Burning Time (40 page)

“Detective April Woo, from the Two-O,” she said, showing her ID. She tried not to be startled when she finally got a look at Bergman. He was a burly man with intense dark eyes that seemed to jump right out of his briar patch of a beard.

“We need some help with a search,” she added.

“Who you looking for, Detective?”

April pulled out her copies of the two tapes and the photo sheets and settled into the hard metal chair by his desk.

“You have a tape machine?” she asked.

Bergman with all the hair on his face nodded curiously. Yeah, he had a tape machine. It was just after four. April hoped Sanchez would hurry up and get over the bridge before the traffic got worse.

Claudia Bartello looked up in surprise at her tenant in the leather jacket, the jeans, and the motorcycle boots.

“I thought you weren’t dressed,” she said accusingly, looking sharply around the room.

Troland glared at her. He couldn’t believe it. Her head seemed to come out of her neck at a funny angle that he hadn’t noticed before. There was something wrong with her. Maybe that was why she stood inside the door the whole time that first day when he came and didn’t even ask him in.

Now she looked like a joke to him. She looked like some kind of enraged comic book crone with a lumpy body, swollen ankles, and a mouth that seemed to be shaking a stick at him.

“Where is she?” she demanded, turning toward the closed bedroom door. “I want to see her.”

What should he do? Troland didn’t feel like moving his mouth to talk to her. She was an ugly thing that was upsetting him. He had work to do, a whole lot of work, and he hadn’t slept the night before. He could feel the muscles
cramping in his neck and hands and shoulders. He was so deeply into it he hadn’t felt any fatigue until now.

He wanted to punch her in the mouth for interrupting him. His face was impassive, but his hand closed tightly around the lighter in his pocket.

“Why don’t you answer me? You never answer me.”

Suddenly the old lady launched into a full-blown tirade with a whole list of complaints that made no sense. She was screaming and carrying on like the crazy woman who had upset him so much in the subway. He had walked out of the car, and she had followed him, hitching up her filthy skirt and urinating between cars as he tried to get away.

“I want you out of here. I want you
out.”
The crone jabbed her finger at his chest. “I won’t have dirty business in my house. I told you that before. You don’t listen. You never listened.”

The finger kept jabbing at him. He backed a few inches away from it, trying to decide what to do. He couldn’t believe this. She was hardly four and a half feet tall and didn’t seem to get that it wasn’t a good idea to scream at him. He couldn’t hear when somebody started screaming at him. The pressure to do something about it was building up.

His gaze shifted uneasily to the bedroom. He’d left all his stuff there. He didn’t want to leave the witch alone in there with his stuff too long. She was tricky. Sometimes she seemed to be fainting and she really wasn’t. She just went somewhere else for a while and wouldn’t talk to him or listen or groan or anything. He didn’t like that.

He had a feeling she got some kind of power when she passed out. Like she was charging up from some outside evil source he didn’t know about. It was clear to him now that coming to her here was an even more important thing
than he had thought. She was more than a fallen angel who had betrayed him. She was actually a witch he had been sent to burn. He couldn’t leave her for a second. The last time he left her she got the ropes untied. No one he ever tied up got out before, which more than proved she was a witch. He had to get back to her right away.

He was trying to figure it out, how he was going to get it all done. And the old woman was still shrieking at him, distracting him from what was important.

“Get your stuff and get out now,” she was screaming.

“Shhh,” he said, opening his mouth for the first time.

There was just no way he was ready to get out. He had stenciled the whole body, thighs, crotch, breasts, everything. But all he’d actually tattooed so far was the area around the navel.

It was coming out pretty good, if you looked beyond the puffiness and irritation of the skin. In some places it had blown up pretty bad. It occurred to him that she might be allergic to the ink, even though he had gotten the best kind, the one with the brightest colors. But he wasn’t going to let the possibility of an allergic reaction worry him. What difference did it make?

Well, the difference was that here he had come all this way to do something special on this particular body, and she turned out to be some kind of witch that was trying to fuck it up. Well, she wanted to puff up, that was fine. He’d burn her up. He just had to get her decorated first.

She was married to a doctor, but Troland was the Doctor of Death. Troland had decided to incorporate the doctor’s staff down the middle of her body with the twisted snakes and the flames around it. Except that he’d leave a space on her chest for the brand. Then the Harley-Davidson wheels and the eagles’ wings would come out of the snakes’ shoulders and spill out her sides while the serpents’
teeth devoured her nipples. He had only gotten that far. He hadn’t decided yet what to put on her neck and cheeks. And now this bitch was telling him he had to get out. No way he was going to get out.

“Don’t tell me to shhh,” she cried. “It’s my house. I’ll say what I want.”

It became clear that the crone wasn’t going away. She took two steps toward the bedroom. “I’m going to see what kind of dirty stuff you’re doing in there—”

The pressure had built up so much he wasn’t thinking any more when he grabbed her. He just wanted it to stop. At first he took hold of her and shook her as if she were a sack of laundry. But she wasn’t quiet. Her bones made cracking sounds like they were all breaking at once, and she squawked with surprise.

“Shut up!” Even now she was infuriating.

His hands went around her scraggy throat. The skin hung down from her chin, crepey and soft. He almost gagged with disgust. Now she was off balance, hanging by his hands, heavy and inert. Not so hard to kill, but hard to handle.

The package continued making gurgling noises while he wrung her neck, trying to get it to stop. He flung her away from him when her bladder emptied, wetting his boots.

“Fucking shit!” The bad ones thwarted him even in death.

He rushed into the bathroom to wash his hands and clean off his boots. When his hands smelled like soap, he went to check the witch tied up on the bed. He was calmer now.

For a second after he opened the door, he was completely dazzled by his work. It was an awesome sight, the woman covered by his extraordinary drawings in colors so vivid they looked like an oil painting. The only thing that
marred the picture was the part he had actually tattooed, which didn’t look like it should at all. Never mind.

Her hands were tied. He had covered her mouth with tape so she’d be quiet.

“How’s it goin’?” he said pleasantly.

Her eyes were wide open, and kind of stunned, focused behind him at the bundle on the floor in the other room.

“Oh, don’t worry about that. I’ll take it away.”

He closed the door. He was moving slower now, wanted to take a nap. Maybe he’d take a nap. He promised himself a rest after he cleaned up. Yeah, that sounded good. He took some of the plastic he had planned to use for the witch and lined the trunk of the rental car with it. He didn’t want to leave the body in the house where someone might come by and find it. He didn’t want to pick it up either, so he dragged it to the stairs and kicked it step by step all the way down. At the bottom of the stairs, his foot glanced off the bundle. His heavy boot dislodged the ancient lawn mower propped against the wall, setting it in motion. The blades whirred as it rolled over the end of the corpse, severing a brittle toe as if it were a twig in the grass. He hoisted the bundle up and threw it in the trunk. Now he didn’t have to think about it any more.

Emma lay there with the tape over her mouth. The door was closed. For a long time after the old woman stopped screaming it was profoundly quiet. Then she heard Troland go to the refrigerator and get something to drink. She could hear the pop of a can opening.

Troland. She could not visualize him as he must have been as a teenager, seeming normal enough to be in school, but doing things no one could even imagine. Her heart felt huge, big enough to burst.

She could hear him moving around out there. She tested the ropes. They were tied so tightly now there was no way to get out of them. She kept opening and closing her hand, trying to keep the circulation going.

Earlier, she had shivered uncontrollably for hours. All she wanted to do was warm up. Then he turned several lights on her so he could see better, and started working on her with the concentration of a surgeon. He shaved her, painted her body with Mennen Speed Stick, and stuck transfers all over it. It was then, before he even set up the table with the inks and the needles and the rubber
gloves and the tattoo machine, that she knew what he was going to do. He was going to tattoo her. She knew how it was done. She knew about transfers.

She didn’t even realize she was screaming, totally out of control. She thought the sounds were in her head. He was going to mark her perfect body, and there was nothing she could do to stop him. He was crazy. Nothing would stop him. He’d seen the fake tattoo in her film, and now he was doing one for real. But this wasn’t just a little thing on the shoulder. This was her
whole body
. He was going to tattoo her
whole body
. Oh, no. No!
Can’t take this
. Emma couldn’t stop screaming.

He didn’t seem to hear it.

“No. No, no. No!”

Was this what her daddy described, what it felt like when bombs were falling everywhere, your buddies were dead all around you, your legs were blown off? You were bleeding to death in a muddy swamp, and
still
you didn’t give up.

“Nooooo.”

She could hear her daddy’s voice behind her, in her ear.
Be a soldier, Emmie. Take what they dish out and be a man about it
.

“No,” she screamed.

“Shut up, or I’ll tape your mouth,” he said finally. “That’s enough.”

She shut her mouth. And still the screams came out. She felt the ropes with her fingers. They were low on her wrists, too low for the game.
Untie the knots with one hand, Emmie. Show me how good you are
.

Not good enough.

The first time the needles touched her skin was like a jolt of lightning. She was dead. She knew she would not survive this. The sting and burn, coming both at the same
time on the sensitive skin of her stomach, told her life was over. Yet it went on and on, and she was still alive.

Years ago, when she first came to New York, Emma had a long tussle with a young man at the end of a date that had seemed pedestrian and safe. He was a Wall Street lawyer, and he jumped on her in the middle of a conversation about depositions. He didn’t care that she was unwilling, and would only seem to stop for a minute or two to calm her down, before attacking her again. Her body was covered with black and blue marks by the time she finally got rid of him. And even at the door he tried tackling her one last time.

“Hope springs eternal,” he said when he called her two days later for another date.

“I don’t want to die,” Emma whispered now.

Now, instead of freezing to death, she was burning. Her stomach was on fire where he had tattooed it. She could feel the heat radiating outward. He was going to tattoo her whole body until she was burning all over, and still she didn’t want to die.

On the floor by the bed was a butane torch. She stretched out her fingers, wiggling them to see if she could reach it. It worked like a big lighter. Push the handle down, she knew, and a flame would shoot out. What was that for? I have to pee, she thought. He put packing tape on her mouth because she couldn’t keep from making noises. Now she could only make grunting sounds.

On the other side of the door she could hear him muttering to himself. Then she started hearing other noises, thumpings and scratchings. A car door opened and a few minutes later slammed shut. Later, he came back and started fiddling with something in the wall. At one point there was the sound of a hammer hitting metal. What metal? What was he doing?

Her terror was like a wild animal. Her pulse seemed to be everywhere, as loud as the hammer on the other side of the wall. What hammer? What metal?

Then silence, for a long, long time. Maybe an hour. Maybe more. She shifted her body, trying to get closer to the torch. Way above her hand, on the table, was the switchblade. She couldn’t reach that, either. She knew he had a gun somewhere, too, but she didn’t see it. She was sure the old woman was dead. Maybe someone would come looking for her. Emma started pushing at the tape with her tongue. She closed her eyes.

Waiting for a red light on the street in front of the Greek diner, April felt a mounting excitement. The sight was amazing. Next to her was the diner, exactly as Jason Frank had described its unrelated twin in California. In front of her was the ramp to the Triboro Bridge. Way ahead she could see the bridge, long rather than high, spanning the East River. Just about a block behind her, Twenty-eighth Street bisected Hoyt Avenue. The houses on either side of the wide street were all attached, single-family dwellings. None was more than two stories high.

The stoplight was taking forever. April had some very long seconds to sit there gaping. Right there, all in one place, were the landmarks the psychiatrist had told her to look for, and didn’t think she’d be able to find without him. Ha, she wasn’t so stupid. If Grebs and the Chapman woman weren’t right around here, she’d eat her badge. She gripped the wheel tightly to stop her hands from shaking.

The light changed. She moved forward slowly, taking a moment to look down at her notebook where she’d copied
the house number the old lady had given to Officer O’Brien.