Apaches - Lorenzo Carcaterra [130]
“He’s not at home,” Wilber Graves said to her. “He’s out. With his friends.”
“What do you want?” Carolyn asked, trying to keep a calm voice and a level breathing pattern.
“I want everything the cop calls his own,” Wilber said. “Everything.”
A few moments later Carolyn stood in front of the telephone, the towel stripped from her body and thrown to the floor. She was fully naked, her hands bound tightly behind her with chicken wire, the tip of a Spanish-made red-handled switchblade pressed against the side of her neck. Wilber rubbed Carolyn’s body with his free hand, moving gloved fingers in a slow motion up against her firm breasts, down the contours of her stomach, over the front of her thighs. Occasionally, he slipped a finger inside her vagina.
“You won’t believe this,” he said to her. “But I really wish I didn’t have to kill you.”
“Why are you waiting?” Carolyn asked. Her eyes stared straight ahead, trying to will herself to another place, a safer one, where men didn’t kill on whim or orders and where a woman could listen to Bach, read a book, and wait for someone she loved to call and tell her so. She could smell the Lean Cuisine dinner burning in the oven, too many minutes past done.
It almost made her want to smile.
The phone rang at seven minutes past eleven.
The first ring jolted her, the tip of Wilber’s knife edging in deeper, cutting into the side of her skin, drawing blood. Wilber removed his hand from Carolyn’s waist, picked up the phone, and placed it against her ear. He let her hear Boomer’s voice on the other end. Wilber smiled at her as he moved the phone away and cradled it on the side of his neck.
“Hello, Detective,” Wilber said into the receiver.
“Where’s Carolyn?” he heard Boomer say.
“She’s snug and warm right here in my arms,” Wilber said. “I have to tell you, you have excellent taste in women. That’s surprising in a police officer.”
“Anything happens to her …”
“Something is going to happen to her, Detective,” Wilber said. “We were just waiting for you to call before it does.”
“Let her go!” Boomer’s shout could be heard well beyond the range of the receiver.
“I will,” Wilber said. “I promise you that. But first, would you like to hear her say good-bye?”
Wilber pressed the receiver against Carolyn’s ear.
“Speak to him,” he told her.
Carolyn closed her eyes and took a deep breath, the knife pressing against her neck. “I love you, Boomer,” she said.
She never felt the cut. Her head turned light, the room spun around her in slow circles, the front of her body went warm with blood. Her legs weakened and sent her to the floor, a slight moan coming from her lips as her head touched down on the wooden planks.
Wilber hovered over her and watched her die, calmly ignoring Boomer’s frantic shouts into his end of the phone.
“My name is Wilber Graves,” he said into the phone once Carolyn had taken her final breath. “I’ve just killed a woman who loved you, and it was my pleasure. Goodbye, Detective.”
Wilber placed the phone back on its cradle, took one more look down at Carolyn, and closed the knife. He turned the stereo back on to Bach, went into the kitchen, and turned off the oven before he walked out of the apartment.
His work for the night at an end.
• • •
BOOMER WENT TO the wake, where the coffin was sealed, and to the funeral, held under the angry rain of a late spring day.
He had been fast on the crime scene, arriving within minutes of the precinct sector car. The two young officers hovering around the apartment had been decent enough to cover her naked body with a white sheet stripped from her bed, a sheet he and Carolyn had slept under together. Boomer pulled it back and stared down at the woman he had grown to know so well in such a short time. Her lips and nails were already starting to pale, her clear skin taking on the waxy color of the dead. The open wound still gurgled blood. Her eyes were closed, her mouth curved in a twisted smile. Boomer crunched