Mr. Murder - Mr. Murder Part 34
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Mr. Murder Part 34

Under the tissues is a travel-size box of Handi Wipes, moistened towelettes sealed in foil packets. They have a lemony scent.

Very nice. He uses the Kleenex and towelettes to scrub the muck off his face, and he smooths out his sleep-matted hair with his hands.

He won't frighten anyone now, but he is still not presentable enough to be inconspicuous, which is what he desires to be. Though the bulky raincoat, buttoned to the neck, covers his bullet-torn shirt, the shirt reeks of blood and the variety of foods that he spilled on it during his feeding frenzy in McDonald's rainswept parking lot last evening, in the now-abandoned Honda, before he'd ever met the unlucky owner of the Buick. His pants aren't pristine, either.

On the off chance he'll find something useful, he takes the keys from the ignition, gets out of the car, goes around to the back, and opens the trunk. From the dark interior, lit only partially by an errant beam from the nearby tree-shrouded security lamp, the dead man stares at him with wide-eyed astonishment, as if surprised to see him again.

The two plastic shopping bags lie atop the body. He empties the contents of both on the corpse. The owner of the Buick had been shopping for a variety of items. The thing that looks most useful at the moment is a bulky crew-neck sweater.

Clutching the sweater in his left hand, he gently closes the trunk lid with his right to make as little noise as possible.

People will be getting up soon, but sleep still grips most if not all of the apartment residents. He locks the trunk and pockets the keys. , The sky is dark, but the stars have faded. Dawn is no more than, fifteen minutes away.

Such a large garden-apartment complex must have at least two or three community laundry rooms, and he sets out in search of one.

In a minute he finds a signpost that directs him to the recreation building, pool, rental office, and nearest laundry room. , The walkways connecting the buildings wind through large and attractively landscaped courtyards under spreading laurels and quaint iron carriage lamps with verdigris patina. The development is well planned and attractive. He would not mind living here himself. Of course his own house, in Mission Viejo, is even more appealing, and he is sure the girls and Paige are so attached to it that they will never want to leave.

The laundry-room door is locked, but it doesn't pose a great obstacle.

Management has installed a cheap lockset, a latch-bolt not a dead-bolt.

Having anticipated the need, he has a credit card from the cadaver's wallet, which he slips between the faceplate and the striker plate. He slides it upward, encounters the latch-bolt, applies pressure, and pops the lock.

Inside, he finds six coin-operated washing machines, four gas dryers, a vending machine filled with small boxes of detergents and fabric softeners, a large table on which clean clothes can be folded, and a pair of deep sinks. Everything is clean and pleasant under the fluorescent lights.

He takes off the raincoat and the grossly soiled flannel shirt. He wads up both the shirt and the coat and stuffs them into a large trash can that stands in one corner.

His chest is unmarked by bullet wounds. He doesn't need to look at his back to know that the single exit wound is also healed.

He washes his armpits at one of the laundry sinks and dries with paper towels taken from a wall dispenser.

He looks forward to taking a long hot shower before the day is done, in his own bathroom, in his own home. Once he has located the false father and killed him, once he has recovered his family, he will have time for simple pleasures. Paige will shower with him.

She will enjoy that.

If necessary, he could take off his jeans and wash them in one of the laundry-room machines, using coins taken from the owner of the Buick.

But when he scrapes the crusted food off the denim with his fingernails and works at the few stains with damp paper towels, the result is satisfactory.

The sweater is a pleasant surprise. He expects it to be too large for him, as the raincoat was, but the dead man evidently did not buy it for himself. It fits perfectly. The colon-cranberry red-goes well with the blue jeans and is also a good color for him. If the room had a mirror, he is sure it would show that he is not only inconspicuous but quite respectable and even attractive.

Outside, dawn is just a ghost light in the east.

Morning birds are chirruping in the trees.

The air is sweet.

Tossing the Buick keys into some shrubbery, abandoning the car and the dead man in it, he proceeds briskly to the nearest multiple stall carport and systematically tries the doors of the vehicles parked under the bougainvillea-covered roof. Just when he thinks all of them are going to be locked, a Toyota Camry proves to be open.

He slips in behind the wheel. Checks behind the sun visor for keys.

Under the seat. No such luck.

It doesn't matter. He's nothing if not resourceful. Before the sky has brightened appreciably, he hot-wires the car and is on the road again.

Most likely, the owner of the Camry will discover it's missing in a couple of hours, when he's ready to go to work, and will quickly report it stolen. No problem. By then the license plates will be on another car, and the Camry will be sporting a different set of tags that will make it all but invisible to the police.

He feels invigorated, driving through the hills of Laguna Niguel in the rose light of dawn. The early sky is as yet only a faded blue, but the high formations of striated clouds are runneled with bright pink.

It is the first day of December. Day one. He is making a fresh start.

From now on, everything will go his way because he will no longer underestimate his enemy.

Before he kills the false father, he will put out the bastard's eyes in retribution for the wound that he himself suffered. He will require his daughters to watch, for this will be an important lesson to them, proof that false fathers cannot triumph in the long run and that their real father is a man to be disobeyed only at the risk of severe punishment. (, Shortly after dawn, Marty woke Charlotte and Emily. "Got to get showered and hit the road, ladies. Lots to do this morning."

Emily was fully awake in an instant. She scrambled out from under the covers and stood on the bed in her daffodil-yellow pajamas, which brought her almost to eye-level with him. She demanded a hug and a good-morning kiss. "I had a super dream last night."

"Let me guess. You dreamed you were old enough to date Tom Cruise, drive a sports car, smoke cigars, get drunk, and puke your guts out."

"Silly," she said. "I dreamed, for breakfast, you went out to the vending machines and got us Mountain Dew and candy bars."

"Sorry, but it wasn't prophetic."

"Daddy, don't be a writer using big words."

"I meant, your dream isn't going to come true."

"Well, I know that, " she said. "You and Mommy would blow a basket if we had candy for breakfast."

"Gasket. Not basket."

She wrinkled her face. "Does it really matter?"

"No, I guess not. Basket, gasket, whatever you say."

Emily squirmed out of his arms and jumped down from the bed.

"I'm going to the potty," she announced.

"That's a start. Then take a shower, brush your teeth, and get dressed."

Charlotte was, as usual, slower to come fully awake. By the time Emily was closing the bathroom door, Charlotte had only managed to push back the blankets and sit on the edge of her bed. She was scowling down at her bare feet.

Marty sat beside her. "They're called 'toes."

"Mmmm," she said.

"You need them to fill out the ends of your socks."

She yawned.

Marty said, "You'll need them a lot more if you're going to be a ballet dancer. But for most other professions, however, they're not essential.

So if you aren't going to be a ballet dancer, then you could have them surgically removed, just the biggest ones or all ten, that's entirely up to you."

She cocked her head and gave him a Daddy's-being-cute-so-let's humor-him look. "I think I'll keep them.

"Whatever you want," he said, and kissed her forehead.

"My teeth feel furry," she complained. "So does my tongue."

"Maybe during the night you ate a cat."

She was awake enough to giggle.

In the bathroom the toilet flushed, and a second later the door opened.

Emily said, "Charlotte, you want privacy for the potty, or can I shower now?"

"Go ahead and shower," Charlotte said. "You smell."

"Yeah? Well, you stink."

"You reek."

"That's because I want to," Emily said, probably because she couldn't think of a comeback word for "reek."

"My gracious young daughters, such little ladies."

As Emily disappeared back into the bathroom and began to fiddle with the shower controls, Charlotte said, "Gotta get this fuzz off my teeth." She got up and went to the open door. At the threshold she turned to Marty.

"Daddy, do we have to go to school today?"

"Not today."

"I didn't think so." She hesitated. "Tomorrow?"

"I don't know, honey. Probably not."

Another hesitation. "Will we be going to school again ever?"

"Well, sure, of course."

She stared at him for too long, then nodded and went into the bathroom.

Her question rattled Marty. He wasn't sure if she was merely fantasizing about a life without school, as most kids did now and then, or whether she was expressing a more genuine concern about the depth of the trouble that had rolled over them.

He had heard the television come on in the other room while he had been sitting on the edge of the bed with Charlotte, so he knew Paige was awake. He got up to go say good morning to her.

As he was approaching the connecting door, Paige called to him.

"Marty, quick, look at this."

When he hurried into the other room, he saw her standing in front of the TV. She was watching an early-morning news program.

"It's about us," she said.

He recognized their own home on the screen. A woman reporter was standing in the street, her back to the house, facing the camera.

Marty squatted in front of the television and turned up the sound.

"* so the mystery remains, and the police would very much like to talk to Martin Stillwater this morning*"

"Oh, this morning they want to talk," he said disgustedly.

Paige shushed him.

"* an irresponsible hoax by a writer too eager to advance his career, or something far more sinister? Now that the police laboratory has confirmed the large amount of blood in the Stillwater house is indeed of human origin, the need for the authorities to answer that question has overnight become more urgent."

That was the end of the piece. As the reporter gave her name and location, Marty registered the word "LIVE" in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. Although the four letters had been there all along, the importance of them hadn't registered immediately.

"Live?" Marty said. "They don't send reporters out live unless the story's ongoing."

"It is ongoing," Paige said. She was standing with her arms folded across her chest, frowning down at the television. "The lunatic is still out there somewhere."

"I mean, like a robbery in progress or a hostage situation with a SWAT team waiting to storm the place. By TV standards, this is boring, no action, no one on scene to shove a microphone at, just an empty house for visuals. It's not the kind of story they use for a live spot, too expensive and no excitement."

The broadcast had gone back to the studio. To his surprise, the anchorman wasn't one of the second-string newsreaders from a Los Angeles station, who would ordinarily have pulled duty on an early morning program, but a well-known network face.

Astonished, Marty said, "This is national. Since when does a breaking-and-entry report rate national news?"

"You were assaulted too," Paige said.

"So what? These days, there's a worse crime than this every ten seconds somewhere in the country."

"But you're a celebrity."

"The hell I am."

"You may not like it, but you are."

"I'm not that much of a celebrity, not with only two paperback bestsellers. You know how hard it is to get on this program for one of their chat segments, as an invited guest?" He rapped a knuckle against the face of the anchorman on the screen. "Harder than getting an invitation to a state dinner at the White House! Even if I hired a publicist who'd sold his soul to the devil, he couldn't get me on this program, Paige. I'm just not big enough. I'm a nobody to them."

"So* what're you saying?"

He went to the window that provided a view of the parking lot, and parted the draperies. Pale sunlight. Steady traffic out on Pacific Coast Highway. The trees stirred lazily in the mildest of on-shore breezes.

Nothing in the scene was threatening or unusual, yet it seemed ominous to him. He felt that he was looking out at a world that was no longer familiar, a world changed for the worse. The differences were indefinable, subjective rather than objective, perceptible to the spirit more than to the senses but nonetheless real. And the pace of that dark change was accelerating. Soon the view from this room or any other would be, to him, like something seen through the porthole of a spacecraft on a far alien planet which superficially resembled his own world but which was, below- its deceptive surface, infinitely strange and inimical to human life.