Eight
The turn-of-the-century Victorian mansion had been
overrun by a growing city. Now, it squatted on a meager quarter acre of
hillside, surrounded by a rotting stone wall and brownstone tenements.
Saplings hid its lower windows from view. A single dim light filtering
through the trees was the only evidence Jennifer could see that the house
hadn’t been abandoned altogether.
She hurried up the steps in front, hoping that
Francis had called ahead, and that Ed was waiting for her. The house was
part of the old way of doing things, a bridge between the brothel it had
once been and a way-station for distressed employees of Miss Peugeot’s
Secretarial Services. Francis had been talking about selling the property
as her business evolved and her taste in girls leaned toward the
independence and competence it took to survive modern hazards ranging from
AIDS to the computer-aided watchfulness of the IRS. But for this
terror-ridden night, it fulfilled its original purpose. A knock on the
door brought Ed to the door with his old .38 revolver clutched in his
right hand.
Ed went with the house. He, too, was a quality
product beginning to wear with age. Ed was in his fifties, carrying too
much weight about the middle and reluctant to wear the glasses he needed,
but still more than an even match for most of the bad guys Francis dealt
with from time to time. Jennifer gave the man a fierce hug and received a
fatherly pat on the back in return. “Francis called,” the man said
gruffly. “Girl, I hope you’re wrong about Cathy.”
Jennifer burst into tears and endured a bout of
violent shudders. Ed closed the door and guided her into the living
room. Antiques had been Francis’ obsession at one time, and a second
justification for the safe house. The property itself was worth a
fraction of its content.
Jennifer sat on the edge of an ornate couch. Ed
poured her a drink despite her tender age and shoved it into her hands.
“Force it down. Did it happen like Francis said? Is Cathy dead?”
Jennifer forced the searing liquid down as instructed
and felt it settle into a pool of warmth in her stomach. “He had a skinny
sword. There was blood on it.”
“Dimitri Carvelli had the sword?”
She nodded again.
“You girls should know better that to go out on your
own,” he admonished. “Francis knows what the hell she’s doing. She said
you stopped off at Wanda’s before you came here. Didn’t you bring her
along?”
“She wouldn’t come. I couldn’t tell her about
Cathy. She would have freaked.”
Ed went to the phone by the door. He dialed and held
the receiver to his ear for long minutes. “She was shooting something,”
Jennifer called out.
“Heroin?”
“I don’t know what it was for
sure.”
Ed slammed the phone back down after several
ominously quiet minutes. “How did you get here?”
“I got away with Cathy’s car, but the radiator was leaking and
it overheated, and the headlights were broken. I borrowed Wanda’s car,
but she wouldn’t come with me. Ed, go get her. Please?”
Ed tucked the gun in his belt. He went to a metal
panel against one wall and began flipping switches to the house’s security
system. “Don’t open a window or an outside door without letting me know.
Until Francis can get help and have Dimitri stopped, we have to assume
he’ll try to cover his tracks. Right now, that means you and Wanda. Get
your butt upstairs. Take the back bedroom for the night. Stay put. If
you’re hungry, raid the kitchen on the way up.”
She gave Ed another anxious hug.
“Lock your door,” Ed said, his anger softening, his
hand dwelling on her shoulder. “There’s a loaded twenty-two caliber
pistol in the nightstand, just like your own. Do you remember how to use
it?”
Ed had showed her. At the time, it had seemed like
such a crazy thing to have to learn how to do. “I remember.”
Jennifer went upstairs. She locked herself in the
bedroom, showered and crawled into bed without bothering to search the
dresser drawers for a negligee or robe. She curled in the middle of the
old goosedown mattress and pulled the heavy quilt comforter over her
head. She sobbed quietly to herself, racked with guilt for leaving Wanda
behind and unable to exorcise the memory of Cathy’s scream.
In time, Ed tapped at the door. “Can I come in?” his
muffled voice sounded. “You don’t have to get up. I’ve got a key.”
She opened her eyes to the darkness of the room. The
door clicked and opened. Dim light from the hall washed across the wall.
Ed sat on the edge of the bed and massaged the back of her neck with one
hand. “How are you doing, kid?”
He knew how she was doing. He could feel her body
tremble.
“The cops got a call for the Carvelli estate,” Ed
said. “I don’t know how they’re going to handle it, except that nobody
wants to see anyone get hurt unnecessarily. If Cathy’s still alive,
they’ll get her help. They’ll go after Dimitri. It’s out of our hands.”
“And Wanda?”
“Francis sent one of the girls to check on Wanda.
You and I get to hold down the fort here in case there’s further trouble.”
Jennifer couldn’t imagine the shape and form further
trouble might take. She closed her eyes, concentrating on the sensation
of Ed’s calloused hands kneading her back. “You’ve grown up, Jennifer,”
he said after a time. “You’re hardly a kid anymore, and you’re a darn
site prettier than any of the others. Don’t you dare tell them that I told you
that.”
She murmured her thanks and smiled, and with a gentle
pat on the behind, Ed tucked in her blankets and left the room. Exhausted
by her flight through the night, Jennifer fell into a deep and dreamless
sleep.
She awoke hours later to the bed shifting beneath
her, and to cool air flooding across her body as her comforter was tossed
aside. A heavy body straddled her, pinning her to the mattress. Sprawled on her back, naked, her eyes flew open in shock.
A hand slammed against her throat, cutting off both
her breath and the scream that had gathered in her lungs. The dark eyes of
a stranger burning with desperation hovered inches above her face. She
had seen them only once before. How, she wondered, had he ever found
her? How had he gotten past Ed?
His smile was the self-satisfied smile of a
predator. He brought his right hand into view and a shiny blade snapped
open, gleaming in the light from the table lamp she had left burning.
Jennifer went as rigid as stone.
“It was Evelyn wasn’t it?” Dimitri growled at her.
“The blonde you was with? Was it Evelyn?”
“It was Cathy!” she gasped defiantly through his hand
clutching her throat. Her hands were free. She clawed for his eyes, but
she couldn’t quite reach, and he only renewed his grip on her throat,
cutting off her breath until she clutched at the bedclothing instead.
His smile went away. The tip of the knife went to
her face. “It was Evelyn, you lying little bitch. It had to be Evelyn.”
The door behind Dimitri creaked open. Ed stepped
into view, his face drained of color, his chest wet with his own blood.
Jennifer’s eyes widened in shock as he raised his revolver and slowly
squeezed off a shot.
The bullet was a fraction of an inch off its target.
Dimitri’s right ear vanished in a stinging spray of blood. His shriek of
pain mingled with Jennifer’s own scream of panic. They rolled in opposite
directions.
Ed’s aim followed Dimitri. He fired a second and a
third time. Dimitri rolled away bellowing rage and threw his knife end
for end, silencing the revolver, but gasping for air as he clutched bullet
wounds in his arm and side.
Jennifer leaped to her feet and ran to Ed, smearing
blood all down the side of her body as she eased him to the floor. She
reached down to pull out the knife, but Ed shook his head frantically. He
opened his mouth to speak, but it, too, was full of blood. Even as she
watched, his eyes rolled up into his skull and he sighed.
But he was still breathing and Jennifer promised
herself that she’d not panic and get herself killed. Dimitri was
staggering to his feet, bleeding and dazed. She fled into the bathroom and
gathered her clothes. She went through the connecting door into the
adjacent bedroom, and only then remembered that she had bypassed the
opportunity to fetch the pistol Ed had given her and shoot Dimitri.
It was too late to backtrack. Besides, Ed had
already shot him up pretty badly. She paused and listened to the sounds
filter through the walls, but heard nothing except the sound of her own
shuddering breathing and the roar of her pulse in her ear. She dressed in
the dark as fast as her shaking hands would allow.
Jennifer fled the house. She went out the back way
through dingy hallways, setting off the alarms as she went.
She circled around front to Wanda’s car and leaped inside. There was
nothing she could do for Ed except to call Francis. She had nowhere to go
to make the phone call except to her own apartment. She drove like a
maniac, hoping desperately that Ed was okay and that he had put an end to
Dimitri’s short but horrid reign of terror.
Jennifer parked in the back of her duplex and hurried
up the back stairs, turning on lights through her second floor apartment
on her way to the phone.
Francis was waiting for her at the other end of the
line. In a quavering tone of voice, she told Francis what had happened.
“I’ll put in a 911 for Ed,” Francis said in a
curiously calm tone of voice, “But we have to leave the city until this is
settled. It would be safer to leave the state entirely. Do you have your
plastic with you?”
Jennifer’s plastic consisted of an Illinois driver’s
license that showed her to be eighteen and a VISA card issued in her
name. “What do you want me to do?”
“Jennifer, go home. You know what to do once you get
there. Do you think you can handle the responsibility?”
It had always shocked her that Francis should treat
her as an equal, better even than most of the older girls in her employ,
even though she had said that she never wanted Jennifer to earn a living
in the same way. “Yes, I can do that,” she said.
Francis hung up gently. Jennifer refused to put the
phone down until she went over a mental list of all she had to do. She
then set the handset in place and packed necessary clothing. She cleaned
the room of anything of personal value and put it all in one suitcase.
And she took her chrome-plated twenty-two caliber, six-shot revolver, the
one Ed had given her last Christmas.
Lightning flashed in the sky driving west to the
interstate. A brief rain came and went. She left the lightning glowering
in the huddled thunder clouds in her rear view mirrors, hoping that Wanda wouldn’t be too angry for having taken her car. Three
hours later, before the sun had cleared the receding bank of storm clouds
in the east, she had crossed the Mississippi River into Iowa and rented a
motel room for the day.
She had caught some sleep at the safe house, but she
needed a few more hours rest to clear her head. For a time, she lay
sobbing in a bed too hard for comfort while a hot and misty day brightened
outside. It was over now, she tried to tell herself. Ed had shot Dimitri
dead. Even if Dimitri was still alive, she had seen him bleeding. How
could he ever hope to track her down so badly hurt? She managed to doze
thinking that Francis would straighten everything out as she slept. Cathy
and Ed would have been taken to the hospital hours ago. They, too, would
be sleeping now, healing. And Dimitri Carvelli would be in jail. Only in
the nightmares that haunted her in her sleep did Dimitri wander the
darkness, looking for her with his knife clutched in his fist, twisting
it, and flicking cold, evil light into her eyes.
