The Mad and the MacAbre (2 page)

No. Terrible idea.
Terrible
idea.

"You can't win 'em all," he whispered.

The hunt was over. Charlie walked back to
his car and drove home.

- 2 -

Charlie stared at the TV for about three
hours, not really watching it.

* * *

He was deeply ashamed of himself the next
morning. Grabbing her arm? How could he be that careless? That
impatient? He was starting to lose control, and if he didn't shape
up soon, he'd find himself on the receiving end of a three hundred
pound convicted rapist's penis. At least, that was the fate he'd
overheard a co-worker wish upon the person who stole her laptop.
For what Charlie was doing, he'd probably end up with a much larger
rapist. Or a much larger penis. Either way, he needed to get
himself back to normal.

There was always his emergency shelter, but
that was a last resort. He'd rather not spend his remaining years
hiding out like an animal.

He looked at his reflection in the bathroom
mirror. "Shape up or ship out," he told himself.

Charlie brushed his teeth and rinsed with
Listerine, then practiced his smile a few times. He didn't think it
looked that creepy. Maybe it was his eyes. He knew people whose
eyes seemed to sparkle when they smiled, but his never did.

Contacts might work. Lighten his eyes up.
Turn them from brown to blue or green. Then the women might trust
his smile. He should make an appointment to visit the eye doctor
sometime soon.

After work the next day, Charlie decided to
empty his change jar. All of his spare change went into the plain
glass jar. When the jar was full to the very top, he'd dump it into
the grocery store's loose change machine, get his savings in paper
currency (minus an eight percent service charge), and then buy
himself something special. With his last jar, he'd bought a really
nice power drill with dozens of different bits. He found that he
preferred the smallest one.

The jar was just over a third of the way
full, and Charlie's official rule was that the top coin actually
had to protrude over the surface before he could consider spending
the money. But having already decided to break the biggest rule in
his life, using the change jar early was a pretty minor infraction,
and a handful of bills could possibly accomplish what his
personality couldn't.

* * *

He walked out of the grocery store,
disappointed. Only fifty-five dollars and twenty-one cents. Less
than he'd expected. The jar must've been heavier on pennies than
usual.

Still, it should be enough to get somebody
into his car. Though it felt like cheating this way, he didn't
think he had a choice. After this one, he'd get completely back on
track. Follow all of the rules. He just needed to get this one out
of his system and then everything would be back to the way it used
to be.

* * *

The money worked. He didn't even have to
promise that more was forthcoming. He drove with the
hooker--really, a crack whore, though he hated that term--in his
passenger seat and tried to keep his eyes on the road.

"So what do you want to do?" she asked.

Charlie shrugged. He didn't have a script
for this sort of thing.

"I bet you have some idea."

"Okay."

"This your first time?"

"No."

She smiled. "Not first time ever. I meant
first time for money."

"Oh. Yes."

"I can tell. I know a guy who can give us
something to make us both feel better. It doesn't cost that
much."

Charlie shook his head.

"You sure?"

"Yeah."

"You're the boss. Pity, though. You'd have a
lot more fun if you relaxed a bit."

"I'm okay."

She pointed through the windshield at a
building up ahead. "How about you pull behind that bank over
there?"

"My house is better."

"How far is it?"

"Not far."

"You know I can't drive around all night
with you, right? Not for what you're paying. Let's just go
someplace quick."

"My house is better. It'll only take ten
minutes."

"You got beer?"

"Yes."

"What kind?"

Charlie tried to remember the commercials.
"Bud Light."

"All right. But we're gonna have to be
quick."

The first thing she did when they walked
into his house was excuse herself and go into the bathroom. When
she emerged a couple of minutes later, her eyes were glazed over
and she gave him a half-smile. She wasn't anywhere near as
appealing now, but it was very easy to get the chloroform-soaked
rag over her mouth.

* * *

"I never had any interest
in finding my real parents," he told her, as he polished the blade
with a cloth. "I could probably find them, I guess, but I don't see
any reason to do that. I lost touch with my first foster family,
too, and I spent a lot more time with them than I did my birth
parents, so it's just not something that's important to me. I feel
guilty about that sometimes, like I
should
care, but I don't. Why do you
need parents when you're in your forties?"

She continued tugging on the straps. He
liked that.

"I think maybe if I'd had a really good
childhood or a really bad childhood, I'd be more interested. But I
barely even remember being a kid. What would we talk about? I don't
even use credit cards, so it's not like I'd try to borrow money
from them. This is going to sting a lot, so brace yourself. I mean
it--it's really going to hurt. I'm going to cut you right there.
Not a long cut but a deep one. Are you ready? Blink if you're
ready. I bet you can't keep your eyes open like that for more than
a minute. Want me to time it? One one thousand, two one thousand,
three...see, you blinked. Ready?"

Charlie winked at her, then slid in the
blade. Not too deep. He left it there for a few minutes, giving it
a slight twist every now and then.

Finally, he removed it and showed her the
tip. "Don't worry, I'll make the bleeding stop now. Then you can
relax for a while."

He giggled as he tended to her wound. This
was well worth the risk he'd taken. Not that he planned to ever do
it again--he had to follow the rules--but for this one time he
deserved the pleasure.

She went into withdrawal on the second day
and died on the third, but Charlie felt completely satisfied.

* * *

His September
24
^th
hunt went much more smoothly. He got her the first night.
She'd begged him for money. It probably would've been harder to
keep her
out
of
his car than to get her in there.

She screamed so loud when she regained
consciousness that Charlie worried that even the extensive
soundproofing in his basement might be insufficient, so he put on
the leather gag. By the third day, she wasn't screaming very loud
anymore, and he took it off.

* * *

His November
24
^th
hunt was about average. Last year around Thanksgiving he'd
told his victim that he was celebrating with human flesh instead of
turkey, and then he read her some cannibalism jokes he'd gotten out
of a book. He dug out his notes and did the same thing this year.
He didn't really eat her, though.

He drove her pieces to the Body Pond, which
was a small pond about an hour out of the city. As far as Charlie
knew, hardly anybody ever went out to the pond, and he thought it
was deep enough that even an extended drought wouldn't uncover the
rock-filled sacks.

Of course, he hoped to fill the pond enough
that someday he'd be forced to find a new hiding spot.

* * *

"What do you think you're doing?" Alicia
asked, walking over to his desk.

"What?"

"What do you think you're doing?"

Charlie squirmed and desperately wished she
would leave him alone. "I'm just trying to work."

"Everybody else is in the break room having
Christmas lunch. Doing work is strictly off-limits. C'mon."

"I didn't bring anything for it."

"Why not?"

Charlie shrugged.

"You could have at least signed up to bring
napkins. It doesn't take anything to stop on your way here and buy
a package of napkins. But I won't tell anyone you didn't contribute
if you don't. Let's go get some food."

"I'm fine."

"If I called it a holiday lunch instead of a
Christmas lunch, would you go?"

"I'm not hungry."

"How hungry do you have to be for
cookies?"

"I don't know."

"Get up, Charlie. The whole department is
having a holiday lunch, and you're part of the department. It's
silly for you to sit here by yourself. Don't make me drag you in
there by your shirt collar. I'll do it."

Charlie looked back at his computer screen.
"I'm not hungry."

Alicia stared at him for a moment, and then
shrugged. "Whatever you want. I'm just trying to be nice to you.
Hope you get a lot done."

She left, and Charlie let out a deep sigh of
relief.

* * *

Charlie walked down the sidewalk, hands deep
in his pockets, breath misting in the cold air. He had no interest
in the Christmas lights or the music that played from one of the
downtown shops, but he did enjoy the crunching sound the occasional
patches of ice made under his feet as he walked.

The wind was starting to pick up and it was
getting chillier than he liked. He pulled the hood of his jacket
over his head and decided to cut through Klant Park. It wasn't
usually a good idea to walk through the park at night (Charlie was
confident in his ability to deal with a helpless vagrant woman;
less so in his ability to fend off a group of muggers) but the
small park seemed to be empty.

As he walked through the single path, past
the swing set, he heard something.

A faint whimper.

He stopped and listened more closely.
Definitely a whimper. Not human. Sounded like a dog.

He glanced around, looking for the source.
It was difficult to hear over the rush of the wind, and the park
was poorly lit, but it seemed to be coming from the opposite side.
He picked up his pace a bit, curious to see what was out there.

He walked through the park until he found
the source of the sound, which came from beneath a wooden bench. It
was indeed a small dog, lying on its side. He crouched down and
stared at it with mild interest.

Charlie had never owned pets as a kid, and
didn't feel he was missing anything as an adult. He knew that a lot
of serial killers started with animals and worked their way up to
humans, but Charlie didn't see the point. Anybody could have
control over a domesticated dog, unless it went on a wild rampage
and started mauling infants. There was no trick to keeping a dog on
a leash, no thrill to be gained from causing it pain. Why
bother?

He wondered what was wrong with the dog.
There didn't seem to be any blood. Maybe it was just starving.

The dog kind of amused him. It had a funny
black-and-white face (white down the middle, black on the sides)
that almost looked like a clown. He didn't know the name of the
breed, but this kind of dog appeared in television commercials a
lot. He liked the way its eyes bugged out a little. Very silly.

He gently brushed his hand across its fur.
The dog whined, though Charlie didn't think he was hurting it. It
wasn't wearing a collar.

Would it bite him if he put his finger next
to its mouth? He'd never been bitten by a dog before. Maybe it
would enrage him enough to want to bring the dog to his basement.
That would certainly be less risky than a homeless woman.

Of course, the dog could be rabid. That was
a good reason not to see if it would bite him.

It didn't seem to be foaming at the mouth at
all, and it certainly wasn't being aggressive. Admittedly, Charlie
knew very little about rabies, but everything he'd seen on TV and
movies involved foaming at the mouth and growling. A rabid dog
wouldn't just lie here under a park bench; it would be going
berserk.

He took off his right glove, extended his
index finger and carefully placed it in front of the dog's
mouth.

The dog whimpered and licked his finger.

Charlie wiped its slobber off on his jeans.
Disgusting.

But he wasn't going to kill it simply
because it got some dog spit on him. He put his glove back on and
stood up. He might check back tomorrow to see if it had starved to
death, just out of curiosity.

As he walked away, the dog let out a pitiful
howl. Charlie kept walking. It wasn't his dog, and if the owner
didn't care enough to watch his property, Charlie wasn't going to
do it for him. If he saw the owner frantically searching for his
dog, he might point out where it was laying, but beyond that, the
animal wasn't his problem.

He left the park and resumed walking on the
sidewalk, once again enjoying the crunch of ice under his feet. He
tried to remember which commercials he'd seen that kind of dog in.
At least one of them was for flea medicine--the clown-faced dog was
scratching and the pug wasn't. Or maybe it was the other way
around. He also thought one of those dogs was in a car insurance
advertisement. It might have talked.

It was definitely a popular type of dog. Not
only would the owner probably be looking for it, but there might be
a reward for its safe return.

Charlie had no idea how much a clown-dog
cost, and he had no idea what kind of reward might be offered for
finding one...but what if it was a lot? What if it was five hundred
dollars? Though it was unlikely to be that much, what if the owner
was really attached to the dog? It wasn't as if Charlie had
anything else to do tonight--he might as well take the dog home and
hope there was a reward. If there wasn't, he'd throw it back
outside. No harm done.