Endless Night (12 page)

I was still thinking about those things when water started gushing into the machine and Hillary turned away and walked to the door.

After she was gone, I climbed down off the top of the cabinet. I hung by my fingers, then dropped. Then I hurried and crouched at the end of the freezer.

And waited. You wouldn’t believe how hot it was in that place. Sweat dribbled all over me. It tickled. I felt like my whole body’d been oiled, then rolled in a pile of dust and webs and bugs. There were dead spiders smeared all over my chest and arms and legs. Some old blood from the folks last night, too. Plus, I was dotted with lots of red bumps. I itched like crazy.

I could smell my sweat, too. My sweat, and the stale blood.

Usually, I do like the others and lather up. I didn’t do it last night, though. A good thing, too. For one, the cops—Hank and Pat—would’ve caught a whiff of me the second they came through the door.

Maybe I’d better explain. Lathering up is one of the things we do before we start on a foray. It’s like actors putting on their makeup before the curtain opens on a play. We do it in Tom’s van. That’s where we change into our skins, where we arm ourselves, and where we lather up.

We don’t lather up with soap. We scoop the stuff out of a big jar and smear ourselves with it. Tom labeled the jar, LUCKY STIFF STUFF. It’s just his sense of humor. Inside the jar, what we’ve got is a portion of someone we’ve killed.

Killed a while ago.

The stuff is slimy and ripe.

Some of us dab it on like after-shave. Some like to really pile it on. It’s pretty disgusting what some of them do with the stuff.

I use it sparingly, myself. A touch here, a spot there.

We do it for good luck. And because the death stench instills fear in the hearts of our enemies. And we also do it just because it’s so fucking weird we get a kick out of it.

Anyway, I didn’t lather up last night because the trots hit me. Tom’s got a toilet in the van. That’s where I sat while the others were doing their bit with the jar. By the time I got finished and came out, they’d already left.

Hey, what do you know? I never thought of this till just now—the jerks had gone on ahead to the house to start without me, and then later they drove off without me and left me in this fix. So this was like a preview of coming betrayals.

Anyway, all I wanted to do was catch up. I didn’t want to miss out on any of the fun. So I didn’t bother gooping myself.

Maybe that saved me.

In fact, I’m sure it did. Those cops that came looking for me in the utility room would’ve smelled me. I’d be dead right now if I’d used the Lucky Stiff Stuff. Dead and soon to become my own brand, my own flavor of the week. Simon Scent.

Great. I’m starting to get morbid.

Probably the beer.

Anyway, the thing is, I didn’t use the stuff, so I didn’t stink, so the cops didn’t nail me. So there I was hunkered down in the utility room this morning, waiting for Hillary Weston, sweaty and itchy—but stinking of nothing much worse than my own BO.

I sure wished she would hurry back.

After a while, I started thinking about what I’d like to do to her. That got me pretty excited, so basically I forgot about how hot and itchy and miserable I was.

Finally, she came back.

When she walked past me, I stabbed the top of her foot. She wasn’t wearing shoes or socks or anything, so my knife went right into her bare skin. She sucked in a big, surprised breath and tried to jump back. Her foot actually jerked up off the floor. It didn’t get away, though. All it did was slide a few inches up my knife blade.

Then it was me who jerked her foot up. I pulled out the knife while my other hand clutched her ankle and yanked her leg forward and shoved it really high.

She was letting out a squeal until her back slammed the floor. Which knocked her wind out. After that, all she could do was wheeze.

I landed on top of her, sat on her chest, grabbed a handful of hair to keep her head pinned down and pushed my blade against her throat. Hard enough to hurt, but not hard enough to cut her.

Next, I asked who was in the house.

She shook her head. She tried to talk, but only choked out some noises. Her chest was pumping fast. It felt good, going up and down under me that way. And I liked how I could feel her shaking.

After a while, she whimpered, “Please don’t hurt me.”

“I don’t want to hurt you,” I told her. “You’ll be okay if you do everything I say.”

She nodded hard. She was crying, of course, which didn’t improve her looks. I didn’t much mind the tears or her red eyes, but the snot sliding out of her nose was pretty gross.

“For starters,” I said, “who else is in the house?”

She waited too long before answering. Also, during the wait, a change came into her eyes as if a good idea had struck her. “My husband,” she said. “He’s ... he’s home sick from work. He’s right inside. He’ll be coming out here in a minute. He’s a policeman.”

“Liar, liar, pants on fire,” I said.

Then I took my knife away from her throat and jammed it crosswise between her teeth and slashed down, opening both her cheeks with one quick swipe.

She grabbed her face and didn’t even seem to care I was stripping off her clothes. She had an all-over tan. Personally, I like finding fresh, white places on a gal. The white shows modesty, a sense of privacy. When I see it, I know I’m being treated to secrets.

There’s something hard about an all-over tan. On Hillary Weston, it seemed appropriate.

I would’ve preferred some pure, white places, but I did enjoy the polished, glossy look of her tan. And the way she squirmed on the floor. And how her tits jiggled. They were small, with brown nipples that reminded me of the suction cups that came on toy arrows when I was a kid.

I used to pluck them off, and whittle points on the arrows with my knife.

I shot a cat named Mickey in the eye with an arrow like that.

You could lick the suction cups and make them stick to your forehead. These looked like they’d been licked and stuck on to the front of Hillary’s tits. Neither of them had a socket for the arrow shaft, though; these came to a blunt point instead.

Her skin was hot and smooth and slippery.

She flinched and writhed each time I hurt her.

When she started to scream, I stuffed her panties into her mouth.

It’d take me an hour, maybe, to tell everything I did to her. I know I’d get a kick out of talking about it. Talking about these things is almost as good as living through them again. But a lot needs to be told about other stuff.

I’ll cut to what I found most interesting.

Normally, I’m completely focused on the person I’m with. I’m into the moment, you know? I’m not daydreaming. While I did Hillary, though, I made believe she was the girl.

You know,
the
girl. The one who got away.

Hillary vanished. The girl was under me, and I loved every minute of it, every inch of her.

Afterward, I perched on top of the freezer and ate a Dove Bar. Then I put Hillary in the freezer.

As much as I hated to expend the effort, I mopped the mess off the floor. Then I left the utility room. The room had been
horribly
hot and stuffy. Outside, the summer breeze felt cool and soft and wonderful.

The back yard was fenced in, completely enclosed and private. Hillary’s tan should’ve been a clue to that. Too bad I hadn’t made the connection earlier. I could’ve dragged her out into the fresh air before indulging.

Oh, well. No great loss.

It would’ve been much nicer, is all.

While I headed for the back door of the house, I made myself a mental note to do the girl outside. If at all possible.

Even if it required some extra efforts.

The perfect surroundings for the perfect treat.

I entered the house. It was as chilly as a refrigerator. I shivered and got goose bumps. But I took comfort from the knowledge that Hillary in the freezer had it worse than me.

I was fairly confident that her husband was not at home, but I went looking anyway. The search turned up nobody. From the looks of things, they didn’t have children, either.

I learned their names from subscription labels on magazines in the bathroom.

Benedict and Hillary Weston.

I wondered what the girl’s name might be.

Maybe Traci? Kimberly? Lynn? Joan?

I’ll find out.

I took a very long, hot shower. The mess sluiced off me. Soaping down, I closed my eyes and pictured myself in the utility room. Not with Hillary, of course, but with my girl.

I wished she was with me in the shower.

And she
will
be with me in a shower. Maybe not today. Maybe tomorrow. We’ll take a nice, long shower together
before
I take her outside to do her. That way, she’ll be squeaky clean.

She shouldn’t be difficult to find.

The way I had it figured, our friendly folks in the news media were sure to give the whole story a big play. They’d tell me the names of the two kids who’d survived last night’s ordeal. With a little bit of luck, they might even say where the kids have gone to.

Only one problem.

My “pals” might get to the girl before me.

Chapter Twelve

It made me sick to think of the others getting to her first. They could have the boy. I didn’t give a hot hoot about him. But I wanted the girl for myself.

I
had
to have her, but they’d kill her if they got the chance.

Suddenly, I felt like time was running out. I told myself to calm down. Even if Tom and the others had found out where the kids were, they wouldn’t rush into anything.

They’re nuts, but they aren’t fanatics. They don’t want to die for any cause. They just want to enjoy the thrills of making
others
die.

So I tried to calm down. I stayed in the shower, soaping and rinsing, until I felt completely clean. Then I stepped out and dried myself on a thick, soft towel. It was a little bit moist when I pulled it off the rod. You’d think it would’ve gone into the wash with the other stuff. But maybe Hillary’d planned to wash it in the next load.

I hoped she’d been the one who made it wet.

The idea of rubbing myself with her towel was kind of appealing. What part of herself had she wiped with this section of the towel—with this?

It was disgusting, though, to imagine it might be her husband’s towel. What if he’d dried his cock or ass with the same part of it I was using on my face?

Not a pretty thought.

I searched the towel for clues. Sniffed it, studied it for tell-tale hairs.

Wherever we go, we leave pieces of ourselves behind.

That’s why the cops go over crime scenes so carefully, gathering up everything, even vacuuming. They’re looking for what we’ve left of ourselves. Not just fingerprints or footprints, but bits of us. They want shreds of fabric from our clothes. They want samples of our spit, blood and semen. They want the specimens of our skin scraped off by the fingernails of our prey. And, oh yeah, they very much want our hair.

It’s all physical evidence, and physical evidence is what makes convictions.

Our little gang wants to avoid being identified, much less convicted, so we do our best not to provide any physical evidence. Even though we don’t wear gloves (they’re like condoms and screw up the feel of things), we’re very careful to wipe whatever we touch. We leave our civilian clothes in the van. Except for our shoes, we don’t wear anything into the house except whatever we’ve tailored out of someone else’s skin. The outfits
always
include scalp or pubic hair of the person who originally wore the skin. Like I said earlier, we go in with no hair of our own except our eyebrows and lashes. So any other sorts of hair we leave behind won’t belong to us.

To protect ourselves against traces of us we might deposit on or inside the bodies of our victims, we simply take the bodies away in the van. We have other reasons to take them. But the effect is the same: they aren’t left behind to give away information about us.

Last but not least, we bum the scene of the crime. We use delaying devices to start the fires. That way, we’ve got time to make a getaway ahead of the fire trucks.

Nothing cleans like fire.

But just in case the fire might go out or be extinguished too fast, or otherwise not destroy the area, we leave little or nothing of ourselves behind. What we leave, if anything, is more likely to confuse the cops than enlighten them.

For instance, strands of hair from the head of a drifter we picked up on Mulholland last year. Or fingerprints from the pretty young kindergarten teacher who was last seen going to her car after a midnight showing of
The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
(The trick’s in Tom’s Fabulous Fingertip Gloves.)

You can see, we’re like NASA. We’ve got loads of backup systems, failsafe
systems—redundancy!

We leave behind nothing to incriminate us.

Except this time a couple of witnesses!

Oh, well, they’ll be taken care of. By me, I hope. The girl, at least. Like I say, they can have the boy. A couple of the guys would
prefer
him, if you know what I mean. No sexual discrimination here. We’re equal opportunity killers.

Anyway, to get back to the point, I found a curly brown pubic hair on the towel I was using after my shower. It matched Hillary. Unfortunately, though, I didn’t know Benedict’s hair color.

And didn’t want to know, frankly. I told myself that this was Hillary’s pubic hair and her towel. Then I finished drying.

After that, I cleaned off my Connie kilt. I hadn’t worn it into the shower. You know, you don’t want to wash fine leather with hot water. I’d previously treated it with a conditioner and water-repellent lotion, so a damp washcloth took off most of the blood and grime.

I didn’t put the kilt back on, of course. To get home without being stopped, I’d need to wear something just slightly less conspicuous.

Conventional clothes. And hair, if possible.

The cops had to know, by now, that my head was shaved. There was probably an APB—“Be on the lookout for chrome-domes.” They might even have roadblocks.