CRIME THRILLERS-A Box Set (34 page)

Cruise began to smile. A mob of determined men. He had always known that about them. Hoping they'd never find out it was a fraternity he had long abused.

They'd caught him. And so it goes. He'd get off some way. They'd send him to some institution, know he was crazy. He'd make sure they knew that.

Even if they sent him to prison, he wouldn't stay long. Sooner or later he'd be out.

Fucking truckers thought they had won.

They just weren't as smart as Cruise Lavanic.

#

Molly came behind the trucks, racing as hard as she could.

She saw her father off to her right and veered toward him. Together they hurried across hummocks and around squashed cacti and broken mesquite.

"What are they doing?" she yelled at her father over the harsh roar of the combined engine noise.

He shook his head and hurried on. He held his bad arm to his side to keep from jarring it as he ran.

They reached the back of a trailer and moved down between two of the trucks. Cab doors stood open. They had to close one to get past it and into the magic circle of lights.

What they saw stopped them both cold. From their vantage point they saw Cruise standing in the center of the men. He was naked from the waist up, bleeding from his shoulder, blood streaming down his chest. Both his arms looked notched with cuts that ran with blood. The front of his slacks were blackly wet. He was grinning like a death's- head, his freshly shaven face gleaming with sweat in the glare of the headlights.

He was bragging to the advancing men. His voice carried above the trucks' motors.

"Any of you pricks heard of Minde? M-i-n-d-e? Lot Lizard out of Charlotte, North Carolina. She's off your hands for good. I buried her deep in the woods. What about Connie outta El Paso? Heard of her? You want names? I know names, faces. Never forget them, never do. There was a girl called herself Cupcake, ever hear of her? Haven't in a while, have you?"

The silent circle grimly advanced, tightening, drawing closer around Cruise. The men gripped their bats and pipes. They took the safeties off their guns and socked clips into place with hard metallic bangs.

"Molly back there behind you. Molly, I almost did. She was one of my best ones. I kept her around too long, though, didn't I? Sweet kid, but lots of trouble, let me tell you, she was real trouble."

He couldn't stop talking, couldn't get his mouth closed for nothing. He knew he shouldn't be saying anything, that he was egging them on by what he said, but the words simply kept coming, refusing to stay unspoken. He hadn't this many witnesses in all of his life, and it was too good a chance to pass up.

"I sat up during the hours when Molly slept and watched her, fantasizing about what I was going to do to her. I had it in mind to kill her here at this special place. If you hadn't all come, if Boots hadn't..."

He paused and swiveled his head from one side to the other, watching the grim faces of the men surrounding him. He wasn't going to tell them
everything
.

"I'd stay awake and watch Molly," he repeated. "I thought about dismembering her, taking off her head first, and then her arms, her legs, taking my time to watch the life run out of her eyes..."

He kept telling them what he wanted to do to Molly and so many of the things he had done before. All about the blood and the dying, the cleansing rites and the time, way back, when he knew he wasn't going to be like the rest of the men, not like them, the ones coming to...

Bash in his head.

Shoot out his eyes.

Break the bones of his legs.

Murder him.

They weren't going to hand him over to the cops. He realized that hard truth with a shock that ran through his chest and down into his legs. He wobbled slightly on his feet.

And still he kept talking, despite everything, telling them what he had wanted to do to Molly, all the intimate details of his fantasy of blood.

#

Molly stood next to her father behind the closed line of men, the hair on the back of her neck standing up as Cruise talked about what he had planned for her. The mutilation. Burying her somewhere he could come visit the way Henry Lee Lucas did with the girl he had traveled with and dismembered and left beside a roadside fence in Texas during one of his murderous sprees.

And as the hair rose on her neck, Molly felt again the humiliation Cruise had allowed to befall her. She felt again the ropes digging into her wrists and ankles. She saw clearly the way he killed the woman in the Pick 'N Save, the poor soul's eyes still begging Molly for help even in the last moments. She relived the night she ran from him across the desert toward one of the ranch houses near the Mexican border. She thought she was dying. She thought she couldn't breathe.

She thought about how many hours of her young life she had lived in fear of dying. How close she had come to death.

Her gaze lowered to the man in front of her, to his hand. He held a claw hammer, loosely gripped in his fingers. She heard Cruise's voice. She saw how the men stood there unmoving and suddenly she feared they would never move on him, they'd let him get away with all the crimes he listed for them. Before she knew it she had grabbed for the hammer and ripped it from the trucker's grasp.

She was running across the circle, coming at Cruise's back, the hammer raised. She heard faintly her father calling her. She felt the circle tremble as if made of one body. Everyone stepped in closer, but they wouldn't stop her now, she was almost upon him, and still his words would not cease, the words kept coming to spew the filth of murder into the open. His very existence made the world a squalid and dangerous place to live, his madness made the night a time of terror for the innocent who died at his hands.

She rushed behind him and landed a blow to the back of his head, but it glanced off his ear, nearly ripping it from his skull. He turned screaming and she raised the hammer again, sound far away and muted, the sound of her father's voice calling to her, the combined roar of the men as they screamed in unison a battle cry.

The hammer claw caught him in the side and she pulled with both hands to free it. She must kill him. She must stop him for good. Forever.

His flesh gave and an incredible spout of blood pumped out from his side even though he hunched over and tried to hold it with both hands.

Then the circle of men had reached them, led on by her example, yelling like men at war, descending on the despicably evil human in their midst.

She felt someone take her around the waist and haul her backward off her feet. She dropped the hammer and kicked and fought.

Her father said into her ear, "No, Molly! No!"

The first man to reach Cruise stove in the side of his head with a baseball bat.

#

Cruise didn't feel the rest. He thought--his last thought--that maybe he had made a few mistakes, but all in all it was worth it to live his life the way he chose. He was a real man.

#

Mark thought he hadn't seen anything, even in Vietnam, like the savaging the truckers gave Cruise Lavanic. He was horrified that it was his daughter who started it. When the men finished, there wasn't anything recognizable upon the ground. Just blood and bone jumbled together, it could have been a large animal worked over by desert scavengers.

When the highway patrol arrived, trailing more dust across the desert into the dawning red streaks of sun to the east, the truckers were already in their cabs, tidying up logbooks, and talking on their CBs about a good place to eat off I-10.

Everyone agreed the killer tried to fight them, that he threatened them with a knife, that he even, by God, jumped one of them and wanted to cut his throat and would have succeeded had they not all intervened.

One officer overheard by Mark said, "Lucky if we can get a fingerprint off the son of a bitch. Might not be enough left even for that. I hope to shit they got the right guy."

In the ambulance on the way to the hospital, Molly sat beside him, holding on to his good hand. He smiled up at her from the gurney and she slowly smiled back.
Molly.

#

Molly wasn't the same girl her father knew before she left him. In one week of separation she had lived a lifetime of experience. She could tell from the look in her father's eyes that it didn't matter. He was glad to have her back.

For her part, she was glad to be back.

She took a cloth offered to her by the ambulance attendant. She wiped her hands. He pointed to her face and she wiped there, smearing Cruise's blood across her cheeks so that she looked like an Indian painted for the warpath. She handed back the cloth and thanked him.

She didn't care how she looked. She was happy just to be alive and free.

Happy just to be.

THE END

KILLING CARLA

by

Billie Sue Mosiman

Copyright@Billie Sue Mosiman 2012

Originally published by Pocket Books as SLICE

E-book edition 2012 by Billie Sue Mosiman All Rights Reserved

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Proofread by Mark Lewis at
Madman Literary Services.

Other books by Billie Sue Mosiman include:

BANISHED

LIFE NEAR THE BONE

CYRPT TALES-A COLLECTION

INTERVIEW WITH A PSYCHO

WIDOW

WIREMAN

BAD TRIP SOUTH

NIGHT CRUISING

GOLD RUSH DREAM

HORROR TALES-HORROR TALES 2

THE SUBWAY COLLECTION-THE SUBWAY COLLECTION 2

A LONELY WALK-A ZOMBIE'S NOTEBOOK

SCROLLS OF THE DEAD (LEGIONS OF THE DARK-RISE OF THE LEGEND-HUNTER OF THE DEAD)

THE SCREAM

WALLS OF THE DEAD

SUSPENSE THRILLERS-A boxed set

HORROR THRILLERS- A boxed set

DARK THRILLERS-A boxed set

SULLY

THE STATE OF GEORGIA, USA, 1988

CHAPTER 1

Sullivan Torrance watched his wife's murderer walk out of the courtroom a free man.

"Sully, I'm damned sorry. How could I know this would happen?" Mike Dalamas, the state prosecutor and one of Sully's oldest friends, threw a batch of papers into his briefcase and clicked it shut.

Sully's gaze followed the crowd of reporters who had descended and engulfed the defendant, Martin Lansing. Yeah, how could Mike know? Who would think the sheriff's office would take evidence without a warrant? How did something like that happen?

"Wait, Sully, let me buy you a beer. We can take the side door. Let the Atlanta press have Lansing."

Sully shook his head. "Thanks, Mike, but I've got business."

"Leave him alone, okay? Let someone else watch him now. We lost. It's over."

"It will never be over. Not while he's free and I'm alive."

The courtroom emptied, the thunder of voices echoing along the marble hallway to the stairs outdoors. Sully maneuvered around the crowd on the steps and went to his new black Cadillac parked across the street. He sat behind the wheel smoking a cigarette, watching for Martin Lansing's blond head to appear. Sully thought about running him down. Get it over with quick, then take the punishment.

There was satisfaction in fast, violent murder. Ask Lansing. He knew. But then Sully's thoughts locked onto their normal track, and he knew he was not the same species as his enemy. He was not a Lansing carbon copy. He could not commit premeditated murder. Fast, slow, easy, hard. He couldn't do it.

But he could watch. He could hound Lansing, run him to earth. He would never let it go.

Ash from the cigarette fell onto the black velvet seat cover. He brushed at the gray spot and thought of his wife. Frannie loved the color black. She ordered the car. She had over a dozen black evening dresses in different styles. Beautiful black chiffons and crepes and satins. Her skin was ivory cream and the dresses had looked stunning on her. Sully buried her in one of the dresses. But no one saw it. She had been too destroyed to view in an open casket. He hadn't seen her in her burial dress either. He had to take the word of the undertaker that she had been carefully dressed, her hair combed from her face, her delicate hands crossed on her chest...

More ash fell onto the seat. Sully looked up and saw Lansing leaning over the hood of the Cadillac, peering through the windshield.

"Too bad about your wife, Mr. Torrance. I really mean that. Know you're going to miss her."

The grin cane.
When the devil picks over your bones
, Sully thought,
that's how he looks. Now I know I can kill if it means ridding the world of that arrogant, satisfied face.

He dropped the dead cigarette into the ashtray and turned the key in the ignition. His foot floored the accelerator. The high whine of the revved motor jarred Lansing's smile loose. He backed away from the hood, hands held up to each side of him as if in surrender.

All I have to do is put it in gear, Sully rationalized. Just slip it into drive, smash that freak-slime-sick-bastard all over the pavement-sidewalk-alleyway. Murder really can be as easy as breathing.

Lansing turned his back and sauntered away, hands in pockets.

Sully let up on the gas pedal reluctantly. His chance was gone. He listened to the engine idle down while sweat beads broke out on his forehead. It was May and warm already. He had planted a white rosebush next to Frannie's grave. White roses were her favorite. She had carried them in her wedding bouquet, and then they were draped across her casket. When the graveside bush bloomed, Frannie would know he remembered.

He would always remember.

He would never let it go.

CHAPTER 2

Martin Lansing eyed the black Caddy on his tail. What now? More surveillance? For how long? A week, a month, a year,
forever
? Torrance had wanted to run him down. Another few seconds and he might have done it.

Fear coiled in Lansing's gut and produced a sharp cramp that made him wince and shift his buttocks.