House of Skin (18 page)

Dear Eddy,

I remember it was storming the night it began.

I’d been free for about a week, I think, and it seemed to rain every day. I took my time getting to San Francisco. I knew you’d still be there. That’s where they sent you, wasn’t it? After they’d let you out. It wasn’t easy finding that out. It would have been impossible had I still been at the asylum. But a year or so after you left, I was sent to the prison. I had limited freedom there. My family started getting money to me. I used it to bribe guards. It was a simple matter for them to track you down via the prison’s computer system. It links up with the state’s penal files where they keep track of people like you and I.

I went to your little apartment first. You weren’t there, but your landlady told me where to find you.

If she’d known who I was, she would’ve locked the door.

I hadn’t been in a bar in years. How many, I couldn’t remember. They hadn’t changed any. Why you’ d chose such a redneck establishment was beyond me. I went in and saw you soon enough. You looked at me once, but you didn’t recognize me. It had been some time, I suppose. All those other men were looking at me and thinking their thoughts. It gave me a charge. They probably wanted to get me out in their cars. They had no idea.

I sat down by you, remember? I ordered a glass of wine and you drank beer. You didn’t even look at me. You’ d sunk pretty deep.

“It’s been a long time, Eddy,” I said.

You looked shocked that I knew your name. “Has it?” you said.

“Oh, yes. You don’t remember me?”

“No.”

It hurt when you said that. But I’ d expected it. “I used to watch you walking in the yard at Coalinga.”

“You were there?”

“D-Ward,” I said. It was enough. “They never let us mingle.”

“So I heard. You got out finally?”

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

You laughed at that. The sound of your laughter was beautiful to me. It drew strange looks from others, though. But that was just because they’ d never been there, they couldn’t know our secret joke.

“Where are you heading now?” you asked. “What are you gonna do?”

“That all depends on you.”

Our eyes met and I think we both knew what was coming next.

“Who’s she?” a voice said.

I turned and there was a girl standing there giving me dirty looks. She looked like some kind of heavy metal whore in her leather and studs. Her face had a weary, worn look to it. I thought she was kind of attractive in a depraved sort of way. She had nice legs and a very elegant neck. I wanted to sink my teeth into it.

“She’s our guest, Christy,” you said.

“I thought we were leaving,” she said.

“We are. All three of us.”

Christy didn’t like the idea. But she didn’t argue.

You had a van outside and we climbed in. There was a Thermos of whiskey and some coke in the back. We sat in a circle and drank. After Christy did a few lines, she didn’t care who I was. The three of us got down then. She had her hands all over you. She didn’t give a damn that I was there. She wanted it and in a bad way. You obliged. She had her clothes off by then and so did you. It wasn’t long before mine were off, too. I held her head between my knees and squeezed her breasts while you rammed into her. She was really into it. I don’t think she’d ever done anything like that before, but she was hot for it. While you fucked her, I pressed myself against her wet mouth and she ate me. It had been so long since anyone had done that. God, how I came.

That’s when I took out the straight razor.

You just smiled.

Christy never saw it, never knew it was there until I drew it across her throat. Her tongue was still inside me. It was the best orgasm I ever had. She was bleeding and scratching me, but I held her there until I was done and her moaning was just a wet gurgling. You kept thrusting in her. I could barely stand it. That’s when you took the razor and cut her eyes out. I think she was unconscious by the time you finished. Maybe dead. It didn’t matter. By the time you got it out of your system, she looked like raw meat.

Then you took me.

I had wrapped my legs around you and you fucked me so hard I thought I was going to die. Maybe I did just a little toward the end. When we were done, my ass was red with Christy’s blood.

“She’s dead,” you said dully when you pulled out. “What do we do now?”

I remember smiling, her blood hot all over me.

The van was Christy’s and we left it in the lot. And her in it. We cleaned up ourselves the best we could with her clothes and then we got in my car and went to your place. A hot shower felt good.

And then we were cruising again.

I was driving and you didn’t ask where we were going. I think you knew.

There was nowhere else to go.

“What’s your name?” you finally asked.

“Cherry,” I told you. “Call me Cherry.”

“Cherry,” you said, rolling it off your tongue. It tasted sweet, didn’t it? “I like that.”

We had to get another car. That much was apparent. I didn’t like the idea of driving the one I had. It made me nervous. We drove for a long time. I kept expecting to hear sirens. But it would be hours if not days before someone decided to look in that van. There was nothing to worry about. I got us across the bridge to Marin and we kept driving.

I don’t remember the name of the first town. It wasn’t much of a place, was it? Just a little town with a motel and a couple of gas stations, the first place we came to after leaving the off ramp. The rain had stopped and the wind was blowing. I remember the moon coming out, huge, swollen, watching over us. We pulled into the parking lot of that little bar and waited. You put the hood of the car up and stood in the shadows.

It wasn’t long before that man came by.

“Problems?” he asked, more than happy to help out a woman in distress.

“Yeah. My car won’t start,” I said. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Well, you just let me have a look,” he said and dropped me a wink. Oh, men are so predictable. He’d get my car going again, but for a price. He had no idea how expensive it would be.

He bent over and looked at the engine. I was right behind him, pressing up against him. He liked that.

Until I jerked his head back and cut his throat.

Yours,

Cherry

Lisa was taking a bath when the phone rang.

Its shrill cry jarred her nerves. She didn’t want answer it, but she knew she had to with everything going on. She wanted nothing better than to lay back in the hot water and work the knots from her muscles and the aches from her head, but she had no choice.

She wrapped herself in a towel and ran into the bedroom, grabbing the portable.

“Hello?”

“Good evening, Doctor.”

She felt a chill sweep through her. Her blood was ice. “Who is this?”

“You don’t recognize my voice?”

“No and I don’t have time for games.”

“Cherry Hill,” the voice giggled. “You might remember me from Coalinga, from Chowchilla. Don’t pretend you don’t remember me.”

“I remember you.” And Lisa did. The bells were ringing, each one of them a warning bell that felt like it was going to split her head open.

“I’m glad you remember,” Cherry said. “If it hadn’t have been for you, I might still be at that place. I’ll never forget you for getting me out there and I’ll never forget what you did to me there.”

Lisa’s throat was dry with panic. “What do you want?”

“I want you to stop looking for Eddy Zero.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s what I want. You always liked to please me, remember?”

“Cherry, listen to me. Why don’t I meet you and—”

“And you’ll see I get the help I need?”

Lisa felt weak inside. “It’s for your own good, Cherry.”

“Stop looking for him,” the voice said. “If you find him, you’re going to find me … and you don’t really want that, do you?”

The line went dead.

Lisa climbed back in the tub, her lips forming words that she was unaware of. Even the hot water couldn’t stop her from shaking. There are always worse-case scenarios in life and she had just encountered one of them.

Cherry Hill.

Cherry Hill.

My past is coming back to haunt me,
she thought and it was the truth. Knowing it, it was all she could do not to slit her own wrists.

Stadtler, Grimes, and Zero were busy men. They pretended to be certain people during the day but at night they were something else entirely. In the passage of weeks since they’d drugged the girl and began their explorations of death, they had the blood of five women on their hands. The guilt was taking its toll on Grimes and Stadtler. Both were mere shadows of the men they’d been before striking this peculiar partnership with Zero. They rarely ate now. Even pot-bellied Grimes was beginning to look thin and Stadtler was a skeleton. They jumped at any sudden noise and saw the police everywhere. The study of death was destroying them both physically and psychologically.

Only Zero seemed to be enjoying himself by that point.

He hadn’t changed. Every fresh killing left him in a sort of euphoria that frightened the other men. He seemed to draw his strength from killing, taking life from death. He had become sort of a parasite who ran down like a clock in-between murders. The other two never saw him between meetings, they couldn’t know the listless, drained creature he became until he got his fix.

They met on their usual night and plotted.

“Back to work,” Zero said, sipping brandy.

Grimes said nothing.

“How many do you plan on killing?” Stadtler asked.

“You mean, of course, how many do
we
plan on killing?”

“Yeah, whatever.” Stadtler didn’t argue. Zero knew as well as he did that they were just dupes, that it was Zero who called the shots. He selected the victims, he oversaw their murders, and he did the actual cutting on their corpses. They were merely followers, little more than indentured servants who were in so deep by that point that they didn’t know how to get out and were terrified of what Zero would do to them if they tried.

Zero smiled. “We’ll dispose of as many as need be. Our study is just beginning. The science is the thing. The murders are a means to an end, nothing more. When we’ve learned all we can, we’ll be done with the dirty work.”

“We can’t hope to go on like this,” Grimes said.

“And why not? What will stop us?”

“The police for chrissake, Zero. Do you think they’re just ignoring the bodies they find?” Stadtler said, his voice nearly neurotic in tone. “There’s a hundred men if there’s one out there right now hunting us down.”

“They’ll never find us. Not if we use our brains.”

“I don’t know if I can do it again,” Grimes admitted.

Zero looked amused. “You two aren’t coming apart on me, are you? We struck a bargain.”

Neither spoke a word.

“What you need is diversion,” Zero advised in a genial tone. “Our subject upstairs is softening up nicely. She’s beginning to call out for her mother. It’s delicious.”

Grimes seemed to come to life. “Why don’t we toy with her a bit?”

“Not just yet. She’s not ready yet.”

“Soon?”

“Very. But tonight …”

“The streets?”

Zero grinned. “Yes, our study continues.”

Fenn dropped Lisa off at her hotel earlier and wasn’t invited up as he’d hoped. He supposed his love of her was wishful thinking at best. In a way, he thought he should just lay it on the line and tell her how he felt. But at the same time, he feared it would damage their working relationship and what friendship they’d managed to accrue. It was all so terribly strange. He hadn’t felt so nervous about pressing his attentions on a woman since he was fifteen. And, if nothing else came of this, it was good to feel that way again.

He drove around for some time, thinking of these things.

When he got back to Southern Station, there was a good deal of activity as there always was that time of night. Hookers, pushers, pick pockets, and all manner of street garbage were being dragged in and processed. Some were quiet, others screamed and fought. Such was the atmosphere of a city precinct at night. Fenn worked days now, but he still did night duty. There seemed to be no set hours for a homicide detective.

“We’ve got him,” a voice behind him said.

It was Gaines. “We got your boy, Jim. He’s in holding.”

Fenn smiled. “Spider?”

“Yeah. He’s one weird bastard, too.”

“Bring him on up then.”

Gaines left and Fenn went to his desk, getting a pad of paper and a folder of crime photos. He went into an unoccupied interrogation room and waited. He felt nervous and he wasn’t sure why.

It took three uniforms and Gaines to bring Spider in. He was in cuffs and leg irons. Fenn had never seen anything like him. He was dressed in a knee-length black leather coat, his hair knotted in braids and set with gleaming beads. His face was painted white, black grease around his eyes and on his lips.

“Motherfuckers! Get your fucking hands off me!” He was squirming in their grips like a snake. Fenn half expected him to slip right out of the cuffs.

“Take it easy,” Gaines said. “Take it easy!”

“You don’t know what you’re doing! You don’t know what you’re involved in!”

“Sit him down,” Fenn said. God, he got so sick of these fucking deviants. He longed for the old days when he could have beaten them into submission.

They did, but not without great effort. Spider apparently had the strength of the insane. If it wasn’t for the bonds that held his arms and legs together, he would’ve surely overpowered all three men with ease. Fenn had never seen such raw hatred in a man’s eyes.

“He ain’t going anywhere,” one of the uniforms said proudly. They were on either side of him, holding him down. Gaines was behind him, twisting his cuffed wrists up. If Spider fought too much, his arms would break.