Go Kill Crazy! (2 page)

Dez snapped a hand across his face, rocking his head savagely to the side. He screamed behind the gag again.

“
Look at me, bitch!
”

Quincy wanted to defy her. Wanted to close his eyes and never see any of them again. He wished they
would
cut his eye out. Hell,
both
of them. But something primal within him wouldn’t allow him even this gesture.

So he looked at Dez.

But he couldn’t look her in the eye. The intimidation factor was just too high. It was like looking into the devil’s eyes. So he focused instead on one of her countless tattoos, an image of a Halloween black cat crawling up the side of her neck.

“You’re going to obey Echo this time. Nod if you understand.”

Quincy nodded.

There was nothing else he could do.

Echo went back to work on his ear. This time he gritted his teeth and closed his eyes as he expended every last bit of remaining will he had in an effort to remain perfectly still. His eyes came open again the moment he felt the last strand of tissue connecting his ear to his head tear loose.

Echo displayed the severed ear for him, pinched between a thumb and forefinger. Then she smiled and held it close to her mouth. “Hey, pig, tell me if you can hear this. My name really is Echo-Echo-Echo.”

The girls were delirious with laughter after that. The bloodthirsty lovelies looked like a vision torn from the darkest depths of nightmare country. There was a demented, perverse, funhouse aspect to what he was seeing. It almost seemed like a hallucination. Like something that couldn’t be real.

That impression changed again when Echo tossed his ear over her shoulder and came at him again with the straight razor. The blade sliced into the skin just below his hairline. Blood spilled down his forehead and over his squeezed-shut eyelids. Quincy’s whole body shook again as he felt the blade cut in a straight line toward his temple.

She’s scalping me
, he thought.
Oh, dear God, she’s
scalping
me!

Echo laughed as Quincy sobbed and swallowed blood.

“Come on, pig, let’s get a look at your brains.”

Quincy opened his eyes and squealed as he felt her start to tug the loose flesh away from his head. Through a vision stained crimson by the spilling blood, he saw Dez uncap one of the big vodka bottles. She took a single deep swig from it. When Echo moved behind him to slide the blade into the flesh at the back of his neck, Dez ripped the triple thickness of duct tape from his face, extracted the blood-soaked sock and jammed the open neck of the vodka bottle into his mouth. He spluttered, choking on it, spitting what he could of it out even as the alcohol burned the gash in his cheek. But it was useless. He couldn’t stop her from jamming the long neck of the bottle all the way to the back of his throat.

“
Drink, bitch!
” she screamed at him. “
Drink it all! Fucking drown, pig!
”

It was just the first bottle. Not all of it got into his lungs, but plenty did. Dez had the second bottle open by the time Echo finished peeling his scalp from his head. He tried to resist, but they forced his mouth open.

And he drank and drank.

And drank some more.

Bottle after bottle.

Until he was dead.

Chapter Two

But before all that happened…

The front door was unlocked when Lana arrived home from a rare afternoon shift at the Booty Boutique, the Tampa strip club where she worked as an “exotic dancer”. She nudged the door open and stepped into a dark living room. She frowned as she groped for the light switch. Blaine’s car was parked out front, same as always on a Monday afternoon. He worked nights at a warehouse, and Sundays and Mondays were his usual days off. It wasn’t like him to sleep the day away on those days. He was usually up practicing his music and trying to write songs. So maybe he wasn’t feeling well. He’d been complaining of headaches lately.

Lana found the silence and darkness mildly curious, but these things did not overly concern her. She was tired from dancing and wanted to nap for a couple hours before heading back out to the club later that night.

Her normal shift was ten p.m. through the wee morning hours. Which was the best shift because all the guys were shitfaced and loose with their money. But today she had been covering for a friend who had a sick baby. Lana was happy to do the favor. Extra hours meant significant extra cash, even during daylight shifts. And you could never tell when some showoff businessman might roll in with some associates he wanted to impress. Today she had hit the jackpot. A big, florid-faced man in an expensive suit and an oversized cowboy hat entered the club shortly after lunchtime. In blatant defiance of local anti-smoking ordinances, he had a big, smelly cigar wedged into a corner of his mouth. Accompanying him was an entourage of several other cigar-smoking douchebags.
 

It took every ounce of will Lana had not to laugh in the Boss Hog-looking motherfucker’s face when he introduced himself as “Big” Ted Wilkinson and immediately asked for a lap dance. But that was the job. You danced for any and all of them. Didn’t matter how they looked. Fat or skinny, young or old, ugly or handsome, if they had the cash, you had to make with the booty shakin’.

And anyway, this guy oozed money. He took an immediate shine to her, throwing so much cash at her she offered to escort him to a VIP room for a private show. He declined and instead slipped a scrap of paper into her garter. His number was on it. She could call him any time she wanted for a “proper date”. Again, she had to call on a hell of a lot of willpower not to laugh in his face. Not because she considered the prospect of seeing the man outside the context of the club laughable. He was rich as fuck. Of course she would consider it. What was funny was the idea of a “proper date” with the likes of him. Flirting with a tattooed and multiply pierced stripper in a place like the Booty Boutique was one thing. In here guys like Big Ted were hidden away from the judgmental eyes of their more straight-laced colleagues. In public was another deal altogether. Take away all the booze and the showoff aspect and…well, clearly it wasn’t going to happen. But no-tell motel sex in exchange for a large amount of cash?

Maybe.

It was something she did now and then with high rollers when the money was right. She didn’t like it much, but she endured it as a means to an end. Between these occasional private arrangements and the money she made dancing, she did more than all right for herself. She was still very young and hot, but she wasn’t dumb. Her looks wouldn’t last forever. So she meant to stockpile as much money as she could while she could. And in the meantime, Blaine could keep working at getting somewhere with his music. She had faith in him. Not only was he very good looking, but he was also super talented. He was an amazing singer and could play practically any instrument. He was destined for stardom and she planned to be right there alongside him for the whole ride. And by then all the sacrifices she’d ever made would have been worth it.

She flipped the light switch up and eased the door shut, taking care to make as little noise as possible. If Blaine wasn’t feeling well, she didn’t want to disturb him. With that in mind, she stepped out of her heels before proceeding to the kitchen, where she shrugged her purse off her shoulder and dropped it on the counter. Then she padded barefoot across the cool kitchen tiles to the refrigerator. She pulled the door open and peeked inside at the contents, thinking she might prepare a light meal prior to catching a few winks of her own. She was reaching into the fridge for a jar of strawberry jam when she heard it.

The moan.

What the fuck?

For a long moment, she thought she’d imagined it. Other than the hum of the refrigerator and the sound of cool air issuing from a nearby floor vent, the apartment was quiet. Then she heard it again and knew she had imagined nothing. She gently closed the refrigerator and, treading as lightly as possible, walked out of the kitchen and entered the short hallway that led to the bedroom.

She stopped halfway down the hallway, held her breath and stared at the sliver of light visible through the closed bedroom door. Her heart was galloping. An incipient rage quickly gained momentum, making her chest feel tight. She tried telling herself not to panic, not to rush to judgment. Maybe Blaine was very
sick
and the moans she was hearing were merely a reflection of that.

Then the sound came yet again, escalating to a higher pitch this time, almost like a scream. By now she knew these were not sounds of sickness or misery.

They were sounds of pleasure.

Of
ecstasy
.

An unfamiliar sense of deadly calm descended over Lana as she turned away from the door and returned to the kitchen. She felt detached. Like a stranger inhabiting her body. She knew what she meant to do and felt nothing. No sense of horror. No internal debate of right and wrong.

Back in the kitchen, she opened her purse and got out her gun. The very one Blaine himself had given her as a birthday present for protection against the predators he always imagined were lying in wait for her outside the club at the end of a late shift. He loved her and didn’t want anything happening to her.

Only that love had been nothing but a filthy lie.

How else to explain what was happening now?

Back down the hallway again, pausing a last moment outside the door. Then she let out a breath and gripped the doorknob in her free hand. The frequency and volume of the orgasmic sounds increased dramatically as she twisted the knob and eased the door open. She poked her head in and saw Blaine rutting away atop a curvy blonde woman with long, toned legs and large breasts.

Lana stifled a gasp.

The blonde was Alice. Her friend. And co-worker. The one with the supposedly sick baby she’d had to unexpectedly rush to the emergency room. Lana felt slightly dizzy as she rapidly processed it all. The whole thing had been a plot engineered by these two betraying pieces of shit so they could get together and fuck. The one thing they hadn’t counted on was her early departure from the Booty Boutique thanks to a lull in business following the exit of Big Ted and his gang.

Lana’s hands were shaking as she moved farther into the room. The shaking was not a product of nervousness. It was the rage continuing to gain momentum. She knew exactly what she meant to do. What she
would
do. She wasn’t going to just wave the gun around and threaten them. And she had no interest in interrogating them. What did it matter how long this had been going on anyway? Whether it had happened once or a hundred times was irrelevant.

It had happened.

They had betrayed her.

And now they would pay for their indiscretions. She reached the edge of the bed and watched them a few moments longer. They were so into the act that they were oblivious to her presence. Blaine writhed and thrust against Alice with uncontrolled abandon, rocking the bed frame and causing the headboard to slam against the wall. Alice’s lovely legs were locked tight around him and her long, bright red nails were digging grooves in the flesh of his muscular back.

Lana raised the gun and aimed it at the center of Blaine’s back.

She waited.

Alice’s eyes came open and her head turned at last in Lana’s direction. Then she gasped and those blue eyes got very, very big. Blaine grunted loudly, obviously mistaking this for yet another expression of passion.

Lana locked eyes with Alice.

Smiled.

And squeezed the trigger.

The bullet punched a nickel-sized hole through the small of Blaine’s back. He screamed. They both screamed. Blaine arched his back and screamed some more as he tried to disengage himself from Alice. The next bullet drilled through the back of his head and exited through his forehead. A spray of blood and brains spattered Alice and the headboard. Lana’s man was dead. The man she’d loved more than anything. Dead. And she felt nothing at all that resembled grief or regret. All she did feel was that still-simmering rage. She had never even looked the cheating motherfucker in the face. Which was just as well. He didn’t have much of a face left now. The exit wound had seen to that.

Lana laughed.

Even in the midst of murderous violence, the thought struck her as funny. She discovered some interesting things about herself in those bloody moments. Things like the possibility that maybe she wasn’t really all that nice a person at heart. Maybe, in fact, she was kind of a bad person. Because who else but a bad person would laugh now?

Alice shoved Blaine’s corpse away from her and rolled out from under him. She sat up and scooted to the edge of the bed. Lana saw that the first bullet had passed all the way through Blaine and had entered Alice’s body. A bloody hole just below her navel was leaking blood.

Lana laughed again.

Double penetration.

Alice stared up at her with pleading eyes. She put her hands to her stomach and whimpered. “Please…” She tried to stand, but her legs were wobbly and she plopped back down on the edge of the bed. “Please…”

Lana sneered. “Stop begging. It’s not gonna help.”

She squeezed the trigger again and the next bullet went between Alice’s breasts. The one after that made a ruin of her face and ended her life. Only then did Lana lower the gun. The rage gripping her began to fade as she watched her dead friend’s body slide off the bed and flop awkwardly to the floor.