Chapter 5
It was quite a little scene.
Fallon watched them. They were far too wrapped up in what they were doing-and with each other-to know that he was there. The girl was lying on her back, stark naked, with her arms wound tightly around the boy, and her mouth was glued to his. The boy. also naked, bobbing vigorously as he thrust against the girl. The boy was dark and well-muscled. Fallon couldn't see too much of the girl; the boy hid her breasts. But he could tell she was good-looking, and it was obvious that she was one perfect hell of a fine partner.
He went on watching and they went on performing. The crisis was coming, he saw, and it looked as though they were both going to hit the peak at the same time. He watched the signs of the impending crisis with the critical scrutiny of a Broadway reviewer at an opening night. He studied them, and he watched, and he felt their excitement and saw it as well, and they moved faster and the girl made a whole series of little barnyard noises from somewhere deep in her throat, and her back arched and she moaned intensely and the boy went rigid and they hit the crest together.
They went limp, completely and utterly limp. The girl sagged and collapsed and the boy sprawled against her, too weak and too spent to move.
Fallon cleared his throat. "I've got seconds." he said.
They jumped a mile. The boy went rigid, spun around, looked at Fallon and stared with his eyes popping out of his head. The girl was obviously trying to scream but she was too terrified to make a sound. The boy stumbled, got to his feet, grabbed his pants and got a hand into a pocket. His eyes glared at Fallon and Fallon smiled at him.
The kid said: "You a cop?"
"No."
"Why, you louse," the kid said.
He let go of his pants and came up with the knife he had had in his pocket. He pressed a button and the blade snapped out, shining keenly and wickedly in the night. It was a good-sized switchknife with an eight-inch blade and it looked as though it would do the job it was designed to do. The boy held the knife low and moved his arm from side to side like a cobra getting ready to strike. He came toward Fallon and smiled at him.
Fallon looked at the knife, at the smile on the boy's face, and at the girl. The girl didn't look so scared now. Little witch, he thought. She wanted to see the boy cut him. Well, she was just out of luck.
Fallon smiled back at the boy. And he showed him the gun, let him look down its black muzzle, and watched the smile fade quickly from the boy's face, watched the confidence evaporate, watched the face turn sickly pale.
"You better drop that blade," he said softly.
He could see the boy thinking it over rapidly, trying to calculate the odds of knife against gun. The kid didn't have a chance and he damn well knew it. His fingers opened and the knife dropped from them, bounced once on the ground, and then lay still as death. Fallon looked at the boy and the boy looked at the knife, and then at the gun.
"I guess you win," the kid said.
"No kidding."
"What do you want?"
Fallon smiled.
"I got no money-"
"Forget money." Fallon looked at the girl-she was snow-white now, fish-white, and scared as hell. "What the hell do you think I want, you punk?"
"You want her?"
Fallon nodded.
"So she's yours, man. Hell, I had her and I'm done with her. I ain't married to her and she ain't my sister so I don't give a damn what you do to her, dig? You want her, she's all yours. See? And man, whatever you do to her, it's like I never saw you or her in my life. I don't cop out to the fuzz, see, so everything's cooL"
"Sure," Fallon said. The girl had started to cry now. The boy didn't care what happened to her and she was sick thinking about it and sicker thinking about what Fallon might do to her, and so she began to cry.
"So I'll just get my clothes on," the boy said. "And' then like I'll cut out of here."
"You're a real hero, aren't you?"
"Rather be a live coward," the boy said. He was almost cocky now that he was sure he would get away alive. "Rather be a live coward than a dead hero. She's nothing to me, man. A nice hunk of trim and all, but nothing to get killed over. A good loving and all, very choice action, but nothing more."
Fallon reached over and picked up the kid's knife.
"You can keep that if you want," the kid said generously. "It's a good blade, but if you want it, it's yours. It and her, you can keep them both."
The kid had his pants on. He was buttoning his shirt. Fallon smiled at him and stepped closer, and then he used the knife, bringing it up quickly in a vicious underhand arc. The knife was into the boy's flesh before he knew what was happening. He choked and coughed and tried to get away and never had a chance. The knife went into his stomach just above the belt and kept going up, tearing through him all the way up into his chest, all in one movement, and blood spurted like a river and the kid was dead before Fallon got the knife out of him. He was dead and he still took a step, a faltering half-step, and then he pitched over onto his face and did not move again, ever.
The girl screamed.
It was a real scream this time. It tore out of her throat, not too loud but very definitely a scream, an audible blood-chilling scream. Fallon stopped the scream expediently by kicking her in the face. He didn't kick her hard for two reasons-for one thing, he didn't want to mess her up, and for another, he didn't want to knock her out. She had to be wide awake if he was going to enjoy himself, and he damn well intended to get his kicks with her.
Because she was choice. Naked, and coated with sweat, and just through with a nice bit of love, and scared half to death, but choice just the same. She was young, too, younger than Sally, younger than anything he had ever touched. Fifteen probably. Not a day over sixteen, anyway, and he would give plenty of odds on that point.
Why not check? He said: "How old are you?" She didn't answer. "How old are you?"
"Fifteen."
"That's pretty young for a tramp," he said. "It's pretty young to die, too. What's your name?"
"I ... I-"
"What's your name, tramp?"
"Linda."
"Okay, Linda," he said. "You're built nice, Linda, little Linda. Nothing little about these, though, is there? You've got a nice pair, little Linda. Big enough to bounce, aren't they?"
She didn't draw away. She let him touch her, let him play with them. He stroked the firm rich flesh and pinched the rosy nipples playfully, tugged at them and felt them stiffen. It was a pure reflex, he thought. Rub a pair of nipples and they would go stiff, whether the girl was good as a stove or cold as a refrigerator in Alaska. Just a reflex.
"Linda," he said conversationally, "you don't want to die just now, do you?"
"Oh, God-"
"Be easy to kill you. Cut you up and watch you bleed to death. Or just stick the gun in your mouth and give the trigger a little bit of a squeeze. You want that?"
"Oh-"
"Or you can just do what I want you to do. You might even like it, girl."
She looked at him, wide-eyed, and then she swallowed, and then, slowly, she nodded her head.
And she didn't fight him.
She was choice stuff. He stripped off his clothes and moved to her, and her body was smooth, and he touched all the secret parts of her sweet girlishness and he took her fiercely and she did not struggle at all, not fighting him. He thought that she could really pretend, that she did a convincing job for a girl who obviously felt about as passionate as a dishrag. She would make a very fine hooker, he thought.
If she lived long enough.
But it wasn't enough to take her. He had to hurt her, too, had to have her squirming and moaning.
So he hurt her. First he gave her a kiss, and like a willing little tramp she stuck her tongue in his mouth, and he dug his fingernails into her breast with all his strength. She gasped and he gripped her harder and twisted and her body went rigid as the pain tore through her succulent flesh. He let go of her breast and grabbed her little arm and bent it back,' straining it, putting pressure against the elbow.
And he went right on driving to her, thrilling to the sheer agony that dominated her body. He kept it up, faster and faster and faster, harder and harder, thrilling with his pleasure and taking extra measures of pleasure from the sheer luscious delight of her pain. More. More-
At the precise moment of fulfillment, as he gasped out his lust, he put a tiny extra bit of pressure on her arm. Just a little added touch, a little extra bit of energy.
Her arm snapped like a toothpick.
"Please," she said.
She had passed out when he broke her arm; the pain was too much for her and it knocked her out. She was out for almost ten minutes, and he spent that time dragging first her and then the boy's body deeper into the park, taking the dead one and the living one to a spot where nobody would possible come across them. The boy's body could stay there until it began to smell, and even then nobody would ever stumble on it. The spot he chose was hemmed in by two walls of sheer rock, and overgrown with shrubbery, a place where people dumped their garbage or threw their waste paper. They didn't exactly hold picnics there. He was going to hold a picnic now, but he had his own special ideas of what a picnic should be and not everyone would be likely to go along with them.
A picnic, all right. A great picnic.
Now they were in that spot, he and the boy and the girl, with the boy dead and the girl looking as though she wished she were dead. And she said, again: "Please."
She was stretched out on the ground, the broken arm motionless at her side. Her eyes were pools of hate and horror.
"I let you do it," she said. "I didn't fight you, I was good to you. Will you let me go now?"
"No," he said. "Are you going to kill me?"
"No."
"Why did you break my arm?"
"I wanted to."
"It hurts awful."
"I wanted it to hurt."
She digested this. "Will you hurt me any more?"
"That depends."
"Will you let me go?"
"That depends, too. If you do what I want you to do, I'll let you go."
"Honest?"
"Sure."
"Oh, hell," she said. She sat up and put her good hand on her body, touching herself to see if she was all right. Her other arm hung like the arm of a rag doll. She touched her sore breast and her eyes focused on the marks that his fingernails had made.
"You really hurt me there," she said. "What is it? You get some kind of kicks that way?"
"Something like that."
"Hell. Listen, I never hurt you, I never did nothing to you. You let me go and you don't have to worry about cops. I'm no great friend of the cops, I wouldn't tell them, I wouldn't tell anybody."
"I know."
"So you'll let me go?"
"If you do what I want."
She was almost afraid to ask. Finally she said: "What's that?"
"You kiss nice," he said. "You're good at it" She didn't understand.
"You've got a pretty mouth," he told her. "Real pretty. A young girl with a nice mouth."
She still didn't understand. She was fairly stupid, he decided. It figured that she would be. Smart fifteen-year-old girls didn't go out getting taken in Central Park in the middle of the night. Not smart ones. The ones that were both dumb and pretty, those were the ones that did, and this little frail was one of them. Her name was Linda and she was fifteen and she was gorgeous and she was about as stupid as could be.
"A nice mouth," he repeated. He reached over and ran his index finger around her lips, and poked it inside and touched her little pink tongue. And then he touched himself, the same way, and then, at long last, she got the message.
"Oh."
"Yeah."
"I never did that before," she said.
"Never?"
"No. Not ever."
Well, that made her sort of a virgin, anyway. "I never killed a fifteen-year-old before," he said. "They tell me there's a first time for everything."
"That's what I have to do?"
"Uh-huh."
She swallowed. "I wish it was something else," she said hesitantly. Her eyes stayed on him now, wide and fascinated. "I wish it was anything else. That's one thing I always said I would never do."
"You could die instead."
"Oh, no," she said. She looked up at his face now, her eyes terrified. "Listen, if I do that, if I do what you want me to do, if I do it good and you have a good time and everything, if you like it, if I do it good, then will you let me go?"
"Sure."
"You promise? You swear?"
"Sure."
She nodded slowly. "All right," she said. "I ... oh, hell, I'll do it."
And she did it.
She moved toward him, slowly, dragging her broken arm after her as though it had been tied to her with string. She raised herself onto her knees and knelt before him like a devoted follower before a sacred idol, and her good arm reached around him, and he looked dawn and saw her pretty little face.
Her mouth opened.
Her mouth closed.
It was good. It was very good, it was excellent. She didn't know too much about what she was doing but you couldn't expect much more when you took her age and her lack of experience into account. You had to admit that she was a natural, and that she had a hell of a lot of potential.
She drove him crazy, drove him wild. He was holding the knife at her throat just to make things better, but she was so good that he didn't bother and he let go of the knife and let it slide to the ground. He tangled his hands in her hair and he stroked the sides of her face and his passion mounted higher and higher, and he was tickled and teased and thrilled by the most extraordinary caress on earth.
She didn't stop.
His body shook, swaying back and forth, swaying from side to side. God, he thought, he was going crazy. He was honestly and thoroughly going crazy. This was nothing normal, nothing ordinary. This was the quintessence of thrills, the answer to every lustful question. This little girl, this young thing, driving him wild.
He would lose his mind, he thought. It was so good, so thoroughly perfect, that he would just plain lose his mind. They would take him away and they would lead him to a padded cell and they would lock him up and they would throw the key in the East River and he would spend the rest of his life locked up like that, a happy little moron, just dreaming of naked young girls and remembering the lush thrills this Linda had given him. Her lips.
And more and more, and faster, and up and over the final crest, with the rivers flooding over onto the fields and deluging all they touched.
She never stopped.
It took a long while for the world to get back to normal. He sat on the ground with the knife in one hand and the gun in the other while she leaned over in the bushes and vomited a few times, emptying her stomach and making unpleasant noises. It took a while, but finally everything was back to normal and he took a deep breath and lit a cigarette. The girl came back and started putting on clothes. Just a shirt and a pair of slacks-that was all she had had. She was really dressed for action, and she had had enough action that night to last her a good long time.
"Well," she said. "I guess I'll go home now, mister."
He looked at her.
"I did what you wanted," she said. "I guess you liked it, too. It wasn't as bad as I thought."
He didn't say anything. She was buttoning her blouse now, buttoning it up over her bulging swollen breasts. He could see the mark where his fingernails had sunk into her. He could remember the way the pain had torn through her then, too. It was a happy memory.
"I'm pretty good," she said. "Huh?"
"You're great," he said, raising the gun. "I wish I didn't have to kill you, sugar."
She started begging, pleading, telling him it wasn't fair. She backed off and tried to run and slipped over a rock and fell on her hands and knees, and he came up behind her and ripped her blouse off. She tried to crawl away and he kicked her in the breast and she moaned.
He grabbed onto her pants and dragged them off of her and she was nude again and crying like a baby, absolutely hysterical with terror, because she knew that now she was going to die and there was not a thing she could do about it. She had done everything, everything he had asked her to do, and it still wasn't enough. He was going to kill her anyway.
He had no choice. There were three reasons for it, and the first and most obvious reason was that he could not afford to let her live. She might tell the police, or even if she wasn't going to talk they would find her and get it out of her, and he did not want to leave that kind of a witness walking around. He had already killed her boy friend, and he had already killed Shirley, and one more murder wouldn't make his punishment any worse. They would kill him anyway, so he had nothing to lose by killing her and he had everything to gain.
That was one thing. Another thing was that here he was with a brand-new gun, never tested, and he hadn't used it yet that night, and he wanted to know what it was like. He had killed two people with knives but he had never killed one with a gun, and he had a chance now, so why not take it?
And the third thing was very simple. This girl had been fun for him. He enjoyed her. And the only way to complete his enjoyment was by killing her, because that would be the final thrill of them all, the coup de grace, the end of it.
She was still trying to crawl away. He walked alongside her, kicking at her, and when he tired of that he caught hold of her long hair and held her back so that she could not crawl anywhere. He held her hair in his left hand, and with his right hand he reached around and shoved the gun in her face.
"Come on, now," he told her. "Open your pretty little mouth, Linda. Open your mouth and kiss the gun."
He got the gun into her mouth. She kept fighting, aware of the inevitable but unable to accept it. He rammed the gun deep into her pretty mouth and stretched out beside her, kissing her and caressing her and jabbing the gun into her mouth, and just as he thought the whole world would split apart at the seams, he squeezed the trigger and blew off the top of Linda's pretty head. The noise was tremendous but nobody heard it and nobody came and Linda was dead.
It didn't take him long to get out of there. He used the dead boy's shirt to wipe blood and dirt from his own body, and then he left them in a neat pile, with the girl lying on her back and the boy piled face down on top of her, so that anyone looking at them would think at first glance that they were making love, just as Fallon had found them in the first place. He left them arranged as a gruesome dirty joke and got his own clothes on and stuffed the gun in his pocket and took the boy's knife along too and got the living jumping hell out of Central Park. This time he didn't even take a cab. He ran down a subway arcade and bought a token and went through the turnstile and got on the D train and went back to the King William, and he got to his room and took a hot bath and had a few drinks and fell asleep right away.
The morning was dark and gloomy and rain was falling. He woke up once and looked around and groaned and fell back asleep again. He woke up again, later and went into the bathroom and showered and shaved and came out again and threw himself down on the bed He wasn't tired but he was sick to his stomach and couldn't throw up. He didn't feel like eating but he knew it would be a good idea getting some food into his stomach. It took effort, but he got into his clothes and went downstairs. He smoked a cigarette in the lobby and looked out at the rain. The desk clerk said that it was certainly coming down outside. Fallon agreed that yes, it certainly was.
There was a delicatessen three doors away. He walked through the rain to it and took one of the tables in the rear. An ugly waitress brought him a menu and said that it was certainly raining cats and dogs, wasn't it? Yes, Lee Fallon agreed. It certainly was, all right.
He ordered an Isaac's Special, which was tongue and pastrami and corned beef and turkey and Russian dressing and cole slaw, all of this between two large slices of rye bread. He washed all of it down with a bottle of cream soda and smoked two more cigarettes, paid his check and tipped the waitress and walked back through the rain to the King William.
In his room, he thought he was going to throw up. But he took a stiff drink of bourbon and his stomach settled down again.
He remembered the boy with the knife, remembered sinking that knife into that boy and cutting him up the middle.
He remembered Linda, what she had looked like, what she had sounded like, how her flesh had felt. He remembered the things she had done to him, and he remembered the things he in turn had done to her.
He remembered the old pervert.
It was funny-he had gone out to make money, and he had come back with the sixty bucks from the man and nothing else. But he had left two dead bodies behind him, two grisly souvenirs of the night's entertainment. He had gone out on business, and then he had wound up wasting all his time on pleasure, and it was funny.
Funny.
Funny as a crutch.
Funny as a hearse with a flat tire.
Funny.
Now, in the cold gray light of day, he realized something about himself. He realized now that he had crossed some special line, that he had managed to slip over the edge. This had not happened when he killed the prostitute in her apartment, the first one, the lush, Shirley. That was murder, that made him a killer, but it was different.
He didn't cross the line when he stomped the pervert. And he didn't cross the line when he knifed the kid, or when he made Linda do what she had done.
No. No, he crossed that line when he killed Linda. By all the rules he should have let her live. It might have been risky, but it was only fair. She had done all the things he had made her do, and he had killed her anyway, and that changed him from an amoral man who got weird kicks into something else, something a great deal different.
It made him a mad dog.
He realized this, just as he realized full well that it would be impossible to reverse things now that they had gotten underway. He was a mad dog, a crazy man, a lunatic. In a sense he had been right when he thought Linda would drive him crazy with her love. It amounted to that. He was crazy now and getting crazier by the minute, an utterly uncontrollable bundle of packaged rape and torture and death that no one could restrain so long as he lived.
He was calm now, of course. For the moment he was no mad dog, was just a relaxed man sitting down and having a glass of bourbon. But he himself was able to realize how temporary this stage was. No matter what he did now, sooner or later-and probably sooner-he would lose control again.
Only it would not seem like a loss of control. When it happened, it would seem perfectly reasonable. He would merely be doing what he wanted to do, would merely be going after those forbidden pleasures which were-to him-the highest form of satisfaction.
And more people would get killed.
And more, after them.
And how would it end?
In one respect, he knew very well how it would end. It would end with a policeman's bullet tearing a hole in his chest, or a knife cutting through him. Or it would end with death in the electric chair or in the gas chamber, or a slower form of death in an insane asylum. There was no question about his sanity, but from a legal point of view it could probably be argued either way, so he might get the chair or the nuthouse and there was no way to product which it would be.
Nor did it very much matter.
One way or another, it would end. And on the way be would do a lot of damage to a lot of people, and all the way he would do his best to keep from getting caught, yet he would never do the one thing most likely to save him-he would never be able to stop what he was doing. That would go on forever.
What made him the way he was? That was a question he did not know how to answer. He knew that he first realized his hunger for pain and blood when he raped the girl in Ohio, but that didn't begin to explain how the desire had been born in him.
In books and movies, they traced it all back to your childhood. Something happened in your early life and it left a scar that changed your whole development, and you got worse and worse as you grew up and eventually you turned into some kind of a nut. That was the way they figured it in the books and in the movies.
But he couldn't figure it out that way, because he couldn't remember anything in his childhood that might have touched it all off. As a matter-of-fact, he could remember virtually nothing of his younger years. He knew that he had gone to school, that he had lived with his parents-but it was all blurred and he could not seem to bring it into focus.
Why?
Why?
Plenty of questions and not a single answer.
He lit a cigarette and smoked thoughtfully. Cigarettes, he knew, were bad for you. They did bad things to you, and it was not healthy to smoke them. And yet he also knew that he could smoke as much as he liked because it would not really make a bit of difference, not a bit, because smoking would not kill him. He would not live long enough for cigarettes to hurt him. He would be killed, just as he killed others.
Maybe he was even looking forward to it. All at once he remembered that dream, that terrible dream, the one he had had just before he stuck the long and vicious carving knife into Shirley's heart. He had awakened from that dream with sweat coating his body, and then in the afterglow of the dream he had murdered the poor woman in her sleep.
The dream-
All about being naked and being hanged by a whole batch of people who laughed at him while they pulled on the rope and laughed at him while he kicked at the air and laughed at him while bit by bit he choked to death. And hating it and liking it at the same time, a crazy dream if ever there was one.
Did it mean something? A guy at prison, a very sharp guy, had told him once that every dream meant something or other. He had never cared much at the time because that was a stage in his life when he never dreamed anyway, so he just filed the statement somewhere in the back of his mind and forgot it for the time being. Now, though, he remembered it. What the hell did his dream mean? It was something to think about, and it would have been something to ask a psychiatrist about. But you don't go to a psychiatrist and tell him how you keep all the time murdering people and then ask him to tell you what some crummy dream meant. You don't work things that way because it doesn't make a great deal of sense.
But he wished he knew. There were a lot of things he wished he knew. He wished he knew a way to stop himself, because he knew things would only get worse and would never get better. He wished that now, while he was calm and relaxed, he had the guts to get rid of the gun so that it would not be available the next time he snapped. But he knew well enough that he could not possibly bring himself to do this. He would keep the gun, and he would use it again.
And again.
He put out one cigarette and lit another one. Well, he had a watch now. Maybe that was something. And maybe he could get more things, and more money, and-
Already the relaxed and calm mood was beginning to fade away and leave him. Already the lust for crime and pain and death was coming back.