She tried to twist away, but his quick hands were already closing about her scarfed throat like an act of love. She scrabbled wildly at the iron-hard forearms, tried to claw his eyes, tried to knee his crotch with the strength of desperation.
But his hands had the strength of death. He spun her about, shoved her facedown on the couch, got a knee in the middle of her back as his hands found the ends of the scarf. He dragged it tight around her throat.
Her black skirt was up around her waist, opaque black panties molded the ripe globes of her buttocks. Her thrashing body under his, her smell of sweat and perfume and fear made his erection immense; but the M.E. would find his semen in her, there would be questions. If he took her away with him, he wouldn’t put it past Mr. David’s minions to check her body cavities.
He couldn’t chance it. Her movements became erratic, lost volition, ceased. He stepped back and blew out a long breath. He was drenched in sweat as from a heavy workout.
When he rolled her over, her face was almost black and her tongue, pink as a baby’s thumb, was sticking out of one corner of her mouth. She sprawled in a lewd doll-pose of surrender, but there was nothing seductive about voided bowels and loosened kidneys. Her eyes stared beyond him into death with a sort of infinite horror. His lip curled with contempt. Dying was easy.
And Kata was just a disposal problem, just cooling meat.
Chapter Thirty-seven
As the bleating sheep swung past him, strung up by a leg on the conveyor loop, the big Negro jabbed his gleaming needlepoint spike into its ear. The animal gave a convulsive jerk and was carried away, dripping blood from its nose, to be skinned and eviscerated. The big slaughterer reached for the next one.
Out on the loading dock, Dunc transferred the sheep’s carcass from his shoulder to the last empty hook in the Niarchos Meats van. A burly man in a blood-splattered white smock chomped his cheap cigar and made a check mark on his clipboard.
“That’s the one we been looking for,” he said.
Dunc made ritual reply. “Too bad they saved it ’til last.”
He inserted his time card, the clock punched out 6:13 — almost forty-five minutes past quitting time. Maybe tonight would be the night. He added his card to the others already in the rack.
The locker room was filled with tall rows of double-stacked metal lockers with wooden benches in between. A few stragglers still pulled on street clothes after their showers. As Dunc entered, a redheaded Irishman with freckles and overmeaty earlobes paused in the doorway to raise a fine tenor in song:
There was sudden silence in the locker room. Dunc had been working there only three days, he knew Flaherty didn’t like him, but this was the Irishman’s first direct challenge.
“I guess you know the color of your own nose,” he said.
And pushed past into a locker room now noisy with laughter. He kept going, down between a row of lockers, cursing himself for saying anything. He wasn’t here to get into a brawl; that could spoil everything. But as he stripped off the bloodstained white smock and stuffed it into an already bulging canvas laundry bag, he breathed a silent sigh of relief: Flaherty’s voice, bragging as if he had won the confrontation, was retreating down the hall.
When Dunc came back with wet hair and a towel wrapped around his middle, the big colored man was at the next locker.
“You ever get into a fight with that guy, watch out,” he said in a rumbling bass voice, “he’s good at kicking kneecaps.”
“Hey, thanks.”
The Negro flashed a big grin and was gone. Dunc dressed slowly. By the time he was tying his shoes, he was alone. He’d jimmied the storage closet’s lock the first night, so he went in, pulled some boxes out from the back wall just far enough to slip behind them, and sat down with his legs stretched out in front of him. He leaned back against the sidewall to wait.
Falkoner leaned against the window of the gas station pay phone on South Palm Drive, smoking a cigarette and waiting for his connection to a SUtter exchange number in San Francisco.
The operator said, “I have a collect call for anyone from a Mr. Simmons in Palm Springs. Will you accept the charges?”
A flat voice answered, “Put him on.”
“Go ahead, sir. Your party is ready.”
Falkoner ground out his cigarette against the window, said “Yes” into the phone, and hung up without waiting for a reply.
After paying for his gas, he drove the Mercury out of Palm Springs and westward across the desert. He’d strangled Kata with the scarf to avoid finger marks on her throat: he’d intended to leave her strung up as a suicide. Even without a note, suicide would have been accepted. A woman used to the good life, reduced to telling fortunes in a Mexican bar and sleeping with the Mexican bouncer, takes a hard look at her future, the scarf is already around her neck, the ridge beam is convenient... He would have left the car and walked back to town.
But he’d decided he just couldn’t risk it: Langly had a leaky face. So he’d packed the clothes and personal items she would take when moving on, had put them in her suitcase that was beside him on the Mercury’s front seat. Kata herself he had wrapped in a blanket and stuffed in the trunks spare-tire well.
Dunc listened to the cleaning crew leave the locker room, went down the corridor and out across the slaughtering floor. He had twenty minutes until the 8:00 P.M. arrival of the night watchman. The blood had been washed down the drains, and the conveyor belt was silent, but the smell of death lingered; the very walls were impregnated with it.
On the mezzanine was a walkway in front of glass-fronted offices. Dunc let the tight little O of his pencil flash lead him to the personnel file cabinets. In the drawer marked “F—J” he found FLAHERTY, DENNIS MICHAEL. Pulled it out.
Yes! The Social Security numbers matched!
He’d nailed the bastard. Six months ago a certain Shamus Herron had been working as a butcher at McSorley’s Meats in East Orange, New Jersey, when he had lifted $25,000 in cash from the safe. Since McSorley made book on the side, the cash was unreported and he couldn’t go to the police.
But last week Herron had given the pay-phone number of a San Francisco bar to his former girlfriend, Margie McConnell, back in East Orange. McSorley had offered a rather extravagant cash reward for information about him; Margie had cashed in.
Dunc had snooped around and had learned enough to get a job at the slaughterhouse on Evans Avenue in the Hunter’s Point district. Tonight he’d confirmed that Dennis Flaherty’s Social Security number was also Shamus Herron’s. Social Security withholds were recorded primarily by account number, not name.
He drove in on Third Street past the Wessler — poor old Kiely was already retreating into memory — and parked across from Ma Booger’s. At Tommy’s Joynt he had a ninety-nine cent roast turkey leg with mashed potatoes and stuffing, and went up to bed.
At U.S. 99, Falkoner went north to Colton, then cut across to U.S. 66 on a dirt road, once again pointed the nose of the Mercury at the far thin glow of Los Angeles. He counted bugs as they squashed against the windshield, and at nine o’clock ate Mexican food in a small adobe diner. The bright serapes decorating the walls reminded him of the Red Arrow.
Tomorrow night back in Palo Alto he would use each of his wife’s orifices in turn. It had begun after his first two kills, the personal ones, had continued and intensified after each of his three professional assignments from Mr. David. She had chosen to whore around, what did she expect? Red roses?