cause of all this.'
Mary, frozen in place, said nothing and did not move. Again Lauralie stared up at the TV to see her yearbook photos displayed.
'I got what I wished for, Mary. Finally…wanted.' She laughed. 'Wanted by everybody now…hell of a price on my head, you know that, Mary? Mary, Mother of God, you think you'd like to collect on that bounty, Mother dear?' Lauralie again laughed.
Maury called from the kitchen, saying, ''Nough yammering out there, Mary. Burgers'll be up in five!'
'If you want to stay safe, get down behind the counter, Mother Mary,' Lauralie told her as she snapped open her purse, tilted it in Mary's direction, and flashed the muzzle of a gun lying within. The muzzle looked like the head of a snake to Mary, but she knew what it represented.
Lauralie had seen the activity of police vehicles going for the farmstead as she had filled the gas tank at a Mobil station on the main artery leading to her and Arthur's 'sugar shack' as she'd called it. She had waited at a careful distance, watching as slowly the raiders came away, leaving the area. One car in particular, belonging to Lieutenant Lucas Stonecoat, she had followed to this vicinity, noting where the shrink and the cop had turned off, approving of the location.
'I can't stop them from knowing they've located Arthur's car,' she told herself aloud, 'but I can stop them from calling it in.'
'What's that, honey?' asked the waitress, trying to bolster some courage in her heart and some feeling in her knees. Pretending ignorance and failing miserably. The heavyset blonde's makeup had melded with the grease here, her pores shining. 'Did ya want something else? Some coffee maybe?' She lifted the steaming pot and took a step, coming out from behind the counter, when Lauralie lifted the 9mm Glock from her purse, causing Mary to drop the coffee on the counter and duck. The explosion of the coffee urn sounded like a gunshot inside the empty diner. Outside, the two state troopers snatched out their weapons.
She wasn't yet ready for capture. She pulled the trigger of the 9mm she'd purchased from Clive's Gun Emporium, two blocks distant from the orphanage, the day she walked out of Our Lady. The first shot exploded the plate-glass window dropping the closest trooper, his body slamming into the pebbled drive, his feet twitching in his boots. The exploding shards of glass had dug into the second trooper's face and eyes while he pulled off a single shot, narrowly missing Lauralie's head, hissing by her.ear. Her second shot created a bloody hole in the other trooper's chest as he fell back on the hood of the BMW, instantly lifeless, his body slumped down to the grille, where he appeared merely to be in a slumped repose.
Maury had come racing in from the kitchen, had grabbed Mary by the arm, and was guiding her out the door behind the counter, rushing for a rear exit. Lauralie calmly stood, shouldered her purse, and walked around the counter, almost slipping on spilled coffee, going for the couple, her weapon smoking in her hand.
As she made her way to the rear of the M amp;M, Lauralie imagined Meredyth Sanger lying in the crook of Lucas Stonecoat's arm right now, sleeping blissfully under the canopy of safety she enjoyed, while she, an orphaned child without home or family or loved ones, was engaged in killing people she did not even know in her effort to make Sanger feel fear and self-loathing for her part in all of this. Lauralie meant to shatter Dr. Sanger's every conscious and perhaps unconscious moment of well-being and comfort, whatever it took.
She'd narrowly escaped the farmhouse raid, thanks to a sixth sense that police had zeroed in on Arthur. She suspected it had unraveled because Arthur had babbled on too long with the realtor lady when they'd rented the farmhouse. This, along with the likeness in the newspaper, made Arthur a liability, and adding to her growing dislike of Arthur and his touch, she'd had to listen to his increasingly constant nagging about her motive for hating Meredyth Sanger, until finally she'd simply had enough.
Lauralie moved down the narrow passageway and examined the kitchen, searching for where Maury had taken his waitress bride. She yanked open the freezer door, her gun pointed at the frozen, hanging carcasses of beef. East Texas elk, and buffalo. She recalled seeing elk stew and buffalo burgers on the menu. She rushed from the kitchen, back into the shoulder-width corridor, going for the rest rooms.
No one in the women's room.
No one cowering in the men's room.
Back to the grimy cave of the corridor, and she flashed on a momentary thought that wily Maury had gotten past her and rushed out the front. Not likely.
She looked past stacks of boxes-food and vegetable crates-to a blue door in the rear. Gone out the back, Jack, she thought, going for the door.
She heard a motor trying unsuccessfully to turn over just the other side of the blue rear door. As she pushed past boxes and cartons in her way, her sleep-deprived brain struggled to keep on task-on Mary and Maury-part of her saying, To hell with them…let them go… let them live to tell the tale of her great marksmanship… while another part of her mind drifted back to Arthur and the way she had left him at the farmhouse. At least I gave the dog man an everlasting home, a fucking stomping ground he can haunt unendingly, his very own personal eternal habitat, she thought, recalling how much she had liked the old place, and how he had completely spoiled it for her. Aside from killing Arthur-something she'd known she would do from the beginning-Lauralie had had to abandon the farmstead prematurely, before she was finished with her original plans. There remained a lot to carve up and forward to Dr. Sanger. But as in all things, one opportunity lost meant another found. Lourdes's entire bloated lower portions, like the racked carcasses in Maury's freezer, presented the largest and most shocking image Lauralie had imagined possible. Her next move against Sanger and Stonecoat necessitated that she wrap with care the rest of Mira Lourdes's body and transport it here.
She stood at the rear of the restaurant now, throwing up her arms and the gun to protect her eyes from stone and gravel spitting up at her from the barking tires of Maury's red Dodge pickup as it roared from the rear lot, ramming into a Dumpster and dragging it along with it. Lauralie leveled the gun, feeling a slight admiration for the M amp;M couple for making it this far.
Aiming for the back of Maury's head, his chef's hat still on, Lauralie steadied the gun with both hands and fired. The bullet zipped through the rear window, creating a little hole in both the window and the back of Maury's white hat, coloring it red, and opening up a gaping hole on the exit side, blood and brain matter all over the dash and dripping down the steering wheel as the truck plunged into a bank of public phones that now crumpled and jammed below the truck's demolished grille.
The red pickup held in place, its horn sent out a cry like a wounded, trapped animal. Only Mary, jammed in behind the passenger-side airbag, had any mobility left, should she leap from the disabled vehicle.
Lauralie looked around. Cars whizzed by on Highway 41 fronting the M amp;M Cafe. No one had pulled in, and no one had paid any heed to the scene at the diner.
Lauralie heard Mother Mary whimpering within the confines of the cab as she neared the disabled vehicle. Let the woman live. Think of the horror she now has to live with, if you let her live, Lauralie's head told her.
'No…not a time to take chances now…' she answered her doubts. Not until I make Sanger's life not worth living… not until I kill her man and maim her for life.
Again she leveled the gun, watching the stunned, blubbering Mary struggling against the duel problems of
Maury's weight and her imprisoning air bag, which had bloodied her face on impact. Her wig lay half on, half off her head. She tore with both hands at the ballooned air bag.
'Let me get that for you, honey,' shouted Lauralie, firing into Mary's head, the bullet exiting and exploding Mary's brain and the air bag simultaneously.
Since the troopers had not acted quickly enough, no one would know that the random killings here had anything to do with Lauralie Blodgett, she reasoned.
She dropped the smoking gun back into her purse. 'And they say there's no such thing as a free meal,' she joked, stepping lively now for the front of the cafe and her car. Passing the dead trooper sitting upright against her grille, she suddenly felt a pair of icy hands wrap around her ankle. The dead trooper had reached out and latched on, but he hadn't the strength, and she flicked her ankle, freeing it, coming away with a bloodstained stocking.
She reached into her purse, fingering the gun again, but the trooper had again gone dead. She let it be, got into the car, turned the key, and pulled straight back from the parking space. One trooper lay in the painful pose of a swastika, his body going in four directions at once, while the other lay in repose where he had softly slid from her grille to the pebbled drive when she had backed out.
She turned and pulled out onto the highway, and drove north toward the Spring Brook area and Meredyth
