The Closer

by Donn Cortez

  “What?”

  “That’s not all. There’s also the whole Ima braking system: Imajerk pads, Imaliar rims, Imawasteofspace axles. All standard, always included.”

  “I’m not sure I heard you right—”

  “Sorry, didn’t mean to get all technical on you. Occupational hazard with salesmen—it’s how we deal with insecurity, right? We try to impress people with all these facts and figures. Comes off a little intimidating sometimes, I know. I just want to establish my credibility with you—I’m not just some guy in a suit pretending to work at the dealership, right? Ha ha.”

  “Not a lot of businesses around here.”

  “No, just warehouses and trucking companies, mainly. Still, there’s quite a bit of green space, isn’t there? I guess it’s because we’re right on the edge of the city. Say, pull over for a second, will you? There’s something I want to show you.”

  “I really have to be getting back—”

  “It’ll just take a second. Right here’s fine. Okay, now just push that button there, that pops the trunk. Great. You can leave it running, just don’t lock the keys in it. C’mon back here.”

  “What did you want to—Jesus! What the fuck!”

  “Ha! Ah, you should see the look on your face…. I’m just messing with you. Pretty nice meat cleaver, huh? Solingen steel, just like the rest of the set. We’re throwing one of these in with every Lexus this week. Leather case, hand-stitching, seventy-two pieces. All top-of-the-line, every kind you can think of. Look at these Yora blades: Yorajoke paring knife, Yorafool fileting knife, Yoratotalloser butcher knife. You hear what I’m saying?”

  “I—I think so.”

  “Good, good. There’s also the Fuckyoumakemesick steak knives, the Whatareyouwaitingfor bread-and-butter knives, the serrated Killmeyoufuckingpussy….”

  “Okay. Okay, enough with the hard sell. You got me. Can I see that one, please?”

  “Sure. That’s—uff. What? Oh Christ—”

  Salesmen. They’ll talk themselves into a fucking grave.

  If the proceeding was a little unclear at times, I apologize—but if you think you were confused, imagine how I felt.

  It’s called the aura phase. It’s the first of seven that psychologists say serial killers go through. (Though I gotta say, I ran through the next four pretty fucking quick: trolling, seduction, capture, and the kill. Totemizing and depression cap off the list.) The aura phase is typically characterized by vivid fantasies and sometimes hallucinations; in my case, I heard the asshole practically begging me to kill him.

  So I did.

  I used a butcher knife, and went straight for the throat. Thrust, not slash. The blade went through the windpipe no problem, but I felt it glance off the spine before it came out the other side. The cutting edge was pointed outward, and the edge was so fucking sharp it sheared right through the rest of the neck when I yanked it back. The blood looked like a special effect—it sprayed everywhere. The guy spun around, tried to run, and fell over after two steps. It looked fucking comical.

  Of course, I had quite the head of steam built up by that point. One thrust just wasn’t gonna do it, y’know? So I went over to where he lay and worked out for a while. Nothing fancy, just slamming that big, heavy blade down over and over and over again. Thunk, thunk, thunk. It reminded me of baseball, somehow— you know that feeling when you swing and really connect with the ball? Like something gets transferred at the point of impact, from you to it, and then that ball is gone. Flying away, getting smaller and smaller and you hope it never comes back.

  Deeply satisfying.

  “How’s it going?” Nikki asked.

  Jack looked up from the screen. “Satisfactory,” he said. “I’m checking his list of dump sites now. Up for a trip to California?”

  “Depends. I could use the sunshine, but—I don’t know, Jack. He could be jerking us around, stalling for time. For all we know he hunts in Ohio.”

  “I don’t think so.” Jack stood up and stretched. “He gave me a phone number with a California area code, and it’s his voice on the answering machine.”

  “You didn’t call from here, did you?” She regretted it as soon as she said it; Jack was too smart to do anything that could be traced.

  “No, I drove to a pay phone a few miles away. While you were downstairs.”

  Nikki crossed to the refrigerator, opened it and peered inside. “Oh,” she said.

  “He say anything interesting?” Jack asked.

  “No, just the usual bullshit—threats, bribes, pleading. You know.”

  “He could still be lying.”

  “Well of course he’s lying, I’m not stu—oh.” She shook her head. “You meant about the dump sites.”

  “Yeah. Give us the right area, wrong details. Buy him a few more hours.”

  “Either way, I guess we have to check it out. I’ll go.” She took a long-necked beer out of the fridge and closed the door. “Once I’m there, he won’t dick us around long.”

  “No. I don’t think he will.”

  She twisted off the cap and tossed it clattering into the sink. “So,” she said. “Is it just me, or is this one… different?”

  He eyed her warily. “In what way?”

  “His targets, for one thing. He kill any women?”

  “One. A stockbroker.”

  “Well, that’s what I mean.” She took a long, thoughtful swallow of beer. “A stockbroker. I don’t know, maybe I’m just being a bitch, but I find it hard to give a fuck about a stockbroker. Girls working the street I can identify with—someone working Wall Street, not so much.” She frowned, then smiled. “Funny, huh? Most people would feel the opposite way.”

  “We’re not most people.”

  “Yeah, no shit. It’s not just his targets, it’s why he’s going after them. Almost like it’s—I don’t know, political or something.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Everybody kills for the same reason.”

  “Yeah?”

  “They kill because they’re killers. Whatever their stated reasons, they’re just rationalizing to let them do what they want. It doesn’t matter if it’s sex, or money, or revenge. Someone wants to take up murder as a hobby, they’ll find a reason.”

  “Even us?” she asked softly.

  “Like I said—it doesn’t matter.” Jack turned back to the laptop. “Results do. They end people, we end them. We give the families of their victims some answers. Nothing else is important.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Nothing else. I’m gonna go pack.”

  She put her half-finished beer down on the counter-top and strode out of the kitchen.

  Jack returned to work.

  Jack went downstairs. He unlocked the door to the interrogation room, stepped inside and turned on the light. He left the door open.

  Djinn-X looked up. “What do you want now?” he snarled.

  “There are some things I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t believe you. You understand, you just don’t want to admit it.”

  “No.” Jack pulled up a chair and sat down. “The lawyer you killed. I don’t get it.”

  “Jefferson? What’s to get? He worked in tax law. He specialized in making sure multinational corporations gave up as little of their huge profits as possible. He was a scumbag with the morals of an eel and I killed him.”

  Jack leaned forward intently. “No, it’s how you did it. You beat him to death with a golf club.”

  “So?”

  “So you killed him at his house. He was a hunter. He had game trophies mounted over the fireplace, twelve-point bucks and bighorn sheep and cougar heads. Right?”

  Djinn-X nodded. “Yeah, I remember. Place looked like a fucking taxidermist’s.”

  “Well, don’t you think it would have made more of a statement if you’d decapitated him and stuck his head up there?”

  “Hmmm. I never thought of that.”

  “Here, let me show you something.” Jack reached out and freed Djinn-X’s ankles and h
ands. “It’ll just take a moment.”

  There was a door in the far wall, a plain white rectangle with a small sign on it that read Studio. Jack opened it and walked through. Djinn-X followed him.

  On the other side, a flower garden. Sunflowers and rosebushes and hollyhocks taller than Jack bloomed in a vast, tangled sprawl, but all the plants were covered in a thick layer of dust as gray as the sky overhead.

  “Looks like the day after fucking Pompeii in here,” Djinn-X said.

  “Look,” Jack said. There was a stone fireplace in the middle of the garden, with a crackling blaze going. A naked man stood in front of it, his face a featureless blank.

  “See, this is how I would have done it,” Jack said. He used the hunting knife in his hand to make a long, vertical slit down the naked man’s chest, then made two more cuts along the length of his arms and legs. He handed the knife to Djinn-X, then quickly stripped the skin from the man’s flesh. He was careful to keep it in one piece.

  “See?” Jack said. He lay the skin down in front of the fireplace.

  “Bare skin rug,” Djinn-X said. “Now, why didn’t I see that? Jack, you’re a fucking natural.”

  “No, I’m just doing my job,” Jack said. “That’s all.”

  “Hey, what’s that?” Djinn-X pointed down at Jack’s feet. The plant growing there was unlike any Jack had seen before; knee-high, it had a thick, central stalk with a cauliflower-like growth at the top, surrounded by a collar of wide, flat leaves. A thick network of red veins webbed the stalk, leaves, and the silvery gray central growth— which, Jack realized, wasn’t a cauliflower at all.

  It was a brain.

  “That wasn’t there before,” Jack said. “I didn’t plant that.”

  “Well, it didn’t just fucking appear out of nowhere,” Djinn-X said. “Looks a little dry, though. Here, lemme help.”

  He held a hand over the plant. Blood dripped down his arm and off his wrist.

  “No, don’t do that,” Jack said. “Don’t feed it.”

  “Sorry, Jack,” Djinn-X said. “Gotta take care of The Pack, right? And hey, this is my job now. Fertilizer.”

  The red veins wrapped around the plant were pulsing, twitching… and then they pulled free, rising up like a nest of red snakes, writhing and flexing and getting longer. They formed an intricate, rippling network in front of Jack’s eyes, branching from artery to vein to capillary, a crimson mesh growing ever finer as it expanded to fill his vision, his whole world….

  It was terrifying. It was beautiful. It was—

  The phone rang.

  Jack jerked awake, fumbled for the handset. “Hello?”

  “Jack. It’s Nikki. Everything checks out.”

  “Everything?”

  “Yeah. I’ll be back tomorrow—just have a last errand to run.”

  “Okay.” He hung up.

  He shook his head, trying to clear it. He couldn’t get rid of that last image of an endless, scarlet mesh.

  He had a cup of coffee, and then went downstairs.

  The black cube of the interrogation chamber was just as he’d left it. There was no white door marked Studio. Djinn-X was still securely chained to his chair.

  “You told the truth,” Jack said.

  “I—I could use some water,” Djinn-X croaked.

  “I didn’t.”

  “What?”

  “I lied. I’m not going to release your methods on the net. I am going to pose as you in the Stalking Ground. You’ll never be known as anyone but another psycho who got caught. And I’ll make sure every member of your ‘family’ knows you were the one who gave them up.”

  Djinn-X started to cry.

  “Seduction isn’t a word most people associate with serial killers, but that’s exactly the process, isn’t it?” Jack asked. He picked up the ball-peen hammer, hefted it with both hands. “You gain your victim’s trust first. They have to feel safe before they’ll make themselves vulnerable. That’s part of the thrill, right? That moment when you yank the rug out of from under them and drop them into Hell.”

  “Their fault. It’s all their fucking fault—”

  “You know that horrible, sick feeling you have right now, in the pit of your stomach?” Jack said. “That’s what every victim of a serial killer feels. Betrayal.”

  He put down the hammer and picked up a meat cleaver. “It’s the last thing they feel.”

  “No. No, please, there’s something I didn’t tell you—”

  “And it’s the last thing you’re going to feel….”

  Nikki used Djinn-X’s keys to get into his place. She’d been there once already, to check some of the information he’d given and pack up his computer equipment in two large suitcases. She’d taken them back to her motel and called Jack from a pay phone.

  Now she was back. To keep a promise.

  The place wasn’t much, just a studio apartment in a concrete-block high-rise. The walls were bare and white, the carpet a stained beige. A tiny balcony looked across at another high-rise.

  She pulled the drapes closed, then took a can of black spray paint out of her purse. She shook it methodically for a full minute, looking around. The room held a ratty pull-out couch, a high-end mountain bike in immaculate condition, a dresser, a couple of bookshelves and a desk with the monitor and printer she hadn’t bothered taking.

  She sighed and got to work.

  When she was done, she dropped the now-empty can back in her purse. FUCK YOU was now stenciled everywhere: the walls, the monitor, the rows of books. She’d sprayed it on the ceiling, the floor, the drapes, over the appliances and across the bed. The same message screamed from every surface, over and over.

  “You wanted it, you got it,” Nikki said. “And fuck you, too.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Parker Stoltz’s day got off to a good start. The song playing when his clock radio went off at 5:55 was “ABC” by the Jackson Five, so he watched the local ABC news affiliate that morning. The weather was overcast but not raining, with patches of low-lying fog—not unusual for Portland at this time of year. The traffic report said volume was steady with no major problems.

  He had a shower and then examined himself critically in the bathroom mirror, looking for changes. The five moles on his pale skin—three on his back, one on his thigh and one on his neck—remained the same. The bald spot in the middle of his lank brown hair seemed no larger. His face—slightly bug-eyed, crooked nose, froggy mouth—showed no new wrinkles or blemishes. His stoop-shouldered, small-chested frame looked a little out of alignment; he reminded himself to book a chiropractic appointment.

  He did nick himself shaving, but he made four small horizontal cuts just below his right nipple to balance things out, and managed to cover them with only one Band-Aid.

  Breakfast, as always, was orange juice, coffee, an egg, one slice of toast and five pieces of bacon. He was done by 6:45, leaving him plenty of time to run through his checklist.

  He turned the lights on in the garage, fluorescents gleaming off the freshly waxed white of his 1995 Taurus. He started with the tires, making sure each one was at exactly fifty-five pounds of pressure. He made sure all the lights and switches were functioning properly, and that the radio was properly tuned. He made sure the locks still worked.

  Then it was time to leave.

  Everything was fine at first. He made his way from the quiet, tree-lined streets of his neighborhood to the freeway on-ramp without incident. He merged quickly and cleanly into the flow of traffic. He drove the speed limit, as always, and avoided the passing lane.

  The trouble began with the pickup. It was an old blue Ford, rusty and belching smoke, loaded down with landscaping equipment. It was going at least six miles under the speed limit, and it was right in front of him. He signaled for a lane change, but the traffic suddenly closed up on his right. No one was willing to let him in.

  He shook his head and changed his signal from right to left. He would have to use the passing lane.

  He shoulder-
checked, looked in both the rear-view and side mirror, and accelerated smoothly into the lane. He passed the blue Ford, being driven by a man in his sixties wearing a greasy-looking baseball cap. Stoltz gave the man a cold stare but was ignored.

  Once he was past the truck he slowed and signalled to return to his lane, but a yellow Beetle was already doing the same from the far right. He slowed further, intending to slip into the rapidly widening gap between the pickup and the Beetle.

  And then the silver SUV appeared.

  It roared up behind him in the passing lane, doing eighty easily. It decelerated abruptly, stopping only inches from his rear bumper. The massive chrome grille looked like the bars of a cage in his rearview mirror.

  Before Stoltz could even react, the driver of the SUV had flicked on his high beams. Halogen brilliance flared in the rearview, blinding him for a second. He reached up quickly and flipped the mirror to night vision, but the glare was still painful.

  The driver laid on the horn. Stoltz gritted his teeth and sped up, but the SUV stayed on his tail. The driver honked again, a long, mindless bleat of anger.

  He looked for an opening, but an endless line of cars stretched out beside him, practically bumper-to-bumper. He was going seventy now, and the SUV was still there. He couldn’t change lanes now even if there was an opening: he was going too fast.

  A vision flashed into his mind, so intense it was overpowering. Losing control of the car, the rear wheels drifting to the right as the front went to the left, landscape rotating around him as the car went sideways and then the sudden shock as the tires dug in and it flipped, spinning around and around and crashing onto its roof and the agonized rending of metal and bone. He could smell the burst fuel line, hear the sirens as they came to cut his body out of the wreckage….

  The blare of the horn snapped him back to reality. He slowed down, forcing himself to ignore the frenzied honking he got in response, matched the flow of the lane beside him and turned on his signal light. A pretty, freckled girl driving a Ram truck waved him in; he nodded and waved back in thanks.