Killing Spree (9 page)

“Hon, these are small-timers. They spent all afternoon putting the screws on you for a measly six grand and some change. Hell, any self-respecting mobster wouldn’t waste his time and manpower. They probably have one or two crummy loser-cops on their payroll, and made one of them request patrol duty in this neighborhood after Barry pulled his disappearing act. We have a good shot at getting these guys—
if
you’d go to the police.” She sighed. “If you don’t report this, it’ll just happen again.”

Gillian took the bag of frozen peas away from her face for a moment. “The guy in the alley told me that the sixty-one hundred dollars bought me some time. I don’t think they’re going to—”

“Oh, come on, Gill!” Ruth interrupted. She glanced in the direction of the living room, where Ethan was still glued to
The Simpsons
on TV. She leaned closer to Gillian and lowered her voice. “Did you really believe him? I mean, he’s not exactly a reliable source, is he? This is the same guy who had you speeding through rush hour traffic so you could meet him in some alley within exactly fifteen minutes or they’d
cut your son’s throat
. They were jerking you around, honey, putting you through the paces for their own amusement.”

Gillian started to cry, and it made her head throb even worse. “They’re threatening Ethan.” She pointed to her battered face. “
This
is what happened when I called the police today. But I feel lucky, because Ethan’s all right. I’m not pushing my luck, Ruth.”

In fact, the short, dark-haired creep who had beaten her up was actually true to his word. While Gillian felt a constant police presence around the duplex, the mobsters—or whatever they were—had more or less disappeared, for a while anyway.

As she sat at the kitchen table with the phone in her hand, Gillian thought back to that discussion with Ruth in this same spot nearly two years ago. Not much had really changed. She’d published a few more books. She still hadn’t heard a word from Barry. And these hoodlums were back.

Gillian knew why, too. Someone had called the house one night several weeks after the Saturn-selling episode. Ethan had picked up the line. They’d convinced the ten-year-old that his family had been entered in a radio contest. From Ethan, they’d gotten the dates of his birthday, his parents’ birthdays, and their wedding anniversary. Later, as each of these landmark dates approached, Gillian would catch little telltale signs that she and Ethan were being watched again: more mail tampered with; garbage can lids askew and debris scattered in the backyard; a sudden rash of phone calls asking for Barry and hang-ups.

These unsettling events—along with carols on the radio—came at Christmastime, too. Obviously, they figured Barry might get sentimental and want to come home for one of these special occasions. Or maybe they thought he’d send a card—with a postmark on the envelope or a PO box where he could be reached.

A special occasion was coming up. Ethan’s fourteenth birthday was only a week away.

Gillian shouldn’t have been so surprised to find someone lurking near her front porch a few minutes ago. She should have expected it—along with someone rummaging through her mail and garbage again. They counted on Barry contacting his family for his son’s birthday.

Despite everything, Gillian secretly hoped against hope for the same thing.

“If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and try again. If you need help, hang up and then dial your operator…”

The cordless phone started to make a loud, pulsating alarm sound. Gillian switched it off, then got up from the breakfast table.

She wasn’t going to call the police, not if there was even a small chance of Barry coming back soon.

As she replaced the receiver on the cradle, she noticed there were four new calls on the Caller ID box. All of them were from her friend, Dianne Garrity in Chicago.

Gillian had thought Dianne was still vacationing in Palm Springs. She checked the answering machine: no messages. The four calls from Dianne’s home phone in Chicago were all made within minutes of each other. All of them were hang-ups.

Gillian switched on the phone again, then dialed area code 773, and Dianne’s number. She got her friend’s answering machine:
“Hi, this is Dianne, and due to personal and technical difficulties, I’m unable to come to the phone right now. So leave me a message after this slightly irritating beep. Thanks a bunch.”

Beep.

“Hi, Di. It’s Gill. Looks like you tried to call me this morning. I thought you were still in Palm Springs. By the way, thanks for the postcard. Anyway, give a call and
leave a message
if I’m not in. Take care and we’ll talk later.”

After hanging up the phone, Gillian stepped outside and headed around to the backyard. She quickly cleaned up the mess by the garbage cans. She put the lid back on the second receptacle, and then took a long look around the backyard. Biting her lip, she studied the ravine as well. She didn’t see anybody.

“Hey Ethan!”
she heard someone shout.
“How’s it fagging, Ethan?”

“Look at the fairy sail by!”

Gillian came around toward the front of the duplex.

His head down, Ethan approached the front porch with his knapsack full of books strapped to his back. Three boys, all on bikes, had stopped on the street to yell at him.

“Hey faggot! Want to blow me?”

Gillian hurried to the front yard. She glared at them. One of the boys let out a howl, and the other two burst out laughing. They rode away on their bikes.

Ethan slipped inside the house, and Gillian started in after him. Her heart was breaking for him. “Are you okay, honey?” she asked.

“Fine,” he answered, heading toward his room.

“Those boys—” she started to say.

“They’re just being jerks, Mom. Forget about it.” He ducked into his room and shut the door.

Gillian went to his door, and was about to knock. But she hesitated. She felt so useless—and helpless. Ethan obviously didn’t want to talk about what had just happened. Gillian wasn’t eager to broach the topic herself. She and Barry used to discuss the possibility that Ethan might be gay. Even as far back as kindergarten, Ethan’s teacher had mentioned during their private parent-night conference, “Ethan is a very nice boy—sensitive. During playtime, he—um, seems more interested in the girls’ activities than the boys’ activities. Most of his friends are girls. But he gets along well with everyone….”

Later, on their way home in the car, Barry took his eyes off the road for a moment to throw her a crooked smile. “Gosh, I think Ethan’s teacher was trying to tell us back there that he’s different from all the other little boys.”

“Well, you couldn’t expect we’d be the only ones to notice,” Gillian replied. “She also said he was very nice.”

Now that he was an adolescent, Ethan seemed to be struggling with the issue, and unwilling to acknowledge it.

Barry used to be so good with him. If he’d felt any shame or disappointment in his son’s questionable masculinity, Barry had never shown it at all. Gillian wished he were there right now, so he could tell Ethan that he was a great kid and they both loved him. At this moment, Ethan needed his father.

Sitting in his parked car, a block away from Gillian’s duplex, he sorted through the half-burnt contents of the black plastic bag. Ethan Tanner had ripped a magazine into several small pieces, set some of it on fire, taped it up in a bag, and buried it in the garbage.

Until he saw it was a magazine, he’d thought the kid had stashed some letters from his long-lost papa in that bag. He didn’t understand why the brat had gone to such lengths to destroy and hide a stupid magazine. Then he discovered what kind of magazine it was. A few pictures in the magazine had survived the torch job.

He chuckled.

He took out his cell phone and made a call. “Hey, yeah, it’s me,” he said after his cohort answered. “You were saying the other day that the kid might know where his dad is. Well, if that’s true, I think I figured out a way we can get to him.”

Two hours later, and twelve hundred miles away, along an on-ramp to Interstate 90 in Rapid City, South Dakota, a black Honda Accord slowed down for a hitchhiker. The driver told the hitchhiker, named Sean, to throw his hiking pack in the backseat and sit up front with him. “Maybe you can find us a decent station on the radio,” he suggested, pulling back onto the highway. “None of this country-western shit.”

Sean was twenty-eight. He’d been backpacking throughout the country for the last few months, sort of a spiritual journey. He’d worked hard as a graphic designer for this big computer company for seven years. “Then one day, I just said, ‘Screw this, I’m out of here,’” Sean explained. He was very much on his own. He’d broken up with his longtime girlfriend last year, and was estranged from his family, who had become a bunch of Holy Rollers.

The man behind the wheel said he’d just flown in from Chicago. He was driving the rest of the way to Seattle so he could see the country, “maybe meet a few interesting people along the way.” He was a writer, though so far, every attempt at publishing his work had failed. He was going to see a woman in Seattle. “She’s an author too,” the man explained. “Have you read any Gillian McBride thrillers?”

Sean wasn’t familiar with her work.

“She wrote one called
Highway Hypnosis
. Ever hear of that?”

Over cheeseburgers at a truck stop, the driver told Sean the plot of Gillian McBride’s
Highway Hypnosis
. “I guess it’s not something you should talk about while you’re eating,” he joked. He went into detail about the book and how its scheming maniac villain murdered a number of hitchhikers in order to sell their identities and their internal organs.

Sean chuckled. “Huh, should I be nervous? Are
you
a maniac?”

Smiling, the driver nodded. “Oh, I’m certifiable, a regular menace to society.”

“Well, when you sell my liver, don’t take any less than five grand. It’s in terrific shape. I gave up drinking years ago.”

They were still laughing and joking under the stars—on their way back to the Accord in the parking lot. Sean volunteered to spell him at the wheel for a while.

“No, thanks, I got it,” the driver replied. “Besides, you’re going to be tired pretty soon.”

Sean buckled his seat belt. He squinted at him. “What do you mean, I’ll be tired?”

The driver started up the engine. “Oh, you know, sometimes a person can get sleepy after a big dinner.”

Sean stared at him in the glow of the dashboard lights. The guy had the strangest little smile on his face.

About ten minutes after they pulled onto the Interstate once again, Sean read a sign:
SHERIDAN
—49
MILES
. But it was a little blurred. Maybe he was tired after all. There was nothing wrong with his eyesight. His old girlfriend, who always wore glasses, used to say she wanted to inherit his beautiful blue, twenty-twenty-vision eyes.

He suddenly thought about that book the driver liked, the one with somebody selling people’s organs.

Sean reached for the button to lower the car window, and he couldn’t find it in the darkness. Everything seemed fuzzy. “I think I’m a little carsick,” he said, surprised to hear himself slurring his words.

“That’s just some initial nausea,” the driver said, studying the road ahead. “It’ll pass. You’ll be sleepy soon.”

Numbly, Sean stared at him. But he couldn’t get the guy into focus. “Wh—what do you mean? What are you talking about?”

The driver switched off the car radio. He kept his eyes on the road. “Just relax,” he said.

The constant humming of the car tires was almost hypnotic. Ahead, headlights swam in the darkness. Sean tried to reach for his seat belt, but he could barely move. “What—what’s going on here?” he asked.

“I did a lot of research on pharmaceuticals. This one works pretty damn fast…”

Numbly, Sean stared over at the driver. For a moment, his vision was right, and he saw the headlights sweep across the man’s face. Hands on the wheel, he was watching the road ahead.

Then everything went out of focus again. He heard the man talking, but it seemed to come from someplace far away, and he only caught snippets:
“It’ll just knock you out, Sean…when you got up to go to the bathroom at the restaurant…why your Coke tasted funny…right about now…a sort of paralysis…know exactly what you’re experiencing, Sean. I read up on it when I was studying surgical procedures
.”

Sean couldn’t move. The headlights’ glare had now become muted spots swirling in front of him. The driver’s voice, so calm and steady, was fading out. Sean felt himself surrendering to unconsciousness. Minutes seemed to pass, or perhaps it was just a few seconds, but he heard the driver say something else.

“See, this was Gillian’s idea,”
he said.
“It’s all for her…”

Sean didn’t hear anything else after that.

The clever killer in Gillian’s
Highway Hypnosis
was a former surgeon. He conducted his operations in a remote, hidden bunker in the desert outside Las Vegas. His private little OR featured sterilized, state-of-the-art equipment. His patients received first-class treatment—right up until he had surgically removed what he needed from them. The unfortunate hitchhikers were expendable, but their organs were making him money.

He had it pretty nice, the lucky son of a bitch. Gillian’s demented doctor didn’t have to look for an isolated spot in the middle of the night and set up a makeshift operating area. He was never expected to improvise. He didn’t have to buy all his surgical accoutrements on the same day he was picking up his victim. Yet only an hour before stopping to give Sean a lift, he’d been at a medical supply store that served Rapid City Regional Hospital. And before that he’d bought some camping and gardening equipment at a hardware store.

The mad genius surgeon in
Highway Hypnosis
wasn’t nearly as resourceful as he was. Hell, he was always doing Gillian’s fictional killers one better. In
The Mark of Death
, the girl had been stabbed by “Zorro” in the back of an empty car. But he’d pulled off the same thing with a taxi driver in the front seat. The department store dressing room strangulation in Gillian’s
For Everyone to See
ended with the victim in a heap on the floor. But he’d left his victim hanging on the wall like a hunter’s trophy. And now, working from what he’d learned on the Internet and in books, he was about to perform surgery—in the most primitive of locations.

While driving along Interstate 90, he’d noticed dozens of road signs for campgrounds, but he only started paying attention to them after Sean had passed out. His hitchhiker “patient” was slumped in the front seat with his head resting against the window. The shoulder strap and seat belt seemed to be holding him in place—like a piece of lifeless cargo.

When they pulled off the highway and stopped at the closed gates to a campground twenty-three miles south of Billings, Montana, Sean didn’t even stir. The campsite was closed for the winter. No one was around to hear him shoot the chain lock off the gate.

Driving down the unlit, gravel road, he couldn’t see anything beyond his headlights. The tall trees surrounding him seemed to form a dark, endless tunnel. It was scary and exciting. He felt his heart racing. By the dashboard light, he glanced at Sean, still asleep in the passenger seat. He smiled.

Moonlight peeked through the trees and helped him find a clearing off to one side of the road. He spotted several picnic tables and a restroom facility that was boarded up. He pulled over by one of the picnic tables, climbed out of the car, and immediately went to work.

Dragging Sean out of the vehicle and laying him on top of the picnic table was the hardest part. Though still breathing, the hitchhiker was just dead weight. He covered his patient with a rain slicker—to keep him warm. Then he dug two battery-operated lamps from the trunk—as well as two suitcases full of medical equipment.

He kept his gun in his coat pocket. He wasn’t worried about Sean waking up. No, the gun was for uninvited guests. Bears and other forest creatures were likely to smell the blood—and there would be a lot of it. He didn’t want any of them interrupting his work.

Sean might not be his only kill tonight.

He set up the lights, and then opened one of the cases. It was full of surgical tools, mostly clamps and scalpels, along with a suction device that looked like a turkey-baster.

“Sean?” he said, removing the rain slicker from him. “Sean, can you hear me?”

His patient didn’t move. His closed eyelids didn’t even flutter.

He unbuttoned the man’s shirt, and pulled it off. He stared at Sean’s slightly hairy chest, watched it move up and down with each breath. Then he glanced at the scalpel in the open case, the same tool that would be slicing through Sean’s skin within a few minutes.

He donned the rain slicker. Even with all the clamps he had, there would still be an awful lot of blood. He didn’t want to ruin his clothes.

He opened the other case and gazed at the stainless-steel retractor that would fit over Sean’s chest. It would open up his rib cage. The sight of that shiny, new contraption excited him. He couldn’t wait to use it. He felt like a kid, trying out a new toy.

He heard some noise in the woods, trees rustling, but something else too. The four-legged inhabitants of this forest sensed something was about to happen. Perhaps they could already smell the blood.

He could too.

Ethan’s mother’s book signing was a minor success. A book club, made up of a dozen women around his mother’s age, had shown up to hear her talk. Plus a few stragglers came by and sat down. Ethan watched from the bookstore’s café. He finished some trigonometry homework while eating a grilled-cheese sandwich. They had these lousy, all-natural “vegetable chips,” instead of fries or regular potato chips—and no Coke, only lemonade, but it wasn’t so awful.

Watching his mother “at work” was nothing special for Ethan. But he remembered what it was like two years ago, when she’d just been starting out. He recalled a trip with his parents to the Northgate shopping mall, where they’d found his mother’s debut thriller,
Killing Legend
, on the shelf at Waldenbooks. It was the first time he’d seen his mom’s book in a store. Ethan wanted his mother to know he was impressed
(“Oh, wow, that’s SO cool!”)
, and maybe he milked it just a bit. A few people in the store turned their heads to see what all the fuss was about. Most of them smiled when they realized an author was there with her husband and son. But Ethan noticed a skinny, twentysomething blonde with her boyfriend in the Self-Help aisle, and she was imitating him in a mincing, effeminate way. She flailed her limp wrist and whispered, “
Wow, that’s SOOO cool!
” in a lisp-inflected falsetto. At that moment, Ethan’s heart sank, and he prayed his parents didn’t see the woman’s little pantomime.

He immediately shut up, and retreated over to the Sports section, where he tried to look interested in a basketball book. All the while, he fantasized about that skanky blonde getting mowed down by a truck in the parking lot.

Instead, something happened to his dad when they stepped out to the lot. A short man with dark hair and a goatee approached his dad outside the mall’s south doors. “Barry, old pal,” he said, grabbing his father’s hand and pumping. “Good to see you. I’d like a word.”

His dad seemed a little put off. With a tight smile, he told Ethan and his mom to go wait in the car. He’d only be a couple of minutes.

The Saturn wasn’t parked far away. Ethan sat in the backseat and through the rain-beaded windshield, he watched the man talking with his father. He kept punching his father’s arm—like they were old friends or something. Finally, his dad pulled out his wallet and gave the dark-haired man some money. Then he headed back to the car.

Ethan remembered his mother asking about the man. “Oh, that’s Leo, from my union meetings,” his father answered, starting up the car. “He was hitting me up for a few bucks. I would have introduced you, honey, but I think he was embarrassed.”

“He didn’t seem embarrassed to me,” Ethan’s mother replied. “In fact, he seemed pretty pushy. There was something about his manner, I—”

“Honey, relax, he’s not such a bad guy. Like I say, he’s a friend of mine.”

For some reason, the memory of that dark-haired man talking to his dad stuck in Ethan’s head. Three months later, after his father had disappeared, he saw that
not-such-a-bad-guy
leaning against a parked car about a half block from the duplex. Ethan was on his way to the bus stop for school. He recognized the guy, but couldn’t remember from where. The man with the goatee was drinking from a Starbucks carryout container and staring at him.