Before The Killing Starts (Dixie Killer Blues Book 1) (8 page)

Chapter 18

The reception desk at
Ellie's hotel was empty when Evan got there so he headed straight up to her
room. He was fifteen minutes early but he knocked on the door anyway and wasn't
surprised when he didn't get an answer. He didn't fancy going back down and
sitting in the depressing lobby if he could avoid it so he sat down and leaned
against the wall to wait. Half an hour passed and she still hadn't turned up.
He thought about asking if they'd seen her at reception, but, after the trouble
at the bar, he was getting a bad feeling about the whole situation. The less
people who saw him here, the better. He got up and paced up and down, then
tried the door handle and the feeling of unease intensified a notch as the door
swung open. He let himself in and closed the door behind him.

The room smelled of
stale bodies and unwashed sheets, and it was empty. The bed took up most of the
floor space. He took a step towards the bathroom and felt something sticky
under his foot. He pulled off his shoe and ran a finger through the tacky
liquid but he had no idea if it was blood or not. He took a couple of tentative
paces towards the bathroom, as if a dead body in the shower stall was something
you had to creep up on, and pushed the door open. She wasn't in there either.
He let out a long breath. At least she wasn't lying naked in the tub, her eyes
gouged from their sockets, legs bent at impossible angles. 

It was obvious the room
had been searched—there hadn't been much in the way of clothes in either the
closet or the dresser, but what there was had been strewn across the floor. The
mattress had been pulled off the bed and was leaning up against the wall. There
was a small suitcase lying open on the bed frame and a couple of pairs of shoes
kicked into the corner. It didn't look as if she planned on staying in town for
long.

What he couldn't know
was whether she'd been in the room when they were doing it. There was still the
possibility that she was out and about, aiming to get back for their meeting at
six and she'd been delayed. Or gone shopping or whatever else women do that
makes them late every time. The other alternative was whoever searched the room
had taken her away with them. All he could do was wait to see if she turned up.

The only other furniture
in the room was a threadbare armchair with a couple of suspicious looking
stains on the upholstery. It was that or the bed so he settled into it to wait.
Six thirty came and went, and by seven he knew she wasn't coming. He'd had a
vague, nagging suspicion ever since he'd spoken to her on the phone. There had
been something not right about the call. She'd sounded panicky when he said he
was coming straight over and he was getting the feeling now that she just
agreed to meet him to get him off the phone.

If it hadn't been for
what she said about Sarah he'd have dropped the whole thing right there. He'd
almost got beaten up and now she'd gone missing—it was more trouble than it was
worth. But—and it was a big but—she
had
mentioned Sarah and he knew he
had to follow it up.

He pushed himself up out
of the armchair and crossed to the bed and picked up the suitcase. It was a
regular, small carry-on suitcase with wheels and a telescopic handle. The sort
of thing that would be big enough for a week away for a man, or an overnight
stay for a woman. On the outside there was a small, zippered pocket with enough
room for your travel documents and a book to read.

He unzipped it and felt
inside and pulled out a slim diary. Did anyone still use a diary? Did anyone
under twenty-five even know what one was? It was strange that whoever had
searched the room had missed it. Maybe they hadn't but it wasn't what they were
after.

He looked at the date—2007—and
was on the verge of putting it back when a sudden thought blind-sided him. He
felt his stomach flip, felt his legs go weak. The room was way too hot; he
needed some air. He crossed to the window and opened it and stuck his head out.
He breathed deeply, couldn't get enough of it, sucking traffic fumes and all
the rest down into his lungs.

He looked at the diary
shaking slightly in his hand, an
up-yours
buzz of anticipation taking
his breath away. Maybe he didn't need Ellie's help after all. He remembered
back to when he'd kept a diary, back in the day, before everybody lived their
whole life through their phone. At the back there'd always been a removable
section for names and addresses and phone numbers. Removable, so that you
didn't have to write them out all over again every year. You could keep on
transferring them for ten or twenty years, amending people's details as they
moved and changed phones until the whole thing was a mess of crossed-out
entries and new ones squeezed into every available gap until you finally bit
the bullet and got a new one and cleaned it all up.

He wiped his sweaty
palms on his pants and opened it up at the back. Sure enough, there it was. A
couple of loose pieces of paper fell out onto the floor. He ignored them and
pulled the address section free. He could see from the number of amendments
that it had been regularly updated over the years. He flicked through to the
B's and there it was—
Sarah Buckley
. His hands were shaking harder now,
but not so hard that he couldn't see, right there next to her name, the address
of the house they'd lived in together and a number for the house phone and a
number for her cell phone—a number he knew had stopped working the day she
disappeared. There were no crossings-out, no amendments, no new number or
address squeezed into the margins.

He took a couple of
paces backwards and dropped into the armchair. He flicked through the pages
until he got to the S's but he knew it was no use. Ellie was a surname person,
not a first name person. Sarah had been under the B's, she wouldn't be in the
S's as well. He felt numb. For one stupid moment he'd really believed that he
would find some new address or phone number for Sarah, neatly written under
their old details.

He felt so stupid. As if
Sarah, having successfully disappeared off the face of the earth, would have
given her best friend her new address and made sure she wrote it down in her
diary for the whole world to find.

He let the address book
drop from his fingers onto the floor and leaned back in the chair and stared up
at the ceiling. He closed his eyes and rested his arm across them shutting
everything out. Or keeping it all in. He sat upright and opened his eyes to try
to stop the images that he didn't want to think about crowding into his mind.
He got up and walked over to the bed. The two pieces of paper that had fallen
out of the diary were lying on the floor and he bent down and picked them up.

One of them was a
photograph cut in half. It was of Ellie and he immediately knew what it was. He
pulled the photo that Ellie had given him of Dixie out of his pocket. The two
halves were a perfect match, but it was no big deal. He'd been pretty sure at
the time that the person who'd been cut out of the photo was Ellie. He had no
idea why she'd cut it in half—it was the most natural thing in the world that a
person searching for somebody might have a picture of the two of them together.

It looked like they'd
been on vacation somewhere. Somewhere hot anyway and they were smiling like
they were having a great time. Then something else caught his eye and another nagging
thought crossed his mind—a nasty idea about why Ellie might have cut the photo
in half. It wasn't about her at all.

There was another woman
standing next to Ellie on the other side to Dixie. All you could see was her
arm round Ellie's shoulders. But the photo hadn't been cut on that side—whoever
had taken the picture had either been totally inept with a camera or had
deliberately framed the shot so that only Ellie and Dixie were in it. He
couldn't stop looking at that extra arm. The way it was casually draped round
Ellie's shoulders. The slim hand wasn't gripping her shoulder so that you'd
only really see the fingertips. No, it was more like the arm was around her
neck and the hand was hanging down the front of Ellie's shoulder so you could
see the whole hand. And the wrist. And the bracelet on the wrist.

He felt fear spread down
through his intestines and up into his throat; fear of having what he'd
searched for these last five years suddenly in front of him; fear of finally
knowing the truth however ugly it might be. It flooded his brain until he couldn't
think straight, couldn't form a single, clear thought that wasn't distorted by
what he wanted to see.

There must be thousands
of bracelets just like it, but that didn't stop his legs buckling for the
second time in less than five minutes. Maybe hundreds of thousands of them, but
that didn't change the fact that he'd bought one just like it for Sarah's
twenty-fifth birthday and to the best of his knowledge she'd worn it every day
since.

Was that her hand? Was
that her wrist? Her arm? Surely it had to be. Now, more than ever he had to
find Ellie. Before he'd walked into this room the odds had been on Ellie
stringing him along to get him to help her, with the slimmest chance that she
was telling the truth. Now those odds were shifting and he knew he'd never be
able to tell her to take her story and stick it up her ass.

Something else crossed
his mind. There were three people in the photo, so who was the fourth person
taking it? Another girl friend? Another man? Two happy couples on vacation
together? His brain was exploding. He wanted to be sick. This wasn't how things
were meant to turn out. He didn't want to find Sarah to learn she'd left him
for another man. No mystery, no disappearance, just an everyday tale of finding
a guy with a bigger johnson. Or a bigger pay check. Or a smaller johnson. Or
anything that wasn't him.

He stuffed the two
halves of the photo into his pocket and looked at the other piece of paper that
had fallen out of the diary. It was just a plain sheet of paper from a memo
block. On it was a name—MacQuaid's—which he assumed was the name of a bar
rather than a person, today's date and the letter 'J'. He turned it over but
there wasn't anything else. Maybe Ellie was spreading her business around.
Perhaps she'd sent some other unwitting sap to a bar called MacQuaid's looking
for 'J'. He'd ask her about that too if he ever found her. He folded the piece
of paper and put it in his wallet, then put the diary back together, put it
back in the zippered compartment in the suitcase and got the hell out of there.

He came away feeling
like he'd got a lot more than he bargained for and a lot less at the same time.
He knew he wouldn't get a moment's peace until he managed to find Ellie and get
some answers. He also knew now that the bitch would make him work his butt off
for them.

It made him want to
punch the wall.

Chapter 19

There was nothing Ellie
would rather have done than meet with Evan and explain everything to him.
Unfortunately that that wasn't one of her options at the present time. After they'd
finished at her hotel room Juan and José had put a sack over her head, tied her
wrists and stuffed her into the trunk of their car. It was a little
melodramatic, a bit of overkill, since she couldn't exactly see where they were
going from inside the car's trunk, so what was the point of the sack?

To get her in the
right frame of mind
,
she supposed.

They'd driven across
town and hustled her into a building and one of them pushed her down a short
flight of stairs into a basement. She'd stumbled and slipped off the stairs,
fallen screaming through the air, unable to see where she might land or even
put out a hand to break her fall, but the other one had been at the bottom and
caught her. They thought it was hilarious.
Pricks
. They pulled the sack
off her head just long enough to stuff a dirty rag into her mouth and sat her
on a hard wooden stool. They tied her ankles to the stool's legs and tied her
thighs to the seat so the whole of her body below the waist was fixed firmly in
place. Then they tied another piece of rope to her wrists and threw it over one
of the exposed rafters above her head. They pulled the rope taut so her arms
were stretched out above her head and tied it off on a cleat fixed to the wall.
One of them had given the rope a quick tug which nearly jerked her shoulders
out of their sockets and looped the rope one more time around the cleat.

After they'd finished
trussing her up, Juan—she assumed it was him from the smell of cigarettes—stood
in front of her. She could feel his presence looming over her, hear his heavy
breathing, but what was he doing? She could smell damp and something else she
couldn't identify. Nobody said a thing or made any kind of noise. She could
hear the blood pounding in her ears, taste bitter bile in her mouth. She was
aware of a sudden shift in front of her. Pain exploded in her foot and screamed
up her right leg, flooding her brain with white light, as he stamped down
viciously on her instep. Her scream shattered the stillness even with the
filthy rag in her mouth. She tried to twist away but she was tied tight. The
stool flexed and creaked but didn't move. It was bolted to the floor.

'Hurts, doesn't it,'
Juan said with a laugh and stamped down again.

Through the blinding
pain she heard him say
fair's fair, after all
. 

'You just wait here, Chico will be here in a minute,' one of them said, she couldn't tell who.

They turned out the
light and left her alone in the darkness.

It was more like an hour
than a minute before anybody came back. As each minute dragged out her mind ran
through all sorts of horrible scenarios. By the time she heard the door open
and the light went back on her stomach was twisting like a worm on a hook, a
nervous spasm making her whole body twitch. She was in exactly the state they
knew she would be.

She couldn't tell how
many of them there were. Nobody said a word. She heard one of them walk across
the room and put something down next to her. It sounded like it was a small
table. Then a number of metal objects were dropped onto it. She was aware of
somebody standing next to her, looking down at her. She gasped as a hand
grabbed hold of the sack over her head and pulled it quickly off. Juan was
standing next to her with the sack in his hand. There was nobody else in the
room.

'Have a look on the table
before the sack goes back on,' he said.

Ellie closed her eyes
and turned her head the other way. She didn't want to know what was on the
table. She could imagine what it was; she didn't need to look at it as well.

'Go on, take a look,' he
goaded.

She clamped her eyes
shut tighter and tried to think about anything apart from what she knew was
sitting a foot away from her thigh. But the trouble with having her eyes shut
was that she couldn't see anything at all, couldn't see him raise his hand and
the first thing she knew about the vicious backhand slap he gave her across the
mouth was the stinging pain as her head snapped sharply to the side and her lip
split. She let out a cry but it was lost behind the rag in her mouth.

'That made you open your
eyes, eh?'

She looked up into his
leering face but still didn't look down at the table. She closed her eyes
again. She didn't want to look at his face either. She felt the sack land in
her lap and heard him walk round behind her. She felt one hand grip her chin tightly,
the other one clamped hard on the top of her head. He twisted her head towards
the table. His strong fingers dug into her flesh. She couldn't stop her head
from moving. He held her head still, facing the table.

'Take a look.'

She knew she was going
to. She couldn't help herself. She didn't want to know but not looking wasn't
going to make it all go away. And she knew the morbid curiosity that lives
inside us all—the sick thing that makes us want to look at a car wreck on the
freeway hoping to see some blood and guts and severed body parts—would make her
open her eyes. He didn't have to do anything. If he'd left her another two
minutes she'd have turned her own head.

She opened her eyes.

And closed them again.
But it was long enough. A long, thin filleting knife—the sort of thing chefs or
fishermen use for gutting fish—sat on the table, and, next to it, a pair of
gardener's pruning secateurs, spring loaded for quick repeated cuts, red
non-slip plastic covering the ergonomically shaped handles.

'Good girl,' he said,
patting her on the head before pulling the sack back over her head.

She listened to him walk
away across the room and turn out the light. Apart from the fact that her head
was in a sack, she didn't need any light to see what was now imprinted on her
mind.

They didn't leave it
another hour this time—they knew they didn't need to. Ten minutes max. The door
opened and the light went on. She could tell there were more of them this time.
There was a buzz of anticipation in the room. Somebody walked briskly towards
her. She could feel the spring in his step; almost imagine the twisted, eager
smile. He pulled the sack off her head. She blinked into the light. Juan was
standing in front of her, and José was there too, and of course, Chico. He was dressed in black pants and a black shirt—the sort of thing a priest wears—and
she could see the white square of his roman collar at his neck. She'd heard the
stories, she knew what that meant.

Juan went to stand with
José as Chico crossed the room and stood in front of her, smiling down at her.
She flinched as he stretched out his hand and touched the side of her face.

'Ellie, how nice to see
you again. What happened to your mouth? Somebody hit you?' He looked round and
Juan and José replied with it-wasn't-me shrugs.

She tried to say
something through the gag in her mouth.

'Shush,' he said,
stroking her face, 'save your breath for later.'

Behind him, Juan or José
sniggered.

Chico
let his hand drop from her face and
stepped away from her. 'Okay, who wants to start?' he said.

The two guys made a big
thing of
you go first, no after you, I insist.
José took a step back
with a little bow and a flourish, so Juan stepped up to the table. He took a
moment deciding before selecting the filleting knife.

'Be careful, that
thing's sharp,' José called out from behind him.

Juan grinned and leaned
in towards her. She tried to back away but her bottom half was rock solid on
the stool and any movement just increased the ache in her arms. Over by the
wall José told hold of the rope and pulled it taut. Ellie gasped into the rag
as her whole body was stretched tighter than a nun's chuff. Juan's grin grew
bigger still as he looked down at her breasts straining against her blouse, the
buttons stretched almost to breaking point. One by one he hooked the tip of the
knife under the buttons and cut them off with a quick flick of the wrist until
they were all gone, her blouse hanging open. He took hold of the material and
pulled it up around the back of her head and cut it away until all that was
left was the collar and a few tattered shreds around her outstretched
shoulders.

He stood back and
admired his work—and her breasts in her sheer brassiere of course. 'Mmm, mmm.
Nice. What a shame,' he said, shaking his head. He walked behind her and ran
the tip of the knife slowly down her bare back and all the way up again, up her
neck, coming to rest behind her ear. She saw Chico give a small nod and tried
to pull her head away but Juan took a great handful of hair at the nape of her
neck and pulled it upwards, forcing her head forward, exposing the back of her
neck.

'Just a trim, madam?'
Juan said and sliced off the clump of hair in his hand before she knew what had
happened. Everybody laughed as he put the knife back on the table and dropped
the hair into her lap.

She knew it was all just
to humiliate her and felt a strange thump of hope in her chest—maybe that's all
it would be. They weren't really going to cut her after all, they just wanted
to scare and humiliate her.

Okay, job done, guys,
you can stop now . . .

Then it was José's turn.
She didn't need to see the bulge in the front of his pants to know he'd have
liked to carry on what he'd tried to start in her hotel room. He circled round
behind her and she knew what was coming before she felt it, the repugnant
hardness as he rubbed himself against her back like a badly trained dog
dry-humping the pastor's leg. He bent over and reached round her and cupped her
breasts in his filthy hands. She felt sick and helpless, violated, and tried to
cling to the hope she'd felt a moment before: it's all about the humiliation;
all about them and their sorry, sad, misogynistic lives; you're just a piece of
meat and a piece of meat doesn't care.

She could think it all
she wanted, but she couldn't stop the shudder of disgust as he slid his hand
inside her brassiere, gripped her nipple in his fingers and squeezed it hard.
Really,
really
hard. She bit down on her tongue, determined he wouldn't
get the satisfaction of a cry or a gasp.

He put his mouth to her
ear. 'I'm gonna hang this on a chain 'round my neck,'  he whispered, the
loathsome piece of misogyny slipping from his mouth as if there was nothing
more natural, and gave her a last, spiteful tweak.

 He stood up and hooked
a couple of fingers under her brassiere between the cups and yanked hard. The
clasp at the back came apart and her breasts fell free, although they couldn't
fall very far, of course, since her arms were stretched so tight over her head.
He picked up the secateurs and opened and closed them a couple of times like an
alligator's jaws. Ellie's shook her head violently, her eyes bulging in their
sockets. She tried to scream but all you could hear was a desperate, muffled
noise in the back of the throat. José gripped the brassiere and pulled it so
that the shoulder straps pulled tight around the back of her arms, pulling her
forward on the stool, arching her back like she was offering herself to him. He
snipped first one, then the other cleanly in two, the straps putting up as much
resistance as a blade of grass. Her body snapped backwards again and he dropped
the secateurs back on the table and walked away.

'Do you like gardening?'
Chico said to her, picking up the secateurs. He opened and closed them a few
times like José had done.

Ellie just shook her
head. She didn't even try to say anything. What could she say, even if she
didn't have a filthy rag stuffed in her mouth? And all she could think was:
maybe
it isn't just about the humiliation.

'These are made in Switzerland, you know,' he said waving the secateurs in front of her face. 'The best you
can get. Used by professionals the world over because of their strength and
durability. See the shape of the handle'—he held them out for her to see—'that
spreads the force required evenly over all the fingers. Not that we're going to
be cutting anything that needs much strength today.'

There was an
appreciative murmur from behind him. The main event was getting under way.

He opened and closed
them a few more times. 'And see that'—he pointed to a groove on the blade—'that's
a sap groove so that the sap, or any other fluid for that matter, flows away
and doesn't gum up the blades. So you're ready for another quick cut.'

He turned to the guys
behind him. 'Anyone got a pencil?'

José fished in his
pocket and handed him one. She couldn't start to imagine why he was carrying a
pencil around in his pocket.

'Watch this,' Chico said to Ellie. He put the end of the pencil in the jaws of the secateurs and snipped.
The blade sliced through the wood like it wasn't even there, the end of the
pencil dropping to the floor. He made a couple more quick cuts, the blade
looking like it was eating up the pencil, little round slices dropping to the
floor one after the other.

'Impressive, eh?' He
smiled at her and she felt the whole of the bottom half of her body go weak.
She had a horrible tingling sensation in her bladder and knew she was about to
wet herself.