Lost Echoes

11

The ceiling had shadows on it that looked like the blades of a fan, and this was because the light fixture on the ceiling had little slats inside.

The big man lay on the bed looking at this, considering something or another about it, but he was uncertain what. A spider crawled out of the light fixture and dangled out to the side of it, and he thought, if it falls, it will fall on her.

He turned and looked over at the woman beside him, then at his partner, who was on the other side of the female sandwich, grinning. His partner was up on one elbow looking at him, so he rose up too, and grinned. They were just a couple of Cheshire cats tossing grins across the room.

The big man swung his feet to the side of the bed and sat there and looked toward the open door of the bathroom, thought about the car. They had to get rid of the car, and they needed to do it soon. It was good to stretch out for the moment—all the activity, the adren-line, had made him tired—but you could stretch your time too far, and if you kept stretching, the whole thing was going to snap. You had to think about that. Had to.

They had found her at the motel. It was one of the places they liked to look, and mostly they weren’t lucky, but this night they were. They cruised in, and out back of the place, getting out of her car, heading toward the row of rooms, was the girl.

Quick was their middle name. They were out of the car and had her before you could blink an eye, hand over her mouth, pulling her into her own ride, hitting her with a tire iron, dropping her down onto the floorboard, taking her keys, him driving her car, his partner following in theirs. On out to the woods to leave their car and take her car back to the motel room. She had a key. Number seven. There could be a man in there. A family. That was all part of the game.

They took her back to the motel and into number seven and there was no one else. It was easy, and they did to her what they wanted to do. Had fun.

He looked at the young woman lying in the center of the bed. Her dead eyes looked at the ceiling in the way his live eyes had, but she saw nothing. He had seen shadow slats and a spider. It was all shadow to her and no awareness of shadow.

He liked to think about that, try and understand it. What was it like to be nothing, to know nothing? How was it to be dead? He didn’t want to experience it himself, but in her eyes, in that last moment when he fastened his hands around her throat, after she had come awake from the blow to the head, after they had finished with her, he thought, for just an instant, in her face, in her eyes, he could see the shadow of death move into her head behind the windows of her soul.

It was quite a feeling.

The big man got up and started for the bathroom, scratching his naked ass as he went. Behind him he heard his partner get up, and when he looked, he saw he was getting dressed.

That didn’t surprise him. They had used protection, condoms, and they had disposed of the condoms down the toilet, but his partner wasn’t even going to wash his dick. He ought to wash it just because he ought to. Had to be some real nasty on that dude.

He turned his attention to the woman again.

Still dead.

She hadn’t miraculously come back to life.

They had had that happen once. Thought a gal was dead, had her at a drive-through eatery, covered in a blanket, down on the backseat floorboard, and while they were waiting on their burgers and fries, looking at the kid on the other side of the window hustling around at the register, they heard a sudden gulp of breath.

The woman they thought dead was not dead.

He remembered it as if it were yesterday, though it was…two, three years ago. She had gulped air, and with his partner at the wheel, he had reached back between the seats as she rose up like a zombie from the dead, the blanket over her head and body, and he grabbed her throat. Grabbed it right through the blanket and squeezed, cutting off the hose, not letting the fuel get into her system. Held her tight.

She thrashed. Her arms came out from under the blanket.

He looked at his partner, who saw what was going down, then he glanced at the kid behind the register, gathering up a sack now, turning his pimple-painted face toward them, reaching for the sliding window, and with all his might, he pushed down with his hand, squeezed with his fingers, and the woman—girl, really—kicked a couple of times. But the kid, he didn’t notice shit. There was music inside, and you could really hear it now that the window was slid back, some canned shit that ran all day long at the place, and he was saying, “Two burgers, all the way. Fries. Two Diet Cokes.”

“Yeah. Yeah,” his partner said, and gave him a bill.

A big bill.

Damn.

Now they had to wait for change, and there he was, trying to hold that bitch down, and she was goddamn strong, and it was work, doing it with one hand stuck back between the seats, trying to look casual, hoping the burger doodle guy didn’t see her feet moving around back there, didn’t hear them against the seat. All that, and his partner gives the guy a big bill and waits.

Later, his partner would say, “Shit, man. It’s what I had. Don’t want him to remember I gave him a twenty, some such thing, said keep the change, something like that, ’cause he sure would remember that, don’t you think? So I had to wait on the change. Had to.”

And of course he was right. But there was the kid, passing sacks and drinks along, taking the money, and there he was, his hand tight on the woman’s throat, doing what he thought he had already done, and then, as her arms, way out from under the blanket, thrashed and she dug her nails into the back of his hand and he gritted his teeth to keep from yelping, the kid closed the window and his partner juiced the car.

He looked back through the rear window, saw a car behind them, some kids. But they weren’t paying lots of attention. And when they drove off, the kids pulled to the window and stopped. He let out his breath. When they turned the corner and went back on the road, he turned and slipped between the seats, catching his shoe and pulling it off on something or another. He dropped down onto the floorboard, bringing his knee into the middle of her, jerking off the blanket, letting go of her throat, hitting her three, four times with his fists.

And when she was out, slowly, carefully, he went back to squeezing, feeling her neck bones crackle beneath his strong fingers. He strangled her, finished her. And then when they were out in the woods, he cut off her fingers and they shoved her out and he took the fingers with him. Later he dug his skin out from under the nails on the fingers and trimmed them down, and put the fingers in an ant bed; after a while, a week or so, he went back and dug them up and put them in a bag and carried them out with him fishing, left them in the water out by the dam, each one with a fistful of sinkers tied to them.

But this one, lying on the bed, she wasn’t coming back from nowhere, and she hadn’t scratched anyone. She had gone over. She was dead, dead, dead. ’Cause he knew how to do it now, how to be certain.

“You gonna run the water?” his partner asked.

The big man snapped back to the job at hand.

“Sure. Give me a minute; then bring her.”

His partner, completely dressed now, walked to the curtains and stood in front of them. The bright yellow sign with the red light that blinked MOTEL throbbed through the curtains and made the room pulse like a heat blister.

“I get worried,” his partner said. “I have fun, and I’m okay, but afterward I get worried. Always think there’s DNA all over the goddamn place. Some skin cell off my ass or something.”

The big man paused, put a hand on the bathroom door as he looked at his partner. “See my hand on this door? Think I’m fucking scared? Think I’m worried about prints?”

“You ought to be. You know we ought to be.”

“All right. There’s some fear. Wasn’t any fear, would you do it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“I wouldn’t. I don’t think you would either. Thing is, I’m gonna wipe the place clean. I’m gonna run a tub full of water, and we’re gonna clean her, and then we’re gonna let her soak in the water. Where guys who do this fuck up is, they take souvenirs. We aren’t going to take any. I mention that, ’cause I saw you eyeing her ankle bracelet.”

“I thought about it. She’s got a ring through her pussy too. I seen you look at that.”

“It’s there to look at, but I don’t want it. That’s like asking for it. Guys do this, take that stuff, they’re just asking for it. And they kill in the same place, same way, dispose of the body the same way—”

“We’ve done some of that—”

“Yeah. But we change up too. And we don’t do it all the goddamn time. You got to hold back some. Have some self-control. It’s more fun when it’s built up some steam, and then you still got to be careful. That’s the thing matters, self-control.”

“I don’t know. We had self-control, we wouldn’t do it.”

“It doesn’t take any self-control not to do it. It’s the self-control to do it that matters. To know you’re taking a chance, and still keep your head.”

His partner turned back to the curtain and the lights.

“I suppose.”

Sometimes he worried about his partner, thought maybe he was just a little flaky, out there on the rim, wobbling.

“I’m gonna wipe the place down,” he said, “do the cleaning. Then we’re gonna go. Got some DNA here…well, they got to connect it to us. Isn’t any reason to connect it to us, is there?”

“I suppose not.”

“Most little burgs like this, you know they don’t even have fucking DNA tests. Costs to get that done. Costs too much for little towns. You know that. So it ain’t like a fucking television show where they find one nut hair and know some fucker in Cleveland did it. Not if we’re careful. Shit, man. Risk is part of it, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Then, we do what we’re supposed to do, any DNA they got, we don’t worry too much about, ’cause they got to match it to us. And why would they? It’s the more practical shit ought to worry you. Like leaving your fucking wallet or some such thing.”

“Yeah. You’re right.”

His partner was back at the bed now, looking down at the nude woman’s body.

“She was sure easy. I didn’t get, you know, what I was looking for. I sort of feel sorry for her. For me, she was kind of a waste. I don’t like to waste. Get what you want, it ain’t a waste, but she died and I didn’t get what I wanted.”

“Sometimes it’s a thrill. Sometimes it ain’t much. It’s like dinner in a strange restaurant. You can’t count on anything. But sometimes it’s pretty special. You got to take a run at it, see how it turns out.”

The big man went into the bathroom to run the tub full of water.

Later they drove away in her green Dodge, leaving her in the motel, at the bottom of the tub, covered in soapy water, this after cleansing and rinsing her a few times. They drove the Dodge to the woods, both of them wearing gloves now.

They got out and paused to light cigarettes and lean against a tree and look up through the branches at the moon, careful not to toss their cigarettes, so as not to leave anything of themselves behind.

Finally they loaded up in their car and drove back to where they lived, some hour or so away. When they got to the big man’s house, first thing they did was remove the shoes they had bought at Goodwill, wiped them down and put them in a bag and took them to the Dumpster.

The big man thought it all over. By the time anyone found the car, maybe found their tracks, even if they came to them, checked out their shoes, looked for them in the dump, if they could find them, those shoes would be plowed way under, could be anyone’s shoes, mixed in with coffee grounds and used Tampax and rotten tomato slices.

Living this kind of life, even taking precautions, keeping the kills down to different towns and wide apart, you still had to be careful. DNA could really be a problem. His partner was right about that. But it could be beaten, this DNA. Wasn’t magic. Was beaten all the time. Otherwise nobody would get away with anything.

Besides, what was the game without the thrill of discovery? Fear of prison and the hot needle full of drop-you-down-dead? Fear of getting caught, that was the hullabaloo that kept it all exciting. Gave life the juice. ’Cause without death, without fear of it, without having it hanging over your head like a slow-tipping bottle full of acid, the whole of existence was merely about floating from one moment to another, like a frog on a lily pad, and he didn’t like to think of himself as a frog.

No. Had to compare himself to some other kind of critter, something that had to do with water…well, he’d go for big water. The ocean. And he would be a great white shark.

Yep. He was a shark. And his partner…well, he was a sucker fish clinging to his belly. No. His balls. Sucked up tight on his balls. That’s how he liked to think of him.

A sucker fish.

And him, the shark, dragging his partner through the water, clinging to the old shark nuts.