Except when he’s asleep, Ricky thought, smiling in the dark.
He supposed about the only thing more despicable than shooting a man in the back was cracking him in the head with a hubcap mallet while he slept like a baby in his own home. This was Ricky’s speed.
When he’d slipped through the facsimile of a front door, he plunged into more darkness. Bars of moonlight fell in wedges across the floor. Upon entering, he’d rustled the plastic a little—not much of a sound under regular circumstances, but loud as holy hell when you were trying to kill a man. Ricky gritted his brown teeth at the rustle, then stepped quickly aside so that no moonlight might give him away. He stood dark as a shadow himself.
He let his eyes adjust, roving. A cheap, shitty little place like most of them, but it looked clean, much cleaner, in fact, than the cheap, shitty little house he shared with his even more demented brother.
He spotted some bookshelves and some cabinets, and a cubby of a kitchen with what looked like a thirty-year-old refrigerator. There was also one of those mini stove/oven combos that folks had in efficiency apartments. Perfect, he thought. His instructions were explicit: drop some of the allergy pills in the bottom of the saucepan and leave it on the stove. It would look to the fire marshal and cops like good ol’ David Something-or-other had been cooking the shit down with denatured alcohol, the stuff had ignited, and then . the whole joint burned down. He’d leave the other stuff lying around, too, and drag David’s dead or unconscious body out of his bed and let him burn up with everything else. If Ricky did it right, the hubcap ’ mallet wouldn’t crack the skull, so it wouldn’t look like murder.
But . . . where is the guy? Ricky wondered.
He could hear him snoring. He strained his vision, then let more things become visible in the room.
There’s the cracker.
It was just an old spring cot the guy slept on. Ricky could make out the form of his body, and the short ink-black hair that almost looked darker than the darkness.
Time to rock, he thought, hefting the mallet’s weight in his hand. He moved forward in short, silent steps. When he got closer he noticed a roughly cut stone of some kind hanging over the guy’s bed; Ricky wouldn’t know in a million years that it was specifically a chrysolite stone, said to bid good dreams and protect one’s home from evil. The stone wasn’t exactly doing a great job tonight.
Another few steps and he was at the head of the cot, looking right down at the stupid rube. The mallet froze high over his head, and in that moment Ricky could see his own shadow thrown against one walclass="underline" a shadow of death, a haunter of the dark.
At that single image he smiled, his heart beating faster, because he looked bigger now than he ever had.
“Who the—”
The Squatter’s eyes glimmered in the moonlight, wide open. A hand shot upward, but—
Thud!
—too late.
One whack with the mallet was all it took. Ricky patted the top of the guy’s head, felt no fractures. Good job. Didn’t matter if he was dead or not, because he’d surely die in the fire that Ricky would start in a few minutes. David Something-or-other’s lights were out for good.
A macabre realization occurred to him then. The last thing this weirdo hillbilly saw in his life . . . was me.
Ricky liked that.
He went back out and grabbed the bag. It didn’t take long to put the matchbooks up in a cupboard, along with the acetone and the first bottle of denatured alcohol. Next he pulled a small boiling pot off the wall, set it on the stove, and dropped in a handful of allergy pills.
Now all I gotta do is drag the cracker out of his bed, empty the other bottle of alcohol around the joint . . . and light ’er up.
Ricky liked fires. He’d liked to look at them since he was a kid-when he’d burned his mother and stepfather’s house down with them in it. Bitch had it comin ‘fer lettin’ her old man make me ‘n’ Junior . . . He didn’t finish the thought, but it would suffice to say that fires made him feel like a success. They made him feel transcendental . . . not that he had any clue what that meant.
With some huffing, he dragged the Squatter out of the cot and left him to lie across the floor. Ricky didn’t notice his chest moving up and down, so he guessed he was dead. Burning the fucker up alive had more kick to it, but that was the way the cards fell sometimes.
He noticed a jar on the kitchen counter. Pickled eggs, it looked like. Shit, yeah! I love pickled eggs. He and Junior had loved them as kids; their mom had made them all the time, before she’d started boozing hard and passing out every night, leaving their stepfather free to come into their rooms, and—
Well, that was another story.
He opened the jar, was about to grab an egg, but—
Holy shit!
The stink from the jar hit him in the face like someone dropping a flowerpot on his head.
Smells worse than a fuckin’ pile a’ dead dogs.
He put the jar back, revolted; then—
“Daddy?”
—his eyes bolted open, and he spun.
Shit!
There was someone else in the shack.
A slant of moonlight fell right on her, like a spotlight. A girl—mid-teens, he guessed, but it was hard to really tell with these Squatter girls because so many of them blossomed a few years before other girls.
It must’ve been something in the water.
But whether it was or not scarcely mattered to Ricky. He was all fucked-up in the head to begin with, and now—razzed and bristly over busting the cracker’s coconut in his own bed and about to turn the joint into a late-night bonfire—he was even more fucked-up.
His blood felt hot, excitement tingling on his skin . with his sweat. His crotch felt tight.
“You’re not my daddy!” she objected in that weird slur of clan dialect. She cast a worried glance down at the empty cot.
The guy was lying in darkness behind Ricky. She can’t see him, he realized. He saw her own cot now, wedged in the comer of the room out of the moonlight. “Aw, now don’t’choo worry ‘bout your daddy, sweet- , heart. He’s outside runnin’ a errand, but he’ll be right back. Me ’n’ him are good buddies.”
The girl’s lower lip trembled, not that Ricky was looking at her lower lip. He was looking at the rest, though, his lust holding his eyes open.
“But I ain’t never seen you before,” she questioned.
“Oh, well, that’s ’cos me’n yer daddy, see, we work together on them crab boats.”
Yeah. Ricky was all fucked-up in the head, all right, and as for the girl?
Well, never mind what he did to the girl before he set the place ablaze and slipped out into the night.
(III)
Patricia dreamed of smoke and fire. She was running through the woods somewhere near the moonlit water, and though fires raged around her, she felt nothing even remotely like fear. Instead she felt invulnerable, safe. Heat wafted about her, but caused no injury. If anything, it only stoked the heat of her own desires.
“That’s what the heat is,” a voice calmly pointed out. It was Dr. Sallee sitting in a chair by a stand of trees. “The symbology of the dream mechanism. Our will is guided by conscious and subconscious impulses. It defines us as individuals, in subjective terms that are too complex for the concrete world around us: dreams.”
The voice drifted like the smoke. Patricia tried to focus on the doctor’s words and discern what they might mean with regard to her specifically, but too many other things nagged at her, such as her calm in the midst of this raging forest fire, and the hot tingling of her skin. She felt flushed; she felt . . .