Page 173 of Random in Death
“Get the hell away from me.”
“How did it feel? You couldn’t jab your cock in her, but with the needle you could penetrate her. Did that get you off, Francis? And knowing you’d be one of the last people she saw. No more shaking her ass, showing herself off. Did knowing that get you hard?
“How did it feel?”
“Amazing! Vindicating! Orgasmic! Everything I’d hoped and more. They connive to make us desire them, then they refuse, they walk away. But she saw me. She felt me. Then I was the one who walked away.”
Eve flicked a glance at the camera before she walked back around the table.
“Did you intend to kill her?”
“Are you an idiot? Of course. She saw me.”
“And Arlie Dillon.”
“She let that brainless moron put his hands all over her. Oooh, a wasp, a wasp!” He threw back his head and laughed. “I almost stayed to watch her die, but that would have been a mistake. I don’t make mistakes.”
“The theater was a mistake.”
“It was not. It was an unforeseen complication, and it only pushed me further along my timetable.”
“To Coney Island.”
“Do you know how much time, skill, exacting work it took to create the proper formula? Of course you don’t. How could you? I deserved a reward for all my time, my work, my focus, my dedication.”
“You deserved to rape Delaney Brooke.”
He let out a sigh that spoke of mild annoyance.
“In the first place, rape is a lie perpetuated by women to deny men their right to intercourse. Secondly, it wouldn’t have been rape, even by your skewed definition. She was compliant. And I didn’t know Delaney would be there.”
“It didn’t matter who you raped. Raped, Francis. It’s rape when you inject someone with a drug that takes away their free will.”
“You can call it rape. That’s just a word women use to control men’s natural instincts. She let me touch her—she told me to. She touched me. She told me to fuck her. You can call it whatever you want.”
“And I do. So does the law. You had the second syringe. Did you intend to kill her with it?”
“She saw me! How did you get to be a lieutenant when you’re so slow and stupid? On your back, like the rest of your kind. Legs spread, whoring to take a man’s job.”
He beat his fists again. “I was nearly there. You spoiled it all! I had her on her back, and I was so hard! She was ready, all soft and weepy.
“You took that from me. I’ll kill you for it one day.”
“If I had a dollar for every time some schmuck says that to me, I’d have a bunch of million dollars. You, Peabody?”
“Maybe about half a million. You’ve been on the job longer, and it adds up.”
“Long enough to know Francis here has confessed, on record, to murder, attempted murder, attempted rape, and so on.”
“So what?” He shrugged, and with it could almost have passed for a normal teenager.
Except for the eyes.
“Wait… let me rephrase. So the fuck what? I’m sixteen. I’ll be out in less than two years. I have the first hit of my trust fund coming to me at eighteen, too. I can go where I want, do what I want.
“I believe I’ll take a gap year. I’d have earned it.”
Keep right on thinking that, Eve decided.