Reilly 13 - Dreams of the Dead by Perri O'Shaughnessy Page A

red, snotty, and nasty, transforming her into a new person who didn’t love me after all, who’d played me for gifts and thrills.
    I put my left hand over her mouth and held her down with my other hand, trying to keep her quiet, saying, “Cyndi, Cyndi,” in a soft
chant, but she squirmed like a python, a big snake who had turned against me forever, vicious and out of control. Some small part of my rational mind arrowed its way through the chaos of my emotions to one clear thought: She would tell. If I let her go, she would call the police about my plans.
    As if reading my thoughts, she bit me suddenly on the arm, a deep bite, as if she were trying to eat me. The clock, the one she had watched so avidly, flashed one o’clock.
    This time reflex played no part. I hauled off and hit her hard again, connecting with her chin, knocking her head back to the pillow. She didn’t move. I rubbed my forearm, groaning. White teeth marks, no blood yet, purpling under the skin. I looked at her. Silence, for now.
    In emergencies I go cold. Time slows down. In the middle of one now, hardly any blood around, I noted that I hadn’t even sat in a chair. Other people slept here every night. The room was full of prints. I had touched almost nothing. Cyndi had even handled the key.
    She stirred.
    Her black nylons lay on the rug beside the bed in easy reach. I picked them up and wrapped them around her neck. I don’t believe at that moment I really meant to kill her, but when she started fighting me, everything snapped into place. The thought had entered my brain, the possibility. I fought back. I held my position even though she struggled through every dying second.
    Finally, she stopped. I held tight long enough to look at her pretty hair, her body, anywhere but her face. I wrapped and stretched the black material tighter, muscles straining, encountering no more resistance.
    The clock’s second hand moved. Round and around it ticked forward as I waited, holding the cloth against her neck. Three times around. Three minutes of hell past one. I had to be sure.
    I let go.
    Eyes open, she looked dreamily at the ceiling as if she had spotted something interesting there, face now a mottled, swollen gray, fog-colored. I felt a mental storm coming on, not a storm of rage and self-preservation this time, but a storm that would soon lead to decompensation.
    I had never killed anyone before. She had forced the situation, put me in serious danger.
    I checked the room, ears wide-open for the clank of a cart. I dressed quickly, looking around for signs of my presence. Ten past one. I maneuvered her into bra and panties, unwound the black material from around her throat, and settled her on the bed, wondering at the changes. She looked removed. Distant. Spent. This was the sum total of her life, one stupid mistake.
    I had no time, but still I arranged her tangled hair.
    Did she think of her children and her husband, in those last moments, when she gasped and I became a maniac?
    Her hair felt silky, alive, twisting between my fingers.
    Was she sorry? Had there still been a chance?
    Her mouth dropped open. I closed it. It dropped open again. I closed her eyes. They opened. She was still fighting me. Her skin moved between life and death in front of me, changing from an interim dusky color to something like salt, inert.
    Time to go.
    I had the door open and was ready to leave when I realized I didn’t have my wallet.
    Leaving the door ajar, I crept back inside to look for it. I was so screwed up from the liquor and pain and the rest of it that my eyes couldn’t focus anymore. Nothing on the rug, nothing on the bedside table. Seventeen past one in the afternoon. Brilliant sunshine. Fucking Tahoe clarity.
    I found my wallet under the bed nestling near a used condom, not mine. I grabbed it, stuffed it into my pocket, and left, pulling my cap down low. I hit my hand on a cart full of towels on the way out. No blood, just another scream in my head. What I had