HCC 115 - Borderline Read Online Free PDF Page A

fingerprinting and a suspended sentence. This thing, now, was
     different. This thing was going to get him electrocuted. This thing would get him
     a very bad beating, three times as bad as the time when he looked at the broad. And
     after they beat him there would be a trial, and he would be found guilty, and then
     they would strap him in a chair and throw a switch.
    He would smell his own flesh burning as the current jolted through his body, Then
     he would be dead, and it would be over.
    Forever.
    He shivered, a weird action in the intense heat. He remembered now, remembered the
     thing he had done. His breathing grew heavy as the scene flashed through his mind
     again:
    A night, and a girl.
    The girl was thirteen years old. He didn’t know this then but found it out later in
     the newspaper stories. The girl was thirteen years old, and the girl had soft pale
     green eyes and the budding breasts of a precocious adolescent. Brown hair, soft brown
     hair that would be very soft to touch. Legs that were starting to come into their
     own, a little awkward still, a slight bit bony, but beginning to fill out. A mouth
     with no lipstick on it.
    She shouldn’t have been out that late. It was after midnight, Saturday night, and
     Weaver was on his way home from the movies. They had a pair of horror movies that
     night, one about a vampire who drank the blood of women, one about a man who could
     transform himself into a black panther and leap from trees upon passing girls.
    The movies had excited Weaver. He had imagined himself as the vampire in one beautiful
     sequence where they had shown the vampire, his fangs in the neck of a terror-stricken
     blonde. Weaver remembered the shrill screams of the blonde, remembered how the camera
     had shown the tops of her creamy breasts, how the vampire had sucked her blood and
     left her dead. In the other movie he had mentally changed placed with the black panther.
     When the animal dropped from a high limb upon the back of a youthful brunette—this
     girl, too, providentially equipped with a low-cut gown that exposed her breasts—Weaver’s
     excitement had been almost too much to bear. The beast’s talons clawed the girl’s
     shoulders and Weaver wanted to scream with passion. And now he was on his way home.
     The passion was bottled up inside; when he reached his small furnished room on Tulsa’s
     north side, he would relive the two movies and relieve his frustrations the only way
     he knew. For now, he was just walking. Walking alone, through dark streets.
    And then he saw the girl. She was walking toward him, and he looked at the fluffy
     brown hair that looked so soft. He saw her waist and thought that he could span it
     with his hands. He saw her breasts, and he saw the promise her loins held. He saw
     her throat, an ivory column, and he recalled the teeth of the vampire in the throat
     of the blonde.
    Even then he might have done nothing, might merely have added her to his masturbatory
     fantasy that night. But she spoke to him. She walked right up to him and asked him
     what time it was.
    He didn’t own a watch. He told her it was late. His voice had an odd quality to it,
     a metallic whine.
    “Oh, gosh,” she said. “I should of been home hours ago. I went to this movie, see,
     with Elvis in it, and it was so good I saw it through three times. My Ma’s gonna skin
     me alive, but it was some picture. Don’t you just love Elvis?”
    Those were the last words the girl ever spoke.
    The streets were dark and empty. Weaver grabbed her, one hand over her mouth, the
     other on her shoulder. There was no convenient alleyway but a darkened storefront
     was a handy substitute. He got her into the storefront, his arms strong with muscle
     and desperation. He released her for a moment, and her mouth opened for a scream.
     He hit her in the mouth with his closed fist. He knocked out three of her front teeth.
    She was wearing a plaid skirt and a pale yellow blouse. He tore the blouse