With the rifle pressed to his right leg, he strolled back to his car, leaving the murder scene. He wasn’t rattled as he’d been earlier in the evening, when Myra Rockhill blocked his shot. Nor was he disappointed by tonight’s outcome. Even though the other targets had been arrayed before him briefly like a platter full of delectables, there was no profit in faulting himself for his mediocre shooting.
There would be time enough for the rest of them. Here in the mountains or back in Miami, or wherever on earth he had to go to finish the mission. He’d taken down Jacob Panther, and he’d had a decent shot at the Monroe girl, the crosshairs settling on the side of her pale face, but as he squeezed, he’d jiggled the weapon and missed. A little overexcited, perhaps.
But those jitters had passed, and now a satisfying peacefulness settled over him as he climbed into his car and headed back to the highway.
No hurry. Indeed, when he considered it more fully, it was actually preferable this way. One at a time, with breathers in between. A measured approach, no orgy of violence. Plant the seed of fear in each of them, let them marinate in dread, knowing he was coming ever closer. A nameless avenger.
At first he’d toyed with the idea of leaving notes. Words or phrases cut from newspapers. Or perhaps assume a titillating nickname. Taunt them and toy with them as the Hollywood villains did. But after a few moments’ consideration he dismissed the idea. He was by nature and by choice a drab and simple man. Such gaudiness was not his way, not his personality.
Better to be as anonymous and invisible as the air.
Another good reason to draw out the cycle of killing for as long as possible was his mother. Because when his mission was completed, and the last of them was dead, then the wire strung tight inside his chest, the wire that had been droning for weeks, would slow its hum and finally cease to vibrate, and in the ensuing stillness his mother’s voice would regain its prominence. Her shrill nagging. Every hour, every day.
Not that he didn’t love his mother, or pine for her, or honor her in her afterlife, but her harsh voice, which rose inside him at night when the house grew quiet, when he was sinking away into sleep—well, if he was honest, that voice distressed him, put unmanly flutters in his pulse.
A year after her death, his mother continued to badger him over the pettiest issues. She was forever after him to keep the toilets spotless, scrub out the tubs and sinks, floss his teeth at least once a day, clear the dead rats from the traps in the barn, all the obsessive trivia that had constituted her own daily routine for seventy years, the endless chores that consumed her right to the end of her days, when she lay on her deathbed in cancerous agony, and finally as she stared into the remorseless eyes of her Maker, and issued her last commands to those surrounding her deathbed.
In her dying moments, his mother had revealed to him the true nature of his ancestry and the ruinous toxin that streamed through the family’s veins, revelations that he’d had no inkling of previously. And it was those final words of hers that launched this deadly quest. Their echoes that drove him every hour.
But even in the very moments after the good woman passed along those weighty revelations, as she lay panting for breath, her next admonition, the last words she spoke, concerned the health of his teeth and gums.
As he drove along the highway, staying well under the speed limit, he still felt in the meat of his hands the pleasant throb from the Heckler & Koch. True, all but one of his shots were errant, yet a kill had been achieved. A kill that was as crucial as any of the others. His mother should be pleased.
It was when he stopped for a traffic light that he heard her voice, hardly more than a tickle of noise in his ear. Had he flossed after breakfast this morning? Had he?
No mention of his shooting. Just the flossing.
Had he?
Honestly, he couldn’t remember if he had or not. A day so full as this one. A day of momentous actions. Deaths and escapes and near misses.
Plaque never stops growing, was her reply. It is always there. Always. Working below the gum line, eroding the solid bones. And the rattraps? Had he checked them today? Had he? Had he?