Shiver

8

At six o’clock, having finished his dinner, Rood set about making his preparations for the night’s work.

From his bookshelf he pulled out a copy of the 1990 Thomas Guide for Los Angeles County, a spiral-bound map-book with an alphabetized directory covering every street in the county. He pinpointed Miss Wendy Alden’s address-9741 Palm Vista Avenue-and marked it in red ink.

Then he peered into the large canvas drawstring bag he used for carrying his tools and trophies, taking inventory of its contents.

The hacksaw, fitted with a fresh tungsten-carbide blade. Two spare blades, in case the first one broke; bone was tough. The clay gryphon, carefully wrapped in plastic. His Toshiba tape recorder with a built-in omnidirectional microphone, loaded with a blank thirty-minute cassette; he would clip the tape recorder to his belt before the kill. A jumbo two-gallon Baggie, in which Miss Alden’s head would be sealed. A wire twist tie for the Baggie. Saran Wrap for the hacksaw, which would be bloody, dripping; no use getting the bag soiled. A metal loid and wire tool for opening locked doors. A roll of electrician’s tape and a hammer, useful for breaking windows with a minimum of noise; he’d tried that technique for the first time at Miss Osborn’s place, and it had worked wonderfully well. A Tekna Micro-Lite miniature flashlight, four inches long. A pair of night-vision binoculars for scoping his victim from the street.

His weapon and his leather gloves were tucked in the side pockets of his black winter coat, which he now shrugged on.

Yes, he decided as he reviewed a mental checklist. He had everything.

He left his apartment, shut and locked the front door, and let the screen door bang shut. In the newly fallen darkness he crossed the courtyard, a patchwork of cracked concrete and rectangular grass strips. From the apartment across the way came the steady barking of Mrs. Weiman’s German shepherd, Sherlock. The dog was often allowed to wander the courtyard, and Rood invariably stopped to scratch him behind the ears. He loved animals. In truth, he vastly preferred them to human beings. He had never been what one might call a “people” person.

His car was parked on the street. It was a 1963 Ford Falcon, the Futura Sports Coupe model, a white two-door hardtop with a tan interior. When viewed from the front, the Falcon looked squarish, almost boxy, but in profile its lines were as sleek and streamlined as a Fifties rocketship, the kind that was always setting down on a planet of nubile young women and enlarged iguanas, amid the alien vegetation of Griffith Park.

The word FORD was emblazoned in silver capitals across the hood, above the chrome grillwork and the huge round glassy headlights. Under the hood, a V-8 engine lay concealed, quiet now, like a somnolent animal, but poised to awaken with a growl at the turning of a key. More bold silver spelled out FALCON across the rear end of the trunk lid; below it gleamed the taillights, each one a red circle of molded plastic with a plastic knob embedded in its center, looking uncannily like a nipple. Arrowlike strips of chrome had once graced the sides of the car, but these had fallen off, leaving empty grooves in the metal.

Rood had bought the Falcon in Idaho a month before his move to L.A. two years ago. He was not a connoisseur of classic cars, but he appreciated old-fashioned workmanship, the solidity of a thing made to last. At the time of his purchase, the Falcon’s odometer had registered eighty-six thousand miles; he’d realized, of course, that the car must have clocked far more mileage than that, with the odometer resetting to zero every hundred thousand miles. Yet even after the decades of hard service the car had delivered, it remained dependable; never once had it broken down.

What had drawn him to the car most of all, however, had been neither its design nor its durability, but that name: Falcon. The bird of prey, riding the high thermals, quartering the land below, then swooping out of the sun, its shadow the black shape of death, claws extended to snatch up the squeaking innocent, and rising, wings spread, talons strewed with blood. Falcon. Yes. Rood liked the sound of that.

Unlocking the door. Rood placed his canvas bag carefully on the floor of the backseat, then slid into the driver’s seat and started the engine. When he closed his fists over the simulated wood-grain steering wheel, he smiled, pleased with the hard smoothness of it.

He turned the key in the ignition, switched on the headlights to cut the night, and motored south for a few blocks, hooking east on Olympic Boulevard. As he drove, he tuned the radio to a pop-music station. Rood liked songs, nice songs, not this modern rap garbage or this heavy-metal ugliness.

“Desperado” came on. The song was one of his favorites. He admired the romanticized portrait of the outlaw, the loner, the man who refused to play by the rules. Of course the message of the song was that the loner was wrong, that he should give up his life and settle down, become ordinary. But Rood was sure that the message had been inserted only to appeal to the gutter filth who bought popular records; their mean prejudices and narrow outlook must be appeased.

The same cowardly appeasement could be seen in Hollywood movies. At the end of nearly every one, the villain got killed in some messy and horrible way, and the audience clapped their hooves and baaed and bleated in satisfaction. But, in truth, the villains were the real heroes, because they stepped outside society’s boundaries, they dared for greatness, they endured the loneliness of the outcast, just as the musical desperado did; and though their lives ended in blood and fury, they died as martyrs to a great cause, the cause of superiority to the mundane.

Better to reign in hell than serve in heav’n, Rood thought, quoting Mr. John Milton, who in turn had been quoting Lucifer.

He turned south on Beverly Glen Boulevard, passing the apartment building where Miss Rebecca Morris had lived. The sight evoked pleasant memories; he smiled in warm nostalgia. Miss Morris had made a fine kill, but there were far finer ones to come. What he had done in the past few years was only the beginning. Dimly he’d glimpsed his future, and it was magnificent. Songs and poems would commemorate him. Some unborn Homer would chart his odyssey. Statues would be raised in his image, and monuments in his name.

It had been a long road he’d traveled to reach the threshold of such greatness. As a child he could never have predicted his awesome destiny. He had been weak then. Yes, weak from the beginning.

His mother had often told him the story of his difficult birth, three weeks ahead of schedule, and how the small, wet, shriveled, wailing thing in her arms had not been expected to survive for more than a few days. An inauspicious arrival for one who would someday become the destroyer of worlds.

He had survived, of course, and grown; but he had not grown well. His weakness as an infant hung on like a stubborn illness. He developed into a skinny, nearsighted child blinking at life through thick lenses in owlish frames. He couldn’t run more than a few yards without tiring, couldn’t bat a ball or throw one, couldn’t chin himself even once. He had no skill at sports, no confidence in any aspect of life pertaining to physical activity. His body was an alien vessel in which his mind was trapped.

The only escape for him lay in imagination. Fantasies became his life. In daydreams he was strong, strong enough to take revenge on those who wronged him daily. He could shape his private inner world to whatever specifications he desired, edit and alter it at will, control the outcome of any situation. He could be a god.

Reality was less malleable, and for that reason, it was terrifying. He remembered the day in gym class when the teacher ordered the kids to climb a rope. The others did it with varying degrees of ease, most of them nimble as monkeys, a few grunting and straining but getting the job done. Then it was his turn. He stared up at the knotted line that extended to the ceiling a million miles high. He knew he couldn’t do it; and what was worse, he knew that the others knew it also. He felt the pressure of their eyes on him, the tension of their suppressed laughter straining for release.

“Hurry up, Frankie.” It was the gym teacher’s voice, empty of compassion. “Get going. Quit fooling around.”

He managed to climb five feet before his meager strength gave out. Then he just hung there, unable to go higher and afraid to slide down. Around him rose the sound he feared more than anything, the sound of children’s laughter, the ugly, hooting, chattering laughter heard only in treetops and playgrounds.

Afterward, in the locker room, the others ganged up on him. Holding him by his arms and legs, they slammed his head into the steel door of a locker again and again while his small fists flailed uselessly.

Weakling, they called him. Baby girl. Faggot.

Finally they shut him in the locker and left him there. For two hours he was trapped in that lightless coffinlike place, breathing through the vents and whimpering softly. Eventually the janitor heard him weeping and let him out.

Rood winced at the memory and tightened his grip on the steering wheel.

There had been many such incidents. Children were evil creatures; they sensed weakness and preyed on it. In any group of youngsters, there was one who would be cast as the outsider, the loser, the perpetual victim. In the small town where he’d grown up, in the school that had been his prison, he had been assigned that role, and there was no escaping from it.

He was twelve years old when he developed an interest in the opposite sex, an interest confined to sexual fantasies; he was sure he had no chance with any of the girls in town. They knew too much about him. They knew he was a sissy because he was the one picked on by the other boys. They knew he was weird because he kept to himself and rarely spoke above a mumble. They knew he was a fairy because he wore glasses and was no good at sports. Oh, yes, they knew everything.

He did his best to satisfy his urges in secret. His collection helped, at least for a time. He spent many hours pressing his lips to the satin smoothness of stolen panties and running his tongue over the cups of bras. But articles of clothing, no matter how seductively feminine, were not enough. He needed a woman, a woman who would love him and whisper tender words to him and stroke him in the dark. He needed love.

Only three times in his life had Rood tried to establish any form of intimacy with a woman. He made his first attempt while in the tenth grade. After helping a girl with her homework on several occasions, he summoned all his courage and asked her to a school dance. The look on her face when she turned him down-that mixture of discomfort and shock and imperfectly concealed amusement-was a splash of acid burned into his memory.

His second attempt came four years later, on the night of his twenty-first birthday, when he visited a whorehouse. He still wanted a woman, wanted one desperately, but he was terrified of facing rejection again.

The whore did not reject him. His wallet was full; that was all she cared about. But when she took him to bed with her, a terrible thing happened, a thing that shamed him worse than any humiliation of his childhood. He was impotent with her. His manhood, which had never failed him when he huddled alone in the bathroom, was limp and unresponsive. The whore told him that it was all right, that it happened all the time; but he heard the contempt in her voice, the words she had not spoken, the words she must have been thinking.

Sissy. Weakling. Faggot.

His third and final attempt took place on a winter afternoon six years ago, the day when he dared to ask Miss Kathy Lutton to a movie. At the time he hadn’t known her last name; he learned it a year later from news reports of her murder in the parking lot outside the restaurant. A murder that had never been solved.

Miss Lutton had rejected him, but he had not taken rejection and humiliation passively that time. At last he’d found a way to exercise power over women. The ultimate power, the power of life and death, the power of a god.

Even as a child. Rood had known of the power that was his when he did things to animals. He’d thrilled at their helplessness, their frantic squirming and final convulsions. He’d known other varieties of power as well-the power that came from shoplifting, from breaking into homes, from setting fires and watching the flames leap up.

But none of that had been enough to make him truly strong. Murder was different. Murder was the medicine that cured him at last of the disease of weakness.

Now he was more powerful than any of the bullies who’d beaten him, more powerful than any of the frigid, sexless, man-hating bitches who’d done their best to emasculate him. He’d strengthened his body with a rigorous exercise regime, and he’d strengthened his character with ever greater tests of his courage and cunning. Over the past five years he’d taken many lives, each time refining his technique and polishing his skills.

There was Miss Georgia Grant, whom he encountered on a hiking trail in 1987. After that, the teenage girl he kidnapped outside of Boise; he saw to it that her body would never be found. Then, in 1989, two kills: Miss Lynn Peters, the escort-service whore in Nampa, and Miss Stacy Brannon, the hitchhiker on Route 15.

Shortly afterward he moved to L.A., where he found new opportunities. A nameless female transient he buried in Griffith Park. A few months later. Miss Erin Thompson, the UCLA student whose body must still be moldering in a cave near Paradise Cove. Then Miss Kelly Widmark, who worked at a video store in Santa Monica, and who died in the alley behind the store. Her murder, unlike most of the others, was impulsive and unplanned; the sight of her as she stood at the checkout counter, so young and virginal and yet so very ripe, jolted him with desire, and he simply left the store without renting a tape, then waited in the alley, hoping she would leave via the rear door. She did. And more recently, less than a year ago, in fact, there was Mrs. Carla Aguilar, the housewife from Culver City. He saw her on the street and followed her for hours before ambushing her in the parking garage of a shopping mall.

His first kill in Twin Falls was rushed and rather sloppy. Only gradually did he learn to draw out each murder by means of physical or psychological torture, to enjoy the corpse afterward, and to take parts of it with him for purposes of preservation; he’d always taken pleasure in keeping the animals’ remains. At first fingers and tongues seemed particularly appealing; the possibility of taking the head did not occur to him until later. He tried it first on Mrs. Aguilar, but the cheap hacksaw blade made a mess of things and foiled his intent. Only once he bought a tungsten-carbide blade could he be sure of taking the trophy he most wanted.

Now the Gryphon would strike again. And the city would tremble before him. And he, Franklin Rood, would laugh.

Power, yes. He had power. Unlimited power.

He was the most powerful man in the world.

As he headed east on Pico Boulevard, approaching Miss Alden’s neighborhood, he found himself humming along with the new song on the radio, which was “Sweet Dreams.”