But she didn’t want to think about it right now. What was the use? It would do her a lot more good to concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other.
She walked on into the wind with her head low, hoping she didn’t crash right into somebody while rushing blindly toward the intersection. Luckily there weren’t many people around at the moment. In another half an hour it would be six o’clock and the street would fill with commuters returning from work, but this was the lull when most nine-to-fivers were still in transit, jammed together in crowded trains and buses.
She could almost envy them, ridiculous as that sounded. Their average routines, their common complaints… right now she would have traded for them in a minute.
It was so cold out here, so dark and cold.
Her daughter’s playspace was about five blocks downtown, and she would need to cross the street heading toward it, walk south on the next avenue. But the parked cars along the curb were crammed so close together — bumper to bumper, almost — that it seemed impossible to find an opening between them, another of this city’s ongoing shortages being available spots. She figured it would be better to wait till she reached the intersection than catch her coat or slacks trying to squeeze between fenders.
Those cars aside, her block rarely got too congested. Residential, lined with trees, it was a lot quieter than most, and could almost make you forget what a busy part of town this was in general. She supposed the corner park over on the other side of the block, Peter’s Field, also helped cut down on foot traffic. In fact, she herself wasn’t eager to walk past it. There were usually strong gusts kicking up all around its fences, probably something to do with how the wind sort of pooled and swirled around the park, really just a little open space with some benches where the old men and women liked to sit around feeding the pigeons, and athletic courts the basketball and tennis players claimed as their own in the summertime.
She would hate to cross the street there, but couldn’t avoid it, and admittedly felt like a spoiled, selfish bitch even letting a minor inconvenience of that sort enter her thoughts. These days, she had heavier concerns pressing down on her shoulders, and might have given anything in the world to see them lifted. Having an indoor center for her daughter so close to home… she knew she really ought to be thankful for that and leave it alone.
Still hunched forward against the wind, she was unaware of the guy who stepped from the front passenger side of the parked car on her left until he called her name, and even then almost crashed into his door as it swung open over the sidewalk. Startled, not recognizing his voice, she came to an abrupt halt and looked up at him, barely avoiding the door.
His face, what she was able to see of it in the dark, was unfamiliar to her.
“Nice to see you,” he said, smiling, repeating her name as he sidled around the door, quickly moving right up in front of her.
She didn’t recognize his face in the shadows, couldn’t place it, didn’t have a clue who he was. But his eyes… something about his eyes, the way they were locked in on her, made her think she probably didn’t want to know him.
She backed up on impulse, confused, anxious, suddenly realizing there was nobody on the park side of the street, nobody else on this side.
Nobody but the two of them standing out here on the darkened sidewalk.
“I’m sorry,” she said to whoever the hell he might be. Starting to get really frightened now, trying to ease forward around both his body and the door. “I’m in a hurry to get somewh—”
His gloved hand came up, clapped over the lower half of her face before she could finish her sentence. Then another had came up to her neck, something held in it, what she thought looked like a fat marker pen. As she started to scream against the hand covering her mouth, a snapping sound came from the tubular object, and she felt a sting right through her scarf, and the scream died off into a muffled in-turned whimper.
Instantly dizzy, her senses flushing away, her legs turned to soft putty, she reeled, felt herself being shoved into the car, thrown across the backseat. And then heard its doors slamming shut in what seemed some distant place behind her.
By the time the driver got back into his vehicle and pulled from the curb, she was completely unconscious.
His Maglite raised above his shoulder, its lens turned downward in the pitch blackness, he walked around the pile of sod, rotten leaves, and splintered branches concealing her body. The surface of the frozen bog quivered underfoot, its icy carpet of moss and tangled weeds crackling with each step he took through his slow circle, like a thick rubber mat that had been spread over an even thicker layer of broken glass.
The flash’s wide, high-powered beam revealed a hint of white flesh — part of her cheek, or maybe her neck — and he knelt to scoop another clump of dead foliage into his gloved hand and toss it where he’d caught his glimpse. He recalled having seen patches of snow among the nearby brush and stunted trees, momentarily considered flinging some onto the heap for added cover, but then decided it was better to leave the snow undisturbed. More would fall to blanket her soon enough… unless the coyotes and bobcats arrived first. They were all over these woodlands, half starved in the bareness of winter, scavenging for whatever food would sustain them. Probably they would take care of the body before any human being had a chance to discover it. Not many people wandered this far from the beaten path, and those who did — off-trail hikers, nature watchers, that type — wouldn’t get the inclination for months. Not until the wicked cold abated.
He continued to move around the corpse, frost-hardened mud crunching beneath his weight.
The auto-injector couldn’t have worked any better, he thought. A little pressure was all it had taken for its needle to eject from the tip and penetrate the heavy scarf she’d worn around her neck, releasing the contents of its prefilled dispenser.
The propofol had put her out in less than a minute. He’d experimented with a wide range of sedatives, tranquilizers, and anesthetics in his solitary career, could recite a whole desk reference’s worth of names from memory, and was convinced he’d never gotten hold of anything more potent. The dosage he’d pumped into the woman, eighty milligrams into the artery that fed her brain, could have put a horse on the ground in seconds. She’d already been semicomatose when he finished her in the backseat, pinching shut her nose with one hand, clapping the other over her mouth, blocking her airways until her autonomic motor system simply gave up on trying to fill them.
His take-outs weren’t always as clean, but he preferred it when they were. With his best ones, the ones that went the way she’d gone, it was almost as if he was the Sandman kneeling at their sides, gentling them to sleep, making them yield to him with a soft, easy touch.
Hush, baby, he’d whispered in her ear. You hush, and I’ll see you by-and-by.
He had kissed her goodnight — lightly, on the cheek — as she went out with hardly a shiver and a gasp.
Now he came full circle and paused to stand in silence over the body’s outstretched legs. He could see filaments of vapor escaping his mouth and nostrils to scatter in the bright cast of his Mag, hear timber creaking and groaning around him in the wind.
In the unlikely event anything was left of her when the thaw arrived, it would be sucked down into the bog. The acid mire sped up decomposition, turning organic remains into food for the peat and sphagnum. There was a whole education to be gotten from being piss poor and orphaned young, and that had been among the abundant lessons he learned in the cranberry bogs where he’d toiled during the October harvests, just a kid back then, part of a large troop of strapped and exploited seasonal laborers. The pickers, most of them, were minors like himself, along with hardscrabble local women and Mexican illegals who had come thousands of miles north of the border to join them in slogging through those flooded fields for less than minimum wage, raking berries loose from the vines so they would float to the water’s surface, then skimming for them with big brooms, rakes, and nets… and this while the foreman, their padrone the migrant workers had called him, sat watching with his fat ass parked high and dry in the cab of his tractor. As you tramped across the bog, it would drop down in ditches where the cranberry vines took root, and you’d wade out deeper, step by step. Start out covered in cold slime to your ankles, and later on find yourself swamped to the waist, where the dead things came stirring up from the mucky bed. Drowned chipmunks, squirrels, foxes, birds, there would be small animals and decayed pieces of animals floating all around you, leeches and wormy creatures clinging to them, feeding on their putrefied tissues.