Day of the Dead - J. A. Jance [4]
Finally he found his voice. “My God, Gayle, what have you done?” he whispered hoarsely. “Tell me.”
“What do you think I’ve done?” she retorted. “I did what I told you I was going to do. You had a problem. I took care of it.”
She turned away from him, leaned down into the car, and removed something from the backseat. When she faced Larry again, she was holding a butcher knife by the handle. Larry saw it and knew that it was theirs—the one from the wooden block that sat on the kitchen counter.
“You’ll probably want to clean this up while I go take a shower.”
She started toward the door while Larry stared down in astonishment at the bloodied knife in his hand. This was a nightmare. Surely it couldn’t be happening, and yet…
“You didn’t…” he began.
She turned back on him. “Didn’t what?” she demanded. “Didn’t let you wreck everything we’ve worked for?”
For some reason all the muscles in both Larry’s hands quit working at once. He dropped the trash bag, letting the bloodied clothing spill messily onto the floor. The knife slipped from his other hand. It fell to the concrete floor and landed on its tip. The top inch or so of the steel blade shattered while the rest of the knife spun out of reach under the car. Leaving them where they fell, Larry followed his naked wife into the house and down the hall to the bathroom.
Gayle had turned on the shower in the tub and was stepping into it when Larry entered the room behind her. Seeing him, she shook her head in resignation. “Well,” she said, “as long as you’re here, you could just as well come wash my back.”
And, God help him, that’s exactly what Larry Stryker did because, no matter what, he always did what Gayle wanted him to do. He stripped off his clothing and clambered into the tub behind her. She was waiting for him, standing under the steaming-hot cascade with little rivulets of bloodied water streaming from her hair. He watched in fascination as they coursed down her neck and across the gentle slope of her breasts.
“Here,” she said, handing him a bar of soap. “You do know how to use this, don’t you?”
And so he had scrubbed her clean. A pale pink sheen of blood sluiced off her body and made its way across the white porcelain tub and down the drain. She stood like a compliant child under his ministrations, letting him wash her body and shampoo her hair. All the while she watched him with those amazing green eyes of hers, eyes that never wavered and seemed somehow unaffected by both shampoo and soap. Just when Larry thought he had completed the job, she handed him the fingernail brush. It turned out she was right to do so. Close examination revealed crusted blood still lingering under her nails.
When he had finished with the nailbrush and glanced back at Gayle, she was smiling at him. “See there?” she said. “Lady Macbeth was wrong. The blood does too come off. Now it’s my turn. Let me wash you.”
By then the hot water was beginning to give out. Even so, Gayle worked her customary magic. From the beginning she had always known exactly what to do to make Larry wild to have her. It had been true when he’d first met the eighteen-year-old college sophomore who was two years younger than he was. It was still true now, twelve years later. Gradually the water went from warm to cold, but Larry didn’t notice. He was aware of nothing but the tantalizing touch, first of Gayle’s hands and later her lips, on his all-too-compliant body. It was all he could do simply to remain standing.
Finally, she turned off the water. Without bothering to towel off, she led him, stumbling and still soaking wet, into the bedroom, where, in one smooth motion, she drew him down onto the bed and into her body.
Gayle had always liked sex, but that night she was ravenous for it, wanting him—giving and taking—far beyond anything Larry could ever remember. It was only later, when Gayle was sleeping and Larry wasn’t, that he realized what had happened. Rather than being appalled by