Ted Dekker - The Bride Collector

Her face was white. She stared at him with terrified eyes, like a rabbit, he thought. Except a rabbit appeared to be looking out of the sides of its head, whereas Nikki was staring directly at him with large, round, glassy eyes. The way you killed a rabbit was to club it over the head, but he didn’t want to hurt Nikki.

Her fingers were shaking, but she seemed to grasp the situation then, because she closed her mouth, swallowed, and stood a little taller. When she spoke, her voice was low and breathy.

“The Bride Collector.”

“The Bride Collector. Yes, that’s what you call me. My name is Quinton. Will you turn and face the wall to make this easier?”

Nikki stared at him, neither sitting nor facing the wall as he’d suggested. He prayed that she wouldn’t force him to hurt her or do anything stupid like the last one had, running into her dresser.

“Please, it won’t hurt. Let’s make this easy.”

“Quinton.” She was still coming to grips with his name, but she’d calmed. The psychologist in her was rising to the surface. He knew her type. He’d spent countless hours opposite those charlatans who’d tried to dig through his mind. He hadn’t considered this aspect of his choosing Nikki.

Could God choose a psychologist as his favorite? At first blush Quinton would think not, but the fact of the matter was that God had chosen Nikki. In his great wisdom, he had put his finger on this woman in front of Quinton and said, I choose this one because she is my favorite. Send her up to me.

Still, filled with the deep and unshakable knowledge that nearly all mental health “professionals” were profoundly deluded and interested mostly in money, like the drug companies they served, Quinton was momentarily confronted by the irony of God’s choice. He had selected one of the six lesser brides from the sewer.

Perhaps Quinton’s role was to help Nikki see the light, and then deliver her. Remove from her this one thorn in her flesh to perfect her in God’s sight. After all, every human carried their sin with them. In Nikki’s case, the sin was a little more obvious than most.

“You won’t hurt me,” Nikki said.

“Please face the wall so-”

“You don’t even want to hurt me,” she said. “You’re ill, Quinton. May I call you Quinton?”

She was trying to psychoanalyze him. He had a gun on her and she had the strength to attempt this trick. The mother moaned; time was running out. The psychos were probably hard at work on the jack in the whole. They probably had some savant decoding the pattern in his last note.

“If you don’t turn to the wall, then I’m going to have to kill your mother,” he said. “I’d rather not because I’ve already killed two people today and I’m not a killer at heart.”

“Listen to yourself. You’re not making sense.” She edged to her left, and he thought she might be working up the courage to make a run for it.

“If you run, I will kill your mother. If you don’t turn around and face the wall, I will kill your mother. We can talk later, but right now I need you to use your head so that I won’t have to hit it. Can you manage that?”

“You won’t do that. I can help you. You think you’re doing this for God, but God hates people who take innocent life. You don’t have to do this.”

Buzz, buzz. He lost some of his composure then, infuriated by her willingness to thumb her nose at God. But the mother was stirring, so he was confronted by a choice: Which first?

Bride. He needed the mother alive in the event he would require more leverage.

Quinton headed for her using long strides. Nikki darted to her left and he tore after her, cursing her recklessness. This wasn’t what he wanted. Now he would have to stop her and return to the mother before she had a chance to crawl to a phone and alert the authorities. This was undoubtedly Nikki’s hope. But Quinton would help her put her hope in a higher power.

Adrenaline flooded his veins. He was in good shape, but with God’s help he was perfect. Nikki sprinted down the hall, black sundress flying behind her thighs like bat’s wings.

He closed the gap just before she reached the entrance, hit her head from behind with the pistol, and snatched a handful of her dress so that when she fell forward so she wouldn’t hit the wall.

Unfortunately, her momentum carried her into the door. Her forehead slammed into the wood panels before she collapsed, though she came up short from hitting the floor, held up by his grasp on her dress.

Quinton swore again. Her face had undoubtedly been damaged. Shaking with a rage that he fought to control, he turned and dragged her back down the hall.

The mother was on her feet by the phone, already stabbing at the numbers when he rounded the corner into the kitchen. He released the sixth’s dress, lifted the gun, and shot the older woman through the head. She hit the wall and slid to her seat.

Sorry, Mother, but you saw me. I know, I know it’s not fair.

The nine-millimeter now had six bullets, but the gun would no longer be useful to him. The FBI forensics team would find three bullets-one in each of the cops and one in the mother-that matched this weapon. The pistol itself could not be traced, he’d made sure of that, but any bullets fired from its barrel could be matched to this particular gun. He would put it in a paper bag and throw it in a Dumpster when he retrieved his 300M.

Returning to Nikki’s unconscious form, he applied some chloroform from the bottle in his pocket to a rag and pressed it against her face. She would remain still long enough.

With a broom from her pantry, he quickly swept the floorboards where he’d walked in the kitchen and the hall. Stray hairs could fall from one’s head easily enough, and he hadn’t been wearing his shower cap. He placed the dust and the broom head in a garbage bag, hoisted Nikki over his shoulder, and looked about the room, running through his checklist. No fingerprints, none of his blood, urine, sweat, or spittle. No food, no clothing, no hair. Clean.

Using Nikki’s key, he opened the door to her Range Rover and dumped her in the back. He hog-tied her with some string from his case, taped her mouth closed with duct tape, and shut her inside.

Using a small battery-operated vacuum, which he’d bought in the event that their blood didn’t drain as intended, he sucked up any traces of himself that might have floated to the cruiser’s carpet. He changed back into his own shirt and rolled the cop’s shirt into the black garbage bags from his seat. Clean.

Ten minutes after Nikki’s blue SUV rolled up the driveway, it drove back down, this time with Quinton in command, seated on three more plastic garbage bags.

The ride back to the rest stop was uneventful. The sixth lay quietly in the back, dreaming, perhaps of her true destiny. Quinton scanned the radio waves, listened to a political talk show for ten minutes but had to turn it off. Thinking of what was to come elevated his excitement to the point that he found it difficult to remain focused on avoiding detection, and he’d hoped the talk radio would distract him. But the political nonsense only replaced his excitement with agitation. He’d long ago concluded that nearly all humans who went to such lengths to achieve political success had to be both extremely egotistical and at least somewhat mentally ill.

The exchange from the blue Range Rover to his 300M took twenty minutes, only because he had to wait for perfect timing, which required three aborted attempts. But he finally managed the switch cleanly, vacuumed out Nikki’s floorboards, and settled behind his vehicle’s more familiar controls for the last leg of his trip.

It was twelve minutes after noon. Quinton felt positively giddy.