Fear itself

8

It was close to two in the morning when Linda let herself into the house. She hung her coat on a peg in the vestibule; as she limped past the answering machine in the living room, she saw the message light blinking, and stopped to check it out.

Mr. Pender, this is Judge Heinz. I hope you’ve received my letter by now. There are a few matters we need to go over. Please give me a call at your convenience.

He’d left a number. The machine was on a small table near the vestibule, along with the wire basket full of mail Linda had been saving for Pender. She found a letter from Noble J. Heinz, Attorney at Law, LaFarge, Wisconsin, jotted the telephone number on the back of the envelope, and left it on the top of the pile. Pender was due back late tomorrow afternoon-Linda had no intention of getting out of bed until then.

Or answering any Bu-calls. She retrieved her cell from the pocket of her coat and called her own office to leave a message for Pool, to the effect that she would not be coming into work tomorrow, and that if there were any calls from media or brass or especially OPR, could Pool possibly, please, stall them, hold them off, tell them she was dead, anything-Linda would call her on Monday to explain. And, oh yeah, thanks for the invite, but she’d have to pass on Halloween, because she was going to bed now and intended to stay there, not just through Halloween, but probably through Thanksgiving as well.

And exhausted as she was, it was only the knowledge that she really could sleep in as long as she wanted tomorrow that gave Linda the incentive to prepare for bed, instead of just throwing herself across the bedcovers and collapsing in the rancid clothes she’d been wearing for over eighteen hours.

Linda undressed in the bathroom, while seated on the toilet, pulling her slacks down over her shoes and tossing her dirty clothes into the mildewy rattan hamper. Then she washed up a little, brushed her teeth, and crossed the hall to her bedroom wearing only her shoes and braces, and leaning even more heavily than usual on her cane. Tomorrow, she reminded herself, she’d have to start wearing a bathrobe for the trip across the hall. Tonight, though, she was too tired even to pull on a nightie-she untied her shoes, slipped them off along with the braces, crawled under the covers naked, closed her eyes, and was asleep within minutes.

A dream. It had to be a dream. Simon Childs standing over the bed, holding a revolver in one hand, hiding the other hand behind his back. But not the Childs from the elevator video, with the self-assured manner and the easy slouch, nor the groomed and handsome Childs of the DMV photo, looking better with his silver hair and dapper ’stash than anybody has a right to on their driver’s license.

No, this was a ragged, haggard caricature of Childs-no hair, no mustache, wearing an unzipped black leather bomber jacket over a hideous sport shirt of mustard yellow and dung brown.

“Where’s your boyfriend, Skairdykat?”

Still clinging to the hope that it was only a dream, Linda tried to open her eyes. They were already open. She closed them instead, heard the springs creak and felt the mattress shift. When she opened her eyes again, he was sitting on the edge of the bed, grinning like the happiest madman in the asylum.

“I asked you where your boyfriend was. If you don’t answer me, you’ll have to answer to my friend here.”

Slowly he drew his hand from behind his back. Linda was not surprised to see that he was grasping a snake by the neck. This was her dream: what else would he have had in his hand? She tried to draw back, but with his weight atop the covers, she found herself pinned beneath them. Not very dreamlike, she thought, trying to wriggle free-not very dreamlike at all.

“You’re dead,” she told him. “They found your body.”

“Keep telling yourself that,” he replied, slipping the revolver into the waistband of his high-water slacks. “It’ll make the game more fun. But until we get started, you can avoid a good deal of unnecessary suffering by simply telling me where your boyfriend is, and when he’s expected back.”

Unnecessary suffering. Dream or no dream, Linda didn’t like the sound of that; dream or no dream, she decided to play along. “I don’t have a boyfriend, but if you mean Agent Pender, he’s on vacation-I haven’t heard from him in nearly a week.”

“My misunderstanding. And when is Agent Pender expected home?” There was nothing in Simon’s voice to suggest sarcasm-or that he had tugged the covers down to Linda’s waist.

“I don’t know.”

“I find that hard to believe.” He looked up from her naked torso, searched her eyes.

Linda held his gaze. Though those were not a pair of eyes you wanted to be looking into while you were trying to hold on to your sanity, neither were the snake’s-she could see its tongue flickering in and out at the edge of her peripheral vision.

He brushed his fingers across her stomach. “I’m still finding that hard to believe.”

“Listen,” she said, angered by the intimacy of the touch, “if I were expecting him momentarily, do you think I’d tell you?”

The hand began traveling up, past her chest; his long fingers gripped her chin and turned her head toward the snake. “Eventually,” he said.

9

Simon triumphant! But even he was a little surprised by the ease with which all the pieces were falling into place. He shouldn’t have been, he told himself: the great ones always make it look easy. Naturally the cops had bought the charred-corpse scenario. The key was suggestion, the planting of an assumption that became a fulfilled expectation. He didn’t have to convince them that the body was his-they’d convinced themselves.

Nor did Simon deny there was an element of luck in all this. He was lucky the Harley had been available-it would have been a lot harder to hide the Lexus in the woods. He was lucky, too, that Skairdykat had failed to lock the front door behind her-but luck favors patience as well as preparation. Arriving before she did, having the patience to wait, to watch the empty house, instead of just breaking in, meant there were no signs of forced entry that might have alarmed her into locking up-or not entering in the first place.

As for the game itself, Simon had never doubted his abilities. Unnecessary suffering… eventually: more suggestion, gentle guidance. Simon’s theory, Simon’s genius: fear comes from within. You can’t drive it in like a railroad spike; you have to plant it like a seed and nurture it until it blossoms.

True fear, however, is a bloom that demands time, patience, attention, and concentration, none of which Simon could provide until he knew when and how Pender was expected to return. And yet the traditional mainstay of the torturer-the infliction of pain, either gross or subtle-was not available to him. Not only was pain itself anodyne to fear, but the fear of pain was a mere avoidance reflex, like a worm shrinking from a hot needle, and as such, relatively uninteresting to Simon.

Still, he reasoned (and despite his having logged only a few hours of sleep since Ogallala, thanks to the crosstops he found his mind was as sharp as it had been all night), if the man wasn’t home at two in the morning, he probably wasn’t coming home. Even if he did, Simon would hear the car coming down the long drive, and still have the element of surprise on his side.

More likely, though, he’d have all night to play with Skairdykat. So he let her slip on a bathrobe-naked, she looked like a concentration camp victim; Simon much preferred Dorie’s type-and helped her into the living room, where he laid a crackling fire with last winter’s dry logs. Once again, it was all so easy: no need to tie her up; she wasn’t going anywhere without her cane and braces. He didn’t even have to gag her: this time of night there wasn’t a living soul within a mile of Tinsman’s Lock.

“Kind of chilly tonight,” he said, sitting down next to her with the canvas travel bag on his lap, and the snake in the bag. “Does it ever snow around here?”

“I don’t know. I just moved here, myself.”

“I know-Gloria told me. By the way, do you know how she died?”

By the way? By the fucking way? Linda ignored the question, stared into the fire.