Authors: Ray Garton
She enlarged each picture and looked at it, starting with the first and through to the last. The final picture was the most sickening – Kendra grinning up at the camera with Steven’s semen spattered all over her face. She knew Kendra’s face, knew her expressions – that was a real smile, a real, genuine grin on Kendra’s face. Anna could not understand, how could it
be
? He must have gotten her drunk. But when? How could Anna not have
known
?
Her stomach tightened, then turned over and over inside her.
Her lungs felt filled with ice water.
Her hands curled into fists and her fingernails dug hard into her palms until they nearly broke through the flesh.
Her brain felt on fire inside her head, as if the flames might be shooting out her ears, as if her smoking hair might be singed from the roots up.
She returned to Kendra’s homepage with a click of the mouse.
She pressed her hands flat on the desktop and stood gradually. She walked very slowly out of the bedroom and down the hall to the kitchen. She went to the living room and looked at Kendra. She was still asleep on the couch. Anna turned back and went into the kitchen. She took the large knife from the counter, the knife with which Kendra had cut herself. She slid the blade down into her shorts on her hip, pulled her T-shirt down over the handle that stuck up from the shorts’ elastic band. She slipped her bare feet into flip-flops and left the trailer.
Anna walked slowly down the road to unit five, the flip-flops slapping against her heels. She knocked on the door. It opened a moment later and Steven Regent smiled widely down at her.
“Hey, baby, how’s it going?” he said. He pushed the screen door open and she went up the steps, into his trailer.
Behind her, he closed the screen, then the door, and turned to her. “You come back for some more, honey?” he said.
She stepped up to him and put her left hand to the back of his neck, pressed her body to his, and gave him a long, deep kiss. When she pulled back, just a little, he said breathlessly, “Whoa, you really
did
come back for some more, huh, Kitten?”
She did not smile as she looked at him. When she spoke, her voice was low, but clear and crisp. “How did my daughter get on your fucking website?”
His smile faltered a little. “Wha ...
what
?”
As she replied, she reached down with her right hand and removed the knife from her shorts. “I
said
, how ... did my
daughter
... get on your fucking
website
?”
“Your ... daughter? I don’t understand, Kitten, whatta you mean, your – “
She plunged the blade into his stomach. It made a wet sound going in.
Steven gagged and gurgled and his tongue jutted from his mouth as his eyes bulged.
“You filthy fucking bastard,” Anna growled as she pulled the knife out.
Blood gushed from the wound.
Steven’s mouth hung open and his eyes rolled around in their sockets.
She sent the knife in again, to the hilt, her teeth clenched. This time, she twisted the blade inside him.
Steven released a pathetic gurgle and went down. He fell backward, pulled away from the blade, and hit the floor heavily.
“How dare you,” Anna said. “How
dare
you!”
She knelt beside him, and with Kendra on her mind – her innocent, retarded daughter, her little blonde baby girl – she stabbed him again, and again, and again. She held the knife in both hands and brought her arms up and down, up and down. She did not notice the blood splashing up from Steven’s body, getting on her arms and the front of her T-shirt and shorts, even spattering her face. She kept stabbing him long after the final death rattle escaped his lungs and he lay dead and staring up at the ceiling with wide milky eyes. After awhile, her hands appeared to be wearing wet, red gloves up to her elbows.
She stopped, sat back on her lower legs, dropped the knife, and heaved with sobs. They shook her entire body. She lifted her hands and held them at each side of her face without touching it. She looked at them – first the left, then the right – and saw all the blood on her, and only sobbed harder. Blood dribbled down her cheeks, down her arms. It was everywhere, all over her. Steven was a mass of blood before her. She could smell it, and it was sickening. She could smell the blood and shit from his dead body.
Anna sobbed until she could sob no more, until she was empty, exhausted, blasted out inside. Her sobs subsided and became small whimpering sounds. At first, she didn’t realize the sounds were coming from her and she looked around for their source.
She almost collapsed. She wanted to lie down beside him and sleep. But she couldn’t do that. She did not know
what
to do next. All she knew was that she had committed murder.
She had killed a man.
And she did not know what to do next.
* * * *
Kendra straddled Reznick in his recliner. She was naked.
“You’re hard,” she said as she massaged the bulge in his pants. She smiled as she moved forward and kissed him. Her hair fell forward in drapes on either side of them.
He felt her breasts press against him, warm and pliant.
Then she pulled back and began to unbutton his shirt.
He lifted his hands and put them on her breasts. He squeezed them gently, ran his thumbs over the nipples until they became hard and puckered.
“Kendra,” he whispered, just to say her name.
She smiled as she ran her hands over his bare chest, dragged her fingernails lightly over his skin, over his nipples.
She moved back a little, reached down and unbuttoned his shorts.
Someone knocked on the door.
Kendra unzipped his shorts and reached in to find his erection.
“Wait,” Reznick said when the knock came again.
But Kendra ignored the knocking and wrapped her fingers around him.
“No, wait, there’s somebody at – “
The knock at the door sounded again.
When he looked at Kendra again, she was Victoria. She held a gun in her right hand. She put the gun to her temple as her left hand fondled Reznick’s erection.
He heard the gun explode as he jerked awake with a small cry.
“Marc?” someone said. “Marc? I need some help.”
He recognized Anna’s voice.
Reznick’s hands trembled and his heart hammered as if he had just gone for a long run, something he hadn’t done in ages. He straightened up in the recliner, wide awake now, and stood unsteadily. He felt weak and shaky all over.
“Marc, please.”
“Anna?” he said as he turned to the door. He walked over and opened the screen. “What’s up?” He flipped on the porch light, and what he saw made him gasp.
“I don’t know if I should come inside,” she said. “I’m kind of a mess.” She laughed, then – a high, abrupt, breathy laugh that sounded on the verge of hysteria. He’d heard it before, that laugh, and it caused him great concern.
“Are you hurt?” Reznick asked as he came down the front steps.
“No, no, not me, not me, it was someone else who was hurt, and I hurt him.” Another of those spooky laughs. She held her hands out before her, fingers apart.
“Is that
blood
that’s all over you?”
“Yes, yes, it’s blood.”
“You must be dripping it all over the place. Where did you come from?”
“Unit five.”
“The new trailer?”
“Yeah.”
“What happened?”
“I killed him, Marc, I killed him, stabbed him to death for what he did to my little girl.”
“You ... you just killed someone?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Here in the park?”
“Yes.”
“And you came straight over here?”
“Yeah.”
Dripping blood like that,
he thought, looking around to see if anyone was watching, seeing. He saw no one.
Reznick thought fast. “Okay, look, here’s what I want you to do. Walk across the road to that trailer over there, okay? Right through the trees to that trailer over there.”
“What for?”
“I’ll explain later. Then I want you to walk diagonally over to this trailer over here,” he said pointing. “Can you do that? Just do it quickly, and we’ll get it over with.”
Reznick’s heart was still pounding, but now for a different reason. His erotic dream was forgotten, as if he’d never had it.
Anna zigzagged like a drunk over the narrow trailer-park road, crossed the divider, then crossed back again, then stopped, turned to him, and said in a stage whisper, “What now?”
He walked over to her and stood beside her for a moment, looking at her.
“What’d you have me do that for?”
“You’re trailing blood all over the place. You came straight to my trailer. I’d rather not be involved once the police are pulled into this tomorrow,
if
they’re pulled in tomorrow. Now it looks like you wandered all over the place and didn’t just come over here.” He pointed to another trailer. “Go over there, under the carport, and stand there for a few seconds and just drip for a while.”
As she did as she was told, Reznick walked down to unit five. The door was open, the screen door closed. He approached the door and looked in through the screen.
“Oh, my God,” he whispered.
It was a slaughterhouse. There was blood everywhere. The corpse was bathed in it and it covered the carpet and some of the furniture. Through the screen, the blood looked black, like motor oil.
He heard her approaching behind him, her flip-flops slapping her heels.
“What happened?” he whispered.
They stood close, and in the glow of the porch light, he could see her face, see the expression on it, see her eyes, her lips.
“He runs a website,” she said, her voice quavering. She sounded unlike herself, as if she were about to snap. But obviously, she had already done that.
“A website?”
“Trailer Park Girls. He has her pictures on it. Naked. Pictures of her touching herself. Pictures of her ... of her ... sucking on his
filthy cock
.” She said the last two words through clenched teeth.
“What? Who?”
“Kuh-Kendra. My Kendra.”
“TrailerParkGirls.com?”
“Yeah, that’s it.”
Reznick frowned. That was one of the websites owned by Burning Lizard Amusements. That meant the dead man lying on the floor in the trailer was probably one of the two men he’d seen frolicking with Alicia Carey and her friend on Jupiter Lane. And he lived here in the Riverside Mobile Home Park.
“I think he drugged her,” Anna whispered.
“What?”
“Kendra.” Her lips were a tight straight line. “I think he drugged Kendra. Or he got her drunk. Or something. I mean ...
my
Kendra.” Her voice was merely a breath now as her face softened. “How could she do such a thing? How did he make her do it?”
“He was probably very good at it,” Reznick said. “Very manipulative. He’s talked a
lot
of women into taking their clothes off. I’ve seen his other websites. They’re filled with women who’ve done it. I wouldn’t worry too much about it. I don’t think it’s scarred Kendra, or anything like that.”
“How do
you
know? How will we
ever
know? Until later, I mean? It might not show itself for years.”
“Look, I’d love to stand here and talk about this with you, but, uh ... what exactly do you want me to do?”
“I ... I don’t ... I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. You were the first person I thought of. I didn’t know who else to go to. I ... I just, I lost it, something inside me, it snapped, and I couldn’t stop, I couldn’t stop stabbing him, I’ve never felt that way before in my life.”
Reznick thought of what she’d told him earlier that night, the threat she’d made if he ever took advantage of the crush Kendra had on him. He’d had no idea then that she was so capable of actually going through with it.
“I can’t go to prison,” Anna whispered. “Who will take care of my Kendra?” Her hoarse voice trembled and she interlocked her bloody fingers just below her chin, her eyes wide and glistening. “I can’t leave her all alone. I-I can’t, I can’t
abandon
her.”
“You want me to help you dispose of the body?”
Her eyes widened more, even though it didn’t seem possible. She put a bloody hand on each side of her head, curling her fingers into her auburn hair. “I-I-I don’t knuh-
know
. I cuh-can’t
think
.”
Reznick began to pace. “Let me think,” he said. “Let me think.”
And for a while, Reznick thought.
Twenty-One
“Can you wait right here?” Reznick said.