1965 - The Way the Cookie Crumbles by James Hadley Chase Page B

wailing scream of terror. She tried to run, but he grabbed her arm, jerking her against him. He had imagined she would have been easy to handle. He had tremendous confidence in his immense strength, but he found he could scarcely hold her.
    Desperate with terror, she kicked, clawed and bit. She didn’t scream anymore. They fought silently and horribly. He kept hitting her across her nose and mouth. Her face now was a mask of blood. She was weakening. Grinning savagely, his breath coming in laboured gasps, he shifted his right hand to her throat, his fingers sinking into her windpipe. As if she realized this was her end, she seemed to go mad. Jerking and twisting in violent convulsions, she nearly broke his hold, but he managed to hang on. He fell forward, bringing her down with him and now he was on top of her, flattening her and his left hand joined his right.
    She was still struggling, but life was draining out of her. He increased the pressure on her throat. Her long legs began to thrash, then her heels drummed in the sand. It was her final, feeble effort. Then abruptly she went limp. Her eyes rolled back in the sightless stare of death.
    Shuddering, Algir got to his feet. A trickle of blood ran down the side of his neck where she had clawed him. His heart was thumping so violently, he felt suffocated.
    Unsteadily, he moved away and sat down abruptly, his back against a tree. He remained still, his head in his hands for some minutes.
    Well, it was done, he thought, fear like a cold coil inside him. If he had known it was going to be like that, he wouldn’t have done it. He wouldn’t have repeated those last awful moments for all the money in the world. He looked at his strap watch. The time was 08.40 hours. He was behind schedule. With an effort, he got to his feet and walked to where he had left the Buick. He stopped by the car, listening and looking down the dirt road. Only the sound of the sea and the plaintive cries of the gulls came to him. He reached into the glove compartment, took out half a bottle of whisky and gulped down a stiff drink. Then he unlocked the trunk of the car and leaving it half-open, he returned to where he had left the dead girl.
    Without looking at her tortured face, he caught hold of her and slung her over his shoulder. She was heavy, and he staggered a little as he walked back to the car. He bundled her into the trunk and closed it. Then getting into the car, he reversed it up the dirt road until he came to the turnaround.
    He pulled up, set the brake, got out of the car and opened the trunk. He took out an old Army trenching tool he had picked up in a Miami store. Then he got the girl over his shoulder and carrying the tool in his hand, he walked across the sand to the nearest high sand dune. He dropped her at the foot of the dune, then straightened to look along the miles of deserted beach. Satisfied he was alone, he knelt beside the girl’s body and began to undress her. This task sickened him, but it had to be done.
    Ticky had said, ‘Get all her clothes. They’ll have the College laundry marks on them. We can’t take a chance.’
    He had trouble getting her girdle off. He cursed softly, sweat blinding him, as he wrestled with it. Finally, he got it off. Now she was naked. Around her bruised, swollen throat she wore a gold cross on a thin gold chain. He couldn’t leave that on her. He hated touching it. He had been brought up as a Catholic and although nothing of his religion had stuck, the cross reminded him of the church he had gone to as a kid with its blaze of candles, the smell of incense and the throb of the organ.
    He dropped the cross into his pocket and made a bundle of her clothes. Then picking up the trenching tool, he climbed up the dune and began shovelling the sand down on the naked, murdered body.
    A buzzard circled overhead, its wide wings making a shadow on the sand. It was still circling in ascending spirals long after Algir had finished his gruesome task and had