by J L Aarne
“My friend Carla got me to do this online dating thing. Signed me up for it, filled out my profile and everything and I was like, sure, why not? I mean, what could really go wrong?” Eden said. She picked up her coffee and blew on it. “A lot of things, apparently. Like abusive dirt bags. I can’t believe I got matched up with a guy like that either. He is not a nice guy, but you know… I don’t know, I think I’m a nice girl. I was completely decent to him. Polite and everything.”
“You were,” Rainer assured her.
“You were listening?” she asked. “Oh, wow. That’s embarrassing.”
“This is hardly a private location,” Rainer said, smiling. “I may have overheard a little.”
“Well, I guess that’s a good thing though,” she said. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” Rainer said.
They drank their coffee and talked for a little while. Rainer told her he taught English, she talked about dropping out of college, how she volunteered three days a week with veterans and she was thinking about nursing school. Her parents didn’t really approve, but they were still supportive. He listened and she appreciated that he listened and she also thought he was a very nice, very attractive man, so she gave him her number and told him to call her later before they parted.
Ezekiel came to Rainer’s creative writing class, but he was fifteen minutes late and had to sit in the back. They hadn’t spoken since the night Ezekiel walked him home from the Conoco. When the class was over, he expected him to linger and try to catch him alone again, but he didn’t. He was one of the first out the door.
It was pretty disappointing.
Elijah and Erzsé hadn’t been by for a couple of days either and their redecorating project remained unfinished. Some of the furniture they had deemed unsuitable and disposed of had yet to be replaced. His end tables in the living room were all missing and the landline phone sat on a stack of old books that Pogo knocked down at least twice a day.
They were not there when Rainer returned home that afternoon, so he called them, but there was no answer. He called Thomas at home and on his cell phone and also got no answer, which was strange, so he tried him at work.
A woman named Nikki told him that Thomas had left work early. Because this was Thomas, who was a dedicated workaholic who never left work early, Rainer found this a bit alarming. He got in his car and drove over to Thomas’s house. When no one came to the door after he rang the doorbell and knocked, he used his key and went inside.
Thomas was not there and he had fed all of his pets. He was not intending to be home later either.
Rainer wondered if Thomas was at Jasmine’s house, but then he dismissed the idea. Thomas would not do such a thing. Rainer had been completely serious when he told him that he would kill her the next time and Thomas, if he cared about the girl at all, would not risk it.
He left Thomas’s house and drove back home. It occurred to him that he had not seen Ezekiel or his slick black car since he had hurried from his classroom and that was also strange. It was the time of day when he had come to expect to see his car parked by the curb.
“Where is everyone?” he muttered to himself.
He caught sight of Lance LaRoche carrying a case of beer up the stairs as he was crossing the parking lot, but the man didn’t notice him and Rainer did not speak to him. Out of curiosity, he took his phone out as he was going inside and dialed Cosra’s number. It rang and went to voicemail.
Rainer could see a long tedious, solitary night stretching out before him and he did not like it. It was almost enough to make him wish he had student papers to grade. Almost.
He went for a run, showered, tried Thomas’s cell phone again and got his voicemail again and gave up. He stretched out on the sofa to finish reading about Dexter’s slash-happy sleuthing. When he finished the book, he was bored again.
He hadn’t visited the coyotes in a while. He decided to do that. Maybe he’d take a friend along.
He fished Eden’s phone number out of his pocket and called her.
Chapter 18
Rainer took Eden to dinner at Centzon Totochtin. She had never been and they hadn’t had reservations. That Rainer could get them in at a nice table on such short notice charmed and impressed her. She talked about nursing school and he talked about work a little, but he mostly listened to her, watched her eat and wondered where everyone he knew was spending the evening. If they all knew each other, he might have thought there was a party somewhere that he hadn’t been invited to.
After dinner, Rainer drove her home. Eden told him that she had enjoyed herself and her casual touches became slightly more intimate and suggestive on the drive to her apartment. If Rainer wanted her, he could have her. He had known that from the beginning when he sat down at her table in the coffee shop, but it had taken Eden until dinner to figure it out for herself.
He put his hand over hers on his arm and patted her fingers, smiling to himself.
He didn’t drive into the parking garage at her building, but pulled around in front for her to get out. He wasn’t going to stay this time was what this told Eden. Rather than offending her, she seemed only more pleased and charmed by it. Rainer was such a gentleman.
“I had a nice time,” Eden said again.
She leaned over the dividing consol and smiled at him and Rainer leaned toward her because it was what she expected him to do and kissed her. She tasted faintly fruity like the zinfandel she’d had with dinner.
He palmed a syringe from the pocket of his jacket, put his hand up like he was going to stroke his fingers through her hair and instead slipped the needle into the side of her neck. Her breath caught on his tongue; first the pinch then the drug. Rainer smiled.
“Dinner was nice,” he said against her mouth. He gently pushed her back into her seat. “I want to show you something.”
She made a choking sound and watched him out the corner of her eyes.
“Sorry about that. Probably should have stuck you somewhere else, but I don’t want you to scream,” Rainer said. He backed the car out of the parking lot. “You can scream later though. It’ll pass.”
Eden made a distressed keening sound in her throat. She couldn’t move and she was realizing what a monumental mistake she had made by trusting him.
“Don’t blame yourself for that,” Rainer said. “You did all the right things. You’re a smart woman. I don’t think there was a single person in that coffee place who would have wanted to change places with you at that table with Curtis, but I admire the way you handled yourself. Unfortunately, I’m what you might call an unforeseeable element. I’m nobody’s hero, Eden. You couldn’t be expected to know that, so don’t let it get you down.”
She grunted. It was probably intended to be words. Something scathing to put him in his place, he had no doubt.
“How about some music?” he asked. He reached over and turned on the stereo. Nick Cave’s Murder Ballads album was still in the CD player from a few weeks earlier when he recommended it to his students. He grinned. “That’s serendipitous mood music, wouldn’t you say?”
She didn’t reply.
He drove toward the desert and sometimes sang along with Nick Cave. He had a particular fondness for “Where the Wild Roses Grow,” which seemed to fit their current situation wonderfully. If they had been in a movie, he imagined it as a very nice soundtrack to their drive out into the desert beneath the full moon.
The drive was about an hour and it was dark enough to touch the blackness in the desert at night. No streetlights, no windows anywhere, no home fires and no neon bar signs. There was nothing for miles in any direction to cast light except Rainer’s headlights and the moon and stars. There were billions of stars so far outside of the city, but the tiny pinpricks of light did not illuminate the night at all when there was not a full moon above. The full moon cast an ethereal silver glow over everything and Rainer could see enough to walk by it, but it wasn’t enough to work by, so he rounded the car to dig a flashlight out of t
he trunk.
His kit was on the floor behind the passenger seat and Rainer got that before he got Eden out of the car. She was still immobile, though she tried to scream at him when he hefted her over his shoulder and carried her.
Somewhere distant a howl rose out of the night and the hairs along the back of Rainer’s neck lifted. He paused to listen. It came again. Like the last time he had been out to this place, it sounded like a wolf. A really big wolf.
“It’s impossible though,” he told Eden, and started walking again. “There are no wolves in southern California.”
“Let me go,” Eden said, forcing the words out.
“Yeah, in a minute. We’re not quite there yet,” he said.
“Please,” she said.
He ignored her.
The place where he finally stopped was familiar and comfortable to him. The fire pit was one he had made himself and though the sands shifted with the weather, he recognized some coyote footprints around it that weren’t very old. The biggest ones belonged to Pied, the leader. The little ones were pups he hadn’t seen yet. They had been too small to venture away from their dens the last time.
There were also some bones scattered around the pit. The skull and some vertebra belonging to the late Gregory Alan Beck were still in the middle of the fire pit surrounded by char and ashes.
Rainer put Eden on the ground a few feet from the pit. Her eyes landed on the bones, she looked into the blackened skull’s eyes, at its rictus grin, and made a soft, strained screaming sound. It wasn’t loud, but it echoed into the night off the dunes and hills, far out into the empty miles of desert. It sounded loud in the total silence.
A howl answered her.
“That is not a coyote,” Rainer said to himself.
He knelt to build a new fire over the charred bones of Gregory Alan Beck. While his back was to her, Eden gathered enough strength to try moving, using her elbows in the sand to pull herself along. The ketamine hadn’t worn off and it wouldn’t for a while, but she had only lost consciousness briefly in the car. Rainer turned his head to watch her for a minute.
“I admire your determination,” he said. “Your… moxie, yes. I like it.”
He stacked sticks of dry, sandy wood around the skull in a teepee with some crumpled paper. He lit it and the fire took off. He warmed his hands over it. Behind him, Eden had crawled a little ways, leaving ruts in the sand behind her. He let her. She wasn’t going anywhere.
“There’s really nowhere to go,” he said.
He stood, brushed sand off his trousers and the palms of his hands then put two fingers in his mouth and gave a piercing whistle. He listened. Faintly, but not very far away, a coyote’s yipping howl answered him. He whistled again and more coyote voices joined the first so that they sounded like a laughing pack of insane rioters approaching.
Rainer walked over to Eden, grabbed her by the hair to pull her up from the sand and dragged her back toward the fire. His kit bag was on the ground nearby and he opened it with one hand, holding her down with the other around her throat lest she attempt to fight him. She couldn’t yet. Her struggles were ineffectual squirming and whimpers. He took a length of rope from the bag and tied her wrists tightly, pulled them above her head and hooked rope between her wrists to a stake he had driven into the ground near the fire pit a long time ago. It was the type used by people with large dogs to stake their pets outside when they went camping or if they did not own a good fence. It would not be easily pulled out.
She tried to roll over onto her stomach, but Rainer grabbed her, turned her back and tied her ankles. She attempted to kick him and he stomped on her shin. She moaned.
“You’re quite lively. Perhaps I didn’t give you a strong enough dose,” Rainer said.
He had cut the dose from that which he usually gave because she was not a large person. She was a little smaller than some of the women he had drugged with it before. He usually had to wake them up after they were trussed and he was ready to play with them, but that would not be necessary with Eden.
“Now, if you kick me again, I’ll break your leg,” Rainer said.
He knelt beside her and removed a hunting knife with a gut hook from his bag. Her eyes widened and he smirked. “This isn’t for you,” he said.
He caught the neck of her nice little black dress in the hook and sliced it open like he was unzipping it. The fabric fell to either side of her body, leaving her naked to the air. She was wearing very nice silk and lace panties and a matching bra. Perhaps she had known what she wanted from him before they finished dinner after all.
“Though I’ve used this for that before,” Rainer continued. “It’s a bit messy, but it’s effective. Unzips your skin like it’s a rubber suit.”
“Please. I want to go home,” Eden said. Her voice rasped dryly.
“No, that’s not going to happen,” Rainer said. “This is it, darling Eden.”
“Are you going to rape me?” she whispered.
“No.”
He removed a roll of material from his bag and unrolled it to reveal several surgical instruments. Eden closed her eyes and tears slid down her face to wet the hair at her temples. There was rustling on the other side of the fire and they both looked up as a coyote circled around the fire toward Rainer, his head down low, eyes darting between the people and the flames.
Rainer selected a scalpel and held it up so the firelight would hit it and Eden would see. She started to shake and her bladder released. The smell of it reached him first and Rainer cursed and moved back as the urine spread out over the sand toward him before soaking into the parched ground.
“You should have gone before we left the restaurant,” he snapped, disgusted. “I should have insisted. This always happens.” He sighed. “This is Pied, by the way. He always gets the first bite.”
“What are you talking about?” Eden asked, eyes rolling fearfully toward the coyote.
Two more joined Pied just outside the glow of the fire. Their eyes caught the light and shined and their teeth gleamed as they panted. They eyed Rainer and the woman expectantly, waiting for their meal, but they shifted and seemed more nervous than usual.
Rainer knelt by Eden’s legs and began to cut. She screamed then and it wasn’t soft or faint, it was full-throated agony, sharp and brittle. He hobbled both her legs, sliced the tendons and carved the muscle from her calves. She screamed and shuddered and tried to pull free of the stake she was bound to, flopped and twisted to get away from him and his blade, but Rainer was quick and practiced with it. He made short work of her legs and threw the meat to the coyotes.
They snarled and yipped at each other, tried to steal meat from the mouths of their fellows and paid no attention to the wailing and shrieking of the woman. Rainer sat down near her head, lit a cigarette and watched them eat while he petted his fingers through Eden’s fine gold hair. She stared up at him with unseeing eyes, blind with pain. After a few minutes she passed out and he let her. The coyotes weren’t finished eating what he had already given them.
More coyotes came, there was even a new pup, though it kept to the shadows and didn’t venture close to the fire or to Rainer. When another wolf howl shattered the night the pup and a couple of the other more skittish coyotes dashed away.
Pied turned his head toward the sound and growled.
“It sounds like it’s getting closer,” Rainer said.
The coyote darted a look his way at the sound of his voice then went back to eating.
Rainer put his cigarette in his mouth and got up, leaned over Eden to look down at her face. She was prettier when she was sleeping, he thought. Then he slapped her. She came to with a pitiful wail.
“Hello again,” Rainer said.
“Please don’t. Please, just let me… I can’t,” Eden babbled.
“Please what? Let you go?” Rainer smiled. “I believe we’re past that.”
Eden’s eyes rolled back and he patted her face. “Stop. Just… leave me alone.”
Rainer lau
ghed. “What, out here? Your legs are stripped to the bone, you’ve bled a good bit and if the coyotes don’t get you, whatever’s out there howling would finish you off. If I were inclined to release you, which I’m not.”
She looked at him then and her eyes focused. “You’re sick. You’re a sick fuck.”
“I know,” Rainer said.
He picked up the scalpel again and dropped to his knees beside her. He flicked his cigarette butt into the fire and began to cut. He made a Y incision with the scalpel. Eden screamed and cursed him and yanked futilely at her bound wrists trying to free herself.
The coyotes drew close to her, smelling the blood, familiar with the sounds she was making and her struggles. To them, it meant food. Her thrashing made them tense and jump back. They finally retreated a few feet away and sat down to wait.
Rainer tired of her squirming and twisting and put his hand around her throat and squeezed, holding her down while he opened her up and cutting off her air, taking her to the brink of unconsciousness. Out in the darkness, the wolf howled, answering her screams. When she went quiet, the howls became faintly inquisitive.
“You know, as I understand it, fear is what humans have so they don’t walk into traffic, give rides to shady looking hitchhikers or try to pet the big bad wolf,” Rainer said conversationally to Eden. “Then at some point, they evolved in such a way that that most important of survival instincts is almost completely eradicated. It’s not because you don’t need it anymore. If anything, you need it more. The monsters are harder than ever to spot. I don’t often experience it myself, but I’ve come to recognize those moments when I should feel it.”
Rainer stopped talking to reach for something else from his bag. Eden was not unconscious, but she was dazed. Her eyes were out of focus and bleary, her breathing was heavy and rasped in her throat. Rainer watched her for a moment, his heart racing, a soft buzz in the back of his throat. Then he began to spread open her ribcage. She screamed shrilly and he bit down on his bottom lip, a purely sexual thrill sliding through him like a lover’s petting hand.
