needed to throw up!—and that’s when Timothy stabbed the fork into one of those blue eyes that had attracted him so, stabbed her all the way into the soft tissue of her frontal lobe. Blue ran red. Blue ran red.
Timothy took a step back. He held his gnawed wrist to his chest. He would need a tourniquet. But first he took one last, long, disappointed look at Lynette. What a bad, bad pet she had turned out to be.
He found a first aid kit upstairs, in a bathroom attached to the master bedroom, and after dousing his wrist in fiery iodine, wrapped it tightly in toilet paper and then Ace bandages. It was a temporary solution, but it would have to suffice. While upstairs, Timothy wandered the halls. This wasn’t his house, but he knew the occupants wouldn’t be back for another twelve days (according to the information he’d gleaned at his father’s travel agency). He tested each of the three beds. The king-size in the master bedroom was the most comfortable—firm but not too stiff. Timothy wanted to take a nap. His left hand felt…well, felt nothing at all, and he knew that was not a good sign. Begrudgingly, he roused himself from the king-size bed and made his way back downstairs to the kitchen. It was time to go.
But first, the photographs.
He slid out an iPhone from his jeans pocket. Taking pictures was not his cup of tea, but Cain42 had posted strict requirements, and Timothy intended to meet them all. Of course, he hadn’t intended to meet them today—he’d hoped to have a lot more time with his pet—but c’est la vie. He ambled down the wooden stairs into the basement and aimed his smartphone’s camera at his expet. She lay crumpled in the corner. Her head lolled to the side like an infant’s. Timothy quickly snapped off a series of pictures and reviewed them on the camera’s LCD screen. They weren’t the most original photographs in the world—for one, the sixty-watt lighting in the basement dispersed in uneven patches and cast some unfortunate shadows across Lynette’s corpse—but they would have to do. Timothy slid his iPhone back into his jeans pocket, waved goodbye with his good hand to the one-eyed blonde in the corner and returned to the kitchen. Now it was time to go.
He dialed the gas stove. It activated with a hiss. He then opened the nearby microwave door, snagged six cans of Campbell’s soup from the pantry shelves and hefted them one by one onto the microwave’s glass plate. The microwave door closed with an agreeable click. Hiss, click. Such pleasant sounds a kitchen made. He set the timer for thirty minutes and hightailed it for the back door. He had no idea how long the metal cans would take to spark and ignite, and he didn’t want to take any chances.
As it turned out, he was able to make it all the way to the end of the residential block before the kitchen exploded. One of Cain42’s cardinal rules: the cleanest crime scene is a destroyed crime scene. Glass splattered onto the front lawn. Flames licked through the open windows at the house’s placid green exterior. Green became black. Soon everything on that plot of land—the master bedroom, the grass, the remains of Timothy’s pet—would be black.
Fire always painted in monochrome.
Timothy inconspicuously joined the gathering crowd come to watch the fireworks. There weren’t many people, really. Most of the suburban neighborhood’s occupants were at work. But there were enough to blend in, at least until the M7 bus arrived and Timothy was whisked far away from the blaze. The bus left the curb as the first of the fire engines showed up. Timothy hoped none of the firefighters got injured. Good people, firefighters.
He unrolled his earbuds, plugged them into his iPhone and listened to an album of Brahms lullabies as the Sullivan County bus traveled into the next town over. Once there, he transferred to a Trailways bus, which deposited him a few dozen miles east to New Paltz. By then it was dusk, dusk on his birthday. From the New Paltz terminal, Timothy used some cash from Lynette’s wallet, which he had in his other pocket, to pay for a cab home.
Another of Cain42’s rules: always hunt far from where you sleep.
Timothy’s house was not far from historic Huguenot Street, a minivillage of Colonial America located in the heart of New Paltz. When he was much younger, sometime between the cats