But there was no real purpose to it back then. It just sort of was.
Consciously, anyhow. Because it seemed to her now that she’d been trying to accomplish something all along, even though she had never spelled it out for herself. And then the day came when she just plain got it.
Which gave her work to do. First she had to remember them, and then she had to find them, and then, finally, she had to do what she should have done in the first place.
She had to kill them.
How?
There was a cab waiting when she left the prison, and the driver took her to a motel about a mile away. The office smelled of curry, so it was no great surprise when the manager turned out to be Indian, but how Sanjit Patel and his wife had wound up playing host to prison visitors in the middle of nowhere was one of life’s great mysteries.
The room was clean, if a little shabby, and the shower was hot and the TV got sixty channels, so it would be no hardship to stay there while she worked out a plan. And that might take a while, because she didn’t know where to start.
She was on the approved visitor list, which meant she was entitled to sit across from him with nothing between them but a thick pane of glass. She couldn’t touch him, couldn’t pass anything to him, and couldn’t even have on her person anything that wouldn’t get through a metal detector, and pass the scrutiny of the prison matron. There was no way she could get a weapon in with her, and even if she could, what possible good would it do her?
If she had a gun, and if she were proficient with it, and if she could sneak it in there, and if by some chance the glass wasn’t bulletproof, as she rather suspected it was, then she might conceivably be able to put a bullet in him. But she couldn’t possibly get away with it. They’d have her in custody before he fell off his chair.
So what did that leave?
FIFTEEN
The trailer was an Airstream, its sculpted silvery exterior badly pitted by the elements. It was small, designed to be towed behind a car, not moored permanently in a trailer park. Inside, thick dark curtains covered the windows. The maroon carpet was stained, and you could smell the toilet.
An unpainted plywood box held a mattress a foot off the floor. The sheets were not visibly soiled, and the stack of towels beside the bed were neatly folded, and apparently clean.
The fuck truck.
“You don’t have to go through with this,” Peter Fuhrmann said.
“But I want to.”
“Really?”
Did she? Well, it was a pretty sordid space for a romantic encounter. And Peter, dressed in his orange jumpsuit and wearing his hangdog expression, didn’t exactly set her pulse racing. But she was here, wasn’t she? And he was one of only three names left on her list, and, well—
“Right off the bat,” she said, “I can think of one thing that’s definitely worse than having sex here.”
“And what would that be?”
“Being here,” she said, “and not having sex.”
That at least got a smile from him. “It’s no place for state dinners,” he said. “I’ll grant you that.”
“Or intimate conversations.”
“Or curling up with a good book.”
“Or even a bad one. Peter? Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“When was the last time you were—”
“With someone?” He avoided her eyes. “I haven’t been with anyone since…”
He couldn’t say the name, so she said it for him. “Since Maureen.”
“Yes.”
“You never—”
“No.” He was silent for a moment. “I couldn’t even think about it. It’s as if that part of my life ended when—”
“When she died.”
“Yes.”
“And in prison—”
“People find outlets,” he said. “Men hook up with each other. That’s of no interest to me. And there are screws who can smuggle a woman in for the right price. Screws, that’s what they call the guards. What we call the guards, I should say.”
“But that’s of no interest to you either, is it?”
“No. I don’t even—”
“Don’t what?”
“Masturbate.”
“That’s what I thought you were going to say. You don’t?”
“No.”
“And when the urge comes—”
“It doesn’t.”
“Oh.”
“Audrey, the last time I had sex with a woman, she died.”
“It wasn’t the sex that killed her.”
“No, it was the drug I gave her.”
No, sweetie, it was the poison I gave her.
“And here’s something I don’t think I’ve ever said to another human being. See, there’s no way to know exactly when she died. Was she already dead while I was—”
“Still fucking her.”
He winced at the word, then nodded. “I’ll never be able to know, and I don’t even want to know, but I can’t get the notion out of my mind. And I can’t bear to think about it.”
Actually, she thought, the whole idea was pretty hot. But that wasn’t something she was prepared to share with Peter.
Instead she asked him why he’d agreed to visit the trailer with her.
“Because I didn’t know how to say no,” he said. “Isn’t that a hell of a reason? And I thought maybe, oh—”
“Maybe you’d wind up wanting to.”
“I guess.”
“But you don’t.”
“I’m afraid I wouldn’t—”
“Be able to do anything? Is that why you gave girls Roofies? A sort of Viagra by proxy? The girl takes it and you get a hard-on?”
“It may have been something like that.”
“Then let’s try a little role play, Peter. I’ll take off all my clothes and just lie there. You can pretend I’m in a coma. Or, hey, this is even better — you can pretend I’m dead.”
He stared at her.
“What’s the matter, you don’t think that’s funny? All right, let’s turn it around. You be the one in the coma.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Take off your clothes,” she said, in a tone that clearly expected obedience. “Now lie down. On your back, Peter. Eyes closed. You don’t get to see me, Peter. And you can’t move. You’re paralyzed, you’re unconscious, you’ve barely got a pulse. All you can do is lie there and breathe.”
She got out of her own clothes, sat on the edge of the bed, reached out a hand and took hold of him.
“No, don’t move. And don’t open your eyes.” Her grip tightened. “I’m not kidding. All you do is lie there, or I swear I’ll rip it off.”
She didn’t know what he was doing with his mind, how he was letting it play. She didn’t care. Her own fantasy was demanding all of her attention.
And it kept changing, insistent upon reinventing itself. At first it was pretty close to the reality of the situation: He was lying there, entirely in her power, unable to move because she had forbidden him to move, unable to see because her words were as blinding as a strip of duct tape over his eyes.
And then it changed, and in her mind he was physically immobilized, spread-eagled on the bed with his hands and feet in restraints, his mouth taped shut, a blindfold in place.
And in the third phase he was drugged. Unconscious, comatose, unable even to feel what she was doing with her hands and mouth.
And then — bingo! — he was dead, and that was the best of all. Oh, she’d been with plenty of dead men, but her interest in them had always ended with the sweet delight of their dying. Once they were dead, once she’d absorbed the sense of accomplishment and completion their deaths afforded her, she was ready to move on. They were off the list, out of her life even as they were out of their own, and the last thing she wanted to do was stroke their bodies, or suck their cocks.