Succubi

The hospital updated their ward residence photos every year. The police probably wouldn’t be looking for two guys with white hair.

Duke slouched on the bed. He was watching the Three Stooges: Shemp was pumping Larry up with a fireplace bellows stuck in his mouth. Erik changed the channel.

“Hey, man! Whatdaya think you’re doin? It’s a Shemp!”

Shemp, Erik thought. We’re two killers trying to outrun the entire state, and all he cares about is Shemp. “We have to monitor the news as much as we can,” his voice creaked. He flipped through late morning cartoons, then—froze. Suddenly, he was looking at himself on the TV screen, and a newscaster was saying, “…have killed four in less than twenty four hours. Erik Tharp and Richard ‘Duke’ Belluxi escaped the state mental facility near Luntville yesterday morning at eleven thirty, overpowering two employees and murdering two more. They fled the grounds in a lawn contractor’s vehicle which was later found abandoned at a nearby convenience store, where they murdered a clerk and abducted a twenty year old Luntville woman only minutes after their escape. The woman, whose name is being withheld, was found dead later that afternoon in a ditch off State Route 154. She’d been shot, beaten, and raped, police say.”

Duke chortled laughter, pointing. “Looky! It’s us!”

Indeed it was. Both their faces filled the screen. Duke was grinning in his picture. Erik stared.

“Yeah, my mama, I’ll bet she’s proud!” Duke laughed. “Can tell all her friends her son’s a TV star!”

“Come on!” Erik shouted. “We gotta get out of—”

“What are you shittin’ a brick about?”

“They found the girl’s body, Duke. That means they know what kind of car we’re driving!”

The station wagon was parked right out in front of the motel, in full view from the main road. The first cop car that drove by would see it and then…

“Get our stuff together,” Erik commanded. “I’m gonna move the car around back so no one can see it from the road. We’ll have to leave on foot, get a new car somewhere else.”

“Right,” Duke said.

Erik slipped out the front door and got in the station wagon. How long had the police known what they were driving? It was incredible that the car hadn’t been seen yet.

Too incredible.

Something clicked behind his ear.

“Right there, fella,” a voice whispered.

Erik’s whole body seized.

The female cop had sneaked up alongside the car. She leaned over, pressing the barrel of a Ruger .357 to his temple. “You blink and your brains go out the other side of your head. Understand?’

“Uh, yes,” Erik croaked. His eyes darted right. A police cruiser was parked on the side of the last room. “Luntville Police Department,” a seal read.

The woman had dark red hair tied in a bun behind her hat. She wore mirrored sunglasses in which Erik could see twins of his own face. “You and me,” she whispered, “we’re gonna walk over to that squad car nice and quiet, right?”

“Uh, yes,” Erik croaked.

“You get out real slow and keep your hands up.”

The woman opened the station wagon door. She kept her gun trained on him. It was a big gun, but then Erik thought of Duke’s, which was even bigger. Right now, Duke was doing one of two things. He’d either crawled out the bathroom window and was heading for the hills, or he was standing behind that tacky louvered motel room door and lining up the sights of the gun he’d taken off the old man at the Qwik Stop.

Erik stood straight, his hands in the air. He whispered, “Lady, the other guy’s in the room right in front of us and he’s got a—”

It was a strange collision of sounds and sights crammed into a single second. The woman’s police hat shot up in the air, and suddenly she was standing before Erik with no head. It simply…disappeared. Only then did Erik hear the loud bang! The woman, headless now, seemed to stand for a moment, her pistol still thrust out. Then the body collapsed.

Erik’s expression collapsed as well. He lowered his arms. More blood on my hands, he thought.

“Ooooo eee!” Duke celebrated. He’d fired through the louvers. “Perfect head shot, man, fifteen, maybe twenty feet!”

Duke loped out, the Webley still smoking. He picked up the policewoman’s hat and put it on, laughing.

My God, Erik thought.

“Get the stuff,” he said, “and move the cop’s body into the room. I’m moving the car.”

Duke whistled gaily, dragging the body toward the room. “S’shame, though, you know? Wasted a perfectly good set of tits. Could’ve had me a good ol’ time with this girl-fuzz.”

Erik parked the station wagon behind the motel. Then he jogged back around to see what was keeping Duke.

Duke was sitting in the passenger side of the woman’s patrol car. He adjusted the hat on his head and looked up, grinning.

“Come on, buddy. We might as well ride in style, right? I’ll ride shotgun.”

By now Erik had resigned to Duke’s sociopathy. He had no choice. He started the car and tromped the accelerator. Duke wailed.

Luntville was just north. Erik sped south. The cop had probably radioed in her location when she’d spotted the station wagon. When she didn’t answer up, her friends would come looking.

Duke looked like a kid in a candy shop, surveying the car’s interior. Erik’s mind raced. “We’ve probably got five minutes before they’re onto us. When they find the cop you killed, there’ll be a hundred cars after us.” Erik turned off the main road, fishtailing. The further off the main roads they got, the more time they’d have to change cars. He remembered the area well. The back roads were a maze. “We have to ditch this car and get a new one real fast.”

“Why? I like this car,” Duke complained. He tore open a pack of Twinkies. “How come we gotta change cars all the time?”

“Don’t you understand anything? As long as they know what we’re driving, we don’t stand a chance. We need a car that nobody knows we’re in.”

And that prospect worried him. Taking a car meant taking (or killing) the owner. Erik didn’t want any more people dead, but he knew Duke had other ideas in that regard. How can I control an uncontrollable person? he grimly asked himself.

The mobile radio, a plug in Motorola, began jabbering. Then, much more clearly, a woman’s voice broke: “Two zero eight?”

Erik stuck his head out the window. The front fender bore the stencil: 208. “That’s us,” he croaked.

“Two zero eight, do you copy?”

Duke gaped at him, cheeks stuffed.

“Two zero eight, acknowledge.”

“Give it a shot,” Erik advised. “We’ve got nothing to lose except our lives, and we’ll probably lose those anyway.”

“Think positive, buddy.” Duke pointed to his own head. “Positive, that’s the way. How do you work this thing?”

“Just pick it up and push the button when you want to talk.”

Duke keyed the mike. “This is two zero eight. Go ahead.”

“Two zero eight, what’s your status?”

“A okay. Everything’s just fine.”

Erik was shaking his head.

The radio fizzed through a pause. “Two zero eight, are you ten eight?”

“That’s a roger. I’m the big ten eight.” He released the button and chuckled. “What the fuck’s ten eight?”