"Fits her too."
"She the missus?" asks the redhead. His friendliness is not as natural as when Vess spoke with him about turning on pump number seven. He is definitely uncomfortable and trying not to show it.
Time to startle them, see how they react. Will either of them begin to realize just how much trouble is coming?
"Nope," Vess says. "No ball and chain for me. Maybe one day. Anyway, Ariel's only sixteen, not ready yet."
They are not sure what to say. Sixteen is half his age. Sixteen is still a child. Jailbait.
The risk he's taking is enormous and titillating. Another customer might pull off the highway at any moment, raising the stakes.
"Prettiest thing you'll ever see this side of paradise," says Vess, and he licks his lips. "Ariel, I mean."
He takes the Polaroid snapshot from his coat pocket and drops it onto the counter. The clerks stare at it.
"She's pure angel," says Vess. "Porcelain skin. Breathtaking. Makes your scrotum twang like a bass fiddle."
With barely disguised distaste, the cashier looks at the pump-monitor board to the left of the cash register and says, "Your sixty bucks just finished going in the tank."
Vess says, "Don't get me wrong. I never touched her-that way. She's been locked in the basement the past year, where I can look at her anytime I want to. Waiting for my little doll to ripen, get just a little sweeter."
As glassy-eyed as fish, they gaze at him. He relishes their expressions.
Then he smiles, laughs, and says, "Hey, had you going there, didn't I?"
Neither man smiles back at him, and the redhead says tightly, "You still going to make some other purchases, or do you just want your change?"
Vess puts on his most sincere face. He can almost manage a blush. "Listen, sorry if I offended. I'm a joker. Can't help puttin' people on."
"Well," says the redhead, "I have a sixteen-year-old daughter, so I don't see what's funny."
Speaking to the Asian, Vess says, "When I go hunting, I take trophies. You know-like a matador gets the bull's tail and ears? Sometimes it's just a picture. Gifts for Ariel. She'll really like you."
As he speaks, he raises the Mossberg, draped with the raincoat as if with black funeral bunting, seizes it in both hands, blows the redheaded cashier off his stool, and pumps another shell into the breech.
The Asian. Oh, how his eyes widen. The expression in them is like nothing ever to be seen in the eyes of fish.
Even as the redhead crashes to the floor, this young Asian gentleman with the fabulous eyes has one hand under the counter, going for a weapon.
Vess says, "Don't, or I'll shove the bullets up your ass."
But the Asian brings up the revolver anyway, a Smith & Wesson.38 Chief's Special, so Vess thrusts the shotgun across the counter and fires point-blank at his chest, loath to mess up that perfect face. The young man is airborne off the stool, the revolver spinning from his hand even before he has a chance to squeeze off one round.
The redhead is screaming.
Vess walks to the gate in the counter and passes through to the work area.
The redheaded cashier with the sixteen-year-old daughter waiting at home is curled as if imitating the fetus-like pink birthmark on his forehead, hugging himself, holding himself together. On the radio, Garth Brooks sings "Thunder Rolls." Now the cashier is screaming and crying at the same time. The screams reverberate in the plateglass windows, and the echo of the shotgun still roars in Vess's ears, and a new customer could walk into the store at any second. The moment is achingly intense.
One more round finishes the cashier.
The Asian is unconscious and going fast. Happily, his face is unmarked.
Like a pilgrim genuflecting before a shrine, Vess drops onto one knee as a final gasp rattles from the dying young man. A sound like the brittle flutter of insect wings. He leans close to inhale the other's exhalation, breathes deeply. Now small measures of the Asian's grace and beauty are a part of him, conveyed on the scent of the Slim Jim.
The Brooks song is followed by that old Johnny Cash number "A Boy Named Sue," which is silly enough to spoil the mood. Vess turns off the radio.
As he reloads, he surveys the area behind the counter and spots a row of wall switches. They are labeled with the locations of the lights that they control. He shuts down all the exterior lighting, including the OPEN 24 HOURS of red neon on the roof.
When he also switches off the fluorescent ceiling panels, the store is not plunged into total darkness. The display lights in the long row of coolers glow eerily behind the insulated glass doors. A lighted clock advertising Coors beer hangs on one wall, and at the counter, a gooseneck lamp illuminates the papers on which the Asian gentleman was working.
Nevertheless, the shadows are deep, and the place appears to be closed. It's unlikely that a customer will pull in from the highway.
Of course a county sheriff's deputy or highway patrol officer, curious about why this establishment that never closes is, in fact, suddenly closed, might investigate. Consequently, Vess doesn't dawdle over the tasks that remain.
Huddled with her back against the end panel of the shelves, as far as she could get from the cashiers' counter, Chyna felt exposed by the display-case light to her right and threatened by the shadows to her left. In the silence following the gunfire and the cessation of the music, she became convinced that the killer could hear her ragged, shuddery breathing. But she couldn't quiet herself, and she couldn't stop shaking any more than a rabbit could cease shivering in the shadow of a wolf.
Maybe the rumble of the compressors for the coolers and freezers would provide enough covering sound to save her. She wanted to lean out to one side and then the other to check the flanking aisles, but she could not summon the courage to look. She was crazily certain that, leaning out, she'd come face-to-face with the eater of spiders.
She had thought that nothing could be more devastating than finding the bodies of Paul and Sarah-and later Laura-but this had been worse. This time she had been in the same room when murder happened, close enough not merely to hear the screams but to feel them like punches in the chest.
She supposed the killer was robbing the place, but he didn't need to kill the clerks just to get the money. Necessity, of course, was not a deciding factor with him. He had killed them simply because he enjoyed doing so. He was on a roll. He was hot.
She seemed trapped in an endless night. A breakdown in the cosmic machinery, gears jammed. Stars locked in place. No sunrise ever rising. And coming down through the frozen sky, a terrible coldness.
A light flashed, and Chyna brought her hands up defensively in front of her face. Then she realized that the flash had come from the other end of the store. And again.
Edgler Vess is not a hunter, as he had told the redheaded cashier, but a connoisseur who collects exquisite images, recording most of them with the camera of his mind's eye but once in a while with the Polaroid camera. Memories of great beauty enliven his thoughts every day and form the basis of his gratifying dreams.
Each camera flash seems to linger in the huge eyes of the Asian clerk, glimmering as if it were his spirit trapped behind his corneas and seeking egress from the cooling mortal coil.
Once, in Nevada, Vess had killed an incomparable twenty-year-old brunette, whose face had made Claudia Schiffer and Kate Moss look like hags. Before meticulously destroying her, he had taken six photographs. With threats, he had even managed to make her smile in three of the shots; she had a radiant smile. Once every thirty days during the three months following that memorable episode, he had cut up and eaten one of the photos in which she'd been smiling, and with the consumption of each, he had been fiercely aroused by the destruction of her beauty. He had felt her smile in his belly, a warming radiance, and knew that he himself was more beautiful because he contained it.