The Resurrectionist

The Resurrectionist

Wrath James White

A Living Nightmare

It was still dark when Sarah woke up in her bed with the taste of blood on her tongue. Josh was snoring quietly beside her. The sheets smelled fresh, like they had just been washed. Sarah screamed.

She kept screaming even when Josh woke up and wrapped his strong arms around her. Even when he began to rock her back and forth and stroke her hair.

“It’s okay, Sarah. It was just a bad dream. Everything’s okay.”

Sarah checked Josh’s neck and chest. Then she checked her own. There were no wounds, no blood. She dropped her head onto Josh’s shoulder and began to weep.

“That sick bastard. You don’t know what he did to me. He killed us. You were dead. We both were. The new neighbor…that guy…Dale…he murdered us!”

“It was just a dream.”

“No! It wasn’t a dream!”

To Mom

CHAPTER ONE

Dale walked slowly down the hall, yawning and rubbing his eyes as he tiptoed to his parents’ bedroom where the screaming was increasing in intensity, growing ever more shrill and agonized. He shivered despite his flannel pajamas and held his comic book clenched tight in his fist like a security blanket, rolling it up and squeezing it until the pages creased and wrinkled and the cover tore. He hadn’t slept yet. He’d been lying in bed reading The Man of Steel, trying not to fall asleep until the fighting was over.

Just as he had every night, he’d lain awake listening to the wet smack of knuckles striking flesh, the roar of his father’s angry voice and his mother’s own shrill, defiant retort, not backing down until the blows began to fall without relent. Then, when his mother had been beaten into silence, that horrible sound would come. That squishy, rhythmic smack of flesh against flesh mingled with grunts and groans and his mother’s muffled sobs. A part of him had always worried that someday his father would go too far and he would wind up an orphan. A part of him figured it was inevitable.

When Dale heard that new sound, wetter, more violent, less rhythmic, cries and screams that turned into a gurgling wheeze, he knew that his mother was dead before he ever walked into the bedroom.

His mother was swimming in a river of blood. It poured off the bed as Dale’s father continued to stab her. He was still inside of her, raping her as he did every night, eyes glittering, high on crystal meth. The steak knife in his hand rose and fell over and over again, stabbing in rhythm with his own thrusts. Dale’s mother had stopped screaming. Still, she continued to struggle beneath him, trying to escape. But even her struggles had lost their urgency. Her arms and legs pinwheeled in slow motion, her fingernails clawing the bloody sheets as Dale’s father fucked her from behind and stabbed her in the back again and again, wrenching the knife free from her shoulder and flinging blood onto the white walls up to the ceiling before clenching the knife in both fists and bringing the blade down again with all his strength.

When her movements finally ceased, his father rolled her over onto her bloodied back. Her head wobbled loosely on her neck, which had been hacked and cut so that her vertebrae were visible through the back of her neck. Dale thought that this meant the assault was over and his mother would finally have some peace, but his father reinserted his erect penis into his mother’s blood-slickened vagina and continued stabbing her in her breasts, throat, and face until she was nearly unrecognizable.

His father didn’t say a word as he viciously unmade Dale’s mother. He grunted occasionally with the effort and exertion as he simultaneously fucked and stabbed her. His father finally ejaculated, his body hitching and jerking. His eyes rolled back in ecstasy. A grin ripped across his bloodied face. He looked over at his son and smiled wider. For a moment, Dale thought his Dad was going to hold up his hand for a high-five. His father was still breathing hard and smiling when he looked back down at the ruin he’d made of his wife. Blood and sweat ran down his father’s face and Dale watched as his dad wiped the sweat from his eyes with his forearm, replacing the perspiration with blood, looking pleased with himself, as if he had just painted a work of art or played some complicated piece of music. His father looked at the knife in his hand and the blood that covered his fist and arms, then looked back down at Dale’s mother and began to cut on her again.

Dale watched the entire thing without saying a word. He knew that this was much worse than the beatings. He knew that his mother was dead and that she would never be coming back, but he just could not connect with it all somehow. He felt as if he were watching a movie and not the sadistic murder of the woman who had given birth to him, who had been feeding him macaroni and cheese just hours ago, before tucking him into bed.

He walked into the living room and picked up the phone. He could hear tearing and ripping sounds coming from his parents’ bedroom. He gritted his teeth, wincing each time he heard the sound of skin ripping away from muscle. Dale finally began to sob as he dialed 911.

“Police emergency line. What is your emergency?”

“My…my daddy just killed my mommy and…and he…he’s cutting her up.”

He closed his eyes and tried his best to block out the sounds coming from the bedroom. He didn’t want to go in there again, didn’t want to see his mother butchered, reduced to meat. What he’d already seen and what he was imagining in his head was bad enough. Dale didn’t want to know what his father had been doing with that knife for the last twenty minutes. He waited on the couch with his hands clamped over his ears until the police arrived.

“Police! Open the door!”

Dale opened the door for the police and was whisked outside and into the arms of a female officer who placed him in the front seat of a squad car. The policewoman told him her name. Linda? Lydia? Lila? He had forgotten it immediately after hearing it. He was too busy thinking about his mom.

Everything was happening so fast. His mind was having a hard time catching up. Somehow, he’d gone from eating mac and cheese, watching Afro Samurai on TV, and kissing his mom and dad good night to sitting in a cop car while policemen stormed the house to arrest his dad, who’d just murdered his mother. Dale’s mind was having a hard time making the adjustments. He could not connect with this reality.

He watched the other officers enter the house, heard the shouts and screams and then the gunshots. He began to cry again, screaming for his mommy when he saw the officers stagger out of the house, ashen-faced, some regurgitating on the front lawn, others just staring off into space. A couple of cops held each other and wept. It was seeing those cops crying for his dead mother that broke him, brought home the reality of his mother’s brutal murder.

“Mommyyyyyy! Mooooommyyyy!”

“Stay right here.”

The female officer climbed out of the police cruiser and walked across the lawn into the house. It was less than a minute before she came running back with her eyes wide and terrified. Dale watched as she leaned against the trunk of the car and vomited into the street while crying hysterically.

“Oh my God! Oh my God! He tore her apart! How could he do that to his own wife? How could he do that to the mother of his child? He cut off all of her skin!”

Dale quietly left the police cruiser. He walked back across the lawn and into the house while the other officers stood by their vehicles comforting each other, calling for the coroner’s van and the crime-scene unit, doing whatever they could to avoid going back into the house.

The bedroom was splattered red. The carpet was saturated with his mother’s blood. It squished between Dale’s toes as he crept barefoot toward the bed. What he saw splayed out on the sheets defied all sanity. His father had torn his mother’s body apart. Her nightgown was pushed up around her neck and the skin had been flayed from her torso and piled up on the floor. She had been stabbed multiple times in the face, neck, and chest, puncturing both eyes, her cheeks and forehead, bisecting her mouth and nose. Her ears had been removed and she’d been scalped. Her throat had been cut so deeply that she’d been nearly decapitated. Dale’s father had begun skinning her legs when the police had apparently burst in and shot him. His body was crumpled up on the side of the bed.

Dale crawled up onto the bed, slogging through his mother’s blood, his chest hitching with emotion, and placed his lips to his mother’s lips, trying to give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. He blew into her lungs, then inhaled deeply and blew again. He was about to give her another breath when he felt her blow back into his mouth. She was breathing.

Her breaths came slowly at first and then began to speed up, coming faster and faster as if she was hyperventilating. As Dale watched, her flesh began to knit back together. A fury of movement exploded beneath the thin sheet of skin that remained on her body. It looked as if her muscles had been filled with tiny insects that were all moving at once, warring within her flesh.

Severed veins, arteries, tendons, and sinews crawled like vines over exposed bone, slithering like a nest of worms within the lacerated meat, reattaching muscle to skeleton. Skin cells regenerated, reproducing at an astonishing rate as the skin grew back to cover her skeletal muscular system where the skin had been shorn away.

Her breaths came in quick, short bursts as her body remade itself, chest rising and falling rapidly. Long minutes went by before her breathing began to slow, relaxing into its normal rhythm. Slowly, her eyes opened and she sat up.

Dale’s mother looked around at all the blood and skin and bits of flesh, then down at her husband’s body. She screamed and immediately the room filled with police officers with guns drawn, shouting at her and ordering her to lie down on the floor.

“Get down! Get the fuck on the floor! Put your hands where I can see them!”

One of the police officers tackled Dale’s mother and soon three cops were pinning her down and wrestling her arms behind her back. Once they had her in handcuffs they lifted her back to her feet.

“Now, who the fuck are you? How did you get in here?”

Blood obscured her features in a mask of red.

“I live here. What are you doing in my house?”

“Where’s the body? What did you do with the body?”

“What body? I don’t know what you’re talking about! What happened to my husband?”

She was in a panic. Dale clung to her legs, hugging her tight.

“There was a woman’s body lying in this bed with her head almost cut off and half her skin removed. You’ve got her blood all over you. Now what did you do with the body?”

Police officers surrounded Dale’s mother, staring at her in horror and disgust. His mother’s nightgown had been cut to ribbons. Her breasts and the triangular patch of brown hair between her thighs were visible through the rents in the fabric. Blood covered nearly every inch of her body.

“Who let her in here? Who was supposed to be watching this kid?”

“It’s my mommy. She’s okay. I made her better.”

The officer who’d tackled her pointed at her shredded gown.

“Isn’t that the same nightgown the dead woman was wearing? What the fuck is going on here?”

Two of the officers who’d handcuffed Dale’s mother were now standing beside her, backing slowly away, looking at her as if she were a ghost. The fear in their eyes was like a light growing brighter until it radiated from them and filled the entire room.

The policewoman walked over to Dale and his mother. His mother was holding him tight, smearing blood onto his pajamas.

“What happened to my husband?”

“We had to shoot him. He was killing someone. We thought it was you. Do you know where the girl went? The woman whose body was here in this bed?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“There wasn’t anybody else in here. It was just my mommy. My dad hurt her real bad and then I gave her mouth-to-mouth like they do on TV and she was all better!”

The police officers all looked at one another, not knowing what to make of it. The officer who’d shot Dale’s father, a fat Italian cop in his forties, was shifting nervously from one foot to the other, wringing his hands. He looked around at his colleagues for support.

“I’m Lisa…L-Lisa McCarthy. This is my house. What are you all doing here?”

“How are we going to explain why we shot this woman’s husband without a body?”

Another officer with gold bars on the sleeve of his uniform looked down at the body on the floor.

“Well, he had a knife. And with all that blood it looked like he’d killed her.”

The policewoman who’d taken Dale out to the police car was standing in the room, looking around at all the blood and then at the blood-soaked woman with the torn nightgown.

“No! This wasn’t some kind of hallucination! We all saw what he’d done to her. He almost cut her head off! Her skin was removed. Look! It’s still there. Her skin is still there! There has to be a body.”

The officers dashed frantically around the house, trying to find the missing corpse. The policewoman continued to stare at Dale’s mom, noting the blood matted in her hair, already coagulating, the slashes in her nightgown. The policewoman began to visibly shake. She looked from the bloodied woman to Dale and back.

Dale’s eyes connected with the policewoman’s and the officer clamped a hand over her mouth as she stared back at him.

“Oh my God. It can’t be,” she whispered.

The policewoman sniffled a couple of times, wiped the vomit from her lips with the back of her hand, then wiped the tears from her eyes and straightened her uniform. Dale watched as she nodded to the other officers, gave them a weak smile, and then knelt down, taking Dale’s hand. The policewoman looked up at Dale’s mom and then over at the other officers.

“Can I take your son outside so the officers can ask you a few questions?”

“Uh, sure, but I don’t know what happened. I just woke up on this bed in all this blood. And…and then I saw Mikey dead.”

“He killed you, Mom. You were dead and then I brought you back.”

The policewoman looked at Dale for a long moment. Dale could feel her trembling as she held his hand. Her hand flew up to her mouth again and tears welled up in her eyes. Dale knew right then that she believed him.

“Let’s get you out of here.”

The policewoman took Dale outside, casting one last glance over her shoulder at the blood-soaked woman, the woman she’d seen just minutes ago with stab wounds in her face and half the skin stripped from her body.

Outside, Dale and the policewoman sat in the back of the police cruiser. The sky had gone from black to gray as the sun began to rise somewhere beyond the big houses and trees. Dale stared out the window of the police cruiser, watching the sunrise. When he turned back toward the officer, she was smiling.

“You…you healed her, didn’t you?”

Dale nodded.

“How?”

“Like they do in the movies. Mouth-to-mouth resussisation.”

“You mean ‘resuscitation’?”

“Yeah, I breathed into her and she healed all up.”

“But she was dead. You know that, right?”

“Yeah, just like on TV. She was dead and I saved her.”

“But-but how did her wounds heal?”

Dale shrugged his shoulders.

“I don’t know.”

“And you’re sure that’s your mom in there? It’s not some other woman that got in the house somehow?”

“No, that’s my mom.”

“And the woman who was on the bed when we got here, the woman who was all cut up, that was your mom too?”

“Uh-huh.”

The policewoman smiled and wiped tears from her eyes.

“It’s a miracle,” she said.

Tears began to flow freely down her face and she began to laugh.

“It’s a miracle!” she said louder.

Dale smiled back at her, confused but happy.

Moments later CSU arrived. They began collecting evidence, evidence that would confirm exactly what Dale had told the policewoman, evidence that they would all reject. A week later, when the lab came back with the DNA results, the blood on the bed and carpet and the skin recovered from the scene were all confirmed as coming from Dale’s mom. The results were dismissed as some sort of lab error and the case was promptly closed.

CHAPTER TWO

Dale picked up the kitten from the crate. His hand gripped its head tightly as he slowly turned it like he were unscrewing a jar, twisting its neck. He could hear the bones crunching and sinews and ligaments ripping and popping as the kitten kicked and gurgled and scratched. Its tongue flopped out of its mouth and its eyes rolled sideways and came to a stop. Dale smiled as he watched its chest cease its rise and fall. He stared at the kitten for a moment, then breathed into its mouth. Once. Twice. He pulled his mouth away and smiled as the kitten began to breathe again and its heartbeat returned, unnaturally fast at first, then gradually slowing. The fur around the kitten’s neck undulated and Dale could hear snapping and popping sounds as muscles, bones, and sinew rearranged themselves beneath the feline’s skin.

The kitten purred as Dale scratched its tummy and behind its ears. It closed its eyes and rubbed against Dale’s legs contentedly. Dale chuckled and shook his head in disbelief.

“Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.”

He grabbed the kitten by the throat again and began to squeeze.

Dale could hear his mother and grandmother talking in the kitchen. They were talking about him. They were always talking about him. They tried to whisper but it was so still and quiet that he could still hear every word drifting through the open window on the warm spring breeze.

“I talked to the priest today…about Dale.”

“Momma! I told you nobody is supposed to know about him. About what he can do.”

“Oh, hush. I didn’t give away your secret. It was in a confessional. He can’t tell anybody. Besides, something ain’t right with that boy and you know it. The dog won’t even play with him. I find knives and clothes in his room with blood on them. And I have nightmares. I have these terrible nightmares about being stabbed and suffocated. I know it has something to do with Dale.”

Dale’s grandmother was an old Southern woman who’d grown up on a farm. She wasn’t like those Southern belles you saw on TV sitting on the porch of some old colonial mansion sipping mint juleps. His grandmother had dropped out of school in sixth grade to work the farm. She was hard and coarse and always spoke her mind whether she was right or wrong and was more likely to be smoking a cigar than sipping tea.

“Shhhh! Keep your voice down, Momma. He might hear you.”

“Ya see? You’s afraid of him too.”

Dale heard his grandmother pause and take a deep breath. He paused too, holding his breath, waiting to hear what she’d said to the priest about him.

“I told him all about what happened to you and what Dale did. How he breathed life back into you. The things I’ve seen him do around the house. How I watched him kill a butterfly in the garden and then bring it back to life. Then I asked Father Stanley why God would put a power like that in the hands of somebody evil.”

“Momma! Dale’s not evil.”

“That boy has got the devil in him and you know it.”

“He’s just a little boy.”

“And God help us all when he becomes a man. God help us all.”

His mother let out a long sigh and Dale could almost see her rolling her eyes.

“What did Father Stanley say, Momma?”

“Oh, he’s an old fool. He tried to tell me that God wouldn’t give power like that to someone unless it was to fulfill his purpose somehow. He told me Dale must have some good in him, that God must be working through him in some way. Made Dale out to be some kind of saint. He wanted me to bring him to the church and set him up like they used to do with the revival tents and all. So he could heal people in Jesus’s name.”

“And what did you say?”

Dale continued to listen. He was fairly certain that whatever the old battle-ax had said about him, it hadn’t been good.

“I told him that God gives power to evil people all the time. Hell, some of the most powerful people in this world are mobsters, drug dealers, pimps and gun runners, dictators and warlords. I asked him if God had some sort of plan for Hitler or Stalin or Mussolini or Saddam Hussein or that idiot that got us into the war in Iraq. That shut him up right quick. He came back with that old bullshit about God working in mysterious ways. It seems like whenever you point out God doin’ something that just don’t make no damned sense they always hit you with that. Maybe God ain’t really all that mysterious. Maybe he just likes puttin’ us through hell.”

“Momma, you don’t mean to talk that way.”

“To hell if I don’t. You explain it then. You tell me why God would give that kind of power to a boy like that. That boy got the devil in him, I’m tellin’ you. He ain’t got no conscience, no sympathy. You know damn well he ain’t no good. He’s just like his father and look how he ended up.”

Dale squeezed the kitten tighter. Its tongue lolled from its mouth and it made a dry hissing sound as its legs beat at the air. His mother, his grandmother, none of them understood him. He didn’t even understand himself. All he knew was that he was different and for some reason it felt good to kill things.

The smile marring his face turned cruel and the look in his eyes became one that battered women often saw in the eyes of their abusers. It was the look his dad had worn the day he’d taken a knife to Dale’s mother. Dale grabbed the kitten’s head with two hands. It began scratching, hissing, and kicking its legs, its entire body twitching and convulsing as Dale shoved his thumbs into its eyes. Blood poured down the kitten’s furry face, soaking its whiskers, as Dale’s thumbs dug into the feline’s brain.

The kitten twitched and shuddered, then went limp. Dale withdrew his bloody thumbs from the cat’s skull and wiped them off on his Levis. He stared down at the cat and tried to feel for a pulse in its throat. He wet the back of his hand with his tongue and held it up to the cat’s nose to see if he could feel it breathing. It wasn’t. Dale looked over his shoulder to make certain that no one was watching and then gathered the kitten into his hands. Its body was so tiny it barely filled his cupped palms. He held its face up to his lips and once again Dale exhaled into the cat’s lungs, watching as its chest expanded and then began to rise and fall rapidly.

Its eyelids seethed with movement. A riot of activity was taking place in the empty sockets where its eyes had been. A wet crackling sound emitted from the cat’s bleeding face as it regenerated. When the kitten’s eyelids fluttered open, two flawless green orbs stared up at Dale. The newly resurrected kitten sat in Dale’s palms, licking its own blood off its whiskers and grooming itself. It showed no fear as Dale began to stroke its fur. Just as before, it rubbed itself against him, purring contentedly. It had no idea of the things Dale had done to it.

Still holding the kitten, Dale removed a small penknife from his pocket. He stabbed the knife into the kitten’s throat as the kitten howled and hissed, crying out in agony and spearing its tiny needlelike claws into Dale’s hands. Its claws were still embedded in Dale’s hands when it began to shake and convulse, spraying blood from its mouth. This time Dale whooped with excitement and laughed out loud as the little gray-haired Himalayan choked on its own life fluid.

He was still smiling when he placed his lips against the kitten’s mouth for the third time and breathed part of his own limitless life force back into the cat. The smile grew wider as the kitten’s legs began to kick again and the wound in its throat stitched itself closed and faded away. His smile fell to a hard, flat line when he looked up and saw his mother standing above him. He spotted her there only seconds before the back of her hand collided with his mouth.

“What the hell are you doing? Do you think torturing a poor animal is funny?”

Dale fell backward, still holding the cat. His eyes filled with tears and widened in shock.

“I-I wasn’t doing anything. I was just playing with it.”

“Playing with it? I watched you kill it with that knife!”

His mother pointed angrily at the small blood-covered knife still clutched in Dale’s hand.

“But I brought it right back to life! It doesn’t even know what happened to it.”

“How do you know that? How do you know it doesn’t remember? And even if it doesn’t, that still doesn’t make it okay. Do you think it was okay, what your daddy did to me? Because you brought me back? Do you think that made everything okay?”

“But you don’t even remember what happened and neither does the kitty. Look!”

Dale reached out for the kitten but this time it hissed and bit him on the webbing between his thumb and forefinger, then dashed across the garden and into the house.

“Ow!”

Dale seized his injured hand with his other hand and brought it to his mouth to suck away the blood.

“Oh, baby! Let me see that.”

Dale’s mother knelt down and took his injured hand in hers. There were two tiny puncture wounds where the kitten’s fangs had pierced his flesh.

“Dale, listen. You’re right. I don’t remember what happened to me and hopefully I never will, but that still doesn’t make it right. What your father did to me was terrible and he’s going to rot in hell for it. I may not remember the pain now but from what those police officers told me they saw, it must have been horrible. Just because you can bring me back to life or bring that cat back doesn’t make it okay for us to suffer like that. Just because we can’t remember what happened doesn’t make it any less…evil. It’s still wrong.”

Dale stared at his mother. His face betrayed his utter lack of comprehension.

“It’s like those Christians that say that if there wasn’t a God they’d be out there robbing, raping, and murdering folks. If that’s true, and the only reason they aren’t out committing crimes is because they’re afraid to go to hell, then they aren’t really good people. Deep down they’re every bit as evil as the murderers and rapists…as evil as your father. There’s this quote and I forget who said it. I’m not really good with that sort of thing. But it says that morality is what you do when no one is looking. It’s what you do when you know you won’t get caught. Do you understand? Even if no one knows what you did when you killed that kitten, even if the kitten doesn’t even know, you’ll know and it’ll change you. It’s not about what you’re doing to the kitten. It’s about what you’re doing to yourself. Do you understand?”

Dale nodded and his mother gathered him into her arms and hugged him. But Dale hadn’t really understood his mother at all. The part of him that might have understood, might have empathized, had died on those many nights that he’d watched his mother get beaten and raped by his father. It had been buried the night he watched him stab her to death, rape her, and skin her. Dale hugged his mother tight, still remembering what she had looked like bleeding on the bed until he’d resuscitated her. He didn’t understand. Not at all.

CHAPTER THREE

Dale heard his grandmother wake up in her bed screaming.

“Oh my God! He killed me! He killed me!”

He heard his mother’s slippered feet sinking into the old carpeting as she ran down the hall to his grandmother’s room. Her voice was calm and soothing, the same way she sounded when she spoke to him.

“It’s okay, Momma. You just had a bad dream.”

“It was Dale. He strangled me. He choked me to death. He killed me!”

“You’re not dead, Momma. Everything is okay. You’re okay.”

“No. No. No! He did it! I’m telling you he did it. He killed me and then he must have brought me back. Just like he did with that butterfly and that kitten you caught him torturing.”

“But why would he do that? If he wanted you dead, then why would he bring you back to life? I think you just had a bad dream.”

“It wasn’t a dream. He touched me too. He undressed me and he touched me.”

“Momma! Why would you say that?”

“He did it, I’m tellin’ you! H-he…he…urrrrlllgh.”

“Momma? Momma? Oh my God, Momma! Dale, call the ambulance! Dale! Dale, call the ambulance! Your grandma is having a stroke.”

Dale threw back the covers and stepped out of his bed. He walked up the hallway and into his grandmother’s room. His mother sat on the edge of the bed cradling his grandmother in her arms while the woman turned blue and saliva foamed from between her lips and came frothing down her chin. She must have bitten her own lip or tongue because there was blood in her saliva. Her eyes had rolled up in her head so that only the whites were visible. As Dale stood there, her eyes rolled back down out of her skull and fixed on Dale. Her eyes widened and she began to tremble. Dale smiled. When he looked up at his mother she was staring right at him. There was a look on her face of terror and disgust. She had seen his smile. Dale walked over to the phone, picked it up, and dialed 911. He continued staring at his mother and grandmother as he spoke to the emergency operator and they continued staring at him.

Later that night at the hospital Dale’s grandmother passed away. Dale was asleep when she went. He woke up when his mother grabbed him and began slapping him. It took a moment for him to orient himself and remember where he was, in a hospital, with his dying grandmother. But why was his mother attacking him? Dale covered his head to protect himself from the blows.

“Mom? Stop! Why are you hittin’ me? I didn’t do nuthin’!”

“Bring her back! Bring her back!”

The nurses looked confused when they rushed into the room and pulled her off her son. Dale was breathing heavy. There were bruises on his face and arms from where his mother had struck him. His mother was breathing hard too. She stared at him with something that looked very much like hate blazing in her eyes as the nurses held her back and she struggled in their grasp.

“Bring her back! Do it! Do it!”

“Mrs. McCarthy! There’s nothing he can do for her. The doctors did all they can. No one can help her now. She’s gone.”

“But he can. He can bring her back!” She looked directly into Dale’s eyes. Her eyes were so full of tears that he wasn’t sure that she could even see him through them. “Why won’t you bring her back? Why?”

Dale tried to think of something to say, something that would ease his mother’s mind and make him sound compassionate and wise. He couldn’t think of anything. The only thing he could think to say was the truth.

“I don’t want to bring her back. She didn’t like me.”

The two nurses turned to look at Dale. His mother’s mouth dropped open.

“You did this. Didn’t you? You did this to her. It wasn’t a dream. Was it? Get out of here! Get the fuck out of here! I don’t want you anywhere near her!”

A big, burly black orderly arrived with security.

“Maybe you should wait in the lobby, little man. Your mom is just a little upset. Everything will be all right.”

“Get out! Get out! Get out! You did this! I know you did this!”

Dale walked out of the hospital room with the orderly and the security guard. He hated to see his mother like this, but he was glad the old woman was dead. He began to whistle as he walked toward the lobby. He stopped himself, suddenly realizing how inappropriate it must have appeared. He looked up at the orderly who was exchanging looks with the security guard. Their faces were completely shocked. It struck Dale as funny. He started to laugh, which made their expressions turn to bewilderment, which caused Dale to laugh even harder. They walked him into the lobby and then walked away shaking their heads. A teenage mother sat in the lobby, bouncing an infant on her lap.

“What’s so funny, kid?”

Dale wiped tears from his eyes and looked over at the girl. She was smiling at him, anticipating a really good joke.

“My grandmother just died.” He turned away from her and continued to laugh.

CHAPTER FOUR

Dale sat in his room reading an old article in his dogeared Encyclopedia of Crime about a serial killer who had been captured in Philadelphia in the 1980s. His name was Gary Heidnick and he had been kidnapping women, keeping them chained up in his basement for months, raping and torturing them. A few of the women Heidnick kidnapped had been murdered and buried in his backyard or in a nearby wooded area. At least one of them had been dismembered, her flesh boiled into a stew and fed to his dogs and the other women. Dale found himself aroused by the tale. He believed the only way he’d ever get a girl would be to kidnap one.

The girls at his high school paid no attention to him except when they teased him and called him a loser or nerd. A bad case of acne made Dale’s face look like he were growing cranberries on it. Where his skin was not erupting with pimples it was sickly pale, and he was so skinny that the bones in his chest and shoulders stood out prominently through his skin whenever he dared to wear a tank top. It looked as if he hadn’t eaten in months. His chest was concave and his cheeks were sunken in. His eyes stared out from deep in their sockets, giving his face a cadaverous skeletal look. He was the very antithesis of the athletes all the girls in his high school were chasing. He didn’t have their tanned muscular physiques. He looked about as healthy as death smoking a cigar in a nuclear waste dump.

Dale turned next to a story about Ed Kemper but soon lost interest in it. He wasn’t interested in reading about killers who murdered just for the sheer joy of killing. He knew that joy. That was the only joy he could ever remember knowing. Now that he was in the full swing of puberty and his hormones had begun to rage and riot, he was interested in other forms of satisfaction. He was more and more interested in the girls in his class and curious about what pleasures their young bodies might hold.

Dale could understand raping a woman and then murdering her to keep her silent. It had a sort of logic to it. He could even understand the idea of killing just for the pleasure of the act. But the idea of taking souvenirs home, pieces of their corpses, and masturbating with them, that made no sense at all. The only reason he could think of to rape a woman would be so you didn’t have to masturbate. Raping a woman and then killing her was one thing, but killing her and then raping her was just twisted. Dale thought about his father and what he’d seen him doing to his mother’s corpse. He had been getting just as much pleasure from skinning her as he had from fucking her.

Dale slammed the book shut when he felt an erection swelling in his shorts. He remembered how his father had stabbed his mother again and again and then slit her throat as he fucked her doggy-style. Dale was ashamed at how that memory made him feel. He knew it was wrong but he couldn’t help the sensations that image aroused in his body. It was as if his own body was betraying him and his mother. Dale was terrified that he understood Kemper more than he’d realized. He thought about what his grandmother had said about God being crazy for giving the power of life to a person like him. He hated to admit it, but the old woman had been right. He wouldn’t do anything good with this power.

In the next room, Dale’s mother was taking a bath. Dale had heard her running the bathwater hours ago. She hadn’t left the bathroom since. He wondered if he ought to check on her. She had been in the bath far too long and he had heard a splashing and thumping sound coming from in there twenty or thirty minutes ago. He was afraid she might have fallen and hurt herself. It didn’t matter though. If she was dead, he would simply bring her back like he’d done before.

The hollow echo of solitary drops of water splashing down into a larger pool of water echoed down the hallway as Dale approached the bathroom he shared with his mother. He grasped the handle but the door was locked. It was one of those privacy locks that were about as useless as childproof caps on medicine bottles. Dale reached for the little metal pin that his mother kept above the doorway. All you had to do was slip it, or just about anything else that would fit into the little hole, in the center of the doorknob and the lock would disengage. It was more of a nuisance than a deterrent if someone really wanted to get in. The “key” wasn’t there.

“Mom?”

There was no answer.

“Mom?” Dale spoke in a louder voice. “Are you all right in there?”

Still no answer.

Dale banged his fist on the door.

“Mom! Mom!”

All he could hear was the drip of the tub faucet.

Dale sighed and turned away from the door. He took his time walking back to his room to get a hanger. There was no hurry. He had learned through trial and error that even if someone had been dead for several hours he could still bring them back, as long as they hadn’t begun to decompose. Once a corpse began to rot it was good and dead.

Once he had retrieved a wire hanger from his closet, Dale began straightening it as he walked back down the hall. He imagined he would find his mother drowned in the bathtub after slipping and hitting her head on the edge of the tub. Perhaps she had fallen out of the tub completely and cracked her neck. Whatever it was, he could fix it.

Dale slid the straightened hanger into the hole in the doorknob and disengaged the lock. The door popped open and Dale slipped inside. He wasn’t prepared for what he found. Dale’s mother lay in the tub just as he had expected, only she hadn’t slipped and hit her head or broken her neck or drowned or had a stroke or a heart attack. She had slit her wrists. The bathwater was tinted red like fruit juice. She had made a mess of her wrists. She cut across them first; then she’d taken the blade and cut all the way up her forearms. Ghastly red crosses scarred her arms.

Her eyes were closed and she looked as if she’d simply fallen asleep. Her breasts were pale and flabby and had flopped to either side of her chest. Her legs were splayed immodestly but the amount of blood in the tub prevented Dale from seeing anything. Dale felt that uncomfortable stirring in his shorts again as he stared at his mother’s nude dead form. This time he didn’t shy away from it. There was no one around. No one to see what he was doing. Why not have some fun? he thought. He had never seen a real woman naked before, and even though it was his own mother, she was naked, and at least she wasn’t just a picture in a magazine or on TV.

He reached out and hefted her big flabby breasts in his hands, then rubbed the nipples. The straining in his pants became more persistent. Dale knelt down and licked droplets of blood and bathwater from her nipples, then began to suck them. He pinched them hard, bit one, then brought his lips to his mother’s mouth and prepared to breathe life back into her lungs. He was just about to exhale when he spotted the words written on the shower wall behind her.

Let me die.

Dale paused there, trying to decide what to do.

Let me die.

It was her do-not-resuscitate order.

But why does she want to leave me?

The idea of being alone terrified him. Maybe it was just a test? Maybe she knew he would bring her back and she was just testing him? Maybe she was warning him to be a good boy or she’d leave him forever.

I’ll be good, Mommy. I’ll be good. Just don’t leave me.

Let me die.

“Noooo!”

He clamped his mouth onto hers and breathed into her lungs again and again until she began to breathe for herself. She let out a deep breath and then a sob. A wail of anguish came from her as she rose from the bathtub. Her eyes were wild and she pulled at her hair and scratched her face.

“Why? Why? Why, Dale? Why did you do this? Why didn’t you let me die? Why did you bring me back? Why didn’t you let me die?”

Dale looked confused.

“B-because I need you. I love you.”

Dale’s mother shook her head.

“No. No, you don’t love me. You don’t know what love is. You’re not capable of feeling love. I don’t know what you feel, or if you feel anything at all, but it isn’t love. You’re evil, Dale. You’re some kind of monster. Now just leave me alone and let me die.”

Tears welled in Dale’s eyes. He couldn’t believe his mother was saying these things to him. She had been looking at him suspiciously ever since his grandmother died. Now she’d finally said what she was really thinking.

Dale’s brow furrowed and his voice lowered. He stood up and put a hand beneath his mother’s chin, turning her head to look him in the eyes.

“No, Mom. I won’t let you die, ever. I need you and I’m not going to let you go. You can kill yourself again but I’ll just bring you back. I’ll just keep bringing you back again and again. You can’t leave me. You can’t ever leave me.”

The next day his mother set herself on fire and burned down the house. Dale awoke to a room filled with smoke and a bedroom door that was engulfed in flames. He’d had to crawl out of his window and jump down into the parking lot below to avoid being immolated himself. He had just barely managed to get out of the house alive. The firemen told him that there had been gasoline poured outside his door. His mother had tried to take him with her. This time, he was not able to bring her back. She had found a way to get away from him after all.

CHAPTER FIVE

Sarah Lincoln awoke to the smell of maple syrup, frying bacon, and the clash and clang of pots and dishes. She loved Saturdays. Saturday was the day that Josh felt guilty for working late all week and woke up early to cook her breakfast. Sarah knew that Josh had to work to support the family. She still hated it. She wished he could spend every day with her.

She loved being able to stay home and play the dutiful housewife, cooking and cleaning, decorating their home, clipping coupons, balancing the checkbook, and making herself beautiful for him, but she’d be lying to herself if she didn’t admit that she resented it sometimes. Seeing Josh leave for work every morning before the sun rose, and sometimes coming home long after dark, working double shifts, ten-, eleven-, and twelve-hour days, awoke all of her jealousies and insecurities. Even knowing that Josh was hard at work, all Sarah could think about was that at least he had people to talk to there, and that many of those people were women.

Josh was a blackjack dealer at one of the largest casinos in town, and while she just could not imagine standing in place for eight hours shuffling cards—it would have been hell on her feet and her lower back—she could imagine all the interesting people he got to meet. Including drunk, flirtatious women looking for a Vegas fling.

Sarah didn’t think Josh was cheating on her. He wasn’t the type. But she knew he enjoyed his work. He enjoyed the social interaction. He enjoyed getting the chance to meet celebrities and millionaires and people from all over the world. Sarah didn’t get to meet anyone except the clerks at the local grocery store and the sales people at Wal-Mart. She was alone. She had no friends in Las Vegas. She’d left her family, her friends, and everyone she’d grown up with back in Indianapolis. After living in Las Vegas for eleven years she still did not even know the names of her neighbors. With all the foreclosures, her neighbors kept changing before she got to know them. Josh was her only friend.

The acrid aroma of burning butter wafted up from the kitchen, followed by a few whispered curses and the whoosh and sizzle of cold water running into a hot pot. Sarah giggled. Josh was many things, a hard worker, a sensitive listener, an attentive lover, even a pretty good singer, but he was a terrible cook. As she did every weekend, Sarah crawled out of bed and decided to go downstairs and rescue Josh before he burned down the house.

A loud banging noise came from across the street and several loud voices began shouting, not angrily, just talking louder than was necessary. Sarah went to the window and looked out. There was a moving truck pulled up to the little single-story house that an old couple named the Jensens had lived in before their mortgage rates had gone up and they’d gone into foreclosure. Sarah felt sorry for them. They were the only neighbors she spoke to regularly and even then it was mostly just small talk on the way to the mailbox.

Three men in overalls were carrying large boxes out of the back of the U-Haul. A small, skinny guy with dirty blond hair, wearing a white polo shirt and jeans, stood by nervously. One of the movers dropped a box onto the ramp that led out of the back of the truck and it slid down into the street. Nothing appeared to be broken, but the skinny guy looked like he was about to scream. Veins popped out in his forehead, the muscles in his jaws were clenched tight, and his complexion had turned red, but when he spoke his voice was calm and measured.

“Would you please be more careful? I have some expensive computer equipment in these boxes. It’s what I do for a living.”

Sarah shook her head in disbelief. If it had been her stuff those clowns had dropped all over the street she would have flipped the hell out. She never understood why guys always felt like they were never supposed to show any emotion. Josh was the same way. If the house was on fire he’d be standing there trying to figure out how to wake her without raising his voice.

The skinny guy turned his head toward the sky as if praying that his stuff would all make it into the house unscathed. His entire body was tense and his eyes were closed. He turned his head toward the house slowly and opened his eyes. A full thirty seconds went by with him standing in his driveway staring up at her window. His face relaxed and he calmed down. For a moment, Sarah thought he was looking into her eyes. She was suddenly conscious of the fact that she wasn’t wearing a shirt but she doubted he could see her through the blinds. Then the man smiled. The expression wasn’t particularly perverted or threatening. It merely looked amused. Still, Sarah felt a chill race over her skin. She crossed her arms over her chest and stepped away from the window.

Sarah walked into the closet and picked out a shirt. She thought for a moment about getting dressed but didn’t want to give in to paranoia and admit the man had spooked her. She threw the T-shirt back onto the shelf and walked downstairs into the kitchen wearing only her panties, pink cotton boy-briefs, and no bra. She was thirty-four but still had the body of a teenager thanks to long morning jogs and a couple marathons a year. She and Josh planned on having kids soon, which meant that in a few years she would no longer be able to walk around the house naked, and after a child or two would probably not want to. She hefted her breasts in her hands. They weren’t the silicone-filled double-D cups every other woman in town seemed to have, but they were real and at a 36-C she thought they were just the right size. They hadn’t begun to sag yet and were still fairly firm. Josh liked them, and that was all that mattered. She knew that after she had a few kids they probably wouldn’t look quite the same and she’d become more self-conscious. She couldn’t imagine walking around the house with stretch marks, sagging tits, and a paunch. But until then, she planned on enjoying her freedom, which meant that in her house, she wore as little as possible.

“Good morning, honey.”

Josh turned toward her, smiling, then turned red when he saw her naked body. He was still such a prude. Sarah didn’t know how any man could be married to her for ten years and still be so sexually inhibited.

“Do you have to walk around naked all the time? What if some pervert is looking through the windows with a telescope right now?”

“This is Vegas. If a guy wants to see a naked woman he can see better bodies than mine for a handful of ones and a two-drink minimum.”

“But why would he if he can see yours for free?”

“I’d be flattered if someone were going through all that effort just to see me.”

Josh walked over to the windows in the kitchen and then in the great room and shut the blinds. Sarah giggled.

“You really do think someone might be looking. That means you still think I’m hot. Wanna fuck?”

“I made pancakes.”

Josh smiled wide like a proud parent as he held up a plate of crispy bacon, fluffy eggs, and three blackened pancakes.

Sarah smiled back. At least the bacon and eggs looked good.

“Thank you, sweetheart. Maybe we can fuck after breakfast?” She winked at him, then took the plate and plopped down at the kitchen table. She didn’t even have to look at Josh to know that he was turning red again. He embarrassed so easily it never ceased to amaze her.

“Maybe you can lick butter and syrup off me?” She smiled at him and he fumbled a plate and almost dropped it. Sarah laughed.

“You are so wild.” Josh laughed.

“That’s why you married me.” She winked at him again and shoved a piece of bacon in her mouth.

“There’s someone moving in across the street.”

“I know. I saw him when I was upstairs. It looks like it’s just some guy moving in by himself.”

“He didn’t see you, did he? I mean, you had some clothes on, didn’t you?”

“If he can see through the blinds, two stories up, in the daytime, then he’s Superman.”

“In other words, you didn’t have a shirt on?”

“Relax, nobody saw me.”

She thought about the way the new neighbor had looked up at the window and another cold chill ran over her.

“Well, do you think maybe we should go introduce ourselves?”

“I guess that means you don’t want to fuck me?”

“Sarah, is that all you think about?”

He had concern in his voice when he asked the question, as if he thought Sarah was crazy, some kind of nymphomaniac. Josh had asked her many times in the past if she’d ever been sexually assaulted or abused. He had almost insisted that she had been. It was the only explanation he could think of for her powerful sex drive, using his self-help-book psychology. Men always figured that a woman had to be damaged in some way if she had a stronger libido than theirs. It was one of those male-chauvinist things that pissed Sarah off.

Josh was even worse than most men when it came to that because he himself had been molested as a child. He had told her about it once and then made her promise never to bring it up again. He had been one of the apparent thousands of young boys who had been molested by a priest. His mother had sent him to Bible camp for the summer and one of the camp counselors, a popular young priest, had dragged him out into the woods every night for eight weeks. The camp counselors would tell all the kids what to say in their letters home and then read each one before they mailed them, destroying any that mentioned sexual abuse or any displeasure at being at the camp at all. They had all apparently been in on it.

Josh had come home and told his parents. They had freaked out and sent him to a home for troubled kids, where he’d been abused again by one of the older boys who’d anally raped him at knifepoint and one of the youth counselors had forced him to perform oral sex. This time he told no one. Eventually, he had his growth spurt and beat the hell out of the older kid. The counselor had left him alone then too.

Nothing happened to the priest who’d started it all. He got away with what he’d done for twenty years, and then one day they’d been watching TV when his picture had flashed on the screen, along with a story about how he’d been accused of molesting young boys going back more than a dozen years.

“More than twenty years.” Josh had corrected the newscaster. Then he’d told Sarah the story. It had explained a lot, his shyness and timidity in the bedroom and his defensiveness around the entire Catholic child-molestation issue. Josh was still religious but avoided church like the plague though he still called himself a Catholic. Sarah didn’t get it.

“How can you believe in a God who would let his own representatives do this? If he does exist, he might as well not exist for all the difference it makes.”

“God had nothing to do with that,” Josh said.

“But I thought God had something to do with everything?”

“He didn’t have shit to do with that! That was just a man. One sick, twisted, evil man.”

“But didn’t God create the man?”

“God gave man free will.”

“How can there be free will if God is all-knowing? If God already knows everything you will ever do from birth to death before he ever creates you, then he created you specifically to do those things because he could have not created you or created you with a different nature. I’m just saying, an omniscient creator and free will are sort of incompatible concepts. Omniscience is more compatible with determinism.”

“You’re going to have to dumb it down for me a little. I didn’t go to graduate school. But it sounds to me like you’re saying that God wanted me to be raped by a priest? Is that what the fuck you’re saying?”

That discussion hadn’t gone well. They never did. Sarah had tried to discuss his religious beliefs with him a few times but they had all turned rather nasty and ended in shouting matches. Eventually, they had agreed that that subject was taboo, as was any discussion of his molestation. And Josh had slowly begun to open up more and more sexually under her patient guidance and coaxing. Sarah had enjoyed the challenge. It had fed her own need for control.

Sarah had always enjoyed making men uncomfortable with her wantonness, and even knowing the reasons for Josh’s rather conservative attitude toward sex, she still enjoyed teasing him and rarely felt guilty about it even though she knew she should have. Much of her sexuality was an act anyway. If Josh had sex with her every time she asked for it she’d have stopped asking. She considered it a sort of protest against the double standard. A man who wanted sex all the time was a stud. A woman who liked sex was some kind of slut or a victim. And sex abuse aside, she knew that Josh felt the same way. This was just one more annoying manifestation of Josh’s puritanical Catholic upbringing that Sarah had yet to adjust to.

“After barely seeing you all week? Yeah, fucking you is all I can think about. When I stop thinking about fucking you, start worrying.”

She knew that Josh didn’t think it was ladylike for a woman to say “fuck.” It was one of those things he’d learned to get used to. Sarah even suspected that it secretly turned him on. She was so different than his friends’ wives. She was more like the wives in Penthouse Forum.

Sarah shoveled the eggs into her mouth along with the rest of the bacon and then stood up, still chewing. She walked over to the garbage can and scraped the pancakes off the plate into the trash.

“Hey!”

“I love you, honey. But there’s no way I’m eatin’ that shit. I do appreciate it though. You’re sweet for trying.”

“Thanks. Sweet is exactly what I was going for.”

He looked truly hurt. He looked down at his own plate full of burned pancakes, then walked over to the garbage and tossed his uneaten breakfast in as well.

“Oh, well. I tried.”

“And I love you for it.”

Sarah stood up on her tiptoes and kissed Josh on the cheek. Josh was not a small man. He was six foot four and over 250 pounds. He’d played hockey in college and had once had aspirations of making an NHL team. That was until he’d lost his athletic scholarship and had to admit that he didn’t have a hockey player’s killer instinct. He still played hockey on the weekends whenever he didn’t have to work or when Sarah didn’t nag him into staying home with her, which she did often. After he’d worked all week, if he finally got a weekend off, she didn’t want him spending it chasing a bunch of men up and down the ice with a stick. She wanted him all to herself. She knew it was selfish and she ought to have felt guilty about it but she didn’t. Sometimes she tried to be supportive and went to watch him play. The hotel he worked at sponsored their league and they played against other hotels, bars, and strip clubs that all had their own teams. Sarah knew that it made Josh feel great to compete in those games. It was the closest to the NHL he’d ever get. And it was a good excuse for him to stay in shape. His size and muscles made Sarah feel safe and when he hugged her she felt like a child again, without a care in the world.

“Okay, I’ll go put some clothes on and we’ll go say hi to another neighbor that we’ll probably never speak to again as long as we live here. But when we come back in I’m going to fuck you like I paid for you.” She smiled mischievously, then skipped up the stairs.

Upstairs in the bedroom, Sarah began to sweat. Her hands shook as she reached for the T-shirt. She was shrugging into a pair of jeans and almost fell over. Her legs were trembling.

What the hell is wrong with me?

She began to hyperventilate. The room tilted and whirled like a carnival ride.

I think I’m having an anxiety attack. Either that or a stroke.

She held on to the closet shelves and took deep breaths, waiting for the moment to pass. She thought about calling Josh but her pride prevented her. Sarah didn’t want her husband to think she was weak. She had always been afraid to show weakness around him or any man. She considered herself the rock of the relationship. She was the strong, steady one, the one who never worried, never panicked, never flipped out no matter how difficult things got. Josh was the one who panicked whenever they were late paying a phone bill and rushed to the doctors whenever he had a cough or a stomachache. Sarah always kidded her husband about being a hypochondriac. The last thing she wanted was for him to see her freaking out.

“Sarah? Sarah, you coming?”

After a few more breaths the trembling in her body stopped and her breathing settled back into a normal rhythm. She finished pulling on her jeans and slipped on a pair of flip-flops.

“Sarah!”

“I’m coming right now!”

Sarah trotted down the steps and met her husband at the front door.

“What took you so long? Why are you all sweaty?”

“Well, you wouldn’t fuck me so I had to do it myself. You wouldn’t want me meeting the neighbor when I was all horny, would you?”

Josh’s eyes widened.

“You didn’t.”

“A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.”

Sarah walked out the front door, leaving Josh standing there with his mouth hanging open.

The moving truck was almost empty when Sarah crossed the street to greet the neighbor. Josh jogged across the street to catch up with her. The movers all stared at her like they hadn’t see a woman in years. Josh draped an arm around her protectively, claiming his territory.

“You’re jealous. That’s sweet.”

“Okay, let’s just meet the guy and go home.”

“He’s the guy standing in the garage.”

Sarah and Josh walked toward the garage where a skinny guy in a white polo shirt stood, holding a blender and looking around as if searching for an escape route.

“Hi! We’re your new neighbors. I’m Sarah and this is my husband, Josh.”

Sarah held out her hand and the man looked at it for a second as if he were afraid it was going to grow teeth and bite him. Sarah looked back at her husband, then back at the man and smiled. The skinny man reached out tentatively and gripped Sarah’s hand.

“I-I’m Dale. D-Dale McCarthy.”

Josh stepped up and stuck out his hand. The skinny man winced as if he thought Josh was about to strike him.

“Nice to meet you, Dale. This is a great house you’ve got here. We knew the previous owners. Nice old couple. They took great care of the place.”

The skinny man shook Josh’s hand and smiled nervously.

“Nice to meet you both. You live across the street?”

He looked at Sarah when he asked, then looked away, dropping his gaze toward the ground and grinning. Sarah once again felt a shiver race up her spine.

“Yeah, we live in the big two-story. So where ya from, Dale? What brings you to Vegas?”

“I’m from Mesquite originally but I just moved here from Henderson. I do Web design.”

“I’m a blackjack dealer over at the Hollywood Galaxy Casino. The wife here just finished grad school and she’s still working on her dissertation. It’s a study of the sociological effects of pornography on society’s collective unconscious or something like that. She’s going for a doctorate in social science.”

“Wow. Congratulations. You must be really proud.” He was staring at her breasts when he spoke. His odd little grin was widening. He was almost drooling.

“Thanks.” Sarah folded her arms across her chest and crossed her legs, visibly uncomfortable. She looked at Josh and then back at the house and then back at the skinny little man in the white polo shirt.

“She’s the brains of the operation. I’m hoping that soon she’ll be the one taking care of me. They’ve already offered her a position at UNLV.”

“Excuse me? Where do you want your TV?”

A large black man in gray overalls with LOW-COST MOVERS silk-screened across the chest stood holding a plasma screen in his enormous hands.

“Jesus! Be careful with that. Put it in the master bedroom.”

“Well, Dale, I’ll let you get back to moving. Nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you too.”

Once again Dale looked at Sarah when he spoke, then down at her breasts, then grinned awkwardly and looked away. Sarah turned and walked back across the street, anxious to get out of the man’s sight. Something about the way the neighbor looked at her made her feel violated. She felt like she needed to take a shower. Josh had to almost run to catch up to her. He caught up with her just as she opened the front door and stepped inside. She shut the door behind him and locked it.

“What was that all about?”

Sarah closed her eyes and took several deep breaths, trying to slow her racing heartbeat.

“That fucking guy is weird. He creeps me the fuck out. He’s got to be some kind of pervert or something. Why did you have to tell him I was home alone all day?”

“I didn’t say that!”

“You told him that I was home working on my dissertation while you’re at work. I don’t want that weirdo knowing that I’m here by myself when you’re at work.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t think it was a big deal. I was just making small talk.”

“It’s okay. I’m probably just overreacting.”

Josh smiled and gathered her into his arms.

“I’ve never seen you this agitated before. Are you sure you’re all right?”

“I’m okay. It’s just the way that pervert was looking at me. He kept sneaking peeks at my breasts. Did you see that? And he could barely make eye contact with me.”

“The guy just looked like he was terrified. A lot of guys are just nervous around beautiful women. A computer geek like that has probably never been with a woman as beautiful as you without paying for her.”

“Oh, thanks. That makes me feel better.”

Josh brushed the hair from her face and kissed her on the lips. It was a long, deep kiss, sucking her tongue into his mouth, nibbling and sucking her bottom lip. Sarah had always loved the way he kissed her. Even after ten years of marriage it still made her knees weak.

“You want to go upstairs?” Sarah asked breathlessly.

“No. I want to fuck you right here on the floor.”

Now it was Sarah’s turn to blush.

CHAPTER SIX

Dale watched the couple walk back across the street. His eyes crept down to the woman’s ass as if they had a will of their own. It was small but round and tight. She was beautiful. He had seen her standing in the window earlier. He couldn’t really make out her features but he knew someone was there and now he knew that it had been her. She hadn’t been wearing a bra when she met him. He could see her nipples poking through the fabric of her shirt. She had a lovely face too. Big doelike eyes, slightly slanted as if she had some Asian blood in her somewhere. She had high cheekbones and full lips. Her hair was shoulder length, a deep, lush black, with wild loose curls. Dale thought she looked more like a movie star than a doctor of sociology or social science or whatever it was she was studying. She looked a lot like his mother.

Her husband had said that she didn’t work, but that he did. That would leave Dale and his new neighbor plenty of time to get acquainted. But Dale wasn’t sure he could wait for the guy to go to work on Monday. Luckily he didn’t have to. It didn’t matter how big the guy was if he didn’t know it was coming. And Dale was going to make sure that neither of them knew what hit them. An erection was already tenting the front of his jeans.

Dale spent the rest of the day organizing his things in his new home. The movers had all gone and boxes sat upon boxes in every room of the house. The house was small, only 1,300 square feet. But it was perfect for him. It had two bedrooms, two baths, and a den with a window that looked out onto the street. His neighbor had been right. The old couple who had owned the house previously had taken great care of the place. For such a small place they had packed it with expensive upgrades. They must have spent almost as much upgrading the place as they had on the house itself. They must have thought this would be their last house, the house they would die in. Then they had lost most of their retirement in the stock market and their interest-only loan had adjusted and they’d been forced into foreclosure. Dale had picked up the house for half of what it had been worth a year ago.

The appliances in the kitchen were stainless steel, the cabinets were cherry wood with brushed nickel handles and glass fronts. Dale thought he would have to get better dinnerware. His dishes were mismatched and half of them were stained or chipped. Not that he ever entertained but he still liked his place to look good just in case, and seeing his old cheap dinner plates through the glass cabinet doors made the house look cheaper. It made it look like he didn’t really belong in such a nice place.

The knobs and hinges on all the doors in the house were also brushed nickel, like the handles on the cabinets. There were faux wood blinds, which matched the cabinets, on all the windows. The floors in the kitchen, living room, hallway, and both bathrooms were covered in twenty-by-twenty-inch travertine, white with orange, black, and brown veins running through it. The wood floor in the den was the same cherry color as the cabinets and shutters. The only things Dale didn’t like were the white walls. With all the other upgrades you would have thought they would have painted the walls a different color, maybe an accent wall or two or a faux finish. He would have to take care of that later.

Dale walked into the den and began unpacking his computer. He moved his desk over by the window so he could look out at the house across the street while he was working. He began unpacking his printer, his scanner. He plugged in his digital webcam and the speaker on his computer and then began unpacking all of his books.

It took him almost two hours but Dale managed to unpack, organize, and decorate his den. His bookcases were filled with books on Web design, true crime, and detective thrillers, along with crime-scene investigation and police procedure and old erotic novels from Anais Nin, Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch, Henry Miller, and de Sade. In several boxes that remained unopened were black-market DVDs and old VHS tapes of vintage pornography, including S-and-M movies from the eighties and nineties and some more modern torture films.

His computer was up and working. A picture of his mom and dad hung on the wall opposite the window. He had even hung up a couple of movie posters from two of his favorite movies, Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs. Dale loved Quentin Tarantino movies. Tarantino was his favorite director.

Dale had posters of several Russ Meyers films still rolled up that he was planning to hang in his bedroom. That would be his next project. The movers hadn’t even put his bed together and his mattress and box spring were leaning against the door to the master bathroom. At this rate, he wouldn’t be done until well after dark. That would just barely leave him time for dinner and a brief nap before it was time to visit the new neighbors.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Sarah watched Josh rinse the dishes and stack them in the dishwasher while she curled up on the couch waiting for Real Time with Bill Maher to start. Josh had made dinner tonight and she had to admit that it wasn’t half bad. He’d found a recipe for enchiladas in one of those little recipe books you picked up at the supermarket and had baked her some, using tortillas, Monterey Jack cheese, fire-roasted red chilies, cream-of-mushroom soup, and Old El Paso green enchilada sauce. It was actually pretty good and Sarah had eaten half the pan. She’d have to do a long run tomorrow or else she’d be packing on the pounds. She knew Josh would love her even if she got fat.

“Would you still love me if I gained a bunch of weight?” It didn’t hurt to ask.

“When you marry a woman, you always have to assume that she’s gonna gain at least thirty or forty pounds. You’ve still got like twenty pounds to go.”

“What? I’m still the same size I was when you met me.”

“I don’t know about that. You’ve been eating a lot of ice cream lately.”

“You’re a pig. You know that don’t you? A male-chauvinist pig.”

“That’s just how you like me.”

“Now you’ve got me thinking about ice cream. Why don’t you run to the store and get us some?”

“Why don’t you? I cooked dinner. Remember?”

Sarah hugged the afghan wrapped around her.

“But I’m so comfy.”

“You’re the one who wants ice cream. I’m just the guy who deserves it.”

“You’re such a jerk. I can’t believe you’re trying to make me feel guilty.”

“Guilty for what? For not getting ice cream for your poor tired hubby after he’s worked hard all week and then slaved over a hot stove all day to make you a nice meal? I did cook you breakfast and dinner.”

“Well, I made lunch and you burned the pancakes this morning, so we’re even. But the enchiladas were pretty good. I guess that’s worth a trip to the grocery store.”

“Wait until I finish with the dishes. I’ll go with you.”

“That’s a good hubby.”

“Don’t push it, woman.”

Josh and Sarah were arm in arm, looking like new love as they walked out of the house and climbed into their SUV. When they drove off, they glanced only casually at the house across the street. There was a light on in the den and Sarah thought she could make out the silhouette of the neighbor’s head through the closed blinds.

An hour later they were curled up in bed with a couple pints of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, watching Dexter on Showtime. Sarah was asleep before the credits rolled.

Josh must have gotten up and turned off the television after she’d fallen asleep because the room was completely black when Sarah awoke suddenly to the sound of her husband choking. She reached out for him and her hand came back wet. Josh was bleeding. His throat had been cut. He was choking on his own blood. When Sarah’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, she saw the new neighbor standing above her husband, stabbing him in his chest again and again.

“Oh my God! What are you doing? Josh! Oh my God! Josh! Get the fuck away from my husband! You’re killing him! Heeelllp!”

Sarah grabbed hold of her husband and began scrambling off the bed, trying to drag him with her, away from the crazed man with the knife.

The neighbor put the knife, dripping with her husband’s blood, against Sarah’s throat and raised a finger to his lips.

“Shhhhhhh. Shut. The. Fuck. Up. I don’t want to kill you but I will and I’ll enjoy it.” Dale smiled to emphasize the point. “I’m going to fuck you anyway. Dead or alive.”

“Y-you-you killed Josh. Oh my God. You killed him!”

The neighbor’s fist lashed out and punched Sarah in her mouth, knocking her back onto the bed.

“I told you to be quiet. Since you won’t cooperate, I’m just gonna have to kill you first.”

The neighbor climbed over her husband’s corpse and straddled Sarah’s stomach. He drew the knife across Sarah’s throat, cutting through both her jugular vein and carotid artery and lacerating her windpipe all in one clean cut. Sarah watched her own blood spray out over her breasts. She was struggling to breathe, lungs filling with blood, drowning, as she watched the neighbor begin to undress. When she saw him remove his erect penis from his pants she hoped that she would be long dead before she felt that puny uncircumcised thing inside of her.

The neighbor was fondling her bloodied breasts and stroking his ugly little cock. Her blood squished between his fingers as he squeezed her breasts and pinched her nipples. Sarah was beginning to lose consciousness. The neighbor slid his cock between her breasts and was using the blood from her severed throat as lubrication as he fucked her tits. When he finally came, his cum splashing onto her neck and face and mingling with the blood in a sickening mess of red and white, Sarah had already begun to convulse. By the time the neighbor was hard again, she was already dead, sparing her from feeling his cock between her thighs and in her mouth.

It was still dark when Sarah woke up in her bed with the taste of blood and semen on her tongue. Josh was snoring quietly beside her. The sheets smelled fresh, like they had just been washed. So did Sarah. Even Josh smelled unusually clean. He smelled like Irish Spring and ammonia. Sarah screamed.

She kept screaming even when Josh woke up and wrapped his big, strong arms around her. Even when he began to rock her back and forth and stroke her hair and tell her that everything would be okay. She was still screaming as he kissed the tears from her eyes. His eyes were half closed and he was still blinking the sleep from his eyes and trying to clear his head but even half-asleep his first priority had been her.

“It’s okay, Sarah. It was just a bad dream. Everything’s okay.”

Sarah checked Josh’s neck and chest. Then she checked her own. There were no wounds, no blood. She dropped her head onto Josh’s shoulder and began to weep.

“That sick bastard. You don’t know what he did to me. He killed us. You were dead. We both were. The new neighbor…that guy…uh, Dale…he murdered us!”

“It was just a dream.”

“No! He stabbed me! He stabbed you and…and he raped me! It wasn’t a dream!”

“Baby, you’re okay. You’re not dead. I’m not dead. It was a dream. That’s all. A bad dream. Now go back to sleep. You’re safe. I’m right here. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

Sarah laid her head down on the pillow and pulled Josh’s arms around her. He snuggled up against her back, spooning with her as she slowly drifted back to sleep. He didn’t notice the door across the street open and the porch light click off, but Sarah did. Sarah shivered and began to weep again. She buried her face in the pillow and shook her head back and forth.

“No. No. No. No.”

It was a long time before she fell asleep again.

CHAPTER EIGHT

When Sarah woke the next morning she didn’t remember anything that had happened the night before. Her mouth still tasted like pennies and the smell of soap and disinfectant still permeated the air, tickling the fine hairs in Sarah’s nostrils. She stretched, looked over at Josh, who was already dressed and ready for work, and smiled.

“Good morning, lover.”

“Good morning. That must have been one hell of a dream you had last night.”

“What?”

“You woke up screaming in the middle of the night. You said you had a dream about that guy who just moved in across the street killing both of us?”

“That little skinny guy? I’d probably kick his ass.”

“You said he raped you and stabbed us both to death.”

“Wow. He must have really creeped me out the other day. I don’t remember any of that.”

Sarah looked over at the clock on the nightstand. It was seven thirty in the morning.

“Aren’t you late for work?”

“I’ve got a few minutes. I just wanted to make sure you were okay before I left.”

“I’m fine. Go ahead and get to work. I’ll let you know if the neighbor tries to break in and kill me.”

Sarah winked coyly and draped her arms around the back of Josh’s neck and gave him a light kiss on the lips.

“You sure you don’t want me to stay?”

“Not unless you’re going to spend the day fucking me. But honestly, I’m still sore from yesterday. I need a few hours to rest up.”

“You are incorrigible.”

“Maybe dreaming about the neighbor all night made me horny.”

“Dreaming about Santa Claus makes you horny.”

“He does look good in those big leather boots and he carries a whip.”

“You have problems.”

“And you have fifteen minutes to get to work.”

Josh bent over and kissed Sarah again.

“Good-bye, sweetheart.”

“Bye, lover.”

Sarah rolled back over and snuggled up against her pillow as she listened to Josh’s footfalls descend the stairs and walk out the front door. The door closed quietly with just a slight click and then the garage door rose as Josh pulled the SUV out of the garage. Sarah squeezed the pillow and a small red dot appeared on the pillowcase. She threw back her sheets and the indentation of her body was outlined with blood that had seeped up through the mattress.

“What the hell?”

Sarah climbed from the bed looking at the bloody mattress and pillow. Vague, dreamlike memories, nightmarish flashes of blood and meat and pain drifted into her head, then fled almost as soon as they appeared, leaving terrifying afterimages and a horrible feeling of unease. Images of Josh with his throat cut open, the neighbor’s face grinning at her, her own breasts splattered with blood. Bile rose in her throat, burning her esophagus.

“Oh, God. Oh, God. What’s going on? What the hell is going on?”

Sarah ran into the bathroom and regurgitated into the toilet. The image of the neighbor fucking her blood-soaked breasts with his oily little cock invaded her mind and she vomited again and again until green stomach bile was the only thing that would come up. Sarah sat by the toilet, trying to catch her breath, the nightmares receding from memory. She stood up, walked into the bedroom, and began stripping the sheets from the bed.

The mattress looked like an abattoir. It was saturated in red. There was a small red puddle where she had lain. The blood had soaked through the sheets and stained the bottom of the comforter.

“What the hell?”

Sarah flipped the mattress, then took the sheets downstairs along with the stained comforter. Her hands shook and tears ran down her cheeks as she shoved them into the washing machine. She dumped a scoop of detergent into the machine, turned it on, and ran out of the room.

Scooping up her cell phone, she dialed Josh’s number. There was no answer. He must have already been on the casino floor. The voice mail picked up after six rings.

“Josh? I think something’s wrong with me. I’m bleeding. I mean…I think I am. There’s blood all over the mattress. I don’t think I’m on my period, but there’s blood everywhere. And I keep seeing pieces of that dream, that nightmare. It just feels so real…and…and all the blood. Call me back. Please call me.”

Sarah hung up the phone and sat down at the kitchen table. She tried to remember the dream from the night before but the images were growing increasingly faint. By the time she took the sheets out of the washing machine and put them in the dryer, the dream had been completely forgotten. She started the dryer, then piled the comforter into the washer. She dumped a scoop of laundry detergent into the machine and shut the lid.

Sarah gradually convinced herself that she’d simply started her period early and experienced an unusually heavy flow. She thought about going to the doctor’s office. It couldn’t be healthy to bleed that much but she supposed that that was the reason they made the jumbo-size tampons for “heavy-flow days.” She’d never had a heavy-flow day before. It looked like someone had bled to death. Sarah tried her best to ignore all the elements of her menstruation theory that didn’t fit. She walked into the kitchen and popped a multivitamin and an iron pill.

While the sheets were drying, Sarah decided to go for a run. She needed to clear her head, to get away from the house, to think about anything but blood and death and nightmares. Feeling the wind in her hair, her heart pumping hard in her chest, the steady rhythm of her own breaths synchronized with her footfalls always made her forget about everything else.

Sarah put in a panty liner just in case she started to bleed again; then she pulled on a pair of running shorts and a dry-fit tank top. Sarah grabbed her iPod and her Garmin GPS navigator and headed out the door. She went through a quick routine of stretches on the driveway, staring at the new neighbor’s front door as if she expected him to burst out of the house and attack her on the front walk. The vertical blinds on the front window parted slightly and Sarah hit the play button on her iPod, squeezed the tiny headphones into her ears, and took off jogging down the street faster than she’d intended just as “Kerosene” by Miranda Lambert began to play.

“Light ’em up and watch them burn, teach them what they need to learn…” She sang out as she pumped her legs at nearly a full sprint. She was breathing hard after only three blocks. Sarah checked her Garmin and realized that she had just run three blocks in less than three minutes. She had to adjust her pace. It took her another two blocks to calm herself down and steady her breathing. She hated the fact that the guy freaked her out so much. She wanted to go knock on his door and kick his scrawny little ass just to get over it.

Sarah jogged briskly past rows of for-sale signs lined up like tombstones. Nearly every third or fourth house was abandoned. It had never occurred to Sarah before how deserted the neighborhood was becoming. When she and Josh had moved in the community was still under construction. New couples and families had been moving in daily. Then construction had slowed to a halt and a mass exodus had begun as home values plummeted and people began defaulting on their loans. Now, half the homes in the neighborhood were in foreclosure. Her morning jog had grown increasingly depressing as every day she noticed a new house with a for-sale sign in front of it. Most of the signs contained the ominous sub-caption BANK-OWNED.

Miranda Lambert clicked off and Revolting Cocks came blaring through Sarah’s headphones screaming, “Let the bodies hit the floor!” Sarah had to resist the urge to start sprinting again. Something about that song always got her blood pumping and it struck her as oddly appropriate as she jogged through her dying neighborhood, which was turning into a ghost town little by little.

There was an elementary school a few blocks away and Sarah felt a stirring of her maternal instincts at the light, airy, high-pitched squeals of children’s laughter. She stared at the joy-filled faces climbing on the jungle gym and running in reckless circles on the rubberized playground. Every time she passed the playground she reconsidered her decision to wait to have kids. She wanted to have Josh’s babies. She just wasn’t sure that she wanted them right now. She wasn’t sure that she was ready to give up her carefree lifestyle, her freedom, and most of all, her figure. Sarah continued jogging past the school and soon the laughter faded into the background.

After another mile, Sarah passed an active-adult fifty-five-and-older age-restricted community that was also half built. Construction had been ceased once funding had run out and the real-estate market had frozen after only a quarter of the houses had been built. Finished homes stood interspersed with dirt lots. Yesterday, there had been an ambulance in front of one of the homes and Sarah had seen a gurney being carted out with a body covered in a white sheet. In this community, a for-sale sign didn’t always mean a bank foreclosure.

Sarah checked her pace on her Garmin compared to yesterday’s run. The little computer screen showed where she had been at this time the day before and she was nearly half of a block ahead of her previous run. She picked up her pace, trying to put a full block between herself and the imaginary runner in her device, racing against herself.

An hour later, when Sarah made it back to her house, she was drenched in sweat. Josh had always told her that she sweated like a man. Her dry-fit tank top was completely soaked. She checked her Garmin and saw that she had shaved a full minute off her run and burned 620 calories. She looked across the street and the vertical blinds in the new neighbor’s front window were swaying back and forth as if someone had just closed them. Sarah hurried into the house.

The dryer had stopped. Sarah gathered the sheets and dumped them into her laundry basket; then she wrestled the big down comforter into the dryer and set it on high. She was walking up the stairs with her laundry basket when the phone began to ring. Sarah ran up the last couple of stairs, dropped the laundry basket on the bed, and snatched up her phone.

“Are you all right?”

“Well, it’s a good thing I wasn’t passed out on the floor bleeding to death.”

“Are you on your period?”

The way he asked the question infuriated her for no reason she could articulate.

“No. I just woke up in a pool of blood…my blood…I-I think. Maybe my dream was real. Maybe the neighbor really did stab us both to death.”

“Are you serious?”

“No, I’m not serious. Do I sound like I’m dead?” Sarah shot back in an irritated tone. She couldn’t explain why she was so annoyed with him today.

“Do you need me to pick you up some…um…some feminine products on the way home?”

“No, I’ve got plenty of tampons at home. Thanks. Next time answer the fucking phone.” She hung up and sat down hard on the bed. She knew that she was wrong for lashing out at Josh but she also knew that in minutes he’d be so wrapped up in his work, laughing and joking with his customers, that he would have forgotten all about it. He was good that way. It was one of the things about him that annoyed the shit out of her.

CHAPTER NINE

They had just come upstairs after washing the dinner dishes. Tonight, Sarah had cooked dinner. She’d made Josh’s favorite, a big, fat, juicy porterhouse from Omaha Steaks with cracked pepper pounded into it and blue cheese on top. It was her way of apologizing for acting like an asshole earlier.

Sarah sat on the edge of the bed reading a book. The light on the nightstand and the TV were on. Josh was lying beside her with a pillow over his head, trying to block out the light and noise.

“Will you please go to sleep? Are you still tripping about that dream?”

“No. Yes. I don’t know. I just can’t sleep.”

Conan O’Brien was making fun of the audience for not laughing at his jokes. It was an odd sort of comedy that Sarah couldn’t get into. She switched the channel to Spike TV and began watching an old replay of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Matt Hughes was getting his ass kicked by an out-of-shape B.J. Penn. Sarah usually loved that type of blood sport but tonight she just wasn’t in the mood. She turned to Comedy Central, then lay back on the bed as the gang from South Park pranced across the screen.

She opened her book, a novel about zombies on an old battleship written by a relatively new author named Brian Keene. Normally she loved a good horror novel, and Brian Keene was one of her favorites, but it was just too gory for her tonight. She looked at an Edward Lee novel that sat unopened on her nightstand with a picture of a winged devil on the cover. No way, she thought. Instead, she picked up a book about the people you meet in heaven after you die. After only a few pages, she fell asleep with the television still on, Cartman and Stan singing about Christmas poo in the background.

Sarah slept fitfully, horrible images of knives and blood dashed through her mind, of Josh screaming in pain, herself being raped, mutilated, and abused. She woke up twice, exhausted and drenched in sweat. When she woke up in the morning she was convinced that there was more to these dreams than just her subconscious overreacting to a creepy neighbor.

“Josh? Wake up, Josh.”

“Is it time for work?”

“No. I just need to talk to you…about these dreams I keep having. They’re really starting to freak me out.”

“You had another one? Like last night?”

“I think so. I can’t really remember. But I think it was bad. Really bad.”

“Do you want to see a psychiatrist or something?”

“No, Josh. I think something is really going on. I want to go to the cops.”

“You can’t call the cops because of a dream.”

There were tears in Sarah’s eyes when she looked over at Josh.

“But what if it isn’t a dream? What if he’s really doing things to me in my sleep?”

Josh turned over and faced Sarah. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and gave Sarah his full attention. He stared into her eyes for a long moment before he spoke, reading her expression as if he were trying to solve a complex equation.

“Then you wouldn’t need to call the cops because I’d kill him myself.”

Sarah smiled halfheartedly and hugged her husband tight.

“What time do you go to work today?”

“I work the swing shift today, four to midnight.”

“I don’t want to be here alone tonight.”

“I made some extra money in tips last night. Some dot-com millionaire younger than my little brother tipped me three hundred dollars before he started losing. Why don’t I take you to buy a gun? With the way the neighborhood is changing it’s probably not a bad idea anyway.”

“Are you serious?” Sarah lit up at the idea. “What kind?”

She swiped the tears from her eyes with the backs of her hands and sat up in bed.

Josh looked at her with a bemused expression on his face. He reached out and brushed the hair from her face.

“You really aren’t like other women. You know that?”

“Why do you say that?”

“Most women would object to the idea of having a gun in the house but you can’t wait to buy one. You’re too eager, in fact. Should I be afraid here? You’re not going to use it on me, are you?”

“Not as long as you keep fucking me when I want to be fucked.”

She kissed him on his lips, then rubbed her hands over his shoulders and down his arms. His biceps were still hard and muscular despite the layer of fat he’d put on since moving to Vegas. He’d had less time to exercise and spent too much time at the buffets. She ran her hand over his belly, which had expanded quite a bit in the last few years. It jiggled as she rubbed it. She ran her hand back up to his chest. His pecs were still big and hard like a bodybuilder’s. They were even bigger than they’d been in college. Josh had begun powerlifting the last few years because it was quicker. He’d pile as much weight onto the bar as he could, do two or three reps, do that for three or four sets and then he was done. His entire routine took him less than twenty minutes a day. It was all he had time for.

He may not have had one of those ripped-up bodies full of cuts and striations with veins popping out everywhere like Arnold Schwarzenegger, but these days neither did Arnold. Josh was still a big, strong man despite his growing paunch. Sarah ran her hands over his belly, then down between his legs where he was already hard. Josh was not a small man in any regard. She hated to admit that the size of his cock had been one of the things she’d first fallen in love with. She knew that women weren’t supposed to care about the physical, especially when it came to what a man was packing. It was supposed to be all about being treated right and cared for and Josh was good at all of that too. He was patient and supportive and attentive and treated Sarah like a queen. But being hung like a porn star certainly didn’t hurt.

“Mmmmm. Is that for me?”

She crawled beneath the covers and swirled her tongue around the head of his cock, licking up and down and flicking the head with her tongue as he squirmed and moaned. She continued teasing his cock with her tongue until he couldn’t take it anymore and reached down and grabbed her by the hair, forcing his cock down her throat. She loved it when he did that. Josh wasn’t a rough lover. He was sweet and loving, preferring to make love even when she was in the mood for a good hard fuck. But she had her ways of awakening the beast in him.

Josh aggressively fucked her throat and Sarah tried her best to ignore it whenever he felt like he’d shoved his cock too far down her throat and paused to ask if she was okay. Sometimes he was so nice it almost killed the mood. Josh may have had a huge cock but no man had made her gag since she was a teenager. It was no secret that she hadn’t exactly been a virgin when they met, but Josh still treated her like she was made of china. It was usually pretty sweet but right now it was annoying. She grabbed his ass cheeks and forced his cock all the way down her throat past her tonsils; then she squirmed a finger up his ass to massage his prostate.

Sarah heard him gasp and felt his entire body tense. Right then she felt like the most powerful woman in the world. She was in complete control. He was completely helpless. A devilish part of her wanted to bite him a little just to let him know how helpless he really was, but Josh wasn’t the type of man who needed to be reminded of that type of thing. He was the type who saved women from those types of men. Instead, she swirled her tongue around his cock while it was still buried in her throat. Back in high school, she and her girlfriends had practiced giving head on carrots and bananas, until she could swallow an entire banana with no problem. They’d read in a book on sexual positions, which her friend Ellie had taken from her mother’s nightstand, that women were supposed to practice. It had paid off.

“Oh my God!” Josh cried out and his legs shot out straight and began to tremble.

He began fucking her throat harder and more urgently. His entire body quivered and he ejaculated down her throat. He was still coming as she slid her mouth back up to the end of his cock.

Josh came like a porn star too. He could shoot a fly off the wall across the room. Sarah’s mouth was completely filled with his warm semen when she rose from the covers. She gargled his seed, making bubbles and letting some dribble out of the corners of her mouth. Then she swallowed and licked her lips, scooping up the semen that had dribbled down her chin and licking it from her fingertips. She smiled, watching Josh’s jaw drop. She’d learned long ago that one of the keys to a successful marriage was throwing something new into the mix every now and again. Internet porn was a great source of new bedroom tricks. And Sarah had a lot of time on her hands to learn new things.

“That was incredible! Wh-where did you learn to do that?” Josh was still breathing hard and little spasms continued to wrack his body intermittently.

“My turn.”

She crawled up Josh’s body and straddled his face. He went to work immediately, flicking her swollen clitoris with his tongue and stabbing it up inside of her, then dragging his tongue down to her anus and giving the rose-colored bud of her asshole the same attention, alternating back and forth between clitoris and anus while Sarah scratched at the headboard and cried out in ecstasy.

“Oh, fuck! Oh, fuck! Oh, my fucking God! Yes! Yes! Oh, fuck, YES!”

When she came, it was like the world was ending. Her body began to spasm and convulse as orgasms tore through her.

Suddenly, images of the neighbor began flashing through her mind. Images of him fucking her from behind, forcing her to look at him in the mirror over the vanity as he raped her ass, bent over Josh’s lifeless corpse, then slit her throat from ear to ear. Another orgasm ripped through her as she screamed. She climbed off Josh and sat with her back against the headboard, still reliving the rape.

Josh smiled, unaware.

“Wow. I can’t remember the last time you came like that. You definitely are not on your period.”

Sarah began to cry.

“What? What did I do?”

“I was raped. I was raped, Josh! The neighbor, Dale, he raped me!”

“Are you sure? You sure this wasn’t a dream?”

“He raped me!”

Josh jumped up from the bed and snatched up his clothes. He walked into the closet and came out with a semiautomatic handgun that Sarah never even knew he had. He pulled on his jeans, moving fast, and Sarah was afraid he was going to zip up his cock in his zipper. She had never seen him look so angry.

“Where’d you get that? What are you going to do?”

“I bought it a few weeks ago when one of the guys at work got beaten up in the parking lot by a bunch of teenagers, some sort of gang. It’s a Glock nine-millimeter. I’m going to put a couple of hollow points in Dale’s head. You stay here. Just call the police and tell them what happened.”

Josh walked out of the room and started down the stairs. Sarah was so confused. She didn’t know what to do, what was real, or what was in her head. She looked around the room, searching for something that would make the whole thing make some kind of sense. She looked across the street and could see Dale cutting the small six-by-eight-foot patch of lawn in his front yard with one of those old manual lawnmowers. He was sweating profusely and the muscles in his skinny little arms were quivering as he struggled to push the lawnmower. He looked so weak and helpless. The whole thing was just so ridiculous. Dale looked like anything but a rapist and murderer. It couldn’t have been real.

“Josh, no! Wait!”

Sarah ran out of the room and dashed down the stairs to catch him.

“Wait, Josh! It was a dream. It was just a dream.”

Josh was still moving toward the front door. He cocked the nine-millimeter, jacking a round into the chamber.

“Josh, no!”

Sarah raced past him to block the front door.

“It was just a dream! Don’t kill him. I was just dreaming. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. I don’t know why I keep having them. I don’t know what it is about that guy that freaks me out so much, but it was just a dream. I promise I’ll go get help. I’ll go see someone.”

Josh relaxed and gathered Sarah into his arms.

“Okay, baby. I’ll make sure we get you some help. But get dressed first. We’re going to buy you a gun.”

CHAPTER TEN

On the way to American Marksman they stopped at the hotel to get Josh’s paycheck. A white F-350 pickup truck cut them off as they drove up the ramp to the second-floor parking level and Josh had to slam on the brakes to avoid hitting them. Josh leaned on the horn and the three rednecks in the car glared at him and the driver flipped him off. Sarah winced. That was one thing you didn’t do to Josh. He was not the most even-tempered guy to begin with and disrespecting him when you were in the wrong brought out his violent side. Josh was out of the car before Sarah could restrain him.

“You could have fucking killed us!”

“Fuck you! You should have been watching where you were going.”

Josh walked right up to the car and put his foot into the driver’s-side door, leaving a huge dent. The three occupants of the car leaped out. The driver was the closest to Josh and the minute he stepped out of the car Josh launched a fist into the man’s temple, knocking him cold. The passenger door closest to him had opened at the same time but the tall skinny guy in the backseat had been a little slower getting out, giving him an extra thirty seconds before Josh smeared his nose all over his face in an explosion of blood that gushed down his face, turning his white T-shirt crimson. The passenger door on the other side of the truck had opened at the same time but the overweight guy in the black and blue NASCAR hat and the multicolored Hawaiian shirt with topless hula dancers on it was in no hurry to join his friends. He held up his hands as he walked around the truck as if Josh were aiming a gun at him.

“It’s cool, man. It’s cool.”

Sarah knew that he wanted to hit the guy anyway. Josh turned reluctantly and walked back to the car. It was this side of Josh that made people certain that he abused her until they saw them together. As big and mean as her husband was, he was a teddy bear with her.

They parked in front of the hotel valet and Josh let one of the attendants know that he was just picking up his check and would be leaving in minutes, then jogged into the casino while Sarah waited for him in the car. Sarah thought about Josh beating up those two guys and began to laugh. This wasn’t the first time she’d seen him beat the crap out of someone. It had been a regular part of Saturday nights back in college. If he wasn’t getting into fights on the ice during one of his hockey games he was fighting someone in a bar or a movie theater or just walking down the street. The funny thing was that he never set out to start the fights. Guys just liked fucking with him. They felt they had to prove their manhood by challenging the biggest guy in the room, which was usually Josh. Something about Sarah’s husband apparently threatened most men. It was even worse when the guys were drunk and feeling ten feet tall and bulletproof. Josh never hesitated to rip the S off a guy’s chest and remind him of his mortality. Sarah suspected that he secretly delighted in it. Still, guys were always trying to test him, which drove him crazy.

It was hard for Sarah to rectify the softhearted gentleman she knew with the guy who had just minutes ago knocked out two guys in the parking garage. But Sarah loved the fact that he had that in him. It made her feel safe and, truth be told, it turned her on more than a little bit.

Josh returned to the car and after tipping the valet for letting him leave his car there, he drove out of the garage and back onto Las Vegas Boulevard. The 215 expressway was only a couple blocks away and soon they were headed southwest at seventy miles per hour. It took them less than twenty minutes to make it across town and soon they were exiting the freeway on Eastern Avenue.

American Marksman was a big store that looked like a supermarket from the outside; located in a strip mall on Eastern Avenue, it was by far the biggest store on the block. Sarah was surprised by how many people were packed into the store shopping with their families. Apparently, small-town folks weren’t the only people who clung to guns when the economy went bad.

Some of them had infants in strollers as if they were just out bargain hunting at Wal-Mart. She was even more surprised by the number of single women, young and old, shopping for handguns, rifles, and shotguns. There were the typical rednecks, cops, and wannabe gangsters too. She wondered how often criminals were in here shopping for guns right alongside the cops who would later arrest them?

Josh and Sarah walked over to one of the many display cases. A salesman with a thick Alabama accent walked over to them.

“Good morning. What can I do ya fer?”

“I’m looking for a handgun for my wife.”

“Something little?”

“No. Something big,” Sarah said.

Both Josh and the salesman looked at her, surprised.

“Well, okay then little lady. You ever handled a weapon before?”

“My father was a lifetime NRA member. He taught all of us how to shoot. It’s been about fifteen or twenty years though, so I’m sure I’m rusty.”

“You wantin’ this for home protection or to carry around witcha?”

Sarah looked at Josh, who shrugged in response.

“Home, I guess.”

“Then how about a .38 Special? Smith and Wesson makes a nice one and it’s relatively cheap.”

“I don’t want a revolver.”

“Okay. Well, the customer’s always right.” He reached under the counter and took out a small semiautomatic. “How about a .380? It has about the same stopping power as a .38.”

“Too small. I want to put a big-ass hole in whatever I shoot at.”

Sarah didn’t smile when she spoke.

“Then you want a .40. It has more stopping power than the nine-millimeter but it doesn’t have the extra kick of a .44. Glock and Sig Sauer make nice ones but they’re pretty pricey. We do have a used Sig on sale for five hundred dollars.”

“That’s a sale? How much is it regular price?”

“Nine hundred dollars.”

“Wow. I guess that is a sale then.” She turned to Josh. “Can we afford it?”

“Well, the mortgage is paid and we don’t have a car payment. We’ll have to tighten the belts a bit but, yeah, we can afford it.”

“Then that’s what I want.”

“How many bullets you want?”

“I want two or three boxes so I can practice.”

“How about two boxes of target ammo and then a box of hollow points for that stopping power ya want? How’s that sound?”

“That sounds about right.”

“You want to try it out first? We got an indoor range here in the back.”

“Sounds like a great idea to me. What do you say?” Josh said.

Sarah shrugged.

“Then let’s go for it. I guess.”

The salesman handed them both a pair of plastic goggles, headphones, and a couple of paper targets with a bull’s-eye in the center.

“Do you have any of those targets that look like people?”

The salesman cocked an eyebrow at her, then looked at Josh as if to say, “Are you sure you know what you’re doin’ here, buddy?”

Josh held up his hands in surrender.

“Yeah. They’s two dollars a piece.”

“I’ll take five.”

The salesman shook his head and took five targets out of a cabinet behind the counter. The targets had pictures of men in ski masks holding guns. They looked like the type of criminals Batman beat up in between fighting supervillains in the comic books Sarah had read as a child. The salesman handed the targets to Sarah, then opened the door and led the way into the shooting range.

“My name’s Mike by the way.”

He held out a big, meaty hand with hairy knuckles.

Josh shook his hand first and then Sarah did the same.

“Josh and Sarah Lincoln.”

“Pleased to meet you both. Go ahead and put the goggles and headphones on before we get in there.”

He put on his own, then waited while Sarah and Josh donned their own protective equipment.

The range was full of people lined up putting holes in paper targets. There were couples like Josh and Sarah, fathers with their sons, and single men and women. The sound of the gunshots was deafening. They walked up to an empty booth and the salesman put the gun on the table along with two boxes of ammo and ejected the clip, laying the gun and the clip side by side.

“Now you load the clip like this.”

The salesman shook out eight bullets into his hand, picked up the clip, and began pushing the bullets into it one at a time with his thumb. Then he took them all back out and handed the clip to Sarah.

“You try it.”

Sarah loaded the clip, pushing the bullets in with her thumb just as Mike had done.

“Then you slide the clip into the gun like this, click the safety off. See that red dot? When you see that dot that means the safety’s off. You just pull the slide back like this and that puts a round in the chamber there. Now you’re ready to go. Just line up the sights, like this. Take a deep breath. Hold it. And squeeze the trigger.”

Sarah went through a hundred rounds of ammo. By the time they were done she felt like an old pro. She was almost eager for someone to come walking into her bedroom uninvited. She wanted to see what those hollow points would do to human flesh.

“Why didn’t we ever do this before? This is fun. We should go shooting every weekend,” Sarah said.

“So, I guess we’re buying the gun then?” Josh asked.

“Hell yeah we are!”

They walked back into the store area with Mike.

“Do you have a blue card?”

“I do. I just bought a gun here a few weeks ago.”

“Then you should register it in your name. Otherwise you’re going to have to go through a two-week waiting period while we do a background check on her. If it’s just going to be in the house and she won’t be carryin’ it around, then it won’t matter whose name it’s in. Eventually, you’re probably gonna want to get one registered in her name though.”

Sarah watched Josh hand the salesman his gun permit and his driver’s license. She felt amazingly relieved. If anything happened now, at least she’d be able to defend herself. The salesman copied down the information and took a Xerox of it along with Josh’s driver’s license. He handed both the license and the permit back to Josh and Josh handed him the credit card. Minutes later, Sarah and Josh were walking out of the store with her new gun.

“We need to make one more stop.”

“Where at?”

“I want to get you something to hide that in where you can get to it fast if something happens. Just in case.”

Sarah leaned closer to him and kissed him.

“Thank you, Josh. I know you think I’m losing my mind but I appreciate you doing all of this to make me feel safe. You could have just taken me to the psych ward to get my head examined.”

“Don’t worry. I’m going to do that too.”

Sarah punched him in the arm, then kissed him again.

When they pulled up at The Spy Shop, Sarah looked confused.

“Trust me. This place is cool. You’re going to love it.”

He looked like a little kid in a toy store as Josh rushed through the door, nearly forgetting to hold the door for Sarah, then catching it just before it swung back and almost smacked her in the face.

“Sorry, my fault. But just wait until you see the stuff they have in here.”

Sarah followed her husband to the back of the store where deceptively innocuous clothing hung on racks. She could not wait to see what kind of weird stuff they’d built into these garments. She felt like James Bond preparing for a mission. There were leather jackets with built-in bulletproof vests and holsters, purses with a slit in them for storing a gun for easy access. There were kitchen aprons with gun pouches, negligees and garters with built-in holsters, a Kevlar baseball cap, a pair of gloves with a built-in Taser gun, Kevlar pillowcases with hidden gun pouches.

“Okay, this place is pretty cool.”

They ended up buying the Kevlar pillow with the hideaway pouch for a gun. On the way out of the store, Sarah stopped to look at the surveillance equipment.

“I think maybe we should get a burglar alarm.”

“I don’t know if the house is prewired.”

“I think it is. We just need to hire a company to set it up and monitor it.”

“I’ll look into it tomorrow. It sounds expensive.”

She picked up a teddy bear with a camera in it.

“What’s this? He’s cute.”

The man behind the counter perked up, sensing a sale. Sarah guessed that he was probably on commission.

“That’s our nanny cam. It attaches to a VCR. You just turn it on and it’ll record everything that goes on in the room. Then you just play it back when you get home.”

“That’s pretty cool.”

Josh took the bear out of her hands and handed it back to the salesman.

“Maybe next time. We’re going broke here.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. We can take the pillow back if you want. We don’t need it.”

“No, I want you to have it. I don’t work as hard as I do for nothing. We can afford it. Let’s just leave before we buy anything else.”

“There is one more thing that I want.”

“What?”

“Let’s stop by The Linen Store and buy some new sheets.”

Josh didn’t ask her why and Sarah didn’t volunteer the information. She knew he’d figure it had something to do with some type of rape-trauma recovery, a ritual like cutting your hair or buying new clothes. Maybe he’d figure the sheets reminded her too much of the dream.

When they arrived at the store, Sarah began looking at sheets that she knew Josh thought were hideous. She didn’t care. The more hideous they were the better the chance he would remember them and that’s all she wanted. She picked up a set of green sheets with polka dots, flowers, and stripes.

“No way in hell. I’m sorry but those things are so loud they’d keep me awake all night.”

Sarah laughed.

“Okay, how about these?”

She held up a set of paisley sheets with big lotus flowers all over it.

“Didn’t Jerry Garcia die in those? They look like they should come with a bong and a nickel bag.”

Sarah covered her mouth and giggled. She always loved Josh’s sense of humor.

“It’s either these or the green ones.”

“Okay, but if I start having acid flashbacks in the middle of the night, you’re going to have to talk me down.”

When they got home, Josh went straight to bed, but not before Sarah stripped the bed and put on their new paisley sheets. There were still those disturbing bloodstains on the mattress. They had dried now but they were unmistakable.

“Jesus! You did bleed a lot.”

“I never started my period though.”

“Maybe you bled it all out in one night.”

“That doesn’t happen.”

“It could have been a miscarriage.”

Sarah stopped making up the bed and looked over at Josh. That was a possibility she hadn’t considered. She and Josh had stopped using birth control so it was entirely possible. Sarah finished putting the sheets on the bed and then stared at the sheets thinking about the possibility that her body had rejected an embryo or a fetus and Josh was about to take a nap in the blood.

Why the hell did you have to say that, Josh? she thought. It was time to buy a new mattress. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Josh staring at her while she stared at the sheets.

“Those sheets trippin’ you out? I’m suddenly in the mood to hear some Jimi Hendrix.”

Sarah forced a smile and tried to snap herself out of it.

“I’ve got some Jim Morrison and The Doors on my iPod.”

“I’ll pass.”

“Sleep tight, lover.”

Sarah closed the door quietly as Josh slipped into bed. She walked back downstairs, leaving Josh to sleep. They had been out all day and now he had only a couple of hours before he needed to leave for work, just enough time for a quick power-nap. Sarah sat on the couch, pointing the Sig Sauer across the street at the neighbor’s house and dry-firing it.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Sarah got dressed for a late-afternoon run. The summer was nearly over but the temperature was still in the low nineties. A stark white sun blazed directly overhead. The air was hot and dusty and there was no shade to be found. Sarah imagined that she were running directly beneath the hole in the ozone layer. She could feel her skin tightening as the Vegas sun baked all the moisture from her pores. Next time, she’d have to remember to put on sunscreen. Sarah hated women who fried their skin to darken it and thought tan lines were absolutely hideous. Living in Vegas, she’d seen the aftermath of one too many tans, premature wrinkles and dark spots, skin the texture of leather, and eventually the big C. It was idiotic to do that to yourself on purpose just to look beautiful. Sarah thought her own milky white skin was beautiful as it was. Yet here she was risking melanoma under the hot September sun.

She decided to cut her run short. The idea of getting tan lines was freaking her out. Sweat stung her eyes and a crust of salt covered her forehead and cheeks. Her black dry-fit top had big white stains on it that resembled efflorescence from all the sodium and potassium she’d perspired. By the time she made it back to the house, Josh was already up and getting ready for work. Despite the new gun sitting on the kitchen counter where she’d left it before her run, Sarah experienced a moment of dread at the thought of being left alone.

“You sure you can’t take the night off?” she asked as she hugged him from behind.

“Not after all the money we just spent. Tips have been slow lately, that’s why I’ve been working so much. The days when I made five hundred dollars in tips on a regular eight-hour shift are pretty much over until the economy recovers. I was thinking about doing a double tonight if the pit boss will let me.”

Sarah frowned.

“Just remember that I’ve got a gun now. If I find out that you’re fucking around on me I’m going to give you a .40-caliber castration or, better yet, an enema!”

Josh kissed her on the forehead, then licked her salty sweat from his lips.

“You don’t leave enough when you’re done with me to share with any other woman. If you’re still too freaked out to be alone, then I’ll stay.”

“No, you’re right, we need the money. But don’t do a double tonight. You can do it tomorrow but I need you tonight.”

“Okay, I’ll be home by one.”

“Be home by twelve thirty.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Josh smiled wide and kissed her on the nose, once more getting a mouthful of salty perspiration.

“When are they going to start giving you regular hours? You’ve been extra-board for over a year. One day you’re working eight to five and then the next day it’s four to twelve, then twelve to eight. And then with the overtime? This is getting ridiculous.”

“Yeah, but that’s why our house isn’t in foreclosure.”

Sarah smiled weakly, then made a pouty face.

“We could fuck just as well in an apartment. Probably better because I’d see you more.”

“All you think about is fucking. I guess I should be flattered.”

“What else is there to think about? I’m bored half to death!”

“You could work on your dissertation.”

“But if I finish my degree I’ll have to get a real job; then I’d have even less time to drive you crazy.”

Josh kissed her again and wrinkled his nose at her musky smell.

“I hope you’re going to shower before I get home.”

“You know you like me when I’m dirty.”

She winked at him as she pulled her shirt over her head. She was pleased to see his eyes zero in on her breasts. It meant that he was still attracted to her. He knelt down to slip on his shoes and Sarah wondered what he would have done if she’d dropped her shorts and told him to lick her pussy—sweat, funk, and all. Knowing him, he would have probably done it just to please her. He may have even enjoyed it. The thought of it began to turn her on. One day she’d have to try it.

“Good-bye, beautiful.” Josh walked out the door.

Almost immediately the silence became deafening. Sarah walked into the kitchen to get her gun and then walked upstairs, leaving all the lights on downstairs. This was not the time to worry about the electric bill. The last thing she wanted was to be in a dark house alone.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, on her ugly new sheets, cradling the gun in her lap, Sarah wished she had talked Josh into buying her a pit bull. As much as the notion of pooper-scooping repulsed her, it would have been nice to have something big and mean in the house that was on her side. She’d have to talk to Josh about that when he got home.

The forty-two-inch plasma-screen TV protruded from the wall opposite the bed, flicking from one channel to another as Sarah hunted for something to preoccupy her. Her bedroom was painted a light tan with a cola-colored accent wall behind the king-size four-poster bed and the light from the TV cast flickering shadows across the dark wall. She loved this room. But tonight it was filled with bad memories, memories she wasn’t even certain were real.

There was nothing on TV and Sarah didn’t feel like cleaning. She felt exhausted, as if she’d just run twelve miles instead of four, but she was afraid to fall asleep. Dark, violent dreams still echoed in her mind.

Sarah began flicking through pay-per-view channels, growing increasingly frustrated. She’d already seen all of the new releases and she had no appetite for soft porn. Sarah clicked off the television, tossed the cable remote across the room onto her love seat, and grabbed her laptop.

She went onto eBay and surfed through the ads for iPods, laptops, designer purses and shoes, and various collectibles before logging on to a local runners’ message board and checking the forum threads for any interesting discussions. This was her ritual. It was what she did to convince herself that she hadn’t logged on just to look at porn. But the truth was that surfing the porn sites was her favorite pastime. It wasn’t something she did for titillation so much as morbid curiosity. The bizarre fetishes she ran across amused her to no end. She kept telling herself that she was going to write a book someday and that this was simple research.

Sarah clicked through all the usual bukkake, farm sex, amputee, and midget porn sites until she got to the weird stuff. She stopped at a “sleepy sex” website for men who liked to make love to women who just lie there like corpses and then a necro-sex site for men who liked to make love to actual corpses. Josh would have lost his mind if he knew about the type of websites she went on. The necro-sex sites were all geared toward the goth crowd and featured women lying in coffins wearing pale makeup with black eye shadow. Sarah laughed and clicked on another link. For some reason, even the goth freaks who fucked fake corpses were making her uncomfortable.

She found a site for blood-play that showed men and women making love while cutting each other with razor blades and another site showing nude women hanging from nooses. Sarah shuddered and clicked off the website. It was just too much for her tonight.

“What the fuck is wrong with people?”

But Sarah knew that normally she would have found even the most violent and perverse porn sites fascinating. That was before she dreamed about being murdered, then woke up the next morning on a blood-soaked mattress. Now she wanted something more vanilla. She clicked on a lesbian site and tried to amuse herself with pictures of women who looked like anything but lesbians fucking for the camera. She closed her laptop and lay back on the bed with the gun on her chest. There was no fighting it. She was tired as hell and, for once, she wasn’t the least bit horny. She felt like she’d never be horny again.

Sarah closed her eyes and clicked the safety off the pistol.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Sarah woke up as Josh walked into the room.

“Sorry, baby. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

Sarah wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands, then sat up straight in bed. She looked around the room in a panic.

“Turn on the lights.”

“Go on back to sleep,” Josh whispered.

“Turn on the lights!”

The room filled with light and Sarah immediately looked down at the sheets. Her heart began a drum roll in her chest. The sheets were white. No flowers. No paisleys. No psychedelic colors. Just plain white. Sweat broke out on her brow and she began to hyperventilate.

“Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit.”

Josh’s forehead wrinkled and he held his hands out helplessly. The gesture annoyed the hell out of Sarah and made her feel completely alone. He eyes began to tear up.

“Oh God. Oh shit.”

“What? What is it?”

“Where are the sheets? Where are the sheets, Josh?”

Josh shrugged.

“What sheets?”

“The ugly ones we bought from The Linen Store. The hippie sheets with the paisleys and the big ugly fucking flowers? I put them on the bed before I went to sleep. Where are they? Where the fuck are they, Josh?”

Josh looked down at the bed.

“Are you sure you put them on?”

“Of course I’m sure! That’s why I bought them. So I wouldn’t forget them. I know I put them on the bed.”

Sarah sprang from the bed and stomped into the closet. She rummaged through the laundry basket, tossing jeans, T-shirts, skirts, and bras onto the floor. She ran out of the closet and downstairs to the laundry room with Josh following close behind her. She opened up the laundry machine and there were her sheets, clean, wet, balled up at the bottom of the washer. A pair of her underwear were in there too. They were the same ones she’d been wearing when she’d fallen asleep. She looked at Josh. He stared back at her wide-eyed. Slowly he shook his head.

“I didn’t wash them.” Then she added, “Where’s my gun?”

Josh stared at her blankly.

“Where’s the fucking gun? I had it with me when I went to bed. Where is it? Where’s the fucking gun?”

“Um, I think I saw it upstairs.”

Sarah dashed back up the stairs. She found the Sig Sauer sitting on the dresser. Her hand shook as she reached for it. She paused, her hand hovering over the pistol as if she was afraid to touch it. She turned and looked at Josh who was watching her, holding his breath, as if she were about to pick up a poisonous snake. They were both breathing hard.

“Did you put this here, Josh?”

“No. It was there when I walked in.”

“It was lying on my chest when I went to sleep. I was holding it with both hands.”

She picked up the gun and ejected the clip. It was empty. She pulled the slide back. The bullet she’d placed in the chamber was gone. Josh sucked in a quick breath and began looking around the room for bullets.

Sarah knew that this must be hard on Josh, suddenly being forced to be the calm, steady one while she fell apart. It was a complete reversal from their normal roles. She could tell that he was having a hard time holding it together. Seeing the panic on her face was unnerving him but he was trying to remain calm for her sake. Staying calm was not one of his strong suits and the strain was showing on his face. She loved him for the effort he was making.

“Do you smell that?”

Josh’s expression was beginning to look as panicked as her own.

“What?” Sarah asked.

Josh took the gun from her and sniffed the barrel. He held it out to her. Sarah sniffed it as well. There was the unmistakable smell of burned carbon.

“It’s been fired.”

Sarah began looking around the room for bullet holes while Josh checked the floor for spent casings. It didn’t take her long to find one. There was a hole in the bedroom door. Josh closed the door and behind it was a nice, neat round hole in the drywall.

“You shot at something, someone maybe? The neighbor? Did you have another one of those dreams?”

“I don’t think they’re dreams, Josh. Do you think I changed the sheets and did a load of laundry in my dreams? I think someone was in here. I’m scared, Josh.”

“Should I go over to the neighbor’s house?”

“And do what? We have no proof he did anything. If you kill him or kick his ass, then you’ll just go to jail and I’ll be all alone.”

Sarah reached out and pulled her husband close. She wrapped herself in his big, thick arms, leaning her head on his muscular chest, searching desperately for some sense of security, wanting to believe that her husband could protect her from whatever this was.

“Well, then what happened? Do you really think he came in here and attacked you? Then stripped the sheets off the bed and washed them? That just sounds so crazy. This…this can’t be happening.”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember. I laid down with the gun on my chest and then I woke up when you came in the room.”

“Well, something happened. I’m calling the cops.”

“And telling them what?”

“I don’t know. But I’m calling them. Something is definitely going on.”

“B-but what if it’s just me? What if I’m going crazy or something? I don’t want them to put me away somewhere.”

“They won’t put you away. I don’t think it works that way. They don’t just lock you up for saying crazy shit. Half of Las Vegas would be in the loony bin if that’s how it was. But maybe they can test the place, see if someone has been in here?”

Sarah was confused, uncertain, but she was scared to death. Maybe she would feel better if the cops came. Josh stood next to the bed holding his cell phone, looking at her, waiting.

“Okay. Call them.”

Sarah looked around the room as Josh dialed the phone number for police emergencies. The more she looked the more things she noticed out of place. The light on the nightstand and the radio alarm clock had switched places. There was a big red stuffed bear that Josh had bought her for Valentine’s Day the year they got married. She always kept it next to the bed and there it was, next to the bed. Only it was on Josh’s side of the bed. Even her laptop was unplugged and sitting on top of the dresser instead of plugged in on the floor by the bed. And there were clean spots on the floor again. Places where the carpet was lighter, where it had obviously been scrubbed. Sarah knelt down and rubbed her hand over one large spot beside the bed that was almost three shades lighter than the rest of the carpet as if someone had used bleach on it. The carpet was wet.

“Yes. My name is Josh…Josh Lincoln. Someone has been in our house. I think they may have attacked my wife. Okay. Okay. How long before they get here? Okay. Thank you.”

“Josh.”

“They’re on their way.”

“The carpet is wet. It’s been cleaned.”

Sarah stood back as Josh knelt down and inspected the carpet. She already knew what he was going to say. There was just no denying the fact that the carpet had been cleaned. It looked as if all the color had been bleached out of it in spots. There was a cream-colored spot on the tan carpet that was nearly four feet wide. As they looked around they began to notice spots on the walls behind the bed that looked as if they had been cleaned or freshly painted.

“And, before you ask, no, I didn’t decide to get up and clean the carpet in the middle of the night.”

Josh just shook his head and rubbed his face with his palms. He was trying to figure out what to say, obviously wracking his brain for the right words, visibly distressed by his inability to explain what he was seeing. Sarah was almost hoping that Josh would have had some rational explanation for it all, even if the answer was that she was crazy. But fear and confusion was written clearly across his face.

“Do you really think someone’s been in the house? How could they sneak in here without waking you up? You think maybe somebody drugged you? Some sort of date-rape drug like rufinol?”

Sarah thought about it. If she had been drugged, then the gaps in her memory, the hazy dreamlike images that came back to her in brief flashes, would make a lot more sense. Even her memories of being murdered could be dismissed as drug-induced hallucinations.

But how could someone have gotten in here to drug me in the first place? How would they have slipped me the drugs? Sarah wondered. The idea created as many questions as it answered. And if it was true, that would mean that her dreams about being raped by the neighbor were real. Sarah hugged herself and shuddered.

“I don’t know. But maybe I should go to the hospital to get checked out.”

“Before the cops get here…” Josh paused. Sarah looked at him quizzically.

“What, Josh? What?”

“This is fucked up, but I have to ask you…”

“Ask me what?”

“The drugs…um…they aren’t going to find…I mean…someone drugged you, right? You’re not using…”

Sarah realized what he was getting at and something dark and mean spread inside of her, wanting to lash out at Josh and tear his face off his skull or at the least, slap the shit out of him. She knew that, given the circumstances, it was a perfectly reasonable question to ask. The whole thing looked and sounded insane. And if she wasn’t schizophrenic, then the only other possibility, besides someone breaking in and raping and drugging her without her being able to remember it, was that she was using drugs herself and doing all of this in some kind of drug-induced delirium. Given the choices, it was far more likely from his perspective that she had started using drugs. She had also confessed to Josh once that she had used methamphetamines in high school as a weight-loss aid, “The Meth Diet” she and her friends had jokingly called it. She’d started using it again in college to help her stay up late to study just before she and Josh had met. He had every right to be suspicious. But right now she needed him to be on her side and this question, right at this moment, felt like a horrible betrayal.

“No, Josh. I’m not a fucking drug addict. I’m not snorting meth or smoking crack while you’re at work.”

Sarah turned her back on Josh as the tears began to flow. She started to throw herself down onto the bed but just the sight of those clean white sheets halted her. She didn’t want to touch them. Whoever had broken in here and done things to her had also touched those sheets. Sarah stood in the middle of the room, with tears racing down her cheeks, and screamed.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“So, you’re saying that your neighbor has been breaking into your house and drugging you and raping you?”

The cop looked like he’d just gotten out of high school but he already had that disinterested look of someone who was used to seeing the worst of humanity. He had that look of one who had grown bored with anything short of gunfights and fatal car accidents, that superior cop swagger as if everyone without a badge owed their existence to him. His prematurely thinning copse of blond hair, acne scars on his cheeks and forehead, and bulbous Adam’s apple were clear indications that he had probably been on the wrong end of many insults and ass-kickings during his school years.

“We’re not sure. That’s why we called you. Someone has been in the house though.”

“Someone came in and scrubbed your floors and walls and did the laundry but didn’t take anything?”

“Someone raped my wife and cleaned up to hide the evidence. I mean…someone might have. She just keeps having these dreams and then all this stuff in the house that’s out of place.”

“And why do you think it’s your neighbor?”

“My wife saw him. I mean…she thinks she did. She has these dreams and in them it’s him. He’s there and he’s raping her and killing her.”

The police officer, who looked like a young blond Anthony Perkins, stared at Josh. He was obviously suppressing a laugh. Sarah felt terrible for putting Josh through this.

“Look, I know this all sounds crazy. Can you just check the house and see if there’s any sign that someone has broken in?”

The cop sighed deeply.

“Okay, I’ll check the doors and windows.”

Sarah and Josh looked at each other. Sarah felt so foolish, she couldn’t hide her embarrassment. She was blushing and fidgeting. She wished they hadn’t called the police but she wanted to know. She had to know if someone had been breaking into their house.

The police officer checked the windows in the living room, the kitchen, and the den. He checked the front door and the rear sliding door.

“Sir? Ma’am?”

“Yes?” Josh walked over to the sliding-glass door where the cop was standing. Sarah came with him.

“How do you lock this door?”

“You just flip this latch at the bottom of the door.”

“Up or down?”

“You just push it down with your foot.”

“Uh huh. Go ahead. Flip the lock.”

Josh stepped on the latch.

“Now, open the door.”

Josh pulled on the sliding-door handle and the door slid open easily on its track.

“Try it again.”

This time Sarah pushed past her husband and stepped down firmly on the latch. She grabbed the door handle and once again the door slid easily open.

“You should get yourself a security bar for this door. With all these empty houses around it might not be a bad idea to get a security alarm too. Gangs and drug addicts sometimes squat in these abandoned houses. It’s a real problem. These foreclosures send the crime rate through the roof.”

“So, do you think someone has been breaking in here?” Sarah asked a little too anxiously.

“There’s no sign of forced entry but then an intruder wouldn’t really need to break anything to get in when he can just slide the door open.”

“We’ll get it fixed.”

“Get that security system installed too.”

“We will.”

“Is that it?” Sarah asked. Her voice rose higher than she had intended it to, giving a panicky edge to it.

“That’s all I can do with the evidence we have right now. If you remember anything more, then you can come down to the station and file a report. But I can’t go across the street and arrest some guy because you had a bad dream.”

“But you can question him?”

“Do you really want me to do that? I can. You’re right. I could go across the street and ask him if he’s been breaking into your house and attacking you when you’re sleeping. But if he didn’t do anything and all you had was a really scary realistic dream, then you might just piss him off and start a war between you.”

“He’s right,” Josh said, and Sarah knew he was too, but that’s not what she wanted to hear. She wanted the neighbor fingerprinted. She wanted her entire house dusted for fingerprints, checked for blood and semen and hair fibers and whatever the hell else they could find. She wanted him locked up and interrogated until he admitted the things he’d been doing to her.

“What about fingerprints? Can’t you check the house for prints?”

“We would need to get his prints to compare them to and that would require a warrant. Unless you can tell me right now that you know for a fact that he attacked you, I can’t get that warrant. If you tell me it wasn’t a dream and you remember him breaking in here and raping you, I’ll have that warrant in minutes and we’ll get fingerprints and semen samples from him, run a rape kit at the hospital and dust the entire house for prints and blood and any other body fluids. Without that, there’s nothing we can do. I can’t get a warrant or call in for a CSU team based on a dream and some clean sheets.”

“Could you run a rape kit on me anyway? Just to make sure it was only a dream? I haven’t showered yet so if something happened there might still be…” Sarah paused. The words did not want to come out. A shudder went through her body once more and she grimaced as if she had tasted something foul, as if she could still taste him. “…evidence.” She turned away in embarrassment, then turned back and forced herself to meet the cop’s eyes, not wanting him to know that she was embarrassed, trying not to appear weak. She had no idea why that was so important to her. But she hated the idea of appearing weak in front of anyone except Josh and not even him most of the time.

The cop took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He tapped his pen against his notepad, upon which he had written absolutely nothing. He hadn’t taken a single note about anything she had said.

It was apparent to Sarah that he wasn’t planning on doing a single thing about her intruder and was just humoring her. She was almost tempted to tell him that they weren’t dreams and that she knew for a fact that she had been raped but she didn’t. She was still not sure how much of what she remembered was a dream and how much was real. She couldn’t remember a thing from last night. Not being attacked. Not firing the gun. Nothing.

If this was all in her head and she was going crazy she’d be putting the neighbor through hell for nothing and causing him all kinds of problems. People only tended to remember when someone was accused of a crime not when they were exonerated. A rape charge might get him fired or chased right out of the neighborhood. He might even retaliate by suing them or calling the homeowner’s association on them every time they were late bringing in their trash can on trash day or when they parked on the driveway instead of in the garage or if they didn’t trim their shrubs or calling the Nevada Water Authority when they didn’t change their sprinkler clocks on drought days or calling the police whenever their stereo was too loud or any of those other petty things neighbors did to one another to make their lives hell. It might even wind up with him and Josh in a fight or worse. She thought about Josh storming out of the house with a gun in his hand. What if Dale had a gun? That could get really ugly. She definitely did not want to start a feud with the new neighbor.

“What if she’s been drugged, and that’s why she can’t remember anything? You could do a urinalysis while she’s at the hospital.”

“Still no way to prove the neighbor did it or that she didn’t take the drugs herself.”

“But if they find that she’s been raped and they find some kind of date-rape drug in her system, that should be enough for a warrant then, right?”

The policeman looked down at his patent leather cop shoes and shook his head, raising his arms in surrender.

“All right. I’ll take you down to the hospital.”

“I’ll get my purse.”

Sarah walked into the living room and snatched her purse off the couch. She walked past Josh without looking at him. She was still angry that he’d doubted her about the drugs. As she walked out the door she hoped that if Dale had really drugged her, he hadn’t used meth.

The ride to the hospital was loaded with tension as the police officer attempted to talk them out of it during the entire ride.

“You sure you want to do this, right? These examinations can be pretty invasive. I’ll have to call a rape counselor. That’s just procedure. And she’s going to ask you some pretty tough questions.”

“I’ll tell her everything I can remember.”

“They might have to ask you about your marriage. You know, to rule your husband out as the rapist.”

“My husband didn’t rape me.”

“I’m not saying that. I’m just trying to prepare you for some of the questions they might ask you.”

“It sounds to me like you’re trying to talk me out of it.”

“I’m taking you, aren’t I?”

They fell silent for the rest of the ride. Sarah was grateful for the break. She needed to think. She wanted to try to remember as much as she could.

Sarah still could not remember much of the previous night. She remembered changing the sheets. She remembered surfing the Internet and then putting the laptop down beside the bed and grabbing her gun. She remembered falling asleep with the gun clenched in both hands and held tight to her chest. And she remembered waking up when Josh walked in. Everything in between was completely gone. But she could remember the previous night clearly.

She remembered waking up and reaching out for her husband, only to feel that warm wetness and hearing him wheezing and gurgling as he drowned on his own blood. She remembered looking up and seeing Dale stab Josh again and again. And she remembered what he had done to her. She could not forget the image of his tiny penis thrusting between her blood-soaked breasts. The problem was that she could also remember waking up unmarred with no visible wounds or scars and seeing her husband…alive. It had to have been a dream. But then she’d started finding things, things that didn’t add up, things that supported her memories. The only thing that didn’t make sense was the fact that she and Josh were alive.

They arrived at the hospital with the police officer still visibly annoyed at being inconvenienced. There was a nurse waiting for him along with a victim advocate from the LVPD.

“We’ll take it from here,” the female detective said, and the young officer looked like he could just barely contain the urge to jump for joy.

“Have fun, guys,” the officer said, and saluted them with a flip of his hand as he turned and walked out the hospital’s sliding doors, weaving around a gurney that was being rushed in by some paramedics with a man on it screaming his head off and bleeding from a huge wound in his leg. The officer gave the bleeding man the same flippant salute as he strode out into the parking lot.

“Asshole,” Sarah and Josh said in unison as they watched him leave.

The female detective smiled at Sarah as she ushered them into a small examination room.

The victim’s advocate from the police department was a tall black woman in her late thirties with thick curves. She had a kind face with a scar in the corner of her mouth that ran from the right corner of her lip up to her nose.

“My name is Detective Trina Lassiter.”

“Sarah Lincoln.”

“Okay, Mrs. Lincoln, tell me what happened,” she said as she and the nurse pulled on a pair of latex gloves.

“I’m not really sure. I remember being attacked but I’m not sure it wasn’t a dream.”

The nurse just nodded without looking up.

“That’s normal. Your mind sometimes suppresses unpleasant memories,” the nurse, a Latino woman in her fifties, said.

The detective opened a big plastic bag and withdrew cotton swabs, Q-tips, and little plastic jars.

“When do you think this happened?” Lassiter asked.

“The memories are from two nights ago but I think something may have happened last night as well.”

The nurse finally looked up. She looked at Detective Lassiter and then they both looked back at Sarah.

“You think you’ve been raped twice?” Lassiter asked.

“At least. I think the neighbor is doing it. I think he might be drugging me.”

Detective Lassiter turned to the nurse who was still staring with her mouth open.

“Let’s get blood and urine samples. Check her for GHB and rufinol.”

She turned back to Sarah.

“Okay, let’s get your clothes off. Is this what you were wearing during the attacks?”

“No. They happened at night when I was sleeping. I was just wearing my underwear but somebody washed them.”

She related the entire incident, as much as she could remember including being stabbed and then waking up the next morning without a mark on her. She told the detective about the bloody sheets and then the missing sheets the next day. The tall black woman listened patiently.

“Okay. Okay, let’s just get you undressed.”

Sarah took off her clothes and slipped into the hospital gown. She put her legs into the stirrups and closed her eyes as the nurse swabbed the inside of her vagina and anus and then swabbed beneath her tongue and inside her cheeks, bagging each Q-tip and labeling it before placing them back into the plastic envelope. She winced as the nurse slid a syringe into the vein on the inside of her elbow and withdrew three vials of blood. Then she gave Sarah a cup and helped her into the bathroom to take a urine sample.

When she came out of the bathroom she could tell by the demeanor of the two women that something had changed.

“What did you find?”

“Nothing. We’ll send the samples to the lab but there’s no sign of vaginal bruising or tearing. No sign of rectal trauma either. It doesn’t look like you’ve been raped.”

Sarah just stared at them, trying to figure out what it all meant.

“But…? But those memories? Those fucked-up horrible memories? Am I going crazy?”

“I’m not saying that nothing happened. If you were drugged your muscles may have relaxed, making it easier for him to penetrate. You may have even had an involuntary reaction and been lubricated enough that he didn’t tear any tissue the way he would have if you weren’t lubricated. That’s normal and it doesn’t mean you enjoyed it or anything. The body just acts funny sometimes and there’s nothing we can do about it. You also said his penis was small. All of that may have contributed to the lack of evidence. A lubricated condom on a small penis could leave very little evidence of bruising or tearing.”

Sarah nodded in agreement, barely listening. She kept thinking about what the detective had said about her being lubricated. Had she subconsciously enjoyed it? Maybe all the porn she watched had fucked up her head. How could she have enjoyed being raped by that perverted little freak? The woman had said that it happens all the time and it didn’t mean that she was enjoying it or that the sex was voluntary but Sarah still questioned herself. She could only guess what Josh would say. He already thought she was a nymphomaniac. But there was, of course, another possibility. It might have all been in her head. She might have never been raped at all.

“Like I said, we’ll test the samples. It might be a good idea to get a semen sample from your husband too so we can exclude his semen.”

Sarah nodded. She didn’t want to talk anymore. She just wanted to go home.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Sarah didn’t say anything to Josh when they left the hospital. She didn’t know what to say that wouldn’t make her sound insane.

“Let’s call an alarm company when we get home. We’ll see if we can get someone to install it tonight.”

Sarah shook her head slowly, still staring ahead, eyes glazed, looking out the windshield at nothing.

“No. We don’t need to spend any more money on this. But I can’t take another night in that house. Not tonight. Let’s just go home and get some clothes and I’ll go with you to work. See if you can get us a hotel room.”

“Okay. Okay. That shouldn’t be a problem. I’ll speak to the hotel manager. I should be able to get us a few nights for free. That will give me enough time to get that door fixed. I think I’m going to get an alarm installed anyway. I should make some good tips tonight and that cop was right. The neighborhood is changing.”

Sarah nodded again, still staring out the windshield at the desert rushing by. The mountains surrounding the valley were still an odd sight to her. In Indianapolis there was nothing to see but trees and more buildings. Though, the mountains were the only things about the town that Sarah thought of as beautiful. This was a town that destroys its own history. Any building older than thirty years was threatened with demolition leaving only row after row of cookie-cutter stucco tract homes, most less than ten years old. More and more Sarah was coming to despise this city.

The collapse of the economy had devastated the town, leaving brand-new houses standing empty, vacant strip malls, and towering office buildings standing unfinished, little more than steel frames without the bank funding to complete them. And the crime rate had been steadily increasing year after year. There were more red and blue bandanas hanging from the back pockets of sagging jeans than she had ever seen before.

Their car pulled into the driveway and Sarah turned to look at the house across the street. She thought she saw the blinds close as she turned. A sudden fury rose inside her and she stormed down the driveway and started across the street toward the neighbor’s house.

“Fuck this bullshit! I’m not going to let anyone terrorize me and scare me out of my own damn house!”

“Sarah!”

Josh came running after her, catching up to her in the street. Sarah did not slow her stride.

“Sarah? Sarah? What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to let this bastard know that I know what he’s been up to. I want him to know that I’m not afraid.”

Sarah walked up the neighbor’s steps and pounded on his front door. It felt good to be doing something, to be taking control again instead of just sitting back waiting for him to break in and attack her again. Even if the entire attack was all in her head and the neighbor didn’t know what the hell she was talking about, it would still feel good to be doing something. After being probed and examined and being told by those fucking nurses that she might have gotten wet when she was being raped, it felt great to go on the offensive. She waited. There was no answer. She pounded on the door again.

“Open this goddamned door! I know you’re there. I saw you looking at me through the blinds!”

The door swung open and Dale stood there in a robe that was too big for him and made him look even smaller, weaker, and emaciated.

“Yes?”

“I know what you’ve been up to and if I ever catch you sneaking into my house again I will kill you. Do you hear me? I will blow your fucking head off!”

Dale looked terrified. His eyes shifted nervously from Josh to Sarah.

“I-I-I haven’t been in your house. What are you talking about? I wouldn’t do anything like that.”

Josh tried to step in front of Sarah.

“My wife has been under a lot of stress lately.”

Sarah whirled on him, pushing him back and jabbing a finger in his face.

“Don’t! Don’t you fucking dare!”

Josh fell silent and dropped his head. Sarah turned back to Dale.

“I don’t know how you’re doing it, but we are going to catch you and then your ass won’t go to jail. I won’t call the cops. I’m going to send your scrawny ass to the fucking morgue!”

Dale smiled. It was quick. He suppressed it almost immediately and resumed his look of fear and confusion. But Sarah saw it. He had smiled. Before she could think, question herself, talk herself out of it, she drew her hand back and slapped him. She turned her shoulders into the blow, giving it her all. He fell against the doorjamb and a big, angry red welt in the shape of four fingers rose on his left cheek. The expression on his face was one of stunned outrage but then she saw it again, that quick smile. Sarah balled up her fist and pulled back and Josh grabbed her, dragged her off the steps and into the street.

“I’ll fucking kill you! Do you hear me, you fucking pervert! I’ll kill you!”

Up and down the block, doors and windows opened as the few remaining curious neighbors looked out to see what was going on. Sarah knew she ought to feel embarrassed but she didn’t. She felt great!

“Why did you hit me? You’re crazy! I’m calling the cops! You’re crazy!”

But for the first time in days she didn’t feel crazy. She felt strong again. She felt in control again. And even if she was imagining everything else, she had not imagined that smile. She was certain about that.

She turned and shook free of Josh, then walked into the house, stomping her feet with her hands balled into tight fists. Josh walked in right behind her.

“I can’t believe you slapped him.”

“He fucking smiled at me. That slimy, nasty little bastard was grinning at me.”

“I think we need to get you someone to talk to.”

“What?”

“Maybe…I don’t know…Maybe you need some help.”

There it was, out in the open. He thought she was crazy.

“Do you think maybe we should at least wait for the lab results?”

“That policewoman told me they found no physical signs of rape.”

“She told you?”

“I’m your husband. I was concerned.”

“Did she tell you that it could have looked that way because he used lubrication and had a small dick? Or because the drugs relaxed my damned vaginal muscles?”

“Well, drugs or lubricant would show up in the lab results.”

“That’s why maybe you should wait before you try shipping me off to the fucking loony bin! Wait to see if maybe I’m fucking right!”

Josh was keeping his distance. He appeared to be afraid that she would attack him too the way she had attacked the neighbor. He held his hands out palms up as if he were trying to negotiate with a gunman. Sarah really did want to hit him. Josh knew her well.

“But what if nothing happened? You just slapped that guy. He could press charges. You were about to beat the hell out of him. Can you seriously imagine that little guy attacking anybody?”

“Maybe that’s why he uses the drugs? So we can’t fight him.”

“We don’t know that he uses anything! We don’t know that anything happened! This could all be in your head. You could have sleepwalked and shot off that gun and changed the sheets and scrubbed the carpet and then crawled right back into bed and went back to sleep. That sounds a whole fucking lot more likely than some sheepish little guy who lives across the street has been breaking in at night and raping and killing you but you can’t remember it and, did I forget to mention, you aren’t fucking dead!”

Sarah was stunned. Now it was all out in the open. Everything she had felt before, all the power and confidence, was now gone. Now, she felt crazy again.

“Wow. I-I really didn’t know you felt that way.”

Josh deflated, collapsing on the couch.

“Look, I’m sorry. I just don’t know what to think. This is just so fucking confusing and scary as hell…either way. I mean, if this guy has been drugging both of us and then breaking in and raping you, that’s fucking terrifying. And if you’re, you know, losing it, that’s almost worst. You-you’re my rock. You’re supposed to keep me from losing it.”

There was a hitch in Josh’s voice. When he looked up at her there were tears in his eyes. It broke Sarah’s heart. She felt like she had let him down, as if she had failed him in some way.

Sarah hadn’t thought much about how this must have been impacting Josh. She knew that Josh was not built for stress or surprises. He was a middle-of-the-road business-as-usual type of guy and this was as far from that as could be. This was the other side of the moon.

A silence fell between them, heavy and uncomfortable. Sarah walked over and plopped down beside Josh. She leaned over and put her head in his lap.

“I’m not crazy, Josh. But I can’t expect you to believe that. I mean, crazy people don’t know they’re crazy right? If I’m sleepwalking or something, I guess I wouldn’t really know. Let’s just get away for a few days. It might make things a little clearer We could both probably use a little break from all this.”

Once again, in the midst of her own trauma, it was her taking care of Josh. Sarah didn’t mind. It felt normal. She hated that she had been leaning on Josh so much lately.

“Let’s just grab a few things and go. We’ll treat it like a honeymoon.”

Josh nodded and slowly rose from the couch. He still looked shaken, scared, uncertain. Sarah cupped his face in her hands and forced him to look her in the eyes.

“I’m not crazy, Josh. Don’t worry. I’m not crazy.”

Josh smiled weakly and hugged her. She could tell that he was still not certain. Neither was she. She would have to change that.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Once she had settled into the hotel room, the first thing Sarah did was plug in her laptop and get online. She looked up The Spy Store and began scouring through their surveillance equipment. Most of it was prohibitively expensive. She settled on the nanny-cam teddy bear. Both attacks had taken place in her bedroom. If she could catch it on film, then she could prove to Josh and herself that she wasn’t crazy. Then she’d have that fucker arrested and her life would go back to normal…after a few years of therapy.

Sarah wrote down the model number and the address to the store. Then she opened her documents and began working on her dissertation. She had no desire to surf through porn sites. She’d already seen enough violent and deviant sex acts to support her theory that human sexuality on a whole was growing more nihilistic as overpopulation increased. She didn’t need to see any more pictures of women being brutally fist-fucked and gang-raped. Her sex drive had already crashed and burned. She wasn’t certain she’d ever have the desire for sex again. That alone made her want to murder Dale.

Sarah took a digital voice recorder out of her overnight bag and slipped it under her pillow. If anything happened tonight, she would at least have a recording of it. She began to write about the increased popularity of what she called “nonreproductive sex” such as sadomasochism, anal and oral sex, the use of sex toys, and ejaculation outside the vagina, on the face, breast, buttocks, etc., following the start of the AIDS epidemic.

Human sexuality had been a major focus of her study ever since she was an undergraduate. She had grown up in a very religious household where sexuality was never discussed. Sexually explicit books, movies, or TV shows were not allowed in her home when she was young. Even music with explicit lyrics was banned. She had first learned about sex from her friends in high school. It was a wonder she hadn’t gotten pregnant at fifteen like most of them had.

In college she’d finally had the freedom to explore her sexuality and divide the facts from the fiction. She had become fascinated with both the lore and the science of sexuality and had switched her major from psychology to social anthropology. She was hoping to someday write a groundbreaking book that would shed new light on human sexuality and show the necessary social function of so-called deviancy. She believed that the evolution of sexuality followed a Darwinian trajectory where acts like sexual violence would have long been eliminated from the human gene pool if they did not serve some purpose. In this case, she theorized, that the purpose was to harness sexual energy into nonreproductive activities that would not further contribute to overpopulation or exposure to disease.

Of course, by that logic, she should have found greater sexual diversity in the more overpopulated cities and countries than her research had so far uncovered. There should, in fact, have been an exponential increase in sexual deviancy in cities with populations over five million as compared to those of a million or less. But she could not find any significant differences.

Sarah closed the laptop in frustration and picked up the room service menu. She was beginning to doubt if she would ever finish her dissertation and was starting to lose her drive. She kept finding new holes in her theory that needed to be filled and each time she plugged one hole it created another. She was also worried that all of this research might be the cause of her violent sexual dreams. And if they were real than she didn’t want to rationalize the things that monster had done to her, which is what it felt like she was doing with her research.

Sarah scanned down the menu straight to the deserts. She needed some comfort food. She found some chocolate cake and vanilla fudge ice cream. It was just what she needed. She picked up the remote and turned on the TV. She pushed the menu button and clicked on pay-per-view movies. She needed a good romantic comedy, something silly with Ben Affleck or Hugh Grant. That, along with the ice cream and the cake, was guaranteed to take her mind off her troubles. And if that didn’t work there was always the hotel gym, though she hated running on treadmills. The wind in her face and watching the scenery rush by were part of the thrill of running. But she didn’t feel like battling crowds trying to jog up the Las Vegas strip. Even with the decrease in tourism due to the recession, the strip was still packed like a nightclub on Saturday night.

There were no movies on that Sarah either hadn’t seen or could stomach. As much as she wanted to feel girly and feminine and lose herself in something mindless, she just could not stomach another girl-from-the-wrong-side-of-the-tracks-meets-perfect-rich-gentleman movie. She had her limits. Finally, she settled on a nature documentary about the migration of gray whales. Not what she had in mind but the sound of the ocean and the whale calls were strangely soothing.

She had almost fallen asleep when there was a knock at the door. Sarah’s pulse rate shot up and it suddenly became difficult to breath. She scrambled off the bed, groping for her purse and the loaded .40-caliber pistol inside it.

Sarah’s hands shook as she removed the semiautomatic pistol from her bag, jacked a round into the chamber, cocking it as she walked toward the door.

“Who is it?”

“Room service.”

“Just leave it outside the door.”

“Um…I need you to sign for it.”

Sarah let out a low moan. There was no peephole in the door. She would have to open it to see who was on the other side. She put the chain on the door and put the barrel of the gun against the door as she slid it open, prepared to pull the trigger if it was Dale. She could hear her own heart hammering in her ears.

A young Latino man stood on the other side of the door wearing a red jacket and pushing a cart with a silver tray on it that held her ice cream and cake. She flipped the chain off the door and hid the pistol behind her back.

“Sorry, come on in.”

She opened the door and stepped aside so the waiter could wheel in her dessert.

“Anything else, ma’am?” the waiter asked as he handed her the bill.

Sarah paused and placed her gun on the nightstand, then walked over and took the bill from the waiter. She signed for it and scribbled a generous tip at the bottom, then handed it back. The waiter stole a quick glance at the gun, smiled, then began backing out of the room.

“Thank you. You have a nice night, ma’am.”

Sarah smiled back and followed him to the door, closing it behind him and reengaging the chain lock. After pushing the cart up to the bed, she plopped back down on the bed to eat cake and ice cream and watch gray whales migrate.

Less than an hour went by before she’d had enough. Sarah was bored. She decided to go downstairs to the casino and gamble a bit. She loved playing slot machines but usually resisted the urge. Gambling was a bad hobby to get into when you lived in Las Vegas. She had known more than one friend who’d moved to the city and then had to move back home after a few months of losing their entire paychecks to slot machines and video poker. Maybe she’d play blackjack instead. She wondered if Josh would be surprised or embarrassed or both if she was to sit down at his table to play. She wasn’t sure whether it was legal to play at her husband’s table. It might break some sort of federal gaming laws. She decided not to risk it. She could always play at the table next to him. That might even be more fun, she thought. It would drive him crazy to see her there.

Sarah stood up and started getting dressed. She considered wearing a miniskirt with no panties but was just not in the mood to call sexual attention to herself. She had the irrational fear that even there in the casino Dale might still be watching her. She couldn’t stand the idea of him staring at her from across the casino and getting aroused. Right now, the idea of anyone getting aroused by her felt creepy, scary.

Instead of the miniskirt she picked up a pair of sweat-pants and slid on some flip-flops. She pulled Josh’s favorite college T-shirt on over her head. She looked about as unsexy as could be. She decided to at least do her hair and makeup.

She grabbed her makeup bag and pulled out lipstick, blush, mascara, and eye shadow. She sprayed a little too much perfume on her neck, then wiped it off with her hand and rubbed it between her breasts and onto her thighs. Sarah laughed at herself. For someone with no interest in having sex she was acting like she were getting ready for a booty call.

Her lipstick was a light pink from M-A-C Cosmetics called “Barely Legal.” She rubbed it on her lips, then puckered in the mirror. She brushed out her long eyelashes until they were fluffy and thick and gave her eyes a sultry sleepy look. She added a dark shimmering plum eye shadow and outlined her eyes with a thick eyeliner that further darkened her eyes.

Sarah smiled. Even in sweatpants and a T-shirt she still looked fuckable. Her smile faltered as she once again thought about Dale. For a second she even considered wiping off all the makeup. She shook it off.

I’m not going to let that son of a bitch turn me into some homely spinster.

The gun still sat on the nightstand and Sarah looked at it for a long moment, trying to decide before she picked it up and popped it into her Coach purse. She grabbed her hotel key and walked out the door, making sure she closed it firmly behind her before she walked off toward the elevator.

As Sarah made her way down the hall to the elevator a man stepped out of his room just as she passed his door and Sarah jumped and groped for her purse, trying to open it and get at her gun. Just as she realized that he was no threat, just a guy heading down to the casino, she also realized that, had he been Dale or some other rapist, he would have been all over her before she could have gotten to her pistol. It made her feel a lot less secure and made the ride down to the elevator a lot more tense and terrifying. Sarah had her hand in her purse the entire time with her finger lightly touching the trigger guard. When the man smiled at her she almost pulled the trigger.

The Hollywood Galaxy Casino was one of the newest hotel/casinos on the strip. It had pictures and memorabilia of famous Hollywood and recording stars all over the walls and in glass cases placed strategically throughout the casino. There were statues dressed in clothes almost as famous as the stars who had originally worn them. Clark Gable’s clothes from Gone With the Wind, Jim Carrey’s clothes from The Mask, Wesley Snipe’s costume from the Blade movies, the original Batman costume, a few outfits from Madonna, Cher, Michael Jackson, Prince, LL Cool J, Run DMC, Metallica, Nirvana, Kiss, The Doors, and countless others.

Sarah hadn’t been in the casino for months and she found herself walking around like a tourist, staring wide-eyed at the photos of old Motown stars and eighties heavy-metal hair bands. The casino wasn’t as full as she remembered from the last time she’d been there. There were almost as many locals as tourists, which was a bad sign for a casino on Las Vegas Boulevard whose main trade were the steady tide of out-of-town guests who came here to blow off steam, get drunk, gamble, patronize the many strip clubs on Industrial Avenue just one block over from Las Vegas Boulevard and the even more numerous call girls and prostitutes who lined the hotel bars after midnight. Sarah wondered how the prostitution trade was faring during the recession. Had they likewise discounted their services like every other retail industry? Were they now giving two-for-one hand jobs and blow jobs? Fifty percent off on anal with a free golden shower?

Sarah chuckled as she wound her way through the casino. The idea of discount pussy was just hilarious to her. She wondered why anyone would have bothered raping her when they could have had a professional willing to do whatever they wanted for a negotiable fee.

She glanced over at the bar where a few prostitutes had already begun to congregate in their skintight party dresses cut down to their navels. A couple of middleaged conventioneers were already mingling among them. The girls cast angry glances at her as she passed, which caused her to laugh harder. Of all the companies going bankrupt, the world’s oldest profession would definitely not be one of them. Business was slow but steady, at least in this casino.

There were blackjack dealers standing at empty tables and row after row of empty slot machines. Empty craps tables, poker tables, and roulette wheels gave the casino an almost abandoned look despite the fact that there were still a couple hundred gamblers on the casino floor. It was just a few hundred fewer than one would have expected.

It didn’t take Sarah long to spot her husband. He was standing alone at one of the empty tables. Next to him a withered and wrinkled Asian woman who looked nearly a century old sat alone playing cards, just her and the dealer, a tall blonde in her early to midforties who looked like she had probably been stunning in her youth. She looked like an aging showgirl. Sarah decided to join them at the table.

As she walked up to the dealer’s pit, Josh turned to her and smiled wide, obviously happy to see her. His smile widened further when he noticed that she was wearing his T-shirt. Sarah smiled back politely, then took a seat at the table adjacent to his, next to the old Asian woman.

“Hello, mind if I play?”

Josh’s smile widened and he almost laughed as she pretended not to know him. The man Sarah had ridden the elevator down with took a seat at Josh’s table. Sarah had an irrational moment of fear where she suspected he might have been following her. Then she saw Josh greet him with obvious recognition and realized that he must have been a regular.

Sarah reached into her purse and took out the money Josh had left her with. Two hundred dollars. Josh had intended it to be her spending money for the next three days or so. She hoped that she wouldn’t lose it all on the first night.

“Uh…I need to buy some chips.”

A cashier arrived within moments to relieve her of her cash in exchange for little hard circular pieces of plastic in three different colors stamped with the Hollywood Galaxy Casino logo.

“Thank you.”

Sarah pulled out a yellow chip and tossed it on the table. She was ashamed to admit that even being the wife of a dealer she knew very little about the game. She preferred slot machines. She wasn’t even sure how much the yellow chips were worth. She hoped that she hadn’t just bet fifty bucks on the first hand.

Sarah barely paid attention to the game. She preferred to watch Josh work. He and the man from the elevator were laughing and joking as the man played one hand after another, then lost it all, then won again, then lost again. Occasionally, Josh would stare over at Sarah and Sarah would stare back at him as if they were strangers flirting across a crowded room, trying to gain the courage to approach each other.

The man at Josh’s table was tipping heavily whenever he won and Sarah found herself wishing he’d keep winning and keep tipping but inevitably he’d lose all his money to the house. They all did. No one built a multimillion-dollar casino to make other people rich. She’d heard a statistic once that 85 percent of the people who gambled in casinos won but only 13 percent actually left the casino with their winnings. The rest gambled it all away, giving it right back to the casino and usually with interest. The casinos knew this and that’s why they made sure to keep you there as long as possible.

There were no clocks and no windows in the casinos. Nothing to give customers any indication of how long they had been sitting at the poker tables or blackjack tables or slot machines. As long as you were playing the drinks were free. And cocktail waitresses came by three or four times an hour to make sure you had everything you needed, making sure that there was never any need for you to leave the casino. The waitress had already come by her table three times and she was starting to feel a bit of a buzz from her third glass of chardonnay. They were not supposed to let you gamble if you were drunk but, as long as a customer didn’t actually pass out at the table and as long as you continued to gamble, the drinks usually kept flowing. There was even a famous rumor that the casinos pumped pure oxygen into the casino to keep you awake. As far as she knew it was just a rumor but she wouldn’t have been surprised.

You could cash your paycheck at the casino and they would even give you a free roll of quarters if you did as a sort of incentive, not just to cash your check there but to stay and gamble. You could even take a loan out against your house right there at the cashier’s window inside the casino. Sarah wondered if perhaps the psychology of the compulsive gambler might have made a better subject for her dissertation. At least gamblers didn’t freak her out the way porn and just about anything sexual had begun to disturb her.

Sarah was starting to lose too much money and she was drinking a bit more than usual, feeling quite good but aware of how easily it could turn bad with just a few more drinks. She stood up and gathered what chips she had left. Smiling at the Asian woman, and leaving a twenty-dollar chip for the dealer as a tip, she walked over to the cashier’s booth to cash in her chips.

She’d started with $200. After a dizzying series of wins and losses that she had just barely paid attention to, she’d come away from the table more than a hundred dollars short. She hoped that the man from the elevator started to win again soon. In addition to the gun and the alarm system, Josh would now have to make an extra hundred dollars to cover the money she’d lost. But Josh had always forgiven her recklessness. Her daring was a quality he lacked and had always admired her for. From the beginning of their relationship he’d always said that he found her wild spirit to be one of her most attractive features second only to her breasts. But with all the money she’d been spending lately, her breasts were going to have to pick up some of the slack.

Sarah took the eighty-two dollars she had left after playing blackjack and cashed them in for quarters. She took her bucket of quarters and sat down at a row of slot machines. She sat down at the machine at the very end so that she was still in sight of Josh. As she pumped quarters into the machine, she watched the other patrons. Most of them were elderly retirees gambling their life savings, their social security checks, the equity in their homes, all in hopes of hitting it big. There was a smattering of young couples and young singles but they were few and far between.

A young Mexican woman sat on her boyfriend’s lap feeding quarters into the machine and pulling the lever. The hopeful expression on her face each time she plopped in a quarter was as if she expected each one to hit the jackpot. She was barely old enough to be in the casino. Her breasts were even larger and more perfect than Sarah’s. She had long, thin, muscular legs sticking out from beneath a tight plaid miniskirt. Thin, muscular arms like a dancer. A gorgeous body except for a stomach that bugled out over the top of her skirt, giving her a muffin top.

Her boyfriend looked to be almost twice her age. He was in his early thirties and wore a clean white polo shirt, plaid Carhartt pants, and black leather loafers with white socks. He had tattoos on his hands, arms, and neck. His eyes were completely dead. He showed no interest at all in either the slot machine or the woman on his lap. When he turned and looked at Sarah, no doubt wondering why she was staring at him, she felt as if she were looking into the cold black eyes of a great white shark. Sarah smiled weakly and turned back to her own machine.

Sarah was nearly down to her last ten dollars when the lights went crazy on her machine and a siren went off. She had hit the jackpot. More than $2,000 in quarters poured out of the machine. Sarah started clapping and jumping up and down, screaming as silver coins rained from the machine. She collected herself just in time to shove a bucket under the tray. One of the cocktail waitresses came and brought her more buckets. The Mexican couple sitting just a few machines away were staring at her now. The young woman looked happy and excited. Her boyfriend was just staring with those dead eyes. Sarah was happy she would not have to leave the casino. She would have been terrified that the man might have followed her out into the parking lot. She scolded herself for stereotyping but the tattoos on his neck certainly looked like gang tattoos to her, not that she was an expert on such things.

The waitress helped Sarah carry her buckets over to the cashier. Sarah could not get the grin off her face as she watched the cashier dump her quarters into a counter and then slowly count out $2,500 in hundred-dollar bills. When Sarah turned around, stuffing her cash into her purse, Josh was standing behind her.

“It looks like you made out better than I did tonight. I only had about half a dozen customers during my whole shift. I made about a hundred and twenty bucks.”

Sarah opened her purse and showed Josh the fat wad of hundreds.

“Well, I made enough for both of us.”

“That’s beautiful. I guess that pays for the Sig Sauer.”

“And the alarm system!” Sarah beamed.

“And a few drinks at the martini bar?”

“Oh, definitely.”

Sarah was smiling from ear to ear. It was the happiest she’d been in days and after a few drinks she was going to feel a whole lot happier.

Josh ordered something called a macho martini, which contained Red Bull. Sarah sat next to him on a plush blue velvet couch sipping a pomegranate martini. There was a band playing jazz versions of R&B songs. Sarah sat back and relaxed to a slow sax-driven cover of Smokey Robinson’s “Tears of a Clown,” letting the music and alcohol slowly take her away. She could feel her muscles unwinding, the tendons in her neck and shoulders unknotting, all of her tension and fear slipping away. Even when the saxophonist attempted a sloppy, amateurish cover of a Miles Davis tune and then an even worse John Coltrane cover, it didn’t bother Sarah at all.

“He should be shot for that,” Josh whispered.

“Shhhh,” Sarah replied with her eyes still closed. She threaded her arm through Josh’s and pulled him close, snuggling up against him.

Sarah ordered a watermelon martini and then a sour apple martini and then something called a love martini, which had strawberries cut into the shape of hearts. Josh was still sipping his first martini when Sarah gulped down her fourth and began nibbling on the strawberries at the bottom of the glass.

“I guess you needed that, huh?”

Josh kissed her on the neck and his warm breath traveled up behind her ear sending a pleasant tingle down her spine. Sarah giggled, then turned and kissed him, tasting the bizarre combination of vodka, vermouth, and Red Bull on his tongue. It really wasn’t as bad as it sounded. She scooped a strawberry out of her glass and slid it into his mouth. She was going through all the motions, just as she normally would, but she felt none of the usual stirrings, none of the usual desire. She felt the love for her husband. But instead of wanting to break bedsprings, all she wanted was to be held and kissed and told how beautiful she was. She wondered if she was becoming like all the other wives whose sex drives were murdered by those two magical words: I do. Only hers was destroyed by a knife and an oily little uncircumcised penis. She shook the memory from her mind and hugged Josh tighter. She was enjoying herself too much to let those disturbing images invade her mind and ruin her night.

“You hungry?”

Sarah tried to remember when she had eaten last. It had been ice cream and cake back in the room hours ago.

“I certainly am.”

“They have the best chicken fingers ever here.”

“Chicken fingers? Are you serious?”

“Trust me. They use strips of fresh chicken, not processed, so it isn’t dry and rubbery. Then they roll them in Cap’n Crunch, fry ’em up, and cover them in hot buffalo sauce. They taste amazing.”

Sarah was still frowning.

“Okay, I’ll try it.”

“You will not be disappointed.”

Sarah ordered another martini while Josh ordered the fingers. She knew she had already had too many. She was afraid of what would happen if she stood. She didn’t think her legs would hold her. Luckily, Josh could easily carry her if it came to that. It wouldn’t have been the first time.

The band was breaking down and a new band began setting up. They made the transition in minutes and the next band was playing by the time the chicken fingers arrived. They were a Prince cover band and when they started off their set with a really good version of Prince’s classic “Sexy Motherfucker,” Sarah attempted to drag Josh out onto the dance floor. She had been in middle school the last time she’d heard the song. Back then she’d considered Prince the sexiest man on earth.

The lead singer of the cover band could have been Prince’s twin. Except for the fact that it was a woman, which Sarah would have never guessed if Josh hadn’t told her. The Princess drew her mustache on with eyeliner. She had all of Prince’s moves and sounded exactly like him, easily imitating His Royal Badness’s earsplitting falsetto on the high notes.

Josh was not a dancer, however, and he did all he could to resist her efforts to make him shake his groove thang. His strategy was brilliant. He shoved a chicken finger into Sarah’s mouth. She was just about to protest when she tasted it. It was tender and juicy. Josh was right. This wasn’t the usual processed meat. This tasted as if it was fresh off the bone and the sauce was amazing, hot and sweet. The sweet was obviously from the Cap’n Crunch. It was a combination that worked amazingly well.

“Oh, my God. That is incredible!”

“I told you so.”

Content now to simply listen to the band while she licked buffalo sauce off her fingers, Sarah picked up another chicken finger and slowly tore it apart, savoring each moist, delicious bite. The band switched to “Baby I’m A Star!” and were only halfway through the next song, “Erotic City,” when she cleaned her plate, shoveling the last piece into her mouth as if it were her last meal on earth. Then she turned to look at Josh’s plate. There was just one more piece on his as well.

“If you loved me you’d share.”

Sarah batted her eyelashes at him and stuck out her bottom lip in the most adorable pout she could manage.

“Uh, uh. No way. You already ate all of yours.”

“Pleeeeeease?”

She looked too adorable to resist. Josh ripped the last chicken finger in half, gobbling up his half and feeding the other half to her.

“See, I knew you loved me.”

“I’m just a sucker for a pretty face.”

“Awww. He thinks I’m pretty. He wants to kiss me.” She teased in a mocking singsong voice. She puckered up and gave him a big, wet, sloppy, drunken, clumsy, sexy kiss that almost knocked both of them off the couch and onto the floor. They began to laugh uncontrollably.

“You ready to dance now, sexy man?”

Josh turned up the last of his macho martini, emptying the glass in a few quick gulps. He stood up from the couch, bowing slightly and holding out his hand for her.

“Fuck it. Let’s dance.”

Luckily for Josh, the band had just slowed things down. Lucky for Sarah too since the martinis had taken away a great deal of her motor coordination and just walking to the dance floor was a challenge. She had to lean on Josh for support, enduring his frown of disapproval. He hated to see her this drunk but he was giving her a pass because of all the stress he knew she was under.

The band began playing “The Beautiful Ones” as Josh wrapped his big, meaty arms around her and began to sway. They danced through a long drawn-out version of “Purple Rain” that began with the entire instrumental version before beginning the song. By that time enough of the alcohol had worn off that Sarah felt a bit more confident with trying to dance. When the band began playing “Diamonds and Pearls,” Sarah twirled on the dance floor like a ballerina and then, taking Josh’s hand, she guided him through an awkward drunken waltz that left them both giggling hysterically and took away enough of Josh’s inhibitions that he stayed on the dance floor, working up a sweat as they danced their way through “Kiss” and “Get Off.” They were both exhausted when they finally left the dance floor and returned to their couch. They even received a smattering of applause from some of the other bar patrons.

“You know, I’ve been thinking about it…” Sarah began as they both got comfortable back on the velvet couch.

“Thinking about what?”

“What if, instead of an alarm system, we bought a dog?”

“A dog? I don’t think a little puppy is going to do much.”

“I don’t mean a puppy. I mean a full-grown big-ass dog. Like a Rottweiler or a Doberman? We could get one that was already trained. I heard that you can adopt retired police dogs.”

“Do they use Rottweilers as police dogs?”

“Well, it doesn’t have to be a Rottweiler. A German shepherd would do.”