FINAL EDGE
Robert W. Walker
Copyright © 2010 by Robert W. Walker, www.robertwalkerbooks.com
Cover copyright © 2010 by Stephen Walker, www.srwalkerdesigns.com
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from Robert W. Walker.
CHAPTER 1
At a farmhouse outside the Houston city limits
A FALL BREEZE lifted his hair and kissed his cheek as Dr. Arthur D. Belkvin raised the ax overhead, holding it over his victim's terrified eyes. The act of taking the life of this woman would engender no joy in Arthur, and he got nothing out of her terror, not like Lauralie did. Lauralie claimed to be only eighteen years old, but she gave the impression of a much older woman, her dark eyes, dark hair, and exotic skin making her irresistible to the thirty- year-old Arthur. But something in the wild, Tex-Mex- looking Lauralie Blodgett's body movements and eyes made her appear for the moment absolutely ecstatic in anticipating the fall of the ax.
Arthur felt he must say something to the soon-to-be- dead Mira Lourdes. "Don't think this was my idea. I'm not a freak," he told the woman at his feet, "but I gotta do what Lauralie tells me to do. I have no choice."
Hands tied to feet, her neck lying across a wooden post on the earth out back of a house in the woods, Mira Lour- des struggled and choked on a gag he'd placed in her mouth. She was only half aware that Lauralie, the woman he referred to, stood nearby, watching, guiding Arthur to do the thing he was told to do. To behead Mira. "Do it, Arthur, do it!" the woman chanted.
"She's got to understand first, Lauralie. I don't want her going to her death thinking I'm one of those twisted perverts that can only feel sexually aroused at the sight of blood and carnage." He calmly continued, now addressing his victim again. "At least you gotta know that going into eternity, Mira Lourdes."
He watched her squirm, listening to her keening whine beneath the gag. He didn't want to see her suffer. "It isn't as if I'm a sociopath or a psycho or anything of that nature."
"What do you want from me?" she had begged when she had first come to, only to realize they had thrown her into the trunk of a car—that she was abducted and bound from head to toe.
"My father was a half-breed with a brain tumor, and my mother was his whore. I got issues with society! I want them to pay," said the woman.
"Them? Who are them? I don't know anything about you or them!" Mira screamed.
"But I do, and I want them—the collective them to pay. And they will."
"Look, my name is Mira...Mira Lourdes," she pleaded, "and I'm a g'damn teller in a g'damn bank! My first job since graduating college, and seven years later I'm still there. Never hurt anyone...And... and I don't have anything to do with this. You've got to...got to...to listen to me and let me go, Lauralie, Arthur, please! I won't say a word, like none of this ever happened, I swear...I swear!" She only wanted to go home, not to Dwayne but to her mother and father, to her childhood home. She wanted the comfort of her little pink room and canopy bed, the child's bed too small for her now, long gone in a garage sale years ago now, but she wanted it, wanted to curl up in the folds of the blanket special to her, the one her Grandma Lourdes had made for her. She wanted to see her grandma, to see her here and now, although she knew Grandma was on the other side. She wanted to be with her, to be held by her.
The small man, calling himself Arthur, shrank from harming her, almost as if he could read her desperate thoughts. She could see him literally shrinking from what Lauralie proposed. She could see him wanting to shirk it off and walk away from harming her. She read it in his body language, his eyes, his very sweat. He did not want to harm her. But the woman, calling herself Lauralie, didn't show the slightest emotion or compunction, but rather spat on Mira, before ordering Arthur to gag her. "Shut her whining up! Gag the bitch, now!"
That's when he gagged her, knowing he could not listen to her, could not get involved in who she was beyond his woman's terrible plans for Mira's body—what she needed her for. He didn't know Mira-the-victim from Mother Goose. Lauralie had randomly selected Mira from the phone book, after discarding several other people named Lourdes. Mira just happened to have a FOR SALE sign perched on the window of her Saab as they drove by her house. She'd bounded enthusiastically out of the house and right to them when they parked and began to examine the car on all sides, examining the relative seclusion of the house and driveway as well, thanks to the large lilac bushes all along the neighbor's property.
She really badly wanted to sell her broken-down Saab, coming down on the price as he haggled, so he had agreed to a test drive if she would come along to field questions as they arose. Shrugging, smiling, her ponytail bobbing, she quickly rushed in for the car keys, locked up the house, and joined the couple, made to feel safe by the presence of the woman accompanying Arthur, Lauralie, who nestled down in the rear of the Saab.
On the test drive, Arthur did all the talking—said he was a vet just setting up a practice and in need of another vehicle "to transport animals without worry to the upholstery, you see?"
"Oh, well, you needn't worry about spoiling the inside of this junker," she'd said, and Arthur recalled the lilting, childlike nervous laughter following her words like a bird chasing a grasshopper.
The rest of his own nervous talk centered on questions about the car, until suddenly Lauralie, from the rear seat, did what she had threatened she would. She crushed a chloroform-soaked cloth against Mira's mouth and nostrils, forcing her into unconsciousness.
The two together were so bold as to tempt fate, leaving Arthur's own car in Mira's driveway. Anyone might have come home before their return; some neighbor walking a dog might have noticed the unusual car on the street. But then Arthur and Lauralie returned, taking her groggy form from the one car and placing her into the trunk of the other before calmly driving off, all in broad daylight. Lauralie had become so excited at their accomplishment that she had almost made him wreck the getaway car into a lamp-post, grabbing his face in both her hands and smothering him with her lips between cries of "We did it! We did it, Arthur!"
From the trunk, Arthur heard Mira's groans and an occasional groggy kick.
When Mira came fully conscious again, she found herself tied and gagged and inside a black world, the trunk of their car, on her way to God or Satan knows where.
She thought it amazing that they had returned her Saab and exchanged it for their own vehicle, a dark blue late- model sedan, as she recalled, a Cutlass Olds from the stamp on the dashboard, the interior clean enough to eat off, yet a strange medicinal odor permeating every fiber of the cloth seats.
Maybe Arthur was what he said he was, an animal doctor, but what did he and the woman want with her? The woman, the damned woman who had been sitting passively behind her, Mira now recalled; it had been the seemingly submissive bitch who had knocked Mira out with some sort of drug! She recalled the struggle, the cloth covering her nose and throat, filling her lungs with the same stenc has she had smelled in the car, chloroform, smuggled into the backseat by that cunning cunt. The two of them had planned out every detail of Mira's abduction.
Mira tried desperately to recall everything about the car and the two people who had control of her, praying she would live through this ordeal to one day have the opportunity to point a finger at them. However, her intent to do so was becoming blurred by questions of why and how this had happened to her. She silently asked, Why me... why now? What do they wan
t with me? Did the bastards choose me randomly? No, it's got all to do with the stinking ad I placed in the Penny Saver, the car... that damn car I want to sell, the one Dwayne wouldn't lift a finger to help me with. That's what brought these two freaks to my doorstep.
Arthur gave pause before letting the ax fall, thinking of how he had become Lauralie Blodgett's sex slave, his only wish in life to please Lauralie. She promised him pleasure and gave it to him tenfold, pleasure beyond anything he had ever experienced or imagined he could ever have found in this life without her having come to him and given herself to him, but it came with a price. Not only did she wield a wicked power over him, body and soul, but he must kill for her.
All she asked of him in return for pleasure was to kill one person for her, to take one single human life. That had been her first condition. It was soon followed by a demand that he find a suitable place and the proper tools to dissect the body of the victim. After this, she leaked bits and pieces of her plans to him as the abduction unfolded. Still, she never revealed her reasons, the underlying cause of her hatred for Mira Lourdes. That, she promised, would come in time, along with the entire story of how her life had been ruined and destroyed by others who must now pay.
"Just know that I love you, Arthur, and I need you...I require your help, true, but I've grown so very fond of you," she assured him. "I can hardly recall a time when we weren't together. We were meant to be together, born to be together, Arthur. No man has ever made me happier in or out of bed."
Her motives would become clear as time went by. For now, he simply must follow her and give himself over to her in blind faith; otherwise, she would leave him and find a man who could live up to her expectations and give her what she wanted. She had made the threat only once, but it was enough to make Arthur quake.
Arthur had never had a woman before, and she had treated his vicinity with respect, without ridicule or laughter, but with gentleness and a genuine warmth. She cried the night of their first sexual encounter, saying she only wished that she could have come to him a virgin, untouched and unspoiled. He wiped her tears away and told her he would not change a single thing about her, ever. "I know how lucky I am that you will have me," he had said to her. "And I know that I'll never have another."
He must hold onto Lauralie at any cost. Still, what she asked of him was extremely hard.
"When I am fulfilled in my master plan to win my ultimate goal: to destroy—even if for only a time—the peace and tranquility of a man, a woman, and a major American institution, then we can have the rest of our lives together, Arthur, in peace and harmony. Trust me...trust me..."
He didn't know what she meant by this, but he promised to trust her.
As he spent more time with her, she let drop more details of her plan. Arthur thought now of how Lauralie saw it, how she talked about it, how her name would become synonymous with that of Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacey, Lizzey Borden, Eileen Woumos, but better, she said, even more headline-fetching since she would be viewed as a distinctly different kind of killer, obsessed with her single- minded plan. A simple yet bold plan.
Lauralie wrapped her arms around Arthur, who remained hesitant, the ax still poised over his head. She snaked her hands inside his shirt and pants, touching, caressing, promising in his ear that he would have her forever if he would only do this small thing for her. She squeezed and rolled his penis in her hand. "Do it, Arthur...do it, now!"
"Okay, okay, I will."
"So let it fall and let it begin," she shouted, and Arthur hesitated no longer, letting the sharpened blade dig into Mira's white neck, exactly at the spot where he'd laid the neck across a railroad tie purchased from the local ACE Hardware to create, between ax blade and post, Lauralie's idea of a crude guillotine. Now, looking down on his results, Arthur felt a wave of revulsion as the head held, dangling by threads of tissue and bloody bone, looking like a broken doll's head, half twisted from the blow, one dazed live eye looking up at him.
Lauralie, more disappointed and angry than repulsed, shouted, "You fool, Arthur, you fucking fool!" Before he could blink, she had grabbed the ax from him and she had swung. Her blow sent Mira's head toppling off and away. It thumped to a halt and settled on its left cheek. It looked strangely up at Arthur where the underbrush below a fence rail mimicked her hair.
"Get it! Get the damn thing before some coyote or fox grabs it up and runs off with it!" Lauralie shouted.
Arthur traipsed after the head, which had come to rest in the bush at the foot of a rotting fence post. At least she's mercifully dead, Arthur told himself, her eyes are not staring at me any longer, but even as he thought it, he saw Mira's body had begun twitching as if attempting to crawl as far from her severed head as possible.
Arthur swallowed hard at this, his hands sweating in the cool evening air. Looking back at Lauralie, he saw that her eyes shone with a kind of demented delight. The bloody ax resting on her shoulder now, Lauralie calmly returned his stare now as if to ask. What must I look like?
"We should've thought to bring a Polaroid," she joked. "Damn but that felt good. Now we begin the fun work, right, Arthur? Just as we planned. You brought all your tools, didn't you? The bone cutter, the saws, and scalpels?"
"All my tools, yes...got them inside." He pointed to the old white clapboard house they had renovated for the work. He had taken hold of Mira's runaway head by the long hair, and he handed it to Lauralie's outstretched fingers.
Balling up Mira's long auburn tresses in her fist, Lauralie lifted Mira's eyes up to her own, staring into them for a long moment as blood dripped from the severed head. "Your bad luck your name is Lourdes," she said, lowering the head to her side now. Lauralie then stepped off, carrying the severed head toward the farmhouse, her jaunty, schoolgirl gait, her playful hand, and the breeze conspiring to sway the bloody dismembered thing as Arthur watched it paint Lauralie's white cotton dress and gray flannel apron as if with a repeated brush stroke. Lauiralie's hip and thigh had an increasingly large red-brown rust spot building with each step toward the house.
"God, I hope she's not planning on cooking that for dinner," he quietly said to himself.
"Come ahead, Arthur! Bring the rest of her, Arthur!" she shouted over her shoulder at him. "We'll need all of her for what we have to do."
Arthur watched a fall cardinal chase its mate into the nearby thicket.
Houston, the following evening
LIEUTENANT DETECTIVE LUCAS Stonecoat's large Cherokee hands carefully fingered the unmarked package that had arrived via courier at his apartment home. The package had been left with Jack Tebo downstairs at Tebo's Grill and Tavern, situated just below Lucas's apartment. It had been hand-delivered—no stamps or UPS or FedEx markings whatsoever. With a strange return address, that of a convent school on the north side of the city, the package simply looked out of place and unusual. The tough, seasoned cop knew no convent girls, but he had enemies both in and out of the Houston Police Department. Lucas knew he could not be too careful.
When Lucas had stopped at Tebo's, the older man had told him that he'd left a package on his doorstep, and that Lucas owed him two bucks for the tip. When Lucas had lifted the package, it had made no sound, but it felt hefty for so small a bundle, about the size of a softball; worse yet, it smelled. Not of sulfur or minerals; not even of fertilizer. Something altogether worse—something of rotting flesh—odors he'd encountered as a young man in a nameless, faraway jungle in Vietnam. Tebo's rhino-sized nostrils were so gummed up with nicotine, tar, and burger grease that he'd obviously missed the odors emanating from the package.
Lucas now carried the package inside and through his home, going for the kitchen sink. There he gingerly placed it into the basin. He toyed with the idea of calling in the bomb squad, but something nagged at him, telling him it was not an explosive, and that calling in the bomb squad boys would ultimately result in a big embarrassment.
He sought the tools he needed to carefully unwrap the box sent from Our Lady of Miracles Convent for Gi
rls. Using tweezers and a paring knife, Lucas began to cut through the rough twine binding the package. As he worked, Lucas thought of the time he had come back from the dead on a battlefield strewn with bodies. He had been taken for dead, just another corpse to add to the growing pile that the Viet Cong had created of their enemies. They liked piling bodies atop one another, dousing them with gasoline, and burning the pyre of dead and dying.
In order to cope with the horror of his situation there in Nam, Lucas had gone into a coma of sorts, or what his Cherokee ancestors called a ghost walk, a weightless, bodiless existence in which the spirit leaves the body. During this time, he saw his body being lifted by two Viet Cong who struggled with his weight. They swung his lifeless form onto the hill of flesh, the bodies piled high and growing. It all came from an overhead view as if he were floating above the scene.
He focused again on his own body, lying lifeless beneath others now piled onto his own. But something within spoke to Lucas, an ancestral voice. A dead grandfather figure telepathically told him he was yet alive and that he must return to his body. Lucas found himself amid the smoke and clouds of a chasm. All around him Lucas could see the souls of others as they departed, so many wisps of smoke dissolving into the atmosphere as others from beyond reached out and took their hands to guide them.
Lucas fought to touch the ancestral hand, but the old man adamantly and stoically refused to reach out to Lucas, telling him in a telepathic way that it was not yet his time, that he must go back, that he had much yet to accomplish in this life. Then he was gone in the time it took for Lucas to take a breath of air.
Choking, he awoke amid the stench of decaying flesh. The battle had raged on for days, and many of the dead he lay above, beside, and under were decaying beneath a baking sun. Then he felt the corporeal flesh and heaviness of his own body again. Opening his eyes, he found himself crushed, hardly capable of breathing, below a mountain of dead men stacked like cordwood. For a time, his spirit had walked among the dead, but now he had fully returned to his senses and the horror of war.
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