'So whaddya want, Mitch? Money?' Larry had asked. 'I have plenty of that. We can make a deal.'
Mitch shook his head. 'No deals,' he said.
Larry Wraike's mumbled, half-drugged offer of a deal constituted his last words. Moments later, Mitch shoved a fist-sized gag into the man's mouth. Looking down at his trussed and helpless victim, Mitch peeled off his own clothes and set them out of harm's way. That was another piece of Andy's sage advice. No sense in getting blood anywhere it wouldn't be easy to wash off.
When Mitch turned back to the bed, he was holding the knife. As soon as he saw it, Larry's eyes bulged with fear. He thrashed on the bed, trying to get loose, but Mitch's expert knots held firm. It would have been fun to tease him with the knife for a while, to prick the son of a bitch here and there, just to get his attention.
That was where the scheduling problem came in. Without realizing how long it would take for the drug to wear off, Mitch had hired a young prostitute to show up later in the afternoon. Now her scheduled arrival was less than an hour away. By the time she showed up and let herself in with the room key Mitch had thoughtfully provided, Mitch had to be finished with Wraike-finished, cleaned up, and long gone.
'It can be a beautiful thing if you do it right,' Andy had said. 'It's almost like a dance. All you have to do is touch them with the tip of the knife, and you can watch their flesh try to crawl away from it. A knife has far more nuances than a gun.
'Given your history, I can understand your peculiar fascination with what an exploding shell can do to the human anatomy. But let me ask you this: When you shoved the barrel of your rifle up that little gook girl's twat, you couldn't feel her heart beating, could you?'
Still shocked that Andy had used the effects of the drug dose to trick him into revealing his darkest secret, Mitch Johnson had shaken his head.
'I didn't think so. With the tip of a knife, though, if you hold it right here in the hollow of someone's neck, you can feel their pulse,' Carlisle said. 'It comes right up through the handle with a vibration that's so faint you can barely feel it. And the more scared they are, the better you can feel it. There's nothing quite like it,' he had added, twisting his distorted lips into what could only have been a smile of remembrance.
'There's nothing like it at all. And then, after you let them know that you own them, that there's nothing they can do, that's when it gets personal. You stand there and you're God, and all you have to decide is where to cut them, where to draw the first blood. Just wait,' he added. 'You won't believe how great it feels.'
'Like getting your rocks off?' Mitch asked.
'No,' Andy Carlisle had said. 'Better than that. Much better.'
And so, with his rival lying naked on the bed, Mitch tried touching the tip of the knife against the hollow at the base of Larry Wraike's throat. The thrashing stopped. Larry lay there still as death beneath the weight of the knife. The only thing that moved were his eyes. They swung back and forth between Mitch's face and the slightly trembling blade.
Mitch held the knife delicately. The vibration that came through the bone handle reminded him of a time long ago when, as a twelve-year-old, he had plucked a tiny baby bird out of a nest. He had held it in the palm of his hand for several minutes, feeling the frantic beating of its heart and wings against his skin. He didn't remember how long he held it. What he did remember was that eventually the damned thing pecked him, bit him so hard that it drew blood. When that happened, he simply closed his fist around it, crushing out that little bit of life as if it had never existed.
That had been a very clear and simplified lesson in the ethics of crime and punishment. The bird had hurt him, so he killed it. This was the same thing.
Moving the tip of the knife away from Wraike's throat, Mitch was gratified to see the man's heartfelt sigh of relief. As the stark tension drained out of Larry's body, Mitch felt a sudden stiffening in his own. He almost laughed aloud at the sensation. Some idiot psychology major had once done a series of interviews at the prison, asking some of the more violent offenders if there was any correlation for them between sex and violence.
If Mitch ever ran into that broad again, he'd have to be sure to tell her that for him the answer was a definite yes.
'You do know why I'm doing this, don't you?' he asked.
Larry shook his head frantically.
'Would you like me to tell you?'
This time Larry's answering nod was equally frantic. Mitch wasn't so much interested in having this one-sided conversation as he was in stretching the moment. He could not, in his whole life, ever remember having anyone listen to him with quite such rapt attention.
'You cheated me,' Mitch said with no particular animosity. By the time they reached that point, Mitch Johnson had moved far beyond anger. He was simply delivering information, allowing Larry to understand the gravity of his mistake. Maybe, in another lifetime, he wouldn't make the same fatal error a second time.
'The deal was all set,' Mitch continued reasonably. 'All either one of us had to do was wait for old man Kiser to kick off. He was already sick, so it wouldn't have taken long. Once he did, we both would have made out like bandits. Instead, you waited until I was locked up and then you moved in and took your share and mine as well. To top it all off, you ended up fucking my wife, too. That wasn't a nice thing to do, Larry. It just wasn't right.'
Around the gag and behind it, Larry's lips and tongue tried vainly to form words. He might have been agreeing with Mitch's assessment. He might even have been trying to say he was sorry, but as far as Mitch was concerned, it was far too late for apologies. After eighteen years, sorry didn't exactly cut it.
In the end it was the sexual injustice of Larry Wraike's actions that ruled the day. That, even more than the money, dictated the final result. That was why the first cut-the one that bled the most-was directly between Larry Wraike's legs. Mitch stood back and watched for a while, watched the man writhe and squirm and bleed and try to scream. And then, when Mitch lost interest in that, just as he had with the bird, and because he was worried about the time element, he went ahead and finished him off.
Larry Wraike was dead long before Mitch took the knife and began carving up his face. Andy would have called that gratuitous. It might even have been more than Andy himself would have done. If so, it was a way for Mitch to prove to himself that he had graduated, that he had moved beyond being Andrew Carlisle's student. He was, in fact, a talented killer in his own right, out to get a little of his own back from those who had wronged him in the past.
It took only a matter of seconds to mangle Larry Wraike's face. Afterward, while Mitch was showering, he laughed to think of Lori being called into a coroner's office to identify the bloody remains. Other than Lori and a few cops, not many people would see what he had done, but the thought of Lori seeing her husband that way made Mitch happy.
She was, after all, the only one who mattered.
As expected, Mitch himself was miles away from the motel when the teenaged prostitute from the other side of the border let herself into the room and discovered the body. Despite her frenzied screams and her subsequent protestations of innocence, she and her pimp would be going on trial soon, down in Santa Cruz County, for the savage murder of Larry Wraike.
Mitch Johnson had made it back to his RV on Coleman Road without any questions asked. And if any homicide cops from Nogales ever went looking for the old man who had met with the victim in a bar a few hours before his death, they never had any luck finding him.
Nope, as far as Larry Wraike was concerned, Mitch Johnson got away clean.
More relaxed now, Mitch stood up, stretched, and went inside, but he still didn't feel like sleeping. Instead, he took out a sketchbook and went to work.
'What was the author's name again?' Noreen Kennedy, the prison librarian, had asked.
'Nicolaides,' Mitch Johnson answered. 'He's Greek.'
'And the name of the book?'
'The Natural Way to Draw.'
Noreen was a firm believer in the importance of rehabilitation. 'You're studying art, then?' she asked.
Mitch smiled diffidently. 'I've always been interested in art,' he said. 'But there was never enough time to do anything about it. Now I've got nothing but time. This book is supposed to be the best there is.'
The book arrived eventually, courtesy of an inter-library loan. And it was every bit as good as Mitch had been told it would be. With a pencil and a cheap sketchbook, he went to work doing the exercises. The book contained a year-long course of study. Unfortunately, the checkout period was limited to two weeks.
