Copyright © 2008 Gary Madden
All rights reserved, Wild Child Publishing.
Flatly's car sat behind Fun Times, still ticking while the engine cooled. Solan took a moment to respect his reporter's instinct before deciding what to do. In spite of the concern he felt for the unwary prostitute, he wanted this to play out just right--the details had to be in order. He didn't want Flatly exonerated through circumstance or to have the cops push him out of the loop. Both would choke the life out of his story, and he'd worked too hard to wind up recounting a post-arrest police debriefing. He wanted to witness the whole thing, get the chilling details, and witness the cops netting Flatly.
He crossed the alley and made his way up the steps to Fun World's employee entrance. The door wasn't locked, and inside the building glowed with the half-light of overhead fluorescents. He stepped into a smallish storeroom fitted with a time clock and shelves stacked with cans of pizza sauce and cleaning supplies; standard fare for any restaurant, he imagined. The only abnormal thing about this particular establishment was the fact a serial killer owned it--Solan was convinced of it! The flat monotone of Flatly's voice drew him deeper into the building.
Solan took the pistol from his pocket and eased the hammer back. He moved through the storeroom toward a closed door. A sliver of light outlined the door, spilling out onto the storeroom floor from the office beyond. Flatly had stopped talking, and Solan heard the muted shuffling of motion. He debated what to do next--whether to burst in or to call the cops and wait. The two options bounced around his skull frustratingly; the man breaking the story to the world shouldn't be confused at this crucial moment, and the uncertainty made him feel impotent. That impotence could only be overcome by action. He drew a spine-stiffening breath, took the door's handle, and plunged in.
Just inside the threshold of the small room, Solan stepped onto the crisp plastic of a blood-spattered, blue tarp. Two steps away hung a woman, or, more accurately, the remains of a woman. She hung like a broken marionette, dangling from lines tethering her to the ductwork in the ceiling. Her head lolled to one side, and the gag in her mouth might have stifled her cries, but it couldn't choke back the terror she must have felt in her last moments of life. The empty death-stare of her lifeless eyes conveyed that emotion flawlessly, forcing Solan to draw a disgusted intake of breath in spite of his jaded sensibilities. Blood seeped from a ragged wound across her throat, and a thick torrent of blood saturated the front of her shirt to the point that its original color couldn't be discerned. Her sleeves and pant legs, also saturated, clung to her skin, and each extremity ended in a bloodied stump. Solan fought the urge to vomit. Nothing in his career had prepared him for this scene.
The corpse swayed slightly, and for the first time Solan spotted the pink, ropey tail curled on the floor beneath it. A blood grizzled snout and a pair of glassy black eyes peered over the girl's shoulder. The rat suit...it had to be Flatly! The man's depravity was unique. Solan raised his gun.