No noise came from the machine shop. But a bright light inside cut through wires of opaque glass in the lower half of the door, throwing sprays of dark diamonds across the corridor.
Something had gone on here. She sensed it. Perhaps her demented janitor awaited her, crouched to kill but ready for seduction if she played him right.
Jonquil grasped the doorknob and moved boldly inside, into the full light of the shop. Bulks of machinery stood gleaming and silent everywhere.
Tensed to repel attack, she took in Brayton and Raven standing by the far wall. Their soiled prom clothes had been torn. Their faces were forlorn and bereft, their eyes unable to stray from what they beheld.
Then she strode toward them. A large lathe moved out of her way, and there before her-wafts of deathstench turning the air moist and oozy and charged with sexual energy-were a pair of mauled, mutilated kids.
An unidentifiable male, headless, lay akimbo upon the tile floor. His off-white tuxedo was as pinkish red as bleeding gums. His chest looked as if it had, from neck to navel, once sprouted teeth, all of them yanked out now. Gaping holes pooled there, crimson fleshcups that made Jonquil swoon.
But it was the female that truly got Jonquil off, what with its slutty red-frilled frock and the sizzling-as-hot- blacktop body, no mistaking it, of Peach Popkin, whose face alone would have made identification problematic.
The Popkin girl had been caught in a swan dive, her arms extended, her bare back arched up into a U upon the platform that housed the table saw. Her breasts met the table’s smooth surface at nipplepoint, their tips pushed flat beneath her blanched aureoles.
Beyond the blade, the girl’s strawberry blond hair, streaked a deep red, wisped forward. Her coiffure had been mussed from the killer’s having pressed her forehead forward into the gray blur of a spinning blade.
At rest now, the blade stuck deep, through skin and skullbone, parting the halves of her brain. Though sprays of gore had spattered her flesh, most of it had shot across the room like spoutings from a dying whale’s blowhole.
The scene was breathtaking.
“We can explain,” came Brayton’s voice, a warmth to it that moistened Jonquil further.
“Oh no you can’t,” she said, not accusing but filled with the wonder she felt.
“We were in the backways,” said Raven. “We saw the killer come out of here. He had the boy’s head by the hair. He got away.”
“Marvelous,” said Jonquil. The woman before her was one succulent saucy wench. Then it struck her. “How did you break into the backways? Only the slasher’s supposed to know the combination, him and the janitor.”
“Should we tell her?” Brayton asked.
Raven made a face. “What choice?”
He shrugged. “Zane Fronemeyer was chosen to be your school’s slasher. He’s dead. The janitor axed him in his basement. Fronemeyer’s wives are dead too.”
Jonquil shuddered. “Zane was a scumsucking zit from the word go. He wanted to suck my scum. He kept nagging, long after I made it clear he was less than zero in my book. Camille and Hedda deserved better. But the question remains: How do you two know all this?”
Brayton tried to speak, then gave up.
“Let’s show her,” his date said. She raised her hand to her left ear.
Brayton did likewise.
Christ! In the presence of death, these two sexy people, thought Jonquil, are about to expose their sexlobes to me. They’re as turned on by all this as I am.
Ripples of come—need treadled through her loins. The right word, the right look, would set her off without a touch.
Their lobebags fell away.
And there, in all their glory…
But Raven’s exposed lobe was dyed a godawful green, some ridiculous protest among the homeless-by- choice. And Brayton yanked and peeled and his sexlobe, his friendship lobe too, came away in his hands like some spent Cyrano’s nose putty.
The crude puckers of flesh which punctuated the question marks of his ears meant but one thing.
“You and Raven… you’re—”
He nodded.
“My name’s Winnie,” the woman said.
“They took us off the streets, drugged us, delivered us to Fronemeyer. But Gerber Waddell killed him before he could kill us.”
This changed everything.
A couple of freaks.
From the look of his severed lobes, Brayton was a promjumper. No way would Jonquil deign to suck on the vestigial stump of anyone’s sexlobe, least of all some joker who had dodged his prom. Why, blowing a fucking eunuch would be about as frustrating and far more humiliating.
Jonquil sublimated her lust and grew cool.
“You’ve got no business being here,” she said. “I ought to have you, I will have you arrested.”
Brayton raised his hands. “Hey now—”
“We’re your best chance of catching the killer. You need access to the backways, and we’ve got it.”
The feisty little slut was right.
Jonquil still had the hots for Gerber Waddell. If she expected to fuck him before he was futtered, that could only happen by playing along with these two.
She deflated and stood down. “I give,” she said. “The backways it is. Let’s find him.”
“This way,” said Brayton, putting his lobebag back on. He punched a tiny keypad over the panel they stood before.
Winnie entered first, a soiled doll returned to the dingy package it had arrived in.
Jonquil went next, loving all over again the musk Brayton wore as she passed him and regretting what she’d learned about him. He’d have made an irresistible bedmate.
Brayton trailed after her.
The panel slid shut as the musty backways swallowed them up. Fired up at the prospect of finding the janitor, Jonquil moved between the homeless pair as though she were a convict and they her jailers.
Sandy glanced about nervously.
The larger stairwells, wide and step-scuffed at the four corners of the school, always teemed with students between classes.
But halfway along the east, north, and west sides of the school were less-frequented stairs, shut off at top and bottom by steel safety doors. The lights burned harsh here, throwing hard-edged shadows across pink-tiled walls.
The stairwell, which stank of Lysol, was a place of loneliness and crushed cigarette butts.
Rocky was squatting against one wall.
Beside him stood Cobra, his knee bent and one cleated heel stuck to the wall like a magnet. His back bent, he puffed on a coffin nail.
Sandy feared the lulls, those times when the three of them were here alone. Rushes of kids would come by from above and below, the bars of the steel doors clanging and releasing, latches raucously catching as they swung shut. Then for a time, no one. Ominous stillness. All a-fidget, she would long for the next wave of promgoers, her friends, Rocky’s friends.
Or total geeks, it didn’t matter.
Anyone to suggest safety in numbers.
They had hit another lull.
“Let’s go some place else,” she said.
Rocky, on automatic, began to rise.
Cobra’s free hand restrained him. “Stay put. Don’t get me wrong. I like Sandy’s sweet ass and I’m planning
