SUSPENSE THRILLERS-A Boxed Set (51 page)

“We?” Worried.

“My roommate and me. She keeps house, I work and make the money. Don't worry. She stays in her room. I told her you'd be coming over tonight.”

“Oh, well in that case. You don't think she'd want to join us?”

Shadow laughed at the thought. “No, I don't think so.”

She led him from the underground garage to the front of the house where the porch light shone yellow across the white marble. She did not want to get stuck with him on the dark spiral stairs leading into the back of the house.

She opened the door, then turned and locked it behind her. “Just a precaution,” she said.

He looked around and nodded. “Nice. This place must have twenty rooms.”

“It has a lot. We don't use them all, of course.” She went up the curving staircase and listened for him to follow. She moved down the hall to her bedroom door and opened it. “Here's where it all happens.” She held the door open for him to enter first.

He turned abruptly and pushed her against the door, pinning her back against the frame.

She pushed against his chest with both hands. “Hey! This won't cut it, friend. I have ways and I have ways.” Her heart pumped hard. She feared he'd hurt her again, hurt her before she could get the game underfoot, before she could protect herself.

He laughed, obviously amused by her secretiveness. “Sure, baby, it's your show.”

He sidled into the room. “That old bed gonna hold us?”

She motioned for him to try it while she closed the door. He flopped backwards onto the bed, arms flung out at his sides. The mattress bounced, but the heavy wrought-iron frame held steady.

“I've been waiting for this a while.” He propped himself up onto his side to watch her move about the room, put away her gym bag in the closet, slip out of her shoes. “You sure know how to tease a man.”

“You haven't seen anything yet. Do you like games?” She looked at him seductively from below long black lashes. It was a look the men at the club loved. Promises—everything was a promise and a tease, an out-and-out lie, a fraud.

“Sure, who doesn't?”

“Little bondage? Little fun?” She took off the short bolero jacket that left her arms naked. She wore a black bustier, lace cups, low back.

He stood up and began taking off his jacket. “I get to tie you down?”

“No, honey, I get to tie you down. But slowly. One thing at a time. You'll see.”

He shucked off his clothes like a teenager with a willing date. She avoided looking at him while she slipped off the tight electric-blue Spandex pants. She lovingly stroked the crystal decanter and two glasses sitting in the tray on her dresser, her finger outlining the rim of one glass to hear it sing. When the bed creaked with his weight she turned to him, smile frozen in place, ready for the game to commence.

Eighteen

“You see a dancer, someone like me, in a club. You like what you see so you try to make a date. If the dancer—she's not me—says she's not interested, what do you do?”

He laughed wildly, spluttering and giggling, having the time of his life. He was already on his way to death. He had failed her test. He had not answered her questions the way he should have. And this was the last one, the trick one, but it didn't matter. For each question he answered the wrong way, she had tied down an arm or a leg until he was fully incapable of moving from the bed. He now lay spread-eagled, naked, vulnerable, arms and legs bound to the heavy iron.

He was a hairy man with a bloated midsection, legs too small for his torso. He looked like a fat trophy brought home from a safari, some wild unknown animal out of a jungle. To her he was an ugly creature, but it was the ugliness inside him, the evil there, that needed to be destroyed. He could have looked like Quasimodo and that was no sin. It was the heart that had rotted away inside that made him worthless.

She could smell him and it made the back of her throat periodically catch so she couldn't swallow. He had a musk scent so strong that he might have been a rutting cat.

“Hell, I go after her anyway, just like I done you.”

“What if she really doesn't like you?”

“You don't like me? I gave you lots of money.” He moistened his lips, unsure now.

“I didn't say me. I said, what if she doesn't like you? And you keep after her. That sound right to you?”

“Hey, this game over yet? I could use some head, you know? My goddamn pecker is about to fall off from waiting.” He laughed again, but this time his mirth was short-lived and forced.

“This is the last question. You've liked it so far, haven't you?” She ran her nails up the inside of his leg, but pulled her hand back before reaching the dark region of his groin.

With her gaze fastened on him, she felt her mind slip. Just a notch. The way a bicycle chain will slip and catch again. Inside her head she felt it: click. And found herself thinking about her children. Gabriel and Stevie. Their laughing faces. The way they smelled when she pressed her face into the crevices of their chubby little boy necks. Then: click. Her mind came back to her, the daydream over.

She blinked, knowing she had gone away. That's what had happened, she'd gone away. Only for a few seconds, but it frightened her nevertheless.

Her victim shivered and closed his eyes. “Yeah, yeah, it's been fun. This erotic shit is great for a while, but let's get the main act on the road, okay? We ain't got all night.”

“Oh, but we do. All night long.” She glanced at the windows on the far wall, relieved to see it was still dark. “So what if she doesn't like you. You know that. You sense it. What do you do?”

“Oh fuck, I don't know. I pay for something, it ought to be mine. She don't like me, what do I care? I ain't asking her to fucking marry me.”

She stood, completely naked now, and glided to the dressing table where the decanter waited. She saw from the corner of her eye that he was straining to keep his head up, keeping her in view. “You asked for a drink before. I'll get you one now.”

“Just a few sips. Then you straddle me and ride for the border, whatta you say?”

She brought the glass to the bedside. She sat beside him and slipped one hand beneath his neck to raise his head. He had been tied down for the best part of an hour. He was thirsty, his lust driving him wild, while she teased and played her game.

He drank down the entire highball glass of whiskey and Warfarin before he started coughing. She moved away from him with the empty glass. Then she returned, bringing the chair from her dressing table. She positioned it beside the bed—but at a little distance—sat down, crossed her legs. She smiled beatifically.

“Goddamn! That whiskey tastes like shit. You need to pay more and get better booze.”

She nodded. Smiled.

“I can't get this awful taste outta my mouth. Christ.” His throat worked while he swallowed and swallowed. “You don't have something in the house better than that stuff, something to chase it with?”

“No.” She waited.

“Why you sitting there looking at me? Look now what you've done. My hard-on is dying and, if you want to know, these scarves are cutting off the blood in my hands and feet. How ‘bout you untie me so we can fuck for real? I'm not all that hot into this bondage stuff.”

“You treat women like slaves. That's bondage.”

A flicker crossed his eyes. He winced and tried to pull his legs free. “Look, I'm getting pissed, okay? Enough's enough. Now let me loose. I don't think this is funny anymore.”

An involuntary moan escaped him. He tried to jerk his hands from the bed. The scarves held fast, tightening more around his wrists. “I feel sick. My stomach . . . my stomach's . . .”

“Hurting?” she asked. She leaned forward a little to look him in the eyes. “Is there pain yet? I'd be interested to know what it feels like.”

“Listen, you bitch, I don't know what kind of game you're up to, but I don't like it! I ought to get up from here and beat the living hell outta you.”

“You're dying,” she said coolly. She was surprised how calm she sounded, how detached she felt. “What are you talking about?”

“You won't beat the hell out of me or any other woman again. You won't hound them, use them, abuse them, or screw them. Not anymore.”

“You know who I am? You know who my friends are?”

“I couldn't care less.”

He pulled his head to his chest. He blanched. He began to gag. White rings of flesh stole around his eyes and sweat seemed to magically appear on his forehead.

“You'll probably vomit some of it up.”

His eyes were popping from their fleshy shells. He was sweating profusely now so that the musky smell of him filled the room. He murmured, “You're not lying. That whiskey . . . poison . . . you've poisoned me . . .”

“Absolutely,” she said. “A pretty nasty poison too. The dog it killed, it made him bleed from the eyes. I don't know if that was before or after it killed him, but either way, it's not pretty.”

He started to scream, but she had an extra scarf ready. She stuffed it in his mouth and sat in the chair again to wait for the end of the show.

~*~

It was not pretty. It was sick-making. She suspected his stomach hemorrhaged first, filling his abdomen with blood. She had made a special effort to consult a book on poisons in the local library. She knew more of what to expect than she had let him know.

He vomited some of it up. Then, as he thrashed about, his nose bled, his ears, then his eyes. Finally, while he still breathed, the frothy blood bubbling in his nostrils, he bled from the penis and rectum. It made a mess on her sheets. Luckily she had known, thanks to her research, to cover the mattress with a plastic liner.

Funny, but she hadn't thought out the emotional ramifications of murder. What it would feel like to sit idly by while someone died. It didn't surprise her, though, that she was not moved. Even the stray dog she'd accidentally poisoned deserved life more than the man thrashing and gagging and bleeding on her bed.

Several times during his death throes her mind slipped again. In and out of a groove. She didn't know when she'd “go away” or when she'd return. Click. Click. The bicycle chain ratcheting round and round the teeth of the gear, clicking in, clicking out.

Flashes of the past came and went, some so fast she couldn't catch them. Right before her eyes raced various visions, or perhaps they were hallucinations, she didn't know exactly what they were or what was happening. First she saw her children, whom she mourned deeply each time they appeared. And then her dead husband with his perplexed look, standing before her, arms at his sides, the gun in one of his hands. He was whole again, his brain not yet splattered across the room from the gun blast. “I have to do this,” he said plaintively. “It's the only way.”

“Do what?” she cried, stricken with a fear so deep it paralyzed her.

He stood over the boys in the den, the gun in his hand. Stevie thought it a toy and reached for it. She thought Gabe said something, but she didn't hear what it was. Daddy something. Daddy don't?

“It's the only way out,” he repeated. Then she came unglued and reached toward him, her body taking her across the room to stop him. Dear God, let her reach him before he did it.

But he pointed the gun at Gabriel and he pulled the trigger. She didn't see . . . it was so fast . . . but she saw him . . . pointing the gun at Stevie . . . who screamed . . . And she was at him, on him, in fact, clawing at him with insanity replacing all normal thoughts. But he had the gun, still smoking and hot, in his mouth, and she leaned away, hoping he would, hoping he wouldn't, hoping she was dreaming a nightmare, that it wasn't real, it couldn't possibly be . . . real.

Faster and faster the images came, wavered, disappeared. Click, click, clickclickclick.

After the poison had done its job and the man on the bed stopped breathing she came back to herself. She blinked and came to know how rigid she'd been holding herself in the chair. The muscles of her shoulders hurt, her buttocks were numb, and it felt as if her hands had turned to slabs of frosty meat.

She worked her arms and stood up, feeling behind her to massage the globes of flesh she had been sitting upon. It dawned on her she had not thought anything out beyond her victim's death. She had arranged every detail from the decanter to the scarves, but she had not thought about how to remove a man from her bed—a man who must weigh quite a bit over two hundred pounds.

As she stood looking out the window, contemplating the problem, the sky lightened to old unpolished silver. The smell in the room—of his sweat, his blood, his agony—made her move from the window to pace the floor.

Finally she had to wake Charlene.

“I need your help,” she said, tiptoeing into the other woman's bedroom.

Charlene came awake suddenly, sitting up in the bed. She wore another old-fashioned nightgown, long and flowered, with a lace collar. “What is it? Who's here?”

“You saw the man I brought home?”

“Shadow? What's the matter? I stayed in my room, just as you said.”

Shadow was nodding in the dark. Charlene had the blinds closed. She reached out and turned on the bedside lamp. Mackie hissed where he lay at the foot of the bed. “Well, he's dead,” she said.

“What?”

“I killed him.”

“You what?”

“Murdered him. Poison. Rat poison.”

“Oh, hon, tell me it ain't so. You're just kidding, right? It's some kind of awful joke.” Charlene hurried from the bed and went to the doorway, peeking around the corner into the hall. “You didn't really do nothing, did you? You're just playing a trick on me, huh?”

Shadow led her by the hand down the dim early-morning hallway. They stood together staring at the inert body lying on the bed, staining the white sheets red.

Charlene bolted. She rushed down the winding stair to the living room. She was at the front door, trying to undo the deadbolt, very much like the boys must have done when imprisoned with the murdered former owner. But Shadow caught and stopped her.

“Hush, Charlene. It's just like before only this one didn't break into the house. He broke into my life. At the club. He wouldn't go away. He wanted to use me. He caught me outside, and hit me in the face. I couldn't make him leave me alone. And if I didn't let him come to the house, he would have hurt me again. A lot worse.