19
THE MAN WITH THE whispery voice was worried now. He’d thought to easily take ten, or fifteen, or twenty . . . and then maybe drift away, and start again somewhere. He’d toyed with the idea of faking his own death in the style of himself, just for the implicit humor of the situation . . . Set it up by killing a couple of people and never revealing where he left them . . .
Now, that’d be tough. The cops were nipping at his heels—that goddamn Pope was the one who did it to him. He’d come back like the ghost of Christmas. If he hadn’t . . .
Without that accident, without those f*ckin’ fishermen, they would have been looking for Pope for another year. He’d seen the activity down by the bridge, the divers, the cops, and as soon as he’d seen it, he’d known that Charlie had come back.
The Gods Down the Hall had said that this might happen; that some weird happenstance would trip him. They’d told him in detail how they’d been caught, how small slips led to bigger ones, until finally they stepped on the fatal banana peel. To prevent that, to prevent the cops from isolating one man, they had to be fed options until they choked on them, Biggie said. Feed them leads that point away, he said.
If all else failed, they said, it was better to go out in a blaze than in a cage.
Biggie Lighter had grinned at him and said softly, “They got a name for it, the good Christians do.”
“Yes?”
“Armageddon. The final battle. If it comes to it, think how good that would feel . . .”
IF THE FINAL BATTLE was coming, the man with the whispery voice wouldn’t leave Millie behind. Couldn’t do that—he’d waited so long to take her . . .
THE NIGHT THAT the killer came to visit, Charlie Pope had been dozing on a broken-back couch in front of the TV. The killer, who’d scouted the trailer park the night before, nosed the state car past Charlie’s back door, then reversed and snugged up to the trailer. He sat for a moment, watching and listening, then took the book-sized medical kit off the front seat, climbed out, and knocked on Charlie’s back door.
The killer was a slender man, dead white and muscular in a knotty, workman’s way, with a barbed-wire tattoo on his left biceps and a German art-deco eagle on his back, just above his buttocks. He had three black dots in a triangle on the web of skin between his right thumb and forefinger, and he told people—mysteriously reticent about the details—that he’d gotten them in the army. Everyone in the unit had one, he said. He couldn’t say what unit that was. Always the wisecrack, delivered with the well-practiced, engaging grin: “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”
Charlie took a minute to answer the knock. He was burly-gone-to-fat, hairy, still half asleep, dressed in jeans and a yellow smiley-face T-shirt, his gut pushing out in the gap between shirt and pants; he stood blinking in the porch light. “Hey, man. What are you doin’ here?”
“Drop-in drug check, Charlie. Required by law,” the killer said. “I need a blood sample.”
“Ah, shit. This time of night?” But Charlie stepped back so the killer could step inside with him. “I didn’t even know you could do that . . .”
“Required by law—and I’ve got some questions to ask,” the killer said. There was steel in his voice now. Never let an inmate get on top of you, even after they stopped being inmates. “Take fifteen minutes. How’ve you been feeling?”
“Not too bad—I hate the f*ckin’ job, though. Get up at five o’clock, lift them f*ckin’ cans all f*ckin’ day. Hurts my f*ckin’ back. Better’n that f*ckin’ hospital, though.”
The door opened into the tiny travel-trailer kitchen. The killer held up the kit and said, “Let’s get the blood test out of the way. Give me your left arm.”
The syringe was already loaded, lying there in the case, along with the Ziploc bag, vinyl gloves, the scalpel, and the six-foot coil of nylon rope. He had an alcohol wipe in a single-sized paper pack; unnecessary, but it added a subtle hint of innocence. If you were going to murder somebody, why would you swab his arm with alcohol?
So Charlie turned, and the killer ripped open the swab packet, wiped Charlie’s triceps, picked up the needle, and gave him the injection.
“Feels more like it’s going in than coming out,” Charlie said over his shoulder.
“Mmm. You haven’t been messing with any drugs, have you, Charlie? Cocaine, meth, even grass—that wouldn’t be good.”
“Honest to God, I don’t got money for f*ckin’ cigarettes.”
The killer pulled the needle out, dropped it in his kit, then pointed Charlie to the couch. “Why don’t you sit down, we’ll fill out this questionnaire, and then I can get out of your hair. Let you sleep,” he said.
Charlie obediently plopped down on the couch. The killer took a slip of paper from his shirt pocket, looked at it, and then said, “Have you been dating?”
Charlie goggled at him. “Dating? You gotta be f*ckin’ kidding. Everybody in town knows what I was arrested for . . .” His eyes drooped, and he yawned, and he mumbled, “I couldn’t get a f*ckin’ date . . . Jesus, I’m sleepy. Must’ve been the blood you took out.”
Either that or the overload of phenobarbital that he’d just put in, the killer thought, amused. Enough to kill a horse. Charlie tried to get up, struggled, then fell back on the couch . . . “I don’t . . . I don’t . . .”
He was out. The killer’s heart was beating a little faster now. He was insane, but not immune to fear; in fact, his whole life had been lived in fear. At this point, he could bullshit his way out, he thought. In five minutes, if he went ahead, he couldn’t. He leaned forward from the kitchen chair, examining Charlie’s slack face. Well . . .
He had vinyl gloves and a scalpel in his medical kit, and a Ziploc bag. He pulled on the vinyl gloves, knelt next to Charlie’s body, turned his arm, and cut off Charlie’s little finger. Charlie twitched once, then went still again. The killer wrapped the bag around the stump of Charlie’s finger, watched until it contained an ounce or so of blood, dropped the finger inside, then got the rope.
He murdered Charlie with the rope. The drug would have done it, in time, but he didn’t want to waste that time—didn’t want to be inside Charlie’s place any longer than he had to be. So he stood behind the other man, put the rope around Charlie’s neck, and pulled hard. Held it; held it; held it. In a minute or a little more, Charlie began to shake. That went on for a short time, less than a minute, the killer thought, and still he pulled on the rope. Held it.
Sweaty work, killing somebody with a rope. Like hanging on to a rope tow up a ski slope. He was tough, but his arms were shaking by the time Charlie was dead. It took much longer than in the movies. As a psychotherapist, he thought, a medical professional, he should have known that; he giggled a little at the thought.
When he was sure that Charlie was dead, he looked at the hand with the amputated finger. The flow of blood had stopped. He pulled the bag off Charlie’s hand and then stuck the mutilated hand down the front of Charlie’s pants, right down by his crotch. He put the bag on the kitchen table.
As he worked around the body, he thought about what he’d just done. He’d killed four people before Charlie, all male, all street people, but never for the simple pleasure of it. The killings had delivered a rush, but the rush had been agonizing, like an overdose of ice. Three of the men had something the killer wanted: money, drugs, food, clothing, a radio. The other man, the fourth man, had been a predator himself, had come after the killer’s cash. The attack had come at night, under the pier at Santa Monica; the attacker died with a five-inch blade in his throat.
Then, there’d been nothing but fear. The Gods Down the Hall said that was to be expected: but when you penetrated the fear, there came the most exquisite pleasure. When you took control, the fear dropped away, and you were at peace.
That hadn’t quite been the case with Charlie: Charlie had been more in the manner of a business killing, setting up what was to come next. But there had been a tingle, a sketchy, uncertain pleasure in the process. Not enough. He was reaching for something much more complicated, and much deeper.
When he was ready, he turned off the lights, stepped outside, popped the trunk of the car, took out an old canvas duffel bag, then backed up, sat on the stoop for three minutes, and simply listened. Listened to the bugs, the buzzing of a mosquito trap somewhere, the seeping-in sounds of a TV from another trailer, the burr of air conditioners. When he was satisfied that there was nobody close, that he couldn’t be seen, he stepped back into the trailer, grabbed Charlie by the belt, and dragged him through the door, down the steps, and loaded him into the car trunk.
The killer was strong, but the body was loose and floppy and heavy, and he had to struggle to get it inside. The body landed with a thud and a clank on top of the pile of logging chain. With the trunk lid down, he went back inside the trailer, carrying the duffel bag, and walked back to the bedroom.
He stuffed Charlie’s few personal possessions in the bag: Charlie hadn’t been out long, hadn’t made any money, so there wasn’t much: shaving gear and deodorant, a cheap Timex, jeans and shirts and underwear. On the way back through the kitchen, he noticed a thin brown streak on the kitchen floor. Dried blood? Where had that come from? He checked himself. Not bleeding anywhere. Maybe he’d squeezed some out through Charlie’s jeans . . .
He got a handful of toilet tissue from the bathroom, soaked it in water, and wiped up the streak, looked at it: even dissolved in water, it was brown. Maybe steak sauce or something, he thought. He threw the wad of paper in the duffel bag, picked up the plastic bag with the amputated finger, turned off the light, and carried it all out to the car. The duffel bag went in the backseat, the plastic bag under the front seat.
He was done, but he sat a moment, reviewing it. He’d programmed this pause into the killing. He could not come back, so if he’d forgotten anything . . .
He thought, and thought for another minute, and he slipped his left thumb under the vinyl glove of his right hand, ready to peel it off, and then the word bracelet popped into his head.
Good God, he’d forgotten the bracelet. He got out, a thread of panic running through him. There was no way he could have forgotten the bracelet. He popped the trunk again, got the small bolt cutters from the spare tire well, fumbled in the dark until he found the bracelet on Charlie’s ankle, cut it loose.
He carried the bracelet between his little finger and thumb up to the trailer and inside. He dropped it next to the couch, about where it might land if you sat on the couch to cut it off.
Anything else? The panic was still there, and he ran through his mental to-do list. He’d gone over it a hundred times in his mind, or even a thousand times, and here, at the critical moment, he’d forgotten the bracelet.
But there was nothing else. He got back in the car, turned the ignition key to the second stop, let the windows roll down. He sat and listened some more. When he was as sure as he could be that he wasn’t watched, he headed out to Interstate 35.
On the highway, a sudden cold squirt of adrenaline made his hands shake on the steering wheel. Christ, he couldn’t have forgotten the bracelet. The excitement of the killing had done something to him, had taken him to a level where the mundane realities of the process had slipped away from him. He had to check for blood, he had to clean up, he had to do all the little chores that the Gods Down the Hall had forgotten. He had to remember, the Gods Down the Hall were smart enough, but they were Down the Hall because they’d gotten careless.
He never thought it would happen to him, a mistake like that, an oversight, because he was too smart—but now he saw how it could happen. The motion, the push to move, could get on top of you. Next time, he would have a checklist with him, a written to-do list. If he were going to kill for pleasure, he’d mix hard science with the art of passion. No way he wanted to end up Down the Hall—far better to be dead.
THE NIGHT WAS WARM and hazy, with a low overcast, and as the killer drove across the prairie, the small towns would first come up as a glow in the sky, street and business lights reflected off the cloud base, then as points of light, then as a harsh blue-white and orange-white grid. He passed through them silently, slowly, safely, taking no risks with the speed limit.
Forty-five minutes after the killing, he pulled into a turnout at a historical marker. He drove by the place daily and had never seen a car in it. At the same time, the turnout road ran through a small alley of trees and brush, out of sight of the road.
He got out, lifted the trunk lid. Charlie was lying on a carefully arranged bed of logging chain. He pulled loops of the chain around the body and, with precut five-inch loops of aluminum wire, fastened together opposing links from the chain.
He worked quickly in the weak light of the trunk lid, listening for cars on the gravel road; nobody came down it in the hurried, heavy five minutes of work. He was alone with the dead man and felt a small curl of hair-raising superstitious dread. What if Charlie’s eyes opened . . .
He giggled again. Hell, he’d have a heart attack is what would happen. But Charlie was as dead as a carp on a riverbank, and his eyes didn’t open. The killer shut the lid on the car trunk, backed out of the historical site—he had no idea of what it marked—and on to the road.
The bridge was only a half mile away. He took the gravel out to the blacktop, turned left, idled over a low hill. A car was coming toward him. He saw it move to the middle of the road as it crossed the bridge, then back to the right as it cleared it. He idled along at forty miles an hour, checking the rearview mirror, looking for lights, and watching for lights out front . . .
When he was sure he was clear, he hurried on down the hill to the bridge; stopped in the middle of it, popped the trunk, and walked over to the railing and looked down. Sometimes fishermen parked beside the bridge: there was just enough space for two cars. Never, as far as he knew, at night: and there was nothing this night . . .
He went back to the car trunk, dragged Charlie out. With the extra weight of the chain, he struggled to get him to the railing. When he got him there, he had to lift Charlie’s legs first, prop them on the railing, then walk around to pick up Charlie’s head.
And when he did, the feet fell off the rail. He was breathing hard and felt a little panic rising in his throat: this was impossible. He couldn’t get the body high enough to prop up the head end. He finally bent it upright, got Charlie’s neck hooked over the sharp edge of the rail, took a breather for five seconds, then hoisted the dead man’s chest over, balanced the body, then got the feet going. The chain caught on the edge, and he spent a moment wrestling back and forth, the chain making a loud ripping noise on the metal guardrail.
And then Charlie went, falling into the darkness. A moment later, the killer heard a satisfying splash from below: Charlie’s last dive was a belly flop into thirty feet of water.
He brushed his hands together, felt the stickiness. As he walked around the front of the car, he looked at them in the headlights. Jesus: he was covered with blood. Hadn’t thought about that, either, Didn’t have any way to clean up. He knelt in the headlights, looking as his shirt. More blood . . .
Man, the complications were piling up. If he was going to do all this, if he was going to do what the Gods Down the Hall demanded that he do, he was going to have to get a hell of a lot better than this.
And quick: they were hungry for the first woman. Tired of descriptions, tired of what-we-might-do.
They wanted meat. They wanted it now.
He thought about Millie Lincoln. The woman did crazy things to him, and the thought of her blood drove him into a near frenzy.
Not now; if he took Millie Lincoln, the cops would be on him for sure.
But he would take her later. He licked his lips at the thought. Millie.
MILLIE LINCOLN HAD a decent body, she thought—not Hollywood quality, but decent. Maybe she could lose a few pounds. She looked at herself in the full-length mirror that she and her roommates had pinned to the back of the front door: Okay, maybe ten pounds . . .
“You think my ass looks fat?” she asked Mihovil, who was sitting on a couch, reading a Dilbert cartoon book.
“I would have to see it closer . . .”
“Hey: does it look fat, or doesn’t it?”
“Every time I see it good, I get hard,” he said. ‘What more do you want?”
She went over and plopped on the couch next to him and said, “Pizza.”
“I think so. I am starved to death.”
But he kept his nose in the book, not quite ignoring her. She crossed her legs and put them across his. He said, “Pizza,” and dropped the book on the floor, and brushed his hands up and down her legs. “Mmm. You’re sticky.”
“Haven’t shaved my legs in a week,” she said.
“Don’t shave your legs until I come back,” he said. “Tomorrow. Tomorrow I will shave your legs for you.”
“Really.” Sounded okay.
“I am very good with a razor. You will see.”
“Mmm.”
THE NEXT EVENING, the roommates were gone, and they moved into the shower.
Mihovil told her that the first great thing he’d experienced in the States was the shower in their apartment in New York. They hadn’t had running water in the refugee camp, and when his family got to New York, got the small apartment in Brooklyn, it had been like heaven.
“Wasn’t heaven—was the f*cking Yugoslavian ghetto, but it seemed like heaven, and all this hot water from the shower. I could stand in the shower for an hour—I took a shower every morning before school and every day when I came home and every night before I went to bed. You cannot understand hot water coming from the wall until you haven’t had it.”
When he got his residency and moved into his own apartment in downtown Mankato, he’d unscrewed the showerhead and replaced it with one he bought from a local hardware store; a showerhead that produced a torrent of water.
“My mother always said the best thing about America was a kitchen with a real stove and a real sink and everything works; I always thought the shower. And the toilet, of course.”
HE GOT HER IN the shower and said, “First we soap your legs. Huh? We need some nice shaving soap.”
He’d brought it with him. He shaved from an old-fashioned mug, with a shaving brush; but the thing that really turned her crank was the razor.
He produced an ancient-looking leather-covered box and from it extracted a straight razor with a mother-of-pearl grip. “From my homeland,” he said. “My father gave it to me when I came old enough to shave.”
The hot water was pouring down over her belly and legs, and Mihovil lathered her legs with the brush—the brush felt amazing, the brush was something she decided she couldn’t live without—and then began carefully shaving her legs, carving his way upward, kneeling on the dirty old tiles, his hands soft and the blade like a piece of light cutting through the prickly leg hair . . .
Like any number of college students with good bodies, Millie liked to lie in the summer sun in a bikini; and a bikini required the removal of patches of pubic hair, left and right. The problem was that when you shaved, you often got nasty red bumps from ingrown hair. The idea of shaving off all her public hair had never appealed to her, because she suspected that she’d turn into one gigantic infected red bump.
But Mihovil, shaving up her legs, simply didn’t stop. He just kept going. And the brush felt so good . . .
Mihovil could feel her trembling as he played with the razor and then with the brush, with the razor and the brush, razor and brush . . .
Millie began to whimper, and she knotted her hands in his long Jesus hair, and she began to cry out . . .