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crawling all over his dick the way she was, willing to try anything for him—including whips and chains and clips and knives and leather, the whole magilla. No way was he going to tell her that until he had to.

    Until something more interesting came along.

    And then one day it had come along.

    Funny. He couldn’t remember her name either.

    In had been ugly, though, he remembered that. The end of the thing with Greta. She’d screamed and whined and pleaded. Showed up drunk a couple of times, pounding on his door. Begging.

    But the cancer was already finishing his father by then and he knew it was impossible, that he was going to have a lot of money soon and he knew she wasn’t up to it. Not with that accent, those tastes.

    So it was bye-bye Greta.

    Maybe for real now.

    Jesus.

    He finished the scotch, poured himself another glass just for sipping purposes and returned to his chair.

    His nerves were steadier. The scotch expanding insidehim. He reached for the remote and pressed
play
.

    The film whirred into motion.

    And the knives were out.

    Knife, actually. One guy with a long, serrated kitchen knife and the other pulling a pair of metal garden clippers out of his back pocket, the kind you used to trim back branches, holding them up for the camera.

    Which now lurched forward a pace or two. Evidently there was no zoom lens and Tricky Dick Three was carrying it nearer to the bed on its tripod.

    It was still no closeup, but better.

    The woman who still looked ninety-nine percent like Greta moaned but did nothing to resist as the guy with the knife snipped away the shoulder-straps to her bra and then sawed through the center. Her breasts shuddered free. The nipples were pale pink, large, blending away into the paler breast flesh. Just like Greta’s.

    The man cut through the waistband of her panties and pulled them out from under her.

    Like Greta, a real blonde.

    Howard gulped his scotch. The goddamn movie just wasn’t made for sipping.

    The whole idea that this was Greta he was watching—that it even could be Greta—scared the bloody shit out of him. There was something about it so fucking ironic and infinitely more perverse than he’d ever dreamed—maybe even more than he’d ever wanted to dream—that you had to wonder. All these gruesome images. All these years collecting this stuff. All these years searching, looking for . . . what?

    Death, obviously.

    It had to be. The experience of violent death in which he was both observer and yes, participant. Participant in that he’d bought and paid for this particular tape, he’d sort of even financed the thing in a way. Allowed it to be. He and others like him.

    Okay, he’d done it a thousand times.

    But now it was someone he knew, someone he’d screwed every which way to Sunday who was going to get seriously hurt here, and you had to wonder.

    It was just possible he’d bitten off more than he could chew.

    He was about to find out. In spades.

    Because Dickie Number Three was lurching forward with the camera again, coming closer, as Dickie Number Two put the clippers back in the pocket of his greasy jeans and grabbed her by both her arms—unfortunately standing in front of her, the asshole—pulled them up over her head and held the wrists pinned to the bed.

    Her struggles were feeble, the drug still working.

    Until Dickie Number One leaned over with the sharp serrated knife and carved an X on her left breast, the center of the X the center of her nipple, blood pooling up and oozing down her side as she screamed and struggled in earnest, adrenalin kicking in and beating hell out of the sedative so that Dickie Three had come out from behind the camera to grab her legs and hold them while Dickie One carved the right side of her the same as he’d done the left
.

    And then it was all three of them
.

    Dickie Two working on her fingers and toes with the clippers, snipping at the joints, joints popping off all over the bed, Dickie One finding