The Mad and the MacAbre (7 page)

He tugged again. Kutter tugged back.

"You're not doing this correctly," Charlie
said. He knew next to nothing about dog/human interactions, but he
at least knew how to play fetch. How was it possible that he
understood the rules better than Kutter?

Charlie let go of the Frisbee. "When you're
ready to play right, let me know."

Kutter stared up at him for a moment, then
let out a whine.

"Don't whine at me. You have to let it go.
Do you want me to throw it with your jaws still stuck on it?"

Charlie grabbed the Frisbee and gently
tugged again. Kutter vigorously shook his head side-to-side and
refused to relinquish his grip. Charlie tugged a little harder and
Kutter tugged back harder.

"You're playing the wrong game," Charlie
informed the dog. Tug-of-war was supposed to be with a thick rope,
or a sock, or maybe a dead squirrel. Frisbees were for throwing and
playing fetch. This dog was totally mixed up.

Charlie released his grip again. This time,
Kutter let the Frisbee fall. Charlie picked it up and gave it
another fling--right into the same tree. He looked around the park
to see if anybody had noticed.

Several people had. They were amused.

Charlie cursed.

Kutter brought back the Frisbee, and after
another minute of not letting go of it, dropped it into the snow.
Charlie picked it up and walked several feet to the left to
distance himself from that stupid tree. He swung his arm back and
forth a few times, trying to envision the trajectory the Frisbee
would take when he released it. Finally, with all of his strength,
he threw the disc.

It was another pretty lousy throw, but this
one at least missed the tree and any other obstacles and flew
through the air like it was supposed to. Kutter, barking furiously,
chased after it, running across the park at top speed while kicking
up snow. He leapt up into the air and caught the Frisbee in his
mouth.

Wow. Charlie was
impressed.
He
certainly couldn't do that.

Kutter happily scampered back over to
Charlie and dropped the Frisbee in front of him. Then Kutter
snatched it back up as Charlie reached for it. It was a bizarre
combination of fetch and tug-of-war--clearly the poor animal had
never been taught how to separate the individual games. No problem.
Charlie played along, making several attempts to retrieve the
Frisbee before Kutter let go of his prize.

The next throw was infinitely better.
Charlie hoped lots of people had seen it, because it went perfectly
straight and almost beyond the edge of the park. Kutter caught this
one, too.

"You're pretty talented," Charlie told the
dog. "That's a good skill to have."

It wasn't really, unless there was a market
for Frisbee-catching, but everybody else in the park was
complimenting their pets, so why shouldn't Charlie? He scratched
Kutter behind the ears, then threw the Frisbee again.

And again. And again.

He threw the Frisbee until his arm ached.
Kutter never seemed to get tired of it. On the seventh or eighth
throw, Charlie accidentally blurted out "Go get it, boy!" which was
of course a completely pointless command, but he found that he felt
a surprising lack of self-consciousness while saying it, so he kept
it up, going so far as to cheer on the dog as it sprinted toward
the purple Frisbee. Though Kutter didn't catch it every single
time, he at least got three out of four, and the ones he missed
could generally be blamed on the quality of Charlie's throw.

Charlie shifted to his left arm when his
right arm started to go numb, but after a throw that involved
flinging the Frisbee straight down into the ground, he decided to
quit for the day. He checked his watch. Wow. They'd been there over
two hours. It hadn't felt anywhere near that long.

It was a lousy hunt, but a good day.

- 7 -

"That wasn't very smart of us," said Charlie
as they pulled into the McDonalds drive-thru. All that
Frisbee-tossing had made him hungry. "Everyone in that park is
going to remember us. We can't hunt there tomorrow, or maybe any
other time. We're too memorable."

Well, perhaps they weren't. Certainly Kutter
wasn't the first miracle Frisbee-catching Boston terrier to have
spent a couple of hours practicing his craft in the dog park...but
still, they had to be as cautious as possible, and running around
in front of everybody was not the way to keep himself out of
jail.

Even if he
had
found a woman willing
to get into his car, it would've been a terrible idea to actually
lure her inside. He'd screwed up.

That said, Charlie didn't feel like beating
himself up over it. He didn't feel like crying. He wasn't pathetic.
He felt fine.

He'd had fun. And it was a much safer kind
of fun than torturing and murdering a woman in his basement.

He ordered a Big Mac, large fries, and Coke
for himself, and three hamburgers and a cup of water for Kutter.
Kutter gobbled the burgers almost as quickly as Charlie could
unwrap them and toss them over to him, and also lapped up the water
in no time, although Charlie had to keep tilting the cup, since it
wasn't really designed for a dog.

Not a bad day at all. And they really didn't
need to drive so far to do it again. He was sure he could find an
equally nice dog park in his area. If he wasn't planning to kidnap
anybody, there was no reason to be discrete.

He'd resume the hunt tomorrow. If he felt
like it.

* * *

That evening, Charlie sat on the couch,
watching television. Kutter lay on his lap, snoring softly.

There was a knock at the door.

Kutter immediately woke up, jumped off the
couch, and ran toward the front door, barking. "All right, all
right, calm down," Charlie said, even though he was a bit panicked
himself. Nobody ever came to his door at nine-thirty at night.
Hardly anybody ever came to his door, period.

He peeked through the peephole. It was a
young blonde. She didn't look like a cop.

Charlie opened the door. The young woman,
who probably wasn't even twenty-one, smiled brightly at him.

"Hi," she said. "I'm Patti, and I'm trying
to pay my way through college. It's pretty expensive these days, as
I'm sure you know."

Charlie didn't respond. She sounded even
more rehearsed than he did.

"So I'd like to offer you the chance to
purchase subscriptions to your favorite magazines at a greatly
discounted price." She crouched down and petted Kutter. "Aw, what a
cutie! What's her name?"

"His name. Kutter."

"Awwwwwww." She scratched Kutter's chin,
until he rolled over and she rubbed his belly.

Charlie glanced outside. Nobody around.

He grabbed the girl by the hair and yanked
her inside. He slammed his hand over her mouth, kicked the door
shut, and dragged her into the kitchen where he kept the bottle of
chloroform.

* * *

Well,
that
was impulsive.

Charlie leaned against the basement wall,
staring at the blonde who was now strapped to the metal table,
still unconscious. He should've been cackling with glee; she was,
without a doubt, the finest victim he'd ever claimed. If he
believed in fate or a higher power, he would have called her a
heavenly gift. But she wasn't--her presence at his door was a
coincidence, and her presence in his basement was the result of
acting without thinking.

He'd wanted to let her go as soon as he got
her into the kitchen. Unfortunately, this wasn't like accidentally
stepping on her foot or spilling soda on her blouse. He couldn't
just apologize and send her on her way. She had to die.

But that was a
good
thing,
right?

Somebody would definitely come looking for
her. The disappearances of young cute college students didn't
typically go unnoticed. And though she was dumb enough to go
knocking on the doors of strangers after dark, she probably wasn't
dumb enough to do it without telling anybody where she was going,
so the search would probably begin soon.

He had to get rid of her. The question was,
how much time did he have? A day? A couple of hours?

Under other circumstances, a couple of hours
with a victim would barely seem worth the effort. But tonight, it
sounded like paradise.

Did he have even that long? What if she
lived at home, and his house was her last scheduled visit before
she was late for dinner? The cops could be one or two houses down
already, doing a methodical search.

Would they suspect him, though? Would they
suspect that the guy with the cute dog was a killer?

Yeah, probably. Charlie still had to admit
that he was kind of creepy.

"What should I do?" he asked Kutter, who lay
on the cement floor, chewing on a piece of rawhide. He didn't like
having Kutter down here, as if the dog might think less of him for
what he'd done, but he knew that if he kept the basement door
closed, Kutter would just stand outside of it and bark. Loud
barking in his home was not a good thing at this moment.

The smartest course of
action would be to quickly end her life and dispose of the
body...but freebie victim or not, it seemed like a waste. If
this
was
divine
intervention, which it wasn't, was it a good idea not to make the
most of his gift?

"Now you're just trying to rationalize it,"
he said out loud. Kutter looked away from his rawhide for a moment
as if Charlie was speaking to him. "Bad idea. Bad, bad idea."

He needed to slit her throat, soak up as
much pleasure as he could from the act, and then get rid of her.
Dump her in the Body Pond.

Or...?

He could take her someplace else. Someplace
far away. Someplace where he could take as much time as he
wanted.

His emergency shelter?

He owned a crappy little cabin deep in the
sticks, about a five-hour drive away, left to him when his second
set of foster parents died. He'd only visited it a couple of times,
and had stocked it with canned food, bottled water, and other
emergency supplies. His plan was that if he ever did screw things
up badly enough that the police found out about his murders, he
could hide out there for quite a long time.

The cabin was miserable, though. He'd only
go live there as an absolute last resort.

And it wasn't soundproofed. His assumption
was that if he ever had to flee from the police, he'd probably quit
killing women for a while. Deep in the sticks or not, he couldn't
have a live victim out there, so the cabin idea was out. He'd deal
with her here.

Charlie walked over to the table and ran his
fingers through her hair. She was absolutely beautiful.

Killing her seemed like...a crime.

What a bizarre way to feel.

He'd been given the gift of a lifetime
(admittedly, a high-risk gift that could easily land him in prison)
and he just didn't really want to kill her. He sort of wished he'd
asked her to go get coffee instead.

The whole situation reminded him of when
he'd gone to a buffet restaurant, and he'd eaten until he was full
and didn't want to eat anymore. As he was walking toward the exit,
he'd noticed that they put out strawberry cheesecake. He didn't
much feel like eating dessert after his huge meal, but he knew that
he loved strawberry cheesecake and would have pounced upon the
opportunity to have some if he weren't so full, and he'd felt
compelled to eat it anyway.

Would killing the girl make him just as sick
to his stomach as the cheesecake?

Maybe this wasn't a good example. He could
go for some strawberry cheesecake right now, actually. The point
was that dragging the young woman into his house was a decision
based more on what he'd wanted in the past than what he wanted
now.

If only he could undo it.

"You can't change what's in the past," he
said. He'd be fine. Quite honestly, he was probably just still
riding high on the adrenaline from playing with Kutter all
afternoon--in the morning, he'd be absolutely delighted to have a
beautiful college student to slice.

Yeah. That was it. Also, he was just
nervous. One cut with the razor and he'd probably be energized with
the desire to kill.

Maybe he'd use the drill instead.

No, no, the razor. Keep it simple.

He selected his smallest razor from the
shelf, and then held it above the unconscious girl's stomach. He'd
awaken her with smelling salts before he began the process, but he
should figure out his plan of action first. "Where to cut...where
to cut...?"

He dropped the razor in surprise as the
phone rang.

He quickly picked it back up--it had broken
the skin on her stomach a bit--and set it on the metal table as he
hurried upstairs. Kutter followed him, and he told the dog to shush
up as he opened the door to the basement and hurried through the
kitchen into the living room to answer.

"Hello?"

"Hi there! I'm calling about the dog you
found."

- 8 -

Charlie suddenly felt as if he'd been kicked
in the chest. "What?"

"I heard from one of your neighbors, Darlene
Clifton, that you found a Boston terrier about a month ago. I think
it's mine."

Before Charlie could lie, Kutter let out a
loud bark.

"Hey, I recognize that guy!" said the man on
the other end. "I'm right in your area. Mind if I stop over?"

"I'm...heading out."

"I'm literally like a minute from your
place. I'm passing Darlene's house right now."

Charlie wasn't sure which one Darlene was.
Probably the old lady on the corner. He supposed it didn't
matter.

"Okay," he said.

"Great, thanks!"