WIDOW (22 page)

“Just a few sips. Then you straddle me and ride for the border, whatta you say?”

She brought the glass to the bedside. She sat beside him and slipped one hand beneath his neck to raise his head. He had been tied down for the best part of an hour. He was thirsty, his lust driving him wild, while she teased and played her game.

He drank down the entire highball glass of whiskey and Warfarin before he started coughing. She moved away from him with the empty glass. Then she returned, bringing the chair from her dressing table. She positioned it beside the bed—but at a little distance—sat down, crossed her legs. She smiled beatifically.

“Goddamn! That whiskey tastes like shit. You need to pay more and get better booze.”

She nodded. Smiled.

“I can't get this awful taste outta my mouth. Christ.” His throat worked while he swallowed and swallowed. “You don't have something in the house better than that stuff, something to chase it with?”

“No.” She waited.

“Why you sitting there looking at me? Look now what you've done. My hard-on is dying and, if you want to know, these scarves are cutting off the blood in my hands and feet. How ‘bout you untie me so we can fuck for real? I'm not all that hot into this bondage stuff.”

“You treat women like slaves. That's bondage.”

A flicker crossed his eyes. He winced and tried to pull his legs free. “Look, I'm getting pissed, okay? Enough's enough. Now let me loose. I don't think this is funny anymore.”

An involuntary moan escaped him. He tried to jerk his hands from the bed. The scarves held fast, tightening more around his wrists. “I feel sick. My stomach . . . my stomach's . . .”

“Hurting?” she asked. She leaned forward a little to look him in the eyes. “Is there pain yet? I'd be interested to know what it feels like.”

“Listen, you bitch, I don't know what kind of game you're up to, but I don't like it! I ought to get up from here and beat the living hell outta you.”

“You're dying,” she said coolly. She was surprised how calm she sounded, how detached she felt. “What are you talking about?”

“You won't beat the hell out of me or any other woman again. You won't hound them, use them, abuse them, or screw them. Not anymore.”

“You know who I am? You know who my friends are?”

“I couldn't care less.”

He pulled his head to his chest. He blanched. He began to gag. White rings of flesh stole around his eyes and sweat seemed to magically appear on his forehead.

“You'll probably vomit some of it up.”

His eyes were popping from their fleshy shells. He was sweating profusely now so that the musky smell of him filled the room. He murmured, “You're not lying. That whiskey . . . poison . . . you've poisoned me . . .”

“Absolutely,” she said. “A pretty nasty poison too. The dog it killed, it made him bleed from the eyes. I don't know if that was before or after it killed him, but either way, it's not pretty.”

He started to scream, but she had an extra scarf ready. She stuffed it in his mouth and sat in the chair again to wait for the end of the show.

~*~

It was not pretty. It was sick-making. She suspected his stomach hemorrhaged first, filling his abdomen with blood. She had made a special effort to consult a book on poisons in the local library. She knew more of what to expect than she had let him know.

He vomited some of it up. Then, as he thrashed about, his nose bled, his ears, then his eyes. Finally, while he still breathed, the frothy blood bubbling in his nostrils, he bled from the penis and rectum. It made a mess on her sheets. Luckily she had known, thanks to her research, to cover the mattress with a plastic liner.

Funny, but she hadn't thought out the emotional ramifications of murder. What it would feel like to sit idly by while someone died. It didn't surprise her, though, that she was not moved. Even the stray dog she'd accidentally poisoned deserved life more than the man thrashing and gagging and bleeding on her bed.

Several times during his death throes her mind slipped again. In and out of a groove. She didn't know when she'd “go away” or when she'd return. Click. Click. The bicycle chain ratcheting round and round the teeth of the gear, clicking in, clicking out.

Flashes of the past came and went, some so fast she couldn't catch them. Right before her eyes raced various visions, or perhaps they were hallucinations, she didn't know exactly what they were or what was happening. First she saw her children, whom she mourned deeply each time they appeared. And then her dead husband with his perplexed look, standing before her, arms at his sides, the gun in one of his hands. He was whole again, his brain not yet splattered across the room from the gun blast. “I have to do this,” he said plaintively. “It's the only way.”

“Do what?” she cried, stricken with a fear so deep it paralyzed her.

He stood over the boys in the den, the gun in his hand. Stevie thought it a toy and reached for it. She thought Gabe said something, but she didn't hear what it was. Daddy something. Daddy don't?

“It's the only way out,” he repeated. Then she came unglued and reached toward him, her body taking her across the room to stop him. Dear God, let her reach him before he did it.

But he pointed the gun at Gabriel and he pulled the trigger. She didn't see . . . it was so fast . . . but she saw him . . . pointing the gun at Stevie . . . who screamed . . . And she was at him, on him, in fact, clawing at him with insanity replacing all normal thoughts. But he had the gun, still smoking and hot, in his mouth, and she leaned away, hoping he would, hoping he wouldn't, hoping she was dreaming a nightmare, that it wasn't real, it couldn't possibly be . . . real.

Faster and faster the images came, wavered, disappeared. Click, click, clickclickclick.

After the poison had done its job and the man on the bed stopped breathing she came back to herself. She blinked and came to know how rigid she'd been holding herself in the chair. The muscles of her shoulders hurt, her buttocks were numb, and it felt as if her hands had turned to slabs of frosty meat.

She worked her arms and stood up, feeling behind her to massage the globes of flesh she had been sitting upon. It dawned on her she had not thought anything out beyond her victim's death. She had arranged every detail from the decanter to the scarves, but she had not thought about how to remove a man from her bed—a man who must weigh quite a bit over two hundred pounds.

As she stood looking out the window, contemplating the problem, the sky lightened to old unpolished silver. The smell in the room—of his sweat, his blood, his agony—made her move from the window to pace the floor.

Finally she had to wake Charlene.

“I need your help,” she said, tiptoeing into the other woman's bedroom.

Charlene came awake suddenly, sitting up in the bed. She wore another old-fashioned nightgown, long and flowered, with a lace collar. “What is it? Who's here?”

“You saw the man I brought home?”

“Shadow? What's the matter? I stayed in my room, just as you said.”

Shadow was nodding in the dark. Charlene had the blinds closed. She reached out and turned on the bedside lamp. Mackie hissed where he lay at the foot of the bed. “Well, he's dead,” she said.

“What?”

“I killed him.”

“You what?”

“Murdered him. Poison. Rat poison.”

“Oh, hon, tell me it ain't so. You're just kidding, right? It's some kind of awful joke.” Charlene hurried from the bed and went to the doorway, peeking around the corner into the hall. “You didn't really do nothing, did you? You're just playing a trick on me, huh?”

Shadow led her by the hand down the dim early-morning hallway. They stood together staring at the inert body lying on the bed, staining the white sheets red.

Charlene bolted. She rushed down the winding stair to the living room. She was at the front door, trying to undo the deadbolt, very much like the boys must have done when imprisoned with the murdered former owner. But Shadow caught and stopped her.

“Hush, Charlene. It's just like before only this one didn't break into the house. He broke into my life. At the club. He wouldn't go away. He wanted to use me. He caught me outside, and hit me in the face. I couldn't make him leave me alone. And if I didn't let him come to the house, he would have hurt me again. A lot worse.

“Don't you see? They shouldn't go on living. They keep doing these things to women. They never stop. And no one else can stop them. Police can't and jail can't and shrinks can't. They keep on doing it, hurting people and forcing them to do things until someone has to end it . . .” She talked fast, her voice hardly above a whisper, the words tumbling and rushing, as out of control as a raging river.

Charlene shook her head and squeezed shut her eyes. “You're as sick as I am, Shadow. Kay . . . remember? Your name? What it was like in that place?” Charlene turned in Shadow's hands to confront her. “We're both sick. We ain't right in the head, honey. We're way over the deep end. We're living in a nightmare. I see ghosts and hear voices. I was counting on you to keep me sane. I needed you. But you can't kill people!”

“I'm not Kay anymore. I'm someone else. Kay Mandel had a home and a family. She had a life. She had little boys. Babies. Who ruined that for me, Charlene? Who?” Again that odd clicking sounded in her mind and she saw the boys, mutilated beyond repair, beyond identification. She shook herself, denying the memory a chance to linger.

“A man destroyed all that. And men keep after me, Charlene. They just keep after me.” Shadow turned away and crossed her arms over her chest. She had dressed again, after his last death rattle. She wore black slacks and a black turtleneck pullover. Working clothes. Night clothes. She didn't know how to make Charlene understand. She had to enlist her help. Without it she didn't know how she'd remove the body.

Charlene sighed. She touched Shadow's arm tentatively. “I'll help you,” she said. “Maybe I can help you, I don't know. I don't know anything anymore. I guess we have to stick together no matter what.”

Together they rolled him into the sheet and liner, then hauled him onto the floor. They dragged him across the catwalk and down the back stairs, across the moon-splashed lawn, to the short pier. The entire time Charlene talked, but Shadow didn't listen. There was no dialogue in the world that was going to change what had been done.

“You can't do this,” Charlene said, wheezing from the exertion of getting the big naked man into the boat. “This ain't right. This is murder.”

Shadow still wasn't listening. She was hearing the man talk to her, answering those questions in all the wrong ways, answering with bravado and vulgarity and sometimes with cruelty.

He would lie at the bottom of the sea. And the world was a safer place because of it.

~*~

Son might have missed the report of the dead man had he not had the late television news on while he read over and edited the pages he had written earlier in the day.

“. . . man found floating . . . Kemah channel . . . cause of death unknown at this time . . .”

Another body dumped in the bay? The second one in a few weeks. He could feel his pulse rate increase because his heart fluttered in his chest.

He put away his manuscript and switched the channel to another local station to see if there were any further details. All the channels were into the weather report now.

Man. Dead in the water. Floating into land. Serial murder? It could be a trend, a pattern building. He must watch this very closely. Perhaps a game was underfoot. He couldn't let it happen without becoming a player.

The next morning he was up early, waiting for the paperboy to throw the paper onto the front lawn. As soon as he saw him cycling by, he opened the door and made his way down the front path. He had the paper in his hands seconds after it hit the dew-wet grass.

Inside, he stripped off the clear plastic bag and opened up the pages to the overnight crime-report section. Autopsy pending, it said. Cause of death unknown. But the man did not appear to be a fisherman. He was naked as the day he was born. He had not yet been identified. It was definitely murder.

It was not until two days later that Son found out the cause of death. In a small column the dead man was identified as Gregory Corgi, twice-convicted felon, on parole for extortion. He had been murdered with an anticoagulant generally found in retail rat-poison products.

Son could hardly control his elation. There wasn't a real pattern yet, but he had a feeling in his gut that this was the work of a serial killer. He couldn't be certain, any more than the police could—not with only two similar murders—and it was true one man had been stabbed to death and the next poisoned —and two MOs wouldn't usually point to a serial murderer—but Son had a feeling about it anyway. The victims were both male. Both found floating around the Kemah/Seabrook area of the bay.

Something was going on. The cops wouldn't pick up on it yet, but there was definitely a possibility of a killer working the area. Some kind of killer. It might just be a few kill-offs of the Mafia persuasion, but for some reason Son doubted that. They didn't much like their handiwork showing up so easily. The mob got rid of a guy, the guy disappeared. Unless the death was meant as a warning to someone or some group. And this just didn't smell like mob work. Why dump them in the bay, for instance? Why not on the doorstep of the party to be warned?

“Just one more,” Son whispered. “Come on, one more, and we've got a ball game.”

He sat back in his desk chair and contemplated the ceiling. Male victims almost always indicated some aspect of homosexuality in the killer. John Wayne Gacy and his young men. Dean Corrl and his young men. But the two victims so far hadn't been young. They were in their forties.

It was a true puzzle. And why stab one, poison the other?