I opened my eyes. My right hand was cuffed to the frame of the bed. Frank Merrick was sitting on a straight-backed chair that he had placed by my bedside, his body leaning slightly forward, his gloved hands between his knees. He was wearing a blue polyester shirt that was too tight for him, causing the buttons to strain like the fastenings on an overstuffed couch. A small leather satchel lay between his feet, its straps untied. I had left my drapes open, and the descending moonlight shone upon his eyes, turning them to mirrors in the gloom. Immediately I looked for the gun on my nightstand, but it was gone.
“I got your piece,” he said. He reached behind his back and removed the Smith 10 from his belt, weighing it in his hand as he watched me. “It’s quite a piece of weaponry. A man’s got to be serious about killing to carry a gun like this. This ain’t no lady’s gun, uh-uh.”
He shifted it in his hand, folding his fingers around the grip and raising it so that the muzzle was pointing straight at me.
“Are you a killer, is that what you are? Because if you think so, then I got bad news for you. Your killing days are almost done.”
He stood quickly and pressed the muzzle hard against my forehead. His finger lightly tapped the trigger. Instinctively, I closed my eyes.
“Don’t do this,” I said. I tried to keep my voice calm. I did not want to sound as if I was pleading for my life. There were men in Merrick ’s line of work who lived for that moment: the catch in their victim’s voice, the acknowledgment that dying was no longer an abstract future concept, that mortality had been given form and purpose. In that instant, the pressure of the finger on the trigger would increase and the hammer would fall, the blade would begin its linear work, the rope would tighten around the neck, and all things would cease to be. So I tried to keep the fear at bay, even as the words scraped like sandpaper in my throat, and my tongue caught against my teeth, one part of me trying desperately to find a way out of a situation that was now far beyond its control while another focused only on the pressure against my forehead, knowing that it presaged a greater pressure to come as the bullet tore through skin and bone and gray matter, and then all pain would be gone in the blink of an eye, and I would be transformed.
The pressure against my forehead eased as Merrick removed the muzzle from my skin. When I opened my eyes again, sweat dripped into them. Somehow, I found enough moisture in my mouth to enable me to speak once more.
“How did you get in here?” I asked.
“Through the front door, same as any normal person.”
“The house is alarmed.”
“Is it?” He sounded surprised. “Guess you might need to get that looked at.”
His left hand reached into the bag by his feet. He took out another set of cuffs and threw them at me. They landed on my chest.
“Slip one of them bracelets around your left wrist, then raise your left hand against the far bedpost. Do it slowly, now. I didn’t have time to test the pull on this beauty, not with you waking up so suddenly and all, and I don’t rightly know how much of a tap it might take to set her off. Bullet from a gun like this would make a real mess, even if I aimed it right and it killed you straight off. But if you was to panic me, well, there’s no telling where it might end up. I knew a man once who got caught by a slug from a.22 in the brainpan, right here.” He tapped the frontal lobe above his right eye. “I got to admit, I don’t know what it did in there. I figure it must have rattled around some. Them little sons-of-bitches will do that. Didn’t kill him though. Left him speechless, paralyzed. Hell, he couldn’t even blink. They had to pay someone to put drops in his eyes so they wouldn’t dry up.”
He stared at me for a moment or two, as though I had already become such a man.
“Eventually,” he continued, “I went back, and I finished the job. I took pity on him, because it wasn’t right to leave him that way. I looked into them unblinking eyes, and I swear that something of what he was had stayed alive in there. It was trapped by what I’d made him, but I released it. I set it free. I guess that would count as a mercy, right? I can’t promise that I’d do the same for you, so you be real careful putting them cuffs on.”
I did as he had told me, leaning awkwardly across the bed so that my trapped right hand could close the cuff around my left wrist. Then I placed my left hand against the far bedpost. Merrick walked around the bed, the gun never wavering from me, his finger poised over the trigger. The sheet beneath my back was now drenched with perspiration. Carefully, using only his left hand, he secured the cuff, leaving me lying in a cruciform position. He moved in closer.
“You look scared, mister,” he whispered into my ear. His left hand brushed the hair from my brow. “You’re sweating like meat on a grill.”
I jerked my head away. Gun or no gun, I didn’t want him touching me like that. He grinned, then stepped back from me.
“You can breathe easy for now. You answer me right, and you may live to see another sunrise. I don’t hurt anything, man or beast, that I don’t have to hurt.”
“I don’t believe that.”
His body tensed, as though, somewhere, an unseen puppeteer had suddenly given his strings a gentle tweak. Then he pulled the sheets away from my body, leaving me naked before him.
“I think you ought to watch what you say,” he said. “It doesn’t seem to me like it’s smart for a man with his dick hanging out to start running off at the mouth in front of someone who could do him harm if he chose.”
It seemed absurd, but without that thin covering of cotton I felt more vulnerable than before. Vulnerable, and humiliated.
“What do you want?”
“To talk.”
“You could have done that in daylight. You didn’t have to break into my house to do it.”
“You’re an excitable man. I was worried that you might overreact. Then there’s the small fact that last time we were due to meet, you screwed me over, and I ended up with a cop’s knee in my back. You could say that I owe you one for that.”
He moved the gun swiftly to his left hand, then knelt on my legs and punched me hard in the kidney. With my body held rigid there was no way that I could move to absorb the pain. It ran riot through my system, forcing bubbles of nausea into my mouth.
The weight came off my legs. Merrick picked up a glass of water from the bedside table, drank from it, then splashed the remainder on my face.
“That’s a lesson I shouldn’t ought to have been forced to teach you, but you been schooled again in it anyways. You cross a man, you can expect him to come back at you, uh-huh, yes you can.”
He returned to his chair and sat down. Then, in a gesture that was almost tender, he carefully pulled the sheet back over my body.
“All I wanted was to talk to the woman,” he said. “Then she called you in, and you started interfering in matters that were no concern of yours.”
I found my voice. It came out slowly, like a startled animal emerging from its burrow to test the air for threats.
“She was frightened. It looks like she had good cause to be.”
“I don’t hurt women. I told you that before.”
I let that go. I didn’t want to anger him again.
“She didn’t know what you were talking about. She believes her father is dead.”
“So she says.”
“You think she’s lying?”
“She knows more than she’s telling, is what I think. I have unfinished business with Mr. Daniel Clay, uh-huh. I won’t let it lie still until I see him before me, alive or dead. I want recompense. I’m entitled to it, yes sir.”
He nodded once, deeply, as though he had just shared something very profound with me. Even the way he spoke and acted had changed somewhat, the little “uh-huhs” and “yes sirs” becoming more frequent and pronounced. They were ticks, and I knew then that Merrick was drifting out of the control not only of Eldritch and the Collector, but of himself.