cutting a tree with a single stroke.
Chop, wriggle, lift.
The killer meticulously attacks both bodies with the long broadsword. Clean, hard strokes. Devastating. Blood squirts high and sprays the killer. Flesh and bone part like air in the path of the razor-sharp knife. Puddles of frothy blood are quickly soaked up by the sand, leaving dark red stains.
When the -butchering is over, the Cuban drives the machete deep into the sand. He sets a red wool hat over the knife's handle and hasp.
Then both killers look up into the hills. they see the distant figure of Damian Rose beside the shiny green car. The handsome blond man is motioning for them to hurry back. He is waving his fancy German rifle high over his head.
What they can't quite see is that Damian Rose is smiling in triumph.
PREFACE
The Damian and Carrie Rose Diary
Consider the raw power and unlimited potential of the good old-fashioned 'thrill kill.' Under proper supervision, of course.
The Rose Diary
January 23, 1981; New York City
At 6:30 A.M. on the twenty-third of January, the birth date of his only child, Mary Ellen, Bernard Siegel-tall, dark, slightly myopic-began his usual' breakfast of loose scrambled eggs, poppyseed bagel, and black coffee at Wolf's Delicatessen on West Fifty-seventh Street in New York City.
After the satisfying meal, Siegel took a Checker cab through slushy brown snow to 800 Third Avenue. He used his private collection of seven keys to let himself into the modern dark-glass building, then into the offices of the publisher par excellence for whom he worked, and finally into the largest small office on that floor-his office-to try to get some busywork done before the many-too-many phones began to ring; to try to get home early enough to spend time with his daughter. On her twelfth birthday.
A young woman, very, very tan, squeaky clean, with premature silver all through her long, sandy hair, was standing before the dark, double-glazed windows. The woman appeared to be watching 777 Third Avenue (the building across and down Third Avenue), or perhaps she was just staring at her own reflection.
Bernard Siegel said, 'One-how the hell did you get in here? Two-who the hell are you? Three-please leave.'
'My name is Carrie Rose.' The woman turned to face him. She looked to be twenty-eight or twenty-nine, spectacularly poised and cool. 'I've come to make you an even more famous man than you are now. You are Siegel, aren't you?'
The editor couldn't hold back a slight smile, the smallest possible parting of thin, severe lips. She called him 'Siegel.'
Damn these shameless, impudent young writers, he thought. Had she actually slept in his office to get an interview? to give lucky him first crack at this year's Fear of Flying, or Flying, or The Flies?
Squinting badly, pathetically, for a man under forty, Siegel studied Carrie Rose. Mrs. Carrie Rose, he was to find out soon. Wife of Damian Rose. Soldier of fortune herself.
Under closer scrutiny, the young woman was striking, tall, and fashionably trim. voguish.
She had on large tortoiseshell eyeglasses that made her look more sharp-witted than she probably was; the blue pin-striped suit was meant to keep Siegel off his guard, he was sure. An old Indian dodge.
'All right, I'm Siegel,' the nearsighted editor finally admitted. 'I'm hardly famous. And this sort of clever, gratuitous nonsense doesn't cut it with me.... Please leave my office. Go back and write one more draft of your wonderful book. Make a regular-hours appointment with my-'
'Oh, but you are famous, Bernard. ' The woman interrupted him with an ingenue's toothy grin. 'You're so well known, in fact, that busy people like myself go to great inconvenience to give you million-dollar book properties. Books that will make, at the very least, dents in history
Siegel laughed. A cruel little laugh, but she deserved it.
'Only a million for it?'
Carrie Rose laughed, too. 'Something like that. '
She examined Siegel closely, then looked casu ally around his office at the unmatched oak and pine bookcases on two of the walls; an Olivetti letter a typewriter tucked inside the banged-up rolltop desk, with sheafs of crisp white bond stacked neatly be- side it; new, shiny book jackets pinned to a cork board; manuscripts in different-color typewriter-paper boxes. The editor.
Siegel put down his briefcase, kicked off his loafers, and sat on his chair. He gave her a long cold stare. 'Well, where is this magnum opus?'
'You haven't had it ghostwritten yet,' the young woman said. Carrie Rose. 'Your writer's source material will be a diary my husband, Damian, and I kept last year. An unusual, very original diary that will cost you two million dollars. It's about... an awful nest of machete murders. Over a hundred of them.
The pretty woman said it very coolly 'an awful nest of machete murders.'
PART I
The Season of the Machete
March-July, 1979
Death in Lathrop Wells
