999_ Twenty-Nine Original Tales of Horror and Suspense - Al Sarrantonio [149]
Bonte, Paone thought in slow dread. Dario Bonte—Vinchetti’s only rival …
“And the police were all too happy to hand you over to our goodly employer,” Willet continued. “Half of the state police are on Don Bonte’s payroll … and this way, the suffering taxpayers are spared the cost of a trial.”
Paone felt like he was about to throw up his heart.
The nurse’s breasts shook when she giggled. “But we’re not just going to kill you—”
“We’ve got some interesting games to play before we do that,” Willet said. “See, our job was to make sure you survived until Junior could get here—”
A door clicked open, and then the nurse reeled back the curtain to reveal a typical basement. But that was not all Paone saw. Standing in the doorway before some steps was a frightfully muscular young man with short dark hair, chiseled features and—
Aw sweet Jesus holy shit—
—and a crotch so packed it looked like he had a couple of potatoes in his pants.
“Three guesses why they call him Junior,” the nurse giggled on.
“And three more guesses as to what happens next,” Willet said. Now he had shouldered a high-end Sony Betacam. “You see, Mr. Paone, your boss may own the market share for child pornography, but our boss owns a share of the rest. You know, the really demented stuff. And as a gut-shot amputee, you’ll be able to provide us with a very special feature, don’t you think?”
Paone vomited on himself when Junior began to lower his jeans. The nurse jammed a needle into Paone’s arm, not enough sodium amytal to knock him out, but just enough to keep him from putting up much of a fight. Then the nurse took off his restraints and flipped him over.
“Don Bonte doesn’t like child pomographers,” she said.
The stitches across Paone’s abdomen began to pop, and he could hear Junior’s footsteps approach the bed.
“As they say,” Willet enthused: “Lights, camera, action!”
P. D. Cacek
THE GRAVE
I admit, with some head-hanging, that I had to he pointed in P. D. Cacek’s direction. One of the main reasons for the existence of my acknowledgments page at the front of this book is to pay thanks to certain people for “giving” me writers that would have slipped through the cracks in my brain (there are many such). For some reason Trish’s work (she told me I could call her Trish), which has apparently caught fire recently (a novel, Night Prayers, has been compared to Nancy Collins’s Sonja Blue books, and there is also a story collection, Leavings), had escaped me. She is one of those writers whom Charles L Grant would have lovingly tended in the garden of his Shadows series, and her clear head and careful, mood-evocative prose, immediately evident when I read “The Grave,” were a breath of fresh air.
If you don’t agree, you’re wrong.
It was as if someone had suddenly wrapped a thick layer of cotton around her. Things that had been ordinary and familiar became muted and removed.
If she hadn’t been so frightened she might have even laughed at the feeling. Not that it was an entirely unpleasant sensation.
She could still hear the birds singing in the thick, autumn-bright canopy above her and identify each sweet trill and warble, caw, churr, chirp and whistle. She could smell the moss and moisture from the stream as it gurgled through the shallows not twenty feet behind her and she could feel the whispered urgency of the wind reminding her that she really should be heading home for supper. These things were familiar. These things had accompanied her for the last fifteen years as she walked the wooded path to and from her position as Bryner Elementary School’s Head Librarian.
These things she heard and smelled and felt.
But she saw only the tiny grave.
The imaginary feel of cotton tightened around her.
For fifteen years she had walked that same path through the woods, had heard the same noises, felt the same seasonal changes, but until today she had never noticed it. Never saw