The Closer (22 page)

She slowed to make the corner, but never gave the highway a second glance.

The road led to a mobile home in the middle of nowhere. Nikki pulled off onto the shoulder as soon as she spotted the place; fortunately, the rise of a low hill blocked her from sight.

She got out of the car, taking a pair of binoculars with her. A lizard scurried away and into the meager shadow of a clump of sagebrush. The sun was still low, but the heat was starting to climb.

She crouched down and peered over the crest of the hill. A few hundred yards away, a white trailer sat at the end of the road. A black Jeep was parked in the front; to the rear, the rounded bulk of a quonset jutted like a barrel on its side, half-submerged in a flat and sandy ocean. Other than the slowly settling dust, she could see no movement at all.

“Okay, fuckwit, which building are you in? Eeny meenie, miney moe…”

Time to make a decision.

“Damn you, Jack,” she muttered. “If I wait, he’s gonna find that tracking unit and rabbit. If I go in alone…”

She could what? Die? Wind up an entrée for a psychopath?

“Least I don’t have to worry about funeral expenses,” Nikki said. “And who knows, maybe I’ll wind up giving the fucker heartburn.”

She went back to the car and got her pack. She left the car where it was and struck out deeper into the desert, keeping the hill between her and the buildings. When she was a hundred yards out, she started angling to the side, staying low and behind the sage.

The Gourmet could hardly wait.

It had gone perfectly. The courier delivering the package had been more than happy to give it to him in the elevator; no more than a business card had been necessary for ID. He had driven straight home, considering recipes all the way. Perhaps he would pickle the tongue….

Once he got in, he took the package straight to the workshop. With Djinn-X captive in the next room, he hardly thought he had anything to worry about—but still, there was no excuse for sloppy security.

His metal detector was an old model, a disc the size of a dinner plate mounted at the bottom of a five-foot handle. He put the package on the floor and passed the disc over it—to his surprise, something registered immediately.

Fillings? Or something more dangerous?

He moved the box immediately to his workbench. He wasn’t terribly worried about explosives—any-thing traveling on an airplane would already have been checked for chemical traces. But that still left many, many possibilities.

He was excited, rather than afraid. He’d laid and sprung many traps, and no one ever suspected a thing until the very last second. He’d often wondered what would happen if the roles were reversed; now was his chance to find out. Was he clever enough to figure out the package’s secret without it destroying him?

He considered options. He believed in the inviolability of the Stalking Ground; the system was a good one, and he didn’t think the authorities could crack it. Even if one of The Pack were caught, it was in their own best interests to keep the website a secret.

So the surprise was courtesy of a member of The Pack. Road Rage had no motive that he could see—but maybe the motive wasn’t his. If Djinn-X had detected his attempts to track the location of the Stalking Ground, perhaps this was the webmaster’s try at a preemptive strike. He could have offered Road Rage some sort of deal to take him out.

But Djinn-X would want to recover the head himself, without destroying it. Which meant…

A tracking device.

He got a box cutter, and slit open the top of the package.

Nikki approached the quonset from the rear. There were no windows that she could see, but there was a door. As she got closer, she could smell animal manure, though she didn’t hear anything that sounded like livestock.

Gun out, she cautiously tried the doorknob. Locked.

She thought for a second, then crept around the side of the building. When she got to the corner, she peered around the edge toward the trailer. It had windows, but shades blocked the two she could see.

The front of the quonset had two doors, a big double-sided one in the center and a regular-sized one next to it. She took a deep breath, then moved cautiously toward the smaller door. She tried very hard to keep her feet from crunching on the gravel underfoot.

The door was unlocked.

She pushed it open.

Inside the box was a plastic bag, sealed with a strip of tape. The Gourmet examined it from the top carefully, then slit the box down the sides. There were no wires he could see.

Inside the bag was a human head. He studied it without touching it, looking into the glazed, bulging eyes. “Hello, Closer,” the Gourmet said.

When he was satisfied there was nothing attached to the outside of the bag, he opened it. The head was still fresh, so the only odor was a slight coppery smell. He lifted it by the hair out of the bag and onto a plastic sheet on the table. He picked up the metal detector and waved it over both the remains of the box and the head; as he’d suspected, the metal was in the head itself.

He pried open the mouth—nothing obvious there. But when he upended it and used a penlight to peer down the stump of the neck, he spotted a slit in the upper palate.

He reached in and poked a finger into the slit. Where he should have felt the soft resilence of brain tissue, there was something hard and angular.

He withdrew his hand and considered.

Abruptly, the perfect solution came to him. A wide smile on his face, he picked up the head and took it into the kitchen.

“Well, fuck me with a wire hairbrush,” Nikki said under her breath.

The inside of the quonset looked like one of those roadside zoos, the kind where you paid five bucks to see a cage full of sleeping snakes and an old, toothless alligator. A large tank—five hundred gallons, easy—against one wall contained dozens of octopi. Empty jars and lids littered the bottom. Nikki had always thought of the creatures as being gray or pinkish, but these specimens rippled with bands of color, from a deep blue to an orangey green. Many were attached to the glass by suckered tentacles, while others pulsed through the water, disembodied lungs trailing ropy guts.

A face stared out at her from behind a metal mesh. For one queasy second she thought it was a child, dressed in black and somehow disfigured; then her perception adjusted and she recognized it as a chimpanzee. It gazed at her silently with sad brown eyes, its wrinkled fingers hooked around the wires of its cage.

And of course, there was the elephant.

It was blithely stuffing hay into its mouth, and hardly spared her a glance. It wasn’t in any sort of pen—only a thin cord attached to one of its hind legs tethered it to the wall, a cord that looked barely strong enough to restrain a large dog.

She had only a moment to take it all in—and then the two poodles in the large pen beside the chimp started barking.

The Gourmet flicked on the fluorescents. “Look what just arrived!” he said cheerfully, dangling the severed head by its stringy brown hair.

Jack blinked, tried to focus. “No, thanks,” he managed. “I had Italian for lunch.”

“Oh, you’re not going to dine. You’re going to be the
sous
chef—that means you help prepare the ingredients.” He placed the head squarely on Jack’s crotch, so the dead eyes seemed to be looking down the length of Jack’s body disapprovingly.

The Gourmet rummaged in a drawer, brought out an old revolver. “Genuine six-shooter,” he said, holding it up for Jack to see. “Old, but perfectly functional.” With his other hand, he took a long, thin filleting knife from a rack.

He put the gun to Jack’s head—then cut the ropes binding his wrists.

The Gourmet stepped back, returned the knife to its slot while keeping the gun trained on his prisoner. Not that Jack was in any shape to jump him—his arms were all but useless.

“Sit up,” the Gourmet said.

“I can’t,” Jack replied. “You tenderized my arms, remember?”

His captor leaned forward, grabbed Jack by the hair and pulled him upright. Jack tried to support himself with his arms, but they wouldn’t take his weight; when the Gourmet released him, he crashed back onto the table, crying out as pain lanced from his wrists to his shoulders.

The Gourmet tried again, yanking Jack toward him at the same time, so that his behind scooted forward and his legs bent at the knees. By leaning forward Jack was able to keep his balance, but the head rolled off his groin and landed between his spread thighs. It stared blankly up at him as if to say, “Hey—you’re the one that chopped me up in the first place.” Jack’s arms flopped limply at his sides, screaming sacks of dead, useless muscle.

“Now,” the Gourmet said, taking a step backward, “I think there’s a prize hidden in this particular container. I’d like you to pull it out.”

“All right,” Jack said. He didn’t see any reason to resist.

It took an agonizing effort to move his arms at all, but his hands still worked. He managed to fumble the head around so it wasn’t looking at him anymore.

“Is this a twist-off, or do I need an opener?” he asked.

“Go in through the neck. There’s a slit in the back of the throat—it’s behind that.”

Of course there is,
Jack thought.
I put it in there myself. Too bad I didn’t put a .38 in there while I was at it.

He was about to reach inside—when suddenly, dogs started barking.

Nikki froze—then darted inside and pulled the door shut behind her.

She looked around wildly. If he came out of the trailer to check on the noise, she should have a place to hide—and then she noticed the door in the far wall, beyond what looked like exercise equipment. What if he came out of there?

There was a pile of bales in the far corner, next to the elephant. She ran without thinking, ducked down behind them. The elephant favored her with a bemused glance.

She heard the door in the back open.

The fuck am I thinking? I know he’s the Gourmet. I should just stick my gun in his face and wrap him up for Jack.

Except this one wasn’t going to faint the way Road Rage did, was he? No. Somehow, she didn’t think that a guy who kept a bull elephant in a shed behind his house would be intimidated by a woman with a pistol. She might have to just shoot him—and she knew, with a cold certainty, that she could.

But what if it
wasn’t
the Gourmet? What if he’d used a go-between, or it was some half-bright local he’d hired to feed his fucking menagerie?

She heard footsteps.

The Gourmet glanced sharply at the door, then back at Jack. “Of course,” he said. “You’re working with Road Rage, aren’t you? That would be him, now.”

Jack knew better, knew who it had to be. “You fucking moron,” he said, forcing a laugh. “Think you’ve got everything under control? That’s not Road Rage—
I’m
Road Rage. You’ve been torturing the
wrong guy
— Christ, you haven’t even figured out that Djinn-X is a
woman.”

That got his attention. Good—if he thought Nikki held the keys to the Stalking Ground, he’d think twice before killing her. Jack continued, “And she didn’t come alone, either. See, we all talked it over, and we realized something—namely, that you’re a fucking
loon.
And since we never got to have our little hunt, we thought it might be fun to do the real thing.”

He fixed the Gourmet with his eyes, tried to project a savage glee. “You poor asshole—
the Patron’s out there.”

The Gourmet swallowed.

“Then I don’t need
you
anymore, do I?” he asked.

He raised the revolver and shot Jack in the head.

Was that Jack’s voice?

She barely had time to finish the thought before the sharp
crack!
of a gunshot made her jump. Before she knew what she was doing, she was sprinting around the elephant and for the back of the quonset. That’s where the shot had come from—where Jack’s voice had come from. Jack’s voice, saying something about the Patron.

She stopped herself just short of the door. The dogs were barking crazily now, yelping at the top of their poodle lungs. The elephant raised his trunk and trumpeted. The chimp, completely unmoved, continued to stare at her with mournful eyes. It seemed resolved to whatever fate had in store.

She had to think. Think like Jack.

No. Think like the Gourmet….

Fortunately, it wasn’t
Jack’s
head.

By the time the Gourmet finished his statement, Jack knew what he was going to do. Gambling that the Gourmet’s habits would make him go for a body shot, he raised Road Rage’s head to chest level.

Impact slammed the head against him, knocked him flat on his back on the table. The sudden movement of his arms was excruciating; he wanted to scream, but the breath had been knocked out of him.

He wondered how much of the damage the skull had absorbed.

He wondered how long he had to live.

The Gourmet didn’t waste time putting a second bullet into his captive; he moved quickly and quietly from the kitchen to the workshop, frightened yet exhilarated.
The Patron? Here?

Djinn-X may have been the Stalking Ground’s creator, but the Patron was its undisputed champion. The Gourmet knew he’d have to eat him eventually, but…

He wasn’t sure he was ready. This was the
Patron,
for Christ’s sake. His elaborate scenarios, his attention to detail, his knack for eliciting horror—all inhumanly perfect. If he and Djinn-X had pooled their talents, his chances for survival were minimal.

Except—they were on
his
turf.
His
stalking ground.

Smiling, he opened the electrical panel on the wall of the workshop and flipped three of the switches— the ones marked in red.

Too late, Nikki remembered how much the Gourmet liked traps.

A loud
chonk!
from the front of the quonset caught her attention. A steel bar had swung down and locked into place, blocking the door she’d come through. The overheads shut off, and a bank of colored spotlights behind the octopus tank flared to life and began to flash. The room flickered blue, red, green.