Urge To Kill. John Lutz

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СКАЧАТЬ she managed to turn her head slightly, before the pain stopped her. She saw that she was in what looked like a large basement. Gray concrete walls, wooden support beams, exposed steam and water pipes, round ductwork with shreds of insulation hanging from some of it like grotesque stalactites.

      Asbestos? Could be dangerous.

      The pain became unbearable, and she tried not to move at all other than to blink away her tears.

      In the glimpse she’d had of herself, confirmed by the lack of constriction on her upper arms and her legs, she knew she was nude.

      Someone—What’s his name? I need to know it so I can plead, beg for him to stop whatever’s going to happen!—someone had done this to her, put something in her drink, perhaps. Something had caused her to black out, to awaken here, dangling from her bound wrists and ankles like a…She didn’t want to know what. Or didn’t want to think about it.

      Tears welled again in her eyes and tracked downward along her temples, beneath her hairline. Tickling as if in cruel and obscene jest.

      Motion caught her gaze, and there he was in her pain-blurred vision, the man from last night. She wasn’t surprised to see him. He had to be responsible for this.

      He was walking toward her, also nude, like a figure in a dream. Only it wasn’t a dream. She could only pray that it might be. That she might wake up a second time, in her apartment, in her bed. Safe.

      When she saw the knife in the man’s hand her heart leaped. She did try to struggle then, but couldn’t so much as squirm. Her hyperextended arms and legs were like lifeless tense cables preventing her from crashing to the concrete floor.

      She saw that the man had an erection, and at that moment he reached up with the blade and must have sliced through the rope binding her wrists to the horizontal beam, because her upper body suddenly dropped.

      She flinched as she swung downward. Surely her head was going to crack open on the hard floor.

      But her body swung like a pendulum, swiveling slightly, her hair brushing the floor with each pass. Though her wrists were bound together, her arms were free now. She reached over her head—which was downward—and her fingertips scraped the concrete floor. There was no pain though, only numbness.

      As she swung she saw something circular beneath her, a drain cover.

      She dragged her numbed fingertips over the rough floor again, hearing them scrape, feeling her nails bend back and tear, as she tried to stop her body from swinging. If only she could stop she might support some of her weight by pressing her fingertips against the floor, reduce the pain in her ankles. The full burden of her weight was pulling on her ankles now, and she was swinging in lessening arcs. The rope must be digging into her flesh. She could feel something warm trickling down her calves, past her knees, along the insides of her thighs toward her crotch.

      Blood!

      The rope must have cut deeply into her ankles. She flashed a vision of her twisted, torn flesh.

      Oh, God!

      There was a sudden burning sensation on the right side of her neck. Then on the left. She caught a glimpse of a bloody knife blade and knew the man had slit her throat.

      It wasn’t her throat, though. It couldn’t be.

      Then she accepted that it was and lifted her arms, probed with her fingers, felt warm blood and something else.

      It was when she heard the trickle of her blood in the drain that the real horror engulfed her. Her life was draining away, her remaining time, her remaining everything!

      She panicked and tried to suck in air through her nose, and managed to raise her hands enough to rip the tape from her mouth. She drew in a breath to scream but inhaled only blood.

      The man had waited until the pendulum arc of Vera’s swinging body narrowed and was almost stopped before he cut the large carotid arteries of her neck.

      He watched her.

      Watched her.

      After she’d tried to scream, he’d drawn the blade across her taut throat.

      She wasn’t alive when her body slowed to describe a small elliptical orbit above the drain and finally dangled motionless from the beam.

      Nor was she alive to see the man, showered and neatly dressed, leave the building’s basement, switching off the lights behind him.

      She’d been dead for several hours when he returned to make sure she was completely bled out.

      4

      In the feeble light from his car’s outmoded headlights, retired NYPD homicide detective Frank Quinn didn’t see the damned thing. Not soon enough, anyway.

      His old black Lincoln Town Car jounced and rattled over a pothole the size of a bomb crater, and he wondered if he’d chipped a tooth. He lifted what was left of his Cuban cigar from the ashtray and chomped down on it to use it as a mouthpiece so it might at least pad another such impact of upper and lower jaws.

      He knew cigars were bad for him and had pretty much given them up, but the Cubans were too much of a temptation. Or maybe part of the appeal was that they were illegal, and he used to be a cop.

      He smiled, knowing a cop was never something you used to be. He’d always figured small transgressions forestalled larger ones, so the cigars were okay.

      Quinn cursed silently at traffic on Broadway as he jockeyed the big car north toward West Seventy-fifth Street and his apartment. The windows were up, and the air conditioner was humming away in its struggle with the hot summer evening. There was a slight persistent vibration of metal on metal—possibly a bearing in the blower fan motor going out. Quinn made a mental note to have it looked at. This would be a bad time of year for the car to lose its air-conditioning.

      A traffic signal changed a block up, and a string of cars near the curb accelerated and made the sharp right turn onto the cross street. This created a break in the heavy traffic, and Quinn gratefully took advantage of all that barren pavement before him and ran the car up to about forty-five—a fast clip for most Manhattan streets.

      Feeling pretty good, he puffed on his cigar and almost smiled. This was his poker night with five other retired or almost retired NYPD cops, and he’d won over a hundred dollars. It hadn’t been a high-stakes game, so he was far and away the big winner. Everybody but Quinn bitched when they stopped playing, as agreed upon, with the last hand dealt before ten o’clock sharp. Quinn always felt unreasonably triumphant after coming out ahead at poker, even though at the level of skill where he was playing luck had everything to do with the outcome. Still, his life had left him at a point where he took his victories where he could find them.

      Light glinted brightly for a moment in the Lincoln’s left outside mirror. Headlights behind him. Despite the car’s brisk speed, the trailing traffic was catching up. Quinn squinted and checked the rearview mirror, but didn’t see much. The thick cigar smoke was doing something to the rear window, fogging it up so he couldn’t see out.

      Is it doing that to my lungs?

      He could see well enough to know the car behind was too damned close.

      Tailgaters СКАЧАТЬ