and narrow hips, and it had aged well.
“There is
I reached for her. She danced lightly away from me, eyes amused.
“Not here, lamb. We don’t want to stain the couch, do we?”
She took my arm. Her hands were cool. We walked, side by side, toward the bedroom. She bumped her hip against me as we walked. At the doorway I grabbed her, kissed her. She ground her body against mine, then slipped out of my arms.
“Bed,” she said.
She lay on her back. My hands touched her breasts, her belly. I moved over her, ready for her, and…
“Come on, lamb. I never fucked a killer before. Can you do it without a knife, baby?”
The words were knife enough. They went for the groin and found their mark, and desire dropped like a fast curtain. Everything turned to flashes of red and black. I had a fire in the back of my skull. My hands turned to fists.
I did not kill her, I did not even hit her. I wanted to. I ached to. But somehow I found strength I never even knew I had, and I threw myself away from her, threw my whole body away from her and off the bed and onto the floor. And lay there for a nearly blank moment while the red and black faded slowly out and the world, for better or for worse, came back into focus.
“Well Gwen said you were a lousy lay, killer. Do you always crap out like that? Is that what happens with the whores? You use the knife when you can’t get it up?”
“I never killed those girls,” I said quietly. I got up from the floor. “I never killed anyone. But just now I came within two inches of killing you, Linda. I hope you got your kicks.”
“I got all the kicks you could ever give me, killer.”
I looked at her. I couldn’t even hate her any more. It was all gone, and I felt nothing more than a nugget of shame for having briefly wanted her.
“You can put the knife away,” I said. “I just became immune to you.”
“You think so?”
“I know so.”
“My baby sister had a lover.”
“I don’t care.”
“She told me all about it.”
“I don’t care.”
“She wasn’t in love, though. It was purely for sex. You couldn’t keep her happy in that department, killer.”
I turned away from her. I walked back into the living room and she followed after me. I got dressed. She didn’t.
“I know who it was.”
“I didn’t ask his name. Partly because, at the moment, I don’t think I really cared. Partly because I had the feeling she would tell me anyway. I had challenged her to stick the knife in again, and she had to prove she could do it, so she would tell me.
“Don’t you want to know?”
“What’s the difference?”
“It was someone you know.”
I dressed slowly and deliberately. I wanted more than anything on earth to get out of there and away from her, but I took my time and dressed slowly and carefully, turning my socks right side out, before putting them on, knotting my tie neatly, all of that.
And she said, “It was Doug MacEwan.”
13
I DISAPPOINTED HER. SHE WANTED A REACTION AND I SIMPLY didn’t give her one. Not, I must admit, because I was too drained and dispassionate and dull to be surprised, but because I very simply did not believe her. It was too obvious a line.
“You really are immune, aren’t you?”
I nodded.
“My mistake, then. I should have told you in bed. That was my Sunday punch; I was saving it from the minute you started asking, and I thought I’d hold it right until the end, but-”
“Earlier,” I said, I might have believed it.”
She took a step back, placed her hands on her hips, and flashed me an astonished smile. “Oh, beautiful,” she said. “You don’t believe it?”
“Of course not.”
“Then maybe you’re not immune after all.”
“You’re wasting your time, Linda.”
“Am I? Okay, killer, let me cite chapter and verse. Easter time, the same year you killed the girl, Gwen told you she was going with me to see Uncle Henry, who was supposed to be dying. He wasn’t. The same weekend your friend MacEwan had a convention in St. Louis. He didn’t You can even check all of this out you silly bastard. About a week after their weekend Gwen didn’t come home one night She said she was with me; I was drunk and trying to kill myself. You offered to come over and she wouldn’t let you. MacEwan had a story for Kay that night, too. Then a week after that-”
She went on, and she documented everything quite perfectly, and after a while I stopped listening. I felt strangely numb. I wanted to go away. I wanted to be alone someplace dark and quiet and warm.
“Still think you’re immune, killer?”
I looked at her. “Get dressed,” I said “You look lousy naked.”
“I asked you a question.”
I turned from her, walked toward the door.
“Do you think he framed you?”
“I don’t know.”
“You just can’t admit that you killed those girls yourself, can you?”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t say anything. I opened the door, I walked outside into fresher air, I closed the door after me. And walked down the path to the sidewalk with the sound of her laughter ringing metallically in my ears.
I must have walked around blindly. I thought I was taking the right route back to the train station, but evidently I made a wrong turn somewhere and wound up lost. By the time I realized this my sense of direction was completely out of whack, and I ultimately circled around half the city and came up behind the railroad terminal from the far side.
Which was just as well.
Because I had made one mistake. I had never thought to rip the bedroom telephone out of the wall, or to incapacitate Linda, and she had decided to use the knife one final time. There were police cars all over the place.
14
I SLIPPED BACK INTO THE SHADOWS, TURNED THE CORNER, WALKED quickly away. The train was clearly
