The Undertaker

“Stay there,” I told her as I inched forward, reaching out, navigating through the dark room with my fingertips. Fortunately, these old houses were not large. I bumped into the kitchen table and then my hand found the counter top and the stove on the far side. To my right, the darker, rectangular shape of a doorway emerged from the gloom. I figured it led to the front rooms. I took two steps toward the door when my foot bumped into something large and soft lying in the middle of the floor. I lost my balance and fell forward on my hands and knees.

“Are you all right?” Sandy quickly asked.

“Yeah. Have you got a match?”

She rummaged around inside her big shoulder bag. “Here. You want them?”

“No. I don't want to move. Light one, but cup your hand around it.”

She struck the match across the emery paper once, twice, then a third time before it lit, but by then I had already guessed what was lying next to me.

“Oh my God!” she said as she dropped the match on the tile floor. Its dim yellow glow quickly went out, but not soon enough. In that split second I saw a dead, battered, and half-naked body lying on its back, tied to a kitchen chair. The face was bloody and swollen beyond recognition, its eyes staring up at the ceiling, but I knew it was Doug.

Sandy had seen it too. She quickly turned away and I heard the sound of gagging and coughing as she threw up in the corner.

There was nothing to say. I took the matches from her hand and lit another, forcing myself to take a closer look as a towering rage grew inside me. They had used coat hangers to tie his legs and arms to the chair and the wires had cut deep into his skin as he struggled. There was a kitchen towel jammed in his mouth and enough bruises and burn marks to show that Doug had died slow and hard. Worse still, there was a second body in the room, sprawled on the floor near the sink. It was a woman. She was naked and as badly beaten as Doug was. Her face was turned away from me, but I knew it was Sharon. It took a real sadist to beat and torture two people like that and a real twisted mind to order it. Not that Tinkerton would have come here and gotten his own fingers bloody. He preferred rubber gloves, a clean, white surgical gown, and classical music when he worked, so the kitchen of an old brownstone would be far too crude for his tastes. That was the moment I knew I could never rest until I killed the man, with my bare hands if I had to.

I was trembling, my legs shaking, but I forced myself to my feet. “Come on,” I said hoarsely as I took Sandy by the hand and dragged her out the door.

She seemed to be in a daze as she looked back to the bodies. “You… you aren't going to leave them in there like that, are you?”

“There's nothing we can do for them now and if we don't get out of here we'll be next.” I pulled out my shirttail and wiped off the doorknob and the wall where she touched it. We turned and ran down the rear stairs hand-in-hand, trying to put the horror of the kitchen behind us. When we reached the rear gate, I heard Sandy's pained voice call to me as she tugged on my arm. “Slow down, damn it. If I fall, I really will break my butt!”

She was right. I slowed down and we stopped at the gate to take some deep breaths and clear our heads. “We'll head back downtown,” I told her. “I need some time to think.”

Her hand was still gripped in mine as we turned east up the alley and jogged slowly away. Side-by-side, our footsteps were finally in synch as they splashed and echoed off the old, worn asphalt. We had gone no more than a hundred feet when I heard the unmistakable “Pop! Pop! Pop!” of a silenced pistol firing at us from the shadows further up the alley. I heard one shot, then another and a third, as the slugs smacked into the heavy wooden garage door behind us like a bass drum. I didn't stop to think. I wrapped my arms around Sandy, picked her up, and dived blindly over a row of trashcans that stood against the brick wall to our left. The three shots had not come all that close, but I knew there were more bullets where those came from.

I twisted in the air as I went over the cans and landed on my back with Sandy on top. I got a sharp elbow in the ribs for my trouble, but I kept rolling until I had her jammed up against the wall and she couldn't get up, which was good. I turned my head and looked out through a gap in the cans. Across the alley, the dim outline of a man stepped from the shadows two houses ahead of us. I couldn't make out his features, but he had a pistol in his hand with a fat, ugly silencer screwed onto the barrel. A silencer? That ruled out the cops and the Neighborhood Watch Committee.