“Don’t,” she said, flinching away. Louder than her protests in the garden, stronger even. Then, weaker, as if she’d startled herself: “Get out of my house.”
“It’s all right,” he soothed. “You’re shocked at me barging in here like this. I’m shocked too, you want to know the truth. But maybe you should feel flattered. It shows what an impression you made on me this afternoon in the garden.”
“If you go now, I won’t call the police.”
“I really need to see those lovely breasts again, to feel their nipples harden under my tongue. Let me do that and I’ll leave.” Fat chance. But give her the option of sliding into it without seeming to.
He laid one hand on her shoulder, felt the soft thin-boned structure beneath. She stepped back, out from under it. “Don’t touch me again.” Genuine warning there. “You have about one more second before I go for the phone.”
His hand tingled where he’d touched her. Her feint at resistance surprised him. But he could still hear the victim inside her, waiting for that false shell of denial to crumble. Just a case of this being her house. Alone with him, her doors and windows closed against sound. No wonder her defenses, such as they were, were up. “No need for threats, sweet lady. I won’t beat you like Danny did. I’ll just—”
“You’ll get out of here is what you’ll do.” She went for the front door, brushing past him. He grabbed her arm and spun her about, held her tight around the waist.
“Maybe you like the rough stuff,” he said. “Maybe it turns you on, maybe that’s why you stayed with Daniels. I can give you that in spades if that’s what you want.” He felt absurd, offering to beat her, but it felt right too: Something about her was sucking his anger right up to the surface, anger he didn’t even know he had. And by God it was a sexual anger, a turn-on. She was looking better and better to him, struggling helpless in his arms, her skirts brushing cool against his erection as he tried to press it into her.
Her hands whipped up to Jimmy’s face, searing flame along his cheeks. He gave her his backhand. She lost her footing, stumbled to the linoleum, grabbed for the door. Locked, deadbolted like his and Nona’s front door.
He hauled her up from behind, breasts squished flat beneath his arm. With his other hand he reached under her skirt along the hip, felt the sheer bikini fabric at his fingertips, struggled to get purchase on it despite her sudden resistance.
“No!” she shouted, breaking away from him and running for the front room, intending he guessed to circle through the dining room into the kitchen and out the sliding door.
Absurd, he thought, heading back through the TV room to cut her off, upsetting a big-leafed plant on a flimsy table as he ran. Bitch wasn’t playing fair. Or maybe he just didn’t know her game yet. But by God she was going to learn his pretty quick. His penis flapped against his pants like an impatient turkeyhead, but he made good time. Sound of door-blinds being shoved aside, a combination celery crunch and card shuffle. Not her day for escape, he thought, this door locked too and her attacker—Got her!—spry in his rage and desire. He shoved a hand straight down the back of her skirt, yanked her backward as hard as he could. A button pinged off the blinds.
***
The garage door woke Danny from a dreamless sleep. One moment gone, the next revived. Disoriented though. Shit stench close by, his body draped over a log of fur. Then it all came back and he knew he was lying on top of Nona’s cold corpse. Her bowels and bladder had let go in the night; the sheets were cold and damp under his hands. Wolf lay sleeping by the door, Nona’s chewed head nestled like best buddies next to his. The door into the garage opened and closed out there. Jimmy, tuft-haired joke of a security guard, couldn’t even guard his own wife. Man was in for a surprise when he waltzed through that door. But he heard Jimmy use the hall bathroom, then move around the house everywhere but here.
Danny rolled off Nona; tried to anyway. His cock was clotted inside her neck, groin hairs stuck to the stump of her torso like thin spaghetti congealed in meat sauce. He lost a few hairs in the process, but peeled carefully free of her and stood at last by her bed in the pre-dawn light. The candles he had lit hours before hunkered like turrets, melted in upon themselves.
Sounds outside the window. Jimmy going by. Amazing. Was he doing yardwork? Danny raised the end of a slat and put his eye to the thin angle. Jimmy, in work clothes and white Adidas, unfolded a stepping stool and peered through the fence, something in Danny’s yard fascinating him. He watched Jimmy climb the steps, saw him vault over into his wife’s garden. “Cocksucker,” Danny muttered, not too loud but loud enough to rouse Wolf. Bastard was clearly up to no good. A surge of anger seized Danny. Murderous bitch or not, Karin was still his wife; now here she was, alone in the house, about to be set upon by her neighbor. His house, his wife, under attack. If not sexual, then maybe violent. That upset him even more: It was his job to take Karin apart, nobody else’s. Pussy on demand and the doling out of discipline as needed, these were a husband’s prerogative.
Wolf growled behind him.
“Save it, Wolf,” he said, snagging Clarence’s clothes off the floor. No time to clean the gore off his body, no time to go through Jimmy’s closet.
Wolf’s growl deepened.
“What the fuck’s with you?” He turned in time to see Wolf take off. Instinctually his hand shot out, snatching the German shepherd by the throat in mid-leap. The grave had given Wolf a mean streak. Not to mention a lapse in obedience. Danny arced him around and slammed him against the wall by the windows, knocking a crook-necked lamp off Jimmy’s night table. Wolf fell awkwardly, but came out of it chastened, his big brown eyes limpid in a savage face. “Let’s go,” said Danny, kicking aside his lover’s head and storming out of the bedroom.
Down the hall and out the kitchen door, Wolf now in lockstep beside him, Danny pictured Jimmy breaking into his house. Little twerp. He’d pretzel him for that. He touched even one hair on his woman’s head, Danny’d wrench his fucking teeth out and do some exploratory root canal work with the help of an auger bit and his buddies Black and Decker. Cool night air, grass wet and soft under his unshod feet, he vaulted the fence as easily as if it were three feet instead of six, Wolf right behind him. A bush bristled and snapped under Wolf’s weight, but he righted himself quick enough, and Danny said, “Not a sound.” In the kitchen, Danny could see a hand—her hand—fumble at the door, then disappear. The blinds were only partially open, but it was enough for Danny to see shapes struggling in the house, one trying to flee, the other preventing it.
He had an urge to smash through the door, rip aside the blinds, and take the fucker down in a rain of glass. Right, play Rambo, watch the lights go on all up and down the block, rouse the neighbors, bring on the police, lose his chance to kill Karin in leisure. “Come on, Wolf,” he said and sprinted through the garden, noting as he passed how much more profuse and varied the flowers had become in a year’s time. He rounded the house, found the side door to the garage open, good old pickup sitting there on the wrong side of the garage, things fucking rearranged on the walls. He wrenched open the door, key still in the lock from Jimmy. Wolf burst past him—his mouth roiling with growl—through the laundry room, and Danny steamrollered behind him down the hall, knocking over potted plants and setting overhead ones spinning as they came on.
***
Amazing how unsexual this is, he thought, this attack on Karin. True his dick was up, but that was the doctor’s doing, not his. What he felt was rage that she’d resisted after being so compliant in the garden and an exhilarating sense of impending triumph now that he’d pinned her to the floor in front of the TV and her blouse was yanked halfway out of her skirt. Jimmy held her down with one hand and a knee, his other hand struggling with fabric. Her kicking, vicious but ineffectual, exposed her legs and thighs, the pink bikinis hugging the cleft that was almost his.
Then the house exploded in fear, a fireball of sheer terror invading from the direction of the garage. Jimmy, needing no time to think about it, rose to hi
s feet and turned as if to run. Sound buffeted his ears, too much sound to process, and a glimpse of movement slipped into the corner of his eye. Reddened creatures. A dog, a man, fresh from a pool of crimson clay. Jimmy did this absurd fandango with the dog, backing up and raising his hands as the creature advanced, slower now, teeth bared, fur tufted with mats of blood, his master standing behind but not at all Jimmy’s focus, a man of shadows.
Jimmy tried to break from the dance, tried to run for the kitchen, but even as he tried it, he knew it was part of the dance too: his hand, his good right hand, hovering too long between them, impossible jaws snapping out like a sprung jack-in-the-box, closing dead center on it, skin pierced, blood shooting up about white canines that closed and met despite Jimmy’s shock, despite the remembered pain of falling at the beach when he was no more than ten—that same hand!—jagged piece of bottle hidden in the sand, him crying, his daddy carrying him into the ocean to wash it off, then to the first-aid station by the parking lot, a scared confusion of sound, watching a needle slide into his arm, tetanus shot, coming to with smelling salts—all this in the split-second the dog punched its teeth through his hand and began to shake him so hard his arm was nearly wrenched from its socket. He had the absurd thought that he ought to be able to shrug off his body like a grabbed coat, to escape out the door without it.
“Wolf!” came the voice. Jimmy looked up as the dog released him, the flash of recognition first in the sound of that name, then in the confirming inconceivable face of the man, a face caked in blood like bad Indian makeup but no less familiar for all that.
“Danny?” The name hardly came out at all.
The insane apparition moved forward, passing through every invisible protective barrier Jimmy’s mind threw up against it. Jimmy drifted back against the fridge but the drifting was weak in his legs, no energy, no speed. The closer the Danny-thing came, the more his hold on sanity slipped. Right up to him it came, close enough to breathe into his face, to burn him with its eyes. When it spoke, something snapped in Jimmy’s brain, a seal broke and the air rushed into his vacuum-packed head. “Whatsa matter, neighbor? Dog hurt your hand?”
“Please,” he said, soft through tears, over and over, not knowing what he meant. Please, Danny, please go back into the earth? Please vanish into the nightmare you came from and take your hellish pet with you? No matter. The Danny-thing understood.
“Okay, Jimmy,” it said, holding his bleeding hand up between them so the flow of blood tickled his wrist even as his palm throbbed. It gathered a pair of fingers in each hand, forced Vulcan salute, and split them apart at the webbing, an opening rend of flesh burbling new blood and impossible agony down his arm. “Ooh, I’ll bet that hurts, huh Jimmy? Let me see if I can’t make it better.” The fisted hands closed the V they had made, folded one over the other, Schwarzenegger fervently praying, then crushed Jimmy’s hand between them, pulverized it into the sawdust mitt of a stuffed doll. Jimmy nearly passed out, but it slapped him, shouted, “Not yet, damn you, you don’t slip out of it that easy.” Then quieter, glancing down, back up: “Besides, you seem to be getting off on the pain a whole bunch. I’ve heard of masochism, but Jesus, Jimmy, keeping your hard-on while having your hand crushed, why, that’s just plain perverse. What were you planning to do with this dick, Jimmy? Were you going to screw my woman, Jimmy, is that what you had in mind?”
He shook his head, or tried to. The Danny-thing had let go of his hand, but Jimmy rested it against his chest, afraid to uncrook his elbow. It gripped his erection now, halfway up from the balls, not like a ball player testing a bat but more like a skinflint boss gripping the arm of a worker caught with his fingers in the till. “Looks pretty lethal, Jimmy. You think this is a weapon? This ain’t no weapon. You don’t believe me, I’ll prove it to you.” His last words were tight but his grip was tighter. A string of no’s streamed through Jimmy’s mind because he knew what was about to happen and he couldn’t stop it. The thing’s other hand dug into his shoulder, leverage, then it rose slightly and wrenched his penis out and down and off, it was off, by God it was off just like that, no more roots to it than a snowman’s arm, and his pain mixed the muscle wrench and nerve yowls of an entire system savaged, with the raw mind-scandal of losing what he’d built half his life around, his linchpin, his axis, The Great Persuader as an old girlfriend had put it. Now it rose in the air, ball-less but still erect, squeezed off at the base, two thin plastic tubes whipping about like bloody handlebar streamers, tubes tugged out of the pump in his scrotum. And down it came on his head and face, again and again, whap! like a fat boneless finger, Daddy’s admonishing finger, only swelled up tenfold and connecting viciously, not just hovering a warning in the air but coming down, a bludgeon of flesh spurting thin red arcs with each smack to his face. There was trauma below and trauma throbbing on his chest but he somehow had room in his inventory of hurt to feel the battering he was taking above and try to resist it. He raised his left arm, blocked a blow or two with his hand. Then stopping its assault, the Danny-thing grabbed that hand, opened it, closed it about the severed organ. “You want it, buddy? You got it. Want to whack that sucker off? Go on, beat yourself over the head with it.” His eyes scanned the room. “I got a better plan.”
He was gone, off past the kitchen table. Jimmy held his manhood in his hand, felt blood and pump-fluid ribbon down his arm, watched the thing go limp as a balloon and bow forlornly before him, a dying white snake. He was in shock. His back lay flat against the fridge and only the tension in his knees kept them from unlocking and sliding him to the floor. His eyes shifted toward the window, to Danny, his murderer, standing next to a tall thin cactus. One hand was on the pot. The other closed around the base of the cactus, not flinching back as the needles sank into it. The cactus pulled right out, hardly any roots at all for such a tall sucker, nature’s chainsaw blade in Danny’s hand.
The face loomed again. The breath, the anger. “Okay Jimmy, time for you to get royally fucked.” Jimmy mewled, wanting the misery to end. “You got the hole, hey I don’t mind you’re on the rag if you don’t. Now all we need is something to shove into it. Why Jimmy, look what I have here. Big bruiser, isn’t it? But where there’s a will, there’s a way. That’s what my fuckin’ momma always told me. Let’s see if she was right.” The Danny-thing pressed the cactus head to Jimmy’s pants, twisting it past the blood-soaked fly and flaring off rockets of agony when it touched the new wound. He saw it disappear, slowly at first, then quicker, as Danny pushed the thing inside him, demons playing on his face. He thought absurdly of Civil War soldiers having legs removed without anesthetic, of being brave in the dentist’s chair; but it hurt, it hurt so godawful much, his insides skewered and punctured and flowing together where boundaries had once separated them. His bladder let go, his bowels, not much choice, they were being shredded anyway. Let me die, he thought, let me die now. Oh shit, please please God now. But he hung on, his body fiercely craving life in the midst of torment.
Then his killer pulled the cactus out like a thrust sword, needles hooking his life and dragging it through a flaring tunnel of pain. He felt it leaving him, felt the Valium of death begin to fog his suffering. Then a hand covered his face, two fingers opened his mouth like steel calipers, and the taste of blood and shit washed over his tongue as the unstoppable ram of a cactal fist flattened it, shredded it, taking its thick way down his throat.
***
“Well, well,” he said, strangely devoid of anger at seeing her, “if it isn’t Karin herself.” She was still on the TV room carpet, having come to a kneeling position but kept at bay by Wolf. “I guess Jimmy didn’t realize what a dangerous position he was in, attacking you. Man could’ve been killed. Lucky for him I came along.” He picked two cactus needles out of his palm. Long ones. A few drops of blood, then the skin closed.
“I . . . ,” she said, then shut up.
He looked around the room. “Where the fuck’s my TV? Where’s our sofa? And what’s with the fucking wallpaper? Made a f
ew changes around here. Trying to wipe me out of your memory, is that what’s going on? Brought your crummy plants in here and fucked up a perfectly good house like I said you would.”
In the kitchen, the soles of his feet sticky with blood, Danny kicked aside the dead man’s legs. Killing was some kind of fun, but the mess of the afterglow he could do without. He washed his hands, talking to her through the half-wall that ended six inches above the sink. “Got new carpet I see, yuppie white. Couldn’t get my blood out of the other one over yonder? Over there, where you murdered me?” He shut the water off and shook his hands into the sink, rain gusts against tin roof.
“You’re . . . different,” she ventured.
Infuriating little-girl voice. He’d always despised that voice, but now it started a new seed of pure rage in his gut. He couldn’t have that, not yet, so he closed the sucker off. “You bet I am. And if I’m not mistaken, I’ve got you to thank for it, for which you can bet I’m going to pay you back in the worst way. You can count on that, I—” The TV room came suddenly into focus: The gleam on the far wall was wrong. Not short sharp ornamental steel, but glass, the pale glass of framed pictures. His Viking dagger, no frills, just six inches of double-edged death; his good old Arkansas Toothpick, Jim Bowie’s proud eight inches of flared flamboyance; the Green River Knife, its crude walnut handle plain beside the fancy-dan finery of the Black Forest dagger—all of them missing. He hurried over to the wall in disbelief, past Karin, past Wolf, the pictures looming larger, resolving into images, a wedding, bride and groom knifing into a cake, two grinning idiots in tender embrace. Karin. Happy with some fool Danny’d never seen, some guy reminded him of the fucking jerkoff who’d been class president or some shit in high school, walking the hallways with his books neatly tucked under his arm like he owned the fucking universe. Framed baby pictures, his and hers. Danny recognized some of Karin’s, scared kid, that trapped look he liked to terrorize out of her. The other joker, upscale photos, upscale trike and toys, little-man suits on a three-year-old and he looked, the little fuck, like he belonged in them.
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