Life Rage

by L. L. Soares

  The idea that he might be an undercover cop pumping her for information about Grif crossed her mind, though she didn’t believe it. She was pretty good at reading people.

  “I saw an old friend I hadn’t seen in ages,” she told him. “And he had to leave this morning. So I guess that’s got me down. I usually don’t drink this early. How about you?”

  “My job’s getting me down,” he said. “And I’ve been thinking about quitting.”

  “What do you do?” she asked. This was his chance to lie to her, if he wanted to keep his cover.

  “I’m a detective. Homicide. You wouldn’t believe the stuff I’ve seen.”

  She relaxed a bit more. He didn’t ask her anything about her friend. And he really seemed depressed by his job.

  “Pretty horrible stuff?” she asked him.

  “You got that right,” Ben Carroll said. “I guess I’ve just about reached my limit. And I’m wondering if I should just hang up the badge forever.”

  It was clear that something had seriously affected him.

  She had made a pact with herself not to pick up cops anymore. It was a good way to avoid trouble. But for two reasons, she decided to leave with Detective Ben Carroll.

  First of all, was the fact that he was hurting so badly that she couldn’t resist him. She was like a shark getting a taste of blood before a kill. The sensation was uncontrollable.

  The other thing was that, like Grif had mentioned to her the night before, she’d noticed the ache was bothering her again. Where, in the past, a kill would last her a few weeks, now they only lasted a day or two. And then she wanted more.

  She needed more.

  And Ben Carroll’s pain was like an aphrodisiac to her, making the ache even stronger.

  He drained his beer. “Do you want another one?” he asked her.

  “Ben, I was wondering. Would you like to go somewhere else? Someplace more, I dunno, more intimate.”

  He seemed surprised at her suggestion, but it made him smile. He was almost handsome when he smiled. “I’d love to,” he said.

  She smiled and finished her beer. “Let’s go.”

  She took his hand and they got up from their stools, and went out into the afternoon sun.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  “Stop here,” Jeremy said to the cab driver. The man pulled over to the curb.

  They’d stayed a good distance back from the man. The growing traffic made that easier.

  “Do you want me to wait?” the driver asked.

  “Just drive around the block and come back,” Jeremy said. “And then we’ll head back.”

  He opened the door. “Do you want to stay here?” he asked Colleen.

  “No, Jeremy. I want to go with you.”

  “Dressed like that?”

  “You’re not exactly a homeless man, yourself.”

  “We don’t really have time to change,” Jeremy said. “And this could be dangerous.”

  “I want to go with you, Jeremy.”

  “Okay, but we won’t get too close. I just want to see where he’s going.”

  They could see him across the street. He went into a wide alleyway, which appeared to open out onto a court of some kind.

  They got out, and the cab pulled away from the curb. They crossed the street and headed in the direction of the alley’s mouth.

  “Stay here,” Jeremy told her, looking around. “Hell, this isn’t exactly the best part of town. We better make this quick.”

  “Jeremy, shouldn’t we call the police?”

  “By the time they got here, he’d be gone. I want to see where he goes. Maybe he lives around him, and we can give the police the address.”

  He was about to move away from her, then hesitated. “You better come with me.”

  “Okay.”

  He grabbed her hand and they approached the alley. It led out onto a courtyard between buildings, and there were neglected gardens on either side. It had obviously been a fancy part of town at one time, but had been allowed to get run down and ignored.

  “Any sign of him?” Colleen asked softly.

  “No. I think we lost him. Which means this whole thing was a waste of time.”

  “Not really. We could still tell the police he came here. Maybe they could find him.”

  “There are a lot of buildings here. He could be in any of them. For all we know, he could be long gone by now.”

  “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea,” Colleen said.

  “This man has to be brought to justice,” Jeremy said. “We had to at least try to find out where he was going.”

  They journeyed a little deeper into the courtyard. Jeremy looked up and around at the surrounding buildings. It was easy to see that, in another era, they had contained luxury apartments.

  It was then that the man attacked him. He came without warning, with a speed that defied description. He leapt and crashed into Jeremy, pushing Colleen to the ground. She tried to stand up, but the force of the collision left her feeling disoriented for a moment.

  The attacker, the same man they had been following, was pounding Jeremy with his fists, ripping at him with his hands. Then the man bit down into the meat of Jeremy’s throat and ripped out a huge chunk of flesh, spitting it to the ground, as he continued to rip Jeremy’s body apart.

  It reminded her so much of what had happened to Turney. It was happening all over again.

  She somehow got to her feet, hearing Jeremy’s screams as he was torn apart by his attacker. She wanted so desperately to scream, or to hurl herself at this maniac, but she simply stood there, frozen in time, unable to respond to the horrific tableau before her.

  Jeremy’s screams didn’t last long, and then the man was standing there, awash in blood. What was left of Jeremy was only pieces on the ground.

  He was breathing hard as he stared in her direction.

  It was the same red, raging face she’d seen when Turney was murdered. The mouth twisted into an unnatural grin that wasn’t amusement at all, but uncontrolled anger. The glaring eyes, the flared nostrils.

  And then she saw another vision. This time, instead of rattlesnakes, she saw an animal roaring without sound, nothing familiar, just pure ferocity. Something beyond classification or time. The image was superimposed over his face, and then was gone. His real face was even worse, contorted in a mixture of anguish and fury.

  He didn’t stare her way for long. Soon he was frantically searching in several directions. A puzzled look crossed his face. It was clear that he was as confused as she was.

  Something was holding him back.

  She found the ability to move again, and ran out of the courtyard. Her high-heeled shoes threatening to topple her, but she kicked them off and kept running.

  She ran down the block. A horn blared at her. It was the cab.

  She flung the back door open and got inside.

  “Where’s your boyfriend?” the driver asked her. “What’s the matter?”

  “He isn’t coming,” she told him. She spoke as if she were in a trance. She gave him an address and he pulled away from the curb.

  As they drove by the alleyway, she was terrified that the man who killed Jeremy and Turney would leap out at them and tear the taxi apart with his bare hands. But he did not. He wasn’t anywhere she could see.

  * * *

  “You wouldn’t believe the kind of shit I’ve seen,” Detective Benjamin Carroll said as he unbuttoned his shirt. “It’s enough to send a normal person around the bend.”

  Viv nodded her head. This place made her uncomfortable. It was the same motel she had brought Maggie to that last time. She wasn’t certain, but this could have even been the same room. The one Maggie died in. She never brought her prey to the same place twice, but he’d insisted they’d come here. She couldn’t exactly tell him, “I killed someone here recently, can we go somewhere else?” Besides, the way she felt right now, the quicker they got this over with, the better.

  Since Grif had left that morning, she had fou
nd herself in a profound funk, and this was just what the doctor ordered to relieve the sadness that draped over her like a shroud. This sad, weary man had practically begged her to end his life.

  He had a good build for a man his age. Viv guessed he was in his mid-to-late forties. He didn’t have much of a gut, and he had good muscle tone. He must work out regularly, she thought. Some of the older ones like him had a tendency to let themselves go to pot.

  She knew. She’d taken her share of policemen’s lives away. There were a lot of depressed men on the force, and she’d exploited that when she’d been younger. But they were a little too easy, and they could draw the wrong kind of attention for someone trying to keep under the radar.

  Ben Carroll’s stomach was pretty tight. His arms were hard and muscular. His face, on the other hand, betrayed him. The tired eyes with the glassy stare. The tell-tale wrinkles in the corners of his face.

  And the smell of desperation on him. Desperation and too much cheap whiskey and beer.

  She imagined he had probably been a handsome young man once. Maybe a football hero in high school. Smart but aimless, he’d found his way onto the police force. He’d been intelligent enough to excel to the rank of detective.

  But he clearly found that unconsoling. Pointless.

  As he got undressed, so did she. She was stretched out, wondering again if she’d been on this particular bed before. They all felt the same in this motel. Hell, there were other places just like this that felt the same, too. The same hard mattresses and weak box springs. The same blankets that you knew were never cleaned regularly.

  So many telltale stains if you inspected them closely enough. The evidence of a thousand fucks.

  “But enough about me,” Carroll said, pulling off his underwear. He wore briefs. She noticed things like that. She would have thought he was a boxer man. She was already naked and spread on the hard mattress that creaked every time she moved. “What about you?”

  “You know,” she said. “I really didn’t come here to talk about myself. I came here to fuck.”

  He half-smiled at that. The kind of expression cynics had when they can’t believe a streak of good luck. He had a prominent erection and didn’t even make an attempt at foreplay. He just pushed her knees wider apart and rammed it home.

  She was ready for him.

  He gritted his teeth in an almost painful smile as he fucked her. At first she’d thought that he might have false teeth, but she could tell now that they were real. He was totally into it. Totally focused. Maybe he was afraid if he didn’t concentrate hard enough, he’d lose his hard-on.

  Older men tended to try harder.

  He felt good inside her. But that wasn’t how she got off. For her, this was the foreplay. As he moved in her, she closed her eyes and concentrated herself, on his insides. On that region that was the deepest part of who he was. It didn’t take her long to find the tender parts, the scar tissue inside. There was so much of it. She would have had to be blind to miss it. Like a beacon inside him, a flashing neon sign that said, I am in pain and I want to die. It was all a jumble, hearing his thoughts, feeling his emotions. She tried to block it all out and focus on her goal.

  She had seen this hundreds of times before, but not always so severe. Who didn’t have at least a twinge of a death wish? An open wound that refused to heal over? It was as if Ben Carroll was nothing but a walking death wish.

  She hooked onto that soft spot and reeled it in.

  She could sense that Carroll felt her inside his head, because he seemed to lose his concentration for a moment. The strange, skeletal smile faltered. He stared down into her face, her half-closed eyes.

  And then, he started to die.

  Somehow, she wrapped herself around those wounded parts of him and hugged them close, and she could feel what he felt, a strange warmth that bordered on drowning. Like there was fluid in his lungs, depriving him of air.

  He started to come.

  And that was when it got more intense and turned from fear to heightened sensation. The orgasm intensified and didn’t end quickly. It was long and drawn out, making him shiver atop of her.

  Meanwhile, she took what she wanted.

  The sensation was so strong, he was gasping hard for air.

  As he came, what he was, the personality and soul of Ben Carroll, sprayed forth from him into her, along with his semen.

  And as he faded, drooping on top of her, that’s when she started to come.

  For all she knew, he was already dead, slumped across her belly. But that didn’t matter at all. She was riding off her own furious sensations. Something that dwarfed what he had just experienced in every way.

  Viv drifted in and out of consciousness during the waves of pleasure. They were stronger than they’d been in a while. It must have been Carroll’s high level of pain. When it was over, she lay there on the bed, breathing hard, trying to regain her focus. The first thing she did was slide his body off of her.

  Something about this time had really bothered her. She had caught some of his stray thoughts. He knew about some of the other deaths she had caused, and she could tell he was wondering if he had found the killer. The “blonde woman” he was looking for. And yet, there was another part of him, just as strong, that wanted to find her. That wanted her to take his life. She almost wondered if this had been a set-up, an attempt to somehow catch her in the act, but something in his thoughts had calmed her. He hadn’t been trying to catch her in the act; he had wanted to become part of the act itself.

  She arranged his body neatly on the bed and covered it with the sheet and blanket. Like tucking a child in for the night. She wanted to feel regret, but she really didn’t know him. There was a time when she felt sadness for those who died in her presence, a time when she even felt guilty for what she was compelled to do. But that time was long since gone. There was no use getting too wrapped up emotionally in it all.

  Trying her best to ignore the corpse on the bed, she went about her usual routine, washing herself, cleaning the room. Once she was done and dressed, she put on her sunglasses and left.

  She made sure to stay away from the manager’s office. Luckily, Ben had taken care of getting the room. She didn’t think anyone had seen her come or go. So soon after Maggie’s death, this place made her very antsy. No more motels for a while, she thought. And I’m definitely not ever coming back to this one.

  There were woods behind the motel, and she cut through them to get out to the highway. She walked for a mile or so before she started hitchhiking. It didn’t take her long to get a ride.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  When Colleen got back to Jeremy’s house by the beach, she really had no idea what she was doing. She paid the cab driver some exorbitant amount (and somehow she had enough money in her purse, thanks to Jeremy).

  She went inside the house and wandered around aimlessly from room to room. Turning on lights and turning some off, trying to focus on what she was looking for, trying to think through the shock that numbed her.

  Among her things in the drawers Jeremy had let her use, she found a straight razor. She used to joke that she used it to shave her legs, that it gave her the closest shave, but in reality it was something she had not used in a long time. Something she did not want to hold again, but which she had kept for a moment like this, when the pain was just too much.

  She remembered back when she was a teenager, when she used to cut herself out of boredom and depression. But this was something more. This was pure horror, and an unbearable sadness. Emotions that threatened to swallow her whole. To crush her.

  She needed something to bring her back to reality. To cut through the agony she was feeling inside.

  She stuck her arm out in front of her and ran the edge of the razor across it, drawing blood. It had been a long time since she’d done it, but somewhere in the back of her mind she knew it would happen again.

  She carved shapes into her arm, bringing more blood to the surface. She did not cut her wrist. The
n she switched the razor to her other hand and stuck her other arm out in front of her.

  The cutting helped, but she still couldn’t get Jeremy’s murder out of her head.

  Blood dripped onto the bathroom floor. She’d somehow wandered there during her cutting, and now the floor was splattered with blood that flowed from both her arms.

  She stared at herself in the mirror above the sink, unable to comprehend who she was, or why she was alone in this house.

  * * *

  Sam was having a hard time thinking as he drove down the street. He wasn’t really sure where he was going. All he knew was that he was covered in blood and he wanted to get clean again.

  How the hell did I get covered in blood, anyway? It was like he was experiencing a nervous breakdown. Like he was constantly living through a mixture of reality and dreams that was confusing and thick as fluid around him, forcing him forward on a current he could not comprehend.

  There were things he thought he did, that he could not understand. Things that made no sense to him. He couldn’t even be sure what was real anymore.

  But this blood on him now, it was real. And if he was able to trust his memory—and he wasn’t sure that he could—the reason why was a horrible one. One he refused to

  accept.

  He’d seen another man torn apart in front of him. He could not determine who was doing the tearing, but it looked like the work of his own hands. But it didn’t feel like he was doing it. He was an observer, forced to watch the horror of another man dying in front of him. The whole thing had such a dream-like quality to it. But here he was, and the blood seemed so real.

  He saw the public beach coming up on his left. The weather was getting colder and it was deserted. Water. It was only a temporary answer to his problem, but he wanted so badly to be clean, and here was water in abundance.

  He turned left and parked in the lot beside the beach. There didn’t seem to be anyone around, for as far as he could see.

  Sam got out of the car and ran toward the waves.