SUSPENSE THRILLERS-A Boxed Set (15 page)

Although she had not seen everything in the store, it was necessary to make her choice. She bought the figurine. The rest of her anger melted away as she looked at the rainbow colors of the umbrella.

"Wrap it for me," she commanded the woman who took her money.

As the figurine was being covered with white tissue paper she decided the present deserved a box too. For four ninety-five a person should at least get a box. "Put it in a box," she ordered.

"It don’t come with a box." The sales lady’s voice was close to a snarl. She put the blue girl in the bottom of a thin paper bag.

“I don’t care if it comes in a doggie bag, I want a box for it," Jennie said firmly.

She got her way. She usually did. She knew she was often crotchety and rude, but she did not care. What had the people in this city ever done to deserve courtesy? Had good manners made life more comfortable for her? They had not.

Only the ornery got what they asked for these days. The nastier and more demanding you were the more respect you received.

The bus ride home was as bad as Jennie had thought it would be. The downtown bus was packed with city workers returning home. At first she could not find a seat and thought she would be forced to stand. There were not any gentlemen around anymore to give a lady a seat. The bus lurched two blocks before Jennie, in a state of near panic, spied an empty place in the back. It was between two Hispanic women with parcels heaped in their laps.

"Can I sit down here?" Jennie asked. She intended to sit anyway, but the lady by the window had an imposing look about her. "I gotta sit down," Jennie added, pressing past the aisle woman’s knees.

Finally squeezed into place between them, she hawked her elbows close to her sides to keep contact with them minimal. Tacos, hot sauce, refried beans. Sweat, greasy hair, unwashed clothes. Jennie gagged at the revulsion that crept up her throat.

When Jennie finally unlocked her front door, she was beyond exhaustion. Before unwrapping the birthday present, she went to the big rocker in the corner and put her stockinged feet on the blue vinyl hassock.

Closing her eyes, she relived the day and found it partially rewarding. The pie and coffee were good. The umbrella girl was a stroke of good luck. But the rides back and forth!

She woke with a start and realized she must have fallen asleep. She still had the box in her hands. Glancing at her feet she saw the brief rest had helped the swelling. As she began to unwrap the figurine something stopped her fingering through the tissue paper. A premonition. A chill that rolled down her spine.

She held still for several seconds, pondering the feelings. Sloughing it off as a bad case of birthday nerves, she finished pulling tissue from the umbrella girl. Getting slowly to her feet, Jennie took the figurine to the front window and set her on the sill looking out at the ending of the day.

Then the premonition returned.
Someone was in the house!
She knew it without turning around or searching the rooms. She knew it in her old aching bones. Fear took over, but she fought for control. She watched her hands begin to shake as if they no longer belonged to her, but she would not succumb to irrational fear. How dare someone come into her home! How dare they lurk in the shadows and deliberately frighten an old, defenseless woman!

She whirled and saw a split-second imagine of a man’s head as it pulled back around the door facing in the hall. A surge of indignation carried Jennie across the room. She had her hand on the doorjamb exactly where she had seen the face seconds before. Peering into the darkness beyond the hall, she could see nothing that might be a man. To reach the light switch she would have to step into the darkened room. She hesitated, then called out, "What do you want?"

The silence that followed made her falter. Why had she not run out the door rather than toward this fearful confrontation? Someone was hiding and what was it he might do to her? "Answer me! Answer me this minute! You come out of there. I don’t have nothing worth stealing." Her voice was strong and steady, but that wasn't how she felt.

She supported herself against the wall. Tension held her erect, but there was a fuzzy line creeping up her vision. She could feel the blood in her head thumping wildly. Quick bites of pain slicing through her chest.

She thought she would rather die than endure this horrible, waiting, creeping silence.

"You have something worth stealing. You have your life," a voice said from the darkness.

He came to the door, the game at an end; the serious time of killing had arrived. He found her on the floor in a faint. He checked the pulse in her bony wrist. At least he had not been cheated.

He lifted her light body and carried her outside. He had to get out of the house, have her on his own, in his own way, not surrounded by the putrid smell of rotten oranges and dust. He put her in the car and left the neighborhood. They were on a little used highway in an industrial area bordering southeast Houston before she awoke whimpering.

“Shut up, old woman," he snapped.

She sat up in the back, looking around her in confusion. Gray hair spread untidily around her gaunt face and a tic began in her left eye. He could hear her breathing hard, and her fear thrilled him.

"You let me out of here," she said, but it was a whimper, not a strong command. "What do you want with me? Where are you taking me?"

He smiled at her, and she was stayed quiet.

Ahead was a barren spot. He pulled onto the shoulder of road where a beaten grass path led to a wide drainage ditch.

"Where are we going?" Jennie cried as he hauled her out onto gravel. She spoke into his face, his strange, expressionless face. "I don’t believe this." She searched through her mind for a code, a bit of advice, some reasonable argument that might stop the man from harming her. She giggled and sobbed at the same time.

He had her hidden behind tall grass. He let go of her arm and fiddled with his shirtfront.

Jennie backed away from him on her hands and knees, scurrying backward like a startled crayfish. There was a clay-like mud in the ditch that stuck to her hands. Horrified at the filth she was in, she looked up at the monster in the last light from the setting sun. There was something swinging back and forth, back and forth from his right hand. It hypnotized her and she stopped, staring.

He was speaking to her. She strained to hear. "This is merciful and clean," he whispered. "Tell them I sent you home."

She struggled for breath. None of his words made any sense to her, no sense whatsoever.

The killer stepped behind her and wrapped the wire around her shivering throat. She fought very little, surprisingly little, but it might have only seemed that way to the killer, whose strength had met no real match. Bones cracked and blood flowed, leaped to meet the ground, flowed once more.

The killer stood quietly for several minutes. Sated. He imagined himself within the old woman’s blood as it seeped into the ground, dripped, streamed, seeped. Finally he walked three feet to his left and picked up her head by the spiky gray hair. Then carefully, fondly, he positioned the head on her flat chest. She had fallen back gracefully and looked as peaceful as any corpse in a silken casket.

He hiked a shoulder, squatted beside the body, and peered at her eyes. "I don’t want you on my land," he told her quietly. "I’ll leave you here for them to find. All of you. Only you."

He chuckled and tapped two fingers lightly on her hair. His hands scooted down the length of her still body, straightening the cotton dress. The head suddenly unbalanced and rolled from her chest. He reached for it beside her arm and pressed it down into the sunken rib cage until it was lodged in place. He noticed one brown support hose sagged around her calf and pulled the stretchy material up tight. Finished. When they found her, no one could complain he had left her in a mess. She was as neat as death by garroting could leave her. Except for the odd placement of her spiky gray-haired head, she might only be asleep and dreaming of apple pie and strong good coffee.

#

Jennie Sargosie had been dead two weeks before her body was discovered. Two surveyors stumbled across her lying stiff and decaying in the drainage ditch. One of the surveyors turned his back and retched miserably before scrabbling up the slight hill to the highway. The other surveyor stooped and curiously poked at the severed head, which still miraculously sat on the chest cavity. He could tell it was an old woman because of the dress, but without it he would not have been sure. There had been too many warm days in February, and maggots and ants had eaten away part of her face to expose the right cheekbone. But none of the desecration was as terrible to contemplate as the open empty neck. The surveyor would not pursue his morbid instinct to look at it closely.

Yet during the hour and a half before the police arrived the curious surveyor satisfied his thirst for gory detail by looking over the rest of the corpse from every conceivable angle. He even got on his hands and knees and turned his head upside down to stare up into the shriveled hole of her nose to see if he could catch sight of the brain. He lifted her skirt with a stick to see what she wore underneath. Her slip stuck to her thigh, however, and he let the skirt drop back into place.

That night he told his wife everything he had done. He was surprised and hurt when she went to their bedroom and locked the door on him. He never mentioned the old woman again. But he dreamed of her often. She reminded him of his grandmother. It was a pity the murderer had cut off her head. The surveyor knew it was an act of depravity, but most of all it seemed to him such a damn pity.

SAM BARTHOLOMEW sat on a bar stool in Danny’s Bar drinking Seven and Seven with Jack DeShane, who was putting him under the table with Scotch on the rocks.

"Number three," Jack said. His tongue was not working too well, but Sam understood every word he said and some he did not say.

"Yes, but a change in the pattern of the killing," Sam pointed out.

"What do you goddamn make of it--putting her head on her chest that way?” Sam knew that as the night and the drinking progressed, Jack’s use of the word "goddamn" would increase to the point of idiocy.

"Could be any number of reasons. Maybe he’s running scared, ready to retire his act. Could be something else though--pity, grief at what he’d done--"

"Goddamned monster got no pity," Jack interrupted. "Had no pity for Willie. For that woman in her bed, her goddamn bed with the pillow."

Sam rapped loudly on the bar for refills. He did not want to think too much about the specifics of the murders when he was in public. He might lose control and do something. Smash the frosted mirrors behind the bar. Wreck the tables and chairs.

"In a dirty ditch," Jack mumbled into his Scotch. "Grabbed her in her own home and drove her there. Goddamned shame I’ve not found him yet, the lowdown evil bastard."

"I know." Sam studied his young friend. He desperately wanted to pat Jack’s shoulder, but he couldn’t and he wouldn’t. Things like that between men didn’t do much good. You just suffered stoically. Goddamned shame.

Jack continued to stare into his Scotch. "When I came out of the service, I shoulda gone to Merkel, Texas, and stayed on my dad’s place. He wanted me to. He goddamned begged me. But I had to join the force, be on a big goddamn city police force." He turned to Sam and gazed at him forlornly. "Why’d I do that, Sam?

We’d be all right now if I’d got outta here.”

"Yeah, maybe." But Sam knew Willie might have died wherever the DeShanes had lived. Or would he?

But that was past. The boy was dead, buried. So were the two women. The Wireman had to be stopped before he killed someone else. But how?

There had been a bit of skin beneath Willie’s fingernails but no blood. He had scratched his killer, fought him, struggled to the last to survive. Oh God. There was not enough evidence. No eye-witnesses. The victims appeared to be picked randomly, the motive could be anything from a vast feeling of inferiority to mother-hate. All they had was the weapon. A wire. Probably a garrote. Could be home-made. And tremendous strength. The Wireman had fearsome power. A wrestler? Boxer? Karate? Athlete? Probably young to go with his strength. Height, six foot or more. And that is all the police had. A wire, muscles, youth.
Goddamn.

"I wish they’d let me work," Jack said, motioning for another round. It was last call, almost two in the morning. Mrs. Lawrence would be waiting for him. Maggie waited too, her dreams light, her arms ready to wrap Sam close and warm. "They won’t let me goddamn work!"

"It’s best, Jack," Sam explained yet again. "For a while. "They’re afraid...

"I know what they’re goddamn afraid of. Me turning vigilante. Well, by God, they’re right. I’m patrolling every day on my own. I’m asking ’round. If I catch the bastard, he’s goddamn dead. Dead, Sam!”

Sam sighed and took his drink. He knew he would do the same if it were his child who had been mutilated and murdered. And he was not sure he could trust himself to handcuff the killer if he caught him either.

Without witnesses it would be so easy to rid the world… But the law was law. However ineffective it was becoming, however unbalanced the scales of justice, it was the law.

"That’s why you’re on leave of absence, Jack. They’re doing all they can. The trail’s cold. It’s been cold for weeks. We’re going to have to luck into this one."

Jack sobered a little. "And he’s changing his pattern, which means...?"

“We’re nearer. He knows it. He’s weakening. He may want to quit."

"Lets get the goddamn outta here." Jack stumbled from the stool and caught Sam’s arm for balance. "Mrs. Lawrence said next time I did this she’d move back in her own house. Then I'd be alone."

“She won’t leave," Sam assured his friend as he helped him to the door. On the street he saw nothing but a drunk puking into a sewer. He aimed Jack at the passenger side of the Monte Carlo.

"I can drive, doan worry. Lemme do it," Jack protested.

"I’ll drive. You ride. Go to sleep, Jack. Try to go to sleep."