Short Stories полностью

I am pretty sure I have a fresh pack of cigarettes on the low table in the living room. I concentrate hard in that direction. I see them. I am disappointed. Not a fresh pack. An almost-fresh pack. A pack, in fact, in the condition I like least: recently unwrapped, the crisp little cardboard lid raised up, and one cigarette missing from the front row. I hate that for two reasons: First, the pack looks violated. Like a dear, dear friend with a front tooth punched out. Ugly. And second, however hard I try to prevent it, the sight sends me spiraling back to grade-school arithmetic: There are twenty cigarettes in a new pack, arranged in three rows, and twenty is not fucking divisible by three. I see a pack like that and instantly I am full of rage and paranoia: The tobacco companies are lying to me. Which, of course, they would. They have an accomplished track record in that department. For forty years I have been paying for twenty, and all along they have been supplying me with eighteen. Eighteen is divisible by three. As is twenty-one, but are you seriously suggesting the tobacco companies would supply more than a person pays for?

So I lie and pant, but again, let’s be clear: The oldest, tiredest dog you ever saw sighs a hundred million times faster than I was panting. We’re talking glacial inhalations and exhalations. Whole species could spark and evolve and go extinct between each of my morning breaths.

I had left cigarette butts at the scene. Two of them, Camels, close to but not actually mired in the spreading pool of blood. Deliberately, of course. I know exactly how the game is played. I’m not new to this. The police need the illusion of progress. Not actual progress, necessarily, but they need something to tell reporters, they need smug smiles and video of important things being carried away in small opaque evidence bags. So I play along. It’s in my interests to give them what they need. I give Mr. Rafferty things to smile about, and I’m absolutely sure he knows they’re gifts.

But they’re useless. A cigarette smoked carefully in dry air retains almost no saliva. No DNA. No fingerprints, either. The paper is wrong, and most of it burns anyway, at a temperature close to two thousand degrees. So the gifts cost me nothing, and they give me the satisfaction of knowing I am playing my part in keeping the whole show on the road.

I move the fingers of my right hand and make a claw and start to scrabble microscopically against the resistance of the rug. I have future events to plan: getting to my knees, standing upright, stripping, showering, dressing again. A long agenda, and many hours of work. No breakfast, of course. Long ago I decided that respect for minimum standards of propriety forbade eating after killing. I am hungry, make no mistake, but the promised cigarette will help with that. Plus coffee. I will make a pot and drink it all, and compare its thin fluidity to blood. Blood is less viscous than people think, especially when generated in the kind of volume that my work produces. It splashes and spatters and runs and drains. It is spectacular, which is the point: Obviously Mr. Rafferty does not want to work cases that are mundane, or trivial, or merely sordid. Mr. Rafferty wants a large canvas, and a large canvas is what I give him.

I push with my left palm and ease my shoulders an inch off the floor. The pressure is relieved from my cheek. I am sure the flesh will be red and stippled there. I am not young. My face is doughy and white. Tone has gone. But I can pass it off as razor burn, or bourbon. I focus again on the almost-fresh pack ten feet from me. Tantalizing, and for now as distant as the moon. But I will get there. Trust me.

I have no clear recollection of last night’s events. The details are for Mr. Rafferty to discover. I sow, he reaps. It is a partnership. But lest you misunderstand: My victims deserve to die. I am not a monster. I have many inflexible rules. I target only certain kinds of repulsive criminals; I never hurt women or children. I look for the people Mr. Rafferty can’t reach. And not hapless, low-level street pimps or escort bookers, either: I set my sights a little higher. Not too high, though: for that way lies frustration. Neither Mr. Rafferty nor I can get to the real movers and shakers. But there is a wide layer of smug, culpable people between the two extremes. That is where I hunt. For two reasons: I can feel a glow of public service, and, more importantly, such careful selection puts Mr. Rafferty in a most delicious bind. He wins by losing. He loses by winning. The longer he fails to find me, the more the city is relieved of bad people. The reporters he deals with understand, although they don’t say so out loud. Everyone—me, Mr. Rafferty, citizens, inhabitants—benefits from perfect equilibrium.

Long may it continue.