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A hand clamped iron-hard on her left thigh.
Polly wrenched free and felt her way like a blind woman through the doorway to the living room, Red’s laundry like ghostly hands trying to drag her back. A softness coiled around her feet and she fell to her knees. Fingers raked her ankle, then wrapped around it, digging hard into her Achilles tendon. Pain dragged a cry from her.
Her attacker grunted with exertion.
And pleasure.
Scrabbling on sliding magazines, Polly was losing ground. The man’s fingers were wire cables, his strength enough to drag her backwards. Far stronger than she, he could have hammered her kidneys with balled fists; he could have thrown himself upon her and snapped her neck or slammed her head into the floor. He did none of these things; slowly, as if he savored the process, he was pulling her into himself, swallowing her as a snake would swallow a mouse. Garbage piled up under Polly’s chin, drowning her. Scrabbling on the glossy magazines, her hands found no purchase. When Gracie was a baby, too little to walk, she would crawl across the satin bedspread. Polly would catch her tiny, pink feet, pull her back into her arms, and kiss her, then away she would crawl again, laughing. Not Emma. Emma would roll over and kick out in anger.
Polly rolled onto her back, twisting her captured foot painfully. Using the foot that was free, she kicked with the desperation of the trapped. Animal sounds, grunts and shrieks and roars, poured from her. The killer held on, his faced pressed against her leg. She could feel the wet heat of his breath through her trousers. His mouth was working up behind her knee to her i
Her captured leg broke from his hands. She kicked again, then scooted backwards like a crab. Before she got to the door she must have turned and stood, but she remembered none of it. By luck or instinct, her hand found her purse on the overturned basket. Grabbing it, she hurtled down the steps and out into the street. Maybe she was chased; maybe she wasn’t. Her escape made so much racket, she couldn’t tell.
Outside, streetlights seemed preternaturally bright and endlessly reassuring. She ran toward her car.
Hands shaking so badly she could scarcely get the key into the ignition, she started the car and drove across Jackson Avenue, then into a smaller street. At each corner, she turned. As she crossed Louisiana Avenue, she watched the rearview mirror. After all the evasive maneuvers, she realized she was praying the murderer had followed, praying she would see a black SUV or a sleek sedan tailing her.
Anything but a cherry red, mint-condition, 1949 pickup truck.
Charles Whitman. Texas Clock Tower. I can see myself doing that. Not right now (no gun, ha ha). Charlie is this marine, right? So, he likes guns and has them. Maybe he’s got this wife that needs stuff and maybe she’s even nice and all but she NEEDS stuff and she’s always at him. And maybe at school he’s got these teachers yammering at him to get stuff. Maybe old Charlie got to thinking everybody was eating him, biting chunks of his flesh out, and he was ru
31
Marshall had not cried in so long his body did not know how. Sobs sawed out in anguished groans. Hot and niggardly tears crept from the corners of his eyes. His shoulders and arms jerked as if he fought to free himself from the clutches of sharp-nailed fingers.
The fit lasted only minutes. Tears were not cleansing; there was no relief, only an ache in his gut where muscles had clenched in a vain attempt to vomit out the unvomitable.
Breathe, you psycho fuck, he ordered himself and drew in warm air, thick as night, exhaled noisily, and again took a lungful of the static air. A semblance of sanity returned with the oxygen. He looked up at the basement’s center beam.
The axe hung where he’d put it not five minutes before. It had not migrated up the three flights of stairs to secrete itself under the bed like an ogre in a children’s story. It had not flown out of the darkness like a sentient thing, a bat spiraling upward in the night to prey on the i
The cellar was dark enough the newly cleaned metal gleamed only in Marshall ’s mind’s eye. Still he reached up and flicked off the overhead lights. True or not, TV crime shows had him convinced that scrubbing with turpentine would not be enough. A crime scene investigator would spray the axe with a magic substance and it would glow blue where blood had seeped into the wood, clotted in the crevices between handle and head.
There is no crime scene, he told himself.
A key grated in the outside door. Polly had come home.
“No!” he cried as the door swung inward.
Da
“Sorry, man. It’s just me, Marshall.”
“Damn it!” Da
“Sorry,” Marshall said.
“The door’s unlocked in the middle of the night. What the hell… What are you doing here?” he demanded.
Had Marshall not known his brother never took any drug but aspirin, and that sparingly, he would have thought he was high on something with an edge. “I live here,” Marshall said. “Take it easy. Sorry I startled you.”
Da
Threat vanished-that or he had imagined it.
“Sorry myself, brother,” Da
“What are you doing in the basement in the dark anyway? Where’s Polly? The kids? You don’t look so good, Marsh.”
“Polly and the girls are staying at Martha’s,” Marshall said wearily and, the effort of standing suddenly too great, sat on the step again.
Da
“It’s there. I just put it there.”
“I wasn’t looking for the axe,” Da
“It wasn’t there last night,” Marshall said. “It was upstairs. Under the bed for Christ’s sake. Like before.”
“And you don’t… ”
“No. I don’t remember a thing. I’m a fucking werewolf. At night I turn into a predator and wander the streets thirsting for blood. Goddamn.” He rubbed his face, as if he could scrub the image from his mind.
“You’re too hard on yourself, Marsh. Nobody’s been hurt.”
“There was blood on the axe, Da
Da
“You’re sure it was blood?” Da
“Pretty sure. There was a lot of it, smeared over the blade, the butt, down the handle.”
“Like before.”
“Yeah. I brought it back down, cleaned it with paint thi
“Maybe it wasn’t human blood,” Da
“That makes it better? Sneaking around the neighborhood hacking dogs to death? There’s no way out, Da
After a minute, Da
“Suicide.” Marshall laughed.
“Don’t say that!” The fear in Da