Robert Walker - Final Edge

Arthur gave pause before letting the ax fall, thinking of how he had become Lauralie Blodgett's sex slave, his only wish in life to please Lauralie. She promised him pleasure and gave it to him tenfold, pleasure beyond anything he had ever experienced or imagined he could ever have found in this life without her having come to him and given herself to him, but it came with a price. Not only did she wield a wicked power over him, body and soul, but he must kill for her.

All she asked of him in return for pleasure was to kill one person for her, to take one single human life. That had been her first condition. It was soon followed by a demand that he find a suitable place and the proper tools to dissect the body of the victim. After this, she leaked bits and pieces of her plans to him as the abduction unfolded. Still, she never revealed her reasons, the underlying cause of her hatred for Mira Lourdes. That, she promised, would come in time, along with the entire story of how her life had been ruined and destroyed by others who must now pay.

"Just know that I love you, Arthur, and I need you…I require your help, true, but I've grown so very fond of you," she assured him. "I can hardly recall a time when we weren't together. We were meant to be together, born to be together, Arthur. No man has ever made me happier in or out of bed."

Her motives would become clear as time went by. For now, he simply must follow her and give himself over to her in blind faith; otherwise, she would leave him and find a man who could live up to her expectations and give her what she wanted. She had made the threat only once, but it was enough to make Arthur quake.

Arthur had never had a woman before, and she had treated his vicinity with respect, without ridicule or laughter, but with gentleness and a genuine warmth. She cried the night of their first sexual encounter, saying she only wished that she could have come to him a virgin, untouched and unspoiled. He wiped her tears away and told her he would not change a single thing about her, ever. "I know how lucky I am that you will have me," he had said to her. "And I know that I'll never have another."

He must hold onto Lauralie at any cost. Still, what she asked of him was extremely hard.

"When I am fulfilled in my master plan to win my ultimate goal: to destroy-even if for only a time-the peace and tranquility of a man, a woman, and a major American institution, then we can have the rest of our lives together, Arthur, in peace and harmony. Trust me…trust me…"

He didn't know what she meant by this, but he promised to trust her.

As he spent more time with her, she let drop more details of her plan. Arthur thought now of how Lauralie saw it, how she talked about it, how her name would become synonymous with that of Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacey, Lizzey Borden, Eileen Woumos, but better, she said, even more headline-fetching since she would be viewed as a distinctly different kind of killer, obsessed with her single- minded plan. A simple yet bold plan.

Lauralie wrapped her arms around Arthur, who remained hesitant, the ax still poised over his head. She snaked her hands inside his shirt and pants, touching, caressing, promising in his ear that he would have her forever if he would only do this small thing for her. She squeezed and rolled his penis in her hand. "Do it, Arthur…do it, now!"

"Okay, okay, I will."

"So let it fall and let it begin," she shouted, and Arthur hesitated no longer, letting the sharpened blade dig into Mira's white neck, exactly at the spot where he'd laid the neck across a railroad tie purchased from the local ACE Hardware to create, between ax blade and post, Lauralie's idea of a crude guillotine. Now, looking down on his results, Arthur felt a wave of revulsion as the head held, dangling by threads of tissue and bloody bone, looking like a broken doll's head, half twisted from the blow, one dazed live eye looking up at him.

Lauralie, more disappointed and angry than repulsed, shouted, "You fool, Arthur, you fucking fool!" Before he could blink, she had grabbed the ax from him and she had swung. Her blow sent Mira's head toppling off and away. It thumped to a halt and settled on its left cheek. It looked strangely up at Arthur where the underbrush below a fence rail mimicked her hair.

"Get it! Get the damn thing before some coyote or fox grabs it up and runs off with it!" Lauralie shouted.

Arthur traipsed after the head, which had come to rest in the bush at the foot of a rotting fence post. At least she's mercifully dead, Arthur told himself, her eyes are not staring at me any longer, but even as he thought it, he saw Mira's body had begun twitching as if attempting to crawl as far from her severed head as possible.

Arthur swallowed hard at this, his hands sweating in the cool evening air. Looking back at Lauralie, he saw that her eyes shone with a kind of demented delight. The bloody ax resting on her shoulder now, Lauralie calmly returned his stare now as if to ask. What must I look like?

"We should've thought to bring a Polaroid," she joked. "Damn but that felt good. Now we begin the fun work, right, Arthur? Just as we planned. You brought all your tools, didn't you? The bone cutter, the saws, and scalpels?"

"All my tools, yes…got them inside." He pointed to the old white clapboard house they had renovated for the work. He had taken hold of Mira's runaway head by the long hair, and he handed it to Lauralie's outstretched fingers.

Balling up Mira's long auburn tresses in her fist, Lauralie lifted Mira's eyes up to her own, staring into them for a long moment as blood dripped from the severed head. "Your bad luck your name is Lourdes," she said, lowering the head to her side now. Lauralie then stepped off, carrying the severed head toward the farmhouse, her jaunty, schoolgirl gait, her playful hand, and the breeze conspiring to sway the bloody dismembered thing as Arthur watched it paint Lauralie's white cotton dress and gray flannel apron as if with a repeated brush stroke. Lauiralie's hip and thigh had an increasingly large red-brown rust spot building with each step toward the house.

"God, I hope she's not planning on cooking that for dinner," he quietly said to himself.

"Come ahead, Arthur! Bring the rest of her, Arthur!" she shouted over her shoulder at him. "We'll need all of her for what we have to do."

Arthur watched a fall cardinal chase its mate into the nearby thicket.

Houston, the following evening

Lieutenant Detective Lucas Stonecoat's large Cherokee hands carefully fingered the unmarked package that had arrived via courier at his apartment home. The package had been left with Jack Tebo downstairs at Tebo's Grill and Tavern, situated just below Lucas's apartment. It had been hand-delivered-no stamps or UPS or FedEx markings whatsoever. With a strange return address, that of a convent school on the north side of the city, the package simply looked out of place and unusual. The tough, seasoned cop knew no convent girls, but he had enemies both in and out of the Houston Police Department. Lucas knew he could not be too careful.

When Lucas had stopped at Tebo's, the older man had told him that he'd left a package on his doorstep, and that Lucas owed him two bucks for the tip. When Lucas had lifted the package, it had made no sound, but it felt hefty for so small a bundle, about the size of a softball; worse yet, it smelled. Not of sulfur or minerals; not even of fertilizer. Something altogether worse-something of rotting flesh-odors he'd encountered as a young man in a nameless, faraway jungle in Vietnam. Tebo's rhino-sized nostrils were so gummed up with nicotine, tar, and burger grease that he'd obviously missed the odors emanating from the package.

Lucas now carried the package inside and through his home, going for the kitchen sink. There he gingerly placed it into the basin. He toyed with the idea of calling in the bomb squad, but something nagged at him, telling him it was not an explosive, and that calling in the bomb squad boys would ultimately result in a big embarrassment.