He partially covered the telephone’s mouthpiece with his hand, making sure he could be heard through the line. “What kind of pizza do you guys like?” he said, getting dull stares in return, at least from the two other conscious people in the room. They didn’t seem to care about pizza. Neither did the dead guy or the unconscious one. “Pepperoni? Sounds good,” he pretended to answer.
“Did you hear that?” he said into the line. “We’ve reached a consensus that pepperoni is the way to go. I’m more of a veggie man myself, but in the interest of demonstrating that I can play well with others, I’ve decided to toe the company line. So you go ahead and work on getting that food for us, and when you’ve done that, you call back and we’ll discuss the next step. How does that sound?”
There was a short pause on the other end of the line. Finally Lieutenant Sanders—Bob—said, “Of course we can get some pizza for you. But I’m sure you realize we will need something in return, some gesture of good faith on your part. Perhaps you could release one of the people inside the house in exchange for the food?”
“We’ll talk about that when the pizza actually arrives. It’s been a pleasure working with you, Bob. Remember, no stupid moves. Let’s all try to row in the same direction. Talk to you soon, Bob.” He placed the handset gently down on the receiver and turned toward the little bitch on the couch, happy he had gained some time and excited he could now get back to work.
CHAPTER 50
The pain in Cait’s arm was excruciating. It felt as though she had jammed the entire limb into a roaring fire in Victoria’s fireplace. She had anchored the long flap of skin in place with her left hand before the crazy bastard Milo duct-taped her arms to her belly, and as soon as he walked away to answer the telephone, she lifted her body into a sitting position.
She was able to protect the injury a bit, at least for the time being, huddling as much of her body around it as possible. She knew it wasn’t going to matter, that the moment he returned he would force her back into a horizontal position and resume his ghoulish work, but it was a reflexive reaction to the trauma inflicted on her body and one she could not have prevented even if she wanted to.
In the kitchen, Milo replaced the phone on its cradle and hurried back, looking a bit preoccupied but smiling down at her like a doctor who had been called away on an emergency. “I’m sorry for the interruption,” he said sweetly. “Those people can be real pests. Now, where were we? Do you remember?”
The terror returned with a vengeance and Cait babbled into her gag, trying to beg for her life, trying to tell him she would do whatever he wanted if only he would stop peeling the skin from her body, but of course it was no use. She could not make herself understood and knew it wouldn’t matter even if she could. She began hyperventilating, panting into her gag, feeling faint and light-headed, almost wishing she would pass out so the pain and fear would just go away.
No such luck.
Milo reached out and placed his strong hands on her shoulders and forced her back down on the couch. The moment he let go, her body sprang back up into the sitting position in a desperate attempt to protect her arm.
He made a disappointed tsk-tsk sound with his tongue and said, “Apparently you’ve decided not to cooperate. That’s unfortunate, as you’ll soon discover. Normally, your reticence would translate into just that much more fun for me, but since we’re under a mounting time crunch, I’ll have to handle things a bit differently than I’d like.” Then he ripped the duct tape off Cait’s bare belly without so much as a word of warning. Tiny flecks of skin came with the tape, bonded to the super-sticky surface like flies to flypaper but Cait barely noticed. All she could think about was what was to come.
She lifted her injured arm over her head, left hand still clamped over the awful injury, in a desperate attempt to remove it from Milo’s reach. He fumbled on the floor for his duct tape and ripped off another long strip, holding it in front of Cait’s eyes with an evil smile.
She knew he was waiting for a reaction and willed herself not to give it to him, but she simply couldn’t stop herself. She whimpered and moaned into her gag and he watched for a moment, eyes glazed. Cait noted dispassionately in a dusty corner of her brain that he was getting off on her fear and was disgusted by the knowledge.
He sat and watched her, doing nothing, lost in his reverie, stupid smile creasing his face, and then something seemed to click in his head and he pushed her roughly onto her back once more. He grabbed her left arm and slammed it against the back of the couch, then wound the duct tape over it and around the couch’s wooden frame, effectively immobilizing her.
The flap of skin he had created with his knife before the telephone rang hung loosely off her arm now, wet blood dripping onto her belly. The flap was maybe eight inches long and a couple of inches wide—a tiny landing strip carved into her arm—and Cait stared at it with renewed horror as the pain re-intensified, the nerve endings in her arm screaming and complaining and begging for relief.
She panted and moaned and cried into her gag and watched her captor with wild eyes, praying for Kevin to leap out of his chair, miraculously healed, duct-tape bindings flying off him like in a Hollywood movie, or for the dead police officer to spring suddenly back to life and save the day.
But none of that happened. Kevin lay unmoving and pale next to Victoria, and the police officer remained just as dead as he had been since Milo dropped him in the doorway like so much cordwood.
Then the determined psychotic got to work, muttering something about time pressure and pizza deliveries, of all things, and how it was so unfair. Cait didn’t understand what the hell he was talking about, but forgot all about it a second later, because that was when he placed the blade of his knife against her skin next to the landing strip he had already made and began carving another.
He drew deftly back on the blade and lifted another strip of skin right off her arm, maybe a half-inch thinner than the first but just as long, and the pain ratcheted up again, she hadn’t thought it possible, but God help her, it was. Cait wailed into her gag and bucked against her bindings and she felt the knife dig into the meat of her arm as a result but she continued to struggle as she lost what little remained of her self-control. Her arm burned and throbbed in fiery agony and she forgot all about Victoria and Kevin and even Milo the Butcher himself, as her entire being was fixed on the damage being done to her right arm.
The room turned red around the edges of her vision and a buzzing began in her ears—it sounded as though an airliner was taking off right in the living room—and somewhere deep inside her head Cait knew she was about to lose consciousness. She was going to pass out from the intense pain and she welcomed the relief. She willed herself to lose consciousness, to escape this torture. Whether she lived or died was irrelevant, the only thing that mattered was somehow putting an end to this terrible burning agony consuming her right forearm.
But she didn’t pass out. She wasn’t so lucky. Through the pounding red pain she watched her torturer do his gruesome work. He completed his second pass with the knife, finishing the second tiny runway right next to the first, and examined his handiwork with a critical eye. He was breathing heavily; sweat dotting his skin just above his upper lip.
He glanced at her face and smiled when he noticed her watching him. “Looks good,” he said, as though they were discussing tomorrow’s weather forecast or the chances of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers reaching the playoffs.
And then he spoke and sent a chill through Cait’s overtaxed brain. She hadn’t thought things could get any worse. Surely this was it. Surely he was done. Surely he would get up and walk away and leave her alone now.