Lost Dog (A Gideon and Sirius Novel Book 3) Page 23

  Sirius had been patiently waiting for me to finish working for hours. Dogs are great about overlooking the shortcomings of their humans. I had kept him waiting for his dinner, and then had kept him waiting for his walk.

  “Go get me the leash,” I told him.

  Sirius ran off to get his leash. Our use of the leash is infrequent, but for the sake of appearances, Sirius is willing to walk around with it in his mouth. Some people are scared to see a dog off-leash, and aren’t assured that Sirius is a trained police dog. When that occurs, Sirius hands me his drool-laden leash and happily lets me buckle him up.

  My partner deserved a long walk, and I gave him one. We took the roundabout way to the local park, and Sirius caught up on the day’s news. I thought about Angie and tried to keep my blood from boiling. In a day or two she’d be coming home to us. I hoped her stay wouldn’t be permanent. It wasn’t only a selfish wish; it was a wish for the safe return of Heather Moreland.

  On the bell lap to our house, familiar headlights came sweeping our way and caught us in their beams. Seth was returning home in his Jaguar, which had the personalized license plate SHAMAN.

  He rolled down his window. Sirius ran over, braced his front legs in the open window slot above the driver’s door, and managed to give Seth a kiss. It was a neat trick considering that he still had his leash in his mouth.

  “Working late?” I asked.

  “Weekend retreat,” he said. “What about you?”

  “Long day,” I said.

  “Up for a nightcap?”

  “What took you so long to ask?”

  CHAPTER 34

  BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

  He called himself Kurios, which was the ancient Greek word for “master” or “lord.” He was Curious Kurios. She still resisted calling him “Lord,” but he was bending her to his will. Unfortunately, the two of them would not have as much time together as he had hoped. Kurios couldn’t take any chances, and as unlikely as it was that he’d be found out, it was best to be safe.

  If everything had gone as planned the night before, he would have had more time to play with her. Mindful of cameras, he had parked half a mile from the house, but as soon as he exited his car, that damn dog had known he was there. The closer he’d gotten, the more the dog had barked. And when he’d neared the fence, the dog had gone crazy. Other dogs would have bolted down those chunks of meat he’d tossed over the fence, but not her. She’d wanted to bite him into chunks of meat. That fucking dog had almost managed to vault over the fence. Even when he’d gotten a stranglehold on her, she’d thrashed and fought and kept resisting.

  He’d planned to kill the dog on the same night he took his slave. He’d brought along pepper spray that was supposed to be so toxic as to drive off grizzly bears, along with his twenty-million-volt stun gun. He planned to disable the dog, then inject it with enough ketamine to put her to sleep permanently. Both bitches were supposed to have gotten the ketamine, but he’d only had the opportunity to dose one of them.

  The loose end of the dog bothered him. His slave’s absence should have gone unnoticed for days, but the dog had gotten the cop involved. It was a good thing he’d noticed the tracker the bitch had tried hiding in her nightie. After all his planning, that one slipup had almost done him in. That’s why he couldn’t be too cautious. And that’s why he would need to dispatch her much sooner than he’d planned. Get rid of the evidence, just like he’d gotten rid of the tracker.

  Kurios wished he could have seen the cop’s expression at the end of that wild-goose chase. He wondered if the cop could appreciate the thought behind where he’d taken him. It was unlikely, of course. The cop was cunning in his own way, but he was still a troglodyte. While the cop thought he was being so smart, Kurios had managed to turn the tables on him. He’d planted a much better tracker in the cop’s car. It was the cop who’d taken him to Angie, even though he didn’t know it.

  At the moment, the tracker told him the cop was home. No doubt he was sleeping.

  Kurios wasn’t ready to sleep. Not yet. Tonight he had a few special prizes in store.

  The entrance to the bomb shelter was hidden by a large garden shed in his backyard. The shelter had been built in 1962 at the height of the Cold War. The builder had spared no expense trying to escape the imminent nuclear fallout. The shelter went deeper underground than most. And the bunker had been built with ample insulation.

  While it wouldn’t have deterred radiation, it was perfect for silencing screams. Kurios had done all sorts of tests before getting his slave. Aboveground no one could hear what was going on down there.

  Down there. He liked the sound of that. And he liked going down there to his own Eva Braun. It was a great dungeon for fucking. Kurios had known it would be. For the longest time he’d had to imagine how it would be. But now he knew.

  Kurios unlocked the entrance to the fallout shelter, lowered the ladder, and began his descent down. Normally he liked to observe her through his closed-circuit television system, but not tonight. There was much to do.

  He decided to announce himself before she was able to see him. Now what was that line? Oh, yes. It was a song his slut mother used to sing.

  “Oh, no one knows what goes on behind closed doors,” he said, speaking the words more than singing them.

  The acoustics in the bunker were exceptional. You could hear a pin drop. And the sound quality of screams really couldn’t be improved upon.

  Kurios put on a mask. He hadn’t yet decided whether or not to let her look upon his face before she died. It wasn’t just that he was being cautious. The masks he wore allowed him a sense of freedom. He could be whatever monster he chose.

  Tonight he was Frankenstein.

  The slave tried to hide her fright, but he could read it on her, smell it on her. She stunk up the room. She smelled of waste, and his unwashed spilled seed.

  “I brought you a present,” Kurios said.

  And then he showed her what he was holding in his hand. At first she didn’t understand. He moved closer to her cage and tossed her what looked like a swatch of fabric. She bent down to look at it, and then realized what she was seeing.

  Her expression of horror and revulsion made Kurios hard.

  “No,” she whispered.

  “Tomorrow I’ll bring you her heart,” he said.

  “No!” she cried. Tears streamed down her face. “Don’t hurt her,” she begged. “She’s already had too much pain in her life.”

  “I won’t hurt her,” said Kurios. “I can’t hurt her. She’s already dead.”

  He watched as his slave’s face began to melt. That’s what it looked like. It was almost as if he’d put a match to wax.

  He showed her the other thing he was holding. “I used this to take her ear.”

  In the gloom of the room, the razor-edge of the box cutter stood out. He lowered the box cutter to the cement floor, and then kicked it inside her cage.

  “A word of advice,” said Kurios. “Don’t cut your wrists horizontally. That’s an amateur mistake. You want to make multiple vertical cuts. That will do the job.”

  CHAPTER 35

  FOR MEDICINAL PURPOSES ONLY

  Seth and I slowly sipped a second drink. We were both tired and were talking less than usual, but between us was the comfort of an old friendship.

  I took another pull on my bourbon and mused, “For medicinal purposes only.”

  That made Seth smile. “Is that so?”

  “The proof is in the proof,” I said. “When I was a boy, my mother used to take me on her visits to her sister Florence. Aunt Florence lived on the other side of the country in Portland, Maine. What I loved most about Aunt Florence’s house was her collection of old bottles. She had hundreds of them, most from the nineteenth century. The bottles had these wonderful shapes and sizes and colors, far different than the glasswork we see today. Even on some of the so-called clear glass, there were hues of purple and green when they were touched by sunlight. On the bottoms of some of them were p
ontil marks indicating they had been handblown.

  “My favorite bottles had writing on them. Lots of little towns back then used to have their own breweries and bottleries, and I’d take out an atlas and look those towns up on the state maps. But I found the products themselves even more interesting. I can remember names, such as Moxie Nerve Food, and Dr. Liebig’s German Invigorator, and Dr. Jayne’s Alternative, and Miller’s Antiseptic Oil.

  “We think modern advertising has a corner on hyperbole, but you should have seen some of the claims on her old bottles. They contained mostly booze, a much higher alcohol volume than anything being distilled today, but the contents were described as balms, tonics, purifiers, compounds, elixirs, and extracts. Nostrums, cures, refreshers, and remedies. Great vocabulary lessons. And there was one inscription on a number of these bottles that made me curious. And so I went to my aunt and my mother, and I asked, “Why do some of the bottles say ‘For Medicinal Purposes Only’?

  “They laughed and laughed. And then they explained how there was a time when some doctors really believed that alcohol had medicinal purposes, and how distillers capitalized upon that.”

  “For medicinal purposes only,” said Seth and smiled. “I wondered how you would get back to that.”

  “Time in a bottle,” I said.

  “More like lightning in a bottle. Whatever happened to your aunt’s collection?”

  “When she passed, her children got it. I hope they kept those old bottles and didn’t sell them.”

  “Did you ever think of starting your own collection?”

  I nodded. “I’ve actually gone on expeditions to old dumps. So far I’ve found exactly one bottle—an old, rectangular apothecary container. But the digging and looking was a lot of fun. It was like searching for hidden treasure. And it was certainly a healthy way to hit the bottle.”

  “Another drink?” asked Seth.

  I shook my head. “The first two drinks actually felt as if they were for medicinal purposes. I wouldn’t be able to say that about the third.”

  As Sirius and I both got up to leave, I said what had been on my mind the entire time, but which I only now stated: “It was a week ago at about this time that Heather Moreland was taken.”

  Seth had known what was weighing me down, and gave me a sympathetic pat on my back.

  I don’t know if any old distillers ever made a nostrum they called a “dream tonic.” It wouldn’t surprise me if they did. And I might have been a believer in such a product, if not a buyer. The fire came to me when I wasn’t seeking it, and for my sins known and unknown, I burned.

  Haines was there to greet me. He was always a constant in my fire walk. Even when I avoided seeing him in my personal life, he haunted me. Langston Walker wasn’t the only one with a ghost.

  The gusting wind stirred up the flames, boxing us in. The fire was talking to me again. It wasn’t only its crackling, popping, and sizzling; it wasn’t only the howling wind, or the lamentations of the smoldering brush, or the taunts of the dust devils.

  “Pay the toll,” roared the fire. “Pay the toll.”

  “What is it?” asked the Strangler.

  I wasn’t sure if he was hearing what I was hearing, or if he was asking why I’d stopped and seemed to be listening to something.

  “Pay the toll,” I told him, and with a shake of my head signaled our direction.

  “The fire,” he said, as if I couldn’t see it everywhere.

  I cradled Sirius’s limp form in one arm that refused to let him go, and centered my gun on the Strangler’s chest.

  “Pay the toll,” I told him.

  And then we walked through fire, and burned a little more.

  My partner’s excited barking was even louder than the fire, drowning out its voice. His barking delivered me from hell, and I sat up gasping for air.

  The fire receded. With a hot, trembling hand, I reached for Sirius and stroked his nape. “Thank you,” I whispered.

  The moment after came; with it came the crazy stories. My oracle speaks in many tongues, and rarely allows for an easy interpretation.

  Jacob Marley came in the form of Langston Walker. I stared into what looked like my mirror, and Walker materialized. Walker said nothing, but held up a sign that read “0 8 4.”

  He disappeared before I could ask him what that meant.

  And then Angie appeared in my mindscape. She was excitedly sniffing something. She was telling me we had to hurry. But I still wasn’t sure what she was saying. I did hear the voice of my one-time instructor, though: “You got to listen to your dog, Gideon.”

  Like Scrooge, I got a third ghost. An unholy trinity. Emilio Cruz, or at least a marionette that appeared to be Emilio Cruz, lectured me. His mouth opened and closed, as if pulled by strings.

  “Point number one,” he said. “I had nothing to do with my wife’s disappearance. Point number two, I don’t know anything about my wife’s disappearance.”

  Cruz’s mouth wasn’t in sync with his words. He was lying, or he was a dummy, or both. His wooden choppers kept clicking, but they were at odds with the timing of his words. My sensory overload did its usual short-circuiting, and I fell asleep.

  When I awakened in the morning, my body ached. My lips were cracked, and my skin was red and dry. It felt as if I was once more a harlequin that went around masquerading in a patchwork body of skin grafts. My steps were slow and painful, as if the fire was a recent event and not something in the past. I was dehydrated, and nauseated from the pain. After drinking two glasses of water, I went in search of some coffee. Imagine the worst hangover ever, combined with physical ailments that suggested recent burns. It was psychosomatic, I knew, but the mark of fire somehow manifested itself upon my body.

  I sipped my coffee and took a chaser of aspirin. My recovery always takes time I don’t want to afford it. Instead of thinking about my PTSD, I contemplated my visions in the order of their appearances. What the hell was Langston Walker telling me? And why was he suddenly silent and forced to communicate through signs?

  The paper he’d held up had the numbers “084.” I typed those numbers into my search engine and came up with a reference to a comic book wherein the code 084 meant an object of unknown origin. That wasn’t something even my subconscious mind would have known, but I found it ironic that I was thinking about an object of unknown origin.

  Angie’s silence was more understandable. She was a dog. But I worked with dogs and was supposed to be able to divine what they were communicating. It was frustrating still not getting it. And what made it worse was Heather Moreland. Angie knew we had to hurry. At some level I knew we had to hurry. But that only made me all the more frustrated at my inability to figure out where to go and what to do.

  Later, I would call Dr. Green and see how Angie was, but not now. There was other business I needed to tend to. I had to go call upon the dummy of my dreams. I had to go pull some strings of my own.

  My shadow fell over Emilio Cruz. He was using a pressure blaster to remove paint and rust from a panel he was working on.

  “What the hell?” he said, turning off the pressure blaster.

  “I have some questions for you, Emilio.”

  “You’re not allowed back here. This is a work area.”

  “The sooner you answer my questions, the sooner you can get back to work.”

  His face flushed red. “If you don’t leave, I’m going to call . . .”

  He stopped voicing his threat in midsentence. Threatening to call the police on a cop isn’t usually much of a deterrent.

  “I’m going to call your superior,” he hissed, rethinking his warning, “and lodge a complaint.”

  “Are you sure you took anger-management courses?” I asked. “Your face is red and you sound furious.”

  “He who angers you controls you. I won’t let you control me.”

  “The last thing I want to do is control you. Like I said, I just have a few questions. I’m sorry if that upsets you.”

  “I’m no
t going to give you the power to upset me. That would surrender my self-worth.”

  The jargon was getting thick, I thought.

  “During all of our conversations, Emilio, you’ve never seemed very concerned about Heather. I thought she was the love of your life.”

  “I’m not her keeper.”

  “And you’re not curious about what happened to her?”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me if Heather went off and ended her life.”

  “Really? That would surprise me a lot.”

  “People who die by suicide don’t want to end their lives; they want to end their pain.”

  Most of the words coming out of Emilio’s mouth were jargon he’d picked up in therapy. I was reminded of my conversation with Seth the night before, and how I’d talked about the purported remedies described in those old bottles—the nostrums, balms, and elixirs.

  “Heather was all about overcoming the odds,” I said. “Out of nothing, she made a life for herself. Her biggest misstep along the way was you.”

  Emilio clenched his hands into fists. The tattooed snake on his arm slithered and undulated as the muscles in his arms rose and fell.

  When he didn’t reply, I said, “I’m sorry. Is that a sore subject for you?”

  “Anger is the only thing to put off until tomorrow.”

  “That sounds like one of those posters in Dr. Barron’s office.”

  “Talk to my lawyer. I have nothing more to say to you.”