could before she went down.
But then Kevin coughed and moaned. His eyes remained closed and his face was still sheet-white but he was alive! Cait steeled herself and turned him over onto his back. She had to examine his wound. She had no idea how long their captor would be gone and doubted she would be allowed to care for Kevin once he returned, so speed was critical.
She lifted his shirt, now soaked and matted with his own blood, and when she did, a sickening gush of it bubbled up and out of his chest. The shirt was acting as a kind of rudimentary bandage, partially restricting blood flow, and it occurred to Cait that Kevin’s loss of consciousness might be the only thing keeping him alive. His heart rate had dropped and was no longer forcing the blood out of his body at such an alarming rate.
But something had to be done. Quickly. She needed to improvise a more effective compress than a piece of cotton resting against the gash. Cait ripped his shirt down the front, scattering buttons across the floor. They bounced around like little rubber balls. She worked his arms out of the sleeves and lifted his upper body as gently as she could off the floor, sliding the shirt out from under his back. His blood dripped down her hands.
She eased Kevin back to the floor and then twisted the shirt into a long, thin bundle of material, wringing the blood out of it like a sponge. She looped it across his chest, pressing it over the wound, and then began to tie the sleeves into a knot.
As she worked, she began to feel a gentle pressure in her brain, like a Flicker trying to gain a foothold, and she slowed down and forced herself to ignore it, to push it away. She had far too much to worry about right now to indulge a fucking mind-movie.
The Flicker was insistent but so was she. She closed her eyes, angry at the waste of precious time, but felt certain that losing a few seconds to fight off a Flicker was far preferable to losing who knew how many minutes if she were to let it in.
Finally the pressure eased and Cait was able to continue. She breathed a sigh of relief, having been uncertain she could actually fight it off. She strained to tie the sleeves together as tightly as possible, hoping sufficient pressure would be applied to the wound to prevent Kevin from bleeding out right here on the floor. But it was a temporary fix at best. He needed medical care and he needed it quickly.
Again the gentle pressure of a Flicker pressed into her brain and again she shut it out, her annoyance growing along with her terror.
Dammit!
This was the worst time to have to deal with this. Out of her peripheral vision she could see Virginia straining against her bonds, her muffled voice soft, clearly trying to pass along some kind of message. It was quiet and low and completely unintelligible thanks to the duct-tape gag. Cait felt badly for her but her priority at the moment had to be Kevin.
Besides, Milo would undoubtedly be back soon—Cait was surprised he hadn’t already gotten rid of whoever was at the front door. He seemed awfully anxious to get started with whatever torture he had planned for her.
Cait’s head was turned to look at Virginia, willing her to stop twisting and grunting in her chair, fearing Milo’s threat to come back and kill them all. And then Kevin groaned. He remained unconscious, but let loose a long groan, certainly loud enough to be heard around the corner in the hallway.
Kevin groaned again and Cait slapped a hand over his mouth and prayed he would stop. His skin felt clammy and his eyes remained closed. She whispered into his ear, “I’m here, baby, it’s okay, everything’s going to be okay,” knowing she was doing it for herself more than for Kevin, knowing also it was most likely a lie, but she had to do something; it was either this or break down and cry. So she whispered to him.
She whispered again and her voice was drowned out by the impossibly loud roar of a gunshot. Cait had never heard one before—she hated guns and wished every day that there was a way Kevin could do his job without having to carry one—but she recognized the sound immediately, nevertheless. The gunshot was followed by the sound of an intense struggle taking place around the corner and down the hall.
Another shot.
More struggling.
Cait realized she was screaming again but she couldn’t stop herself. Oh, God, she couldn’t stop. This day had turned into a living nightmare and she knew that whatever was taking place out by the front door had only resulted in more horror, more pain and more fear.
She removed her hand from Kevin’s mouth and clamped it over her own, finally stopping the scream, sobbing uncontrollably instead. It seemed suddenly unlikely that silence mattered, but she still worked to get herself under control. She felt like she might puke and swallowed hard, forcing the contents of her stomach back down.
A sliding/scraping/slithering noise came from the hallway.
Cait told herself not to look. She refused to look.
Then she looked. She couldn’t help herself. She glanced up as Milo turned the corner, hunched over, dragging…he was dragging…oh, God, it was a body. He was dragging a body, and the body was dressed in a policeman’s uniform very similar to the one Kevin wore every day when he went to work. And the body was bloody and unmoving.
Then Milo dropped the policeman’s body with a thud. He turned and straightened. He looked at her and smiled.
40
Boston Police Officer Gina Knowlin eyed the tenement building suspiciously from the front seat of her cruiser. She hated these sorts of calls. Some nutcase had reported a dead body on the third floor—anonymously, no surprise there—and, equally unsurprisingly, had not bothered to offer his name or any other information to the dispatcher who fielded the call.
The discovery of dead bodies was not particularly unusual, especially in this neighborhood, where vagrants, drug dealers, users, gang members, hookers and their johns combined to form a rich stew of potentially deadly violence. But what made this call different, according to dispatch, was the condition of the victim—a young female who had been, if the frantic report was to be believed, “skinned alive by Mr. Midnight,” whatever the hell that was supposed to mean.
The call was bogus, that much was obvious. The police had been getting flooded with Mr. Midnight sightings for months, and they were almost always bogus.
And there was another factor to consider, particularly in this area. Gina had been a Boston patrol officer for over half a decade and had responded to dozens of calls exactly like this one. Some loser with a hard-on for the cops would call in a phony report just to see the authorities run around like chickens with their heads cut off, often using the distraction provided by the response as cover to commit some other felony nearby.
Gina stepped out of the vehicle, scanning up and down the street for the second responder. This was just
about the worst place in the entire city to have to investigate a call alone. The building was abandoned, condemned, which meant that anywhere from a couple to maybe as many as a dozen fucking vagrants were using the piece of shit as their home base. And vagrants didn’t like cops, for obvious reasons.
After a couple of instances last year where officers responding to calls exactly like this one had been ambushed, set up to be attacked and then badly injured, the administrative geniuses who hadn’t walked a beat in decades had come to the conclusion—prompted by the patrolmen’s union, of course—that it was too dangerous for officers to answer these types of calls in neighborhoods like this alone.
Now, the revised procedure called for a minimum response team of two officers, which was why Gina stood cooling her heels with one foot on the front bumper of her cruiser, scanning the area, waiting for Tommy Mitchell to join the party. So far, no one seemed to be paying any attention to her, but experience had taught her that could change in an instant.
Finally Mitchell’s cruiser rolled slowly down the nearly deserted street and Gina felt the tension ease, if only slightly. Tommy was not what even the most generous observer would consider a self-motivated officer—he was a thirty-year veteran who had never risen above the rank of patrolman—but standing alone in this neighborhood had begun to make Gina feel conspicuous and uneasy. Like a target.
Tommy eased to a stop behind Gina and worked his way laboriously out of his vehicle. She figured he had to be two hundred eighty pounds if he was an ounce, and what might once have been muscle had years ago turned mostly to flab. If ever a cop fit the stereotype of the donut-eating flatfoot, it was Tommy Mitchell. Gina watched the left side of the cruiser rise on its suspension as he exited and tried to suppress a smile, more or less succeeding.
She wondered why she had been so tense just a moment ago. This was just another bullshit call phoned in by just another crank with an axe to grind. She would be treated to the sight of Tommy Mitchell trying to avoid a heart attack as he trundled up the three stories only to discover an empty apartment; then she would get to listen to his colorful language on the way back down. Then she would return to her vehicle and get on with her day.
No big deal.
Except something felt wrong. The crank calls involving fictional dead bodies designed to fuck with the police were almost always the same—very non-specific as to gender, age or cause of death, they were uniformly stunning in their lack of creativity. But this one was different. According to dispatch, the caller had been panicked and agitated, practically babbling in his haste to relate the information.
And he had been extremely specific: A young woman, probably early twenties, naked, tied up in a dentist’s chair—that was a new one—and brutally tortured, tiny stab wounds all over her body and—this was the most disturbing—long strips of skin peeled completely away from her bones.
“Mr. Midnight,” the caller had said.
Thinking about the report made Gina shiver and she wondered if Tommy felt any more nervous about this call than usual. He hitched his belt up under his massive belly and glanced at her, his face scrunched into a scowl.
“Let’s get this shit over with,” he said, and Gina decided Mr. Midnight would have to be standing in front of Tommy Mitchell with a loaded gun in one hand and a surgeon’s scalpel in the other to arouse his suspicions, and even then he might not notice anything was wrong until he took a bullet in the forehead.
Tommy stalked across the cracked concrete walkway and up the dilapidated stairs into the building, not looking back or waiting, simply assuming she would follow. She sighed deeply and trotted to catch up. The lock had been broken off the front door—years ago by the look of the rusted mechanism—and never replaced. Undoubtedly any replacement would have been hacksawed off as well, so what would be the point?
Gina entered the gloomy building and followed the sound of Tommy Mitchell’s boots clomping up the stairway to the right of the foyer. It was obvious he wanted nothing more than to clear the call so he could get back to whatever he had been doing before—sitting in his cruiser reading a book, most likely.
By the time she reached the second-floor landing, the sound of Tommy’s footsteps was already receding as he proceeded down the third-floor hallway over her head. Jesus, Gina thought, for a fat slob this guy can really move when he’s properly motivated. She sprinted up the final set of steps, cognizant of the shadowy stairwell, pissed off that Mitchell had left her behind when the whole point of having a pair of officers respond to the call was for their protection, not to split up so they could be picked off by any lunatic with a grudge and a weapon.
Hurrying down the hallway, Gina turned right and entered the only open doorway, crashing into Tommy and falling to her butt as she bounced off his massive bulk. He stood just inside the apartment’s entrance, invisible from the hallway, frozen to the spot in shock.
Gina picked herself up off the floor, ready to tear into the stupid asshole. She considered herself a patient person, but enough was enough. “What the hell are you…”
She stopped in midsentence, taken completely by surprise as Tommy Mitchell unsnapped his holster and removed his service weapon. He turned and stepped nimbly over her, checking behind them both in the hallway, swiveling the gun left and right. Then he edged cautiously into the apartment.
A creeping sense of horror overtook Gina. Her instincts had been right. This was no ordinary crank call from a disturbed crackpot. She rose to her feet and followed Tommy, stopping in the exact spot he had moments ago, chilled by the sight in front of her.
Whoever had called in this mess had been spot on. Blood was everywhere, congealing on the floor atop a clear plastic tarp laid out with care around the base of what did indeed look like a gigantic dentist’s chair. Secured to the chair with duct tape was a young girl, naked, unmoving and clearly dead, with wounds exactly as had been described to dispatch.
Gina slapped at her holster and removed her gun as Tommy had. She took three steps into the room and Tommy came around the corner. “This shithole’s clear,” he muttered. “There’s nobody here. We need to call this in,” as if expecting Gina to argue. She didn’t argue.
While Tommy made the call, using his cell phone instead of the radio transmitter clipped to his shirt in the hopes of keeping the inevitable lookie-loos away for as long as possible, Gina moved deeper into the room, drawn toward the young woman immobilized on the chair. It was clear the victim was dead—no one could survive such massive blood loss, not to mention the terrible wounds that had caused it—but she went through the motions anyway, checking for a pulse on the woman’s neck. Tommy hadn’t bothered to do that and it should have been their first priority after ensuring the apartment was clear.
The mistake didn’t matter, though. There was no pulse, as she had known there wouldn’t be, and the victim’s skin was cool and sticky with dried blood.
Gina turned away, angry with herself and Tommy Mitchell, unable to put her finger on exactly why. She glared at Tommy, an act that seemed to have no effect on him but made her feel marginally better, and then stepped back to the front door and checked the hallway once more. It would be very bad form to have the killer return and get the drop on them as she and Tommy were busy inside, and securing the apartment from the outside would be the first piece of business to accomplish while waiting for the homicide detectives to arrive.
The hallway was still empty.
She began to pace, waiting for the homicide dicks and the crime scene techs to begin arriving. She hoped it wouldn’t take too long; the prospect of cooling her heels here for longer than a few minutes with nobody to talk to but Tommy Mitchell was almost as depressing as finding the body of the victim had been.
41
Milo used the dead cop’s uniform shirt as a towel, pinching material between his fingers and sliding the knife blade through the gap. Blood sluiced off the stainless steel and ran down his fingers. The shirt’s cotton wasn’t terribly absorbent, but beggars couldn�
�t be choosers, as the old saying went, and besides, after a moment the blade was nearly as good as new. A little blood on his hands didn’t bother Milo Cain.
He reached behind his back and placed the knife carefully between his belt and his jeans, leaving it hanging down off his ass like a razor-sharp tail, exactly as he had done when the doorbell rang.
Then he knelt down and hooked his arms through the armpits of the dead cop. He rose to a semi-crouch and dragged the still-warm corpse around the corner and into the living room, turning the body sideways and dropping it across the doorway like a fallen log. Its head struck the floor with a teeth-rattling thud, hard enough to cause a concussion had the man been alive. Milo felt confident the interfering flatfoot was beyond such concerns now.
He flashed a bright smile at the younger woman, the one he was going to have so much fun with in a couple of minutes, and then glanced at the old hag to make sure she was still tightly secured in her chair. She was. The duct tape appeared intact.
He had taken a chance dealing with the knock at the door before securing the younger bitch to a chair. Had she been thinking clearly—and quickly—everything could easily have gone to shit for Milo in a matter of seconds. But based on the dynamics he had observed during his disturbing visions of these three people and the short time he had spent here in person, he had anticipated that when he went around the corner and answered the front door, the rattled younger woman would be so concerned about her injured boyfriend she would run to his aid, not even giving a thought to releasing the older woman or rushing to the kitchen for a weapon or to grab the phone.
And he had been right. The pretty young thing was even now crouched over the man Milo had stabbed, thus blowing any chance she might have had to get away.
Because now it was too late.
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