Killing Spree by Kevin O'Brien Page A

But he couldn’t get the guy into focus. “Wh—what do you mean? What are you talking about?”
    The driver switched off the car radio. He kept his eyes on the road. “Just relax,” he said.
    The constant humming of the car tires was almost hypnotic. Ahead, headlights swam in the darkness. Sean tried to reach for his seat belt, but he could barely move. “What—what’s going on here?” he asked.
    “I did a lot of research on pharmaceuticals. This one works pretty damn fast…”
    Numbly, Sean stared over at the driver. For a moment, his vision was right, and he saw the headlights sweep across the man’s face. Hands on the wheel, he was watching the road ahead.
    Then everything went out of focus again. He heard the man talking, but it seemed to come from someplace far away, and he only caught snippets: “It’ll just knock you out, Sean…when you got up to go to the bathroom at the restaurant…why your Coke tasted funny…right about now…a sort of paralysis…know exactly what you’re experiencing, Sean. I read up on it when I was studying surgical procedures .”
    Sean couldn’t move. The headlights’ glare had now become muted spots swirling in front of him. The driver’s voice, so calm and steady, was fading out. Sean felt himself surrendering to unconsciousness. Minutes seemed to pass, or perhaps it was just a few seconds, but he heard the driver say something else.
    “See, this was Gillian’s idea,” he said. “It’s all for her…”
    Sean didn’t hear anything else after that.
     
     
    The clever killer in Gillian’s Highway Hypnosis was a former surgeon. He conducted his operations in a remote, hidden bunker in the desert outside Las Vegas. His private little OR featured sterilized, state-of-the-art equipment. His patients received first-class treatment—right up until he had surgically removed what he needed from them. The unfortunate hitchhikers were expendable, but their organs were making him money.
    He had it pretty nice, the lucky son of a bitch. Gillian’s demented doctor didn’t have to look for an isolated spot in the middle of the night and set up a makeshift operating area. He was never expected to improvise. He didn’t have to buy all his surgical accoutrements on the same day he was picking up his victim. Yet only an hour before stopping to give Sean a lift, he’d been at a medical supply store that served Rapid City Regional Hospital. And before that he’d bought some camping and gardening equipment at a hardware store.
    The mad genius surgeon in Highway Hypnosis wasn’t nearly as resourceful as he was. Hell, he was always doing Gillian’s fictional killers one better. In The Mark of Death , the girl had been stabbed by “Zorro” in the back of an empty car. But he’d pulled off the same thing with a taxi driver in the front seat. The department store dressing room strangulation in Gillian’s For Everyone to See ended with the victim in a heap on the floor. But he’d left his victim hanging on the wall like a hunter’s trophy. And now, working from what he’d learned on the Internet and in books, he was about to perform surgery—in the most primitive of locations.
    While driving along Interstate 90, he’d noticed dozens of road signs for campgrounds, but he only started paying attention to them after Sean had passed out. His hitchhiker “patient” was slumped in the front seat with his head resting against the window. The shoulder strap and seat belt seemed to be holding him in place—like a piece of lifeless cargo.
    When they pulled off the highway and stopped at the closed gates to a campground twenty-three miles south of Billings, Montana, Sean didn’t even stir. The campsite was closed for the winter. No one was around to hear him shoot the chain lock off the gate.
    Driving down the unlit, gravel road, he couldn’t see anything beyond his headlights. The tall trees surrounding him seemed to form a dark, endless tunnel. It was scary and exciting. He felt