Лоуренс Блок - Random Walk - A Novel for a New Age

She chatted and he made conversation, not really paying any mind to the words she spoke. She was just right and he was going to do her and the excitement was absolutely wonderful. On the one hand he wanted to drive forever, putting off the act indefinitely, prolonging the tantalizing feeling that gripped him now. And, at the same time, he wanted to stop the car that instant, to kill her oh God yes before another moment went by.

He waited, and a third impulse came. He had the thought of letting her go, of driving her all the way to Kirksville, even turning there and taking her straight to her home in Edina, and of never touching her, never doing her the slightest injury. She would hop out of the car and drag her duffel bag up the driveway to her house, never knowing how close she had come to death.

He had that urge some of the time. Every now and then he acted on it. Every now and then he would open his hand and release the helpless bird that fluttered within, watching benevolently as she flew away. He entertained the thought, then dismissed it. No, not this one. This bird would not be doing any more flying.

A mile down the road, he braked smoothly and turned onto a gravel road heading east.

“Where are we going?”

“There’s construction up ahead,” he told her.

“I didn’t see a sign.”

“I don’t think there was one. I came down this way this morning and everything was all snarled up. We’ll cut over to the next road going north and miss all that traffic.”

Her eyes were wary. She thought it was going to be okay, she still felt pretty safe, but it had at least occurred to her that it might not be, and it was giving her something to think about.

He slowed, turned left onto a narrower road.

She said, “Are you sure this is a road? It’s just a dirt road, I think it’s just a farm road—”

“It goes through.”

She was fumbling in her purse, and some instinct warned him. He slammed the brake pedal to the floor. She was propelled forward against her seat belt. He held the wheel with his left hand and swung his right, backhanding her full force across the mouth. She cried out.

He took the bag from her lap. Just below the top layer of articles he found a canister of Chemical Mace. She cringed when he displayed it.

“I wasn’t going to do anything,” she said. “I swear I wasn’t.”

He looked at her.

“I just got scared and I wanted to hold it,” she said. “I got frightened, I… please don’t hurt me.”

“Be quiet.”

“I’ll do anything you want. Just don’t hurt me.”

“Be quiet. And sit still.”

It was, as she had guessed, just a farm road. It would probably be safe for the next few minutes. But it would be safer still off the road, and he had her cowed now, she wouldn’t try anything. Off the road, screened from sight by shrubbery, there would be no need to hurry.

He got the car where he wanted it and cut the ignition. She was calmer now, and a little more sure of herself. “I’ll do anything you want,” she said. “Honest, anything. Just so you don’t hurt me.”

He nodded. “What’s your name?”

“Bethany.”

“How old are you?”

“Nineteen.”

“Take off your clothes, Bethany.”

“Here? Or should I get out of the car first?”

“Stay in the car. You’ll have to unhook your seat belt first, though.”

“Oh, right.”

She kicked off the sandals, opened her jeans and raised her hips up off the leather seat to squirm out of them. He took them from her, tossed them into the backseat. She took off the sweatshirt next, and then the T-shirt under it. No bra, and her tits were bigger than he would have guessed, milky white and very nice.

“Very nice,” he said aloud.

She colored, and hesitated, and he said, “Yes, Bethany, the panties too,” and she took those off and he flipped them into the back.

He had been wearing a suit jacket. He got out of it and tossed it in back with the clothes she’d removed. He filled his hands with her flesh. She was, he noticed, not terribly clean about her person. She had a discernible body odor, along with the very palpable smell of her fear.

He made her lie down on the front seat, and he laid his body on top of hers, pressing her down onto the seat. He could feel the heat of her loins through his trousers, he could feel her tits through his shirt, and he took her face in his hands and looked at her sweet young face.

“Just don’t hurt me,” she said.

“Oh, Bethany,” he said. “Oh, you poor darling, it’s no fun if I don’t hurt you.”

He watched her face as she took in what he’d said, and it was lovely, just lovely, and he didn’t want to put her through any more and couldn’t stand any more himself. So he placed the heel of his right hand under her chin, his fingertips just grazing her lip, and he cupped her forehead with his left hand, and he pushed up on her chin and back on her forehead and snapped her neck.

#57.

The first woman he killed, the black prostitute in the downtown motel, had been dispatched in a manner that was unplanned, impulsive, and extremely hazardous. He had left traces of his presence that a police laboratory could have found. And, although the pleasure had been unprecedented in his experience, it had been managed in such a manner as to make the aftermath uncomfortable and awkward.

Since then he had learned how to keep risk to a minimum while maximizing his pleasures; he was, indeed, conditioned to think in those terms, since they were essentially identical to one’s goals in real estate investment.

Almost from the beginning he had stopped having intercourse with his partners. It was a pleasant sensation, certainly, to have one’s sexual organ within a slippery envelope of flesh at the critical moment, but physical sensation of that sort played such a minor role in the excitement of the act as to render it almost irrelevant. And it was virtually impossible to achieve physical intimacy of that sort without leaving traces — pubic hair, semen, each capable of yielding no end of information to a trained forensic pathologist. On top of that, the act left traces upon oneself, and there was always the chance of catching a disease. While there was undeniable poetic justice in the notion of a woman infecting her killer with something at the least loathsome and at the worst life-threatening, he had no desire to afford one of his victims an opportunity for that sort of revenge.

So he tried keeping his clothing on, and the pleasure was no less intense for it. His orgasm came not as a result of friction between his penis and another object but as the pure inevitable response to his mental excitement. He usually pressed against a woman when he killed her, but he didn’t have to in order to reach full release.

But that, too, had a messy aftermath. He’d have to wash his underwear or throw it out, and sometimes his trousers had to make a trip to the dry cleaner. It took a while to hit on the solution, in part because he wasn’t looking for one at first; for the first year or more, each killing was followed by a vow that he would never kill again, and so there seemed little reason to seek a better way to manage it.

He tried putting on a condom first. That worked, certainly, but there was something ridiculous about it, and he hated it. And then, on one occasion when impulse and circumstance provided him with the opportunity to kill a very pretty waitress in the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant in Houston (lying on the asphalt between two parked cars, crushing her windpipe with a tire iron), he had used all the strength available to him to hold back his orgasm.

It was enormously frustrating, but the act was thrilling all the same, and he’d simply hurried back to his motel room to stretch naked on his bed, reliving the episode in his mind while he relieved himself manually. He masturbated again the following morning, but this time he held back his ejaculation to defer his pleasure, and in so doing he made an astonishing discovery: it was possible to have an orgasm without ejaculating.