Point Doom (20 page)

“NO! Jesus, NO!”

“I’ll start now. I’ll start with the fingers on your right hand, then move to the left hand. Then I’ll go to work on your other ankle. You remember how it goes, right?”

“C’mon! This is me, Fiorella! C’mon, we had something going together, remember?”

I loosened the restraint on her left hand. “You choose, Vikki. It’s up to you.”

She struggled, arching her body on the bed as her naked, thick breasts began flopping from side to side. Then she stopped squirming and glared at me, but said nothing.

After switching the gun to my opposite hand I forced the T-shirt gag back into her mouth. Now her eyes were like a wild animal’s. I grabbed her index finger in my fist and, in one motion, forced it back until I heard a snapping sound.

It took several minutes for her to stop screaming.

NOW I LEANED
close to her ear and pulled the gag out. “Tell me when you’re ready to shoot yourself, Vikki. Your other fingers and the thumb are next. One at a time. I’m not going to rush this.”

“Kill me! Just shoot me in the head. Just do it!”

“No no no. You’re the one who’ll do that. I’ll aim the gun under your chin for you but you’re the one who’s going to squeeze the trigger and hopefully blow the top of your head off. I’ll be the one who helps. Just like you helped Woody die. It’s your call. You can die fast or you can die slow.”

She glared at me but didn’t speak.

I began forcing the gag back into her mouth but she resisted by clamping her jaw shut. Reaching down I slapped her swollen ankle with my hand, twice. Hard. That caused her to begin howling again and I jammed the T-shirt back into her mouth.

The broken finger was already swollen to twice its normal size. I held another finger in my fist, then looked into her eyes. “Okay, here we go again, Vikki,” I whispered. “Get ready.”

She began screaming into the gag. Then she nodded her head up and down.

I pulled the gag out.

“Okay. Okay. No more. I’ll do it! I’ll fuckin’ do it!”

Rolling her to her side, I freed her left hand from the belt restraint. Spit and tears were streaming down her face. I heard a sound, then looked down between her legs. She had pissed herself.

Grabbing her left hand tightly, I put the gun in it. My free hand was around her wrist, my finger blocking the trigger guard.

“Ready?” I said.

“Fuck you, man!”

“Right.”

I put her finger on the trigger.

“Okay,” I said, “here we go. Bye-bye, Vikki.”

Her eyes were fixed on the ceiling as she squeezed the trigger.

I WASHED UP
her bathroom and cleaned myself up. That done, I wet the hand towel, wrung it out, then wiped off any traces of my prints in the bathroom and in the bedroom.

A quick once-over of the remaining night-stand drawer revealed something new: a small black leather bag—a sort of miniature tool kit—behind a box of CDs. In it were leather thong restraints, three different sized pairs of pliers with black handles, along with two pairs of surgeon’s gloves and a scalpel. Vikki’s traveling torture kit. She only helped. Right!

Preparing to leave, I located her purse in the living room and removed her cell phone, tucking it into my jacket pocket. Then I returned to the bedroom for the last time, put on the surgeon’s gloves from the torture kit, and wiped everything down again, including the belts I had used to bind her. Then I tore off the piss-soaked, blood-soaked sheets and put them in a pillowcase.

After picking up my Beretta I covered what was left of Vikki’s head with the bedspread. Suddenly I felt the need to vomit and rushed back into the bathroom. It went on for five minutes.

LEAVING THE BUILDING
with Vikki’s sheets under my arm, on my way up Sixth Street to Mom’s Escalade, I punched in the number to Archer’s cell. Just as I was putting the phone to my ear, I saw a dark, four-door Benz hook a quick right onto California Avenue, then speed away.

Archer answered on the third ring. “Who’s this?”

“It’s JD. Look, I’m in business. With any luck this could all be over in twenty-four hours. Maybe less.”

“You’re on Sydnye? How’d you get to her?”

“What about my mother? Did you get help?”

“I tried. I made the calls. I’m still waiting.”

“Okay, I’ll call you when I’m done, Archer. Keep trying.”

Then I clicked off.

A few blocks away I threw Vikki’s sheets into a Dumpster behind the Miramar Hotel.

TWENTY-FIVE

s
wan knew he was not like other men. In fact he was highly aware that his own life was a rather unique one, and that, for whatever cosmic motive, he had been selected and had survived to emancipate himself to a far greater purpose. His existence on the planet represented what he considered to be, for lack of a better term, a sort of experiment—perhaps a kind of virtuoso celestial circus act. In his spare moments he had often mused on these things.

For over fifty years now the producer had risen to increasing riches and status in Hollywood to hold ever-expanding influence over others. On any number of occasions one call from his Century Park East office suite had changed the course of a person’s life completely—for good or ill. In two situations that jogged his recollection, there had been suicides. In another, a pretty, full-breasted girl, whose movie-star career he has assisted for fifteen years (primarily to indulge his personal sexual whims) and whose life he now owned outright, at least on paper, had become engaged to a European head of state. She had neglected to call him for his permission. He had countered this slight simply by making two phone calls. In short order, an exposé of the woman’s private life and drug use reached the tabloid press, complete with revealing photographs of her bisexual escapades. In no time, her betrothed changed his mind and the bitch’s career in the film industry was over.

Swan knew that there had to be a reason he wielded so much power. For even as his star rose to new heights above the Santa Monica coastline, so did his personal zeal for his principal hobby: torture and murder. He had killed often as part of his unfolding mission and those uninterrupted events were profound evidence to him of his unique existence. To date, ninety-seven humans had met their end at his hands. He had preserved mementos of each occasion in a special underground room at his estate and reexamined these artifacts whenever he felt a bit out of sorts.

Over the last twenty or so years he had moved on from the more simplistic bone breaking to more advanced excisions and other, more complex surgical procedures. For instance, removing the intestines of one of his subjects while that person watched from a mirror mounted above their body, all without anesthetic, had become one of Swan’s favorite diversions. The expression on his subject’s face as he or she watched a nearly soccer-ball sized mound of their own steaming entrails unraveling on their sternum was, to say the least, entertaining to observe.

Swan was aware that his bent for the exotic had become more extreme as time passed. These days he often enjoyed feeding his clients their removed body parts, severed and with an array of condiments.

He could think of no other person of historical significance who had killed more people with his own hands simply for the purpose of amusement. The pleasure—the satisfaction from these acts—had continued to grow to ever-increasing heights. Re-watching an expression of terror in the eyes of his victims in his film archives gave him a full measure of pleasure. It fed his appetite—his need—for more. Seemingly, the more fear he harnessed, the greater his sense of power, and the more pleasurable his later sexual emissions became.

In Hollywood men trembled when he entered a room. The women he owned sought him out to provide certain kinds of pleasure in exchange for his favor and influence. Swan knew that men like himself had inhabited the planet as archetypes for millennia. What his personal quest, in the time accorded to him here, was to create a new record of human possibility for others like himself. Nothing less. And time had proven him unerringly correct. Karl Swan hadn’t been stopped and he wouldn’t be stopped.

Current scientific data informed Swan that light in the universe could be traced back in an unbroken stream 13.6 billion years. His own life had been designated as a punctuation mark in human history. The world was ready for something else—something with teeth. Something entirely unique. Something to make mankind first tremble, then gawk in awe.

On many occasions over the years, in leaning over his victim—intentionally inhaling their last breath just after delivering a fatal thrust of his blade—he had sensed that he had become part of the eternal. He had risen to experience unification with ultimate power. True transcendence.

Birth and death were the only constants, and to be present at the moment—
in
the moment—when another person surrendered his being was, Swan felt, a vocation of the highest calling. The weak deserved pain and death. Their fear was their purpose on the planet. Swan’s task was to honor their uselessness by an act that emancipated them.

While the families of most men his age were interviewing board and care facilities for their aging and crippled loved ones, Swan’s physical abilities had remained largely undiminished. He could still run two miles, full-out, three times a week, on the quarter-mile track at the rear of his estate. Thanks primarily to human growth hormone, over the last fifteen years he had remained a superb physical specimen. His blood pressure was a steady one-twenty-six over seventy-two and his weight a trim and ready one hundred ninety-seven pounds—certainly adequate for his seventy-five-inch frame.

His only physical deficit was his lifelong inability to sleep. The dreams that haunted him almost every time he closed his eyes had gone on unabated for over seventy years. Those dreams had been with him since he left Germany as a boy, and shed the cynical nickname Corporal Jewboy.

Swan took three or four one-hour naps daily to compensate and, over time, he’d made the necessary physical adjustments. After all, he was not like other men, was he?

Sexually, Swan considered himself to be still at his peak, and he held with the Chinese in their literature on men’s sexuality in one important respect: Restricting one’s ejaculation to one incident per week had great wisdom. The Chinese believed that a man’s essence was contained in his reproductive fluid. His semen was the epicenter of his power. To disseminate that power carelessly and too frequently was, both Swan and the Chinese believed, to squander it.

All his life Swan had prided himself on his penis. Its length was eight inches by nearly four inches in circumference. For the last two years, he had confined his once-weekly orgasms to Friday afternoons, when his current attendee, pretty Catelena, a slender, twenty-year-old wetback girl from Jalisco who possessed unusually large brown nipples, willingly performed deep-throat fellatio on him.

Catelena would come to him half an hour after he’d punched in her cell number. She would enter his large and elegantly appointed library, which contained three thousand books and was known to be the largest collection of first editions west of Chicago. Swan delighted in having his cock sucked here. He would let his eyes scan the shelves while Catelena serviced him. He felt he was sharing her with the masters.

His remarkable collection had been purchased from the Estelle Doheny estate. On his shelves were
Kapital
, edited by Friedrich Engels, the
Aeneid
by Virgil, translated by Gavin Douglas, the original
Ulysses
by James Joyce, published by Shakespeare & Company in 1922,
The Great Gatsby
by Fitzgerald, first state, in the rare dust jacket, and
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
—Keynes, John Maynard, London. Also in the rare dust jacket and inscribed by the author.

From time to time, while Catalena’s head pulsated in an up and down motion, he would even read to her.

On Fridays, his day to cum, he would not permit her to use her hands at all. He would grasp her by the back of her neck and force his piston down her throat again and again until the moment of completion presented itself. His eruption never entered the girl’s mouth but rather traveled directly down her throat.

Catalena was a decidedly friendly girl who spoke no English, and Swan made sure that she received three thousand dollars in cash every week in a sealed white envelope. He also made it his business that her mother and father were provided for nicely. The
patron
of Grey Fox Estate prided himself on family values.

At the end of his Friday sessions with Catalena, she would always look into his eyes and smile, then whisper, “Mucho gusto, señor.”

Swan’s daughter, Sydnye, had, for the five years prior, been the only one to supply him oral sex regularly. Sydnye had quite simply become a master at it. Then the girl, for her own reasons in her middle teens, had declared that she was a lesbian and her sexual encounters with her father had been terminated. A period of great turmoil between the two of them had commenced and Karl Swan now considered his daughter and the status of their relationship to be an irredeemable mess. He had made her wealthy and tried his best to stay out of her life, but the fact remained that his only offspring had become a psychiatric disaster. She consumed psychotropic drugs by the handful and carried with her any number of diagnoses that had necessitated her confinement for extended periods. The kid was, in the words of the street hoodlums in Los Angeles, a total whack job.

One of Swan’s favorite pastimes for the last twenty-five years, when he was not experimenting in his work room or abroad working on a film, was adding to his estate on Grey Fox. The grounds now contained seven buildings. He had participated in the design of each structure and worked closely with the architects and engineers. Of particular interest to him were the apartments that had been specifically constructed for his newly recruited staff. The main building contained eight units. The day when fresh arrivals came north from Mexico, they would enter and occupy their attractively designed and furnished new quarters, and the estate would host a celebration. Swan always made sure to be there. He had been fluent in Spanish for years and he liked to wear his sombrero on those fiesta occasions.

Plump little Raoul, his estate manager, had been his right-hand man for almost three decades. It was with Raoul that Swan placed his requests for new people as the human requirements arose. Through a network of associates, in three major regions of central and lower Mexico, Raoul would recruit their new residents. These persons would be made offers of an eventual path to American citizenship, given a two-thousand-dollar cash bonus, and told to maintain complete confidentiality regarding any and all negotiations. On their initial meeting with Raoul they would be assured that if they did well at their first assignment in America, they would be taught a trade and then move on to another wealthy client in the United States. This, of course, was untrue.

All new arrivals were assigned kitchen duties, gardening, horse tending, and appropriate menial tasks around the grounds. None of them would leave the property alive. Swan exerted complete control at his estate and all those who were in his employ were bound by a strict code of silence, and paid handsomely. All infractions were dealt with quickly and firmly.

Of standing importance to Karl Swan and Raoul was that no new helper would be over thirty-five years old and that the females and males should be of equal populations.

The patron of Grey Fox liked to spend a good deal of his time in the basement of the apartment quarters, in the private video-monitoring room.

Each of the eight dwellings in the building had concealed cameras in all its rooms and in the closets, and the images and accompanying sound feed these generated amused Swan and had become his personal reality-TV show.

Over the last dozen years, what the owner of Grey Fox Estates was primarily looking for in the hours he spent alone in the basement in front of his video screens, were budding romantic involvements among his new residents. Swan had developed an interest in observing sexual interactions—mating rituals. These fresh unions would have a significant impact on his later activities in his hobby room, under the stables. Two-person deaths had begun to enhance his personal enjoyment immeasurably.

Having one lover, restrained on his wall unit, watch the other undergo increasing pain only feet away on the center table, made for highly captivating drama. The surprises that materialized were invariably fascinating.

Swan had personally overseen the installation of five video cameras in his hobby room. Naturally, only state-of-the-art equipment was used. By virtue of his position in Hollywood and his ongoing fascination with the mediums of film and video, Swan had dedicated himself to learning to become an accomplished editor. He derived pleasure from meticulously crafting each one-hour segment into a theatrical quality event. After years of primarily single-unit extinction, relationship deaths had given Swan, to borrow a phrase, new life.

When both subjects entered the hobby room and were confined to their assigned apparatus (both of course had secure restraints), the proximity of the standing-position table to the horizontal platform offered a profusion of possibilities.

Watching the reaction of subject no. two (the standing person, and almost always the female) after, for instance, an eye removal or a limb excision from their loved one at only inches beyond arms length, could be exhilarating.

Swan would typically begin his questioning of the naked participants in a casual vein. An opening like, “How long have you two known each other?” might be standard to the female on the upright table. Then he would comment on their evolving romance and produce his handheld camera to play back one of their more exciting sexual encounters.

On the other hand, if on that day Swan felt more like getting right down to business, he might simply begin with: “I’ve been watching you two have sex through a hidden camera in your room. I’ve enjoyed what I’ve seen. I’ve been thinking of fucking you in the ass before I kill you.”

Swan might then explain the first of the session’s procedures to the female. “I’m going to start now on your boyfriend. While you watch I’ll insert these two twelve-inch needles into the shaft of his penis.”

If, for whatever reason, that didn’t produce the expected reaction, he might add: “But, you have a choice, my dear. I could use them on your breasts instead.”