Killer Instinct

NINETEEN

He was home safe now, his freezer restocked, his mind at ease, and his physical needs sated. He felt replenished by the swift taking of the boy's blood, but in those most private of private moments, in his killing mind and soul, he knew that it was not just the blood he needed, but the ritual itself, that it somehow linked him with a heritage he knew only in the innermost, deepest avenues of his psyche, a kind of traveling vampiric genetic predisposition to blood-thirst in its most primal form, and also a predisposition to administer suffering and torturous pain to his victims.

He had unloaded the van, moving from garage to house, placing all his instruments of death into the garage sink, where he routinely cleansed them of any bloody or clinging tissue. The least microscopic tissue match or blood match that might connect him with the victims could be his undoing. He knew this full well. He started the business of cleaning up, his least favorite part of the hunt for fresh prey, when fatigue overcame him.

For the first time in his killing career, he let the cleaning up go for the morning.

The office would be expecting him early tomorrow. Indiana had been trying and he had spent some desperate hours there. When the distraught young thing at the hospital did not come out of the emergency room alone, but in the company of a pair of cops who escorted her from the parking lot with flashing lights, he knew enough to not only slump down in his seat there in the van where he watched them, but not to follow. He knew a curse when he saw one, and his plans for this girl had been cursed from the start.

He drove around the hospital after the police lights disappeared over a mound lined with trees. He cruised about the hospital Jot like a shark surveying its waters until he saw the thin silhouette of a person draped over the front end of an I-Roc with racing stripes, the hood pointing heavenward.

His prayer was answered.

He drove up so that his window was closest to the bony, angular form in the dark, the form that held what he wanted.

“ Car trouble this time of night can be a bitch,” he said casually when he rolled down his window. When the young man stepped into the spray of the sodium-vapor light of the parking lot, he was instantly recognized, and so was the killer.

“ Mr. Matisak? Is that you, sir?”

“ Your lucky night,” he said. “What do you need? A ride?”

“ That's not necessary. I'll just go back inside and phone.”

“ You got auto club?”

“ Nahhh, can't afford it when you've got payments like mine. Have to put it on my Mastercard, I guess, but where the cash'll come from, I don' know. Damned insurance is killing me.”

Tommy Fowler was a fragile-looking man, effeminate in both speech and mannerism. He had long, sandy hair that cut a swath across one eye. He wore the hospital whites of an orderly, but he was too small and thin for an orderly, and so he was relegated to such duties as dispatching the shipment trucks and marking little boxes on hospital forms that indicated shipments of bed linen, towels, syringes, tubes, IV bottles, and drugs in and out of the hospital. It was on the loading dock that Tommy Fowler routinely saw Mr. Matisak, where he knew the other man as a salesman for the Balue-Stork Medical Supply out of Chicago. There are faster ways to die, he thought but did not say. “Yeah, I know about bills,” he said instead. “Look-”

“ Do you know I have to work two jobs just to make-” He made a little gesture as if to pound on the hood of his shimmering white car when he stopped short, controlling the impulse, frowning. “Christ, why'm I bothering you with my troubles? Sure you got your own problems.”

“ Hey, Tommy, if we can't help one another out once in a while, what's it all about? You know?”

Matisak had never offered him the time of day before, Tommy was thinking. Matisak saw this behind the eyes. Matisak hurried the moment along, saying, “I've had a few setbacks lately, too.” He thought of the girl in the waiting room, an hour before.

Matisak had turned up the volume a bit on the beautiful symphony that wafted from his tape deck; the strings were magnificent. He hoped that Tommy would respond to them.

Regarding him with renewed interest, Tommy said softly, “So many… so many slings and arrows the flesh is heir to… and must… must endure.”

Matisak recognized it instantly as a flirtatious remark, and that Tommy likely got off on pain. He was playing right into his hands. He had noticed Tommy before whenever he came to the hospital, but he had never been so attracted to the kid as now. “Slings and arrows, huh? Or is it more like whips and chains the way our bosses get on our behinds?”

This made Tommy laugh lightly.

“ Why don't you make your call from home, Tommy? Make it… easy on yourself. Hop into the van. Hell, I've got a phone in here you can use-right here.”

“ Hey, that'd be great.”

He came around and climbed into the van as Matisak grabbed for the needle he had been holding in reserve for the girl in the waiting room. Now it was Tommy's downer. The boy would do just as well, if not better, he felt, knowing that men actually had more blood in their bodies than women. Matthew Matisak was elated now, his heart pounding, his eyes beaming. The boy must have seen the transformation, because he put a hand out to him, taking his hand in what was ostensibly a shake but which turned into a lingering touch accompanied by a thank-you.

“ It's no big thing,” he replied.

“ But I think it is,” Tommy shot back.

He then let the boy make his phone call, allowing him to relax where he sat, allowing him to finish the call, then he pulled out the hypodermic. “You know I can get you just about anything you want, being in my line of work, Tommy. I mean stuff that'll make the world go away for a while.”

Tommy grinned at this, but said, “Hey, I'm okay. I don't need anything. Life's tough, but right now, I'm clean and I… I sorta want to keep it that way.”

“ Sure, sure, I understand.”

“ What kinda shit you shootin' anyway?”

“ New drug. Nobody's ever heard of it before.”

“ Cocaine base, heroin? What?”

“ Can't explain its effects. Entirely new, Tommy, something developed at Balue-Stork.”

“ Well, I've got to be clear when those guys come for the car, or they'll take me to the cleaner's.”

“ Fuck the car and those guys tonight. We go to your place… we shoot up… see what develops. What do you say?”

This appealed to Tommy, but he still hesitated and finally said, “No, no, man. I'd like to but-”

Matisak saw that he was losing him. He suddenly took hold of the other man's forearm and jammed the hypo into him.

“ Hey, hey, man!” shouted Tommy. “You're going to fucking pop my vein up like a balloon! I got work tomorrow! They see this and it's time to piss in a bottle and my ass is screwed! Damn you, dammit! I said no!”

“ Just a little something to lift your spirits, Tommy,” he told him. “What the fuck is it? What'd you give me?” Tommy plunged out the door on his side, nearly falling. He stumbled around, a little, girlish whimper escaping him, his eyes bulging with fear and confusion. It was a look that fed Matisak, a look that made him brave and arrogant and evil all at once. He climbed down from his side of the van going through what he must do methodically in his mind when he met Tommy there in front of his car, the two men staring at each other, and Tommy coming to realize that there was something more in Matisak's interest in him than helping an acquaintance, or in going to bed with him; there was something primal in his eyes, and there was a scalpel in his hands.

“ What-thaa-hell-ah-ya-doing?” Tommy's speech was slurred along with his vision. “Whaa-was-sat-stuff? Whaa-kinda-stuff-ya?” Tommy pulled away from him, but the potent drug was already coursing through his brain, spinning him like a top. He wheeled and fell between his car and the next, dragging himself along. He felt a pair of powerful hands tearing at his pants leg and shoe. Felt the shoes come off and the socks torn away, but by now it was all as unreal as a dream and he no longer felt the sensation of being held down, and he didn't feel it when the scalpel severed the tendons of both heels.

He didn't feel himself being hefted up like a potato sack by the stronger, larger man, nor the pain of an abrasion to the forehead when he was unceremoniously thrown into the rear of Matisak's recently waxed light silver-gray van. He felt only darkness as Matisak tore his wallet and keys from him. Matisak recouped the shoes and socks, leaving only the small trail of bloodstains that dotted the concrete from the I-Roc to where the back of his van had stood. He then went to the I-Roc, disengaged the alarm with the beeper on the key chain and reached inside for what he wanted, coming out with a garage door opener. This was all done to the sound of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the beautiful music wafting up the side of the hospital to the windows there.

He scanned the windows for any sign of someone's having seen what had occurred here. He saw no one. There were only a handful of lit windows at this hour of the night. He looked in all directions around him. No one.

He next slid back into the driver's seat of the van, where he popped a fresh tape into the player, looked over his shoulder at his prize, and said, “I just want a little blood,” and then he casually drove out of the lot.

A mile away, he turned off the road, brought up his lights and read Tommy's ID card for his address. He hoped it would be a suitable place for gathering up Tommy's blood; he hoped Tommy lived alone; he hoped the rest of the night would go with ease.

And it had, save for a little trouble finding a suitable place to hang Tommy in the necessary position. The drugs had worn off by then and Tommy had come around to find himself with a tourniquet around his neck, hanging upside down and nude. Thus far he had not been scarred or mutilated in any other way than the cutting of the tendons-a precaution-and the near microscopic incision to the jugular where now the spigot dangled, held firm by adhesive tape. He could feel the spigot below his chin and just barely see its end, but he could clearly see the mason jar filling up before his eyes where Matt Matisak held it below the tap in his jugular. The loss of blood further dizzied and overwhelmed Fowler.

Matisak was halfway through filling a jar of blood when Fowler began to thrash, spilling some of the vital juice, staining the cheap, imitation oriental rug below the banister of the stairs leading to the second floor. This made Matisak curse. He then stopped the flow of blood, turning off the thumb-tack-sized dial of the spigot and tightening the tourniquet until Tommy choked.

Tommy began crying, blubbering incoherently. Matisak told him, “I thought you were into pain, Tommy.” His voice choked off, his eyes alone pleading with the mad Matisak, Fowler left the killer no choice. He turned his scalpel on the young man's eyes, swiping at them, making him flinch. But he did not want to cut his eyes. Not yet, anyway. He didn't want to open another wound in this section of the body. It would reduce the powerful flow at the jugular, and it would cause a bigger loss than the spill Tommy had caused.

He just needed to calm Tommy down.. He looked for the hypodermic he had prepared, found the milder dose of barbiturate and plunged this into Tommy's tied arm. It was enough of a dose to keep the other man lulled, until the blood-taking was complete. He didn't have time for games, not this time.

Afterward, he slashed the eyes, as he did with all his victims; not because he had an eye fetish, or because he didn't want the victim to see him, or as some shrink would have it, put out the eyes to save the poor victim from the sight of his own dying, but because it would confound police authorities.

With the same cold logic, with Tommy long dead now, he went to work on the genitals and limbs using his power tools. Once he was satisfied with this work, he looked into his case for the sable-hair paintbrush. To the sound of a light drizzle against the panes of the little house. Teach painted the bloodless open wounds, sucking in the odor of the blood as he dipped the brush into the jar and moved it across Tommy Fowler's throat.

It had become late by then, and he must get back to Chicago. But he mustn't rush too wildly. He mustn't leave anything of himself behind.

Now that Matisak was home from his Indiana run, he stared into a picture of Tommy Fowler, a photograph he had found in the young man's home. He smiled at the memories and placed the photo on a large board filled with the photos of his other victims on the wall in his old grandfather's and his father's den, which was now his den. He sat back and gazed into the faces of his victims, reliving the moments at the end that he had spent with each, the moment he literally held their lives in his hand.

Maybe a bath before turning in would be nice, he thought. He had enough blood now, for a while anyway. Yes, a bath would be refreshing. He allowed the dirty tools, for once, to sit.?