Endless Night Page 10

  I was fairly confident that her husband was not at home, but I went looking anyway. The search turned up nobody. From the looks of things, they didn’t have children, either.

  I learned their names from subscription labels on magazines in the bathroom.

  Benedict and Hillary Weston.

  I wondered what the girl’s name might be.

  Maybe Traci? Kimberly? Lynn? Joan?

  I’ll find out.

  I took a very long, hot shower. The mess sluiced off me. Soaping down, I closed my eyes and pictured myself in the utility room. Not with Hillary, of course, but with my girl.

  I wished she was with me in the shower.

  And she will be with me in a shower. Maybe not today. Maybe tomorrow. We’ll take a nice, long shower together before I take her outside to do her. That way, she’ll be squeaky clean.

  She shouldn’t be difficult to find.

  The way I had it figured, our friendly folks in the news media were sure to give the whole story a big play. They’d tell me the names of the two kids who’d survived last night’s ordeal. With a little bit of luck, they might even say where the kids have gone to.

  Only one problem.

  My “pals” might get to the girl before me.

  Chapter Twelve

  It made me sick to think of the others getting to her first. They could have the boy. I didn’t give a hot hoot about him. But I wanted the girl for myself.

  I had to have her, but they’d kill her if they got the chance.

  Suddenly, I felt like time was running out. I told myself to calm down. Even if Tom and the others had found out where the kids were, they wouldn’t rush into anything.

  They’re nuts, but they aren’t fanatics. They don’t want to die for any cause. They just want to enjoy the thrills of making others die.

  So I tried to calm down. I stayed in the shower, soaping and rinsing, until I felt completely clean. Then I stepped out and dried myself on a thick, soft towel. It was a little bit moist when I pulled it off the rod. You’d think it would’ve gone into the wash with the other stuff. But maybe Hillary’d planned to wash it in the next load.

  I hoped she’d been the one who made it wet.

  The idea of rubbing myself with her towel was kind of appealing. What part of herself had she wiped with this section of the towel—with this?

  It was disgusting, though, to imagine it might be her husband’s towel. What if he’d dried his cock or ass with the same part of it I was using on my face?

  Not a pretty thought.

  I searched the towel for clues. Sniffed it, studied it for tell-tale hairs.

  Wherever we go, we leave pieces of ourselves behind.

  That’s why the cops go over crime scenes so carefully, gathering up everything, even vacuuming. They’re looking for what we’ve left of ourselves. Not just fingerprints or footprints, but bits of us. They want shreds of fabric from our clothes. They want samples of our spit, blood and semen. They want the specimens of our skin scraped off by the fingernails of our prey. And, oh yeah, they very much want our hair.

  It’s all physical evidence, and physical evidence is what makes convictions.

  Our little gang wants to avoid being identified, much less convicted, so we do our best not to provide any physical evidence. Even though we don’t wear gloves (they’re like condoms and screw up the feel of things), we’re very careful to wipe whatever we touch. We leave our civilian clothes in the van. Except for our shoes, we don’t wear anything into the house except whatever we’ve tailored out of someone else’s skin. The outfits always include scalp or pubic hair of the person who originally wore the skin. Like I said earlier, we go in with no hair of our own except our eyebrows and lashes. So any other sorts of hair we leave behind won’t belong to us.

  To protect ourselves against traces of us we might deposit on or inside the bodies of our victims, we simply take the bodies away in the van. We have other reasons to take them. But the effect is the same: they aren’t left behind to give away information about us.

  Last but not least, we bum the scene of the crime. We use delaying devices to start the fires. That way, we’ve got time to make a getaway ahead of the fire trucks.

  Nothing cleans like fire.

  But just in case the fire might go out or be extinguished too fast, or otherwise not destroy the area, we leave little or nothing of ourselves behind. What we leave, if anything, is more likely to confuse the cops than enlighten them.

  For instance, strands of hair from the head of a drifter we picked up on Mulholland last year. Or fingerprints from the pretty young kindergarten teacher who was last seen going to her car after a midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. (The trick’s in Tom’s Fabulous Fingertip Gloves.)

  You can see, we’re like NASA. We’ve got loads of backup systems, failsafe systems—redundancy!

  We leave behind nothing to incriminate us.

  Except this time a couple of witnesses!

  Oh, well, they’ll be taken care of. By me, I hope. The girl, at least. Like I say, they can have the boy. A couple of the guys would prefer him, if you know what I mean. No sexual discrimination here. We’re equal opportunity killers.

  Anyway, to get back to the point, I found a curly brown pubic hair on the towel I was using after my shower. It matched Hillary. Unfortunately, though, I didn’t know Benedict’s hair color.

  And didn’t want to know, frankly. I told myself that this was Hillary’s pubic hair and her towel. Then I finished drying.

  After that, I cleaned off my Connie kilt. I hadn’t worn it into the shower. You know, you don’t want to wash fine leather with hot water. I’d previously treated it with a conditioner and water-repellent lotion, so a damp washcloth took off most of the blood and grime.

  I didn’t put the kilt back on, of course. To get home without being stopped, I’d need to wear something just slightly less conspicuous.

  Conventional clothes. And hair, if possible.

  The cops had to know, by now, that my head was shaved. There was probably an APB—“Be on the lookout for chrome-domes.” They might even have roadblocks.

  You might think this head-shaving thing is pretty stupid. We’re so careful not to leave traces behind, but then we go wandering around with bald pates, and you can’t make yourself much more conspicuous than that.

  Actually, though, there’s a much more basic reason for shaving our heads. The reason has nothing to do with being careful about physical evidence. I’ll get to it later, if I have time. It would take a lot of explaining.

  For now, let’s just say that having a bald head usually presented no problem for us. That’s because we always made sure nobody saw us during a foray and survived.

  We sure had survivors this time, though. So my bare crown could get me killed.

  I went searching through the master bedroom. I wanted to find a wig. No such luck.

  In a drawer of the bedstand, though, I did find a .45 caliber Colt Mark IV. It was the government model, a black (actually, they call it Colt blue) semi-automatic. Two loaded magazines were in the drawer with it.

  I would’ve preferred finding a wig.

  Firearms make too much noise. And killing with a gun—it’s interesting and not entirely bland, but it doesn’t give you the real joy and satisfaction that you get from using other means.

  We all have our favorite methods. Only Dusty prefers guns. I figured this was an emergency, though. I was in sort of a fix, and a .45 might be my ticket out.

  If only I had a good head of hair to go with it ...

  I’m not a great original thinker, but all of our bunch read horror novels. Generally, they aren’t very scary. They’re just pretend, after all, and we’ve done stuff for real that makes most of the fiction seem pretty tame. But we get a bang out of them for a lot of other reasons, and we study them for new ideas. Like I said earlier, the whole idea for our gang came from some old horror novel. Today, a book I’d read last year is what gave me the answer to my hai
r problem.

  The answer, of course, was Hillary.

  Me and my knife paid a visit to the freezer.

  She hadn’t frozen yet.

  I took her scalp along with the hair, so I could wear it like a cap.

  Then it was time for another shower. I took my new wig in with me, and shampooed it. After drying it a bit with a towel, I tried it on. Too small. But a couple of cuts up the sides loosened it. I put it on again. It was maybe a little too loose, but it would have to do.

  I kept it on and used a blow dryer on it. I brushed it, fluffed it up. In no time at all, the hair looked great.

  It would’ve looked great on a gal, anyway. It made me look like some sort of a fruitcake—like a rock star or one of those “shock radio” freaks.

  People were bound to stare at a guy in this sort of hair.

  Well, I would be wearing Hillary’s hair so why not wear her clothes, too?

  The cops certainly weren’t looking for a woman.

  I would transform myself from Simon into Simone.

  Even though the wig felt rather nasty on my head, I kept it on while I went hunting for the proper attire. The hair was dry, but not the scalp. It felt like I’d peeled the skin off a raw chicken breast and slapped it on my skull. Not very pleasant. But I was afraid that if I took it off, it might dry and shrink, and maybe even stiffen in a way that would screw up its fit. Besides, I was Simone, now. Simone had lush, brown tresses.

  Soon, she’d be gorgeous. Or at least not so obviously a man.

  As it turned out, Benedict’s clothes wouldn’t have fit me anyway. He was a lot bigger than Hillary, whereas she was just my size.

  I found a most alluring pair of panties. They were royal blue and shiny, with little more to them than a stripper’s g-string. Wearing those and the hair and nothing else, I looked positively alarming.

  The addition of pantyhose made me look like a fellow I’d seen one night when an old girlfriend dragged me to Swan Lake. Oh, how merrily he’d leaped and pranced!

  I wanted to throw a chair through the bedroom mirror. But broken mirrors are supposed to bring bad luck. This particular mirror was the size of the closet door, so it’d probably bring more than the usual seven years. I needed all the luck I could get, so I let it alone.

  I could’ve just turned away from the mirror, of course. I didn’t. As much as I hated the ludicrous images it tossed back at me, they intrigued me.

  When I put on the bra, the mirror suddenly became my friend. The bra matched the panties. I wadded tissues into balls, and stuffed its flimsy cups. No longer did I look like a dancing fairy. Now, I was a woman.

  Simone.

  For a while, she turned me on. Why not admit it? Hell, I’ve admitted a few other things this afternoon, huh?

  I loved the look of her. I posed, studying her from every angle. I caressed her. She was me, of course—I’m not crazy. But I do have a pretty good imagination, so I found it easy to pretend she was a stranger. A beauty, too.

  When I squeezed her tits and the nice pert cups of the bra collapsed, the feel of the mashing wads of Kleenex put a damper on my excitement. I got on with business.

  I went looking for a skirt.

  Young gals in L.A. hardly ever wear skirts. They wear shorts or jeans or sweatpants. Which is fine with me. I’m not one of those ancient farts who thinks a gal isn’t feminine except if she has a skirt on. The trend makes me curious, though. I like to wonder about the whys of things.

  The real difference—the central difference between pants and skirts—probably the only difference that counts in a sunny climate—is that skirts are open between the legs, while pants have a cloth barrier there.

  Are skirts avoided for no other reason than because they don’t have that barrier?

  And what would that mean or signify?

  Do the gals feel safer, more protected, when access is restricted? I know I feel vulnerable when I wear my Connie kilt. That doesn’t bother me, though. It adds to the thrill. But maybe on a day to day basis, you’d rather have the safe, sheltered, enclosed feeling you get with pants.

  Anyway, who knows the real reasons for anything?

  What I knew was that I wanted to wear one of Hillary’s skirts or dresses. Maybe for a lot of reasons. But it would’ve been dumb for me to pose as a female—hair, pantyhose, bra, etc.—only to face the world in a pair of jeans or shorts.

  I needed the total, complete effect.

  Nobody seeing me should have to wonder even for an instant whether I’m a gal or just a long-haired geek.

  I finally chose a pale blue, denim skirt that hung loosely to mid-thigh, and a bright yellow blouse. The blouse had sleeves that ended at my forearms with wide, floppy cuffs. It buttoned up the front. I left the top buttons undone to catch the eyes of the fellows. In the mirror, I actually appeared to have cleavage—an effect of the bra, maybe. The bra, by the way, could be seen through the fabric of the blouse.

  My Adam’s apple was so insignificant that I didn’t bother tying a scarf around my neck. Cross-dressers always try to hide their throats. It’s such a giveaway. But then, it’s probably necessary if you look like you’ve swallowed Mount Shasta.

  I used an electric shaver to take a day’s growth of whiskers off my face, then added a few touches of makeup.

  Last but not least, I slipped my feet into a pair of bright, white tennis shoes.

  Then I checked myself out in the mirror. Terrific! Simone was a masterpiece. She looked cute, confident, carefree, casual but well off. The sort of woman who maybe had played some tennis this morning, and was now on her way to run a few chores before lunching with “the girls” at the club.

  She didn’t look like a Simone, though. More like a Doris or a June. Which was no problem at all.

  Happy with my new appearance, I loaded the Colt. I carried it and the spare magazine into the kitchen. Earlier, I’d spotted Hillary’s purse there on the counter in front of the radio.

  Her car keys and billfold were inside the purse. I added the gun and magazine, slung the leather strap over my shoulder, and went out the back door to the garage.

  The garage door didn’t have any remote control opener that I could find. But it slid without any trouble when I dragged it sideways by the handle.

  Hillary’s car was not inside the garage.

  In fact, the two-car garage looked as if it was being used to store everything but cars.

  No car was parked in the driveway, either.

  That’s all right, I told myself. It’s probably on the street.

  I went through the house and looked out its front window. The Westons had a very large lawn, all neatly trimmed. Beyond the lawn was a stretch of curb long enough to hold four parked cars. And four cars were parked there. The curb on the far side of the street was empty—a sure sign that this was street cleaning day for that side. Everyone had scrambled for places over here.

  Great.

  Four cars in front of Hillary’s house.

  One or more of them almost had to belong to the Westons.

  Likely just one, though. The others probably belonged to neighbors.

  It would behoove me to approach the right car on the first try.

  The key ring from Hillary’s purse held eight keys, including two sets of car keys. The car keys were branded with the manufacturers’ names: Chrysler and Jaguar.

  From the window, I could see that none of the four in front of the Weston house was a Jaguar. So the Jag would have to be Benedict’s car, which he’d driven to work.

  I recognized one of the four as a Porsche, another as a Volvo. The remaining two looked nondescript. I’m no car expert, but I figured one of them almost had to be Hillary’s Chrysler.

  I hurried outside and across the lawn. From the sidewalk, I checked out the two mystery cars: a Honda and a Toyota.

  The nearest Chrysler vehicle was parked on the other side of the Weston driveway, beyond not only their driveway but past a Toyota, a VW Rabbit, and a Ford pickup.

  The s
hiny, blue Chrysler Imperial was parked with its bumper no more than a yard short of the neighbor’s driveway.

  Would Hillary have parked this far from her house?

  Not damn likely.

  Especially not when she and her Benedict owned a perfectly good, empty driveway.

  This was almost for sure not her car.

  It was the only Chrysler anywhere near their house, though. Maybe Hillary had a reason for parking it here. She might’ve picked up something at the store for her neighbor, parked here to drop it off, and then walked home instead of bothering to move the car.

  Something like that. Life is odd. Who knows?

  If this was her car, I could be on my way in a few seconds. If it wasn’t, then somebody might see a woman trying to unlock a car that didn’t belong to her. Or an alarm might start blaring.

  I decided to take the risk.

  Keys ready, I stepped around the rear of the Chrysler, walked on the street to its driver’s door, and plugged a key into the lock. It slid right in. But it wouldn’t turn. I tried the other Chrysler key. It also fit into the slot, but refused to budge when I tried to twist it.

  So far, no car alarm had killed the morning quiet. Nobody had yelled at me, either.

  I pulled out the key, stepped back, then frowned and shook my head for the benefit of anyone who might be spying on me from one of the houses. Then I stepped around to the back of the car, peered at the license plate, shook my head again and walked away, trying to look puzzled.

  I returned to the Weston house.

  And that is where I still am.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Where the hell is Hillary’s car?

  In the shop? Maybe it’d gotten recalled for faulty brakes or something. Maybe somebody stole it. Maybe she’d loaned it to a friend.

  Maybe God, wanting to shaft yours truly, had DISAPPEARED the damn thing!

  Anyway, wherever it might be, I couldn’t find it.

  So I sat on a sofa in the living room and did some thinking.

  I wanted to get out of the neighborhood. I wanted to track down that girl, beat the others to her. But most of all, I wanted the cops not to get me.