Jonathan Nasaw - Fear itself

He brushed his fingers across her stomach. “I’m still finding that hard to believe.”

“Listen,” she said, angered by the intimacy of the touch, “if I were expecting him momentarily, do you think I’d tell you?”

The hand began traveling up, past her chest; his long fingers gripped her chin and turned her head toward the snake. “Eventually,” he said.

Simon triumphant! But even he was a little surprised by the ease with which all the pieces were falling into place. He shouldn’t have been, he told himself: the great ones always make it look easy. Naturally the cops had bought the charred-corpse scenario. The key was suggestion, the planting of an assumption that became a fulfilled expectation. He didn’t have to convince them that the body was his-they’d convinced themselves.

Nor did Simon deny there was an element of luck in all this. He was lucky the Harley had been available-it would have been a lot harder to hide the Lexus in the woods. He was lucky, too, that Skairdykat had failed to lock the front door behind her-but luck favors patience as well as preparation. Arriving before she did, having the patience to wait, to watch the empty house, instead of just breaking in, meant there were no signs of forced entry that might have alarmed her into locking up-or not entering in the first place.

As for the game itself, Simon had never doubted his abilities. Unnecessary suffering…eventually: more suggestion, gentle guidance. Simon’s theory, Simon’s genius: fear comes from within. You can’t drive it in like a railroad spike; you have to plant it like a seed and nurture it until it blossoms.

True fear, however, is a bloom that demands time, patience, attention, and concentration, none of which Simon could provide until he knew when and how Pender was expected to return. And yet the traditional mainstay of the torturer-the infliction of pain, either gross or subtle-was not available to him. Not only was pain itself anodyne to fear, but the fear of pain was a mere avoidance reflex, like a worm shrinking from a hot needle, and as such, relatively uninteresting to Simon.

Still, he reasoned (and despite his having logged only a few hours of sleep since Ogallala, thanks to the crosstops he found his mind was as sharp as it had been all night), if the man wasn’t home at two in the morning, he probably wasn’t coming home. Even if he did, Simon would hear the car coming down the long drive, and still have the element of surprise on his side.

More likely, though, he’d have all night to play with Skairdykat. So he let her slip on a bathrobe-naked, she looked like a concentration camp victim; Simon much preferred Dorie’s type-and helped her into the living room, where he laid a crackling fire with last winter’s dry logs. Once again, it was all so easy: no need to tie her up; she wasn’t going anywhere without her cane and braces. He didn’t even have to gag her: this time of night there wasn’t a living soul within a mile of Tinsman’s Lock.

“Kind of chilly tonight,” he said, sitting down next to her with the canvas travel bag on his lap, and the snake in the bag. “Does it ever snow around here?”

“I don’t know. I just moved here, myself.”

“I know-Gloria told me. By the way, do you know how she died?”

By the way? By the fucking way? Linda ignored the question, stared into the fire. How sane and casual he sounded when she wasn’t looking at him.

“When I ask a question, I expect you to answer it. Remember what I said about unnecessary suffering?”

“Oh, that’s a crock. You want me to be afraid of what you might do, so you don’t actually have to do anything.”

Simon was impressed. He was also beginning to suspect he was in for a tussle. She would fight him every step of the way, this FBI agent. He didn’t mind-it was his game, and they had all night. “I’ll tell you anyway. She was in the bath. We’d been together all night-just like you and I are going to be. Hot bath. No suds. The-”

“Yes!” Linda hadn’t meant to shout.

“Yes, what?”

“Yes, I know how she died. Coral snake, neurotoxin, respiratory failure. So you can save yourself the trouble.”

“But it sounds so clinical, the way you put it. It wasn’t clinical at all. For one thing, the coral didn’t want to bite her-I had to hold it up against her neck, press it right up tight against her jugular, then let its tail droop into the hot water. They have short fangs, the corals-they have to-”

“Shut up. Just shut the fuck up.”

He boxed her ear. It was a trick he’d learned from Grandfather Childs. Very painful-even prizefighters hate to get whacked on the ear. One way or another, it seemed, the old man was always with him. “To be continued,” he said. “Where’s the kitchen?”

Linda felt as if she’d won a small battle-at least he’d dropped the pretense of civility when he slapped her. She resisted the temptation to provoke him further, though. She let him help her into the kitchen, kept her mouth shut while he made coffee.

Then he poured them each a cup, sat down across from her at the kitchen table, and it began again. Linda did her best to tune him out, but you can’t close your ears like you can your eyes; you can look away, but you can’t listen away. So she heard most of it, the worst of it, as Childs recounted in meticulous detail how Gloria had died.

And he was right; it wasn’t clinical at all. He made Gloria’s death throes come alive; he acted out the pain, and how she’d gradually gone numb, how her eyelids had drooped, how a look of surprise had passed over those half-hidden eyes at the end, when she tried to draw a breath and her lungs would not respond.

A lousy way to die, thought Linda. But she could have guessed all that, extrapolated it from the condition of the corpse and the fax from Poison Control, if she’d wanted to. So all Childs had really accomplished, she realized, was to take the incentive out of the surrender-and-get-it-over-with option for her. Which left the fight-to-the-last-breath option. Physically, she told herself, she was no match for him-physically, she was no match for the Pillsbury Doughboy-but maybe she had a shot at outwitting him.

As in any fight, it was always a good idea to get your adversary distracted. “So how’d it go in Atlantic City? How’s your mom?”

“A drunken hooer-a dead drunken hooer. How’s yours?”

Touchy, touchy-that told her she was on the right track. “Did you mean to kill her, or was it an accident?”

Simon almost answered, then caught himself. Wrong game. “That’s neither here nor there-I still haven’t finished telling you about Gloria.”

“You got to where Gloria’s dead. That’s pretty fucking finished. What’d you do, kill her twice?” When you were trying to convince somebody you were tough-when you were trying to convince yourself, for that matter-it helped to be an Italian from the Bronx. Swearing helped, too.

“Watch your language.”

“Fuck you.”

Simon was momentarily at a loss. He couldn’t let her attitude stand, but if he let things get heated, he might find himself playing the game with a bloodied corpse; not much satisfaction there. “In case you’ve forgotten, Skairdykat, I do have the power of life and death over you.”

“Big hairy deal. Every strunz’ with a loaded gun has the power of life and death.”

In a contest like this, Linda was beginning to realize, it also helped to have a fatal disease. She watched the steam curl lazily from her coffee, then took a tiny sip-still a little too hot to drink, but not bad for the Safeway house blend. Linda was starting to appreciate little things-that was also supposed to be one of the pluses of having a fatal disease. Yeah, right. Then it occurred to her: in the last hour or so, the odds of her dying from MS had dropped considerably.