Fiction: KILLER
Part two of the JANE DOE trilogy
She was thirty minutes late. He raised his hand to her across the bar.
“It’s good to meet you,” he said when she came over.
She was so tall he had to crane his neck to look up at her. She muttered something he couldn’t make out, then took the shot of whiskey he held out and threw it back. He gestured to the bartender to pour two more.
They sat in a red velvet booth. Her sole profile photo on the app was a grainy picture of her against a gray sky with low-res clouds filled with dark rain, and he was surprised how she carried that dourness with her even here.
“Normally it’s me reaching out to girls on the app,” he said. He did not mention how he touched the screen when she messaged him, brushing two fingers across her cheek, marking her.
She downed her shot.
“You meet lots of girls?”
“Don’t get the wrong idea. I’m not just looking for the first wide-eyed wounded doe I come across. I spend a lot of time thinking about deep stuff.”
“Deep stuff.” She wiped her runny nose on her sleeve.
“What it all means. Where we come from and how we’re all the same but different. Your profile says you like the desert. What’s so great about the desert?”
“It’s hot. Nothing can survive in it.”
“But nothing’s there.”
“That’s what I like about it. The emptiness. It’s scorched clean. Like fire.”
“You’re from Vegas?”
“Just passing through.”
“A drifter, huh? They say this is a place you can start over. But that’s a lie. What kind of work are you in?”
“I’ve had all kinds of jobs.” The waitress brought another shot and she downed it, too. “Killed chickens at a farm. Carnival for a while.”
“That’s quite the resume,” he said. “Myself, I’m between opportunities at the moment. I’ve been thinking I’d like to find work in a prison. Keep watch over the bad guys as they serve their debt. My dad was killed when I was a kid, you know. They never caught the killer. Want to see a magic trick?”
He pulled a switchblade from his pocket and thumbed out the blade. Then he held up his thumb for her to see, before covering it with a cloth napkin. He twirled the knife between his fingers theatrically, then jabbed the blade into his covered thumb, wincing in pain.
“Ta-da,” he said, pulling away the napkin to reveal his intact thumb. He pocketed the knife and threw a punctured lime wedge on the table.
“I pocketed the lime when I handed you the shot earlier,” he said. “We call that misdirection.”
“Lets get out of here.”
In the parking lot, he dropped to a crouch in front of his car—neon orange and dented all over as if someone took a softball bat to it—and motioned to the license plate.
“Get it? Camaro Kev. Like on the app. My friends just call me Kev. Sometimes Killer Kev.”
He drove to where she pointed, barely saying a word, out to the edge of the city. What street lights worked out this way illuminated shuttered warehouses and ruined factories.
“Buses run out here?” he asked.
“I walk everywhere.”
“That must take you hours. This is no place for a lady to live. Haven’t you heard about the killer?”
“There are all kinds of killers.”
“Not like this one. He travels across the metro area, slashing the throats of women who live by themselves and nobody cares about. No offense.”
She didn’t say anything. Past the industrial zone, they arrived at a gloomy trailer park and the weather-beaten doublewide in which she lived.
“Turn off the lights,” she said.
When he did, she leaned over the dark interior and stuck her tongue in his ear. It was electric. She grabbed the bulge in his pants. The whiskey on her breath, the rubbery sound of her moving across the leather interior. She would not kiss him, and when he pushed his way into one, she bit his lip and got out of the car. He followed her up the steps.
The trailer was like a crime scene, an aftermath to some natural disaster. Holes punched in the walls, exposed insulation. A bare and darkly stained mattress on the floor.
“Nice place,” he said, walking inside. He kneeled in front of a large, stuffed duffel bag. “Living out of this?”
“Don’t touch that.”
“A bag full of money then.”
“It’s not mine. Some guy left it.”
She turned the deadbolt and pulled her shirt over her head. Her bra was flesh-colored and her skin bruised all over.
“That’s what I’m talking about. Just give me a minute, baby.”
He stepped inside the coffin-sized bathroom and rolled the door closed after him. The bulb flickered and buzzed above him and he stared at himself in the mirror. He wondered how he was going to do it. No two were ever the same.
He used to think it was improvisation, like free jazz, but now he knew that another force was acting through him. It usually ended with the knife, steel graceful and clean, but with the last one he met online he found himself taking her throat in his hands and crushing her windpipe until the veins in her neck stopped pumping blood to her brain. Eye to eye the whole time.
This one would have to be quicker—his sister was expecting him soon. But when he went for his knife, his jeans pocket was empty. Where had he dropped it? It would be one thing if it slipped out of his pocket in the car. But if it fell inside the trailer somehow…
The lights were off when he came out of the bathroom.
“Baby?”
But there was only a tall, thin man leaning against the front door.
“She’s gone,” the man said in a Southern accent. He had a quiet voice that lingered in the room. “Took her payment and left. It’s just the two of us.”
“Who are you?”
“Me? Nobody.” He stepped into a patch of moonlight on the trailer floor, his suit and wide-brimmed black hat, both black, glistening. “I’ve been looking for you, Kevin.”
“Looking for me?”
“Oh, yes. I’ve been looking for you for quite some time.”
“Listen… did I meet some girl you knew?”
“Not yet. But I hope so very soon. You’ve been a very naughty boy, yet I’m not concerned with what you’ve done. I’m interested in what you have to give me. You do have something for me, you know.”
The man stepped closer. He smelled of latex and iron. Something else, too, biting his nose. Sulphur. His face looked like it had been shaped with lumps of wet clay. His face was wrong.
“What do I have for you?” Kevin whispered. He backed away as the man came closer, but his back hit the wall and there was nowhere else to go.
“Why, Kevin. Your last words.”
Originally published in Punk Noir Magazine