John Lutz - Darker Than Night

He looked over at her, hair tousled, eyes sleepy. “Nothing. The door’s still locked, everything looks normal, nobody hiding anywhere in here.”

“Did you look in the kitchen?”

“Sure. Normal. Everything’s okay, Marcy.”

“The bedroom.”

“Huh? We just left the bedroom.”

“There are places to hide there.”

“Sure, I guess there are.”

She smiled at him. He’d been brave for her. Now he was humoring her. But that meant he was thinking of her, showing his love.

“You wait here while I go check.”

He trod barefoot back into the bedroom, looking forward to going back to sleep. But why not give Marcy her way? He was too tired to argue. And he’d been revved up a few minutes ago, thinking maybe she had heard something or knew somehow there was someone in the apartment.

Damn, he’d been revved up!

Calmer now, reassured, he entered the dim bedroom and didn’t bother turning on the light. As he moved toward the closet door, he held the bat higher. Anything’s possible.

“Don’t forget to look under the bed,” Marcy called from the living room.

Ron paused and lowered the bat.

The man lying flat on his stomach beneath the bed switched the long-bladed knife to his other hand, on the side of the bed where he could see Ron Graham’s bare feet. Watching the feet gave him some idea of where Graham’s face and vulnerable throat might appear any second if he peered beneath the bed. Using the knife might be awkward. It was all a question of body position. Graham would be surprised and horrified and frozen for a second, allowing the opportunity for a quick body shift and a slash with the knife. But the bare feet were so important, where they were, where the toes were pointed. The man with the knife lay very still, his upper body an inch off the floor, watching the pale bare feet, watching…

Ron walked close to the bed and sat down on it. He sure didn’t feel like bending over and checking for monsters. He would humor Marcy only so far.

“Nobody under there!” he called to her. “Just a few dust bunnies.”

He rose and went to the closet, quickly opened the door, felt afraid as he inserted an arm and parted the clothes to make sure no one was hiding back there in the darkness.

Then he caught himself. He’d bought into Marcy’s delusions.

What the hell am I doing?

Feeling foolish, he grinned and stepped back, closing the door. Shaking his head, he returned to the living room.

“All clear,” he told Marcy, who was standing near the sofa looking worried.

She let out a long breath, then hugged him tightly.

He kissed her cool but damp forehead. “Can we go back to bed now?”

“Yeah. I’m sorry. It’s just that I’ve been worried lately and having the damnedest dreams.”

“Dreams can’t hurt you.” He put his arm around her waist and led her back toward the bedroom.

“They can sure as hell scare you.”

When they were back in bed, he moved close to her. “Since we’re awake…,” he said.

She felt her nightgown being tugged and worked upward, and she dug her heels into the mattress and raised her back until her breasts were no longer constrained by the taut material. His fingertips and then his lips were light on her right nipple. Desire moved at the core of her and she raked her fingers through his damp hair. Still she was outside of herself, of what was happening. She wanted to do this, but it was too soon after being so frightened.

He was toying with her left nipple now, not going to stop. She knew him so well. He wasn’t going to be talked out of this. And she didn’t really want to talk him out of it.

“Can I use my vibrator?” she asked. “I need to relax, and I’m still pretty shook up.”

“You’ll be shook up in a different way soon,” he reassured her.

“Ron…”

He raised his head. “Okay.” He kissed her between the breasts, using his tongue on her bare flesh, then shifted his weight and stood up. The vibrator was fine with him, anyway. He’d tell her where and how to use it, then let her decide she was ready, then-

“Hurry, please!” she said behind him as he opened the closet door to get the vibrator down from the top shelf. He smiled and didn’t answer.

And gasped when he saw the face and eyes staring out at him, felt the cold blade slice in and up toward his heart. Everything was devoured by the searing pain…his world, his loss, his love, his hope… All of it fell away and he dropped swiftly and breathlessly in a dark elevator plunging toward blackness.

He tried to say Marcy’s name, as if it were the magic that might somehow stop the fall and save him, but that, too, died in darkness.

Marcy, lying back with her eyes closed and massaging her nipples with her fingertips, sensed something was wrong. Then she heard the funny, gasping sound Ron made and sat up in bed as suddenly as if a puppeteer had yanked her strings.

She saw Ron standing against the black background beyond the open closet door, then watched him sink to the floor.

Marcy tried to call to him but made only a strangled, cawing sound.

And out of the closet stepped her nightmare.

Half an hour later, while walking away from the Grahams’ apartment building, their killer decided this had been much better than his last late-night encounter.

It was because of the knife.

He’d left his gun in Martin Elzner’s hand. The police could do wonders with their ballistics tests, and they could connect gun to crime, therefore he could no longer have it in his possession. It was simply too risky, and he’d learned not to take unnecessary risks within the larger risks that he must take. So, as planned, the gun made a convincing prop.

But it should have been a knife to begin with. Always a knife.

So he’d left the gun, wiped clean of fingerprints other than those of Elzner’s dead hand. The silencer, too, was of no further use, so he’d disposed of it by tossing it in a Dumpster. Surely by now it was lost in a vast landfill.

Two days later, at a flea market on the West Side, he’d bought a produce knife, the sort used by warehousemen and shippers of fruits and vegetables. It was a long folding knife, slender, with a bone handle and a high-quality steel blade that would hold an edge.

When he’d bought the knife, he was sure it would do what he needed, and now it had.

Most of the blood was from the wife. Quinn could almost taste its coppery scent along the edges of his tongue in a way that brought saliva and a queasy stomach.

Along with Pearl and Fedderman, he stood in the Grahams’ bedroom near the body of the husband, Ronald. The dead man was lying tightly curled on his side on the floor, partly encircling most of the blood that had spilled from him, as if he’d tried to conserve the precious substance and failed. The frozen expression on his face suggested he’d experienced an agonized death. Quinn had seen similar expressions on the faces of too many victims of gunshot or knife wounds that incapacitated immediately but allowed a period of suffering before the end.

“That one’s pretty simple,” said Nift the ME, who was standing near the bed where the wife lay. “He was stabbed once beneath the sternum with an upward angle that got the heart.” He motioned toward Marcella Graham. “This one, on the other hand, is more complicated. Over a dozen stab wounds, and deliberate damage to erogenous zones.” He motioned toward two lumps in the puddled, crusted blood on the bed. “Those are her nipples.”

“Jesus!” Fedderman said.

Nift grinned at the veteran cop’s reaction. “I’d say your killer had his beef with the wife, and Hubby had to be eliminated so he wouldn’t interfere.”