Т Паркер - Where Serpents Lie

Eight steps, right turn: window. Plunger on. Cutter scratches a loose circle around the suction cup, pane rasps quietly as it breaks away. The hole is clean. Michael Hypok: craftsman. His latexed hand reaches inside for the slider latch. There. Up unlocks, so he eases up. The window slides in the channel with hardly a sound if he does it slowly, and he does it very slowly so the Item can remain in dreamland, and when the window is finally open and a brief pause tells him that no one is stirring not even a mouse, he hoists himself into the opening and in the faint white moonlight his supple body pours to the bedroom floor like cream dispensed from a pitcher.

He turned on the Hiker’s Headlight and found the bed. Item #4 was sleeping deeply, lost in a comforter, just its little head with all that blond hair showing. He looked down and admired it for a long minute: all the innocence, all the joy, all the magnificence it would inspire. But, work to do.

Then he heard something in the darkness to his right.

The light blazed on and he stood there looking at this thing, Margo Gayley, Christian single mother, in the doorway wearing a pink robe and a terrified expression, holding something small in her hand.

She pointed it at his face. He had already begun to crouch and coil when he heard an aerosol hiss and saw the red mist jet overhead. He leapt just as she lowered the can, but he was already up, midair, and he took a load of the stuff on his neck.

His eyes burst into flames just as his hands closed around Margo’s throat. He drove forward. He couldn’t open his eyes because of the heat. She made an awful gagging sound. He felt both their bodies slam back into a flimsy panel that gave way and let him fall down on top of her, hands powerfully locked on this thin throat, and he felt a bunch of what had to be clothes falling on his back as he forced her head down as far as it would go. He focused every cell of his burning, outraged strength to drive his thumbs all the way back to his fingers. He put his weight into it, his neck and back, his hips and legs, everything dedicated to the meeting of thumb pads and fingertips. They were already close to touching. He’d never heard a sound like she was making, part whimper and part screech but mostly this dry clicking sound like muscles flapping against each other. He released his thumbs for just a second to move them higher up, where the bones and glands were, then smashed down again with ferocious force. He felt her fingers on his wrists, but they had no power. She was kicking up violently with her knees but he’d landed between them and all he had to do was keep his groin jammed up tight against hers and her knees couldn’t even touch him. He could hear Item #4 screaming and feel it thrashing his back with something, but neither mattered a bit right now, only the rrr ... rrr... rrrrrrrrrrrrr coming from his own throat. Then a sudden muted crunch and his thumbs almost met his fingers and the woman relaxed so Hypok throttled her still harder until there was no resistance left, just accepting flesh and this screaming thing behind him lashing his back with what felt like a belt.

He whirled. The Item shot out the door and into the house. Hypok rose with shaky legs and followed it. It ran down the hallway and around a corner. Hypok made the corner in three long strides, just as it flew out the front door. Hypok followed it into the little front yard, into the misty morning air, but he stopped short and thought about the van. How far away from it could he get — his life force, his escape, his freedom? Fuck it, get the Item! It was hauling down the sidewalk, loose T-shirt rippling and tiny feet a blur beneath it, like how the chickens used to run when his mother chased one down for dinner. It wasn’t screaming, it was just moving and moving fast. Get the van, then get the Item!

Ten steps and he was there, flinging himself through the door, turning the key in the ignition where he had left it, throwing the tranny into first and gunning the gas all at once. The van jumped forward. He hunched over the wheel and flipped on the brights. There it was, flailing straight down the sidewalk, growing larger in the bright beams, shirt waving like a flag at a ballpark, hair flying out everywhere.

The van ate up the distance. The Item looked back, eyes dark and shining. It looked like an animal just before you run over it. Hypok lurched past it, then threw the van into park and slammed through the door. But it cut across the lawn on a diagonal, away from him. He heard its scream pierce the heavy air. It screamed again. A light went on in the house it had passed, the house on the lawn of which Hypok now stood, eyes burning and heart pounding, watching his future scooting away from him like a rabbit. Like a bad dream. Then another light, one house back of him. Then another, from the house it was running to. Like every damned household in suburbia knew he was here. Up the walkway to the porch it scurried, while Hypok could only watch in mute, furious heartache as the door opened and Item #4 vanished from the moist darkness into the warm welcoming light of a cozy Orange County home. After the Item was inside, two heads appeared in the doorway, looking at him. Then the man stepped onto the porch and crossed his arms. Ward Fucking Cleaver in boxers. The woman was probably already on the phone.

Hypok walked back to the van and drove away, unconcerned that Ward would remember his plates, stolen months ago from an out-of-commission Audi near the Bright Tomorrows building in Irvine.

He was a mess. His eyes burned, his lips and nostrils burned, his neck burned, his right thumb was sprained and he had absolutely nothing to show for himself. He held up his right hand and looked at the latex glove, fingers torn and peeled back, a yawning hole over his palm. Same with the left, but no palm hole. He noted that his lucky snake bracelet was gone, fuck, probably ripped off in the disagreement with the mom. God knew how many fingerprints he’d left behind, but he was clean, they couldn’t match prints with nothing, the pinheads. Margo Whatsername wasn’t going to be fingering anybody for a while, either.

Driving slowly, he signaled his occasional lane changes, trying to get his nerves to settle a little. He drank more tequila, but that did the opposite of settling nerves, it just taunted him with its warmth and courage and it made him feel again that consolidation down there in the naughty zone, morning wood, which he’d been hoping to deal with in some depth before the sun came up. It made him want sex; it made him want... well, everything.

He headed east on the 91, out of Orange County, where he figured some kind of APB would be on the cop waves. Not enough traffic on the roads to feel safe, yet. Just before the county line he saw another billboard of himself. It really wasn’t a bad rendition of his old look. He thought it might actually be a help to him now, transformed as he was into dark-haired, hip and poetic sideburn and earring man. It was a decoy. He watched himself watch himself until the sign turned to reveal the insipid stop smoking announcement on the other side. He wondered what the names of the bones were he’d crushed in the mom’s throat. Whatever. That thumb was sore.

Getting off on Maple Street in Corona, he then went north to the park. Hypok had scouted the place as a possible Item release site, but it was too crowded, too many people, no privacy. Of course it was closed now, but he parked anyway and wandered across the damp grass toward the drinking fountains and rest rooms. Stooped over the fountain he let the water loop up into his eyes and blinked them a lot until the burning eased up. Then lips and nose. He pulled off the gloves and rinsed them, then poured some of the wet gravel from the fountain bed into them and tossed them on top of the outhouse. Then he giggled.