But you're better off with Dave, so I leave you to each other. I wish you all the luck and success that your heart desires. I wish you all the happiness that I will never have.
Don't try to look for me. Let it go. While it lasted, it was the best. Now it's time to move on. I love you, baby.
Good-bye.
He didn't sign his name to the note. It didn't really matter. By the time she got to the bottom, she could barely focus anyway.
"God damn you," she whispered, then said it again. On the second time, she crumpled the note and tossed it at the wall. It hit. So what.
It wasn't enough.
Not nearly enough.
"You bastard," she continued, a bit more of her voice behind it. On the bed beside her, Bubba began to whine. Good ol' Bubba: every last drop of Billy's goodness and innocence, distilled into a ball of wiggling fur and dropped on her doorstep. She hugged the dog tightly, crying as she did it, abandoning herself to the slight consolation he gave.
She wished that Lisa were here to confide in, to hold, to try and make sense of the nightmare with. But Lisa had already been swallowed by it, gone to wherever radical lesbian feminists who didn't believe in God went when their bodies died and their beautiful souls were unleashed into the ether.
Gone to Heaven, Mona thought. Whether she believed in it or not.
Then she thought about Billy; and for some reason it made her think about Hell.
It took another five minutes for Mona to drag herself out of bed. It took an additional three minutes for her to make it to the phone. Believe me, baby, her mind informed her in a voice that was not her own. Finding out would be the worst move you ever made.
It took another thirty seconds to pick up the phone and dial the number.
From then on, it was out of her hands.
Entirely.
Larry awoke at 9:56 to the sound of the telephone's ringing. He felt shards of jagged crockery and glass dig into his back, and moaned. The phone rang again. He put his right hand out to steady himself, felt the piece of paper in it at the same time as the piece of broken glass poked through it and into his palm.
He screamed.
The phone rang again.
"SHIT!" he yelled, pulling out the glass, smearing blood across the note that Billy had left for him. The note, the blood, the glass all mingled into a senseless gestalt that he had no handle for. He stared at them all with equal incomprehension.
The phone rang again.
And the machine clicked on.
"Don't care what the neighbors say:
Roth and Rowe are here to stay.
We can't make it to the phone.
Leave your message at the tone.
BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP"
"PICK UP!" came the shrill voice over the answering machine's speaker. "PICK UP, GOD DAMN IT!'
Larry struggled to his feet, feeling dizzy and drugged. His hand was still bleeding. The white paper of the note was turning red. His flesh tingled painfully, looked darker than usual.
"Answer the fucking phone, you coward! You don't get away from ME this easy!"
The telephone, and its requisite machine, were two of the only things in Larry's room that remained undamaged. Larry staggered toward it, lifted the receiver to his ear, heard the painful whine of feedback, turned down the volume automatically, and spoke.
"Hello?" His voice sounded like a lapidary machine, grinding stone. "Who is it?"
"Larry?" The voice was quieter, but no less shrill.
"Yeah." He looked at the blood, rolling down the sheet of paper. "This is Larry. Who is this?"
"Oh, Jesus. Larry. Is Billy there? This is Mona. I gotta talk with him." The words all came out in a jumble, but the tone dropped to a manageable pitch.
"Mona, Billy's not here." He looked at the note, gauged the silence of the room. The terror came back: a cancerous, bleeding lump in his throat.
He looked at the note.
He read the first words.
"Larry." Not a question. "What's wrong? What's the matter?"
"I've got a note in my hand," Larry said. His voice was calm and even, in complete betrayal of everything he felt. Thank God for the bullshit arts. "I've got a note from Billy, and it's covered with blood. Maybe I should read it to you."
Mona's voice. Very tiny. "Okay."
His own voice, not much larger, as he read her the text.
Larry
I don't want to kill you. That doesn't mean that I won't. It all depends on whether you follow these simple rules
DON'T TALK ABOUT ME TO ANYONE.
DON'T GO INTO MY FUCKING ROOM.
Do what I say, and everything will be okay.
Fuck up, and I cannot be responsible for what happens.
Take care, man. Be smart.
Obey.
Silence: complete, and all the more hideous for it.
From the other end: the faintest sound of tears.
Larry used the minute or two in which Mona could not speak to assess his own situation. He was more than half inclined to cry himself, but it wasn't in his repertoire. Like his first pair of shoes, his emotions had been bronzed and set up on a mantel somewhere. There seemed no point in breaking them out now.
"I'm on my way," Mona voice said suddenly. "Before you do anything, wait for me."
"But—"
The phone went dead in Larry's still-bleeding hand. He stared at it for a minute, wanting to sing out the cautionary note that he was not heeding himself.
It was ten o'clock.
FORTY-EIGHT
TIME TO GO
Stanley Peckard awoke, reluctantly, at the twenty-second hour. He could tell, because Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous was just starting on Channel 11. Even before the pain, before the stink of his own rotting flesh, Stanley connected with his video programming.
A voice was jabbering on about the joys of owning seventeen limos, but it was all lost on Stanley. There was a crackling band of static along the inside of his, brain, thrumming like a high-voltage cable severed and dipped into the ocean. It spoke to him, overriding his own moaning and the voice-over from the tube.
It almost drowned out the demons.
Almost.
When Stanley woke, it was
(time to go)
dark in the room, with only the flickering blue light and burble of the TV to moor him down. He already felt light, just as light as light could be. And he felt another light, another kind of light entirely: a distant light, urging him to just leave his body entirely and
(go)
fly away, free of both Earth and demon voice, to where the one living force that had ever loved him was waiting with
(SHARP!)
open arms.
"No," he whispered. "No, I won't." The armchair in front of the TV was moist and warm. It might have had something to do with the fever that ate at him now, leaving his clothing soggy, and his body wracked with chills, reminding him that it was
(time to go)
too late for a doctor, too late for a priest. He was
(SHARP!)
weak, he was
(SHARP!)
dying; the sticky, gangrenous flesh of his arm attested quite convincingly to that fact. There was nothing to do but
(go)
sit there and let nature take its horrible course. He didn't have the strength to
(go)
do anything but let the comfy chair and the distant light enfold him. He certainly didn't have the incentive.
There was nothing that anyone could offer him. He was
(SHARP!)
dying. He was
(SHARP!)
too far gone to
(go)
help them anymore, and too weak to resist. He was
(SHARP!)
completely helpless in the face of what the demons told him now.
She would be the Bestest Of All Possible Girls. They made that very very clear. She was the one all along, the one that all the others had led up
to: better even than Lisa, his special friend who hadn't been much of a friend at all, had she, what with breaking his arm and nearly killing him and all.
They showed him his Bestest Girl in exquisite detail. Her flesh shimmered like gold against the drowning darkness of her hair. She would come for him tonight, they said. Come to take him in her arms and make it all go away. All the hurt. All the pain.
She would descend from the heavens above, they said. And it would all be over.
The first commercial break was just beginning. Stanley's vision was swimming, but he knew an ad for Burger King when he saw one. He wondered, vaguely, how much Burger King had in common with the lifestyles of the rich and famous.
Then he was staggering to his feet, yanked helplessly by forces utterly beyond his control. The pain was horrible. His battered Stetson sat on the rat-bitten couch. The shadow it cast over the top half of his face effectively concealed the tears that bled from his eyes.
It was time to go.
They didn't need to tell him again.
FORTY-NINE
THE DREADED TOLD-YOUSO'S
Rizzo was weary. Nothing unusual in that. If he was wearier than usual, that was his miserable partner's fault. Between the failure to shut up and the failure to make sense, Hamilton was breaking all the mental health laws that Rizzo demanded from a sane human being.
"Listen to me," Dennis the Menace persisted. "I'm asking a simple favor. Add up all the times that you've patronized me, regarding my hunches. Then line it up with a column that shows all the times I've been right. Then tell me that I'm full of it."
"I already told you that."
"But you haven't done the groundwork."
"You haven't told me anything!" Rizzo snapped, slamming his fist on the desk. "You haven't given me a goddam thing that I can use! What did you do, throw the fucking I Ching? I mean, Jesus!"
"What do you want me to do? Bring him in for a confession? You wouldn't believe it, anyway."
"That's true." Rizzo lit a cigarette, mashed the sweat of his brow with the back of his hand. "The hundred-billion crazies that call in here every second tend to dampen the fires of my faith."
"Nice to know that you put me in such good company."
"Well, hey! I'm sorry! You sound just like 'em! If you came in here and informed me that you'd found the Lost Continent, I'd sit here and wait for the punch line. If you persisted, I'd assume that you don't know how to tell a joke. As it is, you've gone way the hell past the point where it's funny. You got me worried now, Junior. And I don't like that."
The telephone rang, mercifully cutting the conversation short. Rizzo glared at it balefully anyhow, just as a matter of principle. He had come to hate telephones over the course of the pseudo-investigation. All they brought was heat and flak, heat and flak, twenty-four ball-busting hours a day.
He ran down the possibilities in his mind: the mayor's office, the commissioner's office, the press. The crank calls never made it past the front desk, thank God; though these days they'd have been a welcome change of pace.
"I'll tell ya. That pesky Pia Zadora, she just can't get enough of me," he quipped, reaching for the receiver. Hamilton didn't laugh. He didn't even look. Rizzo shook his head, wearier than ever, and prepared himself for another little slice of happiness.
But when he brought the receiver to his ear, Desk Sergeant Padillo sounded uncharacteristically excited. "We got Dirty Harry on the line here, Frank. He wants to talk to you."
"What?" Rizzo's breath caught, and he felt a bass drum thud in his belly. "Are you sure?"
"I'd practically stake my badge on it. He's crazier than a bedbug, but he sounds just like Clint Eastwood."
"Okay. Okay." Rizzo dragged one rolled-up sleeve across his forehead again, where some fresh beads of sweat had collected. "I'm ready. You got the tape rollin'? Of course you do. Okay. Lemme at him."
Padillo clicked off. There was a moment of silence. Rizzo snuck a glance at his partner, who had suddenly turned attentive.
Then the line clicked on again.
"Hello?" Rizzo said. It was as far as he got. Because the voice that boomed out of the receiver took him completely by surprise. The voice was too loud. The voice was all wrong.
"THEEEEEERE'S NO NEED TO FEAR!" it exclaimed, thunderous and wimpy all at once. "UNNNNNNNNDERDOG IS HERE!"
"What the—" Rizzo began again, was met by a gale of high-pitched and derisive laughter. Rage boiled up inside him, shattering through the tension like a wrecking ball. "Who the hell are you?" he demanded.
"Don't fret, sweet Polly. That evil fiend will get his just desserts, or my name isn't mild-mannered Shoeshine Boy—"
"Alright, asshole! Cut the shit!" There was no getting around the fact that the guy did a perfect Wally Cox, but that was beside the point. "You wanna talk to me, talk fast, 'cause I'm not in the mood to play Name That Goon. Alright?"
"Alright," came the voice from the other end, snapping so abruptly and completely back into the Eastwood mold that it shocked Rizzo to the bone. "Yeah, I got something to tell ya, punk. But first I wanna ask you a couple of questions.
"This is the eighth day of your so-called investigation, am I right?"
"That's right."
"And you still haven't caught him."
"That's right."
"And he just keeps right on killing. Four down, how many more to go?"
"Three—"
"Four, asshole. Let me emphasize that. You're forgetting Lisa Traynor." Pause. The sound of a difficult swallow. "The girl who died last night makes four."
"I guess he doesn't see you as much of a threat."
A strange spark of déjà vu went off in the back of Rizzo's head. The second he took to dig for a connection gave his caller a chance to go on.
"But that's okay, because I've got his number. You hear me? I know who the Slasher is. You'll be able to read about it in tomorrow morning's papers."
"Wait a minute, wait a minute." The insult was forgotten in the light of this new information. "What are you saying?"
"I'm on my way to his place right now. What you'll wind up finding is a hundred pounds or so of plump link sausage. Yummy nums." A low chuckle.
"You know something, buddy? You're a sick sonofabitch. What makes you think that I believe you?"
"You will."
"I don't even know who you are!"
"Ask your erstwhile partner. Or better yet, don't. I love to watch you fumble around. It makes my day."
Rizzo was just about to yell something else when the line went dead. He did it anyway. "Sonofabitch! Padilo! Did you get a trace on that?"
"Not enough time, Frank. Sorry."
"Shit. Yeah, okay. Thanks, Ralph. Nice try." Then he hung up the phone and started kneading at his forehead with his hands.
"So what do we do now?" Hamilton asked. His voice was quiet. There was the soft click of his own receiver, settling down in its cradle.
"Same thing we've been doing the whole time," Rizzo said. "Sit around with our thumbs up our asses and wait for someone to make a mistake." He sighed heavily, then turned his wearier-than-ever gaze to his partner. "At least we know who it is now."
"Yeah?" Hamilton said, beginning to grin. "And who might that be?"
Rizzo grinned back sourly, lit another cigarette.
"Rich Little," he said.
FIFTY
REVERSE SEXISM
The cab was a Checker, big and ungainly and solid as a tank. The last several years had seen them slowly phasing away, like the last days of the mastodon; but to Billy they would always be the quintessential New York cab.
So when it pulled over for him at the corner of Park Avenue South and Twenty-first Street, he clapped his hands with glee. The night was young, the timing was perfect; and to top it all off, he had a goddam Checker chariot to take him downtown in style.
"Alright, muh man!" Billy exclaimed, climbing in the back. "How are you on this fine evening?"
"Can't complain," the driver said, unintereste
d. "Where ya headed?"
"How's First Avenue and Thirteenth Street sound?"
"Yer payin', buddy. Whatever you say."
Not much of a talker, Billy mused, settling back into the darkness of the huge backseat. The car began to roll, and Billy smiled. That's okay. It gives me time to think think think.
And there was plenty to think think think about. His nocturnal visit to the office of First Choice Messengers had been just what the doctor ordered. Riffling through the application files had given him the name and address of his prey: something that the phone book had been unable to provide.
And it had given him an insight into the beast that he found quite fascinating indeed.
The guy was a moron. He could barely even write his own name.
Stanley Peckard. Billy let the name roll off his mind's tongue lovingly. Stanley Peckard. You son of a gun. Boy, are you gonna be surprised to see me!
The note was still in Billy's pocket; he could feel it dig into his ass cheeks through the tightness of his jeans. He could smell the dried blood. He didn't want to dig it back out again. He didn't want to cry anymore.
But it had made him think about Lisa, and that was really all it took. His emotions were very close to the surface, no matter how hard he tried to repress them: manic, depressive, you name it, he had it. So when he felt the sorrow coming on, he
(NO!)
shifted gears abruptly. He made himself think about happy times. The way she smiled. The
(smile y-face)
way she stood her ground. God, she was tough! Like when
(i hurt him, billy, you polish him oft)
she'd faced down those twits, those man-hating shrikes she worked with. God, that was fantastic. He could still see her face, the way she'd looked when she'd told them to leave.
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