spiders.
She had thought that nothing could be more devastating than finding the bodies of Paul and Sarah-and later Laura-but this had been worse. This time she had been in the same room when murder happened, close enough not merely to hear the screams but to feel them like punches in the chest.
She supposed the killer was robbing the place, but he didn't need to kill the clerks just to get the money. Necessity, of course, was not a deciding factor with him. He had killed them simply because he enjoyed doing so. He was on a roll. He was
She seemed trapped in an endless night. A breakdown in the cosmic machinery, gears jammed. Stars locked in place. No sunrise ever rising. And coming down through the frozen sky, a terrible coldness.
A light flashed, and Chyna brought her hands up defensively in front of her face. Then she realized that the flash had come from the other end of the store. And again.
Edgler Vess is not a hunter, as he had told the redheaded cashier, but a connoisseur who collects exquisite images, recording most of them with the camera of his mind's eye but once in a while with the Polaroid camera. Memories of great beauty enliven his thoughts every day and form the basis of his gratifying dreams.
Each camera flash seems to linger in the huge eyes of the Asian clerk, glimmering as if it were his spirit trapped behind his corneas and seeking egress from the cooling mortal coil.
Once, in Nevada, Vess had killed an incomparable twenty-year-old brunette, whose face had made Claudia Schiffer and Kate Moss look like hags. Before meticulously destroying her, he had taken six photographs. With threats, he had even managed to make her smile in three of the shots; she had a radiant smile. Once every thirty days during the three months following that memorable episode, he had cut up and eaten one of the photos in which she'd been smiling, and with the consumption of each, he had been fiercely aroused by the destruction of her beauty. He had felt her smile in his belly, a warming radiance, and knew that he himself was more beautiful because he contained it.
He can't remember the brunette's name. Names are never of any importance to him.
Knowing the name of the young Asian gentleman, however, will be helpful when he describes this episode to Ariel. He puts aside the Polaroid, rolls the dead man over, and takes his wallet from his hip pocket.
Holding the driver's license in the light from the gooseneck lamp, he sees that the name is Thomas Fujimoto.
Vess decides to call him Fuji. Like the mountain.
He returns the license to the wallet and tucks the wallet in the pocket. He takes none of the dead man's money. He won't touch the cash in the register either-except to extract the forty dollars in change that is due him. He isn't a thief.
With three photographs taken, he needs only to keep his promise to Fuji and prove that he is a man of his word. It is an awkward bit of business, but he finds it amusing.
Now he must deal with the security system, which has recorded everything that he's done. A video camera is mounted over the front door and focused on the cashiers' counter.
Edgler Foreman Vess has no desire to see himself on television news. Living with intensity is virtually impossible when one is in prison.
Chyna was in control of her breathing again, but her heart knocked so hard that her vision pulsed, and the carotid arteries thumped in her throat as though jolts of electricity were slamming through them.
Again convinced that safety lay in movement, she leaned into the light and looked around the corner into the aisle in front of the coolers. The killer was not in sight, although she could hear him moving at the other end of the store: crisp furtive rustlings like a rat in a drift of autumn leaves.
On her hands and knees, stomach clenched in terror, she crawled into the spill of cooler light far enough to look along the narrow aisle, seeking something on the shelves to the right that might serve as a weapon. Without the butcher knife, she felt helpless.
No knives were conveniently for sale. Nearest to her were hanging displays of novelty key chains, fingernail clippers, pocket combs, styptic pencils, packets of moistened towelettes, eyeglass-cleaning papers, decks of playing cards, and disposable cigarette lighters.
She reached up and took one of the lighters off the rack. She wasn't sure how she could use it to defend herself, but in the absence of a satisfyingly sharp length of steel, fire was the only weapon available to her.
The overhead fluorescent panels blinked on. The brightness froze her.
She looked toward the far end of the store. The killer wasn't in sight, but across one wall his slouched shadow swelled huge and then shrank and then glided away like that of a moth swooping past a floodlamp.
Vess switches the lights on only to look at the video camera mounted above the front door.
Of course the incriminating tape is not contained in the camera. If access were that easy, even some of the dimwit thugs who make a living sticking up service stations and convenience stores would be smart enough to climb on a stool and eject the cassette to take it with them or otherwise destroy the evidence. The camera is sending the image to a video recorder elsewhere in the building.
The system is an add-on, so the transmission cable isn't buried in the wall. This is fortunate for Vess, because if the cable were hidden, the search would be more time-consuming. The line isn't even tucked up above the suspended acoustic-tile ceiling. Bracketed to the Sheetrock, it leads openly to the back partition behind the cashiers' counter and through a half-inch-diameter hole in that wall to another room.
There's a door to that room as well. He finds an office with one desk, gray metal filing cabinets, a small safe with a combination lock, and wood-pattern Formica storage cabinets.
Fortunately, the recorder isn't in the safe. The transmission cable comes through the wall from the store, continues through two more brackets for a distance of about seven feet, then drops down through the top of one of the storage cabinets. No attempt at concealment whatsoever.
He opens the upper doors to the cabinet, doesn't find what he seeks, and checks below. Three machines are stacked atop one another.
Tape whispers through the bottom machine, and the indicator light shines above the word RECORD. He presses the STOP button, then EJECT, and he drops the cassette into his raincoat pocket.
He might play it for Ariel. The quality will not be first-rate, because this is an old system, outdated technology. But the precious girl will be impressed by his bold performance even in too brightly lit scenes on black- and-white tape that has been re-recorded too often.
A telephone stands on the desk. He uncouples it from the cord that leads to the wall jack and uses the butt of the shotgun to smash the keypad.
A new shift of clerks will come on duty, probably at eight or nine o'clock, in four or five hours. By then Vess will be long gone. But there's no point in making it easy for them to call the police. Something might go wrong with his plans, delaying him here or on the highway, and then he will be glad that he bought himself an extra half hour by destroying the telephones.
Beside the door is a pegboard on which hang eight keys, each with its own tag. With the exception of the current regrettable interruption in service, this establishment is open twenty-four hours a day-yet there's a key to lock the front door. He slips it off its peg.
In the work area behind the cashiers' counter once more, after closing the office door behind him, Vess snaps down a switch, and the overhead fluorescents wink out.
He stands in the dim light that remains, breathing through his mouth, licking his lips, rolling his tongue over his gums, tasting the lingering acrid scent of gunfire. The gloom feels good against his face and the backs of his hands; the shadows are as erotic as slender, trembling hands.
Stepping around the bodies, he goes to the counter and takes only his forty dollars from the cash register drawer.
The young Asian's Smith & Wesson.38 Chief's Special lies on the counter, in the cone of light from the gooseneck lamp, where Vess carefully placed it minutes ago. He is no more capable of stealing the gun than he is of taking money that doesn't belong to him.
The Slim Jim, from which the Asian took a large bite, is also on the counter. Unfortunately, the wrapper was
