The mass of flesh abruptly stopped moving. Hoke twisted his head around and saw that they had reached the end of the hallway.
There was a closed door.
A few of the Kinchers were fumbling with the doorknob.
Hoke’s heart beat a mad rhythm against his chest wall. It felt as if it would blow apart at any moment. He wasn’t sure what awaited him on the other side of that door, but his gut told him it was worse beyond anything he could imagine.
The door opened.
He saw bright light and filth-enslimed walls.
An ungodly stench rolled out.
The hands on him pushed him forward, shoved him through the circle of flesh into the room, where he got his first look at Gladys Kincher.
Hoke screamed.
Garner’s mocking laughter echoed in the hallway.
Hoke screamed again.
The other Kinchers followed him into the room and the door slammed shut.
The girl’s wide, terrified eyes stared a desperate plea at her. Muffled whimpers were audible from behind the gag of wadded-up panties and duct tape. She was maybe a shade over five feet tall and probably weighed a hundred pounds in her clothes, which she wasn’t wearing at the moment. Her face was pale but lovely, her jawline a delicate, graceful curve of tender white flesh. Longish, straight black hair brushed bony shoulders. She had a slender neck. An Audrey Hepburn neck. Her collarbone defined itself starkly against the pale skin every time she breathed in through her nose. She was a genuinely beautiful young girl, probably no more than nineteen.
“Stick it in her neck.”
Megan didn’t hesitate.
She slammed the ice pick into the girl’s throat and yanked it out. Blood spurted from the hole. A bit of the initial gout splashed Megan’s bare chest. The girl’s jaw worked pitifully as she struggled to speak through the gag and the blood filling her throat. Her head went up and down and her body bucked as her cuffed hands strained against the shower nozzle overhead. The way her face contorted and her eyes bugged out made Megan think of a fish flopping around on the deck of a boat. Megan watched the girl’s blood spill down the front of her body and drip into the tub. She knew she should feel sick, overcome with shame, but she did not.
Not with the cold barrel of that .45 pressed against the back of her head.
She didn’t want to be doing this.
But she didn’t want to die even more.
Madeline, her new minder, the one wielding the gun, leaned close, placed a hand on her waist. Her voice dropped to a huskier register as she said, “Stick it in her eye.”
Some part of her still wanted to go into movie-heroine mode. Do a quick spin about and knock the gun from the cunt’s hand with a judo chop. Then jab the bloody ice pick into her throat. Into
her
goddamn eye. Snap off some dark quip as her adversary hit the ground and died like a pig. But she knew it wasn’t a real option. She couldn’t save the girl. Not now. And any gesture of defiance could result in her own death.
Fuck that noise.
She adjusted her grip on the ice pick and rammed it into the girl’s left eye, driving it in hard, angling it upward into the brain. Her stomach did a violent roll, but she gritted her teeth and choked back a tide of nausea as she focused on driving the ice pick farther in. Blood
and some other viscous fluid oozed over her hand. The girl’s body twitched violently a few times and went still. Megan eased the ice pick out of the bloody socket and dropped it in the tub. She flicked her wrist and thick droplets of blood splattered the body.
Madeline slapped Megan’s ass. “Good job, new girl. You may have a real future here.”
Megan stepped aside as a bald, burly man moved past her, reached into the shower, and unlocked the cuff attached to the shower nozzle. He then lifted the body up and out of the tub as easily as she’d lift a pillow. Another man unfurled a sheet of plastic on the tile floor, and the burly guy set the limp body on the plastic with surprising gentleness. He then retrieved the bloody ice pick from the shower and shoved it into a back pocket of his jeans. The men rolled the body up and carried it out.
Megan was amazed.
The whole exercise in bloody murder had taken maybe five minutes.
She flinched as Madeline placed the tip of a finger on her left breast and wiped a bit of blood off her still-trembling flesh. The woman put the finger between her lips and sucked the blood into her mouth. She moved the finger in and out, making soft noises as she mimed fellatio. Megan gritted her teeth again, fought back the grimace that wanted to form. She was still in a delicate situation. To understate to the nth fucking degree. It would not do to show disgust at this stage of things.
“I think you’re my new favorite, Megan. I really do.”
Megan forced a smile. “Thank you.”
“I shit you not. I’ve seen a lot of new girls break in situations like that. Just so you know, I wouldn’t have killed you if you hadn’t been able to do it. Not after doling out almost five grand of Preston money for your sweet ass.”
Megan felt sick.
Madeline’s eyes glittered with amusement. “That’s right. If you’d decided you couldn’t go through with it for moral reasons or some shit like that, you’d still be here anyway. But you looked inside yourself and decided you were perfectly okay with trading another girl’s life for a guarantee of your own safety. I like that. With a mentality like that, you’ll not only survive at the Sin Den, you’ll thrive. You’re a cutthroat bitch, just like me.”
“Why did you…want me to kill that girl?”
Madeline shrugged. “Every once in a while we need to make an example of someone. Sonia tried to escape. She got as far as the parking lot. Which would have been okay if word hadn’t gotten out, but all the other girls knew about it, so she had to go.”
“What did you say her name was?”
Madeline frowned. “Sonia. Why should that matter to you?”
Megan thought of the name etched into the wall of that little holding room and the accompanying desperate note. She wouldn’t be calling the number she’d memorized after all. What could she say?
Hello, this is your daughter’s murderer…
She shook her head. “It doesn’t. Not really. I just wanted to know the name of the girl I killed.”
Madeline smiled again. “To personalize it—I get it. Makes her a real human being, not just a piece of meat you cut up. And makes it harder to rationalize what you did as anything other than pure murder.” She chuckled. “Damn, I like you.”
Megan made herself say it: “Thanks. I…like you, too.”
Madeline laughed. “Oh, I doubt you mean that.” She winked. “Yet.”
Megan had no idea what that meant. The weird eye
wink or the yet part of her statement. So she made herself smile again and didn’t say anything.
Madeline looked her up and down. “You are a mess. Get in the shower and clean yourself off. We’ll talk more out in my office.”
She left.
Alone at last, Megan started shaking all over. Soft, nervous laughter bubbled out of her. The sound bothered the still-sane part of her psyche, but she was helpless to suppress it. Earlier today she’d been on her way to a big music festival with her boyfriend. A guy she really adored. Life was good. And normal. Now, a scant few hours later, she was looking at a future as a sex slave-stripper. It was like something out of some sleazy grindhouse movie of the seventies. But it was her real life and therefore not funny at all.
So she stopped laughing.
She turned and stepped into the tub, oblivious of the blood pooled around the drain until she stepped in it. She cringed and moved back a step, succeeding only in smearing the blood across a wider section of the tub bottom. She heaved a disgusted sigh and closed the shower curtain. Then she twisted the knobs and stepped into the water spray jetting from the nozzle. The cool water made her gasp as it struck her skin. She fiddled with the knobs again to adjust the temperature. She let the water sluice the blood off her chest and then dipped her head under the spray to get her hair wet. She closed her eyes and stayed there for several moments, enjoying the soothing feel of the rushing water on her flesh.
Then she opened her eyes and saw that there was still a bit of red caked around the drain. But it was slowly breaking up and moving through the dark holes in the metal. She watched what remained of the blood she’d spilled swirl away and felt a sick fascination. It was like watching Sonia herself disappear all over again. She tried
to make herself feel the self-disgust she knew should be there, but it was like trying to signal someone on Mars with a ham radio. It was like Madeline had said. She was a cutthroat bitch. She cared only about her own safety, ultimately. That would make her a sociopath, which was not a thing she would ever have believed about herself prior to today. But maybe she was being too hard on herself. Perhaps she was temporarily incapable of being moved or shocked by violence in the wake of what she’d seen that insane sheriff do to one of his deputies.
No.
She couldn’t let herself off that easily. Sure, that was a part of it. But Madeline’s take on the matter was on the money. Megan found she couldn’t deny it at all. Moreover, she would do it again, if put in the same position.
Without hesitation.
The hot water turned lukewarm, and finally she cut it off. She stepped out of the tub, dried off with a towel she pulled from a nearby rack, and wrapped the towel around her body. She braced herself for what was ahead and ventured back into the office.
Madeline was seated behind her desk, reading a copy of
Us Weekly.
She looked up as Megan settled into the chair in front of the desk. She set the magazine on the desk. “You ready to shake your ass for an audience?”
“No.”
Madeline laughed. “Too bad. You’re going on stage for the first time in about forty-five minutes.”
Megan’s eyes widened. She sat up straighter in the chair. “But that’s crazy! I’m not anywhere near ready. Don’t I get some kind of private training first?”
“Sheriff said you pole danced before.”
“Yeah, in a private fucking class! With a bunch of other
girls
! This is not the same fucking thing at all. I can’t do it. Not yet.”
Madeline’s face turned hard during this outburst. “You can. You will. And I can tell you this. You won’t enjoy your punishment if you refuse.”
Megan thought of Sonia.
The ice pick wedged into her eye socket.
Any punishment she received for refusing to dance her first night wasn’t likely to be that extreme, but she knew it wouldn’t be any barrel of laughs either. There was no point in arguing with Madeline. She would do what was expected of her. Again.
They talked some more and settled on Megan’s stage name. Amber Wine. Could have been worse, given some of the possibilities Madeline rattled off. Megan sort of liked it. She would have a light first evening, dancing only to two songs, just enough to break her in. That was something of a relief, anyway. That settled, they adjourned to the dressing room. Most of the girls stared daggers at her again, but at least that tall blonde wasn’t around. Madeline led her to a large walk-in wardrobe, where they selected her stage gear—stockings, stiletto heels, garters, G-string, and bustier. The next stop was one of the primping stations in the dressing room, where Madeline watched her dress and instructed her on the proper whorish application of makeup. That done, Megan fluffed her freshly dried hair and looked at herself in the mirror.
She had to admit it—she looked pretty fucking hot.
She looked at the other girls and smirked, letting them know she knew she was sexier than any of them. Some of them looked troubled, as if they believed it themselves. Some of the others shot her angry expressions that hinted at future drama. She guessed they all knew she had killed Sonia. A friend of some of them. Good. At least they would know how far she was willing to go to save her own ass. The only real threat among them was
the missing Nordic goddess, but she would worry about her later.
Madeline led her out of the dressing room and down the narrow, dark hallway. The door to the small holding room stood open as they moved past it. Megan glanced in and wished she hadn’t. Sonia was in there, her limp body sprawled across the unfurled sheet of plastic. A shirtless, muscular man with a cigarette wedged into a corner of his mouth stood over her. He held a heavy ax propped over one shoulder. The man caught her eye and grinned. Another, heavier-set man saw her and calmly closed the door.
At the far end of the corridor Madeline opened a door on the left and led her into a shorter stretch of narrow hallway. The blaring hard-rock music was louder than ever now. This song was something she didn’t recognize, but something about the texture of it told her it was yet another eighties headbanging anthem, which seemed to be about all they played here. They went through another door on the right, and the music grew louder still, reaching near-deafening proportions.
They climbed a short set of steps to a small backstage area. There were three other girls in skimpy lingerie there, all apparently waiting their turn on stage. The tall blonde wasn’t here either, which meant she must be performing right now. And judging from the raucous hoots and catcalls audible even through the thundering music, she was a big crowd favorite. Megan wasn’t surprised.
Madeline beckoned her to the curtain, where they peered around the edge to watch the show.
Megan gasped.
The eighties anthem ended and a tune of more recent vintage kicked in.
“Crazy Bitch,” by Buckcherry.
Megan couldn’t imagine a more appropriate soundtrack
to what was happening on stage. A man was tied to a chair at the center of the stage. The man was young, maybe late twenties. He was slim and might have been handsome under better circumstances. But his clothes clung to his body, soaked through with sweat. Sweat plastered longish hair to his scalp. He was shaking and crying, an endless stream of tears rolling down his shiny cheeks. Looking at him punctured the hard shell that had begun to encase Megan’s soul. She felt outrage. This man was a victim. A terrified, helpless captive. Just like her. Just like dead Sonia.
And just as with Sonia, there was not a damn thing she could do about it.
The blonde was down to heels, stockings, and G-string. She lay flat on her back in front of the bound man with her legs high in the air. She tweezed her pink nipples to stiffness with her fingers and turned her face to the crowd as she faked an orgasmic expression. Oh hell, maybe it wasn’t faked. She sure looked into what she was doing. She flexed her legs, kicking them up and down like a spastic child.
Then she rolled onto her side and reached for something shiny at the front of the stage. Her hand closed around the object and she rolled again, got to her hands and knees. She moved along the front of the stage, slinking like a cat. The men in the seats up front roared to their feet and a rain of green bills fell on the stage. The blonde stayed focused on her act, making no move to scoop up the loose cash as she continued to the far end of the stage, where she shimmied to her feet and struck a dramatic pose with one hand on her hip. She flicked her other wrist and a straight razor popped open.