Chris Mooney - The Killing House

She had also worked him over. His face, a swollen, pulpy mess of split skin and drying blood, was almost unrecognizable. Fletcher put his foot up on the back bumper and rolled up his trouser leg, wondering what Borgia had done to provoke her.

Fletcher removed the knife from its sheath. A favorite among scuba divers, this knife had a long blade with a serrated edge that could cut through cartilage and muscle with minimal effort and, if needed, bone.

Borgia groaned as he turned his head, his good eye staring up at the knife. He tried to speak, but his words were muffled by the rag that had been stuffed in his mouth.

‘Relax, Mr Borgia. I have no intention of treating you the same way Miss White did. I promise you, I won’t be anywhere near as kind.’

Fletcher slit the zip ties binding the man’s ankles. He tucked the knife into his pocket and hoisted Borgia out of the trunk — an easy task, given the man’s rather diminutive size.

Fletcher searched the trunk, found the usual assortment of offerings: jumper cables, reusable shopping bags and a plastic container stocked with bungee cords. He selected the jumper cables, shut the trunk, and, with one hand gripping the back of the Borgia’s neck, marched the barefoot man across the bumpy mat of dead leaves, twigs and small rocks.

Fletcher didn’t speak as he led Borgia deeper and deeper into the woods. The only sounds were Borgia’s footsteps and his laboured breathing.

The man’s frame held barely any body fat. Without this much-needed insulation, he couldn’t stop shivering. He fell several times. Fletcher lifted him to his feet, and he kept stumbling about, disorientated, until he fell again.

Ten minutes had passed; it was enough. Fletcher shoved Borgia face first against a tree. He used the jumper cable to secure the man’s neck against the trunk.

Borgia had turned his head so he could watch the forest with his working eye.

‘Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “A man must ride alternately on the horses of his private and public nature, as the equestrians in the circus throw themselves nimbly from horse to horse.” Emerson was referring to a man’s conscience.’ Fletcher tapped the blade against Borgia’s forehead. ‘Now let’s see if we can find yours.

‘I don’t know what you’ve read or heard about me, Mr Borgia, but know this: I find dishonesty unspeakably ugly. Please bear that in mind before you answer.

‘We’ll start with the most obvious question: why did you order one of your HRT operators to kill Ali Karim?’

Fletcher pulled the rag from Borgia’s mouth. More than one tooth had been knocked loose during his altercation with M.

‘You forgot something, Malcolm.’

‘Please, enlighten me.’

‘I’m not afraid to die.’

‘That remains to be seen,’ Fletcher said, and grabbed two of Borgia’s fingers. A quick turn of the wrist and they broke.

Borgia screamed. Spittle mixed with blood sprayed against the tree bark.

‘Why did you try to kill Ali Karim?’

Borgia started to giggle.

‘Did that give you an erection?’

Fletcher broke two more fingers.

Borgia gave another scream. When it subsided, the manic giggling returned.

‘I know who you really are,’ Borgia said. ‘I know what you did.’

‘Which is?’

‘Go ahead, Malcolm. Use the knife. Go ahead and cut me and make me bleed. Do what you were born to do — what you love to do.’

Fletcher stuffed the rag back inside the man’s mouth.

‘Goodbye, Mr Borgia.’

The man was still giggling. Fletcher turned and walked back through the woods, heading for the car. He would wait there for fifteen, maybe twenty minutes; any more than that and he would risk losing Borgia to hypothermia. Then he would return, and if Borgia still failed to answer his questions, Fletcher would be forced to take the man to one of Karim’s nearby properties.

Fletcher ran down a slope, branches snapping underneath his boots. The car came into view and he caught a blurred shape rising on the other side of the hood. Quickly he turned to his left, his hand already inside his coat and ripping the SIG from his shoulder holster, when the person near the Mustang fired — not a gunshot but a hiss, like compressed air escaping.

Fletcher was moving into the woods, when a man emerged from behind a tree, a man with a disfigured face and holding a handgun. The man who had killed Boyd Paulson and abducted Dr Sin and Nathan Santiago from Karim’s New Jersey beachfront home. Brandon Arkoff.

Arkoff fired. A pop of compressed air escaping and something shattered against Fletcher’s bulletproof vest. Arkoff kept firing and the person near the Mustang — his partner, Marie Clouzot — was firing too.

Fletcher felt something sharp pierce his thigh, like a needle. Warmth trickled through his muscle as Arkoff ducked behind a tree. Fletcher fired off a round, saw the exploding tree bark. He fired again and felt another needle-sting on the back of his head.

He ran, stumbled and quickly righted himself. He pressed ahead until his legs gave out.

Fletcher collapsed against the hard ground. He had dropped the SIG, could see it lying just a few inches away among the brown dried leaves. He went to crawl for it, collapsed. His arms had turned limp, and his vision was fading. He saw a tranquillizer dart sticking in the meat of his thigh.

He heard approaching footsteps and then he saw a rifle. Looking down the gun sight was the pale, almost bloodless face of Arkoff’s partner, Marie Clouzot, the woman who had tried to kill him in Colorado.

Malcolm Fletcher awoke to warm air and voices.

‘Sit still. It will be over before you know it.’

A woman’s voice, deep and husky. The kind cured from a lifetime of cigarettes and hard liquor.

‘Why can’t you give me Novocain?’ Alexander Borgia’s voice, and it was coming from the same direction as the woman’s — someplace straight ahead, only a few feet away. ‘Don’t you have any of that shit down here?’ Borgia asked.

‘Just grit your teeth and bear it,’ the woman replied. ‘You’ve been through worse — and you’re goddamn lucky I installed this thing. Otherwise, I never would’ve found you, and you’d still be freezing to death out in the woods.’

A great fog filled Fletcher’s head, but his senses were working, alert: he was lying on his left side, his cheek pressed against something cold and hard. It had the rough, gritty texture of sandpaper. He didn’t feel any bindings on his wrists or ankles. His mouth felt dry, and there was a throbbing in his forehead, a tight band of pressure that had the feeling of a hangover. The sedative loaded in the darts. One had hit his thigh and the other had grazed the back of his neck.

New sounds, some near by, some faint: a low, guttural moan. The rattle of chain link. And everywhere, raspy, sickly breathing. There was a pervasive reek of blood and unwashed skin, and, behind it, the distinct and overpowering stench of human decomposition.

His eyes slit open to a tight cluster of intensely bright lights. A pair of blurry figures stood on either side of what appeared to be a very long and very tall stainless-steel table.

Fletcher didn’t move his head or body; he wanted Borgia and the woman to think he was unconscious. He blinked, and kept blinking, until everything came into a sharper focus.

The light came from a portable floor-standing surgery lamp, its wide, twenty-inch elliptical reflector dish positioned over a stainless-steel operating table. Borgia stood behind the table. His face was still grotesquely swollen, but it had been cleaned up. A surgical mask covered his mouth and nose, and he had changed into a grey sweatshirt several sizes too big.