John Lutz - Urge to Kill

As he watched, the woman raised her hand to her right ear. She jerked her head quickly to the left, almost like a bird when something’s caught its attention, and began toying with the ear, straining as if to examine it or look behind it.

Pearl!

“Pearl?” he said in a hoarse voice.

He heard her sharp inhalation as she jumped and backed away from the mirror. She stepped out of the half-bath and looked around. “Who’s here?”

“Me. Quinn.”

She looked all around her, then down at Quinn lying on the floor near one of the desks.

“You scared the holy hell out of me,” she said.

“Sorry.”

She squinted at him, then came toward him with a kind of broken gait, as if restrained by caution and curiosity. “You okay? What’re you doing on the floor? How come you’re here so early? How’d you get here?”

He found himself grinning. “Lots of questions, Pearl?”

“But you are all right?”

“Seem all right. Hell of a headache, though.” He moved to sit up. “And my ribs are a bit sore,” he added.

“Don’t try to get up. I’ll get some help.” She moved toward the nearest desk and a phone.

“No, no.” He raised a hand, stopping her.

Her hand came away from the phone, but she was staring oddly at him.

“I’ll be fine, Pearl. Really. I just need a minute.”

“Don’t try to get up yet.” She rolled a desk chair over to him and sat down in it, leaning forward and fixing him with an assessing stare. “Looks like you hit your head. What happened? You fall?”

“No. Somebody hit me in the head. Rammed his own head or his shoulder into my ribs first.”

“Somebody attacked you in here? That’s some nerve. This is a police facility.”

“There’s no sign on the door.”

“Well, that’s true.”

“I didn’t even get a chance to turn on the light,” Quinn said. “We need to look things over, see if anything’s missing.”

Pearl glanced around. “Computers are still here. So’s the coffee brewer. I was just about to make some.” She paused. “Some of the desk drawers aren’t shut all the way. And one of the bottom file cabinet drawers is hanging open.”

Quinn gripped the desk corner and hauled himself to his feet. He was dizzy for a moment, and the headache was stronger.

Pearl stood up and held his arm. “You gonna be okay?”

“Yeah.” He guessed he was. He looked around and saw what Pearl had seen. “I disturbed him. He was looking for something, on a fact-finding mission.”

“Who we talking about?” Pearl asked. But they both knew.

“Tigers do that,” Quinn said.

“Leave drawers open?”

“No. They double back on whoever’s stalking them; then they lie in wait and become their most dangerous.”

“I didn’t know you hunted tigers.”

“I watch the nature channel.”

“Do we really think the intruder was the killer, trying to learn what we know so he can stay ahead of us?”

“It’s a possibility. Let’s look around and see if he was successful.”

Pearl moved closer and put both arms around Quinn, steadying him. Of course that was when Fedderman arrived.

He stood inside the door with a surprised look on his face that needed to be wiped off with a napkin. “I’m interrupting…”

“Don’t be an asshole,” Pearl said. “We were practicing judo.”

Quinn moved away from Pearl and explained to Fedderman what had happened. Then the three of them, still silently absorbing the break-in and assault, examined drawer and file cabinet contents and decided nothing was missing.

“He might not have wanted to steal anything,” Fedderman said, “just read things. Just learn.”

“And we can’t know how much he did learn,” Quinn said.

Pearl went over and perched with her haunches on the edge of her desk. “Damn near everything’s in the papers or TV news anyway.”

“And now he knows that,” Fedderman said.

“If he had time to examine everything.”

Pearl pushed herself away from her desk and went around to her computer. She booted up hers, then the other two computers, and clicked on their histories. None of them showed any activity after yesterday afternoon.

“I don’t think he learned much, if anything,” she said. She sat back again on the edge of her desk and crossed her arms. “Maybe we’re making this too complicated, Quinn. Maybe he just wanted to bash you in the head.”

“And knew I’d be coming in at two in the morning?”

“So you interrupted a burglar, and he bashed you in the head,” Fedderman said.

“Possibly. But he did a lot of snooping around and apparently didn’t steal anything.”

“Could he have gotten away after initially knocking you down?” Pearl asked. “I mean, did he have to also hit you in the head?”

“I’m not sure. It’s still hazy.”

“So maybe he was snooping, like we figure. A tiger.”

“Huh?” Fedderman said.

Pearl gave him a dismissive wave of her hand to shut him up. To Quinn, she said: “And he was glad for the opportunity to bash you in the head.”

“Can you think of anyone who’d wanna do that?” Fedderman asked. “Other than me and Pearl.”

“And the killer,” Pearl added.

“One person,” Quinn said, “and I know where to find him.”

The bottle or the gun?

Lavern Neeson, badly bruised from last night’s beating by Hobbs, had risen at three in the morning in pain and this time had chosen both.

It was eight o’clock now, getting warmer and brighter outside. The bedroom was dim, though, because the shades were drawn and the heavy drapes pulled closed, so no one could have seen last night what Hobbs had done to her. It was an overly furnished, somewhat worn and chintzy room of the sort that held its secrets. On one of the walls was a discount store print of a flock of birds-crows, probably-rising as if startled from a wooded landscape. Lavern had never liked it, but never considered changing it.

She sat in a small chair near the bed, listening to Hobbs snore, holding the shotgun from the closet on her lap and casually aimed at him. He wasn’t scheduled for work today and would sleep until well past ten. But Lavern liked to toy with the notion that he might wake up, and the first thing he’d see would be her and the dark muzzle of the shotgun. He wouldn’t know it wasn’t loaded, but maybe he’d die on his own, of a heart attack.

More likely she’d simply scare the hell out of him, and then he’d beat the crap out of her for frightening and embarrassing him.

Still, just thinking about it afforded her some amusement.

In a little while, she’d get up from her chair, leave the bedroom, and return the shotgun to the back of the hall closet. Another day with Hobbs would begin. Fear would begin.

The faint noises of the city winding up for another busy day wafted in to Lavern, and she thought about all the women out there who weren’t in any way dependent on husbands or lovers like Hobbs, women leading happy, pain-free lives, not afraid of making a wrong move that would lead to severe punishment.

Lavern envied those women, but joining their number seemed almost impossible.

She could think of only one way out of her predicament, and it terrified her.

If she left Hobbs, he’d surely come after her. It had happened once before, three years ago. If she tried to change him, he would beat her. If she changed herself, he would beat her. She knew that her friend Bess, who kept urging her to go to a women’s shelter, was right. Not about the shelter-she couldn’t stay there forever, even if Hobbs didn’t simply come and get her. And restraining orders-she’d read the papers, seen the news, and knew how ineffective they were. What Bess was right about was that eventually it was almost certain that Hobbs would kill her.