Bad Games 2 - Vengeful Games (19 page)

“See what happens when you spill your juice, Fannelli?” he said. “You slip and fall and then you hurt yourself.” He threw the empty carton at the battered fetal ball on the floor that was Arty. The officer then locked the cell and strutted off down the corridor, whistling a pleasant tune that was assuredly more for Arty’s ears than his own—a smug reminder about the lack of empathy he had when it came to giving a beating.

Arty remained in his fetal ball for a moment until he was sure the officer was truly gone. His position was not one of cowardice or weakness, just protection. The first two blows with the officer’s night stick had dazed him good. Arty was always concerned about head injuries. Many serial killers had suffered head injuries early on in their developmental years and it contributed to their lack of impulse control. Arty and his late brother Jim were better than that. They had supreme control. Serial killers were pathetic and weak. It was why they were inevitably caught. No impulse control.

So once the first two hits to the skull had Arty seeing stars, he immediately dropped to the floor, covered his head, and opted for a beating to the body, to which the officer happily obliged. It wasn’t anything excessive. The officer wasn’t stupid enough to think that a simple slip and fall could account for an inmate who looked in need of at least a week’s stay in the infirmary. Just a few good whacks and it was done.

Arty slowly uncoiled from his ball then stretched out on his cot. His head throbbed, his ribs ached, and he knew it would be even worse tomorrow. But it was just physical pain that would eventually fade. The feeling of helplessness hurt the worst—the lack of power. If Arty were free, he and Jim would have taken the officer from his home in the middle of the night and removed and cauterized his limbs by now.

Arty slipped into a daze as he recalled a similar incident from years ago. An unfortunate was a functioning torso when the brothers had finished with him. His head constantly cried for mercy that was not forthcoming as he flopped on the floor like a fish.

Then they’d brought in the doped-up hooker.

Somehow she’d managed to get him hard.

And then all three had stepped back and laughed at the weeping torso with the hard-on.

Jim had eventually ended the whole scene with two bullets: one for the torso, and one for the hooker—for being a tease.

“
She was being a fucking tease,”
Jim had said with a smirk to a delighted Arty.
“Poor guy’s got a hard-on with no arms and legs, and she’s laughing instead of finishing him off.”

A small nostalgic smile had formed on the corner of Arty’s mouth as he recalled the past. Now it was gone, sadness and anger for his departed brother the primary culprit. But what about his sister? Her sudden emergence into his life was a godsend, yet he still didn’t know her precise intentions. Discretion was obviously the order of the day, and while she was certainly taking care of things on the outside—his fake mother, Amy’s father—he wondered if she had plans to try and free him.

And oh if she did …

The Lamberts. The things he would do. He would kill the children this time, no question. Ordinarily he and Jim would leave children be. They often used children as instruments to heighten torment for their subjects, but they never planned to kill them. They had left many traumatized orphans in their wake, and he supposed that was often a fate worse than death (to which he felt nothing), but intentional killing of children was against their rules. Not for reasons of empathy, but for reasons of caution. Murdered adults? Horrible. A shame. Murdered
children
? The world stopped. You
would
be found, and you
would
be punished without mercy. Even the most hardened and brutal of inmates adhered to this code.

So they never killed children. But the Lambert kids?

Arty clenched his fist until his knuckles went white and his fingernails cut into his palm. Jim was gone now, and if his sister
was
planning to free him (and in his heart, he knew she was), he was going to make some new rules.

He would kill the Lambert children. He would kill them
first.
Slowly. And he would make Amy and Patrick watch—even if he had to glue their eyelids open.

Chapter 37

It had been a week since the incident Patrick and Amy seldom referred to as “that night.” Things did not go back to rainbows and kittens right after—Bob Corcoran was still dead after all, and Amy was still grieving—but they were okay, and the Lamberts were very familiar with okay. After what they’d been through this past year,
okay
was the silver medal of status updates.
Good
was the prestigious gold.
Great
? They’d experienced sporadic moments of
good
since Crescent Lake, but the enigmatic
great
was becoming a memory. A memory that, lately, carried more melancholy than hope.

Patrick was pouring coffee into his travel mug when Amy came up behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist. He looked back over his shoulder and said, “Morning, love.”

She laid her cheek in the center of his back and mumbled a good morning.

He turned into her. He was cleaned and dressed for work, she was in a big tee-shirt and sweats with rumpled hair and puffy eyes. He went in for a kiss.

She turned away and covered her mouth. “Haven’t brushed my teeth yet.”

“Oh shut up.” He gripped her chin with his thumb and index finger and pulled her lips to his. She obliged, but it was only a quick peck.

“Did you make me some?” she asked, peering around him towards the coffee maker.

“Yeah, but it’s not that hippie shit you drink. It’s a dark roast.”

Amy let go of Patrick’s waist and opened the cabinet. She took out the bag of dark roast. “When did you get this?”

“Couple of days ago. I need every conceivable advantage if I’m going to get this Megablast account polished by next month.”

“Why not just drink Megablast?”

“Very funny.”

She smirked. She knew how vile the stuff was. Amy began looking deeper into the cabinet. “Where’d you put my hippie shit?”

He palmed the top of her head and guided it away from the cabinet and towards the countertop where a bag of organic coffee stood.

“How silly of me,” she said. “Looking for coffee in the coffee cabinet.”

“I took it out for you so you wouldn’t
have
to look in the cabinet.”

“If you were hoping to be such a saint, you could have poured the rest of your swamp water out and made me a fresh pot of
my
stuff.”

Patrick kissed her on the back of the head and then pinched her butt. Amy jumped, turned, and took a swipe at him. He dodged, laughed, and hurried towards the mudroom with his coffee and briefcase.

*

It was 5 p.m. Patrick was intending on staying until at least seven. His neck ached, his eyes burned, and he was hungry. A brief diversion from his PC right now would be nice.

Steve Lucas did a quick rap on Patrick’s office window and immediately poked his head in before being invited. Patrick’s mind flashed to the TV show “Laverne and Shirley.” Whenever Laverne or Shirley had just finished stating something creepy, slimy, revolting, or just flat-out annoying, their apartment door would always fly open on cue, revealing the two loveable doofuses that were Lenny and Squiggy, who would then simultaneously belt out their nasally trademark:
“Hello!”

Except Steve Lucas was not a loveable doofus. He was just a doofus.

“How they hanging, big man?” Lucas asked.

Patrick took a deep breath, let it out slow through his nose, forced a smile. “It’s going fine, thanks.” He did a quarter turn back towards his PC, hoping Lucas would take the hint.

He did not. He pointed at Patrick. “You …” He pointed at himself. “Me …” He grinned. “Happy hour. Right now. What do you say?”

The mere mention of happy hour reminded Patrick of the incident with Amy, and his annoyance meter shot up a notch. “I’m good, man, thanks,” he said.

Lucas stood in front of Patrick’s desk. “Aw, come on, man. Look, I’m buying, okay? Besides you gotta meet this girl I’ve been seeing.
Smokin’
hot.” He lowered his voice and raised his eyebrows like a car salesman about to whisper an unbeatable offer.
“Fucking crazy in bed too, I’m tellin’ ya.”

Patrick took another deep breath. “That’s great, Steve, I’m happy for you.” He threw a thumb over his shoulder towards his PC. “I’ve just got way too much stuff to get done.”

“Come
ooooon …
it’s Friday. Give Amy a call, she can join us.”

Patrick’s annoyance meter jumped another notch. “I don’t think so.”

Steve cocked his head. “Everything okay?”

Patrick nodded once. “Fine.”

Steve put his hands on Patrick’s desk, leaned in and said, “You know, if you and Amy are having problems, I can see if my new girl has a friend …”

Patrick was not consciously aware of the look he gave Steve Lucas just then, but when Lucas held up both hands and stepped back as though a gun had just been pulled on him, Patrick was certain that the fire that had instantaneously erupted in his gut had climbed and ignited his face, smoking nostrils, red eyes, the works.

“Whoa, relax, man,” Lucas said, his hands still up. “Forget I said anything.” He slipped out of Patrick’s office without another word.

Whatever rage Patrick had just felt towards Steve Lucas delightfully faded when he watched the man shit himself and scurry out of his office. Patrick allowed himself a brief smile then went back to work.

Chapter 38

Samantha Hurst, also known as Monica Kemp, sat on a barstool in Bravo’s Tavern, drinking a vodka martini and waiting for Steve Lucas to arrive. She was wearing her blonde wig, her green contacts lenses, a thick layer of eyeliner, and an outfit that screamed sex from the rooftops—the exact persona she had donned when she had met Steve a week ago.

Monica had been waiting for Patrick in the parking garage of his office building—basic surveillance, using the time to contemplate some type of innocuous
in
to Patrick and the big advertising account Amy had mentioned. She found it with Steve Lucas. Monica could read body language as well as she could English, and what she’d read as Patrick hurried to his car with Steve Lucas grinning and chatting away endlessly at his heels was written in a bold 72 font: Steve Lucas was an annoying prick, and Patrick couldn’t stand him. And oh yeah, they worked together.

Courting Steve hadn’t been difficult. The man was the type to take the bait from anyone with a heartbeat, let alone a knockout like Monica. It was the sex that tested her resolve. Much to his delight, she had slept with him the first night they met and it proved more difficult than she had predicted. The bastard had decent staying power. She had nearly dried up several times on that first night, and the only thing that had kept her wet were the graphic visions of what lay in store for the Lamberts once her brother was free.

The seven days and nights that followed had been much of the same. It had been an effort, but Monica managed to dispense enough convincing sex into the eager hands of Steve Lucas to keep him blissfully ignorant to her ulterior motives. A quick lunch-time pop-in at the office on the fourth day had been followed by another on the sixth. Both times Patrick had been out of the office (she had checked in advance), and by the end of that sixth day Monica had the complete layout of the building’s interior and could find Patrick’s office walking backwards.

All she wanted now was a key, or more appropriately, a magnetic key card—a magnetic key card that registered the name Steve Lucas every time it was swiped. She didn’t
need
it, of course; she could get into the office another way if she wanted, but talk about two for the price of one. She smirked and sipped her martini.

Steve arrived a moment later. She ordered him a double bourbon then put her lips to his ear. “
I feel like getting crazy tonight,
” she whispered, her hand tracing the inside of his thigh beneath the bar.

Steve grinned and looked as though he might squeal. He grabbed his bourbon and downed it in three gulps. Monica immediately ordered him another. He grinned again, and she grinned back—no faking this time.

*

Steve Lucas sat slurring and leering like a drunken fool on his sofa. He kept mumbling something about fooling around, yet Monica’s only reply was a playful bat of the eyes coupled with promises of a reward for patience. That and another large bourbon, his eighth of the night. And if one were to look close enough at bourbon number eight, one might see a few undissolved particles of the benzodiazepine Klonopin floating around in the amber liquid. Not that Steve was capable of noticing. She could have dropped the pills in whole and he likely wouldn’t have noticed. As far as tasting something odd about bourbon number eight? Well, drunkenness was her friend, as was Klonopin itself. Monica had chosen Klonopin over Xanax because Xanax had an exceptionally bitter taste. Klonopin was no puff of air, but it was mild enough for someone who was well and truly shit-faced not to give a crap.

*

It was less than thirty minutes before Steve Lucas was snoring on his couch. Monica slapped his face and he never so much as twitched. She slapped him once more for fun and then began rifling through the wallet he had placed on his coffee table. She found the key card in seconds, picked up her cell and dialed. A male voice picked up on the first ring.

“Code in.”

“Neco. 8122765.”

“Waiting for voice authentication … clear. What’s up?”

“I need 7146.”

“Hold.”

A click, a pause, and then a different male voice. “What is it and how soon?”

“Security card. Standard magnetic stripe. Nothing crazy. I need it tonight. Multiple copies.”

The male voice gave a confirmation number and an address in Philadelphia. Monica hung up and called her father.