Held & Pushed (2 book bundle) (34 page)

When he spoke, once again to change the subject,
he had to first clear his throat of the emotions that had choked him.

“So this number that you called from, is it the
number to the motel?”

“No. It’s my cell phone. I just bought it today.”

“Okay. I’ll write it down so if I need to call
you, I’ll have it.”

“Please do. I don’t have a good signal here
though. I had to walk around in the room until I found one. So if you ever call
and I don’t answer, just leave a message. I’ll call you back as soon as I get
it.”

 
“Deal.”

“So how’s Mason?”

“He’s great.
Getting big.
And more handsome by the day.”
I could hear the smile
in his voice.

“Well he gets that from you.”

Wade chuckled. “Thanks. But I can’t take all the
credit. You had a little something to do with it.”

I smiled, but the next thing he said wiped the
smile off my face completely.

“He asks about you.”

Amazingly, I managed to talk, even though my
throat had snapped shut, clenched tightly around the lump that had suddenly
formed there.

“He does?”

“Yeah.
A lot, actually.”

I couldn’t hold it back any longer. It started
with a few tears escaping from my eyes and trickling down my cheeks, but it
quickly escalated to sobs. I couldn’t help it. The thought of my baby having to
ask about his mommy broke my heart.

When Wade realized I was crying, he did what he
always did and tried to console me, which only made me cry harder. I should be
there, at home with him and Mason so they didn’t have to ask about me, and they
could console me properly if I cried.

“Hey, Nicole.
Don’t cry.
It’s okay. It’s all going to be okay.”

“I should be there,” I sobbed.

“And you will be. You just can’t be right now.
Everything is going to work out. Mason’s little. In a few years, he won’t
remember that you were absent for a while. All he’ll remember is that you’re
his mother and he loves you just as much as you love him. You’ll see.”

Would I? Would I really be able to be with them
again, to be a family?

I certainly intended to.

Somehow I managed to stop crying long enough to
finish the conversation with Wade. But as soon as we hung up, the tears came
again. This time, I didn’t fall into the seemingly bottomless pit of self-pity
and sorrow. This time, I only cried for a few minutes before I got mad. I was
furious with Ron for putting me in this position, for forcing my son to have to
ask about his mother and causing my husband to have to comfort me over the
phone.

My anger strengthened my resolve. I was more determined
than ever to get my life back. I saw only one way to do it, so come Thursday I
was going to take action.

9

T
he
sex with Bethany was good enough, though it was not great. It was nowhere near
as good as it had been with Nicole. Since Bethany was bound to the embalming table
and unable to move, she was left with no choice but to let Ron do whatever he
wanted to her. Instead of screaming and begging him to stop, she laid there
with her eyes closed, crying silently, fat tears rolling down the sides of her
face. So though the sex wasn’t great, her silence allowed him to imagine that
it was Nicole lying beneath him.

The problem with her was all the times they
weren’t having sex. The constant sound of her begging and whining, moaning and
complaining was too much for Ron to deal with. He was getting really tired of
listening to her. Merely the sound of her voice was beginning to annoy him
because all she ever did was bitch and beg.

It was becoming clear to him that she was never
going to be able to replace Nicole. He’d been a fool to believe otherwise. But
still, he wasn’t quite ready to give up on her. He decided to give her one more
chance to redeem herself before he considered her an absolute loss and
discarded her like the piece of trash that she was.

During Bethany’s stay in his home, Ron had tried
to recreate his time with Nicole. He’d brought a deck of playing cards with him
to the basement and asked if she’d like to play a game of Gin Rummy with him.
She declined, using words normally heard coming from the mouths of filthy
prostitutes.

He’d brought down board games and asked if she was
interested in playing those. Again, she declined, calling him vile names.

She didn’t want to partake in any of the
activities he offered, and it was really beginning to anger him. She was a
guest in his home. How dare she refuse to participate in friendly games with
him? Who the hell did she think she was?

“Okay, Bethany,” Ron said, once again standing
beside the table with a deck of playing cards in his hand. “Let’s try this
again.”

She turned her head in the opposite direction to
avoid looking at Ron, a childish move that infuriated him.

Clearly and slowly, enunciating each word so she
couldn’t later claim to have misunderstood him, Ron asked, “Would you like to
play a game of cards with me? It doesn’t have to be Rummy. We can play whatever
game you choose.”

Nothing.
She didn’t turn
to look at him.
Didn’t shake her head yes or no.
Didn’t acknowledge him in any way.

“Bethany, believe me when I say that it’s in your
best interest to answer me.”

Half a minute passed. Just when Ron became
convinced that she wasn’t going to respond to him, she said, “Fuck you.”

Ron’s jaw clenched shut, the muscles in the side
of his face twitching.

He turned around and slammed the deck of cards
onto his work table, his nostrils flaring. He picked up the locking pliers from
the table and held them tightly in his hand as he whirled around to face her.

“That’s the wrong answer, bitch.”

Quickly, he went to her left hand, held tightly to
the table by the thick leather restraint. He locked the pliers onto the tip of
the long, manicured fingernail on her index finger. With no warning and no time
for her to register what was about to happen, he yanked, pulling the entire fingernail
off her finger.

Then the screaming started.

Her head rolled from side to side as she wailed,
crying and cursing him while begging him to stop.

“It was a simple game of cards, Bethany,” Ron said
as he locked the pliers on the fingernail of her middle finger. “All you had to
do was play a simple game of cards.”

Yank.

Her fingertips bled, and as he started to lock the
pliers onto the nail of the next finger, she attempted to fight him by folding
her fingers down, placing the tips in the palm of her hand, creating a fist.

In no mood to fight with her, Ron adjusted the
pliers. With his left hand, he focused on her pinky finger, plucking it from
the others and holding it out straight. She tried to pull it away from him, to
tuck it back inside her fist along with the others, but it was no use. He
locked the pliers onto her finger below the middle knuckle and applied
pressure.

The finger popped off with a satisfying
snap
, falling to the floor and laying
between the bloody, discarded fingernails.

The blood was really squirting now, shooting out
the end of the stump that only seconds ago had been a finger.

The screaming intensified.

Ron felt that familiar rush that he loved so much.
His heart raced and the adrenaline pumped through his veins. He felt alive in a
way that he only felt when there was a woman tied up in his basement that he
was punishing for deeds she’d done. Or in this case, hadn’t done.

“I bet you wish you’d played nice with me now.
Right, Bethany?”

Snap!
Her next finger was gone.

She screamed louder.

“I bet you wish you’d just listened to me and done
as I said. Isn’t that right, Bethany?”

Another
snap
as the middle finger disappeared, falling to the growing pile of severed
appendages on the concrete floor beneath her.

More screaming.
More blood.

When the pliers cut through her index finger, they
didn’t cut all the way through. The finger hung from her hand like a limp
sausage, connected only by a thin layer of bloody skin. Ron looked at the
mangled digit and wondered what the pain felt like.

He cupped his hand around the dangling finger and
gave it a gentle tug, watching as Bethany’s face wrenched in agony and horror.
Smiling, he continued to pull on the broken finger, slowly twisting it to add
to the pain. Finally, when the skin had stretched beyond its limits, it ripped
and was no longer attached to her hand.

Then, on a whim, he held her severed finger in his
hand and used it the tip of it to wipe the tears from her eyes.

“You can only blame yourself, Bethany,” he said
softly, leaving a smear of blood and tears across her eyes and cheeks.

She looked silly lying there with blood on her
face. It was almost as if she was wearing make-up, red eye shadow and rouge
spread across her face like a clown who had been crying.

This struck Ron as funny. He laughed as he tossed
her lifeless finger to the floor alongside the others before continuing his
work.

When there were no more fingers on her left hand,
Ron stepped over to her right hand and started on those. One by one, he clamped
down on the pliers and detached her fingers from her hand. He could no longer
hear the beautiful snapping sound that came from the pliers crunching through
the bone. All he could hear were the deafening screams of this disrespectful
whore as she writhed in agony on the cold steel table.

Among the screaming, Bethany spat a long line of
vile curse words, all directly aimed at Ron. She cussed his mother and his
father, called him every name in the book, and even created curse words that
hadn’t even been invented yet.

He no longer found her amusing. Nicole would never
say such disgusting things to him. Nicole had class that this gutter rat
couldn’t even dream of having.

Done with the pliers, he tossed them onto the work
table. From the shelf above, he grabbed a small tube of gel, intent on
silencing her screams.

She didn’t seem to notice what he now held in his
hands. In her agony, she paid him little attention as she rolled her head side
to side, squeezed her eyes closed, and opened her mouth wider in order to
scream at the top of her lungs.

Ron approached her from the side opposite the work
table. He was right handed and needed the perfect angle to achieve his goal. He
came in fast, wrapping his left arm around her head and grabbing her mouth. He
applied pressure on the bottom of her jaw, forcing upward to keep it closed.
She fought him. Boy, did she fight him. But he held firmly and didn’t let go.

It wasn’t easy, but he spread the gel across her
lips, emptying the entire tube. He threw the empty tube to the floor and used
his now-free right hand to hold those full and pouty lips of hers together,
careful to not get any of the gel on his fingers.

After enough time had passed to allow the super
glue to set, he let go of her head and mouth and watched as she tried to scream
through sealed lips.

Ron smiled.

She was still loud, but not nearly as loud as she
had been before. Her screams were muffled, and by the end of the night they’d
be silenced forever. But first, he wanted to have a little fun.

10

T
hursday
started off bright and sunny, but by noon the sky had become overcast. A
thunderstorm was on the horizon, threatening to drench the city with rain and
rattle the windows with claps of thunder.

After loading my things in the car, I searched the
motel room thoroughly to make sure I hadn’t left anything behind. I took great
care to not overlook anything, searching every nook and cranny of the room for
any item that I might’ve forgotten.

No matter how the day went, I would not return to
the room. Just in case things went badly, I didn’t want to leave behind any
incriminating evidence. I even considered wiping the room so my prints wouldn’t
be found, but decided that was an unnecessary trouble. I’d used an alias when
checking in and had paid for the room in cash a week at a time. There was no
way anyone could trace me to the motel, and even if they did, it was a motel.
There were sure to be dozens of fingerprints found in the room. Who’s to say I
didn’t stay a night here at some point? The important thing was making sure
that none of the items I’d purchased were left behind.

Once I was satisfied that I had loaded all of my
belongings in the car, I pulled out of the parking lot, leaving the motel
behind me.

I stopped at a drive-thru and grabbed something to
eat. I wasn’t hungry but it was going to be a long day and I would need my
strength to get through it. By the time I drove across town, parked, and
settled in for the wait, the aroma of the food had filled the interior of the
car, and my stomach had begun to rumble with hunger.

Ron’s book signing was scheduled to start at 1:00
PM. I didn’t know what time he would arrive, so I set up surveillance at just
past 11:00 AM. I ate the fast food, keeping my eyes focused on what lay beyond
the windshield.

Nearly an hour passed before I saw Ron’s car. From
where I was parked down the road, I could see him as he pulled out of his
driveway and turned onto the two-lane blacktop, heading into the city where he
would be greeted by his adoring fans.

I remained parked in the driveway down the road
from his house for half an hour after Ron’s car faded from sight to be sure
that he didn’t return home.