Damn it.
Longarm drew his Colt and held it at the ready while he moved ghost-quiet through the rest of the downstairs. There were no other bodies. Only two. Only. Jeez. Murder was bad enough. Murdering women was worse. Two women dead in this house. And no sign of Clarice.
He should have found Clarice. Barbara was here. And the woman he thought was the other aunt. So where the hell was Clarice?
Longarm held his revolver in his left hand for a moment while he slowly and carefully wiped his right palm— damp with dread—on a trouser leg; then he resumed his grip on the gun. And began slowly, carefully mounting the steps toward the bedroom where he and Clarice had romped. So very few days past. He remembered the way.
Chapter 44
He heard the squeaking of bedsprings first. And then after that the low, soft sobbing of a woman in tears. They were in Clarice’s bedroom.
The door, he found, was primly shut. Everyone else in the house was supposed to be dead, but Buddy Matthews had tidily closed the bedroom door before he began raping his niece.
Longarm twisted the knob, pulling the door slightly to him so as to release the latch with as little noise as possible. The brass tongue slipped free from the mortise without a sound, and Longarm breathed easier.
He could hear Clarice’s weeping clearly now. And the steady, rhythmic creak of the springs along with the moist, meaty sound of flesh slapping flesh as two sweaty bellies collided over and over and over again.
Longarm made sure the Colt was comfortable in his hand and then pushed, ever so gently, on the door. A groan of metal rubbing on metal sounded as the hinges objected. It sounded almighty loud in Longarm’s ears. But then from inside the room, to someone distracted as Matthews no doubt was by now …
He pushed the door open another few inches and slipped inside. To find Buddy Matthews, trousers around his ankles and his boots still on but his ass bare and pale, shiny in the yellow lamplight inside Clarice’s half-darkened room. The man was lodged deep between Clarice’s legs, covering her slim body with his own. The two had stopped their movement at the intrusion.
Both looked at him with the wild, wide-eyed stares of deer caught unexpectedly in the beam of a bull’s-eye lantern. Both seemed frozen in place, locked into position with Clarice spread open to the lust of her own uncle. Except they hadn’t become frozen quite quickly enough.
Matthews must have had excellent hearing and perfect reflexes too, for with so little warning he had grabbed a slim, long-barreled revolver—Longarm recognized the gun as a crude Colt replica from the old cap-and-ball days, probably one of the weapons so hastily manufactured for the Confederacy by Dance Brothers or Griswold and Greer or some similar, even less well-known makeshift factory—and was holding it tight to Clarice’s temple. The girl looked at Longarm, and her tears flowed anew.
Her uncle held the cocked revolver tight to Clarice’s head with one hand and with the other quite casually reached over onto the nightstand beside her bed. He picked up a blood-crusted folding razor—no wonder the wounds in the flesh of the dead women downstairs had been so awful—and smiled at Longarm as he flipped the blade out of the handle and laid the edge ever so lightly across Clarice’s throat.
“Move and she dies, Deputy.”
“Do you know me?” Longarm asked.
“By reputation. I know who you are. I seen you at night sometimes lately. Know what else? I seen you screw with Clarey here. I got awful horny watching you do it with her. Those other bitches, they never liked being with boys. Not even when they were little. But Clarey, she likes a prick. Don’t you, honey?”
When the girl did not answer, Matthews’s voice hardened, and he repeated the question in a menacing hiss. “I said you like a prick. Don’t you?”
“Yes, I … yes I do.”
“You like it when I screw you, don’t you?”
“Yes, I like it.”
“You like me screwing you better than you like him. Don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“A lot.”
“Yes, I like it a lot.” Her voice was small, and the tears coursed freely down her cheeks to soak into the pillow behind her head.
Matthews’s razor fluttered rapidly up and down with the wild cadence of the heartbeat in Clarice’s throat.
“Don’t … hurt me … please.”
“You don’t want me to do you like I did those bitches downstairs?”
“No. Please.”
“I’ll do whatever I damn want with you. You know that, don’t you.”
“Yes.”
“And you respect me for that.”
“Yes. Of course.”
“You respect me a whole lot. Don’t you.”
“Yes. A lot.”
“A whole lot,” he corrected.
