Deathgrip Read online

  Janet DeWitt’s eyes went wide, and Paul fixated on her angular frame, almost visualizing her skeleton as he imagined the numerous broken bones he had healed since the first night beside Stacy Donnelly’s bed…

  And Mrs. DeWitt dropped her garbage bag and her left arm went suddenly rigid, yanked upward, marionette style. She looked at it, surprise, and within seconds it was obvious she felt more than alarm at an unexpected muscle spasm. Pain, lots of it.

  Paul dropped her right hand, backing onto the first stair, but it was too late, no stopping this. She choked out a soft cry as her arm, locked at the elbow, began to tremble. Then a leg. Tension, all was tension, irresistible forces and immovable objects, and she staggered backward, eyes huge as she regarded Paul with fear and loathing.

  Tension — and breaking point. Upper arm compacting into itself with a crack as sharp as a rifle shot, and she shrieked, a jagged shank of bone spearing through skin and blouse, blood spattering the wall beside her. Leg following suit, two compound fractures punching through flesh, and her leg folded inward at an impossible angle, the impact swatting her to the floor.

  Paul could only watch, frozen in temporary paralysis, this is not for mortal eyes, I only touched her, ALL I DID WAS TOUCH HER!

  Mrs. DeWitt jittering on the floor, and another splintering crack, thick and wet, a crimson bloom on her right elbow. The sound again, one foot kicking askew, a thrown shoe slamming into the wall, ALL I DID WAS TOUCH HER, and the hallway had become terribly claustrophobic, alive with the shatter of bones.

  At last, her head whipped around, crack, and though she lay on her back, her dimming eyes stared into the floor.

  Silence, and she moved no more.

  “I only touched her, “ Paul whispered, and regarded his hands. No different from before, no clues as to what had just been channeled through them. Five-fingered enemies, they were, with ghastly secrets all their own, and oh, to be rid of them.

  Before any curious neighbors might step out to see what had caused such commotion, Paul ran upstairs, not even breathing until he was safely past his apartment door.

  Meager comfort. He was beginning to fear that enemies found their best hiding places on the inside.

  Chapter 15

  He missed the old days. Mike Lancer remembered them well, a few years ago before the great holy conversion to computer, when the editorial department clacked with typewriters. Now, everywhere, video display terminals, a harvest of Apples, humming with quiet little lies. The typewriters had been a welcome distraction from the air conditioner, on its last leg since something like Reagan’s first term in office. Hearing the thing labor, you were reminded of just how poorly it worked, and given September heat in southern Florida, Mike would just as soon hear the typewriters. A service call? Get real. The publishers of The National Vanguard protected money like an elite corps of bodyguards.

  For perhaps the twentieth time since the morning mail, he pulled out a glossy flyer from the stacks of paperwork on his desk. Stared at a picture of a woman in the midst of a group of poorly dressed Hispanics.

  Something wasn’t right here, but damned if he could figure out what it was. Well, sure, the lady had married a crook, but this one went beyond old grudges, some new wrinkle. Amanda Dawson, looking like the white bread queen of the Salvadoran jungle, offered no hints. Only that sweet, sweet smile.

  Mike sighed, tossed the Dawson Ministries newsletter aside, took a long swig at the sweaty bottle of Jolt near his elbow. Double the sugar and caffeine of mere mortal colas. Three bottles a day helped provide the minimum daily requirements in two of the seven basic food groups a la Lancer: sugar, fat, starch, grease, caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol. Accept no substitutes.

  Mike Lancer was a thirty-four-year old medical miracle. Joyfully abusing everything from brain cells and liver, to soles of bare feet on hot asphalt, errantly tempting fate with a nightclub full of social diseases, tanning himself to perfection under the Florida sun, and his health was better than an iron-pumping nun’s. The Vanguard mandated yearly checkups for health insurance purposes, and the doctors hated him. He flaunted defiance of everything they stood for.

  And did it with a smile. His longish face twinkled when he smiled, appeared almost somber when he did not. But life was fine.

  Yes, there had been that crisis of career goals a few years ago, waking up after a decade of decadence to realize that, no, he would never rise to Woodward and Bernstein levels, would likely never rise above working for newspapers bought impulsively in the checkout lines of supermarkets. Go ahead, laugh it off, I fucked up in the game of Life. Legions of people would not let themselves laugh, which still left him several squares ahead.

  The National Vanguard was one of seven leading tabloids in the country, five of its competitors published within jogging distance here in what was sometimes called Tabloid Valley in southern Palm Beach County. Down the coast in Boca Raton were the National Enquirer and the Weekly World News. Up the coast in Lantana were three more. The Vanguard sat plunk in the middle in Delray Beach. And its lurid covers, between which lurked mondo bizarro stories of UFOs and plastic surgeons to the stars and Elvis reincarnate, looked just the same as the rest.

  And he was a pro, could churn out the oddball article with the best of them, but damn that clingy desire to write just one piece of genuine worth. It kept him strangely vigilant in a job where vigilance was not required.

  Take the latest newsletter from Dawson Ministries. Fluffy trash-can fodder, usually, but not today, though he could not say precisely why.

  For years, he’d found Dawson, and his dubious brethren cut from the same self-styled holy cloth, an object of fascination. Even more so when their ranks proved as vulnerable to worldly foibles as the most secular of organizations. Such joy watching the tumble of the PTL empire, the political burial of Pat Robertson, the sleazy carnal revelations about Jimmy Swaggart. These guys were such a never-ending source of entertainment, who needed afternoon soaps?

  Mike had seen to it that, under a false name, he was on the mailing lists of some two dozen of these self-anointed demigods. A dollar or two donation in each case, and a semiliterate letter listing a few nonexistent prayer needs, and he was assured of a monthly deluge of half-baked theological interpretations and financial pleas coming to The Vanguard’s post office box.

  He would sift through it all, hypocrisy fascinating at any level. There was no level to which some of these people would not stoop if it meant tapping into more dollars. And — be honest, now — he would dearly love to be instrumental in seeing that one more of them took a dizzying fall.

  His sister Allison had instilled that desire. Rest her soul.

  He retrieved the Dawson piece again. Let the current story in progress — a quasi-interview with some teenage nymphette who’d filed a paternity suit against a soap opera stud — gather more electronic dust. Mike scanned the newsletter … inspirational testimonials from Dawson’s flock, more inspiration from the man himself, pictures and case histories of so-called “healed apostles.” The real goods, though, were in a black and red shadow box, an update on Amanda Dawson’s incursion into foreign missions. The body copy was supposedly a letter excerpt:

  The Lord is indeed being glorified through works in His spirit even in the midst of a nation torn with a civil war. DAILY we are seeing souls won to Him! And with your continued help, we might even see an end to fighting here in the jungles and cities of El Salvador. All it takes is prayer, and of course it does indeed take dollars to keep us here and keep us working. So please help us, and please do the very best you can, as the Lord loveth a cheerful giver. I love you and pray for ALL of you daily. — Amanda

  Dawson and his wife bringing about a peaceful settlement between a rightist government and leftist guerrillas? Ahh, give us all a break.

  Time to call in an expert opinion. Mike vacated his desk, weaving through the gauntlet of others whose fingers clicked those quiet keyboards. A tiled stairway with well-worn traction strips took him down into prod
uction. Cooler down here, lucky shits. He passed the tilted paste-up slabs and continued into the photo department. Old Kodak paper boxes were stacked onto nearly every available flat surface, and file cabinets bulged. The darkrooms were empty and a lone tech hunched over a worktable. A heavy acrid chemical smell shared the air with Mozart. The Serenata notturna in D major — party on, dude. Ramon played that stuff all the time.

  “Hey,” Mike said to his back. “Got a minute?”

  “Always.” Ramon straightened, and the overhead lights gleamed from a single gold earring, left lobe. Mike saw that he was cropping the excess from a print of Joan Collins, snapped by an alert photographer the day before at Miami International. Big deal, but the hausfraus ate it up. “What is it?”

  Mike unfolded the newsletter with a snap, tapped Amanda’s picture. “Take a look at this. Is this real?”

  Ramon was the resident king of photo manipulation. You wanted to see Vanna White strolling Sunset Boulevard with a yeti, he was your go-to guy. He took the flyer and spread it atop his cutting board, then swung his flexible lamp around for better lighting. Bent lower and frowned.

  “Fine-looking lady. My guess is you don’t think she belongs in there with the rest of the beaners. Tell me I’m wrong.”

  “What do you think?”

  Ramon straightened and waggled narrow eyebrows and cracked his knuckles. Heavy drama. He snatched a magnifying glass and flipped the lens into place. “Let the doctor examine.” Back to his hunch, lens at work. “Hmmm. No Mackey line that I can see, so if it’s a fake, it wasn’t a simple paste-up job.”

  “Mackey line?”

  “Yeah.” Ramon was still poring over every detail, lecturing by rote. “No matter how well you cut something from one picture and position it onto another, it still jumps out at you. Like a three-dee movie. So you sand the edges down on the back to bring them in to the same level, but I can always tell. And I don’t think this baby was a paste job.” Frowning into his lens, tongue absently working the inside of his cheek. “Could’ve blended it. Taken two negatives and done test strips. Exposed the background onto a print except for her exact shape, then covered the ground and exposed her negative into the hole. All one print then. And if that’s what this one is — it’s one fine piece of work. Cause I sure can’t see anything around her edges that gives it away.”

  “So you can’t tell if it’s fake or not.” Five more minutes and he’d be back at that dreadfully boring paternity suit story, please find something.

  “Hold your water, Mikey, I’m not through. I was just looking for the obvious.” His head popped up a moment, weaving to Mozart, a few seconds of shut-eyed bliss. “Let’s see how good this job really is.”

  Time passed. Minutes ticked. Life-forms evolved and became extinct, all while Ramon made little grunts to himself. Potential giveaways being shot down in flames. Then:

  “Oh, Luuuucy!” An impeccable Ricky Ricardo, he would only do it for a select few. “You gotta lotta essplaining to do!”

  Mike leaned over his shoulder, eager, “What? What?”

  “We got us a winner.” Ramon grinned. “Check the lighting. Somebody got a little careless here.”

  Another quick scan did no good. “I can’t place it.”

  “The nasal shadows.” Ramon took his X-acto knife and used its blade as a pointer. “I’m guessing this outdoor scene was shot early morning or late afternoon. The shadow of everybody’s nose is going off toward their left cheeks.” Beneath the lens, the blade looked as wicked as a broadsword, and indicated the shadows of a couple of the more prominent noses. Then Ramon switched to Amanda’s face. “She was taken with an overhead light source. The shadow’s directly under her nose. Hmm. Looks like a little teeny Hitler moustache.”

  Mike snatched up the newsletter and tossed an arm around Ramon’s shoulder, a hug as quick as it was clumsy, a thousand thanks. On the way back up to editorial, Mike took the stairs two at a time. If Dawson was faking his wife’s presence in El Salvador, he had to have a good reason. Or dire need. It just didn’t feel right to be another unique grab for cash — why bother with all that trouble? All he had to do was send out a mass-mailing, here’s a cause God has revealed I should undertake, or here’s some new ministerial calamity with a choke-hold on our finances. Please help. And if he was as bold as Oral Roberts, he could throw in the stipulation of a heavenly death sentence if not enough dollars were raised.

  Missions in El Salvador? That would be the day. But it left one more pressing question: Where was Amanda Dawson actually spending her time these days?

  It took a quarter-hour of verbal wrangling, but Mike finally convinced the celebrities editor that something was brewing in the ranks of Donny Dawson Ministries. And that the public appetite in seeing fallen idols of his nature wasn’t even close to being sated. And should The National Vanguard be first to break it wide open…

  Well. His editor could figure that one out for herself. She reluctantly signed a voucher to get him some operating cash.

  Five minutes after that, a tousle-haired Mike Lancer banged down his phone after a quick conversation with his travel agent. Out of this office at last. He killed off the remainder of the now-warm Jolt and scratched on a memo pad, Friday 9/6, 10:10am TWA 745 to OK City Donny, your ass is mine!!!

  Chapter 16

  For Paul, the days of late summer had melted into an indistinct mass. Let that sleep schedule get thrown out of whack, doing away with the buffer zone between the days, and insanity found it easier to squeeze between the cracks.

  He remembered the police from Monday night, going door to door, eventually to his own. Routine questioning of all building residents regarding the death of neighbor Janet DeWitt. He’d been deep into his private beer stock by then, far drunker than upon arrival. The only way to dull the senses, numb the touch. He had slurred and wavered, quite the sorry spectacle of dignity lost, and no doubt the police had mistaken his cheesy pallor as one more side-effect.

  In Paul’s account of his evening, he adhered to truth until the point of actually stepping into the building. Then a replay of how he wished the evening had gone: a few reprimands from Mrs. DeWitt about his condition (in case neighbors had overheard), then stumbling up the stairs, across his threshold, and tuning in to catch some videos on MTV — see it on over there? — then zoning out on the sofa. He had seen nothing, heard nothing.

  Did they believe him? Apparently so. After all, though disheveled, he was free of bloodstains. There was also the raw power involved in what had killed Mrs. DeWitt. With all those broken bones, she looked to have been bulldozed by a locomotive. Had she been found in the street rather than in her building, hit-and-run would have been anyone’s first guess. Obviously, it had taken someone with enormous strength to do that kind of damage. Paul, who by generous estimate didn’t even look to break 160, wasn’t even in the ballpark.

  And had little reason to worry about accusations. The autopsy contributed even more confusion. Death by massive trauma, the kicker being a broken neck, this much was obvious. However, her injuries were too great to have been sustained during a fall down the stairs. There were no contusions that would indicate she’d been beaten with a blunt instrument, and no bruises as evidence anyone had so much as laid an unkind hand on her.

  So far as the medical examiner could tell, the poor woman, with nearly half the bones in her body broken, had undergone the compound fracture equivalent of spontaneous human combustion. File this one under UNEXPLAINED, because no one had a clue…

  Except for Paul, and he had his hands full keeping the reins on runaway sanity, a continuous mental replay of every indelible contortion and snap of bone. Here, watch it, again, watch it, dream awake and see just how ghastly a process can be invoked by a mere touch. See what your hands have wrought?

  Until, like self-fulfilling prophecy, Paul actually did pass out on the sofa. No balm, this, no quiet slumber, no soothing rest for the sick of heart and spirit. For the old nightmare was waiting, welcome back, and it held him
with arms of dread…

  The same pastorally serene field gone gray, same horse and vivid birth of its rider from a back-borne womb, and the retrieval of the strange-looking rod.

  Gale force winds and a dead bolt forward, horse and rider barreling past a backdrop of savage clouds, across fields swelling with a sweet symphony of screams too loud to be human, too terrified to be anything else, and he raised his rod on high, readying to sweep it down with the force of a headsman’s ax.

  The horse plunged heedlessly into a field of corn, row upon row swaying in the winds, as the rider hacked a broad swath down their center. Cornstalks, tall and healthy, ears plump in their husks, slash, watch them fall by the scores to be trampled under moldering hooves. The rider’s advance knew neither fatigue nor mercy, seasons of wither, back and forth, end to end, swing and fall, until the field was reduced to stubble.

  And the litter, everywhere, a newly devastated field that could have been the entire world. The fallen husks had peeled back to reveal, not kernels and cobs, but human bodies, bleeding in their fetal curls.

  The rider dismounted, grand master of the dark harvest. His black boots grinding the fallen into yielding earth, a careless and unceremonious burial. While behind him, his steed’s purpose had apparently been filled, and it collapsed into a twitching heap, leaking twin streams. Blood from back, foam from muzzle.

  The rod, instrument of decimation, see it, finally, identify, and may merciful God in Heaven help me now. The long staff was topped with small wings, twin snakes intertwining up its length: the caduceus, ancient symbol of the science of medicine.

  The healer, used to bring death to the masses, and when the rider stripped away the caul of tissue obscuring his face, Paul wasn’t even surprised to see his own face staring back.