John Miller - The Last Day

“When you do remember,” Mayes said, taking out his card, “call me. Any time, day or night.”

“Look, we appreciate your concern, we really do,” Natasha said, “but we just want to get on with our lives.”

“By the way,” Ward added. “Can you inform the press, off the record if that's what you have to do, that I've been cleared?”

“I think I can do that. Unofficially.”

Fifteen minutes later, Natasha was behind the wheel of her Lexus, waving at the security guard, who waved back as she and Ward rolled by. The crowd amounted to one TV van, which was aimed the wrong way for a full- blown chase sequence. Besides, the reporter and a cameraman had set up the camera for a taping. The sides of the road were littered with empty water bottles, soda cans, and fast-food sacks, to the point that it looked as though a packed garbage truck had roared by with its rear door open.

“I guess we don't need guards for the press any longer,” Natasha said as she pushed down on the accelerator.

“Looks like the party's over,” Ward said. “Thank God.”

“You can say that again.”

“Looks like the party's over. Thank God.”

Her hair wet from a long, hot shower, Alice stood looking into her closet trying to decide what she was going to wear to the “toys for bucks” exchange at the mall. She thought about Earl when she looked at the box on her dresser where his gun was hidden.

The question was whether she'd dress comfortably as always, or maybe dress up like a serious businesswoman. It was business she was going to be doing. Two thousand dollars for a little toy car whose doors and hood didn't even open up. For that kind of money there should be a little toy driver who moved his hands and head and maybe even changed the toy oil. It was mind- blowing that anyone would pay that much money for a toy Alice dried her hair, feeling she deserved the money for, if nothing else, keeping it safe.

The car reminded her of visiting her father and his bimbo wife, a Vegas Barbie whose boyfriend was plastic surgeon Ken. She'd already had her lips pumped up so she looked like she lived in a beehive. Alice's three- year- old half brother was an annoying little dork with a nose that ran constantly. He couldn't talk without yelling demands at the top of his shrill voice.

Alice's mother had new breasts, probably thinking that with the bigger breasts she could hold a man, or some other silly shit. She read brochures about face-lifts, buttock inserts, and all manner of cosmetic- enhancement nonsense. Alice knew it was a waste of money, but there was no way to convince Delores Palmer, who had the money to waste. If her mother didn't think she could have the pert figure of a sixteen- year- old, Alice could be driving a nice new BMW convertible instead of a shitty little beater.

Alice decided to dress formally. She stretched on a tight pair of black designer jeans her stepmother had bought her in Vegas, a crisp black T-shirt sporting a Jolly Roger where the skull had been replaced with a silhouette of a doughnut, and lightweight socks with yellow bathtub ducks on them. She slipped on a pair of dark gray sandals.

Going down the stairs, Alice heard odd sounds. Slipping to the kitchen door, she looked in to see her mother lying on the butcherblock island, with her skirt hiked up and her legs spread. Her blouse was open and her new and very erect breasts were exposed for the benefit of Bruce Benning, a neighbor who had just turned seventeen. He lived five doors down and had mowed the lawn since spring. Alice herself had flirted with him on several occasions over the years, but to no avail. Now, standing on tiptoe, his shorts a nylon puddle on the floor, he thrust his hips, driving himself in and out of Delores Palmer, his gaze moving between her breasts and his member's mesmerizing vanishing act.

Furious, Alice turned and went to the den and started to go out through the French doors, thinking she'd slam the door to jar the couple. With her hand still on the handle, a thought occurred to her and she looked at the telephone. She crossed over to the table, punched in 911, and waited for the operator to answer.

“Nine one one. What is the nature of your emergency?”

Alice cupped the receiver and whispered, “Hurry, help me. I'm afraid… he's going to rape me.”

She set the phone down, leaving the connection open so they couldn't call back and spoileverything. The best thing about living in a good neighborhood was that there were lots of cops with not much to do.

Delores Palmer might figure out Alice had called them, but whatever shit she caught would be worth it. Her mother knew Alice was home, since her car was in the driveway. Delores conducted her life as though she was a busy, single woman without a worry in the world… or a child.

Alice went out the door, closing it gently so her mother wouldn't be disrupted. Alice imagined that the interruption would be much more impressive when accomplished by armed police officers peering in at the fuck session from the freshly mown backyard.

Standing in his bedroom, Watcher slipped on black jeans and a long- sleeved black T-shirt. His flashlight and the Randall lay side by side next to his black sneakers.

Watcher's mind locked on a memory three years old. One cold night, after spending two adventurous hours in bed with a young sergeant's wife, Ross had just fallen asleep when Watcher slipped out of the man's closet, overpowered the older man, tied him up, and gagged him. He wrapped the naked man in a sheet and carried him, kicking and twisting, out to his waiting car. Watcher drove to an abandoned house trailer ten miles outside Fayetteville. After lashing the sergeant to a kitchen chair, Watcher had gone back into the bedroom and led in his own wife, who began sobbing when he tied her into a chair facing her lover.

Sergeant Ross begged Watcher to let him live, and cried that he was sorry about the affair. Picking up a section of heavy iron pipe from the counter, Watcher broke both of the man's knees with two swift blows. The sergeant's screams reverberated on the cheap paneling and leaked out through the broken windows, carrying over the vacant fields surrounding the trailer.

Watcher had next taken up a propane torch and lit it. Evelyn was new to violence and was certain that she was going to soon follow the sergeant's fate, so her screams were even louder than her ex- lover's. The sergeant was a fit man of forty, which helped him last two hours while Watcher first played the torch over his naked extremities and then went to work on his torso, neck, hair, and finally his face. Thick smoke and the unmistakable smell of cooking meat filled the trailer to the point that it was difficult for Watcher to see through it.

The last thing Watcher did was turn off the torch, shake up a can of spray- foam insulation, and push the plastic straw into the barely conscious man's throat. Pressing the trigger mechanism, Watcher heard the hissing as the foam shot out, filling Ross's throat with the yellow foam that expanded rapidly, oozing back out of his mouth and nostrils. That done, he removed the sticky surgeon's gloves, slipped on a second pair, and smiled at his wife, who looked at him with terrified eyes. Roughly, he tied rope around her knee, then pulled the loose end behind the chair and tied it around her other knee, opening her legs wide.

“Evelyn, my darling slut,” he said emotion-lessly aiming the straw's tip at the exposed target. “Could I interest you in a refreshing douche?”

The gates into pastoral Oakwood Cemetery faced Church Street in Concord. Behind the painted iron fence, narrow asphalt roads serpentined among gently rolling hills lined with stone monuments dotted with evergreens, boxwoods, and stately oak trees. Barney's grave was located just to the left of his grandfather's in the family plot where McCartys had been buried since 1918.