Her door is, of course, locked, but locked doors were never a problem for me. Instead of kicking the door in, I send my soul-hand beneath her weather stripping and tickle it along her heart. This is perhaps a little ironic cruelty: the retired schoolteacher, herself the mother of four, would be betrayed by the organ symbolic for the community’s love of her.
Ah, well, too late for regrets. Already her heart ceases. Already, she slides down into the wheelchair, the cushion bunching up against old, stocking-clad legs. It is like old times. Again, I’m killing from a distance, killing with a touch. No more thumbs bitten off. No more wrists locked in handcuffs. With no hand, there can be no handcuffs.
There’s a homeless man by a fire in a fifty-five gallon drum. He’s one of the thirty percent who is mentally ill. He’s also an addict. The drugs ease the illness temporarily, but they deepen it afterward. It’s a simple enough thing, then, to bring around the stray dog he’d begun to feed, bring the dog and a pack of others around, initially to see what scraps the man might have, but then to smell the salty savor of a cut on his leg from a piece of rebar this morning. How like addiction and madness are wild dogs! Once invited, they dart in to snatch away bits of meat from the one who welcomed them. I stand and watch until he is still, and the real tearing has begun. There’s plenty more killing to do this night. The best assignment of the evening is just now ahead of me.
Mrs Billings is lying in bed as I come through her window. It’s late. I stand in a puddle of moonlight, just inside the window, and try to make out the softly snoring sleeper. It’s been a bad year for Mrs Billings, to lose a husband, to be indicted for embezzlement, and now, to die. She was taking it all in stride, though. In the many newspaper photos I’ve seen, she looks well-pressed and confident, always turning aside reporters with waves and smiles. I suppose I expect her to look the same now, suited for the combat of the streets, but instead she is in jammies.
I turn on the light.
She doesn’t stir from sleep. She’s undeniably middleaged, a gray pile of hair pillowing her careworn face. There’s a regal reserve in her features even as she softly snores.
To others, she’s an embattled widow, the wife of a white-collar criminal slain by a blue-collar killer. For me, she’s a Madonna. She carefully, patiently arranged my early life, not as a mother would – in the planning and coddling and living of days – but as an accountant would. She created my past. It was through her that, for however brief a time, I became William B. Dance; I became human.
She deserves to die well. The suffering she’s endured in the last year entitle her to the best I have to offer. It’ll need to be well planned, an expensive affair. Her death should be worth the thirty-five million that, when she dies, will become no one’s money, stored away in a vault in Geneva. Such a death should involve the destruction of a large piece of property – certainly more than this million-dollar villa in Naperville. It needs to be corporate capital that’s destroyed – not an antiquity at the Field Museum or even a business like Marshall Fields – but wait! Macy’s bought them out. Yes, the setting would be perfect for a death that would impugn the aristocratic safety and luxury of the place. If I truly were my former self, I would arrange for her dress hem to get snagged in an escalator’s teeth, and for the ceaseless walkway to grind her to pieces. The blood would never quite be scrubbed from every gear and cog, and urban legends would begin about Macy’s and the German butcher who designed its escalators to slay. Such theatrics would have been easy when I was yet an angel. Now, they are beyond my abilities. I’m a shadow of my former self.
“Who’s there?” comes her voice, groggy and murmuring. I shut off the light and hold still.
Mrs Billings sits bolt upright, breathing rapidly and clutching a wiry hand to her chest. Her eyes hang wide open, and she croaks out, “Who’s there?”
I do not respond, do not move.
“Who turned out the lights?” she asks, and then rubs her head. “I don’t know what I’m talking about,” she assures herself, taking a few deep breaths before leaning back against her pillows. “Whoever you are, fuck off. I’m trying to sleep.”
I wait until her breathing has returned to the low, smooth drone of sleep, and then I head back toward the window. There’s no fitting way to kill this woman here, tonight, with my own hands – well, hand. After all she has been to me, I won’t let her die badly. Even so, I have the feeling I’ll never fully escape my humanity until Mrs Billings, the literal author of my humanity, is dead. There’s plenty of time; Chicago nights are endless. For now, this earthly flesh of mine is tired, and I long for my lightless home and my bound-up little wifey. Every human boy at one point leaves his mother to go to his wife.
I hope Donna has had a pleasant evening. It had been a monumental effort to jiggle the gurney all the way to the shelves. Even then, Donna had almost been defeated by the blankets piled atop her. It had taken many minutes to shimmy the covers far enough that she could wrench her hand out sideways to reach the shelf. At least her memory had served – the scalpels were right there.
Still, the angle had been all wrong. She had made numerous small cuts in her side before she at last got the scalpel positioned. Then, it had been sweaty work straining to cut the thick nylon cord. All the while, she had focused on a single image – cradling her newborn child in the bright, clean comfort of a hospital. Donna was nearly through the band on her wrist when he returned. The restraints still held her tight, and the blankets still covered the work she had done – but none of that mattered. She’d moved the gurney. If he lit the penlight, he would know instantly.
“Good morning, Donna,” came the killer’s voice from the dark doorway. Impossibly, from that distance, his fingers seemed to gently brush her cheek. “You’re awake.”
Through clenched teeth, she replied, “You’re alive.”
Samael moved forward. His feet made dry noises on the cement floor. “Very much so. Though five others are not.”
She grimaced, flexing her arms against the ropes.
“You sound proud.”
“I am what I am,” he replied without apology. He did not approach her, instead moving to the corner where he had a mattress. He began undressing. Well-worn clothes sloughed from the man’s flesh. Clothes and a leather mask. “And, right now, I’m tired – a mortal condition I hope soon to be rid of. I’m going to sleep. Do you need anything first? I should probably shift you, to prevent bedsores.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t want you to touch me.”
More sounds in the blackness – the sigh of Samael easing himself to the mattress and the rustle of sheets. “Well, then, good morning, Detective Leland, and goodnight.”
“Goodnight,” she heard herself say.
She lay there, listening. Time was meaningless. Only the occasional drip of seeping water and the quiet inhalations of a murderer made time pass at all. Donna waited. The killer’s breathing deepened. He stopped shifting on the mattress.
That was enough. She couldn’t wait anymore. The scalpel was hot and wet with sweat and blood. It was slick in numb fingers. Oh, but there was only a little left.
She thought of herself cradling her child. With a small pop, the wrist strap snapped. The restraint flopped loose. Hardly daring to breathe, she listened.
Samael did not stir.
Good. She flexed weary fingers before setting them to work on the buckle across her chest. There were eight straps in all. The buckle gave out a traitorous click as it opened. Again, she listened, and heard only the steady snoring. Now, Donna too could breathe again. She told herself that she was nearly free. She bent forward to release her feet. Now, what? What?