Bad Thoughts

Chapter 36

It was past midnight before Shannon was able to pick up a taxi from Logan airport. He gave the cabbie the address that Winters had given him and then sat back and stared absentmindedly out the window. The cabbie, a bulky middle-aged man with a thick Russian accent, tried to make small talk and he didn’t let Shannon’s lack of responsiveness deter him. After a while he settled in about the recent serial murders.

“At least they know who the person is,” the cabbie said, nodding his bald, square head.

Shannon didn’t respond. He kept his gaze directed towards the window, watching the freezing rain bead up on the glass.

“My shift don’t start ’til eight,” the cabbie went on, “so on TV I saw his picture. Very ugly man.”

“Is that so?” Shannon muttered.

“Yes. Very. I hope they catch him soon. I have wife and children home alone while this sicko loose. I don’t like it.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“Why shouldn’t I?” the cabbie asked, scowling. “He could hurt them just like others. What a world, huh? When they catch him I hope they exterminate him. Like bug.”

The cabbie stopped talking. The streets were, for the most part, empty and the taxi was able to speed along, stopping only briefly at red lights and not at all at stop signs. The city had a weird, desolate feel to it. As if it were lifeless. As if the buildings were nothing but tombs for the dying. Shannon watched blindly as the city sights passed by. After a few minutes the cabbie broke the silence, commenting about how the killer didn’t deserve to live another second among decent people.

“Not with things he did,” the cabbie declared stubbornly.

“I agree with you.”

“The judges, they probably let him out on technicality.”

“That won’t happen.”

“Let’s hope not. Worse than animal.”

The address Winters had given was in Arlington. When they got close to it, the cabbie asked if Shannon knew which house it was. Shannon said he didn’t.

“With this rain I can’t read numbers,” the cabbie complained as he slowed down and stuck his head out the window to try to read the number posted on one of the houses. He slowed down three more times before pulling up to a small cape-style house. As Shannon paid him, the cabbie noticed the red smudges on his overcoat but didn’t comment on them.

Shannon walked up to the front door and stopped. He didn’t have a gun, he didn’t have anything he could use as a weapon except for his car keys and they wouldn’t do any good unless he could get in close. He left his keys in his pocket. If Winters was watching him, he didn’t want to give him any idea of what he was thinking.

If he were watching him…

The thought struck Shannon that if Winters had been watching him he would’ve stopped by now. He would know that Shannon was right outside the front door and he’d be hiding near it, waiting for him.

Shannon knelt low and moved alongside the house. Blinds had been closed on all the windows and the lights were off. What did Winters tell him, that Susie was dressed up like a Christmas turkey? Which, deciphering his perverse sense of humor, meant he had her in the kitchen, just like he and Herbie had had his mother. Shannon continued on to the back of the house, picked up a small plaster statue of a saint, and tossed it through what he guessed was the kitchen window. As it crashed through, he took a headfirst dive after it. His foot, though, caught in the blinds and, instead of rolling as he fell, he went straight down, hitting the floor with a thud and jamming his shoulder. As he scrambled to his feet he saw Susie tied to the kitchen table. Then something hit him hard on the back of the neck, the blow pushing him back to the floor. Broken glass cut both his hands and face.

“That was stupid,” a soft, singsong voice breathed into his ear, “if any of the neighbors heard anything and call the police I’ll have to kill both of you.”

“Yeah, so what?”

“Kind of cavalier, Billy Boy. Believe it or not, I’m not planning on killing either of you. Not if I can help it. I’ve got other plans. Wonderfully, nasty plans.”

A knee pushed hard into Shannon’s back, knocking the wind out of him. His right hand was jerked behind him and his two fingers, the ones that had been broken years earlier, were grabbed.

“Ah, here’s what I’m looking for,” Winters whispered. Metal clamped down on those fingers and twisted upwards until the bones snapped. Shannon couldn’t help screaming. The floor muffled the noise somewhat.

“A nutcracker,” Winters confided cheerfully. “I love using them.” Then softly, “You need to control yourself better, Billy Boy. As I already told you, if you make noise and neighbors call the police, I will have to kill both of you. Then I’ll give myself up and rest comfortably in prison. If we’re not interfered with, I’ll just continue on as planned. So be a man like your dago partner had been. I did much worse to him and he didn’t once scream like a baby. At least not ’til the end.”

“You smell like shit,” Shannon grunted, his breathing labored. Pain forced hot tears into his eyes. “Ever consider taking a bath?”

“I’ve been trying to get nice and ripe for you, Billy Boy.” Winters held on to Shannon’s broken fingers and used them to force him to his feet.

“Up and at ’em,” Winters whispered from behind. “I have something to show you.”

Winters, using Shannon’s broken fingers, forced Shannon into the dining room. Lying in a corner was what looked like a pile of raw meat. Up close it was a human body. Even though most of the skin had been removed, Shannon was able to recognize his partner. He tried to twist around to get at Winters, but Winters applied more pressure to his broken fingers. The pain forced Shannon to his knees.

“I’ve been as busy as a bee today,” Winters whispered casually. “His cousin, or at least most of her body, is upstairs. She came home as I was finishing up with my whittling. Your wife had the best seat in the house for both killings.”

Winters moved closer until his breath was hot against Shannon’s ear. “Look at him,” he ordered. “Want to guess how painful it must be to be skinned alive? I’d have to think it would be a hell of a lot worse than only having your fingers broken. He took it like a man, Billy Boy. No screaming, no crying. You really ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

“You’re nothing but a fucking psycho.”

“It doesn’t matter what I am. What matters is I got you on your knees cowering because of a couple of broken fingers. And I got your wife tied up and ready for action. Put your other hand behind your back. Now.”

Winters worked on his broken fingers until Shannon complied. Then Winters tied his hands together, binding the rope tightly around both broken fingers. The throbbing from his fingers went all the way up his shoulder. It was like nails had been driven into his bones. Winters grabbed him by his injured fingers and forced him back to his feet and into a chair. He pulled up a chair opposite Shannon.

“For years I planned on skinning you like that,” Winters said.

It was the first time Shannon had actually seen him. For the most part, Winters looked as he did in the dreams. He had the same slit mouth, and under it, nothing. It was as if a hatchet had been taken to his face, cutting off anything below his razor-thin lips. His skin color, though, was more waxy than pale. Maybe even a bit jaundiced. And his eyes were more sick than dead.

“I’ve been waiting a long time for this little face-to-face,” Winters said.

“God, are you ugly,” Shannon intoned in a low, guttural voice. “You even look worse than you smell.”

Winters’s eyes dulled a bit. “Another comment like that,” he said, “and I go into the other room and cut off one of your wife’s appendages. Maybe a finger, maybe something else. Understand, you little fuck?

“Also,” Winters added after waiting for a response, “you try anything stupid and the same thing happens. She loses a piece of her. My choice which piece.”

“You have no chance in getting away with this-”

“I know that,” Winters acknowledged. “I’ll be caught and I’ll grow old in prison. It’s a fate I’ve accepted. Just as I’ve accepted instead of killing my victims, I’ll only be able to slip into their dreams and torment them. But that’s much later. After tonight, anyway.”

“Just get this over with,” Shannon said. “I’m tired of listening to you and I’m tired of smelling you.”

“No. I’ve waited a long time for this, Billy Boy. A very long time. We’re going to have a nice little chat first, and then we’ll have all night to do the things we need to do. And please, don’t try to pretend you don’t care.”

“I really don’t anymore.”

“Of course you do. After all the things I’ve done to you? And your wife lying in the other room helpless?” Winters nodded slowly, a dull glint in his eyes. “You care, Billy Boy.

“Now,” Winters continued, “let me tell you what I originally planned for you. Because what I settled on is so much better. I want you to fully appreciate it.

“It was going to be similar. I was going to show up in your dream and tell you I was with your wife. I was going to give you an address. Same as what I’ve already done. Except the address was going to be for a young, sweet little coed and FBI Agent Swallow would be fervently waiting there for you. The reason he’d be waiting for you is because I’ve been visiting him in his dreams, telling him that you’d be killing this sweet, little girl next. Of course, by then, he’d also know the carving knife used on your redheaded bitch therapist came from your apartment.

“The whole case would be circumstantial, but you’d be found guilty of my murders. And you’d spend the rest of your life in prison, or at best, an insane asylum. And I’d be there every night, visiting you in your dreams.”

“Too bad the case against you broke,” Shannon said.

“Not really. Because what I’ve improvised is really much sweeter. Have you figured it out yet?”

Shannon didn’t answer. As his hands shifted, the rope pulled tighter around his fingers, driving the imaginary nails deeper into his bones. His body stiffened as the pain immobilized him.

A smugness twisted Winters’s small, bloodless lips. “I think you got it. Any questions before we get started?”

“Go to hell.”

“Come on. You must have some curiosity. Haven’t you at least wondered how I slip into your dreams?”

“Okay, I’ve wondered about that.”

“It’s because I’m a god. At least, spiritually. My body might bleed and break, just like Herbie’s did, but inside I’m a god. And tonight you are going to suffer my wrath like no one ever has.”

Shannon couldn’t keep from laughing. “A little full of ourselves, are we? You, a god? Jesus. You’re nothing but a freak.”

The skin around Winters’s mouth tightened and a light pink flushed his cheeks. He moved quickly out of his chair, slapping Shannon hard across the face with an open palm. The blow sent Shannon and his chair tumbling to the floor. Winters reached down and grabbed him by both his hair and his broken fingers and jerked him to his feet.

“Enough chitchat,” Winters whispered from behind. “We got a busy night ahead of us.”

Winters forced Shannon back to the kitchen and to the table Susan was tied to. Using the carving knife and holding Shannon’s broken fingers, Winters cut the rope tying Shannon’s hands together. He then twisted Shannon’s broken fingers until he heard an audible gasp, and then he slapped the knife’s handle into Shannon’s free hand.

“You know what you’re going to do,” Winters breathed into Shannon’s ear.

Shannon tried swinging the knife around, trying to get at Charlie Winters’s thick body, but Winters simply applied more pressure on the broken fingers until Shannon collapsed against the table, the side of his face resting on Susan’s stomach. He couldn’t help noticing how cold her skin felt. As he was pulled away from her, he saw the fear in her eyes, the wetness around her cheeks. Anger swelled up within him. He tried to swing the knife around and again was forced to collapse against the table.

“Is that the best you can do?” Winters asked. “Gawd, are you a weak, little shit.”

“I’m going to kill you,” Shannon breathed through the pain.

“Is that so?”

More pressure was applied to his injured fingers. The pain sucked the breath out of him. From behind he could hear a wheezing laugh ooze out of Winters. The pressure continued. The pain seemed to build on itself, becoming something unbearable.

Shannon looked into Susan’s eyes. He told her that no matter what was done to him, he would not hurt her. “And I won’t let this sack of human garbage hurt you, either.”

More wheezing laughter came from behind. The pressure increased.

“I would take the dish rag out of her mouth so the two of you could talk, but I’m afraid she would scream. Even though she’d know I’d have to kill her, she’d still scream. I don’t think she could help it. But you can talk, Billy Boy. Why don’t you tell her how my cousin had you whimpering like a baby and pissing in your pants?”

Winters raised the pressure a notch.

“Come on, Billy,” Winters breathed in his singsong voice. “You can do it.”

“I was thirteen at the time,” Shannon said, trying to keep his eyes level with Susan’s. It was a struggle, though, the pain forced him to look away. “My mother was already dead before I got home. They broke my fingers and tortured me. I don’t know how long it went on for. I don’t remember too much about it. Even at the time I don’t think I was fully conscious of what was happening. I think I was in shock. Now, it’s nothing but a blur in my mind.”

“I think you’re a liar,” Winters said. “I think you remember every little detail of what happened.”

More pressure. Constant, continuous. The imaginary nails driving deeper into his bones.

“One thing you didn’t lie about,” Winters said, “is that pain will make a weakling like you do anything. But you can stop it if you want.”

He gave the injured fingers a harder twist.

“All you have to do is cut her,” Winter said. “One drop of blood, that’s all. You cut her and show me a single drop of blood and I stop. After all, how much could a cut like that hurt her? I’m sure she’d want you to. I mean, trading all that pain for only a single drop of blood. You pick the spot, sport.”

“You killed Janice Rowley-”

“That’s right, bright boy.”

“You framed Roper.”

“Of course I did. Weak little shit. One little dream visit and he smothers himself. Come on, sport, show me the blood.”

The pressure continued. Winters’s singsong voice droned through it, mixing with it, intensifying it. Shannon’s hand shook as he held the knife against Susan’s thigh. A small cut was made, drawing blood.

The pressure stopped. “You broke your promise,” Winters said. Then to Susan, “He’s really quite a liar. I don’t know who he’s trying to fool with this gallantry crap. He doesn’t love you. The person he pines away for, who he dreams about every night, is his therapist. A real cute piece of meat, although a bit pale for my taste, and probably at this point a bit too stiff.”

“I’ll tell you what I do dream about,” Shannon forced through clenched teeth, “the way it felt cutting off your cousin’s head. It’s like I’m there again. Seeing him scared shitless, smelling him crap his pants. I shove the knife into his neck. And all I want is to do it again.”

“Now you know why I do what I do,” Winters said. He twisted Shannon’s injured fingers until the pain shot off like a fireball, firing deep into his brain. Then the red glare faded into blackness.

As Shannon regained consciousness, he heard Winters whispering things to him, his words slurred and nonsensical. After a while, he realized Winters wasn’t whispering but talking loud enough for Susan to hear. He was detailing what Shannon would have to do to stop the pain.

“You see,” Winters was saying, “you cut her after only ten minutes of pain. I can keep it going for hours, probably even for days. By then you’d be begging me to let you do these things to her. And in your heart you’ll want to do them. You’ll be dying to do them. So why go through all that when you know how it’s going to end up? We both know you’re nothing but a pissant weakling.”

Shannon shifted the knife so he was holding the blade and then flicked it over his shoulder. Winters dodged it and the knife clanked off the wall.

“You’re going to have to beg me to let you retrieve it,” Winters said.

The pressure was turned on. His fingers had swollen and the pain now was far worse than before. It seemed to fill him up, to push deep into his skull, hard against his eye sockets. Shannon begged to retrieve the knife. Winters ignored him. Shannon kept begging. It seemed an eternity before Winters moved him away from the table to where the knife had landed, all the while increasing the pressure. After Shannon picked it up, Winters moved him back to the table, back to Susan.

More pressure. Just as the room would start to slip sideways on him, just as his consciousness would start to fade into blackness, the pressure would be modulated down. Then it would be increased.

“If you want it stopped,” Winters said, “you’re going to have to push the knife into her throat. Not enough to kill her, or even do much damage, but enough to leave it bobbing up and down.”

Shannon looked at Susan and then at the knife’s blade. Through the pain he started laughing.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Winters whispered softly. “But it won’t do any good. If you kill yourself I’ll do horrible, horrible things to her. Far worse than what I’m asking of you.”

“That’s not what I’m thinking, shithead.”

His injured fingers were twisted violently. Consciousness flickered away for a heartbeat.

“Enlighten me,” Winters demanded.

“It was really pretty funny,” Shannon said, still laughing.

“Go on.”

“It was about, ha ha, you and your cousin.”

“Yes?”

“I was thinking how you must’ve been there while I cut his head off.”

Winters pushed his broken fingers back. Consciousness slipped away for a moment. Then Shannon started laughing again, harder than before.

“You were probably standing there watching. Ha ha, too chickenshit to do anything.”

“Your front door was being broken down. I thought the police were coming.”

“But they weren’t. It was just my neighbor. And you were too chickenshit to do anything with a thirteen-year-old boy with broken fingers and a forty-year-old tax accountant.”

“Shut up.”

Shannon’s broken fingers were jammed back. His consciousness faded for a moment. Then he was laughing again.

“What did you do, hide in the closet? Too chickenshit to move?”

“I said shut it!”

“What a fucking god. The god, ha ha, of chickenshit!”

There was a hard, violent twist. Then pain exploded through him. It seemed to blow him towards the ceiling. His body rising as if he were filled with helium. All pain was gone, all feeling was gone, any concern he had had dissipated. He looked down and saw both Winters and himself, or at least his body. It was like those other times with Herbie and his father. He had somehow detached himself from his body and was observing the events from a distance. It all seemed only vaguely interesting to him.

Charlie Winters’s face had become pinched. Thin, hostile lines pushed up from his forehead. He was straining as he used both hands to twist Shannon’s broken fingers. And Shannon’s own body just laughed harder through it all.

Then Winters stopped. He stood for a moment, confused, staring at what was in his hands, not quite comprehending that the two broken fingers had separated from Shannon’s body. Had, in fact, been ripped from the body.

It was as if Shannon were watching it all from outside of himself. Watching as his body turned and pushed the knife into Charlie Winters’s neck. Watching as the confusion drained out of Winters’s face, only to be replaced by wide-eyed disbelief and then fear.

From what seemed like through a haze, Shannon watched as Charlie Winters’s head was hacked from his body. Even as his head rolled free his lips kept moving, at least for a few seconds, screaming in panic the word “no”…

Shannon knew he was missing his two broken fingers. Even still, he could feel a throbbing ache from where they should’ve been. He stood up slowly and let go of the knife. Winters’s head had rolled a few feet from his body. Shannon tried not to look at it. He tried to stare straight ahead, trying hard not to even catch a glimpse of his mutilated hand.

He heard a muffled noise from behind. Susan’s small body was convulsing as she sobbed. Shannon stumbled over to her and removed the dish rag from her mouth.

“It’s going to be all right now,” he said, trying as hard as he ever had to smile.

“I’m so cold. Please get me something.”

“Sure. I’ll be right back.”

He made his way upstairs. A woman’s torn body lay in one of the bedrooms. He removed both the quilt and a sheet from the bed. The sheet was used to cover Winters’s head and body. He lay the quilt over Susan.

“Just another minute. I need to find something to cut these wires with.”

“Bill, you need to call an ambulance-”

“What else did he do to you?”

“Not for me, for you.”

“I’ll be okay. Just a minute…”

Shannon searched through the house until he found a wire cutter. He didn’t seem to have much strength in his left hand and it took a while to snap the wires, but eventually he had them off Susan.

“I know better than to ask if you’re okay,” he said.

Her face twisted slowly into the saddest clown smile Shannon had ever seen and then she started bawling. As she, did Shannon tried to hold her. He tried like hell not to bleed on her.

“He lied about what he told you,” she said when she could. “Your therapist, Elaine Horwitz, survived. I heard it on the news earlier today.”

And then she just sobbed harder.

Charlie Winters knew he was dead.

Instead of being drawn to a white light, he had been pulled through some sort of black void. The book he had read in prison had stated that leaving your body and dying were basically the same thing. This was different, though. He felt anchored to where he had been pulled to. Movement didn’t seem possible. And his essence, or spirit, or whatever it was that defined him, had changed shape. He had the sensation that he had become gnarled and gnome-like.

They came as a group. The ones he’d recently murdered. Joe DiGrazia, Pig Dornich, Phyllis Roberson, the hooker in East Boston, all of them. There were even some he recognized from his days with Herbie. There were a few he didn’t recognize. Somehow he knew they were guides.

They milled around him, looking at him as if he were insignificant, as if he were unimportant to them, and then they turned from him. None of them had spoken, none of them acknowledged him. It was as if he didn’t exist. Then they were gone.

The quiet was unlike anything Charlie Winters had ever experienced. A pure, absolute quiet. He almost welcomed it when he heard them.

The noise they made was like razor blades being scratched over glass. Millions of blades over millions of pieces of glass. A pure, raw terror filled him as the blades scraped closer, as the noise screamed through his every fiber. He still couldn’t see them, but he could sense they were almost on top of him.

They were on him then. Shredding him, engulfing him, their blades ripping his being to infinite pieces. Just as the quiet before had been absolute, his agony now was also pure and absolute.

When he had first learned how to slip into the dream world and then into other planes of existence, he searched for Herbie. He never found him, though, and he now knew why. Herbie suffered this same fate, or rather Herbie must still be suffering this same fate. Because Charlie Winters knew the shredding would never end. He knew the agony would never end.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The book had stated there was no hell, that you would keep going back to earth until you improved yourself to where you could enter a higher plane of existence. Which meant he and Herbie would keep going back to earth. That was how it was supposed to be.

Through the pure, absolute agony he felt an overwhelming sense of betrayal. It was all so damn unfair. After all, there wasn’t supposed to be any hell.

A voice cut through the swarming mass, it cut through the agony screaming through Charlie Winters’s consciousness. It told him: “You can’t believe everything you read in books, Charlie.”