Dexter Poindexter averted his gaze from the mirror. He was a shy guy. Too shy for his own good, some people said.
That’s what Mommy and Daddy told him, though Daddy Owen, the spouse they had divorced the year before, disagreed.
Dex fluffed the wide ends of his bone-white bowtie, nice smooth ripples. Its color and satin sheen matched his lobebag, a tight garter band right around the base of the ear and a generous splay below.
He sincerely hoped these things were dry-cleaned between rentals. It grossed Dex out to think of some other guy’s lovelobe in this same bag. Maybe many guys, though styles changed often enough that it wasn’t likely.
Dex shrugged into the coat, buttoned a button at his waist, and shot the sleeves.
His tux looked sharp.
Tweed would whistle at it. Her eyes would go wide. Of course, Dex would be busy admiring what a knockout she was in her gown, which she had described again and again these past few weeks in great detail.
It was fortunate they were in the dance band. Running through one chart after another would take their minds off the general terror.
As sophomores and juniors, he and Tweed had played senior proms, learning first hand what it was like to see the murdered couple carried into the gym, laid out beside the centerpiece, danced around, and at midnight torn apart.
That reminded him.
He went to the dresser and lifted the cleaver, its blade no longer than his index finger and not much wider. His church group—all church groups across the nation did this—had given him and Tweed practice. An expendable sheepdog. Dex had gotten a cross-section of tufted ear and only been nicked once.
Of course, tonight there would be more kids diving in to futter the couple. And their state of mind would be way more agitated.
That was for sure.
Dex’s right leg twitched.
You had to be brave, cram in there, push and shove and lunge, praying that some doofus did not, by design or accident, clip your lobes, or slice off your fingers, or slash your face.
Dex raised his suitcoat’s right flap.
These tuxes, the more expensive ones anyway, had a special pair of loops. On the right loop, he secured the handle of his cleaver. On the left, his Futterware container.
The cuffs caught his attention, as wide as high collars, and as flappy.
Cufflinks.
As stern as Dex’s father was, he always had his son’s welfare at heart. Dex removed the lid from the white box on his bureau. On top of a layer of cotton waited the gold-skull cufflinks his father had worn, and Dex’s grampa before him.
Signs of love.
Mommy and Daddy had that ferocious look stitched to their faces. Harsh words spilled in profusion from their mouths. They were quick with the whip and Christlike in their savagery.
But they were proud of him, pleased in his choice of Tweed as a girlfriend, and bursting with joy that tonight was Dex’s prom night.
He would brave the slasher, cut his way through the brambles, and emerge triumphant and ready to take his place as a useful citizen.
What more could he ask of life than that?
Dex poked a cufflink through a stiff ironed hole and snapped it into place.
The principal of Corundum High was taking his sweet time getting ready.
He wasn’t showering.
He wasn’t dressing.
Nor was he busy thinking mean thoughts about the little shits who would get their comeuppance tonight.
In point of fact, Peyton “Futzy” Buttweiler was on his hands and knees in the playroom, being whipped senseless by his lacklove wives.
“I’m sorry,” sniveled Futzy.
Torment sneered. “Far as I’m concerned, you’re not nearly sorry enough. He isn’t, is he, Trusk? Lay into the fucker!”
And Trusk, the heftier wife, did as she was told.
Frayed and beaded whip-ends sizzled through the air and snapped away, interwoven with the high smack of Torment’s bullwhip, crosswise upon naughty little Futzy Buttweiler’s back.
Bloodspray spattered the walls, an abstract mural in progress.
Futzy’s much deserved flaying fired up his brain. But his dead daughter’s image burned as bright as ever.
“Harder,” he pleaded. “Harder!”
“You miserable little shit-smoocher,” said Torment. “Don’t you dare order me and Trusk about. We’re not a couple of high school tramps. You see all those blood flecks on the wall?” She bunched up twists of Futzy’s sweat- slicked hair and yanked his head back. “Tomorrow, first thing, you’re going to lick ’em all off, every damned one of them. No breakfast for old Futzy-Wutzy till he gets these walls spanking clean.”
“His wounds are closing,” observed Trusk.
“Well, fuck,” said Torment, “we can’t have that now, can we? Open ’em back up. Make new ones. Real fierce and frenzied, Trusk. Slice the scumwipe some indelible memories. Volley!”
With that, Trusk and Torment redoubled their effort. Grunting into their swings, they so minced the skin covering Futzy’s shoulders and ribs, that wide expanses of bone peered through. Seas of red rushed in, to be parted by renewed whipsmacks.
“ Fuck his sorry ass!”
Futzy wept.
Kitty’s young face shone bright and smiling. Her senior picture.
But around the edges of her smile peered an accusatory look, a look of shame and disgust at her father’s inaction at her senior prom.
She was right to scorn him.
Do it, he thought to the two bitches he had taken in to punish him after Kitty’s death.
A marital masochist, that’s what he was.
Do it. Do it!
He dared not say it aloud, lest they withhold his punishment entirely.
“Now,” said lean and mean Torment, the brains of the duo. “Give off. Man the machine.”
Trusk’s whip handle clattered to the floor.
Futzy braced himself for the pain.
Spang went the release mechanism and hush-hush-hush the grains of salt from the funnel above. They pinged and stippled against his skin, finding their way, much of them, into the V’s of his wounds.
Salt knifed into him everywhere. Pain waved through his body like the unending misery twenty years before, the thoughts he could not shut off no matter how hard he tried.
Futzy passed out, the harsh words of his wives ringing in his ears, longing for death but knowing it would not yet be his.
The blue clunker pulled up to the curb and parked two blocks from Zane Fronemeyer’s house.
A quiet walk past manicured lawns, no faces peering out. The doorbell chimed. Zane would be in the basement. But if not, if he was finished already, knifing three of them wouldn’t pose too great a problem.
All planned, all smooth.
Familiar heads appeared at the decorative window in the door: Hedda and Camille, taste of sex on the lips,
