John Lutz - Night kills

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"Are you sitting down?" she asked when he picked up.

Without waiting for an answer, she told him what she had and began reading aloud into the phone, but not so loud that anyone in the restaurant might overhear.

Just as she'd thought, he loved it.

By the time she flipped down the lid of her phone, Cindy's appetite had magically returned. She pulled the still-warm bowl of stew back close to her from across the table and ordered another Guinness.

He'd sawn the broomstick in half. Now he finished sharpening one end and began the sanding. He enjoyed this part. He would use increasingly more finely grained sandpaper as he shaped the end into a gradually tapered fine point.

For almost an hour he sanded, idly watching television as he worked. An old spaghetti Western starring Clint Eastwood was playing. The TV was on mute, so he could only read Eastwood's taut dialogue in closed caption at the bottom of the screen. That was okay. He'd seen the movie half a dozen times and could practically fill in the dialogue himself. The rhythmic sound of the sandpaper on wood was soothing as he felt the tapering broomstick take shape in his hands.

Finally, when his hands and forearms began to ache from the effort, he set the broomstick and sandpaper aside. He ran a finger along the shaft of the broomstick, all the way to its point. The wood was smooth now and would require only about an hour's more sanding with the finely grained paper. Then he would go over it with tack cloth, and later he'd apply a good oil and rub it in well. Not too much oil. He wanted the sharpened broomstick smooth, but not too smooth. Feeling the resistance, that was part of it.

It wasn't supposed to excite him; that hadn't been part of the plan. But it did. There was no denying it. And it made him wonder, did they have to be dead?

His throat was tight. He swallowed.

Amazing, he thought, the things you discovered about yourself. It was his job that kept opening doors in his mind. He was so good at what he did, sometimes it scared him.

Eastwood chewed on his stubby cigar and squinted at him from the TV screen.

Eastwood, or at least the characters he usually played in his movies, wouldn't approve of him. But when the actor was younger, he might well have been handed altogether different kinds of scripts and would now be seen in an altogether different light. The man was an actor; his public image and probably his personal image had been shaped by the scripts he was given, written by someone he might never have met. In a way, we were all in the movies, whether we knew it or not.

He smiled at Eastwood, then went over to an antique rolltop desk and removed a drawer. Reaching into the cavity left by the missing drawer, he worked a wooden lever that opened a secret compartment in the side of the desk. From the compartment he withdrew a gray metal lockbox with the key in it. He turned the key, opened the lid, and reached in and got out a small Colt semiautomatic, holding the gun by its checked handle. It fired hollow-point twenty-two-caliber bullets and made little more noise than a loud slap. Not a powerful weapon, but the hollow points would penetrate a human being and break into pieces that would rip and tumble through bone and tissue and cause a great deal of localized damage. One careful shot to the heart was enough to bring someone down. If the wound itself wasn't sufficient to kill, the person would lie there in shock. And while the person lay stunned and disbelieving, almost certainly dying, two shots to the head would be enough to make sure. That's what the little Colt was-sure. He had a fondness for the gun.

He glanced at the silent TV screen. Eastwood was on a horse now, raising a lot of dust while galloping hell for leather over terrain that looked like Arizona but was probably in Italy.

What must that be like, flying across a purpling plain on a white and brown speckled horse? It must really impress the ladies. The ones in Rome and Milan, anyway.

He'd heard or read somewhere that Eastwood bought his cigars in a shop in Beverly Hills and cut them in half for his movie scenes. So much in life was an act.

Ignoring the TV, he removed a cleaning kit and some gun oil from the metal lockbox, along with a soft white cotton cloth.

He was about to clean and oil the gun when his cell phone, on top of the rolltop desk, played the first few bars of "Get Me to the Church on Time."

He glanced at the Caller ID before answering the phone. "I was hoping you'd call," he said, smiling.

A pause.

"Yes," he said, still smiling. "Of course. Of course. Yes. Yes. You know I do. Yes."

He put down the gun and wandered the room as he talked, as if motion would lend import to his words. Whoever was on the other end of the connection was receiving his full attention.

"Okay," he said, "I'll see you there. You can't know how much I'm looking forward to it." He idly picked up the broomstick and observed its sharpened point as he listened to the caller.

"See you there," he said again. "Love you."

6

Death had drawn them together again. They met at Quinn's first-floor apartment on West Seventy-fifth off Columbus in the room he'd converted into a den. Quinn sat behind his big cherrywood desk, his rough-hewn features sidelighted by the shaded lamp, making his oft-broken nose seem even more crooked. One of the Cuban cigars he had illegally supplied to him was propped at a sharp angle in a glass ashtray. The cigar wasn't burning. It was pointless to start things off with Pearl already bitching.

She was seated cross-legged in an armchair to the left of the desk, facing Quinn, wearing faded jeans, a blue Mets T-shirt, gray socks. The loafers she'd slipped off lay askew on the floor near the chair. Her raven-black hair was pulled back and wound in a knot. She wore her usual dark eyeliner, which made her almost black eyes appear even darker. Quinn thought she looked fabulous.

Fedderman, perched on the less comfortable wood and leather casual chair, looked his usual discombobulated self. Though his face had gotten thinner, it still had its expectant, hangdog look, as if he'd just committed some transgression and now needed forgiveness. He'd lost a bit more of his graying hair since Quinn had last seen him and was now almost bald on top. Quinn was sure he recognized the baggy brown suit Fedderman was wearing, and noticed that his right white shirt cuff was unbuttoned and hanging out of his coat sleeve. For some reason that often happened to Fedderman's cuffs when he used a pen or pencil for any length of time. Quinn almost smiled, seeing the frayed, loose cuff peeking out of the coat sleeve at him. Old times.

Fedderman looked over at Pearl. "I heard you had some trouble at the bank."

"Screw you," she said, dismissing Fedderman. She turned her attention to Quinn. "Lauri's no longer living with you?"

Lauri was Quinn's daughter, now almost twenty. "She and Wormy are living in California, trying to promote his music career." Lauri's lover, Wormy, so called because he was tall and painfully thin and kind of undulated when he walked, was front man for his band, The Defendants. Lauri's last letter said the group was close to a record contract. Her next-to-last letter had said that, too.

"I thought the boy had talent," Fedderman said.

"But what about his music?" Pearl asked.

"What about these murders?" Quinn said, reminding them why they were here. He picked up four green binders, then moved out from behind his desk and handed two to each of his detectives. "Renz supplied copies of the murder books. I made copies for you two."

"You must already have looked yours over," Fedderman said. "Any conclusions?"

Quinn sat back down behind his desk, automatically reached for his cigar, then drew his hand back when he noticed Pearl giving him a look. "I already told you some of the basics: two torsos, female Caucasian, each shot through the heart, no prints on file, and no way to identify them. Twenty-two-caliber hollow-point bullets. Both of them separated when they entered the victims, but the pieces stayed in the bodies and the lab managed to reconstruct them enough to be sure they were fired by the same gun. Both victims were sexually penetrated by what seems to have been a long, sharp stake of some kind that left a residue of oil."

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