Chain Letter (21 page)

“He’s going to kill us!” Fran cried. “He’s going to take us
out to where we hit the man and dump us on the road and run us over.”

“Now, now,” Kipp scolded patiently. “Don’t ruin the story for her. Start with how
you were kidnapped.” Fran tried to speak but only ended up blubbering. Her outburst
didn’t initially faze Alison. That the Caretaker wanted to kill them sounded like
old news. But as the information sunk past the layers of bodily misery, she decided
that whatever they had to tell her had already been ruined.

“Fran’s story isn’t really very interesting,” Kipp picked up. “She was in Bakersfield
at her grandmother’s house when her sweetheart Caretaker dropped by for a friendly
visit. She was so flattered that when he asked her for a walk and offered her a spiked
carbonated beverage that tasted like a codeine float, she didn’t think twice. At least
I had an excuse, I was drunk when I downed the drugs Neil must have slipped into my
beer. Naturally, this is only Fran’s version of the story. Personally, I feel Neil
simply kissed her and she swooned at his feet.”

“I did not kiss him!” Fran said, indignantly.

“But did he kiss you?” Kipp asked. “All those hours you were unconscious in that van
he stole, he might have done all kinds of nasty things to you.”

“Neil would never have . . . ” Fran began, before realizing that defending Neil’s
personal integrity at this point would be a losing proposition.

“Kipp,” Alison groaned, “just the facts, please.”

“But aren’t you happy to see that I’m still alive?” Kipp asked. “Joan wasn’t, but
Brenda gave me a big kiss.”

“I’ll give you a kiss later, if we don’t all end up getting killed.”

“Actually,” Kipp said, thinking, “none of our stories is very interesting. I went
to sleep one night in my bedroom and woke up the next morning in this bedroom. Fran
and I have been keeping each other company ever since. She’s not the girl I thought
she was. Did you know she once painted a nude poster of Brad Pitt?”

“Kipp!” Fran whined.

“Neil’s been feeding us,” Kipp went on without missing a beat. “For lunch this afternoon,
we had apples, and for dinner last night, we had apples. He’s not big on condemned
prisoners enjoying delicious final meals. Last week, though, he brought us a bunch
of bananas. He even lets us go to the bathroom whenever we want.”

“Neil flagged us down a few hours ago about a block from your house,” Brenda said.
“Joan was driving. She almost ran him over. Man, we were spooked. I practically peed
my pants.”

“You did pee your pants,” Joan growled. “All over my upholstery. But I wasn’t that
scared, not till he pulled out that damn gun.”

“He has a gun?” Alison asked, her alertness growing with each revelation. She did
not have to ask why Joan had used the
same line as the Caretaker. When she thought about it, Joan was always talking that
way. Neil could have swiped any of their remarks for his chain letter.

“Yes,” Kipp said. “Didn’t he show you the nice black hole at the end of it? Tell us
how he captured you. We heard him play the music and people tape. I bet you thought
you were coming to a party.”

“I thought I was coming to a party,” she muttered.

“We heard a shot,” Brenda said. “What happened?”

“I missed, twice. It’s a long story.” It struck her then that her room, minus the
furniture, was identical to this one. A pair of binoculars lay discarded beneath the
cardboard-covered windows, and even before the arrival of the first letter, she had
felt as if someone had been watching her. “How did you survive losing all that blood?”
she asked Kipp.

“Brenda told me about that,” Kipp said. “What a dramatic exit! A trail of blood reaching
to the street! You got to grant Neil one thing, he’s got style. But to tell you the
truth, I didn’t lose any blood, not as far as I know.”

“Interesting,” Alison said. The police had verified that the blood had definitely
been human. With his illness, it was relatively easy to understand how Neil had obtained
the drugs. And he had probably picked these cuffs up at a swapmeet or an army surplus
store. But where did he get the blood? From his own veins? Siphoning it off over a
period of time? If that were so, it provided a unique insight into his madness. He
would
torture himself as readily as he would torture them. “Has Neil talked to you much?”
she asked.

“Brenda has explained his cancer,” Kipp said, catching her drift. “Watching him these
last couple of weeks, Fran and I had pretty much figured on something like that. He
doesn’t complain but that guy is really hurting. I think it’s obvious that the disease
is to blame, the malignancy has gone to his brain. I don’t hold any of this against
him. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, the poor guy.”

She nodded, though that sounded a bit pat to her: tumor in the head and the sick boy
goes on a rampage. It also sounded self-serving, The Caretaker—she couldn’t quite
interchange Neil’s name with the villain’s—had repeatedly spoken of their evil. Was
it possible he had a—granted perverse, but nevertheless—consistent motivation for
what he was doing? If that were so, and she could understand what it was, perhaps
she could get through to him. “Where is he?” she asked.

“Downstairs,” Fran said. “He’s got a terrible cough. I think he’s dying.”

“Pray that he hurries,” Brenda said.

“What a terrible thing to say!” Fran said.

“You’re the one who’s worried about getting squashed out on that desert road,” Brenda
said.

“Well, so are you!” Fran shot back.

“My point exactly,” Brenda said. “He’s nuts. He’s . . . ”

“Would you two please shut up,” Alison said, and it seemed
when they had first received the chain letter, Brenda and Fran had been arguing and
she had had a headache. “Kipp, has Neil spoken to you using the Caretaker’s style
of language?”

“Not exactly, but he has said things like having to ‘balance the scales,’ ‘purge our
filth,’ and ‘pay for our crime.’ ”

“Have you tried to talk sense into him?”

“Endlessly. And he sits and listens to every word we have to say. Neil always was
a good listener. But he doesn’t let us go, doesn’t even argue with us, just brings
us fresh bags of apples.” Kipp stopped suddenly. “But maybe he will listen to you.
He’s brought you up a few times, not in any specific context, just muttered your name
now and then.”

“Favorably or negatively?”

“Both ways, I would say.”

“Do you really think that he intends to kill us?” she asked.

Kipp hesitated. “I’m afraid so. I think he’s just been waiting to get us all together.
The guy’s gone.”

“But
could
he kill us?”

“Alison, anybody who could pull off what he has could probably do anything he damn
well pleases.”

“But we’re not all together,” she said. “Where’s Tony?”

“Dead,” a sad and worn voice coughed at the door. To say that Neil did not look well
would have been the same as addressing such a remark to a week-old corpse. His yellowish
flesh hung from his face like a faded and wrinkled oversized wrapper. His back was
hunched, and it was obvious that his
right leg was painful. The once irresistible green of his eyes was a pitiful blur,
and the left shoulder of his dirty leather jacket was torn and bloodied. Back at her
house, when Alison had thought she was giving Joan her due, he must have shoved open
her bedroom door and then jumped back, but not quite quick enough. That she had wrestled
him and come out the loser was a testament to how driven he must be. An ugly black
gun protruded from his belt.

Tony
, she wailed inside. No matter how badly she had been flattened tonight, each time,
her strength had returned. But if Tony was gone, she was gone. Mist covered her eyes,
and she heard crying, not Fran’s, but Joan’s.

Neil limped into the room. In one hand he carried a hypodermic needle, in the other,
a medicine bottle filled with a colorless solution. Obviously, he intended to sedate
them before dragging them down to the van and driving them out to the desert road.
He knelt unsteadily by her side and, it would have been funny in another time and
place, pulled a small bottle of rubbing alcohol and several balls of cotton from his
coat pocket. His breathing was agonizing. He refused to look her in the face.

“Neil,” she whispered. “Did you really kill Tony?”

“He killed himself,” he said quietly, arranging the cotton balls in a neat row, as
a nurse might have done.

“Is he really dead?” she pleaded. Neil nodded, his eyes down. A pain, bright like
a sun rising on a world burned to
ruin, overshadowed the injuries in her body. All that kept her from giving up completely
was that Neil might be lying. “You would not,” she stammered, “have killed your friend.”

He didn’t respond, just kept rearranging his cotton balls. She leaned toward him.
“Dammit, you answer me! Tony was your best friend!”

Endless misery sagged his miserable face. He sat back and stared at her. “He killed
himself,” he repeated.

He was speaking figuratively, she realized, and it gave her cause to hope. “Neil,”
she said patiently, “when Tony and I were at your funeral—when we thought you were
dead—he told me how you felt about me. He said that I was important to you. Well,
you are important to me, too.”

He glanced at the covered window. In the lower right hand corner was a bare spot,
probably through which he had watched her. “I wasn’t,” he said. “Only the man cared
for me.”

“The man? Neil, the man was a stranger.”

“He was somebody. And he was wronged, and he never complained. How could he? He was
never given the chance.” Neil lowered his head. “He would have been my friend.”

The emotion in his voice made her next step uncertain. Even as she sought to reach
his old self, her eyes strayed to the revolver in his belt. Her hands and feet were
bound, but her fingers were free and the weapon was not far. “I am your friend,” she
said carefully. “We are all your friends. Hurting us will not bring back the man.”

“That’s what I told him,” Kipp remarked cheerfully.

“We don’t want to bring him back, I just want all of us to be with him.” Neil nodded,
a faraway look in his eyes. “You’re very pretty, Alison, and you see, he’s very lonely.”

She thought she saw perfectly. She shifted position slightly, angling on a clean approach
to the gun. The maneuver made her next words sound hypocritical to her own ears. “He’s
not lonely. It’s you, Neil, who’s lonely. Let us go. We’ll stay with you.”

“You would?” he asked innocently, mildly surprised.

“Yes. Don’t be afraid. We’ll help you with the pain.”

A shudder ran through his body. “The pain,” he whispered dreamily. “You don’t know
this pain.” His eyes narrowed. “You never wanted to know me.”

“But I did,” she said, striving for conviction. This was not going to work. She was
having to use half truths and he was, even in his deranged state, extraordinarily
sensitive to deceit. “I thought about you a lot. Just the other day I was telling
Tony that . . . ”

“Tony!” he yelled scornfully. “Tony knew how I felt about you! But he didn’t care.
He took what he wanted. He took the man’s life. He took you. He took and took and
gave nothing back. He wouldn’t even go to the police.” A spasm seemed to grip his
stomach and he bent over in pain. She squirmed closer. The gun, the gun . . . if she
could just get her hand on it, this would all be over.

“He was afraid, Neil. He was like you. He was like me. You can understand that.”

He shook his head, momentarily closing his eyes. “But I don’t understand,” he mumbled.
The gun handle was maybe twenty inches from her fingers and the interlocked handcuffs
had about ten inches of play in them. If she could keep him talking . . .

Good God, be good to me this one time.

Unfortunately, just then, Neil sat back and picked up the hypodermic. “We need to
return to where all this started to understand, to the road,” he said, regaining his
confidence, sticking the bottle with the needle, the clear liquid filling the syringe.
He pulled up her pants leg and picked up a cotton ball.

“But you promised to tell me your dream,” she said quickly, playing a desperate card.
A drop oozed at the tip of the needle, catching the light of the naked bulb, glistening
like a deadly diamond. It was very possible be would simply finish them here and now
with an overdose. Yet Neil hesitated, and the play went on.

“When?”

“When we were standing on Kipp’s street in the middle of the night. Before Tony came
over, we were alone, and I told you about my nightmares and how they were frightening
me. You tried to cheer me up. You started to tell me about a wonderful dream full
of colors and music and singing.”

“What a night that must have been.” Kipp sighed.

“So?” Neil said. He lowered the needle.

“I asked you if I was in it,” she said.

Neil winced. “No.”

“Yes! I started to ask. Remember, just when Tony interrupted us? I wanted to know
if I was that important to you that you would have dreamed about me.” She swiveled
her legs around, disguising the overt movement with an expression of pure sincerity.
Neil was listening and she prayed that Kipp kept his mouth shut. At Neil’s next solid
blank spell, she was going for the gun.

“I dreamed about a lot of things,” he admitted. “You were one of them. But I can’t
see that mattering to you.”

She held her tongue. In spite of his words, she could see that he wanted to believe
her. His madness and sickness aside, he was just like everyone else: He wanted to
know his love had not been wasted on someone who couldn’t have cared less. He ran
an unsteady hand through his tangled hair, fidgeting. “You were always too busy,”
he said, raising his voice. “I tried to talk to you. I called you up. But you always
had things you had to do. That was OK, I could understand that. I could wait. I could
have waited a long time. But then . . . I saw I couldn’t wait forever; not even until
the summer when you would have had more time . . . I saw I was going to end up like
the man.”