Harry and showing him where the bathroom and the refrigerator was. “Josh? Make sure you bring our guns up with you. I don’t think I can sleep without mine.”
“Okay, I’ll bring it. Good night, Harry.”
Sarah was about to get in the bed. She had just pulled back the covers when the rancid smell of curdled blood assaulted her nose. She had almost forgotten about the blood in the mattress. The technicians from the crimescene unit had cut three huge two-foot- by-two-foot squares out of the mattress for evidence but had left the rest of it. They had taken the fitted sheets but left the comforter and had even pulled the covers back up like they were trying to make the bed. It didn’t make any sense. There was something almost gruesome about it. Sarah looked down and only then did she notice that they had done the same with the carpet. The big clean spots were gone. Where they had been there was now just bare wood. It was time for a new mattress and a new carpet. There was no way she could sleep on that thing. Sarah collected her pillow and left the room. Josh was coming up the steps when she passed him in the hallway.
“I can’t sleep in there. It smells like rot. All the blood in that mattress is starting to reek and the police technicians cut it all up. I don’t know why they didn’t just take the whole thing. There ain’t shit we can do with what’s left of it. The whole thing smells like blood.”
Goose bumps raced across her flesh as she realized that she was talking about her own blood and remembered how it had been bled out of her. She went into the guest room and crawled into the queen-size bed wondering how Josh was going to fit in there with her. Josh tucked the Sig Sauer under her pillow and put his own weapon on the nightstand.
“Good night, baby. I guess we don’t need to get that Rottweiler now.”
“Let’s just hope that Harry still has some bite left in him,” Sarah said, then kissed Josh on the lips and rolled over to go to sleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Dale could hear the detective snoring in the next room. He’d panicked when Sarah and her husband had come home and begun searching the house for him. When the detective had arrived, he was certain that he’d be discovered. But they had missed him. The detective had talked about killing him if he found him in the house and so Dale had decided to slip out as soon as he was able. He’d been waiting ever since for the detective to finally go to sleep. It had taken longer than he had expected.
At some point Dale had fallen asleep and, as usual, he had dreamed of his mother. This dream was different than the rest, however. This one felt more like a latent memory, a recollection of something long-suppressed. He felt the emotions almost immediately, before anything had happened, a crushing fear and sadness came down on him along with the taste of metal and the smell of blood and his mother’s tea leaf-scented perfume and perspiration.
“Why are you killing me, Mom?”
Tears raced down his cheeks as Dale watched his mother standing above him, clubbing him in the head with the hammer. He could feel each concussive impact. He could see the world fading into darkness and taste the coppery twang of blood on his tongue, feel it leaking from his ears and plugging his nostrils. He was awakened by the sound of his own sobs.
Dale sat in the dark, worried that he’d given himself away with his crying, expecting to be dragged out from beneath the sink at any moment by Sarah’s Neanderthal husband and the detective and murdered right there on the laundry room floor. His face was still wet with tears, the dream still vivid in his mind. But Dale knew that it had been more than just a dream. He knew it with near certainty. His mother had tried to kill him. Somehow, his mother had beat him with a hammer, had nearly murdered him, and he had no memory of it until now. His mother had hated him. She had tried to kill him and then she had burned herself alive and tried to take him with her. No one loved him. No one ever had. The only way he had ever gotten anyone to show him any love was when they were dead or dying, when he had them at his mercy.
Above him, everything was quiet. He had no way of knowing if Sarah and her big apelike husband were really asleep but he knew they were completely aware of him now. They had caught him on film. They even suspected he had been hiding out in their home. And they had guns. And now there were three of them. He would have to very careful.
Dale’s arms and legs were beginning to tingle from the loss of circulation. His limbs had started to go to sleep and now he didn’t trust them to hold him when he stood. He had been folded up in the cabinet beneath the laundry sink for hours, waiting for his chance to slip out quietly. Now he was thinking that he might not go so quietly after all.
Dale slowly pushed open the cabinet door. He had folded himself into the small cabinet like a contortionist. He pulled his leg from where it had been bent beneath him and slowly unfurled himself from beneath the sink. His legs tingled maddeningly with pins and needles shooting up and down his limbs. They felt as if they were made of wet tissue, and Dale had to steady himself by holding on to the sink while he waited for the blood to flow back into his extremities.
He thought about Sarah and her perfect body, those big tits with the big swollen nipples, that tight wet pussy, and that gorgeous face. He wanted her so badly every muscle in his body was tensed, sinews pulled tight, trembling with the force of his desire. He could feel the erection surging in his boxers. He didn’t care anymore about the detective, about getting caught, or even getting killed. He had to fuck Sarah Lincoln again. He needed her, wanted her more than his next breath, his next heartbeat. He didn’t think it was possible for him to live without her. She was perfection.
Dale reached into his pants and began to stroke himself as he remembered fucking Sarah in her sweet little ass, between those big lovely breasts, ejaculating his seed on her perfect porcelain doll face. Dale knew he was not a well-endowed man. The one time a woman had given herself to him willingly it had ended with her laughing at him, ridiculing him for his diminutive size. Well, it hadn’t completely ended that way. The real end had come when he’d plunged a knife into her neck and gave her a tracheotomy, carving a hole in her esophagus just big enough for him to stick his little cock in and rape her throat. Then he had brought her back to life and driven her home smiling and grinning the entire time. He had even shaken her father’s hand when he dropped her off. That had been the last time he’d allowed himself to try to date a woman the “normal” way. He now saw his talent as what it was, a gift from God. It had been given to him to make up for all the other things God had failed to give him. It was his compensation for being born to parents who were meth addicts, for being so frail and sickly, skinny and pale, for having such a tiny penis. He could fuck anyone he wanted now, no matter what he looked like. All he had to do was sneak up on them…and kill them. Then he could bring them back to life just like Jesus did.
Dale took a few steps away from the sink to test his shaky legs. His feet still felt numb but it no longer felt like his legs were going to collapse underneath him. He stretched his arms and wiggled his fingers until all the tingling sensations went away; then he pulled out his hammer and slowly cracked open the laundry room door.
The old, fat detective with the ponytail was sitting on the couch in his wrinkled suit with a pillow behind his head and his face pointed up to the ceiling, mouth open, snoring like a grizzly bear. He was clutching a fleece blanket in his lap. His Glock was still tucked under his arm in a shoulder holster. Dale calculated his chances of creeping out of the laundry room, across the great room and into the living room without waking the detective and then killing him before he could pull out that gun. The chances weren’t good. But Dale knew that he was going to try it. There was never a question. He would do anything for one more night with Sarah.
The first floor in the Lincolns’ house was all stained concrete with a glossy polyurethane coating. The floor was slippery but at least it didn’t squeak like a wooden floor or make that tapping noise that tile floors made when you walked on them in your shoes. But they weren’t completely silent. Dale slipped off his shoes and began tiptoeing across the hard floor in his socks. His heartbeat was thundering in his chest and sweat drenched the handle of the claw hammer in his left hand, as well as the curved and serrated diver’s knife in his right. The saliva in his mouth had dried up and his eyes felt watery. He stared intently at the detective’s face, prepared to bolt for the front door if the man woke and knowing he would never make it.
Halfway across the floor, only three or four yards from the detective, Dale decided that if the man woke up he
