Читать онлайн «The Impaler»

Автор Грегори Фьюнаро

INSIDE A KILLER’S LAIR

Markham felt a cool breeze rush past, and after a moment heard a clanging sound coming from another part of the cellar. He cracked open his eyes and quickly scanned his body. He was tied up, but not down to anything; he could roll over onto his back if he wished. Yes, he had to be in the Impaler’s cellar—the cement walls, the trickling sound of the blood and water running down the floor drain.

Footsteps approaching again and Markham shut his eyes—another cool breeze and the sense of movement behind him. His mind spun furiously; he was starting to panic, felt as if any second he would open his eyes and try to bolt—when all of a sudden he felt the Impaler’s arms slipping underneath his torso.

Markham’s muscles tensed. He thought surely the Im-paler had to have felt them tense, too—but a moment later he was being lifted off the workbench.

I’m to be next, he thought. Whatever the Impaler did to the others before he skewered them he intends to do to me …

Books by Gregory Funaro

THE SCULPTOR

THE IMPALER

Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

THE

IMPALER

GREGORY

FUNARO

For John Scognamiglio and Michael Combs

O mighty lord! O exalted god of battle!

Thou art brilliant in the bright heavens!

Let me proclaim thy greatness!

Let me bow in humility before thee!

—Ancient Babylonian prayer

Prologue

Criminal defense attorney Randall Donovan had really stepped in it this time—was in the shit way over his head and sinking fast. The man in the ski mask would not answer, would not even listen to him.

“I’m begging you!” Donovan screamed. “This hasn’t gone so far that there’s no turning back. I don’t know who you are—who your people are—but your beef isn’t with me.

I swear, whatever they’re paying you, I’ll double it!”

Nothing. Only the flashing strobe light above his head; only the deafening pump of eighties music and occasionally what sounded like power tools coming from the next room. He recognized the tune from way-back-when in law school—Depeche Mode or New Order or some other shit band like that—but he couldn’t remember the name of the song or the band that sang the cover; didn’t even know there was a cover until he met the man in the ski mask. For the man in the ski mask had been cranking the two versions back to back for days, and now Randall Donovan knew all the lyrics by heart.

“How could you think I ’d let you get away?

When I came out of the darkness and told you who you are. ”

He was in the man’s cellar, naked and strapped to a chair. Of that much he was sure. The room was cold, the chair soft and cushiony like a dentist’s chair. Indeed, when he first woke up, Donovan thought for a moment that he was at the dentist’s—his senses dull, his vision cloudy as the steady pulse of the strobe light brought him slowly back to consciousness. Then the smell hit him. Two smells, really. A bitter, chemically smell—close, in his nostrils—and another underneath it: something foul, like rotting garbage.