Pitfall (18 page)

My tongue seemed to have cleaved itself to the roof of my mouth. It was a moment before I was able to speak. “You ignored his cries?”

“They were of no importance. The end result was all that mattered. Sometimes weeks would pass before the chamber was unsealed. When it was, I made sure the first thing Charles heard upon being removed was my own voice. Frequently it took days to get him functional again. But he always did.” He smiled at his son, who returned it. “Always.”

Eli faced me squarely. “My son is nearly forty. In that time he’s never had a friend, never enjoyed a woman, never known a teacher other than myself, and the Shinto priests I brought in to instruct him in martial arts.” He made a motion of dismissal. “Of course, later they were discretely disposed of.”

I didn’t bother replying. What could I say?

He finished up, “Charles knows all the classics of literature, plays flawless piano, is fluent in seven languages, and has a measured IQ of one hundred and sixty-eight. He is completely fearless, utterly strong, and absolutely loyal in his devotion to me. Because of this, and so much more, I’m proud to call him my son.”

With that Eli became brisk, and the interest in his reptilian eyes blinked out. “And now, as much as it pains me to leave, I’m afraid I must. I’m sure you and he have many things to discuss.” He addressed the other man. “Don’t waste too much time here, Charles. When you’re done, meet me in my office. There’s pressing business at hand.”

For the last time the old man regarded me intently. “Were I you, Mr.  Brenner, I’d answer whatever questions my son asks. Truthfully, and the first time.” He turned to go.

“Wait.” I’ll admit it, I was trying to keep my voice steady as I spoke. I really wanted Eli to stay, not for his sparkling company and sharp wit, but because every minute he remained would delay by that much the time when Boneless would start in on me.

I hoped. On the other hand, like I said before, it very well could be that one of those comfortable-looking Morris chairs against the wall belonged to the old man. Eli and Charles Cross were obviously who T. S. Eliot had in mind when he wrote
The Hollow Men.

Eli picked up my dossier off the table, tucked it under his arm, and strode out of the room. Behind him, the door hissed shut.

I readied myself. Here we go.

I swallowed. “Hey, listen …” My mouth tasted like it had been wiped down with a kerosene rag. I tried it again. “Listen …”

Utterly ignoring me, Boneless turned to that long table on my right, the one with all that sharp gear resting on it. Humming something maddeningly familiar, he began picking up those tools, examining them critically one by one before putting them back exactly where he’d lifted them.

It took me a moment to place the tune. The song he was butchering with his wheezy voice was an old one, from the seventies:
The Needle and the Damage Done
, by Neil Young. He was playing mind games. I knew all about them.

As he rummaged he said, “Do you like music, Mr.  Brenner?”

I moistened my lips. “When it’s done right I do.”

My insult went right past him. “So do I. All kinds of music. It helps me relax. I’m very tense this evening. You’ve been quite bothersome.”

“Gosh, that’s too bad. I’d tell you how sorry I am, but I’m just not able to work up the effort.”

“Not a problem.” Still he kept picking up things and putting them down, searching, searching. “Are you familiar with that music I was just humming?”

“Yes. Was that to prepare me?” If I was going out, I was going out tough. I hoped. “Will needles be figuring into our fun?”

He turned. “That’s right. Electric ones at first, to make you pliable. After that, ones with a larger gauge will be used to draw your bone marrow. But that’s neither here nor there. I just happen to like Neil Young’s music, that’s all.” He returned to his search. A second later he found what he was after, and held it up. “Isn’t that the way? It’s always the last place you look.”

A pair of locking pliers.

Walking over to me with a light tread, Boneless lifted my left hand and scowled. “Now why on Earth did Father let you keep your wedding ring? Reminding you of your loss, I suppose …”

Critically examining the diameter of my little finger, he turned it this way and that. Nodding once, he placed it gently back down on the chair’s armrest, and then from behind the chair he pulled a small wheeled cart. On it rested a twelve-volt Sears car battery, its black terminals fastened with jumper cables. Clamped in the other end of the cables were what appeared to be long, sharp, metal knitting needles.

Humming again, Boneless bent low. What was he doing? Then from somewhere beside the table he picked up a bucket of cold water, straightened, and doused me. Grabbing the pliers he adjusted the knurled knob on its handle accordingly.

I shook the dripping water from my eyes. Oh shit. This was gonna sting.

Placing the pliers’ jaws between my knuckle and the finger’s second joint, he grew businesslike. “Now then. This is how our session will progress. I will ask you a question. I’ll only ask it once. You will, without hesitation, give me a complete, factual answer. Any delay, or hint of a lie, and I’ll dislocate this finger, and then shock you with the needles. If you remain obstinate we’ll proceed to another finger and another jab, and then to another, and so on. Is that clear?”

I didn’t answer, and he pulled a face. “That was a question, Mr.  Brenner. Let’s not start out on the wrong foot, shall we? I asked you if that was that clear.”

“Crystal,” I croaked.

“Wonderful. To the first question: who else besides the late Shelly Thornhill knows who you really are, and why you’re here?”

I could feel the color drain from my face.
Shelly, dead?
No. I didn’t believe it. He was lying. But I read the depth of his shark’s eyes. There was no deception there. But
how—?

I grew cold with despair. All I could figure was that Boneless and Eli must have had her followed home. There she was murdered, probably along with her little boy.

And heavy-hearted, with a sick certainty I realized it wasn’t this nightmare factory’s Glock-packing thugs who’d killed them.

It was me.

First Megan and Colleen and my unborn son Ben, and then my men in Iraq, and now Shelly and her child. All of them dead because of me. I’d killed them as surely as if I’d pulled the trigger myself. I just hoped their deaths had been quick. I almost laughed in gallows humor. When Chucky here finally got around to dispatching me, he’d be doing me a favor.

But then my grief was cut short as the full import of his words struck home. With Shelly dead and Seth Delacroix who-knows-where, there’d now be no rescue coming for Sarah Cahill.

Or for me.

Chapter Twenty-four

B
oneless tightened down the pressure on the locking pliers a hair. “I’ll repeat the question, but I don’t plan to make a habit of that. Fair warning. Now. Who else knows you’re here?”

What was the point? Steeling myself for what was to come, defiantly I glared straight into his dead eyes. “Up yours.”

The pain was worse than I imagined. In one fluid motion Boneless locked the pliers down on my little finger, and then violently wrenched the digit vertical. The wet sound of the knuckle popping out of joint was the same as a chicken leg separating from the thigh. At the same instant he jabbed the sharp end of the long needles straight into my chest, right though my soaked undershirt. The electricity arcing through me burned like fire. The pain climbed and climbed and then peaked as my body convulsed.

He removed the needles, and slowly the agony receded as shock and numbness began taking over. I could breathe again. A few seconds passed before I glanced at my hand. Sure enough, my pinkie was standing at full attention, straight enough to do a military cadet proud. Not surprisingly it was already swelling and turning an angry purplish-red.

Tunelessly humming again, Boneless disengaged the pliers by flipping a lever on its handle and moving over to the next digit. He seated it. Then without warning he tightened them down and did the same to that finger, snapping it up toward the ceiling, at the same moment shocking me again. Longer this time.

My yell now was as much rage as pain. “What did you do
that
one for?”

He gave me that same weird half-smile. “Oh, that was just for me.” For reasons of his own he skipped my middle finger, going for the index. “Again. Who have you told?”

“Screw you!”

When that one came out it almost felt like he was taking my thumb with it, and he shocked me again, much longer this time. It seemed endless.

An eternity later he cut the power, and I shuddered in dread as he placed the pliers around my middle finger.

“This one’s thicker than the others,” he cautioned. “And the battery still has plenty of power. Bear that in mind.” Then his voice dropped, as much a whisper as a muse. But what he said made no sense. “Did you know that we are, every one of us, bilateral creatures?”

Bilateral creatures? What did that have to do—?

Reaching out, he touched my hairline with his thumb and lightly drew an imaginary line from there down my forehead, stopping at the bridge of my nose.

“If I were to take a very large, very fast saw blade, and split you down the middle, your dead right half would be very nearly a mirror image of the dead left. Not exactly, of course; minute variations could be found, but not enough to matter.”

I couldn’t imagine where he was going with this.

“Nature in its infinite whimsy has designed us this way.” He still bore that same unsettling smile. “Giving someone like me an unending source of amusement. For instance, this.” Slowly he wagged the pliers before my eyes, and then in a flash he slammed them against my face, shattering my nose.

I gasped, my eyes flooding with tears and my ears roaring.

“You’re not so pretty now, are you?” he bellowed. “I’m going to rip your freaking face off. When I’m finished with that, I’ll start ruining your hands. Two hands, get it? Two hands, two feet, two testicles, two ears.” His mad smile was blazing, and then suddenly the heat seemed to vanish, like steam leaving a wet driveway. “And two eyes.” He let that sink in a moment. Then he said, “Mr.  Brenner, you’re going to prove a world of joy for me tonight.”

Raw fear and screaming rage flooded in, each fighting for the upper hand. Twisting, I struggled vainly against the bonds, my warm copper blood flowing down over my lips. I knew I wasn’t getting out of this one without help, and for the first time since I was a child I found myself whispering a desperate plea under my breath.

“Oh, now what’s that you’re doing? You obviously didn’t get the memo. God is dead. Look at me. I’m proof.” He bobbed the pliers lightly, his sigh packed with import. “You’ve disappointed me, Mr.  Brenner. And I deal with that so badly.”

In one swift movement he brutally dislocated that last finger and simultaneously shocked me again. Again it seemed to go on forever. Hopelessness threatened to close around my heart as I screamed in pain. I’d failed Sarah, just like I’d failed my wife and children, and Shelly and Ronnie, and my men.

A memory rose, like a silvery minnow swimming up from a murky creek bed.
  April, 2006. Iraq. Our night mission is over before it starts, ending in one blinding, horrific flash of a concealed improvised explosive device, an IED. As I lay there bleeding out I can hear the shrieks of my remaining men. Small-arms fire is cutting them to pieces.

Next to me I sense the presence of another man. Slowly my vision clears. It’s Sergeant Tom Gaddick, lying very close to me, where the blast has thrown us.  I slide my eyes, the only things I can move, up and down his body. It doesn’t seem the sergeant knows his legs are gone. His bleeding is far worse than mine.

And then dying, he speaks. “Don’t let it be for nothin’.”

Like guns in a turret I swivel my gaze back up, locking onto him as I strain to make out his gasping words. They sound dim in my ringing ears.

“You hear me, Cap?” He grips my forearm with fading strength. “Don’t let it be … for nothin’…”

I blinked. Gaddick was here. Only now he was whole, the way he was before he’d been shredded.

This was crazy. It was simply the trick of a fevered mind on sensory overload. But still. He was wearing his crisp desert BDUs, the battle dress uniform we’d all been issued before we’d shipped out, his black beret cocked in a rakish manner atop his large bare skull. And in some weird,
Return of the Jedi
special effect, he was glowing and semitransparent.

Gaddick’s voice was tempered steel, his eyes lasers as they bored into mine. “Don’t let it be for nothin’, Cap.” He faded out.

I don’t believe in ghosts. I knew full well what I’d just seen and heard was my own mind telling me to hang tough, using my dead master sergeant as a template. But the thing was, he was right. It wasn’t for nothing. Those men in my command hadn’t died in vain  but for a cause greater than themselves. And so it was now.

Here’s the deal. Someday, like all of us, I’ll die. My heart will stop, my brain will flatline, and I’ll find the answer to the question we all ask sooner or later.

But not tonight.

The pain hadn’t left. It was still there, as strong and powerful and pervasive as ever, only now a stronger power was overriding it, and my veins began to swell. I knew what this was. Roaring through me, filling me completely, was nothing less than the culmination of five generations of always spoiling for a scrap, relentless hillbilly cussedness, honed to a razor’s edge by my time in the Rangers.

I laughed softly.
It ain’t the size of the dog in the fight …

“I will be buggered.” Bending low again, Boneless peered at me. “Laughing, are we?” He straightened. “Perhaps you’ve already slipped over into madness. It wouldn’t be the first time it’s happened this quickly. I’ve broken stronger men than you.”

“Have you thought of turning professional?” I croaked. “I understand sideshows are always desperate for new geeks.”

He didn’t respond as he calmly placed the pliers back in their spot on the table. When he faced me again, what he was holding was worlds worse: a brace-and-bit, like an old-world carpenter would have used to drill a hole for a door pull. My grandfather had one just like it.

“Geeks. Nice. Let’s see how this particular geek does in wielding this little beauty on your left kneecap.” A beat passed. “The right one we’ll save for later.”

Recoiling, I tightened my muscles, readying myself for fresh agony.

And at exactly that second, the power died. For a moment the entire room was plunged into a darkness as complete as deep space. It was all I could do not to whoop in exultation. All right, Marsh. You did it. Then the lights slowly dialed back up, but only at about half strength. From somewhere an emergency backup generator must have kicked in. Maybe that was enough. Boneless and I looked at each other. He frowned.

My mouth filled with my own blood. Ignoring my injuries, I spit it out on his shirt and managed to dredge up a hideous grin. “Don’t look at me. I didn’t do it.”

Before he could react the door behind him slid open, and two black-uniformed men hustled in. Through my pain-dimmed eyes I couldn’t quite make out who they were—not that I cared all that much—until the bigger of them spoke.

“Power glitch, Mr. Cross. We were just about to head down to the cafeteria for a snack when the whole system dumped like an old guy flushing a toilet.” At that
bon mot
his partner went, “A-hyuk-hyuk-hyuk.”

I will be dipped in shit. Blakey Sinclair and his trained orangutan, Chet.

Boneless sighed, harsh disapproval evident on his face. “That’s the second time in the last two weeks. I’ll not have it again.” He pointed at Blakey. “Is that clear?”

He gulped. “Sure thing, Mr. Cross. Chet and me, we’ll get right on it, sir.”

“What was the name of the electrical contractor we used? Evanston?”

“That’s the one,” Blakey agreed.

Boneless’s cadence was low and measured. “I was never happy with his work. This seals it. I want him brought here, to this room.” Mayonnaise-like spittle had collected at the corners of his mouth. “Do you understand me?”

Both men answered in unison. “Yes sir.”

He shook his head, looking disgusted. “I suppose I need to check this out.” He indicated me. “You two, watch him. I’ll be in Control. And Sinclair,” Boneless went on with dark menace, “I heard about your row with Mr.  Brenner at Jerry’s. That doesn’t concern me. What does is his condition when I return. I don’t want him touched, by either of you. He’s mine. Are we clear on that as well?”

Heckle and Jeckle answered in the affirmative.

Boneless nodded once and started away from me. He was just walking through the door when I called out, “Hey, Chucky.”

Taking the bait he spun around, stalked over, and clocked me hard in the face.

I’d seen it coming, and so managed to deflect the worst of it, twisting at the last second. Still the flesh under my left eye had torn with the savage blow, snapping my head back. More hot coppery blood flowed freely down over my chin and onto my shirt.

And that was good. Boneless was off balance now. Losing control.

“I can’t believe it,” I grinned. Although the walls were sliding and wavering in my vision, I aimed to tweak that. “You punch like a dying whore.”

For a second I saw a pulsing vein stand up on the side of his neck as his face twisted in fury. If I was lucky he’d stroke out and save me the trouble of killing him. But the moment passed, and he gave me what I’m sure he thought was a look harsh enough to decalcify my spinal column.

Digging deep I managed to come up with another wicked, mocking grin, but my words were pure ice as I pinned him with a flat gaze. “You may think this is over, but you’re wrong. I’m looking in a dead man’s eyes.”

He smiled. “Really.”

“Yeah, really. The next time we meet, it’ll be under a black flag.”

“That’s highly doubtful.” Boneless’s thick lips curled up in a condescending smirk. “The next time we meet, I’ll be tossing your broken, living body into the Pit.”

And then he was gone, the door slipping shut behind him.

Blakey narrowed his piggish eyes, boring holes in me, cocking his head slightly. “Well, I’ll be hung.” I fervently hoped so. “If it ain’t the funny man.”

“That’s me.”

“Tied up like a present.” He gave both my shoulders a quick glance and pretended to shudder. “Oh no, Airborne tats. Chet, looks like we have us some kind of a hard guy here.”

“Let me out of this chair and we’ll see.”

“In a minute, maybe. We heard you’d been nailed. That sure was a funny trick you pulled on us at Jerry’s the other night. Chet and me, we laughed about it the whole time the docs were sewing us up.”

He wasn’t kidding. Blakey sported a puffy white bandage over his left ear, the one my fist had cauliflowered. His friend hadn’t fared much better. Chet’s throat was so red and swollen he looked like a bullfrog about to croak.

“Those doctors didn’t do such a good job,” I observed. “You and your buddy look like a couple of prize fight losers. Cute, though. You boys have the market cornered on cute.”

Blakey snarled and took a step toward me, but Chet grabbed his arm. “Hey, man.” He looked and sounded worried. “Remember what Boneless said?”

With a yank he pulled his arm free. “I remember. Who’s gonna tell him. You?”

“Better listen to him, Blakey.” My tone carried dark warning. “You go busting me up and Chet won’t have to tell Boneless. He’ll know with one look.”

Blakey’s grin didn’t do a thing for him. “Not a problem. I’ll leave your face alone. You notice I’m not packing, so you don’t have to worry about getting shot. No, what I have in mind is more along the lines of a little body work.” From the wheeled table he picked up what looked like a TV remote control. He turned to Chet. “I’ve seen this work. When I press the button on this thing, the clamps’ll let go. The second they do, get him on his feet.”

Chet, ever the obedient toady, got ready. Blakey thumbed the button, wisely staying just out of reach while the device opened. His smile was gone, replaced by a tough-guy roll of his shoulders that looked silly even when it was still popular in 1930s gangster films.

“You’re all mine, cracker,” he hissed in contempt. “And don’t think you’ll get out of this with any fancy tricks. That worked once. Don’t expect a second chance.”

Blakey was so engrossed in his testosterone posing he wasn’t paying close enough attention to what the other man was doing. And old Chet had made a classic error. He’d lifted both arms and my left leg from their clamps, but the right one hadn’t fully come apart. Crouching in front of me as he worked, it hadn’t occurred to him he’d left himself wide open.

As it were.

The last fastening swung wide, and when it did I savagely slashed out my left foot, planting the toe of my dress boot as sharply and deeply as I knew how into Chet’s groin.

The color blanched from his face, eyes gone wide in shock. Clutching at himself he sank to his knees and fell to his side, yelping like a puppy caught in the gears.

Shooting up from the chair, with my uninjured right hand I grabbed the first thing in reach, the table full of tools, and threw it as hard as I could at Blakey.

He must have still been amazed at what he’d just seen, as he was a fraction of a second slow in blocking it. The table struck him solidly in his solar plexus, driving the air from his lungs, and both he and it went down with a crash.

Time to boogie. I was heading for the door when something grabbed my ankle and I went down hard, hitting the cement floor with my head and left hand. This time I thought the pain was going to black me out. Gasping, I looked to see what had tripped me.