D. Gilles - Colder Than Death

“How do you mean?”

“To kidnap someone there can’t be any trace of them. Their families have to be convinced that they ran away. It’s easy to dispose of purses and handbags and such, but what do you do with a car? Every woman I ever took was kidnapped when they were in a situation where they had left their home or place of work on foot.”

“What did it matter?”

“I didn’t have to worry about disposing of their vehicles. That, more than anything, was what made me act so quickly with Brandy Parker. In the few minutes we spent talking she let it slip that she’d been in an accident and that her car had been totaled. As yet, she hadn’t gotten a new one. She was hitchhiking everywhere. Guess what, Del? She hitchhiked to the cemetery that day. Hearing that, I began formulating a plan. I knew she was there alone. Not a soul was near us. I could knock her out, put her in the trunk of my car and have her home in fifteen minutes.

“What went wrong?”

“Knocking her out was easy. From all my years working on bodies I knew the exact location of the right nerves to hit…like when you see people in movies render someone unconscious with the touch of a hand. She was out like a light and didn’t even know what hit her. It was while I was about to pick her up and carry her to my car that I saw it.”

“What?”

“She had a hideous scar on her face.” As he pointed at the right side of his face the photograph I’d seen of Brandy flashed before my eyes.

“So?”

“I didn’t want to work with a built-in imperfection. Maintaining the bodies for perpetual preservation was difficult enough. I didn’t want to have to work on a body with such a problematic scar.”

“That still doesn’t tell me why you had to kill her.”

“I had no choice. If I left her there unconscious she would’ve come to and known who I was. Sooner or later she might’ve seen me. She had to die. I thought about putting her in the car and bringing her back here and putting her in the ground in the gully, but it was daytime and I didn’t like doing my dirty work in the daylight. I had to think fast, so I dragged her body behind one of the mausoleums…only for the purpose of figuring out what to do. It was while I was behind that mausoleum that I noticed one of the bricks in the back was loose. I loosened it some more, then loosened another and another until there was a big enough space for me to slide the body inside. Before I did it, I took one of the bricks and hit her on the head. Again, because of my knowledge of the body, I knew exactly where to place the blow. For what it’s worth, she was unconscious when I hit her so she didn’t feel a thing.”

When we reached the edge of the gully I stopped and looked down. It sloped at an incline that would be easy to walk up or down on and was filled with wild weeds, grass and an occasional shrub. “Now where?” I asked.

“Down. Just keep moving.”

“So you started with your wife,” I said. “Why all the others?”

“It’s kind of like dating, Del. You go out with one girl for awhile and you get tired of her, so you find someone else. That was part of it. The other part was the challenge of preservation. Over the years there’ve been such advancements in chemicals and whatnot I decided to try different experiments in the treatments. I know this isn’t going to make you feel any better, but I’ve been keeping a detailed journal of all my experiments… obviously not to be released to the world until after my death, but I wanted some good to come out of this, other than my own personal pleasure and satisfaction. To the left past this tree coming up.”

“Why Alyssa, Nolan?”

“She was perfect. I would see you with her around town. I couldn’t wait to get at her. Imagine, to preserve that kind of beauty forever.”

“So you sent the letter and the postcard.”

“Yes. But she wrote them. It was her handwriting. All part of the plan. I mailed them when I was out of town at conventions. It had to look like she had run off.”

“That was a mistake, Nolan. What you didn’t know is that Alyssa ended our relationship.” He looked at me with an odd expression. “I was too embarrassed to tell you or Lew. The letter came three weeks after she dumped me. It never made sense as to why she would’ve sent it.”

“No matter,” said Nolan. “But I’m glad you told me this. I don’t feel as bad now. She was already out of your life.”

“Not really. She’s been in my heart ever since. I could never feel anything for another woman…or trust one because I was afraid she’d take off. You killed a part of me, Nolan. I feel like this is the second time I died.”

“What do you want me to say, I’m sorry? You made a choice to hang on to a fantasy. You ruined your life, not me. Go past that tree stump.”

“What kind of pleasure did you get doing this for all these years? Jesus, Nolan.”

“You have every right to ask that question, Del. But when you look at the nature of our business, especially my end of it, there isn’t much difference between a beautiful young woman if she’s alive and sleeping or dead and appears to be sleeping. Over the years, I’ve come to think of myself as a man with five wives who never grow old and fat, who never cheat on me or talk back or make me hate myself. My women never go out and buy expensive dresses or run up credit cards or get wrapped up in their own careers. My wives stay home. I always know where they are. Okay. Stop here. Turn around.”

Nolan handed me the shovel.

“Start digging, Del.”

The dirt piled high and thick upon me. The deafening silence of the grave was all I had left. I heard the pounding sounds of what was unmistakably the shovel smoothing out the dirt three feet above me. He was done.

I knew it would only be a matter of seconds before whatever air was filtering through the dirt and somehow making its way into my lungs would stop. I didn’t understand why I was still breathing, but I didn’t waste a moment dwelling on it. In his mind, I was dead or would be shortly.

I wondered if he was getting nervous or anxious about getting caught, or if he had enough of a conscience to feel any sadness or guilt over what he had done. But there was no time to waste on what was going on in his mind. Breathing was uppermost in mine.

My nose was now completely plugged with dirt. I knew that trying to inhale one more time would be foolish. I also knew that my only chance to keep breathing would be to somehow get the duct tape off of my mouth and there was only one way to accomplish that. I would have to chew through it from the inside and I’d have to do it fast. The problem was getting my teeth in a position in which they could start tearing away. To accomplish this I had to use my tongue as if it were a crowbar, pushing against the tape and trying to make enough of an indentation for my teeth to have a shot.

I couldn’t do that. He had applied the tape so tightly that I couldn’t even force my lips apart. This time for sure I thought death would come and something inside of me welcomed it. I was tired of fighting. But some other mechanism within, maybe the survivor instinct we all have locked away, wouldn’t let me give up. Almost as if it had a will of its own, my right arm began to lift its way up through the dirt that was still being shoveled onto me.

It inched along slowly. Too slowly. I wanted to help it along, but I was petrified that any kind of sudden movement might disrupt the manner in which the dirt was settling. My lungs ached. I strained for air. There was none left. I could feel myself blacking out. My arm made its way from my side to my lower abdomen, then in jerky, half-inch-at-a-time movements that made me feel like a mime, across my stomach and chest, up to my mouth where my fingers took over and with an unsteady motion carefully peeled back enough tape to enable me to breathe, barely.