by Rodd Clark
“No. I think I will head back to my place tonight. We can arrange some schedule of meeting somewhere to talk,” Gabriel said with sure confidence.
“Hooking up just to talk? Is that all you want now?” Words that were meant for Gabriel’s ears alone, but the breathy question hung like an albatross around his neck.
“Worry naught, my baby boy . . . you will ride again.”
Even without turning, Christian could sense the killer’s power over him. He was a child being denied his prize, and he curled his bottom lip in a pucker, thankful Gabriel hadn’t seen it.
THE FUTURE was a ridiculous consideration for either man. Both were trapped in the final hours of their daylight, only they didn’t yet know this. While Christian reflected about the possibility of a life spent with Gabriel, the killer was measuring out his irrevocable, unalterable days. For Gabe, he had lived his life with a single motto: Everything crumbles and dust takes it all. He could appear playful in Christian’s eyes, he could smile and joke about sex, but only because he saw the finality of it all . . . recognized the fate that would befall everyone, knew his future was locked into place, preordained. And it wouldn’t be a good ending.
Gabe understood you couldn’t take a life without first understanding just how feeble life was, how tentative and weak it stood alone. If you desired murder, you held a life in your hand. Whether you released it to grant life or gripped tighter to end it, it was at your command and discretion.
HER NAME had been Sandra Hodges. She was round and fair-skinned. Her blonde hair hung at her shoulders with a smile that made one forget her plump size. Lovely was a word her friends and family used to describe her, but it was her personality that made her special, in a not-so-special shell. Four years before Washington, Gabe had been traveling through California. It was there the two strangers had met.
“Don’t be too afraid to be weak,” he whispered over her shoulder calmly, just as she drew her final breaths. The look on her face was something Gabe would remember for all future days. It had not been sadness or surprise . . . maybe it had been acceptance.
Gabe had come closer to getting caught with Sandra’s murder than he ever had before. It was in the timing, or the lack of it. As the fat woman trembled in those last breaths of life, Gabe barely had time to sop up her essence before his escape became compulsory. He hadn’t chosen well, the spot where he took her. He was a vampire who needed sufficient time to drink, and he had rushed with her. He’d had no plan for the blonde’s ending, and it nearly caused his undoing. He had only left the carwash stall seconds before another car pulled in. The water jet lay dripping suds from its nozzle like a bleeding artery.
He’d first caught sight of Sandra as she was standing next to her tiny red Prius shooting soapy streams on her new baby. She was alone. The light enveloping her held its usual brilliance, causing Gabe to weave his vehicle slightly, unexpectedly. He raced to the next corner and took a hasty U-turn to make it back around so that he could park in the adjacent stall. Excitement surged in his chest as he grabbed a familiar blade from under his driver’s seat. His tension bubbled up and his nerves jangled as he shoved the blade in his jeans and opened the door under the pretense of washing his road dirty car.
It was early dusk. There had been no traffic on the streets next to the SUDS-STREAM CAR WASH. He wondered why a single woman would ever choose to wash her car in such a remote and unsavory area. It was as if she didn’t respect her own safety. He wanted to mention that to her before he killed her but chose to hold his tongue. Taking a long look around for cameras and pedestrians, he calmly walked into the next stall, spotting her smiling as she held the wand over her windshield. He offered a pretense of asking her if she had change for a single or know where the change machine might be. She was cordial, naturally. Gabe could barely make out her round features because of the light that blinded her face.
It was over in seconds as he encircled her quickly, placing his massive arm around her ample breasts then the other covering her mouth to quiet her scream. She was wearing a pink, frilly sweater, forcing Gabe to wonder why fat girls always dressed as if they were still in high school. He could smell her perfume slathered over her buxom tits, and he felt remorse for her type. Never invited to the dance, playing the good girl, all smiles, but only because no one had ever asked her to play anything other. Claiming to her friends she had to babysit on Saturday nights, when the sad truth was no one ever asked her to do much else. She should have lost her virginity in the same ratty back seats as her girlfriends, but she had become a caricature of daddy’s little girl, grasping her virtue with tight, fat fingers. It was a tragic disguise to everyone but her that her chastity had never been a prize of value for any of the boys in her grade.
Gabe held her tightly as he drove the blade into her chest, breathing heavy in her ear, almost sensually. Her pretty pink sweater started to ooze a bright red stain between her breasts as the air in her massive lungs escaped with a grisly sound. The cable knit flowers on her sweater ran from pink to blackened red, and Gabe felt her full size as the oxygen left her and she became a dead-weight puppet who’d had her strings cut.
“Don’t be too afraid to be weak,” he whispered again.
It seemed the best advice he could offer her, and she appeared to open with his words in her ears, at least until she was nothing but fat girth in his arms. Gabe laid her gently on the wet ground as suds intermixed with blood, and he noticed one of her equally frilly slippers had fallen from one of her round feet and rested on the drain with the melting soap and blood. He noticed it had once been pink as well.
Sandra Hodge’s body was discovered seconds later by someone who would arrive to wash their own car. She had been hard not to notice: a plump figure lying with her face in the water next to a pretty red Prius. Gabe had just stepped back to his stall and was pulling out as the other car pulled in. The sight of that pudgy, dead thing caught the driver’s eyes first, giving Gabe an opportunity of pulling out before he left a witness. He passed police cars heading to the SUDS-STREAM CAR WASH, sirens screaming out loudly as he passed, driving with his window down to enjoy the warm night air.
Chapter Sixteen
CHECKING OUT OF the Mayflower Plaza was disappointing for Christian. The only thing that made it bearable was when he and Gabriel had raced back upstairs and hurried to the bedroom as they stripped off shirts and jeans, and Christian yanked off of his underwear, laughing as they launched naked onto the comforting mattress for one last romp. It was like living a young schoolgirl’s fantasy, practically swooning in the arms of her more dominate man. And for his part, Gabriel worked hard to complete the vision and to live up to that daydream of his ideal fable. Hard, brutal, sweaty thrusts, then light calming touches before the inevitable soft wet kisses exploring Christian’s chest.
They both knew it would be a while before they would have the chance to be together again, so the writer languished over Gabriel’s body, tracing every scar and line. He stroked his fingers in every cranny, a traveler, fascinated by unfamiliar settings. He soaked in every moment before the phone rang and they were forced to extricate from their lovemaking to get dressed quickly and head downstairs.
“Now what?” Christian asked as they stood on the sidewalk with his tiny duffle slung over his shoulder. The front entrance of the Mayflower was entreating them back inside, but it couldn’t be an option.
“I’m a little confused here, do I head home and just let you disappear into the side streets? Or do we schedule our next outing now? Hey, I haven’t even given you my number yet. I suppose I could just wait for you to call?”
“You worry too much, mister man. How ’bout I call you tomorrow, and we can meet up for a drink, maybe coffee. You choose a place. Someplace we can work . . . someplace where I can’t get you naked.”
Gabriel was apparently stronger than he was; he could drop it like an unwanted cloak whenever he needed to. He could live with the absence, but for Christian it was the void he couldn’t begin to fathom. S
mitten, crazy—he wasn’t sure how to define his emotions, but he understood what he wanted, and it was Gabriel Church regardless of his past or his predilections.
“Okay, fine,” he said quietly as he scratched out his number on a piece of paper he’d pulled from the duffle. He added his address because it seemed ridiculous not to. “Call me. But before you strike out . . . please tell me. What does someone like you do during the day? How will Gabriel Church occupy his time?”
“Why, thinking about you . . . naturally.”
Gabriel smiled his usual twisted grin, and the light bounced from his beautiful eyes. Christian had to force himself to turn and head in the direction of where his vehicle had been parked for two full days. He sensed the familiar tug from behind him, drawing him like some sinful vice with a bent and begging finger. It took all his persuasion to walk away as if it meant nothing at all. He’d rather have followed Church home so he could watch him from a distance, study his actions. That thought disgusted him, it reeked of insanity and obsession, but it was not as if he didn’t already feel that presence growing, like some damned, dark foreshadowing.
Christian should have spent his time considering whether Church would murder in his absence, but he was foolishly locked into his own selfish reasoning. The writer’s compulsions were blinding him to the translucent. He would have said that he’d been in Church’s company during their entire time together, and that he hadn’t noticed him staring at anyone particularly hard or that he wasn’t surely fighting his own sick obsessions. Christian told himself he would have been aware if Church had seen his fucking light shit. He would’ve seen the change overtaking him. Wouldn’t he?
AS GABE headed through busy side streets, passing businesses and fast-moving throngs of crowds, he glanced back more than once, just to ensure he wasn’t being followed. His face became corpse white and there was a steely determination in his gray eyes. He’d enjoyed his time with the writer, and he’d gotten his rocks off more times than he could’ve anywhere else, at least outside of a brothel with a few hundred dollars in his pocket. He liked spending time with Chris; he liked having a toy to call his own. No one had ever bent so willingly to his desires before. It was a nice change of pace, one where he couldn’t help but smile with that twitching throbbing from his jeans as he remembered all the things they’d done together.
It took thirty minutes of meandering through side streets and taking long blocks, only to double back, before Gabe was back at his dismal flat. After basking in the sumptuous Mayflower for two days, this place looked even dumpier than it had before. He would have been embarrassed to have Chris see his rented surroundings. But it was what it was. He wanted to take a break from the writer today. He was beginning to lose perspective, forgetting his old life in the warming embrace of a new one.
They would only be apart for possibly a day, but he suspected he’d miss hearing Chris’s honeyed voice from across the room. In as much as he would miss seeing those eyes twinkle nervously every time Gabe passed by close enough their bodies brushed, ever so slightly. He liked how Chris could be the cold voice of reason whenever he asked Gabe the same questions that he might’ve asked himself, given the opportunity. He enjoyed watching Chris weigh out the morality of his deeds. Not as if he himself hadn’t already spent many hours in deep contemplation over that very issue. He liked to look up and see the writer’s fixed expression over his cocktail glass or that accustomed cup of coffee. He might miss that most of all.
Gabe pulled the crumpled telephone number from his jeans and tossed it on the nightstand beside his bed. The air seemed stale and rank from a lack of circulation, so he pushed open the French doors overlooking the courtyard. The doors were New Orleans in style, just as the courtyard was. It was the single feature about this hovel that made it passable. He pulled his shirt over his head and dragged it under his armpits before tossing it on the mattress and standing by the window for whatever breeze he could find.
He was forming a plan in his mind. Although abstract, it was developing a tangible edge, and Gabe had been playing with it ever since he and Chris had last fucked at the hotel. There were things he’d never told Chris, and those secrets were materializing now in his quiet, rented room as he stared out at fireflies beginning to dance in the air of the piazza. Gabe had always held a belief he would never get caught. He would never be tried and convicted for his part in the murder spree. That was never his destiny. If he were going to get arrested that white-light radiance would have been somehow different than it was. How was it possible that his victims were so distinctly shrouded in the familiar glow? They were distinguished for identification. This was some master plan that was working in the background. He was sure of that. He assumed when it ended, it would end poorly, with him eating a bullet and Chris writing a novel about who he was—why he’d done the things he had.
From the beginning Gabe had wanted his stories told. He’d always harbored a secret desire that his legacy might be published on paper, possibly in a book that someone could pull from a shelf and physically hold in their hands. His life had been a train wreck from the beginning, but now he wanted his life to have residue, something that went beyond the news accounts and twisted articles by psychiatrists. Doctors who’d never met him but were somehow able to make broad statements about his character. He’d banked on this story being conveyed, particularly after running across Chris. Granted, he’d never considered developing feelings for his biographer. Just the idea Gabe would spend time running his tongue over the stranger, or entering him from behind again and again . . . it was ludicrous.
He couldn’t control his emotional attachment to Chris that was true, but he could control how his story ended. And this was the switch that was turned continuously on, then off again in his head, making it seem perfectly reasonable that Gabe would ask his new friend to participate with the next killing.
BACK AT his loft, Christian gathered his notes on the dining room table. He circled himself with all the papers, articles, and his recent notes from his stay at the Mayflower. It was a daunting task, but he knew the book had to begin with an outline. He would use his usual process of drafting his framework and push those ideas through the grinder of his mind. It was his custom to work in this fashion; he liked to see the gristle and fat left in the bowl. It was how he’d written before, although he’d never written about a serial killer, nor had he ever written anything close to true crime. This would be a challenge.
He suspected the book needed to completely catalog each homicide, and he wanted Church to confess to his crimes, every one. He wanted to research the victims, their backstories and their families. It was important they have a voice throughout his manuscript. What he hadn’t considered from the onset was his desire to make Church more engaging, more human. Originally that had never been the plan.
Christian Maxwell may have been one of the first to connect the unlikely homicides to a single killer. The more he’d read about the murders, the more intrigued he’d become. Even he could see the shrieking pathology of the crimes, mainly because there didn’t seem to be one . . . at least an obvious one. The more articles he read about the string of unsolved murders, the more it seemed a construction was hidden somewhere inside their lack of relationship. It was as if the killer was speaking directly to him, because he saw the random nature of the murders more than any other investigator. He would stand staring at the news reports he’d cut from papers and pinned to his whiteboard, but the more he added to his collage, the more they whispered to him to look closer.
The writer would feel like he was weaving dangerously through traffic every time he faced the whiteboard, and his heart would race at the thought of how close he was to seeing the full picture, which seemed forever just out of his line of sight. It was never enough to alert police, he had nothing more than they did, just a nagging itch in the back of his throat suggesting he was closer to finding their killer than they were. He’d tried to visualize the faceless killer; it was easier than standing in his shoes be
cause the motives were still too far from his grasp for understanding. That shocking realization only hit him when he placed a pin in a map and knew without hesitation the next victim would be discovered there. His hands trembled when he was later proven right, cutting the article from the paper about the latest unsolved homicide to pin on his wall map, right next to his whiteboard.
But that had been before he met Gabriel; now everything was different. Now as he sat surrounded by old print newspapers, his laptop sitting open, his trusty legal pad there, fixated on the mountain of work ahead of him, he would list every homicide on paper to go over with Gabriel later in a conversation he knew would not be pleasant. It would be difficult trying to perform the task so analytically; he would need to force the faces of all of Church’s victims from his head. He didn’t need to see their bloody smiles staring up from the paper and invading his efforts.
Christian’s hands refused to work the keys. He mistyped many words and found his thoughts straying just out of reach. He kept hearing Gabriel whispering over his shoulder, refusing to allow him any solitude to work. He was making ridiculous statements and running his tongue along the writer’s ear in an effort to distract him. He was an impetuous child demanding to be noticed: Look at me, Daddy . . . hey, watch me! Christian had to turn around a couple of times. He knew he was alone in his loft, but he still felt that breathy awareness at his nape, ghostly perceptions standing behind him telling him Gabriel was directly behind him, staring over his shoulder, reading every word he typed and pouting disapprovingly.
Even without the killer in his presence, he was haunted. How could he construct a book about something as horrific as murder with Gabriel dancing around in his mind, occupying every waking thought?
