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  It was a hand on his throat. He peeled it off. As he did, another appendage trapped his hand.

  Renny pulled back and dragged his rubber-limbed assailant out from under the bed—the preferred place of concealment for seasoned, traditional bogeymen.

  It was Victor again.

  Moreover, it was Victor as he had been buried that afternoon. Bones all smashed. No head.

  Renny was instantly mummified in a barbwire-tangle of leathery muscles and nonliving rubber flesh; it was like trying to wrassle a waterbed. What used to be Victor’s arms and legs—now freed from bones and framework—coiled and constricted into tentacles that were much quicker than Renny’s fists. They slithered snug around his windpipe, his chest, his stomach, and Renny could feel it coming: the big squeeze that would make the life jump right out of him.

  Now Renny was making those screamy noises.

  He was clawing at his own face when Barb, no longer wailing, charged back from the kitchen, brandishing the biggest meat cleaver Renny had ever seen.

  Victor had threatened her with the cleaver once; that was how she’d known where to find it.

  And Barb had, in face, seen too many monster movies. Especially the ones about psychos and kitchen implements; you could get every-damned-thing on cable nowadays. She hacked and chopped and slashed and hollered and only nailed Renny by accident once.

  The grabby Victor-thing began falling to pieces faster than a clay pot run through on the wheel with a cutoff needle. Tearing a suffocating creeper of skin free from his mouth, Renny flailed to a sitting position and sucked air.

  “Barb—you cut me open, goddamnit!”

  “I missed, honey, I’m sorry, okay? That thing was all over the place!”

  She helped him stand. He was wobbly, unused to needing help, to being nearly beaten. Their feet buried in the desiccated meat on the floor, she felt him shake. He hugged her tight and genuinely.

  “I know. I know, babe…but that thing is ole you-know-who again.”

  “Can’t be. No way.” She pressed her face into his neck, not looking.

  He lifted a scrap of now-inanimate flesh and turned it to the faint light, so Barb could see the tattoo. A cherubic, comic-book devil-child looked back at her from a corona of flame.

  “Aww, shit—it’s Hot Stuff, Renny!”

  “Yep.” Jesus, wasn’t there anyone whose life hadn’t been touched by Harvey Comics?

  Victor Jacks had gotten his ink at a Sunset Boulevard parlor called Skin Illos, at the Behest of Nikki, who had been his girlfriend of record prior to Barb. Barb had heard you could bleach tattoos by using a laser. She hadn’t been able to work up the spit to suggest this to Victor prior to his very timely demise.

  “Renny…hon…I don’t want to make you mad or nothing, but—”

  “But?”

  “What if Victor…you know, keeps coming back every time we, you and I…you know.”

  “Victor ain’t coming back again.”

  “What’re we gonna do?”

  “What I wanted to do originally. Dump him in the sewer. What’s left of him. Let the rats chow down.”

  “Guess we’re gonna need another Hefty bag, huh?”

  Barb grimaced at the sliced-and-diced assemblage of tissue on the floor. It relaxed and settled, shifting softly. Renny stared at it, too, panting, with shiny eyes, the sweat leaving his chin in droplets.

  “But first, babe, hand me that meat cleaver.”

  The manhole cover weighted ninety-five pounds, give or take. Renny had the advantages of a prybar and good upper torso strength. Thus were the headless, autopsied, dismembered, broken-boned earthly remnants of Victor Jacks consigned to L.A. County’s waste-disposal network.

  Hacking Victor into itty-bitty bite-sized morsels had given Renny a peculiar thrill—the same excitement that had granted him a full-on chubby while bludgeoning Vic-baby the first time.

  Sucker just wouldn’t give it up. Renny had to admire that, begrudgingly.

  And if Vic-baby somehow managed to make a third curtain call, why, that’d be the tits, too. Because Renny was starting to enjoy the new, fun things he could do with his hands.

  Like what he might do if Barb lost her marbles and started that gawdawful shrieking again…

  Nahh. Just a vagrant thought. No problem there.

  Renny yanked his fingers clean and the lid seated with an iron clank. An old pal of his had once broken three fingers by not letting go soon enough, after chasing a Frisbee into the sewer. That made Renny think again of Barb. Maybe it was getting time to let her go. True, she’d come to his rescue and handled herself well enough tonight, but what if Victor was some kind of curse or something, specific to her?

  You don’t pull back your hand in time, you lose. And it wasn’t his fingers that Renny had been parking inside of Barb most of the recent past.

  Just now, in fact, he was up for another bout. His body urged him to hurry home to her. She would be fresh out of her bath, tasty and scented, and Renny wanted to ride her until she screamed for real.

  “Do you hear something? A noise, or—”

  “Oh for christ sake, Barb!”

  “I’m serious. Stop it.”

  Feeling like a wiener, Renny backed out and listened to the doubletime of his own heart, backdraft from his urgent need to climax, soon-sorta-like-immediately. Barb listened intently—she resembled a grade schooler trying too hard to concentrate—not for sounds from the heart, but telltales of nearing monsters. She as still head down, ass up after coyly asking Renny to do her that way, and she clung to the mattress as though it could render her some psychic truth.

  “I don’t hear anything, baby, except maybe your own paranoia bouncing back at us from the walls.” Fed up, he grabbed his smokes off the nightstand. Pretty glib, he though, for a guy who was strangling on a rope of living dead ligaments about an hour ago.

  “I thought I heard the seat fall down in the bathroom.”

  “My fault. I left it up.” When Renny strove to impress, he could be the most courteous, thoughtful man on earth. Then, as he procured what he wanted, he let the courtesies slide. Like tonight: He’d left the seat up on purpose, a territorial assertion he knew she’d notice, yet tolerate. The brilliant trick of Renny’s life was that he made sure people always noticed him when he was being a swell guy, so there was less risk of him being singled out when he was being a turd of ethics. Voilà: He was known far and wide for being fair, wise, and trusty. No way he’d ever sleep with another man’s partner, or murder someone, or even think of doing the deed.

  Even to someone already dead.

  Renny could take blame artfully, too—whamming it back the way a tennis pro returns a smartass server. Like the toilet seat thing.

  “I admit I left the seat up, baby. Your house, your rules. But that fuzzy cover on the tank makes it fall down again, and—”

  “Shh!”

  He smoked in silence, having scored his point. Barb took the cigarette from between his lips, stole two quick puffs, and replaced it as though afraid of being caught tampering with the evidence at a murder scene.

  Renny gave up and went to use the bathroom. He left the seat up.

  “Barb, there’s water all over the bathroom floor. I think maybe your pipes are backing up. Rots, maybe.”

  “Oh, no! Is it all, you know, messy?”

  “Just water. Like a big splash, all over.”

  “Renny!”

  That brought him back quick enough. What a man.

  As he skidded in barefoot, he caught Barb shrinking and pointing. Something had just moved near the juncture of wall and ceiling above her cosmetic table. Renny squinted. The something was low-slung, slide along lizard-fashion, and was now watching them both coldly from seven feet up.

  “What the hell is it?” said Renny. “A rat?”

  “You ever see a white rat with no hair, with eyes that big? Jeeezus, Renny!” Barb could see pretty well in the dark after all. “Where’s the bat?”

  Renny almost ch
uckled. “I’ll get the damned thing. Whatever it is.”

  She stopped him, open palm to naked chest. “No you won’t either, Renny. Now, I’ve been doin’ some thinking, and you’re a nice guy and a good man and a good male protector and all that, and I haven’t been holding up my end on this deal, and like you said, this is my house…so let me do this. It’s my turn.”

  When Barb let loose with stuff like that it stopped Renny deaf and dumb: How could he even consider dumping a woman this good?

  She watched his cigarette glow near the bedroom door. “You just stay right there and hit the overhead lights when I tell you, okay?”

  “Yes’m.”

  “Go!”

  The hundred-watter Barb kept in the ceiling fixture blinded them. The thing on the wall recoiled and dropped behind the mirror. Renny and Barb heard it hit the floor and scrabble into the shadows.

  “See it?”

  “I see it,” Barn lied. She shielded her eyes and groped around until she found the bat.

  “I don’t see it.”

  Renny could see the tail of Barb’s cat, poking from beneath the dresser. It was a miserable calico Renny felt was responsible for every one of his sneezes since he and Barb had linked up. When it wasn’t skulking around the kitchen trying to eat everything in sight, it was shedding pounds of hair and clawing the furniture to ribbons. It had some kind of inane cat name Renny could not retain. It didn’t listen when Barb told it no. It never had.

  It had probably knocked the toilet seat over, numb little fart.

  The tail twitched in that spastic way that announced the cat was revving up for the old chase-and-disembowel routine. Barb told the cat no, loudly. It didn’t listen.

  She tried to block it with her foot, but the cat executed a tight dodge and zipped under the dresser, way ahead of her. There followed an unseen, brief, and violent encounter that sounded pretty awful, though neither Barb nor Renny could see any of it.

  The cat’s tail whapped Barb in the chest. The cat was no longer connected to it. Tufts of calico fur followed, held together mostly by blood.

  Barb began making cave-person noises and wedged herself into the combat zone, dealing short, blind strokes with the bat. The bureau began to scoot with each hit, bunching the area rug.

  The intruder darted out from the far side. It looked like a hand.

  “Barb, it’s a hand!”

  “What!” Barb backed off, frantic and hollow-eyed. “What! What! A hand? I don’t care! It hurt my cat!”

  “Barb, it ran under the bed.” Renny stepped back from the edge, just in case Barb started swinging again.

  Hot for combat, Barb spun. “It hurt Rumplecatskin!” The kill light was in her eyes.

  She swept aside the dust ruffle. Two eyes returned her gaze from about a foot in. Then it charged, before she could bring the bat into play, and got a tight grip on her throat.

  It was Victor’s hand, all right. He’d grabbed her throat enough times for her to make a lightning ID. Whatever else had befallen Victor’s mortal ports, his right hand was still strong and mean as ever. Barb’s wind was cut and in seconds she’d see the purple spots. Victor knew exactly how to throttle her.

  She collapsed into a heavy, spread-legged sit-down as Renny dived across the bed, not as fast as he could have been. He didn’t really want to touch it. The severed wrist terminated in a reddish-white bag of muscle, like the fat, nontapered tail of a gila monster. Renny grabbed that end and tried to yank it off.

  Goddamnit, but this was getting to be much more trouble than anything was worth.

  Barb’s face had shaded to mauve. Renny crawled in tighter, bent back the clutching index finger, and heard it pop as he broke it at the base joint.

  Shouldn’t he just let it polish Barb off? Would this all be over then?

  Nope, he thought as he levered the middle finger out of the flesh of her neck. No way he was going to be beaten and humiliated by disorganized body parts. He cocked the finger away savagely and smiled when he heard it snap.

  There were eyeballs on the back of the hand, and they swiveled a full one-eighty to glare at Renny. The pupils dilated. Barb was sucking wind in big horsey gasps, her face flushing crimson.

  Renny remembered the first time he had ever shaken this hand. Howyadoo. Victor Jacks was the sort of guy whose very existence dared you to be better than him and promised to humiliate you if you tried.

  The thumb and ring finger could not hang on alone; apparently Barb had smashed the pinky, a lucky hit with the bat; it jutted crookedly, alienated from the choking operation. Renny pried the hand free and chucked it across the room as Barb fell down. The hand bounced from the wall to the floor, leaving red impact smears. Clumsily, it tried to locomote.

  Barb stumbled over and started stomping on it. She got gook all over her heel, slipped, and nearly fell again. This enraged her enough to bash the hand with the bat until it didn’t move anymore.

  Both of them squatted down at a safe distance and got their first really clear look at it.

  Apart from the killer hand and about four inches of forearm. There were Victor’s eyes. Eyes that had always been the color of pastel-blue enamel, opaque eyes that did not deal in emotional shades, with the hairtrigger flecks of silver buried deep like vague rumors of madness. The eyes were seated across the first three knuckles on the back of the hand and looked roped down by strings of muscle and threads of optic nerve. One eyeball had just been imploded by Barb’s death-dance. At last Renny could recognize the bulbous bag that hung off the far end of the wrist.

  “That’s his heart.”

  The whole assemblage reminded Renny of something that Victor might jerry-rig on his auto workbench. He was known to be miraculous when it came to solving your vehicular woes with a bent coathanger, spit, and a soldering iron.

  “His heart.” This was not the sort of news Barb was eager to hear. “His heart, oh godddd….how could it be his heart, they took it out, you beat him to pieces, didn’t you break his hand? Last time?”

  Renny honestly could not recall.

  “I mean…he didn’t have no head, Renny! What’d the eyeballs do, roll here by themselves?”

  As they watched, the heard-end caved in, voiding blood in a final death spurt. It made a large, wet, wide stain on the finished wood of the now-exposed floor.

  It appeared to Renny as though it had farted. It was kind of funny. “Wow. You really broke his heart.”

  She began slapping him. The blows were openhanded and basically harmless. “Renny, goddamnit, that’s not funny! That’s his fucking hand! It’s been around my throat plenty of times, and for a minute there I could actually see him, like he’d come back whole to beat me up again, and it’s not funny!”

  Barb was a pace and a half from an asylum. Her tirade petered out and left her sobbing. Renny did the right thing and tried to hold her. She let him. If he had given her a Kleenex, she would have dislocated his jaw.

  “Okay, okay. Sorry I’m such a jerk.”

  Pangs of selfishness could occasionally make Renny feel guilt, or something like guilt. More important right this minute was the abrupt deduction he’d made while keeping an untrusting eye on the no-longer-moving hand thing.

  Victor had been stabbed and gutted…and had come walking back. He’d had all his bones busted and he’d come blobbing back. And Renny had dumped Victor in the sewer and Victor had come back again, from the sewer. Up through the toilet, just like those urban legends about scuba-diving rats, and snakes, and crocodiles, all of which the eyeball-hand resembled.

  “Look, babe, I know what this thing needs. I’ll make sure there ain’t nothin’ left this time.”

  “And how do you plan on doing that?” Barb had regained enough of her equilibrium to peek at herself in the bureau mirror to ensure she didn’t look too messed up.

  Renny lifted the interloper by its broken pinky. He could feel himself piling up jungle smarts by the minute.

  “You got any charcoal starter out back?”

/>   It stank. Truly. It sizzled when it burned, a roundly unappetizing spectacle that Barb forced herself to witness. They both watched it cook down and Renny periodically batted the chunks apart with barbeque tongs until it was reduced to black goo and bone ash.

  Barb plodded back inside to take her third shower in twenty-four hours. There was just no washing Victor off her life.

  Renny watches the goo smolder and bubble on the coals. Kind of like pork, the smell.

  He rubbed the smoke from his reddened eyes and finished up, not really wanting to enter the house again. He no longer wanted to play bed games with Barb. He just wanted to get some sleep.

  By the time Barb had toweled off, she discovered Renny deep in slumberland. Igg, she’d have to change the sheets, despite her shower. A job for tomorrow. She sat on what was, de facto, “her” side of her own bed, successfully not waking her partner in crime.

  Renny was different, she knew. Their relationship had turned. Flowers decay. Banquets spoil. Water evaporates. And their sneaky victory had soured. At first it had been a delicious, shared secret; now it had become a horrid quickmire that bonded them like a pair of panicked dogs struggling to uncouple.

  She felt, well, dead inside, to hammer a phrase. Blown out, wasted, spent, scorching at the edges. She did not want to feel anything so much as she wanted to feel nothing.

  Renny was sleeping with his mouth unhinged, as usual, just beginning to snore. That snore would tell her that she was far, far away from his thoughts. She gently grabbed his nose and tilted his head so he no longer faced her. The incipient snore died with a gurgle.

  She felt unusually sensitized, to the point where the dust on the sheets and comforter bothered her. Grit was in her eyes, and she fancied more dust layered upon her soul, like wet snow. The thought that it might be the powder of dead bones made her start crying, and she never stopped.