Killing Spree by Kevin O'Brien Page B

his heart racing. By the dashboard light, he glanced at Sean, still asleep in the passenger seat. He smiled.
    Moonlight peeked through the trees and helped him find a clearing off to one side of the road. He spotted several picnic tables and a restroom facility that was boarded up. He pulled over by one of the picnic tables, climbed out of the car, and immediately went to work.
    Dragging Sean out of the vehicle and laying him on top of the picnic table was the hardest part. Though still breathing, the hitchhiker was just dead weight. He covered his patient with a rain slicker—to keep him warm. Then he dug two battery-operated lamps from the trunk—as well as two suitcases full of medical equipment.
    He kept his gun in his coat pocket. He wasn’t worried about Sean waking up. No, the gun was for uninvited guests. Bears and other forest creatures were likely to smell the blood—and there would be a lot of it. He didn’t want any of them interrupting his work.
    Sean might not be his only kill tonight.
    He set up the lights, and then opened one of the cases. It was full of surgical tools, mostly clamps and scalpels, along with a suction device that looked like a turkey-baster.
    “Sean?” he said, removing the rain slicker from him. “Sean, can you hear me?”
    His patient didn’t move. His closed eyelids didn’t even flutter.
    He unbuttoned the man’s shirt, and pulled it off. He stared at Sean’s slightly hairy chest, watched it move up and down with each breath. Then he glanced at the scalpel in the open case, the same tool that would be slicing through Sean’s skin within a few minutes.
    He donned the rain slicker. Even with all the clamps he had, there would still be an awful lot of blood. He didn’t want to ruin his clothes.
    He opened the other case and gazed at the stainless-steel retractor that would fit over Sean’s chest. It would open up his rib cage. The sight of that shiny, new contraption excited him. He couldn’t wait to use it. He felt like a kid, trying out a new toy.
    He heard some noise in the woods, trees rustling, but something else too. The four-legged inhabitants of this forest sensed something was about to happen. Perhaps they could already smell the blood.
    He could too.
     
     
    Ethan’s mother’s book signing was a minor success. A book club, made up of a dozen women around his mother’s age, had shown up to hear her talk. Plus a few stragglers came by and sat down. Ethan watched from the bookstore’s café. He finished some trigonometry homework while eating a grilled-cheese sandwich. They had these lousy, all-natural “vegetable chips,” instead of fries or regular potato chips—and no Coke, only lemonade, but it wasn’t so awful.
    Watching his mother “at work” was nothing special for Ethan. But he remembered what it was like two years ago, when she’d just been starting out. He recalled a trip with his parents to the Northgate shopping mall, where they’d found his mother’s debut thriller, Killing Legend , on the shelf at Waldenbooks. It was the first time he’d seen his mom’s book in a store. Ethan wanted his mother to know he was impressed (“Oh, wow, that’s SO cool!”) , and maybe he milked it just a bit. A few people in the store turned their heads to see what all the fuss was about. Most of them smiled when they realized an author was there with her husband and son. But Ethan noticed a skinny, twentysomething blonde with her boyfriend in the Self-Help aisle, and she was imitating him in a mincing, effeminate way. She flailed her limp wrist and whispered, “ Wow, that’s SOOO cool! ” in a lisp-inflected falsetto. At that moment, Ethan’s heart sank, and he prayed his parents didn’t see the woman’s little pantomime.
    He immediately shut up, and retreated over to the Sports section, where he tried to look interested in a basketball book. All the while, he fantasized about that skanky blonde getting mowed down by a truck in the parking lot.
    Instead,