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

With Missy Flanders, the hunger wouldn’t go away. And he couldn’t find a way to assuage it.

When he got out of George’s office, when he finally managed to flee from further reports on Missy’s physical excellence and sexual virtuosity, he got into the Lincoln and just drove around without paying any attention to where he was going. He wanted to give himself a chance to calm down, but after half an hour it started to become clear that he wasn’t getting any calmer, that he wasn’t going to get calmer this way.

He hadn’t hunted since Wanda Rae Johnston in Abilene, hadn’t even gone out looking last night or this morning. That hardly constituted a long dry spell, but maybe a quick kill would take some of the pressure off.

He had bought a hunting knife somewhere in Arkansas or Oklahoma, and he got it out and took it from its sheath, slipping it into the map compartment in the door with its butt protruding. He drove around but couldn’t find a suitable hitchhiker anywhere. He parked at a shopping plaza and sat in his car watching women pushing shopping carts out of the Winn-Dixie. Within ten minutes he settled on one. He slipped the knife under his belt, got out of the car and went after her.

She was a little older than he preferred but still attractive, still lively. She was loading bags of groceries into her blue Subaru hatchback when he caught up with her. He said, “Miss? I think you dropped this.”

She turned. He had his hand behind his back, his fingers curled around the butt of the knife. Before she knew what was happening the blade was in her chest.

He stuffed her into the back of the Subaru, slammed the hatch shut, rolled the empty cart away. The knife, its blade wiped clean on the hem of her dress, went back in the map compartment, to be discarded at the first convenient opportunity. He drove out of the plaza parking lot and away.

#82

Except it didn’t help at all.

It had thrilled him, of course. Overstimulated as he was, it could hardly have done otherwise. But it was like scratching one leg when the other one itched. It did nothing to relieve the real source of his torment.

He still saw Missy’s face every time he closed his eyes. He saw her with George, doing all the things George had insisted upon talking about. He saw her licking her red lips and squirming on a mattress. He saw her tied up, eyes rolling in terror. He saw her with her throat slashed, with her breasts chewed off, with her flesh pierced by a dozen arrows. Christ, he wanted to do everything to her, he wanted to kill her a hundred different ways, he wanted to drink her blood, he wanted to cut off her head and use her bleached skull for a paperweight.

Maybe he had acted too quickly. Maybe he had settled for too ordinary a woman and dispatched her with too little ceremony to satisfy the blood lust Missy Flanders had provoked in him.

He didn’t think that was it, but all the same he drove around and found another supermarket, and this time he picked his victim with care. He wandered through the aisles until he found a lovely little thing with a beauty mark on her cheek and a saucy bottom that was wonderfully snug in her straw-colored jeans. He cleared the checkout counter ahead of her, and he was in his car with the motor running as she walked to hers.

He followed her home. He gave her a few minutes to get settled. Then, clipboard in hand, he walked up to her door and rang her bell.

She was all alone in the house, and she agreed with some reluctance to answer a few questions on her views of foreign policy, brightening considerably when he told her she would receive a twenty-dollar honorarium for her trouble. He caught her off-guard, put her to sleep with a choke hold, stripped her naked and immobilized her arms and legs with picture wire, then gagged her with her own panties. He spent a full thirty minutes with her before he finished her off with another length of picture wire.

#83.

He went back to the motel and took a shower. He sat in a chair, got up, threw himself down on the bed, returned to the chair, and realized he was too restless to stay in the room. He went down to the pool and tried swimming laps to work off some of the energy in his body, but it didn’t really help. He got dressed and took himself out to dinner but had no appetite. He picked at his salad, drank two cups of coffee even though he was too tightly wired to begin with, and returned to the Holiday Inn.

He still couldn’t get that fox-faced little bitch out of his mind.

The second one that day had been wonderful, one of the best he’d had, and it didn’t seem to make any difference. He could go out again. He could work his way through the female population of Wichita Falls. It wouldn’t change a thing.

He had to have her, and there was no way he could see to get her.

The next morning he drove to her house.

It wasn’t easy. He remembered that her name was Flanders, and that George had said she lived in Archer County. There were a couple of possible listings. George had mentioned where her husband worked, but he couldn’t remember.

Waco-Eggert. He called their personnel office. He was doing a credit check, he explained; did they employ a man named Alvin Flanders? They did not, but they did have a man in their employ by the name of J. T. Flanders. That was one of the Archer County listings in the phone book, with an address on Caperwood Court.

He didn’t want to ask directions, so he bought a map and drove there. The area where she lived was new, and the map was not entirely accurate. On top of that, the subdivision had been laid out by one of those planners who liked to talk about escaping from the tyranny of the grid, and as a result all the streets made strange turns and looped around in unfathomable directions, and it was impossible to keep your bearings.

Eventually, of course, he found her house. There was no one home — no lights on inside, no car in the garage. And you could tell she and her husband had no children. There was no swing set or jungle gym in the backyard, no toys in the garage.

She was at work now. In a couple of hours she would go out for lunch, and George Kingland, the son of a bitch, would do whatever he wanted with her.

God, it was maddening!

He was parked in front of George’s office at noon when the two of them left for their tryst. They rode in George’s car — evidently she didn’t have a car of her own, George had said something about her husband driving her to and from work. He followed them to the downtown Holiday Inn at Eighth and Scott. She stayed in the car while George went to the desk. Then they drove around back and parked.

What was the point of this? What was he going to do, follow them to their room and listen at the keyhole?

He got out of there. Back at the other Holiday Inn he packed quickly and checked out. He had missed the official checkout time but the girl at the desk winked and told him it was okay. He got on the highway, set the cruise control at sixty-five, and drove to Amarillo.

He thought about her all the way.

He checked into a Ramada, took his bag to the room and unpacked. He fixed himself a weak scotch and water but left half of it unfinished. He picked up the phone. There was no one he knew in Amarillo, and he didn’t feel like calling Marilee and the kids.

He called George. “I left there before I got a chance to say goodbye,” he said. “Give my love to Gwen, will you?”

“I sure will. We were hoping to have you to dinner, but I just got through talking to the Holiday Inn and they said you’d checked out.”

“Well, they wouldn’t lie to you. Incidentally, that file you had your girl bring in yesterday—”

“Greystone Estates.”

“That’s the one. Is that something I should know about?”

“Oh, shit, no, Mark. Fake Tudor semi-detached townhouses for upscale wetbacks. We’re just writing short-term paper on ’em because we don’t want ’em falling down before they’re paid off.”