Free HCC 115 - Borderline by Lawrence Block

he was at least a somebody for once. He knew
     this, and in a weird way the knowledge was comforting. He had Done Something. The
     Something was a horrible thing, but he had done it, and they had put his picture in
     the newspapers and had broadcast his name over the radio. They called him Dracula,
     and they called him the Cannibal Killer, but now, for the first time, they knew who
     he was.
    And this made him feel good, somehow. It was better to be loathed as a fiend than
     to be thoroughly ignored, better to be hated than not to be known at all. One act
     of horror had given direction to his life, had elevated him from
no
body to
some
body.
    He went on walking. The sky was streaked with false dawn. He walked surely now, his
     stride powerful, his arms swinging easily at his side. He was the Angel of Death,
     he thought. His life had a mission, a strange and terrifying sense of purpose.
    He thought now of that little girl in Tulsa. He realized now that he had made several
     significant errors in his thinking. Before, that girl had seemed to have been a dreadful
     mistake, an end. But she was not an end at all. She was a beginning. She was the first
     person he had killed.
    She would not be the last.
    And, with this re-evaluation of the girl’s role, he came also to a new understanding
     of his procedure from that point on. Capture was inevitable, he knew. Sooner or later
     he would be caught by the police, caught and beaten and killed. But until then it
     was not enough merely to go on living, merely to hide like a scared rabbit and wait
     for the inevitable closing of the net around him.
    He had to be positive in his behavior. He had to go on killing, had to seek out other
     girls, had to do to them as he had done to the thirteen-year-old girl in Tulsa. Fresh
     killings would not hurt him. The police could not beat him any more brutally for additional
     corpses. And death in the electric chair, when it came, would be just as painful and
     just as final no matter how many girls died at his hands.
    False dawn gave way to real dawn. Weaver went to another cafeteria and had another
     breakfast, this time a plate of scrambled eggs and an order of toast and jelly. He
     left the cafeteria and walked again, finally finding a store where they sold razors.
     He bought an old-fashioned straight razor. The salesman asked him if he wanted a leather
     strop as well. He told the man he already owned one.
    He walked back to the hotel. He put the razor away in a dresser drawer under some
     clothing. It was a sharp razor, and he liked it already. Soon, he thought, there would
     be blood upon the blade.
    The stack of horror comics was where he had left it. He picked up each comic, tore
     it in half, and dropped it into the wastebasket beneath the washbowl. He did not need
     the comic books anymore. He did not need to live his life through pictures and balloon
     dialogue. He would live an active life now.
    He went to bed and slept well.
    * * *
    Marty woke up at ten. He and Meg had called it a night around three, and as usual
     he could not sleep more than seven hours at a stretch. He got out of bed and walked
     to the bathroom, deciding that he must have a clock in his head, the way he never
     slept more. It was strange, because the sense of timing only worked when he was unconscious.
     During the day he never knew what time it was. When playing cards he lost all track,
     never knew whether he’d been playing for three hours or nine hours. But when he slept,
     somehow he always knew.
    Meg was sleeping soundly. He took hold of her shoulder, shook her gently. Her eyes
     remained closed.
    He showered and shaved. He came back and she was still sound asleep. He took a pencil
     and a scrap of paper and wrote her a note, telling her that she could fix herself
     breakfast, that he would be back soon. He got dressed and went outside to the garage,
     got into the Olds and drove away.
    The sun was bright, the sky clear of clouds. Marty decided that it