“Please...”
“Diane, answer my question. Why aren’t you at work?”
“I have the day off.”
“Okay, fair answer. You figured you’d get in some alone time, run a few errands, clean up the house, and take a mental health day, huh?”
“Yes.”
“Things would sure be tough for Robin and Gabriel if they didn’t have a mother, wouldn’t they? I bet they’d cry their little eyes out. I hope you have relatives who would take them in, or else the poor kids may end up bouncing from one foster home to the next. They can’t always keep orphaned siblings together, you know. Oh, they try, they give it their best, but there’s only so much you can do.”
George felt like he was going to vomit. What the hell was he supposed to do? Rush him? Try to shoot him in the face? It was absolutely killing him to stand there helplessly, but what else could he do?
“Hey, George, I’ll make you a deal. You throw that gun over here, toss it into the sink, and I’ll let her go. I won’t even slice off an ear. Maybe I’ll slice off part of an ear, but not the full ear, I promise.”
“No way.”
“Okay, okay, I won’t cut off anything. No mutilation. You won’t get that offer again, and you’ve got five seconds to decide.”
George put on the safety, then tossed the gun across the kitchen into the sink. Bullets didn’t seem to hurt Ivan anyway, so it wasn’t as if he was worse off.
“Nice toss,” said Ivan. “Just for the record, I wasn’t worried about getting shot, but I don’t want you squandering bullets and attracting the cops while we’re having sooooo much fun.”
“I said, the cops are already on their way.”
“And I believe you’re fibbing. I at least know that you didn’t call them. Hey, George, do you know who else in this room likes to lie? I’ll give you a clue. It’s not the woman.”
Oh God...
“That’s right. Well, Diane, it’s been lovely chatting with you, but now I need to create a couple of orphans.”
He slowly slid the blade across her throat. Diane’s eyes widened, her legs buckled, and Ivan let her fall to the floor, clutching at her neck and making horrible choking sounds.
“You sick fuck!” George shouted. He took another step forward--he couldn’t help himself--and Ivan held up the bloody knife in a defensive position.
“Don’t do it, George. You’ll get it a lot worse than she did.” He crouched down next to her. “See how I didn’t cut all that deep? I could’ve cut all the way to the bone, but then she would’ve bled out too quickly. This way it lingers a little more.” He ran a finger through the gash in her neck and held it up for George’s inspection.
“She didn’t do anything to you!”
“No, but you did.”
Diane’s body twitched as the pool of blood on the tile expanded. George had witnessed some terrible things in his life, even a few cold-blooded murders, but those were brutal, emotionless killings designed to punish or send a message. He’d never seen anything like the sense of malicious glee that was on Ivan’s face right now. The guy couldn’t be happier if he were a ten-year-old at an amusement park.
Diane coughed, sending blood trickling down both sides of her mouth.
Ivan held the butcher knife over her, moving it back and forth. “I think I should stab her again. What do you think, George?”
“If you do, I’ll kill you.”
Ivan shrugged. “Eh, empty threat.” He stood up and picked George’s gun out of the sink, then pointed it at him. “I don’t want to shoot you. You won’t be much fun if I do.” He crouched back down next to Diane. “Wow, lots of blood in the human body, huh? You don’t think there’s that much just looking at somebody, but we leak pretty good.”
George forced himself not to scream in rage. “You’ve made your point.”
“Oh, I’m so far from having made my point that it isn’t even funny.” Ivan slammed the knife into Diane’s stomach, burying it all the way to the hilt. Most of her strength was gone by this point, but she still let out a gasp of pain through the gurgling blood. He wrenched the knife out of her, considered his next target for a moment, then slammed the knife deep into her thigh.
George clenched his fists so tightly that his fingernails dug into the skin.
“Pretty frustrated, aren’t you?” Ivan asked, yanking the blade out of her leg. “I would be too, in your shitty situation. You should beg me to let her go. That would be pretty entertaining, since she’s basically dead at this point.”
Ivan stabbed her five more times, running the length of her body, each thunk making George cringe. Then Ivan stood up and rolled her onto her back with his foot. Diane lay splayed out on the kitchen floor, eyes open, unquestionably dead.
“You’re pathetic,” said George, his mouth completely dry.
“Pathetic? That’s the adjective you’re going to throw out? Pathetic? You had to stand there and watch me murder a mother of two. Your best buddy apparently isn’t even going to check on you. George, dude, at this particular moment, I am most definitely not the one who’s pathetic.”
“Then why don’t you come after me, instead of an innocent woman?”
“It’s not an either/or deal. I can do both.”
That comment scared George a lot more than he wanted to admit, but he stood firm and held up his fists. “Then let’s do it.”
“No rush, no rush.” Ivan put a hand to his ear. “Hear that? No sirens. Amazing what you can get away with during a weekday, isn’t it? Let me tell you a little about me. Secret origins kind of stuff. I love to kill people. Absolutely love it. Always have. It’s the usual serial killer deal--I caught a frog when I was in grade school, and spent the afternoon playing around with it, putting it in a Lego maze and that kind of thing. Tried to make it eat a grasshopper. Great afternoon. Then my mom called me in for dinner, and I knew she wouldn’t let me bring the frog inside, so I was going to let it go, but instead I took out my pocketknife and cut off its arms and legs. Frogs are a bitch to hold down while you’re doing that. Loved watching it writhe. I spent the whole meal wondering how my poor dismembered frog was doing, and I didn’t even have dessert. That’s right, hot fudge sundaes on the table and all I cared about was that frog.”
George wiped some sweat from his forehead. He’d really hoped that Lou would come in, guns blazing, even though Lou didn’t currently have a gun. His partner had to be doing something, right?
“I went back outside, looked in the shoebox where I’d left that frog, and he was still alive. Oh, he wasn’t doing much, just sort of opening and closing his mouth, but he was alive. So I dissected him. I couldn’t tell you what the frog parts were called or what their biological functions were, but I saw all of them.”
“Am I supposed to respect this?” George asked.
“I don’t care if you respect it or it disgusts you or gives you a big fat boner. I just want you to listen. I killed a lot more frogs after that. I mean a lot more. If the Supreme Being turns out to be a frog, I am more fucked than Hitler. From there I moved up to mammals. Mammals were even more fun. Bagged my first human when I was twenty-one. A hooker. I wish I’d been more inventive, but no, it was the typical ‘crack whore who won’t be missed’ scenario. Wanna know how I did it?”
“Actually, I don’t.”
“Oh, come on.”
“How did you do it?”
“Blowtorch. It’s extremely inefficient.”
“So how many people have you killed?”
“Americans, not that many, probably not even a dozen. But I spent some time in Africa, and, oh, I racked up a body count there. Same thing in Mexico. You go to the poor parts of the world, and you can live like a king and slaughter like a dictator. It’s pretty fantastic.”