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

“I just thought I’d check.”

“Well, it don’t never hurt.” His voice dropped and deepened. “Kid, I had some kind of a lunch hour today. You’re not gonna believe this.”

Then don’t tell me, you bastard, he thought. But he listened, knowing that was why he’d made the call in the first place.

He didn’t hunt in Amarillo. He didn’t have to struggle with temptation. There was no temptation. When his eyes fell on other women, at poolside, on the street, in a restaurant, he barely noticed them.

He spent the night in his room, touching himself, killing Missy in his mind. He would leave in the morning, he told himself, and he would drive a long ways away. He could go into New Mexico, he could set the cruise control and never stop for anything but gas straight through to Los Angeles. Once he’d put distance between himself and that little bitch, maybe he could get her out of his mind.

But God, it galled him to leave her alive.

That was it, he realized. It wasn’t just that he wasn’t getting the pleasure of killing her. It was that it actually infuriated him that she went on living, that George went on having her. Deprivation was one thing, he could probably live with that, but this other thing that he felt — was it as simple as jealousy? — was eating him alive.

He didn’t just want to kill her. He actively wanted her to be dead. He would even be willing to have someone else kill her, to have her die in a train wreck or a flash flood, just so he could be free of her.

Sometimes, John Randall Spears had written, you had to walk away from a deal. Sometimes, no matter how many incentives you offered, the seller wouldn’t go the necessary distance to meet you halfway. Sometimes, as much as you might want to buy a property and as much as the seller might want to do business with you, the numbers couldn’t be made to work out. When that happened you shook hands and wished each other well, and you walked off into the sunset with no regrets, because there were always plenty of other properties out there for you to purchase.

But, Spears had said, when you really wanted something, you could usually get it. If you looked at it from enough angles, there was almost always a way for all concerned to win.

In the morning he told them at the desk that he would be keeping the room for at least one more night. He left his clothes in the drawers and closet, his bag on the luggage stand, his razor and toothbrush in the bathroom. He had breakfast, signed for it, and drove back to Wichita Falls.

It wasn’t much easier finding the Flanders house the second time, but he managed it, pulling the Lincoln right into the garage. The door leading from the garage to the house was locked, as was the house’s front door. He forced a basement window and got in that way.

The door at the top of the cellar stairs was locked, but the lock was like a bathroom door, a button that you pushed, and he was able to open it. He went through the house, committing the floor plan to memory, finding out where everything was. He touched the clothes in her closet, studied what must have been the couple’s wedding picture. Her husband looked like the sort of man who got in fights at country-and-western bars.

When he left, the button lock on the basement door was fixed so that it would open at a touch. The window through which he’d made his entrance and exit was unlocked, needing only to be shoved open.

He drove to a shopping mall that housed a triplex cinema. He sat through a movie, ate a burrito, saw a second movie. From there he drove to a budget motel, where he paid cash for one night. On the registration card he gave his name as James Miller of Roswell, New Mexico. He listed his car as a Plymouth sedan and made up a license number. He hung the Do Not Disturb sign on his door and went to bed.

When he woke up it was past midnight. He showered and dressed, wiped away any fingerprints he might have left, and went to his car. He drove directly to the Flanders house. It was hard to see street signs in the dark, but he had learned the route by now.

The lights were off, and Flanders’s car was in the garage. He parked the Lincoln on the street around the corner and walked back. He slipped quietly up the driveway, opened the basement window he’d forced earlier, and lowered himself into the basement.

He had picked up a pair of rubber gloves in the shopping mall, and he put them on now. He took his time climbing the cellar stairs — he remembered which steps creaked, and avoided them. At the top of the stairs he manipulated the lock and eased the door open.

And heard something. He stayed perfectly still, listening, and identified the sound as a television set. He checked his watch. It was twenty to one. He eased the door shut and sat down on the steps and waited. A little after one he opened the door again and listened, and the television was off.

He waited another half hour, his whole body tingling with anticipation now. He had reached a point where he didn’t mind the wait. It was important, to assure the affair’s success, but it was also part of the excitement. The more he drew things out, the more satisfying they were.

At length he opened the door a third time and moved through it, finding his way to the kitchen. His eyes had long since accustomed themselves to the dark, and he moved across the linoleum tile floor and picked the knife he had selected earlier from the chunk of slotted butcher block. He carried it at his side and glided silently through the carpeted hallway to the bedroom.

The bedroom door was open. He stood outside, listening. The closer he got to her, the more intense his excitement became, as if she was at the center of a magnetic field to which he was relentlessly drawn.

He let himself be drawn into the bedroom. He had already determined, from the contents of the bedside tables, which side of the bed was hers, but the room was light enough so that he could see the two of them, lying on their backs, covered only by the top sheet.

He went to her side and stood there. He could hear her breathing, softer than her husband, and he could smell her scent. He thought of all the things he would have gladly done to her, given world enough and time, and he did them quickly in his mind.

He crouched beside the bed. He wanted to draw this out but he didn’t dare, he was already risking too much. At any moment either of them could sense his presence and stir, and he could not allow that. So he readied the knife, and then he settled his left hand palm-down over her mouth.

Before she could react, before she could open her light brown eyes, before she could even stir beneath his hand, he killed her with a single thrust into her heart.

#84.

The orgasm was unprecedented. It was hardly identifiable as having anything to do with sex. It did not seem to be centered in his loins, but involved every cell of his body in equal measure. It shook him, it dizzied him, and he decided afterward that he had probably lost consciousness for an indeterminate period of time, that his spirit had separated from his body for a moment even as hers was taking permanent leave of her body.

Reviewing it later, he couldn’t even say to what extent it had been pleasurable. Pleasure in this instance had been somehow beside the point.

When he recovered his senses, he stayed where he was, crouching at her bedside. His hand, encased in the rubber glove, still gripped the knife. Her life had passed through the knife and up his arm, and in so doing had fused his hand and the knife into a single unit. He had to will his fingers to let go.

He leaned over her, pressed his lips to hers. He did not want to leave her, it felt curiously like an act of abandonment, but it was suicidal to stay where he was. She had ceased to breathe, her energy had departed from the room, and at any moment her husband might sense the change and open his eyes.