The Handyman
Kyle Ricci was in bed when his beeper went off. He sat up sharply, hand reaching out to still the electronic beep. His eyes were clear and focused, no hint of sleep in them even though he had been dreaming when the compact little box had begun to emit its call. He threw back the covers and walked nakedly to the telephone on the small dresser. He dialled the operator and asked for an international line, giving her the number, she advised him it would be a few minutes and he replaced the receiver.
The call was to a safe number, as always, until the integrity of a ‘phone line was assured, all calls were to a safe number. While he waited for the telephone to ring, he opened the door of his apartment. The newspaper was folded neatly at the foot of the door. He scooped it up and returned to the bed, sitting on its edge. His short holiday was over. He glanced at the headlines on the front page. There was nothing of interest there. The story that interested him was on the third page, below the fold, two columns wide. He read it quickly, eyes scanning the newsprint, searching for salient points, hints that more was known than was being reported, there was not and he smiled. The smile was cold, calculating and would have chilled anyone who saw it. He was alone.
The telephone rang, the bell cutting through his thoughts and he sprang quickly to his feet.
“Your call, Mr. Myers,” the operator said before clicking off the line. Kyle grinned. He always checked into hotels under assumed names, had passports and other relevant documentation that stated he was indeed, Mr. Michael Myers. It was one of Kyle’s little jokes that the names he chose were those of killers, fictional or otherwise. Michael Myers was the former. The young boy who killed his sister and her boyfriend with a carving knife at the age of six and was institutionalised for fifteen years before escaping to wreak havoc against Jamie Lee Curtis and her baby-sitting friends in John Carpenter’s classic Halloween.
“This is Myers,” he spoke over the ocean, his words reaching their destination with a second or two delay.
“We need you back in the office, Mr. Myers. There’s some paperwork that needs clearing up.”
Paperwork! Kyle loved it. He loved the necessity to code messages in innocuous language, it was all part of the game. His game. The killing game.
“What sort of paperwork?” He asked.
“Some invoices. They seem to have gone missing. I thought they were locked in your draw, but when I found the key, they weren’t there.”
Kyle almost whistled down the ‘phone. Alex had gone!
“When did you notice they were gone?”
“First thing this morning, local time.”
Kyle nodded to himself, calculating the time difference in his head. “I’m on my way.” He hung up without waiting for a reply. Who would have thought that Alex would ever run? What caused it? He shook his head again. It wasn’t his problem. Finding the little brat was.
He was right, his holiday was over, he’d enjoyed himself immensely, he glanced again at the paper, picking it up and reading the story again, losing himself in the details, remembering… .
It had a wooden head, it had a wooden head and it was light—the paper hadn’t mentioned that. It had a wooden head and it was light and it made a shhh sound in the air as he swung it.
Normally, he would have used a proper hammer with a sturdy handle and a nice, big, heavy head on the end. A nice, big, heavy, metal head with a flat, shiny round block at one end for putting nails into wood (or flesh) and a beautiful, sharp claw at the other end with which to pull out nails (or pull nails off fingers). The kind of hammer that makes a nice, satisfying whoosh sound when you swung it. Yes, normally, he would have used a proper hammer, but this time he had broken in through a kitchen door. The kitchen door because it was situated at the back of the house with a nice large garden with high privet hedges on all sides, affording the luxury of total cover.
No one had seen him enter the garden. The house was detached, the second in line of eight large, detached, very similar houses in the quiet, middle class suburb.
It was mid-afternoon, husbands were at work, winding down to the holiday, perhaps enjoying a pre-Christmas drink; children were still at school, or napping. Bored housewives were at the mall, shopping or zoned out in front of some puerile, intelligence insulting soap opera or game show. (Except for Mrs. Hughes at the far end of the block who was entertaining the plumber, cleaning his pipes in a rather more novel way than he had cleaned hers twenty minutes before). Except also, for Mrs. Benson, who was about to re-enter her kitchen from the laundry room and discover a man there who should not have been. A man who definitely was not a plumber—but did wear overalls—and was carrying a tool sack.
Kyle’s sack carried the tools of his trade, one of those tools being the aforementioned hammer with the big, heavy, metal head.
He looked like a handyman—indeed that had become his non-de plume in his current guise, a name very different from his own or his other identities, like Michael Myers, for instance, but a name that meant much the same thing when you got right down to it.
The Handyman was not his real name, but the newspapers did not know what his real name was, just that his handi-work had spread the length and breadth of the city in the past two years and claimed the lives of seven women. The papers had given him his nick-name after his second outing, when a teenage boy delivering the afternoon paper across the street from his victim’s house saw a man “dressed in overalls, like a mechanic or you know, a handyman” disappearing down the side of the house towards the next road and, presumably, his getaway.
He looked like a handyman except for what he held in his hand.
Ida Benson had been preparing dinner for her husband before scurrying off to the laundry room to change the washing over from the washer to the tumble dryer and had lightly pounded the steaks with a meat mallet.
When The Handyman broke into the kitchen, the tenderiser caught his eye immediately and, although it had a wooden head he decided, there and then, that he would use it instead of his normal tool.
Ida Benson returned to her kitchen carrying an empty linen basket in her arms. She stopped rock still, the basket dropping from her arms, when she saw the man in overalls in her kitchen, with her meat mallet in his hand.
A scream began to build in her throat, she tried to back away, to turn and run, but she was frozen in place. Her mouth opened. As it did so, Kyle swung the mallet, stepping a pace closer as he brought his arm around. Although it was light, he swung it with force. The mallet’s head struck Ida’s temple with a sharp thwacking sound. Her muscles relaxed instantly and she fell sideways towards the floor. The smoothness of her fall was interrupted by the long pine table centred in the room, her face hit it. The corner of the table punctured her left eyeball like a knife into the yolk of a lightly fried egg. Blood erupted from her exploded eye as her body swivelled one hundred and eighty degrees and she fell flat out on the kitchen floor beside the empty plastic linen basket.
Kyle Ricci, a.k.a. The Handyman, his face fixed in a wide-eyed grin, straddled Ida’s chest and brought the meat mallet down onto Ida’s upturned face. As he pulled it away again there was an ugly sucking sound as the gummy fluid from Ida’s ruptured eye clung to the mallet’s little wooden points. He didn’t stop pounding for ten minutes.
Afterwards, as he was scrubbing his hands under the tap, he pondered the fact that blood was a rather stubborn substance, it seemed that each time, it was harder to wash the blood off his hands; and the meat mallet would be a damn sight more difficult to clean than his usual hammer. But, a craftsman always took care of his tools, and clean it he would.
When he’d left the house, as he had entered it, he was not noticed. Just how he liked it…
Kyle shook himself out of his reverie. Memories of his exploits gave him almost as much pleasure as the deeds themselves. He glanced down at his nakedness and saw that he was excited. He began to play with himself. His holiday had been fun, but he enjoyed his job just as much. He brought his mind back to the problem of Alex. He disliked the little shit intensely, killing him would give him immense pleasure. Grinning cruelly, his hand moved more rapidly.