Her name, she told him repeatedly, was Marni. He was in no danger of forgetting that fact, nor did she seem to be in any danger of remembering his name, which she kept asking him over and over. He’d said it was Jack—it wasn’t—and she kept apologizing for her inability to retain that information. “I’m Marni,” she’d say on each occasion. “With an i,” she added, more often than not.
He found himself remembering a woman he’d picked up years ago in a bar with much the same ambience. She’d been a very different sort of drunk, although she’d been punishing the Harvey Wallbangers as industriously as Marni was knocking back the gandy dancers. She’d grown quieter and quieter, and her eyes went glassy, and by the time he’d driven them to the place he’d selected in advance, she was out cold. He’d had some very interesting plans for her, and here she was, the next thing to comatose, and wholly incapable of knowing what was being done to her.
So he’d let himself imagine that she was dead, and took her that way, and kept waiting for her to wake up, but she didn’t. And it was exciting, more exciting than he’d have guessed, but at the end he held himself back.
And paused for a moment to consider the situation, and then very deliberately broke her neck. And then took her again, imagining that she was only sleeping.
And that was good, too.
“AT LEAST I GOT the house,” she was saying. “My ex took the kids away from me, can you imagine that? Got some lawyer saying I was an un—t mother. Can you imagine that?”
The house her ex-husband had let her keep certainly looked like a drunk lived in it. It wasn’t filthy, just remarkably untidy. She grabbed him by the hand and led him up a flight of stairs and into her bedroom, which was no neater than the rest of the place, then turned and threw herself into his arms.
He disengaged, and she seemed puzzled. He asked if there was anything in the house to drink, and she said there was beer in the fridge, and there might be some vodka in the freezer. He said he’d be right back.
He gave her five minutes, and when he returned with a can of Rolling Rock and a half-pint of vodka, she was sprawled na**d on her back, snoring. He set the beer can and the vodka bottle on the bedside table, and drew the blanket to cover her.
“Catch and release,” he said, and left her there.
FISHING WAS NOT JUST a metaphor. A couple of days later he walked out his front door into a cool autumn morning. The sky was overcast, the humidity lower than it had been. The breeze was out of the west.
It was just the day for it. He got his gear together, made his choices, and drove to the bank of a creek that was always good on this kind of day. He fished the spot for an hour, and by the time he left he had hooked and landed three trout. Each had put up a good fight, and as he released them he might have observed that they’d earned their freedom, that each deserved another chance at life.
But what did that mean, really? Could a fish be said to earn or deserve anything? Could anyone? And did a desperate effort to remain alive somehow entitle one to live?
Consider the humble flounder. He was a saltwater fish, a bottom fish, and when you hooked him he rarely did much more than flop around a little while you reeled him in. Did this make him the trout’s moral inferior? Did he have less right to live because of his genetically prescribed behavior?
He stopped on the way home, had a hamburger and a side of well-done fries. Drank a cup of coffee. Read the paper.
Back home, he cleaned and sorted his tackle and put everything away where it belonged.
THAT NIGHT IT RAINED, and did so off and on for the next three days. He stayed close to home, watched a little television.
Nights, he’d lean back in his recliner and close his eyes, letting himself remember. Once, a few months back, he’d tried to count. He’d been doing this for years, long before his mother died, and in the early years his appetite had been ravenous. It was, he sometimes thought, a miracle he hadn’t been caught. Back then he’d left DNA all over the place, along with God knew what else in the way of trace evidence.
Somehow he’d gotten away with it. If they’d ever picked him up, if he’d ever attracted the slightest bit of official attention, he was sure he’d have caved immediately. He’d have told them everything, confessed to everything. They wouldn’t have needed trace evidence, let alone DNA. All they’d have needed was a cell to lock him into and a key to throw away.
So there had been many, but he’d ranged far and wide and little of what he did ran to pattern. He’d read about other men who had very specific tastes, in essence always hunting the same woman and killing her in the same fashion. If anything, he’d deliberately sought variety, not for precautionary reasons but because it was indeed the spice of life—or death, as you prefer. When I have to choose between two evils, Mae West had said, I pick the one I haven’t tried yet. Made sense to him.
And after he’d changed, after he had in fact become a catch-and-release fisherman, there’d been a point when it seemed to him as though he’d had a divine hand keeping him safe all those years. Who was to say that there was not a purpose to it all, and a guiding force running the universe? He’d been spared so that he could—do what? Catch and release?
It hadn’t taken him long to decide that was nonsense. He’d killed all those girls because he’d wanted to—or needed to, whatever. And he’d stopped killing because he no longer needed or wanted to kill, was in fact better served by, well, catching and releasing.
So how many had there been? The simple answer was that he did not know, and had no way of knowing. He had never taken trophies, never kept souvenirs. He had memories, but it had become virtually impossible to distinguish between recollections of actual events and recollections of fantasies. One memory was as real as another, whether it had happened or not. And, really, what difference did it make?
He thought of that serial killer they’d caught in Texas, the idiot who kept finding new killings to confess to and leading the authorities to more unmarked graves. Except some of the victims turned out to have been killed when he was in custody in another state. Was he conning them, for some inexplicable reason? Or was he simply remembering—vividly, and in detail—acts he had not in actuality committed?
HE DIDN’T MIND THE rain. His had been a solitary childhood, and he’d grown into a solitary adult. He had never had friends, and had never felt the need. Sometimes he liked the illusion of society, and at such times he would go to a bar or restaurant, or walk in a shopping mall, or sit in a movie theater, simply to be among strangers. But most of the time his own company was company enough.