SUSPENSE THRILLERS-A Boxed Set (33 page)

Hurrying out to his car after that first meeting, gleeful and no longer requiring the quart of alcohol, he drove off the parking lot and across the street to a closed-strip shopping center. He backed into a space in front of Pilgrim's Dry Cleaning and waited. He could see the front of the Liquor Mart, and was not so far away he could not recognize the cashier.

He followed her home. He came back late the next night to the liquor store. And as many nights as he could afterward. Memorizing her walk, which shoulder she carried her purse on, how long it took her to unlock the car door when she left after closing.

She was always alone. She always parked her car at the right end of the building in the last slot, or if it was unavailable, as close to the store front as possible. She came to work five days a week at four in the afternoon and stayed until closing at midnight. The manager locked up and left an hour later.

He obsessed about the clerk, wondering who lived with her. There were two other cars in the drive at her house when she returned home between midnight and one each working night. An old Caddy with a busted left taillight, and a cherry-red Chevy truck with a black tool box mounted below the back window. She might have a boyfriend. She might have two. He fantasized a ménage à trois.

He wondered what kind of lingerie she wore, what she slept in, who her friends were. He imagined her life and, imagining, fell in love with her. You could not kill what you did not love.

Tonight was the night. He knew her as well as he was going to at this distance. At twelve midnight he parked in front of the dry-cleaning store. He watched the front of the Laguna Liquor Mart, his pulse hammering in his throat, his palms beginning to sweat. He wore navy slacks and a matching short-sleeved shirt. Nothing memorable or outstanding.

It was a warm April night and he could feel the sweat crawling down from his temples like worms wiggling from out of his hair. Madly chirping crickets made a racket in his ears. He supposed they were down in the drainage ditch that bordered the shopping strip. Making passionate love. Performing acrobatics. Singing arias. Some damn noisy thing.

He couldn't see the stars for the city lights, but the moon was quartered, high up in the sky, a bitter lemon-peel yellow.

Time to go. Minutes ticked by. Time to go and he was paralyzed. It never failed. When it was important that he make the first move, he stalled, worrying incessantly over minor details. What if someone accompanied her to the car tonight? What if the manager left just as she did? What if a squad car cruised by to check the place? He had to be ready to turn aside suspicion if anything unexpected occurred.

He forced himself to open the car door and step out, eyes focused on the Laguna Liquor Mart. She was coming. He could see her moving purposefully down a long aisle through the store to the double glass entry doors.

Hurry. Hurry now.

He crossed the street between passing cars, face turned from the oncoming headlights. Entering the parking lot, he kept the wide-blade hunting knife in his fist at the side of his thigh, out of sight. He walked casually toward the lighted store. All business, no hint of delay now he was in motion. Every molecule dancing with anticipation.

He was still three car-parking spaces away from his destination—her car—when she came from the store, slinging the black leather bag over her shoulder, car keys in hand. She stepped off the curb into the drive-by lane, and crossed it. She hadn't raised her head yet, hadn't seen him. She almost always fiddled with the key ring, shaking it around until she found the key that would unlock her car. He made it through the three spaces. He circled the rear of her dirt-brown Nissan Maxima just as she found the ignition key and looked up, noticing she was not alone.

Her steps never halted, but they slowed, and she frowned at him. Her shoulders went back, her head tensed. A protective hand gripped her shoulder purse.

He smiled. “Hey, you closed already?”

She nodded, angling a little away from him, still making for the Maxima's door. “Yes, I'm sorry.” She wasn't looking at him now, her mistake. She wanted to ignore him, pretend he wasn't there. He took the opportunity to move in even closer.

She wanted into her car, locked and safe, of course she did. He knew all her thoughts, all of them.

“Damn,” he said. “And they wanted another twelve-pack of Miller Lite back at the party. I thought y'all stayed open all night.” Friendly. Non-threatening. Just a party kind of guy.

She had the key in the door lock, but was having trouble. She didn't want to present her back to him, and standing the way she was, trying to keep him in sight from the corner of her eyes, she wasn't able to turn the key quickly enough. “We're closed,” she said. Then she swore softly and the key turned and the little latch inside the Maxima shot up with an audible click.

Her hand went for the door latch. His hand went for her mouth. He held her against his chest, tight, the knife point around front, pressed dangerously into her left breast. If she moved, the blade would cut into pliant flesh.

“Easy . . . easy. Get in and crawl over the gear shift.”

She hadn't struggled except for a second. He could feel her heart pumping against the knuckles of his knife hand. He could feel the round softness of her breast and the hot place just below it where her ribs began. “Open the door. Get in and climb over to the passenger side like I asked. Don't scream. I'll kill you if you scream.”

Only one out of ten ever disobeyed him. They had been told fighting back got them killed. They had been correctly advised.

She managed to open the door. He held her mouth, keeping the knife to her breast, and bent with her into the seat. He brushed briefly against her buttocks and suddenly could think about nothing but having sex with her. She felt so warm, like a furnace against his skin, and her scent was faint rose. Then he let her go, but reluctantly. She scrambled over the gear shift, her shoes clacking like Spanish castanets against the steering wheel and console. She was crying. But not screaming.

He slid into the driver's seat and reached over, jerking the keys from her trembling hand.

“We're going for a little ride.”

~*~

He had to do it outside of Houston where he wouldn't be interrupted. These types of murders took time. They were grisly. Messy. Demanding.

He knew all of Houston and the cities outside its environs that were attached to the city limits as if by busy umbilical cords comprised of strip shopping centers, fast food franchises, and supermarkets. He drove her from Pasadena onto Interstate 45 north, took the 610 Loop to 290 West. He already knew a place, a killing place, one of his own, outside of Hempstead not far from Houston. Secluded. Beautiful in its ghostly serenity.

She talked to him, trying to swallow down rising panic, offering him her money, her car, submitting to him if only he wouldn't . . . if only he wouldn't . . . He didn't respond. Then she began to cry again, the effort causing her to heave and hunch and hold onto her stomach, and he told her, “Shut up, I have to drive. Don't make this harder for yourself than it is.”

They always cried. They always begged. Once in a while, but not often enough to suit him, they were crazy wild and hysterical. There was never any variety in a woman's emotions.

He turned down a country road heading north, away from Hempstead. He had to watch for the turnoff. He knew it by a curve in the road, a big live oak growing in a lonely field. There was a place, an abandoned farmhouse, weedy, overgrown, gray and falling down. Site of multiple murders over a period of many years. His place. Cattle grazed the fenced pasture land behind and on each side of the old house, but there wasn't another dwelling for miles.

He parked behind the house, driving through weeds taller than the Maxima's windows. He told her to get out. Beneath the lemony moonlight, he marched her up broken and creaking steps to a black opening into the house. The back door was missing. There was a strong smell of damp wood rot, a smell of night air gone stale and bad inside the yawning empty room. She pleaded that he not hurt her, rape her, okay, but no, don't hurt her, please, she'd do anything for him if he promised not to harm her. Oh God.

He said he wouldn't. She wanted him to lie and he did.

Inside, he thought it not in his interest to put off the inevitable longer than necessary. The serial killer's rationalization for these murders was not his. He copied the crime itself, but he could no more recreate the original killer's motivations than he could fly to the moon by flapping his arms. His main pleasure came from adding to a string of murders without penalty. It was the most perfect, orgasmic lift in the universe to work inside a pattern already laid out. A certain gender, certain age, certain type, certain manner of death. It was pattern that mattered, duplicating it. He was a student faithfully executing the lessons taught by a master, a Tintoretto influenced by the staggering talent of a Michelangelo. The serial murderer he copied might be into necrophilia, cannibalism, sadomasochism, dismemberment, or mutilation. None of those variations particularly moved him, even as he was called upon to perform them in order to match some of the profiles he had imitated over the years. However, these additions did not repulse him either. He was like the physician called upon to stitch a jagged tear in a person's leg at a car accident, even though his specialty was plastic surgery.

Whatever was called for. That was what he did.

Before she could even turn to face him with a fresh barrage of tears and hoarse whispery pleas, he plunged the knife into her back between the shoulder blades and rode her with his weight down to the bare wood floor.

Now she screamed.

~*~

It had taken most of the night. Hours. Undressing her dying malleable body. Sucking her silent dusky lips one at a time into his mouth, discovering the places where she had patted the rose scent—behind each pierced ear, in the crook of her arms, behind both fleshy knees. Talking to her while light drifted and died in the brown eyes, testing her death to be sure it was real before cutting off one arm, both legs, her head. Burying those parts in the makeshift graveyard that held an abundance of such body pieces from times past. Hiding again the shovel under the crumbling carcass of a fallen Sweetgum tree. Wrestling her slick torso into a black plastic garbage bag he had brought along in his back pocket. Hoisting her into the trunk of the Maxima.

At the hand pump that brought up rusty iron water from the well near the back of the house, he bathed off the blood, feces, and urine that slimed his body. He put on his clothes. There was a blotch of dried blood on his blue shirt, from the first stabbing frenzy of her back, but he could wash it at home.

He knew they would find a way to identify her by the one arm he left attached to the body. So far, in the six preceding killings, one body part was left intact. Probably for identification purposes. Or to fulfill some mangled fantasy the killer had invented.

It was barely light—the city hunkered down in a fog-shrouded dawn, freeway lights blinking out—when he drove the Maxima south of Houston into Pasadena and parked it in the end slot at the Laguna Liquor Mart. The air reeked with the rotten-egg scent of chemicals from the oil-refinery plants, but he took a chest full of it as if it were sweet honeysuckle air.

He made it home before the freeway work-traffic crush, before six a.m.

Suffused with adrenaline, he was able to pass the day without sleep or mishap. And through all the long hours of this sleepless day he walked around patting his belly, snapping his fingers, smiling to himself. He was a full man, replete, confident and radiant, thrilled at his accomplishment that no one would ever know or guess.

No one except the serial killer he had one-upped. Another fool of a man who could never speak of the treachery done him.

Three

Detective Mitchell Samson walked down the block in the inner city neighborhood watching all the shadows. Neon flicker from the many club signs along the sidewalk did little to alter the dark night's dangerous possibilities. Grotesque shapes loomed in the alleyways and staggered toward him, their faces limned in sulphurous yellow, emerald and vermilion. Mitchell kept his head down, but his attention sharp. It was not a good place to be late at night.

He saw Big Mac leaning against a telephone pole on a street corner at about the same time the bag-lady snitch saw him. Homeless, broke, unemployable, Big Mac lived on handouts and by trading street news with the cops. Mitchell felt in the breast pocket of his jacket and withdrew a bill. He had it folded and waiting just in case he saw her. There but for the grace of God, he often thought. She could be me. I could be her. We're old friends.

“Hey, Samson, how's life treating you?”

Where'd you get that t-shirt, Mac? I didn't know you went in for headbanging music.” Mitchell reached out and stuffed the folded twenty into the woman's hand.

“Aww, I don't like nothing like that. Some kid gimmee this shirt. Pretty colors, though, ain't it?” She pulled the oversize t-shirt out from her emaciated chest and looked down at the wild collage of colors spraying out from the faces of a band she had never heard of before. “I kinda like it.”

Mitchell moved on down the sidewalk, Big Mac at his side. The woman ate all her meals at McDonald's, and Mitchell believed that was why her color was as pale as oyster shell. Her arms were stick-like, her knuckles thick with arthritis, but she possessed a jittery energy, the kind someone dancing on the edge of survival needed to keep herself dry, warm, and fed.

“Heard anything on that gay bashing happened down here last week?” Mitchell asked. He didn't really expect to get anything for his money. He just knew Big Mac needed a hamburger. She looked wolfish, under deep strain, the lines in her face digging woeful trenches toward underlying bone.

“Might've been some kids outta the neighborhood. Seen a carload of ‘em down here about that time. Waving bats out the car windows. Calling people faggots and names like that. Not that there ain't some flaming fags here, but, you know, what's the problem with that? Cain and Abel might have been fags, what do we know, right?”