Dale took another step and felt the stair flex under his weight. He slowly released his weight off his foot and used the railings to lift himself up over the stair, supporting himself on his arms. He took the next few steps without a sound and was soon standing in the upstairs hallway outside the master bedroom.
Dale knew that there was a strong possibility that Sarah and her husband were on the other side of the door with their guns cocked, waiting for him to enter so they could empty their pistols into his face. His pulse had been over a 160 beats per minute since he’d woken under the sink. Now it felt like it was closer to 200. He put his hand on the doorknob and slowly turned the handle. The door crept open slowly and Dale slipped inside.
The room was dark except for the dim illumination from the streetlight outside leaking through the blinds. It was just enough light for Dale to see that the room was empty. The bedsheets had been pulled back revealing a mattress stained with blood. Dale could smell blood in the air, rancid blood. He stood in the doorway for a while trying to figure out where they could be. He spun around and looked in back of him to make sure they hadn’t set some sort of trap and weren’t
sneaking up on him from behind. Then he checked the closet and under the bed. They weren’t there. Dale was about to scream when he remembered the other two bedrooms. They had probably slept in one of those.
But why? Was it some kind of trick?
The longer Dale stood in the bedroom, the more overwhelming the smell of fetid blood became. Slowly it dawned on him that the smell was probably the reason why they had not slept in their own bed. He turned around and crept quietly out of the room, closing the bedroom door behind him.
In his socks, still tiptoeing as softly as possible, Dale made his way to the first bedroom and pushed open the door. His heart lightened and an overwhelming feeling of joy rose inside him as he spotted Sarah lying beside her husband, eyes closed, sleeping soundly. Her big husband was making whining and whimpering sounds in his sleep and tossing and turning fitfully. Seeing that videotape of what Dale had done to him had obviously disturbed him greatly.
Dale didn’t know what had possessed him that day. He had just wanted to punish the big man. He wanted to emasculate him, humiliate him. Seeing Josh’s big cock and knowing that he was fucking Sarah with it every night, that she willingly gave herself to him, that she enjoyed it, loved it, loved him, imagining her sucking it, letting him fuck her in the ass with it, had enraged him. All he could think of was how much he wanted to break Josh down and show him, show her, that Josh was not a better man than Dale just because his penis was twice as big. He wanted Sarah to see her big, strong husband with his porn-star cock, humbled. He wanted to show her who the real man was. Thinking about it had made Dale’s cock hard and so he had gone
with it and used it as an instrument of torture. It had even surprised Dale when he had managed to ejaculate. He wondered if they had done a rape kit on Josh. He wondered how humiliated the big man must have felt when they swabbed his rectum and found Dale’s semen inside of him.
Dale took a moment to delight in the big man’s misery, watching as the big man moaned and grimaced in his sleep, reliving his violation; then Dale stepped inside the room and lifted the hammer over his head. He brought it down with all of his might and blinked when the blood spattered his face. Sarah began to scream almost immediately. She always screamed. Dale had come to love that sound as much as he loved her.
Sarah woke up when she heard the detective moving around downstairs. She could hear Josh’s voice down there too. The two men were talking about something with obvious excitement. Sarah sat up in bed, yawning and stretching, and tried to hear what they were talking about.
“I already called Trina. We’ve got a CSU team headed over here right now.”
Something had happened. Last night. Even with the detective standing guard. Somehow, Dale had gotten into the house again. Sarah swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up. She felt her feet squish into the carpet and pink foam squeeze up from the carpet padding in between her toes. She ran to the window and opened the blinds. There was a clean spot on the carpet so light that it was almost white. The spot was huge. It surrounded the entire bed. Where she had stepped, pink footsteps trailed all the way to the window. Where Josh had stepped, the footsteps were almost red. Even the sheets on the bed were no longer the white ones that had been on the bed almost since they’d moved into this house. They were a pale blue set she’d had since college and hadn’t seen in several years. Sarah began to tremble. This was too much. This was all just way too much.
The room began to tilt and spin and Sarah knew she was about to faint. She began to hyperventilate and her heart felt like it was going to pound its way through her rib cage. She wanted to scream but could not find the voice. Sarah tried to focus, to slow her breathing, slow her heartbeat, do something to fend off the panic attack before it took complete control over her. Now that she knew that this was all real, that it was not some figment of her imagination, it was just too much to deal with.
Sarah took several steps toward the door. When she felt the bloody water squish out of the carpet between her toes again, she could not help herself. Sarah screamed and collapsed onto the floor.
Detective Lassiter, Harry, and her husband were all hovering over, looking down at her with worried expressions on their faces when she woke. She was downstairs in the living room, lying on the couch with a pillow beneath her head.
“Are you okay?” Josh asked. He looked so worried and frightened.
“What happened?”
“He got in again. We’ve got him on tape walking into our bedroom. But he’s disappeared. The police can’t find him anywhere.”
Sarah looked up and there was a huge reddish brown stain on the ceiling above their heads. She looked down at the floor where there was a similar stain on the concrete.
“He wasn’t quite so neat this time,” Harry said, wincing in disgust.
That was when Sarah noticed a similar stain in the detective’s hair. The whole side of his head was caked with blood. His gray hair was almost completely red on one side. His neck and shirt were stained red-brown
as well. Harry was right. Dale had been messy this time.
“What happened?”
“You must have fainted.”
“No. I mean what the hell happened? How did he get in? You were supposed to protect us.”
“I don’t know. I must have fallen asleep. But don’t worry. He really fucked up this time. We’ve got more than enough to arrest him now and this time we can make it stick. We’ve got him for breaking and entering, felony stalking, trespassing, attacking a police officer, and whatever else the DA can come up with.”
Everything but murder and rape.
Sarah looked over at Detective Lassiter.
“But you can’t find him. Can you? You don’t know where he is, do you?”
“We’ll find him. In the meantime we’re going to move you into protective custody.”
“What if you never find him?”
“We will. I promise you we’re using every resource at our disposal.”
“But you still can’t promise me he won’t get away, can you? You still can’t promise me I won’t be looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life, that I won’t wake up one night and see that sick fuck standing over me. You can’t promise me there won’t be any more bloody sheets in my laundry or bleach spots on the carpet, can you? He did it again, with a detective sitting right in my living room! Even with all of us armed with guns he just walked right in here and raped me again!”
“Sarah, I am sorry. I don’t know how it happened. I must have fallen asleep and he got in the house somehow and hit me with something.”
“No.” Josh spoke up. “He didn’t get in the house.
He was already here. He was in here hiding somewhere, somewhere we didn’t look.”
“We looked everywhere, Josh. He wasn’t in here.”
“He had to have been. We must have missed something. Harry was sitting right here on the couch. Look how far that front door is from here. If someone had walked in that door Harry would have had plenty of time to react. And even if he somehow overpowered Harry, which I can’t really see happening, we would have at least heard the struggle upstairs.”
“So, he must have ambushed me somehow,” Harry agreed.
“He might have still come in through a window. You have vinyl window frames. They don’t make a lot of noise when you open them and they’re notoriously easy to break into. He could have popped open a window and crept into the house without anyone knowing he was here. He used a hammer in that video. If he caught Harry from behind with the hammer there wouldn’t have been much of a struggle,” Detective Lassiter said.
“I don’t know. It just doesn’t feel right.”
“Well, we’ll make sure the boys from CSU are thorough when they go over the place. We’ll have them dust everything for prints. We’re going to have to do another rape kit on you…and you too, Mr. Lincoln.” Detective Lassiter looked over at Harry. “Maybe even you too.”
“Awww, fuck. Are you kidding me?”
“You saw the tape. You saw what he did to them. We have to be thorough about this.”
“So, you don’t think we faked the tape?”
“I never did. I just couldn’t explain it any other way.”
“And now? Did Harry tell you about the case he worked on like ours?”
“He told me. It still doesn’t make sense to me. I mean, I believe in God. I even believe in the supernatural. But I just can’t believe that God would let someone like that have that kind of power. I’m sure if we thought about it long enough we could figure out how he’s doing it. There’s got to be a reason that doesn’t involve mystical powers.”
Harry shook his head and snorted in disgust.
“How is this any different than the power a parent has over their children? How many times have we seen parents abuse that power, neglect, beat, torture, and molest their own kids? Crackheads, junkies, and meth addicts have kids. Those young, innocent lives in the hands of people who would trade them for a dime bag. God gives immense power to really fucked-up people all the time. This really isn’t any different.”
Detective Lassiter held up her hand and turned her head away. She closed her eyes like she was trying to compose herself but her eyebrows furrowed and her nostrils flared.
“Harry, I’ve told you about this before. I’m not going to stand for you bashing my faith. You’re free to think what you want, just keep it to yourself because I don’t want to hear that shit.”
“You asked a question.”
“I’m serious, Harry. Back off.”
Harry waved his hands in surrender.
“You did ask.”
“So what are we going to do?” Sarah asked. “Where will we go? What about Josh’s job?”
“He’s going to have to miss a few days.”
“He’s extra-board. He’s not technically a full-time employee even though they work him harder than anybody. He can’t miss days. He doesn’t get any sick time or anything like that. They’ll fire him.”
“Well, does Dale know where you work?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I can’t remember if we told him when we introduced ourselves or not.”
“Because if he does, he can follow you back to Sarah.”
Everyone turned to look at Sarah again. She felt more like a victim now than she had in days. Everyone had to look out for poor, poor Sarah. They had to make sure the boogeyman didn’t get her.
And did I mention that the boogeyman looks like fucking Don Knotts in
The Incredible Mr. Limpet
?
Sarah thought.
“Well, I have to work or we’ll lose our house.”
“Let the damn bank have it,” Sarah said. “I can’t stand to look at that bedroom anymore. And that smell. I’ll probably smell that for the rest of my life as it is. The house is worth half of what we paid for it now anyway. We’ll never get that equity back. We’ll just go back to being renters. This neighborhood is turning into a ghost town anyway.”
The two detectives stood beside Sarah’s husband, looking at the stain in the ceiling.
“I don’t know if I’d cry too much about losing this place now if I was you. No offense but it would creep me the hell out to live here,” Harry said, turning his back on the room and buttoning his sports jacket.
“That’s real sensitive, Harry.”
“No. He’s right. Fuck this house. Just give us some time to pack our things.”
“You can’t lose your job though. We can’t even get an apartment without a job and this isn’t like it was a
few years ago when you could just walk right out and get another job. People are being laid off left and right. You need this job.”
Sarah was standing between her husband and the two detectives with her arms folded across her chest. She pointed at Josh’s chest as she spoke. Her fingernails had been bitten almost down to the cuticles. Josh withered. His entire body appeared to wilt in front of her.
“She’s right. I can’t get fired right now. I’m going to have to go to work.”
“Okay. Well, you’re just going to have to be careful. Watch to see if anyone is following you. Once we decide on what hotel we’re going to put you up in you’re going to want to make sure you drive past it a few times before you park just to see if anyone is following you. I’ll drive you home the first night just to show you what I mean.”
“Thanks, Detective. I don’t mean to put you out. We just really can’t afford for me to lose my job.”
“I’ll take him. Neither one of you can drive worth a damn.”
Detective Mike Torres stood in the doorway eating a bag of spicy Doritos and licking his fingers. He walked into the room swaggering like a B-movie matinee idol. Sarah couldn’t hold back her laughter. He looked like such an asshole. Even his melodramatic entrance was overdone and evidence of a massive unchecked ego. Detective Lassiter rolled her eyes.
“So, does that mean you believe us now?” Sarah asked.
Torres shook his head. He was wearing a white short-sleeved shirt and a red silk tie. He was still wearing black jeans with black motorcycle boots. He looked
like a member of a Mexican motorcycle gang who’d cleaned up for a job interview or a court appearance.