He was clawing at his own face when Barb, no longer wailing, charged back from the kitchen, brandishing the biggest meat cleaver Renny had ever seen.
Victor had threatened her with the cleaver once; that was how she’d known where to find it.
And Barb had, in fact, seen too many monster movies. Especially the ones about psychos and kitchen implements; you could get every-damned--thing on cable nowadays. She hacked and chopped and slashed and hollered and only nailed Renny by accident once.
The grabby Victor-thing began falling to pieces faster than a clay vase run through on the wheel with a cutoff needle. Tearing a suffocat-ing creeper of skin free from his mouth, Renny flailed to a sitting position and sucked air.
“Barb—you cut me open, goddammit!”
“I missed, honey, I’m sorry, okay? That thing was all over the place!”
She helped him stand. He was wobbly, unused to needing help, to being nearly beaten. Their feet buried in the desiccated meat on the floor, she felt him shake. He hugged her tight and genuinely.
“I know. I know, babe…but that thing is ole you-know-who again.”
“Can’t be. No way.” She pressed her face into his neck, not looking. He lifted a scrap of now-inanimate flesh and turned it to the faint light, so Barb could see the tattoo. A cherubic, comic book devil-child looked back at her from a corona of flame.
“Aww, shit—it’s Hot Stuff, Renny!”
“Yep.” Jesus, wasn’t there anyone whose life hadn’t been touched by Harvey Comics?
Victor Jacks had gotten his ink at a Sunset Boulevard parlor called Skin Illos, at the behest of Nikki, who had been his girlfriend of record prior to Barb. Barb had heard you could bleach tattoos by using a laser. She hadn’t been able to work up the spit to suggest this to Victor prior to his very timely demise.
“Renny…hon…I don’t want to make you mad or nothin, but—”
“But?”
“What if Victor…you know, keeps coming back every time we, you and I…you know.”
“Victor ain’t coming back again.”
“What’re we gonna do?”
“What I wanted to do originally. Dump him in the sewer. What’s left of him. Let the rats chow down.”
“Guess we’re gonna need another Hefty bag, huh?”
Barb grimaced at the sliced-and-diced assemblage of tissue on the floor. It relaxed and settled, shifting softly. Renny stared at it, too, pant-ing, with shiny eyes, the sweat leaving his chin in droplets.
“But first, babe—hand me that meat cleaver.”
The manhole cover weighed ninety-five pounds, give or take. Renny had the advantages of a pry bar and good upper torso strength. Thus were the headless, autopsied, dismembered, broken-boned earthly rem-nants of Victor Jacks consigned to LA County waste disposal network.
Hacking Victor into itty-bitty bite-sized morsels had given Renny a peculiar thrill—the same excitement that had granted him a full-on chubby while bludgeoning Vic-baby the first time.
Sucker just wouldn’t give it up. Renny had to admire that, begrudg-ingly.
And if Vic-baby somehow managed to make a third curtain call, why, that’d be the tits, too. Because Renny was starting to enjoy the new, fun things he could do with his hands.
Like what he might do if Barb lost her marbles and started that gawdawful shrieking again…
Nahh. Just a vagrant thought. No problem, there.
Renny yanked his fingers clean and the lid seated with an iron clank. An old pal of his had once broken three fingers by not letting go soon enough, after chasing a frisbee into the sewer. That made Renny think again of Barb. Maybe it was getting time to let her go. True, she’d come to his rescue and handled herself well enough tonight, but what if Victor was some kind of curse or something, specific to her?
You don’t pull back your hand in time, you lose. And it wasn’t his fingers that Renny had been parking inside of Barb, most of the recent past.
Just now, in fact, he was up for another bout. His body urged him to hurry home to her. She would be fresh out of her bath, tasty and scented, and Renny wanted to ride her until she screamed for real.
“Do you hear something? A noise, or—”
“Oh for Christ sake, Barb!”
“I’m serious. Stop it.”
Feeling like a wiener, Renny backed out and listened to the double-time of his own heart, backdraft from his urgent need to climax, soon--sorta-like-immediately. Barb listened intently—she resembled a grade-schooler trying too hard to concentrate—not for sounds from the heart, but telltales of nearing monsters. She was still head down, ass up after coyly asking Renny to do her that way, and she clung to the mattress as though it could render her some psychic truth.
“I don’t hear anything, babe, except maybe your own paranoia bounc-ing back at us from the walls.” Fed up, he grabbed his smokes off the nightstand. Pretty glib, he thought, for a guy who was strangling on a rope of living dead ligaments about an hour ago.