In Dark Places

Chapter Sixteen

Gray hung up, smiling, and climbed onto his rack, hands laced behind his head.

Now that had been some good, clean fun.

He'd never called the doc before, but tonight he was so goddamn jazzed, he had to work off his nervous tension somehow. And the best way to do it was with a little old-fashioned, ail-American mind fucking.

That had been part of the sport all along. One of the best parts, always. He'd made it his trademark. He'd become known for the mind games he played on the parents of his victims.

Hours after one of his girls was dead, he would call her folks, using a stolen cell phonea different phone each time. It had been fun, like making prank calls when he was a kid. Being drunk hadn't hurt. Typically he stayed wasted for a day or two after a kill, enjoying the buzz. And the conversations with the parents only made the high that much sweeter.

He could remember every word.

"I'm the one what took your baby girl, ma'am," he would say in a trailer-trash drawl. "And the thing is, I'm wondering if you had any preferencesy'know, as to where you'd like to pick her up."

"You're letting her go?"

"Oh, sorry. I meant where you want to pick up her body."

"Oh, God, please, please don't, she's a good girl, she's all we have."

"You're telling me you want the little bitch alive?"

"Please amp;"

" 'Cause I just assumed you were glad to be rid of her. No offense, but she's kind of a pain in the ass."

"Don't hurt her."

"Here I thought you'd be grateful to me for taking her off your hands. I was doing you a major favor. Now all of a sudden I'm the bad guy?"

"She's a good girl; everybody loves her"

"If she's such a good girl, where'd she learn to give those high-quality blow jobs?"

"God, oh, dear God amp;"

"Sorry, must be some miscommunication. This ain't God you're talking to. My name's Willy. As in Free Willy. 'Cause I'm free and I intend to stay that way, and since your bitch daughter's seen my face amp;"

"She's all we have"

"Then you better get started on another one. Biological clock's ticking, lady. Tick-tock. Tick-tock."

Some of his games were more elaborate. He would call the parents and playact as a concerned citizen, saying he'd found their daughter wandering down Olympic Boulevard, dazed but unharmed. Or he would be a doctor at UCLA Medical, reporting that their daughter had been brought to the emergency room. Or a reporter asking to confirm the rumor that their daughter had been picked up in San Diego, suffering from amnesia and sexual abuse.

He chuckled, remembering. He hadn't played that game in a year, but he'd picked the right time to get his groove back. With any luck, the doc would be up all night worrying. Tomorrow she'd be tired and distracted and pissed off. Hate would make her careless. It worked that way for people like her.

Not him, though.

Hate made him stronger, sharper, fiercer. Always had. Hate was what drove him.

His first session with Dr. Robin, she'd given him some bullshit test, and he'd scored high on the hostility index. No surprise. Hate had never been a four-letter word to him. Hate was strength, and fire, and taking no shit from anybody. Hate built him up, made him big, got him pumped. Hate was his rocket fuel, his adrenaline rush. Hate was like sex to him, an orgasm that lasted for hours, days, and got him off again and again. He was in love with hate.

And the doc wanted to cure him of that? Might as well snip off his balls. Without hate he would be a neutered puppy, a weak sister, a nobody.

Without hate, he could never have done even half the shit he'd pulled. And that would have been a damn shame. Everybody was always on his case, asking why he'd killed those girls. The answer was fucking obvious. He enjoyed the hell out of it.

The first kill hadn't been completely intentional. He'd snatched the girl with the vague idea of holding her for ransom. At least, he'd told himself that ransom was his motive, although he'd never fixed a dollar amount or worked out any means of collecting the money. Still, maybe he would have demanded ransom if the little bitch hadn't kept struggling in the back of his van. She'd squirmed, moaning behind the gag in her mouth, while he sat up front listening, until finally he couldn't stand the damn noise any longer. So he went back to tell her to shut up, and found that her blouse had come unbuttoned, exposing her fine round jumanjis for anyone to see. At the time he'd been sure she had undone the blouse on purpose, trying to come on to him, seduce him into dropping his guard. She was like that slut Delilah in the Bibleor was it Jezebel?one of those old Bible whores who fucked with guys and played games with them and got them thinking with their dicks. Her trying to trick him that way amp; man, it had pissed him off royal. He'd taken her outside and put a bullet in her head without thinking twice about it.

Which was funny, because later, when he'd sobered uphe'd been wrecked out of his mind, like he always was when he pulled off dangerous shithe'd realized the blouse had gotten unbuttoned by accident. She was just trying to loosen the duct tape on her wrists and ankles, that's all.

Yeah, he'd felt pretty stupid once his head cleared, but not so stupid that he hadn't gone out a couple months later and done it again.

It had been fun, was the thing. You took one of those stuck-up junior misses, and you scared the living shit out of herliterally, in one case; goddamned girl had pooped in her pantiesand then you pumped a slug into her noggin, wham, bam, thank you, ma'am. And every time you thought about it or heard some blow-dried asshole talking it up on the news, you got good and hard all over again, and you could whack off till your arm was sore. Better yet, hook up with a gal on Western Avenue for the lay of your lifebecause it didn't matter how much of a skank she was or how many needle tracks she had on her arms, you could close your eyes and pretend she was little Miss Prom Queen, and that was all you needed to get off again and again and again in a series of blastoffs straight to the fucking moon.

That was the only sex he ever got out of the sport. He'd never raped his captives, not from any moral compunction, obviously, but because he had to get liquored up to do the kill, and when wasted, he couldn't perform. He was always too looped to get his Johnson to cooperate.

Too bad for his girls. They never knew what they'd missed out on. Not that he cared. He got what he came forthe pure rush of the kill, the games and fantasies afterward. Another notch in his gun, another young lovely disposed of. Except they weren't lovelies to him. They weren't nothing but gashes, slits, coochies. Fur pies, bearded clams. Hot-boxes and honeypots. Gray chuckled, wondering how many words there were for that part of the female anatomy. Squirrels, muffs, jelly rolls amp;

He remembered the last time he'd seen his mother. "You talk like a damn nigger," she'd told him when he slipped into his ghetto slang. "Everybody talks like that on the street," he'd explained, but she wouldn't listen. "Like a damn nigger," she'd repeated, shaking her head.

She never heard him out. Just like when his dad used to hurt him, fuck him uphe'd tell her about it, and she wouldn't hear. It was like he was talking to a ghost.

Well, she was a ghost now. Dead for three years, dropped by a stroke. His dad was alone and getting drunk every night, pissing away his pension in a shithole apartment. All of which was fine as far as Justin was concerned. He didn't owe his old man a goddamned thing. Didn't owe nobody nothing, when you got right down to it. He was a self-made man through and through.

Of course, his mom had been right. He did talk like a nigger, but that was because on the street, and in stir, the jigs defined cool for the rest of the population. They set the trends. Gray didn't mind following trends, as long as he got some fun out of it. This whole serial-killer thing was a trend, a fad. Except for maybe Jack the Ripper, who the fuck had ever heard of a serial killer before, say, 1960 or thereabouts? Now they were as common as crabs on a crack whore. They were in style, and who was he to argue with the arbiters of popular taste?

Anyway, the whole gig had been some serious fununtil he got busted.

He always left the bodies where they fell, to be found by some hiker or park ranger. In two cases, they had never been found at all. Even after his arrest and conviction, when he told the authorities where to look, no remains were recovered. Coyotes and bobcats must have gotten there first, or maybe a flash flood or mudslide had swept the bodies away.

The trouble was that in one instance a body had been found too soon. By sheer bad luck, a motorist stopping to take a roadside pee had stumbled on the remains of Jessica Bender, his last victim, half-hidden in the brush. Because only a few hours had passed since the murder, the crime-scene nerds had been able to retrace Gray's steps and recover the tire marks left by his van. Worse, they had found a few flecks of paint where the van had scraped a yucca plant. The make, model, and color of the van were reported on the news. An overly observant neighbor of Gray's called the police hot line. Gray's prior convictions made him a plausible suspect. A search of his van uncovered hairs and fibers from his girls.

So here he was in a glass cage. All because some asshole couldn't wait to take a piss.

But tomorrow he would have a little surprise in store for the Deputy Dawgs. Something up his sleeve, so to speak.

Gray smiled, staring up at the ceiling of his cell.

In less than sixteen hours, he would be freeor he would be dead.

One way or the other, this was his last night in the Reptile House.