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Jennifer's Murderer

Chapter Eight

The turn-of-the-century Victorian mansion had been overrun by a growing city. Now, it squatted on a meager quarter acre of hillside, surrounded by a rotting stone wall and brownstone tenements. Saplings hid its lower windows from view. A single dim light filtering through the trees was the only evidence Jennifer could see that the house hadn’t been abandoned altogether.

She hurried up the steps in front, hoping that Francis had called ahead, and that Ed was waiting for her. The house was part of the old way of doing things, a bridge between the brothel it had once been and a way-station for distressed employees of Miss Peugeot’s Secretarial Services. Francis had been talking about selling the property as her business evolved and her taste in girls leaned toward the independence and competence it took to survive modern hazards ranging from AIDS to the computer-aided watchfulness of the IRS. But for this terror-ridden night, it fulfilled its original purpose. A knock on the door brought Ed to the door with his old .38 revolver clutched in his right hand.

Ed went with the house. He, too, was a quality product beginning to wear with age. Ed was in his fifties, carrying too much weight about the middle and reluctant to wear the glasses he needed, but still more than an even match for most of the bad guys Francis dealt with from time to time. Jennifer gave the man a fierce hug and received a fatherly pat on the back in return. “Francis called,” the man said gruffly. “Girl, I hope you’re wrong about Cathy.”

Jennifer burst into tears and endured a bout of violent shudders. Ed closed the door and guided her into the living room. Antiques had been Francis’ obsession at one time, and a second justification for the safe house. The property itself was worth a fraction of its content.

Jennifer sat on the edge of an ornate couch. Ed poured her a drink despite her tender age and shoved it into her hands. “Force it down. Did it happen like Francis said? Is Cathy dead?”

Jennifer forced the searing liquid down as instructed and felt it settle into a pool of warmth in her stomach. “He had a skinny sword. There was blood on it.”

“Dimitri Carvelli had the sword?”

She nodded again.

“You girls should know better that to go out on your own,” he admonished. “Francis knows what the hell she’s doing. She said you stopped off at Wanda’s before you came here. Didn’t you bring her along?”

“She wouldn’t come. I couldn’t tell her about Cathy. She would have freaked.”

Ed went to the phone by the door. He dialed and held the receiver to his ear for long minutes. “She was shooting something,” Jennifer called out.

“Heroin?”

“I don’t know what it was for sure.”

Ed slammed the phone back down after several ominously quiet minutes. “How did you get here?”

“I got away with Cathy’s car, but the radiator was leaking and it overheated, and the headlights were broken. I borrowed Wanda’s car, but she wouldn’t come with me. Ed, go get her. Please?”

Ed tucked the gun in his belt. He went to a metal panel against one wall and began flipping switches to the house’s security system. “Don’t open a window or an outside door without letting me know. Until Francis can get help and have Dimitri stopped, we have to assume he’ll try to cover his tracks. Right now, that means you and Wanda. Get your butt upstairs. Take the back bedroom for the night. Stay put. If you’re hungry, raid the kitchen on the way up.”

She gave Ed another anxious hug.

“Lock your door,” Ed said, his anger softening, his hand dwelling on her shoulder. “There’s a loaded twenty-two caliber pistol in the nightstand, just like your own. Do you remember how to use it?”

Ed had showed her. At the time, it had seemed like such a crazy thing to have to learn how to do. “I remember.”

Jennifer went upstairs. She locked herself in the bedroom, showered and crawled into bed without bothering to search the dresser drawers for a negligee or robe. She curled in the middle of the old goose-down mattress and pulled the heavy quilt comforter over her head. She sobbed quietly to herself, racked with guilt for leaving Wanda behind and unable to exorcise the memory of Cathy’s scream.

In time, Ed tapped at the door. “Can I come in?” his muffled voice sounded. “You don’t have to get up. I’ve got a key.”

She opened her eyes to the darkness of the room. The door clicked and opened. Dim light from the hall washed across the wall. Ed sat on the edge of the bed and massaged the back of her neck with one hand. “How are you doing, kid?”

He knew how she was doing. He could feel her body tremble.

“The cops got a call for the Carvelli estate,” Ed said. “I don’t know how they’re going to handle it, except that nobody wants to see anyone get hurt unnecessarily. If Cathy’s still alive, they’ll get her help. They’ll go after Dimitri. It’s out of our hands.”

“And Wanda?”

“Francis sent one of the girls to check on Wanda. You and I get to hold down the fort here in case there’s further trouble.”

Jennifer couldn’t imagine the shape and form further trouble might take. She closed her eyes, concentrating on the sensation of Ed’s calloused hands kneading her back. “You’ve grown up, Jennifer,” he said after a time. “You’re hardly a kid anymore, and you’re a darn sight prettier than any of the others. Don’t you dare tell them that I told you that.”

She murmured her thanks and smiled, and with a gentle pat on the behind, Ed tucked in her blankets and left the room. Exhausted by her flight through the night, Jennifer fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

She awoke hours later to the bed shifting beneath her, and to cool air flooding across her body as her comforter was tossed aside. A heavy body straddled her, pinning her to the mattress. Sprawled on her back, naked, her eyes flew open in shock.

A hand slammed against her throat, cutting off both her breath and the scream that had gathered in her lungs. The dark eyes of a stranger burning with desperation hovered inches above her face. She had seen them only once before. How, she wondered, had he ever found her? How had he gotten past Ed?

His smile was the self-satisfied smile of a predator. He brought his right hand into view and a shiny blade snapped open, gleaming in the light from the table lamp she had left burning. Jennifer went as rigid as stone.

“It was Evelyn wasn’t it?” Dimitri growled at her. “The blonde you was with? Was it Evelyn?”

“It was Cathy!” she gasped defiantly through his hand clutching her throat. Her hands were free. She clawed for his eyes, but she couldn’t quite reach, and he only renewed his grip on her throat, cutting off her breath until she clutched at the bed-clothing instead.

His smile went away. The tip of the knife went to her face. “It was Evelyn, you lying little bitch. It had to be Evelyn.”

The door behind Dimitri creaked open. Ed stepped into view, his face drained of color, his chest wet with his own blood. Jennifer’s eyes widened in shock as he raised his revolver and slowly squeezed off a shot.

The bullet was a fraction of an inch off its target. Dimitri’s right ear vanished in a stinging spray of blood. His shriek of pain mingled with Jennifer’s own scream of panic. They rolled in opposite directions.

Ed’s aim followed Dimitri. He fired a second and a third time. Dimitri rolled away bellowing rage and threw his knife end for end, silencing the revolver, but gasping for air as he clutched bullet wounds in his arm and side.

Jennifer leaped to her feet and ran to Ed, smearing blood down the side of her body as she eased him to the floor. She reached down to pull out the knife, but Ed shook his head frantically. He opened his mouth to speak, but it, too, was full of blood. Even as she watched, his eyes rolled up into his skull and he sighed.

But he was still breathing and Jennifer promised herself that she’d not panic and get herself killed. Dimitri was staggering to his feet, bleeding and dazed. She fled into the bathroom and gathered her clothes. She went through the connecting door into the adjacent bedroom, and only then remembered that she had bypassed the opportunity to fetch the pistol Ed had given her and shoot Dimitri.

It was too late to backtrack. Besides, Ed had already shot him up pretty badly. She paused and listened to the sounds filter through the walls, but heard nothing except the sound of her own shuddering breathing and the roar of her pulse in her ear. She dressed in the dark as fast as her shaking hands would allow.

Jennifer fled the house. She went out the back way through dingy hallways, setting off the alarms as she went. She circled around front to Wanda’s car and leaped inside. There was nothing she could do for Ed except to call Francis. She had nowhere to go to make the phone call except to her own apartment. She drove like a maniac, hoping desperately that Ed was okay and that he had put an end to Dimitri’s short but horrid reign of terror.

Jennifer parked in the back of her duplex and hurried up the back stairs, turning on lights through her second floor apartment on her way to the phone. Francis was waiting for her at the other end of the line. In a quavering tone of voice, she told Francis what had happened.

“I’ll put in a 911 for Ed,” Francis said in a curiously calm tone of voice, “But we have to leave the city until this is settled. It would be safer to leave the state entirely. Do you have your plastic with you?”

Jennifer’s plastic consisted of an Illinois driver’s license that showed her to be eighteen and a VISA card issued in her name. “What do you want me to do?”

“Jennifer, go home. You know what to do once you get there. Do you think you can handle the responsibility?”

It had always shocked her that Francis should treat her as an equal, better even than most of the older girls in her employ, even though she had said that she never wanted Jennifer to earn a living in the same way. “Yes, I can do that,” she said.

Francis hung up gently. Jennifer refused to put the phone down until she went over a mental list of all she had to do. She then set the handset in place and packed necessary clothing. She cleaned the room of anything of personal value and put it all in one suitcase. And she took her chrome-plated twenty-two caliber, six-shot revolver, the one Ed had given her last Christmas.

Lightning flashed in the sky driving west to the interstate. A brief rain came and went. She left the lightning glowering in the huddled thunder clouds in her rear view mirrors, hoping that Wanda wouldn’t be too angry for having taken her car. Three hours later, before the sun had cleared the receding bank of storm clouds in the east, she had crossed the Mississippi River into Iowa and rented a motel room for the day.

She had caught some sleep at the safe house, but she needed a few more hours rest to clear her head. For a time, she lay sobbing in a bed too hard for comfort while a hot and misty day brightened outside. It was over now, she tried to tell herself. Ed had shot Dimitri dead. Even if Dimitri was still alive, she had seen him bleeding. How could he ever hope to track her down so badly hurt? She managed to doze thinking that Francis would straighten everything out as she slept. Cathy and Ed would have been taken to the hospital hours ago. They, too, would be sleeping now, healing. And Dimitri Carvelli would be in jail. Only in the nightmares that haunted her in her sleep did Dimitri wander the darkness, looking for her with his knife clutched in his fist, twisting it, and flicking cold, evil light into her eyes.

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