When Ranch and Minnow-G.o.d, Minnow"s dead? That"s what Tom said, but it"s hard to believe. And it was Jody that killed him. I can see it, as a matter of fact. Her killing him. All she did was give me a tap with that bat of hers, and I"ve had a lump and a headache ever since. The headache comes and goes, to tell the truth. But it"s probably from when she pounded me. If she really put some oomph into her swing, it"s no wonder she dropped Minnow.
Anyway. Let me think. Oh, yeah. We got back from the trip and told those two, Ranch and Minnow, what we"d done and they went crazy. They acted like they"d been cheated out of all the excitement. They kept saying, "d.a.m.n!" and "s.h.i.t!" and "No fair!" and "How could you do it without us?"
So that"s when Tom said, "It"s no big deal. Let"s go out and kill somebody right now. All of us."
We were sort of having a party at Tom"s place when he said that. It was the week after we got back from our Oregon trip, and we all had permission to spend the night. We were sitting around in his wreck room drinking beer and eating all sorts of munchies.
When Tom said that about going out and killing someone, I got so excited I almost couldn"t breathe. Ranch went red in the face and began panting. Little Minnow started rubbing his mouth. Private mumbled, "Oh boy oh boy oh boy," and Clement bobbed his head, grinning like a dope.
All of us were hot to do it.
"What a bunch of sickos," Tom said.
"And proud of it," Private said.
"Have they taken the pledge?" Minnow asked.
For a while there, I didn"t know what he was talking about. But Tom knew, all right. And he was ready. We all joined hands and did the oath, just the same as on the day when we buried Hester. The only difference was, this time there were six of us.
When we were done, Tom took us out to his garage.
The garage is off to the side and slightly behind Tom"s house. It"s huge, with six bay doors and room inside to hold at least that many cars. There are also a couple of normal doors and some windows. You can"t see through the windows anymore, but you could on the night I"m talking about. It was later that we painted them black.
The garage wasn"t air conditioned like Tom"s house. It had been closed up all day, so it felt hot and stuffy. There weren"t any cars inside except for the Mercedes. There was a lot of junk-tools and gardening equipment, things like that. But the garage was so huge that it was mostly empty s.p.a.ce. It was almost like being in an aircraft hangar.
After we were inside, Tom told us to strip. Seems like we"re always stripping, doesn"t it? The thing is, bloodshed is a messy business, and you don"t want to be stuck wearing gory clothes.
After we finished, Tom handed out black jumpsuits to all of us. He also gave us black socks and black sneakers. Everything fit, too. Which is strange. He"d found out our sizes on his own, without ever asking any of us. He only smiled when I asked him about it.
The jumpsuits looked great on us. They made us look like a skydiving club, or something. But they were awfully d.a.m.n hot, especially while we were in the garage.
After we had our outfits on, Tom led us over to a comer where there were a lot of tools. He said, "Pick your weapons, guys." We helped ourselves to all sorts of nasty instruments: hammers, screwdrivers, pliers, hedge clippers, a sickle, a chainsaw, an ax. We also grabbed shovels and a pickax, though n.o.body discussed whether these were supposed to be weapons or tools for disposing of the body.
We piled all the stuff in the trunk of the Mercedes, then climbed into the front and back seats. It was pretty crowded in there. Tom opened the garage door by remote control. (Only the door for the Mercedes" section was equipped with an automatic opener.) Then we were off!
A team of six hunters prowling the night for prey.
I figured the plan was to drive around and search for a good target of opportunity. What we needed was a gal by herself in a fairly secluded place. You"d be amazed how easy it is. But that isn"t what Tom had in mind.
He drove us to a house only about a mile from where I lived at the time.
Denise Dennison"s house.
Minnow recognized the place, too. He sucked in a breath. "You"re kidding," he whispered.
"You want her, don"t you?"
"Sure. Yeah. But ... You said we"re gonna kill somebody."
"That"s the general idea."
"Denise?"
Ranch laughed. "It"s the only way you"re ever gonna lay your hands on her."
"We"ll do a lot more than lay our hands on her," Tom said.
What an understatement that turned out to be.
It probably took us fifteen minutes to bust into the house. We were pretty quiet about it. We didn"t remember to bring flashlights, so we just went ahead and turned on the lights each time we walked into a room.
We had no problem with the parents. We killed them before they could get out of bed. We did it fast without any fooling around. We don"t do it that way anymore-we stretch things out so we can enjoy every dimension of their surprise and terror and pain and so on. We like to play with them for as long as we can. But we were new at it, that night in Denise"s house.
We all got in on killing her mom and dad. With six of us working at once, it took about two seconds to wreck them both. It was really something to see. Wham! All of a sudden, they"re nothing but spurting piles of demolished yuck.
We knew that Denise had a couple of younger brothers, but the next room down the hallway was hers. Its door stood open. We went in and turned on the light.
The switch made a lamp come on beside her bed. Even though it was bright, it didn"t wake her up because she was sleeping on her side with her back to the lamp. The house had its air conditioning on. She was covered to the shoulders by a sheet.
Minnow sneaked to the foot of the bed and pinched the sheet and slid it down all the way.
Oh, man.
She wore a white nightgown, but it didn"t cover much. What it did cover, you could see anyway because the fabric was basically transparent.
We just stood there and watched her sleep for a while.
You should"ve been there. I"ll never forget the way Denise looked, or how I felt. I"d had the hots for her since junior high. So had some of the others. And now we had her at our mercy.
It was, to put it mildly, a magic moment.
A magic five minutes, more like it.
Then Tom snuck over alongside the bed. He had gra.s.s trimmers which looked like a big pair of scissors. He grabbed Denise"s hair with one hand. At the same time, he caught her throat in the V of the open trimmers.
All of which woke her up.
Her eyes bulged.
"Don"t make a sound," Tom warned.
She shrieked, "Dad!"
Tom partly shut the trimmers. Their blades broke her skin. She made a gasping noise at the pain and started to bleed, but didn"t yell again.
We heard some voices and thumping sounds. Her brothers. They were on their way to the rescue. Which delayed things for Denise. Tom and Minnow stayed behind to keep her on the bed. The rest of us went into the hall and intercepted her brothers.
They were twins, blond and tan, about nine years old. They looked like boy versions of Denise, only younger, of course. Very cute, if you"re into that sort of thing. They were both wearing pajama pants that hung pretty low on them, and no shirts. Mitch and Chuck would"ve gone wild for these fellows, but they didn"t come along and join up until a long time after this.
One of the twins charged at us waving a pocket knife. The other came at us with a baseball bat.
A couple of very s.p.u.n.ky kids.
s.p.u.n.ky till Ranch cranked up the chainsaw.
Then they yelled and spun around and ran the other way. We chased them down. They didn"t even make it out of the hall. Ranch got one with his chainsaw. I happened to be running beside the kid, going after his brother, and blood slapped me in the face like a wet rag. I couldn"t even see where I was going. But I b.u.mped into the back of the kid I was after, and shoved my screwdriver in. We both fell. I jabbed him a few more times while he screamed and thrashed around under me. Then Clement came along and caved in his head with a hammer.
You should"ve seen the hallway after that. What a mess.
We left the twins where they"d fallen. All we really cared about, now that they were out of our hair, was getting back to Denise.
She was still on the bed, Tom clutching her hair and holding the shears to her throat. But now she was lying on her back and Minnow was bending over her, busy pulling the torn remains of the nightgown down her legs. She didn"t move at all except to sob and gasp for air.
Minnow blocked her view of us until he finished with the nightgown and stepped out of the way. Then she raised her head. Must"ve hurt, pushing her neck against the edges of the shears. But she did it anyway, and looked at us.
Seeing all that blood must"ve unhinged her.
Or maybe it was the sight of Ranch"s chainsaw, which was pretty gory.
She went nuts. n.o.body was holding her arms, so she grabbed Tom"s hand and shoved the shears away from her throat. She even managed to turn them and poke Tom in the belly with them. They went into him far enough to leave a pair of quarter-inch scars. He yelled and fell backward off the bed.
Before Denise could do anything else, four of us pinned her to the mattress by her arms and legs. All she could do was twist and squirm. That left Minnow free to go first. So he took off his jumpsuit and climbed aboard. Must"ve been like a dream coming true for him. I mean, we"d all had the hots for her, but he"d been obsessed. For years. He must"ve thought he"d died and gone to heaven.
Ho ho. Now he is dead, thanks to Jody. Bet he didn"t go to heaven, though.
Even if he"d been a regular saint for every other second of his life, the stuff he did to Denise for about fifteen minutes while we held her down bought him a one-way ticket to h.e.l.l, that"s for sure.
We basically didn"t rush Minnow or anything, figuring he"d waited so long for a chance at her. Also, it was a fantastic turn-on to watch both of them.
By the time he was done, Denise was still alive but we didn"t need to hold her down anymore.
Private went second, then Clement. Ranch went next, and showed a certain flair and originality-not to mention good taste-by licking her clean before getting down to real business. Then it was my turn. Denise didn"t look like much by then. In a way, though, that made it even better. Mostly, I remember how slippery she felt.
Tom went last. His belly was bleeding pretty good from the way she had jabbed him. He was smiling, though. Denise was still alive when he started. He used the shears on her. She still had enough energy to scream, but we"d shoved a wad of nightgown into her mouth way before then, so not much sound came out. She was in a few pieces by the time Tom finished.
After that, we took quick showers so we wouldn"t have to leave the house with blood all over us. We took our tools into the showers with us and washed them, too. Then we got dressed and took everything out to the car with us.
All of us climbed in except Tom. He said, "Back in a minute," and we had to wait while he went into the house. He was gone for a lot longer than a minute. Finally, he got in and started the car.
But he didn"t pull away.
"What"re we waiting for?" I asked.
"You"ll see."
Pretty soon, I saw.
Orange light through the living room curtains. Orange light that shimmered and shook and got brighter.
"Pretty good idea," I said.
"Cremate the f.u.c.kers," Ranch said.
"It"s more to cremate the crime scene," Tom explained.
Then we drove back to his place.
Chapter Thirty.
It really ate up the time, telling all that.
If I tried to give you that much detail about everything, it"d take me forever. Or at least longer than I"ve got.
My headache is gone. The aspirin must"ve kicked in. Also, I went ahead and made myself bacon and eggs after I got done telling about our fun and games at Denise"s house. We had some fun there, didn"t we?
I probably shouldn"t have gone into so much detail. I might end up running out of time before I have a chance to tell everything else.
But our attack on Denise"s house deserved some attention, since it was the first time we did that sort of thing. It was like a major event in the history of our little gang. A lot bigger, scarier and more exciting than just nailing one person we might find in the streets somewhere. It was like a quantum leap into a whole new dimension of mayhem.
The news media treated it that way, too.
They called it a "Manson-style ma.s.sacre."
As to who had committed the atrocity, they didn"t have a clue.
I think Tom"s mother probably had a pretty good idea about who"d done it. But we didn"t need to worry about her telling.
We behaved ourselves and began our university careers. Tom decided against Willamette because he didn"t want to break up the gang. He went to Pepperdine instead. Ranch, Private and I went to UCLA, Minnow to USC and Clement to Loyola-Marymount.
Maybe we weren"t angels, but we weren"t dumb. Sure, sometimes we acted like dopes and goofed off, but that was just for fun. Underneath it all, we were smart enough to get into pretty good schools.
We got together sometimes over the next few months, but we didn"t go out and kill anybody.
In November, my urges got the better of me and I nailed a coed in one of the UCLA parking structures. I raped her and used an electrical cord to strangle her. (Quiet, and not much blood to speak of.) This couldn"t compare with hitting a house and doing a whole family, but it was better than nothing.
Anyway, we knew we couldn"t hit a house very often. That sort of crime is just too big.
By the first week in January, we figured enough time had gone by. We all had time off for our winter breaks. Tom had recruited three new members. Somehow, he had a talent for picking guys with the right kind of urges and guts.
I wonder if there"s something about Tom. Maybe he has a sixth sense about these things, or maybe he has a force inside him that switches people on. Serial killers are almost always loners. That"s probably because there just aren that many guys around who have the right mixture of necessary ingredients to bake that particular cherry pie, if you know what I mean. Sometimes you hear about two working together, but that"s pretty rare. We started off with four, and worked our way up to twelve...
Unheard of, as far as I know.