The Violet Hour (33 page)

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Authors: Richard Montanari

BOOK: The Violet Hour
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But where the hell was Willie?
Maybe there was another way in, he thought. Maybe Willie had found another way inside. Or maybe he had waited a couple of minutes and taken off, only to call in an all-points bulletin on the crazy Nick Stella fucker who thinks he can manipulate the where, when, and how of his arrest.
He began to walk a little faster, still keeping his ears attuned to anyone banging on a door or rattling a window.
And that was when the man knocked him down.
Nicky screamed, a short, guttural burst of surprise, scrambled to his feet, lashed out with a much-practiced combination of punches. Air. His heart began to race. Another left, right, left. Still nothing.
‘Who’s there?’ he screamed.
No answer.
And then the man ran into him again. Except this time, something felt wrong. It felt as if the man’s shoes had hit him in the chest. Nicky punched, a straight right hand, and connected with hard bone. Hard
vertical
bone. He backed up a few feet, waiting in an attack stance, his fear catching the breath in his chest.
A leg, Nicky thought. A shinbone. He had punched a shinbone. It didn’t make any sense, but still his hand flared with pain, red needles that shot up his arm and across his back.
He backed up another ten feet or so, crouched down, listened. Nothing shifted or moved in front of him. Although, he thought, it would have been hard to hear over the thrumming of his heart.
When he felt confident that no one was going to lunge at him, he searched his pockets, found the pack of matches. He plucked the last match, carefully felt along the edge until he found the flint surface. He took a breath, held it, struck the match.
The flare was small and insignificant in the expanse of the maze, but it threw enough of its pale light onto the blood-splattered shoes of the man hanging in front of him. There was enough light for Nicky to see the deep red stains that had soaked through the formerly blue denim, the crimson intaglio that was the man’s T-shirt.
And the wraparound shades. For that brief instant, the wraparound shades stared down at him like the eyes of a giant spider.
Willie T, Nicky thought, through the horror.
Willie T.
He skirted the body and ran toward the steps.
The cavalry was dead.
57
 
‘They all cried. And talked. In the end. Geoffrey especially. Confessed to everything he had ever done in his life. Even told me about kicking his old dog. Then he cried like a little girl. It was pathetic.’
Amelia was still tied to the cable that led to the ceiling. Her arms were numb, no longer part of her body. She was still gagged.
‘Speaking of little girls,’ he said. He picked up the burlap sack. He handled it with ease, in spite of its weight, its bulk, brought it next to the desk, dropped it roughly. ‘I always wanted a little girl. Julia and I were going to have two children, you know. A boy and a girl.’
He grabbed a hypodermic needle from the desk, squirted a drop or two into the air, and fixed Roger in a defiant stare. ‘Tell me why you fucked all that up for me, Roger. Tell me why you should have a wife and a family and I don’t.’
Roger lifted his head slowly. ‘I didn’t . . .’
In an instant the man brought the needle down, violently, and stabbed the burlap bag, finding purchase in flesh. He depressed the plunger, removed it, tossed it casually on the desk. He looked back at Roger, as if he had just clipped a toenail, or brushed a bit of lint from his trousers. ‘Of course, you might have a drug addict on your hands in the future. Plenty of product here. Plenty of time.’ He began to pace. ‘Can you imagine that, Roger? Your little Maddie a junkie. Picture it. She’s eleven, twelve years old, she’s sneaking out of her bedroom window, riding into town with some guy named Rasheed, scoring some smack. Imagine that. Little Maddie sucking cock in the back of some fur-lined van, a slave to her daddy’s habits.’
Amelia looked at the burlap sack, the last pieces of her heart breaking. Then, miraculously, as if she had willed it, Amelia saw the center of the bag move up and down. Once. Then twice.
Breathing . . .
The man started to rant, his voice getting louder now, clearly more agitated.
‘Well, I guess Roger isn’t in a talkative mood tonight. Odd, isn’t it? If I remember correctly, you could never seem to shut him the fuck up back in college. And the smooth talk. Jesus. The man could charm the panties off a corpse. Right, Mrs Roger?’ He moved the chair out of the way and stood next to the window that overlooked the back alley. ‘Second last chance, Roger. Tell me now.’ He picked up the burlap bag, one hand holding each end. He suspended it a foot or so off the ground.
‘I don’t . . .’ Roger managed.
The man in the white jumpsuit began to swing the bag back and forth, side to side, slowly, knee-high. Back and forth. ‘I’m going to ask you only two more times.’
Amelia struggled against the ropes. She couldn’t turn her head far enough to see Roger fully, but she could see the window. Oh yes. She could see the man in white, the sparkling of his sequined mask, she could see the bag that held her daughter, her very life, being swung in an ever-increasing arc, ever nearing the windowpane. She tried to scream, but the gag caught it. Her terror tasted like wet foil.
‘Tell me,’ the man said. ‘You were the pirate that night, weren’t you?’
Roger’s head lolled on his shoulders. He didn’t speak. The drugs had taken his voice, his mind, his memory. Roger, please, Amelia thought. Please come back. Fight it. Please tell him. Amelia closed her eyes, imagined the crack of the glass, the thunderclap of the pane breaking outward, the bag sailing through. She forced herself to look.
‘Tell me you were the god . . . damn . . . PIRATE!’ he screamed, the effort to swing the bag faster and faster drawing a bead of sweat on his brow. Amelia saw the droplet run down his forehead, leaving a thin white streak. The man in the white suit was wearing Pan-Cake makeup.
Roger. My God. What have you done?
‘Wasn’t . . . me,’ Roger offered.
The man grimaced, baring his teeth. ‘Liar,’ he said. ‘Fucking liar.’
And then it happened.
In one smooth motion, the man let go of the bag, and the weight of the sack carried it into the glass – shattering it into a thousand sparkling pieces – and out into the black night. For a moment, as the glass rained down, Amelia saw Maddie’s short life unspool in her mind. Her little girl’s first Christmas, her first Easter bonnet. The time she took all the hot dogs out of the fridge and left a trail of them heading upstairs to her room. Her first day of school. How she cried that day. How they both cried . . .
Then the horror blossomed within her, and her grief became a living thing, so powerful a force that she suddenly felt light, almost weightless, as if her insides were being bled through the pores of her skin. Every fear she had ever had, every dark scenario she had ever considered for her daughter, had just happened in a single second.
Maddie.
Maddie-bear.
Amelia St John opened her mouth.
And for a long time, her screams devoured her.
58
 
Nicky heard the music. And something that sounded like breaking glass. He was one floor below. He had learned on the second floor that the doors were locking behind him, but he wasn’t surprised. Ever since his phone call to his cousin Joseph, ever since learning of Johnny Angel’s death, he felt as if he were being drawn deeper and deeper into this core of darkness.
Willie T.
Had Willie been so far into this that the only way out for him was to end up hanging in a warehouse with his throat sliced open? And if that was what this maniac would do to a cop, what chance did he have? It was Willie T who had told him about Rat Boy to begin with.
Was that what sealed his fate?
Nicky continued up the stairwell, the music now growing in volume. Was it the Stones? He opened the door an inch or so and found, as expected, that he had reached the top floor. But of all the things he expected to see when he edged open the door and glanced into the room, what he actually saw nearly took his breath away.
The huge room was laid out like a Sesame Street version of Main Street.
Six-foot boxes that looked like buildings were placed diagonally across the center of the room, connecting the hundred or so feet between the two canvas rooms that Taffy had told him about. He had to look twice. Yes, there really were replicas of streetlights, and cars along the path between the rooms. Some of the boxes were crudely painted to look like buildings with which he was familiar. The Allen Medical Library. Severance Hall. The Boarding House. Euclid Tavern.
Holy shit, Nicky thought. It’s the Case Western Reserve University campus in 1988.
Right down to the mailboxes.
He could hear that the loud music was coming from the canvas room to his left. He could see a shadow against the wall, moving around, darting, growing in size, diminishing. Then slides projected onto the canvas. Yearbook pictures. John Angelino. Benjamin Crane. Julia Ann Raines.
He stepped up to the curtains, parted them slightly, and peered inside. His mind was hardly prepared for what he saw, but he tried to take it all in. Amelia was tied up, kneeling on the bed, surrounded by department-store mannequins. There was a man, a naked man, passed out in a wheelchair, facing her.
But it was the other man in the room that filled Nicky with dread. A man who sat down at the desk, then turned to face Nicky, as if sensing his presence, and slowly removed his sequined mask, a dime-store trick that concealed a very familiar face.
This time, though, the man behind the face wasn’t wearing the thick, Coke-bottle lens glasses.
And it was for that simple reason that Nicky finally saw Gil Strauss’s eyes. Sure, the nose was different, and the chin was a little stronger than it was in his college yearbook picture, but it was the eyes that told him what he needed to know.
G. D. Woltz.
Gillian Strauss.
Strauss.
Woltz.
Nicky put his hand into his pocket, gripped the pepper spray, put his finger on the trigger, and stepped through the canvas curtains, into Gillian Strauss’s world.
59
 
The man in the white jumpsuit sat at the desk, cooking another run of heroin. The TV blaring an old
Who’s the Boss
rerun. The stereo played ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ over and over again.
Maddie. No.
God, no.
Amelia fought the nausea, the heart-shattering grief.
Okay. Maybe . . . maybe she fell on the next building over, Amelia thought. Or a ledge. Maybe she hit an awning or a Dumpster full of soft garbage bags or . . .
She had to get out of this.
Had to.
Her little girl wasn’t dead, see.
Just hurt.
Just . . .
hurt
.
Amelia leaned slightly to the right, then to the left. Right. Left. And began to work on the ropes. But before she could budge them, she looked at the corner of the room, where the two canvas walls met, and thought she might be hallucinating. In fact, she was sure of it. For a moment she thought she saw Nicky standing there, wearing a dark coat, his hands in his pockets.
‘Nick!’ the man in white shouted, as if he were expecting a visitor. He stood up. ‘Come on in!’
Nicky stepped inside, flesh and blood. It wasn’t a hallucination after all. He stood in the corner, nodded at her. She looked at the man in white and, for the first time, saw his face. His ordinary face. She had seen it before. But where?
‘You remember Julia, don’t you?’ the man in white said, gesturing toward Amelia. ‘Julia and I are engaged.’
Nicky just stared.
‘And let me introduce you to the AdVerse Society. This is my good friend Geoffrey Coldicott.’ He crossed the room, not missing a beat of the music. He stood behind the soldier-mannequin. ‘A blow job to die for. Believe me.’ He placed his hands on the mannequin’s shoulders. ‘Between you and me? Not for publication? Off the record and all that? He died screaming
mommy mommy mommy mommy
. I swear to God. Like a little girl.’
‘This is so fucked up, man,’ Nicky said. ‘You gotta get some help.’
‘Help? I don’t need help.’ He gestured to another mannequin. ‘And this, of course, is Johnny Angel. Johnny is the society’s resident thespian. Thespian, not lesbian. Jenny’s our resident dyke.’
Nicky looked away for a moment, back. ‘You called Sebastian Keller from my apartment, didn’t you?’
‘Of course.’
‘And that was you online? You were Prufrock?’
‘Call me Al.’
‘But how did you boot Amelia from the room? You can’t just—’
The man in the white jumpsuit held up his right hand, made a snipping motion with his fingers. ‘Wire cutters. I was right outside her house. The phone company fixed it a few hours later. She never knew the phone was out.’

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