The Sinner (Black Dagger Brotherhood), page 5
In his bathroom, which he had stripped of the cloud-like towels that had once rested on golden rods, flushing away them like birds from perches, he removed his clothes and weapons, each in proper sequence. First, the weapons, which he lined up on the marble counter in a neat, tidy little row of wrath. Two steel daggers. Four handguns, two with suppressors. Seven clips of extra ammunition, because he’d popped off one of his backups playing target practice with a lesser. And then a pair of throwing knives, a length of nylon rope, duct tape, a chisel, and a hammer.
Those last four on the list? No one else knew about them. They were for him. They were . . . private.
His clothes were next. The leather jacket first, which he folded over the edge of the claw-foot tub. The black T-shirt, which he folded and placed by the jacket on the heated marble floor. The boots which he lined up together by the shirt, the socks that he folded on top of the shirt, the leathers that he folded and draped on the jacket. When he was completely naked, he picked the shirt and the socks back up and put them down the laundry chute. He resented this. In the Old Country, he had worn his clothes until they had fallen off of him, replacing items only when necessary. At first, this conservation of resources had been out of necessity. Then it had been a matter of efficiency as he did not want to waste time on the inconsequential.
Now, he lived here. Where people didn’t want to eat their roast beef next to someone who smelled of the street, of sweat, of lesser blood and gunpowder.
Of death, given and received.
This delicate sensibility had had to be explained to him and he resented the compliance that was required. But it was what it was. In the course of his life, he had had to yield to higher powers from time to time. Whether they were virtuous . . . or not.
Pivoting back to the display of the only things that mattered in his life—regardless of what Balz thought—he was drawn to the nylon rope.
And the chisel.
And the hammer.
His body moved forward, called by his private tools. On the approach, he saw different versions of them, flipping through memories of the many sharp edges and forced confinement aids he had used over the centuries as if they were photographs of people whose company he enjoyed and of happy events that had been shared amongst family and friends . . . parties, festivals, birthdays.
Without a conscious command from his mind, his hand reached out to the chisel, his fingertips traveling across the sharp end, the business end, the end that he had driven through many a soft tissue and into many a hard bone. Inside of him, his talhman roared, the horrible energy traveling from the center of his chest directly down his arm, to his dagger hand. A trembling ensued, shaky, shaky.
But not from weakness. From denied strength.
As he pictured using the chisel, the hammer . . . his saw and his axe . . . the other tools of his terrible trade . . . he saw the bodies of his victims lying on different kinds of floors. Wooden floors, finished and unfinished. Marble, stone, and ceramic tile. Carpets, rugs, linoleum. And then there were the outside scenes. The spongy mattresses of wet leaves. The cold gloss of iced-over ponds and drifts of snow. The grit of concrete, another set of knuckles to be leveraged. Then the ocean’s yielding sand, the rocky shores of rivers, and the greedy splash of lake water.
Syn’s breath quickened and sweat broke out across his chest, riding a wave up his throat, into his face.
In his mind, he pictured limbs bent wrong. Mouths cranked open in screams. Intestines blooming out of incisions he’d made in lower bellies.
Massaging the flat, steel face of the chisel with his forefinger, he warmed the cold metal with his body heat, stroking . . . stroking—
A tug on his cock made him look down at his stiffened sex in surprise.
It wasn’t a tug. His erection had knocked into the handle of the drawer between the sinks.
Staring at his extended member, he regarded the flesh as if from a vast difference. And then he stroked the blade of the chisel.
The sensation translated immediately to his arousal, the thing kicking. Wanting more.
Picking the chisel up with his business hand, he held it in front of his face. So clean, so precise, its dimensions declared by sharp, unforgiving edges.
Down below, at his hips, he found his cock with his other palm. As he began to pump himself, he stared at the blade. Harder. Faster. Sharper. Cleaner. Until he couldn’t tell where his thoughts about the chisel ended and the sexual instinct started. The two blended together, tendrils that started separate twisting up quick, forming a rope that tethered two things that should never have had anything to do with each other.
Sex and death.
Abruptly, there was a great surge within him, a rising heat and sense of urgency, and he opened himself to the twisted passion. Turning the chisel in his hand, he watched how the light from overhead played on the blade, winking, flashing . . . flirting, seducing. As he might have with a lover, his eyes went back and forth from the chisel to his cock, a momentum kindling, intensifying.
His talhman pulsed under his skin, the need to kill a second side of him that he suppressed as much as, and for as long as, he was able. Harder. Faster. Rasping breath, his. Pounding heart, his. Pressure in his veins, the cords of his neck popping, his head falling back as his lids squeezed shut. But it didn’t matter that he couldn’t see the chisel. He had a rich forest of images to wander through in his mind, a promenade of bloodied, torturing pleasure that was everything he couldn’t feel down below.
Building . . . building . . . building—
Until . . .
Clicking. He became acutely aware of the clicking as his fist went back and forth along his shaft. And then he started to feel the burn of friction and not in a good way, in an abrasive fashion. Further below his stroking, his balls stung as they crawled up close to his body, like they were trying to discharge themselves in whole if they had to.
Stimulation turned to strangulation, as that which had been called forward was denied exit. Buildup became pent up. Culmination became frustration.
The alchemy he had created now turned against him, the abandonment with which he had released the hold on his head gone now, a gritted grimace righting things such that he saw himself in the mirror.
His reflection was ugly, the features that were harsh when composed now tormented by a sickening denial he was well familiar with. And then there was the chisel, right by his mouth, like a lover he had been kissing. And his hand pumping, the head of his cock purple from the squeezing and the dry rubbing.
Pain now. But like the pleasure that had come from thinking of killing, the origin of the agony was all mixed up. Was it the yanking on his cock? Or something so much deeper . . . going back to very beginning of him.
The very origin of him.
Giving up, Syn tossed down the chisel, disturbing the orderly lineup of hammer and rope and duct tape. With a grunt, he fell forward and gripped the edge of the countertop. His breath wheezed up and down his throat and whistled through his teeth, while sweat dripped off his chin, landing on the top of one of his bare feet.
There was nothing worse than chasing a release.
You never could catch.
The following morning in the Caldwell Courier Journal’s much diminished newsroom, Jo’s knees went loose and her butt smacked down into her office chair. As her hands started to tremble, she made like she meant to put the glossy photographs on her desk instead of having fumbled them into gravity’s greedy clutch. The stack of images fell in a fan, different angles on the gruesome face repeated until it was like her vision was stuttering: The eyes open in terror. The features frozen in a scream. The exposed teeth like those of a wild animal.
No longer anything human.
“Sorry,” Bill Eliott said. “Didn’t mean to ruin your breakfast.”
“Not at all.” She cleared her throat and shifted the top image on the pile to the bottom. “It’s fine, I’m—”
Jo blinked. And saw the all-wrong body glistening under police lights on the backs of her lids. As her throat closed like a fist, she thought about running out of the newsroom and throwing up by the back door in the parking lot.
“You were saying?” She sat up taller in her crappy chair. “About where the body was found?”
Bill crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back in his own chair across the aisle. At twenty-nine, and having been married for a year and a half, he straddled the divide between hipster and adult, his shaggy black hair and black-rimmed glass and skinny jeans more the former, the seriousness with which he took his job and his wife the latter.
“Seven blocks away from that techno club, Ten,” he said.
“What the hell . . . happened to him.” As Jo looked at the next picture in line, she willed her stomach contents to stay put. “I mean, his skin . . .”
“Gone. Taken off of him like someone had stripped a cow. A deer.”
“This is . . . impossible.” She looked up. “And this would have taken time—security cameras. There have to be—”
“CPD is on it. I have a contact. He’s going to get back to us.”
“Us?”
Bill rolled over on his chair and tapped the stack of horror. “I want us to write this together.”
Jo looked around at the empty desks. “You and me?”
“I need help.” He checked his watch. “Where the hell is Dick. He said he’d be here by now.”
“Wait, you and me. Writing an article together. For publication in the real paper.”
“Yes.” Bill checked his phone and frowned. “It’s not like we haven’t been working with each other already on you-know-what.”
She met his eyes. “You don’t think this has anything to do with . . .”
“Not officially, I don’t, and neither do you. We start talking about our little side project trying to find vampires and Dick’s going to think we’re crazy.”
As a sharpshooter went through Jo’s frontal lobe, she had the sense that she needed to ask Bill about something . . . something about the last night . . .
When nothing came to her, and the pain just got worse, she shook her head and looked back down at the photograph of the full body. The tangled, glistening mess was nothing but muscle and sinew over glimpses of shockingly white bone. Veins, like purple wires, added fine-line accents to the crumpled anatomy. And the bed upon which the corpse lay? Skin.
Well, to be fair, there seemed to be some clothes—
The familiar headache rippled through her skull, playing the piano keys of her pain receptors. As she winced, the newsroom’s back door was thrown wide. Dick Peters, as editor-in-chief of the CCJ, walked in like he owned the place, his lumbering footfalls the advance of all that was arrogant and arbitrary, as only the truly below-average could be. Fifty years old, fifty pounds over Dad-bod weight, and retrenched in the sexism of the fifties, the fat folds padding his once-handsome fratboy face were a harbinger of the atherosclerosis that would claim him early.
But not soon enough. Not in the next fifteen feet.
“You wanted to see me,” Dick announced to Bill. “Well, let’s do this.”
The boss man didn’t slow down, and as he passed by like a semi on the highway, Bill got up and motioned for Jo to follow with the pictures.
Stuffing them back into their folder, she strode after the men. As subscriptions and advertisers fell off, everything had been downsized so it was only another twenty feet to the paper-thin door of Dick’s fragile, declining temple of power.
But his authority was undiminished as he dumped his Columbo coat in a threadbare chair—and realized she was Bill’s plus-one.
“What,” he snapped at her as he took a suck on his Starbucks venti latte.
Bill shut the door. “We’re here together.”
Dick looked back and forth. Then focused on Bill. “Your wife is pregnant.”
As if the infidelity was excusable when Lydia wasn’t knocked up, but tacky for those nine particular months.
“We’re reporting this together,” Jo said, dropping the photographs on Dick’s desk.
They landed cockeyed on the clutter of paperwork, the glossies peeking out of the folder, presenting themselves for precisely the close-up Dick gave them.
“Holy . . . shit.”
“This is nothing that anyone’s ever seen in Caldwell before. Or anywhere else.” Bill checked his Apple Watch again. “Jo and I are going to investigate this together—”
Dick turned his head without straightening his upper half, his jowls on the down side hanging loose off his jawline. “Says who.”
“Tony’s still out from the gastric bypass.” Bill motioned to the closed door. “Pete’s only part-time and he’s covering the Metro Council fraud thing. And I’ve got a doctor’s appointment with Lydia in twenty minutes.”
“So you wait till your wife’s done with the lady doctor.” Dick moved the photographs around with the tip of his finger, sipping on his coffee with all of the delicacy of a wet vac. “This is incredible—you gotta get on this—”
“Jo is going down there to the scene right now. My contact with the CPD is waiting for her.”
Now Dick stood to his full height of five feet, nine inches. “No, you’re going down to the scene after that appointment is over, and didn’t you tell me it was going to be a quick one? When you asked for only the morning off?” The man motioned around at scuffed walls. “In case you haven’t noticed, this paper needs stories, and as a soon-to-be father, you need this job. Unless you think you can get good healthcare coverage as a freelancer?”
“Jo and I are doing this together.”
Dick pointed at her. “She was hired to be the online editor. That’s as far as she is going—”
“I can handle it,” Jo said. “I can—”
“The story is going to wait for him.” Dick picked up the photographs and stared at them with the eyes of the converted. “This is amazing stuff. I want you to go deep on this, Bill. Deep.”
Jo opened her mouth, but Dick shoved the folder at Bill. “Did I stutter,” he demanded.
Mr. F stood in front of the house and double-checked the number that was on its mailbox, not that he knew where he was or why he was here. Looking behind himself, he didn’t know how he’d gotten to this culde-sac with its seventies-era split-levels and colonials. No car. No bike. And there was no bus service in this part of town.
But more to the point, he had only hazy memory of . . . fuck.
Something that didn’t bear thinking of.
He had to go inside this particular house, however. Something in his brain was telling him that he was supposed to walk up the driveway and go into the garage and enter the fake Tudor.
Mr. F glanced around in case there was another explanation for any part of this. The last thing he remembered with any clarity was being under the bridge downtown with the rest of the junkies. Someone had approached him. A man he didn’t know. There had been a promise of drugs and the suggestion that sex was involved. Mr. F wasn’t that into the grind, but at the time, he had been too dope sick to panhandle, and he’d needed a fix.
So . . . something awful had happened. And afterward, he’d blacked out.
And now he was here, wearing combat pants he’d never seen before, a flak jacket that seemed very heavy, and a set of boots that belonged on a soldier.
The morning was gray and dull, as if the world didn’t want to wake up—or maybe that was just Caldwell. Everyone in this neighborhood, however, seemed to have gainful employment and school-aged children. No one was moving around in any of the windows of any of the homes. Nobody in any of the yards. No dogs barking, no kids on bikes.
Regardless of the mood the dour weather put them in, they were all out in the world, gainfully employed, properly enrolled in school, participating in society.
He had grown up in a zip code like this. And for a while, when he’d been married, he had lived in one. He hadn’t been back for a lifetime, though.
As he started up the driveway, he was limping, and he knew he’d bottomed for someone. There was also a funny buzz in his veins, a sizzle that didn’t exactly burn, but wasn’t pleasant. He was not in withdrawal, however, which considering it had been—
What day was it now anyway?
Focusing on the front door, he noted the scruffy bushes and the lawn that was littered with sticks and a stray branch the size of a dead body. The mailbox nailed into the stucco was stuffed with flyers, its flimsy maw open and drooling envelopes, and there were three phone books on the welcome mat, all ruined by the elements. The neighbors must love the neglect. He imagined all manner of frustrated knocking and no answers. Notes tucked into the storm door. Whispers at community cookouts about the bad seeds who inhabited 452 Brook Court.
He didn’t go in through the front. A voice in his head told him that the side garage entry was unlocked, and sure enough, he had no trouble getting into the one car. Inside, the crinkled carcasses of dead leaves lay across the oil-stained concrete floor, their entrance granted by a window that had been knocked out by yet another fallen tree limb.
The door into the house proper was locked so he kicked it open, the new strength in his body something that was a surprise, but not reassuring. Catching the panel with his hand as it flew back at him, he stayed where he was, listening. When there were no sounds, he cautiously entered the back hall. Up ahead, there was a small kitchen and eating area, and out the far side, a dining room.
No furniture. No stench of trash or clutter on the counters. Nothing in the living room to the left, either.
There was a lot of dust. Some mouse turds in corners like coins collected. Spiders up around the ceiling and dead flies on the windowsills, especially over the dry-as-a-bone sink.
As he walked around, the floors creaked under the boots that were on his feet. He was sure that the air was musty, but he hadn’t been able to smell anything since he’d been tortured at that abandoned outlet mall. Probably a good thing. He had some hazy flashbacks to it when it had been going down, and he remembered retching from the stench. Maybe the shit had killed his nose, too much funk knocking out a fuse somewhere in his sinuses.
