Jack Ketchum - Right to Life

She watched the cat inch toward Stephen. She’s been right about the cat’s decision. Stephen looked up and saw her and kicked at the air in front of her and she was only a cat but she wasn’t stupid. She backed away. Sat back and seemed to ponder her luck with Kath.

She took a bite of her sandwich and thought that it definitely needed more mayo. She was actually surprised Stephen hadn’t started complaining. But they were out of mayo. She’d forgotten to put it down on the shopping list again.

She was forgetting too much lately. He was always telling her and she thought he was probably right.

Maybe it was stress or something. She didn’t know.

But she agreed with him that this Sara Foster person had nerve. Was probably not going to be all that easy to subdue and subvert. She knew first-hand what the headbox was like and to have calmed down so fast took guts all right.

She wondered if he’d chosen correctly.

Though for some reason he was sure he had. Intuition , he said. The way she walks .

Follow her. Get her name.

“Did you phone in all the stuff to Sandy like I said?”

She nodded.

“What’d he say?”

“He said no problem, give him an hour. The mom and dad’s phone number are probably a New York exchange, he thought maybe somewhere in Westchester or Long Island. The Winthrop School is definitely Manhattan. So he’ll get us the street addresses on those and trace her boyfriend’s plates. He asked was there anything else and I said I guess we’d get back to him.”

“Good. We’ll go through the rest of her address book tonight, see if there’s anything else we can use.”

“Jeez, Stephen. I wanted to watch that movie tonight.”

She took another bite of the sandwich. Wished it had some chopped celery in it. The damn thing was way too dry.

He glared at her.

“Couldn’t we go through her book after the movie?”

“No, we couldn’t go through it after the movie. Can’t you fucking prioritize?”

She wished he wouldn’t use that voice with her. That condescending tone.

She knew better than to argue with him per se. But she wasn’t exactly ready to let it go at that either.

“You were going to get the VCR fixed. I mean, I could’ve taped it.”

“Fuck the VCR! Jesus! What’s more important, Kath? This or your goddamn movie? Do you realize what we’ve done here? Do you remember what’s going on? Do you realize how important this is?”

Important to who? she thought. But she didn’t want to say that to him either. It was an ego thing and she didn’t want to insult him. Stephen prided himself on being a careful hunter and a good profiler of people and a very organized personality. He thought that he had managed this pretty much perfectly so far. He also thought that it was important, that it wasn’t just a matter of his own satisfaction.

She wasn’t so sure about that part.

He saw the look on her face though and relented.

Good. She really did want to see the movie.

“What’s it called?” he said.

“It’s an HBO Original Movie. It’s called COVEN and it’s based on a book I really liked a lot.”

The cat made up its mind and walked over. She picked off a pinch of tuna and held it out to her. She didn’t much like it anyway.

He sighed. “All right,” he said. “After the goddamn movie. But you’ve got to get more serious about this, Kath.”

“Jeez, Stephen. How much more serious can I get? I drove the car, I brought home the pentathol from the hospital, risked my job, risked arrest. I shot her up for you for godsakes! I’m in this up to my neck, y’know what I mean?”

The cat was looking for more tuna. She picked off a chunk and dropped it on the floor. The cat purred and set in.

“I know. But from here on in everything’s got to go by the book. Exactly by the book. And it’s going to be a very long haul. We’ve got to be diligent as hell.”

“Don’t worry. I will be.”

She got up and walked over to his chair and bent over and kissed him. He smelled like tuna and Old Spice aftershave. She glanced at Sara Foster five feet away, still breathing hard but managing to control it, a bead of sweat rolling down off her collarbone from inside the box. She thought that for a woman her age Sara had a damn good body. Her pubic hair was bikini-waxed, unlike her own. She thought she’d like to get that done someday but there was never enough money around for extravagances like a bikini wax. The tan-line from her two-piece was very clear. Forget about the clumsy headbox and she was very attractive. Made her feel sort of dumpy, tell the truth.

All this and fertile, too, she thought.

She wondered if Stephen was going to keep his promise about not having sex with her. Not real sex, anyway. If he’d be able to do that.

He’d better.

“How long you going to leave it on?”

“Well, I’ve got to get her out of the cuffs in about an hour or she’s going to have problems with circulation. But by then she’ll be hurting and compliant enough so that she won’t be hard to handle. I figure we’ll just tie her to the chair here and you can hold her head still for me while I take off the box and blindfold her from behind. I don’t want her to see us yet. I want us to stay anonymous. We’ll turn off the lights and leave her an hour or so and then I want to come back and try to feed her. I’m betting she refuses. So then we put her up on the rack again and I’ll give her her first beating. Show her what things are going to be like from now on. She’ll get the idea.”

“What if she doesn’t? Refuse I mean.”

He grinned. “If you were in her shoes, would you accept food from us right now? But even if she does, fine. Establishes dependency. Either way we can’t lose.”

She collected his empty plate off his lap. The cat tried to nuzzle her leg but she stepped away.

Dumb animal.

“Are you going to stay down here a while?”

He nodded. “I want to make sure she’s basically okay, that she doesn’t throw up inside the box or anything. I’ll hang around. But you go on ahead. I’ll give you a yell when I need you. If Sandy calls let me know.”

“Okay.”

She walked upstairs through the doorway that led to the dining room and kitchen and put the plates in the sink and rinsed them and stacked them in the dishwasher. Outside the window over the sink a pair of jays were harassing a small flock of sparrows attempting to feed by the cherry tree next to the garage, diving at them from the white birch on the opposite side of the lawn. Scattering them but making no real effort to feed. Just flying back to the birch and perching there until the sparrows returned and then diving back down to scatter them again. Seemingly just for the hell of it. Or maybe it was the sparrows themselves the jays were after.

Were bluejays predatory? She didn’t know.

Nowadays, who wasn’t?

In the basement he thought of all the things — the things he would do to her before she broke, all those things which would make her break in the course of time. It would take time he knew and that was fine because the good part was in the breaking. Once the will to resist had disappeared they were like herd animals, like cattle, without motivation other than to go on living with a minimum of pain. The pleasure was in the taming of the will and the mastery of the spirit and he was only in the second true hour of that, the second true hour of all that lay ahead yet already h hard-on was irresistible so he grasped it in his warm calloused hand and looked at her breathing flesh just a few feet away and stroked and stroked.

The cat sat watching him. The cat made him uncomfortable.