Free Ladies' Night by Jack Ketchum

know any more than he knew what had happened to the woman on the subway.
    He felt the wetness seeping through his shirt and a sudden faintness overcame him and he fell to his knees. He died in that position, watching the woman continue past him down the street.
    The second man was a young yuppie broker in suspenders and a baggy white Ralph Lauren shirt which set his Hamptons tan off nicely. As she passed him she stabbed him in the kidneys. The man watched the red stain spread over his shirt like burning celluloid on a movie screen. The shirt had been brand new. It cost him two hundred dollars.
    At 70th Street she passed a fat old man and smiling, stabbed him in the ass. A playful gesture. The knife sunk only to the depth of an inch or so but the old man howled and tripped and fell to the pavement and lay sprawled there waving his hands and screaming.
    She proceeded down Broadway, steel blade dripping.
    ~ * ~
    He was staring at a copy of Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me , wondering if he should steal it. Lydia was still in the storage room and his jacket had big pockets. The cover of the book was badly ripped but his copy at home was falling apart completely. It would be like taking day-old bread from a bakery. Why not?
    Because you're honest, that’s why not , he thought. And because you like her.
    Face it, you more than like her .
    " Shel , come here a minute," she said.
    He sighed and climbed off the ladder. He could guess what was coming. Lydia was going to ball him out again for something he'd done or failed to do — which would make it about the fifth time that night. She was in a pissy mood. Couldn't she see he was exhausted? Up the ladder, down the ladder.
    Couldn't she see he was crazy about her?
    Sure, she had ten years on him. She had a boyfriend and a business too but none of that mattered. He knew she loved books. They had that very much in common. They could talk books the next thirty years of their lives together given the opportunity. He knew it. He'd like to do just that.
    That and . . . the other thing.
    His shirt was plastered to his back. The air conditioner wasn't working again. It was miserably close in here, so that his thick heavy glasses kept slipping down his nose. He pushed them back and walked to the storage room.
    It was pretty dark. There was just the single 30-watt bulb she refused to change for a bigger one — Lydia was actually a little cheap, always saving on the electricity — and they could have used a new air conditioner too. The light didn't do much more than push back the murk into the corners.
    "Where are you?" he said.
    "Back here."
    He was relieved. She didn't sound mad at all.
    He walked inside. The back room was wall-to-wall boxes set on rows of metal shelving, filled with books. They were the first things they'd inventoried.
    So what was she doing back here?
    The dust got into his nose and made him want to sneeze. He held his breath so he wouldn't have to. Even if he did love books he didn't much care for the old musty smell of them, like the smell of mold in a cellar. He thought he was probably a little allergic.
    He heard shuffling to his right. Over there .
    He stepped in front of the next row of shelves and saw her way down the end of the row, facing the grey cinderblock walls, her back to him, half in shadow, her head tilted down like she was reading.
    In the dark?
    "What's up, Lyd ?"
    She turned.
    It wasn't reading.
    What she'd been doing was she'd been working at the buttons of her shirt.
    She was almost finished.
    He couldn't believe it. All he could do was stand there gawking like a dope while she slipped the shirt off her shoulders and he saw that she had no bra on, that her breasts were naked — and god she was pretty there!
    He braced himself against the metal shelving.
    "Well? What do you think?" she said.
    "Huh?"
    She flipped open the top button of her jeans and zipped the zipper and pulled them down over her thighs, the thighs a little too big