John Lutz - Urge to Kill

He wanted to see Zoe and knew that if he called her she could be talked into inviting him to her apartment. But he didn’t want Beeker to be a part of their relationship in any way. Better if he waited a while, until the photos he’d just seen had faded in his memory.

He could wait for a while to see Zoe again. Certainly until dinner.

Later on, he’d see Beeker.

As soon as Lavern carefully and quietly closed the door behind her, she heard her husband’s voice: “You’re late and you’re drunk.”

“I was with Bess.” The first person Lavern could think of who’d back her up. “We sat in the restaurant after dinner and talked, and time flew.”

“You were drinking.”

She knew there was no way he could know for sure if she was drunk, as she’d just come in and the living room light hadn’t even been turned on. She was facing absolute blackness and could only be a dark silhouette against the dim light of the hall. Hobbs was completely invisible in the dark. “We had wine for dinner, then a few drinks afterward. That’s all.”

She didn’t tell him she’d skipped dinner and drunk alone, and then with a man in a lounge far from the neighborhood where she might have been recognized and word might get back to Hobbs. Nothing had happened between her and the man (Victor something, she thought, but maybe not

…), and in fact both had been too drunk to do anything about it if they’d felt any real sexual attraction. They’d been asked to leave and objected mildly, then were actually hurried and pushed from the place by a burly bartender.

Victor (or whoever) had thrown a punch at the bartender that was so ineffective it had been ignored, and there they were out on the sidewalk, barely able to stand.

Lavern had leaned back against a streetlight, closed her eyes, and almost passed out. Or maybe she had briefly lost consciousness. When she opened her eyes, Victor was gone. A man who might have been Victor was crossing the street at the intersection half a block down.

Too far away for her to catch up with him. All that effort…

Well, the hell with Victor.

So Lavern had walked, too, in the opposite direction, weaving noticeably at first and attracting attention. People slowed when they saw her approaching and veered out of her path. They seemed to be ashamed of her, embarrassed for her.

Screw you! All of you!

A woman in a gray business suit gave her a disdainful glance. A teenage boy with baggy pants low on his pelvis kept a hold on his fly and grinned at her as he bopped past. Fellow clowns and rebels.

After a few blocks she began to sober up; she could feel it.

On the cab ride home she’d impressed the driver with her terse and logical conversation about everything from politics to professional basketball. Pretty damned good! She was sure she’d reached the point where it wouldn’t be obvious that she’d been drinking.

She’d been wrong. Hobbs must have smelled liquor on her breath, maybe on her clothes.

“Shut the goddamned door all the way and come in here,” he said.

She obeyed, and at the click of the door latch the lights winked on in the living room, temporarily blinding her.

She gasped. Hobbs was standing ten inches from her and had flipped the wall switch.

The punch came out of the blinding light, smashing into her left ear and sending her reeling against a table, overturning it.

Hobbs was on her so fast she didn’t have time to think about the pain. His initial punches were wild. Then his fist landed on her ribs, which were still perhaps cracked from her last beating. That pain jolted through her, and she was sitting on the carpet, unable to breathe. Hobbs rested a foot on her shoulder and shoved her down so she was lying on her side.

He stood glaring down at her with his fists propped on his hips. “Goddamn lush. You’re screwin’ around on me, too, aren’t you?”

“No! Never!”

“Boozin’ and screwin’ around!”

He kicked her hard in the upper thigh and she rolled over onto her stomach.

This is going to be bad. Worse than usual. I have to get through it. No choice. Have to…

“Into the bedroom,” he said, and began kicking her repeatedly, not hard now. He wanted her able to crawl, and in the right direction. Her bare left elbow bumped a table leg.

“You’re too drunk even to crawl straight,” he said in disgust.

And she was. Lavern had to admit he was right. Were it not for the persistent guiding probes of his shoe she wouldn’t have been headed for the hall and the bedroom door. The door seemed so distant now.

Has he somehow injured my sight?

He kicked harder, hurting the base of her spine, and she crawled faster, shredding her panty hose on the carpet and skinning her knees, scraping the heels of her hands on the rough fiber.

He had to help her into the bed. She flopped back onto the soft mattress, watching the rectangular white ceiling spin up and away, and wished she could keep falling, falling…

Hobbs began to undress her. She didn’t resist, but he lost his patience with buttons and snaps and started ripping off of her clothes.

It proved to be more difficult than he’d thought.

He gave up completely and stalked off into the hall. Steel clattered in the kitchen, and he returned to the bedroom holding a carving knife.

He began slicing not flesh, but material with the knife. So expertly did he use the knife on her resistant clothing that it made her afraid of what he’d be able to do with such expertise to her flesh.

Amazingly, considering his frenzy, the blade didn’t so much as touch her.

Lavern clenched her eyes tightly shut and sent herself somewhere else, somewhere where this was happening to someone else.

You can be two people if you must. You really can. One afraid and in pain, and the other drifting and unfeeling…

Right now, the choice of which to be was easy.

With the morning already heating up like hell, Hobbs left for work without disturbing her where she lay in bed pretending to be asleep, the thin sheet pulled up over her face as if it were a shroud.

Beneath the taut white linen, her eyes were open and afraid.

They’d begun to gather in the park before dawn, and now there were hundreds of them.

At eight o’clock, New York One estimated the crowd at a thousand. It sure looked like a thousand massed on a TV screen. Traffic on Central Park West had to be diverted when their numbers spilled out onto the street.

They carried identical neatly produced FREE BERTY signs, and some wore T-shirts bearing the same demand in large black letters.

The event was large enough to disrupt traffic patterns throughout Midtown Manhattan, and made Quinn late on his way to Alfred Beeker’s Park Avenue office. He wanted to get there by nine, before Beeker’s first patients began to arrive.

He wanted to be in a room alone with Beeker.

Quinn sat as patiently as he could, draping his right wrist over the Lincoln’s steering wheel, watching the brown UPS van ahead of him advance along the street ten feet at a time. His right foot moved automatically between accelerator and brake pedal, advancing the Lincoln along with the van. The car’s air conditioner was sucking in some of the van’s exhaust, so Quinn dropped the driver’s side window about six inches. Heat rolled in, along with more exhaust fumes. The metallic chattering emitted by the air conditioner was louder with the window down. Too loud.

The window was gliding back up when Quinn’s cell phone chirped. He leaned to the side and worked it out of his pocket, flipped it open, and pressed the button to answer.

“That you, Quinn?”

Renz’s voice.

“It’s my phone,” Quinn said.