Shiver

36

“Franklin. Hey, Franklin. You ever fuck your mama?”

“Yeah, she suck you off, weirdo?”

“Bet you fucked her like you fucked them dead girls.”

“Your mama ain’t here to help you now, asshole.”

“Nobody’s here to help you, Griff.”

“You’re gonna have yourself a serious accident.”

“Gonna die. Franklin. Baby-killer gonna die.”

“Baby-killer gonna die!”

“Baby-killer gonna die!”

Scum. Rabble. Filth.

Rood sat on the cot in his cell, staring straight ahead, trying not to hear the voices of the caged animals around him, the chattering monkeys in this human zoo. He’d always despised the gutter garbage of humanity, the street trash, and now he was penned up with them, surrounded by their foul smells and coarse jokes and ugly, evil threats.

At first he couldn’t understand why he’d been chosen as the focus of their collective hatred. Then gradually he’d come to realize that there was a kind of social hierarchy among prisoners. Rapists were very low on the scale, but lower still were murderers of women. And lowest of all, at the very bottom, were killers of pregnant women.

Mrs. Julia Stern had been pregnant.

“Franklin… oh, Franklin…”

The big black convict in the adjacent cell always called him by his first name, pronouncing it in a girlish falsetto that contrasted sharply with the deep baritone of his normal speaking voice. It had taken Rood several days to realize that by saying the word in this way, the man was insinuating that Rood was a homosexual.

“You got yourself a real pretty set of choppers there, Franklin. But I figure to do a little dental work on you.”

“Es dentista!” screeched one of the Hispanics farther down the row, laughing wildly.

“Gonna knock out all your damn teeth,” the man went on, his voice slowing, deepening, as thick and dark as river mud. “So you ain’t got nothing but gums. See?”

“Ningunos dientes!”

“And you know why, Franklin? I say, you know why, motherfucker?” He paused for dramatic effect. “ ’Cause I like my pussy… smooth.”

Rood gripped the edge of his bunk with both hands and tried not to be here. Not to know how close those animals were to him, and how powerless he felt, and how dirty this place was, how disgustingly unclean.

He had never really believed he would be imprisoned. Oh, he’d known that it was a possibility, but the thought had always seemed unreal and faintly absurd. And even if he had believed it, he never could have imagined that jail would be so much like… like school. Yet here he was, reliving the horrible nightmare of his childhood. Once again he was weak and helpless, abused by bullies and thugs, laughed at and insulted and scorned, his manhood questioned, his safety threatened. It was like being back in the locker room. His life had come full circle, a snake swallowing itself, and he’d returned to his beginnings, having accomplished nothing. Nothing.

Don’t think like that, he told himself. You’re the Gryphon. You’ve got power. You’ve traveled a great distance, and you have much farther yet to go.

Brave words. Brave, empty words.

Rood stared morosely at the bars of his private cell, the same bars he’d been studying for eleven days, ever since his incarceration on B row, the section of the Los Angeles County Jail reserved for the most dangerous or notorious offenders.

At first he found it terribly unjust that he would be held prisoner. It was a violation of his Constitutional rights, he’d been sure. After all, there had been no trial yet, not even a preliminary hearing-only an arraignment where he’d been summarily denied bail. He’d had no chance to defend himself, to tell his side of the story. It was all so outrageously unfair.

For several days he mused ruefully that it had been bad luck to call himself the Gryphon. That beast appeared in Alice in Wonderland; and now he seemed to have fallen down a rabbit hole himself, into some topsy-turvy world where the legal system functioned in accordance with the Queen of Hearts’ nonsensical pronouncement: “Sentence first-verdict afterwards.”

Gradually he came to understand that his anger and indignation were wasted. It didn’t matter when the preliminary hearing and trial were held. They would be only formalities in this case. The verdict was a certainty. There was no way out for him this time.

That was when he dismissed the court-appointed attorney. No lawyer could blow a smokescreen dense enough to cover the evidence in his trailer or the testimony of the bitch.

The bitch. Yes. That was what she was, and that was all she was. He no longer thought of her as Wendy, let alone as Miss Alden. She was the bitch. Period.

He still wanted her to die. He yearned for the chance to kill her, to erase her from existence. He dreamed of her death, fantasized it, obsessed on it. Nothing else mattered to him, not food, not freedom, not even his life. If he could kill her, he would redeem himself. He would not have failed after all. He would have won the game.

After what he’d heard this morning on the radio, he craved revenge more than ever.

Many of the cells on the row, although not Rood’s, had radios. Rap, heavy metal, and mariachi competed with one another all day long like blasts of gunfire. Rood hated all that noise. How he longed for the pleasant pop music he used to play in his car.

Occasional news updates interrupted the barrage of unmelodious sounds. Many of the reports were about him; the Gryphon, he sometimes thought with a nostalgic touch of pride, was still the city’s major story.

A few hours earlier he overheard one such report on a radio in an adjacent cell. The announcer recited some meaningless lines about the preliminary hearing tomorrow and about Detective Delgado’s continuing work on the case, then added, “Delgado is rumored to have become romantically involved with Wendy Alden, the alleged serial killer’s last intended victim.”

Rood had felt hot, then cold, then hot again.

Romantically involved.

He was fucking her. That smug, smiling bastard. Fucking the bitch.

He pictured the two of them in bed together, gasping after the orgasm they’d shared. He saw the bitch comparing Detective Sebastian Delgado’s mighty cock with Franklin Rood’s puny, shriveled manhood. Heard her whispering that Rood had been unable to achieve even the beginnings of an erection with her. Heard them laughing, laughing at his impotence.

He had to stop that laughter. Had to. Had to.

But how?

“I love you. Franklin. You got such nice soft tits. I’m gonna marry you in the showers, man. We’re gonna have a real nice wedding. And an even better honeymoon.”

“Luna del miel!”

“You’re gonna like that, ain’t you, queerbait?”

Rood took off his glasses and wearily rubbed his eyes. The glasses had been badly damaged when Detective Delgado smacked him in the face. Fortunately both lenses, though scratched, were still intact; but the hinge that had attached the right temple to the front of the frame had broken off. Before Rood posed for his mug shots, the photographer inexpertly secured the temple with adhesive tape; but since then, the tape had kept coming loose.

“Yo, faggot! Answer the man!”

“What’s the matter with you, Franklin? You deaf or something?”

“Shit, I don’t think he even hears us.”

At least. Rood thought, the temple itself hadn’t cracked. It struck him as odd that the thin plastic would hold up better than the metal hinge.

“He’s a nutcase, all right.”

“Dead meat, what he is.”

Mildly curious, he raised the glasses to the light. The black plastic, backlit, became translucent.

Suddenly his heart was beating fast. His old sense of power, of control, had returned.

“Look at that sucker. He’s smiling, man! Like he’s got a frigging hard-on or something!”

“Bet you he’s thinking about them women he wasted.”

“Nah, he’s thinking about that little baby he snuffed.”

“Too bad the baby-killer gonna die.”

“Baby-killer gonna die!”

“Baby-killer gonna die!”

The chant continued. It was far away. Unimportant now.

Rood slipped his glasses back on.