Evil Dark (34 page)

  Karl placed his unconscious burden gently on the dirt floor. Lacey looked at the black-clad man for a moment, and something in her face reminded me of stories I'd read about Indians involved in intertribal warfare centuries ago, and how their greatest fear was being taken prisoner and turned over to the women.

  "Well, you might as well strip him and get him secured to the frame," she said. "Then we'll get started."

  Undressing our prisoner was easy enough, although I smiled a little when I discovered the guy wore no underwear – he really was going commando. But trying to get a naked, unconscious man tied to a structure like that, arms and legs spread wide, was harder than we'd thought. But finally it was done.

  Lacey looked at our work and nodded approval. Then she asked me, "You have something to break the spell?"

  "Sure do," I said, and brought the little statue from my pocket. "All set?" I asked her, and she nodded tensely. I closed my hand around the statuette, looked at the naked man, and said, "
Pardac
."

  The guy didn't snap awake. It took him ten or fifteen seconds to reach full awareness – and when he did, he was not a happy little camper.

  He blinked rapidly, then shook his head, the way a dog will when trying to get rid of water on its fur. Like the other representative of the Church's elite guard that we'd met, this one was in his late twenties and very fit-looking. His black hair was cut short, but his eyebrows were bushy. One of his knees was circled with old surgical scars, as if he'd tried a little too hard when playing high school football.

  Our prisoner looked around at us, eyes wide.

  "Who are– What did you– How did I get–" Then he seemed to realize the full extent of his plight – he was alone, tied up, spreadeagled naked in front of strangers whose intentions were uncertain. In his place, I'd be scared, too.

  "Jesus fucking Christ – let me
down
from here! Let me
go
, goddamnit!!

  "Blasphemy. How distressing." Karl sounded disapproving.

  "And so early in the proceedings," I said. "Gives us less to look forward to later."

  The commando's gaze traveled around the room, and he didn't seem nearly as pleased with what he saw as Lacey had been. "Wh-where am I?"

  "Someplace where nobody can hear you scream," I said.

  When I spoke this time, he'd stared at me, as if my voice had jarred something in his memory. "I know you!"

  I just nodded. Then the guy shifted his gaze to Karl. "And you! I know you, too. You're that vampire cop!" Karl nodded as well.

  Finally, he looked at Lacey, who stood there, hands in her pockets, a gentle smile on her face.

  "Who – who the hell are
you
?"

  She walked slowly over to him until she stood with her face only a few feet from his. "Me?" she said softly. "I am Vengeance."

  The commando opened his mouth, but no sound came out. After a few seconds, Lacey walked slowly over to the table and its array of agony. She gently ran the fingertips of one hand along the length of the display, lightly touching each instrument in turn. Then she turned back to our prisoner.

  "Do you recognize these?" Her voice was light, almost casual. "They should be familiar. I thought there was a certain… irony involved in taking the implements that have been the source of so much pain for others…" She paused. "And using them on you." Lacey abandoned the teasing tone then, and her voice became hard. "Every one of them."

  The naked man was trembling now, as if the temperature in the basement had just dropped twenty degrees. Finally he screamed, "I don't care
what
you do to me – I'll never talk! I'll never tell you anything, you
cunt
."

  "Ooh, such language." Lacey was playing the tease again. "Do you kiss your mother with that mouth? Or should I say, 'Did you?' Because you never will again."

  She was wearing a medium-weight navy-blue jacket, and now she unzipped it to reveal a short-sleeve knit pullover top and jeans underneath. She draped the jacket over the back of a nearby chair, then reached up, crossed her arms, and pulled the top over her head.

  At least she hadn't gone the Victoria's Secret route. Underneath the top, she wore a plain black sports bra. I thought it looked pretty damn good on her anyway, but that wasn't the point. The striptease wasn't part of the script we'd agreed on.

  Calling a huddle right then might give our prisoner reason to suspect dissension among the ranks of his tormenters, and that would never do. So, trying to sound casual, I said to Lacey, "Um, what're you doing there?"

  She was just kicking off her plain black shoes to reveal bare feet. "Doing?" She gave me an innocent look that I didn't believe for a microsecond. "Oh, you mean this?"

  As she spoke, she'd been unbuckling her belt and undoing a button on the jeans. Now she yanked the zipper down and pushed the jeans past her slim hips. They fell, pooling around her ankles, and she kicked them free.

  "Gosh, Stan, you don't think I want to get a mess all over my clothes, do you? Blood washes off skin
much
more easily than it does fabric."

  Lacey bent, picked up the jeans, and placed them on the chair. She had on a pair of those gray women's undershorts that look like the boxers men wear, and are just about as sexy. But, still, on Lacey…

  A couple of steps brought her over to the commando, who was staring at her in barely concealed panic, despite his big talk of a few moments ago.

  She ran a hand slowly along his inner thigh, just brushing his shrunken penis. "Besides, having a naked woman do all the things that I'll be doing to him adds a touch of piquancy to the whole experience – don't you think?"

  Then she reached behind her back for the bra fastener. "If you guys want to stay for the show, it's OK with me. But if you go upstairs, there's beer in the fridge and a working TV in the living room. In fact, you might want to turn it up extra loud."

  "Good idea," I said, and turned away just as the fastener came undone and the bra slid down her arms. Karl followed me at once.

  We pulled the big door shut behind us, and immediately from inside came the sound of metal sliding on wood. I remembered that there'd been a big bolt next to the knob, and it seemed that Lacey had just shot it, locking the door securely from the inside. I looked at Karl, and he stared back. This part wasn't in the script, either.

 

Karl and I made our way back around the side of the cottage to the front door and let ourselves in. There was beer in the fridge, all right, but it didn't appeal to either of us – for different reasons. Lacey was right about the TV, too. The old 19-inch portable had extendable rabbit ears that could pull in two of the local channels. We settled on one and watched stupid sitcoms. The reception wasn't all that good, but then I can't say that I paid real close attention. I kept waiting for screams to start issuing from the room underneath us, but all I could hear was the inane dialogue and canned laughter of the TV show. Finally, I asked Karl if his acute vampire hearing was picking up anything from below.

  "No screaming, if that's what you mean," he said. "I can sort of make out Lacey's voice, and sometimes the guy's, but I can't catch what they're saying."

  "Let's say we start hearing screams, thirty seconds from now. What do we do about it?"

  Karl scratched his chin. "What do you
want
to do about it?"

  "You could take that basement door down, couldn't you? Despite the fact that it's bolted shut?"

  "Yeah, that wouldn't be much of a problem," he said. "Assuming that's what we decide to do."

  "Why
wouldn't
we? The plan was to terrify him into talking, remember? We can't sit here and let her torture the guy, even if he is a fucking scumbag."

  "The dude's not under arrest," Karl said. "And Lacey's not acting in her official capacity as a cop, either."

  "He's in
our
custody, Karl. We brought him here, which makes him
our
responsibility. And torture, no matter what the motivation, is still a crime. We're supposed to uphold the law – we're the good guys, remember?"

  Karl looked at me. "You never bent the law a little, Stan? Here and there, out of necessity?"

  "Even if I did, what Lacey's doing down there is more than bending the fucking law – it's
breaking
it."

  "Not yet, it's not," he said. "No screaming, remember?"

  "What if she gagged him?" I asked.

  "He'd still be making sounds through his nose, and I'd hear it."

  I sat back and pretended to watch the TV. I was beginning to wish I'd never had the bright idea of trying to scare one of the Church's thugs into giving us information. I should have had Karl try Influence, even if he wasn't real good at it yet, and kept Lacey out of this entirely. Grief and rage had turned her into someone I didn't know anymore, and didn't like very much.

  What if Karl heard muffled screams from below and didn't tell me? Or what if I heard them, too? In theory, I was Karl's superior and could order him to tear that basement door down. Except the operation we were on had no official sanction. And what was I going to do if Karl refused – shoot him?

  I came up with answers for all those questions – trouble was, I kept changing them every couple of minutes. I was still trying to figure out what to do if it got bad down there when the front door opened and Lacey walked in.

  She was fully dressed, I was glad to see, except for the outer jacket she'd been wearing. She was perspiring freely.

  I guess she'd familiarized herself with the place during her first visit, because she went without hesitation to a door and opened it to reveal a sparsely stocked linen closet. She found a tattered blue bath towel, looped it around her neck, and began to dry her face and hair.

  I was waiting for her to say something. When she didn't, the best I could come up with was, "Done for the night, Lacey?"

  She stopped mopping her face and looked at me, her expression hard to read. "Yes, Stan, I'm all finished."

  When she didn't elaborate, I said, quietly, "Did you kill him?"

  "No, he's very much alive."

  "Has he still got all his parts intact?"

  She gave me a half smile. "If he didn't, I'm sure you would have heard the screams. Or if you couldn't, Karl would have." She looked at Karl. "Right?"

  He just nodded.

  "So what
did
you do to him?" I said.

  "I broke his spirit," she said. "Through a combination of terror and sexual excitement, I put so much stress on his psyche that he couldn't stand it, and he broke."

  Karl and I looked at each other.

  "Sexual excitement?" he said to Lacey.

  "Oh, yes," she said. "It can be an important component in an effective interrogation. That's why I was naked. The Gestapo used the technique sometimes, with prisoners they thought wouldn't respond to the more direct approach. Certain prisoners would be questioned by an attractive woman, who would slowly build sexual tension in them, but deny release until she got the information she wanted."

  "How come you know all about the Gestapo?" I asked.

  "I've been doing a lot of reading, Stan, ever since you told me I might have the chance to question one of these people. God bless the Internet."

  "You studied torture, you mean."

  "No, I studied methods of interrogation – which sometimes included torture, I admit. Some of the stuff I read grossed me out – or would have, under other circumstances. But I just viewed it as data that might prove useful."

  "And was it?" I said. "Useful, I mean?"

  "Oh, did I forget to mention that part?" The grin that blossomed on her face reminded me of the old Lacey, someone I hadn't been sure I'd ever see again.

  "The next snuff video is scheduled to be filmed two nights from now, in a warehouse at 1634 Stansfield Avenue. Festivities are due to start at midnight, I believe."

  "Holy shit," Karl said.

  I jumped up, ran over to Lacey and hugged her. "Lacey, that's fantastic! It's all we need to bust these motherfuckers, once and for all."

  The grin was still in place when she said, "Well, it's good to know that my little efforts do not go unappreciated."

  "They don't – believe me," I told her.

  "Did you get anything else out of him?" Karl asked.

  "Just a couple of things," Lacey said. "One is that they've been using Drac's List to identify likely victims."

  "Damn, I
knew
there was something wrong about those people," I said, ignoring the look that Karl gave me.

  "Once they have a profile that looks promising," Lacey said, "someone pretending to be a vampire member will contact him – or her – and start an online conversation. The so-called vampire will find out if he lives alone, has any close friends or relatives, all that stuff. Once they identify somebody who won't be missed for a while, the 'vampire' makes a date – except the poor guy, or woman – gets a lot worse than a vampire bite."

  "You mentioned a couple of things," Karl said. "What's the other one?"

  "Just that, to the surprise of nobody here in this room, the Church owns the
People's Voice
," Lacey said. "The connection is hidden by a series of holding companies, but the Church is pulling the strings."

  "I asked the Feebies to have someone look into the paper and who was behind it. They never got back to me, which isn't exactly surprising." I looked at Lacey. "Congrats, kiddo – you did a hell of a job."

  I ran a hand through my hair. "The only other pressing problem is what to do with Rambo down there until we raid the warehouse the night after tomorrow."

  "We could just leave him there," Lacey said. The monster was back in her eyes now. "I can come back in a week or so and bury him."