Joe Lansdale - Leather Maiden

Booger got in and tossed the jacks and the tire irons in the back seat, because I had forgotten, and closed the trunk. I drove us out of there.

“Scratched the car some,” Booger said.

“Fuck it,” I said.

The traffic was pretty thick. By the time we got to the campus and I found a parking place, which might have been the only place left in the visitors’ area, it was ten minutes till.

We went on across the campus, walking fast, but not so fast we looked like we were in a Charlie Chaplin movie. It should have taken fifteen minutes at a comfortable stroll, but we made it in about five. Booger had the toolbox, and I had forgotten the backpack.

I looked up at the clock tower. For a moment I thought I saw someone move across the face of the glass, but it could have been expectation. What I did notice, however, was that my watch was not in line with the clock’s time. According to the tower clock, we had another five minutes; then I remembered it was slow.

We saw a crowd had formed between the tower and the building that housed the history department. We went around behind the tower. There was some tall shrubbery there, and I could see the narrow door that was at the back of the tower. There was no one there. We looked around carefully, and there were people to be seen, but they all had their backs to us, were already in position at the sides of the tower so they could hear Judence speak. A lot of the people we saw were black.

Without breaking stride we made our way to the tower door and Booger had his lock-beating tools in his hand before we got there. He put the toolbox by the door and put a little crooked tool in the lock, and worked it. The lock snicked. We went inside quietly, into the cool dark, and closed the door quietly.

Just inside, near the door, was a cloth trash buggy that I assumed Caroline had used to carry Belinda inside. I looked in the buggy. If she had been there, she wasn’t now.

The inside of the tower was nearly all clock, and the clock had huge gears that were designed in a kind of German Gothic style; the big gears were turning slowly and meeting the teeth of other huge gears and causing them to move; the gears looked to be larger than ancient round Greek shields. You could hear the gears when they clicked and rolled. You could feel them moving the hand on the big clock because the tower vibrated. Way up you could see light coming through the face of the clock, and all along the little quarter-moon windows was more light, and there was dust floating up from the smooth wooden floor and it hung in the air like a tan mist. Near the gears, as if they were different levels of geological strata, were wooden platforms. There were stairs that wound up between the gears and up through trap openings in the platforms; the stairs zigged and zagged their way up. I could see something halfway up the stairs on one of the platforms. It was in shadow and it was odd and I couldn’t make it out. I started up the stairs. I took out the .38 with the silencer Booger had given me. Booger was ahead of me, going up with the toolbox. He was going to find a place to take his shot. I wondered about the glass. How would he manage to take his shot? I wondered about it only briefly, because I was more worried about Belinda. Had Gregore lied to us? And what in hell was it I had seen on the platform? All of these thoughts charged through my brain like an electric shock.

According to my watch, it was just after ten o’clock. That meant it was right at ten, big-clock time.

When I reached the third platform, I could see one of the huge gears, and I realized, now that I was closer to it, that it was much larger than a Greek shield. It was turning and its teeth were causing a somewhat smaller gear above it to precisely catch its teeth in the bigger gear’s fangs. They temporarily clicked together and the big gear moved the small gear. This was part of the complicated mechanism that moved the hands on the face of the clock. I could also see just behind the gear what I had seen before from below, but due to angle and shadow had not been able to make out.

It was Belinda. There was a cloth bag over her head, a pillowcase probably, but I knew her body and was certain it was her. She was wearing a white terry cloth bathrobe, her ankles pulled together and bound. There was a rope around her neck and it was stretched up into the darkness. Her feet were tied to one of the struts that came out of the platform and supported the huge jagged-tooth gear wheel that was next to me.

“It’s her,” I said.

“So it is,” Booger said. “You get her. I’m going to be busy. She’s got nice legs.”

Booger was already moving up the stairs when he said that, leaving me behind.

I went out on the platform, and now I could see and understand what was happening. The rope was wound around a gear above me, and as the gear turned it wound the rope, and the rope was pulling at Belinda’s neck. Her feet, bound the way they were, didn’t allow the rope to hang her. Another instant, caught between the ropes and the pull, the rig would most likely jerk her head off.

I put the .38 back under my shirt, took out the clasp knife Booger gave me, and popped it open and tried to rush over to Belinda.

As I rushed forward something flashed and I caught it out of the corner of my eye, and I moved, but I was too slow. A long blade caught light from the quarter-moon window in front of the big face of the clock and winked at me. In that moment I saw Caroline’s beautiful face twisted up in a knot of rage under a head of dyed black hair. The blade hit me, slicing down my back. But I turned quick enough that it went in shallowly, then it stuck my hip. I let out a yelp.

I slashed out with my knife and missed. Caroline moved away quickly, to the side of the gear, then she came at me, the knife moving like a lightning strike. I was cut on the arm before I felt it. I knew enough about knives and knife fighting to bring the backs of my arms up. You’re going to get cut, that’s the part you want cut. Soft sides of the arms, that’s where the vital vessels are. You get cut deep there you can kiss your ass goodbye because you’re going to bleed out fast. Caroline knew the knife, she knew what she was doing; someone had taught her.

I skipped back, tried to catch Belinda out of the corner of my eye. Her head was lifting as the rope pulled her. I did a somersault, rolled up to a squatting position in front of her. I used my knife to cut the rope at her feet. She went up on her tiptoes as the gear pulled. Now, instead of being pulled apart, she was only in jeopardy of being strangled slowly.

Caroline’s blade struck as I rose to my feet, trying to cut the rope around Belinda’s neck. Her blade went into my back and I saw a white light, almost fainted. I turned as she was stabbing again. I dodged, went low and hit her just above the shins with the side of my body. It made her bend in half over me and the downward thrust of her knife carried her forward and the tip of the knife stuck in the wooden platform.

I whirled to face her. She was trying to pull the knife out of the platform. I kicked her in the ribs as if I were trying to make a field goal from the fifty-yard line. She rolled almost to the edge of the platform.

Above me, in the darkness, amidst the clicks of well-oiled gears, the moving of the clock hands, I heard Booger say, “Peep-eye, motherfucker,” then there was a sound like a tubercular octogenarian coughing up phlegm, followed by, “That knocked a turd out of him.”

Caroline recovered. She jerked the knife free, came at me. The rope lifted Belinda off the ground. Her head twisted beneath the hood. She shook her head hard and the hood came off and fell. It landed on Caroline’s back, caused her to jerk around and slash at the air.

I tackled her, drove her back. We almost went off the platform. She came down with the knife and it went into my shoulder. I let out with a grunt and my butt cheeks pinched together hard enough to crack a pecan. I caught her knife hand in my left hand, brought my knife down. As it descended, in a micro-moment I saw all those bodies in Iraq, saw Gregore’s head jump apart, then that damn shoe in the fork of the tree. All of it rushed at me like a freight train balling the jack down a deep grade. The blade went into Caroline’s throat and the force of it was so hard I could hear it stick in the platform as it came out of the back of her neck.