The Dead Caller from Chicago

Forty-seven

Robinson had no enclosed rear porch; his back door opened out to the world, where everyone could see. It didn’t matter. I smashed the glass with Leo’s gun, reached in, and undid the bolt.

A wrong, faint smell hit me as soon as I stepped inside. It was gasoline. Two red five-gallon plastic jugs rested on the hall floor, and several books of matches lay on a little shelf above them. In a sick instant, I understood. Robinson had planned to come back, probably at lunchtime, to destroy every bit of evidence against him.

Especially Amanda, who could finger him as a kidnapper.

The thought chilled. I started running through the house.

The bungalow had the exact same floor plan as Leo’s. The back bedroom was just off to my right. The bed was made. He’d not kept her there.

I hurried through the kitchen, to the front of the house. The dining room, the living room, and the little alcove room behind the front porch were sparsely furnished with out-of-date blond maple furniture, a sofa with a grease mark where Robinson had rested his head, and a wire magazine rack. A television sat on a black glass corner unit, directly opposite the sofa. She wasn’t there.

The bedroom off the dining room was Robinson’s. Unlike the front rooms, his room was a mess. Clothes lay scattered about, and the bed was unmade. He’d seen no point in neatening a room he was going to burn.

I ran into the kitchen and stopped. Next to a sink mounded up with dirty dishes, two glasses smeared with fresh milk residue sat on the counter. Two people had drunk from those glasses just that morning.

“Amanda!” I yelled. “Amanda!”

I ran down the basement stairs. Unlike Leo’s, which had been simply divided into a main area and his walled-off office, Robinson’s basement was divided into a rat’s nest of small rooms. Each of the doors was closed.

It was the painting, though, that gave me an instant’s hope. It was propped up across the washtubs. Water dripped slowly from the faucet, and a wet sponge lay dropped on the floor. Some of the lavender and green and pink had been sponged enough to smear, but not enough to reveal. The back of my neck started to tingle. There was no telling what direction his rage might have taken if he’d kept sponging and seen there was nothing underneath.

“Amanda!”

The first door hid a furnace, a water heater, and a workbench piled with tools. The second room had once been a coal bin but now held shelving jammed with old lamps, pots and pans, and an electric makeup mirror. Robinson must have been married once, to a woman who’d left him and the lamps and the pots and the pans behind.

The third door was locked. I beat on it with my fist, then stopped to listen. No noise came from within. I shouted her name and tugged on the door, but the lock was strong. I put my shoulder to it. Still the door wouldn’t yield. I backed up and ran at it slightly hunched, hitting it with my right shoulder just above the lock. The door shuddered on its hinges and broke loose.

She lay on her back on a filthy camp cot. Her ankles and wrists were bound with plastic wire ties, her mouth and eyes covered with silver tape. Her hair was matted. She wore the clothes she’d worn to the turret. Blood had crusted over a small cut above the tape covering her left eye.

“Amanda,” I said.

For one horrible instant she did nothing, and I thought she was dead. I touched her cheek, afraid to do more.

She made to turn her head away. She didn’t want to hear or feel anything.

“Amanda,” I said louder, looking around for something to cut the wire ties.

Her forehead wrinkled as she tried to shut out the sound.

I ran to the workbench in the furnace room, pushed at the pile of tools, and found a wire cutter. Hurrying back, I tore at the tape covering her eyes. She did not wince, for she did not feel the pain. Her pupils were dilated, giant black holes of fear. Leo’s eyes had been like that right after he shot Wozanga, cartoon eyes of shock and horror.

I pulled the tape from her mouth, and she began gasping, sucking in the sudden new air in ragged bursts.

“You’re safe,” I said. “You’re safe.”

She saw and she did not. I cut the plastic ties at her wrists.

“You’re safe,” I said again.

Her chest was heaving in a fury now, desperate to breathe deeply.

I knelt to cut away the ties on her ankles. She’d fall if she stood. I rubbed her ankles, then helped her stand. I had to get her to a hospital.

“You’re safe.” It was all I could think to say.

She said nothing, looked nowhere except straight ahead. She was an automaton, traumatized zombielike in everything except breathing. Her lungs still heaved, fast.

“Work with me now, Amanda,” I said. “A step, and another, out to the Jeep and away from here.”

She took a step, and then another.

The front door creaked open above our heads.

I froze, held my breath. She did not. She kept shuffling forward, breathing fast and loud. She wasn’t aware that Robinson had come home.

Frantic, I grabbed her shoulder to stop her and looked around for the revolver. I’d used it to smash the back-door glass and kept it in my hand as I’d raced to search the house, but I must have laid it down somewhere.

I raised my forefinger to my lips. “Be absolutely quiet,” I whispered.

Her lungs wheezed, in and out.

His footsteps crossed above our heads. He couldn’t have seen the broken back door yet.

The gun. I had to find the gun. I dropped to my knees to search the floor.

She tensed, her breathing coming in shorter, staccato bursts. She’d heard at last; she knew those footsteps. Her kidnapper had come back. I stood up and put my arm around her.

He stopped, above our heads, and in one sick instant I knew why. A cold draft of March air from the shattered back-door window had hit him.

“Son of a bitch,” he shouted. His footsteps thundered toward the back of the house.

I took a last fast look. The gun was nowhere.

He pounded down the stairs.

Amanda screamed.

I grabbed the wire cutters off the cot and ran out of the tiny room. I caught him just as he stepped onto the concrete floor. He had a gun in his hand, but I’d surprised him. He was holding it low, down by his hip. I stabbed the tip of the cutters into the hard bone above his left eye. He howled, flailing at me, and fell to the floor. Something clattered out of his hand. His gun.

I kicked at it, sent it skittering across the cement. Shrieking like nothing human, Robinson got up to his knees and crawled after it, a blinded wild beast. Blood pulsed from the ripped skin above his eye, down onto the floor.

I caught up to him and kicked at his head. His elbows gave way and his forehead crashed down on the cement. He lay on his belly, howling, struggling to wrap both forearms around his head. I kicked at his ribs until he lowered his arms, and then I kicked at his ears and his cheeks until he quit howling and his arms fell lifeless alongside his body.

I grabbed Amanda’s hand and dragged her past the lifeless man.

He moved. I turned to look. He’d pushed himself up to his knees, but he could not see through the bloody pulp that was his face. I tugged her up the stairs, opened the back door, and pushed her out into the cold.

“No!” he screamed from down below, and the gun fired. He’d found his gun; he’d find the stairs.

I reached down, picked up one of the red plastic jugs, and twisted off its black cap. Robinson had staggered into view at the base of the stairs, howling like nothing human. A shot rang out; something thudded on the wall behind me. He was firing blind. Surely he could not see.

I sloshed some of the foul liquid down the stairs and then threw the whole jug down at him as he moved his gun hand to shoot again.

He screamed as he heard me strike the match. “Noooo!” he wailed.

He fired again, but the bullet ricocheted off something in the basement.

The flame burned tiny at the tip of my fingers. I touched it to the others, and the whole packet flared. I threw it down the stairs. It landed on a wood step halfway down. For a moment it sputtered, benign. Then it found the rest of the little river of gasoline and it roared into full life, hurtling flames down into the basement. He screamed.

I kicked the other, closed jug down the stairs and ran from the hell I’d unleashed.