This was unacceptable. She would have to be dealt with, and in the strongest possible manner. But first things first. He had a job to do.
“I already called the police,” the woman said, interrupting his train of thought, her voice unwavering and stronger than he would have expected, given the situation.
“No you didn’t. Only the most paranoid of crazy bitches calls the cops just because someone knocks on their front door. And you’re not the most paranoid of crazy bitches, now, are you? You might be close, but you’re not the most paranoid.”
She said nothing, slumping to the floor, taking the weight of her body off her arms and legs. Milo took a step toward her and she flinched as if expecting to be hit. Her eyes were locked onto his hands, growing almost comically wide. “I have no desire to hurt you,” he said, wondering whether the lie sounded as transparent to the old bitch as it did to him. “In fact, you have to do just one thing to ensure your safety and if you do it, I promise you will not be harmed.”
“Wh-what’s that on your hands?” she asked as if he hadn’t even spoken.
He glanced down at them and saw faded remnants of Rae Ann the Schoolgirl Hooker’s blood. He had scrubbed them conscientiously at the Y, but with the kind of close work he had been doing back at the tenement, it was damned near impossible to wash all traces of the incriminating stains away. And he had been in a hurry. He thought he had done a fairly decent job removing the worst of the blood, but maybe he hadn’t been that thorough after all, since it was the first thing the old lady had seen.
“What is it?” the gun-toting bitch repeated as he stared down at his hands as though they belonged to someone else.
“I’m a butcher,” he said, pleased with his little private joke. “Occupational hazard.”
Now the panic exploded in the woman’s eyes, and Milo flashed back to his fun with Rae Ann. The expression on this old lady’s face was remarkably similar to Rae Ann’s. The bitch rose up as if to scuttle backward some more before clearly coming to the conclusion it was pointless.
“Anyway, as I was saying,” Milo continued, “I want you to do one simple thing for me and then I’ll leave you alone. I can’t promise I’ll let you go, but I can tell you that you won’t be harmed. And that’s a hell of a lot more than you deserve after what you were going to do to me with that little peashooter you had in your pocket. If you ask me, it’s a pretty good deal. It’s certainly the best offer you’re going to get out of me.”
“What do I have to do?” The woman’s voice trembled as she spoke and Milo felt a surge of excitement, the kind he always got when he demonstrated his dominance. The old bag wasn’t as tough as she seemed to think she was.
“You’re going to call the young woman who visited you earlier—”
“—I can’t—”
“—and you’re going to tell her to get her pretty little ass back here,” Milo finished, ignoring the interruption.
“I can’t do that.” The woman was shaking her head obstinately. It was as if Milo had asked her to negotiate world peace. Or change the oil in his fucking car. Did this dim bitch not understand that he was in charge?
“You can and you will.”
Tears welled up in the woman’s eyes. “I don’t have her number.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“I don’t have it.”
“I SAW HER GIVE IT TO YOU!” Milo screamed, dropping to his knees next to her and shouting into her face, spittle spraying, rage bubbling up inside him.
The woman groaned and buried her face in her hands. “I can’t do it.” She began to cry, obviously expecting to be hit or kicked.
Milo nodded, saying nothing. This was ridiculous. Time was passing and he wasn’t any closer now to getting that fucking little whore back here than he had been when he walked through the old bat’s door. He shrugged his backpack off his shoulder and it fell to the floor with a metallic clank.
The woman cringed like a dog that had been beaten its whole life and peeked through her spread fingers. “What’s in there?” she whispered.
It seemed to Milo as if she had a pretty good idea what was inside his backpack and was simply awaiting confirmation, although how she could know was beyond him, and in any event he wasn’t going to play her little game. “You need to stop asking so many fucking questions and start answering a few. I’m running out of patience and if we don’t begin making some progress—and I mean NOW—I’m going to hurt you, and in ways you can’t even begin to imagine.”
The woman covered her face with her hands again like an ostrich burying its head in the sand. Milo almost laughed. The biddy was stupid as well as old if she thought that was going to make a damned bit of difference. He unzipped the main pocket of the backpack and retrieved one of his favorite tools. The pliers felt comfortable in his hand and he immediately began snapping them briskly, confident the staccato beat would get the woman’s attention.
He was right. She dropped her hands and her eyes snapped open, focusing on the pliers like they had been focused on his hands a moment ago. “Get the phone number,” he said softly, his voice barely a whisper. It contained a menace that didn’t need volume to be understood.
She shook her head mutely, terror in her eyes.
Milo reached out, the movement lightning-quick. He grabbed her hand and held it like this was some perverted May/December Hollywood love scene. Harold and Maude for the twenty-first century. He selected a finger at random, noting with amusement that her nails were short and stubby like a dude’s. But it didn’t matter. He wasn’t concerned with aesthetics. Effectiveness was the goal.
He dug the nose of the pliers under the nail of her pointer finger, pushing hard, burrowing into the tender flesh, making sure there was plenty of nail to grip. The woman sucked in a shocked breath and began to scream as Milo yanked, ripping the nail from the tip of her finger in one smooth motion. He clamped his hand over her mouth—he was pretty sure the neighborhood was empty, but why take chances?—and said again through gritted teeth, “I want that telephone number.”
CHAPTER 31
The knob turned and the door opened with a muted squeal, and Franklin Marchand stepped into the mess that constituted Strange Dude’s “home.” Trash was everywhere: fast-food burger boxes, crumpled-up candy wrappers, and empty cans and bottles were strewn over virtually every inch of the floor’s surface. It was disgusting, enough to make even a homeless man used to sleeping in a garbage-strewn alleyway retch.
But it didn’t make Franklin retch. In fact, he barely noticed the mess, his gaze passing over the trash in the blink of an eye, settling instead on a strange contraption erected in the middle of the room. It was a chair, big and blocky, and it had been bolted to the floor with steel bracing straps.
And secured to the chair was what looked like—
—Oh, God, it looked like—
—Oh good Lord, Franklin thought, because although he had stopped believing in a benevolent God just about the time he lost his job and his home and his family and his future, for the life of him he couldn’t think of another phrase that fit the situation. Oh good Lord, he thought, that’s a girl, or at least it used to be a girl until she was stabbed and slashed and, oh good Lord, skinned alive, but now she was not alive, no, she was quite obviously dead and had just as obviously died in a tremendous amount of pain, in gut-wrenching pain, in agony really, Franklin could see that as plain as day, and he took two staggering steps toward the chair without thinking because the girl, oh good Lord the girl, she was skinned alive and—