Thicker Than Blood - The Complete Andrew Z. Thomas Trilogy (8 page)

I pulled the trigger, and the gun fired. I squeezed it again and again, the plangent crack of gunshots filling up the shed, the gray smoke of gunpowder ascending into the rafters, until only the clicking of the hammer remained, thumping the empty shells.

Orson hadn’t flinched.

I looked down at the gun, eyes bulging.

"Blanks, Andy," he said. "I thought you might just threaten me, but you pulled that trigger without hesitation. Wow." He took the knife from the stool and walked toward me. I threw the gun at him, but it missed his head and struck the back door.

"She’s dead, Andy," he said. "I wasn’t going to make you watch her suffer. Not the first time. And this is how you repay me? He was close now, gripping the knife. "Part of me wants to shove this into your stomach," Orson said. "It’s almost irresistible." He pushed me back down into the lawn chair. "But I’m not gonna do that," he said. "I won’t do that." He went to the stool, set down the knife, and walked to the .357, which was lying against the back door. Picking it up, he took two bullets from his pocket. "I’d say your little stunt constitutes fuckup number two." He loaded the bullets and spun the cylinder. When it stopped, he aimed the gun at my chest. "These aren’t blanks," he said.

Click.

I saw the relief on Orson’s face. "Don’t make me do this again," he said. "It’d be a real shame if I had to kill you." He returned the gun to his pocket, pulled out the key for the leg iron, and slid it across the floor to me. "You can use my knife," he said. "I’ll be back for the heart. Don’t botch it up. Put her on one of those plastic sheets in the corner over there. Otherwise, you’ll be scrubbing this floor till Christmas."

I’d regained my voice, and I said, "Orson, I can’t —"

"You have four hours. If the job isn’t done when I return, we’ll play our little game again with three bullets."

He opened the back door, and I saw the sky coming into purple. It didn’t seem like dawn should be here yet. It didn’t seem like it should ever come.

Orson closed the door and locked it. I felt the key in my hand, but I wanted to remain in chains. How could I touch Shirley? She stared at me, those kind eyes open but empty as she lay on the cold, hard floor. I was glad she was gone. Glad for her.

9

THAT is a human being. She was bowling with her family a few hours ago. I leaned down and kissed her forehead. "I am so sorry," I whispered. "You did not…" Don’t lose it. This won’t help you now. There’s nothing you could’ve done to save her; there’s nothing you can do to bring her back. I’d witnessed unadulterated evil — the mental torture of a woman, and I wept savagely. When my tear ducts were dry, I steeled myself, wiped my eyes, and got to the task at hand.

Years ago, when I had time to hunt in the North Carolina mountains, I’d gut the deer I shot in the woods near my hillside cabin. This is no different. No different from an animal now. She feels nothing. Dead is dead, regardless of where it resides.

The work was difficult. But if you’ve taken an organ from one large animal, you can take one from another. What made this so difficult was her face. I couldn’t look at it, so I pulled her bowling shirt over her head.

The ascension of the sun quickly warmed the shed, and soon it became so unbearably hot that I could think of nothing but a cold drink from the well. My thirst hastened my work, and when I heard the door unlocking, long before the four hours had expired, I’d nearly finished my chore. Orson walked in, still sporting the mechanic’s suit. Through the open door, I saw the morning sun, already blinding. It would be another glorious blue day. A breeze slipped in before Orson shut the door, and it felt spectacular.

"Smile, Andy." He snapped a Polaroid. It was strange to think that the worst moment of my life had just been captured in a photograph.

My brother looked tired — a melancholic darkness in his eyes. I stopped working and put the knife down. Because I’d done most of the work on my knees, they were terribly sore, so I sat on the red plastic. Orson circled the body, inspecting my work.

"I thought you might be getting thirsty," he said, his voice now frail, depleted. "I’ll finish this up, unless you want to."

I shook my head as he peered down into the evisceration. "That’s not a bad job," he said. He picked the knife up and wiped it off on his pants. "Go get cleaned up." I stood, but he stopped me from walking off the plastic. "Take your shoes off," he said. I was standing in a pool of blood. "We’re gonna burn these clothes anyway, so just strip here. I’ll take care of it."

I removed my clothes and left them in a pile on the plastic. Even my boxers and socks were stained. When I was naked, my arms were red up to my elbows and a smattering of blood dotted my face, though it was nothing a cold shower wouldn’t rinse away.

I walked to the door and opened it. The sunlight caused me to squint while I gazed across the desert. As I stepped onto the baking dirt, Orson called my name, and I looked back.

"I don’t want you to hate me," he said.

"What do you expect? After forcing me to watch this and making me…cut her."

"I need you to understand what I do," he said. "Can you try?" I looked at Shirley, motionless on the plastic, the bowling shirt still hiding her face. What utter degradation. I felt tears coming to shatter the numbness that had sustained me these last few hours. Without reply, I closed the door, and after several steps, the soles of my feet burned, so I hustled to the well. A showerhead was mounted to the side of the outhouse. I filled the bucket overhead and opened the spigot. When the ice water hit the ground, I dug my feet into the mud. The hair on my arms was matted with dried blood. For ten minutes, I scrubbed my skin raw as the silver showerhead, an oddity in this vast desert, sluiced freezing water upon my head.

I cut the water off and walked to the cabin, standing for some time on the front porch, naked, letting the parched wind evaporate the water from my skin. Guilt, massive and lethal, loitered on the outskirts of my conscience. Still so dirty.

I saw a jet cutting a white contrail miles above the desert. Do you see me? I thought, squinting to see the glint of the sun on the distant metallic tube. Is someone looking down at me from their tiny window as I look up at them? Can you see me and what I’ve done? As the jet cruised out of sight, I felt like a child — already in bed at 8:30 on a summer evening, not yet dark, other children playing freeze tag in the street, their laughter reaching me while I cry myself to sleep.

Orson emerged from the shed, bearing the woman wrapped in plastic. He walked fifty yards into the desert and threw her into a hole. It took him several minutes to bury her. Then he came toward the cabin, and as he approached, I noticed he carried a small Styrofoam cooler.

"Is it in there?" I asked when he stepped onto the porch. He nodded and walked inside. I followed him in, and he stopped at the door to his room and unlocked it.

"You can’t come in here," he said. He wouldn’t open the door.

"I wanna see what you do with it."

"I’m gonna put it in a freezer."

"Let me see your room," I said. "I’m curious. You want me to understand?"

"Get some clothes on first." I ran to my room and put on a clean pair of jeans and a black tank top. When I returned, Orson’s door was open, and he stood inside before his freezer chest.

"May I come in now?" I asked from the doorway.

"Yeah." Orson’s bedroom was larger than mine. To my immediate right, a single bed sat low to the floor, neatly made with a red fleece blanket pulled taut from end to end. Next to the bed, against the wall, Orson had constructed another bookshelf, much smaller, but crammed with books nonetheless. Against the far wall, beneath an unbarred window, stood the freezer chest. Orson was reaching down into it as I walked up behind him.

"What’s in there?" I asked.

"Hearts," he said, closing the freezer.

"How many?"

"Not nearly enough."

"That a trophy?" I pointed to a newspaper clipping tacked to the wall near the freezer. Skimming the article, I found that the names, dates, and locations had been blacked out with Magic Marker. " ‘Mutilated Body Found at Construction Site,’ " I read aloud. "Mom would be proud."

"When you do a good job, do you like to be acknowledged?"

Orson locked the freezer and walked across the room. Prostrating himself on the bed, he stretched his arms into the air and yawned. Then he lay back on top of the red fleece blanket and stared into the wall.

"I get like this after they’re gone," he said. "An empty place inside of me. Right here." He pointed at his heart. "You couldn’t imagine it. Famous writer. I mean absolutely nothing. I’m a man in a cabin in the middle of a desert, and that’s it. The extent of my existence." He kicked off his boots, and grains of sand spilled onto the stone. "But I’m more than what’s in that freezer," he said. "I own what’s in that freezer. They’re my children now. I remember every birth." I sat down and leaned back against the splintery logs. "After a couple days, this depression will subside, and I’ll feel normal again, like anyone else. But that’ll pass, and I’ll get a burning where the void is now. A burning to do it again. And I do. And the cycle repeats." He looked at me with dying eyes, and I tried not to pity him, but he was my brother.

"Do you hear yourself? You’re sick."

"I used to think so too. A tenet of stoicism advises to live according to your nature. If you try to be something you aren’t, you’ll self-destruct. When I accepted my nature, violent as it is, I made peace with myself. Stopped hating myself and what I do. After a kill, I used to get much worse than this. I’d contemplate suicide. But now I anticipate the depression, and that allows me to take the despair and sense of loss in stride." His spirits improved as he analyzed himself. "I actually feel better having you here, Andy. It’s quite surprising."

"Maybe your depression stems from guilt, which should be expected after murdering an innocent woman."

"Andy," he said, his voice brightening, a sign that he’d changed the subject. "I wanna tell you something that struck me when I read your first novel, which was good, by the way. They don’t deserve the criticism they get. They’re much deeper than
slasher
stories. Anyway, when I finished The Killer and His Weapon, I realized that we do the same thing."

"No. I write; you kill."

"We both murder people, Andy. Because you do it with words on a page, that doesn’t exonerate what’s in your heart."

"People happen to like the way I tell crime stories," I said. "If I had the chops to write literary fiction, I’d do that."

"No, there’s something about murder, about rage, that intrigues you. You embrace that obsession through writing. I embrace it through the act itself. Which of us is living according to his true nature?"

"There’s a world of difference between how our obsessions manifest themselves," I said.

"So you admit you’re obsessed with murder?"

"For the sake of argument. But my books don’t hurt anyone."

"I wouldn’t go that far."

"How do my books kill?"

"When I read The Killer and His Weapon, I didn’t feel alone anymore. Andy, you know how killers think. Why they kill. When it came out ten years ago, I was confused and terrified of what was happening in my mind. I was homeless then, spending my days at a library. I hadn’t acted on anything, but the burning had begun."

"Where were you?"

He shook his head. "City X. I’ll tell you nothing about my past. But every word in that book validated the urges I was having. Especially my anger. I mean, to write that protagonist, you had to have an intimate knowledge of the rage I lived with. And of course you did —" he smiled — "my twin. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the tool of writing to channel that rage, so people had to die. But your book…it was inspiring. It’s kind of funny when you think about it. We both have the same disease, only yours makes you rich and famous, and mine makes me a serial murderer."

"Tell me something," I said, and he sat up on one arm. "When did this start?"

He hesitated, rolling the idea around in his head. "Eight years ago. Winter of nineteen-eighty-eight. We were twenty-six, and it was the last year I was homeless. I usually slept outside, because I didn’t leave the library until nine, when it closed, and by then the shelters were full.

"If you wanted to survive a cold night on the street, you had to go where the fires were — the industrial district, near these railroad tracks. It was an unloading zone, so there was plenty of scrap wood lying around. The homeless would pile the wood in oil drums and feed the fires until morning, when libraries and doughnut shops reopened.