John Lutz - Pulse

What really got him was that she looked something like Sherri. Same type, anyway. Different hair, but definitely the same type.

“… Take one,” Sherri was saying. “They’ll definitely make you feel good.”

He looked down and saw that she was holding those same pills from her mother’s medicine cabinet.

“I feel good already,” Rory said. If you only knew…

“Don’t be such a pussy,” Sherri said, and pushed the vial of tablets toward him.

His manhood having been questioned, Rory shoved them away, causing several to spill out onto the ground.

Sherri punched his shoulder, a glancing blow, but it hurt. “Now look! You dickhead! You spilled them!”

She was angry with him. How angry will she be when she figures out I killed her precious dog? Rory knew she was smart. She would eventually find out about Duffy.

He bent down and began picking up the small white tablets, digging some of them out from beneath dead leaves.

“Get them all!” Sherri demanded.

When he had all or most of the dropped tablets in his cupped hand, Rory straightened up and threw them out toward the deeper woods.

“What the fuck, Rory?” She came at him in anger, batting at him, and the nail of her little finger scraped the corner of his left eye. The sharp pain enraged him.

He slapped her face hard, thinking about the girl beneath them in the earth, how she’d died. When she’d died.

How she’d died.

When Sherri, stunned, bent over to spit out blood, Rory brought up his knee and drove it into her midsection. He caught her to break her fall.

He hadn’t actually planned any of this. It was simply a sort of alternate sequence of things he could do. A work of imagination, really.

But damned if that imagined sequence hadn’t begun. And he knew he would let it play out. It was like it was meant to be.

If it wasn’t meant to be, why had he prepared for it without even thinking about it?

Maybe it had something to do with what he’d seen in the clearing, the god, and the girl in the ground.

Maybe he now had the secret knowledge and was acting on it. Nothing in this world really mattered compared to this.

The girl in the ground, she didn’t matter anymore. All she was now was memory. Secret memory.

He went to the Chevy and opened the trunk, got the rope he’d brought, and the roll of thick electrician’s tape.

It had only taken seconds, and Sherri was still curled on the ground, still struggling to catch her breath.

Rory stood over her, listening to her labored, gasping breathing, thinking about the dead girl. He bent down, lashed her ankles together, and cut the long end of the knotted rope with his pocket knife. Odd that he didn’t recall taking the knife from his pocket and opening it. He maneuvered Sherri’s body around on the leaves and tied her wrists tightly behind her back. Hurts? Too bad. He yanked her up and adjusted her body so she was kneeling, then ran a rope between the knotted ropes on her ankles and wrists. Thinking about the dead girl. He pulled that rope tight, bending back Sherri’s body like the dead girl’s had been. She’d almost recovered enough to scream, so he picked up the tape he’d gotten from the trunk, reeled off a long strip, and wrapped it firmly over her mouth, around to the back of her neck, thinking about the dead girl.

Rory used his knife to cut away Sherri’s clothes. He watched her dark and desperate eyes, thinking about the dead girl. Then he straightened up and looked around. The moon was almost full, and there was plenty of light in the clearing. But no one around to see what he was doing. Not out here in this desolate part of town, on this remote road.

He moved around in front of Sherri and looked intently into her face, seeing the terror and incomprehension there. She stared back, pleading. He smiled, thinking about the dead girl.

He stood where she could see him wipe the knife’s blade on the thigh of his jeans and then test its sharpness with his finger. He rolled her forward, onto her stomach, and began using the knife on her back as he’d seen the killer do to the dead girl. Sherri made the same horrified, muted noises the dead girl had made.

After a while, he put her back on her knees, her body bowed in an almost impossible arch. Perhaps someone with a powerful telescope, on some distant star, could see the horrified expression in her staring eyes.

There must be someone out there in the cosmos who can help you.

Well, maybe not.

He began working again with the knife, keeping his thumb and forefinger low on the blade, the way the killer had done with the dead girl. The screams she made now were like the dead girl’s had been, full throated but able to travel only as far as her taped mouth before changing to a frenetic low humming that barely escaped into the night.

He worked on her for quite a while there in the otherwise silent, isolated clearing, thinking about the dead girl. Her body began a frenetic bouncing and vibration, her bare breasts jiggling and heaving. This wasn’t a surprise. Rory got comfortable and watched her eyes, watched them very carefully until all light and comprehension went out of them. Like the dead girl’s eyes.

Then he used the knife to remove her breasts. It was easier than he’d imagined, no bone or gristle to cut, only soft flesh.

He considered throwing the severed breasts into the woods, letting the animals dispose of them. Then he had a better idea and decided to keep them.

Breathing hard, he stood up and went back to the car. He wrapped the breasts in an old wadded plastic cleaner’s bag tightly, so they wouldn’t leak. Then he got a shovel from the trunk.

The earth was soft, and it didn’t take long to bury Sherri.

Standing in the middle of the clearing, Rory looked carefully around him. It was as if he and Sherri had never been here. He would get back in his mother’s car and drive away, and all of this might never have happened.

It might never have happened, so it didn’t happen.

There would be a big fuss over Sherri, but she’d left on the bus and not come back. Not the first girl like her to do that. Things would quiet down after a while. The world would go on. People would forget.

He wouldn’t forget Sherri, though. Not ever.

The dead girl.

New York, the present

Q uinn decided to talk to someone about Dr. Grace Moore’s files himself. After all, hadn’t her patient Linda called on him for help? Hadn’t there been dozens of other women who called Q and A or the NYPD recently maintaining that they were in danger, requesting protection? There simply were too few people to protect them, even if most of their calls weren’t legitimate and they weren’t in actual danger.

The trouble was, some of them were in danger, and it was impossible to know which. It was a small percentage, but they were real. Linda Brooks and Grace Moore had been real, and the danger had been real, and here Quinn was investigating their deaths when he felt he should have known or sensed something that would have prevented them.

That was the problem; he couldn’t predict the future, and the killer could forge it.

The building containing Dr. Moore’s office was a haven from the heat. Everything seemed to be made of marble other than the occasional potted plant. Quinn found himself wondering what it would feel like to lie down on the cool lobby floor.

Per Quinn’s instructions, Pearl and Fedderman were helping Sal and Harold canvass two square blocks of the neighborhood around where Linda Brooks and the doctor had been murdered. Old-fashioned, irreplaceable police legwork. Quinn wasn’t sure where Weaver was; she was Renz’s special conduit to the commissioner’s office, which made her something of an independent operator. Quinn liked it that way. Pearl and Weaver were better kept apart. They could be fuse and explosive.