HE RESTS HIS cheek against the concrete wall, sniffing the faint smell of bleach. The chamber is all concrete—floor, walls, ceiling. The acoustics are poor and the lighting is dim; there is no electricity in here and zero sunlight, so he makes do with three kerosene lanterns he has placed strategically. The effect is haunting, the light constantly changing as the small torches flicker inside their containers.
Is this what it used to look like? He imagines it is. The walls were probably padded in some way back then, and of course there were a cage and a long chain—but otherwise, this seems right.
“Let me go, mister … I promise I won’t say anything ….”
Sally: straining in a backward position, suspended in the air like a roasting pig over a fire. Her back arched painfully, her hands cuffed behind her back, her legs bound together likewise, then the hands and feet joined together by yet a third set of cuffs, attached to the chain that loops through a hook in the ceiling and runs to the crank attached to the wall. A crude pulley system. Not so crude, really, in fact quite well constructed and in fair working order, despite decades of nonuse. They don’t make ’em like they used to.
The metal pole, built into the floor, protruding upward five feet with a steel tip, only two or three feet below Sally’s straining, suspended body, lined up almost precisely with the lowest point of her body, near her belly button, her intestines, allowing gravity to do its work when the time comes.
He turns the crank one full rotation. Sally’s body free-falls downward a foot or so, the chain shaking but holding. Her head bobs from the impact, but her body hardly moves, bound up as tightly as it is. She lets out a squeal, more animal than human.
He walks over to her to measure things up, her terrified eyes, in the flickering light, like something primeval. She is so beautiful. Fear is so raw, so pure.
She tries to wiggle free. Admirable, but useless. She is basically hog-tied in midair, and even if she were somehow able to free herself of the various steel handcuffs—to pull a stunt beyond even Houdini—it would only mean a quicker and more violent death on the spear.
Maybe that’s what she wants now. Maybe she’s given up. Dede and Annie didn’t. They fought. The prostitute, Barbie, though—she gave up. That was the best, watching her eyes surrender all hope, waiting, praying for the end to come.
He touches Sally’s face and she snaps her head away violently.
That wasn’t very nice.
“Let me down from here, mister, please! I have money!”
He can’t let her go. He realizes that now.
I can no longer resist it, any more than I can resist my very existence.
Shaken, he returns to the wall and grabs hold of the crank.
There is a monster inside me. It can sleep for days, for months.
He turns the crank another full rotation.
But it will never go away.
It will feast on me, prey on me, until the day I die.
BOOK V
BRIDGEHAMPTON, 2012
55
“YOU SHOULDN’T BE doing this,” I say as I walk along the side of the road down Ocean Drive toward the Atlantic, the wind calm and the sun beating down on us.
“Roger that,” says Ricketts, my rookie companion.
“I’m a dead-ender,” I tell her. “You know what that is?”
“I think so. Your career’s hit a wall?”
“Roger that.” Without realizing it, I find that my stride has slowed as I near the end of the road, as I approach 7 Ocean Drive.
“Point being, I’ve got nothing to lose,” I explain. “Chief’s going to stick me in one dead end after another until I quit. So I figure I might as well solve a crime or two in my free time. But you, Ricketts? You’ve got a whole career ahead of you.”
Ricketts is wearing a Red Sox T-shirt with running shorts and Nikes. She has the same build as me, lean and hard, but she gets it from genetics, not from working out like I do. “Dad always said I had an attitude problem.”
“The Red Sox shirt being one example,” I note.
I feel my heartbeat escalate, a banging drum against my chest. My breathing tightens up as well.
“Are you okay, Murphy?”
I stop and take a breath. Something about this damn house, every time I get close to it. Like my nightmares, only while awake. Put claustrophobia and panic in a bowl and stir for two minutes.
“I’m fine. Let’s go.” I trudge forward on shaky legs, not eager to share my sob story of scary dreams and panic attacks with the rookie.
“Why are we going to the house?” she asks me, a welcome question, allowing me to focus on the case, and not on this feeling overcoming me.