The Girls He Adored (8 page)

Things started going bad almost immediately. Paula Ann was
homesick before they reached Pismo Beach, and whined all the way to Cambria. Finally, just south of Lucia, they pulled off the highway and followed a dirt fire trail a few hundred yards east to a turnout under a stand of redwood trees, beside a rushing stream.

There Christopher had romanced Paula Ann as only he could. Things were going well; then the stupid cow tried to stop him in the middle of the act. He thought she was being coy, that she wanted him to be more forceful. Then she freaked out big time. Bad mistake—Christopher couldn't handle fear. Max could, though—Max loved fear. It turned him on. And when Max was turned on, nothing short of impotence or premature ejaculation could discourage him. Then when it was over, she carried on as if he'd raped her.

When I rape you, you'll know it, Max wanted to reply. He would have killed her on the spot, but he'd always made it a cardinal rule never to leave a body behind, so instead he loaded her into the front seat and let Ish, the system's internal self helper and an unlicensed wizard of a therapist, deal with the hysterical girl for the next sixty miles.

Given enough time, Ish might have been able to mollify Paula Ann at least long enough to get her back to Scorned Ridge. A leisurely honeymoon drive, however, was definitely out of the question—Ish cut over on Highway 68 and headed east to join 101 in Salinas, intending to take 152 to Interstate 5: a faster and more direct route to Oregon. Unfortunately, while attempting to convince Paula that Max's mistake was both innocent and understandable, Ish's attention wandered briefly from the road, and he ended up running that red light near Laguna Seca.

Max took control of both the body and the wheel when the siren went off and the tricolor light bar of the white Sheriff's Department cruiser began flashing in the rearview mirror. Instead of pulling over immediately, he stepped on the gas in order to put a little distance between himself and the cruiser. It was never Max's intention to try to outrun the souped-up Crown Victoria in the sorry Chevy Celebrity—he was only trying to buy some time in which to have Kinch silence her. (Max could have done it himself, but why deprive Kinch of his only real pleasure?)

One last word from Paula as Kinch plunged the souvenir bowie knife Max had purchased for him at the Alamo gift shop the year before into her right lower abdomen, and drew it toward him in a downward, then upward arc. One word—“Oh!”— then silence.

Kinch thought at first he'd pulled it off—there were no other cops in sight when the cop brought her face within knife range— but she grabbed onto him as he hurried out of the car to finish her off, and hung on with a death grip, despite the enormous knife skewering her from cheek to cheek.

When the second patrol car arrived, Kinch ceded control to Max, who quickly realized there was no hope of immediate escape. Instead he'd turned his energies to facilitating a getaway at a later date—before they were on him, he'd managed to disengage the deputy's key ring and scatter the other keys as widely as possible to disguise the fact that he'd swallowed her inch-long, hollow, singleflanged handcuff key.

Afterward, back at the jail, three deputies beat the crap out of poor Max for half an hour. Two would hold him while the third walloped him in the gut with a riot stick.
Whack
—“This is for Terry.”
Whack
—“This is for Terry.”
Whack
—“This is for Terry.”

“Who the hell is Terry?” he asked, when they took the rubber gag out of his mouth.

Turned out she was the nosy deputy who'd been the cause of all the trouble in the first place. When they told him she was still alive, he said it was a damn shame, and an oversight he'd be taking care of some day. It wasn't just bravado, either—more like a promise.

It had taken the body two days to shit out the key—fortunately Max was already in isolation, or it would have been mighty embarrassing, pawing through his own turds. Now all he needed was an opportunity to use it. He suspected that chance would come tomorrow, on the way to or from his court appearance.

And as he lay back with his arms laced behind his head, staring up at the bottom of the unoccupied overhead bunk, it occurred to Max for the first time that there would be no need for him to put himself at further risk searching for another strawberry blond to bring back to Scorned Ridge with him.

He had, he realized, already found Donna's replacement—one who would serve not only Miss Miller's rather specialized needs, but also the system's. Sometimes a fella just gets lucky.

I
RENE
C
OGAN OFTEN BROUGHT
her work to bed with her. There was plenty of room: the other side of her king-size BeautyRest had been unoccupied—screamingly unoccupied—since Frank had passed away three years ago. Finding a warm male body to fill it wouldn't have been difficult—at forty-one Irene was an attractive woman—but finding a
man
was by now beginning to seem darn near impossible. A man like Frank Cogan, anyway.

She and Frank had both been scholarship students at Stanford. He was a big guy—six-four, with gorgeous wavy blond hair and an athletic physique. They'd married in college; he'd given up his own dream of becoming a painter and dropped out of school a year shy of his degree to support them. He'd gone into construction, and worked his way up from hod carrier to owning his own construction company in Sand City. Neither his hair nor his physique had lasted—Frank was too fond of beer and pizza—but his good humor had never failed him, and though untrained by Irene's standards, his was a first-rate intelligence.

Even three years after his death it was still possible for Irene to pretend that Frank was only in the bathroom, washing up, that any minute the bathroom door would open and there he'd stand in those ridiculous pajamas she'd bought him as a joke one—

She stopped herself. Thinking about Frank and falling asleep were mutually exclusive activities. Irene felt a quick flash of anger—at Frank, for dying; at herself, for still missing him; at God, for the whole mess of existence. Then it passed; she picked up the prisoner's file and went through it again from the first page, a copy
of the arrest report, to the last, a copy of the sheriff's department incident report on the Cortes assault.

Irene tried to picture the slight, boyish man she'd interviewed performing the atrocities attributed to him in the report, but she couldn't do it. Had the stress of being threatened brought out Max's homicidal alter, the persona who had filled out the second MMPI? If so, was there a possibility she could evoke this other personality by threatening him, or otherwise provoking a stress response? It might be worth trying, as long as the prisoner was in restraints.

Eventually Irene dropped off to sleep, which is not to say she got much rest. Her first dream took place in the basement office where she and the prisoner had met. Max was led in, fettered and cuffed. It wasn't until after the guard left that Irene realized that they were both nude. Max explained to her that it was a new type of therapy. She said that she was the doctor and that it was her job to determine the proper treatment.

Not anymore, said Max, coming around the side of the desk, his hands raised in front of him, palms down, thumbs touching in the classic strangler's pose.

Irene looked down and found herself handcuffed to her chair. She opened her mouth to scream, but instead of choking her, he knelt and gently, without a key, unsnapped her cuffs. He helped her to her feet; naked, chest to breast, they embraced.

Then she heard the applause. For the first time she looked up and saw that she was in a packed operating theater—tier upon tier of masked and gowned figures were applauding the two of them. Max—or was he Christopher now?—dropped to his knees again and began kissing her belly, then worked his way down just the way she liked it, just the way Frank used to do it. The applause deepened; it was deafening now, a roar like the surf as the waves of orgasm began to overtake her. . . .

According to an article Irene had read in the
Journal of Human Sexuality,
although damp dreams were not uncommon among women, only a relatively small percentage reported actually dreaming to climax. But it wasn't so much the orgasm that bothered Irene, who up until a moment before awakening had gone without one, sleeping or waking, for three years, it was the identity of the partner her subconscious had chosen.

Fortunately, she had an appointment with Barbara Klopfman,
her own shrink (and her best friend: not an arrangement the American Psychiatric Association would have approved of, but it worked for them), on the jogging trail at 7:00
A.M.
She and Barbara always managed to fit in either a little gossip or a little therapy when they ran—tomorrow morning it would be a bit of both.

A
FTER SUPPER
(Buff Orpingtons, in addition to having gorgeous plumage and being superior winter layers, are also first-rate table birds, white-skinned, plump-breasted, and juicy), the woman retires to the myrtlewood rocker in the parlor with her sewing basket and works by the western window until the light fades.

The piece the woman is working on tonight is nearly completed. Thirty to forty thousand separate reddish blond strands, each knotted into a transparent micro-mesh foundation by hand, using a tiny needle curved like a fishhook. But the hands that fed the golden chickens, gathered the eggs, and caressed the Rottweilers that morning are little more than skin grafts over bone—she can only tie a few hundred strands a night before her fingers start to cramp.

Still, her surgeons would be pleasantly surprised to learn that those hands are able to manage such delicate work at all. Although the interosseous muscles of the palm retained enough of their gripping strength to wield a knife (or an ice pick), it had taken hours of reconstructive surgery to repair the intrinsic lumbricates to the point where the thumb and first three fingertips of each hand could meet, much less grasp a tiny needle.

But pain aside, the woman enjoys the work. It's relaxing, contemplative, even meditative. And there's more creativity involved than one might think—not only must the strands be sorted by length, but color gradations must be matched and blended to create the all-important natural look.

In addition, the work keeps the woman's mind off her problems. The boy has been away nearly five weeks. Even the trip to Texas
last year to obtain the raw material for the piece she's sewing tonight took less than a month. And if something's happened to him? If he never returns? What then of this life they've carved out for themselves, isolated on a ridgetop, no neighbors, no telephone, far from rude stares and pitying—or horrified—glances? She knows she can't survive up here alone. She also knows that while she is wealthy enough to hire attendants or retire to a first-class nursing home, there's probably not enough money in the world to procure
all
the services the boy provides, not for a woman in her condition.

And of course there are other complications, thinks the woman. The drying shed, for one.

The drying shed! “Drat,” she says aloud—she's forgotten all about it. No harm done, though—missing a day here or there is no big hoo-ha, she tells herself, plucking another red-gold strand from her sewing basket and holding it up to the fading light. But it slips from her aching fingers and slithers back into the basket like a snake charmer's cobra in reverse. Time to call it a night.

A steep, narrow staircase leads to her second-story bedroom. She undresses, rehangs the green gown—she has two green dresses and two black, which she wears in rotation and washes by hand. The mask comes off last, in the bathroom; there are no mirrors in the bathroom. She washes it in the sink and hangs it on the towel rack to dry, then brushes her teeth by feel. That goes quickly—it's easy to brush your teeth when your lips have been burned away to the gum line. No bath tonight—nobody to bathe for. She splashes warm water under her arms and between her legs, then slips on a gossamer silk nightdress. She can only bear the touch of silk against her skin—her scar tissue, rather.

So the sheets and the comforter on her double bed are silk as well. She sits on the edge of the bed and from the night-table drawer removes a small ampoule of pharmaceutical morphine sulfate she had taken out of the refrigerator that morning. She raises her right leg until her heel is on the bed, hikes her nightdress up over her raised knee and lets it fall until her leg is bared, then jabs the needle into the back of the right thigh— good skin and plenty of meat there. It's a two-handed operation: one skeletal hand holds the ampoule, the other presses the plunger.