Spider

Spider puts his hands tenderly on either side of the monitor, like a lover would hold a dying partner's face. He stares intently into Lu's eyes.

Glazed and glassy, like the marbles children play with. Look how the orbits of her eyes are all sunken. See how her cheeks are hollowing out so nicely, so beautifully. And her skin – isn't it gorgeous? So white, so beautifully pallid. Your mother would approve of her, Spider. Your mother would have picked this one too.

Spider strokes her face with his damaged hand and then presses his cheek against hers. He holds the monitor for almost half a minute, feeling close to her, connected to her last moments.

Beautiful, so amazingly beautiful.

The body hangs limp on the table. He longs to remove the shackles from her arms and legs. He aches to wash her, to powder her all over and to dress her properly. And then he feels saddened. Saddened that the plan he has for her, the scheme he's nurtured her for, is going to prevent him keeping her, and exploring her.

Time was always a problem. Putrefaction: his least favourite word.

Spider has kept diaries on what happened to the other Sugars and knows that within an hour from now those vivid blue eyes of hers will start to change as the blood vessels become lumpy and patchy and the red blood cells begin to clump together. Within two days, strange yellow, triangular spots will appear on her corneas and will then fade to brown and black. Spider has set the basement temperature at thirty-seven degrees, the same as body temperature, so he hopes to slow down the natural cooling process of her corpse but knows that this will prolong the state of rigor mortis to probably about forty-eight hours after her death. He also knows that there is nothing he can do to stop the gravitational slump of blood and other body fluids. They will flatten and settle against her back, shoulders and buttocks as she lies on the leather table and will leave ugly reddish-purple lividity marks that he will have to cover with concealment creams and powder.

Adjust the plan. Find a way to spend time with her.

Spider sits and fantasizes. He's been lonely for so long and he yearns to have someone new by his side. If he could, he'd stay with her night and day, holding her, talking to her, sharing intimate moments with her, sleeping with her and waking with her. It could be perfect. But that's not the plan.

And then something on the screen catches his attention.

Lu's left hand twitches.

Is it a cadaveric spasm, simply a dead muscle jerking as the body settles?

Or is the little bitch really still alive?

61

West Village, SoHo, New York Jack never made it to bed.

After drinking a few beers and popping an Ambien, he fell into a sleep that was so deep and intense it could better be classified as a coma. Howie had thought about trying to shift him from the couch to the guest bedroom but then decided it was easier to shift the bedroom to him. He tucked a pillow under Jack's head, threw a light blanket over him and turned in himself.

Carrie was propped against pillows watching the end of Law and Order on TV, the last thing he wanted to see. He cleaned up in the bathroom and slipped into bed next to her, noticing how she seemed to look thinner every day.

Okay, so she'd got the diet thing cracked, which was something he couldn't do, but, man, all those creams and shit that she put on her face every night kind of defeated the whole point of losing the weight. The way Howie figured it, women lost weight and stayed trim to look more attractive for the guys in their lives. If that was right, then what the hell was the point of buttering your face with some snow-white poodle-crap cream and lying in bed in nightwear that wouldn't give a mac-flasher from Riker's Island a twitch in his pants? Unless of course, she's screwing someone else. The penny dropped like a grand piano from the roof of the Chrysler building. Howie grabbed the remote and turned the TV off.

'Hey, whatcha doing?' squawked Carrie. 'I was watching that.'

'Tell me straight, Caz. Who the fuck are you fucking?'

Only the white poodle crap cream hid the blood draining from her face.

Carrie waited a couple of heartbeats, wondering whether to lie her way out of it, or feel grateful that the big ugly secret was finally out there for her big ugly husband to see. 'I don't know what you mean,' she lied, trying to buy time.

Howie had never considered hitting a woman, until now. Now he could happily punch her lights out. Not so much because she'd been balling some other guy, though for some members of his family that would be reason enough, or even because he'd been too stupid up until now to figure it out. Nope, what really pissed him off was that he'd dropped a whole twenty pounds in weight and missed all those meals in what was plainly a pointless attempt to stay attractive for her and keep her in his bed.

Well, fuck her! He didn't want her in his fucking bed anyway. Howie's inner rage took over, and before he knew it, he was on his feet, giant hands grabbing and lifting his side of the bed.

Carrie tumbled on to the floor and crashed painfully into the wall.

'You cheating, cocksucking cow!' he said, then banged the bed down, like a weight-lifter with his last lift.

It hit the ground and made the noise of a small bomb as the wooden legs on his side splintered off.

Howie looked at the marital bed and saw it metaphorically. 'Well, it looks like it's all well and truly broken.'

PART SEVEN

Saturday, 7 July

62

West Village, SoHo, New York As the last grey dregs of night filtered into the first warm reds of dawn Howie stretched out his aching bones on the couch opposite the one on which Jack was snoring. He and Carrie had screamed at each other in the bedroom, bawled at each other in the kitchen and even thrown things at each other in the back yard, until they finally ran out of fight-power a little after four a.m. The row had been enough to wake most of the neighbourhood, but Jack had slept all the way through the emotional earthquake. In the harsh light of morning, Howie felt as exhausted as he looked. His head hurt worse than any hangover he'd ever had and he felt more depressed, angry and humiliated than he'd done since someone at high school had stolen all his clothes and sports gear while he was in the showers.

By the time they rode to the office, Jack knew something was seriously wrong. 'So what happened to upset Carrie?' he asked, yawning as he fought off the fug from the sleeping pill. 'I noticed we both got the big freeze this morning.'

Howie let out a long pained grunt and turned down the radio. 'She told me last night she's been fucking someone else. We spent most of the night rowing around you, but you slept through it.'

'Sorry, buddy. I hate sleeping pills, but every now and then I have to take one just to get a decent eight hours.'

'Sorry what? That you slept through it? Or that she's been balling someone?'

They both laughed. Jack started thinking about practicalities. 'I guess you've got round two coming up tonight, so I'll fix a Holiday Inn or somewhere else to shift to.'

'Might be an idea,' said Howie. 'In fact, maybe we can get a two-room discount; I'll probably need to check in as well.'

'It's that bad?'

'Maybe. The sad thing is, I really don't know if I want to fix things. Could be that we've had our time. Perhaps we're all burned out anyway.'

'You want my advice?'

'Go ahead.'

'Don't rush it. Maybe you're right, the best might be behind you, but you've got the kids to think about. It could turn out to be a wake-up call for both of you.'

'Man, right now the last thing I want is a wake-up call, I'd rather have eight hours of zedz,' joked Howie. A news jingle trickled out of the speakers and he turned up the radio. 'Let's see what the friggin' press know that we don't.'

From the sombre tone of the newscaster's voice Jack and Howie gathered that the first story was a tragic one, and they rightly feared that the subject matter might concern them. 'Some breaking news, just in. The controversial news channel Pan Arabia this morning showed more disturbing footage featuring a young woman who it claims is being held captive and is being slowly tortured to death somewhere in America. The video released half an hour ago on the English-speaking version of the Arab-owned news network, shows the woman, believed to be white and in her mid-twenties, tied naked to some form of restraining table. Pan Arabia's crime editor Tariq el Daher defended his channel's decision to broadcast more footage -'