Drop Dead Beautiful 31: Kill If You Will

August 2nd, 2007 at 04:40am Michael Conniff 2

  The Argyle Hunting and Shooting Club was the biggest building beside the lodge in all of Bighorn Ranch, but even so it was not so easy to find it in the dark of night, even with the map and pocket compass Ozzie had given to all of us. Everything was as plain as the nose on my face if I could have seen the nose on my face, but I moved roughly north-by-northwest in a night without the benefit of stars or moon or overt man-made light. There were pockets of light on Bighorn Ranch but they were so far apart I didn’t see how you could get from Point A to Point B without a flashlight or a guide. Ozzie had given me a flashlight, too, but I was afraid to use it because bad things could go bump in the night.

 I stumbled upon a sign that said “Argyle Hunting and Shooting Club” with an arrow pointing up a hill leading to other signs with arrows. Ozzie had given me one of Dr. Melville’s guns, and I knew how to use it, but I was alone because if this was about brute force than my side was probably going to lose in a blowout. I was banking on the investment bankers like Charles Evans, and the lawyers like Bruckman, men of substance who liked their crime clean and white-collar.

I had beaten the O’Kells again, and all I had to do now was to collect.

The Argyle Hunting and Shooting Club proper was black as night, with wings and floors set at elaborate angles against each other like building blocks. The front door had been left open, like someone had left in a hurry, and I went inside with my flashlight on and my gun pointing into the darkness. It was quiet inside, but behind the front counter I found a switch that threw on all the lights – then it was so bright I couldn’t see anything at first. I put down my flashlight on the counter and shaded my eyes against the glare until I could see what looked almost like a bowling alley behind a plexiglass floor-to-ceiling window. There were six stalls separated from each other by walls, and unmistakeable targets on some kind of pulley system with bull’s-eyes on them about as far away as the bowling pins would be. The targets were all untouched at the far end of the alley, and ready for the carnage that came with a new day.

I heard something that sounded like a muffled shout behind me and I turned around. Then I heard it again behind a door marked “Simulation” – and then I heard it again. I opened the door and closed it behind me and I was a blind man in a pool of darkness. I didn’t move until my eyes made their adjustments and I could see a reddish light from an EXIT sign in what looked to be a haze of smoke toward the end of the hall.
With the gun in both hands like Ozzie had shown me, I moved forward toward the reddish light and the smoke. I thought of calling for backup, the way they did on television shows, but I was afraid to make a sound.

 Then I heard the sound again coming from beyond the reddish light.

 “Amanda,” I said.

 I heard the sound again and I moved forward toward it again. 

 The gunshot whistled past my ear close enough for me to hear the wheeeeee before I hit the deck. The flashlight fell to the floor and switched on next to my knee and another gunshot blew it to smithereens. A piece of hard plastic shrapnel from the flashlight dug into my calf and it took everything I had not to scream. I rolled into the next hall hallway like this was a fire and felt the blood running from my calf into my socks.

 He was coming for me. I could hear him.

 I figured I could fire back before he found me. I ducked my head back around the wall and fired as he popped out into the hallway. He popped back in then back out and I fired again – but something was wrong – I was firing at a Jack-in-the-box with a towel on its head that showed no signs of firing back. It was a target, an illusion, a piece of cardboard in a shooting gallery.

 When the next shot came it came from low and at an angle from the other side of the hall and it blew away the corner of the wall about an inch from my head. I fell backwards, found the knob of a door that I opened and then closed behind me. 

 It looked like a kitchen. I kept moving through it into a bedroom and more fun house figures popped out of the walls like this was Coney Island and I had to impress my date. There was a fireman holding a child…then a police officer holding up a gun and his badge…then another bad guy in a turban. A police siren went off and I kept backing away from the door I came in because now somebody was opening it. A big figure with a big head opened the door and I fired right into the gut – but the only thing I hit was another cardboard terrorist with a turban painted on.

 I tripped over something and fell backwards and drooped the gun and scrambled up onto my feet with the gun so fast I was out of the bedroom and into the cockpit of a fake airliner with my back against the dashboard.

A huge looming man not made of cardboard followed me in holding a gun by his side that he was starting to raise and point at me.

“You’re fucked,” the man said.

“You have a way with words,” I said.

“Fuck you.”

Dominic Picatti raised the gun so it was pointing directly at my gut.

“Who killed Sam Albright?” I said. “Or did you have to do it yourself?”

“Makes no difference,” he said.

“Same with Skip Taylor?” I said.

“Same with you,” he said.

 Somebody whistled high enough and loud enough behind him that I could hear it through the police siren. Picatti turned to look while he kept the gun on me. Then I heard a crack from behind him and then the crack of his gun going off and shattering the windshield of the fake jet behind me where I was supposed to meet my fate. Picatti’s gun fired twice more into the wall before Picatti fell in slow motion, with any sound of it lost in the siren, and then he went down limp, the way a snake charmer’s rope goes limp when the charm has worn off.

Behind the extra-large and extra-lifeless body of Dominic Picatti I could see someone holding the gun in both hands just the way I had been taught to. He came forward with the gun still pointed at Picatti and kicked him twice to make sure he would not be moving before he picked up his gun.

 “Clean,” Ozzie said.

 Ozzie took a bedsheet from the fake bedroom and ripped it into a tourniquet but my calf was still bleeding and every step hurt like a son of a bitch. He found the button for the siren in the hall and he pushed it off with one hand while he held me up with the other. There was too much silence then but not the sound I had heard coming in, the sound I assumed had to be Amanda. In a moment, in the silence, we could hear the moaning of a woman or a girl coming from the far end of the hall and that was where we found her, on the floor in a closet with mops and brooms and the overwhelming smell of disinfectant.
 Amanda Madison was Ellie Mae Clampitt given up for dead.

She still had her hair in pigtails but a dirty rag was made into a blindfold over her eyes. Her red-checked shirt was ripped into rags and her skin had faded to an awful and unspeakable paste. I’m not sure if the black tooth from her costume had faded away or if all of her teeth were just fading to black.

Entry Filed under: Aspen, Drop Dead Beautiful, Mystery