“Now see here…,” the preacher said.
He stopped just short of making his point, however; Rachel slammed the grip of her gun against his temple. He yelped once and shut up. Rachel turned to me, her smile broad.
“Thank you, babydoll.” I pointed my gun at Wilkinson. “Now. Get. Naked.”
Slowly, he and his piglet began to disrobe. The mother stood in the corner—she’d gone there immediately when told to and offered no trouble.
While they undressed, I sent Rachel to the kitchen in search of a butcher knife. I unwrapped the towel from the dancer’s neck. Congealed blood, thick and clotted, caked her slit throat. Even in death (or perhaps because of it) Tiffany had an enthralling beauty. I set the shotgun against the nearby wall.
A thought occurred to me.
“Do you have any Coke?” I asked the now naked Reverend Wilkinson.
“Wh-what?” he stammered, the well-trained boom in his voice having vanished with his clothes.
“Coke, mother-fucker. Y’know, cola, pop…what do you call it around here…? Soda…whatever. Do you have some?”
“Yes,” he whispered, his voice full of humbled disgrace. “It’s in the fridge.”
“Good, now we’re getting somewhere.”
Rachel returned, knife in hand. I took it from her, offered a quick “thanks”, and sent her back to the kitchen for some Coke.
She left—grumbling something or other about disorganized husbands—and I opened the duffel bag full of goodies and took out the strap-on. I tossed it to the daughter. She squealed at its touch and let it drop to the floor at her father’s feet. The Reverend jumped away from it like it was a snake and glared at me with hate-filled eyes.
“Put it on,” I commanded her. “You’ll have to let it out a good bit to fit it over your rolls.”
She looked at me, eyes pleading.
I said, “Man, you’re fuckin’ nasty.”
It took a bit more prodding, but the daughter-sow managed to get the strap-on over her legs and around her waist. By that time, Rachel had brought in a couple cans of Coke and set them on the table next to the stripper’s corpse. She walked over to the preacher and trained her gun on his shriveled member.
I took the Reverend’s butcher knife and cut Tiffany across her throat twice—once above Rachel’s cut and once below it.
I fished the two thin, severed strips of flesh out of her throat and set them on the table next to the Cokes. I made several other slashes along the length of her body and scooped out handfuls of her thick and blackened blood, throwing it around the room—on the walls, the furniture, and on the Reverend and his daughter.
As I’d expected, they screamed. They cried, they wailed; the daughter even threw up, spewing a pile of sick green regurgitation onto the plush gray carpet.
I finally stopped flinging the stripper’s insides around like so much monkey shit. I’d left her body a mess. Gaping knife wounds—forced open even wider by the intrusion of my hands—criss-crossed her entire frame. I didn’t touch her face, though. It stared up at the ceiling, beautiful and dead, a juxtaposition of horror and tranquility.
Snatching up the cans of Coke, I emptied them into the stripper’s open neck. I’ve since learned that it’s an urban myth, but at the time I thought it would be cool to let the Coke eat through her neck bone. Hey, even I fall for that shit on occasion.
Satisfied that I’d gotten the stripper prepared just right, I picked my gun back up and trained it on the hostages. I nodded to Rachel. She nodded back and dropped to her knees in front of the Reverend. After spitting in her palm, she began to stroke the fucker off.
The look on her face was priceless. It told a story of revulsion like none other. For his part, the preacher seemed cooperative (at least the part of him that mattered) and in a few minutes Rachel had all the forensic evidence any cop could want. She wiped her hand off on the stripper’s corpse.
I snatched up the shotgun, cocked it, and killed the preacher.
The sound of the blast engulfed the room, instantly destroying the thin atmosphere of hope that the three hostages had been desperate to try and maintain.
The twin pigs screeched, panic stricken, and tried to run.
Rachel tackled the preacher’s wife and jammed the 9mm against her head.
I unloaded a second shotgun blast into the daughter, stopping her quite effectively. The vicious blast tore half of her skull away, splaying bloody fragments of brain and chips of bone against the wall.
Snatching the remaining pig away from Rachel by her hair, I dragged her over to where I’d fired from and shoved the shotgun barrel into her mouth. Her lips blistered up from the metal’s heat, and she whimpered, her pasty eyes pleading for survival.
She disgusted me. I fired the gun, and the slug removed most of the back of her head. Maneuvering her hands up around the shotgun and placing her finger on the trigger, I had her squeeze off one final blast.
Rachel strolled around the room, taking time to study each corpse, looking very much like an art critic at a gallery show smiling and nodding appreciatively at this part of the work, frowning and shaking her head at this one. Finally, she reached the side of the table where I stood. She turned without a word, pulled down her panties, lifted her skirt up over her ass, and bent over the table.
I hurried to oblige.
Afterwards, we took time to go around the house, cleaning prints from anywhere we could remember touching and removing any traces that we had ever been there (unless, of course, you count the four dead bodies in the dining room). We also collected close to eight-thousand dollars from various stashes around the house.
We left, joking about the headlines that would appear in the local papers over the next few days.
LOCAL MINISTER FOUND SHOT DEAD BY WIFE.
INCEST, MURDER, SUICIDE.
A pretty funny thought.
The next morning—after a night spent cleaning up the hotel room—we checked out and made for Canada in our new Cadillac.
Chapter Eleven
Half an hour outside of town, an argument started. It was unavoidable, I suppose, considering the goings on of the last week, but I had held out hope that everything would pass unspoken.
“Tiffany was really pretty, huh?” Rachel asked.
“What?” I said, snapping out of a bloody daydream. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“You seemed to like her.”
A thick, heavy silence followed the statement. I shifted in my seat, aware—all too late—of what I’d just stepped into. Years of marriage screamed at me to keep my mouth shut, but too much pride kept me from listening—it always did.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
Silence, then, “It’s just that you seemed to really enjoy fucking her is all.” Anger tinged her sentence, the word fucking spiked with venom.
“You didn’t seem to mind fucking her yourself.”
“I did that for you.”
“What?”
“I was only doing that to please you…I thought you’d like me to.”
“Well, I did…. Babydoll, if this is bothering you….”
“Oh, no,” she snapped. “My husband tells me he fucks some whore behind my back…no, why the fuck should that bother me?”
“Behind your back? You brought her to the room.”
“I’m not talking about her,” she screamed.
Then it hit me—she was talking about Janine.
My God, all this time it’s been eating at her.
“I…look, it’s not like I was fucking her for sex.”
“Oh, no,” she mocked, cutting me off. “No, no, no, not sex; of course not. What the fuck else would you do it for?”
I got angry too, and my voice rose. “Don’t you understand what this is to me?” I barked, far too harshly, realizing my mistake as I made it.
Rachel started to cry.
I laid my hand on her knee, trying to comfort her. As a reward, five sharp nails dug deep into th
e back of my hand.
Letting out a yelp of pain, I pulled my hand away. “Ow! What the fuck is your problem?”
“You don’t love me.”
“What?”
“You don’t. Just say it. Don’t lie to me and tell me you do.”
“What the fuck? Of course I love you. Why would I be here if I didn’t?” I put my hand back on her leg, squeezing her knee. “Babydoll, look…all this has ever been about is murder. You gotta understand that. You’ve done it, man. There’s nothing like it. I-I don’t know…it’s beyond me to explain.”
I pulled to the side of the road, shifted into neutral, set the brake, and turned to face her. Her eyes, drowned in tears, stared downward, refusing to meet my gaze.
“I swear to you, this will never happen again. Babydoll, you’re the only one I want. No more, I swear it.”
Suddenly, she turned, buried her face in my chest, and bawled.
“That’s not it.” She sobbed against me. “Why did she have to die?”
Rosa.
So there it was—the truth beneath the layers.
“If you hadn’t done this…,” she started but never finished, her words trailing off into her sobs.
I thought back to when we’d disposed of the heads. I’d wanted to just toss them all into an incinerator, but Rachel had refused. She insisted on burying Rosa’s head. I pointed out the danger it represented to us, if someone found the head, alone and buried. Still, she’d refused to give up the idea, and we ended up (or, rather, I ended up) digging a semi-deep hole to put the head to rest in.
After it was all done and I’d filled the hole in, Rachel had stood staring trance-like at the grave, singing softly to herself and rocking back and forth.
I’d hoped that the hasty funeral would bring closure for her. Obviously it hadn’t. Also obvious was the fact that she blamed me for the whole thing.
I stroked her hair and held her close while she cried. Several times I thought to say something to her—to somehow explain that it wasn’t my fault—but I didn’t. Deep down, I knew she knew the truth and I knew that the truth hurt like hell. So, instead of talking, I held her and “shushed” and kissed her head.
Later, after all the tears had gone, she looked up, her eyes swollen and red, and found my gaze. For a moment, I lost myself in the perfect innocence that filled those eyes, an innocence I knew would always capture me, regardless of anything she had done or could ever do.
Her lips, soggy and warm, met mine in a half-hearted peck.
“I love you,” I told her.
“I know you do, Sugar Daddy. I love you too.”
* * * * *
Around twelve-thirty in the afternoon, we stopped at a rest area. Rachel had been pretty morose the whole day and, while we didn’t fight anymore, the tension had never completely gone away. Over the course of the morning, it had ground me down until my nerves stood on a razor’s edge.
I shifted into neutral, set the brake, and snatched up my .45.
“Where are you going?” Rachel asked.
“To let off some steam.”
Without further explanation, I threw open my car door and walked toward the restroom area at a brisk walk. Along the way, I took a second to count the cars in the parking lot; there were two there, besides our own, and a trailer of volunteer coffee servers.
Making a few mental calculations, I stepped through the glass door of the restrooms and into the reception area where they posted the tourist info. On the wall above the travel brochure counter hung a huge map of Pennsylvania. A giant red arrow situated in its center told me that I was here. Twin drinking fountains, one placed at waist height and sporting the guy in the wheelchair symbol, stood between the restroom doors against the wall opposite me.
With purpose, I strode past them and pushed open the door marked MEN.
A fat, balding guy in a Penguins parka stood at a urinal. I fired off a solitary round into the back of his head and stained the pastel-gray tile-work in front of him a bright crimson before he ever knew he was in any danger.
The gun blast thundered, amplified far beyond its normal level by the natural acoustics of the restroom walls. I winced at the unexpected volume of the sound and shook my head to clear it. Through the fading echoes and my ears’ ringing, I heard the panicked sounds of another victim-to-be coming out of the third stall down.
I stepped in front of the stall and listened. He whimpered, probably crying. Raising the .45 to where I figured his head would be, I fired off another round.
Well, it hit, but I misjudged the angle. It didn’t even come close to killing him. Instead, it sent him into a bellowing howl of pain and fear. Still, the sound of his agony sort of soothed me, and my tension started to melt away.
I kicked open the stall door and fired the killing shot.
It turned out that the guy inside had been crying. He looked to be no older than twenty-one, maybe on his way home from college and, I imagine, expecting to have a much longer stay in this world. Well, he was wrong. Happens to the best.
The rest of the stalls stood empty—I checked them—so I strode back out to the reception area. A young girl—looking about nineteen and most likely the stall-guy’s girlfriend—opened the outside door.
I shot her in the back. The force of the impact and her own momentum threw her forward, hard, into the door, shattering the glass all around her in an exploding nimbus of razor shards.
For the most part, she laid still and died where she landed, occasionally twitching on her bed of broken glass. For good measure, I pumped one more round into her, making it a head shot.
Satisfied that she was dead, I walked outside to the coffee stand.
I was too late.
By the time I reached the medium-sized white trailer that housed the coffee folks, they were both dead. To the side of the trailer, 9mm in one hand, coffee in the other, stood Rachel, an evil-looking grin painted across her face. I must have looked disappointed.
“Hey now,” she said, offering the coffee to me, “you’re not the only one with steam to let off.”
I laughed and took the coffee from her, sipping it and finding it far too bitter in that way that gas station and chow-hall coffee always is. But I drank it anyway.
“Feel better?” she asked.
I sipped the coffee again and nodded. “Yeah. You?”
“Oh, yeah. Much. Did you get everybody?”
“Yep, they’re all dead in there.”
It wasn’t until later that I learned I hadn’t gotten everyone. I’d missed one on the women’s side, a little girl of seven—the fat man’s daughter. She’d just stayed in her stall through the whole thing.
Later, long after Rachel and I had left, the little girl gathered enough courage to come out and see what had happened. I can just about imagine what it must have been like for her. She only stumbled on the body of the young woman, according to the news reports.
A state trooper came across the little girl while on a routine check a couple of hours later, standing outside the men’s room, yelling frantically for her daddy to come out.
* * * * *
We reached New York about an hour after we left the rest area. About three hours later, we hit Canada.
Originally, our plan had called for us to pull off the road at the last gas station before the border and stash the guns. Turns out, the final stretch of road from New York to Canada is exit free for quite a bit.
Makes sense, if you think about it. It is a national border after all, and I’m sure we weren’t the first would-be smugglers to set our sights on entering Canada.
The whole last leg of the trip we expected to see some sort of exit or rest stop, but, before we knew it, we’d reached the border’s customs booth.
Cussing, I tossed Rachel my .45 and snapped at her to hide the damned thing. She did, just in time, and we slowed to a stop.
The inspecting officer leaned out of his booth and asked me what purpose we had visiting Canada. He was so laid back and—for lack
of a better word—Canadian about it that I almost laughed in his face.
I told him we were headed for the falls, figuring that that would explain everything and end the questions. It didn’t.
“Whyyyy?” he asked, stretching the single syllable word out in such an awkward manner that I found myself almost unable to contain my laughter.
“We’re tourists.” I dragged the word out just as long as he had, mimicking his voice and inflection.
He didn’t seem to notice. “How long will you be staying?”
“A couple nights.”
He smiled and waved us on, and, at that moment, I swear he looked just like Scott Thompson from Kids in the Hall.
Rachel and I pulled through and burst out laughing.
We laughed the rest of the way to Queen Victoria Falls. I know it may not sound too funny in the retelling—probably one of the classic Things You Had to be There For.
One way or the other, we were in Canada, home free—or at least feeling that way.
We used some of the Wilkinsons’ tithe to get a pretty swank-ass room at the Sheraton and some dinner at a Chinese joint. I had the sweet and sour chicken, fried rice, and egg-drop soup; Rachel had the Teriyaki steak. Afterwards, we returned to our room and loafed, both of us worn out, physically and mentally. Rachel fell right to sleep. I turned in around seven-thirty after watching some forgettable movie whose name I can’t remember.
Chapter Twelve
At this point in the story, it’s important that I rewind for a bit and shift focus—not just to a different aspect of the events I’ve been describing, but to a different person altogether. That person, Steve Largent, was the detective assigned to investigate my first murder. He’s not a major part of this narrative, not by a long shot, but he’s important nonetheless because he almost got me.
Now, I’ve never met Largent, never even laid eyes on him, thankfully, but I feel I know him pretty well. Those of you who have experience in the world of cop to criminal relations would probably say you feel the same way if I asked you to describe a particular officer who’d dogged your tail. I pieced together the following from rumors—hearsay that came from others in the circles I run in.
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