Luther arrives at the service counter in SPORTING GOODS.
The clerk is a stodgy woman with black-rooted red hair.
“Babs, I’m in the market for a baseball bat,” he says.
“Oh, I’m sorry, honey. We don’t carry those cept in summer. But we just got our huntin’ merchandise in if you’re-”
Walking away, Luther pulls his hair into a ponytail and takes a camouflage baseball cap from an aisle of hunting apparel in case the cameras are watching.
For the next two hours he loiters on the outskirts of ELECTRONICS watching Daniel flit around ignoring customers, sucking through Lemonheads until he has a chemical burn on the roof of his mouth.
Daniel finally leaves ELECTRONICS and ambles to the front of the store.
Luther follows him outside where Daniel leans against a Sam’s Choice drink machine and smokes two cigarettes while staring contemplatively out across the parking lot. It’s six o’clock in the evening and the light is bronze. Luther stands near the automatic doors, his attention divided between Daniel and the red sunset.
He feels an erection coming.
By the time Daniel reenters Wal-Mart, Luther is swollen. He follows the clerk to the back left corner of the store, then down a bright empty corridor. Daniel digs his shoulder into a door and disappears into a restroom. Luther reaches the door, pulls the sheet of paper from his pocket, and tapes it over the man symbol.
Luther enters.
Three stalls, two urinals.
Dropping to his knees, he sees the pair of legs in the last stall and smiles.
They are alone. He could not have planned this any better.
Luther walks into a vacant stall. He reaches down, lifts the right leg of his gray sweatpants, and unbuttons the strap of his leather sheath. After setting the knife on the toilet, Luther takes off his sneakers and socks, pulls down his gray sweatpants, his underwear, and removes his sweatshirt and T-shirt.
This is going to be messy and walking through Wal-Mart in blooddrenched clothes is not a wise thing to do.
Taking the knife, he emerges naked from the stall and turns the two faucets wide open. The soft roaring echo of water pressure fills the room. He flushes the urinals, the toilets in the first two stalls, and starts both automatic hand dryers. Finally he flips off the light and opens and shuts the bathroom door as though the janitor had left.
Daniel curses, the toilet paper dispenser barely audible over the babble of running water and rushing air. The blackness is complete except for a razorthin line of light along the base of the door.
Luther stands beside the light switch stroking himself.
He inhales deeply, at home in darkness.
Daniel’s toilet flushes and as the zipper on his jeans ascends Luther grips the knife.
He would have preferred to spread Daniel’s brains across the wall with a Louisville Slugger, one judicious thwack. But the blade will do. In the car he settled on a name for his knife: Zig, short for Ziegler, Andrew Thomas’s middle name.
Luther hears the creak of the stall door swinging open.
Hesitant footsteps approach and eddies of Daniel’s cologne sweep over him.
He feels Daniel beside him now, the clerk’s hand on the cinderblock wall, groping for the light switch.
The knife feels coldly sublime in his palm.
Suddenly the restroom is awash in hard fluorescent light.
Daniel’s eyes register first bewilderment, then terror.
The blade moving, two graceful strokes-one to silence, one to open.
Daniel sits in a warm expanding puddle, fingering the gorge in his abdomen, unable to make utterance.
“Now you sit there and think about what customer service means.”
Luther reenters the stall and quickly dresses.
Then he hits the light and is out the door, one more cairn for this trail he’s blazing.
18
UPON regaining consciousness, Karen’s first thought was that she was no longer in the trunk. Though she couldn’t see, her present blindness owed to the blindfold tied around her head. She felt a cold wind in her face and an erratic source of light struggled through the oily-smelling cloth that masked her eyes.
Karen did not remember being moved. For all she knew she was dreaming again though the chill metal against her cheek seemed convincingly real. She tried to move but could not, her hands and feet now bound with thick rope. The numbing grogginess of thirst weighed down her head.
Footsteps approached, the tip of a boot now inches from her face. She smelled the grass and dirt that clung to it-raw and earthy.
“You’re conscious, I see.”
The voice contained no reverberation. She was outside.
“Where am I? Please take off the blindfold.”
“We better leave that on for now. I tell you, you’re a heavy gal. If I sound winded, it’s because I just carried you up two hundred fourteen steps.”
A prickling crawled through Karen’s spine. “Where is this?” she asked.
“Don’t you see the light? Even through the blindfold I don’t know how you could miss it.”
“I don’t under-”
“That light is magnified by a First Order Fresnel Lens, operational since October First, Eighteen Seventy-two. Karen, let me quell your fear.” The man sat down beside her. “I brought you here to let you go.” Karen began to cry, filling with the purest relief. “But I have to hold on to the Widow Lancing. You remember her from the trunk?”
“Yessir.”
“See, the only reason you’re being released is because I flipped a coin. You were heads, it landed on heads, you get to live.”
“Why are you doing this?”
She smelled his lemony breath in her face and his words came very even and very quiet.
“You think this is all about you you arrogant twat?”
“No, I-”
“I only took you and Elizabeth Lancing to get someone’s attention. Can you guess who it is?”
“I don’t know.”
“You should know. You’ve fucked him. Well, I’m just making an assumption there but-”
“I don’t know who you’re-”
“Andrew Thomas.”
“What do you want with him?”
“Seven years ago, Andrew shot me, left me to die in a snowy desert.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“No, don’t be. What I’ve got planned for him is going to make it all worthwhile. One last thing. Think hard before you answer. Do you believe you’re an evil person?”
“No, I’m-”
“Why not?”
Her captor’s breath warmed her mouth as she thought of all the charitable acts she’d performed in the last year-Wednesdays in the soup kitchen on 54^th, the new writers she’d guided to publication, the angel tree at Ice Blink.
“I’m a decent person,” she said.
“And me? From what little you’ve seen. Am I evil?”
“No sir. I don’t believe you are. I don’t know you. I don’t know what sort of parents you come from. I don’t know if tragedies have happened to you. I’m sure things have caused you to behave…”
“Destructively.”
“Yes.”
“Is anyone evil, Karen?”
“People get damaged. They malfunction. But no, I don’t believe in evil.”
“I see. Thank you for talking so candidly with me.”
The blindfold was removed.
Karen stared through iron bars across a half mile of pines and marshland and dunes to the Atlantic. From this height and distance the ocean was mute though in the light of the yellow moon she could make out the ragged thread of surf extending for miles down the coastline.
Her captor was gone.