Double-Crossed (34 page)

Once in the darkness of the club, she moved to turn a light on. The switch made no difference, and without natural light, the room seemed like a cave. The main door looked bolted closed.

God, I want to get out of here
. “Why did you bring me here?”

All alone, Marianne wanted an answer to what he'd just put her through. Heading instinctively toward the door, desperate to get out into the daylight. She became aware that the doctor wasn't going to answer and wasn't behind her anymore. Terrified the killer hadn't left the room, she turned abruptly, filled with fear again.

With a little sunlight from the storeroom behind him, Marianne could see the doctor standing by the door, a gun in his hand pointed firmly in Marianne's direction.

Marianne froze. “What's this? We need to get out of here.” The full weight of what she saw crept up slowly.

“Marianne, we will not be going out the front door. Do forgive me, but I can't take the chance that you will be seen.”

As if she'd been in a deep, dark fog and had suddenly moved into the brightness of the middle of the day, it all started to become clear to Marianne.

“You killed them,” she said. “And now you mean to kill me.”

“Yes. I killed them. And, yes, I am afraid that I do mean to kill you. I didn't want to initially, but you disappointed me the other day, and I realized that I had lost the control that I had over you, a control that I felt essential to the successful outcome I wanted.”

“Then Joe's superior…is you. The partner he talked about earlier? You told him about my movements, my sex life, and the other details. You've spied on me. You're the one who lied and told him I'd become a threat. And you brought me in here to kill me like the others.”

“Well deduced.”

“I believe I am the stupidest person in all of Sydney, Doctor.”

“I think that you may be, Marianne.”

“And now I will be killed for my stupidity.”

“You will die because you know too much about me and because you saw too much last night. Now you must die here, among the refuse of Joe's wretched corpse and his filthy business. I preferred to kill you at the beach, where so many of the souls we tried to save have died. I would have fed you to the ocean, and you'd float beautiful there forever, never growing old and never feeling any pain. But too much has happened here in this place. I am concerned now that someone heard the earlier shootings. I have to get out of Sydney fast. I can't take you with me anymore, and I can't risk leaving you alive, of course.”

A silence fell over the room. Marianne stared at him. The light coming in the door behind him surrounded him like a halo but hid his features in shadow. The rest of his body barely discernable in the half-light, the gun protruded from his lower waist as if everything poured into the barrel. Every dream or vision or thing inside him, culminated in this moment.

He leaned back into the door, kicking hard at the dead body of Joe. The door opened and more light bled into the room, so now she could see his body and his face more clearly.

Marianne looked at his physical deterioration. Weak and listless, his body slowly giving in under the exhaustion of what he'd done. His pale eyes held no sign of his motivations. They looked the same as if he were tending a wound on her head or telling her not to trust Peter.

Peter.

Peter's reputation remained intact. Her Peter, honest after all. Peter really did love her as he said he did.

“I would have preferred to have you as a companion, Marianne. You have a fine mind. It impressed me from the start. We could have escaped together. I will live on an island for the rest of my days. I have books and all that I will need to live the life of my dreams. I would have delighted in your good company if not for the foolish habit women have of falling in love. Tell me, women's intellect so outweighs men's. Their suffering makes them stronger. They connect to their intuitive knowing and have the natural order on their side. Why, then, do they throw it all away to attach themselves to the foolishness of men? I have never understood this, and it's at the heart of my frustration my whole life. Even in this moment, when your life may be lost, your mind wanders to him. It makes you happy. With death upon you, celebration is in order because your man is not the betrayer you thought.”

Even under the circumstances, Marianne blushed. “Now you want to ridicule me before killing me. That's a little beneath you, I think?”

“I highlight the ridiculous in you, and you blame me for imposing ridicule? You should have seen me practice medicine. I could repair the self-imposed wounds on women, and they would return to sickly lifestyles that perpetuated their illness. I spoke with so many women who had desperate mental illness, caused by various evils inflicted by the men they loved. However, they went back, or chose another man as soon as I could heal them. They are sheep. My efforts to heal were as futile as the physician who stitches up a young soldier only to send him back to the front line. In my youth, all my hope for the future lay in the promise of the minds of women. Now, in my older age, I hate them more for their acquiescence than I hate the men for their stupidity.

“The last woman in whom I put my faith is you, Marianne, and you ran from one fool into the arms of another in the short time that I knew you. In killing you, I will put an end to my hope for the human race. I will leave here and live in isolation until this angry disease takes my body, never seeing another living soul. And you will die perfect, free from your own self-sabotage.”

Marianne knew that he was mad, but the underlying truth of his words stung her. Fundamentally, he had her pegged. Faced with her own death, her joy came from discovering Peter to be blameless. She had no defense for this and couldn't fathom a reason.

Then sanity forced its way into her. Somehow, Marianne knew she would have to shake off this moment and live to get away from him. Her brain kicked into high gear, and she weighed many factors instantly.

Joe had kept a gun behind the bar. The doctor had a gun pointed at her still, but if she flew for the bar, it was unlikely that his shot would hit its mark. Plus, he would have fired the gun, making a loud noise. At this time of the day, the shot would add to any suspicion already aroused by the previous shots, and The Pink Pussycat could be crawling with police before they had a chance to leave.

As he walked toward her, the gun pointed firmly at her belly, Marianne decided she felt incredibly brave.

The bullet struck her in the leg as she ran to the left side of the bar. She fell behind the bar, and for a second, she could not see him. Crawling around the bar, her mind raced to come up with the best possible plan to grab Joe's gun and somehow get her out of there safely.

“Now you have made me reckless,” he whispered in his smooth, unresponsive voice.

He kept talking all the while as he made his way around the bar. Marianne couldn't see him, but she could hear that voice, that reasonable tone, those lucid words coming from his direction. It seemed like a nightmare now, his gentleness and passivity, as if beneath it lurked a kind of evil too hideous to contemplate.

She hid behind the bar, edging her way soundlessly to the area beneath the till, opposite the source of the softly spoken voice.

“Again, the thorn in my side is called Marianne. Just as it was since that fateful night Joe came home and found that you had gone. How I cursed his stupidity for treating you so badly. We had a problem the minute you left, and I had to take the apartment next to yours to keep an eye on you.

“Here at the end, when everyone is gone, you and I remain. You with your fine mind and I with my wits could have easily controlled this operation and helped so many people. But your stubborn refusal to do as Joe said has denied both of us the pleasure of success.

“Like a woman, you betrayed me and my plans for greatness by running to the next fool of a man. Like him, I saw the greatness in you too, but I wanted it for higher things. He only wanted it to gratify himself. And yet you followed him and his sleazy friends into debauchery instead of listening to my wise advice.”

He'd reached the end of the bar, and Marianne saw the gun come around the corner before his body followed. The throbbing pain in her leg spread to her belly, and blood seeped into her jeans. She wondered how much blood loss could occur from a bullet wound to the leg. She slid herself back against the bar and farther around to her left, under the hole in the counter that acted as an entrance to the bar. In just a few seconds, she would have her hand on that gun. As the doctor moved around the other end, she traveled in the opposite direction; they acted as two hands of a deadly clock that marked all the time she had left.

As if reading her thoughts, the doctor spoke again. “You have an injury now, and the one thing you had over me was physical agility. You have robbed yourself of your advantage. Poor planning on your part, Marianne. We will have to move faster now, as the police will have heard the gunshot.”

The doctor came out from behind the bar on the right side. Marianne shuffled around toward the shelving under the till. Now that he stood in the back of the bar, he would easily see that she'd moved. Marianne cursed as she realized how easy she'd made it for him to track her. Desperate to make no noise, she arrived, finally in reach of the shelving under the register. Leaning in, she felt in the dark over the top of the flat shelf. Papers, a hard steel box, and then she had it. The gun was in her hands.

“You won't be able to get out. I have locked the door, and I have the key. You can only exit through the kitchen at the back over here or back through the storeroom. I imagine you have no interest in going back into that room.”

Swiftly, Marianne assessed her position. She had a gun. A gun that might not be loaded, but she hoped like hell it was. She needed to get out safely. Standing and confronting the doctor with her weapon would probably end her life, unless she shot first. This man had out-shot Jimmy, Don, and Joe. As debilitating an illness as he had, he managed to handle the weapon he held. She had to get out. She could move towards the door, but she risked getting another bullet shot through her, and she might not survive the next one. She would have to attempt getting to the storeroom and go out the way she'd come in, crawling over corpses. If the pain or the horror became too much, she could always scream her lungs out in an attempt to solicit help, or take the risk and shoot the doctor with the gun he didn't know she had. In the dark, she immediately turned toward the storeroom. She crawled back toward the bar, trying not to make a sound, and felt her way around it.

Listening to the doctor's steps, she could tell that he worked his way toward the front door. She looked down and noticed blood on the floor around her now. The wound in her leg bled strongly. She felt sick to her stomach and light-headed.

Suddenly, a sound of cars raged outside the front door.

The police!

As she crawled her way around the base of the bar, she could see a faint light coming from the storeroom. It looked as though it opened at the end of a long corridor, a long corridor that seemed to be hazy, ending with a door that poured out the light. She had to get there. She struggled to remember why, but she had some sort of job in there to do. However, her leg hurt, and she couldn't remember why. Everything looked fuzzy.

A pounding started at the front door and echoed though her head.

She felt that if she could just crawl to that door somehow, everything would be over, and she'd be okay.

The crash came from the front door, and Marianne heard a voice say, “Stop! Police!”

At the same time, she looked up and saw two figures at the end of the long corridor. From somewhere inside her, mustering the last of her courage, Marianne screamed at the top of her lungs.

As the two figures came running toward her, Marianne heard the policeman's voice cry out. “No!”

The single gunshot rang deep into the darkness of the bar, and Peter's words rang in her ears, the last thing she heard.

“I'm here now. No one will ever hurt you again.”

* * *

“Well, I must say, that's the hottest gunshot victim I have ever seen.”

Marianne opened her eyes to see Peter sitting by her bed. From the white tiles and the strong smell of antiseptic, she could tell she lay in a hospital ward. Looking down at her bandaged hands and the clear plastic tubing that ran to the apparatus beside her bed, she noticed a band on her wrist that read, “Marianne Ferguson. St. Vincent's Hospital.” She looked over at Peter and smiled.

“How do you feel?” His eyes, deep pools of sympathy, radiated warmth that she felt right through her.

“I feel okay actually. Just a little dry in the mouth.”

“That's from the operation.”

He reached out, took her hand, and looked at her with great empathy.

“Your leg will be fine. The bullet went in through a muscle. They had very little to do. Just remove it and stitch you up.” He looked down and then back to her with an obviously false smile on his face. “You may have to live with a small scar, unfortunately.”

“When did they bring me in here?”

“This morning. Ten in the evening now. You've slept here for about nine hours.”

“Peter, the things I saw! I have to speak to someone.”

Peter put his hand on her shoulder, as if to encourage her to stay put.

“A full investigation is about to begin. They'll question you.”

He shifted in his seat and looked hard at her to see if she could handle a conversation like this. “You need to know some things. The police took the people you witnessed arriving this morning. They've gone to the Villawood Detention Center. There they will care for them and give them full checkups. Also, they know that the doctor killed Jimmy, Don, and Joe.” He looked up at her at this point.

“Evidence has come from other witnesses. The woman who lives next door to The Pink Pussycat is one, and a few people who had heard noises on the beach. Actually, they got the police involved from the beach.”

“Then the doctor must have killed Joe, Don, and Jimmy for incompetence.”