Gumshoe, page 32
Jonnie yelled, spun away, almost fell down. Winter gave him a moment to recover, then came at him again, batting the tip of his rapier around, scoring points. In seconds, Jonnie was bleeding from the right thigh, right forearm, left foot, and had a cut beneath his left eye. His wild hair and the blood gave him a ghoulish appearance. Winter danced back, giving him time to think about what had just happened. The camera circled as Victoria sought a better angle.
Winter began to toy with him in earnest, lunging in, batting the tip of his sword aside, sticking him here and there, inflicting pain but no significant injury. Turning Jonnie into a human pincushion.
“The opportunity to practice on a live subject with full contact like this is exceedingly rare,” Victoria interjected. “She could have killed him in the first second.”
“Yeah, but can she arm wrestle?” I said, figuring I didn’t have much to lose at that point.
Jeri lifted an eyebrow at me.
“Hard to arm wrestle with your dick in your mouth, cowboy,” Winter said coolly, standing no more than three feet from me.
Okay, so I was wrong about having nothing to lose. I shut up.
On screen, Winter continued to toy with Jonnie. This went on for a while. He’d long since given up any attempt to hide his nakedness, and had begun to try to parry her thrusts and even to attack, thrusting, slashing wildly, but nothing worked. His chest heaved and blood coursed down the front of his body from dozens of puncture wounds. His breathing grew labored, coming hollow and heavy out of the speakers. He slipped and fell a few times. The floor was red, slick with blood. As I’d thought, the drain was a real plus in this place.
Finally Winter paused, then darted forward and stuck the point of her blade an inch deep into Jonnie’s left eye. He screamed and dropped his sword. He stumbled against the wall then sank to the floor, writhing, holding his ruined eye, shrieking.
After watching this for a minute or so, Winter stuck the tip of her sword into his rib cage, aimed at his heart. He stared at her through his one good eye. “Just do it,” he whispered. His words were slurred. He’d bitten his tongue. Blood was spilling from his mouth.
Winter stared at him. “Say please, Daddy.” “Do it.”
She looked down at him, pitiless, silent, as if he were a bug, a roach, a gnat.
“Please,” Jonnie whispered. “Please.”
Winter backed away and changed swords, trading the rapier for one of the slender foils that had been on the wall above her bed, a quarter inch thick at the hilt, tapering to a needle point. She rested the tip in Jonnie’s belly button for a moment, then lowered her center of gravity a few inches for leverage and shoved the foil entirely through his body. The tip exited out his back.
It took several minutes for him to die, writhing with the sword in his guts, keening, then at last he went quiet. His lips worked silently as he gazed up into the camera. Finally he bled out internally and it was over.
* * *
Victoria turned off the DVD player.
I felt sick, down deep. Had Jonnie deserved to die that way? I’d never witnessed anything so deliberate, so terrible and one-sided. He hadn’t had a chance. Truth was, I’d never seen anyone die before, other than metaphorically with the IRS. I’ve led a sheltered life. Victoria and Winter had produced what amounted to their own private snuff film. No doubt they watched it every night before going to bed, then dreamed sweet dreams. Ghouls.
“The whole thing took two hours,” Victoria said in a voice so calm it took my breath away. “I edited out the more tedious parts. And I had to change memory cards in the camera and put in a new battery, but, well…you get the idea.
“I think it’s only fitting that at least one of you should die like Jonathan.” She looked at each of us in turn. “And I think that someone should be”—she spun in place, considering the available options—“his lovely daughter,” she said. “The one whom Jonathan called ‘daughter’ all these many years.”
“No!” Kayla said in a thin voice. “Oh, God, no.” She wrenched at the ropes, then sagged on them, crying when her legs gave out.
“The one,” Victoria went on calmly, “who didn’t have the wits to stay in Ithaca, where death would have been so much faster, relatively painless.”
“Please, no,” Kayla wailed. “I can’t.”
“But of course you can,” Victoria said. “You’re a bright girl. You can do anything you set your mind to. Surely your loving father taught you that.”
Kayla continued to cry weakly. It was terrible to hear. I tried to close my ears to it, but couldn’t.
“I’ll do it,” I said. “I’ll fight her.” Tough words, but in fact it was a coward’s way out. I wanted this to be over and that was one way to accomplish it.
Victoria turned. She smiled. “Ah, a volunteer. Such bravery. Such chivalry. The world is saved.”
It was anything but bravery. I damn well didn’t want to die the way Jonnie had, inch by horrible inch, possibly with steel in my eye. But I couldn’t watch Kayla die like that. Or Jeri. I couldn’t.
“Not him,” Jeri said in a hard, tough voice. “Me. I’ll take on that anorexic little bitch. I’ll chop your psycho slut daughter into pieces the size of scallops.”
Slowly, Victoria turned and stared at her. “My God, we are awash in heroic figures.”
Jeri’s eyes blazed. “If you touch him again, just touch him, I swear in Christ’s name that when I die I will curl up in your brain and leave you with gibbering nightmares until the end of time.”
“Goodness!” Victoria exclaimed. “That sounds very much like love.”
Jeri looked straight at me. “It is.”
For an instant I thought my heart had stopped. My vision blurred, fractured into shards of rainbow-colored light.
“Look,” Winter said, staring at me. “He’s crying. How sweet.” Her eyes, however, were volcanic pools of fury.
“You’re jealous,” I managed to say. “No one gives a fuck about you, kid, including your crazy mama. God, how she must hate you, Jonnie’s kid—”
Winter punched me full in the face, bouncing my head off the concrete wall.
My skull throbbed. A wave of nausea returned, but I managed to grin at her anyhow, tasting blood. “Part of you is almost human, isn’t it? A very small part.”
But already the moment was over. Winter smiled at me, rubbing her knuckles. She arched her back. “When I do you, cowboy, I’ll do it topless in that thong like in the video, give you a real nice show.”
I glanced indifferently at her chest. “Yeah? What with?”
A murderous look filled her eyes. After a sharp word from Victoria, she grabbed the television and video player and carried them into the other room, pausing at the door to give me a long, lethal stare, like a monitor lizard eyeing a rat.
Victoria tilted her head at me. “Was anything…unusual found in Jonnie’s skull? Nothing was mentioned in the news.”
I gave her a blank look. “In his skull? Unusual? Like what?” I wasn’t about to give the fiendish bitch the satisfaction.
“So you don’t…well, I’m not surprised. Winter and I played a little joke.”
“Did you?”
“A symbolic gesture, very appropriate. Nothing important.” She turned away.
“Where is Jonnie now?” I asked. “His body, I mean.”
Victoria shrugged. “Out back with Milliken, buried under newly planted roses beneath a layer of lime and powdered sulfur to keep dogs from showing any interest, not that they would —we put the two of them down deep. The soil digs easily, and we were motivated, Winter and I. By the way, the desert here is alkaline. Sulfur’s good for plants.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. “What about my nephew, Gregory?”
“What about him?”
“Did you…how did he…?”
“Die? A lot quicker than Jonathan, but he was much better with the foil. He had intuition and was surprisingly athletic. The best full-contact sparring partner Winter’s ever had, not that he made any contact himself. He was an extremely nosy person, but quite taken with her, the way she was dressed. He came inside for a Coke, and once he regained consciousness from the tap I gave him from behind, she entertained him in this room while I drove his car down to the Peppermill Hotel and walked back. You saw how Winter entertains. In spite of your silly vindictive comments, she has a very nice body.”
“You didn’t have to kill him.”
“We found him on hands and knees at the back of the house, trying to peer through a window into the basement.” She waved a hand, indicating the room beyond the door. “How was I to know what he’d seen? Maybe nothing, but I was most annoyed to find him out there snooping around. One look at Winter, though, and, well, you know the rest. We returned him to his office at three in the morning. His head, that is. The rest is under a honeysuckle beside the garage. It’s doing very nicely, too. Plants like food as much as the rest of us.”
“You’re insane,” I said.
“Oh, I should think that’s perfectly obvious. But at least life is interesting.”
Her eyes took in everyone in the room. “Talk it over. Decide which of you will try their hand against Winter first.”
Then she was gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“ME,” I SAID.
“None of us,” Jeri responded, giving me a savage look. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
Right. Easier said than done.
Jeri lifted herself and let her weight crash down on the eye bolt. And again, and again, with no discernible effect. I hauled down as hard as I could on the ropes that held me. With my ankles tied as they were I was able to generate even more force on the ropes and the eye hook, but nothing gave. Hopeless.
Jeri jangled on her ropes like a ferret on a hook. A sound, almost a growl, came from her throat.
And then I saw something. Or thought I did, an awareness that crept through a gray haze that had kept my thoughts at half speed ever since I’d regained consciousness.
“Jeri!”
She kept at it, violent, possessed, trying to get something to tear loose.
“Jeri, stop!”
She hung there, breathing hard, staring at me. “What?”
“Hold on a minute.”
“Screw that, Mort. No way I’m gonna wait around until they—”
“Hold on a minute.” I was looking at the beam over her head, at the eye bolt to which her ropes were tied.
“Mort—?”
“See that eye bolt above you?”
Jeri craned her neck upward. “What about it?”
I squinted, trying to focus. The bolt went into the bottom of the beam, an inch from its outer edge. The eye of the bolt wasn’t tight against the wood, not even close. It stuck out four inches below the bottom of the beam, as if whoever had put it in hadn’t been able to screw it in any farther, or couldn’t be bothered. I couldn’t tell how deeply it was embedded, but it obviously wasn’t in all the way. Two inches of threads were still visible. It was a weakness. I explained it to Jeri. Whether or not she could exploit it, I didn’t know.
She stared up at the bolt for a moment, considering, then she turned and faced the wall. A glimmer of life returned to Kayla’s eyes. She raised her head and watched.
Hanging from the ropes, Jeri pulled her legs off the floor, planted her feet against the wall and walked them upward, turning herself completely upside down. She looked like a piston again, exhibiting that colossal strength I’d seen in her gym. But what she’d done so far was the least of what she would have to do.
Hanging upside down, she set her feet against the wall at either side of the eye hook, twenty inches apart, toes touching the underside of the beam. Then she did what amounted to a vertical sit-up while hauling on the ropes, reeling them in until she was in a horizontal crouch against the wall with her feet below the bottom of the beam. Her face was almost touching the ceiling.
She grunted softly, playing the ropes out as she slowly extended her body outward from the wall, standing up, but sideways. A sheen of sweat appeared on her body as the forces built up in her, gravity pulling her down, ropes pulling horizontally. Nothing was keeping her up there but the power in her arms and legs, the incredible strength of her torso.
God, she was beautiful!—doing something I couldn’t have done on the best day of my life. Tendons stood out in her neck. She was in a partial squat, legs not quite straight, suspended by forces I couldn’t begin to calculate. Her thighs looked as if they’d been chiseled out of granite. Muscles in her shoulders bulged with effort, arms corded. Her breasts were compact cambered pads, inches from the ceiling. I felt a sense of wonder, knowing that I had never seen a woman like her before, never would again.
Kayla gaped at her, mouth open in amazement.
Jeri was stretched out almost full length beneath the ceiling. I don’t think she took a breath. I doubt that she could have. Her body was rigid. If I felt any occult force radiating off her—and I thought I did, waves of it—it was pure, blinding love.
Then she began to pull in earnest, deadlifting the eye bolt from the side, using the part of the eye bolt below the beam as a short lever, motionless, a statue of stressed stone. She pulled for our lives. She pulled for love. Christ, she could have lifted the front end of a ’57 Buick.
The side of the beam exploded with a gunshot sound of rending wood. Jeri flew across the room in an arc, falling nearly ten feet to the concrete floor, landing on her back and shoulders with her chin tucked into her chest. I heard her breath go. Her head bounced off the door in the opposite wall.
She lay utterly still. Seconds passed. I thought she was out cold. She didn’t appear to be breathing. Kayla gave me a terrified look, then Jeri’s eyes fluttered open and she pulled her knees up to her chest, rolled onto her side, mouth open, trying to suck air into her lungs.
I didn’t say anything. Nothing would have helped. I listened for footsteps, sounds of Victoria or Winter, willing Jeri to get up, get moving. I didn’t hear anything yet, but I didn’t see how they could have missed that sharp crack of tearing wood. They might have felt it, a shock wave jarring the entire house. A fifteen-inch section of the beam had torn out, leaving a splintery gash of exposed wood.
Jeri got her knees under her, then staggered to her feet. The ropes around her wrists were still tied to the eye bolt, and her wrists were still bound by that figure eight of rope between them. She gathered it all up and stood unsteadily, looking around.
I felt a vibration in the wall behind me, sounds, distant footsteps. “They’re coming,” I said.
Jeri darted past me to the workbench, still trying to breathe. She tucked the unwieldy mass of ropes under her left arm. She got the linoleum knife that Victoria had left on the workbench, then turned and took a few steps toward the door.
The footsteps grew louder.
Suddenly the door burst open. Victoria ran inside, slowing to look around. Jeri took a half step toward her, a little half hop, then kicked her under the chin. Not a sparring kick, but the real thing, knee almost locked, leg extended, everything she had. Her heel connected with the underside of Victoria’s chin, bone on bone.
Victoria’s head snapped back, way back, impossibly, unnaturally far. There was an ugly sound of bone breaking, a hideous clack of teeth. Blood sprayed from Victoria’s mouth. I saw bits of teeth fly through the air, and part of her tongue. Jeri kicked her again in the chest with her other foot before Victoria could fall, sending her crashing back through the door, then Jeri slammed the door shut with a shoulder and held it.
Outside, Winter’s voice rose in a hellish scream.
“Get a two-by-four!” I yelled. “Block the door!”
Jeri followed my gaze. She didn’t hesitate. She dropped the knife and grabbed a length of two-by-four, wedged it between the door and a leg of the workbench.
Winter rattled the doorknob, then slammed her weight against the door like a hellcat, screaming, “You killed her! She’s dead! You killed her!”
Easily the best news I’d heard all year.
Jeri got the linoleum knife again and ran to me, pure focused energy, no wasted motion. She couldn’t easily cut the ropes around her own wrists, so she cut mine. The knife was razor sharp. In seconds, my right hand was free. Then my left.
My feet were still tied to the wall. I almost fell flat on my face. Jeri caught me and held me up in a crouch while I used the knife to hack frantically at the cords around my ankles, slashing myself as did, drawing blood. I saw it, but didn’t feel a thing.
Winter pounded on the door. Not like before. She was using a tool of some kind, yelling the whole time, sobbing and threatening us with death, with the slow removal of body parts. Single-minded damn kid. Tiresome, but she was an orphan now, so I tried to make allowances.
I got my legs free. I staggered into the middle of the room, then got the blade of the knife under the nylon behind Jeri’s wrists and cut it away. When she was free, she severed the ropes holding Kayla.
The blade of an axe sliced through the door, sending slivers of wood flying into the room.
I looked around for a weapon. My legs didn’t want to obey me. I felt stiff, clumsy, slow. I stumbled over to the workbench hoping to find something that might be useful against a foil, like a crossbow or a hand grenade. No dice. I got the crowbar off the pegboard. Two feet long. With luck I could crush her skull with it, but it was an ungainly weapon and she had the axe.
And, of course, her foil.
I doubted I could out-duel her with the crowbar. If nothing else, I could throw it at her. All three of us could throw things, hammers, screwdrivers. We might be able to hold her off. We might even get lucky and hurt her. Maybe.
Winter missed a beat or two, then the light above us went out. She’d stopped long enough to throw a switch out there. Then she was back at it. Splinters flew. A chunk of the door tore out, then another. She was doing a hell of a job with the axe, working steadily, breathing like a lumberjack, attacking the door with cold fury. I could hear her panting outside, grunting with effort. She’d given up threatening us, at least for the moment.
