Allan Leverone - Mr. Midnight

No such luck.

Milo reached out and placed his strong hands on her shoulders and forced her back down on the couch. The moment he let go, her body sprang back up into the sitting position in a desperate attempt to protect her arm.

He made a disappointed tsk-tsk sound with his tongue and said, “Apparently you’ve decided not to cooperate. That’s unfortunate, as you’ll soon discover. Normally, your reticence would translate into just that much more fun for me, but since we’re under a mounting time crunch, I’ll have to handle things a bit differently than I’d like.” Then he ripped the duct tape off Cait’s bare belly without so much as a word of warning. Tiny flecks of skin came with the tape, bonded to the super-sticky surface like flies to flypaper but Cait barely noticed. All she could think about was what was to come.

She lifted her injured arm over her head, left hand still clamped over the awful injury, in a desperate attempt to remove it from Milo’s reach. He fumbled on the floor for his duct tape and ripped off another long strip, holding it in front of Cait’s eyes with an evil smile.

She knew he was waiting for a reaction and willed herself not to give it to him, but she simply couldn’t stop herself. She whimpered and moaned into her gag and he watched for a moment, eyes glazed. Cait noted dispassionately in a dusty corner of her brain that he was getting off on her fear and was disgusted by the knowledge.

He sat and watched her, doing nothing, lost in his reverie, stupid smile creasing his face, and then something seemed to click in his head and he pushed her roughly onto her back once more. He grabbed her left arm and slammed it against the back of the couch, then wound the duct tape over it and around the couch’s wooden frame, effectively immobilizing her.

The flap of skin he had created with his knife before the telephone rang hung loosely off her arm now, wet blood dripping onto her belly. The flap was maybe eight inches long and a couple of inches wide—a tiny landing strip carved into her arm—and Cait stared at it with renewed horror as the pain re-intensified, the nerve endings in her arm screaming and complaining and begging for relief.

She panted and moaned and cried into her gag and watched her captor with wild eyes, praying for Kevin to leap out of his chair, miraculously healed, duct-tape bindings flying off him like in a Hollywood movie, or for the dead police officer to spring suddenly back to life and save the day.

But none of that happened. Kevin lay unmoving and pale next to Victoria, and the police officer remained just as dead as he had been since Milo dropped him in the doorway like so much cordwood.

Then the determined psychotic got to work, muttering something about time pressure and pizza deliveries, of all things, and how it was so unfair. Cait didn’t understand what the hell he was talking about, but forgot all about it a second later, because that was when he placed the blade of his knife against her skin next to the landing strip he had already made and began carving another.

He drew deftly back on the blade and lifted another strip of skin right off her arm, maybe a half-inch thinner than the first but just as long, and the pain ratcheted up again, she hadn’t thought it possible, but God help her, it was. Cait wailed into her gag and bucked against her bindings and she felt the knife dig into the meat of her arm as a result but she continued to struggle as she lost what little remained of her self-control. Her arm burned and throbbed in fiery agony and she forgot all about Victoria and Kevin and even Milo the Butcher himself, as her entire being was fixed on the damage being done to her right arm.

The room turned red around the edges of her vision and a buzzing began in her ears—it sounded as though an airliner was taking off right in the living room—and somewhere deep inside her head Cait knew she was about to lose consciousness. She was going to pass out from the intense pain and she welcomed the relief. She willed herself to lose consciousness, to escape this torture. Whether she lived or died was irrelevant, the only thing that mattered was somehow putting an end to this terrible burning agony consuming her right forearm.

But she didn’t pass out. She wasn’t so lucky. Through the pounding red pain she watched her torturer do his gruesome work. He completed his second pass with the knife, finishing the second tiny runway right next to the first, and examined his handiwork with a critical eye. He was breathing heavily; sweat dotting his skin just above his upper lip.

He glanced at her face and smiled when he noticed her watching him. “Looks good,” he said, as though they were discussing tomorrow’s weather forecast or the chances of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers reaching the playoffs.

And then he spoke and sent a chill through Cait’s overtaxed brain. She hadn’t thought things could get any worse. Surely this was it. Surely he was done. Surely he would get up and walk away and leave her alone now.

But this wasn’t it. He wasn’t done. He didn’t get up and walk away. Instead he smiled that devil’s smile and said, “What do you say we work on the other arm now?”

Cait began screaming anew as he reached up and pulled off the strip of tape anchoring her left arm to the back of the couch. He held her arm firmly with both hands as she tried to yank it away, anticipating her actions. He was incredibly strong, or maybe she was just so weakened by now that it wasn’t a fair fight. Either way, her struggle was short and it was over quickly and within seconds he had secured her arm—a fresh new canvas for his sick sculpture-work—over his lap.

Cait felt the knife blade sink into her flesh once again as the telephone began to ring in the background and someone cranked the volume of the buzzing in her ears to the max and the pain increased exponentially and Cait screamed into her gag and it felt like her head was going to blast right off her body and—

—and finally, mercifully, Cait Connelly lost consciousness.

Milo had known the telephone would ring again and had likewise suspected it would happen at precisely the wrong time. After all, how long did it take to order a couple of fucking pizzas? On the bright side, his little torture toy had just passed out—he must be losing his touch; normally he could keep girls conscious for much longer—so it wasn’t like he was being forced to stop in the middle of his fun to answer the damned thing.

“What is it?” he barked into the phone, not bothering with the silly gamesmanship of the last call.

“Hello, Milo, this is Bob. Remember me?”

“Of course I remember you, Bob, we just spoke a few minutes ago, for chrissakes. Is there a point to this call? We’re all pretty busy in here enjoying ourselves and I’d like to get back to the party.”

“Of course, I understand. I just thought you might like to know the pizzas are on their way and will be here in the next few minutes. Is there anything else you think you might need?”

Jesus, Milo thought. Just my luck to get stuck with some fucking Martha Stewart party-planner-in-training. “No,” he said, trying to keep his voice calm. “The pizza will be plenty.”

“Okay, fine. Maybe now would be a good time to discuss how we’re going to get it into the house. I can have one of my men deliver it to the door, but I’ll need your assurance that you won’t take any action to harm him when he does. It would be a real career-ender for me to have a man killed delivering pizza, you know what I mean?”

Milo shook his head. Was this guy for real? “Don’t worry,” he said. “I promise I won’t hurt your precious police officer. I certainly don’t want to be responsible for ending your car—”