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

In the morning he woke up thinking about her. He wasn’t obsessed, it wasn’t like Wichita Falls. He skipped breakfast and scouted a chain drugstore and a supermarket without finding anyone he liked. Back in his car, he wondered if he could even find her house. He hadn’t been paying attention when he drove there, and on the way back he’d just been trying to make his way out of the maze.

He started by finding the farmer’s market, and then he was able to retrace his route with surprising ease. He might have had trouble recognizing her house but her car was parked in the driveway and he had spent enough time following it to spot it at once. And this time her husband’s car was not present.

He left the Lincoln at the curb, picked up his clipboard, and rang her doorbell. She came to the door wearing a flared denim skirt and a white cotton blouse with a scoop neckline. A golden chain around her neck held a small gold cross set with diamonds. She had gold hoop earrings, and several bracelets on each wrist.

“Water company,” he said.

As soon as she turned her back on him he got a forearm around her throat and a hand over her mouth. She squirmed in his embrace, and it felt so good and he had waited so long that he was terribly eager, with the result that he very nearly throttled her on the spot. He wanted to, but at the same time he had invested enough time and effort in this to make him want to get his money’s worth out of her. So he eased into a choke hold and put her to sleep.

He had brought nothing with him but the clipboard, so he found her hardware drawer and searched through it. He stripped her naked and bound her hands and feet with picture wire, then looked for some tape for her mouth. He couldn’t find any. There was a nice and he took it from the drawer and set it down next to her, but there was no tape.

He was closing the drawer when he saw the tube of Krazy Glue. He looked at it and read the instructions carefully. Then he spread a thin film of the stuff on her upper and lower lip and pressed them together. He capped the tube, waited a minute or two, and tried to spread her lips with his fingers. They seemed to be stuck together firmly.

He ran a hand idly over her body and waited for her to come to. At last her eyes opened, and she looked at him in unbelieving terror and tried to open her mouth to scream, and of course she couldn’t. No matter how she fought, her lips refused to open.

He spent half an hour with her. Once the phone rang, and the calling party let it ring a full dozen times before giving up. When it finally stopped he decided he couldn’t wait any longer, and he reached for the icepick. Just as he was about to drive it into her ear he had another thought, and he set the aside and retrieved the tube of glue.

He put a small drop in each nostril and gently, gently, pinched them shut.

#95.

He was already out of town, heading north into Nebraska, when he remembered that he’d intended to go home to Kansas City. He thought about turning the car around but instead kept on in the direction he was going and drove into Lincoln. He hung around Lincoln until he got a nurse who’d just finished her shift at St. Elizabeth Hospital. From there he drove to Omaha, where he stayed two nights, then drove over the bridge to Council Bluffs and killed a housewife with the icepick he’d carried off from the house in Manhattan.

He got two women a few hours apart in Des Moines. North of there, in Ames, he scouted a supermarket and liked one of the checkout girls best of all. He was in his car when the market closed, and when she emerged heading for her own car he stalked her and picked a good spot and swooped down on her, striking her over the head with a tire iron. He didn’t bother to immobilize her with wire or tape, just bundled her into the trunk of his car and drove off with her, and he didn’t stop to open the trunk until he was miles from town on a country lane.

And she was already dead. Evidently he’d hit too hard with the tire iron. She was his hundredth kill, too, and it seemed to him that there should be some significance to the number, yet here she was, pointlessly dead.

She was pretty, too.

He carried her fifteen yards from the roadside and set her down where she wouldn’t be quickly found. A wave of nausea struck him, and he was almost sick. He went back to his car and sat behind the wheel for a while, thinking about things. Then he turned the key in the ignition and drove off.

Maybe it was time to stop.

The thought kept coming to him. He drove south from Ames, skirting Des Moines. It was late, he ought to get a hotel room, but he didn’t feel like it. He drove west on 80, thinking he could take a left at Council Bluffs and drive right through to Kansas City.

Instead he turned right and drove north on I-29 all the way to Sioux City.

He checked into a Ramada, slept for two hours, and woke up clawing his way out of a nightmare. In it, he kept killing the same woman over and over again and he couldn’t make her die. She came back to life again and again. He strangled her, he snapped her neck, he cut her and stabbed her, and she wouldn’t stay dead. Finally she was laughing at him, asking him if he knew who she was. Her face began to come more sharply into focus, he was on the point of recognizing her, and he came abruptly awake, breathless and covered with a fine film of perspiration.

Maybe it was time to stop.

He thought of the girl in Ames, the checkout girl, and how her death had been wasted. But weren’t they all wasted? He remembered the nausea that had threatened to overwhelm him, and as an experiment he let himself recall one of his other recent kills. The nurse in Lincoln, with her white uniform, wilted after a long day’s work, and her big soft pillow tits. He thought of her pain and her absence from the world now, and the nausea welled up in him, if less vivid than in Ames.

But he felt excitement, too. He was sickened and excited at the same time.

He couldn’t go back to sleep. He found an all-night Denny’s and had something to eat, drove around, returned to his room. He watched Australian Rules Football on ESPN, the announcer chattering away excitedly about something that made no sense to Mark. The bodies on the screen were just a blur, the voice just noise.

He couldn’t decide what to do.

After two days he checked out of the Ramada. He drove around, unable to decide where to go, and wound up staying in Sioux City, checking in at the Rodeway Inn. The television set at the Rodeway got the same cable stations as the one at the Ramada. The pool was a little smaller, but they had a sauna.

What difference did it make where he stayed? Or which city he stayed in?

Maybe it was time to stop.

The following night he went out for dinner. He wasn’t hungry but he made himself order baked chicken with a green salad. His waitress was a striking young woman, with long black hair and strong facial features — a hawk nose, deep-set eyes, a red slash of a mouth. Her uniform was tight over her breasts, and the skirt was short enough to show good legs.

He had brought a newspaper to the table, and he read it while he ate, but from time to time he would set it aside and steal a look at the waitress. She was nice. He wasn’t going to do anything about it, hadn’t done anything since the episode with the tire iron in Ames, but this didn’t mean he could stop looking at her, or thinking about her.

He ordered coffee but no dessert. He had drunk about a third of the coffee when she came unbidden to refill his cup. Quietly, without moving her lips, she said, “I get off at eleven. If you’re interested.” He was too stunned to reply. “Meet me in the lot outside,” she went on, her voice just strong enough to reach his ear. “My car’s the white Trans-Am. If you’re interested.”