Career of Evil

44 Then Came the Last Days of May

He had thought she was dead. It had not troubled him that he hadn’t seen a news report, because she’d been a hooker. He’d never seen anything in the papers about the first one he’d done either. Prostitutes didn’t fucking count, they were nothing, no one cared. The Secretary was the one who was going to make the big splash, because she was working for that bastard — a clean-living girl with her pretty fiancé, the kind the press went wild for...

He didn’t understand how the whore could still be alive, though. He remembered the feeling of her torso beneath the knife, the popping, puncturing sound of the metal slitting her skin, the grating of steel on bone, the blood gushing. Students had found her, according to the newspaper. Fucking students.

He still he had her fingers, though.

She’d produced a photofit. What a fucking joke! The police were shaven monkeys in uniforms, the lot of them. Did they think this picture would help? It looked nothing like him, nothing at all; it could have been anyone, white or black. He would have laughed out loud if It hadn’t been there, but It wouldn’t like him laughing over a dead hooker and a photofit...

It was pretty bolshy at the moment. He had had to work hard to make up for the fact that he had treated It roughly, had to apologize, play the nice guy. “I was upset,” he had said. “Really upset.” He’d had to cuddle It and buy It fucking flowers and stay home, to make up for being angry, and now It was taking advantage, the way women always did, trying to take more, as much as It could get.

“I don’t like it when you go away.”

I’ll make YOU fucking go away if you keep this up.

He had told her a cock-and-bull story about the chance of a job, but for the first time ever she actually fucking dared question him: Who told you about it? How long will you be gone?

He watched It talking and he imagined drawing back a fist and punching It so hard in It’s ugly fucking face that the bones splintered...

Yet he needed It a little while longer, at least until he did The Secretary.

It still loved him, that was the trump card: he knew he could bring It back into line with the threat of leaving for good. He didn’t want to overplay that one, though. So he pressed on with the flowers, the kisses, the kindness that made the memory of his rage soften and dissolve in It’s stupid, addled memory. He liked to add a little emollient to her drinks, a little extra something to keep her off balance, weeping into his neck, clinging to him.

Patient, kind, but determined.

At last she agreed: a week away, completely away, free to do as he liked.