Castle of Sorrows Read online

  Sure you do, Chad thought. Sure you know about the way it makes you feel like you wanna jump out of your skin, how it gives you headaches, how it makes you so cranky you often feel like killing somebody. You know all about the bad breath and the inexplicable increase in armpit sweat. You know it can make you feel weightless and truly screw up your night if you drink too much alcohol the same day you juice. You know how it makes your penis do weird things, which is especially scary if you’ve got some insecurities in that area to begin with. How it can makes your stools turn to stone and your nuts ache. You know all these things because you read about them. Right.

  “Not to mention,” Chad said, “that ’roids are unregulated. There’s no way of knowing what you’re putting in your body. It could be anything.”

  What a waste of time, he thought. He knew the type. The shortcut hunters. They spent all kinds of money on supplements, but they never got big. Because to get big you actually had to, you know, do the fucking work.

  “See, that’s what I keep getting stuck on,” Rex said analytically. “The articles all say what steroids do, they say how they can affect your body. But they don’t tell you where you can get them.”

  Chad opened his mouth to tell this wanker to get lost. But just as he was getting ready to, he noticed the man’s watch. It was a Rolex. Now in one way this annoyed Chad even more. Because who worked out in a Rolex? But in another way it made him see Rex in a completely new light. He’d watched the guy pull up through the gym window earlier. In a light blue Porsche. And before changing into his workout clothes, hadn’t Rex been wearing an Armani suit? Yes, Chad thought. He believed Rex had. Living in Malibu and driving a car like that, Rex must be doing awfully well for himself. And the truth was, Chad could use the money. He drove an old Ford Taurus and shared an apartment with another trainer at the gym. And, if Chad was being honest, he did sometimes act as middleman in deals like this.

  Rex raised his eyebrows. “You don’t know anyplace I might find something like that, do you?”

  Chad shrugged, keeping it casual. “If I did, I wouldn’t talk about it here.”

  The way Rex’s smile changed then, Chad could hardly look at the guy. It was as if Chad had just confessed to some terrible crime, one that Rex had suspected him of all along. In a way, Chad guessed this was precisely the truth.

  “And where would you be inclined to discuss such a transaction, if indeed you knew about such matters?”

  Chad didn’t like that word at all—transaction—it sounded too much like prison doors clanking shut. Transaction meant this was getting serious. Transaction meant Chad was officially in this thing, a part of some sinister machinery.

  So keep it casual, he reminded himself. Rex is the one wriggling on the hook, remember? So chill.

  He told Rex he’d meet him at a beach he often went to, one just down the road? Rex said he knew the beach well, he’d surfed it when he was younger.

  Well, whooptie-freaking-doo, Chad thought.

  So they met there and talked it over and agreed on a price, which was much higher than anyone who really knew about steroids would pay. Rex said he wanted to do a cycle of Deca, which Chad usually charged about eight hundred for, keeping half for himself. But he figured, Armani suit, Rolex, Porsche…how about three thousand?

  “Three thousand?” Rex asked, eyebrows raised.

  “Of course,” Chad had answered. “You wanted a full cycle, right?”

  Rex had frowned and said yes, and at that point Chad knew Rex was completely full of shit. Sure, the guy knew Deca was a popular steroid, but that seemed the extent of his knowledge. Three grand was highway robbery, but it would mean Chad’s cut would be huge. Hell, two months’ rent.

  Chad told Rex he needed the money up front, and Rex paid him in cash the next day.

  Then Chad’s source wouldn’t answer his phone calls. Rex got antsy. A week went by and Rex’s chummy demeanor vanished. He demanded Chad deliver the stuff. They were in the locker room of all places when Rex threatened him, guys milling about in their skivvies and some of them with their schlongs hanging out, fat old men who seemed to enjoy being naked in front of each other.

  “Are you going to refund my money or do I tell your bosses?” Rex said loudly enough for one naked guy with his belly hanging over his privates to hear.

  Chad felt cold sweat on the back of his neck. “I told you, I’m gettin’ it.”

  “Forget about the ’roids,” Rex said. “I want my goddamned money back.”

  In truth Chad had spent it. He’d intended to get ahead in his rent but had instead bought himself some new clothes, a pair of sweet sunglasses, and had taken two different women out on nice dates. He’d gotten laid both times, but now the money was gone.

  At length, Rex said, “That’s it. I’m talking to your boss.”

  “Hold on a second,” Chad said.

  “Fuck off,” Rex muttered, moving toward the door. Chad had liked it better when Rex was trying to be his buddy.

  Heart thudding, Chad snagged Rex’s forearm and spun the man around. “You don’t wanna do that.”

  Rex stared up at him in astonishment. “Are you actually threatening me? Are you really that dumb?”

  That set off a blaring horn of fury deep inside Chad. That D-word. It was the quickest trigger he had, probably because he’d heard it so many times and for so goddamned long. He suddenly wanted to kill Rex Holder. Not strike him, not maim him. Kill him. Kill him with his bare hands.

  “I’m not threatening you, Rex,” Chad said in a low voice. “I’m telling you you’re twenty minutes away from getting what you paid for.”

  “Twenty minutes,” Rex repeated.

  “Sure,” Chad said. “I just have to get it from my car.”

  They were standing very close together in the entryway of the locker room. Someone brushed past them on the way out, but neither of them broke eye contact.

  “It’s in your car now?” Rex asked. His voice was skeptical, but from his eyes Chad could see he wanted to believe it. Because in Rex’s mind what was in those vials would transform him in a few short weeks from a scrawny guy with a concave chest and arms like pipe cleaners to a guy that looked like Chad, with muscles on his muscles, the kind the ladies would go wild for. Chad noticed that Rex’s hair had begun to gray at the temples. The crow’s feet around his eyes. He adjusted his mental estimate of the man’s age to mid-forties. More importantly, mid-forties and single. And Rex didn’t want to be single any longer. Rex wanted to snag himself some hotass babe in her twenties, the kind with tits that didn’t sag a bit when she unleashed them from her bra. Or else one of those plastic surgery bimbos who looked a decade younger than she was, the kind who not only wanted her man to drive a Porsche, but to look like a professional athlete as well.

  Chad could see Rex thinking all these things and realized he’d bought himself a reprieve. But he wasn’t out of the hot seat yet.

  Chad said, “It’s in my trunk, but I can’t very well give it to you here, can I? There’re security cameras all over the place.”

  “Where then?”

  “The beach.”

  That glint of suspicion reappeared in Rex’s eyes. “You’re just putting me off.”

  “Honest to God I’m not.”

  “Fine,” Rex said, nodding toward the door. “Let’s go. I’ll ride shotgun.”

  Chad gave him a humoring grin. “We can’t ride there together. That would be just as bad as doing it here.”

  “You just want me to go?”

  “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  “Or maybe you won’t show up.”

  Chad’s grin spread. “Where am I gonna go, Rex? You know where I work.”

  Rex didn’t seem satisfied, but he went along with it. Which left Chad with twenty minutes. Shit, he thought. Hardly any time at all. He should’ve given himself an hour.
r />   But he waited for Rex’s baby blue Porsche to roll out of the parking lot, then jogged out to his own shitbox of a car. There were indeed vials in the trunk, but they were used ones. Chad had tossed them back there a few days ago intending to discard them in a public trashcan, but he hadn’t gotten around to it, which gave him the idea back in the locker room to recycle them with Rex. The only problem, he realized as he crammed the eight empty vials into his pockets, was that he had nothing to put in them. There were ten unused hypodermic needles still in his trunk, so luck was with him there. He figured if he ever got pulled over he’d tell the cops he was diabetic.

  Sweating badly now, Chad reentered Chuck’s Gym, bypassed the locker room and headed straight for the trainers’ office. Chad didn’t come in here often because the only things in the office were some canisters collecting dust and a mustard yellow couch with a broken leg.

  Okay, Chad told himself. What does the stuff in the vials look like?

  Liquid, but slightly thicker than water. And a little translucent maybe. It was tough to tell because the vials were a dark amber color. Chad thought the steroids he used were clear, but then again maybe the liquid was a bit milky. Funny, he’d been putting the stuff in his body for a good five years now but had never taken the time to really examine what it looked like.

  He opened a cabinet door and a black, furry spider clambered out. Chad screamed, did his air dance, his heart whamming in his chest. Trembling now, he scanned the canisters. They were all a faded ivory color, very few of them labeled. He examined the strips of masking tape with faint letters scribbled in ballpoint pen. WHEY, one of the peeling strips proclaimed. SOY, read another.

  Chad frowned at these, thinking they sounded too mundane. They surely wouldn’t fool Rex. A guy like that was probably college educated.

  HYDROSYLATE, the next one read. Better, but something about the name scared him. Too much like a substance you’d find in a laboratory. He wanted to fool Rex, not turn him into a lab rat.

  BONAMI, the fourth canister said. Now that was more like it. Chad had never heard of it before, but it sounded exotic and didn’t make him think of test tubes and Bunsen burners. He guessed the name was Italian or maybe Japanese. He didn’t know a lot of Italian or Japanese bodybuilders, but then again Rex wasn’t going to be a bodybuilder anyway.

  He unscrewed a vial, sprinkled a pinch of the powder in, and filled it with water. But when he shook the vial up, the mixture still looked pretty much like water. He added more BONAMI, shook it, and then sprinkled in some more for good measure.

  He glanced up at the clock. Ten minutes had passed.

  Shit. Working hurriedly now, he sprinkled a goodly dose of the protein powder into the remaining seven vials, filled them with tap water and capped them. Then, taking care to mop off the excess water with some paper towels, he stuffed the vials into his pockets and hustled back out to his car. He was five minutes late arriving at the beach, but Rex was still there just as Chad knew he’d be, the guy too excited about his free ride to the land of ripped physiques and big-breasted women to fret over five measly minutes.

  “You got it?” Rex asked through Chad’s open window. Jesus, not even letting him get out of the car.

  “Here you go,” Chad answered, in truth not really wanting to get out. The only thing he wanted to be was gone. He’d never been a great liar, and he feared if he stayed too long Rex would know he’d been given an innocuous protein drink rather than a real steroid.

  Of course, that was what Chad had believed.

  Until the day one of the other trainers asked him if he’d heard about the guy from the gym who died in his expensive oceanfront condo.

  Chad’s mouth had gone dry. He didn’t even have to ask what the guy’s name was. Nervelessly, he’d slipped into the trainers’ office and opened the cabinet door. He spotted the canister, repeated the name to himself, though he really didn’t have to. He remembered BONAMI well enough.

  He didn’t dare ask anybody about it. What could he say anyway? Hey, what would happen if you were to inject BONAMI into your bloodstream? Could that kill you?

  He was careful. He went to the public library that night rather than using his roommate’s computer. He typed in bonami protein powder and didn’t get a single hit about the stuff. He did, however, get thousands of websites mentioning a kind of cleaning chemical called Bon Ami.

  Chad spent the night under his bed. And the night after that.

  He’d gone to work though, figuring it was more suspicious to not come in. He thought of those vials. If the first one had killed Rex Holder—and Chad was pretty certain it had only taken one dose of the poison to do the job—that left seven more vials in Rex’s condo. Were Chad’s fingerprints on them? He’d wiped them off after filling them, but then he’d handled them while putting them in his pockets and giving them to Rex.

  But no one came to the club asking questions. Chad was safe.

  Yet now, standing immobile in the doorway of the dining room of Castle Blackwood on an island everybody said was haunted, Chad had that sick feeling in his gut again, that dreadful sense of foreboding. And it was something about that stupid red tablecloth that was making him feel this way. Because the tablecloth was moving, the crimson fabric undulating with the breeze. Chad wanted to rush over to the windows and shut them, but that would take too long, and more importantly it would carry him too close to the table. Anything, he realized, might be under that table. There could be one of the gangsters. There could even be a ghost.

  No, Chad thought. Not that.

  And now he fancied he saw something small and glistening just under the lip of the red fabric, something amber-colored and cylindrical…

  The crimson tablecloth billowed in the breeze, and Chad beheld the fingers next to the vial.

  Chad dropped the gun. He scarcely heard the loud thunk it made.

  Oh my God, he thought.

  Chad focused his whole will on backpedaling out of the room. He wanted to be away from the table, away from the bloodless fingers he’d glimpsed.

  Chad turned and expected to run right into Rex Holder’s leering corpse. But the great hall was empty, the foyer beyond that seemingly empty too. Chad knew he should retrieve the gun, but suddenly the only thing that mattered to him was getting the hell out of the castle. He would make a break for it—now—and he wouldn’t stop running until he reached the beach. Then he’d fucking swim back to California if that was what it took. This place was as haunted as they said, only it was worse, because this wasn’t just a place of ghosts, it was your own personal ghosts that resided here, and it had only been one goddamn mistake. Did he deserve to die because of it?

  Whimpering, Chad broke into a run halfway through the great hall, and amazingly, there was nothing there to impede his progress. He wrested open the front door, lurched through and was met with the sight of a pointed object hurtling at his chest. Instinctively, Chad jerked sideways, the spear grazing his chest rather than impaling him. Gasping, Chad stumbled backward through the doorway and gazed up uncomprehendingly at the man who’d just tried to kill him, a skinny blond guy with a crazed expression on his face. One of the gangsters? The guy raised the long, slender object again—not a spear, but something like it—looking for all the world like some deranged native from one of those old Tarzan movies. The guy jabbed at him, nailed him right in the upper thigh this time. Yelping, Chad kicked the guy in the nuts. The guy staggered back, yanking the sharp implement out of Chad’s leg with a sick slurping sound. Whimpering, Chad scuttled backward through the doorway, grabbed hold of the big wooden door and flung it at the guy. The maniac lunged forward at the last second, but the door banged shut just before he made it there. Shaking with terror, Chad pushed to his knees and shot the bolt.

  What the hell? Had the guy just been standing out there waiting for him? And what was up with the freaking spear? It looked like some sort of old-fashioned gardening
tool, its end bifurcated like the tongue of a snake. Why use something that primitive? Why not just shoot him?

  Because the rest would hear it, Chad thought. Then they’d come running. And the gangsters want to pick us off one by one.

  Well, he thought, at least the door was locked now. There was no way he’d be getting—

  The dining room. The windows in there were open.

  Chad was on his feet instantly, his desire to get the windows closed now even greater than his pain and his terror. If the guy had been outside waiting for someone to walk out the front door, there was a good chance he knew about the dining room windows. Even now he’d be pelting around the castle to beat Chad there. But Chad had the more direct route, and more importantly, he had the gun. It would be right where he’d dropped it, right beside the dining room table. When Chad limped through the great hall and reached the dining room he saw this was true—the gun lay a couple feet from the long wooden table.

  He’d grab it in a moment. But first the windows. He didn’t like it, but he had to venture near the butler’s table and that horrid crimson tablecloth to draw the windows shut. But what he’d glimpsed there…that was just the guilt talking. And after all, there was no guarantee Chad was the one who’d killed Rex. First of all, Chad thought as he pushed down the first window and thumbed shut the window lock, guys like Rex were classic candidates for cocaine abuse, for heroin, for all sorts of designer drugs. Maybe the reason no one ever investigated Chad was that Rex never even took the poison in the vials, or if he did, its effects had been negligible. He reached out, closed the second window, now watching the castle lawn a few feet away to make sure that bastard mob guy wasn’t about to skewer him with the garden spear. Chad thumbed the lock. One more window to go. He reached out, telling himself that even if the cleaning powder had been the cause of Rex’s death, it had been Rex who’d taken the stuff, not Chad, and Rex was an adult who could live—or die—with the consequences of his actions.

  Chad got the last window closed, tightened the hasp lock. He exhaled tremulously.