his trail for twenty years now. So what if this one was digital, computerized…it couldn’t hide its identity. Harris grinned as he blew it to pieces. Whatever else happened to him after today, he was finally liberated.
* * *
“Easy, easy does it.” Peterson crouched down beside the boy who was cowering behind the fork truck, clasping his thigh and sobbing. Peterson pried his hands away and looked at the wound through the hole in his jeans. “Looks like it went clean through…bet it didn’t hit the bone. It’s bloody, but I don’t think it got an artery.” From the fork truck he snatched an oily rag, and tied that around a big wad of tissue he pulled from a box at the shipping station behind them. It would have to do for now.
“Can you make the effort to crawl out of here, kid?”
“I don’t know,” he whimpered.
“Try. Right out the loading dock behind us…he sounds like he’s heading off for the commercial presses. Do you know who he is?”
“I don’t know the dude’s name…Harris?”
Peterson nodded. Harris. That made sense. You’d have thought the company would have been more careful about a forty year-old man who came into work this week with a Mohawk haircut. Warren was going to go stomping up to
“I’d get out while I could, kid.”
“Thanks, man. Hey, what are you going to do…go after him?” The kid hadn’t missed the giant screwdriver.
“Yeah,” said Peterson.
The boy looked up at him, clearly impressed. In every harrowing situation, one man stepped forward. It was what sold
* * *
Warren hunkered down behind a shelf full of boxes of paper. If the killer knew he was there, the bullets would tear through easily, so the idea was to simply stay out of view. The shooting was uncomfortably close at hand; commercial press line, he figured. Good God, who could it be? These things only happened on the news! If that damn Peterson hadn’t taken so long with the fuse, he’d be safely on his way home by now…
The plant reminded him of a sinking ship now—the Titanic—the gunfire its engines exploding, and the crew screaming and running about in panic. He had to get to the nearest exit…leave it to somebody else to call the police. Women and supervisors first…
A man knelt down suddenly beside Warren, and his heart almost cried out with a voice of its own. “Peterson,” he hissed, “are you trying to get me killed?”
Peterson smiled at that, and drove the screwdriver up through the front of Warren’s throat. The impact bulged his eyes from their sockets. Then Peterson pushed sideways on the clear yellow handle as if forcing a stuck lever.
Police in Europe are well acquainted with the likes of a Thomas Willis Peterson. A man frustrated by his fearful desire of women and inability to communicate with them for terror of rejection, who takes to stabbing them with an easily palmed awl in the buttocks or thighs in tight crowds and then drifts anonymously away. A sort of revenge on the whole unobtainable species, and a kind of brief intimate penetration. A cowardly, pathetic sort of man they give the elegant name piqueur. In America, in these parts, for ten years now they had called their version of this man—less elegantly, more ominously—the Pick.
Thomas Willis Peterson—the Pick—had never killed anyone, however. But today it had come easily. Today he was inspired…
Now to find Harris, and kill him. He had to stop to reload sooner or later, and the Pick, ever stealthy, would be there. And why not? He could murder a man and become a hero for it. How ironic! Then he’d simply say he had pulled the screwdriver out of Harris’s pocket during the struggle with him. The screwdriver Harris had killed the upstairs supervisor Warren with. Saw the whole thing, Peterson the heroic murderer would tell them…
From anonymity to limelight. Maybe he’d even attract a girlfriend from all this. The idea gave him the courage and power to move on and stalk Harris, his next victim…
* * *
There were four of them hiding behind the shelf in the stock room—the teen age stock boy, an expediter girl and two of the girls who glued the samples in the catalogs the company sent out for dealers to display in their print shops. Harris pointed the assault rifle at the boy’s face and with two shots ruined reams of expensive paper, soaked thoroughly. One girl tried to run for it. Didn’t get far. This was easier than the arcade video shooting games Harris loved to play. More realistic graphics. Though he was a bit disappointed to have found today that blood didn’t fly profusely from bullet wounds as it did in the movies…let alone in glorious slow motion.
He turned on the remaining two, Alise and Joanie. Alise was a pretty teen ager. Easy for a misogynistic psychopath to kill. But Joanie made him hesitate. Poor Joanie…he could empathize with her. Shy, homely. Laughed at behind her back. Worse than they did to him, actually. Small and greasy-haired, eyes blankly timid behind thick lenses. No, even Harris the Mohawked berserker couldn’t shoot so helpless and pitiful a creature. A crippled fawn. He pivoted to point the weapon down at Alise. Her screaming became a hysterical siren…
Click. All thirty-five rounds in the first clip gone already? Harris gave Alise an apologetic grin while he yanked the mag out of the Galil’s belly.
He saw Alise’s eyes move, and whirled around. Peterson. Arm upraised. The Pick, descending on him…
The shot hurled Peterson back, though he remained on his feet. Harris turned again to Alise and Joanie, caught between two confusions.
Joanie’s pistol was a .22 target automatic; not at all powerful, but she was a good shot. One bullet into his left eye was enough to drop Harris at her feet on top of his big masculine rifle.
“Joanie,” Peterson began. He showed more disorientation and annoyance than fear or pain. He watched as Joanie tore the front of her blouse open with one dramatic wrench of her free hand, revealing the colorful massive tattoo of a demon which even flowed across her tiny breasts.
“I am Pazuzu the Avenger!” she corrected him, then shooting him in the left eye as she had with that couple in their car last summer.
Then Joanie turned the gun on Alise before, naturally, she shot herself, too.
John Sadness
Jane Thistle was wrenched with sobs as the tiny raft was carried by the holy men to the water’s edge. She walked in the procession, though she was still weak from the long labor that had delivered the blighted infant. Her husband John Thistle helped support her. Others, deemed more important in the ritual, walked ahead of them, even though they were the parents. There was the mayor of the village, John Stout, and the village surgeon, John Copper, their black top hats severe like parading towers. The four religious men in their cowled robes and sandaled feet, bearing along the flower-decorated raft, took the lead.
The nameless lake spread out before them, vast and black, misted gray where it blended with a distant horizon, lapping the shore with an insidious calm. Violent storms never blew in off this lake, and the oily waves never much varied their steady, somnambulant rhythm. Fish were not caught from this lake, and boats were never sailed upon it. Even travelers from the villages on its far side would rather spend months skirting around it than weeks sailing across it. Too many had been lost in the attempt. Too many had died eating the fish. It was said that these waters were tainted with the fluids from the machinery of those ancient people who had once populated this land, but had died out many ages ago, extinguishing themselves so thoroughly that they took most of their artifacts along with them.
But there was an island at the center of the lake, Jane Thistle had been assured by the surgeon who had examined her newborn, and the mayor who had given the Word, in accordance with the laws of their religion. No one alive had ever set foot upon this island, but it had been sighted before travel on the lake had finally been
