Ragged Man (35 page)

And the soothing warm water called to him to close his eyes and relax. Maybe Rick would come home in time. Maybe he’d fight and kill the Ragged Man and come upstairs and save him before noon, but maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe the timer wouldn’t work, but it probably would. Maybe he should lay back in the warm water and give up, but maybe he shouldn’t.

He didn’t want to be found naked.

He looked down at the radio and stretched his feet toward it till the noose was digging into his neck, choking him. There was no way. The closest he could get was still a foot away, twelve big inches.

He decided to try for the mirror again. He scooted back, easing the noose and brought his knees to his chest again, rocked on his butt and smashed his feet into the wall. Better luck. His foot banged the wall just under the soap dish, as searing pain splashed up his leg.

He screamed against the tape, then clenched his teeth. A winner never quits. He pulled his knees back till they almost touched his nose, straightened his legs, bent his foot back, rocked his body and this time, instead of smashing his battered feet into the wall, he faced it, with his foot on the wall above the soap dish. Then he inched it down till his bent back foot was resting on the top of it.

He closed his eyes and jerked his foot down, managing to just touch the mirror, before the stretching pain caused him to relax and his legs fall back into the tub. He was downhearted. He had given it his best, his very best effort. Now there truly was no hope. He was destined to die in the bathtub, alone and naked. It wasn’t fair, he thought, to have a means of escape so close. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair. Then he looked at the soap dish and gave a quick gasp of surprise.

It was empty.

He had succeeded after all. He started to feel around the tub for the mirror. It didn’t take long for him to discover that it had fallen out of the reach of his bound hands. If he lay his legs out flat against the tub he could feel it between the white porcelain and the back of his right knee. Too far to reach by hand and too close for him to use his feet to pull it toward him.

But he had come too far to give up. He raised his legs and scooted down as far as the noose would let him. Then he lowered his legs onto the small mirror. This time it was sitting a little higher under his leg and when he scooted back, letting the faucet dig into his back, he dragged the mirror a little closer to his hands.

He repeated the process, raising his legs, scooting toward the radio, lowering his legs, scooting back toward the faucet two more times, and after the third effort he was able to reach and grasp the mirror.

He closed his eyes and tensed up as he smashed it against the porcelain, breaking it into several pieces and cutting a deep gash into his right thumb. The stabbing pain and immediate red coloration of the water sent thunderclaps of terror through him. He had seen a movie once where a woman had slashed her wrists and bled to death in a bathtub. The red tinged water in the movie bathtub looked just like the red tinged water in the real bathtub.

Frantically, he felt around for a piece of glass big enough to saw through the rope and discovered to his horror that there were several tiny, very sharp slivers of glass covering the bottom of the tub and every movement he made sent one of the slivers stinging into his skin, but there were no pieces large enough. He had expended the effort to get the mirror and cut himself for nothing.

All for nothing.

* * *

Sam Storm went down the stairs with heavy feet and dark thoughts, head bent in sadness. The Black Beauty was dead. When its spirit left its body, Storm felt a sense of loss that killed much of his resolve, and he began to feel uneasy. He had done terrible things, foul unspeakable deeds, things against the laws of God and Man, things that violated his very nature, but they were things he had enjoyed doing, wrong as they were, God help him, he had enjoyed it. Part of him wanted to quit, but he had to go through with what he had started. There was no other way.

Downstairs, he went to the coffee table in the living room, opened his satchel and took out the Bowie knife. He ran his thumb along the blade as if testing the sharp edge, but a force he didn’t understand made him apply too much pressure and the knife sliced through to the bone, sending a wakeup call of sharp pain from the sharp blade.

The sight of his own blood snapped him back to his purpose. He wrapped his bloody hand around the hilt and walked through the kitchen, out the back door and down the landing, stomping on every step as he headed toward the pigeon cage.

The birds quieted their billing and cooing as he left the landing and stopped completely as he neared the cage. By the time he was standing in front of the loft, they were cautiously eyeing him, silent sentinels alert at their posts.

What was there about him, he asked himself, that made the birds eye him so suspiciously.

“
I’m not going to hurt you,” he lied.

The birds responded by cocking their heads, as if listening intently.

“
I just want a look.” He wondered what it was about pigeons that could fascinate a young boy. When he was a child his parents hadn’t allowed pets and he hadn’t missed them. Not until the Black Beauty had come into his life. The black animal had been the first pet, if he could call it a pet, that he’d ever had. He had been able to understand the animal as he’d never been able to understand a human. The animal had been more friend than any he had ever known, and he missed it.

Then something bucked up his courage, or rather reinforced whatever it was that caused him to do the horrible things. He eased the door of the loft open and slid into the cage, making sure none of the birds got out.

With a methodical and mercenary deliberation, he systematically slaughtered all twenty-six of J.P. Donovan’s pigeons, by using the knife, like a giant sword, against their tiny heads. The birds, frozen in place, sat like ducks in a shooting gallery with the motor off, waiting for the blade to fall.

Then, with the bodies of the headless birds and their heads strewn about the sandy bottom of the loft and his feet covered in their blood, Sam Storm stood and contemplated what he had done and what he was about to do. He had killed so many and part of him wanted to go on killing, but another part wanted to stop, to fade into the sunset. Jamaica maybe, or the south of France. But before he could do any fading, he had to finish Rick Gordon.

He stepped through the bloody mess and exited the loft, not bothering to close the door, and stalked back into the house, leaving blood-red footprints in his wake. There was plenty of the red stuff left on his shoes for the carpet to soak up when he entered the dining room on his way to the stairs.

On the second floor, he poked his head into the bathroom to check on the boy. He smiled as the frightened youth looked up at him from bloody bath water with his eyes wide in horror.

“
I killed your birds,” he said. Then he went back downstairs to wait for Rick Gordon.

* * *

Rick Gordon pulled up the driveway. He wanted to kick the front door down and go in like Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding, with a gun in every hand, all of them blazing, but he knew that would be stupid.

He shut the engine off, looked at the house and listened. It was too quiet. He got out of the car, keeping his eyes locked on the front door, went around to the passenger side, took out the forty-five, ejected the spent magazine, reloading with the fresh one, before shoving it between his Levi’s and the small of his back. He picked up Lincoln Hewett’s thirty-eight and reloaded from a box of shells he’d found in Lincoln’s glovebox, then he stuffed it into a back pocket. Next he picked up the riot gun and jacked five shells into it, also found in Lincoln’s glovebox. Then clutching the shotgun, he started toward the house.

He approached the front door, alert and cautious, taking the steps up to the porch, like a soldier walking into an ambush. He turned the knob slowly, threw the door open when the latch clicked and leapt into the living room, diving onto the carpet and rolling toward the coffee table.

He met no resistance. He got up, trying to shake some of the fear. Maybe he had been wrong and there was no killer at home. He started to relax, when he heard a crashing noise from behind, near the fireplace.

He turned and blasted two rounds out of the pump gun, one into the mirror above the fireplace and one through the adjoining window, blowing the glass out. He jumped back as a small, black kitten darted past and ran through the dining room into the kitchen. The crashing noise had been caused by the cat knocking a soapstone sculpture off the mantle above the fireplace.

A scraping noise from somewhere in back of him sent a warning tingling up his spine. He turned and pumped a round into Ann’s antique rocker, blowing a twelve inch hole through the straight wooden back, sending splinters and pellets into the wall behind.

Someone had been in the house. When he left, he had locked it tight. There was no possible way that cat could have gotten in by itself. He turned toward the fireplace, heard a loud tortured cat-kitten scream from behind and once again he whirled around, pumping the shotgun, shooting from the hip.

The first shell smashed into the dining room table and the second blew apart the television, exploding it in a hail of sound and glass, causing him to pump and dry fire. The riot gun was empty.

The cat darted across the room and he threw the shotgun at it, missing by five or six feet. He cursed. Somehow the kitten had caused him to empty the riot gun, depriving him of his best weapon.

The kitten dashed into the kitchen. Rick decided to follow. He drew the forty-five and moved across the carpet toward the dining room. He stepped past the damaged rocker and the destroyed television, stepping around broken glass. In the dining room, he smiled at the crystal vase sitting on the center of the badly mauled table. Ann bought the vase in Prague, and during her life, had kept it full of flowers. By some miracle it survived the shotgun blast to the table and he took it as a sign that he would survive, too.

He skirted the table, eyes on the vase, and something hard, soft, sticky and wet slammed into the side of his face with gale force.

He jumped back from the headless pigeon as he emptied all thirteen shots from the forty-five into the empty kitchen, screaming louder than the deadly roar of the bucking pistol. When he was out of ammunition and silence again reigned, he realized the kitchen was empty. Whoever threw the bird had used his pitching arm from the back landing, sending the headless Dark Dancer flying in through the back door, through the kitchen, into the dining room.

He dropped the forty-five onto the carpet and withdrew the thirty-eight from his hip pocket and warily entered the kitchen to find that he had killed both the microwave and the blender and had severely wounded the refrigerator.

* * *

J.P. heard a car pull into the drive downstairs and felt a surge of short-lived relief. His first thought was that his mother had come to save him, but his second thought quickly pushed the first aside. If his mother came into Rick’s house the Ragged Man would get her, and who could tell what horrible things he would do to her. He hoped she would back the car out of the drive and go away. His heart sank when he heard the engine cut off.

Only moments ago he thought things couldn’t get worse. He sat in the water that wasn’t warm anymore, looking at the digital clock, frozen in fright. At 8:44 the Ragged Man poked his head in the door, stinging him with a quick penetrating stare that scared the living shit out of him, and now his mother had arrived just in time to be the Ragged Man’s next victim.

He sat in the water and listened to the silence. If there was only a way out. Again he looked around the bathroom. There had to be something. There had to be. He figured a way out of the trunk against impossible odds and anybody that could figure their way out of that, could figure their way out of this. In the trunk he had only minutes to act. Here he had till noon, but maybe not that long. Maybe the Ragged Man had lied and was going to kill him sooner. And maybe he was going to kill his mom now.

His heart screamed as he struggled, trying to slip his hands through the ropes, but they wouldn’t give.

He started to get an idea and a glimmer of hope began to inspire him. Then he heard two loud explosions. He stopped his struggle, confused and scared. Had the Ragged Man killed his mother or had his mother killed the Ragged Man? He screamed against the tape, but he knew the weak sound wasn’t able to penetrate the bathroom walls.

Another explosion followed by a loud screech and two more explosions. It sounded like a battle was going on downstairs. It wasn’t his mother down there. It was Rick. Rick had come to save him. Rick was fighting the Ragged Man. He hoped that the Ragged Man was losing and losing big time.

He checked the clock. 8:47. A lot had happened in just three minutes, he thought, and he was beginning to hope that maybe he would be saved after all, when he heard several rapid gunshots, followed by more silence.

Chapter Twenty-four

Rick, thirty-eight in hand, ran through the kitchen to the back landing. Panting, he studied the landscape and saw nothing out of the ordinary, and again he thought it was too quiet, but he couldn’t put his mind on what was wrong.

He ran his eyes over the edge of his property to the woods beyond, and then he trained them on the Donovan house. Judy’s back door was open.