But this wasn’t it. He wasn’t done. He didn’t get up and walk away. Instead he smiled that devil’s smile and said, “What do you say we work on the other arm now?”
Cait began screaming anew as he reached up and pulled off the strip of tape anchoring her left arm to the back of the couch. He held her arm firmly with both hands as she tried to yank it away, anticipating her actions. He was incredibly strong, or maybe she was just so weakened by now that it wasn’t a fair fight. Either way, her struggle was short and it was over quickly and within seconds he had secured her arm—a fresh new canvas for his sick sculpture-work—over his lap.
Cait felt the knife blade sink into her flesh once again as the telephone began to ring in the background and someone cranked the volume of the buzzing in her ears to the max and the pain increased exponentially and Cait screamed into her gag and it felt like her head was going to blast right off her body and—
—and finally, mercifully, Cait Connelly lost consciousness.
CHAPTER 51
Milo had known the telephone would ring again and had likewise suspected it would happen at precisely the wrong time. After all, how long did it take to order a couple of fucking pizzas? On the bright side, his little torture toy had just passed out—he must be losing his touch; normally he could keep girls conscious for much longer—so it wasn’t like he was being forced to stop in the middle of his fun to answer the damned thing.
“What is it?” he barked into the phone, not bothering with the silly gamesmanship of the last call.
“Hello, Milo, this is Bob. Remember me?”
“Of course I remember you, Bob, we just spoke a few minutes ago, for chrissakes. Is there a point to this call? We’re all pretty busy in here enjoying ourselves and I’d like to get back to the party.”
“Of course, I understand. I just thought you might like to know the pizzas are on their way and will be here in the next few minutes. Is there anything else you think you might need?”
Jesus, Milo thought. Just my luck to get stuck with some fucking Martha Stewart party-planner-in-training. “No,” he said, trying to keep his voice calm. “The pizza will be plenty.”
“Okay, fine. Maybe now would be a good time to discuss how we’re going to get it into the house. I can have one of my men deliver it to the door, but I’ll need your assurance that you won’t take any action to harm him when he does. It would be a real career-ender for me to have a man killed delivering pizza, you know what I mean?”
Milo shook his head. Was this guy for real? “Don’t worry,” he said. “I promise I won’t hurt your precious police officer. I certainly don’t want to be responsible for ending your car—”
BOOM!
The entire house shook on its decades-old foundation as the front door was blown off its hinges. Instantly Milo knew he had been played for a sucker. There was no pizza, there was never going to be any pizza, the pig cops had been playing him just as he thought he had been playing them. Goddammit!
He rushed from the kitchen back into the living room, vaguely aware as he crossed the end of the hallway of the ruined door lying flat on the floor and a cluster of SWAT team members, suited up and armed for bear, gathered on the small front landing in the process of storming the house.
This sucked. He was not going to get to finish skinning the little bitch alive, but if he was going down, he would make good and goddamned sure he took her with him. Undoubtedly the rescue pigs would exercise at least a modicum of caution; hopefully that would give him the few seconds he would need to finish the girl.
She wouldn’t go in the way he wanted, slowly and in excruciating pain, but at least he would still have the opportunity to end her miserable life. With any luck, perhaps they would meet up again in hell and he could properly finish what he had started.
Milo rushed into the living room, knife clutched securely in his right hand. The little bitch lay half on the couch and half off it, her feet still securely taped to the armrest, her body flopped off the cushions, her bare shoulders, arms, and head lying on the floor. She was still unconscious, which represented another disappointment because Milo had hoped that he would at least get the satisfaction of knowing the bitch had seen it coming: terrifying a sweet, innocent little thing beyond her endurance as he pulled the knife blade across her throat from ear to ear, severing the jugular, would have been the perfect way to spend his last few seconds on earth.
No matter. It was time to get to it. He could hear the heavy clomp clomp clomp of SWAT Team boots on the bloodstained hardwood floor as they came to get him. He smiled. They would be too late. Maybe he could even finish off the little bitch and then leap across the room and dispatch Dear Old Mom before they came around the corner with guns blazing.
Mr. Midnight skidded to a stop in front of the prone body of his greatest conquest. She still hadn’t moved. Her head rested on her mutilated right arm, her left hand curled under her chest. A strip of bloody skin lay on the floor surrounded by tiny flecks of the bitch’s blood, apparently the result of her falling off the couch. It served the annoying pain-in-the-ass right.
He leaned over the motionless body and lowered his knife. It would take just a fraction of a second to draw the blade across her throat and end her life. He couldn’t wait.
CHAPTER 52
There it was again, that relentless push, the feeling of a Flicker trying to force its way into her head, the very same sensation she had fought off time after time over the course of the last couple of hours. Cait’s eyes fluttered open and she tried desperately to focus, but she just couldn’t manage it, and then her eyes closed again of their own accord. She felt groggy and woozy and somehow oddly disconnected from her body. From somewhere far away came the sensation of millions of pins and needles being shot into her arm at the same time out of some hellish weapon.
Or maybe her arm was on fire. Yes, that was it, her arm was on fire. She was so very tired and all she wanted to do was sleep but she couldn’t because her arm was on fire, it was burning and blistering and the extreme unrelenting pain was keeping her awake.
And now came that infernal push and at first she tried to repel it one more time. But why? Why bother trying to resist it? What would be the point? Why had she tried to keep it out in the first place? There must have been a reason, maybe even a good one, but for the life of her she couldn’t remember now what it might have been.
So her eyes fluttered and her vision wavered and her arm burned horribly and finally she relented. She stopped trying to resist the push. She was too exhausted to concentrate that hard, anyway.
The moment she gave in, the Flicker flooded her brain, filling her senses with the sights and sounds and smells of a confrontation. It felt hyper-real. She could smell the stale pungent odor of sweat and adrenaline and fear; especially fear. Cait was inside Victoria’s body, she was inside her long-lost mother’s body, and her mother was trying to escape from…she was trying to escape from…oh, God, she was trying to escape from Milo!
She was on the floor, she was flat on her back on the floor and she began scrabbling backward down the hallway in an attempt to buy some time, she needed to buy enough time to reach into the pocket of her sweater and pull out her gun, the one she had hidden away in her pocket. It was a little Smith & Wesson Model 40 handgun that she had owned for decades and had never used but had kept for protection because sometimes Everett could get a little dangerous and you could never tell when you might need to defend yourself.