Free Kiss The Girls and Make Them Die by Charles Runyon Page B

glanced into the side mirror as she drove between the rose-granite columns guarding the entrance to the state hospital. A blue sedan peeled out of the traffic stream and fell in behind her. She noted the rack of lights and horns and sirens on the roof and thought:
What now, Shurf?
    Her eyes felt gluey; she’d had another drink before going to bed, and the dull musty horror of a nightmare still lodged in her brain. At eight a.m . the air was already steamy, the sun a sickly reddish-yellow embryo floating in a globular haze. Her lungs felt stifled; she’d worn a navy dress with zippered front, the cleaners had shrunk the damn thing and she’d failed to notice it when she put it on. She pulled into her reserved parking space and opened the glove compartment, setting the controls which would activate the door locks and set the alarm system. Foolish extravagance, but she had a weakness for electronic gadgetry.
    Pulling her keys from the dash, she got out, closed the door and tested the handle. She saw the sheriff’s reflection in the glass as he got out and walked toward her, his boots crunching on the limestone chat. He looked tired and snarly, with gray half-moons under his eyes. He wore a blue-steel revolver clipped to his belt and nosed down into his hip pocket. That’s against the rules, she thought—but decided not to mention it. Anotherinfraction was coming to her without going through the administrator. She decided to skip that too.
    “You still can’t see Bollinger,” she said, turning.
    “I didn’t come to see Bollinger. I thought you might ask him a couple questions for me.”
    She sighed. “I’m trying to establish an atmosphere of trust. If I come on as part of a police interrogation …”
    “You were just supposed to see if he was able to stand trial.”
    “Yes, well, we can’t just look at his eyeballs and report on his mental condition.”
    He stood looking down at her, frowning and biting his lower lip. “When do you think you’ll be finished?”
    “He’s scheduled for staffing next Wednesday. If he’s ready for release, you’d have him in three days.”
    “Three days after Wednesday is Saturday.”
    “Then it probably won’t be until Monday.”
    “Sh—!” He whirled away and walked to his car with his head down, looking in neither direction. She watched him bend over and reach through the window, noting the way his tan gabardine shirt moulded the thick strong wedge of his back. She wondered why he aroused her hostility. Possibly she was picking up the feeling of the patients. Three women sat on the steps leading to the beauty shop, looking sullenly in his direction. A man walked past on the sidewalk, glanced over his shoulder and hurried on with his head down. Didn’t the sheriff stop to think that he was the Charon of the dark waters, the man who had brought most of them here?
    Now he was walking back, carrying a manila envelope, unwinding the red string which held the flap. He shook out two glossy eight-by-ten photos and held them out to her.
    At first she didn’t recognize the objects pictured. One looked like a pile of dead leaves, the other like torn burlap—but then she made out a grinning jaw, a curving rib cage laid bare by tattered decaying flesh. She felt her stomach churn slowly as she handed the photos back to him.
    “I’m not into necrophilia, Sheriff.”
    “Necro …?”
    “Necrophilia. Love of death—as you probably already knew.”
    “Yeah, well—” He smiled faintly as he slid the photos into the envelope. “We dug these dead bodies up in the woods, about a quarter mile downstream from Bollinger’s cabin.”
    For a few seconds her mind was a jumble, jangled chaos of separate thoughts, each canceling out the other. The sheriff was looking at her, waiting. She wanted more than anything else to walk away from him and all the problems he represented.
    “The paper mentioned only one body. Found somewhere in the national forest, as I recall.”
    The sheriff