Murder House

30

Dede Paris and Annie Church have disappeared. They were last seen leaving their last final exam at Yale on May 9, completing their sophomore years. They said something vague to their friends about backpacking through Europe with the cash they’ve saved up while waitressing. They told their parents they were going to stay in New Haven for summer school and rent an apartment with their waitressing money. Neither set of parents made any attempt to verify their stories. Since May 9, over three weeks ago, no known acquaintance or family member has seen either woman.

Which is exactly how they want it.

Dede and Annie rush out of the ocean, holding hands, and find their towels and bags and umbrella. They slip into their flip-flops and don their shades. They are two beautiful, tanned twenty-year-olds, euphoric with love, with very few answers in life yet but, fortunately, very few questions, either. They will have the rest of their lives to discover their calling, to do their internships, apply to grad school, and brace for a hard world. This summer, they’re going to discover each other, and nothing else.

By the time they reach the place where they’re staying, their skin has long dried, and the withering oven-hot sun beats down on them. Fortunately, they don’t have to go far. Their place is just a two-minute walk from the beach. They’re staying at 7 Ocean Drive.

Well, it’s not their place, exactly. But nobody else is staying here, and it would be a shame for it to stay empty all summer, wouldn’t it?

“I love how freak-show this house is,” Dede says, looking up at the scowling Gothic structure. She is tall and lanky, with bleached-blond hair cropped like a boy’s that practically glows against her suntan. “I keep waiting for Elvira to pop out or something.”

They turn east, walking along the southern border of the estate, covered by thick shrubbery that is taller than they are. Dede, the more athletic and adventurous of the two, was the first to explore the shrubbery, looking for a point of entry. The coiled-wire fence hidden within the shrubbery was formidable but nothing that a good set of shears couldn’t handle, if you had time and patience, and they have plenty of both this summer. Besides, it didn’t have to be pretty, just a large enough hole for them to slip through, the slipping made easier by the thick pieces of rubber they’ve tied over the jagged edges of fence to avoid cuts and scratches during ingress and egress. Sure, they have to squat down and turn sideways to make it through, but it’s worth it — rent free and a ten-thousand-square-foot mansion all to themselves.

As they slide through the opening, Annie looks up at the mansion, the faded multicolored limestone, the stained glass and sharply pitched roofs and medieval-style adornments. She remembers the week she spent in the Hamptons as a girl, when she and her sister heard all about this place.

“No one ever leaves alive / The house at 7 Ocean Drive,” she says in her best ghoulish horror-movie voice, repeating the poem she’d heard. “Not friend or foe, not man or mouse / Can e’er survive the Murder House.”

“That creeps me out,” Dede says.

They head toward the rear of the house. The ten-foot shrubbery provides good cover on the grounds, but the mansion itself is perched on a hill, and they’ve decided their entries and exits should be as covert as possible. In the rear there is a door that, once upon a time, was probably reserved for the servants. The door doesn’t have a knob, just a latch held closed by a chain, another victim of Dede’s shears.

The smell of disinfectant and soap greets them when they open the door. They scrubbed down the rear entrance the first time they came in, clearing out the cobwebs, mopping the floor, scrubbing the walls. The first thing they see is the door to the basement, which is likewise chained. Sure, they thought it was a little odd that an interior door would be locked in such a way, but they haven’t bothered to investigate. There’s enough house without it, and their tolerance for creepy has just about hit its limit. The basement will remain a mystery.

They pass through the foyer, ignoring the museum-like rooms on each side, and climb the winding, creaky stairs. A veranda off a bedroom on the third floor that they found last week has a panoramic view of the ocean.

Annie leans against the railing, sighing with satisfaction. Her hair, up in a ponytail, is the color of cinnamon but has lightened in the sun. Dede comes up behind her and kisses her long bronzed neck. She runs her hands along the outline of Annie’s figure. Annie leans back into Dede’s arms, gently humming as Dede cups her breasts, caresses the skin on her flat belly. “That tickles,” says Annie as she turns to face Dede. They kiss deeply and lie down together on the blanket they’ve spread out, their legs intertwined.

And then they hear a noise. The hollow clink of metal tapping metal, and footsteps, and then a man whistling. Staying low, they inch toward the side of the veranda and peek through the wooden supports.

A man approaches the side of the house with a long ladder held at his side. He is shirtless and looks pretty damn good that way, a V-shaped physique, rippled abs. His curly dark hair falls from a Yankees cap, turned backward.

“Hot tool-belt guy,” Annie whispers. “If I liked boys...”

The hot tool-belt guy drops the ladder against the side of the house and quickly climbs up. The women don’t move, holding their breath, as he reaches their level on the third floor.

“Just behave yourselves, ladies,” he says without looking in their direction. “Deal?”

Busted! Neither woman says anything. Neither woman moves.

“Deal?” he repeats.

Dede stands up, leans on the railing. “We have to behave? That’s no fun.”

Annie stands up, too. “So what’s your story, guy?”

The man gestures upward with his chin. “Me, I’m just patching up the flat roof. Not having as much fun as you, looks like.”

“That’s not fair,” Annie says, which sounds close to an invitation. She gets an elbow from Dede. “So what’s your name?”

“Noah,” he says.

“Are you going to turn us in, Noah?” Dede asks.

He considers them a moment. “Well, that wouldn’t be very nice, would it?”

“It sure wouldn’t.”

“Just don’t make a mess while you’re here,” he says. “I’ll have to clean it up.”

He starts to climb. Both girls can’t help but enjoy the view. Straight or gay, this guy is hard not to admire.

“And one more thing,” he says as he reaches the flat roof. “Don’t go in the basement.”

“Why’s that, Noah?”

“Didn’t you hear? This house is haunted.” The man hauls himself up on the roof and disappears.

31

Annie’s beater VW Bug pulls up to the gate of 7 Ocean Drive. The sun has fallen now at nine o’clock, so all is clear. When they use their car, which isn’t very often, they prefer to enter and exit under the cover of darkness.

Dede gets out to push open the massive gate, using all her weight to do so. Once it’s open, she turns back, squinting into the car’s headlights.

Beyond the beams, across the street, she sees someone, standing flat-footed, looking at her. She does a double take, shields her eyes with a hand — which doesn’t really help — and moves away from the blinding beams to get a better look. It seems as if... the figure moves along with her, and then disappears — maybe into the shrubbery? — leaving Dede with spots in her vision from the car lights.

Dede rushes back to the car and gets in.

“What’s the matter?” Annie asks.

“I thought I... saw someone. Across the street. Staring at us. Watching us.”

Annie strains to look behind her. “I didn’t see anyone when we drove up.”

“I know. Me either.”

“What did he look like?”

Dede lets out a shudder. “Couldn’t really see. A man, looked like. Kind of — you’re gonna laugh — like a scarecrow, sort of? Like, his hair was all stringy and sticking out. He had a hat on, too, I think.”

“A scarecrow?” Annie looks at Dede with mock horror. “You don’t think... the Tin Man might be out there, too?”

“Stop.”

“Not the Cowardly Lion!” Annie brings a hand to her mouth.

“Just drive the car.”

Annie pats Dede’s leg. “You’re paranoid, girl. We’re not supposed to be here, so you think everyone’s looking to bust us. I mean, someone walking down Ocean Drive in the summer isn’t exactly unusual.” She puts the car into gear and drives through the gate. Dede closes the gate behind them, taking another look across the street and seeing nothing.

“That’s the thing, though,” she says when she reenters the car. “He wasn’t walking. He was just watching us. I mean, I think. With the headlights, I couldn’t really see. It could just be my eyes playing tricks.”

Annie pulls the Beetle onto the grass next to the massive detached garage, hidden from sight. She lets out a sigh. “Good to be home,” she says. “There’s no place like home. There’s no place like—”

“Would you shut up?”

As they walk toward the back entrance, they see the ladder the hot tool-belt guy used yesterday, broken down and lying in the grass. “Noah was cute,” Annie says.

“Was he? Was he cute?” Dede throws another elbow.

“Now, now, dearest, I only have eyes for you.”

Inside, they unpack their groceries. They’ve found a place in Montauk that sells lobster tails and oysters at nontourist prices, and Dede apparently looks old enough to buy champagne — the cheapest they had. Tonight is an anniversary of sorts, exactly six months from the day they met on campus.

Annie gets the food ready while whistling that Wizard of Oz song “If I Only Had a Brain.” Dede keeps punching her playfully in the arm, but it only emboldens Annie. As much as it gets under her skin, it’s one of the reasons Dede loves her.

Yes, she thinks, I do love her. Dede has no trouble opening her heart to Annie. She’s accepted her sexual orientation for years now. She came out in high school, and she grew up in Santa Monica, where they practically throw you a parade for doing so. Annie, though, had never been with a woman before meeting Dede. Of course, she knew, on some level, but growing up in rural Michigan, she didn’t acknowledge her sexual preference to her friends or her devout Catholic parents, or even to herself. You’d think, by 2007, people would have loosened up enough, but Dede knows as well as anyone that discrimination doesn’t evaporate overnight but slowly fades over time.

Dinner is great. The dining room is over-the-top ornate, full of all kinds of detail on the walls, little statuettes perched around the room, tall windows with ornamental trim, an enormous chandelier hovering over a big five-sided dark oak table that’s surrounded by high-backed chairs with leather cushions. It’s like Henry VIII meets Count Dracula.

On their jam box, they play some symphonic music that Annie, the violinist, chose; she plays maestro, conducting the music with her fork. And the lobster and oysters are delicious. The cheap champagne is like Pop Rocks in Dede’s mouth. It goes to her head quickly, enhancing her euphoria. Annie is it, she thinks. She is my one and only.

The window rattles and Dede turns to it. The wind, surely. But still, she walks over and cups her hand over the glass to block the interior reflection, looking out onto Ocean Drive.

“Is the Scarecrow still out there? I’d be more worried about him, if he only had a brain.”

“You’ve been waiting to say that, haven’t you?” Dede looks back and finds Annie sitting on the windowsill on the opposite side of the dining room. “What are you doing?”

Annie has her Swiss Army knife open, carving into the wood.

“Annie, you can’t do that! This place is, like, three hundred years old. And it’s not like you can just erase that.”

Dede walks over to get a look at what Annie is doing. As Dede suspected, she is carving their initials in jagged letters:

“I don’t want to erase it,” Annie says. “I want it to be here forever.”

Dede puts her arm around Annie and draws her close, breathing in her shampoo. “Forever?” she says tentatively. Her heart is pounding. This is one of those moments when she feels so vulnerable, her heart laid bare to be embraced or trampled.

“Forever.” Annie looks up at Dede. The champagne tastes even better to Dede the second time, on Annie’s tongue.

32

The girls staying at 7 Ocean Drive are now on the second floor of the mansion, the southwest bedroom. The purple-and-gold bedroom, with the canopy bed and the velvet. The master bedroom where, over two hundred years ago, Winston Dahlquist once slept.

They are naked, and they are doing very fun things to each other. Their young bodies are shapely and athletic and limber, fueled by lust and maybe love — who can say? — and helped mightily by the two bottles of champagne they’ve drunk. The alcohol has undoubtedly lowered their inhibitions, and also impaired their judgment a bit — which is probably why they’ve forgotten to pull the bedroom drapes.

Now, to be fair, the bedroom window looks south, toward the beach and ocean, with only one house in between, which is not nearly as tall. A reasonable person would thus believe that, even with the drapes open wide as they are, she would not be visible to anyone.

But a reasonable person might not expect a man to be standing on the beach, peering northward with a pair of binoculars.

The man who thinks of himself as Holden lowers the binoculars and lets them hang around his neck. Wait — no — no, no. He removes the binoculars and throws them into his bag, which he calls his Fun Bag. This time of night, having binoculars is a dead giveaway — no chance of bird-watching or any other legitimate reason for using them, at ten in the evening. You might just as well wear a sign that says PEEPING TOM.

Be more careful, Holden! He likes calling himself that name. It gets him in the mood, in much the same way the alcohol gets those girls feeling more sexually adventurous. He rolls his neck. Stretches his arms. Cracks his knuckles. Jogs in place a moment, some sand kicking up.

He picks up his Fun Bag and climbs the beach onto Ocean Drive. He is happy, almost giddy. The sky is a deep purple and a soft wind plays with his hair. He is healthy and prepared. Tonight, he is Holden, and he can do anything.

He wonders how long they’ll stay up in the bedroom. Could be they’ll fall asleep, exhausted from the alcohol and sex. It won’t matter. He’ll be prepared either way.

They probably have the doors locked. They certainly should — there are scary people out there! Not that a lock will stop him.

He has a key to the place, after all.

But the front door isn’t an option — too creaky and noisy. No, he’ll use his private entry, his secret way into the house, reserved for special occasions.

Because this has all the makings of a special occasion.

33

Holden rests in the room that Winston Dahlquist once called the guest parlor, a waiting room of sorts off the ground-floor living room. It is ridiculously ornate, like all the rooms — candelabra and chandeliers and custom molding, a fireplace and a marble mantel, a Persian area rug.

They are almost directly above him. He closes his eyes and listens to their laughter upstairs. They are in love, he thinks, or at least they sound like it. His heart is pounding. He is here, and they don’t know it. That is special all by itself — they think they’re sharing something intimate, but he gets to be a part of it.

He opens up a small compact and checks himself over. His hair is smartly combed. His shirt is pressed. His beige trousers are new. His erection is at full mast, pushing against his trousers.

There’s no way to describe this. One part forbidden, one part intimate, one part sexual, and one part full of possibilities unknown even to him — he’s not sure what he’s going to do yet. There should be a word for how he feels.

He thinks of how they’d react if they saw him. What they would say. What they would do. The snappy dialogue that would ensue. The flirtation. They’d be attracted to him, wouldn’t they? Of course they would. Maybe a... a threesome? Wow. Maybe.

Footsteps overhead. Holden shakes out of his fantasy and listens closely. The footsteps are heading... where? Down the hallway toward the staircase?

No. No, she’s just walking into the master bedroom. He hears the water turn on now.

He sighs. This is not good enough, not real enough. He thought this was going to be special. This is kind of fun, but not special. He’s too far away from them, too remote. Should he go up the stairs? No, that would be too risky.

The kitchen, maybe. There will be glasses and dishes they touched. Maybe an article of clothing they left behind? That would help. That would really help.

He has to take a piss. But he can’t do that. Even if he used the bathroom near the back, and even if he sat down like a girl to cut down on the noise, he’d either have to flush — which they’d hear — or leave evidence behind. He’s not stupid. He’s not stupid at all. Stupid? He’s the opposite of stupid. He’s really smart.

Oh, maybe he should just leave.

But tonight I’m Holden.

Okay. He removes his shoes to minimize his footfalls and drops them in the Fun Bag. He picks it up and pushes through the French doors quietly, into the living room. From there, he walks through the foyer. He stops at the staircase, where he hears them upstairs singing in unison to Justin Timberlake:

“I’ll let you whip me if I misbehaaaave! / It’s just that no one makes me feel this way...”

He smiles to himself, feels himself relax. Feeling better, he walks into the dining room, where two empty bottles of champagne, an empty bottle of Evian, a bottle of Tabasco, two plates of discarded lobster tails and oyster shells, and a dish of horseradish rest on the pentagonal table beneath a grand chandelier. Winston Dahlquist used to bring the girls in here. They’d feast on duck and lobster and dates and olives. They’d drink the finest French wines. He probably viewed it as fattening them up before the slaughter.

He hikes the Fun Bag over his shoulder, carefully picks up one of the empty champagne bottles and one of the plates, and heads into the kitchen.

He’s never liked the kitchen much because it’s not original. Back when Winston built this place, the kitchen was for servants only, tiny and functional. Winston’s descendants remodeled the kitchen in the seventies, tripling the size, installing cherrywood cabinets, marble countertops, and stainless steel appliances. It just looks like a boring kitchen, no character. But it’s safe, and it will have to do.

He opens up the Fun Bag just to be safe, just to be sure, just to be prepared. He thinks of the girls having sex upstairs, and then singing “SexyBack,” and it helps him. They’d like him. He’s sure of it. They could share so much.

He smells the champagne bottle. Nothing special. Then he sees lipstick on it, so he touches it with his lips. Not cherry ChapStick, but red and sticky and sweet. Yes. Good. This is getting better now. This was a good idea—

And then it happens in an instant, sneaking up on him, how, how it could have happened he isn’t sure, because he’s so cautious and careful, but he hears footsteps bounding down the stairs and suddenly those footsteps are in the dining room, adjacent to the kitchen, where he is. He moves very quietly toward the opening, hoping, praying that nobody heard him, and peeks into the dining room.

It’s the blonde, the taller one with the short hair. She’s unplugging the stereo resting on the windowsill. She looks good bending over, just wearing a bra and panties. So firm and lean. So... so special.

Oh, God, if I could just...

He ducks back, just on the off chance that she might cast a glance in his direction. His heartbeat is drumming so loudly that he can’t hear, he can’t think straight, but he prepares just in case, he’s had it planned out just in case, and he recites it to himself now. I’m the owner. This is my house. Just in case.

And he reaches into the Fun Bag, also just in case.

He slowly steps back into the recesses of the kitchen and holds his breath.

It’ll be okay, he thinks. This will be better. It will enhance the whole experience, make it more real, more vivid.

That’s what he’s telling himself when the blond girl walks into the kitchen.

34

The blond girl doesn’t see him at first. Her head is down and she’s balancing the remnants of the meal — the champagne and water bottles, the plates of food and the Tabasco — and turns toward the counter in the center of the kitchen to plop it all down before she even realizes she’s not alone.

She recoils in an instant, her breath whisked away in surprise, her hands rising up defensively, everything she’d been holding crashing to the tile floor. Glass shatters everywhere. The sound only amplifies her shock.

Be indignant. This is your house. She’s the intruder. Say that. Say that!

“I’m the... owner,” he manages. He raises a hand in peace.

The girl is too stunned for a moment, but Holden planned this out well. The words did the trick. She doesn’t turn and run, not immediately.

“Oh — oh. I — you’re the own—”

“Dede? Is everything okay?” It’s the other girl. “Dede?”

The blonde looks back toward the living room, then back at Holden.

“How... many of you are... here?” he asks. Excellent! Just what an indignant owner would say.

“Just two of — oh. Oh.” Her eyes dart downward just as Holden feels the warm stain spreading across his crotch. He just pissed himself. He looks down, and then back up at her.

“We’ll leave right now, mister. I’m really sorry.”

She spins on her heels to leave. Holden closes the distance between them in an instant. She senses his approach and starts to run and is nearly out the door when he reaches her, stabbing the Taser into the back of her neck. She goes down hard, her body suddenly limp and unable to break her fall, her face smacking against the kitchen wall and landing hard on the ceramic tile.

“Dede?” comes the voice from upstairs.

Holden drags the blond girl — Dede — into the kitchen, away from the view of the dining room, a trail of blood smearing in her wake. Is she... dead? The fall was nasty. She’s bleeding from the nose and forehead.

What has he done? What’s he going to do? He’s thinking fast, but the adrenaline is catching up with him now and he can’t let it paralyze him, he’s got to think-think-think—

Hearing the urgent footfalls in the living room, Holden grabs a frying pan from the overhead rack and raises it above his head. The brunette gasps before she’s even entered — seeing the bloodstain first, no doubt — and when she rushes in, her eyes are already cast downward at her lover. She lets out a horrific scream as she looks up to meet Holden’s eyes, but by then the frying pan is already crashing down on the crown of her skull.

The pan almost bounces out of Holden’s hand from the harsh impact. He’s never hit anything so hard. The brunette is stunned, reaching for support but unable to find any. She sinks to her knees, still upright but precariously so, and before she falls like a tower tumbling over, Holden raises the pan and cracks it against her skull a second time. When she crumples to the floor, she is lifeless, like a balloon figurine that the air has been let out of. Her eyes are open but still.

Is she dead?

Holden bounces on his toes, looking at each of them. The blonde is still breathing. The brunette is not.

“It was a... accident,” he says. “I didn’t... I just wanted...”

What does he do now? Panic sweeps over him. Run, he thinks, but No, too many clues left behind. The blonde knows what he looks like.

She moans. Her shoulders move. She’s trying to turn over.

Holden watches her. Watches her struggle. Watches her suffer.

But this is their fault. They shouldn’t have surprised him. They made him do this.

“No... no...” The blonde is making noise on the floor. He taps her with his foot. She groans in response. He bends down and rolls her over on her back. Turns her bloodied face to the left, so she can see her girlfriend.

“Look at her,” he says. “Look.”

Her eyes widen in horror. She manages a low, guttural, garbled wail.

It’s the most beautiful sound he’s ever heard.

35

Holden puts a hand on his stomach. It causes a physical pain, a rumble in his stomach like hunger for food, a growl that resembles the angry hum of the motorcycle on which he’s riding at the moment.

He needs it again. He needs the thrill of the chase, the anticipation, the climax itself. It’s been over a year since Dede and Annie, and he can’t decide what was most invigorating: the initial approach, sneaking into the mansion; the physical act; the pain and suffering...

...so much to choose from. It’s kind of like deciding what you like best about pizza, the cheese or the sauce or the toppings; they are inseparable ingredients of a delicious experience. But if he had to choose, it was none of those things. No, it was the aftermath, what’s happened every day since, the feeling of invincibility that comes with knowing he got away with it, that he can do whatever he pleases and nobody can catch him, nobody can stop him.

Oh, there was an investigation. Apparently the girls, Dede Paris and Annie Church, hadn’t told anyone where they were spending the summer. They had told their friends one lie, their parents another, but nobody the truth. It was only through cell phone records that authorities were able to place them in the Hamptons at all. But it was over two weeks after he’d killed them that a search even began, and it wasn’t much of a search. Nobody had any idea where the girls were staying in the Hamptons. They never even focused on Bridgehampton, much less the house at 7 Ocean Drive. The best guess was that the girls were staying in Montauk, because that was where they found Annie’s car, in a tow yard after it had been parked illegally in a church parking lot, stripped of its license plates. (Yes, Holden has congratulated himself for moving her car.) It was when the authorities found the car that they officially determined... drumroll, please... that “foul play” was involved.

Ta-da! They don’t have a clue. The lesson: You can do whatever you want. If you’re smart. If you’re disciplined. If you take care in choosing your victims. If you don’t get greedy.

He drives by the nightclub again, passing the alley where they congregate in the shadows, waiting for any car that might pull over. He slows his motorcycle to an idle and looks to his right, directly where he knows they are. Several of them step out from the shadows into the light of the streetlamp in their skintight dresses, hiked up to show plenty of leg, their hair teased up, their boobs pushed out, hoping to make eye contact with potential customers. There are a half dozen of them, a nice variety of busty and petite, white and black and Hispanic. A smorgasbord of potential victims.

Victims. It’s fun to think of them that way. Not women but prey.

He immediately crosses the tall, leggy blonde off the list, because she is too much like Dede — though Dede ended up being great fun in the end. Still, variety is the spice of life, and, more to the point, an intelligent man like Holden realizes that he cannot leave a pattern of any kind in his wake.

He quickly narrows it down to a busty black woman and a petite blonde.

The blond one it is! Smaller, probably no more than a hundred pounds, and therefore easier to subdue, should any difficulty arise.

But why should any difficulty arise? He has his Fun Bag back at the motel. And unlike last time, when Dede and Annie surprised him, this time he’ll have the chance to show off his charm, to gain her trust, lure her in.

She’ll have no idea what’s coming. She’ll probably think the corkscrew is for a bottle of champagne. She’ll think the handcuffs are just a kinky sex thing.

She might wonder about the handheld kitchen torch, though.

It’s past midnight and there is a healthy stream of people coming and going from the club nearby. Witnesses, potentially — a careful man like Holden thinks of such things — but most are drunk and, in the end, what could they say about him? He’s wearing a helmet with a tinted face shield, and he’s removed the license plate. All anyone could possibly describe is a guy in a leather jacket wearing a helmet on a black motorcycle.

Anyway, if it was entirely risk-free, it wouldn’t be any fun.

Yet he feels a pang of doubt, even as he nods toward the petite blonde. Can he go through with it? He’s rusty; it’s been over a year. As much as he’s been romanticizing it since then, he now remembers how scared he was at the time. Exhilarated, yes, but scared, too.

On his nod, the blonde saunters up to him, wearing a black outfit that covers little more than a bikini would. Her belly is flat, with a piercing through her navel. She has the body of a twenty-year-old, the face of someone older, more seasoned, more worked over. Her heels make her two inches taller, but she’s a little thing.

“Hi, handsome. You want some company?”

“I want... all night,” he says, keeping his helmet on, the face shield down.

“I’m by the hour, hon.”

“I want... all night.” That’s Holden being smart. If she’s leaving for the night, nobody will expect her back in an hour. Nobody will think to look for her at least until tomorrow. Assuming anybody looks for her, period.

“The whole night? That’s two thousand.” She runs her hand over his arm, the leather of his jacket. “It’s worth it.”

“No,” he says. See, that’s Holden being smart again — make her think this is a real negotiation, that he actually plans on paying her something. “Five hundred.”

“Five hundred for this?” she says, running her hands over the outline of her body, moving to the music coming from the nightclub. “C’mon, lover, fifteen hundred. For a night you’ll never forget.”

He doesn’t know what a streetwalker makes in a night, but it can’t be anywhere near that. “A... thousand,” he says.

“Awww, baby. Hang on.” The girl walks back to her friends and says something. See, you were right — she’s telling them she’s done for the night, not to expect her back. Smart, Holden.

“Do I need a helmet?” she asks when she hops on the bike.

He turns back to her as she wraps her arms around his waist.

“No,” he says. “You’re safe with me.”

36

Holden and the blond hooker drive to a motel off Sunrise Highway. He rented the room two days ago, paying in cash and asking for a room in the back away from traffic. He parks within ten feet of the door and brings the girl inside. The room isn’t much to look at. The carpet is torn up, the wallpaper is peeling, the lighting is dim, and the mattress is about as thick as a slice of cheese. But it’s clean and it doesn’t smell. He’s seen worse. And he’s certain she has, too.

He sets his helmet on the small table where the television sits. He spots the Fun Bag in the corner, just where he left it. He looks in the mirror and fixes his hair.

“We need to take care of business first.”

He turns and gets his first look at her in normal lighting. She has a round face, her eyes set slightly too far apart, with a crooked smile that is probably supposed to be sexy. Her dirty-blond hair is teased up in some kind of bun on top of her head. She is very slender, and her skin is pale and freckly. Her breasts are small and her butt is tiny and round.

“Okay.” He has a thousand in cash. He peels it out and hands it to her. She stuffs it in her purse. Is that her idea of safekeeping? It must be. Though it’s not that safe. She’s in a room with a stranger, after all. It’s not safe at all. She’s not safe at all. But that’s an occupational hazard. Everything she does is full of risk. That must be hard, having to make a living by meeting strange men and—

Stop it. Stop thinking like that.

“I’m gonna freshen up,” she says, and then she spins on her heels and heads to the bathroom, her red purse slung over her shoulder.

He looks at himself in the mirror. Don’t start thinking about her life. Think about what you want. Think about what you’re going to do. Think about the handcuffs and the corkscrew and the torch. Don’t fuck this up. You’ve been waiting a year for this—

She returns looking a little more chipper, her eyes glassy.

She’s high. She took something in the bathroom.

He looks over her arms. No signs of needle marks. Cocaine, probably. That’s probably how she gets through this job, high as a kite.

Stop it. You don’t give a shit about her or how she copes with life.

You don’t care.

“So what’s your pleasure, guy?” Her tone is less flirtatious than it was on the street. More businesslike.

“My...?”

“What do you want me to do?” Her eyes bug out, like she’s impatient.

“I just... can we... can we just... talk?”

He’s trembling. She looks at his hands. She sees it, too.

“Okay, we can talk.” She sits down on the bed and looks up at him. “What do you wanna talk about?”

“I...” He swallows hard. What the hell is wrong with you? “What’s your name?”

She shrugs. “What do you want it to be?”

He shakes his head. “No... no.”

“Okay, my name’s Barbie.”

Her name isn’t Barbie. That’s her street name.

“Do you... wanna know... my name?”

“Sure, mister. Lots of guys don’t want to tell me their name. It’s your money.”

He stares at her, unsure of himself.

“Okay, what’s your name, guy?”

She’s so hardened. Deadened. Drugged out. She’ll spread her legs for him or suck him off, she’ll twist and turn her body however he asks, but she won’t really be here. This isn’t real.

It’s not supposed to be like this. Dede and Annie, they were real. He thought the one thing missing was that he didn’t know them first, didn’t get intimate with them, killed them almost at first sight. But that was better. That was better than this—

“Got anything to drink, mister?”

He shakes his head, unable to speak. He should’ve thought of that. He should’ve had a bottle of whiskey or something.

“Got any music?”

Shit. He shakes his head again. He feels everything slipping away, every turn a wrong one...

“I... can’t,” he whispers.

“Can’t what?”

Sweat has broken out on his forehead. His pulse is racing. He doesn’t feel right.

“I can’t... kill you,” he says. His eyes slowly rise to meet hers.

She studies him a moment, lips parted, fear beginning to spread across her face. He feels himself getting hard. He feels the energy suddenly fueling him.

And then her eyes grow big again, when she sees the look on his face.

There. There it is!

She bounces off the bed, rushing for the door.

Yes.

“No!” she cries as he grabs her arm. “No, please!”

He pins her up against the wall, bringing a hand over her mouth. She bites down on his hand, causing a glorious pain, but he pushes back hard, slamming her head against the wall with all the force he can summon. Her eyes roll back and she begins to slide down the wall, unconscious.

He lowers himself, sliding down with her. He drags her over near the bed and lays her out properly.

“Thank you, Barbie,” he whispers.

He handled this wrong, but she salvaged it for him, a last-minute save.

He learned something. He won’t make this mistake again.

He walks to the corner to get his Fun Bag.