THE THINLY DRESSED BONES, TUMBLED ON the floor, issued no cry of surprise, no groan, no même.
To be sure that Brittina was dead, Corky wanted to shoot her once more, this time in the back of the head. Unfortunately, his pistol had begun to bark.
Even the highest quality sound suppressor deteriorates with use. Regardless of the material used as baffling in the barrel extension, it compacts a little with each shot, diminishing in function.
Furthermore, Corky didn’t possess a suppressor of the quality employed by agents of the CIA. You could not expect materials and craftsmanship equal to those of a major firearms manufacturer when you purchased a silencer from anti-veal activists.
He had popped Hokenberry six times and Brittina twice. In just eight shots, the pistol had begun to find its voice again.
Perhaps the most recent round had not been audible outside the narrow house, but the next report would be louder. He was a man who took calculated risks, but this one didn’t add up.
In the trunk of his car, in the tool kit, he kept a fresh sound suppressor, as well as a pair of night-vision goggles and a kit of hypodermic syringes with vials of sedatives and poisons. And two live hand grenades.
[395] As always, however, he had parked a few blocks from Brittina’s house, on a street different from hers. Because Corky was a tenured professor and she was a student, they had been assiduously discreet about their romantic relationship.
Going to and from the BMW to secure a replacement suppressor seemed like an unnecessary complication. Instead, he crouched beside his riddled lover and felt her throat, trying to detect a pulse in her carotid artery.
She was as dead as disco.
In the bathroom, Corky washed his genitals, hands, and face. To be in love with chaos, one did not have to be scornful of good personal hygiene.
From the medicine cabinet, he withdrew a large bottle of Scope mouthwash. With Brittina dead and quite incapable of being offended, Corky took a swig directly from the container, and gargled.
Her kisses left him with a bad taste.
As a result of Brittina’s habit of fasting more than not, she had frequently been in a state of ketosis, during which her body was forced to burn what meager stores of fat it might have been jealously guarding. Among the symptoms of ketosis are nausea and vomiting, but a more pleasant symptom is sweet, fruity-smelling breath.
Corky enjoyed the fragrance of her breath, but after swapping a lot of spit, tongue to tongue, he was sometimes left with a sour aftertaste. Like all things in an imperfect world, lovemaking always comes with a price.
In this case, of course, the price had been greater for Brittina than for him.
He dressed quickly. In his stocking feet, he descended the narrow stairs to the cramped kitchen at the back of the house.
His yellow slicker and rain hat hung on a wall peg in the small screened porch off the kitchen. His black boots stood to one side of the slicker.
Rain crashed in such heavy cascades upon the porch roof that it [396] sounded like a downpour in the jungled tropics. He half expected to see grinning crocodiles in the backyard and pythons slithering in the trees.
He slipped the pistol into one of the capacious pockets of the slicker. From another pocket he withdrew a length of flexible rubber tubing and an object that resembled a snack-size container of yogurt, though it was black with a red lid and featured no illustrations of luscious fruit.
With no reason remaining to be respectful of Brittina’s clean floors, he pulled on his boots and returned to the house. The deep wet tread of his rubber soles squeaked on the vinyl tile in the kitchen.
His work was not yet completed. He had left behind evidence that would convict him of murder. Semen, hair, fingerprints—all must be eliminated.
From the day that he’d begun visiting this pinched place, months previously, he had gone without the latex gloves that he customarily wore at the scenes of capital crimes. Even though Brittina Dowd was nothing if not an eccentric, she would surely have grown suspicious of a lover who at all times wore surgical gloves.
Steeper and narrower stairs than any others in the house led down from the kitchen to a garage in which three of the four walls were underground. Gloom gathered here as luxuriously as ever it had coiled in any catacomb or dungeon.
Corky could almost hear a multitude of spiders plucking their silken harp strings.
Four small windows in the garage door would have admitted some sun on a classic California day. Now the gray storm gloom could not penetrate the dusty glass.
He switched on a bare bulb overhead, providing hardly enough light by which to drain the god of Zoroastrianisin.
The god of Zoroastrianism is Ahura Mazda. Brittina’s car was a Mazda, without the Ahura, but Corky enjoyed his little joke anyway.
From the trunk, he removed four hairspray-size aerosol cans with [397] any one of which a stranded motorist could inflate a flat tire and at the same time seal the puncture in it. He set these aside and then took from the trunk a pair of empty two-gallon gasoline cans.
He had purchased these items for Brittina, in addition to road flares and a yellow pennant emblazoned with EMERGENCY in bold black letters, and had insisted that she keep them in the trunk of her Zoroastrian god at all times.
She had been touched by his concern and had said that diamonds would not have proved his love as surely as did these humble gifts. They were, in fact, part of his preparations to dispose of her body w............