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Flypaper Con: Dark Psychological Thriller - Book 4 Page 9
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Page 9
“Night, Blaire. Thanks for everything.” Nick, Corpse and Hellen were all that remained.
Hellen poked Nick in the arm. “You really don’t remember inviting me?”
He shook his head and poked her back. “I wish I did. Sorry.”
“We were with Mike and Annie, talking about our plans for the day.” She paused to give Nick a chance to sort through the haze and find his lost memory.
A chunk fell into place. “I vaguely remember that.” Nick noticed Corpse shuffling her feet. Her impatience grew. He moved the little group toward the elevators.
Hellen and Corpse followed. “And you said you had the Q and A, which you were nervous about, but were sure would be fine…”
“I was technically right.”
“…and then afterwards you were going to a charity dinner and said that I should go because if there wasn’t at least a couple of other people there you could stand talking to, you might kill yourself.”
Nick stopped at the elevators and pushed the call button. The memory dredged itself to the surface. “I said I’d kill myself with a butter knife right there on the table.” Hellen put her finger on her nose and Nick took a little bow. “Okay, I do remember that. My bad.”
Hellen frowned and looked up at him, pulling her bottom lip between her teeth. “Did you think I was crazy-stalking you?”
Nick looked at his feet and fought back the urge to lie. “It might have occurred to me.”
“Hey.” Hellen pulled his attention away from his shoes. When he looked at her, she continued, “They’ve really done a number on you, haven’t they?”
The elevator doors opened and Nick walked inside. “Who?”
“Everyone.” Hellen and Corpse joined him. Hellen hit the button for the sixth floor and the doors closed.
Nick changed the subject to not his scarred psyche. “Were we really supposed to do anything now, though?”
The hesitation in Hellen’s voice telegraphed her thought process. She took note of his less than artful subject change, considered not giving up that easily, but then let it go. “Nah, I was fucking with you.” She playfully elbowed him. “You can go hang out with Brian and Jane if you want. Huh? Nudge nudge, wink wink, say no more say no more?”
“Noooooooo, I don’t think I’ll be doing that.” Nick pushed the idea of Brian watching from a chair as he and Jane did unspeakable things far, far from his mind. It was even too creepy for a book.
“Do you want to do something?” The doors of the elevator opened. Hellen stood with her hand on the door to keep them open.
Nick looked at Corpse. She made a sour face, but twitched her shoulder, the closest to a definitive go ahead he’d get from her. He took it. “Yeah, I don’t know what we’d do, though. Maybe go for a walk, see where it takes us?”
Hellen pulled her hand away from the door. “Meet downstairs in what? Ten minutes?”
Nick blurted out ‘yes’ as the doors closed, his finger ‘stayin’ alive-ing’ it up and down.
The elevator continued its ascent. Nick bit his lip, smiled and shook his hips in a little dance. He made rave beats with his mouth and then sang, “I’ve got a daaaaate. I’ve got a daaaate.”
“You’ve got a screw loose, you ask me,” Corpse said, her lip curled into a snarl. “Last night you thought she’d slipped you something. Now you’re the one trying to slip her something.” The doors opened on the twelfth floor. Corpse marched for her room. Their room. Whatever.
“You don’t approve?” Nick struggled to keep up.
Corpse rounded the corner and slid her key through the lock to their room. “Would you? She may have brought you back last night, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t playing a long game. There’s no such thing as a good Maggot, dude.”
They walked into the room. It seemed smaller than before; the walls a little closer together. “Well, that’s why she’s not a Maggot anymore.”
Corpse pulled her laptop out of her shoulder bag and opened it on the table. “Once a Maggot, always a Maggot.”
Nick sidestepped that for the time being. “What about Starla? She seemed nice enough. And Gary?”
Corpse sat at her computer. “We have no evidence that they’re Maggots at all. They weren’t wearing red flies.”
He had to concede that. “Fair point. But we’re getting off topic. I think a lot of the stuff with Hellen has been misunderstandings.”
Corpse’s voice cooled. “Remember that time your balcony misunderstood the concept of gravity? Good times.”
Nick had no comeback for that—not one that would have felt right, anyway—so the only sound in the room was that of Corpse’s fingers smashing into her keyboard one by one.
Several seconds went by before Nick spoke. “Are we having our first fight right now?”
Corpse stopped typing. “No, we had our first fight when you said Iron Man could take down Batman.”
Nick thumped his cane on the floor. “I said it was possible, like if Batman was having an off day.”
“Batman doesn’t have off days, he’s fucking Batman.” She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “But no, we’re not fighting. We’re both stupid, is all. You’re stupid because you like to play with fire and I’m stupid for thinking you can’t handle yourself. If I seem wound a little tight it’s because this friggin’ thing is giving me shit.” She thumped her laptop’s screen with a finger.
That was new. Nick couldn’t recall ever seeing Corpse at odds with anything computer-based. “What is it?”
“Whoever monkeyed with the hotel’s security systems didn’t want to be found. So I’m not finding them. And it makes me want to murder things.” She dropped her head onto her keyboard. Her forehead jammed on the ‘f’ key, filling a type field.
“You know, come to think of it, I have heard you talk like this once before,” Nick said. “Back when you were trying to bring Myiasis down.”
Corpse sat up. “It crossed my mind. It would explain quite a bit, frankly, if whoever keeps Myiasis up and running had a hand in DawkinsCon. The app, the leaderboards…”
Nick had all but forgotten about the theoretical yin to Corpse’s yang. “The Anti-Corpse.”
Corpse moused some windows around the screen, arranging them into a tableau only she understood. “Right. I was pretty convinced before, but I’m dead fucking certain, now. Either the Myiasis Administrator has some crazy skills—like I could learn a thing or two—or they’re employing someone who does.”
“Curiouser and curiouser.” Nick leaned over Corpse’s shoulder and stroked a beard that he did not have.
She flung her hand up into his face. “Anyway. Go do your thing. Bring protection.”
Nick looked at himself in the mirror and adjusted his jacket. “I really don’t know that we’re going to get that far. I haven’t even kissed her yet.”
Corpse spun around in her chair. “Not that, fool. I mean bring a weapon in case she gets up in your face.” She turned back to her computer. “My god, gross.”
He lifted his cane into the air and held it outward, like a fencing sword. “Why do you think I have this bad boy?” He lost his balance and dropped the cane back into position to keep himself standing. “I’m out. Don’t wait up?”
She waved at him as he walked out the door. “Via con dios, Bromer.”
Nick walked down the hallway and around the corner to the elevators. He pushed the ‘down’ button and pulled out his phone while he waited. The door opened with a ding and Nick stepped into the glass box.
He looked down at the lobby twelve stories below and spied Hellen. His insides expressed both their excitement and their nervousness at once, in a single jittery wave of nausea. His brain pulled rank and told his stomach to get its shit together.
He pressed the lobby button and the doors slid toward one another. At the last second, a hand reached in between them and they slid open again.
The man in the dog mask walked into the elevator. “Going down.”
Nick moved to the
side of the elevator, in part out of courtesy for the man’s personal space, but also in part because this guy creeped him the fuck out.
The man pushed the button for floor nine and the doors slid together.
They stood next to each other in awkward silence. The masked man’s breathing was heavy, as though he’d been running.
As the elevator approached the ninth floor, Nick finally asked the question that had bothered him for nearly two full days. “Is your get up from a particular movie, or…?”
“No.” The man in the dog mask turned to an angle and fiddled with something just out of Nick’s view. “But I’ve been in a movie and I didn’t want to be recognized.”
“Oh?” Curiosity fully replaced caution in Nick’s sphere of consciousness. “Anything I might have seen? If I may ask?”
Ding.
The elevator doors slid open, revealing the ninth floor hallway. “I’m pretty sure you’ve seen it, Nick” The masked man’s breathing deepened. He wasn’t out of breath; he seethed with rage. “It had your name all over it.”
The dog-masked man dropped something to the floor and whipped around, grabbing Nick by the back of the head. With his other hand, he pressed a cloth into Nick’s face, covering his mouth and nose.
Nick didn’t know what movie this guy was supposed to be from, but he’d seen his tactics on the big screen plenty of times. The cloth would be covered in chloroform or worse. He rammed his cane into the guy’s gut. The attacker stumbled backwards, but he had a hell of a grip, and Nick went with him.
His vision blurred and darkened around the edges. He pushed himself away from his assailant long enough to get a breath of fresh air. He opened his mouth to scream for help, but the cloth clamped down on his face again. He strained against the man’s powerful arms and caught a glimpse of Hellen in the lobby below.
Nick slammed his hand against the elevator glass and yelled as loud as the cloth would allow.
His voice trailed off and his bones turned to mush. He slumped downward; down, down, down into the never ending hole that swallowed light and noise and thought and gave back nothing.
Chapter 12
Nick’s body was electric. All tingles and neurological impulses. Like the whole damn thing had gone to sleep and pinpricks were waking it up. He struggled to move.
Nothing.
He forced his eyes open. They didn’t go willingly. It was a Herculean effort.
Everything was a giant, white blur. Out of focus. He blinked and concentrated on finding some frame of reference for where he was.
None of this was right. It was like he was half-awake. Trapped.
Drugs. He was on something. And it wasn’t special brownies.
Nick opened his mouth to scream, but all he managed was a squeak.
Movement nearby. Someone large.
The Dog Man.
A black shape towered over him and spoke out loud. The words hovered in the air over the bed. Nick’s mind struggled to put them together.
Awake… Asshole… Unfair…
Hellen. Hellen was waiting for him. Was waiting for him. What time was it?
His friggin’ eyeballs were all over the place. He couldn’t force them to pick out one spot to focus on. It was like herding cats.
“How do you like it?”
Nick tilted his head. Hotel room, just like Corpse’s. He was still at the Vera Vista.
The black shape reached out and grabbed his face, his fingers digging into his jaws. “I said, how do you like it?”
The dog mask came into focus inches away from him. It spoke to him. Through him. The words wouldn’t stick.
Nick flapped his mouth uselessly. Questions fired off in his brain one after another, but he couldn’t articulate a single one.
Where am I? Why are you doing this? Who the fuck are you?
“I’ll bet you’re wondering who I am? Why I’m doing this?”
Give the dog a cigar.
“Why I’m doing this...” The Dogman squeezed at Nick’s mouth, pinching his face together. He barely felt it, but the guy squeezed so hard his hand shook. “Have you ever hated someone so much that it overshadowed everything? Every good thing you ever felt in your life? That’s how I feel about you, Nick Dawkins.”
None of that made a lick of sense. Did it not make sense because it was insane or because Nick was tripping balls?
I don’t even know you, Dogman.
The Dogman had said something before… about being in a movie? Was he an actor? One of those kids from the vampire show they jammed into The Inn? He let go of Nick’s face and paced around the bed.
“You don’t know how long I’ve looked forward to this.”
Nick could make out details he couldn’t before. He saw the sky through a crack in the room’s curtains. It was still nighttime.
“I don’t even know where to start. Months of planning, and I don’t…”
The tingling in his arms had lessened and he tried to move again. No go. There was pressure on his wrists. He looked at one and squinted. He was bound—some kind of leather strap.
He couldn’t quite lift his head enough to see his feet, but they didn’t seem to be any better off.
“Today is the day, Dawkins. Dawkins Day. D-Day.”
He blinked some more and his vision continued to clear. His thoughts sharpened. He remembered in fragments. He was taken from the elevator, strapped to a bed and pumped full of drugs.
By the Dogman, who now ranted to himself at the foot of the bed.
The drugs were wearing off.
Nick stretched his lips like taffy and ground his vocal cords together. “Whoooooo…”
Who are you? Who the fuck are you? Say it. Say it, make the words.
“Errrrrrrrrrr…” Nick strained his throat until it ached, but the noise coming out sounded more like a car failing to turn over than the word ‘are’.
He got the Dogman’s attention. He walked to the side of the bed and leaned into Nick’s face. For the first time, Nick saw through the mask’s eye holes and caught a glimpse of the eyes of the man within.
Those fucking eyes.
The look on Danielle’s face as she set herself aflame and pleaded for Nick to stay with her in the fiery conflagration she’d created to be their funeral pyre.
The look on Clark’s face as he savagely bashed Nick’s head in with a coffee pot on his kitchen floor.
The look on Longpig’s face when he considered which part of Nick he’d like to eat first.
Nick had never seen eyes like this guy’s. They didn’t appear to look at him so much as through him. To what exactly, no other person could possibly know.
“What’s that, Nick? You want to talk. There’s a surprise. Always the center of attention. The center of… what’d they call it? DawkinsCon. The center of GutsCon. The center of Forest Down…”
There was an edge in the guy’s voice when he said ‘Forest Down’. He didn’t say it with the detached tone of someone who’d heard it on the news or read it on the internet. He said it like a local. He knew the place. Intimately.
Nick stuck his lips out and tried again to make an intelligible word. “Whhhoooo…”
He was nearly at conversational volume now. Progress.
The Dogman patted him on the chest. “I’m the past catching up to you, Nick.” He stood up and pulled a phone out of his pocket. “I want to play something for you. Here. You like movies, right, Nick? I know you do.”
Sound emitted from the phone as Dogman touched the screen. He held it up in front of Nick’s face. It was a video; recorded on a phone, from the look of it.
Nick sat at the head of the table in the hotel restaurant. Exasperated. Hunched over his plate. “Do I feel bad about what?”
A voice boomed, right on top of the camera. “About any of it.”
Brundlefly. How did the Dogman know Brundle?
On camera, Nick held up his empty hands. “I feel plenty bad about the two people he killed. Do I feel bad about him being shot by a
cop while feeding me to his pet rats? Not so much. Would you?”
The Dogman pulled the phone away and touched the screen. He thrust the phone into Nick’s face again. “There. Listen.”
The video played again. “I feel plenty bad about the two people he killed. Do I feel bad about him being shot by a cop while feeding me to his pet rats? Not so much. Would you?”
The crazed man in the dog mask shut off the video. “What’s missing, Nick? Can you tell me?”
Missing? What was missing? Besides Dogman’s marbles?
Dogman leaned into Nick so close he could feel the hot air from inside the mask waft out onto his face. “You mention the two people Clark Abernathy killed. We feel real bad for them, don’t we, Nick?”
Nick opened his mouth and wrenched his chords into place. The noise he made was a little louder; a little closer to the scream he wanted.
“Are we forgetting someone, Nick?”
Forgetting someone? How many ‘works’ did Clark produce? First was… The Animalgamation. The animals? An animal activist? It would explain the mask.
The Animalgamation on his porch. Then what was next? Next was…
Oh God.
Nick worked his throat again. Louder still.
Scream. Scream, scream, scream you fucking piece of—
Dogman put a hand over Nick’s mouth. “Quiet… be quiet.” He dug the fingers of his other hand into the bottom of the mask and yanked. The rubber squeaked as it stretched and pulled away from the face underneath. “Be quiet or I’ll do to you what Clark Abernathy did to me.”
The mask snapped free of Dogman’s head, exposing a face Nick might not have recognized at all if it hadn’t been for the scar tissue. Small, circular marks, lined in rows above and below his lips, where they’d been sewn together.
Delbert Williams. The real life Cancer Man. The man Clark had sewn crabs into and left in Nick’s driveway to die in the pouring rain. Mad as the proverbial fucking hatter.
No wonder he wore the mask. His face was as familiar as Nick’s. Possibly more so. The video of his radical and unorthodox surgery was not only on every Maggot’s must-watch list, it had gone viral globally. Millions of people had seen poor Delbert having live crabs stuffed into gashes in his chest and legs.