Hillary's upside-down eyes as they blinked open in confusion and terror, which spread through her quivering old frame. He smiled in a kindly manner and said, “I didn't get a chance to thank you and Earl, ma'am, for all your kindness. I'm doing that now.”
“ You bastard! You god awful son-of-a-creature of Satan, you son-of-a-”
Her words were cut short when he severed the jugular, and the rest of her epithets came out in a spittle of gibberish and gurgling and blood.
Matisak stepped back to watch the action of the blood as it pumped itself snakelike down into the silver bucket. He again calculated he had enough jars.
“ It's not the best of blood, but it's carried you two a long way,” he said to the now-silent corpses. He marveled a bit at the way Hillary's corpse flinched and jerked toward the end. Earl had gone much more quietly, but then he'd had a rather bad contusion to the head. A lot of the blood was spilt over the straw and dirt floor, which was a shame, he felt. There was little to do for it; he hadn't the kinds of controls he would prefer. Bleeding a person ought to be more an exact science, as it had been with Dr. Gabriel Arnold back in Philly. Now that dialysis machine, he thought, that was control. He meant to purchase or steal a portable one of his own, no matter what. He meant to be ready for Jessica when she at last came to him.
But here in the rickety old barn, given the conditions, the fact he was a fugitive, the primitive tools he had to work with, he hadn't done so badly. His former care and technique over his victims would, in time, return to him. “Just give it time,” he assured himself, patting and jingling the little canvas bag filled with precious coins, “and I'll be back, stronger than ever.”
He drank down one of the pint jars filled with Earl's blood now, gulping, feeling sated for the first time since his arrival in Tahlequah. The blood fix soothed his frayed edges, calmed his mind, lulled him.
He knew he couldn't stay. The Redbird farm was seen by people going by every day. They'd look at it and instantly feel something odd, sense something out of kilter, see the lack of smoke in Hillary's chimney, smell no baking odors and sense a hundred other things out of sync here. Pretty soon the flies would come and the all-too- natural odor of the corpses would waft out over the little patch of corn that Earl had planted in the spring.
He'd been with the Redbirds for nearly a month now, and they'd finally accepted his story that he was indeed related to them. Some of the neighbors wondered about him, asked nosy questions, but no one recognized him or seemed to want to recognize him. He had altered his appearance, growing a full beard, coloring his hair, sporting glasses, but still he'd imagined that someone might be smart enough to figure him out. If no one else, then Earl.
He knew the lay of the land and the customs here, but old Earl was no more related to him than was the President of the United States. But his grandfather had lived in this old house built of stone to last the ages, and the Redbirds had bought the place, Grandfather first deeding it over to Matisak's parents in the final, feeble moments of his life, as a favor to his son and daughter-in-law, whose idea it was to sell the worthless place. Matisak recalled how his mother, gaining access to the property at last, had talked of better days for them at last. Now, for the Redbirds, their transaction with the Matisak family had come full circle.
Soon he'd come full circle with Jessica Coran too, soon after she received his latest poem to her, after news of how the old Earl and Hillary had ended their days together on this hardscrabble plot of land. She'd come to have a firsthand look at his handiwork; she'd have to. She wouldn't be able to keep away, not even if she wanted to. He was as much in her blood as she was in his, he reasoned.
And when she came… he'd be waiting…
He was angry with Jessica for having left Oklahoma in the first place, for having given up hope of their reunion. Where was she now? Why hadn't she stayed in Oklahoma to hunt him down as she'd promised in the press? Where was the bitch whose blood he most savored now? He'd once again been wronged by the one person whose blood he most wished to devour, and she called him evil, her with her torturing innocence. Always filled with that sickening sense of righteous indignation; the self-righteousness of the pampered and pedigreed, as if she were completely innocent, as if she had nothing whatever to do with his obsessions and his blood lust.
Still, he must admit that she didn't know evil quite so intimately as he'd like her to know it.
But by the god of all that was perverse, she had excited and inspired him. She'd been the catalyst to stimulate him to new heights, since his first contact with her, his first all-too-brief taste of her blood, when she'd first hunted him across the Midwest and throughout all of Chicago. She was the reason Dr. Arnold had to die; she was the reason he himself had to escape, so that he might see her again, touch her again, listen to that melodic voice once more, but this time without cameras or recorders or bars or six-inch-thick glass partitions between them.
He now dipped his index finger into the last jar of crimson fluid extracted from Hillary, and in her blood he wrote across a smooth #2 pinewood board he'd nailed to the joists beside Earl and Hillary his latest sentiment toward Dr. Jessica Coran. He started by drawing a scarlet T, the first line reading:
Time to renew, Jess
Soon he was entranced by his own poetic vision, the words and blood flowing in tandem, as if inspired, his finished product reading:
Time to renew, Jess
All devotion to you, Jess…
Come to renew
Our love which grows here
With each drop that flows here…
Then he was sated for the moment, sipping on more of Earl's blood from one of the mason jars, when he heard a dull rumble-against-stone noise coming from outside, either a faraway plane or a car coming along the hardscrabble surface of the dirt road. A peek out into the bright day hurt his eyes, but he made out the black and white trappings of the Res Police car fast approaching.
Matisak grinned in the darkness.
He had the res cops in his sights now the entire way. They pulled to within six yards of Hillary's kitchen window, one of them shouting from the car while the other hammered the horn. When they got no response, each man got out, both looking trim and muscular in their green serge uniforms.
One went for the house, the other coming directly toward the barn and other outhouses.
Matisak's grin widened. He felt like the ghoul beneath the bridge, prepared to pounce, his eyes wandering back toward the carnage over his left shoulder where the two remaining tenterhooks and halters begged for weight. He raised the blood-caked spade he'd used on Earl.
His single worry was where to find more mason jars and an additional cooler.
10
Brothers and Sisters, I bid you beware
Of giving your heart to a dog to tear.
Quantico, Virginia
She was damned if she did, damned if she didn't, and she bloody well knew it. Even getting on the Lear jet provided her by Paul Zanek and the Air Force at Quantico, she knew there was no hope for it.
If Kim had said no to Paul and the New Orleans assignment, she would have handed Chief Zanek the first official stake to drive into her heart-or the heart of her fledgling division. Insubordination still weighed heavily at the unofficial “court-martials” carried out all the time at Quantico. It would take more than a disagreement about assignments to do her completely in, but it would be a start, a first blot on the record to inevitably lead to another and another until the “evidence” indicted her.
And if not New Orleans, he'd find another “bazaar” for her to be banished to. Still, in accepting the dual challenge brought her by Commissioner Richard Stephens and the presence of Jessica Coran, Kim knew that she
