MAN CUT ME AGAIN DON'T - '
George Stark swept the straight-razor through the kinked telephone cord. The phone machine uttered one angry bark of static and fell silent.
It was good. It could have been better; he'd wanted to do her, really wanted to have it off with her. It had been a long time since he'd wanted to have it off with a woman, but he had wanted this one, and he wasn't going to get her. There had been too much screaming. The rabbits would be poking their heads out of their holes again, scenting the air for the big predator that was padding around somewhere in the jungle just beyond the glow of their pitiful little electric campfires. She was still shrieking.
It was clear she had lost all her happy thoughts.
So Stark grabbed her by the hair again, bent her head back until she was staring at the ceiling, shrieking at the ceiling, and cut her throat.
The room fell silent.
'There, sis,' he said tenderly. He folded the straight-razor back into its handle and put it into his pocket. Then he reached out his bloody left hand and closed her eyes. The cuff of his shirt was immediately soaked in warm blood because her jugular was still pumping the claret, but the proper thing to do was the proper thing to do. When it was a woman, you closed her eyes. It didn't matter how bad she had been, it didn't matter if she was a junkie whore who had sold her own kids to buy dope, you closed her eyes.
And she was only a small part of it. Rick Cowley was a different story. And the man who had written the magazine piece.
And the bitch who had taken the pictures, especially that one of the tombstone. A bitch, yes, a right bitch, but he would close her eyes, too.
And when they were all taken care of, it would be time to talk to Thad himself. No intermediaries; mano a mano. Time to make Thad see reason. After he had done all of them, he fully expected Thad to be ready to see reason. If he wasn't, there were ways to make him see it. He was, after all, a man with a wife - a very beautiful wife, a veritable queen of air and darkness.
And he had kids.
He held his forefinger in the warm jet of Miriam's blood, and quickly began to print on the wall. He had to go back twice in order to get enough, but the message was up there in short order, printed above the woman's lolling head. She could have read it upside down if her eyes had been open.
And, of course, if she had still been alive.
He leaned forward and kissed Miriam's cheek. 'Goodnight, sissy,' he said, and left the apartment..The man across the hall was looking out his door again. When he saw the tall, blood-smeared blonde man emerge from Miriam's apartment, he slammed the door and locked it.
Wise, George Stark thought, striding down the hall toward the elevator. Very f**king wise. Meantime, he had to be moving along. He had no time to linger. There was other business to take care of tonight..
Chapter Thirteen
Sheer Panic