Sex and Murder

by Douglas Allen Rhodes

  Released from the restraining force of the door, he slid forward off the stakes, coming loose of his erstwhile supports and collapsing wetly to the floor in front of me. I turned to look at Angel. She smiled at me like a kid who’s been caught in an April Fool’s Day gag, shrugged blamelessly, and turned to saunter out the door.

  * * * *

  Tristen was a local boy from the next town over, a high school sports star of sorts, with letters in football, wrestling, and baseball. His disappearance kicked off a wave of paranoia and hysteria among the locals until some very nasty family secrets came to light about his old man and his unnatural tendencies.

  While the police didn’t officially quit the investigation, everyone involved—and almost everybody who wasn’t—quietly chalked it up as a runaway. After all, no one wants to live in a home where the dad’s a fag, right?

  Sometimes people make it so easy to get away with murder.

  I explained (or at least tried to explain) to Angel the concept of not killing around where you live. She pretty much blew me off and let me know that if I’d paid attention to her then none of this would have happened. Besides, she pointed out, she didn’t really have any way to leave town to commit murder, not to mention having no money.

  I promised to set her up with some funds of her own if she would promise not to kill any more locals. Of course, she only said she’d think about it.

  The argument seemed unwinnable—short of killing her, like I should have originally—so I let it drop.

  Later on that day, Angel left for a while, taking the Hummer, and I had some time to myself to catch up on my reading. My pot supply consisted of just one joint and a pinner, but it was enough for the task at hand.

  I was able to finally finish The Deepest Sea and enjoyed the clever twist at the end. By the time I finished the book, it was going on ten and I felt sleepy. Angel wasn’t back yet, so I crashed out in my bedroom.

  Morning, or rather, late afternoon arrived peacefully with a warm breeze and the pleasant sensation of Angel nuzzled up against me. For several minutes, I lay in that semi-awake state that lends itself best to daydreams. I happened to look down at Angel’s face just as she came awake.

  “Mmmm,” she purred sloppily through almost-shut eyes. “What time is it?”

  “Almost three.”

  She managed a weak little pout. “Still too early.” Her hand drifted down my body. “Any plans for today?”

  I pulled her tiny frame close against my side. “I thought we might do something different today.”

  “Really?” Her eyes showed a mixture of curiosity and apprehension. “What’d you have in mind?”

  “I thought we might go after some of the old guys you used to meet with.”

  “What?” She sat bolt upright in bed. “What the fuck makes you think I’d want to do that?”

  “I thought you’d want to. I—”

  “What the fuck makes you think you know what I’d want?” she screamed. “You don’t know me.”

  “Settle the fuck down.”

  “Don’t you fucking tell me what to do!”

  She slapped me. I came very, very close to killing her at that moment. Not out of anger, but out of sheer laziness. I’d be fucked if I had the will or the patience to work with this girl. Something held me back, though. I did, however, land a solid right to her temple, knocking her out.

  About eight minutes later, she came to.

  “What...?” she managed to get out before slipping into the far off stare of those who’ve just regained consciousness.

  “Shhh.” I laid her down on the bed. “Just relax for right now. Don’t strain yourself.”

  “What the fuck happened?” she asked, her voice weak.

  “I hit you.”

  Her eyes widened a little. Across her left temple, a large, rapidly darkening bruise stained her white skin.

  “You hit me?”

  “Yeah,” I said, brushing a stray strand of her ebon hair away from her eyes. “Pretty hard too. You were out for the better part of ten minutes.”

  Angel sat still for a moment while she thought about what had happened, then jutted out her bottom lip. “I’m sorry I misbehaved like that. I’ll be good.”

  I shook my head, and a look of barely suppressed fear stole across her eyes.

  “You can cut that little baby girl shit out,” I said.

  The look vanished, taking the pouty lip with it.

  “I’m gonna be real straight with you here, Angel; you ever hit me in anger again, and one of us is going to die.”

  She looked down, sullen. “I’m sorry....”

  “Fuck sorry. Now what do you want to do today?”

  Instantly, my Bloody Angel came back. Only the bruise on her temple remained as a testament to our fight. Her beautiful, sinister, toothy grin drew my attention away from it.

  “I’ve been thinking...,” she started, pausing melodramatically to wait for me to say ‘go on’.

  “Go on,” I obliged.

  “Who’s the one person you most want to kill on the face of the earth?”

  “The three fucks who made The Blair Witch Project.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “So am I. That fucking film is lousy. It’s so damn obvious that they’re play-acting. I mean, fuck, the whole fucking movie that girl has a knife on her, and not once does she pull it. Why? Because she knows the stupid-ass shit outside her tent is just her fucking friends, but the knife is real.”

  “I’m serious here.”

  I obliged her again. “I guess if I had to think of just one person, out of everyone on earth, that I’d most want to see dead—”

  “Fuck that shit,” she interrupted. “Not ‘see dead’, I’m talking about the one mother-fucking asshole that you’d most love to take a chainsaw to. None of this removed killing-people-you-don’t-know-as-you-feel-like-it shit. Who do you really want dead?”

  The next words I spoke seemed to leap out on their own, like I had no choice. “Lieutenant Cruxt.”

  Angel looked confused. “Who the fuck is that?”

  “My old OIC at Cherry Point. God, I hated that guy.”

  “OIC? What’s that?”

  “Officer in Charge, from when I was a Marine. He was a little shit of a man, with thinning hair and no grasp of his own smallness. It was his personal mission to ensure that every day I spent in the Corps was the hell he thought that I deserved.”

  “Why didn’t you just put him in his place?”

  “Angel,” I said, weariness creeping into my voice like it always does when I’m forced to explain the reality of the Corps to those innocent souls who’ve never experienced it, “that was his place, and that’s what officers do—bad ones, at least.”

  “Well, fuck him,” she cried, jumping up on her knees to face me. “He dies.”

  A smile, the likes of which no man will ever learn to resist, stole all thought from me as it covered her face. I pulled her close and kissed her roughly with the insistence of righteous murder.

  “Yeah.” I pulled her up. “He’s going to die.”

  The next day, we set out for Havelock, North Carolina. I hadn’t been there since I’d gotten out of the Corps—with good reason. The place is a wasteland. It’s a ragged and quickly thrown together collection of lean-tos and modular housing, all built with a single principle in mind: nobody’s going to be there that long.

  That’s the curse of the military town. You take an area that’s meant to sustain X amount of men and women and then add in a double helping of extra men, making sure that every new man is a trained killer and alcoholic who wants nothing more, at the end of a hard day of getting fucked by his Uncle Sam, than to get wasted and find some local ass. You end up with hell for everyone. In the end, all the sane people move away, and all the town ends up with are the hustlers, the hookers, and the brainless, those who are fit to do nothing but live off of others.

  Those places are a mess—towns where the defenders of the American dream nightl
y rape it out of existence.

  We got into town late at night on April Fool’s and headed to the Days Inn at the edge of town. The manager (and probably the owner) of the place worked the counter that night. Indian, he possessed that air of pride about him that can only be found in foreigners who’ve done well for themselves in a country of lazy assholes who consider any job that doesn’t pamper them and fawn all over them with money to be below them.

  “All right then, Mr...Parker,” he made conversation as he copied my credit card information, “what brings you to Havelock?”

  “Now, why the hell would you ask that?” I growled. I felt far more irritable than I should have, and something about that guy just set me off.

  “Well, I...I mean....” His bloated face seemed to swell even larger.

  He’d just fucked up in the worst possible way by annoying me, and even though he realized a mistake had been made, he obviously had no idea just how large a mistake it was.

  “I am not meaning...I just was...,” he stammered.

  I started to say something else, but Angel beat me to the punch. Leaping the counter, she pulled out a small .22 she’d brought with her. The manager’s face swung towards the new horror that had risen up to torment him. He screamed.

  Angel fired off a round into his forehead. It made a small entry hole, and, without sound, he slumped to the floor.

  Angel danced around the lobby, high on the thrill of another death. I sighed to myself and reached over the counter to collect our completed room application and credit card receipt. Pocketing the paper trail, I vaulted over the counter and searched the dead man. Snatching a ring of hotel keys from his belt, I spotted the door to the back room and walked to it in order to find the VCR that was linked up to the security cameras.

  “Fuck, Angel.” I tried three keys on the door before I found the one that opened it. “Couldn’t you fucking wait?”

  “What?” she asked, bewildered. “Why the fuck are you yelling at me now?”

  I considered a reply but thought better of it.

  “Fuck it.” I called to her from the back room as I ejected the surveillance tape, “Clean out the cash register.”

  Everything had turned to shit. There was no way we could stay in town long enough to do the job that I had planned to do.

  I jogged out of the back room and, pulling Angel behind me, made for the rental car. I drove straight to Myrtle Beach (approximately two and a half hours away from Havelock) and checked into a hotel. Counting out the money, we realized that we’d netted somewhere around three hundred dollars.

  “Fuck,” Angel snarled.

  “What’s your problem?”

  “Three hundred dollars ain’t shit.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Myrtle Beach was great. I checked us into a suite at the Hilton, and we spent all that day in bed, cutting each other with straight razors, fucking, and doing way too much coke.

  Early the next morning, I set out for a Chevy dealership and bought a minivan. Angel turned her nose up at it, but there was no disputing that it was inconspicuous, and we needed that. We even stole some North Carolina license plates and a registration from a minivan of the same year and model, just to make it look less rushed.

  Late that night, we drove back to Havelock, pulling into town sometime around two in the morning. We checked into a dive motel called the Sherwood Inn—this time without trouble. The desk clerk told us that the town was in a state of confusion due to the owner of the town’s Days Inn having been murdered a few nights back. He went on with some inanities about what he’d do if someone tried that kind of shit on him. We just ignored him and walked to our room.

  In a town as small as Havelock, a murder is a big deal. I remember, right before I got stationed there, a local boy had been killed over some small-time drug shit. For months, the cop tried to find out who’d done the job, and his family posted flyers all over the town and in both the towns to either side. The fucked up thing is, this one guy I knew—a kid named Eric—swore that everyone coming and going knew who’d done it. Still, no one ever saw fit to tell the cops or the family, and the whole thing went unsolved. Good ol’ southern hospitality.

  I got up fairly early the next morning, around nine-thirty, and started my prep work for the murder. First off, I visited the barbershop and got a haircut, Marine regulation high and tight. My mind screamed at the familiar feel of forced conformity, yet somewhere deep inside it felt good; it felt right, as though I were just now getting back to where I should be. Old habits die hardest.

  After the barber’s, I stopped in a uniform surplus store and paid way too much money to get a service ‘charlie’ uniform—pressed and prepared, complete with Captain’s bars, shirt stays, and Corfam shoes.

  Once back in my hotel room, I changed into my new uniform. Angel had just finished her shower. I called her, and she walked out of the bathroom, glistening wet and naked. She took one look at me and burst out laughing, continuing for a couple of minutes.

  “Fuck you,” I growled.

  “Oh…no….” She gasped between laughs. “You look cute.”

  “Fuck you.”

  She laughed harder at that, lay down on the bed, and saluted. “Yes, sir!”

  I gave up and, tossing my new uniform on the bed, stalked to the bathroom to have a shower.

  Afterwards, I shaved, dressed, and strode to the motel office and checked out. Shortly after I’d finished, Angel came out to the van wearing the catholic schoolgirl outfit she’d brought from home for use in our festivities.

  I looked her over, from pony-tailed hair to knee-high stockings and saddle shoes, and I had to smile. The beautiful thing about the catholic schoolgirl outfit is how it inspires both fatherly feelings of protectiveness and decidedly non-paternal ideas at the same time. I don’t think any man can resist it.

  We stashed our gear in the minivan and drove to the base, parking in the reception area right outside the front gate. I gave Angel the stolen van’s title and sent her into the guard shack to get a three day visitor’s pass under the premise that she was there to visit her fiancée, one Lance Corporal Kraycovic, with MWHS-2 Squadron. She breezed through without any trouble at all, and within minutes we pulled up to the front gate, got saluted by the guard, and drove onto base.

  Everything became serious at that point. I was impersonating an officer in the United States Marine Corps, driving a van with stolen plates that was full of guns I had no right to be carrying onto a government installation, and bringing with me a girl currently being sought by the Arkansas state police in connection with the murder and mutilation of her parents. Even putting aside the fact that I was intending to murder a military officer (which, by the way, is considered terrorism in the United States under the Soldiers and Sailors act), any single incident with anybody would be more than enough to get me locked away for life—several consecutive lives, in fact. I felt more sober than I had in years. Believe me, the Marines are not ones to fuck with, especially not in their own home. Still, I felt excited at the prospect of slaughtering that little shit.

  I drove straight down the main street and out to the officers’ housing area (appropriately named Officer Country). I had no idea at all where my old Lieutenant lived, but I figured he’d have made Captain by now so I headed to the area where they house them.

  If you’re looking for someone’s house in Officer Country and you have no idea where it is, you can always look for the signs. They post one in front of every officer’s house telling the name, rank, and unit of the officer who lives there. Sure enough, within ten minutes, I located the home of one Capt. John D. Cruxt, MWHS2. I parked in the driveway, and Angel and I walked to the front door.

  Knocking out three sharp staccato raps on the door (the proper Marine way to knock), I waited for an answer. I was rewarded with the door unbolting and opening to reveal the face of Captain Cruxt’s young wife, Mary. I smiled at her without the slightest hint of charm.

  She looked at me with confusion, her
eyes shifting on occasion to Angel. “May I help you?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Cruxt,” I replied, my tone ominous. “I’m Captain Parker, Criminal Investigative Division. I need to speak with you about your husband, Captain Cruxt.”

  Her eyes widened then narrowed. “What?” she asked in a sharp tone before regaining her composure and adding, “I’m sorry, what exactly was it you needed to speak with me about?”

  “Well, ma’am,” I continued, “your husband is under investigation for suspected involvement in a local child pornography ring.”

  I watched, laughing at her from behind my mask of regulation solemnity, as her face twisted with shock.

  “This is Special Agent Jordan, of the FBI.” I waved my hand stiffly towards Angel. “She’s been assisting us in this investigation as an undercover operative.”

  Angel nodded curtly. “Ma’am.”

  Mary started to speak but stopped short, a spark of realization shining in her eyes.

  “Wait a minute,” she spoke slowly. “Don’t I know you?”

  I gave her my most sinister grin, and her eyes snapped wide with recognition. “Oh my God.”

  I hit her in the throat.

  The captain arrived home promptly at 1700 sharp. I watched him from a window. He marched up the drive, pausing for a moment to look at the minivan before continuing on towards the front door, blissfully unaware of his own looming mortality. He looked much the same as he had two years earlier when I’d seen him last—perhaps a bit balder. A newly acquired gold cord decorated the left shoulder of his ‘charlie’ uniform. It spoke volumes about him (but only if you could read the language it was written in).

  He reached the front door in short order and fitted his key into the lock. I moved to my waiting position, off to the side of the foyer in their dining room. Angel and I had propped the desiccated remains of his wife up against the wall so that they would be the first thing he caught sight of. I knew the corpse would produce a reaction that would be nothing short of priceless.

  I was right.

  The door swung open, and Cruxt stepped in with the beginnings of “Mary” on his lips. He never got it out, though. Instead, he froze where he stood. Making odd choking sounds, he started to shiver. Mary was stripped naked and propped—with her back against the wall—on a table directly across from the door, where a large vase had once sat. Both of her eyeballs dangled from their sockets by their veins and nerves, and I’d cut her lips off, leaving her face in a permanent death’s head grin—minus a couple of teeth in the front. I’d cut open her chest and pulled out her heart, situating it so that she held it in her right hand. Her abdomen gaped open from a knife slash, and I’d placed a small baby doll so that it appeared to be crawling from her womb (Angel thought of that touch). Lacerations and carved vulgarities formed a grisly patchwork pattern on her arms and legs, and several small flags (Naval, Marine, and United States) of the kind they use for place settings at official dinners jutted from her genitals. We’d made her a work of art in lifeless flesh.