The Prettiest Girl I Ever Killed (19 page)

My heart stopped, because I knew he meant it. Curt asked:

“How would you explain it?”

“Oh … that you used my wife as a shield. Or perhaps you killed her and then I killed you. Either way I’ll be a hero. I never plan in advance….”

Lou kept talking, and Curt drew him out. I listened in horrified fascination while he told about watching Mart and me, about killing Anne and Barney and another girl whom we’d thought had merely run away from home. He’d buried her in the dam of a pond he was building. And Jerry Blake had been simple: Lou’s hardware store and the drugstore shared the same storehouse. Jerry was heavily addicted to morphine toward the end; he took to stealing it from the storeroom, shooting himself when he went to the store at night. Lou waited until he’d given himself a shot, then opened a butane tank, hooked up a timed electric spark gadget, and was home before the explosion occurred. Why? His voice was diffident. Lou had concealed Johnny’s theft, but Jerry had discovered the shortage and blamed Lou. Gaby’s stove … it had happened the way he’d explained, except that Lou was the one who’d taken out the packing.

“Remember how Gaby complained that her oven wouldn’t hold heat?” he asked. “The gas built up in there for two weeks before it blew up. It could’ve happened any time. It had nothing to do with her hay fever.”

“Did you plan to kill her?” asked Curt.

“Oh no,” said Lou. “Not at that time, anyway. I wanted you to take her out of the game; it was too much trouble to watch both of you and Velda too. Then a couple of days ago, when both Velda and Gaby were gone, and I thought we could have our private little game—”

“But you threw in Johnny Drew.”

“A pawn,” said Lou. “I was testing your defenses. I didn’t know you had Velda.”

They were like two friends rehashing a card game. I had to pinch myself mentally to realize that death lay at the bottom of it. “We could still have the game,” said Curt. “Let Velda go.” Lou gave a short laugh. “Impossible. She knows too much, Gaby too….”

“Gaby knows nothing.”

“Suspects. That’s enough….”

“You have to keep killing, don’t you? Once you start it’s the answer to every dilemma. How many of those others were murder?”

“Oh, you were right on several. Teddy Groner, as you suspected, bit me underwater. I made up that story of the nail on the spot, then I was stuck with it. I figured it would trip me up someday. The woman who supposedly hanged herself … I made the mistake of thinking she was willing when she wasn’t. The man who was eaten by hogs, the one who killed himself with the shotgun, they were theories I wanted to work out … though I told myself I wanted to buy their land cheap—”

“You know how it ends, Lou?” said Curt in a mild tone of curiosity. “You’ll meet somebody else with the game and it’ll be your turn. That’s the only way it can end, with your death. You’re committing suicide the hard way.”

“Of course,” said Lou. “I figured that out myself. But you’ll never—”

Suddenly everything dissolved in a thunderous explosion. A terrific weight slammed against my back and threw me against the face of the cliff. Darkness closed in. I was sure Lou had fired and I thought, Heaven is a rocky place. Then I realized I was lying on the cave floor. I felt sticky warmth trickle down my face and knew it was blood running from a bump on my forehead. Hands caught my armpits and hoisted me to my feet; I turned and looked into Curt’s face. I was silly from shock; I laughed at the white limestone dust which coated his face, hair and eyebrows. His moist lips looked brilliant red. He looked like a character in a Japanese play. I heard my own laughter echo inside my head, and I realized I was deaf. Suddenly weak, I fell against him and clung for support.

Not until then did I remember Lou. I looked at where he’d been and saw only a slab of limestone.

“Lou—?” I had to shout in his ear. “What happened?”

Curt got the flashlight and shone it on the cave floor. The first thing I saw was the shotgun. Then Lou’s hand, clutching the stock. I followed the hand to an arm, and the arm to the vast slab of limestone as big as a grand piano. I saw Lou’s head, and I turned away quickly and hid my face. But the image remained; his face was swollen, his eyes bulged like those of a rat caught in a trap. I felt no grief, he had ceased to be my husband and became a monster. For an instant I sensed a whole race of such creatures living among humans, saying the right things and performing the correct actions and all the while playing their little death games. How many women, I wondered, will go to bed tonight with a monster?

Curt took my hand and led me toward the rear of the cave. “There’s a rear exit,” he was saying. “I sabotaged the entrance in case they trapped me, put a charge of dynamite behind a loose slab. It happened that Lou was sitting right under it.”

“How’d you set it off?”

Curt showed me the hidden wire running into his shoes. There was a battery pack strapped inside his trousers. He took a reel of tape from his recording apparatus and explained that he’d started the machine as we entered the cave. He’d known I was being followed, but figured the killer would talk only if he thought he had the upper hand.

“Did you know it was Lou?”

“I … was almost sure when I saw the stuffed mice.”

“So
long?
And you didn’t tell me?”

“You had all the information I had, Velda. But you wouldn’t believe it. Come on, let’s find a new hiding place. That explosion will draw attention.”

We crawled out of a hole just large enough to squeeze through. As I emerged into the night, a flashlight blinded me. I started to retreat, but Gaby’s voice said:

“Velda, Curt. It’s me.”

She was standing beside a state trooper, looking almost as pale its her bandages. I didn’t watch as she and Curt embraced. The trooper was a heavy-necked clean-featured six-footer, the kind of depersonalized All-American boy you find in state police uniforms. He came over to me and bandaged my forehead. “I’m Trooper Carson, and you’re …”

“Velda Bayrd,” I said in a tone which was neither sad nor exultant. “My husband is dead inside. He’s a murderer. Curt has his confession.”

A helicopter waited at the top of the ridge. As we flew out, Gaby explained that she’d tried to phone Curt and had gotten strange responses from the operator; immediately she’d put plan “C” into effect. She’d known about the cave and had been able to lead the troopers in. They set us down on the airfield outside Connersville. I started toward the taxi stand and Curt called after me:

“Where are you going?”

I turned and saw him and Gaby standing together. There was no place for me between them. I felt bitterness rise inside me. “Do you care?” I gave him no time to answer. “No, you don’t. You were playing the same game Lou was. It wasn’t as deadly as his; it might be more human if it were. With you there’s no emotion. No involvement. You treat us as though you were some being from the stars. You’re cold and cruel and heartless—”

Suddenly I ran out of steam. “No, I’m sorry. You did it to get Frankie out of jail.”

Gaby came forward and took my hand. “Come with us. We’ll get Frankie out and then go to the islands.”

I could see that she understood my problem. I wondered how many times she’d watched women fall in love with her husband. I felt my stubbornness come in and give me strength: “You might persuade me,” I said. “But I’ve got a daughter. What can I say when she learns her father was a monster? What will I tell her?”

“To … be strong,” said Gaby.

“But I feel that I did it to her. I married him. I …”

I looked past Gaby and saw Curt, his achingly handsome face frozen, and that vague superior amusement in his eyes. Comprehension flooded in like a sunrise. Many people had fallen victim to my husband, but
he
was Curt’s victim. My husband had toyed with them, but Curt had toyed with Lou, like a cat with a mouse. I realized that Curt would go on, having discovered the game behind the game, to seek other men like Lou. And next time there’d be no brother to free, just the sheer thrill of … hunting the hunter.

I turned and walked away. Nobody called me back. I didn’t really expect it.
Be strong, Gaby,
I said to myself.

THE END

If you liked The Prettiest Girl I Ever Killed check out:

Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die

Dan felt a sick-sweet nausea bubbling in his stomach as the nasal voice sing-songed out of the darkness. No mistake, this was definitely
it
. The Bust—three years of peace and finally. His muscles trembled with a sudden desperate urge to flail out, but he knew he’d just tear up his wrists on the cuffs—and if he ran the erg-servers behind the light would be only too happy to load him up with an extra cargo of lead. He stood still and let his rage seep into his stomach, felt it congeal into a hard hot lump of fermenting hate.

The big man stuck his arm inside the door and spoke with casual annoyance: “Where the hell’s your light switch, Bollinger?”

“It’s on the goddam string, hanging down from the ceiling. You got a search warrant?”

“Yeah, I got a search warrant.” Boots clumped on the shaved-oak floor. Light filled the room, and Dan saw his tobacco pouch open on the table, its cornucopia of green gold spilled. Beside it lay two peyote butts which had shriveled and turned yellow. (The last from Our Lady of Laredo. When had he eaten them? Sometime in the forenoon of this Eternity.) He felt the power of the peyote sizzling through his veins, crackling off his fingertips.

The Man pinched up a few flakes of weed and held them under his blunt nose. “What’s this?”

“It’s a medicinal plant. I take it for my nerves.”

The sheriff turned and gazed silently at Dan. His sandy red hair was cropped short and combed flat across his round skull. His pearl-gray eyes were set in crescent folds of flesh. Dan remembered a whale he’d seen on the tube, tons of blubber sliding past, the quick shocking wink of an alien mind, then more tons of blubber. The sheriff was like that—intelligence trapped in a brute’s body. He wasn’t more than an inch taller than Dan, but his chest was as thick as a fifty-gallon drum. A wide belt of tooled leather circled his narrow hips, the gabardine pants fell in a straight crease and broke four inches above his polished boots.

He zipped up the pouch and tossed it across the room. “Tag it and seal it, Wendell.” He picked up a peyote butt and sniffed. “What’s this?”

“Cactus.”

The sheriff grunted and pulled out a chair. “Siddown. Let’s talk.”

Dan slumped onto a stool and let his manacled hands hang behind him, gazing across the table at the sheriff.
This is my house, you redneck cocksucker, who the hell are you to invite me to sit down in my own chair?
He visualized the sheriff pinned in his car with the steering column through his guts. He smiled.

The sheriff eyed him with his whale’s eye. “You ever been arrested before?”

“Check with Interpol, why don’t cha?”

The second deputy—Dan saw him for the first time, gliding swiftly out of the shadow. He had a nose like a tomahawk, rooted above the dark line of his eyebrows. Comb marks divided his coarse blue-black hair into narrow ribbons arching straight back over his long skull. He was part Indian, Dan could tell by the cheekbones which pushed his eyes up into a tight squint at the corners. The eyeballs were like ripe elderberries, quick, darting, hungry. Dan thought of a predator caught in the flash of a hidden camera at some jungle waterhole.

He didn’t remember getting up, but now he stood with the stool between himself and the deputy. The man carried
a long riot stick, a twenty-eight incher like the MPs used, and was turning it in his right hand so that it squeaked inside his tight black leather glove.

They had him bracketed, the sheriff on his right, the tall thin deputy on his left, hatchet-head in front. Dan wondered if the beating would come now, or …

It was to be later. The sheriff flipped his hand and said: “Okay, Colley, Wendell. Search the premises.”

The deputies moved away. Dan dropped onto his stool, stretched out his legs, and yawned.

A fly buzzed at the window above the sink.
Beat your brains out, fool. It’s only an illusion
. Dan reached out and ran his finger over the marks his froh had made in the oak slab of the tabletop. He’d stained the darkwood, then hand-rubbed it with pumice to bring the grain up to a beige-satin finish.

“Wagga slimspahoot unglit?”

Dan leaned forward and watched the sheriff’s lips move. He saw the tongue, sliced and smothered in button mushrooms. I’
m ripped, all right
. The man’s face seemed molded in wax. The blond moustache was like the fake ones they put on department store dummies. But the whale’s eyes were real, they looked out with amused contempt.

“Frishup? Ella-wanna got?” Questions, like lumps of cold clay, plonked his skull. The meanings kept wriggling away, burrowing into the back of his brain.
Where am I? What’s going on here?
Dan saw the gun sticking out of the sheriff’s belt clip and remembered: The bust is still on. Shit … how long?

From the corner of his eyes Dan watched the two deputies mooching around, taking stuff out of drawers, tearing open boxes, sniffing, snorting, muttering. The tall one, Wendell, was kind of a vacuous friendly kid. Dan figured he couldn’t be more than eighteen, a little on the bony side, but cute. He had sheep’s eyes, he would die at an early age. The black-eyed one, Colley, was a man only a mother could love dearly, one you could trust at your side only if the job was mean and dirty and cruel …

The tall deputy ran up the short flight of steps from the
living room carrying the little pot-bellied ceramic Buddha he’d used as an incense burner. “You oughta see that thing he worships on the wall.”

The words struck Dan as funny. Laughter swelled up in his throat and choked him. He opened his mouth to relieve the pressine:
Uh-huh-huh-huh
—! The sheriff stared at him. “What’s funny?”

Dan tried to remember what was funny and couldn’t. A lumpy terror pervaded his flesh. The skin on his arms crawled, he saw it rippling like water, cool, but underneath
burning
. The Man-Mountain began shaking the pouch and asking him something. Yes, Dan nodded. The pouch is mine, yes. But that wasn’t what the sheriff wanted. Dan leaned closer, straining to catch the words which slipped out of the sheriff’s mouth like little silver fish. If he could catch just one he could examine it, and the gubble-bubble would start making sense …

“… Any more of this stuff around?”

“Have I got—?”

“Any more of this … medicinal plant?”

Relief flooded in. “Oh sure. Down behind the dam. You wanta see it?”

His eyesight had never been so spectacular. The stars fell out of the sky and broke like icicles. He couldn’t feel his feet touch the ground, yet he was moving. A cool wind blew up the ravine, the moon was haloed. The stone arch of the bridge glowed with its own light, shapes flickered at the edge of his vision. He turned once, sure he was being followed. But it was only the two deputies. He was amazed to see lights in his little cabin, the sheriff hulking over the table …

He heard a voice call out from the forest:
“Dan, can you come over here a minute?”

He whirled toward the sound, saw an apparition with a bald skull, empty sockets for eyes. A plaid shirt hung open around the chest, but only clay filled the curving white cage of the ribs.

Something stabbed his back. “Don’t try to run.”

Better watch that shit, he thought. These Citizens are young and spooky, they think I’ve got a gang hidden out here in the woods. Damn, wish I had. Machine guns rat-a-tat-tat, the two deputies falling, Ugh! Ugh! himself running free with the wind in his face. They’re just waiting for me to reach the middle of the bridge, he thought, then they’ll shoot. When he reached the top of the arch he thought: They’ll wait until I get down below the dam, then they’ll shoot.

He paused to look down at the water. The moon bounced out from behind a cloud and spread itself on the surface of the pond, broke apart into dozens of dancing silver fish. He wanted to dive in and swim away …

But his two friends wanted to view his crop. Except that for the moment they weren’t friends, they were involved in a wierd morality play in which a man can be thrown in jail because of chemicals secreted by certain plants.
Very astute reasoning, Dr. Bollinger
. He seemed to be addressing the annual pot-growers seminar meeting in the Congressional Ballroom …

Dry moss crunched beneath his bare feet as he walked across a slab of exposed sandstone. It made him think of frost in the churchyard on Sunday morning, walking in patent-leather shoes with Debra on one side, his mother on the other. The odor of ancient varnish bit his nostrils, a woody-musty smell rose from the hymn book in his hands.
This world is not my hooooommmme, I’m just a-travelin’ thruuuuuu
. . . Debra’s voice was a crystal chime, but when Dan opened his mouth everybody turned to look at him with boiled crab’s eyes …

“What the fuck you got all these rocks here for?”

Wendell had blundered into his Zen garden. Porous quartzite rocks caught the moonlight and broke it into granules. Humps of moss-grown granite lay like beached sea lions. The sand raked around them was meant to simulate ocean waves around the continent—why bother to tell them that? The dark lines in the sand began to ripple, like snakes crawling …

He walked on, the breeze felt like spider webs stuck
on his face. His eyes watered; he had a terrible awareness of the flesh clinging to his bones, of each joining of cartilage, muscle, and tissue …

Well, here we are
. He stopped and would have waved his hand if it hadn’t been for the cuffs. The irrigation system was a ditch extending out beyond the spillway; he could dam the flow with a board and make it spill over the bank and flood the terraces. The Incas grew potatoes that way, he thought of telling them that, but they wouldn’t understand. Is that stuff ready to smoke? That was their level.
Oh sure
—stroking the waist-high head of a plant “You can get off on the leaves. Don’t bother with the male plants. Take the ones with the narrow leaves … here. You guys aren’t gonna pull these up, are you?”

“Whatever the sheriff says.”

“Why don’t you turn him on?”

“Shit.” The dark-eyed one whirled away, swinging his beam. “Where’s the rest of your crop, Bollinger? C’mon, let’s not stand out here in the dark all fucking night”

Dan took them down to where his major crop grew on an alluvial prairie located in a wide bend in the creek. He showed them a patch growing in leaf mulch, more in an old stump.

“You’re real scientific,” said Wendell, and Dan knew Wendell was getting a contact high off the leaves. Dan was picking it up himself; he started telling them how you soaked your seeds and grew ‘em in pots until the frost-danger was past. Then you brought them out in the sun. Used to be local weed was pure crap, he told them, but now they were turning out super-dynamite tops at all the colleges; they had experts in agronomy using the latest techniques. He began boasting about all the scientific advances they’d made, how you could spread hash oil on a sheet of blotting paper, and put enough in one letter to keep you spaced for a year, and there were Thai-sticks made up like the ribs of paper parasols, and knuckles of hashish packed in candy wrappers, a whole fucking culture balanced on the point of one little pinheaded law …

Going back he stopped beside the stone lantern at the
foot of the bridge and looked up at Orion spread out across the sky; he heard the shrill chirr of cicadas and smelled the dank pungency rising from the scummy waters of the pond. He felt sadness clutch at his throat, certain that he would never see it again. The forest was a deep absorbent blackness, alive with writhing shapes and bumping forms. It was all here, the residue of a thousand spaced-out nights spent with the creatures of his mind, ghosts of the past and shades of dead companions, dryads and trolls and the weird sisters of germanic folklore. They gathered at the edge of the forest to watch him depart. A cloud came down in the shape of a dark hand, the moon disappeared, and a fetid dankness rose in the air …

The cold flashlight jabbed his back.

“C’mon. Let’s get outa here.”

Dan heard the fear in his voice and wondered if Colley had seen what he had seen, the figure of a woman standing at the top of the bridge, her eyes fixed and a terrible slash across her throat. The blood leaked down across her breasts and matted the rippling sorrel hair which framed the face, the white face of Christina …

He slipped out of time. It could have been a minute, two minutes before he identified the fantasy he was in. He was dressed in black and taking Debra to be burned. She walked ahead in the lantern light dressed in Mama’s white satin slip, with a blue scarf knotted around her waist. The sacrificial altar was the stump of a silver maple, three feet wide and sawed off flat as a table.

More chains! More chains! A thousand pounds of iron hung from his shoulders. The Beast sighed, and waited
.

When he entered the cabin, Dan saw the sheriff sitting at the table looking at the Polaroid nudes he’d taken of Christina.
You nosy bastard
. The sheriff stood up and stuffed the photos in an envelope. Dan saw the bulge of his groin and thought,
What the hell, he’s human
. But that didn’t help, because the bust was still on, and the sheriff said:

“Okay, let’s go.”

Go … go … GO! The word reached through and
tapped the Beast on the shoulder. They had him triangulated again, Hatchet-face on the right about four feet away; the sheriff in front; Wendell off to the left. Dan watched the program click through the computer:
Colley first, then the sheriff. You can leave Wendell until the last
.

Silently he screamed:
This is senseless!
But the Beast didn’t listen. With a savage roar he rose up and snapped the flimsy chains …

Dan felt as if he were standing off to one side watching. He admired the smooth way he sidestepped, cocked his right foot, and drove it into the gut of Colley. The gurgle of retching was music in his ears. Vomit spattered on the floor as the deputy backpedaled across the room and then fell down the living-room stairs with his arms windmilling backward.