Thriller: Stories To Keep You Up All Night
“Where’s my wife?” Keith barked.
“She hit me with a frying pan and ran out!” the man said. “Oh my God, I’ve been rescued by loonies!” he wailed. “She hits me—now you’re going to shoot me?”
“Who the hell are you?” Keith barked.
“Mark Egan.” He sighed, rubbing his hand. “I’m a musician. What is the matter with you people?”
Holding his gun on the intruder, loath to take his eyes from him, Keith draped a throw, tossed on the back of the rocker, over Mrs. Peterson. “Get in there,” he ordered, indicating the guest room. “Now!”
“I’m going!” the man said, lifting a hand. He sidled against the wall, heading for the room. The lantern caused ominous shadows to invade the house.
“You know, you’re crazy,” he said softly. “You’re both crazy!”
“If you’ve hurt her, I’m going to take you apart piece by piece.”
“She attacked me!” the fellow protested.
“Get in there!”
It was then they both heard the scream, long and sharp, rising above the lashing sound of wind and rain.
The shed had seemed to offer the only escape from the violent elements, and she could arm herself there. Their shed held scuba equipment; she could grab a diving knife.
She couldn’t get the door to open at first because of the wind. At last, it gave.
An ebony darkness greeted her.
She slipped inside, reaching in her pocket for the matches with which she had lit the Sterno. Her hands were shaking, wet and cold.
Her first attempt was futile. She was wet; she had to stop dripping on the matches.
At last, she got a match lit.
There, in the brief illumination of flame, was a face.
Eyes red-rimmed.
Flesh pasty white.
Hand gripping a diver’s knife.
“Don’t scream!” she heard.
Too late.
She screamed.
Keith sped out of the house.
He was forced to pause, slightly disoriented. The wind and rain were loud, skewing sounds around him. Then he realized that the scream had to have come from the shed, and he raced in that direction, his gun drawn. He wrenched the door open.
There was darkness within.
“Beth!”
“Put the gun down!” came a throaty, masculine reply.
Beth appeared. Soaked, hair plastered around her beautiful face. There was a man behind her. The fellow who had claimed to be Joe Peterson. He had a knife, and it was against Beth’s throat as he emerged.
“Put the gun down!” Peterson raged again.
“Let go of my wife,” Keith commanded, forcing himself to be calm.
“You’ll kill me. He’s not sane at all, did you know that?” the man demanded of Beth.
She stared hard at Keith, eyes wide on his. He frowned. She seemed to be trying to tell him she was all right. Insane, yes, it was all insane, there was a knife against her throat.
“We’re all getting soaked out here. Let’s go back to the house. Keith, did you know we had another visitor?” she asked, as if there wasn’t honed steel pressing her flesh.
“I’ve seen him.”
“Where’s Mrs. Peterson?” she asked.
“He tried to kill her—stuffed her into the trunk of her car,” Keith said. “She’s on our sofa now. And, uh, your guest is in the house. I imagine.”
“I did not try to kill Aunt Dot! You had to be the one!” Peterson protested, the knife twitching in his hand.
“Let’s get to the house,” Beth said again. “Mr. Peterson, I’ll walk ahead of you, and Keith will walk ahead of us.”
Keith frowned fiercely at her.
“Yeah, all right, go!” Peterson said.
Keith started forward uneasily. There was one man in the house, and another behind him with a knife to Beth’s throat. There was no doubt one of them was a murderer.
He entered the house. The door had been left open. Rain had blown in.
He was followed by Beth.
And the man with the knife.
Mrs. Peterson remained as a lump on the sofa; nothing more than a dark blob in the shadows. Cocoa, however, was no longer with her. He had run to the far side of the room, and wasn’t even yapping. He hugged the wall, near the guest-room door, whining pathetically as they entered.
“There was another fellow with us, too, a musician. Plays for a group called Ultra C,” Beth said to Peterson. She swallowed carefully before looking at Keith again. “What happened to him? He was, uh, in the house when I left.”
“Gone—I hope!”
They heard a sound of distress. It was Joe Peterson. He was staring at the lump on the sofa.
“Mr. Peterson,” Keith said softly. “I’m not going to shoot you. But you are going to get that knife away from my wife’s throat this instant.”
Beth pushed Peterson’s arm, stepping away from him. Peterson barely reacted. He stared at the sofa. “God! Is she dead?” he asked.
Cocoa whined. Beth stared at Keith, shaking but relieved. “Cocoa,” she said softly. “Well, I could have been wrong, but if this man had attacked Mrs. Peterson, the dog would be barking right now.”
“Aunt Dot!” Peterson said numbly.
“She isn’t dead—wasn’t dead,” Keith said. He looked at Beth. “So it’s your musician.”
“You realized it, too…But—”
“He’s out there somewhere. And we’ll have that to deal with. But for the moment…we’ve got to try to keep Mrs. Peterson alive.”
“Keith, would you get me some brandy and the ammonia from the kitchen?” Beth asked. “We’ll see if we can rouse her. Then we can try to make it to the hospital.” She grimaced. “With the Hummer.”
Keith walked to the kitchen, then stopped, pausing to pick up the frying pan that lay on the floor. He froze in his tracks as he heard a startled scream rise above the pounding of the rain. He turned to race back to the living room, then came to a dead stop.
Their living room had been pitched into absolute darkness.
Terror struck deep into Beth’s heart. She had pulled back the blanket, anxious to be there first, to assure herself that the woman hadn’t died.
A hand snaked out for her from beneath the cover, dragging her down with a ferocity that was astounding. Fingers wound around her throat and she was tossed about as if she weighed nothing.
Egan. Mark Egan. Drugged-out musician. No. Psychotic killer.
She saw his deranged grin right before he doused the lantern, holding her in the vise of his one hand like a rag doll.
“What ya gonna do, big man?” a throaty voice called out in the darkness, next to her ear. “Shoot me—you might kill her. Don’t come after me, or she’s dead.”
Beth tensed every muscle. She didn’t know if the man had a weapon or not, anything more than the hideous strength of his hands.
She could hear nothing other than the wind and rain. Stars began to burst into the darkness as his grip choked her. There was no sound of voice. No sound of movement.
Not even Cocoa let out a whine.
Then there was a muffled groan. Not Keith, the sound had not come from Keith! It was Peterson who had groaned. So…where was Keith?
“That’s right,” Egan—or whoever he was—said. “You stay right where you are. The missus and I are going to take the car. Your car. We’ll go for a little ride. Will she be all right? Who knows? But try to stop me now, and you’ll probably kill her yourself.”
He began to drag her toward the door. He chuckled softly. “I don’t see too badly in the dark. I like the dark.”
They were nearly there; she could sense it. He threw open the door. Her heart was thundering so that she didn’t hear the whoosh of motion at first.
She gasped, the air knocked from her as the whoosh became an impetus of muscle and movement. Keith. He flew into them from the porch side, taking both her and Egan by storm and surprise. She twisted. Egan’s grip had been loosened by the fall. She bit into his wrist. The man howled, then went rolling away as he and Keith became engaged in a fierce physical battle.
Cocoa began to bark excitedly. She felt the little dog run over her hand and begin to growl. Egan cried out in pain again. She could hear Cocoa wrenching and tearing at something—Egan. In pain or not, Egan was still wrestling on the floor with vehemence. Rain washed in from the open doorway. The faintest light showed through, glittering on something…
The frying pan.
She picked it up, and in the darkness, desperately tried to ascertain her husband’s form from that of the killer. She saw a head rise—
She nearly struck.
Keith!
The other head was on the ground. There was a hand around Keith’s throat, fingers tightening…
Blindly, she slammed the frying pan down toward the floor. A scream was emitted…
She struck again. And again.
And then arms reached out for her.
“It’s all right now. It’s all right.”
The lantern was lit. Good old Cocoa was in the bedroom, standing guard over Mrs. Peterson who—despite having been dumped unceremoniously on the floor—was still alive and breathing. Her nephew, Joe Peterson, was tending to her.
Keith hadn’t moved the form on the floor yet. Beth didn’t know if he was dead or alive, but he wouldn’t be blithely getting up this time.
She’d seen his face. Before Keith had covered it with the throw.
“Is it…him? The serial killer?” she said.
“I think so,” Keith murmured, slipping an arm tightly around her shoulders.
“But you knew it wasn’t Peterson when I did.”
He turned to her, a pained and rueful smile just curving his lips. “Because anyone who spends any time in Key West knows that Ultra C is an all-girl band,” he said softly.
“I told him you knew music,” she said.
They both jumped, hearing the sudden loud blare of a horn. A second later there was a pounding on the door.
Keith, still gripping his gun, strode to it, pulling it open. Andy Fairmont, from the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office, was there.
“Jesus!” Andy shouted. “There’s a serial killer on the loose! Have you heard?”
Keith looked at Beth. She shrugged, and turned to Andy. “Never pull out a frying pan unless you intend to use it,” she said gravely.
“What?”
“You’d better come in, Andy,” Keith said, and he set his arm around his wife’s shoulders again, pulling her close.
James Siegel
James Siegel says the most common question he’s asked by readers is, Where do you get your ideas? His standard answer is, I don’t know—do you have any? The real answer, of course, is, Everywhere. Siegel tends to write about ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events. Being a self-described “ordinary person,” Siegel doesn’t find it hard to place himself in the protagonist’s shoes. Riding the Long Island railroad for instance—where attractive women would sometimes occupy the seat beside him—sent Siegel into reveries of what if? That ended up as Derailed—the story of an ordinary ad guy whose life goes awry when he meets a woman on the train. Adopting kids in Colombia gave him the notion for Detour, where an adoption goes terribly, murderously wrong. And then there was the day he was lying in a massage room at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. The masseuse touched his neck and said, What’s bothering you? Siegel’s response: How do you know something’s bothering me? And she said, Because I’m an empath.
Siegel was puzzled.
An empath? What’s that?
Empathy
I sit in a dark motel room.
It’s pitch-black outside, but I’ve pulled the shades down tight anyway, so she won’t see me when she walks in. So she’ll be sure to turn away from me to switch on the light.
I don’t like the dark.
I live on Scotch and Ambien so I never have to stare at it, because sooner or later it becomes the dark of the confessional and I’m eight years old again. I can smell the garlic on his breath and hear the rustle of his clothing. For a moment, I’m a shy, sweet-natured, baseball-crazy boy again, and I physically shrink away from what’s coming.
Then everything turns red and the world’s on fire.
I look back in anger, because anger is what I’ve become—a fist of a man.
Anger is what cost me my home, and anger is what put me into court-ordered therapy, and anger is what finally kicked me off the LAPD and into hotel security, where I can be angry without killing anyone.
Not yet.
You’ve heard of the hotel I work in. It’s considered top-shelf and is patronized by various Hollywood wannabes and occasional bona fide celebrities. As downward spirals go, mine hasn’t sucked me to the bottom yet, only to Beverly and Doheny.
I get to wear a suit and earpiece, something like a Secret Service man. I get to stand around and look semi-important and even give orders to the hotel employees who don’t get to wear suits.
She was a masseuse in the hotel spa.
Kelly.
She was known for her deep-tissue and hot stone. I first talked to her in the basement alcove where I went to be alone—but I’d noticed her before that. I’d heard the music seeping out of her room on my way to the back elevators, and when she entered the basement to grab a smoke, I complimented her on her taste. Most of the hotel masseuses were partial to Enya, to Eastern sitar or the monotonous sound of waves lapping sand. Not her. She played the Joneses—Rickie Lee and Nora and Quincy, too, on occasion.
“Do your customers like it?” I asked her.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Most of them are just trying to not get a hard-on.”
“Occupational hazard, I guess?”
“Oh, yeah.”
She was pretty, certainly. But there was something else, a palpable aura that made it feel humid even in full-blast air-conditioning.
I believe she noticed the ugly swelling on the knuckles of my right hand, and the place in the wall where I’d dented it.
“Bad day?”
“No. Pretty ordinary.”
She reached out and touched my face, fanning her fingers across my right cheek. Which is more or less when she told me she was an empath.
I won’t lie and tell you that I knew what an empath was.
A look had come over her when she touched my face—as if she’d felt that part of me which I rarely touch myself, and then only in the dark before the Johnny Walker has worked its magic.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“For what?”
“For whatever did this to you.”
This is what an empath can do—their special gift. Or curse, depending on the day.
I learned all about empaths from her over the next few weeks. As we talked in the basement, or bumped into each other on the way into the hotel, or grabbed smokes outside on the corner.
Empaths touch and know. They feel skin and bone but they touch soul. They see through their hands. Everything—the good, the bad and the truly ugly.
She saw more ugly than she wanted to.
The ugliness had begun to get to her, to send her into a very dark place.
It was one of her customers, she explained.
“Mostly I just see emotions,” she confided, “you know, happiness, sadness, fear—longing—all that. But sometimes…sometimes I see more…I know who they are, understand?”
“No. Not really.”
“This guy—he’s a regular. The first time I touched him, I had to pull my hands away. It was that strong.”
“What?”
“The sense of evil. Like touching—I don’t know…a black hole.”
“What kind of evil are we talking about?”
“The worst.”
Later, she told me more. We were sitting in a bar on Sunset having drinks. Our first date, I guess.
“He hurts kids,” she said.
I felt that special nausea. The kind that used to subsume me back in the confessional, when he would come for me, that dark wraith of hurt. The nausea that came when my little brother dutifully followed me into altar-boyhood and I kept my mouth zipped tight like a secret pocket. Don’t tell…don’t tell. There’s a price for not telling. It was paid years later, on the afternoon I found my sweet, sad brother hanging from a belt in our childhood bedroom. Over his teenage years, he’d furiously sought solace in various narcotics, but they could only do so much.
“How do you know?” I asked Kelly.
“I know. He’s going to do something. He’s done it before.”
When I told her she might want to report him to the police, she shot me the look you give to intellectually challenged children.
“Tell them I’m an empath? That I feel one of my clients is a pedophile? That’ll go over well.”
She was right, of course. They’d laugh her out of the station.
It was maybe a week later, after this customer had come and gone from his regular appointment and Kelly was looking particularly miserable, that I volunteered to keep an eye on him.
“How?”
We were lying in my bed, having taken our relationship to the next level as they say, both of us using sex as a kind of opiate, I think—a way to forget things.
“His next appointment?” I asked her. “When is it?”
“Tuesday at two.”
“Okay, then.”
I waited outside the pool area where the clients saunter out looking sleepy and satiated. He looked frazzled and anxious. She’d slipped out of the room while he undressed to tell me what he was wearing that day. She needn’t have bothered—I would’ve known him anyway.
He carried his burden like a heavy bag.
When he got into the Volvo brought out from the hotel-parking garage, I was already waiting in my car.
I followed him onto the 101, then into the valley. We exited onto a wide boulevard and stayed on it for about five miles, finally making a turn at the School Crossing sign.
He parked by the playground and sat there in his car.
It came back.
The paralytic sickness that made me want to crawl into a ball.
I stayed in the front seat and watched as he exited the car and sidled up to the fence. As he took his glasses off and wiped them on the pocket of his pants. As he scoped out the crowd of elementary-school kids flowing out the front gate. As his attention seemed to fixate on one particular boy—a fourth-grader maybe, a sweet-looking kid who reminded me of someone. As he began to follow this boy down the street, edging closer and closer the way lions separate calves from the herd. I watched and felt every bit as powerless and inert as I did back when my brother bounded down the steps of our house on the way to his first communion.
I couldn’t move.
He stepped up behind the boy and began conversing with him. I didn’t have to see the boy’s face to know what it looked like. The man reached out and grabbed the boy by the arm and I still sat there in the front seat of my car.
It was only when the boy broke away, when he turned and ran, when the man took a few halting steps toward him and then slumped, gave up—that I actually moved.
Anger was my enemy. Anger was my long-lost friend. It came in one red-hot surge, sending the sickness scurrying away in terror, propelling me out of the car, ready to finally protect him.
Joseph, I whispered.
My brother’s name.
The man slipped back into his car and drove away. I stood there with my heart colliding against my ribs.
That night, I told Kelly what I was going to do.
We lay in bed covered in sweat, and I told her that I needed to do this. The anger had come back and claimed me, wrapped me in its comforting bosom and said, You’re home.
I waited at the school the next afternoon, and the one after that. I waited all week.
He came the next Monday—parking his Volvo directly across from the playground.
When he got out, I was standing there to ask him if he could point me toward Fourth Street. When he turned and motioned over there, I placed the gun up against his back.
“If you make a sound, you’re dead.”
He promptly wilted. He mumbled something about just taking his money, and I told him to shut up.
He entered my car as docile as a lamb.
A mother stared at us as we drove away.
I went to a place in the valley that I’d used before, when the redness came and made me do certain things to suspects with big mouths and awful résumés. Things that got me tossed off the force and into mandated anger management where the class applauded when I said I’d learned to count to ten and avoid my triggers. Triggers were the things that set me off—there was an entire canon of them.
Men in collar and vestment. That was trigger number one.
We had to walk over a quarter of a mile to the sandpit. They’d turned it into a dumping ground filled with water the color of mud.
“Why?” he said to me when I made him stand there at the lip of the pit.
Because when I was eight years old, I was turned inside out. Because I killed my brother as surely as if I’d tied that belt around his neck and kicked away the chair. That’s why.
His body flew into the subterranean tangle of junk and disappeared.
Because you deserve it.
When I showed up at work the next day, she wasn’t there. I wanted to let her know; I wanted to ease her burden. When I called her cell—she didn’t answer.
I asked hotel personnel for her address—we’d always slept at my place because she had a roommate. Two days later I went to her second-floor flat in Ventura and knocked on the door.
No answer.
I found the landlord puttering around the backyard, mostly crabgrass, dandelions and dirt.
“Have you seen Kelly?” I asked him.
“She’s gone,” he said without really looking up.
“Gone? Gone where? Gone to the store?”
“No. Gone. Not here anymore.”
“What are you talking about? Where’d she go?”
He shrugged. “She didn’t leave an address. Her and the kid just left.”
“What kid?”
He finally looked up.
“Her kid. Her son. Who are you, exactly?”
“A friend.”
“Okay, Kelly’s friend. She took the kid and left. That lowlife of a boyfriend picked them up. End of story.”
I will tell you that I still did not understand what happened.
I will tell you that I went back to the hotel and calmly contemplated the situation. That when another masseuse walked out of her room—Trudy, one of the girls Kelly used to talk to—I said tell me about Kelly. She’s an empath, I said.
“A what?”
“An empath. She touches people and knows things about them.”
“Yeah. That they’re horny and out of shape.”
“She knows what they’re feeling—what kind of people they are.”
“Ha. Who told you that? Kelly?”
I still didn’t understand.
Even with Trudy staring at me as if I’d arrived from a distant galaxy. Even then, I refused to grasp what was right there.
“Kelly has a son,” I said.
“Uh-huh. Nice kid, too. No thanks to her. Okay, that’s not fair. She just needs to develop better taste in men.”
“You mean the father?”
“No. I mean the boyfriend. She’s got a dope problem—she’s always doing it, and she’s always doing them. Dopes.”
“What about the father?”
“Nah, he’s kind of nice actually. A real job and everything. She dumped him naturally. He’s fighting her for custody.”
“Why?”
“Maybe he doesn’t think junkies are the best company for an eight-year-old. And she’s always trying to poison the kid against him. It’s a fucking shame. You should’ve heard them going at it in the Tranquillity Room last week.”
“Last week…when? What day?”
“I don’t know. He comes by to drop off money for the kid. Tuesday, I think.”
Now it was coming. And it wouldn’t stop coming.
“What time Tuesday?”
“I don’t know. After lunch. Why?”
Look at it. It wants you to look at it.
Tuesday, I think. After lunch.
“What does he look like, Trudy?”
“Geez…I don’t know. About your height, I guess. Glasses. He didn’t look too fucking terrific after seeing her. She told him she was going to take the kid and disappear if he didn’t drop the whole custody thing. You know what I think? Her boyfriend wants that child support.”