Burning Time (42 page)

“Will that blow up, too?”

“Ha ha, you’re very funny.” He sat down and pulled on the rubber gloves, forgot about the juice.

“I thought you said I could have some juice,” Emma complained. “I want some juice.”

“Too late. I was nice, but you weren’t nice.”

“I’m sorry. Please may I have some juice.”

He ignored her. “You should see my work. It’s great. You’ve never seen anything like it.”

Emma took a deep breath. “I’d like to see it. If you let me go to the bathroom, I could see it.”

Troland turned on the machine, and the whine filled the
room. He dipped the needles into the ink and bent over her.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” Emma insisted, grimacing when the needles bit into her skin.

He had begun to spread out lower now, along her pelvis. Her eyes filled with tears. They spilled over and ran down into her mouth and hair. “Please.”

He ignored her.

She had the end of the rope in her left hand. It had always been harder with her left hand. She worked at it, trying not to think of his blowing up the house. He said a lot of weird things. Half the time he didn’t know what he was saying.

Emma closed her eyes against the dipping of the needles into the ink, the dabbing of the Vaseline on her skin, the whine of the machine, and the excruciating sting that quickly heated up into a steady burn. She concentrated on the rope in her left hand. She stopped thinking about the machine. She was a soldier working the second knot.

Then suddenly, without warning, Troland tensed all over and turned the machine off.

“What—?” she asked.

“Shh,” he said sharply. “One sound, and you’re dead.” He was out of his chair and in the other room in a second.

A man appeared briefly at the corner of the Bartello garage door. He kept himself low, angled out of view. April choked back her fear. For a second she thought it might be Grebs, returning on foot from the corner store or something. Then the familiar crouch-and-dodge moves betrayed a cop. She hoped some clown wouldn’t come in and blow the whole thing. She stayed put.

It was cool and damp in the garage. From where she was crouched behind the back wheel of the blue Ford Tempo, April could see the pink felt slipper she had dropped in her haste to duck out of sight. Her Aunt Mei Ling Lily Chen had slippers just like it. Most older Chinese women liked to wear the same black canvas shoes, made in China, that their ancestors had worn for centuries. But Mei Ling Lily Chen said, felt was more comfortable on feet, easier to get off.

Yeah, they came off real easy if you were dead. The severed toe was still on the floor near the lawn mower. Only a few brown spots led to it on the cement floor. If
the stains were blood, the person was dead when the toe was chopped off. All was quiet upstairs.

April thought of Dr. Frank, stuck on the bridge with the rest of her team. She knew it was a highly irregular thing for her to call him like that, but he had broken the case for her. She figured she owed him. She prayed that his wife Emma Chapman, whose features were so different and superior to April’s, was not already dead, too. She shivered, her sweat now chilled and icy under her arms. She wondered where the old lady’s body was.

Suddenly the overhead light went off. April looked up, startled. The light was attached to the garage door. Must be one of those automatic gizmos that came on when the door opened, and then went off after two minutes. The neighbors next door to her parents had one. The gloom settled instantly. Still no sound from outside or the apartment upstairs. In the dim light, the smell of mold seemed to grow stronger. It assaulted April’s heightened senses. The bushes rustled. April held her breath.

An elbow edged around the corner of the garage door. April recognized the shiny gray fabric of Sanchez’s sharkskin jacket.

“April?” It was barely a whisper.

She let out her breath with relief, then stood, her finger to her lips. He gestured for her to get out of there. She inched toward him, down the wall farthest from the stairs. She reached the door, and they moved away from the building, out of sight of the upstairs windows.

She wanted to say something, but Chinese were unsentimental, undemonstrative. Cops, too.

“You all right?” Sanchez asked.

“Yeah, sure.” She didn’t ask what took so long. It was a stupid question. Everything took so long.

“Looks quiet. What’s going on?” Sanchez asked.

“The car’s a rental.”

“Yeah, I saw that.”

“I think he’s up there. I don’t know about the Chapman woman. If she’s alive, she sure isn’t making any noise.…” April changed the subject. “There’s only one way in, up the stairs in the back of the garage. You can get to the backyard through the house. I have someone out there.”

Sanchez nodded. “Pac filled me in. What about the old woman?”

April shook her head. “She’s not in the house. She left the front door open. She may be dead.… I think I found one of her toes.”

“No shit, where?”

“On the floor in the garage.” She looked away, didn’t want him to criticize her for going in there alone.

“We need more people,” was all he said.

“I know. I already called.”

“I heard the dispatch.” Now he looked away. “Go cover the backyard. We’ll wait till they get here.”

April shook her head. “Unless he jumps out the window, there’s no way out.”

“Go cover it, anyway, Detective,” Sanchez snapped.

“What? Are you pulling rank on me? You’re not my supervisor,” April protested angrily. “I’ve taken it this far. I’m not covering the back now.”

Sanchez bristled at the outburst, then relented. “All right, then cover me.”

“No, you cover me,” April insisted. Hadn’t he seen her shoot?

“Look, you want to get this done, or do you want to stand here arguing about it?”

“I thought you wanted to wait for backup.”

He nodded toward the garage. “We’ll go in
there
and wait.”

A car backfired on the street. As Sanchez walked over to check it out, April slipped back inside the garage.

Emma heard a car backfire on the street. She had one knot to go. She turned her head toward the door. He’d taken the butane torch but not the gun. What now?

He’d been gone for a long time. With each knot she untied, the ends of the nylon rope had become more frayed. They were badly tangled now. Emma worked one thin strand out at a time, holding her breath without realizing it. How much time did she have left? She had to hurry, but her fingers were stiff. Her body was slick with Mennen Speed Stick and A and D ointment, smelled of menthol and fear. But there was another odor in the room, deep and persistent. Way under the surface, vague and teasing, like a feather stirring the air, was the faint smell of gas. Emma tried to ignore it. The rope had to be her only concern. She couldn’t worry about what he was up to now.

Emma worked at the last knot, her eye on the gun that lay on the table among half a dozen little paper cups filled with colored ink. She hadn’t heard the outside door open and close since he left the room. She was pretty sure he
was still in the house. She couldn’t let him get her this time.

The last strand pulled free of the tangles. She sat up, shivering and rubbing her arms. Her fingers were stiff. Her arms were numb. She was shaking all over. For a second the sight of her naked body, shiny and colored all over, stunned her. She looked like an eighties poster for a heavy metal rock group. Between her breasts, the skin was white, but her shoulders, her stomach, her arms and legs were a madman’s sick fantasy of a woman tormented by devouring animals and flames.
Get a grip. Get the gun
, she told herself.

She rubbed her arms with the stiff fingers.
Move
. Now her arms were tingling all over as feeling returned. She couldn’t move.
Pick up the gun
. Her fingers cramped. She kneaded the muscles in her hands.
PICK UP THE DAMN GUN
. She reached for the gun. It was cold and heavy. She flexed her fingers around it. She’d shot a gun. She’d done it in an off-Broadway play. How did this one work? She wasted precious seconds fiddling with it, couldn’t find a safety catch. She decided there wasn’t one, put the gun down in her lap so she could free her legs.

With the pistol cold on her thighs, she leaned over to untie her feet. Everything hurt. Her body had been confined, the muscles shut down, for a long time. She hunched her shoulders up and down, easing the cramps. Arched her back.
Come on. Come on, body, warm up
.

The feet were easier. She could see what she was doing. This time only three knots held the rope around each ankle, but they were more complicated ones. She worked at them, her heart beating wildly. If he opened the door, she had only a few seconds to pick up the gun and blow him away.

After what seemed like an hour, the last knot was undone.
Emma slid to the floor and crawled to the window. Shaking all over and numb with fear, she could no longer feel the tattoo burn on her stomach. All she thought of was the gun in her hand, the madman out there somewhere, and the smell of gas leaking slowly into the room.

Quietly, she lifted the shade an inch. Across the street she saw a guy tinkering with his car engine. Beside him another man seemed to be helping him. She raised the shade higher to get their attention, then heard footsteps. She ducked behind the bed. The door opened.

“There’s somebody out there,” Troland said softly. “We’ve got to move.”

Emma fired the gun.

The sky was clouding over, the air was fragrant with cherry blossoms when Jason charged out of his building, turned right, and ran thirty yards to Riverside Drive.

“Damn.” There wasn’t a taxi in sight.

His forehead was beaded with sweat. From here at this hour, Queens was about forty-five minutes away. He hesitated, considering his options, then turned and sprinted across Eighty-fourth Street to West End Avenue. There, he caught sight of a battered taxi heading uptown. He hailed it.

“Hoyt Avenue, in Queens,” he sputtered, getting in and slamming the door.

The taxi was so old there wasn’t a handle on the inside. Its driver, a large black man with dreadlocks, silently made a U-turn and drove down West End.

“Go across at Eighty-first Street. It’s fastest.”

“You telling me how to do my job?”

“I’m in a hurry.” Jason gulped at the air, trying to catch his breath. God, the taxi smelled terrible.

“Don’t tell me how to do my job, mon.” The driver
turned across Eighty-first Street, anyway, and headed into the park.

On Second Avenue, the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge traffic was backed up to Sixty-eighth Street. With six or seven body-jolting jerks, the ancient taxi inched forward, advancing only a half a block with every light. Jason checked the driver’s license. Shit. He was a trainee.

Jerk-stop, jerk-stop, jerk-stop. It was crazy-making. Jason looked frantically around for another taxi. He didn’t see one in the sea of cars and vans on the five-lane avenue, all trying to merge left into the two-lane bridge entrance at Fifty-ninth Street.

The driver put a Rasta tape in his boom box and punched the play button. “Get Up, Stand Up.” Bob Marley sang out from beyond the grave.

Jason clenched and unclenched his fists in fury as he watched the minute hand on the clock in the dashboard, clicking up the minutes in rhythm with the music and the rapidly mounting charge on the meter.

April went into the garage and climbed the stairs. Her ears were still red from Sanchez’s ordering her around. Hell, no, she wasn’t covering anybody. Not this time. It was dark in the back of the garage. At the top of the stairs, she saw a light switch, but didn’t want to try it in case it was wired for a light inside the apartment. She put her ear to the door.

Outside it was quiet again. Maybe backup had arrived and Sanchez was filling them in. But inside, April could hear some movements now. Someone was definitely in there. She could hear footsteps crossing the room away from her. Then there was silence, but only for a second. The crack of a gunshot electrified her.

Without thinking, April raised her gun, stood back, and shot the lock off the door. Oh, God, she was without backup. Couldn’t afford to wait. She kicked the door open. Crouched in the ready position with her arms forward and both hands steadying the gun, she moved in a semicircle, covering the room. Nobody there.

Then suddenly she gasped and lowered the gun.

Emma Chapman staggered through the bedroom door. She was naked and painted all over. A gun dangled in her hand.

Green-and-black patterned snakes with red eyes, and teeth instead of fangs, entwined with eagle’s wings, were wrapped around two doctor’s staffs that spiked the woman’s sides. Red and orange flames rose from her ankles and raced down her arms. On her right cheek, red clown tears ran down her chin to water a burning black rose growing up a vine on her neck. Her stomach was enflamed and swollen, her eyes were wide with terror.

April pushed her shock at the sight away.

“Police,” she said gently. “Give me the gun.”

The woman tottered across the room towards her, nearly falling over the couch. “I shot him,” she cried. The gun fell out of her hand.

“Watch out!” April screamed.

Grebs plunged through the door, the butane torch aimed at them, spitting fire. The blue torch flame roared casting a blinding light. It ignited the upholstered chair. Behind Grebs, the furniture in the bedroom was already ablaze.

April raised her gun but couldn’t shoot.

“Get out of the way!” she screamed at Emma. Emma had come to a halt three quarters of the way across the room, blocking her line of fire.

“Crazy bitch, crazy gook bitch. Burn in hell.”

Grebs lowered the torch to fire the chair by April’s side. A blue flash shot at the fabric.

Crazy bitch! April wasn’t taking that again. She reached out. “Emma, come on. Three steps and you’re out of here.”