Authors: David Jackson
‘Okay,’ she says, answering both of her questioners.
But it’s not okay. She doesn’t feel okay at all. As she climbs the steps leading up to the building, the cautious part of her brain warns her this is one of the least okay things she has ever done in her life.
When she gets to the top step, she considers making her move. But the guy is watching her carefully. She is not sure she can take him by surprise just yet.
Okay, so let’s get inside. Do it as soon as we get in there and his guard is down. Ready, Erin? Ready?
She stoops and enters the building.
It’s darker in here than she imagined, and she realizes then that all the windows are boarded up. The only light is that finding its way in from the doorway, and that lasts only a second before the guy comes in behind her and lets the barrier fall back into place.
And now she cannot see a thing. Her other senses kick into overdrive and the stench in here overpowers her. Urine and feces and the unmistakable odor of marijuana.
She listens for the man’s footsteps, but is unsure as to where he is. Her hand drops into her purse. Grabs the hammer tightly. Her heart is pounding now as she blinks furiously, trying to make her eyes adjust to the blackness. What’s he doing? Where the fuck is he?
A whisper in her ear that startles her: ‘Wait.’
She hears creaking floorboards, then a rustling sound. Jesus Christ, what is he going to do? What the hell was I—?
A rasping sound that makes her jump again. And then light as a match flares into life. The man is standing over a packing crate, on top of which are some candles. He lights two of them, then snuffs the match out with his fingers and tosses it to the floor.
‘That’s more like it,’ he says, grinning. ‘Some romantic lighting.’
Romantic isn’t the word that jumps to Erin’s mind. She’s in a narrow hallway. There is no furniture here, no carpeting. The flickering candles pick out on the floor the occasional bundle of rags, garbage and other items she has no desire to identify. To her left, a staircase rises into the gloom above. Ahead is the lobby of the building. In the right wall, graffiti-adorned apartment doors lie open, but not exactly welcoming.
The man leads her further inside, to the foot of the staircase. He seems more nervous now, and she knows he has a plan. She knows this for certain by the way he is acting. He is going to do something, and it’s going to be soon, and it’s going to be unpleasant.
‘You got money?’ he says.
‘Yes,’ she answers. ‘Yes, I’ve got money.’
‘Show me.’
He licks his lips. His fingers are twitching. He’s practically salivating.
‘Why?’
‘Because I need to tell the guys upstairs that I’ve seen your dough. Come on, show me the green.’
He puts out a hand. Flicks his fingers into his palm several times. Show me.
Erin glances up the staircase. She doubts there is anybody up there. This is just the guy finding out how much he can make here. This is him getting all excited about how better off he’s about to be when he attacks her and robs her and does all manner of unspeakable things to her in this god-forsaken place that nobody will venture into in a million years if they have any sense. This is his idea of foreplay.
So she reaches into her purse. She doesn’t need an excuse to do so, because he’s asked her to. He has issued an invitation. Show me. Give it to me. Let me have it, doll.
So, here. Have it.
He moves more quickly than she hoped for. Pulls his head back as her arm whips toward him. The hammer catches him a glancing blow on the cheek and he yells and staggers back, falling onto the stairs, and she has to rush at him because she can’t give him time to recover and fight back. He might look like shit, but he’s young and wiry and possibly very strong, and so he has to get her blows in first, has to finish this thing quickly. So she leaps forward, but again her attack is thwarted when he raises an arm and wards off her blow – Jesus, why does he have to keep messing this up? Why doesn’t he just accept what’s coming to him, the thing he’s been asking for ever since he came up to her in the park? Why can’t he just put his head on the chopping block and wait for the fateful strike?
But she doesn’t relent. She keeps up the pressure. Raining the blows down on him. Fighting through his meager defenses – die, you stubborn sonofabitch, die! – until all her blows are finding their target, smashing into his cheeks and his jaw and his eye sockets and his skull bones, crack, splinter, thud. Let me get rid of those zits for you, buster, like this and this and this. Let me take that huge shnozz down a size or two for you. Let me do something about those misaligned teeth of yours – pop, pop, pop, until his face is suddenly more malleable and less angular beneath the purple swollen flesh, and he stops yelling and fighting and thinking and breathing.
She halts eventually, unsure as to how long she has been hitting her prey. Unsure as to how many times that hammer has risen and fallen. It suddenly occurs to her that she has hardly breathed during her exertion, and now she sucks in huge lungfuls of air to compensate. She stares down at what she has done, and can almost make no sense of it. Did I do this? Has this really just happened?
But now all she wants to do is to get out of here. There is something profoundly disturbing about this deserted building, as though it is haunted by the ghosts of its ex-tenants, all standing here and watching her. She needs to escape.
‘Attagirl, Erin. Great show. One of your best yet.’
‘Shut the fuck up,’ she says.
She swaps the hammer for the knife. Adds her touch of artwork to the victim. Time to go. Get out, Erin. Get out now. There’s something not quite right about this place. You need to—
She hears the noise then. Slight, but definitely there. Behind her.
She whirls.
In the doorway of one of the apartments, a man. Young, like the guy now lying dead on the stairs. He wears a black biker’s jacket and jeans. His hair is blond and weak-looking, and there is a vacant stare in his eyes. He props himself up against the door jamb, and looks as though he could slide to the floor any minute. He is obviously still coming down from a high.
‘Wow,’ he says. ‘That was intense.’
‘Nice timing. Introduce him to Mr Hammer, Erin.’
She knows he’s right. This guy has seen. He has witnessed. He can’t be allowed to tell others what she has done. And he’s a junkie. That makes him no good. He ticks all the boxes.
So she starts moving toward him, the knife still in her hand. She’s banking on him being too stoned to sense the danger he’s in.
But she’s wrong.
She realizes that when she sees him raise his arm and point the gun at her.
4.23 P
M
Doyle stares at the numbers again.
Two, three, one.
What could they possibly mean? And how is it that Albert is able to attach meaning to them when Doyle, super-intelligent detective that he is, sees just a bunch of digits?
Okay, super-intelligent is stretching it a little. You didn’t know what a prime number is, did you? You couldn’t have worked out all those factors of 231 the way Albert did, without even having to pause for thought.
See – factors! I remember factors from school. I remember what they are.
Not gonna help you here, pal. Not gonna cut the mustard. Face it: math – even basic arithmetic – was never your strong point. At school the only equations you were interested in were of the form You + Attractive Girl = Fun.
But maybe I’m looking at this too deeply. Maybe what Albert sees in these numbers bears no relation to what I need to see. Why should there be a relationship between the two? For all I know, 231 could be the number of times Albert has tied his shoes today. That’s the way his mind works. He doesn’t think like I do. He doesn’t need to catch a serial killer.
I do, though. And that means I still need to understand these numbers.
So let’s start again. Ignore Albert. Take him out of the equation (see what I did there with the math speak?) and let’s see what we have.
Our killer wastes three guys. She – because yes, unlikely though it might seem, all the signs point to this being the work of a female – carves numbers on their heads. Why is she doing this? Two possibilities. First is that she’s just batshit crazy. She just lays down the first number that comes into her addled brain, or she throws dice or something. Whatever, if that’s the reason then there’s no point me looking at these figures any longer. It ain’t gonna tell me shit about why she’s killing or who she’s gonna go after next.
But that seems unlikely. Killers who leave signatures are usually more consistent, and that’s especially true when their minds are fried. If she had left, say, an upside-down cross on each victim, or even what we initially believed was the mark of Zorro, that would have made more sense. That would have been more in keeping with what’s known about psychopathic serial killers.
So that brings us to the second possibility. She’s trying to send us a message. Trying to tell us something.
It must be the order. Why else would you put the first three numbers on three victims, but not in the usual sequence? The order must mean something. Not something mathematical, like Albert is probably thinking, but something more personal about the victims.
But what?
Two, three, one. Vern, then Edwin Steppler, then William Fischer.
Put them in numerical order and we have Fischer, then Vern, then Steppler.
Does that help? Does that tell us anything?
Shit, I hate puzzles.
‘Detective Doyle?’
He looks up to see a woman at his desk. Attractive. Looks a little like Whitney Houston. She wears a suit and carries a briefcase. He hopes she has appeared in answer to his musings. She will wave a wand over the numbers in front of him and their secret will be revealed, and then she will vanish in a cloud of smoke.
‘Uhm, yeah,’ he says, standing and proffering his hand.
Her grip is firm, businesslike. ‘Vanessa Maynard, from Psych Services.’
‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Oh, yeah. Please, take a seat. Can I get you a coffee or something?’
‘No, I’m good, thanks. I hear you have somebody you’d like me to talk to.’
‘Yeah. Albert.’
She opens up her briefcase and takes out a notepad and pen. ‘Tell me about him.’
So he tells her. And while he talks to her he is utterly self-conscious about how he is coming across. He has a thing about shrinks. He always gets the feeling that, no matter what he says or how he says it, he is being analyzed and judged. He could tell them something perfectly innocuous, such as his favorite color, and they will read all manner of things into it. From one simple piece of information they will dig deep into his psyche and discover all kinds of hidden tidbits that have lain there since his childhood. He doesn’t like the idea of people knowing stuff about him that he doesn’t know himself.
And so he remains guarded in his words. He does his best to stick to the facts and not to stray into opinion, not to venture anything that might offer an insight into his own thought processes or emotions. He particularly avoids mentioning how annoyed he is that it’s taken this long for Psych Services to get someone out here, for fear it will give her the impetus to go to town on dissecting his mental health. It’s probably the most uncomfortable conversation he’s ever had at this desk since he arrived at the precinct.
She doesn’t let him off lightly, either. ‘What do you think?’ she asks. ‘Do you believe he killed his mother?’
Doyle’s mouth opens but no words come out for a few seconds. Did he kill his mother? Could there be a question more psychologically loaded than that? Will she ask me about my relationship with my own mother next? Will whatever I say cause her to form an opinion about my sexual adequacy?
Get a grip, Doyle.
He bites the bullet: ‘In all honesty, I don’t know. I hope not. If you must know, I kinda like the guy.’
There. I said it. Read into that what you will. Open up that briefcase and take out the straitjacket if you think you need to.
But what she does is to smile at him. Playfully, she reaches out and flicks the bobble-headed leprechaun on his desk.
She says, ‘Then let’s go see if you’re right, shall we?’
As Doyle looks down at the vibrating plaything, it seems to him that there’s all kinds of things he could make of such a gesture.
He decides it’s best not to go there.
4.37 PM
So now she’s in his apartment.
Not the one in the derelict building – the one in which this guy had been sleeping after his drug fix. This is his real apartment, where he lives. She walked a whole two blocks with this man and made barely a squeak, despite passing several people on the street. But what was she going to do when he was pressing a gun into her ribs? Even if she hadn’t believed he would shoot her, she wasn’t exactly inclined to draw attention to herself after what she had just done.
So she came with him. All the way to this tiny little apartment.
And tiny it is. Just two rooms: a bathroom and a room containing everything else. A minuscule space like this needs to be kept tidy, and it isn’t. The sofa bed is still in bed mode, its grim gray sheets only half covering the yellow-stained mattress beneath. The counter top along one side of the room is littered with unwashed plates, open food-cans and cups half-filled with cold coffee. The sink is crammed with pots and pans containing the remnants of meals going back several days. The stove is spattered and smeared with grease and baked-on food.
‘What are you doing?’ she asks. ‘Why did you bring me here?’
‘Shut up,’ he says. ‘Turn around.’
She follows his instruction, and when her back is to him he snatches her purse from her shoulder and flings it to the floor. Then he grabs her coat and yanks it off her. She sees it fly past her and hit the wall before landing on the floor, and she notices that the brooch is facing her, watching all that goes on here.
‘Don’t worry. I can still see and hear. I’ll get you out of this.’
She hears the words over her earpiece, but they don’t comfort her. She doesn’t trust either of the men who have their eyes trained on her right now.
Something presses into the back of her neck.
‘Don’t move,’ says the junkie, ‘or I’ll blow your fucking head off.’
The guy’s other hand starts to slide over her waist, and she flinches.
‘I said don’t move. I’m gonna search you. Make sure you got nothing.’
His hand slips into the left pocket of her pants, then he brings it out and checks the one on the right.
She closes her eyes, waiting to swallow back her disgust when he checks out the rest of her body. But it doesn’t happen. Instead, he brings his lips to her ear and says, ‘Those tight pants and sweater of yours, I don’t think I need to frisk you for a gun or nothing. Course, I might change my mind about that if you try anything. You understand me?’
She nods, and he pulls the gun away.
‘You can turn around again.’
Slowly, she faces him. He’s still got the gun out, holding it waist-high. She didn’t need his warning. She has no intention of making any sudden moves when there’s the barrel of a pistol being pointed at her.
He studies her, saying nothing.
‘What?’ she asks.
He moves his head from side to side, a smile growing on his boyish features. ‘Shit. I can hardly believe it. What you did back at that building. Crazy shit, man. Why’d you do that?’
‘Tell him you don’t like lowlife junkie fuckwits.’
She ignores the suggestion. Shrugs. ‘He deserved it. He tried to sell me drugs.’
The man’s eyes widen. ‘Ha! What are you, some kind of one-woman clean-up campaign? Nah, there’s more to it than that. That was some seriously fucked-up shit back there, man.’
She doesn’t like her actions being described in this way. It unsettles her. She did what she had to do, and that’s it.
‘I didn’t like him,’ she says.
He laughs at her. ‘No kidding? And there’s me thinking you had the hots for him. Come on, what’s the story? He your ex or something?’
She gives him a look of disgust. ‘I wouldn’t touch him if he were the last man on earth.’
‘Yeah, but you did touch him. You touched him with a fucking hammer, man. And then you sliced up his fucking head, man. I mean, you went to work on that guy. You musta had a reason.’
‘He was going to do something to me. He didn’t take me all the way there just to sell me drugs. He had a plan.’
‘A plan? Woo-hoo! Well, now, that explains everything. Explains all that shit. A plan? Unforgivable. What was he thinking? Can’t let a guy have a plan, no sir. Someone with a plan needs his fucking balls cutting off.’
Erin listens to the biting sarcasm and finds she cannot shrug it off. ‘You’re laughing at me.’
‘Yeah, I am. But I ain’t having half as much fun as you were in that building. You were soaking that shit up, man.’
Erin folds her arms across her chest. She suddenly feels cold and shivery. ‘No. You’re wrong. I… I didn’t enjoy it. It was… necessary. I was just… protecting myself.’
She has trouble finding the words. It worries her that they don’t seem to sit right.
‘Well, you weren’t exactly part of the audience, you know what I’m saying? I saw what I saw. You were in the zone, man. You were gone…’
No, she thinks. He’s got it wrong. It wasn’t like that.
‘Protecting yourself? Fuck. You was hitting him long after he was dead…’
No, I… please, no.
‘And then that knife thing? Taking a blade to the man’s dome like that? I ain’t never seen—’
‘SHUT UP!’
Her yell bounces around the apartment, and her abductor responds by bringing up his gun arm, leveling the weapon at her frightened, confused face.
She stares down the barrel, her lower lip trembling. Is that how he saw me? Could I have really acted that way? As though it wasn’t about
Georgia? As though I was… having fun?
She wants to be sick, and she sees in the man’s face the recognition that he’s pursued this thread as far as he can.
He lowers the pistol again. ‘What’s your name?’
‘
Erin.’
‘All right,
Erin. You can call me Bruce, okay? It ain’t my real name, but I like Bruce Willis. You dig the Die Hard movies?’
She gives a subtle shake of the head. ‘I… I haven’t really watched them.’
‘Yeah, well you should give ’em a try. Best movies ever. Yippee Ki-Yay, and so forth.’
She doesn’t know what he’s talking about, so she just flashes him a weak smile. She’s scared, but what helps her to keep it together is that, for whatever reason, he wants her alive. Otherwise he could easily have killed her back at the empty building.
‘Why did you bring me here?’ she asks.
‘Good question,
Erin. Wondered when you’d get around to it.’
The man who calls himself Bruce – even though he looks nothing like Bruce Willis or a Bruce of any kind for that matter – chews his lip and studies her, as if debating how much detail of his grand scheme he should reveal to his captive.
‘I can sell you,’ he says.
She wants to laugh, but is too afraid of angering this man, and is not so sure it’s funny. What’s he talking about? Human trafficking? Is he serious?
‘Sell me to who?’ she asks.
‘The cops. You’re worth something to them. Gotta be.’
She shakes her head. ‘What? Why would I be worth anything to the cops? They don’t even know about what just happened. What makes you think—?’
‘How many?’ he interrupts.
She stares, open-mouthed. ‘How… How many what?’
‘How many people have you killed?’
It’s a shot in the dark. Has to be. He couldn’t know what I’ve done.
‘I don’t understand. It was just him. Just that one guy. I—’
‘LIAR!’ he yells, and then he’s advancing on her, gun raised again. ‘I heard on the radio. About the homeless dude. Found dead with some kind of fucking Zorro mark on his head. That was you, wasn’t it?
Wasn’t it?
’
‘Yes! Yes, it was me, okay?’ She has her arms raised, and her hands tremble in the air. Her gaze flicks from the blackness of the gun barrel to the unfathomable eyes of the man who might be on the edge of sending a bullet exploding from it.
They stand frozen like that for some time. A dance with no movement but bursting with energy.
And then a smile tugs at the corner of his lips.
‘Fuck,’ he says. ‘I knew it. I knew that had to be you. The chances of two different flakes running around cutting folks up like that…’
‘I’m not crazy,’ she says.
‘No? He deserved it too, right? So that’s two. How many others?’
‘Don’t tell him. Stick with two. He doesn’t need to know more than that.’
But she wonders what the point is of withholding that information. Two victims or four – what’s the difference to him? He heard about Vern on the radio. Maybe he’s heard about the others too.
‘It’s four in total.’
His eyes widen and his jaw drops. ‘Four? You’re shitting me, right? Four? Jesus Christ, girl, what’s gotten into you? What did these people do to you?’
She doesn’t know how to answer that. They were available, that’s all. They were in the right place at the right time. At least for
Erin they were. But can she tell him that? Of course not. That would just sound crazy.
But the true story would sound even crazier.
Says Bruce, ‘You know the cops will be chasing your ass, don’t you? I mean seriously hunting you down, man. Four people on the slab because of you? Five-O will be crapping theirselves over that. That makes you Public Enemy Number One, girl. And that makes you worth something.’
She can almost see the dollar signs in his eyes. The plans being formulated in the brain cells that the drugs haven’t destroyed yet. He’s seeing big money. Enough to buy a ton of drugs and stay wasted forever.
‘Fuck,’ he says dreamily, his gaze drifting. ‘I don’t believe this.’
‘You need to get ready to make a move,
Erin.’
The warning unnerves her. A move? What kind of move am I supposed to make against a junkie armed with a gun? Is he serious?
Bruce snaps back into reality. He starts looking around him.
Erin
narrows her eyes. What’s he searching for?
‘It’s going to be soon,
Erin. Before it’s too late. Be ready on my signal.’
Signal? What kind of fucking signal? What’s he going to do, fire a starting pistol in my ear?
‘Turn around,’ says Bruce.
‘What? Why?’
Bruce glares at her. ‘Because I said so, is why. Now turn the fuck around.’
She turns, so that she’s now facing the disgusting bed. From behind comes the sound of drawers being opened and closed.
‘I can see him, Erin. I’ll be your eyes. Are you ready?’
She twists her head slightly to the left. She can just see her coat out of the corner of her eye, and she tries to throw it a question in her expression: Ready for what?
She doesn’t know whether he understands her query, but he comes back with a response:
‘When he’s not looking, you need to attack, hard and fast. Do you hear me, Erin? Are you ready?’
No. I’m not ready. I can’t do this. What are you talking about?
But then there is no more time for debate, because the order arrives, loud and clear.
‘NOW, ERIN! GO, GO, GO!’
It’s as if she is not in control of her body. The words in her ear act like hypnotic suggestions. She cannot defy them. She doesn’t know what form her attack will take, but suddenly she’s spinning around, ready to pounce, ready to jump on this sonofabitch’s back and rip his throat out, ready to—
But that’s impossible. Because Bruce doesn’t have his back to her. He is not rummaging in drawers. He has found what he wanted and is already facing her. And before she can take a single step forward he is lifting his gun hand again and a snarl is forming on his lips and his eyes are bursting with the heat of death, and he is about to shoot, about to kill…
‘What the fuck?’ he screams, his voice shrill and scared and angry. ‘What the fuck are you doing? I told you. I fucking told you!’
He steps right up to her. Puts the cold steel muzzle to her temple. Presses it hard against her skull. If she were thinking logically now she would stand stock still and she would pray and she would plead and she would hope for mercy.
But she’s not thinking logically. She is breaking inside. Snapping. Not because of Bruce. Bruce is secondary now. Bruce is an irrelevance.
She is not even aware of Bruce as she pulls away from him and turns toward her jacket on the floor and unleashes her fury.
‘What the fuck was that? Are you trying to get me killed? Are you trying to keep me from my baby? Why did you do that?’
She expects an apology at least. An admission of error, maybe. What she gets is laughter.
He laughs uproariously in her ear. This is what he finds funny. Sick, insane situations like this are what floats his boat. He finds this hilarious.
‘NOO!’ she screams. ‘STOP IT! STOP IT!’
And the laughter stops. In an instant. No tailing off or fading away. Just a dead stop, as though he has turned off his microphone.
She stares at the coat, at the brooch. She is panting heavily, like a lioness that has just chased down a gazelle. And like that lioness she could tear someone limb from limb right now.