Pure Instinct

30

Jessica's terror froze her in place while Matisak calmly took her in with that mad glint she'd come to recognize. As he towered over her where she lay, her face dirty with sawdust and grease, his laughter was cut short by his cruel words. “We're going to die here together, Jessica, with you sacrificing your blood to me and me sacrificing my life in order to go into eternity with you.”

The mad metallic, ricocheting racket of the warehouse continued as stiff mannequins marched like wooden soldiers in their suspended poses-like so many marching crosses, she thought, recalling what Kim Desinor had said about burning crosses.

Every so often, instead of a clown or masked marionette, a nasty-looking hook scurried by, winking at Jessica.

Jessica fought to regain her footing, climbing to her knees, careful to tuck her right leg behind her, careful not to alert him to the fact she still carried a gun strapped to her. She easily played the part of one completely cowed and fearful, for she was, and this only helped in her charade, allowing the madman every confidence that he had at last won.

But somehow he knew; he saw some sliver of disdain and hope left in her eyes, and so he quickly backhanded her across the face and tore at her pants leg, having seen the bulge there, and as he tore away the weapon, she tore from him, running, her life depending upon the distance she put between them. But in the dark, she ran into the fallen netting, causing her to tumble and become entangled amid the counterfeit stars and imitation planets and moons. Her heels were lost to the net.

He laughed and pounced tigerlike on her, wrenching her wrists and arms in his powerful grip, his acrid breath burning her eyes. “I've got something I want to show you, Jessica, dear.” His voice was the sepulchral sound of Hades torn open.

He forced her forward through the dark interior of the warehouse until they came to a corner where he switched on a tensor lamp, which revealed a surgical table complete with four straps, one for each of her limbs. Beside the steel table, which looked like something he'd gotten from the back room of a mortuary, stood a squat little machine with light-emitting diode numbers on a screen, its electrical humming a mewing, mild chant within the deafening sounds of the large warehouse. He'd rigged the machine and the tensor lamp to a generator, not leaving anything to chance, or perhaps because he'd cut the power to all sources but the ones he wished to use, for apparently, he also controlled the whirling parade of Mardi Gras creatures that remained spinning over his shoulder about the center of the warehouse.

“ Here is where we die together, sweet Jessica,” he whispered in her ear like a demented lover, holding her tightly against his chest, speaking directly into her ear with his putrid, hot breath. “You first, and I to follow.”

“ How do… how do I know you'll go through with it… that you'll follow?” She led him on, trying desperately to stall for time, but also anxious to know that he did indeed intend suicide after dispatching her. She would at least have that much, she told herself.

“ It's a dialysis machine, like the one I used on Dr. Arnold back in Philly, you remember?”

Now she realized what the small, portable machine was capable of, drawing blood and drawing it quickly and efficiently, Matisak's favorite hobby.

“ Only this time,” he continued, “it's going to pump me so full of your blood that I'm going to implode with you inside me and take us both into eternity's light together, dear one.” He laughed lightly at the thought which would soon be reality.

“ Think of it,” he continued as he guided her unwilling form to the table. “You and I for all time, locked in a blood embrace, filled to the brim with one another like the lovers we are, off to explosive heights, not with my blood, not with your blood, but with our life's blood, Jessica, so that we'll always be locked together throughout the rest of eternity… like I always promised.”

“ Extracorporeally transplanting my blood into you, all at once, using the dialysis machine,” she said to him. “That's no fun, taking it intravenously; it will burst your veins and you'll bleed to death internally.”

“ That's the beauty of it.”

“ But where's the kick in that? How're you going to enjoy my suffering when I won't suffer at all? It'll be over in seconds.” She couldn't believe herself, arguing for him to make her suffering last. But the moment he placed those straps on her and started mechanically inducing her blood from her body, she knew her chances for survival were nil.

“ I can't do it any other way. Drinking it all at once is impossible. You know that.”

“ Blood is a mucolytic, an expectorant. You'd be vomiting your guts out. Yeah, I know.” She tried to keep him talking, to sound as if she were on his side now, trying to help him think through the puzzle, but he was possessed, and he forced her onto the table and brought up a syringe before her eyes.

“ This will help you accept me and my plans for you, Jessica. No sense fighting what fate there is which has brought us together, Jessica. We were meant to become one, you and I, all along. Now we finish what we'd begun so many years before.”

“ But I'm scared, Matthew,” she pleaded. “Fear becomes you.” He tested the syringe, removing any air left in the miniature world of the vial. She tore at the restricting strap dangling just below her right hand as he did so, and she viciously brought it up in a burst of anger and desperation, the strap buckle hitting him squarely in the hand, so painfully and shockingly that the syringe soared over the table and onto the floor. At the same instant, she brought up a naked foot, having lost her heels in the mesh netting earlier, and she kicked him squarely in the jaw, so hard that she hurt the ball of her foot in the effort.

Matisak staggered back just long enough for her to regain her feet and ram the table into his midsection, doubling him over. She grabbed onto the polyethylene tubing and yanked with all her might, pulling it from the dialysis machine, sending it rolling off and out of the circle of light Matisak had created as his artificial bonfire.

She then ran, but she felt him directly behind her. He grabbed onto her shoulder, but she struggled free from her long coat, leaving him with only the cloth and cursing. He pursued demonically, as if he might sprout wings.

She wheeled and barged into a large, freestanding tank, larger than a diving tank. Unsure what was inside the unmarked metal receptacle, she nonetheless grabbed firmly the nozzle and flint attachment. She quickly snatched up the hose handle and turned the gas on-propane, she guessed. Striking the flint, she sent out a spewing gasp of fire into Matisak's eyes, suddenly blinding him, singing his bushy eyebrows and burning his left cheek. He let out a scream of pain and backed away, but she took the fire to the length of its tether, backing him further from her.

“ Bloody bitch!” he screamed.

As he continued to back away from the fire, fending it off with his arms now while still holding firmly to his recovered syringe, Jessica saw her chance to put an end to him.

She tugged on the nozzle hose, keeping the fire at his face, dragging the now-toppled, rolling tank with each step she took, keeping him at bay.

Matisak might have turned and run, but he instead jousted with the fire, trying to rush into and through it to overpower her, but the heat was too intense.

“ Burn, you son of a bitch! Burn!” Jessica shouted.

Matisak continued to back away. She continued to pursue, hoping the propane would last even though a blinking yellow light on the gauge indicated that it was low.

At the same moment that Matisak backed into the array of mannequins and papier-mache animals that were careening by, one of the needle-pointed, razor-sharp hooks mechanically anticipated him, and the ugly hook caught him at the base of the skull, viciously slicing into him, its upward-thrusting tip meeting the brain stem. But death was not instantaneous by any means. The robotic hook arm, feeling weight on its end, now lifted the man from the sawdust and raised him several feet into the air. One leg was caught in a pair of gripping stirruplike arms, but the other flailed wildly with his human arms, and Matisak's entire body quivered and showered blood as away he flew with the rest of the floating carnival all around her.

Jessica dropped to her knees and released the jet flow of the propane torch, the light gone with the flame. Her face now was streaked with tears as well as dirt and grime.

Overhead, a portion of the ceiling creaked, moaned and collapsed in on itself, revealing a black, roiling sky beyond, a kind of black hole that had opened up perhaps to suck in Matisak's soul, which she imagined would rise only so far as Hell.

Once again the whirling, spinning track overhead brought Matisak into her line of vision. She saw that he was still somehow alive, responding spasmodically to the pain and torture dealt him. She searched the dirty floor for one of the two guns she'd brought to kill Matisak with, but was unable to locate either without light to see by.

Finally, she pulled her flashlight from below the netting that Matisak had hoped to trap her beneath, and with the beam she found her. 38 police special. She raised it now, awaiting Matisak's return trip.

He looked to be still now as he moved closer toward her, the terror of his pain clearly etched on his unremittingly grimacing face, yet the spasms had ceased. He appeared dead. He was finally dead.

But then his head fell forward and his open eyes stared down at her and he grinned.

She prepared to fire, aiming for the forehead. She squeezed the trigger inward, inward… about to put him out of his misery… but then decided otherwise.

She thought of the suffering he'd brought into this world. He had created chaos and horror, not only for all his victims, but for her as well. She was his victim.

She lowered her gun, located her coat and watched the dying man's parade of horror continue on and on and on with the tumult of metal wheels rolling about steel grooves. She then went for the exit, leaving Matisak to his death, his last scream diminished by the rattling mechanical pulleys, chains and tracks and the pounding winds further rattling the warehouse walls and exterior.

Jessica stepped out into God's breath, the storm winds now at gale force, having found landfall somewhere along the Louisiana coastline. For all she knew she was stepping into the eye of Hurricane Lois. But it didn't matter. Matisak was dead, and she was free of the ugliest human force she'd ever encountered.

She saw a light sluicing back and forth along the wharf ahead of her, and she heard the insistent shouting which came from Kim Desinor. Kim and Alex Sincebaugh parted the mists around them, racing toward her, Alex throwing a dry blanket over her shoulders. For the first time, Jessica allowed herself a moment's attention, realizing she was ill-equipped to deal with the raging wind which buffeted her about like a crumpled paper boat on the waves of a great ocean. Missing her shoes, her blouse ripped, a cut above her left eye, she still managed a broad smile, for seeing the others was like looking again on life and light. She crumpled into Kim's arms, tears coming freely. Hurricane Lois was still in the Gulf, lingering there as if to tease, as the three of them stood on the wharf below the eyes of the tattered alligator in the backdraft of a roiling air pocket. Alex ushered the women toward his car, asking about Matisak. Jessica simply said, “You'll find him inside. It's finally over.”

A great cloud of closure had enveloped her, a sense of completion and wholeness and strength which even Kim with her amazing sensibilities could not begin to fathom. Kim placed a protective arm over Jessica's shoulder and guided her through the stormy night, down the length of the pier and toward Alex's waiting car, where the strobing light seemed the only beacon left in the world. Overhead, the satanic wind threatened to destroy everything in its path.

Even as she climbed into Alex's car, feeling the machine rocking left to right under the pressure of the storm wind, Jessica only felt relief, for at last she'd managed to do what she'd only dreamed of doing for so long: from the day that she had examined his first victim so many years before in that black little cabin in Wekosha, Wisconsin, from the moment he'd maimed her, from the second he'd killed Otto Boutine, and since the day of his arrest. Real revenge was rare and so long in coming in this life…

“ How… how are you, Jess?” Kim asked.

She looked up into her friend's eyes as the storm whipped Kim's hair wildly about her head. “It's over at last… no more struggling with the devil of devils… I can dream again… can believe in a safer, better world… hurricanes, earthquakes, and killer storms notwithstanding… and it's already a better world without him in it.”

After a look inside the warehouse, where he'd located the power switch which illuminated the place, Alex returned to the car, a stricken look on his face, and called it in. Within minutes squad cars jammed the entryway to the wharf and warehouse area, everyone working a beat interested and curious about the latest twisting development in the Mad Matthew Matisak affair, as many as possible turning out for a look at the monster Coran had brought down, anxious to lay eyes on the sight of him dangling at the end of a meat hook.

Fouintenac was indeed one of Lew Meade's operatives; his real name Leon Stedman, and he'd had a wife and several children. He'd taken on the character of real-life Deputy Mayor Fouintenac merely to remain close to Jessica Coran, to act, as Sand had acted, in the capacity of bodyguard. Apparently, he'd let his guard down. Stedman, alias Fouintenac, had to be bagged, as did Matisak's remains, and Lew Meade was flying in a pathologist from nearby Mississippi to do the honors. Meade, Police Commissioner Stephens and Carl Landry put in appearances.

Meanwhile, Alex saw to it that both Kim and Jessica Coran were ushered off to a safe location where they might gather perspective and breathe a little easier.

He later returned to make sure that evidence techs did their jobs to the fullest, and he even helped by bagging a shardlike piece of glass, thin and beveled to a point-a high-tech blow dart likely dipped in poison, which had miraculously remained in Fouintenac's neck despite the rough treatment Jessica Coran's. 38 had given the dead man's torso. If Jessica's story could be believed, and he had no reason to doubt her, she'd fired three times into Fouintenac's lifeless body when she'd mistaken it for Matisak.

Alex also helped in the triangulation of both Matisak's body and Fouintenac's body, but this was a useless gesture since both bodies had carouseled about the huge warehouse repeatedly.

Lew Meade was understandably upset at the loss of his agent, and he remained uncharacteristically charitable, allowing Alex to do his job, not fighting for territorial or jurisdictional rights or flashing his FBI badge about the place. He muttered something about Stedman's having been a good man in such a way as to make Alex wonder if he meant that Stedman was too good a man to have wasted on Jessica Coran's safety.

Even Meade's calling in the pathologist from the Mississippi FBI field office did not get in the way of the data and evidence collection. This surprised Alex. Since Dr. Jessica Coran was both FBI and the principal in the incident, Alex half expected everyone other than FBI would be given the heave-ho, but this didn't happen.

When Matisak was being pulled from the hook which had entered the base of his brain via the neck from behind, it took several men and a number of sweaty tugs to unhook him. The man had a noticeable hunchback and thick, even bloated skin with splotches of discoloration, as if he had suffered from some unusual disease. Located in the warehouse, not far from the body were a definitely out-of-place surgical table and dialysis machine, which the warehouse owners claimed to know absolutely nothing about.

Reporters from the Times-Picayune did their best to get past barricades and get a photo of the dead Matisak. A picture of the vampire killer beside the sad-faced clowns amid the ruined menagerie in the Mardi Gras warehouse would go for big bucks, and Yancy Rosswell, the police photographer, got what he termed some great surreal shots of the hapless victim.

When two body bags came out of the warehouse, news photographers went to work.

New Orleans was spared the brunt of Hurricane Lois as she made landfall between Biloxi and Gulfport instead; still, the city was ravaged by a primal wind and storm surge that de-stroyed whole sectors, putting many sections under water, the death toll mounting into the thirties, even as the newscasters spoke, since bodies were being discovered beneath flying debris and rubble. But due to the National Weather Service warnings, the time given to prepare and the fact that the center of the storm had bypassed the heart of the city, opting for the east, and because most people were either in their homes or evacuated northward, many lives were spared.

Back at the precinct house, the day was filled with paperwork involving the Matisak case. Both Kim Desinor and Jessica Coran were brought in to give statements. The day wasted away beneath a gunmetal-gray sky. At one point Alex and the others learned that a black man named Lewis was telling a story about having witnessed a beheading inside the confines of an automobile matching the one Stedman had been driving, one found abandoned not far from Gatorland Storage. Lewis's unobstructed view of the beheading had occurred just outside the hotel where Jessica Coran was staying. “The bastard was stalking Coran all along, no doubt about it,” Alex told Ben as they drove for Surette's former apartment. Tonight, Alex meant to do what he could to get some sort of lead on Easy that might lead to the Hearts Killer. It was time New Orleans was rid of such filth and garbage along with Matisak.

Darkness had descended over the city again. It was half past eight when Alex pulled within sight of Surette's place. Beside him, Ben yawned and guzzled the final drop of a soda he'd been drinking.

“ This is crazy, Sincy,” Ben complained again. “I mean, we looked that place over from top to bottom the first time, and it was clean as a baby's behind after a bath. I remember saying how great it'd be to be able to live like these damned transients, you know? 'Member that? No paper, no bills, no bull, I said. Never seen such a clean place in my life. Always thought these types were messy, but not this guy.” Alex kept his own counsel. He just wanted to get back inside Surette's place.

“ Transients live empty fucking lives,” Ben said now. “Wish I had a little less paper on me. You know I'm still paying on that freakin' van I bought four years ago?”

Alex replied, “He wasn't transient, though. He worked seven blocks down the street at the Blue Heron, remember? And not so much as a paycheck stub lying around that apartment.”

The silence built between them like a wall until Alex finally broke it anew. “I… I just can't help feeling we overlooked something. Will you just bear with me? Hell, you can warm your seat here while I go up, if you like… have a doughnut, but I'm going to pay a visit.”

“ I don't know, Alex…this time o' night, dem dare French Quarter folks asleep with der derringers unner der pillows, mon.”

“ We'll pol-lite-ly knock and ask.”

“ Suppose Gilreath's sister is covering for him, Alex.”

“ You really think Gilreath's been lurking around New Orleans all this time, sleeping in some hole by day and coming out nights to overpower larger men and rip their hearts out with a butcher knife?”

“ Just 'cause Surette was bigger than Davey, you don't think so, Alex? Come on, we both know that men can find superhuman strength while under duress. There was a struggle with Thommie Whiley, right? And Thommie was bigger than Davey Gilreath too, but that don't prove nothing, partner.”

“ I don't know… doesn't figure, Big.”

“ What doesn't figure?”

The old sounding-board game between them was back, and it felt good, Alex thought. “Pigsty Gilreath struck me as one of the few cross-dressing cretins around here who actually had his feet on the ground.”

“ That fairy? I never saw anything particularly stable about him. I wouldn't rule him out, Alex, certainly not on the say-so of that whore Susie Socks. Our little Davey, in an attempt to make up for a variety of shortcomings of one sort or another, and taking into account an upbringing that involved a beating every other day… well…”

“ Well, be that as it may, I just can't buy him as a mutilation murderer, Ben. He wasn't above getting his hands dirty in the small-change department, but murder, getting blood on his hands… I just don't see it with Pigsty, no. Of all the street transies in the area, he was at least concerned about good hygiene.”

“ Including oral?” Ben's joke fell flat.

“ And AIDS and other diseases, and yeah, that's what I mean. Hell, man, he couldn't stand to see blood or roadkill, much less kill someone. It just doesn't wash, him as the Queen of Hearts killer.”

“ Guess we'll know more after we bring him in for questioning,” Ben said, letting it drop.

Alex gave Gilreath another thought. Perhaps he had gone off the deep end, perhaps he'd become a Mr. Hyde, roaming the street by night, picking his prey-gay men known to him-choosing his moment and attacking them, cannibalizing them for some bizarre religious-fantasy experience understood only in the heart and the mind of the madman.

But somehow Alex doubted it.