Thriller (11 page)

carefully before looking at Keith again. “What happened to him?

He was, uh, in the house when I left.”

“Gone—I hope!”

They heard a sound of distress. It was Joe Peterson. He was

staring at the lump on the sofa.

“Mr. Peterson,” Keith said softly. “I’m not going to shoot you.

But you are going to get that knife away from my wife’s throat

this instant.”

Beth pushed Peterson’s arm, stepping away from him. Peterson

barely reacted. He stared at the sofa. “God! Is she dead?” he asked.

Cocoa whined. Beth stared at Keith, shaking but relieved.

“Cocoa,” she said softly. “Well, I could have been wrong, but if

this man had attacked Mrs. Peterson, the dog would be barking

right now.”

“Aunt Dot!” Peterson said numbly.

“She isn’t dead—wasn’t dead,” Keith said. He looked at Beth.

“So it’s your musician.”

“You realized it, too… But—”

“He’s out there somewhere. And we’ll have that to deal with.

But for the moment…we’ve got to try to keep Mrs. Peterson alive.”

“Keith, would you get me some brandy and the ammonia

from the kitchen?” Beth asked. “We’ll see if we can rouse her.

Then we can try to make it to the hospital.” She grimaced. “With

the Hummer.”

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Keith walked to the kitchen, then stopped, pausing to pick up

the frying pan that lay on the floor. He froze in his tracks as he

heard a startled scream rise above the pounding of the rain. He

turned to race back to the living room, then came to a dead stop.

Their living room had been pitched into absolute darkness.

Terror struck deep into Beth’s heart. She had pulled back the

blanket, anxious to be there first, to assure herself that the

woman hadn’t died.

A hand snaked out for her from beneath the cover, dragging

her down with a ferocity that was astounding. Fingers wound

around her throat and she was tossed about as if she weighed

nothing.

Egan. Mark Egan. Drugged-out musician. No. Psychotic killer.

She saw his deranged grin right before he doused the lantern,

holding her in the vise of his one hand like a rag doll.

“What ya gonna do, big man?” a throaty voice called out in

the darkness, next to her ear. “Shoot me—you might kill her.

Don’t come after me, or she’s dead.”

Beth tensed every muscle. She didn’t know if the man had a

weapon or not, anything more than the hideous strength of his

hands.

She could hear nothing other than the wind and rain. Stars

began to burst into the darkness as his grip choked her. There

was no sound of voice. No sound of movement.

Not even Cocoa let out a whine.

Then there was a muffled groan.
Not Keith, the sound had not come

from Keith! It was Peterson who had groaned. So…where was Keith?

“That’s right,” Egan—or whoever he was—said. “You stay

right where you are. The missus and I are going to take the car.

Your car. We’ll go for a little ride. Will she be all right? Who

knows? But try to stop me now, and you’ll probably kill her

yourself.”

He began to drag her toward the door. He chuckled softly. “I

don’t see too badly in the dark. I like the dark.”

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They were nearly there; she could sense it. He threw open the

door. Her heart was thundering so that she didn’t hear the
whoosh

of motion at first.

She gasped, the air knocked from her as the
whoosh
became

an impetus of muscle and movement. Keith. He flew into

them from the porch side, taking both her and Egan by storm

and surprise. She twisted. Egan’s grip had been loosened by

the fall. She bit into his wrist. The man howled, then went

rolling away as he and Keith became engaged in a fierce physical battle.

Cocoa began to bark excitedly. She felt the little dog run over

her hand and begin to growl. Egan cried out in pain again. She

could hear Cocoa wrenching and tearing at something—Egan.

In pain or not, Egan was still wrestling on the floor with vehemence. Rain washed in from the open doorway. The faintest

light showed through, glittering on something…

The frying pan.

She picked it up, and in the darkness, desperately tried to ascertain her husband’s form from that of the killer. She saw a

head rise—

She nearly struck.

Keith!

The other head was on the ground. There was a hand around

Keith’s throat, fingers tightening…

Blindly, she slammed the frying pan down toward the floor. A

scream was emitted….

She struck again. And again.

And then arms reached out for her.

“It’s all right now. It’s all right.”

The lantern was lit. Good old Cocoa was in the bedroom,

standing guard over Mrs. Peterson who—despite having been

dumped unceremoniously on the floor—was still alive and

breathing. Her nephew, Joe Peterson, was tending to her.

Keith hadn’t moved the form on the floor yet. Beth didn’t

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know if he was dead or alive, but he wouldn’t be blithely getting

up this time.

She’d seen his face. Before Keith had covered it with the throw.

“Is it…him? The serial killer?” she said.

“I think so,” Keith murmured, slipping an arm tightly around

her shoulders.

“But you knew it wasn’t Peterson when I did.”

He turned to her, a pained and rueful smile just curving his

lips. “Because anyone who spends any time in Key West knows

that Ultra C is an all-girl band,” he said softly.

“I told him you knew music,” she said.

They both jumped, hearing the sudden loud blare of a horn.

A second later there was a pounding on the door.

Keith, still gripping his gun, strode to it, pulling it open. Andy

Fairmont, from the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office, was there.

“Jesus!” Andy shouted. “There’s a serial killer on the loose!

Have you heard?”

Keith looked at Beth. She shrugged, and turned to Andy.

“Never pull out a frying pan unless you intend to use it,” she said

gravely.

“What?”

“You’d better come in, Andy,” Keith said, and he set his arm

around his wife’s shoulders again, pulling her close.

James Siegel says the most common question he’s asked by

readers is,
Where do you get your ideas?
His standard answer

is,
I don’t know—do you have any?
The real answer, of course,

is,
Everywhere
. Siegel tends to write about ordinary people

caught up in extraordinary events. Being a self-described “ordinary person,” Siegel doesn’t find it hard to place himself in

the protagonist’s shoes. Riding the Long Island railroad for

instance—where attractive women would sometimes occupy

the seat beside him—sent Siegel into reveries of
what if?
That

ended up as
Derailed
—the story of an ordinary ad guy whose

life goes awry when he meets a woman on the train. Adopting kids in Colombia gave him the notion for
Detour,
where

an adoption goes terribly, murderously wrong. And then there

was the day he was lying in a massage room at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. The masseuse touched his neck

and said,
What’s bothering you?
Siegel’s response:
How do you

know something’s bothering me?
And she said,
Because I’m an

empath
.

Siegel was puzzled.

An empath? What’s that?

I sit in a dark motel room.

It’s pitch-black outside, but I’ve pulled the shades down tight

anyway, so she won’t see me when she walks in. So she’ll be sure

to turn away from me to switch on the light.

I don’t like the dark.

I live on Scotch and Ambien so I never have to stare at it,

because sooner or later it becomes the dark of the confessional

and I’m eight years old again. I can smell the garlic on his breath

and hear the rustle of his clothing. For a moment, I’m a shy,

sweet-natured, baseball-crazy boy again, and I physically shrink

away from what’s coming.

Then everything turns red and the world’s on fire.

I look back in anger, because anger is what I’ve become—a fist

of a man.

Anger is what cost me my home, and anger is what put me

into court-ordered therapy, and anger is what finally kicked me

off the LAPD and into hotel security, where I can be angry without killing anyone.

Not yet.

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You’ve heard of the hotel I work in. It’s considered top-shelf

and is patronized by various Hollywood wannabes and occasional bona fide celebrities. As downward spirals go, mine hasn’t

sucked me to the bottom yet, only to Beverly and Doheny.

I get to wear a suit and earpiece, something like a Secret Service man. I get to stand around and look semi-important and even

give orders to the hotel employees who don’t get to wear suits.

She was a masseuse in the hotel spa.

Kelly.

She was known for her deep-tissue and hot stone. I first talked

to her in the basement alcove where I went to be alone—but I’d

noticed her before that. I’d heard the music seeping out of her

room on my way to the back elevators, and when she entered

the basement to grab a smoke, I complimented her on her taste.

Most of the hotel masseuses were partial to Enya, to Eastern sitar

or the monotonous sound of waves lapping sand. Not her. She

played the Joneses—Rickie Lee and Nora and Quincy, too, on occasion.

“Do your customers like it?” I asked her.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Most of them are just trying to

not get a hard-on.”

“Occupational hazard, I guess?”

“Oh, yeah.”

She was pretty, certainly. But there was something else, a palpable aura that made it feel humid even in full-blast air-conditioning.

I believe she noticed the ugly swelling on the knuckles of my

right hand, and the place in the wall where I’d dented it.

“Bad day?”

“No. Pretty ordinary.”

She reached out and touched my face, fanning her fingers

across my right cheek. Which is more or less when she told me

she was an empath.

I won’t lie and tell you that I knew what an empath was.

A look had come over her when she touched my face—as

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if she’d felt that part of me which I rarely touch myself, and

then only in the dark before the Johnny Walker has worked

its magic.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“For what?”

“For whatever did this to you.”

This is what an empath can do—their special gift. Or curse,

depending on the day.

I learned all about empaths from her over the next few weeks.

As we talked in the basement, or bumped into each other on the

way into the hotel, or grabbed smokes outside on the corner.

Empaths touch and know. They feel skin and bone but they

touch soul. They see through their hands. Everything—the good,

the bad and the truly ugly.

She saw more ugly than she wanted to.

The ugliness had begun to get to her, to send her into a very

dark place.

It was one of her customers, she explained.

“Mostly I just see emotions,” she confided, “you know, happiness, sadness, fear—longing—all that. But sometimes…sometimes I see more…I know who they
are,
understand?”

“No. Not really.”

“This guy—he’s a regular. The first time I touched him, I had

to pull my hands away. It was that strong.”

“
What?”

“The sense of evil. Like touching—I don’t know…a black hole.”

“What kind of evil are we talking about?”

“The worst.”

Later, she told me more. We were sitting in a bar on Sunset

having drinks. Our first date, I guess.

“He hurts kids,” she said.

I felt that special nausea. The kind that used to subsume me

back in the confessional, when he would come for me, that dark

wraith of hurt. The nausea that came when my little brother dutifully followed me into altar-boyhood and I kept my mouth

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zipped tight like a secret pocket.
Don’t tell…don’t tell
. There’s a

price for not telling. It was paid years later, on the afternoon I

found my sweet, sad brother hanging from a belt in our childhood bedroom. Over his teenage years, he’d furiously sought solace in various narcotics, but they could only do so much.

“How do you know?” I asked Kelly.

“I know. He’s going to do something. He’s done it before.”

When I told her she might want to report him to the police,

she shot me the look you give to intellectually challenged children.

“Tell them I’m an empath? That I
feel
one of my clients is a

pedophile? That’ll go over well.”

She was right, of course. They’d laugh her out of the station.

It was maybe a week later, after this customer had come and

gone from his regular appointment and Kelly was looking particularly miserable, that I volunteered to keep an eye on him.

“How?”

We were lying in my bed, having taken our relationship to the

next level as they say, both of us using sex as a kind of opiate, I

think—a way to forget things.

“His next appointment?” I asked her. “When is it?”

“Tuesday at two.”

“Okay, then.”

I waited outside the pool area where the clients saunter out