by Knight, Dirk
Not wasting time to catch her breath, she hammers the base of the carafe down on the stone floor below, once, twice, three times and nothing. She is exhausted. Her adrenaline has depleted what little energy she may have had from the rest and sparse food.
She will not cry again.
She cannot let him win.
She summons all of her faculties, relaxes her arm on her chest for a few seconds, trying not to look at her floppy tentacle of a pinky. She breaths deeply, and swallows hard the overflowing caldron of human fluids in her mouth; a small relief to her infinite thirst. She counts in her head—one, two three— then, tightening all of her muscles at once she shatter-slams the glass into the rocky floor.
The cylindrical shape she’s been holding now is a quarry of blades, and her grip hasn’t loosened. She can feel the instant warmth as her palm is lain open, shredded by squeezing the shards. She brings them up and discards the smaller of the blades she has created. She uses the slick, sharp piece to carve through the tape binding her left, stabbing herself numerous times, as she goes. Not too deeply, but enough to bring more red roses to the surface. She is covered in blood now; face and hands.
Fingers trembling, but free, she pulls the band away from her neck and cuts away the restraint, again nicking herself some, but growing more deft at handling the makeshift knife with bleeding and broken hands.
No sooner than she has freed her ankles (the easy part), she can hear the gravel squelching under tires, followed by the slamming of car doors. Two doors.
She covers her bloody mouth with her bleeding hands to dampen the sounds of her ragged breathing and crying. She has no way out of this dungeon and now her keeper is back.
Her hopes of escape are dashed for the moment, but she isn’t the one to call the game over a few clouds. She begins to survey her surroundings with fresh eyes, hoping to find a way to pry open the cellar doors, or at least something to bandage her right hand.
Part X:
“You feel the last bit of breath leaving their body. You're looking into their eyes. A person in that situation is God!”
- Ted Bundy
“But that we write unto them, that they abstain from pollutions of idols, and from fornication, and from things strangled, and from blood.”
- Acts 15:20
Bad Company
He had seen the unmarked cop following him since leaving the station. He managed to lose him in Old Town, but there he is, parked right out front of the residential high-rise, waiting for him to return home. Dennis suffered no illusions that this could go any other way.
He hadn’t expected the pig to be her uncle; it had certainly shortened the timeline a bit, but still. It is the twenty-first century. He couldn’t be like his idol, Ted Bundy, and use an assumed identity, travel from state to state, rack up a lifetime killing whores. No, not with the FBI and CIA using traffic cameras and facial recognition software to track him into every cow town and one-light village in America. Not with the NSA pulling everyone’s phone and email records. No, he was going out in a blaze of . . . something.
There’s always Mexico, and he has Jiménez too, but fuck that, just because he has an imaginary friend, who is Mexican, doesn’t actually mean he speaks Spanish. He’d be better off taking a Dora the Explorer DVD as his liaison, and besides, he hates immigrants. Why would he go join them on their home turf, when he can’t even stomach a trip to a Phoenix Wal-Mart. No, this was going to end soon, and badly.
When they had first arrived at his apartment that night, he had instinctively left the .38 snub-nosed, and his bag, in Libby’s SUV. It turned out to be a good call, because Staley surely would have found it in the pat down, along with his razor, and one personalized Arizona license plate.
Now, arriving back to his apartment, and seeing the pigs that’d been shadowing him posted up out front, he finds it in the center console and cocks the hammer back.
“Here, you need to drive for a minute,” he says, pulling to the curb. He begins rifling through the various crap in the back seat until he locates her oversized vinyl car cover, which had come in handy a time or two they had fucked in parking lots outside of bars.
He kisses her beaten face and says, “I love you Libby, and I am counting on you.”
He jumps out of the Suburban, and Libby crawls over the center console to replace him in the captain’s seat.
“I love you too, baby.”
“Drive down to third, then hit a block, slowly, and pick me back up.”
She drives away into the night and Dennis jogs up to the nondescript sedan and empties the revolver into the car via the passenger window, ending the stakeout. He quickly unfolds the massive sheet of vinyl and drapes it over the sedan, taking an extra moment to pop the hood and disconnect the battery cables.
Just as he knew she would, Libby comes back to rescue him and they drive away into the sunrise, heading back to the northern winter of the high desert.
Dennis arrives, again, at his mother’s winter cottage, beyond exhaustion, with his partners in crime. He had hand delivered a package to Phoenix PD at four in the morning; he had driven hundreds of miles, and had beaten Libby worse than she’d ever been beaten.
Dennis had gotten into his stash pretty heavy, and the coca always makes things unpredictable. Her left eye now swollen shut, her mouth lopsided and leaky, and still she followed like a whipped dog.
Maybe it’s the cocaine. She probably can’t feel it yet.
She is sleeping when he pulls into the drive. He looks over to her and relishes the night they had, knowing it will be their last. He has no more use for her. He has vanquished what little innocence she may have had left. He will let her and himself rest, but he makes up his mind that she has outgrown her nuance and is going to die before nightfall.
He leads her to his bedroom, the bedroom only yesterday he had called his mother’s room. He must’ve always known, just as he knew Jiménez was dead. It doesn’t matter. Not now. This will become his final resting place.
He, unable to go to sleep yet, still charged up from the blow and from the sheer adrenaline of confronting his mortality, decides to get cleaned up. Maybe the warm water will soothe him off to see the sandman. Maybe he will just take another hit and kill Libby. Either way, he is beginning to smell himself and doesn’t like it.
He reloads the revolver, and sets it on the counter.
Dimly, Through Glass
The steam sticks to the slippery old mirror and saturates the room. It coats the dingy old wallpaper, which is peeling down in the corners revealing crumbly plaster and slats, riddled with termite holes and cobwebs. It coats the counters, it coats the chrome, and it coats the filthy tile floor.
He wipes away the runny moisture from the specked glass. He can see clearly now, through the reflection of his face, and deep into his own eyes, the wreckage and totality of his life. The once-lavish home is in dilapidation. He has not been good with the upkeep, no better than his deceased mother had been.
He thinks of the girl downstairs.
He will just shoot her. He doesn’t want anything more from her. She is used up now, her newness. He needs to move on. Dennis doesn’t want to stay here anymore. He steps over to the sink. As he peers into the mirror, dimly recognizing the face mutedly returned in the darkened glass, he reaches out for the pearl-handled razor his father left him. Though not the same one he’d used to slit his throat, no, the police had kept that one, it was his father’s nonetheless, and his one heirloom from the man who abandoned him, in death, to a life with his horrifying bitch mother.
How much of himself can he see through the muddy glass? Can he see himself as a child again, can he see what he has become?
The edges of the mirror have faded to a dark grey spotted nothing from where the metallic undercoating has tarnished, rusted, and oxidized, peeling away from the once-polished surface. The steam of countless baths and showers has permeated and infiltrated the infinitesimal spaces and created a wedge for the elements.
; He can see the world for what it is. He sees the nothingness he has cultivated. The glassless windows throughout the house, the wintery draft blowing in leaves and dust. The cupboards that had been filled with hallucinated dishes and foods yesterday are now empty, the rodents and vermin now dominating the habitat of his childhood home.
He generously applies a slather of soapy foam to his stubble.
He drags the blade in one long even stroke after another, across his face, clearing away the days of growth. Soaking up the intoxicating sensation of the blade against his skin. So easily could he experience the exquisite feeling of parting flesh against cold hard steel, simply by making the angle less acute, pressing a little harder.
The feeling of the cleave; the resistance that gives way in a final slice.
He thinks of the football player who was cut so deep he’d nearly lost his head. The sensual parting of flesh. The end of a man’s everything.
The metal doing all it ever did. All it was forged to do.
Oh how he hungered for that again.
He looks over his shoulder and sees her lying there. Limp tattooed foot again jutting from beneath the thin blanket, so peaceful.
How long could they stay here before Staley traced this house back to him? Not long, he supposes, and then he would be screaming up the highway. Especially since he had given him a little incentive.
The plates.
That’s Dennis’s only insurance policy. Even his attorney doesn’t know about this place, but somehow he knows that Staley will find him. He’s sure that the man is a different breed, and as long as he knows Dennis has his niece, he may tread lightly.
When Staley gets there, he’ll be alone. He won’t call in the local cops to fuck up his arrest, or put Tater-Tot’s life in the fumbling hands of the hick cops. He’ll want to do it all on his own, gets his rocks off that way, Dennis supposes. Much the way Dennis gets his rocks taking women down.
Sniveling little bitches, he shows them.
Jiménez just shakes his head at this, doing a little cheek click as he does.
“Taking down women? Taking down bitches? What women, pendejo? How many bitches?”
Dennis looks at him, confused.
“You talking about the bar-fly bimbo? Your fucking cunt mother?”
“My mother? I took care of that bitch for sure.”
“You did those bitches by accident. You didn’t take no pride in your work, muchacho. Not like you talked about for all those years, in your little journals.”
“I took pride in killing Carla. I know I did. . . . I was young, is all.”
“You don’t fucking get it. You’re delusional, homie. And the two bitches you need to be worried about are sucking wind right now.”
“I’m going to take care of them. . . . Libby first, she’s ready.”
“She’s been ready; it’s you who’s not been ready. While you are trying to figure out your psychotic, pretend world, the redhead downstairs is probably breaking out of her chains and the lush nigger-lover on your mother’s bed is still manipulating you, and you are still sitting here, playing with Daddy’s razor.”
“Fuck you Jiménez,” he says, but his friend just laughs.
“Who are you talking to; me or your mother? We’re both just figments of your fucked up mind.”
“You don’t think I see that now? You don’t think I understand what’s going on here?” he shouts while staring into his own eyes reflected in the blade.
“I see myself clearly in this,” he says to Jiménez, who is sitting on the edge of the bathtub, reflected dimly in the mirror. Dennis suddenly wonders if Jiménez was ever real, at all.
Surely, he must have been at some point, he thinks, looking down to the revolver. Surely, that’s what set this off.
But was it?
Or maybe it was my mother.
“You have to kill her now,” Jiménez adds motioning towards Libby. “If you have the courage.”
“I had the courage last time I needed it,” he says, trying to remember his mother.
He was so sick of Carla abandoning him. Every week it was a different man, a different story, a different vacation without him. The lights would go dim from her lack of payment, even though she had the money and traded sex for drugs with those interested, still she would fuck off the payment. He missed his father more every day, since he took his own life. He blamed Carla, as would anyone, and thus his loathing for her grew like mold in a dark basement.
“Today will be different,” he had told himself, “today is my birthday. I am officially a teenager.”
He carried on as he had for years, spending as much time in school as he could, doing extracurricular activities and staying late to finish homework until administrators would tell him to go. They often let him keep their hours, as they understood his home life to be quarrelsome and unhealthy enough, though perhaps not a danger to the child so much so that they would call protective services or involve the law. But things were different then. People didn’t speak up as readily and get in everyone’s business like they do today. It was the Reagan era.
Carla hadn’t mentioned anything, but he just knew she had a surprise for him today. As horrible as she had proven to be at parenting, she had always been good at birthdays. The woman loved to party; it was her one saving grace, so he’d left the campus as soon as the final bell had rung. He had pedaled his bike with excitement and vigor, jumping over shallow ditches and ramping off slabs of busted cement in the IGA parking lot.
Nonetheless, when he arrived home, it was to an empty house and a pitiful meal of dashed hopes.
He resigned himself in pity to watching cartoons and eating ice cream directly from the carton.
When Carla entered the house stumbling and reeking of pot, a few hours later, she offered no apology, or even the slightest notion that she was aware of his birthday. That it had been thirteen years since she forced him out of her womb and that should call for some celebration.
Cake and a candle at the very least.
She tousled his hair instead, and walked into the kitchen, telling him she just came home to give him twenty bucks for a pizza, and to get her shot, because she has a hot date tonight.
“You’re leaving again?” he asked
“You bet your ass I am. Bob Jones, the one who works for the railroad, has asked me to go to the casino with him tonight and be his good luck charm, and I hear he’s hung like a mule.”
“But. But, Mom, today is my birthday,” he pleaded for her to stay—afraid to be alone on his birthday.
“Sorry, Charlie,” she said, dropping her bottle of insulin to the floor. She bent to pick it up and added, “How about tomorrow we do something instead? Unless Bob wants to go to one of the big casinos in Phoenix . . .” she trailed off.
“I should probably bring my kit, in case he does want to hit the road,” she said, more to herself now.
“Shit!” she blared when she dropped the syringe on the floor and hit her head on the counter as she bent to pick it up.
“Howie, get over here and make yourself useful. Fix me up my shot; I’m a little too tipsy right now,” she said, rubbing the soon to be goose egg on the back of her head. She had always called him Howie, in an endearing way, since he was a small child and couldn’t pronounce his r’s. He was Harry, to his Father, or junior, but his mom and he both said Howie. It was one of the few nice things they shared.
“Okay ,Momma,” he said resignedly.
“Wash those dick skinners before you go handling my needle—”
“Yes ma’am,” he said, hoping she would forget to take her shot one day and do them both a favor. Just then, he flashed on something. She took two kinds of insulin, mixes them into one dose: short term and long term. She had told him all about it one day, while she was rambling on under the effects of some hallucinogen; she even told him what the effects were.
“This one hits me fast, so if I don’t have something to eat right after I get sick and can even pass out,” she’d said
.
She is too drunk to do this herself; she will never notice, he thought, pulling the plunger back as far as it would go, and filling the syringe with almost four times the dose of the fast-acting Humalog. He jabbed her quickly in the thigh, before she could protest.
“Goddamnit, buddy, that hurt. Try being a little gentler next time, why don’t you.”
“Sorry mom,” he said with a flippant inflection. That should keep her home for the night, he thought, and wondered how long before she passed out. But she didn’t. She went on about her business with not a care in the world. She said she was getting tired and that a shower might wake her up some, and then added drunkenly that she wanted to make sure her snatch smelled pretty for Bob, anyway.
He could not take the waiting anymore.
With a heavy cast iron skillet in one hand, he trundled up the stairs full of anger and determined to see her off to the ferryman. Bursting through the door, he found her crumpled in the tub, with the scalding water raining down over her. She was out cold, but breathing. He stared at her wet naked body for seconds that lasted hours, feeling his tiny prick stiffen up in his jeans and wanting so badly to touch her breast.
So he did.
He turned the water off and reached into the shower, cupping her in his small hands and brimming over with excitement. He could feel wetness building up in his underwear, coating the tip of his member.
He was leaking.
His hands traveled to her hips, then lower. He had little trouble getting his finger inside of her, and he wondered who was inside of her just hours ago.
Probably Big Bob, from the railroad. He was infuriated by the thought.
Carla’s head lolled slightly under his touch and a whimper-like sound emerged from her drooping mouth. He couldn’t stand her in that moment, but couldn’t pull his hands out of her warm center, either.
He drew the plastic curtain down over her face, and slammed the cast iron down flatly onto her nose and mouth, the force tearing the rod from its wall supports and conking him in the head. It hurt but little and didn’t deter him from his mother. He lifted the monstrous skillet towards the sky, and then dropped it down again on the top of her forehead. She kicked involuntarily, and thrashed about in the porcelain deathtrap. He turned the hot water up as high as it would go and left her to scald and drown in the bathroom.