Shadowfires Read online

  The kitchen had been wrecked. The white-lacquered breakfast table and two chairs were overturned. The other two chairs had been hammered to pieces against everything else in sight. The refrigerator was badly dented and scraped; the tempered glass in the oven door was shattered; the counters and cabinets were gouged and scratched, edges splintered. Dishes and drinking glasses had been pulled from the cupboards and thrown against the walls, and the floor was prickled and glinting with thousands of sharp shards. Food had been swept off the shelves of the refrigerator onto the floor: Pickles, milk, macaroni salad, mustard, chocolate pudding, maraschino cherries, a chunk of ham, and several unidentifiable substances were congealing in a disgusting pool. Beside the sink, above the cutting board, all six knives had been removed from their rack and, with tremendous force, had been driven into the wall; some of the blades were buried up to half their lengths in the drywall, while two had been driven in to their hilts.

  “You think they were looking for something?” Benny asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “No,” he said, “I don’t think so. It’s got the same look as the bedroom in the Villa Park house. Weird. Creepy. This was done in a rage. Out of fierce hatred, in a frenzy, a fury. Or by someone who takes pure, unadulterated pleasure in destruction.”

  Rachael could not take her eyes off the knives embedded in the wall. A deep sick quivering filled her stomach. Her chest and throat tightened with fear.

  The gun in her hand felt different from the way it had felt just a moment ago. Too light. Too small. Almost like a toy. If she had to use it, would it be effective? Against this adversary?

  They continued through the silent house with considerably greater caution. Even Benny had been shaken by the psychopathic violence that had been unleashed here. He no longer taunted her with his boldness, but stayed close at her side, warier than he had been.

  In the large master bedroom, there was more destruction, though it was not as extensive or as indicative of insane fury as the damage in the kitchen. Beside the king-size bed of black-lacquered wood and burnished stainless steel, a torn pillow leaked feathers. The bedsheets were strewn across the floor, and a chair was overturned. One of the two black ceramic lamps had been knocked off a nightstand and broken, and the shade had been crushed. The shade on the other lamp was cocked, and the paintings hung askew on the walls.

  Benny stooped and carefully lifted a section of one of the sheets to have a closer look at it. Small reddish spots and a single reddish smear shone with almost preternatural brilliance on the white cotton.

  “Blood,” he said.

  Rachael felt a cold sweat suddenly break out on her scalp and along the back of her neck.

  “Not much,” Benny said, standing again, his gaze traveling over the tangled sheets. “Not much, but definitely blood.”

  Rachael saw a bloody handprint on the wall beside the open door that led into the master bedroom. It was a man’s print, and large—as if a butcher, exhausted from his hideous labors, had leaned there for a moment to catch his breath.

  The lights were on in the large bathroom, the only chamber in the house that had not been dark when they’d reached it. Through the open door, Rachael could see virtually everything either directly or in the mirrors covering one wall: gray tile with a burnt-yellow border, big sunken tub, shower stall, toilet, one edge of the counter that held the sinks, bright brass towel racks and brass-rimmed recessed ceiling lamps. The bathroom appeared deserted. However, when she crossed the threshold, she heard someone’s quick, panicked breathing, and her own heartbeat, already trotting, raced.

  Close behind her, Benny said, “What’s wrong?”

  She pointed to the opaque shower stall. The glass was so heavily frosted that nothing could be seen of the person on the other side, not even a tenebrous form. “Somebody’s in there.”

  Benny leaned forward, listening.

  Rachael had backed against the wall, the muzzle of the thirty-two aimed at the shower door.

  “Better come out of there,” Benny said to the person in the stall.

  No answer. Just quick, thin wheezing.

  “Better come out right now,” Benny said.

  “Come out, damn you!” Rachael said, her raised voice echoing harshly off the gray tile and the bright mirrors.

  From the stall came an unexpectedly woeful mewling that was the very essence of terror. It sounded like a child.

  Shocked, concerned, but still wary, Rachael edged toward the frosted glass.

  Benny stepped past her, took hold of the brass handle, and pulled the door open. “Oh, my God.”

  Rachael saw a nude girl huddled pathetically on the tile floor of the shadowy stall, her back pressed into the corner. She looked no older than fifteen or sixteen and must be the current mistress in residence, the latest—and last—of Eric’s pitiable “conquests.” Her slender arms were crossed over her breasts more in fear and self-defense than in modesty. She was trembling uncontrollably, and her eyes were wide with terror, and her face was pale, sickly, waxen.

  She was probably quite pretty, but it was difficult to tell for sure, not because of the gloominess of the enclosed shower stall but because she had been badly beaten. Her right eye was blackened and beginning to swell. Another ugly bruise was forming on her right cheek, from the corner of the eye all the way down to the jaw. Her upper lip had been split; blood still oozed from it, and blood covered her chin. There were bruises on her arms as well, and a big one on her left thigh.

  Benny turned away, clearly as embarrassed for the girl as he was alarmed by her condition.

  Lowering her pistol, stooping at the shower door, Rachael said, “Who did this to you, honey? Who did this?” She already knew what the answer must be, dreaded hearing it, but was morbidly compelled to ask the question.

  The girl could not respond. Her bleeding lips moved, and she tried to form words, but all that came out was that thin grievous whining, broken into chords by an especially violent siege of the shivers. Even if she had spoken, she would most likely not have answered the question, for she was obviously in shock and to some degree disassociated from reality. She seemed only partially aware of Rachael and Benny, with the larger part of her attention focused on some private horror. She met Rachael’s eyes but didn’t really seem to see her.

  Rachael reached into the stall with one hand. “Honey, it’s all right. Everything’s all right. No one’s going to hurt you anymore. You can come out now. We won’t let anyone hurt you anymore.”

  The girl stared through Rachael, murmuring softly but urgently to herself, shaken by a wind of fear that blew through some grim inner landscape in which she seemed trapped.

  Rachael handed her gun to Benny. She stepped into the big shower stall and knelt beside the girl, speaking softly and reassuringly to her, touching her gently on the face and arms, smoothing her tangled blond hair. At the first few touches, the girl flinched as if she’d been struck, though the contact briefly broke her trance. She looked at Rachael for a moment instead of through her, and she allowed herself to be coaxed to her feet and out of the shadowy stall, though by the time she crossed the sill of the shower into the bathroom, she was already retreating once more into her semicatatonic state, unable to answer questions or even to respond with a nod when spoken to, unable to meet Rachael’s eyes.

  “We’ve got to get her to a hospital,” Rachael said, wincing when she got a better look at the poor child’s injuries in the brighter light of the bathroom. Two fingernails on the girl’s right hand had been broken back almost to the cuticle and were bleeding; one finger appeared to be broken.

  Rachael sat with her on the edge of the bed while Benny went through the closets and various dresser drawers, looking for clothes.

  She listened for strange noises elsewhere in the house.

  She heard none.

  Still, she listened attentively.

  In addition to panties, faded blue jeans, a blue-checkered blouse, peds, and a pair of New Balance running shoes, Benny fo
und a trove of illegal drugs. The bottom drawer of one of the nightstands contained fifty or sixty hand-rolled joints, a plastic bag full of unidentified brightly colored capsules, and another plastic bag containing about two ounces of white powder. “Probably cocaine,” Benny said.

  Eric had not used drugs; he had disdained them. He had always said that drugs were for the weak, for the losers who could not cope with life on its own terms. But obviously he had not been averse to supplying all sorts of illicit substances to the young girls he kept, ensuring their docility and compliance at the expense of further corrupting them. Rachael had never loathed him as much as she did at that moment.

  She found it necessary to dress the naked girl as she would have had to dress a very small child, although the teenager’s helpless daze—marked by spells of shivers and occasional whimpering—was caused by shock and terror rather than by the illegal chemicals that Benny had found in the nightstand.

  As Rachael quickly dressed the girl, chivalrous Benny kept his eyes discreetly averted. Having found her purse while searching for her clothes, he now went through it, seeking identification. “Her name’s Sarah Kiel, and she turned sixteen just two months ago. Looks like she’s come west from … Coffeyville, Kansas.”

  Another runaway, Rachael thought. Maybe fleeing an intolerable home life. Maybe just a rebellious type who chafed at discipline and entertained the illusion that life on her own, without restrictions, would be pure bliss. Off to L.A., the Big Orange, to take a shot at the movie business, dreaming of stardom. Or maybe just seeking some excitement, an escape from the boredom of the vast and slumbering Kansas plains.

  Instead of the expected romance and glamour, Sarah Kiel had found what most girls like her found at the end of the California rainbow: a hard and homeless life on the streets—and eventually the solicitous attention of a pimp. Eric must have either bought her from a pimp or found her himself while on the prowl for the kind of fresh meat that would keep him feeling young. Ensconced in an expensive Palm Springs house, supplied with all the drugs she wanted, plaything of a very rich man, Sarah had surely begun to convince herself that she was, after all, destined for a fairy-tale life. The naive child could not have guessed the true extent of the danger into which she had stepped, could not have conceived of the horror that would one day pay a visit and leave her dazed and mute with terror.

  “Help me get her out to the car,” Rachael said as she finished dressing Sarah Kiel.

  Benny put an arm around the girl from one side, and Rachael held her from the other side, and although Sarah shuffled along under her own power, she would have collapsed several times if they had not provided support. Her knees kept buckling.

  The night smelled of star jasmine stirred by a breeze that also rustled shrubbery, causing Rachael to glance nervously at the shadows.

  They put Sarah in the car and fastened her seat belt for her, whereupon she slumped against the restraining straps and let her head fall forward. It was possible for a third person to ride in the 560 SL, although it was necessary for the extra passenger to sit sideways in the open storage space behind the two bucket seats and endure a bit of squeezing. Benny was too big to fit, so Rachael got behind the seats, and he took the wheel for the trip to the hospital.

  As they pulled out of the driveway, a car turned the corner, headlights washing over them, and when they entered the street, the other car suddenly surged forward, fast, coming straight at them.

  Rachael’s heart stuttered, and she said, “Oh, hell, it’s them!”

  The oncoming car angled across the narrow street, intending to block it. Benny wasted no time asking questions, immediately changed directions, pulling hard on the wheel, putting the other car behind them. He tramped the accelerator; tires squealed; the Mercedes leaped forward with dependable quickness, racing past the low dark houses. Ahead, the street ended in a cross street, forcing them to turn either left or right, so Benny had to slow down, and Rachael lowered her head and peered through the rear window against which she was crammed, and she saw that the other car—a Cadillac of some kind, maybe a Seville—was following close, very close, closer.

  Benny took the corner wide, at a frightening slant, and Rachael would have been thrown by the sudden force of the turn if she hadn’t been wedged tightly in the storage space behind the seats. There was nowhere for her to be thrown to, and she didn’t even have to hold on to anything, but she did hold on to the back of Sarah Kiel’s seat because she felt as if the world were about to fall out from under her, and she thought, God, please, don’t let the car roll over.

  The Mercedes didn’t roll, hugged the road beautifully, came out into a straight stretch of residential street, and accelerated. But behind them, the Cadillac almost went over on its side, and the driver overcompensated, which made the Caddy swing so dangerously wide that it side-swiped a Corvette parked at the curb. Sparks showered into the air, cascaded along the pavement. The Caddy lurched away from the impact and looked like it would veer across the street and into the cars along the other curb, but then it recovered. It had lost some ground, but it came after them again, its driver undaunted.

  Benny whipped the little 560 SL into another turn, around another corner, holding it tighter this time, then stood on the accelerator for a block and a half, so it seemed as if they were in a rocket ship instead of an automobile. Just when Rachael felt herself pressed back with a force of maybe 4.5 Gs, just when it seemed they would break the chains of gravity and explode straight into orbit, Benny manipulated the brakes with all the style of a great concert pianist executing “Moonlight Sonata,” and as he came up on another stop sign with no intention of obeying it, he spun the wheel as hard as he dared, so from behind it must have looked as if the Mercedes had just popped off that street onto the street that intersected from the left.

  He was as expert at evasive driving as he had proved to be at hand-to-hand combat, and Rachael wanted to say, Who the hell are you, anyway, not just a placid real-estate salesman with a love of trains and swing music, damned if you are, but she didn’t say anything because she was afraid she would distract him, and if she distracted him at this speed, they would inevitably roll—or worse—and be killed for sure.

  Ben knew that the 560 SL could easily win a speed contest with the Cadillac out on the open roads, but it was a different story on streets like these, which were narrow and occasionally bisected by speed bumps to prevent drag racing. Besides, there were traffic lights as they drew nearer the center of town, and even at this dead hour of the morning he had to slow for those main intersections, at least a little, or risk plowing broadside into a rare specimen of crosstown traffic. Fortunately, the Mercedes cornered about a thousand times better than the Cadillac, so he didn’t have to slow down nearly as much as his pursuers, and every time he switched streets he gained a few yards that the Caddy could not entirely regain on the next stretch of straightaway. By the time he had zigzagged to within a block of Palm Canyon Drive, the main drag, the Caddy was more than a block and a half behind and losing ground, and he was finally confident that he would shake the bastards, whoever they were—

  —and that was when he saw the police car.

  It was parked at the front of a line of curbed cars, at the corner of Palm Canyon, a block away, and the cop must have seen him coming in the rearview mirror, coming like a bat out of hell, because the flashing red and blue beacons on the roof of the cruiser came on, bright and startling, ahead on the right.

  “Hallelujah!” Ben said.

  “No,” Rachael said from her awkward seat in the open storage space behind him, shouting though her mouth was nearly at his ear. “No, you can’t go to the cops! We’re dead if you go to the cops.”

  Nevertheless, as he rocketed toward the cruiser, Ben started to brake because, damn it, she’d never told him why they couldn’t rely on the police for protection, and he was not a man who believed in taking the law into his own hands, and surely the guys in the Cadillac would back off fast if the cops came into it.
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br />   But Rachael shouted, “No! Benny, for Christ’s sake, trust me, why don’t you? We’re dead if you stop. They’ll blow our brains out, sure as hell.”

  Being accused of not trusting her—that hurt, stung. He trusted her, by God, trusted her implicitly because he loved her. He didn’t understand her worth shit, not tonight he didn’t, but he did trust her, and it was like a knife twisting in his heart to hear that note of disappointment and accusation in her voice. He took his foot off the brake and put it back on the accelerator, swept right past the black-and-white so fast that the light from its swiveling emergency beacons flashed through the Mercedes only once and then were behind. When he’d glanced over, he’d seen two uniformed officers looking astonished. He figured they’d wait for the Caddy and then give chase to both cars, which would be fine, just fine, because the guys in the Caddy couldn’t catch up with him and blow his brains out if they had the police on their tail.

  But to Ben’s surprise and dismay, the cops pulled out right after him, siren screaming. Maybe they had been so shocked by the sight of the Mercedes coming at them like a jet that they hadn’t noticed the Cadillac farther back. Or maybe they’d seen the Caddy but had been so startled by the Mercedes that they hadn’t realized the second car was approaching at almost the same high speed. Whatever their reasoning, they shot away from the curb and fell in behind him as he hung a right onto Palm Canyon Drive.

  Ben made that turn with the reckless aplomb of a stunt driver who knows that his roll bars and special stabilizers and heavy duty hydraulic shock absorbers and other sophisticated equipment remove most of the danger from such risky maneuvers—except he didn’t have roll bars and special stabilizers. He realized he’d miscalculated and was about to turn Rachael and Sarah and himself into canned meat, three lumps of imitation Spam encased in expensive German steel, Jesus, and the car tilted onto two tires, he smelled smoking rubber, it seemed an hour they teetered on edge, but by the grace of God and the brilliance of the Benz designers they came down again onto all fours with a jolt and crash that, by virtue of another miracle, did not blow out any tires, though Rachael hit her head on the ceiling and let out her breath in a whoosh that he felt on the back of his neck.