Robert Walker - Final Edge

At a farmhouse outside the Houston city limits

A fall breeze lifted his hair and kissed his cheek as Dr. Arthur D. Belkvin raised the ax overhead, holding it over his victim's terrified eyes. The act of taking the life of this woman would engender no joy in Arthur, and he got nothing out of her terror, not like Lauralie did. Lauralie claimed to be only eighteen years old, but she gave the impression of a much older woman, her dark eyes, dark hair, and exotic skin making her irresistible to the thirty- year-old Arthur. But something in the wild, Tex-Mex- looking Lauralie Blodgett's body movements and eyes made her appear for the moment absolutely ecstatic in anticipating the fall of the ax.

Arthur felt he must say something to the soon-to-be- dead Mira Lourdes. "Don't think this was my idea. I'm not a freak," he told the woman at his feet, "but I gotta do what Lauralie tells me to do. I have no choice."

Hands tied to feet, her neck lying across a wooden post on the earth out back of a house in the woods, Mira Lour- des struggled and choked on a gag he'd placed in her mouth. She was only half aware that Lauralie, the woman he referred to, stood nearby, watching, guiding Arthur to do the thing he was told to do. To behead Mira. "Do it, Arthur, do it!" the woman chanted.

"She's got to understand first, Lauralie. I don't want her going to her death thinking I'm one of those twisted perverts that can only feel sexually aroused at the sight of blood and carnage." He calmly continued, now addressing his victim again. "At least you gotta know that going into eternity, Mira Lourdes."

He watched her squirm, listening to her keening whine beneath the gag. He didn't want to see her suffer. "It isn't as if I'm a sociopath or a psycho or anything of that nature."

"What do you want from me?" she had begged when she had first come to, only to realize they had thrown her into the trunk of a car-that she was abducted and bound from head to toe.

"My father was a half-breed with a brain tumor, and my mother was his whore. I got issues with society! I want them to pay," said the woman.

"Them? Who are them? I don't know anything about you or them!" Mira screamed.

"But I do, and I want them-the collective them to pay. And they will."

"Look, my name is MiraMira Lourdes," she pleaded, "and I'm a g'damn teller in a g'damn bank! My first job since graduating college, and seven years later I'm still there. Never hurt anyoneAnd and I don't have anything to do with this. You've got togot toto listen to me and let me go, Lauralie, Arthur, please! I won't say a word, like none of this ever happened, I swearI swear!" She only wanted to go home, not to Dwayne but to her mother and father, to her childhood home. She wanted the comfort of her little pink room and canopy bed, the child's bed too small for her now, long gone in a garage sale years ago now, but she wanted it, wanted to curl up in the folds of the blanket special to her, the one her Grandma Lourdes had made for her. She wanted to see her grandma, to see her here and now, although she knew Grandma was on the other side. She wanted to be with her, to be held by her.

The small man, calling himself Arthur, shrank from harming her, almost as if he could read her desperate thoughts. She could see him literally shrinking from what Lauralie proposed. She could see him wanting to shirk it off and walk away from harming her. She read it in his body language, his eyes, his very sweat. He did not want to harm her. But the woman, calling herself Lauralie, didn't show the slightest emotion or compunction, but rather spat on Mira, before ordering Arthur to gag her. "Shut her whining up! Gag the bitch, now!"

That's when he gagged her, knowing he could not listen to her, could not get involved in who she was beyond his woman's terrible plans for Mira's body-what she needed her for. He didn't know Mira-the-victim from Mother Goose. Lauralie had randomly selected Mira from the phone book, after discarding several other people named Lourdes. Mira just happened to have a FOR SALE sign perched on the window of her Saab as they drove by her house. She'd bounded enthusiastically out of the house and right to them when they parked and began to examine the car on all sides, examining the relative seclusion of the house and driveway as well, thanks to the large lilac bushes all along the neighbor's property.

She really badly wanted to sell her broken-down Saab, coming down on the price as he haggled, so he had agreed to a test drive if she would come along to field questions as they arose. Shrugging, smiling, her ponytail bobbing, she quickly rushed in for the car keys, locked up the house, and joined the couple, made to feel safe by the presence of the woman accompanying Arthur, Lauralie, who nestled down in the rear of the Saab.

On the test drive, Arthur did all the talking-said he was a vet just setting up a practice and in need of another vehicle "to transport animals without worry to the upholstery, you see?"

"Oh, well, you needn't worry about spoiling the inside of this junker," she'd said, and Arthur recalled the lilting, childlike nervous laughter following her words like a bird chasing a grasshopper.

The rest of his own nervous talk centered on questions about the car, until suddenly Lauralie, from the rear seat, did what she had threatened she would. She crushed a chloroform-soaked cloth against Mira's mouth and nostrils, forcing her into unconsciousness.

The two together were so bold as to tempt fate, leaving Arthur's own car in Mira's driveway. Anyone might have come home before their return; some neighbor walking a dog might have noticed the unusual car on the street. But then Arthur and Lauralie returned, taking her groggy form from the one car and placing her into the trunk of the other before calmly driving off, all in broad daylight. Lauralie had become so excited at their accomplishment that she had almost made him wreck the getaway car into a lamp-post, grabbing his face in both her hands and smothering him with her lips between cries of "We did it! We did it, Arthur!"

From the trunk, Arthur heard Mira's groans and an occasional groggy kick.

When Mira came fully conscious again, she found herself tied and gagged and inside a black world, the trunk of their car, on her way to God or Satan knows where.

She thought it amazing that they had returned her Saab and exchanged it for their own vehicle, a dark blue late- model sedan, as she recalled, a Cutlass Olds from the stamp on the dashboard, the interior clean enough to eat off, yet a strange medicinal odor permeating every fiber of the cloth seats.

Maybe Arthur was what he said he was, an animal doctor, but what did he and the woman want with her? The woman, the damned woman who had been sitting passively behind her, Mira now recalled; it had been the seemingly submissive bitch who had knocked Mira out with some sort of drug! She recalled the struggle, the cloth covering her nose and throat, filling her lungs with the same stenc has she had smelled in the car, chloroform, smuggled into the backseat by that cunning cunt. The two of them had planned out every detail of Mira's abduction.

Mira tried desperately to recall everything about the car and the two people who had control of her, praying she would live through this ordeal to one day have the opportunity to point a finger at them. However, her intent to do so was becoming blurred by questions of why and how this had happened to her. She silently asked, Why me why now? What do they want with me? Did the bastards choose me randomly? No, it's got all to do with the stinking ad I placed in the Penny Saver, the car that damn car I want to sell, the one Dwayne wouldn't lift a finger to help me with. That's what brought these two freaks to my doorstep.