But no such luck.
This was no mystery woman, no stranger to his bed. This was his wife of twenty years. A woman he’d once lusted after intensely. But now he could hardly stand to look at her. It’d been ten years since he’d fucked another woman and he’d almost forgotten what it was like to caress unfamiliar flesh. For a while that had been okay. It was the way of things. You get older and settle down, leave the tomcatting around to the younger guys. John had accepted this as his lot for some time, but lately, ever since his recent fortieth birthday, he’d begun to feel restless. He couldn’t shake the gnawing feeling that he was wasting what was left of his…well, not youth, obviously, more like that last dwindling slice of time when he might still possess some virility or fading attractiveness to the opposite sex. No, not youth, more like the last fading echoes of youth, and he didn’t-
Christ.
He reflected on his last thoughts and felt disgust. He was a man. And real men didn’t wallow in self-pity. He was self-aware enough to know he was on the verge of a stereotypical midlife crisis. Most men in his position would seek the help of a therapist, or perhaps slake that renewed thirst for strange flesh by blowing a wad in some cheap hooker’s mouth. But he needed something better than that.
A dramatic change.
A forever change.
And the time for that change had arrived at last. He stepped closer to the bed, curling his fingers tighter around the blade of the carving knife as he searched Karen’s face for any signs of impending wakefulness. He’d stashed the knife in the bathroom closet several hours earlier, while Karen had been so immersed in that night’s episode of Survivor that she’d been oblivious to anything he was doing. Which included the twenty-plus minutes he’d spent locked in the bathroom, slowly masturbating to pictures of Julie stored on his cell phone. Mostly these were pictures taken on the sly, when she wasn’t looking or didn’t know he was around. But the one that got to him the most was the one she did know about. A candid shot snapped at his daughter’s tenth birthday party last week. He’d made some lame joke and she’d laughed and stuck her tongue out at him. He stared at that picture for minutes, at that wedge of glistening tongue protruding between glossy, pink-painted lips. That was the image that got him over the edge, making him come harder than he ever did with Karen these days.
He circled the bed and then stood staring down at his wife, knife held at shoulder level, hand shaking, his soul burning with the need to bury the blade in the sleeping woman’s body. A latex glove was on his right hand. When she was dead-and after he’d inflicted a few superficial wounds on his own body-the glove would go down the toilet. Then he’d call the cops with his practiced sob story about a masked assailant. He was sure he would be convincing enough in his fake grief to make them buy the story.
But he wondered about his daughter. Nancy was asleep in her own room at the far end of the hall. She should be asleep. It was well past her strict bedtime. Still, it bore thinking about. The cops would question her, maybe ask her if she’d heard anything. John debated the idea of killing his daughter before dealing with Karen. On the upside, dead girls tell no tales. Downside, he’d leave telltale signs of blood and possibly other evidence, traipsing back and forth between her room and here. No, he’d just have to take his chances. Odds were she was stone asleep, and if not, he’d figure a way to deal with it.
Meanwhile, it was time to stop fucking around and do this thing. His lips curled into a sneer as he raised the knife higher and psyched himself up to bring it down. He imagined how it would feel to slam the heavy blade into living flesh and felt his cock twitch. The sneer became a smile. It would be a fucking rush, that’s what it would be. He pictured himself pulling the blade out and ramming it in over and over, butchering her the way a genuine random psycho would. It was too bad he couldn’t rape her, too. But that would leave DNA evidence and…well, what if he wore a condom?
Scratch that.
No condoms in the house.
Just do it, an inner voice berated him.
John sucked in a big breath and raised the knife still higher. Then, in that last moment before he would have brought the knife down…he heard something.
A rustling out in the hallway.
John turned away from the bed to stare at the closed bedroom door. He held his breath and waited, counting off seconds. Ten. Twenty. Half a minute. He began to let his breath out, sure now that he’d heard nothing. Or maybe just rodents scurrying through the walls. He’d been meaning to set out mousetraps for weeks. Yeah, that could be it.
Then he heard it again.
That rustling, closer now.
He moved a step closer to the door. The sound came again. Quieter, this time. A shuffling rather than a rustling. An attempt at stealth, feet gliding softly over hallway carpet. John clenched his teeth and swallowed hard as genuine fear leaped into his heart. In his mind, he saw himself as he must look and almost laughed. A naked man, intent on murder and possible sexual assault only moments earlier but now paralyzed with fear. Predator turned prey? No. Ridiculous.
Someone was in the hallway, no doubt.
But the interloper’s identity was obvious.
Nancy.
She was restless, was maybe trying to sneak downstairs for a cookie or some other late-night snack. John grinned. Sudden impulse hurried him to the door. This was too perfect an opportunity to miss. He would take her in the hallway, do it so fast she’d never know what was happening, then return quickly to the bedroom to do Karen. The cops would see that the intruder had stumbled upon Nancy en route to his primary prey. The little snot wouldn’t be around to raise suspicions or cramp his style as he swaggered into a glorious new phase of his life.
He yanked the door open and charged into the hallway-and collided with a big man in a fringe jacket. The man had long, scraggly gray hair and eyes that conveyed insanity even in the gloom of the hallway. His grin was wide and displayed yellow, crooked teeth. And holy Jesus, but he fucking stank, a stench like something from a backed-up sewer drain. It made John’s eyes water. A blinding terror gripped him before he remembered the knife in his hand.
He raised it again.
And was shoved backward into the room, hard, causing him to stumble over his feet and crash into the nightstand next to Karen’s side of the bed. A lamp tumbled off the nightstand and Karen’s stack of paperback romance novels went flying. Struggling for balance, John lurched away from the nightstand. He turned and raised the knife as the big man in the buckskin jacket came into the room, followed by another man. The second man was less stout than the first, wiry, and also had long, filthy hair, but not straight and fine like the other man’s. It was big and bushy. If anything, he stank even worse than his partner.
Karen awoke with a gasp and sat up straight in bed. “John! What’s going on?” Then she got a glimpse of the intruders and unleashed a shrill scream. “ohmygod! helllllllllp!”
She rolled to the other side of the bed, tried to get up, and got her feet tangled in the twisted bedsheets. She took a tumble off the bed and hit the floor hard, crying out in terror and pain.
The big man chuckled. “Don’t let her get nowhere, Clyde.”
“On it.”
Clyde swaggered past his partner and leered at John. The lean man faked a lunge in his direction and cackled at the girlish shriek this elicited. Then he continued around the bed and scooped Karen up off the floor. She screamed again and flailed against him, battering the sides of his head with her tiny fists. If the blows had any effect on him, it didn’t show. He just grinned and let her hammer away a few seconds longer before cracking her across the face with the back of his hand. The sound was loud. And there was a crunch as the cartilage in her nose snapped. Intense pain made her cry out again. Another punishing blow stifled any additional screams. She mewled and blubbered, pleading for mercy, sounding to John like Nancy sometimes did when he put a good spanking on her for misbehaving.