Kiss Of Evil

75

Furnell Braxton is bathed in sweat. For a single, crazy instant, he sees himself on stage in a huge ballroom at the Marriott picking up a local Emmy. He checks his levels. The audio level is dead center; the video, although lagging slightly, sometimes producing a series of still images, is clear. There are now four separate feeds. The lunatic in the white room with the girl. The looping video of all the old pictures. The cop in the black room with the gun. And the NBC live-news cam.

Furnell had taken the live network feed and inserted it into his cablecast like Harry Blackstone dovetailing two halves of a bridge deck. He hadn’t the slightest idea if he had any right whatsoever to grab the feed, but on the other hand, at the moment, he simply didn’t care.

This is Emmy time.

On-screen, in the upper-right-hand frame, the lunatic is poised, ready to slam home a nail he had begun to pound into the nude woman’s left hand. The nude woman is tied to a cross. The lunatic is watching his monitor, his hand over the woman’s mouth.

In the lower-left frame, now, a medium shot of the Cain Towers apartment shot from across the street. Cop cars everywhere. You can hear a helicopter, too.

The lower-right-hand frame is a video feed showing an old crime scene photo, a kitchen floor covered in blood.

But it is the frame in the upper left that has Furnell, and everyone else, watching, spellbound. In that frame sits the police officer, on the verge of suicide. He has a 9 mm pistol reversed in his hands, the barrel against the center of his forehead, his thumb is on the trigger, his face is corded with fear. At exactly midnight he says:

“I know you will see this one day, Missy. I hope you won’t, but I know you will.” His voice breaks. “I love you and your mother with all my heart.”

He pulls the trigger.

The sound is more of a muffled clap than a bang, but the body bucks and shakes, then Furnell sees the hole, dead center on the man’s forehead. The cop slumps into the chair, still and silent.

In the upper-right-hand frame the man in the white caftan steps away from the woman on the cross. He walks up to the camera, stares. He is looking at his monitor in disbelief. Then, he begins to laugh, high and loud and long, spinning in a circle, shouting in tongues.

Death, Furnell Braxton thinks as he turns and deposits his Tony Roma’s dinner all over the control panel, his acceptance speech on hold for the moment.

He had broadcast death.

Live.