Nineteen
Dimitri sat in his car nosed against the tree below
the highway and stared out over the river. The canopy of rustling leaves
overhead protected him from the ferocity of the afternoon sun.
Consciousness ebbed and flowed, but cleared by late afternoon.
He could still think clearly enough to know that he
was being punished by Satan Himself for his failure. He would heal and
feel better when he had attended the task Rosie had given him to prove
himself. He remained indestructible and invincible, he felt certain. He
would not falter until his task was complete, or until he had failed
beyond any hope of redemption. If that happened, he would be dragged
screaming to the deepest bowels of hell.
Now was the time to act. Dimitri climbed from the
car. He moved slowly so as not to send his head spinning, or break open
any scabs on his wounds. He had been watching an elderly fisherman along
the bank of the river during the course of the morning. Surely a
well-outfitted sportsman would have a quality fillet knife he could use,
or a hunting knife, perhaps. Even a gun maybe. He still had his own,
although a gun without bullets wasn’t much of a weapon. The old van
parked nearby looked chock full of goodies.
Dimitri moved from cover to cover to the river’s
edge. He waited alongside a tree until the white-haired gent finally
moved within reach, then simply gave the old man a shove and sent him
plunging backward into the river. He waited until he felt certain the old
man’s floundering hadn’t attracted any attention, then hurried to the van.
He found what he needed most in a tackle box, a foot
long generic Bowie knife and sheath. No guns, but a knife. The Western
motif was a far cry from the ruby encrusted dagger Rosie had provided for
his sacrificial kills. He would have preferred the symbolism of something
more European and medieval, but it was at least an improvement over the
irreverence of his switchblade, a weapon of hateful children, one he had
dropped reaching for his gun at the motel. He exchanged his bloodied
shirt for a clean flannel shirt, then climbed behind the wheel of the van
and searched for the keys.
No keys.
Blood encrusted skin made his faint smile sting.
Within his view of the river, he could see the fisherman’s drowned body
drifting back to shore. The fisherman would have the keys he needed. He chuckled at the hand of fate working in his
favor, knowing full well the power behind it. Ten minutes later, he was
driving north along the river highway in the van, knowing that the girl
had come this way, certain that she was holed up somewhere close by.
He stopped on the shoulder of the road and eyed two
ranch style homes overlooking the river. One had a wheelchair folded up
against the wall in an attached garage, and the other a child’s tricycle
in the drive. He drove on and almost missed the castle on the hill. From
a distance, it almost looked medieval, and he took it as an omen and
parked again on the shoulder of the road.
He left the car and climbed the hill through thick
underbrush and countless oak saplings. When he stepped into the open, he
eyed a figure moving in an upstairs window.
Bingo. Maybe. If Francis had taken refuge here,
she’d have someone reasonably competent standing guard. An armed guard.
The sight of a battered pickup alongside the apartment building warned of
a caretaker. If they were ready for him, he’d be dead in a heartbeat
blundering into their defenses. Despite the risk, he needed a closer
look.
With the knife sheathed on his belt, Dimitri hurried
across the yard, the bullet wounds in his hip joint, gut and shoulder
shooting pain like bolts of lightning lancing up and down his body. He
suspected a kidney harbored one of his little witness’ bullets and would
kill sooner than later. Sooner than that, he would pay her back, trade
her tick for tack, life for life.
He went in through a side entrance, breathing through
parted lips to hear more clearly the sounds of his environment. He paused
in the hall and heard movement in the basement. Someone paced the hall
upstairs.
He used a narrow, rear staircase to investigate and
cracked open the door at the top. A woman in slacks and blouse paced the
hall here, a .357 Magnum clutched in her right hand.
Bingo for sure.
Smiling grimly, trembling, sweating profusely,
Dimitri saw four doors along the hall, two on each side. When the woman
stepped into one of the apartments at the far end, he heard voices and
guessed that there were at least two women there. He inspected the first
apartment at his end and thought it showed no signs of occupation. He
eased the door closed behind him.
And then he heard the sound of water splashing, and
the humming of a woman’s voice. From the bathroom, no less. How
convenient, he thought to himself, and his thin, bloodless lips pursed
into a bloodless smile.
Dimitri drew the hunting knife from its whispering
sheath. He sidestepped to the open bathroom door and peeked around the
corner.
A naked girl with pink skin was bathing, small, but very
mature. She lifted one bare leg into the air from the depth of the big
white tub, wiggled her toes, and then raised the other, singing to herself
as she played in the clear water. Odd that she’d not have soap in her
bathwater. Dimitri had a startling clear view of her nudity through the
mirror towering alongside the tub.
When her face slipped momentarily beneath the water,
Dimitri rushed into the room. He grabbed a bare ankle and hoisted her
into the air with all of his remaining power, prepared to deliver a clean
thrust of the blade into the lower abdominal cavity, an incapacitating
wound, one to allow his victim to remain conscious of the other and far
more devastating sweeps of the blade that would follow. He felt certain he could butcher her
alive before she could make a sound.
“Nooooo!”
The voice roared as if from a distance, and yet it
was nearby and filled with a primal desperation that raised the hackles on
Dimitri’s neck. He looked up in shock at his own image in the mirror. As
maniacal and ghoulish as his own reflection was, another glowing face
appeared, superimposed upon his own, the face of an old man with a shock
of white hair, the face of God Himself.
And then God again roared his thunderous anger.
Dimitri reeled backward, knowing he had lost too much
blood to think clearly. Hallucinating, maybe. Letting the girl slip from
his grasp, he turned about on wobbling legs and staggered back through the
apartment and out into the hall. Pounding his way down the stairs,
ignoring the mass of pain in his body and the fresh flow of blood from his
wounds, he heard the girl in the bathtub finally recover and scream.
If only a reverberation of short term memory, he
heard again the terrible roar of the awful face in the mirror. And with a
pitiful squeak from his own larynx, Dimitri Carvelli went out the side
door and into the refuge of the nearby trees.
