“He’s still alive?” Charlie asked incredulously.
“Yeah, he’s going to be alive a bit longer.” Herbie gave the boy another kick in the ribs and the boy let out another unconscious moan. “As soon as he wakes up from his nap we’re going to spend some more quality time together. I’m not anywhere close to being done with him.”
Long shadows were forming across the dead woman’s torso. Charlie glanced anxiously at a clock on the wall and saw it was four o’clock. “Look, Cuz,” he said, “it’s getting late. We have to get out of here.”
Herbie was shaking his head adamantly, his eyes hardening into sharp, pale crystals. “Sorry, this little piece of shit is going to get to know hell real well before I send him to it.”
“Cuz, this is stupid. We’re putting ourselves at risk-”
“You want to leave now; okay, fine, let’s take him with us.”
All Charlie could do was stare at his cousin with his mouth hung loosely open. “Take him with us?” he sputtered when he was able to. “That’s brilliant, Cuz. Let’s invite a national manhunt to come looking for us. Man, let’s just get rid of him and get the hell out of here.”
“I need more time. Another hour.”
Charlie licked his lips. His mouth felt bone dry. This was crazy. Among other things, their car was parked three blocks away in a supermarket lot. It had borrowed plates and the longer it stayed there the better the chance it would draw suspicion to them. He tried to talk some sense into his cousin.
“We could make this look like some sort of satanic deal,” he said, talking in a quick, panicky rush. “We could cut their hearts out and write some shit on the wall. Cuz, we got to get moving.”
“I need another hour.”
“But-”
“Stop it, Cuz,” Herbie ordered softly.
The way he said it stopped Charlie cold. He knew the look on his cousin’s face and he knew what would happen next if he didn’t stop it.
Herbie rubbed a thumb across the gash on his cheek and grimaced. “You can stay and join me if you want,” he offered, “but not if you’re going to keep acting like this. I don’t need you making me nervous.”
“Why don’t you wake him and get it over with?”
“I said I don’t need you making me nervous!”
Charlie swallowed down what he was going to say and forced his mouth shut. The exasperation was too much. He picked up the padded handcuffs from the floor and shoved them into his pocket. He felt too jittery to stick around. He also knew the more jittery he acted, the more Herbie would stretch things out. “Fine, give me the keys. I’ll meet you by the car in an hour.”
“What do you need the keys for?”
“What do I need the keys for? You got to be kidding. The car’s been sitting in that lot for over three hours. I need to move it before it draws any attention.”
“It can sit another hour.”
“But-”
“I said it can sit another hour.” A petulant smile had twisted Herbie’s lips. “It’s your choice whether I’m here another hour or another twenty-four. It’s all your choice.”
Charlie took a step forward with the intention of snuffing the kid himself, but the look Herbie gave him stopped him. Anyway, he knew it wouldn’t help. It would only make Herbie more determined that they sit there twiddling their thumbs for the next twenty-four hours. That much was obvious. Reluctantly, he headed back upstairs.
“Fine,” he said, “let me know when you’re done.”
Charlie spent the next half hour pacing around the upstairs of the house working himself into a tizzy. The last two years they had been so careful they way they varied the details of each murder, and in fact, making a study of it. They had spent hours reading everything from forensic material to books on police procedural and criminal behavior to make sure there were no patterns to their murders, that there would be nothing the police could tie together, and more importantly, nothing that could bring the FBI in.
And now this. Usually Herbie didn’t throw these type of tantrums-at least not to this extent. All because that piece of shit kid had to cut him. In a way he could understand it, but still Herbie was putting them at risk. It just wasn’t worth it. The more Charlie thought about it, the more infuriated he got. When he heard the screams it was too much for him. Goddamn him, he thought, he couldn’t even gag him first?
He reacted to the screams without really thinking about it-flying down the stairs, his eyes bloodied with rage, his hands squeezing into fists. When he reached the kitchen he froze, not quite comprehending what he was seeing. It wasn’t what he expected. Everything was flipped around from the way it was supposed to be. The kid was on top of Herbie, slashing away at him with a carving knife as if his cousin were a side of beef. And Herbie’s head wasn’t laying quite right, sort of at a ninety-degree angle to his body. Charlie realized his cousin’s head had, for the most part, been cut off from his body.
He heard a noise from behind. Someone was trying to kick down the door. Without thinking, he turned and scampered back upstairs and ended up squeezing into the back of the master bedroom closet, pulling some blankets over him.
Somehow, the police didn’t search the house. If they had, they would have found Charlie Winters cowering in the closet. But they didn’t. They took it for granted that Herbie had acted alone and they didn’t bother searching upstairs, at least not carefully. Later, when the police were gone, Charlie slipped into the night.
He felt like a dead man. Numb and dazed, his world crashing around him. The unfairness of it all was staggering. He and Herbie were meant to be together. Now they weren’t and they never would be again. Charlie Winters couldn’t accept it.
For months afterwards he drifted, not quite sure what to do. There was no pleasure in anything he did. Nothing but a numbness he couldn’t shake. He and Herbie needed each other. They fed off each other. Without his cousin nothing made any sense. The world seemed pointless.
Nine months after his cousin’s death he was stopped by the police for a burned out taillight. He had been traveling through Seattle, driving straight through from Portland. In the back of his trunk was a thirteen-year-old boy he had picked up along the way. Normally, before he had stopped thinking clearly, the boy would’ve been either dead or properly anesthetized. But he had stopped thinking after Herbie’s death. As the officer wrote him up for the taillight, a thumping noise came from inside the trunk. The officer was quicker with the gun and Charlie Winters was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to eighteen years for kidnapping.
His fellow inmates labeled Winters a child molester, reasoning he had kidnapped the boy for purposes other than money. His first week in prison a group of “gorillas” held him down and took turns turning him out. Later, each one of them were found with their throats cut and their testicles hanging from their mouths. The message got out that Charlie Winters was someone to be left alone. It became gospel.
Even still, the next couple of years were a time of utter bleakness for him. Despondent, he lay on his cot and waited as the days blended into nights. Off and on he would think about his cousin and the unfairness of it all. It would stick deep enough in his craw that he’d start to choke on it. That little shit of a kid. He would’ve given anything for an hour alone with that little shit. But there was nothing he could give. Nothing to change that he was trapped within a six-by-nine-foot cage. Nothing to do but wallow in his misery.
His salvation came one day when a guard gave him a book on metaphysics.
He saw the light then.
It wasn’t the light the guard intended him to see, but for Charlie Winters it was as bright as the burning sun.
The ideas from the book-as they were twisted within his mind-summed up everything he and Herbert had known were true but had never quite put into words. Especially about man being god-like. Of course, the concept of every man being god-like was laughable to Winters, but that he and Herbert were was inescapable. As was their reason for being. To punish and inflict pain. For all time. To keep coming back to earth over and over again to spread their suffering. One day he and Herbert would be reunited. The book (again, as it was twisted within in his mind) all but said so. In the meantime, he would have to carry on for both of them and the book showed him how he could do it while in prison. Because you can only lock the body behind bars. If you can learn to leave the body…