Urge to Kill

It was the pain that had awakened her. With each breath, the ribs on her left side seemed to catch fire. She was still holding on to the shotgun barrel, the butt of its wooden stock resting on the bedroom floor.

She had no idea how long she’d slept or been unconscious. From where she sat she couldn’t see the clock.

Hobbs was still snoring, but not loudly. The TV was still on beyond the foot of the bed, tuned to the news, still muted. Yellow closed-caption letters crawled past at the bottom of the screen while an impossibly beautiful blond anchorwoman mouthed each syllable with red, red lips.

Lavern looked beyond the TV, saw light edging the drawn shades, and knew it was morning. Early morning.

Hobbs suddenly snorted and coughed, then resumed snoring. He was sleeping more lightly now. He might wake up soon.

Something on TV caught Lavern’s attention. The closed-caption lettering indicated that the anchorwoman was talking about the Slicer being shot to death in some woman’s apartment. It had turned out that he wasn’t also the .25-Caliber Killer—but the man gunned down earlier by the police was his son, who’d procured the victims for his father. The son, who’d arranged urban ‘hunts,’ had apparently killed no one directly, but had seduced and prepared women for his father to murder and butcher.

Suddenly the screen was split, and another woman appeared, a lanky redhead. The blond anchorwoman was on the other half of the screen, interviewing her. They were discussing the reasons why the father-son team of killers acted as they had. Lavern would have turned up the sound so she could hear their voices, but she was afraid to risk waking Hobbs.

The redheaded woman, Helen something, was explaining the emotional trap the son had been in, and the societal, sometimes-ancient forces that had acted upon both father and son. Reasons and motivations stemmed from all of this. Motivations to kill. Excuses for killing.

None of it sounded like justification to Lavern.

Yet here she was with a shotgun beside her, waiting for her husband to wake up so she could kill him, so she could do to him what he would otherwise eventually do to her.

I have the courage to kill him, but not to leave him.

But did she really believe that? And wasn’t there more to it?

She understood for the first time that she might leave Hobbs and learn how to live without him, but if she killed him he’d be with her always.

Always.

She made sure the shotgun’s wooden stock was firmly planted on the floor, then used the gun as a cane to help her stand up from her chair.

Lavern took a few careful steps. It hurt, but she could walk.

She leaned the shotgun against the bed, where Hobbs would see it when he woke up and think about what might have happened.

Then she limped from the bedroom and went outside. Lavern was still wearing yesterday’s clothes, carrying yesterday’s pain, but right now she didn’t care.

It took her twenty minutes to hail a cab and tell the driver to take her to the Broken Wing Women’s Shelter.

83

Quinn would have smoked one of the Cuban cigars he’d recently bought from Iggy, his supplier, but he knew it wasn’t worth the disapproval and barrage of air-freshener bombs hissing their incense all over his apartment. As if it weren’t his apartment.

He stared at the ceiling and considered how things had worked out.

The case had become clearer in the light of further research, as they all did in the post-arrest phase. The evidence was being added to, reexamined, reclassified, and analyzed. There would of course be no trial, with Martin Hawk and his father both dead.

This one had what the pop psychologists called closure.

Fedderman had returned to Florida, where he thought he could live cheaper and there were a few places that served what tasted like New York deli food. He’d said he might take another fling at golf.

Renz’s reputation was at its high point. A mayoral bid didn’t seem so far fetched at the moment. He and Quinn talked frequently, still arranging and organizing material to develop the full story of what had happened, how this familial team of killer and enabler had evolved. But much of the story was lost in the past and the wooded hills around Black Lake, Missouri, and would never be known. From time to time Renz would mention that someday he might write a book about the case. Being a published author was important in politics, locally or nationally.

Berty Wrenner, as well as most of the surviving Quest and Quarry clients, had been tried and convicted, and the rash of modern-day duels in the city had soon abated.

Quinn’s reverie suddenly ended with the grating ring of the intercom. He glanced at his watch and climbed out of bed.

Pearl identified herself, and he buzzed her in, then unlocked the apartment door and returned to the bedroom to pull on some pants.