Blood Marks Read online

  I got in the line. There were two people between us, and I took the opportunity to look her over.

  I know what people will say, and that's one reason I'm writing this down. They'll say she looked like my mother, or some such bullshit.

  That's all it is, just bullshit.

  She didn't look anything like my mother.

  My mother was short, kind of dumpy, really. Gray hair that she wore in a bun. She had thick arms and legs, and her face was round and fat. She wore glasses with wire rims.

  I don't know why I got off on my mother. She doesn't have anything to do with any of this.

  As I was saying, the woman didn't look anything like my mother. She was tall, nearly six feet, with black hair that hung down past her shoulders. She was wearing a red dress, and she was too skinny for my taste, really. Her legs and arms were very thin. She didn't wear glasses.

  I couldn't really see her face from where I was standing, hadn't really had a good look at it yet.

  She got her egg roll and went over to a table. The food court wasn't too crowded, so I couldn't very well ask her for a seat at her table after I got my own egg roll without causing her to be suspicious, but I sat as near as I could and still remain inconspicuous.

  I wasn't interested in eating. There was a kind of excitement building up in me that I can't explain, not even now. I still feel it, though. Every single time.

  It's not like sex, exactly, but then again it is. I've read about some people who kill because they can't have sex any other way. They kill and then they squirt all over the place. It's as if they were waving their dicks like fire hoses.

  Not me.

  Later, maybe. When I'm thinking about it, thinking about the way they look at me, the way they—

  I'm not going to talk about that part yet.

  I'm not ready to talk about that part yet.

  I'm getting off the track again. Where was I? Sitting in the food court, the excitement building in me, that's where.

  I saw her face then. It was a thin face, like I should have expected, having seen the rest of her, thin and kind of pinched. Thin lips, thin nose, sunken cheeks. Her black hair fell forward as she ate.

  That's when I saw the blood marks.

  The hair couldn't hide them. Nothing could hide them. They were there, squirming on her face like some kind of red living thing.

  I had taken a bite of my egg roll, trying to look like anyone else there, and I nearly puked it out on the table. I'd never seen anything quite so awful.

  No wonder she had to be killed.

  I looked around the food court to see if everyone else was as repulsed as I was, and that's when I got another surprise. No one seemed to have noticed a thing.

  Everyone was eating, talking, laughing, just like there was nothing unusual, just like there wasn't some kind of monster sitting right there in their midst with the goddamned blood marks pulsing on her face like some kind of obscene cancerous growths.

  And then I realized that they didn't know.

  I was the only one, the only one out of that group of blind and ignorant assholes who could see and who knew what he was seeing. I was the one chosen to see, and I was the one chosen to do something about what I saw.

  The excitement was still building in me. It was like a keen, high sound in my head by then, a sound that only I could hear, a sound like no one had ever heard before. It was like music, but it wasn't like music. I can't explain it any better than that.

  I followed her to her car, a little red Toyota Tercel, which luckily happened to be parked not too far from mine.

  (Lucky for me. It wasn't so lucky for her, now, was it?)

  It wasn't easy following her from the mall, which was near the loop. If you've driven in Houston, you know what I mean. The fucking loop is busy all hours of the day and night, and the people drive like maniacs, changing lanes, zooming across four lanes of traffic to get to an exit, cutting in front of you if you leave more than ten feet between your car and the bumper of the one in front of you.

  I managed it, though. She pulled off the loop near the Galleria and drove down Westheimer. Following her was a little easier then, but not much. All the fucking traffic lights.

  She turned off on Gessner and then turned again and pulled into an apartment parking lot.

  I hadn't even thought about how to kill her.

  I'd been so busy with the traffic and trying not to lose her, I hadn't even made a plan.

  It was almost dark, about eight-thirty (this was in the summer, two years ago, which means I've only killed nine women in two years, a demonstration of my restraint if one is ever called for).

  The parking lot was deserted. There were cars there, of course, but no other people.

  I parked a short distance away from her. I was getting desperate now. I had to kill her, but how?

  Then I remembered that I had a tire tool under my seat. Lots of people in Houston carry guns, but I carry a tire tool. You never know when some idiot will pull you over and attack you for some reason, like thinking you've shot him the finger for his own driving habits or needing five bucks for another hit at the local crack house. There are all kinds of maniacs running loose in this town.

  She got out of her car and started toward the apartments, so I reached under the seat and got the tire tool. Then I got out and followed her.

  The tire tool was round, with a flattened tip to make it easy to pry off the hub cap. That part was about a foot long, and then it bent off to a shorter part that ended in the wrench that fit over the lug nuts. It felt smooth and cool in my hand as I followed the woman.

  She never suspected a thing.

  Most of them never do. They might read stories about people being attacked, mugged in their own parking lots, but they never think it will happen to them.

  I was whistling a tune, just walking along, holding the tire tool down by my leg. I was trying to look calm and unconcerned, like I was just another resident of the apartments. As excited as I was, it wasn't easy to appear calm, but I think I managed very well.

  I had gotten to within ten feet of her when she opened her door, and when she went through it I was right behind her.

  She tried to close the door, but I smashed right into it, hitting it hard with my shoulder. The edge of the door caught her and threw her a few feet into the living room. I barreled in after her and slammed the door behind me.

  She was looking at me, her thin mouth open, her eyes getting big. I could tell she was about to scream.

  The blood marks were writhing like snakes. Any minute they were going to crawl right off her and try to get on me. I couldn't let that happen.

  So I stepped over to her and swung the tire tool at her face.

  Chapter 11

  Casey was tired after the swim, but it was late and she and Margaret were both hungry. She fixed Kraft macaroni and cheese out of a box for supper. Margaret liked macaroni and cheese, especially if it had plenty of cheese in it.

  "Did you meet anyone in the pool?" Casey asked as they were eating.

  "Just some boy named Jack," Margaret said around a mouthful of noodles. "And some girl named Sandy."

  "Did you like them?"

  "I guess." Margaret swallowed her noodles and drank some milk. When she put the glass down there was a white milk mustache on her upper lip.

  She seemed notably lacking in her usual enthusiasm when it came to her new acquaintances. "I liked my old friends better."

  Casey felt a momentary twinge of guilt. It had been her decision to move to Houston, and she had known all along that Margaret would be more affected by the move than Casey herself. Still, it had seemed like the right thing to do. She could not picture herself living in the same town with the Asshole any longer.

  "I'm sure you'll like Jack and Sandy a lot when you get to know them," she said. "As I remember it, you hit Jon in the head with your shovel the first time you played in his sand pile."

  "Did not!" Margaret said. She smiled. "I hit him with the pail."

  "Oh," Casey said, remembering the incident more clearly, smiling along with her daughter. She was sure Margaret would adjust, probably better than her mother.

  They had stayed at the pool for a couple of hours, Casey swimming and talking. The more she had talked to the group at Rob's table, the more she found herself liking Rob and Dan Romain, despite the latter's sometimes cynical outlook on life.

  The Warleys were another story. Tina was OK; she had a good sense of humor and knew a little about books and poetry, but she tended to pick on Craig a lot.

  Craig did not take the picking very well, either, but Casey thought a lot of it was justified. He did tend to make pronouncements about everything and to believe that he was the ultimate moral authority on almost any question that came up.

  They had somehow gotten off on the subject of drugs and prostitution, problems with no seeming resolution. It was Rob's opinion that the police did nothing that really helped.

  "They bust the whores on Telephone Road," he said, "or maybe they put on a sting and bust a few of the johns. But what good does that do? In a week or two it's business as usual. The big drug dealers are never touched; they're not even harassed."

  "Why bother?" Dan Romain said, never mentioning his connection with the department. "Bust one dealer, and three more take his place."

  That was Warley's cue. "Why bother to bust 'em at all? The prisons are so full that they'll be back on the streets in six months so we can put somebody else in the crossbar hotel for half a year. What they oughta do is cut their damn heads off."

  "That seems a little harsh," Tina said.

  "Hell it is. I read somewhere that in one of those Arab countries they executed a couple of guys for spray-painting a wall. They know how to do things over there. I bet there isn't a hell of a lot of graffiti on the walls over there, what do you think?"

  "So you think the fear of really severe physical punishment, like being permanently maimed, would keep people from committing crimes?" Romain said.

  "Damn right. Catch 'em and cut their fucking hands off. Or their noses off. That might be even better. You can get artificial hands that work pretty good, but it might be hard to fix yourself up with an artificial nose that looks like the real thing."

  "But this country doesn't believe in cruel punishments like that," Casey protested.

  "Who says it's cruel?" Warley wanted to know. "Those whores, they don't even stay in the slammer overnight. I bet if you sewed their pussies shut for a first offence, you'd do a lot to cut down the number of ladies of the evening soon enough. Pretty drastically, too."

  "It's a drastic punishment," Romain said. "I don't think you'd get the Supreme Court to go along with it."

  "Fuck the Supreme Court," Warley said. "Flag burners, the whole bunch of 'em."

  It went on like that for a while. Casey came to see that Rob and Dan probably kept Warley around simply for the amusement he provided, but she took him more seriously than they obviously did. She thought men like Warley were dangerous. All the anger they kept building up inside was bound to break out sooner or later, or so it seemed to her. Of course, she wasn't the psychologist. Romain was.

  She also found that she was definitely attracted to Rob Hensley. He didn't try to put any moves on her, for which she was grateful, but he was sensitive and responsive, the kind of man she thought she needed after her experience with the Asshole.

  She wasn't about to think about getting involved at this point in her life, however, not with some man she'd met only a few hours before. There was plenty of time for that later. Right now, all she wanted to do was get the supper dishes done and go to bed.

  "What are you working on now?" Tina Warley said. She was standing in the doorway of the "study," which was what she and her husband called the smaller bedroom of their two-bedroom apartment. There was no bed in it; instead it contained a desk, two gray steel filing cabinets, a bookshelf, and a computer table.

  Craig Warley was sitting at the computer table, his face bathed in the glow from the screen of a monitor. The overhead light in the room was not turned on, nor was the desk lamp.

  "Nothing," Warley said, not looking up from the screen. "You can go on to bed if you want to."

  "Is it something for one of the clients?" Tina said. "Yeah. Yeah, it is, but nothing that you're familiar with. I'll be through in a minute or two."

  Tina went back into the living room to watch Johnny Carson's monologue before going to bed. She was a little worried about Craig. He was doing quite a bit of work at night lately, sometimes leaving the apartment and going to the office, sometimes preferring to work on their home computer.

  The accounting business was going well, and they were making money now, after a couple of hard years at the beginning. They had opened up with the help of a loan from her parents right after they got out of college, though they knew it was a risk to start right off with their own business. That was the way they wanted it, however. They didn't want to have to go to work for someone else.

  She and Craig had both passed their CPA exams on the first try, and they knew they could make money, but it had been a struggle in the beginning. They'd opened the office right at the depths of the oil bust, and clients were few and far between.

  Now the city seemed to be recovering, and their business was doing well, but she didn't like the workaholic attitude that Craig had developed. He was away from the apartment almost as much as he was there, and the more money they made, the more overbearing he became.

  She was doing her share of the work for the partnership, had her own clients, but she lacked whatever it was that drove her husband. There were times when she wondered if somehow she might be at fault, if he was using the work as an excuse to avoid her, but that didn't seem likely.

  She sat and watched the TV, and just as Ed was stooging it up and asking Johnny, "How hot was it?", she suddenly wondered if there might be another woman in Craig's life. That might explain his absences even better than work, might explain why he was telling her to go on to bed without him. Maybe he didn't want her anymore.

  She almost laughed at herself for thinking it. Craig seemed, if anything, more interested in her sexually than ever. Sometimes it was as if he couldn't get enough.

  She allowed herself a satisfied smile. There was nothing wrong on that score. If her husband was driven to make money, that was all right with her; there were worse ways for him to spend his time

  It was an hour later when Craig shut off his computer. He covered the keyboard and monitor with their plastic antistatic covers. The printer had not been used.

  He was getting tired of Tina coming in there when he was working on his private projects. He was going to have to warn her off, maybe keep the door closed.

  He went into the bathroom to get ready for bed, thinking about the new resident, Casey Buckner. She was a real piece of ass, and he felt himself getting hard as he thought about her.

  It was a good feeling. He was glad he was still young enough to enjoy it. Hell, all he had to do was think about fucking and he got stiff as a board. He'd been talking to one of his clients, Sam Rouster, a sixtyish oil man, who had told him that nothing, not even sex, ever came easy after you hit the big Six-Zero.

  " 'Bout the only thing does it for me now is the young ones," Sam had said. "Early twenties. They got to have big tits and hard asses, too. Otherwise, forget it. I'm just damn lucky I can afford it. Good thing I didn't lose all my money in the bust."

  Craig turned on the shower and stepped in. He was a long way from the big Six-Zero. Tina was going to get a rude awakening if she was already asleep.

  He sort of hoped that she was.

  Romain turned off his surge protector and watched his monitor grow dark. A faint glow lingered for a few seconds after the power was gone.

  He rubbed his hand over his face. He hadn't been sleeping well lately. Didn't know why. Maybe too much work at the office.

  It could happen that way. You got so involved that the work carried over, simmering down there in your subconscious, bursting to the surface when you least expected it, waking you every time you were about to drop off into deeper sleep.

  There were other things like that, things that boiled around below the surface and burst out unexpectedly in certain types of people. He'd been talking to someone—Howland—about it that afternoon.

  And when it did burst out, it could be terrifying, though not always to the person it burst out of.

  He wished that Howland would leave him out of things. He didn't like dealing with people at work.

  And it wasn't going to help him sleep if Howland kept on pestering him about the serial killer. He almost wished he'd told Howland that he was on the wrong track, that it just wasn't possible for a single person to have committed all the crimes Howland thought were part of the series.

  He would have said that, but sooner or later, probably sooner, someone would have noticed the same thing Romain had, that what tied the crimes together was the remarkable tidiness of the crime scenes.

  It was beyond the reach of probability that there were several killers on the loose, all of whom could commit such antiseptic murders.

  Howland himself would have spotted it, and it wouldn't have taken him much longer.

  Then Romain would have been on the spot, a place he didn't like to be. He never liked calling attention to himself in the department.

  He didn't particularly like it in social situations, either, though there were times when he was tempted, like today. That Casey Buckner was quite an interesting woman.

  She wouldn't have any interest in him, however. He knew that. The women he went out with, when he went, were not like her at all. They were older, and usually a lot more desperate.

  He didn't mind, he told himself. He could even understand it. Why would a young, attractive woman want to go out with a skinny, sour guy like him?

  Money. That was one reason, but he didn't have any, not enough, at any rate.

  Still, looking at her, he was resentful, knowing that even an ass like Craig Warley was more likely to have a chance with her than he was.