Sometimes everything is a confusing muddle. Sometimes the world is gloomy grey, stuffed with steaming snarling stupidity, and instead of all that ambient anger making you thrill with glee it makes you sick, thick-headed, and befuddled. Sometimes life is a mess and nothing your brain can do will make it tidy.
But sometimes you're standing by your car late at night outside a warehouse down by the docks with the night air soft and no mosquitoes around, all alone, with a full moon overhead. And the moon is singing, a high violin-strings whine that stretches your nerves with the darkness beyond a deep accompaniment on cello that soothes, relaxes, strokes a soft cold finger down your spine. Sometimes there's a bad man in the trunk of your car, unconscious, and you have a moment to stand in the night and shiver with delight because it's all ahead of you, the whole night is yours to do with as you please.
And oh, yes please, I do indeed.
I turn and step over to the trunk. The moon is so bright I don't need the flashlight. Every tiny shard of broken glass is a beautiful thing, a shimmering gleaming carpet across this empty parking lot. I pop the trunk release with the keyfob, lean in, and scoop out my unconscious little friend. Over the shoulder he goes, muscles warm and happy to do their job. He's little; I only need one arm to keep him propped in place. The other closes the trunk, and then we're on our way inside.
The key to a successful kill is prior planning, and the key part of planning is the room - having a place set up and ready, completely covered in sheeting. Having your tools well-cared for, bright and ready little soldiers at their stations. Having spare clothing for later, having a source of power for the light and an absolute certainty that nobody else will come anywhere near you for hours and hours - no drug dealers, crackheads, pimps, or homeless; no addicts, sexed-up teenagers or cranky security guards. In a place like Miami, these sorts of refuges are not always easy to come by; it takes time and research, and sometimes a little bit of work to chase off the riffraff. Sometimes getting the kill room ready takes longer than figuring out how guilty the next little vivisection victim is.
It took forever to learn not to rush the job. At first pure impatience wanted to get the better of me, every time. I wanted to cut corners, told myself it wouldn't matter. Only Harry's endless training, over and over and over, kept me straight. Kept me going. Now the prep work is easy, sweet, a warm-up to the main event. A drawing tension as I go through the mechanical motions of plugging things in and stapling things up. Now I enjoy it, like the moments in the clean room before I have to use it. Those moments where there's no blood at all, when it's all tidy and near. Like a blank piece of paper before you write on it, perfect.
Of course, I always write on this paper. I dump my new friend down onto the table and get to work on him. Clothes off with a set of kitchen shears, tape and plastic wrap to hold him secure - he's a little fellow, but I use the whole lot anyways. No point in letting it go to waste; I never keep the tape rolls. Soon enough he's there and I'm waiting for him to wake up.
This is the other quiet time, the time when the lights are on and the table is occupied but there's nothing to do. I touch my tools as though they were talismans. Scalpel, filet knife, hunting knife, handsaw. Slides, pipette, the feel of the cold table under my fingers. I turn and check my victim. No, still out; I still have time. I circle to his trophies. Not much; just some little scraps of paper. Movie ticket stubs. He kept them in a little box. I have them clipped up on a bit of fishing line, strung right across his line of sight. They should be the first thing he sees when he wakes up. Everything is right. Inside, I'm singing like the fat foolish moon, suspended between the hunt and the kill in a moment of peace and sweet anticipation.
There's no blood yet. All his blood is still neatly inside him, flowing around. I'm going to let it out. A little at first, then all at once; then he'll be neatly sectioned off into pieces, tidied up. Squared away. The thing inside me chuckles, and I chuckle too. Harry taught me a lot of things, but even now I'd be willing to bet he never thought being squared away could be taken so literally. But a torso without head, arms and legs can be very square indeed. I pat the forthcoming torso with some affection, and it flinches.
Well, well. The wet little eyes open up and stare at me. I smile down, gentle and kind. I'm feeling euphoric. "Hello, Jimmy. Or is is James?" He makes a little noise, something in his throat. I reach out and pull the wad of fabric out of his mouth, and he works his jaw, worried eyes tracking my every move. He's afraid but dozy still from the drug. His eyes flicker up, trying to see where he is, trying to focus and make sense of what's going on in this new and much smaller world. He sees the movie tickets. His eyes freeze. He counts them with his eyes, back and forth, back and forth. I know he's seeing not just some colorful scraps of paper but vivid blood and screams. Bright little girls with bright hair lying broken in his hands while he sings soft songs to them, just like the last one, the one I'd had to catalog and sort and file away into the endless stream of bits and bites that formed our homicide filing system. She was nothing but numbers there now, little electric sparks. And soon enough he'd be there, a few files over form her, listed as "missing".
The knowledge crowds his eyes and they begin to leak. I study his face. Not fear, not anger. Relief? As soon as I think it I know it's true; Jimmy or maybe James here is relieved.
I straighten up, pick up my tools, lean over him. He's relaxed, at ease. Dead and he knows it and so glad it's all over now. "You've been a bad, bad boy," I say, and there's kindness in my voice. Why not? I can afford to be kind to him now. He's mine, utterly and completely, and he's perfect. He nods, lips quivering. "You're going to pay," I say, and he whispers "yes" as I slide the scalpel gently down his cheek, let the pipette suck up the blood and drop it on the slide, hold it up so he sees me through his own blood. So that I can see his face covered in red one last time before I take it away from him completely. Then the slide goes away, and the face-shield comes down, and Jimmy or maybe James sighs with relief and pain and horror as I slide the knife up between the ribs, through the thick fibrous tissue of the sternum and into his heart.
There's always a little pause there, with the feel of his heart trembling up the knife into my hand. Always a moment that goes away, a moment I can never recapture or recall. That's the moment I wonder about when I see my slides.
Do other killers feel it too? That moment that their memory simply cannot hold? I've never asked.
After the moment comes the hard part. It's demanding work, cutting up a body; especially so when all I want is to sit there for a bit and relax, let the feelings flow through me. But there's never really enough time; day always comes, and with it risk. Even taking my time about it I still break a pleasant sweat. It's workout, and I could never manage if I weren't in such excellent shape. But eventually every part of my broken toy is put away, my playroom is disassembled, and everything is portably packed away in my trunk. It always seems like both a much smaller and much larger package than when I start. The plastic, the body - they need to be so tightly rolled to fit properly. And it's getting harder and harder to find loose rocks and bricks in this city to weight down the body parts in the bags. Then there's that tense moment, when even though the work is done the body is still with you - the moments between the cutting-up and the disposal, when you should be happy but instead you have to be alert and careful. Drive safely but not to cautiously that the police think you're stoned, drive inconspicuously at an hour when nobody can possibly be up to any good. Haul the bags to the boat in an ice chest. Make two trips, because even a little guy is bigger than a big ice chest when he has the entire kill room wrapped around him. Putter out onto the dark night water and at last and finally be alone with the moon, with the fat giggling moon sighing softly on the waves and nobody in the world but me and the dead guy at my feet.
We motor out in the dark, paying a little attention to GPS and the green glow of sonar. Then out in the dark with the stars and the shimmering waves, and over the edge with just a faint splash he goes, and I'm alone again.
Utterly, completely alone.
And it's so good. So nice to feel like this, with the bags drifting down below me, sliding through the dark water under me and the dark night spread above me. I lie back on the boat and stare up at the sky for a moment. Soon enough I'll be up and moving; soon enough I'll be back in the busy noisy world full of fluorescent lights and people yammering away on cell phones and car horns and exhaust and girlfriends and sisters; but right now it's just me and the dark thing inside me under the moon, with a good night's work underfoot and the glow from the work sliding through my muscles like very fine honey.
Nothing lasts forever; the cool wind out here is unpleasant, and I yawn. Rita will be warm and the bed will be soft when I get home. Cody and Astor will watch violent cartoons and later tomorrow we will go to the park and eat Rita's lovely homemade picnic food, and Deb will call me and haul me off to some bloody room where I can make chaos tremble back into tidy physics, back into neatness and order and all that is pleasant about life. Sleep, wake, sleep, wake; but always behind me, always ahead of me, this pleasure. These nights. This moon.