Читать книгу Urge To Kill - John Lutz - Страница 11

Total darkness, total pain.

Where am I?

Vera tried to raise her head and look around, and a deep ache closed on the back of her neck like a claw. She let her head drop backward.

Backward?

That was when she realized she was hanging from her bound wrists and ankles. Her mind flashed on photos she’d seen of large dead animals, their lifeless heads dangling, being carried that way on horizontal poles by hunters. Only she wasn’t being carried; she was stationary. The pain was from her cramped neck muscles, and from her body weight pulling down on her wrists and ankles. She could see nothing in the blackness. Hear nothing.

Her head, flush with the blood rushing to it, began to throb with almost unendurable pain behind her ears. She tried to ask if anyone was there, what was happening, but her mouth wouldn’t open. Something, tape probably, was over her lips, sealing them together. She parted them with difficulty but could only make a soft muffled sound halfway between a moan and a sob. She made the pitiful sound again. Any sound was better than the darkness and silence, and the pain.

She tried again to lift her head, but it weighed a thousand pounds.

But with the thought of motion, and another stab of pain, came memory.

Last night at Risqué Business, the man she’d had a couple of drinks with…darkly handsome…well dressed in dark pants and a gray sport jacket…a red tie…and with a cosmopolitan air, what used to be called smooth.

She tried to recall his name.

Had he ever told her?

Light!

Blinding her. She involuntarily clenched her eyes shut.

When Vera did manage to open her eyes wider than slits she saw the bottom of a floor, rough wood planks running one direction, joists another. Her wrists were tied together with thick rope that had cut off circulation so that her fingers were pale. She strained to see her ankles, her feet—are they as pale and bloodless as my hands?—but couldn’t pull them into her field of vision. She did see several long fluorescent fixtures, two glowing tubes in each. There must be lots of fixtures. That was where all the light was coming from. And the faint, crackling buzzing.

She realized she’d been able to raise her head slightly, almost to the horizontal, and with realization came another shot of pain at the base of her neck. Her head dropped again, dangling at a sharp angle from the thin stalk of her neck.

But she managed to turn her head slightly, before the pain stopped her. She saw that she was in what looked like a large basement. Gray concrete walls, wooden support beams, exposed steam and water pipes, round ductwork with shreds of insulation hanging from some of it like grotesque stalactites.

Asbestos? Could be dangerous.

The pain became unbearable, and she tried not to move at all other than to blink away her tears.

In the glimpse she’d had of herself, confirmed by the lack of constriction on her upper arms and her legs, she knew she was nude.

Someone—What’s his name? I need to know it so I can plead, beg for him to stop whatever’s going to happen!—someone had done this to her, put something in her drink, perhaps. Something had caused her to black out, to awaken here, dangling from her bound wrists and ankles like a…She didn’t want to know what. Or didn’t want to think about it.

Tears welled again in her eyes and tracked downward along her temples, beneath her hairline. Tickling as if in cruel and obscene jest.

Motion caught her gaze, and there he was in her pain-blurred vision, the man from last night. She wasn’t surprised to see him. He had to be responsible for this.

He was walking toward her, also nude, like a figure in a dream. Only it wasn’t a dream. She could only pray that it might be. That she might wake up a second time, in her apartment, in her bed. Safe.

When she saw the knife in the man’s hand her heart leaped. She did try to struggle then, but couldn’t so much as squirm. Her hyperextended arms and legs were like lifeless tense cables preventing her from crashing to the concrete floor.

She saw that the man had an erection, and at that moment he reached up with the blade and must have sliced through the rope binding her wrists to the horizontal beam, because her upper body suddenly dropped.

She flinched as she swung downward. Surely her head was going to crack open on the hard floor.

But her body swung like a pendulum, swiveling slightly, her hair brushing the floor with each pass. Though her wrists were bound together, her arms were free now. She reached over her head—which was downward—and her fingertips scraped the concrete floor. There was no pain though, only numbness.

As she swung she saw something circular beneath her, a drain cover.

She dragged her numbed fingertips over the rough floor again, hearing them scrape, feeling her nails bend back and tear, as she tried to stop her body from swinging. If only she could stop she might support some of her weight by pressing her fingertips against the floor, reduce the pain in her ankles. The full burden of her weight was pulling on her ankles now, and she was swinging in lessening arcs. The rope must be digging into her flesh. She could feel something warm trickling down her calves, past her knees, along the insides of her thighs toward her crotch.

Blood!

The rope must have cut deeply into her ankles. She flashed a vision of her twisted, torn flesh.

Oh, God!

There was a sudden burning sensation on the right side of her neck. Then on the left. She caught a glimpse of a bloody knife blade and knew the man had slit her throat.

It wasn’t her throat, though. It couldn’t be.

Then she accepted that it was and lifted her arms, probed with her fingers, felt warm blood and something else.

It was when she heard the trickle of her blood in the drain that the real horror engulfed her. Her life was draining away, her remaining time, her remaining everything!

She panicked and tried to suck in air through her nose, and managed to raise her hands enough to rip the tape from her mouth. She drew in a breath to scream but inhaled only blood.

The man had waited until the pendulum arc of Vera’s swinging body narrowed and was almost stopped before he cut the large carotid arteries of her neck.

He watched her.

Watched her.

After she’d tried to scream, he’d drawn the blade across her taut throat.

She wasn’t alive when her body slowed to describe a small elliptical orbit above the drain and finally dangled motionless from the beam.

Nor was she alive to see the man, showered and neatly dressed, leave the building’s basement, switching off the lights behind him.

She’d been dead for several hours when he returned to make sure she was completely bled out.