Mark Smith - The Inquisitor

“Yes.”

Dalton kept his eyes and gun on Geiger’s face while his free hand found the wrist restraint and popped its clasp open. He took four steps back, snapped his gloves off, and dropped them onto the floor. Geiger noted the precision of Dalton’s movements: he was meticulous to the last gesture, sweatless, unruffled. His gun still had Geiger’s forehead for a target.

“Go ahead,” Dalton said.

Geiger raised his arm. The initial sensation was of extreme lightness, but then, as he reached down, the feeling inverted, and the bone and flesh felt so sodden that his arm might have dragged him out of the chair and down to the floor if he hadn’t been bound at the chest. He undid the chest strap, and his ribs lifted and his lungs swelled like bellows. The air streaming in felt cool and dense.

Dalton chuckled drily. “Geiger, this has been fascinating. When I write my memoirs it will be one of the highlights.”

Geiger reached down and undid the left ankle restraint. “You’re going to write a book?”

“When I retire. I’ve already chosen a title: Dalton: My Life as a Torturer. ”

Geiger freed his other ankle.

“But not to worry, Geiger, I’ll change your name.” Dalton let out a short hmmm of a laugh. “I guess I’ll have to include an author’s note: ‘Some names have been changed to protect the guilty.’”

Geiger’s fingers closed on the last binding at his other wrist and he pried it open. He looked up at Dalton, his body suddenly feeling lighter again. “I’m going to stand up now and go into the viewing room to stitch myself up and get some fresh clothes.”

“Go ahead.” Dalton nodded, waving Geiger on with the gun.

Geiger rose from the barber’s chair. His first steps were hesitant, and he held his arms out slightly at the hips for balance. The lower half of him felt newly weighted, as if parts of his insides had come loose and slid below his waist before settling in his legs and feet. The loosely wrapped gauze around his thigh, soaked with blood, began to droop. As he shuffled forward, the gauze came unwound and trailed behind him on the floor.

Dalton followed him through the door and stopped as Geiger opened an armoire at the far end of the viewing room. On one side were shelves of medical supplies, on the other drawers of clothes. Geiger took out packets of absorbable traumatic sutures, a pair of scissors, and rolls of gauze and adhesive. He considered lidocaine spray but decided against it; the wounds were jagged and thus would be tricky to sew up, and the pain would help guide him so that he could achieve a tight stitch.

He pulled pants and a black pullover from a drawer and limped to the couch. He let himself drop back into the cushions, but his mind and body were out of sync, and the back of his head smacked hard into the wall before he finished his descent.

“Ouch,” said Dalton, and lowered the weapon.

Geiger held the needle and thread in front of his nose, and in trying to marry them struggled with a frequent shift between foreground and background, as if his brain were a camera lens searching for a focal point. On his third pass Geiger found the needle’s eye with the suture.

Dalton pulled a bottle of Remy Martin off the bar and poured some into a glass. Sipping the cognac, he watched Geiger sew first one cut and then another, his stitches like those of a master tailor. He didn’t see Geiger flinch even once-the man had the tolerance of a bull.

“Where’d you learn how to do that?” Dalton asked.

“My father taught me.”

Geiger had been working at spreading out the pain-taking the waffling burn in his chest, the dull throb in his mouth, and the sharp, barbed pangs in his thigh and sending them throughout his body until the pain was everywhere, making each stab and tug of the needle more a part of a whole rather than an individual assault on his flesh.

“Is he a doctor?”

“A carpenter. Was-he’s dead.”

Geiger pulled the last stitch, snipped it with the scissors, and knotted the end, then sat back and rubbed his palms against the cushions to rid them of his blood. “May I have a drink, please?” he said.

“What can I get you?”

“Anything.”

Dalton put down his cognac, examined the bar’s selection, and poured an inch of vodka into a glass. His gun nosing up, he walked the drink over to Geiger.

“Here you are. Left hand-nice and slow, please.”

Geiger’s eyelids dropped. A long breath blew out of his open mouth. “Give me a second-I’m in a lot of pain.”

“Take your time.”

“You’re very good at what you do, Dalton.”

“Praise from Caesar.”

Geiger’s hand drifted up for the glass. When Dalton’s gaze moved to it, Geiger’s good leg snapped up and smashed into Dalton’s groin. Dalton doubled over, his spectacles falling, and Geiger’s forearm swung into his jaw with such force that two teeth shot out of his mouth. As Dalton went to his knees, Geiger swatted the gun out of his hand. Dalton held there for a moment, swaying, and then toppled over onto his stomach, one cheek to the floor, huffing like a beached fish.

“There was no praise intended,” said Geiger.

Geiger moved carefully off the couch and straddled Dalton, holding Dalton’s left arm high up on his back and pinning the other arm to the floor at the wrist. Geiger’s blow had rattled Dalton’s skull with such intensity that several blood vessels in his right eye had burst, covering it with a spidery hemorrhage.

“Make a fist with your right hand,” Geiger said.

“A fist?” Dalton said, gasping.

“Yes, make a fist.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re not going to do this anymore.”

Dalton shook his head. His chest was heaving, but he managed a wolfish grin. “No. I don’t think I will. I want to see Geiger the Great in action. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, you know?”

“Sorry. You’re about a day too late.”

Geiger pushed Dalton’s left arm higher up his back, and Dalton squealed with pain. “Dalton, for most of my life I’ve wondered what it would be like to kill someone. Say no again and you will give me one less thing to wonder about.” He kept cranking Dalton’s arm higher. “Make a fist.” And higher still. “Do it.”

A muffled syllable signaled concession, and finally Dalton’s right hand curled into a ball against the floor. Geiger made a fist of his own and sent it smashing down on Dalton’s, whose scream nearly drowned out the sound of his fingers breaking. Then Geiger grabbed Dalton’s left hand and swiftly jerked four of the fingers back until the bones snapped. Dalton’s howl was lower this time but longer, and soon it became a rough, growling whir. His hands, resting on the floor with the fingers splayed, looked like two crabs someone had stepped on at the beach.

Geiger got to his feet and fell back onto the couch. He took a deep breath. “Early retirement, Dalton. Teach yourself to type with your toes and you can start writing your memoirs.”

Geiger picked up his pants and pullover and considered the least torturous way to put them on.

“That’s it,” said Harry, turning from a window back to the living room. He sighed. “That’s the whole story.”

After Geiger had left, Corley had put out an assortment of finger food, and once Harry and Ezra had gorged themselves, he’d sent Ezra into the bedroom to watch television and then demanded that Harry tell him exactly what was going on or he would call the police. In telling the tale of Ezra, Harry at first tried to skirt the details of what he and Geiger actually did for a living, but early on it became clear that everything would have to come out. It was the first time he had ever told anyone about his work, and the undertow of the loathsome truth pulled at him.