Carnage: Short Story Read Online Free PDF Page A

pleated slacks and a white shirt and looked like one of the employees who were around the motel doing odd jobs.
    Except he was holding a gun.
    As soon as Pearl looked into his eyes, she knew who he was. Not only that. It was also obvious that he knew who she was. Her legs went rubbery. Fedderman or Sal, or whoever’s shift it was, should have seen the man enter her room.
    But she knew her motel-room door couldn’t be watched all the time.
    “No one saw me come in,” her visitor said, reading her mind. “I entered this morning with the maid and stayed.” He used a foot to lift the skirt on the bed and revealed the maid’s dead arm and hand.
    “Now what?” Pearl asked, in a wavering voice not quite her own, wondering if she could reach her beach bag and Glock before the killer could react.
    She decided it was too risky.
    “Listen,” she said, thinking she might brave it out. “I’m—”
    He stepped closer and punched her in the stomach. So fast. No one would have had time to react, to stop the punch.
    Struggling to breathe, Pearl dropped to her knees. He produced a large role of duct tape, but he didn’t tape her in his usual fashion. While she was still paralyzed and breathless from the punch, he taped her arms to her sides, her hands to the outside tops of her thighs. Then he taped her ankles and knees.
    She was breathing through her nose with effort now, wondering if she’d be able to scream. He smiled at her, knowing what she was thinking, and a wide rectangle of tape was slapped over her lips. More tape over her mouth, then wound around the back of her neck and head. No scream was going to erupt from her. It was all she could do to keep calm and breathe.
    He rolled her under the bed then, as if she were a log, and she found herself lying shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, with the dead maid. She saw the glint of the maid’s bulging eye and knew the woman had been strangled, which was why there was no blood. Except for their two bodies, it was tidy under the bed.
    Pearl knew that audacious as it was, this had all been planned, and it was working. That scared the hell out of her.
    A few minutes later, she thought she heard the door to her room open and close, but couldn’t be sure.
     
     
    “Where the hell is Pearl?” Quinn asked, standing outside the motel’s cocktail lounge. They had a clear view of the beach. It was late in the day but sunbathers still lounged, children still splashed, bodybuilders still strutted, lovers still used the cover of the incoming waves to grope each other. A larger than usual swell assaulted the beach and destroyed a sand castle.
    Sal shrugged. “She left the beach more than half an hour ago. I looked in her room. She’s not there, and that big cloth bag she carries like a purse is gone.”
    “Maybe she drove out to get something to eat,” Fedderman suggested. He’d been assigned to watch Pearl after Sal, and suspected she had deliberately given him the slip. She was like that, tended to go off on her own. The only one who might buck Quinn.
    “She would have alerted us to that,” Quinn said. He glanced at his watch. “She’s been gone at least half an hour with no contact. It doesn’t make sense.”
    “She’s not on the beach,” Sal said. “She’s supposed to tell us before she goes there.” Sal looked thoughtful. “Besides, her swimming suit is there in her room. Hanging over the shower rod in the bathroom and drying out.”
    No one said anything for a long time. Fedderman had been the last one to see Pearl enter her room.
    “Jesus!” Quinn finally said. “If—”
    He was interrupted by the rasping of his cell phone. He wrested it from his pocket and looked at it, prepared to say Pearl’s name. But it wasn’t Pearl on the phone.
    It was the Del Moray Police department.
    “This is—”
    “I know who you are,” Quinn said. “Is—”
    “And I know who you are. At least I was told. Detective Frank Quinn from New York?”
    “Yes.