Hangman (14 page)

When Bart had shone the flashlight into the aft cabin, the Hangman was curled up knees to chin in the quarter-berth cubbyhole beside and behind the doors. Had Bart entered to peer around into the nook, he would have faced the business end of a 9mm Glock.

Now, as Bart engaged the autopilot to slip below, the killer listened intently through the doors.

Once the skipper was off the deck and the cockpit was clear, the Hangman crept out of the aft cabin into the chill night. A gloved hand closed on the winch handle stored in the binnacle pocket as the
Scream-
masked killer took up an ambush position beside the main cabin companionway.

*    *    *

Having hit a button to engage the autopilot to the cockpit steering wheel, Barnacle Bart slipped below for a tot or two of rum. From its hiding place in the bilge of the bow, he fetched a bottle of Mount Gay sugar-cane brandy. The finest rum there is comes from Barbados, and having bullied that Jew into buying a machine he didn’t need, Bart was in a party mood.

Straight from the bottle, three slugs of Mount Gay warmed his gullet.

“Yo-ho-ho,” Bart sang to what, unknown to him, was his wraith in the cabin mirror.

The festive mood was broken by two interruptions in a row. The first was the jangling of
The Yardarm’
s phone. Bart let the machine answer the call with the greeting he’d recorded before his selling trip.

“You’ve reached Bart Busby. I’m on the road until the night of November 9. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you.”

“Mr. Busby, this is Nate Frank. I’m canceling that copier you strong-armed me into.”

The line went dead.

Fucking kike, thought Bart. I’ll tear the bra from your wife’s tits in front of you.

There was a time, back in the good old days, when he could do that without worry. Bully a wuss and Bart knew the wuss would cringe away. But not anymore. The world was topsy-turvy. Bully a wuss at school or work today, the chances were, judging from stories in the news, the guy would pull a machine gun and mow you down along with a hundred other people.

As with AIDS, you had to adapt.

So that’s why Bart pushed the button to replay the message. This time, he’d concentrate on the Jew’s tone, to assess whether he was a wuss on the edge or merely a wuss with false courage once Bart was gone. In which case, he would crumble quickly when the bully returned next trip.

The machine played ten messages before the Jew’s, one of which was a beep that marked the Hangman’s call last week from a public phone. No message, just a beep, because the call was made to ascertain when Bart would return to his boat.

Bang!

What was that?

Bart turned from the machine.

Bang!

Outside.

Something loose in the wind?

Bart hurried to the companionway to scramble back out to the cockpit. As he scaled the stairs through the open hatch above, the bully saw a zillion stars up in heaven. Where he was going, there would be no stars at all.

Ironically, Bart’s first thought was that the boom had somehow slipped off the gallows. A boom was the spar extending back from the mast at the foot of a sail, and a gallows was the notched support on the roof of the aft cabin that kept the boom from swinging when the sail was lowered.

That gallows, however, wasn’t the gallows that he should be worried about.

For what had caused the bangs that drew Bart out was the companionway doors of the aft cabin slamming shut. Strange, because Bart was certain that he had locked them before slipping below deck for a tot. With that mystery in mind, he poked his head up through the hatch into the starry night, his torso emerging from the main cabin like a snail forsaking its shell, until the Hangman smashed the winch handle down on his skull.

Bart saw stars of another kind as the bully crumpled into the cockpit well.

*    *    *

With a knee on deck by the gunwale and leaning over the cabin roof just forward of the hatch, the killer waited in ambush for Bart to come up from below.
Whap!
The winch handle clubbed down on the bastard’s head to lay him out cold, giving the Hangman lots of time to truss him up.

There were different ways this could be done. Free the boom from the gallows and it could be used to lynch Bart by noosing him with a line that ran up to the head of the mast and came back down. Fasten the loose end of the line to the stern end of the boom and Bart would be yanked up into the air if the boom was shoved to either side, out over the lake. The pull of that “jerk-’em-up” gallows, however, would not be that high, so the hanged man’s legs would probably dangle in the water, making it difficult to proceed with what the Hangman had planned for Bart.

An alternative would be to fasten the loose end of the line to an anchor with lots of chain. Throw enough metal overboard to counter Bart’s weight and the anchor sinking down into the depths of the lake would yank him up the mast. That method, however, created a problem of logistics. How do you hide that much equipment on board without piquing suspicion?

Better to use the winch.

And hoist Bart like a sail.

*    *    *

The word “wuss” was a major term in Bart’s lexicon. “Wuss” was an amalgam of “wimp” and “pussy,” and for a man of Bart’s intellect, “wuss” fit poets to a T. The only poem Bart had liked before he dropped out of school was Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

Water, water, everywhere,

And all the boards did shrink;

Water, water, everywhere,

Nor any drop to drink.

 

In effect, the Mariner was a bully like Bart. The cocky seaman proved that to his shipmates by shooting their good omen, an albatross, with his crossbow. That brought a curse upon the ship, which killed all aboard except the Mariner. The seaman’s horror was seeing the crew come back to life.

They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose,

Nor spake, nor moved their eyes;

It had been strange, even in a dream,

To have seen those dead men rise.

The helmsman steered, the ship moved on;

Yet never a breeze up-blew;

The mariners all ’gan work the ropes,

Where they were wont to do;

They raised their limbs like lifeless tools—

We were a ghastly crew.

 

Bart had missed the point of that poem back when he was in school. What pleased him was that it presented a welcome break from all that wuss poetry about clouds, trees, and nature shit. But now, as he came back to consciousness from the clout on his head to find what seemed to be an animated corpse working the rigging of his ship, Bart recalled the Ancient Mariner and what had happened to him. Suddenly, fathoming the theme, this bully was deathly afraid.

*    *    *

With Bart laid out cold in the cockpit, the killer had crossed to the binnacle to put the transmission in neutral by easing back on the black handle. Flicking a switch in the main cabin had doused the running lights. Once
The Yardarm
no longer made way, the sloop creaked and groaned as it floundered on the choppy lake. Lit by little more than a canopy of stars, the drama unfolding beneath the mast was nothing but a shadow play against the dark of night.

Injure your neck and a physiotherapist may “hang” you in traction. You will be seated in a chair with a halter supporting your head, one strap under your chin and another cradling the back of your skull. The halter will be connected to a hanging line, and your neck will be put in traction by adding weight of ten to fifteen pounds to the other end. The halter suspends without strangling.

The Hangman cinched Bart’s unconscious head into such a halter. The winch for the main halyard used to hoist the sail up the mast was on top of the main cabin, just forward of the cockpit. The halyard line ran from the winch to a pulley at the foot of the mast, then up the mast to another pulley at the masthead, then down the mast to where it was snap-shackled near the foot. The Hangman loosened the halyard line looped around the winch and scrambled forward to unclasp the other end from the mast, pulling it back to the cockpit to snap the shackle to the halter webbing Bart’s head. A few turns of the line around the winch to tighten the free end and the killer was ready to hang Bart by inserting the bloody handle into the top notch of the winch to crank, crank, crank.

As the winched halyard shortened, the cold-cocked bully was slowly hauled by the neck out of the cockpit well and forward over the roof of the main cabin until his head hit the foot of the mast. Crank, crank, crank and he began to rise as the halyard hoisted him like a sail toward the masthead pulley. When Bart’s feet were in the air a foot above the forward cabin, the Hangman secured the winched end of the halyard by dropping it into a pinch cleat. Nylon ties lashed the hanged man’s wrists and ankles to deck stanchions on both sides of the boat, so Bart returned to consciousness to find that he was dangling by the neck with his arms and legs spread-eagled as upside-down Vs.

The animated corpse from the “Ancient Mariner” was a horrible sight. The face had a wonky eye and looked like a screaming skull, and by the faint light of the heavenly stars was as eerie as hell. Judging from the sheen, which could have been an astral aura, the rest of the body was sheathed in a coverall of black plastic. Were Bart not so groggy from the ambush clout to his brain, he might have deduced that was so the apparition would leave no forensic clues behind for the cops to trace. Touch a match to the second skin and—
poof!
—it would be gone.

Having hanged Bart from
The Yardarm
, the Hangman moved aft to lower the Zodiac with davits down onto the lake. The inflated rubber dinghy was powered by a Honda 9.9-horsepower outboard engine. The Zodiac, tied alongside the boat for now, would provide a getaway after this was over. The Hangman would put the sloop into gear by shoving the transmission handle to FORWARD, then would lock the autopilot on a collision course with the west shore. Advance the red handle for a touch of throttle, and long after the Hangman had fled in the Zodiac,
The Yardarm
would run aground in Seattle.

But that would be later.

After this revenge.

Bart pissed himself when he saw the living corpse pull a knife from a carryall on the roof of the cabin. He tried to plead with the horror as the starlit blade slashed his piss-soaked pants away from the lower half of his body, but the halter strap under his chin had shut his yap. The demon cast the tattered garment into the lake. For a moment Bart feared the monster would go for the family jewels, but then he heard a sound below like the unzipping of a zipper. He strained his terrified eyes down to their lower lids in time to witness his stomach and intestines spill out through a horizontal cut across his belly just above the level of his navel.

The pain hit like a torpedo.

Bart screamed deep in his throat.

“Bully,” snarled the Hangman through the muffle of the
Scream
mask. “That’s for what you did to an innocent man.”

Below his heaving ribcage, Bart’s guts had tumbled out from their own weight, and they hung swaying between his legs with the rocking of the waves. The odor off them was as foul as Bart’s character, for the knife that had slit through skin, fat and the muscle of his abdominal wall had nicked the bowel as well. The yellowish fat on the coils glistened sickly. Because the small intestine doubled back on itself, the grisly mess dangled to his knees but didn’t hit the deck.

Again the Hangman reached into the carryall.

Had Bart had functioning bowels, he would have shit himself.

The hand-held, cordless reciprocating saw weighed three pounds. Powered by a nine-volt in-handle battery that jiggled the blade at 2,700 strokes per minute, the tool looked like an electric knife, except it was able to cut through wood and mild steel. Cutting the flesh and bone of Bart’s limbs would be like sawing butter.

The Hangman went to work on the left leg first. A cut from the outside in severed the femoral artery and then the femur bone, spurting blood like a geyser from the combination of heartbeat and gravity. Muted by the halter, Bart—conscious all the while—screamed and screamed and screamed.

Blood, blood, everywhere,

And the size of Bart did shrink;

Blood, blood, everywhere,

For the Hangman’s eyes to drink.

 

In days of yore, in Britain, from whence Americans imported hanging, those who really pissed off the Crown were hanged, drawn, and quartered.

Sharks

Seattle

Friday, November 10 (Six days ago)

Sharks can smell blood in the water, so the sharks were out this morning.

In the early hours of the new day,
The Yardarm
ran aground on Sand Point. With Pontiac Bay to its north and Wolf Bay to its south, Sand Point juts like a nose into Lake Washington. The county had created an airstrip here in 1920, and four years later, that was taken over by the U.S. Navy. When the air station was shut down in 1970, the city of Seattle claimed Sand Point for a park. Had the government not locked up the land during Seattle’s early years, it would probably be a residential enclave today. Instead, Magnuson Park boasts one and a half miles of largely undeveloped shoreline on the west side of Lake Washington. Here, tree-framed vistas of misty blue water front panoramas of the Cascade Mountains to the east and the glaciated cone of Mount Rainier to the south. Grass tapers down to a narrow gravel strip of a beach, and there, at a relatively isolated spot where plants and trees were left alone to attempt a return to primeval forest,
The Yardarm
and its bloody cargo, still dangling from the mast, ran aground in the dark before dawn.

The man who found the sloop was in a broken-hearted funk. Like Bart, he had come home from a business trip last night, a day earlier than planned, to surprise his new wife, which he did when he caught her in the throes of sexual ecstasy in their still-unpaid-for marital bed with his best man.

To drown his sorrows, the poor guy had moped to an all-night liquor store and, fortified with a bottle of Wild Turkey, driven east on NE 65th Street, across the Burke-Gilman Trail, which once was the old Burlington Northern railroad grade, and Sand Point Way into Magnuson Park. There, he had abandoned his car to walk the beach on foot, drinking straight from the bottle as Bart had done, until, pissed to the gills, he had ended up here, where, against the first flush of dawn across the lake, he witnessed a sight of such carnage that he sobered up fast.

Luckily, with him was his cellphone.

Did he call the cops?

Not on your life.

The call he made was to Sue Frye’s TV station, as it offered a cash reward to any Seattleite who phoned in an exclusive news tip.

The bigger the story, the bigger the reward.

So that’s why Sue Frye and her camera crew arrived
before
the cops at the scene of the Hangman’s third murder, and began feeding live video of what they found back to their TV station for immediate broadcast to the waking city.

Vancouver

“Zinc?”

“Mmm.”

“Are you awake?”

“I am now, Alex.”

“Do you still love me like you did when we fell in love?”

Opening his eyes, he rubbed away the sleep. “What brought this on?”

“Tonight’s your date with Maddy.”

“No,” he said. “Tonight’s my date with you.”

“Is she coming?”

“I have no idea. She didn’t say she was. All she said was maybe. Since I suggested we use the cruise to meet and discuss files, I haven’t heard anything different from her.”

“Are you disappointed?”

“Of course not, Alex. I’m going on the cruise to have fun with you, not to work on a case. I get enough work at work, thank you very much.”

“That’s what nags at me.”

“Huh?”

“Why did you stay overnight in Seattle with Maddy when you knew I was waiting at home in bed for you?”

“The case caught my interest.”

“It wasn’t your case.”

“It is now.”

“But it wasn’t then. And you know what the doctor said about losing sleep. You don’t want another epileptic fit.”

“Alex, I got sleep.”

“Yes. At Maddy’s.”

“You’re not being fair. You’ve got me coming and going. Where did this sudden streak of insecurity come from? I love you and no one else. End of story. So rest at ease, and we’ll live happily ever after.”

“What does Maddy look like?”

“A shriveled-up prune,” said Zinc.

Where would Zinc Chandler be today if not for Alex Hunt?

In the aftermath of the Cutthroat shootout, he had returned from Hong Kong with a bullet wound to his head that might have ended his career as a Mountie. For the rest of his life, Zinc would pop several caps of Dilantin a day to ward off epileptic seizures. Four years had come and gone while Zinc worked the family farm in Saskatchewan, waiting for headquarters to approve his return to duty. There he lived the daily regimen of a Spartan and a Stoic, to mend himself body and mind.

Dispatching Zinc to Deadman’s Island had seemed a good idea. Special X was embroiled in a high-profile media circus—an American feminist had been butchered by a psycho who thought he was Jack the Ripper reincarnated—so Chief Superintendent Robert DeClercq could not spare an active investigator to keep his promise to provide a real cop for the detection game of a mystery weekend that had been auctioned off to aid charity. The secret buyer was specific about how he/she desired the interactive game to be played. Twelve crime writers from Canada and the States would be flown to an isolated island off the Pacific Coast to match wits with the cop for a prize of cold cash. The set-up was to echo Agatha Christie’s
And Then There Were None.
Because Zinc was still waiting for his call to duty, DeClercq’s offering him as the real investigator seemed the obvious answer to his predicament. So that’s how the Mountie had found himself surrounded by scribblers in a float plane docked in Vancouver harbor, waiting for the last straggler to arrive before flying off to Deadman’s Island for a deadly weekend.

Etched in his mind forever was the first time Zinc saw her.

Barely discernible through the rain was the city’s downtown core. Huddled like a waif at its feet was the shack of Thunderbird Charters. From the shack to the float plane out on the water stretched a gangway and a hundred-foot dock. The woman sea-legging down the gangplanks struggled against the storm, suitcase lugged in one hand, umbrella opposite fighting the wind to block the slanted rain. She wore a black tight-waisted jacket over black jeans tucked into black cowboy boots, and a black trenchcoat that flapped around her like Zorro’s cape. Though her blonde hair was pulled back in a ponytail and clipped with silver heart-shaped barrettes, her features were masked by wayward strands dancing about her face. As she neared the plane, she looked up, and Zinc’s heart was gone.

Eyes so blue you could dive in to swim in tropical lagoons. A narrow, delicate chin around a most kissable mouth. The grace of an angel in her every move, and the sensuality of a fallen woman in her sleek form. Boarding the plane was the fantasy of Zinc’s dreams, so how he wished—God, how he wished—that he was the man he had been.

“Sorry I’m late, but cross-border shoppers clogged Peace Arch. I’m Alex Hunt,” she told the others as the engines coughed to life. Zinc touched his forehead subconsciously to hide the indent the surgeons had left in removing the slug from his brain.

They say the strongest relationships are forged on the anvil of war. Courage under fire fuses the deepest bond, and everything in life after that is reduced to a footnote in your biography.

What Zinc and Alex went through that weekend was as hellish as any war. Having lured the crime writers to Deadman’s Island on a false pretext while Special X hunted for him back on the mainland, the Ripper killed them off one by one in fiendish ways. Necessity forced Zinc and Alex to make a last stand, confining them to a single room through the long night before the grisly climax.

The woman who spent that vigil with Zinc had transformed herself into an Amazon warrior. Grace replaced by grim determination, Alex crouched beside the door with a knife in each fist. Hair matted and sweaty clothes clinging to her body, she glared with such ferocity that he knew she would have no compunction about stabbing their stalker in the back.

Zinc was out of Dilantin, and it was only a question of hours until the scar in his brain overwhelmed him. Stress and lack of sleep shortened his endurance, so it was a matter of life or death that the Mountie get rest.

He and Alex lay on separate beds in the dark. The cyclonic storm outside was tearing at the roof. Locking themselves in here for the night was the only refuge they could muster. The springs of the bed next to his creaked, then Zinc sensed Alex moving silently across the gap between them, until she hovered over him like a guardian. Her scent was so intoxicating that shivers ran up his spine. Her breath was as soft as a feather’s breeze.

She kissed his forehead.

She kissed his wound.

She kissed his lips and said, “Sleep.”

Sleep he did.

A fitful sleep.

But sleep nonetheless.

The Ripper had stabbed Zinc in the back during the final conflict, and it was a toss-up whether the Mountie would live or die. If the man who flew to the island was but a ghost of his former self, the man carried off on a stretcher was a fading mirage.

They say those who endure a near-death experience see a blinding white light. Zinc witnessed such an aura during his struggle with death, and all that kept him from advancing into the brilliant glare was Alex Hunt calling him back from somewhere behind. When Zinc awoke in the ICU of a West Coast hospital, he saw that “somewhere behind” was the chair beside his near-death bed. Whether he saw that light or not didn’t matter. Perhaps he imagined it, but what he did not imagine was Alex softly calling to him not to slip away through all those in-the-balance days while he was unconscious.

Zinc had come around to find his guardian angel in tears.

“I love you,” Alex said.

“And I love you,” said he.

On Zinc’s release from hospital, she had taken him home with her to Oregon. There, on the windy, crashing shore of Cannon Beach, where she had previously cared for her cancer-ridden dad, Alex had nursed her unconsummated lover back to health. Each day, with sea-spray fountaining around Haystack Rock, they combed the untamed beach together from end to end. When Zinc was strong enough to add sex to his rehabilitation, Alex seduced him like he had always dreamed of being seduced, the instinctive lover who tuned up his body like a Rolls-Royce mechanic.

It was
almost
worth getting wounded!

The bullet to his brain had scrambled Zinc’s mind, however. If you were to ask him how much rain fell in November, and the response he intended was “The rain in November would have drowned Noah,” he might, if he didn’t concentrate, reply, “The rain in Spain falls mainly … No, that’s wrong.”

Crosswords are good. Chess is better. But nothing hones the deductive mind like a Golden Age puzzle. The 1920s and 1930s were the Golden Age of the classic detective story. The three great practitioners of the art of deception were Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen and John Dickson Carr. Of these, perhaps the most devious mind was Carr’s. His forte was the locked-room puzzle, the impossible crime.

To sharpen Zinc’s mind in Cannon Beach, Alex went back to Carr. She would extract the locked-room puzzles from his classic books—
The Three Coffins, The Crooked Hinge, The Plague Court Murders
—and set them up at home as challenges for Zinc to unravel. To add spice to the game, she made herself the prize, shedding a garment for each clue guessed and donning one for each one flubbed. Come night, this version of strip poker picked up where it had left off, and if he cracked the mystery, she was his.

Zinc soon got adept at solving such puzzles.

Eventually, thanks to Alex, Zinc was patched up. When the call to return to Special X finally came, it meant Alex had to abandon Oregon for British Columbia if she was to live with him. Knowing how important it was to Zinc as a man to return to the force, and being the one with a portable occupation, she sold her house, packed up her belongings and crossed the Canadian border.

Where would Zinc Chandler be today if not for Alex Hunt?

And what would he do if he lost her?

Now, as Alex moved into his arms, the phone by the bed rang. On reflex, Zinc reached out and punched the speaker button. “Chandler,” he said to the activated mike.

“Zinc, it’s Maddy Thorne.” Her husky voice filled the bedroom. “You get Seattle stations on cable, don’t you?”

“Yes, all of them.”

“Turn on KVOT.”

In addition to the set on which they had watched
Twelve Angry Men
, Zinc and Alex had a TV on the wall at the foot of the bed. Plucking the remote control from the bedside table, Alex clicked it on and entered the cable channel for that Seattle station.

A moment later, the gray room flickered with blue light. The image that appeared onscreen was an aerial view of the city taken from a chopper. The word “Live” was superimposed in the upper corner, and in the lower corner was “Breaking News.” At first, Zinc wondered if this was the morning traffic report, for there was the Space Needle on the horizon and here was traffic on a bridge across Lake Washington, people commuting into the city. But then the camera closed in on what appeared to be a park jutting out into the water, revealing police cars and cops on foot converged around a sloop that had run aground.

A body hung from the rigging, minus both legs and an arm.

“What do you see?” Maddy asked.

“An aerial shot of a boat.”

“See a good-looking woman raising her hand?”

“The one on the phone?”

“That’s me.”

Alex scowled.

“Don’t peek down my neckline,” Maddy said through the speaker.

The image onscreen switched to a land-based shot of the sloop. The sun was breaking to the east, not up like it was now. “Recorded Earlier” replaced “Live” in the upper corner. Standing in front of the boat and facing the camera was a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman flashing perfect teeth.

“Sue Frye,” she said, “reporting to you
live
from the scene of the Hangman’s third hanging. Those sirens you hear in the background are police cars responding. A KVOT watcher phoned in this news tip, so you are the first in Seattle to witness this sickening crime. What do you make of
this?
”