Killing Hour - Lisa Gardner [64]
He thought of his mother again and the sad look she wore every time she watched the sun die in the sky. Did she know the planet was dying? Did she understand even back then that anything that was beautiful could not belong long on this earth?
Or was she simply afraid to go back inside, where his father would be waiting with his quick temper and hamlike fists?
The man did not like these thoughts. He didn’t want to play this game anymore. He jerked the aquarium from the inside of the van. He dumped its grass and twig matting into the woods. Then he dumped in half of a bottle of ammonia and went to work with his bare hands. He could feel the harsh chemical burn his skin.
Later the runoff from this little exercise would seep into a stream, and kill off algae, bacteria, and cute little fishes. Because he was no better, you know. No matter what he did, he was still a man who drove a car and bought a refrigerator and probably once kissed a girl who used a can of aerosol spray on her hair. Because that’s what men did. Men killed. Men destroyed. Men beat their wives, abused their kids, and took a planet and warped it into their own twisted image.
His eyes were running now. Snot poured from his nose and his chest heaved until his breath came out in savage gasps. The harsh scent of ammonia, he thought. But he knew better. He was once again thinking of his mother’s pale, lonely face.
He and his brother should have gone back inside with her. They could’ve walked through the door first, judged the mood, and if it came to it, taken their punishment like M-E-N. They didn’t, though. Their father was home, and they ran away into the woods, where they lived like gods on pokeweed salad, wild raspberries, and tender fiddleheads.
They turned to the land for shelter, and tried not to think about what was happening back in one tiny cabin in the woods. At least that’s what they’d done when they could.
The man turned off the hose. The van was washed, the aquarium cleansed, the whole project sanitized within an inch of its life. Forty-eight hours later, it was over.
He was tired again. Bone-deep weary in a way that people who had never killed could never appreciate. But it was over. Now, at long last, he was done.
He took his kill kit away with him. Later, he tucked it beneath his mattress before finally crawling into bed.
His head touched the pillow. He thought of what he had just done. High heels, blond hair, blue eyes, green dress, bound hands, dark hair, brown eyes, long legs, scratching nails, flashing white teeth.
The man closed his eyes. He slept the best he had in years.
CHAPTER 18
Quantico, Virginia
5:36 A.M.
Temperature: 84 degrees
QUINCY JERKED AWAKE TO THE SOUND of the phone ringing. Instinct bred of so many other calls in the middle of so many other nights led him to reach automatically toward the nightstand. Then the ringing penetrated a second time, shrill and insistent, and he remembered that he was at the FBI Academy, staying in a dorm room, where the lone phone sat on the desk halfway across the room.
He moved quietly and quickly, but it was no longer necessary. Even as he cut off the third ring, Rainie was sitting up sleepily in the bed. Her long chestnut hair was tousled around her pale face, drawing attention to the striking angles of her cheeks and the long, bare column of her neck. God, she was lovely first thing in the morning. For that matter, she was lovely at the end of a long day. All these years later, day in, day out, she never failed to take his breath away.
He looked at her, and then, as happened too often these days, he felt a sharp pain in his chest. He turned away, cradling the phone between his shoulder and his ear.
“Pierce Quincy.”
And then a moment later, “Are you sure? That’s not what I meant— Kimberly . . . Well, if that’s what you want to do. Kimberly . . .” Big sigh again. The beginning of a headache already building in his temples. “You’re a grown adult, Kimberly. I respect that.”
It