The Killing Vision - By Will Overby Page 0,12

as a zit-faced teenager. They just seemed to naturally flock to him. He knew he had the charm to make them feel special, to make them feel wanted. Hell, all he had to do was start talking to a woman and she practically melted all over the floor. Just a rare talent, he had decided.

Derek had been born when Wade was seventeen and Marla was sixteen. They were hurriedly married at Shy Flat Church, and then they moved into a mouse-infested trailer in the back yard of Marla’s parents’ house. Derek was born six months later. Wade had settled down for a little while and tried to be content with just one woman. That didn’t last long. Before their first anniversary he was already restless and bored, and before their second he had already slept with three other women. It wasn’t that he didn’t love Marla. He truly did back then. But there were times when what she could give him just wasn’t enough, or didn’t excite him, or couldn’t satisfy him. He needed variety, and Marla just wasn’t capable of providing it. And over the past few years Marla didn’t seem capable of providing anything. They never kissed, barely touched. Sex seemed to disgust her, and now he found fulfillment exclusively outside.

This job with the cable company provided him with ample opportunities to meet women, like some of those college babes lounging around fingering each other in the dorm or bored housewives whose husbands were at work and they were home alone just waiting for the cable guy to come install HBO. Joel was usually with him on installs, but occasionally he had the good fortune to be alone, and more than once he had been shown the kind of gratitude customers didn’t normally give their cable-TV installers. Most times he simply flirted, got a girl’s phone number, promised to call her, that kind of thing.

Like yesterday. Joel was doing some maintenance at the office and Wade was doing an upgrade by himself at one of the apartment houses in town. He had gone around in back of the building to check the service entrance, back beside the pool. There was a girl stretched out on one of the metal chaise lounges beside the blue water, spread out during one of the few intense breaks in the threatening clouds. He had immediately begun to sweat. The fluorescent orange of her bikini was a sharp contrast to her sun-bronzed skin and long dark hair, and the mounds of her breasts splayed out from beneath the edges of her top, her nipples pressing against the material like pointing fingers. She was wearing sunglasses, so it was impossible to see her eyes, but he smiled at her anyway, and when she smiled back, he knew she was watching him as closely as he was watching her.

When he had finished his work, he made his way over to her, leaning against the wrought-iron fence that surrounded the pool area. “Hot day,” he said. “Gonna storm later.”

She rolled over and smiled at him. “I love the heat,” she said.

Wade was looking at her breasts, at the minute droplets of perspiration that trickled between them. He licked his lips. “Guess it’s not so bad if you got a pool,” he said. He placed his hands on the top of the railing, knowing she would look at his left one, looking for a wedding band that wouldn’t be there because he never wore one.

“I’m Missy,” she said.

“Wade Roberts.”

“Maybe you could come over and swim sometime. It’s okay if you’re a guest of a tenant.”

He nodded, feeling the bulge of his erection press against the hot metal. “I’d like that.” He looked around, hoping no one could see him practically humping the fence. “This what you do all day? Hang out by the pool?”

She laughed. “Not every day. I’m on vacation this week.”

“Oh.” He was making small talk, using any excuse he could to stand there looking at her glistening skin and the nipples poking against her bikini top. “I had you pegged for a student. Where you work?”

“I work for Dr. Seaver, the pediatrician. You know him?”

“’Fraid not.”

“Don’t have to ask what you do.”

He grinned at her, using that full-toothed smile that always got a woman’s juices flowing. “Hey, can I get your phone number?” He pulled a memo pad and a pencil from his shirt pocket and held them out to her. She took them and scribbled on the paper. 555-8344 Missy. “Great,” he said,