Ghouls

Morris— that’s a very different matter indeed.” His voice shifted. “You’ve betrayed me, Nancy, in a way that can’t be tolerated.”

He was certain the sudden change in his tone terrified her. She picked up a mahogany breadboard by the handle and feebly raised it up. “Don’t try anything, Charles. I’ll flatten your head with this if you do,” but her warning issued out in wavers, verifying her fear. “You can’t admit your failures, you never could. The plan backfired, Charles. Face it. It’s out of our hands now. Sooner or later we’d have to go to the police.”

He didn’t like being told he’d failed; it reminded him of his father. How did she know, anyway? The plan could still be salvaged.

“Yes, sooner or later,” he said. “So you decided sooner.”

“That’s right. I’ve got no choice, seeing how you’ve lost all touch with reality. Tonight, I’m telling Morris everything. And you can’t stop me.”

Willard smiled a great, proud, tight-lipped smile, like the smile of a child who’d outfoxed an adult. “Unfortunately, my love, I can stop you. As a matter of perfect fact, I already have.” His eyes beamed at her, his smile glowed. “Any tingling yet? Numbness of the lips, perhaps? Excess salivation?”

Her voice coyly turned up. “What are you blabbering about?”

“I don’t suppose you’ve wondered why I haven’t had any of the lemonade.”

“Why?”

“I put enough TTX in it to kill the Jolly Green Giant.”

She smiled back at him. “Now I know you’re full of shit, Charles,” she said, firmly confident. “TTX isn’t soluble in water. Unless…”

“Unless what, dear?” It felt so good. So good to fool her so completely. “Unless it’s mixed with a citrate buffer. Like, for instance, citric acid. A chief ingredient in lemonade.”

She dropped the breadboard and bolted out of the kitchen. She dashed crazily down the hall, around the foyer, into the study, stumbling, bumping into walls, propelling herself blindly forward. Willard followed her like a manic shadow. He was chuckling, moving perhaps as desperately as she, so not to miss a single detail of her death. He stayed right on her heels as she flew into the basement doorway and down the stairs.

The overhead lights flashed on. Willard casually propped himself up on the dissection table. He lit a cigarette and watched Nancy root through one of the storage cabinets.

“I know there’s a bottle of ipecac in there somewhere,” he offered. “Good luck finding it, though. But you know as well as I that emesis at this point is useless.”

She ignored him. From a small, square bottle she poured a heap of copper sulfate into a beaker, then filled the beaker with water and guzzled it down. Halfway into repeating the process, she fell to her knees and began to vomit violently on the floor.

“Told you so,” Willard said.

She continued to spasm and retch. It was an awful croaking sound, and very unbecoming in a woman.

“Please, dear,” he said, unable to keep from wincing. “Try and die with some eloquence. This is really very distasteful.”

He knew the TTX would take about twenty minutes to kill, her. But why waste time? She wouldn’t feel much.

First, he pulled on gloves. He knew all about the state police lasers and crystal-resin treatments that could detect fingerprints on human skin. It amazed him—the level to which forensic technology had advanced. Soon, electroporetic techniques would make semen as identifiable as a latent fingerprint. They were convicting rapists with hair-root cells, and getting blood subtypes off cigarette butts. Willard knew he’d have to be extremely cautious.

He spread a heavy, brand-new plastic drop cloth over the table, then lifted her up and laid her on it. He removed her rings, a bracelet, and a silver necklace, and dropped them into a bag. With scissors, he cut off her dress, bra, and panties, pulling each piece out from under her, and then he pulled off her shoes. South River here we come, he thought. It all went into the bag.

She quivered on the table, still alive. Her feet twitched nervously. The flat of her abdomen continued to suck in and out from the vomitive, her empty stomach still pumping away.

He put packaged S, K, & F tourniquets on her wrists and ankles. Then he buzzed off her hands and feet with a 7 1/4-inch circular saw. It was much more difficult than he had imagined, and the racket was revolting.

He extracted her teeth with pliers.

He fizzled her face away with potassium hydroxide.

Now the tricky part. He fixed a 16-gauge biopsy needle to a 100-cc syringe. Then from a previously prepared solution of TTX, citric acid, and water—a concentration many times stronger than the lemonade—he took to the task of filling the syringe and displacing its roughly three-ounce contents into various areas of her body. Two shots into the pericardial sac, four into each lung, ten into the peritoneal cavity. A bead of very dark blood filled each needle hole, and reminded him of carnelian studs he’d seen on cheap jewelry.

The needle made a crunching sound when he punched it through her brain stem. He emptied the syringe forcefully into the middle of her brain.

Oh, dear, he thought. The sphincter was beginning to dilate. Hastily, he stuffed a large rag into it with the snapped-off end of a broomstick. Then he jammed another rag similarly into her mouth, trying to shove it as far down her throat with the stick as possible.

At last. Finished.

He wrapped her up quite carefully in the plastic.

The rest would have to wait till dark.

— | — | —

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Squidd McGuffy’s stank oddly of a zoo or a stable; he would have thought they had animals on the premises, from the smell. The dank place was a pit, literally; it had been built several feet below the street. Inside, two leather-jacketed bikers played darts at the corner, while two more shot-gunned beers to see who could belch more creatively. But the establishment as a whole was devoted to six Brunswick billiards tables, around which congregated a mess of local “skel”—dropouts, punks, rednecks, and not-very-petite high school girls who must be below drinking age. Foul language was not scarce here, and there seemed no great abundance of intellectual discourse. Pretty, blue-jeaned girls wearing pewter skull rings watched in awe as tattooed boyfriends calmly dropped impossible two- and three-ball shots.

Kurt stepped down the short stairs, wondering if he’d ever get back out in one piece. What a dive, he thought. I’ll bet they shoot sex loops in the back room. He thanked God he’d brought his off-duty gun, for all the good it would do against these behemoths. Up front, a tall man with slicked-back hair and a pencil-line mustache leaned against the bar—he glanced quickly and suspiciously to the door, as if expecting a raid. The man had “the eye”; he’d made Kurt as police with one look. Another man disappeared into the back with a tray of sandwiches.

This was ridiculous. A goddamned pool hall. Why had Nancy Willard insisted they meet in this forsaken hole in the ground? Anonymity, of course, a place where they wouldn’t likely be seen by someone they knew. But why? Why the secrecy? Perhaps she was going to make a play for him. Yeah, sure, he thought. Next joke. It all went back to the phone call. I’d like to talk to you about something, she’d said. You may be quite interested.

A breary figure at the bar turned and waved.

Glen Rodz.

What the…but Kurt didn’t waste time finishing the thought. He pulled up the stool next to Glen.