"Why do you have an unlisted phone?" Denise asked, turning into the motel parking lot. "I couldn't find you in any town around here."
"We had crank calls," he said. When she turned off the ignition he lifted her hand to his face and kissed her palm, then licked slowly between her fingers. It was going to be a wonderful night, the uncertainty about the ending was so exciting.
The Cap'n had been at his very best. He had made love to her as worshipfully as if she were a goddess fallen to ground and this were to be her last act among mortals before returning to heaven, a feast of earthly, human delights that must last her an eternity, and he had allowed himself to come only when Denise had half whimpered, half laughed for mercy: "No more. God, no more." Then he allowed her to rest for a moment before reaching for ecstasy himself, reaching it with her crying out "Yes, yes!" while incredibly soaring to orgasm one final time herself.
They lay in the dark, Denise maundering on about something, Luv paying only enough attention to be alert for danger, until he felt the demon begin to claw to the surface inside him. He put his hand on her hip, lowered his mouth to her breast.
"You are incredible," she said, in awe. "I really don't think I can."
"There's something I want you to do for me," Luv said. He rolled her onto her stomach. "I need to do it this way. It may seem a little strange, but I want you to trust me. You do trust me, don't you?"
"Of course," she said. "I'll do anything you want."
"I'm going to put my hand on your neck," he said, putting his fingers in the right spot. "And I'm going to slowly squeeze while I make love to you." He slipped into her from behind and smiled when he heard her gasp with pleasure.
Thrusting into her, he began the slow pressure on her neck, then stopped abruptly, his erection withering. "What's wrong?" Denise asked.
"Nothing," Luv said, pulling away from her.
"What is it? You can do it. I trust you."
"I didn't want to hurt you," said Luv.
"You wouldn't hurt me, you would never hurt me, I know that," she said, rubbing his chest.
Luv rose from the bed and hurried to the bathroom, closing the door.
"Are you all right?" she called.
In the tiny bathroom, Luv stared at himself in the mirror, shaken by his own stupidity. He had been about to kill her when he had suddenly remembered that he did not have his car with him, he did not have his equipment. If he took her car he had no adequate way to clean it, no way to dismemher her, no way to transport her. He could not believe he had been guilty of such a lapse of good sense. He prided himself on being smarter than his adversaries and yet he had been about to act as stupidly as any impulse killer. He had very nearly let his emotions get the better of him.
You're a fool, he told himself A careless, humbling fool, and you're beginning to make mistakes. You were nearly caught in the Caprice-because you went back to help! Idiotic. You didn't even know they were onto the Caprice in the first place. It had to have been because of that incident with the moron Metzger in the woods during the aborted burial of Inge's body. A cop came that close, your car was exposed, and you assumed nothing would happen. Stupid. Now this. You are in peril because of your own behavior, he chided himself. It's nothing they've done, it's never anything that cops do, it's only what people leave behind, the clues they give, the traces they're too stupid to hide. As he heard Denise moving on the other side of the door, coming toward the bathroom, his attitude began to change. There was another side to it, he told himself.
"Are you okay?" she asked diffidently. He could tell she had her ear to the door, imagining him in a heap on the floor, collapsed and overfucked.
"I'm fine," he said, turning on the tap to give her a noise to concentrate on. "In fact, I'm great." And he was, he knew he was. He was Cap'n Luv, not some ordinary skirtchasing philanderer. He was the best. And he was not a blood-crazed psychopath, cutting and slashing random victims. Cap'n Luv killed without pain and left no trail, no bodies, no crime. There had been a flood, that was all. A freak of nature. A fucking fluke. And now, even at the height of his anger with himself, he realized that what had just happened with Denise was not a mistake but a great triumph. Luv had been in the grip of his demon, the mania was fully upon him-and he had resisted. He had won. He had shown that he was truly in charge, Luv was in command, not a mania, not some outer force, not some raving bit of subconscious, but Cap'n Luv. Luv was the king, even of himself. He was exultant, for he now knew in a way he had never fully realized before that he was the complete master.
Of himself, of others. Of his destiny. Of the destiny of others. From here on, the world would be what he made of it.
Luv smiled at himself in the mirror, approving heartily, admiring. His smile broadened until he began to laugh, and he watched his reflection as he did so, monitoring himself even at the height of his gaiety.
Denise began to chuckle in sympathy and he suddenly swept open the door, took her in his arms and whirled her around the room, filling the space with his booming laughter. "The best!" he cried. "The best."
"No, you're the best," Denise laughed, her feet off the floor as he twirled her. He did not argue.
AT ONE A.M. Tee's alarm sounded, again hissing static from a station that was never quite tuned in. He rose and made his way toward the door, where he stopped by the foot of the bed, looking at Marge's shape in the gloom. She was on her side, her back turned to him as they lay in bed, one pillow under her head, one over it, and a third clasped to her chest and stomach like a doll. In good times it was a pose that amused Tee but now it was suggestive of pain, as if she clutched the third pillow with the desperate valor of a cancer victim seeking an anodyne. He was her pain, of course, and did not know what to do about it that would not make it worse.
He had denied having an affair, denied it vigorously and vociferously, denied it to the point where he thought any reasonable person would have to believe him, denied it to the point where he nearly believed it himself The only alternative seemed to be to admit it, but he was convinced that that way lay disaster. There was hope in sticking with his claim of innocence, none in confessing to guilt. He had seen men succumb to unwavering suspicion, men on whom Tee and the police had no evidence beyond a bone-deep certainty that they knew what they knew.
Unaware of the genuinely protective nature of the criminal code's presumption of innocence, of the difficult, sometimes impossible task of proving guilt without substantial evidence, they had confessed because Tee or some other inquisitor had simply waved aside excuses and alibis and continued to bear down, to bore in with the hard finger of blame.
Had they held on longer, Tee knew, they would have remained free, but they saw relief in confession, as if the balm of forgiveness would be given them if they but bared their conscience at last. Sniveling and snotty-nosed, they finally gave in. High school boys confessing to acts of vandalism, bleary-eyed drunks admitting to a variety of stupid, larcenous, violent, self-destructive adventures, the occasional true criminal acknowledging his miscreant ambitions.
Tee did not believe that confession was good for the soul. He believed it represented the point of no return. Say you did, and there was no going back to the time when you did not. He would hang on as long as he had to and if necessary lie himself into his grave. Marge had not moved a muscle since he had awakened, and he knew that she was tense and alert. She had lain like that for the past two nights, no tossing and turning like someone trying to sleep, but catatonically stiff, as if she were listening for a pin drop in the outer rooms. Hostility radiated from her rigid body like heat from a stove; Tee was afraid to touch her for fear of pulling back his hand seared to the bone.