Authors: Robert W. Walker
Maury called from the kitchen, saying, "'Nough yammering out there, Mary. Burgers'll be up in five!"
"If you want to stay safe, get down behind the counter, Mother Mary," Lauralie told her as she snapped open her purse, tilted it in Mary's direction, and flashed the muzzle of a gun lying within. The muzzle looked like the head of a snake to Mary, but she knew what it represented.
Lauralie had seen the activity of police vehicles going for the farmstead as she had filled the gas tank at a Mobil station on the main artery leading to her and Arthur's "sugar shack" as she'd called it. She had waited at a careful distance, watching as slowly the raiders came away, leaving the area. One car in particular, belonging to Lieutenant Lucas Stonecoat, she had followed to this vicinity, noting where the shrink and the cop had turned off, approving of the location.
"I can't stop them from knowing they've located Arthur's car," she told herself aloud, "but I can stop them from calling it in."
"What's that, honey?" asked the waitress, trying to bolster some courage in her heart and some feeling in her knees. Pretending ignorance and failing miserably. The heavyset blonde's makeup had melded with the grease here, her pores shining. "Did ya want something else? Some coffee maybe?" She lifted the steaming pot and took a step, coming out from behind the counter, when Lauralie lifted the 9mm Glock from her purse, causing Mary to drop the coffee on the counter and duck. The explosion of the coffee urn sounded like a gunshot inside the empty diner. Outside, the two state troopers snatched out their weapons.
She wasn't yet ready for capture. She pulled the trigger of the 9mm she'd purchased from Clive's Gun Emporium, two blocks distant from the orphanage, the day she walked out of Our Lady. The first shot exploded the plate-glass window dropping the closest trooper, his body slamming into the pebbled drive, his feet twitching in his boots. The exploding shards of glass had dug into the second trooper's face and eyes while he pulled off a single shot, narrowly missing Lauralie's head, hissing by her .ear. Her second shot created a bloody hole in the other trooper's chest as he fell back on the hood of the BMW, instantly lifeless, his body slumped down to the grille, where he appeared merely to be in a slumped repose.
Maury had come racing in from the kitchen, had grabbed Mary by the arm, and was guiding her out the door behind the counter, rushing for a rear exit. Lauralie calmly stood, shouldered her purse, and walked around the counter, almost slipping on spilled coffee, going for the couple, her weapon smoking in her hand.
As she made her way to the rear of the M&M, Lauralie imagined Meredyth Sanger lying in the crook of Lucas Stonecoat's arm right now, sleeping blissfully under the canopy of safety she enjoyed, while she, an orphaned child without home or family or loved ones, was engaged in killing people she did not even know in her effort to make Sanger feel fear and self-loathing for her part in all of this. Lauralie meant to shatter Dr. Sanger's every conscious and perhaps unconscious moment of well-being and comfort, whatever it took.
She'd narrowly escaped the farmhouse raid, thanks to a sixth sense that police had zeroed in on Arthur. She suspected it had unraveled because Arthur had babbled on too long with the realtor lady when they'd rented the farmhouse. This, along with the likeness in the newspaper, made Arthur a liability, and adding to her growing dislike of Arthur and his touch, she'd had to listen to his increasingly constant nagging about her motive for hating Meredyth Sanger, until finally she'd simply had enough.
Lauralie moved down the narrow passageway and examined the kitchen, searching for where Maury had taken his waitress bride. She yanked open the freezer door, her gun pointed at the frozen, hanging carcasses of beef. East Texas elk, and buffalo. She recalled seeing elk stew and buffalo burgers on the menu. She rushed from the kitchen, back into the shoulder-width corridor, going for the rest rooms.
No one in the women's room.
No one cowering in the men's room.
Back to the grimy cave of the corridor, and she flashed on a momentary thought that wily Maury had gotten past her and rushed out the front. Not likely.
She looked past stacks of boxes—food and vegetable crates—to a blue door in the rear. Gone out the back, Jack, she thought, going for the door.
She heard a motor trying unsuccessfully to turn over just the other side of the blue rear door. As she pushed past boxes and cartons in her way, her sleep-deprived brain struggled to keep on task—on Mary and Maury—part of her saying, To hell with them...let them go... let them live to tell the tale of her great marksmanship... while another part of her mind drifted back to Arthur and the way she had left him at the farmhouse. At least I gave the dog man an everlasting home, a fucking stomping ground he can haunt unendingly, his very own personal eternal habitat, she thought, recalling how much she had liked the old place, and how he had completely spoiled it for her. Aside from killing Arthur—something she'd known she would do from the beginning—Lauralie had had to abandon the farmstead prematurely, before she was finished with her original plans. There remained a lot to carve up and forward to Dr. Sanger. But as in all things, one opportunity lost meant another found. Lourdes's entire bloated lower portions, like the racked carcasses in Maury's freezer, presented the largest and most shocking image Lauralie had imagined possible. Her next move against Sanger and Stonecoat necessitated that she wrap with care the rest of Mira Lourdes's body and transport it here.
She stood at the rear of the restaurant now, throwing up her arms and the gun to protect her eyes from stone and gravel spitting up at her from the barking tires of Maury's red Dodge pickup as it roared from the rear lot, ramming into a Dumpster and dragging it along with it. Lauralie leveled the gun, feeling a slight admiration for the M&M couple for making it this far.
Aiming for the back of Maury's head, his chef's hat still on, Lauralie steadied the gun with both hands and fired. The bullet zipped through the rear window, creating a little hole in both the window and the back of Maury's white hat, coloring it red, and opening up a gaping hole on the exit side, blood and brain matter all over the dash and dripping down the steering wheel as the truck plunged into a bank of public phones that now crumpled and jammed below the truck's demolished grille.
The red pickup held in place, its horn sent out a cry like a wounded, trapped animal. Only Mary, jammed in behind the passenger-side airbag, had any mobility left, should she leap from the disabled vehicle.
Lauralie looked around. Cars whizzed by on Highway 41 fronting the M&M Cafe. No one had pulled in, and no one had paid any heed to the scene at the diner.
Lauralie heard Mother Mary whimpering within the confines of the cab as she neared the disabled vehicle. Let the woman live. Think of the horror she now has to live with, if you let her live, Lauralie's head told her.
"No...not a time to take chances now..." she answered her doubts. Not until I make Sanger's life not worth living... not until I kill her man and maim her for life.
Again she leveled the gun, watching the stunned, blubbering Mary struggling against the duel problems of
Maury's weight and her imprisoning air bag, which had bloodied her face on impact. Her wig lay half on, half off her head. She tore with both hands at the ballooned air bag.
"Let me get that for you, honey," shouted Lauralie, firing into Mary's head, the bullet exiting and exploding Mary's brain and the air bag simultaneously.
Since the troopers had not acted quickly enough, no one would know that the random killings here had anything to do with Lauralie Blodgett, she reasoned.
She dropped the smoking gun back into her purse. "And they say there's no such thing as a free meal," she joked, stepping lively now for the front of the cafe and her car. Passing the dead trooper sitting upright against her grille, she suddenly felt a pair of icy hands wrap around her ankle. The dead trooper had reached out and latched on, but he hadn't the strength, and she flicked her ankle, freeing it, coming away with a bloodstained stocking.
She reached into her purse, fingering the gun again, but the trooper had again gone dead. She let it be, got into the car, turned the key, and pulled straight back from the parking space. One trooper lay in the painful pose of a swastika, his body going in four directions at once, while the other lay in repose where he had softly slid from her grille to the pebbled drive when she had backed out.
She turned and pulled out onto the highway, and drove north toward the Spring Brook area and Meredyth Sanger's secret getaway home on Lake Madera. From what she had been able to learn of Meredyth's parents, they seldom visited the Spring Brook home anymore, residing as they did in faraway Clover Leaf. She had learned that Mom and Dad would be arriving home from Europe tomorrow— information she had gleaned from a neighbor when Lauralie and Arthur had arrived at Mrs. Gaines's door, posing as realtors wishing to talk to the Sangers. Mrs. Gaines had been more than willing to help them, and she'd informed them that the Sangers were vacationing in France. Lauralie h^d gotten the Clover Leaf address when following Byron Priestly on his obsessive search for Meredyth the same day of his death. Now the ideal pair of wealthy parents would be blown up in their idyllic golf community, when they turned a key in the door to their picture-perfect, gas-heated retirement home. All it would take now, a single spark between lock and key. Lauralie had gained entrance by night, setting off the alarm, but she had charmed the bored, jaded young security guard who'd led a team of younger men to the location. She'd claimed to be the clumsiest daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Sanger, visiting from California, and promising the man a date while she was in town, and young Mike had bought it, waving off the other security guards.
After Mike had finally gone, Lauralie wandered the luxurious house, and she watched the fish in the aquarium self-feed from a dispenser, and then she opened a gas line and left. The deadly gas had now had a twenty-four-hour buildup, and it would be forty-eight hours when the cab from the airport pulled up tomorrow. "What a homecoming for Momma and Papa Sanger," she said to the empty car.
From Paris to paradise, she mused, locating the niche off Highway 41 that led into the Madera Lake Estates. She needed sleep badly and wondered who on the lake might accommodate her.
Tonight she would strike Sanger at her heart, "And just when the bitch thinks she can't possibly stand another blow, she'll learn about Mom and Dad dying in an inferno."
Sleep... rest now, her mind told her. She could not recall the last peaceful sleep she'd had. Her mind seemed always in turmoil, always racing, if not with what she must do, then what she had done, examining, questioning, shoring up, and tearing down.
Her eyes closed, the sound of traffic going by on the paved road just the other side of the stand of trees filtering into her consciousness. Somewhere in the distance, she heard the faint whine of sirens. A ghastly discovery at the local diner, no doubt. She saw a mailbox with the family name carved into the wood—The Brodys—and turning in, she followed a winding dirt road toward the lake, when the Brody house peeked from behind the forest wall. She stopped short, viewing the house in the wood. It loomed large and lovely, a beautiful wraparound porch, several turret like pinnacles, a Cape Cod design. She also spied a row- boat this side of the lake at the pier.
She backed up a bit and pulled into a clearing among the trees, parked, shut down the engine, and considered her options. Somewhere on this same lake, Meredyth Sanger and Lucas Stonecoat were enjoying the warmth of their bed, wrapped in one another's embrace.
Sitting in the morning gloom, Lauralie thought of how she had posed Arthur's body, his heart on his sleeve, his dogs at his feet. She'd wanted Sanger and the others to find him in the mocking pose, and to find Mira's heart in the jar. After posing Arthur, she'd had to struggle with Mira's frozen half-corpse alone, wrapping her and transporting her to the car, breaking her nails and scarring her hands in the process. She had intentionally left her DNA in the freezer. Any idiot could put her together with the abduction and murder of Mira Lourdes by now. The investigation was a farce; any leads they enjoyed had, after all, been supplied by the Ripper herself.
"Catch me if you can, but not before I let you," she said to the empty woods around as she exited the car and began to walk the distance to the house, her purse slung over her shoulder, the weight of the gun pulling it down.
"Time for a neighborly visit..."
COGNAC. LUCAS AND Meredyth had, early that morning, settled on aged, expensive cognac, and after a playful contest of who could hold the most liquor before falling into a much-needed, deep slumber, they had nestled into one another's arms and had melded into one another's cognac dreams. Now, at three in the afternoon, they awakened after eight hours of sleep to cognac hangovers.
Meredyth asked herself if she had keyed in the security code downstairs before they had gone to bed. The log cabin-style home was equipped with a state-of-the-art security system, and was built to be impenetrable from the outside—no exposed wires, no weak spots. She brought up the memory of punching in the code, and she also recalled having taken both her cell phone and Lucas's off ring to accept messages only, so as to get some uninterrupted sleep.
Now it was mid-afternoon and Lucas was administering more cognac to combat the hangover, and it worked. They showered together and made love under the warm spray until they took their lovemaking back to the bed. There they luxuriated in one another's embrace, passions, and playfulness.
Sated, lying in one another's arms again, they were moved by hunger to dress, go downstairs, and raid the kitchen for anything they could find in the fridge and on the shelves. As she prepared sandwiches for them, Lucas joked that a typical reservation house could fit into Meredyth's kitchen.
"Is that designed to make me feel guilty?" she asked, punctuating her words with the knife in her hand.