Satan's Sword (Imp Book 2) (36 page)

The master bedroom was a little less pristine, with the comforter hastily thrown over the bed sheets and dirty socks on the floor beside the hamper. The sheets under the comforter were reasonably clean. Nothing was under the bed or in the closet beyond dust bunnies and clothing. The bathroom was unremarkable with a blob of toothpaste in the sink and a crumpled towel on the floor. Nothing in this house stood out at all beyond the weird removal of the driveway and the excessive locks on the door. I didn’t even see the expected rifle or shotgun anywhere. What the fuck? I was so disappointed. Where was the psycho stuff? Where was the snuff porn, explosives, heads in the freezer?

“Got it. Mr and Mrs. Wratzler. They’ve owned the house since nineteen seventy. Place was built in nineteen sixty-eight. I show them as the current owners.”

The second bedroom looked untouched. The bed was carefully made, and there were knickknacks artfully arranged on the dresser and the bed stands. No dust. I pounded on the bed and didn’t see any dust rise from it. Whoever this guy was, he was a neat mother fucker.

“Mr. Wratzler was a civilian vet tech over at the base until his retirement in ’86. His wife got grand champion for needlework at the county fair in ’83. They pay their taxes regularly. Mrs. Wratzler died in ’95. Looks like cancer from the ‘in lieu of flowers’ notation on the obit. Absolutely nothing on Mr. Wratzler since then.”

“Thanks, I’ll see you soon,” I told him and hung up.

If the wife was dead, could the husband have gone crazy and begun killing homeless people? It’s not like he’d be revenging his wife’s death from cancer by killing vagrants. All this clean neatness was not what I’d expected either. He’d have to be really fucking old, too. Did he clean all day, and go chop off ears at night? He must be really fit to grab someone off the street, wrestle them to the ground, kill them, and drag the body off somewhere. None of this made sense.

A more likely scenario was that a younger man knocked off Mr. Wratzler, who would have been easy pickings as a reclusive widow. Then he’d have a home base to organize his killings. I motioned for Boomer to come with me and headed down to the basement. It was either the garage or the basement, and I was banking on the basement.

I flicked on the light and headed down the stairs. There was a nice finished section with carpet, a TV, comfy chairs, and a table. There was even a mini kitchen set up. On the dining room table was a sculpture of what were clearly human ears. After the sterile weirdness of the upstairs, this area was a breath of fresh air. I could feel his personality down here. I envisioned him watching TV in the recliner, dozing off late at night, comforted by the presence of his trophies, knowing that the house upstairs would shield him from a hostile and misunderstanding world. Finally, something interesting about this guy.

Ears. It was an odd choice.

Usually it was eyes. Eyes were the organ of perception, of vision, and awareness. Taking a victim’s eyes meant their judgment couldn’t be reflected back. The judgment of God, condemning a killer for an act beyond the scope of humanity. It robbed their power of perception and stole it for a killer’s own use. Tongues were also popular. The dead could not accuse without their tongues.

Ears were weird though. It was a theft of spiritual perception. They had once been a common Egyptian and Far Eastern theme, but not one seen much in the modern world. Ears connected a person to the soft, subtle sounds of life, of death, to the sound of the divine word. I looked at the sculpture carefully. It was composed of both right and left ears. This guy at least was balanced in his duality, preserving both that which hears the whisper of birth and the whisper of death. Personally, I would have made a hanging mobile from the ears, so they could move in the air and freely receive sounds on the wind. It would have been more artistic, more poetic than this odd, lumpy collage.

The ears had been dried in a relatively professional manner to preserve them from decay. I reached out and felt one. They were fairly leathery. Not dried to the point of jerky. It was a fine line. Not enough drying and they’d still be soft, but mold and mildew over time. Too much drying and they’d be difficult to work with and susceptible to crumbling.

He’d taken armature wire and pierced the ears, probably using a bead reamer from a craft store. It would have gone through the dried ear easily. The lowest ears were wired to a wooden base, and other ears joined in an attempt to make it appear as if they were attached seamlessly. He’d done a good job of hiding the wire. And the wire was a good choice, too. Glue would have damaged the flesh of the ear and made it difficult to fine tune his sculpture. Not that fine tuning would do much for it. Basically it was a pile of ears. Nothing inspirational at all in this thing. It was very disappointing. It made me want to kill him even more.

The basement had its own entrance out to the back of the house. I’d left Boomer upstairs on alert, but now I called softly to him. He padded down the basement steps, still huge with the two massive drooling heads.

“Do you think he uses the upstairs door or this one down here?” I asked him. He looked around the room with obvious interest. “If he comes in upstairs, I may move his ear sculpture up there and wait to greet him, but I’ll just stay here if he comes in through the basement.”

I wanted to provide maximum impact when the guy came home. Sort of like a surprise party of death. If he came in upstairs, moving his sculpture up there would most likely send him into a screaming rage. The fact that I’d touched it, moved his sculpture from his personal area to the foreign part of the house, would be a violation on the level of rape. I would have laid my hands on, ripped from its safe place, the most private part of him. If he came in down here, though, and I was upstairs, he’d see the missing sculpture first and I would lose element of surprise. If he came in down here, I’d need to think of something to do that would have the same emotional punch.

While Boomer checked the doors, I went through another interior door that presumably led from the finished area of the basement to a utility side that should hold a washer and dryer. No surprise, this was the guy’s staging area. I hadn’t been sure if he brought the bodies back here or dumped them close to where he killed them. I’d assumed from the lack of front page news that he’d been disposing the bodies in a discrete fashion. No one would notice missing homeless people, but a rash of earless bodies would definitely spur an investigation. The room was clean and smelled of bleach. A variety of useful tools hung on a pegboard over a stainless steel table. Saws, axes, picks, drills. Rolls of poly and boxes of biodegradable garbage bags stood neatly by the table along with several bags of lime and various shovels. I assumed if I looked around the wooded area, I’d find graves. Boomer could locate them easily, but I really had no interest in digging up dead bodies. The most interesting thing in the room was a food dehydrator by the innocuous washer and dryer. This was the tool to preserve his precious ears.

Boomer indicated to me that this guy used the basement entrance the majority of the time. Patting one of his heads in appreciation, I sent him off to the side of the door where he’d be less likely to be noticed as the guy entered the room. Then I turned off the lights and sat down to wait.

I’m not good at waiting. I fidgeted in the recliner, got up and rooted through the fridge, snapped an ear off the sculpture and played with it a bit. I found a steak knife and killed time by stabbing holes in the arm of the recliner. It was getting on past midnight and I seriously thought about turning on the TV, but the light would alert him to my presence. Sighing in boredom, I continued to hack bits of foam and stuffing from the chair arm. If this guy didn’t get home soon, I was going to order pizza.

It was close to four in the morning before Boomer alerted me of the ear-man’s approach. I’d already drank all the beers and sodas in the fridge upstairs and used the empty bottles to improve the lumpy ear sculpture. Luckily I’d found some ham and cheese and made myself a sandwich, too. I was still starving though. Waiting with anticipation in the dark basement, I heard a dragging noise and a huffing of breath. He must have dragged his victim in some kind of tarp or blanket all the way from the parking area. Now that was dedication.

The guy unlocked the door with familiarity and flicked on the light as he came in. Instead of yelling ”Surprise!”, I took a bite out of one of the ears I’d impaled on the steak knife and chewed thoughtfully.

“This one needed a few more minutes in the dehydrator,” I told him as he stared at me, stunned. “It’s a little raw on the inside.”

You would think the guy would realize something was off. Normal humans wouldn’t break into your house, re-arrange your body-part sculpture, hack up your chair, and cheerfully chow down on one of your victim’s ears. His emotions clearly took control of his brain in this instance, and I saw the red flush of rage flare up his face. With an impressive, piercing scream, he launched himself at me from the doorway.

The guy had good physical instincts. He cleared the floor space and slammed into me, knocking the recliner backwards with the force of his impact. He’d also been paranoid enough to have a knife, a really sharp knife, on his person. I’d barely smacked the floor and he was slicing at me, stabbing furiously over and over into my mid-section with the knife.

“Bitch, bitch, bitch,” he screamed in time with his stabs.

He was heavy, and fast. I couldn’t push him off or completely avoid his knife without using energy, and I didn’t want to hurt him too much yet. This was going to be fun, and I wanted to prolong the experience even if it meant I got sliced up. Inspired, I grabbed his head and planted a kiss on him, figuring the oddness of having someone he was stabbing kiss him might jolt him back into his brain.

No such luck. He bit down on my tongue and raised his hand to stab my face. Now that was something I wasn’t going to tolerate. I blocked his knife with my arm, skillfully wedging the blade between my ulna and radius, then twisted to lock the knife in place. It hurt like fuck, but I’m used to that sort of thing. With my other hand, I stabbed him in the wrist with the steak knife, cutting the tendon and pinning the chewed ear to his skin. This infuriated him further, and he shrieked again, twisting the knife in my arm and grinding it against the bones. Throughout this whole skirmish, Boomer watched with interest from his stealthy position behind the door.

“Boomer, you dumb fuck, get over here and help me!” I shouted at him.

Boomer’s idea of help was to lope over and shove a slobbery head in my assailant’s face, licking him thoroughly. Great, he liked this idiot. I guess I shouldn’t be so critical since I’d kissed the guy. Boomer probably figured affection was the help I was requesting. It did have a positive effect though. The guy took one look at my two headed dog and screamed in terror, scrambling off me and attempting to make a break for it out the door.

Boomer, for once, did something proactive and headed the guy off, blocking the door and wagging his tail in a friendly manner. While I was trying to fix the worst of my stab wounds and repair the chipped bones in my arm, Boomer and the guy did a complicated game of rush-and-block across the basement. Boomer was winning. By the time I was on my feet, he had the guy pinned in a corner and was assaulting his crotch with a very large nose.

“Call off your dog-thing, call off your dog-thing,” Ear-man shouted in a high-pitched, panicked tone. At least he seemed to be regaining use of his thinking processes and some control over his emotions.

“Boomer, hold him,” I commanded my hellhound, hoping he’d obey. “And get your nose off of his dick. Don’t bite it off or anything.” Boomer’s other head looked disappointed. “At least not yet. Maybe later.” He wagged his tail.

I walked over to the guy and yanked the steak knife out of his arm. He grunted and looked at me warily as blood seeped from the wound. I pulled the ear off the steak knife and proceeded to finish eating it. Hopefully he’d get some clue as to what I was from that very pointed action. He must have made the connection because his eyes widened and traveled from my ear chewing down along my smooth, un-sliced abdomen, and across my healed arm.

“You’ve been a naughty boy,” I told him, waving the last bit of ear in his face before shoving it in my mouth. “Poaching in my territory. Killing off humans that are under my protection. What have you got to say for yourself?”

The guy swallowed a few times, glancing from Boomer to me, then back again.

“I didn’t know. I’m so sorry, I didn’t know. I’ll hunt somewhere else.” He was careful not to look me in the eye.

“How could you not know?” I asked. “You seem a meticulous kind of guy. The sort that plans these things out. I’m sure you checked out gang activity and drug territories so you don’t run across any other predators. Didn’t you notice the big, clear area you chose to hunt in and wonder why they steered clear? You hunt my humans, thumb your nose at me, and when I come here to discuss the situation, you attack me. That sounds pretty disrespectful to me.”

“You look like a human,” he whined. “Where is the red skin, the horns, and tail? They told me a bad-ass woman owned most of the downtown rentals, but no one said anything about Satan. Look, I don’t want any trouble from you. We’ve got a lot in common. Maybe we could come to some kind of understanding.”

The more I spoke with this sniveling idiot, the more pissed off I got. I’d hoped for Ted Bundy and got this bumbling fool. How dare he presume to take what belonged to me, to kill my humans? Worthless sack of shit. And there was the issue of that deplorable ear sculpture. I might be able to overlook disrespect and the attack on my people, but a lack of artistic sentiment was something I could not accept.

“Tell me about your sculpture.” I waved a hand toward the lump of ears. I figured I’d give him one last chance to make a poetic statement before I killed him.

He scrambled for words, obviously put on the spot. “Well, they’re ears. Like, you know, like Van Gogh or something.”

“Yes, well why do you use both ears from your victim and not just one? Why ears and not something else,” I prompted.