Aside from the giant model of the world outside the theme park-like entrance, Leisure World didn’t strike Steve as a whole lot different from the other communities they’d visited. But his mother was sold even before they’d made it through the gate, and she grew increasingly enthusiastic as she looked through the brochures in the office, talked to an agent and toured four of the currently available units. There was no pressure, no hard sell, but by the end of the visit his mother was eager to lock up a long-term lease on one of the apartments they’d seen. Steve noticed nothing special about the apartment, and he tried to talk her out of it while they waited at a desk and the agent went in back to get the paperwork. She shouldn’t make this decision hastily, he tried to tell her. Her house wasn’t sold yet, wasn’t even on the market, in fact. There was no hurry.
His mother ignored him, however, and despite his pleas to wait, to take her time and have a lawyer look over the paperwork, she signed every agreement and consent form put in front of her.
He didn’t press further. To do so would make her even more stubborn and determined. She’d probably end up buying a place rather than leasing. Instead, he waited until they were outside, in the car, before letting her know how he felt. “There was no reason for you to ‘lock in’ anything back there. Places are always opening up as people die. You should have at least taken the time to make sure this was a good deal and have someone look carefully at the contract to make sure you’re not getting cheated. My God, Mom—”
“Do not take the Lord’s name in vain!” she ordered him. “How many times do I have to tell you that before it sinks into your thick skull?”
“I was talking about—”
“Do not take the Lord’s name in vain!”
“Jesus Christ,” Sherry muttered.
He wanted to laugh at that, was glad that she’d taken his side against his mother, but her comment didn’t make things any easier, and while his mother did not lecture or yell at Sherry, she remained silent for the rest of the trip home, her mouth pursed disapprovingly, her eyes filled with anger.
The second he pulled into his mother’s driveway, the passenger door was open and she was out. She slammed the car door behind her and stalked up the front porch steps.
“Should we get out?” Sherry asked. “Should we apologize?”
“No.” He put the car in reverse and backed out of the driveway.
Let the old bitch stew.
At the intersection of Euclid and Crescent streets, just before the entrance to the freeway, they got stuck behind a young woman in a Volkswagen who remained unmoving, talking on her cell phone, as the traffic light turned from red to green. Steve honked at her, and she stuck a hand out of her window to flip him off as she sped forward, changing lanes without signaling and almost getting rear-ended by another driver, who also honked at her.
“Asshole,” Steve said.
“I thought it was illegal now to talk on a phone while you’re driving,” Sherry said.
“It is unless you’re using one of those hands-free things.”
“She wasn’t,” Sherry pointed out. She glanced to the left, to the right, then behind them. “Where are the cops when you need them? Someone should give her a ticket.”
Steve would have liked to do a lot more than just give her a ticket. He imagined ramming his car into that Volkswagen so hard that it crumpled under the impact, the steering column shoving straight through the woman’s chest, killing her in as painful a way as possible. The thought calmed him down, although he got worked up again moments later when he tried to get on the freeway and a jackass in a blue pickup truck sped up to block him as he signaled and tried to pull into the right lane.
“What’s the matter with everyone today?” Sherry wondered. “Is there a full moon tonight?”
But the problem went much deeper than that, Steve knew.
Some people needed killing.
That was it exactly. More and more each day, it appeared. He tried to remember when he had not felt this way, for this attitude of his seemed fairly recent. Had he been this annoyed with people in high school? In college? Last year, even? He couldn’t remember, but he didn’t think so. It was possible that he’d had these feelings and just hadn’t been able to express them or had tamped them down, but he was pretty sure that this had all started when he’d learned that his father had killed his first wife—
was a serial killer
—and was not really the ordinary middle-class guy he pretended to be. The knowledge had awakened within him not only an understanding of his father’s motives but sympathetic desires of his own, and whether it was nature or nurture, he had quickly come to realize that he was his fathet’s son.
“I’m sorry I antagonized your mom,” Sherry said.
“Don’t worry,” Steve told her. “She deserved it.”
“I know, but she’s old and she invited us and—”
“It’s good for her. She lives in her own little bubble, treating people like dirt, and she needs a dose of reality sometimes.”
That was true of most people, he thought. They all lived in their own little bubbles.
Until those bubbles were slashed open.
Traffic was light, and they reached Irvine about fifteen minutes later. It was only five o’clock, but they were both tired. They’d planned on going to a movie tonight but decided instead to just go to Sherry’s, stay in and watch one of the many DVDs that she’d bought but had never gotten around to viewing.
There was a Xeroxed sign nailed to a telephone pole in front of Sherry’s apartment complex. LOST LABRADOR, it read. Beneath that was a smudged photo of a black dog wearing a Santa hat standing in front of a Christmas tree. ANSWERS TO “SAMANTHA” OR “SAM,” the message on the sign continued. MISSING SINCE MONDAY. REWARD OFFERED. CALL JIM AT 555-6543.
Steve smiled. He turned to Sherry. “Did you see that? Someone lost their dog.”
“So?” she said.
“Do you know where the dog is? There’s a reward if you do.”
She took her keys out of her purse. “Come on,” she said, annoyed.
He dropped the subject. He wanted to ask her what she’d done with the dog’s body, but it was enough just to know that she’d killed the animal. The thought cheered him up for some reason, and as soon as they got into her apartment, he kissed her. She laughed, pulling away. “What are you doing?”
But he grabbed her, kissed her again, kneaded her buttocks. Stepping back, he met her eyes and began unbuckling his belt.
She looked at him, then started unfastening her pants.
They did it on the couch.
In the morning, Sherry went out to breakfast with her sister. She invited Steve to come along, but he bowed out, saying he wanted to sleep in. The truth was, he didn’t really like Sherry’s sister. Besides, they’d have more fun without him.
He checked through her kitchen after she’d left, found some bread and made toast, poured himself some orange juice. She told him she probably wouldn’t be back until after eleven, so he did his usual search of her apartment, then settled down to watch Meet the Press. But he soon grew bored. He thought about heading home, leaving Sherry a note or calling her on her cell, but he knew she would take that as an insult. He was also hoping for some sex when she came back.
So he decided to go for a walk. Making sure he had his key so he wouldn’t lock himself out, he went out to the sidewalk and, on a whim, turned right.
The streets were completely devoid of pedestrians. There were plenty of cars, and quite a few cyclists speeding down the bike lane, but no one was walking. He was seldom on foot himself, and he hadn’t noticed until now how few people walked in Irvine. He felt as though he were in a Ray Bradbury story or a Missing Persons song.
Ahead, in the front yard of a house, two boys were playing on the grass. That at least seemed normal. But as soon as they caught sight of him, they stopped playing and hurried inside. Apparently, it was so unusual to see a man walking down the sidewalk that the childr
en thought anyone who did so was dangerous. Steve felt like the Frankenstein monster as he passed by the suddenly empty yard, and it was all he could do not to lurch about and groan horrifically as he saw the two boys watching him through the front window of the house.
He finally reached a major street that led to a gas station and a shopping center. The morning was not particularly warm but it was humid, and he decided to get something to drink before heading back. Gatorade sounded good, and he walked down the block to the gas station and its minimart. The refrigerator was broken, however, and the only fountain drinks available were various types of soda.
Steve walked over to the shopping center behind the gas station. The smaller stores were all closed, but the anchor supermarket was open, and he strode across the nearly empty parking lot to the entrance. There was a skinny teenage boy with stringy hair and a perpetual smirk on his face standing to the right of the automatic doors, and he fanned out a series of booklets in his hand as Steve approached. “Would you like to support a drug-free nation?” the boy asked.
Steve shook his head and went inside.
The air-conditioning felt good, and he wandered the aisles for several moments until the sweat on his face had dried. Finally, he walked back to the refrigerated beverage case at the rear of the store and grabbed a sixteen-ounce bottle of Gatorade. After paying for it at the checkout stand, he walked back out the front entrance.
The smirking teenager was waiting to pounce. “Would you like to buy a coupon book to keep kids drug free?”
“I already bought one,” Steve lied.
“How much did it cost?” the kid asked.
Steve stopped, turned. Was this little punk questioning his truthfulness? Was this smart-ass calling him a liar?
“How much did you pay for it?” the boy wanted to know.
Smiling, Steve hefted the plastic Gatorade bottle in his hand and swung it at the kid’s face. The container slammed into the boy’s cheek, nearly knocking the bottle from Steve’s hand and sending the teenager reeling. The skin on the cheek had been broken, and blood was dripping from the kid’s mouth as well.
Steve advanced on him. “You want to know how much I paid for my coupons, huh? You want to know how much I paid?”
The boy’s coupon books were scattered on the ground. “Leave me alone!” the kid cried, and ran into the store.
Still smiling, though the smile was starting to feel tight at the edges, Steve turned and walked back across the parking lot toward the sidewalk. He was sure the grocery store had security cameras. And both the teenager and the older woman at the checkout stand could probably identify him. But he wasn’t worried. He hadn’t been caught yet, and he wouldn’t be caught this time. He couldn’t be caught. He didn’t know how or why, but he knew it was true.
Finishing off the Gatorade in several quick chugs, careful not to let any of the blood touch his skin or clothing, he tossed the plastic bottle into a metal trash can located between two of the pumps at the gas station.
He walked easily back to Sherry’s apartment, arriving just as she did. He nodded politely to her sister, Denise, still sitting in her car, and gave Sherry a big hug as soon as she stepped onto the sidewalk. Denise said good-bye to her sister, pointedly ignoring Steve, and drove off.
“What did you do while I was gone?” Sherry asked.
“Went out for a walk.”
“Was it fun?”
Steve thought for a moment. “Yeah,” he said. “It was.”
Twenty-nine
At work, one day flowed into the next. As much as he’d disliked Gina and McColl, he missed them. His job had been more interesting when he’d had adversaries to plot against, and without the secretary and the department head around, he realized how boring and useless his job really was.
As much as he hated to admit it, maybe Will had been right.
He started paying more attention to the alumni he was writing about, getting to know them through their backstories and the remembrances of those who had known them when they were young. He tried to guess which ones he would like and which ones he wouldn’t, began wondering which ones did not deserve to live.
In one bio Steve transcribed, a graduate of the class of 1999 had been convicted of murdering his wife and was serving a life sentence in a federal penitentiary in Kansas. The man urged his old classmates to write to him in prison.
Steve read that one over several times, even ended up keeping a copy for himself. He thought it very brave of the man to confess what he had done and where he was located, especially when most of his fellow alumni were busy tweaking their bios to make themselves sound as successful and accomplished as possible. On the other hand, what did the man have to lose? He was going to spend the rest of his life in jail, cut off from society. He probably craved contact.
Out of all the people he read about, Steve felt sorri est for the man in prison.
Steve’s own ten-year high school reunion was coming up next year, and though he had no plans to go, he did intend to submit a bio to the booklet, if they had one, and he’d been toying with the idea of what to write. He’d been going over his life since high school, remembering his college days, thinking of ways to describe his job. But whenever he thought about listing his accomplishments, his mind kept coming back to his kills. Obviously, that was not something he would ever bring up, but it was interesting that out of everything he had done, he was proudest of the murders he had committed.
Proudest?
Yes. It was wrong, he knew, and not something he would ever admit to another soul. But there it was.
How many kills had he racked up? Four. And over the past few months! It had taken his father years to reach that number. Of course, the old man had been tied down to a family, and society itself had been a lot less violent back then, so his deeds would have been more conspicuous. Still, Steve had accumulated an impressive tally in such a short time, and he had no doubt that his father would be proud of him. Envious, even.
Unless . . .
Unless he would have thought Steve was being foolish and unnecessarily reckless.
That seemed the more likely reaction, and it depressed him to realize that he was a disappointment even to the idealized version of his father that he fantasized about.
They were two of a kind, though. No way to get around that.
The difference between his father and himself was that, aside from Ruth, his first wife, his father had killed people to whom he had no apparent connection, whereas Steve had killed only people with whom he had a personal connection. From where he stood now, it seemed that his father had discovered his purpose earlier, had looked beyond the narrow confines of his own life to see what good he could do for the world at large. Yes, the world was better off without Gina, without McColl, without Will. And his killing of Lyman Fischer had been a matter of necessity, required to maintain his father’s good name.
But he should be putting his talents to better use, getting rid of those people who really did not deserve to live. Bad drivers. Bullies. Obnoxious teenagers. Ostentatious cell phone users. Women who beat their kids. Men who beat their wives. Thieves. Liars. Religious fanatics.
Of course, he couldn’t just go around murdering people right and left, killing everyone who annoyed him. But he could make surgical strikes, taking out those whose existence was a blight upon humanity, removing from society men and women who contributed nothing but problems to the world. He had proved already that he could kill and not get caught, and it was his duty, his purpose, to utilize his talents.
He was special, as his father had been special.
Did it go back farther than that? If he researched his grandfather, would he find that his father’s father had had a higher calling as well?
He wouldn’t doubt it.
It was in their blood.
But was he always right in his decision on whom to kill? He was definitely good at killing people, but were his choices correct? Each time he looked back on what he had done—accomplished
—he could see no other course of action than the one he had taken. He’d needed to get rid of each and every one of the individuals he had dispatched. And yet . . .
And yet his job was not as interesting as it had been. Just as hanging out with Jason and Dennis wasn’t as enjoyable as it used to be. Yes, Gina, McColl and Will had been horrible people. But, even though it was negative, they’d brought something to his life, something he now missed.
Maybe he wasn’t the one who should be deciding who deserved to live and who did not.
Steve reached for his coffee. He’d bought it at the Starbucks downstairs but had done so purely out of habit. He didn’t really need it; in fact, he didn’t even want it. The paper cup was still warm to the touch, which meant that the coffee inside was hot, and, on a whim, he tightened the lid of the cup, leaned back in his chair to make sure there was no one walking around who could see him, and threw the cup as hard as he could across the room. It sailed over the nearby cubicles and landed on a workstation somewhere in the middle of the floor. He heard a loud scream as the hot coffee spilled on a woman back there, and he ducked down, closing his eyes tightly and clasping a hand over his mouth, trying his damnedest not to laugh.
“Dennis and I are here, dude. Where are you? I thought you were going to meet us. Give me a call when you get this.”
Steve deleted Jason’s message.
He called Sherry, grateful when he got her voice mail. “I’m sick,” he lied. “Stomach flu, I think. I’m going to go home and go to bed. I’ll call you in the morning.”
He was already home, sitting on the floor, his back against the couch, cell phone in his hand. And he sat there until it grew dark, not turning on any lights as the sun went down but remaining in place until his furniture turned into black outlines against the surrounding gloom, and then the gloom turned as black as the furniture, and finally he could see no shapes at all, nothing but blank, endless darkness.
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