Next door he sees a sign that proclaims antiques and below that cut glass on peeling white wood. Discards and junk everywhere. Part of a gas globe and a forty-year-old Pepsi machine that would be worth a few dollars if it wasn't already a solid lump of crudencrusted rust. All of it the same all-pervasive, isochronous reddish-brown.
He is drawn toward the door. Leaving the vehicle on auto-pilot, manipulating himself into the chair for the benefit of passersby. Cheating a little, though, from the car to the chair, and at the small step up to the porch that led to her inviting establishment. Smiling now as he sees the woman alone, tending her lonesome domain there in the light of 30s chandeliers. A cat scurries away.
“Howdy,” she calls out. Bright, too red hair from the “beauty parlor"—what a fucking misnomer THAT is. A pleasant face smiling through crow's feet. An attractive woman, he thinks. He likes the way she holds herself, the look of her shoulders and chest.
“Hi. Beautiful night!” He smiles his magical smile. He could almost read the sound of MMM that some of them make when he smiles at them. Many women were struck by his handsomeness and, for wont of a better word, his unusual dash. He had that thing some men have. Verve. Elan. A thing of style, he supposed. It just HOSED the bitches.
Then there was the business with the chair. They wondered when they saw this great-looking guy—what he would be like as a lover. It intrigued them. Challenged the bitches. Brought out their maternal instincts, he supposed. He knew how to use this. Play to it from the second eye contact was established. Manipulate them from jump street.
“You have a great place,” he said, smiling, staring at her chest, his eyes sparkling with instant desire, moving forward in the chair.
She smiled back. “Thank you. Can I help you with anything in particular?” She thought she recognized the man in the wheelchair, but she couldn't place him.
“I collect everything, honey,” he said with familiarity. “Absolutely everything."
“Well, we've got a lot of that,” she said expansively, gesturing around the cluttered shop.
“You sure do.” He stared at her, moving closer.
“Do you collect glass?"
“I collect everything imaginable. Deco, Greco, baroque, rococo, neoclassical, renaissance, post-modernist, Pre-Columbian, Mayan, Aztec, Peruvian, Schmucker's—"
She laughed. “Well, just look around...” She was forty-something.
“Thanks. I'm lookin'.” He thought of his Mommy. spotting her old oily, black-bladed fan. She had a rotating fan like that, which blew dusty curtains over a silver, pressed-wood nouveau frame of deceased Texas relatives. It sat beside their peach-colored Fada that once played the Pillsbury White Crust Dough Boys and the Cliquot Club eskimos, and the late-night dance remotes from Amarillo. A crackling Fada sitting on a white wooden shelf beside a sink, where a perennial drip had worn a Rorschach into the porcelain. Was this too red redhead somebody's mommy, too?
“Just beautiful,” he purred from the chair.
“Thank you.” She thought he was so good-looking.
“I could just look around here all night,” he said, still staring at her, speaking so intimately to this middle-aged, suspicious stranger.
She blushed prettily and touched some stray orange-red strands, and a giggle escaped. “Oh,” she began to say, something something.
He neither knew nor cared. If someone came in the door behind him now, he would take them too. Ace them right out. Adrenals on Overdrive, wanting to make it with her, hot in his wanting, longing to show this cunt what he had in his pants, coming on now in a blindingly fast rush of cum-heat and death wish, flying out of the chair at her suddenly, smashing the awful thing across her field of vision and into her left temple, driving a steel needle-sharp spike deep into her ear, penetrating her with his heat and his power as she dropped in her tracks, a scream caught in her throat as he struck once more, her brain winking out as she caught something that sounded like “you fucking cunts” in a flaming red blur of pain and sudden death, hearing only the crash of agony as she dropped where she stood, struck by his lightning.
Unmindful of door locks or passersby or anything beyond the all-consuming urgency, the gush of his rage shooting through his loins as he emptied himself in a violent tremble of ecstasy and madness and bitter hatred and remembered pleasures, made all the sweeter by his taste for vengeance and the rush of his newly regained power.
“Ahhhhhh,” surged out of him in an audible gush as he hammered the red-haired slut down. “Ahhhhhhhhhh, fuck fuck fucking CUNTSMMMMMMMMMMM,” pulled from him in the postmortem, post-coital orgasmic tremble. And, shaking and breathing hard, he pulls the penetrator loose from the disgusting heap on the floor and wheels himself back to the waiting vehicle, removing his gloves now. Nuttin’ to it.
Buckhead Springs
If ever there'd been a day when Eichord didn't need to come home to noise and aggravation, it was today, so perhaps that's why the little guy was on his mind so much as he threaded his way through the drive time outbound to Buckhead Springs. He decided he would will the night to be a good one. He wanted a little quiet time, and then dinner, and then some TL & C and early to bed.
When he'd interviewed the old couple in Vega, and the Amarillo people, he'd reached out for all the Spoda trails, paper and otherwise. Between MCTF and the locals it was all starting to funnel down his way now. Massive, useless, time-wasting printouts from the tangled tentacles of law enforcement. Man-hour-eating wild-goose chases that were endearing him to his colleagues in Buckhead not at all. All the wheelchair possibilities. All the institutional possibilities. Identikit feedback. Just the hospital records alone were impenetrable, it seemed, even with the computerized brain of the task-force sorting chaff.
Around a quarter to four he tried for the second time to pick up the gist of some material Doug Geary had sent him. A weighty thesis with the lighthearted title Proximal Root-causes of Homicidal Violence, jointly published by a think tank of clinicians. For the second time he read, “frustration, threat, or jealousy, for example, which can be subdivided into responsive and/or reactive aggression, sexual/social aggression, predatory/destructive,” he rubbed his eyes. All the slashes were making him constantly reassess and redefine each phrase. What the hell was wrong with these academicians? Couldn't they write a simple fucking sentence? This/slash/that—the mad slasher strikes again. I am tired/slash/bored, he thought.
“The proximal causes are multidisciplinary,” he read, “societal, political, environmental, military, industrial/technological, religiostic, economic, organizational...” He skipped a paragraph, stifling a yawn. “...intellectualized value-judgments reached within the scholarly/academic communities and practical-solution-related theory generated experientially within...” Boring boring fucking boring. He closed his eyes and rubbed, yawning until his jaw cracked.
It wasn't even four and he felt guilty, so he picked up some of the reports and started wading through them, reading and making notes with his felt-tipped pen as he read, and by four-thirty he had completed an ornate set of printed notes that surrounded a huge legal-pad-size doodle of a stick figure in a wheelchair, titled in big printed cartoon letters ARTHUR SPODA? A stick figure of a man in a chair holding an icepick over the question mark. Enough, he said, round-filing it and getting up with a sigh. Nothing was more tiring than nothing.
Jonathan, as if he'd read Jack's mind somehow, was again on his all-time best behavior. He'd become particularly docile in Donna's hands, or so Jack thought, when she'd started using their videocassette recorder to tape an afternoon cartoon show that was a great fascination of the boy's. Two shows really, a kid-participation show of a man dressed as a fat clown, and a cartoon show of the most violent hero-villain antics imaginable. Eichord was especially grateful for it tonight, guaranteeing as it did a still and blissful after-dinner hour with their son hypnotized by his electronic baby-sitter.