Jonathan Nasaw - Fear itself

A moment later he was back with his hands in the air and the front of his trunks flat as a Ken doll; behind him, a tall skinheaded white man with a long-barreled revolver had stopped in the doorway, out of range of the camera.

“Turn it off,” the stranger said quietly.

Gloria, tripping on Ecstasy, dazed by the sudden turn of events, her system flooded with dozens, maybe hundreds, of conflicting hormones and neurotransmitters, was too bewildered to respond at first. On screen, Hot and Hotter were laughing. Looks like somebody dropped in unexpectedly, Hotter typed with one finger. Gloria rose, fumbling at her see-through peignoir, and with her eyes trained on the computer screen, she watched herself crossing to the desk in an awkward modesty crouch, covering her breasts with one hand and her crotch with the other. It was disorienting, watching herself cut obliquely across the screen while walking straight ahead, but she couldn’t tear her eyes from the screen, or bring herself to switch the computer off once she reached it-it was as if she wanted to see how the show was going to come out.

“I said, turn it off!”

Gloria was still frozen. Jim stumbled into the picture on the computer screen; an instant later he appeared bodily at the edge of her vision, crawling on his hands and knees toward the surge protector strip. There was a popping, staticky sound; the screen flared white, then black; reluctantly, Gloria turned back to the room.

“If you want money…” Jim was saying. Having unplugged the computer, he’d climbed out from under the desk and positioned himself in front of Gloria, shielding her with his body as he crossed the living room toward the man, who took one long stride toward him, grabbed his arm, spun him around, and clubbed him over the top of the head with the barrel of the revolver.

“Sorry about that, Skairdykat,” said the intruder, stepping over Jim’s twitching body. “But you shouldn’t have lied about living alone.”

8

Stoked on Mexican crosstops and anticipation, Simon had driven straight from Allenwood to Georgetown with only a single stop to gas up and purchase a street guide for the District of Columbia and a cheap canvas travel bag, into which he transferred the snakes. He’d parked the Volvo down on M Street and walked up to Conroy Circle, effecting an entry by the simple expedient of using the leather snake gauntlet to punch through a pane of glass in the back door.

As soon as he had the woman secured-Simon was operating on the assumption that the female was Skairdykat-he went off to explore the premises, with mixed results.

On the one hand, the house was hideously furnished. American Moderne in a neo-Georgian brownstone: oh, please! On the other hand Simon was extremely gratified not to find any little Chinese Rugrats tucked into their beddy-byes. In the thirty-odd years he’d been playing the game, it was a point of pride for Simon that he had never harmed or even frightened a child. Tempting as it might have been to taste that fruit, Simon had taken his self-imposed stricture to such extremes that the only thing his victims had in common was that they were all childless. Having been deprived of both his parents, he just couldn’t bring himself to do that to a kid.

When he returned to the living room, Skairdykat was wriggling around on the chrome and leather couch, rolling her eyes, and making those mmmff, mmmff sounds that meant she was ready for him to take the gag out.

“Are you sure?” he asked her, stroking her forehead, smoothing back that glorious head of jet-black hair.

An eager nod.

“Because if I take it off and then you try to scream again, you’re going to regret it deeply.”

She nodded that she understood. He walked around behind the couch and untied the gag-a terry-cloth bathrobe belt. She spat it out, turned, and followed him with her eyes as he came back around the couch and sat beside her. “Now, is there something you wanted to tell me, Skairdykat?”

“Why do you keep calling me that?”

“Skairdykat? You chose the name, not me.”

“I don’t…Please, I don’t-I have no idea what you’re talking about. You have to believe me; there’s been some kind of mistake.”

He held her face lightly by the chin, tilted her head up toward him, looked into her eyes. She was his first Oriental-there was something particularly appealing, almost childlike, about the smooth curve of the upper eyelid. They weren’t slanted at all, these brown eyes, but sweetly elliptical, like Missy’s. And he could finally see the fear in them, now that the shock and anger had passed. “You’re telling the truth, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I believe you, but I want to run a little test, a little experiment, just to be on the safe side,” Simon explained, gagging her again.

“I’ll be right back.”

He stepped over the man’s body and strolled down the hall to the back door. He brushed the glittering glass dust off the leather gauntlet, unzipped the canvas travel bag lying next to the getaway satchel, and used the pencil flashlight to peer inside. The snakes were asleep again. Simon recited to himself the mnemonic used to distinguish between the venomous coral and its various look-alikes (if red touches yellow, it kills a fellow; snout of black, bad for Jack) as he reached into the bag and grabbed the scarlet king (that was the one with the red snout and the black rings intervening between the red and yellow ones) just behind the head.

When Simon returned to the living room with the scarlet king, he knew within seconds that Skairdykat, or rather, Gloria, had been telling the truth. She was frightened half to death-who wouldn’t be? — but she was no ophidiophobe. He couldn’t provoke a syncope, or anything resembling a true panic attack, even when he jabbed the king’s head directly toward her eyes, though the terrified snake did its part by baring its harmless teeth and flicking its narrow forked tongue out to smell her.

He left the room, returned the king to the travel bag; the coral glanced up disinterestedly. Simon tiptoed back, stuck his head around the archway. Gloria was staring at the man on the floor. When she saw Simon, she quickly looked away, but it was too late. Simon had followed her glance, seen the smeared blood trail on the carpet, realized that the man was feigning unconsciousness: he had managed to drag himself a few inches closer to the desk, to the telephone. Simon wasn’t worried-he still had a long way to go. And the poor fellow might even come in handier, awake.

“Is it him?” he asked Gloria, sitting down beside her. “Is he the one who’s afraid of snakes?”

“Not so far as I know.”

He knew she was telling him the truth. Most of them did, once they’d gotten past their resentment and realized that in addition to being the man who was going to kill them, Simon was also the only one who could spare them. He liked this phase of the game.

“Think real hard then, Gloria. Think as if your life depended on it. Is there anyone else who had access to your computer last week?”

She didn’t have to say anything-he could read the answer in her eyes. “Who was it, Gloria?” he asked gently.

“Linda.”

“Linda who?”

“Linda Abruzzi.”

“And who’s Linda Abruzzi.”

“An FBI agent.”

A decoy, then-Skairdykat was only a decoy, Simon realized with a start. Which meant this was all a trap. Was it about to snap shut on him? “You’re not, are you?”

“What?”

“An FBI agent.”

“No. No, I swear. I swear to God. She was my roommate at college. She was staying with us until she found her own place. I told her-goddammit, God damn the bitch, I told her not to-”