Ramón, that motherfucker.
He knew what was in here. The slimy, weak motherfucker. Sure, he’d tried to warn her on the way here, tried to give her a chance to run, but he didn’t try hard enough, hadn’t told her all the mutilation those girls suffered, because in the end he was still set on doing his job, being a lapdog for those sociopaths. He let her go into this place knowing she would come out a ruined wreck like all the others, and he would have taken her right back to the Weeping Willow dungeon to wander its halls in a muttering stupor until the Madam decided she’d had enough of feeding and clothing an invalid whore. Now, it seemed, the Madam wouldn’t have to worry about that part. The weirdo would have his fun, the Madam would have her money, and the next girl would be sent down the chute and land here after she was dead and buried. Or turned into a puppet for Junior’s amusement. What had that note said? She wished she could remember.
Her mind, similar to the rest of her, was like an over-tenderized piece of meat, and she lay there for several minutes, fading in and out of consciousness, willing herself not to think too hard so that it would drift into her memory like an autumn leaf on a puff of wind. Then, on the verge of a coma-like sleep she hoped would carry her out of this world forever, she remembered a white piece of paper and touching it with her lips, which the freak had painted with lip gloss from her own purse. She’d written what the freak told her to write. But what did it say? Oh God, but she couldn’t remember!
She had no concept of the passage of time, but she was sure enough hours had passed that Ramón had come back for her and the money by now, and if so, he had read that note and . . . what? What did the goddamn note say? “I’ve been a very very good girl,” she croaked, her voice all but withered down to a rough whisper. That was part of it, but there was more . . .
DON’T COME BACK!
Images of the Ballas corpse looming over her, blood from her ruined womanhood dripping from its spiked torture instrument, the voice from overhead screeching, threatening. “Write it! Write it! Don’t come back!” And her trying to hold the pen with numb fingertips and move it with a mostly dead arm.
The thought filled her with a mixture of horror and glee. She was a prisoner here, but she was also free from the Madam. Oh, what a world where one even has to consider which is worse. Certainly that was the sweet lullaby of madness in her head speaking. Certainly she wouldn’t actually prefer to be here with this freak than back at the Weeping Willow. Right?
Prison is prison. Does it really matter where you’re at if you’re still not free? Janie Quick, the eternal font of wisdom and common sense.
But the note signified something important. It meant no deal had been made ahead of time. It meant Junior had decided to keep the product instead of returning it. Maybe he’d paid extra and that would be enough for the Madam. Everyone had a price.
Janie Quick wasn’t having it, though. Oh come on, honey. Put together two and two. Assuming Ballas doubled the payment, that driver had a million bucks sitting in his car, half of which the Madam wasn’t even expecting. With you out of the equation, you think he wouldn’t take that money and run? That’s what you’d have done. Don’t try to deny it.
If Nina hadn’t been in so much pain she would’ve laughed. Assuming her theories were true, the Madam would be without property and full payment, and Ramón—assuming they hadn’t caught him in the act—would now be on the run. Maybe Madam would come here and demand her property back, maybe not. Either way, she would be stuck here until she was dead. It was a desperate hope for a quick death she clung to as the demonic shadows in her mind pulled her into a deep sleep, filled with the vivid and tortured memories of her undoing.
***
She awoke to the same blindfolded darkness, but with a bright new agony below her waist. Whatever painkiller or tranquilizer she’d been on earlier had dissipated while she slept, leaving her with a sensation she could only compare to being engorged with liquid fire. The screams from her shredded vocal cords carried no real resonance, and perhaps that was a relief given what foul thing lived within earshot. Something else changed since she’d last blacked out, aside from the coming of the pain. She could also feel her limbs again, at least a little bit. She gave her toes a wiggle and immediately felt her heart soar with gratitude. At least those vital parts of her were working. However, when she tried bending one of her knees, the pain between her legs flared, sucking the breath out of her lungs. At least the movement allowed her to detect the cold and sticky sheet below her. Lord knew how much blood soaked into it.
Speaking of which, how had she not bled to death? She lifted one tingly hand to feel along the contours of her arm and immediately came upon the tape and plastic tubing. The fucker was running an IV into her. Possibly two. Had he given her a transfusion? And with whose blood? Did this guy have help? Certainly he would have to. A corpse butler couldn’t do everything, and even if he had a corpse doctor, no amount of skilled puppetry could make it place an IV and sew her up where she needed to be sewn.
She wondered what she must look like down there. Images of mutilated genitals flashed through her mind, but she shut that shit down hard. She wouldn’t even think about that. Not now. All she wanted right this second was to stop hurting and maybe go back to sleep, perhaps forever. That meant she had to call out to the freak who did this to her. The monster. She wasn’t even sure the thing was completely human. It had three eyes, for fuck’s sake.
You don’t know that. You don’t know if that was real or some kind of makeup.
That may be, but she somehow doubted it. If he was human, he was very deformed, and she was afraid if she had to look upon that face again, she would fall into the pit of madness still calling to her with her mother’s younger, sweeter voice, whether she wanted to or not.
“Hello?” she said. “C-can you please help me? I’m hurting.”
She listened. Only the drone of the bug lights answered back. She thought maybe she could see a peek of blue beneath the band over her eyes, but she was also grateful that was all she could see. Her memories were terrifying enough.
“Hello?” she called out again, this time a little louder, or as loudly as she could muster with her ruined larynx. Her tongue also felt about three sizes too big for her mouth. Just when she was about to call out again, she heard the sound of wheels rolling on wood, the same sound which had greeted her as she’d stood on the porch of this hellish house, waiting to be let in for her very last trick. It was the butler coming for her. The dead butler with the black diamond eyes. Nina’s blood ran cold.
“Can I help you, Misssss?” The freak was throwing his voice in some pointless attempt at ventriloquism, but Nina could tell he was still overhead. Directly above her, in fact, controlling his puppet with its vast array of rope and string. She wanted to cry all over again, but she swallowed back the tears as best she could. Why was he doing this? What was wrong with him? All good questions, but first, she needed to address her pain. Numb yourself and everything else will fall into place. It’ll be okay. Her mother’s voice again, oddly soothing. Not the whip-crack nonsense she was used to from the unshakable Janie Quick.
“I need more medicine,” she said. “Please. I’m hurting so bad, I . . .” Her voice gave way to whispering and the tears began to flow, despite all her efforts to suck it up and not grovel. She just wanted this to be over with. All of it. Briefly, she thought of Rosie, the girl she’d found lying in a pool of blood in the Weeping Willow’s bathroom, arms slashed to ribbons. If Nina could find a way to do something similar, it could all be over for her, too.
The run of her thoughts was cut short by the squeak and clink of ropes and harnesses above. The freak was on the move, and she could smell him as he moved in closer. She fought in vain to move away, but a pair of frigid wiry hands yanked her back to center. Something hot and wet glided up the side of her face, and it was only after she breathed the swamp bottom fetidness of the thing’s breath that she realized he was licking her.
Revulsion and
chills wracked her body, but she clamped down on her scream. Licking my face. Oh dear Jesus, he’s licking my face!
“Mmmm . . . I love the taste of your pain,” he whispered.
Nina ripped her head away with a cry. “Fuck off!”
The side of her face exploded in hot agony as he hit her, opening up a galaxy of white stars in her vision behind the blindfold. It hurt like hell, but it took a little of her attention away from the other parts of her that hurt.
“You can have medicine, but first you dance for Daddy.”
Dance? She remembered the horrifying ballet he’d made her do after he’d tied her up to look like a life-size marionette. The thought of doing that now, after everything he had done to her . . .
“No. No, I can’t. Please.”
Her words were so many ignored mumbles as her arms were brought up over her head again and tied with the ropes. She could hear the freak panting as he worked. She smelled his rotten sweat as he crawled over and around her like an enormous spider, securing additional bonds to her wrists and elbows, and wrapping a belt around her waist. When he moved her to do that, another nauseating ripple of pain roared through her body. Her screams went unanswered. If anything, the thing’s breathing quickened as if in excitement. Finally, he tied more knots around her feet and ankles and then, with one quick swipe of the finger, ripped off her blindfold.
Her sensitive eyes flooded painfully with the blue light illuminating the room, and she squinted. The sickly pale form of the thing suspended before her for only a moment, a merciful moment where her eyes had not completely focused, before it crawled back up to its ceiling lair, the place from which it orchestrated this whole morbid show. Nina could feel her mind starting to uncouple again, retreating to somewhere safe, as it had after the spiked phallus ripped and gored her flesh. But when the thing above yanked the strings, forcing her upright, all hope of remaining safely ensconced in her mental cage was obliterated by the pain that was no longer a mere wave, but a devastating tsunami wiping out everything in its path.
She sensed the complete ruination of everything that physically made her a woman, but she refused to look down. Didn’t want to see the blood she felt running down her legs like piss. She only hoped she would lose enough of it so her mind would go black forever and put an end to this nightmare.
“Dance with Daddy! Dance with Daddy!” he cried as he manipulated her out of the bed. She could support her own weight a bit more this time, but only barely. There was no hope of controlling any of it. The puppeteer was stronger, and her body too weakened by trauma. He whirled her around and she came face to face with “Daddy,” Hank Ballas, dangling from a similar contraption. For now, his instrument of genital mutilation had been put away. He merely gazed at her with his strange painted green eyes and permanent rictus and then gave her an oddly graceful bow.
“Would you care to dance, my lady?”
It appeared as if the corpse had spoken with its mouth, but then she remembered the butler’s jaw moved as well. Just more puppetry. She could see faint glimmers of fishing line. How long before she became one of them? No longer a living puppet, just a dried out husk with painted plastic eyes and joints articulated by string?
The freak manipulated her into a sloppy and agonizing curtsey. Despite the pain, the world was going gray around the edges, and she welcomed that. Oh yes, please come to me, gray fog. Take me away and don’t bring me back, ever.
A moment later, the music began. A classic waltz. It sounded tinny and scratchy, like it was coming from a very old record player. She barely felt the corpse’s arm slide around her waist, or her hand press against the rough and brittle skin and bones of his other. She watched her hand rise and then fall onto his shoulder under no direction from her brain and couldn’t help but marvel at how very malleable she’d become.
Soon, they were spinning around to the beat of the music, like a couple in a most nightmarish ballroom. The pain was on another level somewhere, and when she finally closed her eyes, the music had become little more than a hum, the afterimage of Ballas’s hateful green stare following her into the darkness.
Chapter 5
Ramón and the Derringer
He panicked the minute the Madam said she was going back with him to the Ballas house, and it remained with him the rest of the day like low static on a bad radio signal. Now, in his tidy little apartment over the Weeping Willow’s garage, he was sitting on his freshly made bed, staring at his top dresser drawer with the sort of intensity one reserved for something like telekinesis. The drawer’s contents, save for one special little thing, were now in the suitcase he’d packed earlier and stowed in the Town Car’s trunk, and he was trying to decide whether he should leave that one item here and move on, or bring it with him to do what he knew deep down needed doing, even if it would set the dogs of hell on his tail.
That special little thing, of course, was a small Derringer pistol, disassembled, its pieces duct taped to the underside of the dresser top. It had been there, suspended over his socks and underwear, since a few months after he’d moved in here. Cassini’s boys thoroughly rooted through every belonging he owned in the beginning, checking for contraband. He didn’t have the pleasure of privacy like a member of the family, or even one of their standard goons. He was a prisoner, not unlike the whores making the bedsprings squeak back in the house. Prisoners—even trustees like him who transported valuable materials—were never issued guns. It was simple, really. If he fucked up and lost the cargo, or if somebody robbed him, he better make sure the thief put a bullet in him before Victor got involved. But in all the years he’d been moving money around for the Cassinis, he hadn’t once encountered a close brush. He still had fire in him, his name still meant something. Ramón also knew Dante Cassini, Victor’s father, and that probably helped as well. Dante . . . Now that was a gentleman. Too bad his son turned out to be such a fucking ghoul, but then again, that ghoul’s loyalty to his old man was what ultimately saved Ramón’s ass.
Before he became Victor’s bitch, Ramón had a few hidden caches throughout the city. A couple hundred bucks behind a loose brick in Chinatown. A duffle bag with a few joints or pills in a locker at Grand Central Station. The pieces of the small Derringer pistol he had socked away in his underwear drawer were spread amongst all those caches, and he’d smuggled them here one by one over a period of a few months. The specially made .410 shells came last, and they were useful. It was strictly a “get out of a tight jam real quick” pistol, easy to conceal and guaranteed to hit something regardless of aim.
All the time he worked for the family, he hadn’t felt a need to put the Derringer together and carry it on the sly. It wasn’t worth the risk of getting caught, for one thing. There were a few occasions he’d considered just getting rid of it, but Ramón knew you didn’t leave the life and just leave your weapons behind. A piece, even a little pop gun like this one, was as much a part of his old gangster’s anatomy as his swinging dick. And he always knew a time would come when he needed it. Now was that time. So, what, you just blow the Madam away? That’ll make your situation with Victor easier. You haven’t fired a gun in over fifteen years, either. Unless you plan on accidentally shooting yourself, maybe you should stick to using your hands.
Maybe, maybe not, but he needed a little insurance in this situation. Obviously, he couldn’t go back to the Ballas place, especially with her in tow. All that remained back there was madness and death. But if the Madam was with him and she discovered the truth of his little embezzlement, maybe after comparing notes with the freak about a certain half-mill . . .
Best not even to think ahead that far.
Ramón stood up, resolve firm in his heart, and pulled open the dresser drawer to peel away the parts of the Derringer. After a few clicks and adjustments with an Allen wrench, he pocketed the little pistol—really, it was small enough to fit comfortably in his trouser pants without the slightest bulge—and sat back down on the bed. The sun had gone down an hour ago, and he anticipated a
call from the Madam any moment telling him to have the car waiting out front. He ran through the plan again.
His phone rang at nine on the dot. The Madam was nothing if not punctual.
“Hello?”
“I’m ready, Ramón. Bring the car around.”
“Sí, Madam.”
They’d had the same conversation, verbatim, nearly every day for the last thirteen years, and God willing it would be the last one. He felt a strange grief at that, and a specter of terror just outside the door of his inner sanctum scratching to be let in, but he forced himself to ignore it. He was already beyond the point of no return. Now he just had to finish this last bit of ugliness, and then he would be on his way.
In fact, the more he thought beyond his initial panic, this slight shift in plan was pretty much ideal. Once he got the Madam out of the way, he would be able to get a much bigger head start before Victor Cassini or any of the hoods in his network were notified of what happened. That meant he’d have time to run one very quick errand before he started making his way south.
He secured his black driver’s cap to his head and took one final glance in the small mirror over the dresser. The wrinkles and salty hair said he was an old man, but the eyes hadn’t changed. They were the eyes of a killer. His own mother knew that about him, even before he became one of the many serfs in the Cassini empire. Madre would look up at him from the vegetables she was preparing for that night’s dinner, or the sewing and mending she always had in her lap when she watched her afternoon “stories,” always with a grimace of disappointment on her face. You a cold boy, Ramón. You been touched by the devil. I knew it from the day the doctor put you in my arms. You was cursed, and you would be the curse of me. She would then hold up one of her hands, so twisted with arthritis it was a miracle she was able to do anything at all, and do the sign of the cross on herself. Thirty years later, the pain by that point more than almost anyone could bear, Juanita Gutierrez would die a raving pill junkie in a state-run nursing home.
Strings Page 8