The Closer (2 page)

There was a hissing sound as gas began to come in via the shower head.

“What type are you?” the voice whispered.

“I’ll tell you if you shut off the gas,” she said coolly.

“A bargainer. Good. I prefer those, I really do. I don’t like the bitchy ones. Unblock the camera and you have a deal.”

She did. The gas shut off, leaving an acrid smell hanging in the air. She tried to keep her breathing shallow, but it still burned the inside of her nose.

“See? I’m a reasonable man. Go ahead.”

“Go ahead and what?”

“Offer me something.”

“I guess you wouldn’t just settle for a blow job, huh?”

Laughter, crackling with static. “You’ll have to do better than that. I’ve had women offer to be my slave, to fuck dogs, to eat their own shit. One even offered her best friend in her place.”

“What about the ones that don’t offer you anything?”

“Oh, the
threateners.
They always say the same things—my boyfriend’s in the Mafia, I’m really a cop, I have AIDS. I had one put a voodoo curse on me, though—that was entertaining. But sooner or later, the threateners always turn into the pleaders.”

“Ever let anyone go?” Nikki asked.

“What do you think?”

“I think I’ll pull out one of your fingernails,” Nikki said thoughtfully. “No, two.”

“That seems rather rude…”

“I know, I know. Usually I let
him
do all the work— some of the shit he does, I can’t stand even being in the same room. But for you, sweetheart—I’ll make an exception.”

“And who’s
he
supposed to be? Your big bad pimp, charging in to save you in his shining Cadillac?”

“Fuck, no. He’s in the same business you are—
Stanley.”

“What?”

“He kills people. Slowly.”

“Sure
he does—”

There was a sudden crackle of static from the speaker, followed by something heavy slamming into the other side of the bathroom door.

“That would be him, now…” Nikki said. She fished a pack of cigarettes out of her purse.

The door swung slowly open. Her partner stood in the doorway, stun gun in one hand. Stanley, unconscious, lay at his feet.

Nikki lit her cigarette and looked down at Stanley. She shook her head.

“This is the
Closer,
you poor bastard. I almost pity you.”

She kicked him in the head, hard.

“Almost,”
she snarled.

Stanley woke to find he was bound, naked, to a chair in his own kitchen. There was a rubber sheet under the chair. His wrists were tied together in front of him, and lashed to his knees. Duct tape sealed his mouth.

The Closer entered with a black bag, which he set down on a chair and opened. He was around thirty, with mid-length brown hair that hadn’t seen a comb in a while, and wore a black leather trenchcoat. He began to empty the bag of its contents, which he carefully arranged on the table.

A box of surgical gloves.

A small vise, a hatchet and a pair of pliers.

A pair of pruning shears.

A hacksaw and a ball-peen hammer.

A packet of razor blades, a clear Baggie full of fish- hooks, and a box of table salt.

A container of lighter fluid, a can of Drano, and a large hypodermic needle.

An electric knife.

A propane torch.

The last items he pulled out were a small tape recorder and half a dozen cassette tapes.

“Now, then,” he said calmly as he pulled on a pair of surgical gloves. He put a tape into the cassette deck and hit
Record
.

“Let’s go back to the beginning….”

He reached out and ripped the duct tape off Stanley’s mouth with one hand.

With the other, he picked up the hacksaw.

She found them in a shoebox in the closet, eight white linen napkins folded into neat triangles and sealed in Ziploc bags. In the center of each napkin was the scarlet imprint of a pair of lips, a kiss captured on cloth.

Nikki studied them. Each bag had a letter stenciled on the back in Magic Marker. She found one with a G on it, and inhaled sharply.

“Gee …Genevieve? Is that you?”

She sat down on the bed and pulled off the blond wig, tossing it to the side. She stared at the napkin through the clear plastic of the Baggie, studying the lips and tracing their outline with a fingertip. She suddenly felt immensely weary, like her body weighed a thousand pounds.

“Oh, Genny. I hope you’re in a better place, sweetie. I hope this helps.”

A muffled but agonized scream came from the kitchen.

Nikki butted her cigarette out in a large, empty ashtray beside the bed. She let the baggy fall to the floor and put her head down, covering her face with her hands.

“I know you’re lying.”

“No! No! I swear to God!”

“You’re as predictable as your victims. First you’ll deny you were really going to do anything, that it was all just a game. Then you’ll act tough, say I have no proof, threaten to sue me. When that doesn’t work you’ll try bribery, and finally pleading.”

“I’m telling the truth, please, oh Christ—”

“And then we arrive at this point.” The Closer reached down, selected a razor blade. He leaned forward intently. “This is when you lie. You tell me something that I’ll have to go check, because stalling is the only option you have left.”

He crammed a rag in Stanley’s mouth to stifle his screams, and worked in quick, precise strokes. The flesh peeled back easily. He used fishhooks to pin the flaps to the tops of Stanley’s ears.

“We’re past that point now. Now you’re going to start telling the truth.”

Stanley nodded, tears leaking from his eyes, then gave a muffled yelp as the salty drops slid across the raw, exposed meat of his cheeks.

“Consider that a preview,” the Closer said. He picked up the box of salt.

He reached down for Stanley’s gag, then stopped. The two flaps of skin stretched to either side, with their tracery of red and blue veins, had their own grotesque beauty; they looked like the wings of a flesh butterfly, with Stanley’s nose the body.

The Closer shook his head, and removed the gag.

“Look in the freezer,” Stanley gasped. “Look in the freezer, I did it for the initiation. I’ll tell you everything I know about them, just
please don’t kill me….”

And Stanley began to tell him some very interesting things.

Seven hours later.

The Closer raised a bloody, rubber-gloved hand and opened the bedroom curtains a crack, letting in a ray of early morning sun. Outside, a kid delivered a newspaper. In a house across the street, a mother kissed her husband good-bye as he got ready to drive his kids to school. The Closer stared at them, regret on his face.

In the kitchen, Nikki sat in a chair next to the table. Various bloody implements were scattered over the table’s surface.

“Know what she liked to do on her days off?” Nikki asked Stanley. “Dress in baggy clothes, baseball cap, no makeup, and try to meet guys. Seriously. She wouldn’t go to a bar, but anywhere else was fair game: the park, the library, the fucking corner store. Wanted to meet someone who didn’t just want to fuck, she said. I told her,
all
guys just want to fuck—only difference between ’em is that some are willing to pay for it. Lucky for us.” She paused, fumbling for a cigarette.

“Except then a prick like you comes along, Stanley, and all the luck turns shitty.” She lit the cigarette, her hands trembling.

“I rehearsed what I was going to say a million times, you son of a bitch. What I was going to say when I finally caught you. Now it feels like it doesn’t make any fucking difference.” She shook her head and gave a grim little laugh.

“But there’s a few things I want you to know. Her real name was Janet, not Genevieve, and—and people
liked
her. She was a good person. She liked cheesy disco music and going to malls, and old cars from the fifties and drinking beer and she wasn’t a goddamn
trophy
to stick in a shoebox after you
killed
her, you sick
fuck!”

One of Stanley’s eyes hung from the socket. It swung grotesquely against his face as he twitched.

“Kill me…” Stanley whispered.

“Is that all?
No fucking problem.”

She grabbed the hatchet and raised it over her head.

Before she could bring it down, the Closer seized it from behind.

“No.”

Nikki whirled to face him, furious. She didn’t let go of the hatchet.

“Why the fuck
not?
You said you were finished with him!”

“I am. But I can’t let you kill him.”

Tears of rage and sorrow spilled down Nikki’s face. “He killed my
friend,
goddammit!”

“I know. But we made a deal when we agreed to work together. You take one kind of risk, I take another.”

She glared at him, then let go of the hatchet.

“You don’t want blood on your hands, Nikki. Not even his.”

“Okay, okay.” She locked eyes with the Closer. “But this time—I want to
watch.”

The Closer met her eyes levelly, his face unreadable.

“All right.”

He turned without warning and swung the hatchet at Stanley’s skull.

Dymund and Fimby arrived at Stanley’s house at 3:15
P
.
M
. Three police cars, the coroner’s wagon and a newsvan were crowded into the end of the cul-de-sac. Neighbors gathered in a small, nervous clump across the street.

Dymund was the senior detective. He was close to retirement, tall and bulky, with thin white hair he kept slicked back.

Fimby was the junior. He had a pear-shaped body and a pear-shaped face, with a salt-and-pepper handlebar mustache riding on top of fleshy jowls. Both of them wore tan trenchcoats and fedoras—not so much for style as to fend off Seattle’s ever-present rain.

“It’s gotta be him,” Dymund said as they walked in the front door, flashing their badges at the patrolman who guarded it.

“It’s not him,” replied Fimby.

“Gotta
be him.”

“Can’t
be him.”

They entered the kitchen and saw the body for the first time. They both stopped dead and stared for a second.

“Okay,” said Fimby. “It’s him.”

“Oh, yeah.”

Dymund leaned in to take a closer look at the body as Fimby snapped on a pair of rubber gloves.

“It’s the Closer, all right,” Dymund sighed. Fimby picked up one of the five cassette tapes lying in a neat stack on the table.

“Four tapes,” said Fimby. “Ninety minutes each. Six hours.”

“Whatever else he is, he’s thorough.”

Another patrolman entered the kitchen. His face was pale, and he carefully avoided looking directly at what was left of Stanley.

“Detective? We’ve found a second body.”

They followed him to a back room where a police photographer was taking a picture of an open freezer. Dymund and Fimby peered inside.

The body was young, nude and female. Her throat had been cut.

“Right hand missing,” Fimby said.

“Doesn’t sound like the Closer’s style, does it? Probably done by the guy in the kitchen—guess we’ll know once we listen to those tapes.”

“Detective?” the patrolman asked. He was young, with acne scars on his cheeks and a bristling blond crew cut. ”Why do you call him the Closer?”

“Don’t you read the tabloids?” Dymund asked.

SERIAL KILLER STALKER STRIKES AGAIN!

Charlie Holloway leaned back in his chair and yawned; it had been a long day. His eyes fell on his own portrait hanging on the wall across from his desk, and he wondered how long it would be before his real face no longer resembled the one captured in oils. He’d always have the big, potato-sized nose, of course, but his hair, full and black in the painting, was already mostly gone and hardly black. His face had gotten fuller as middle age had added pounds along with the years, and his blue eyes—always his best feature, his mother had told him—were usually hidden behind glasses these days.

Ah, if only I had Dorian Gray as a client,
Charlie thought ruefully.
Still, that painting’s going to be worth a mint one day—