The Lonely Mile(25)

Martin looked at his watch and was astounded to discover it was now nearly ten p.m. He had been daydreaming about Carli for over three hours! He smiled at his foolishness; he was acting like a love-struck teenager. It was okay, though, because a chance at possessing a fresh, innocent girl like Carli would never come along again, and there was nothing wrong with savoring that.

Still, as enjoyable as it was to sit around and daydream about his upcoming conquest, what he wanted more than anything else in the world was to have her here, to enjoy her in the privacy of his home in all of the ways he craved, but that “society” said was wrong. Just who was “society,” anyway? And what right did “society” have to intrude on his pleasures?

Martin thumbed his remote, and a new porn DVD sprang to life on his big-screen TV. He loved porn; the X-rated action relaxed him and formed a backdrop for most of his best thinking. Some people listened to Mozart for inspiration; Martin enjoyed the artificial ecstasy provided courtesy of the adult film industry. You say tomato, I say tomahto. The point was, he had some serious planning to do if he was ever going to be together with his little angel.

Martin Krall relished the challenge. He sipped his drink and got to work.





CHAPTER 24


BILL DIDN’T THINK THERE was any way he was going to be able to sleep that night. The adrenaline was still pounding through his body at a rate nearly as strong as when he first finished reading that taunting letter from the I-90 Killer. He knew at some point in the not-too-distant future, all that adrenaline would wear off and he would crash, feeling headachy and sick to his stomach.

But fall asleep? No way. It would never happen.

But he did sleep, and when he did, his dreams came all night, nearly nonstop. They were vivid and colorful, free-form, filled with jagged shapes and menacing shadows and threatening monsters. Enemies he could not see or feel or touch assaulted him from all sides. He could hear them, though, and they taunted him, telling him they were going to tear him apart slowly, so that he could feel every limb as it was ripped from his agonized body, count every drop of blood as it spilled from his torn arteries onto the floor.

Interspersed among these nonspecific visions of impending doom were other, more detailed dreams. They were like subconscious commercials, breaking up the longer. television-show dreams that spelled out in excruciating detail Bill’s demise or, he thought later as he considered their significance, the demise of someone close to him.

Carli, of course.

The shorter dreams were different; they felt more like flashes of something resembling memory than actual scenarios containing a beginning, a middle, and an end. Repressed consciousness or some such similar psychobabble crap, perhaps.

The dreams continued on and off all night and finally, as dawn approached, Bill watched for what felt like hours, rather than just a couple of short seconds, as the man drove past in his repainted off-white box truck, the one with no identifying markings, the one that had obviously been repainted so it could not be identified. He stared and stared at the truck as it receded, hanging before his searching eyes forever as the I-90 Killer drove away. Something was not quite right, but Bill could not put his finger on what it might be. He felt frustrated and angry, like he was missing something of importance.

These short snippets of the remembered encounter were the mini-commercials interspersed with the longer dreams—the main event, nocturnally speaking—where his body was rent; ripped and torn apart painfully, agonizingly, his screams echoing on and on until they were all he could hear. They were everything. It was the longest night of Bill Ferguson’s life.

He awoke to the sound of his dying screams echoing through the tiny bedroom, wondering how many neighbors were cursing him, wondering when the cops were going to show up and serve him with a Disturbing the Peace citation. But they never did. He listened to his heart hammering in his chest as he wiped the sour perspiration from his face with his bed sheet and turned his pillow over, trying, unsuccessfully, to escape the uncomfortable slick of hot sweat.

Finally, as the first hint of dawn’s watery arrival began to pry its way into his bedroom, Bill raised the white flag of surrender against his subconscious. He threw off the bedcovers, listening to his joints creak and complain as he drew stiffly up to his full height and stumbled into the bathroom to brush his teeth and face the day.

He wondered if he had gotten more than ten or fifteen minutes of truly restful sleep. He doubted it. The entire, exhausting night was nothing more than a jumble of half-remembered nightmares and confusing dream sequences. Bill Ferguson was a man who rarely dreamed; or if he did, he certainly never remembered most of them. He normally awoke refreshed and invigorated.

Today, though, was just the opposite. He tried to make some kind of sense of the vivid nightmares as he dragged his toothbrush back and forth across his teeth and gums, doing his best to saw away the sickly taste of fear and foreboding, and mostly failing.

Bill walked down the short hallway to his kitchen, the worn vinyl flooring cool and refreshing on the soles of his feet. He started the coffee machine, hoping a good, strong shot of caffeine might reduce the pounding in his temples. If these dreams continued, he might have to invest in a new coffeemaker, one of the fancy models with a timer so the coffee would be ready for him, hot and fresh, when he stumbled out of bed after suffering through eight hours of tortured, sleepless misery.

The kitchen table felt foreign as he leaned on it with his elbows, holding the hot coffee with two hands in front of his face, blowing lightly on the steam rising in curlicue patterns off the top. He sipped his coffee and thought about Carli, presumably safe in her bed in Sandra and Howard’s house. He wondered what the I-90 Killer was doing right now and prayed to God Agent Canfield was right when she said the nut job had sought out Carli and written the letter only as some sort of cruel head game. He didn’t care about being messed with; he welcomed it, in fact, if it was all the perverted psycho had in mind. He could live with the strange dreams and the frightening nightmares of half-remembered significance if it meant only he, and not Carli, was being targeted.