"Don't be so distracted, Dexter, you need to focus on tonight's kill." Harry sounds terse, like he used to in the old days when I was a teenager and killing was an apprenticeship. I glance over at where he sits on the armchair, watching me tie my shoes laces and pack my duffle bag with plastic wrap.
The kids are at Deb's and the apartment sounds utterly empty but for the small noises of Lumen changing in the bedroom. Instinctively, we broke apart to prepare for tonight, as though our monsters needed to give each other space, room to breathe. Lumen has already packed her small bag, carrying the less bulky but essential items we'll need for tonight and leaving me to wrap the chainsaw and the face guards we'll both need, in my bag. The generous black folds of material hide a multitude of sins.
"I know, I know I need to focus but..." I shake my head and Harry's eyes squint.
"You can deal with Pete after tonight. Have you got a plan?" He leans back and surveys me over his folded arms. I shake my head, wrapping the electric cable for the chainsaw around my hand and elbow and tucking it neatly inside the bag. I add two more disposable aprons, just to be careful, and zip it up. "If you have a plan, then you might feel better." Harry's right, again, I sigh.
Lumen comes into the room, dressed in her kill suit of soft black material. Her silhouette is perfect, slim and athletic, ready for action. My blood starts to pound in my body and somewhere I register how much seeing her like this turns me on.
She must feel the same because she walks across the room and stands in front of me, her hands in my hair and she pulls my face against her stomach. My hands come up, under the black t shirt and the electric shock as they find her skin trembles though me. She exhales and I feel her shiver. I wriggle the material past my cheek and press my lips to the smooth curve of her belly.
"Ok, that's enough; we'll never get out of here if you carry on with that." She is smiling and I can hear it in her voice. I chuckle and she giggles as my breath brushes her skin. She steps back and looks at the bag. "Do we have everything?"
I go through the mental list I have eternally stored inside me. Tonight's kill room is the double garage of Greco's neighbour and I have the measurements and the calculated amount of plastic wrap we'll need all worked out. There's a work bench and a counter top so we'll have somewhere to work on the both of them. I have double the amount of garbage bags and the chainsaw, aprons and face guards make up the rest of the equipment. Lumen has the slides and the M99.
"Yep, we've got what we need. Are you ready?" She stretches her arms and makes a noise like an athlete about to start a race; her breath comes out in a groan. She nods.
There isn't the silence between us I had anticipated as we drive back to that bad part of town where we know we'll find our new playmates. Instead our conversation is domestic, normal.
"So, did you hear from Deb again after she went to interview the relatives of those men?" Lumen is looking out of the window where the bright lights reflect on the water of the bay.
"Only briefly, she said that she got nothing from them, only she didn't phrase it quite like that." I laugh and Lumen chuckles. "Hey, are we going to go out with Deb and Quinn tomorrow? We've been invited to do lunch again at the Grill, seems like a regular thing." She doesn't reply so I glance over and she's pursing her lips and frowning.
"What's wrong?" I try to sound casual but every subtle trace of difference in her makes me worry, worry about Pete, about his intentions and his secret I am keeping from her.
"Nothing, I just promised Pete we could watch a movie tomorrow evening. His apartment is having the AC fixed and the workman's coming at noon, his apartment won't be cool enough so I said use mine. I suppose I could postpone it to the evening. Do you want to come?" Quickly, I judge the situation. Why don't I just tell her what he's doing? But I don't know for sure and old habits die hard, even with Lumen. I don't trust Pete an inch on his own with her but she's not stupid and this might give me the chance to look at his apartment, find out what he's hiding because I'm damned sure it's something. When I know for certain then I'll talk to her about it, she doesn't need to be scared about a monster getting so close unless I have my facts straight. I stretch out my arm and rest it on her shoulder, she smiles.
"Maybe I will, it'll be later though because I'll have to get Harrison to bed and ask Deb if she can have them another night. I hope she doesn't mind. We're going to have to think of something if we're all going to live together." I say it without considering my words and Lumen puts her hand over mine, her fingers laced between my fingers.
"I spoke to Sonja when we picked the kids up yesterday, she's prepared to work some nights in the future, we'd have to have somewhere for her to sleep though..." I look over as the traffic slows down and Lumen is smiling at me. She isn't frightened by what I have said, about our commitment; she's contemplated it herself and taken steps to ensure our family are safe. Steps that include our extracurricular needs. What is more shocking is how this idea doesn't bother me; I can almost feel Harry's approval wafting in on the ether and the hot summer breeze through the window.
"We should start looking at apartments," I say, unable to keep the grin from my face. Lumen's face is alight; she nods as though she doesn't have the words for how she's feeling. I let out a sigh and slide the SUV forward as the lights change and continue our steady flow in the Miami night time traffic.
I watch the hookers, the clubbers, the lovers and the cops on the street. Everyone with their own focus, their agenda for the evening. Get laid, get paid, get drunk, get home unscathed. The music and the lights and the smell of Cuban cooking from the restaurants on this side of town have me smiling into the night. I never felt so at peace, even with the worry of Pete, I know I am in a privileged place. I have my woman at my side, my kids are sleeping safely, the future looks bright and I'm on my way to hack to pieces two really deserving people, how could life be better? I lean over and switch on the radio. The marching band's drum rolls us along and the streets become darker, not as flamboyant and friendly. Lumen taps her fingers on the leather upholstery of her chair in time to the music.
One by one streetlights get less bright, less frequent. Houses are empty and shops are boarded over or encased in metal bars. Shady characters lounge on the steps of houses and deals are being done from car windows and trunks.
"We should park up, we don't want anyone remembering the SUV," I say, as I pull into the kerb and switch off the head lights.
"Will it be ok here?" Lumen looks out of the window, the area is still residential but it's not the clean streets we're used to.
"Yeah, I think so; we've a few blocks to walk before things get really bad." I heft the bag onto my shoulder as I get out of the car. Lumen swings her bag up and follows me as I move off down an alleyway, locking the car behind me with a discreet click.
We've scoped out the area on a couple of maps and planned our route to the kill room. We move like shadows, neither of us needing to speak or communicate with anything but our eyes and hands. Once or twice we come across a drunk or a junkie, sprawled between trash cans and stinking of piss and vomit, but none of them offer us any threat. We're the things that go bump in the night.
The fun really starts when I jimmy back the lock on the double garage and, using the powerful torch for light, I black out the windows with the thick sheeting. Then Lumen flicks on the bright overhead lights and we look at our blank canvas. The tension between us is already building, I am anticipating her kill, imagining her slicing through sinew and tissue and bone with the chainsaw. It's not the first time I've thought of this, ever since that night when we met them at the bar the image of her, blood splatter on her pale skin, her pupils dilated and her mouth open, has been lurking in my brain. Now it emerges into the light as I watch her take the staple gun and start to clamber on the countertop to fix the plastic to the corners of the room. I feel my hard arousal at the thought of what she is going to do tonight.
We work quietly, each of us in our roles, dividing the job between us without conversation. This is how partners act, man and woman in some primal union, predators operating together. It surprises me how little time it takes us to set up the kill room.
I watch her pull the sheeting over the counter top; something in her movement reminds me of how she makes the bed. My body doesn't need any help jumping to the next step and I imagine pushing her back onto the slippery surface, showing her how crazy she's got me with her plans for Greco.
She stands beside me, breathing slightly from the exertion of hauling the plastic along the floor, over the table in the centre of the room and under our feet again. The whole garage is wrapped in its own bubble of shiny, evidence free sheeting. It obscures our vision of the edges of the room and seems to cocoon us in our own world. We are the masters here.
"It's beautiful," Lumen whispers and she is right. The light is softened by the thick swathes of plastic and the surfaces reflect dully like rippled water under moonlight. It's like a dream, or a nightmare, depending which side of the chainsaw you are on. This thought reminds me of Deb, Deb catching us as we hacked up Jordan Chase's body, firing her gun through the plastic strips and then letting us go. That day the plastic saved my life, made it so that Deb can only wonder if it was me behind that curtain of transparent disguise. It's a good metaphor for my life.
Lumen moves to unpack the photos she downloaded of little Todd , the child unfortunate enough to be born to Tina DiMarco and whose life was ended by her lowlife boyfriend. I saw Lumen's face as those little pictures were spat out of the machine. Slowly he emerged, his hair and then his scared, big eyes and finally the tiny, turned down mouth. Like a reversal of his birth he came out, upside down, wrong, and Lumen cried as we stood together and watched his stillbirth from the printer. I see her mouth; set in a line of determination, as she tapes the pictures up along the plastic walls. She pauses to stroke one, smoothing the tiny, frightened features as though she can make him better again, bring him back.
"I'll stop him for you Todd," she whispers, and I remember the ritual, the almost ceremonial way she killed Daniels, the recitation of the names of his victims, the honouring of their deaths as she brought down the knife. She is mesmerising, I am utterly captured by her poise, her dedication to this work. She pulls back her hair tightly and her t shirt lifts slightly, the tanned skin striped with scars and I look at her and I feel the monster inside of me waking.
The Miami night and the wrapping combine to make the room hot and damp; I watch a bead of sweat rolling down from under the high ponytail in which she has trapped her hair. It disappears under the collar of her t shirt and, before I can register what I am doing, I have crossed the room, plastic crinkling under my feet, and my arms are about her waist and I dip my head to follow that salty drop with my tongue. I feel her shudder under me; taste the heat and the damp of her body. She tugs at my hair with her fingers as she presses me to her skin. I am panting, washing away on this hot tide of lust which threatens to spill over me and leave me shipwrecked somewhere unknown.
I feel her ribs heaving under my hands and trace along those slim bones with my fingertips. She moans softly, the sound igniting me and acting like petrol on a flame. I slide my hands up, under her shirt and over the cups of her bra where I feel her nipples, hard and demanding. She growls in her throat and I hear my monster answer her with his own guttural, animal sound. She turns in my hands and kisses me, her hands pressing down my body, stroking and squeezing through the thin material of my dark combat trousers. The smell of her, the feeling of her slim fingers pressing, teasing, builds and builds until there is nowhere for me to go.
She pulls back and presses her nose to mine, her breath coming hard and sharp. I see her eyes closed tight and she astonishes me with the effort she summons to slow her breathing, control her body. I push forward and kiss her again; her soft lips are like burning coals.
"Stop, stop," she whispers, almost as though it is herself she is speaking to, willing herself to be calm, focus. I sweep my hands over her breasts again and she arches, almost on her toes, as her body pushes forward, offering itself to me. Her eyes snap open. "No." It is a command.
I run my hands back to her stomach and lift them away as though she were made of glass. She sways on her heels and I can see the concentration as she fights her instincts for control.
"Sorry," I say it quietly, looking at her for indication of how she is feeling. Did I overstep the mark? Is this stopping a symptom of a survivor or the instinct of a killer? I'm not sure and so I try to read her, my eyes gathering information in the same way that I read a crime scene.
She bites her lip and pulls down the hem of her shirt, the corner of her mouth hitching in a crooked smile. A breath escapes her lips which might be a laugh but I can't be sure. I smile hesitantly and she puts out her hand, palm facing me. I reach towards her with my own hand and she twines her fingers about my own. She presses her palm to mine.
"Not now, later. This is amazing, but think how it will be after..." She looks up at me, under her lashes now and smiles a dark, knowing smile.
"Delayed gratification?" I smirk, "very good. You're right, we should wait but I don't know how long I can wait when this job is over." Her eyes drop to my crotch and she quirks an eyebrow and nods.
"So I see. Don't worry; I have an idea for that too. You're not the only one who likes to plan ahead." She turns and begins to unpack my bag. I watch her connect the power cable and then put down the chainsaw on the long countertop. There's more than enough room for Tina DiMarco on that surface and the chainsaw leaves at least enough room for another body if we had another body. She tries on the face guard, gliding the plastic band over her shiny hair and tightening the slide fastener.
She turns and grins at me from under the visor, her features still sharp in the glare of the high beam light overhead. She adjusts the side clasps so that the curve of the clear screen angles down, away from her nose, giving her room to breathe. Then she picks up the chainsaw, I see her muscles flex as they correct her posture with the weight of the heavy power tool. Maybe I should get her something lighter? The image of her with the fearsome saw, her stance, legs apart, knees and shoulders perfectly balanced, is shocking, powerfully erotic. She brings it down, slicing in the air at an imaginary limb, gauging its weight and the effort needed to keep the swing smooth.
"Have you used one of those before?" She looks too comfortable, too controlled for this to be a first time.
"Yes," she nods, bringing the saw up and resting her hand on her shoulder so the weight of the machine rests against her body. "My father and brother used one like this to cut down trees in the garden. They taught me how to use one, it was a little smaller than this, but the principle's the same. I'm guessing it won't get stuck in bone the way it would in a tree trunk?"
"No, you're right. It should slice cleanly through. You won't be ready for the blood though. Something like this creates a lot of blood, everywhere." I try not to think of that shipping container, of that little boy sitting in a pool of his mother's cooling blood. Lumen sees this, her face registers her recognition of my flashback and she puts the chainsaw down carefully and comes to me, hand outstretched. She strokes my face.
"This isn't just for Todd DiMarco. This is for you, and for Rudy."
Ok, sorry for the looooong delay! My life has got slightly inovolved and I just haven't had the patience. Hopefully the train journey to London will inspire me to get this finished! Thanks to VB for betastardom and to staceuo for being a wicked critic.