In The Falling Light Page 10

  Monica sat on the couch in the living room, their extravagant apartment soaring around her. From the other room Dean called, “Honey? Do you want a drink?

  Dean was a particular man, and very particular about Monica’s appearance. She had undergone a facelift and had her nose thinned, gotten the implants, and hit the gym five days a week; yoga, Pilates, spin classes. Dean was forever in the media, and a man of his status had a certain image to maintain. The lady in his life had to be stunning. Monica did it all willingly, wanting to please him, wanting to be that stunning woman he wanted, and she was. At twenty-eight, she was the center of attention at parties, blonde and long-legged, her chiseled and enhanced figure turning heads, and her photos frequently appeared in the society pages.

  After almost two years of marriage they had Ethan, but Monica was determined not to let the baby impact her looks any more than he had to, and she doubled her efforts, trimming back down in record time. Ethan was nearly three now, and despite their financial prowess, Dean wouldn’t hear of a nanny, except on a part time basis or during vacations. But like their maids, not a live-in. He believed a mother should raise her own children, which Monica came to realize suited her fine. Once all she thought about was shopping and fashion, jewelry and parties and exotic travel. But she found there was something with a much more powerful pull than all that. Her heart ached for their little boy, and she loved being a full-time mommy.

  A perfect life, and the kind of money to make all her dreams come true and more. After a while even the media left them alone, the scent of some other, more salacious scandal drawing off the hounds. Dean was sweet and thoughtful, and although at times he used what she called his “stern voice” with her, usually when she was being extra blonde as Dean put it, he had never once raised a hand to her.

  But then Monica found the box, and confronted him.

  Dean smiled, and punched her in the face so hard it fractured her nose and knocked out a tooth.

  The rattle of ice in a glass announced her husband’s return to the living room. He was dressed in jeans and loafers, wearing an expensive blue button up spattered with drops of blood. Monica’s blood.

  “Sure you don’t want anything?” He smiled that billion dollar smile.

  On the couch, where she had fallen after being hit, Monica could only stare at him, her vision still blurry and the thick taste of blood in her mouth. When she’d come storming into the living room with her accusation, it hadn’t occurred to her that Dean was just standing there in front of the couch, as if he had been waiting. She also hadn’t noticed that the couch was covered in plastic, that lots of the living room was covered in plastic. Monica tried to stand, found out she couldn’t. Dean walked to her with a look of concern on his face, setting his drink on the coffee table.

  “Does it hurt, sweetheart?” he asked. Then he hit her again, three fast blows, one to each eye and another to her already lumpy nose. Monica gurgled and blacked out.

  In the darkness, her mind saw the little cherry wood box, something a young woman might keep her precious keepsakes in. There it was, sitting on her vanity in the master bath. Not there by accident. Dean had decided that tonight was the night, and knew she would open it, that she would come demanding an answer. He knew her so very well, which was probably why he chose her to be Mrs. Cooper number four.

  A series of slaps brought her back to the living room, and she wheezed against her freshly re-broken nose, trying not to gag on the blood and a little hard object which had to be another tooth. Her eyes were swelling to slits. Dean was perched on the coffee table before her, leaning forward relaxed, elbows on his knees, still wearing that smile the TV loved so much. Another man sat in a chair a few feet away, looking at her with his head cocked, as if she was a curious zoo animal. Richie.

  “It’s been a nice four years, hasn’t it, honey?”

  Monica tried to shake her head, but knew if she did she would throw up and pass out again. If that happened, she knew she’d never wake up.

  “But people change, they get too comfortable, and then things get dull.”

  Monica gurgled something.

  “What’s that?” He leaned forward. “You have to speak up, sweetie.”

  She forced herself to lift her head. It helped her breathe better. “Evidence,” she said, her voice thick. “They’ll catch…you.”

  The billion dollar smile returned. “Oh, Monica, no they won’t.” He held up three fingers. “They never have. You’ll be no different.”

  She choked down a clot of blood, swallowing the tooth, and put her hands out to steady herself so she didn’t slump over on the plastic sheeting. “Evidence,” she repeated.

  Dean frowned and nodded, as if seriously considering it. Then his bright smile came back, bigger than ever. “Richie will see to that, like always.” Richie D’Agostino was ex-NYPD, a man who served as Dean’s driver and bodyguard. They had been together for years. Monica knew he was a former cop. She didn’t know he had spent half his career in crime scene investigation, and was a man who knew just what they would look for, and how to make it go away.

  “He did a perfect job with Darla and Piper. He’s got a wood chipper upstate.” Dean nodded to the man in the chair, and Richie tilted his head at the compliment. “Antoinette was even better, a tragic, unsolved street crime. What is this city turning into?” He sipped his drink. “Sure, I’ll take some serious heat, you being number four and all, but eventually it will all go away, just like the others.” He patted the cherry wood box, now resting beside where he sat on the coffee table.

  Panic was overtaking her, and Monica struggled to sit up, opening her mouth and letting out what should have been a scream, but was little more than a loud, “Gaaaaaah!”

  Dean and Richie laughed. “C’mon, you can do better than that!” Dean patted her knee. “Really let it rip.”

  She swayed, gripping her knees to keep from falling back.

  “Go ahead,” Dean said softly, the good humor suddenly gone from his voice and his eyes. “Scream. Scream like you’re about to be murdered. You know no one will hear you.”

  It was true. Their penthouse, occupying the entire uppermost level of their building, was sixty-nine floors above Manhattan’s streets. Dean owned the floor below them as well, and kept it empty. “For privacy,” he had said. Now she knew what he meant.

  “Nope, no one will hear you.” He raised an eyebrow. “Except maybe Ethan.”

  She went motionless at the mention of her toddler’s name, and it cleared her mind a little.

  “Oh yeah, wake him up with a scream. He can come out in his jammies, holding his bear, and get to watch what Daddy does to Mommy.”

  Despite being swollen, Monica’s eyes widened and she bared her teeth. “Don’t you…”

  Dean slapped her then, hard, rocking her head to the side. “Don’t ever tell me what to do, bitch.” Then he sat back, his relaxed demeanor falling instantly into place, his blue eyes sparkling with pleasure. He opened the cherry wood box with one hand, and reached for something in a hip pocket with the other.

  “Want to hear the best part of all this?”

  She couldn’t help but look again at the three slender fingers lying in the box, each in varying degrees of decay, each with a perfectly manicured and painted nail, and wearing an enormous diamond ring. She saw him pull out the big electrician’s snips.

  “The best part is that when we all get to hell, you have to serve me as slaves. Like a harem. Isn’t that great?”

  Monica saw the madness in his eyes, and suddenly wondered how he could have concealed it from everyone, from her, all this time. “Blinded by Love,” the Daily News said. Right. Dean leaned forward and reached for her left hand. Monica pulled it away and tucked it under her armpit. Her husband smiled patiently and reached for it again, but she squirmed and started to twist.

  “Richie, give me a hand, will you?” Then he burst into laughter. Richie snorted as well, and rose from his seat, plopping down beside her and gripping her wr
ist painfully, jerking the hand out and forcing her to straighten her arm. Dean grabbed her fingers and quickly isolated the one with the big diamond on it. The snips came in fast. Clip. The pain was blinding, and Monica did indeed scream, a high yowling which sprayed droplets of blood into her husband’s grinning face. She couldn’t help it, she screamed again. He tossed something into the little cherry wood box.

  Dean turned his head. “Uh-oh, is that a door I hear? Footie pajamas sliding over a marble floor?”

  Monica tensed and froze, straining to listen, forgetting her finger, her smashed nose, her broken teeth and blackened eyes.

  “I think,” Dean whispered, “that when you run off on vacation to wood chipper-land, you’ll take our little boy with you.”

  Confidence in a man is admirable. Blunt stupidity is not. Monica screamed again, but this time instead of a wail of agony, it was something primal, and her instincts told her body what to do. She lifted one knee high and drove her foot into Dean’s chest with such force it knocked him backwards off the coffee table in an ungraceful somersault. She snapped her head to the side and sank her teeth into Richie’s nose, biting down until it crunched. When his hands instinctively went up to push her away, Monica reached inside his jacket with her right hand, closed on the smooth grip of the black automatic he kept in a shoulder holster, and yanked it free. She didn’t wave it, didn’t threaten, just pushed the muzzle against his chest and blew his heart out with a single pull of the trigger.

  Dean was scrambling to his feet on the other side of the coffee table, still on all fours, the billion dollar smile gone and replaced by a look of surprised confusion. He saw her swing the pistol towards him, and the confusion turned to a wild rage.

  “Bitch…!”

  Monica was never able to remember how many times she pulled the trigger. Enough to make Dean’s face and most of his head disappear. The investigators said five, but who was counting.

  The media went crazy, and it was a global sensation for weeks. The story dominated print and television news outlets, true crime and celebrity entertainment programs, talk shows and the internet. Armies of journalists and the curious surrounded Monica’s building and hospital, and of course there was the police with an endless stream of questions. She was labeled both hero and fool.

  Monica fired Saul Kessler from her hospital bed, and by that time her husband’s lawyer was under investigation himself and needed an attorney of his own. She hired a firm of legal predators to deflect the book and movie deal offers, the demands for talk show appearances, and to ensure the District Attorney and the press saw her in the proper light - a victim who defended herself and her child against a monster and his henchman. The law firm also turned its considerable force to locking in Monica’s claim to Dean’s financial empire. Dean had never bothered with a pre-nuptial, since he had always known how the marriage would end.

  Monica got it all.

  She hired a private security agency. They surrounded her and Ethan with ex-mercenary and Special Forces types, the kind of men with little patience for pushy journalists or freak fans.

  Home within a week, she was back in the penthouse with Ethan, who thankfully hadn’t really been coming down the hall to Monica’s screams. That was just Dean’s game. The gunshots woke him, of course, and Monica learned something about herself. She had gone to him, battered and bleeding, and quietly put him back to bed, shushing him to sleep before calling the police.

  The best surgeons money could buy set her nose and reattached her finger – though it would remain stiff and out of sync with the others for the rest of her life – and they assessed the damage to her face. Appointments with more surgeons and dentists would follow.

  Monica was cleared of any wrong-doing within weeks, around the same time the families of Dean’s three murdered ex-wives brought civil suits against his estate. Monica’s lawyers were prepared for a battle, assuring her the families would get little, if anything, but she surprised them by directing immediate settlements, without negotiation. There was plenty of money. She also insisted on meeting personally with each family to express her own grief for their loss.

  For weeks Monica kept Ethan next to her in bed at night, feeling his small warmth against her, soothed by his steady breathing and the knowledge that children are resilient. He barely asked about his father. Now the penthouse was on the market, and Ethan had finally moved back to his own room. Her security people were on duty outside, and the media was under control. Monica was finally safe.

  At 2:00 am the pounding started on her bedroom door.

  It woke her up, a heavy, repetitive slamming on wood, and Monica sat up in bed, her heart thumping. She could hear the door rattle in the frame.

  “Monicaaaa!”

  She covered her mouth to hold in the scream.

  “Monica! Open the door, bitch!” Dean’s voice.

  The knob rattled. She didn’t even remember locking the bedroom door. It was something she never did, in case Ethan got up in the night and wanted to come to her. More pounding, and her dead husband calling to her from the other side.

  “Monicaaaa! Come out, come out!” There was no doubt. She knew that voice.

  The cordless was in the living room. Her cell phone was in her pocketbook on the front hall table. The security men outside the penthouse in the elevator lobby would hear it, wouldn’t they? The door shuddered, and she thought she heard a crack.

  There was no way, she tried telling herself. It was a nightmare. It was a hallucination from painkillers. But she knew she was awake, and had stopped taking the painkillers weeks ago. Monica threw on a robe and slowly approached the door, still covering her mouth. She smelled something foul as she neared it, something wet and moldy.

  “Sweetheart,” Dean said, his voice no longer a yell, “I really need to see you. Come out and play with me.”

  Monica wanted to scream, wanted to run, hide in a closet, wish it all away. When he dragged his nails down the wood and chuckled, she thought her sanity would snap. She started backing up.

  “Mommy?” A little voice, distant and muffled. “Mommy?” A tiny sob. “Mommy, I’m have a nimare!”

  Her breath caught and she froze in place. On the other side of the door, Dean’s voice crooned, “Oh, it’s our little man, Monica. Don’t worry, Daddy will go get him.”

  In seconds Monica snapped off the lock and jerked open the bedroom door. A wave of damp filth washed over her and she gagged, holding onto the frame. The lights of Manhattan, dazzling beyond the wall of windows off to the right of the living room, revealed what was before her. Dean stood several feet away, wearing the blood-soaked clothes he’d had on the night Monica killed him. His face - which should have been missing after five close-range hits from a 9mm – was back, though dark and starting to decay. His eyes gleamed with a dirty, bronze light.

  “Hi, baby,” he said, smiling that billion dollar smile. Something white and wriggling moved in a rotted open cavity in his throat. Monica saw that he wasn’t alone, either. Silhouetted against the panoramic windows, three figures stood side by side, little more than shades. A collective sound came from them, a soft moan. It sounded like pain to her. She didn’t need to recall their photos to recognize Darla, Piper and Antoinette.

  Dean looked back at his former wives, then at Monica. “Don’t you remember what I said? They’re mine. They serve me in hell.” His grin widened. “And so will you.”

  “Mommy?” Ethan’s voice was more urgent, his bedroom just two doors off the living room. Monica sidestepped the corpse to get to him, but Dean was quick, and darted in front of her. Up close she thought she would vomit from the smell.

  Her husband shook his head slowly. “I told you Daddy would get him.”

  The trio of wives moaned, swaying but moving no closer.

  Dean pulled the electrician’s cutters from his hip pocket. “Just need to finish up, baby, then we’ll all be on our way. Mommy first.” He took a step forward, as Ethan called out for her again.

  Moni
ca felt her face flush, felt a heat rise in her chest. “No!” She shoved Dean away with both hands, expecting him not to move, or her hands to sink into his rotting chest, and was surprised when the corpse staggered backwards. Not as surprised as Dean, who let out a startled cry. Monica advanced, and shoved him again. “No.” Another shove. “No.” Shove. “NO!” He fell back against a decorative table, and the marble statuette of a rearing horse wobbled and fell off, shattering on the marble floor. Dean made a growling noise, but the bronze light in his eyes seemed to flicker.

  Monica looked at her husband, then at the three dead women. “I don’t believe in ghosts,” she said, her voice firm, and she clapped her hands together sharply. The shades which were Darla, Piper and Antoinette let out a sigh, and faded.

  “You bitch!” Dean shrieked. What have you done?” He snarled and came at her, but Monica didn’t move, just looked into his eyes as his form lunged through her, his arms grappling but connecting with nothing. Monica faced him as he turned and stared at his hands, then at her, blinking and not understanding.

  “I don’t believe in ghosts, Dean,” she said softly, stepping towards him. “And I’m done with your games.” She clapped her hands again, a crack in the open space of the penthouse, and Dean faded, the light in his eyes winking out.

  The last of him was a soft, receding, “Nooooo….”

  Monica strode through the space where he had been and went to hold her little boy.

  PET SHOP TARANTULAS

  The drugs wear off and I come around

  my wrists and ankles tightly bound

  and in a closet, door and shelves removed

  the air filled with an awful sound

  A scrape of mortar, the sight of bricks