Takeout

                       a Scary Larry novel



                            _Day One_

Larry walked the downtown streets, head down, hands hunched in the 
pockets of his jacket. The crisp autumn winds of October had 
started to give way to the nipping winter winds of November. 
Downtown was quiet for early Saturday afternoon. Larry thought 
most people were still in denial of the approaching winter and the 
deadly sub-zero temperatures that came with it in this part of the 
country. Larry liked winter and looked forward to it every year. 
For him the glaring white snow and frigid air were comforting in 
the way they isolated him from the rest of the world. He had never 
lived far from the heart of the Northern Plains, and he had no 
urge to move to warmer climates like Florida or California, or 
even New York.
     Around October Larry would start to take long random walks, 
enjoying the drifts of dead leaves in the gutter and the new smell 
the air took on. It made him feel alive. He would walk for miles 
through the residential neighborhoods, letting the sensations 
build. Sometimes he got so heady that he would drive the two hours 
to the city and find a good woman. Sometimes a man, but Larry had 
to be in a certain mood for that, and he got very particular about 
men. Much more so than the women. It didn't take as long to find a 
good woman.
     Sometimes he found them in bars, other times in cozy shops, 
occasionally beneath a street light. They would go in his sky-blue 
Ford Tempo to someplace intimate, and then in the early morning 
hours he would conceal the body in a shelterbelt or sink it in a 
cattle pond.

The bookstore looked inviting. It was called Second Glance and the 
sign on the door said it specialized in used and rare books. Larry 
doubted that most were very rare. Not in this town, anyway. He 
turned into the narrow doorway. The door brushed a set of small 
bells that twinkled as it opened. He smelled age. The smell of 
yellowed pages that hadn't been opened in decades. And coffee. He 
smelled coffee coming from close to the desk. The desk was next to 
the door, with seeming random gatherings of loose paper on the one 
side, and clusters of business cards for other bookstores across 
the country on the other. A coffee pot on a hotplate sat at one 
corner of the desk, with a stack of styrofoam cups and a 
handprinted sign that said "HELP YOURSELF!" And older lady with 
short grey hair sat behind the desk, reading a paperback mystery. 
She smiled a greeting at Larry and he nodded in return.
     The store was narrow but long, and crammed beyond capacity. 
The stacks of shelves down the middle of the store were spaced 
just far enough apart for two people to pass with difficulty. A 
card table near the front of the store was covered with boxes of 
paperbacks, and short piles of books littered the floor along both 
sides. Larry didn't like the clutter. He was a neat-freak. He was 
obsessively neat about his own house, and he didn't like to have 
to look at other people's messes. He wanted to attack the 
cacophony of books and straighten them all up.
     Larry started at the first section he came to--Russian 
History--and worked his way along. Looking for distractions, not 
really paying attention to what section he was at. Just looking 
for interesting titles. He had made his way to the back of the 
store when he rounded a corner into the horror section. And he saw 
her. His next. It was an instinctive knowledge that he couldn't 
question. He could have no one else until he had this one.
     Her height struck him first. At least six feet, possibly six- 
two. Slender; he could see the bones in her wrists. He liked that. 
She had on a blue sun dress printed with tiny white flowers, which 
Larry thought was odd to be wearing in this weather. Her dark 
brown hair, not quite black, flowed over her shoulders halfway 
down her back. She had a weak chin and an ever-so-slightly large 
nose, but to Larry these were enhancements. He didn't like severe 
angles on a woman. Softer women fought back less.
     The book in her hands was Clive Barker's "Books of Blood." 
Larry chuckled inside. _How appropriate_, he thought. He pretended 
to be interested in something a little farther down the shelves, 
stealing furtive glances at the girl, memorizing the details. She 
was about twenty-two, he guessed. Nice chest. Acceptable legs. Not 
a glamor queen by any means, but her..._aura_, or something, told 
Larry she was right. Hell, beyond right. She was perfect.
     Another person came around the corner. Almost as tall as the 
girl; blond, short-cropped hair. Wearing a white turtleneck. He 
carried a denim jacket over one arm and held a cheap book-club 
knockoff of a Stephen King novel. He slipped the other arm around 
the girl and Larry's fury nearly exploded. _No one else was to 
have her._
     "You almost ready?" the guy asked.
     "In a minute." Her voice had the rustle of leaves in it. She 
probably smoked, but that meant nothing to Larry. To him the low 
rasp carried the same husky nuance of Kathleen Turner.
     The guy told her he would be up front and left. After a few 
moments, Larry followed. He found the guy over by the astronomy 
books. Larry pretended to look past him at some photography 
collections. He visualized killing this guy in a variety of nasty 
ways. Slit throat. Impaled by glass. Slow dismemberment. He liked 
picturing these things, knowing the other person had no idea 
someone else was fantasizing their death.
     The girl joined him before long. He handed her the denim 
jacket and they went to pay for their books. Larry quickly 
snatched a book off the shelf and stood behind them at the desk. 
The guy pulled out a checkbook and Larry strained to read the name 
and address printed on it. The kid's finger obliterated most of 
it; all he could read was "4th St NW". The kid paid for their 
books and left. Larry had to move fast now. He dropped the book on 
the desk. The lady looked inside the front cover, told him $12, 
and Larry hurridly fumbled the money out of his wallet and paid 
her. She took her time wrapping his book in a paper sack before 
handing it to him. He snatched it out of her hand and was out the 
door before she finished thanking him.
     Out on the sidewalk, he saw the guy and the girl across the 
street. They got into a black Bronco with orange stripes down the 
sides and drove away. Larry wished he had his car with him, but it 
was at home, over a mile away. No problem, though. He knew 4th 
Street. The northwest stretch of it wasn't very long. No problem.
     Larry started home. As he walked, he decided to open the sack 
and see what he'd bought.
     "'Photographing Your Pet,'" he read. "Aw, shit. Now what am I 
supposed to do with _that_?"

That night Larry cruised slowly down 4th Street, scanning the 
driveways. The neighborhood consisted of small, cloned, post-war 
houses pushed close together, their color often the only thing 
that distinguished them from one another. Small yards, small 
attached garages. Once an example of post-Word War II success, 
many of the houses were now low-cost rentals for college students. 
A few of the houses still had the mouldering remains of Halloween 
pumpkins on the front steps, their jovial toothy grins melted into 
grotesque expressions of horror.
     The first few light flakes of snow had begun to fall, giving 
a surreal quality to the sound of leaves crunching beneath his 
tires. He was concerned about the possibility that the Bronco 
might be in a garage or somewhere else out of sight. If that was 
the case he would have to return every night until he did find it. 
Larry was very patient, and even more methodical.
     Then he spotted it. If the garage door had been closed he 
never would have seen it. The unmistakable bucking bronco logo on the 
spare tire cover shone benath the nearby streetlight. Larry slowed 
to a stop alongside the curb. The house was white--like a dozen 
others along this street--with a green door and green-striped 
metal awning. One-bedroom, it appeared. An unimpressive little 
square house with a roof like a flattened pyramid. Larry wrote the 
house number down on a notepad. Then he went home.

Larry had a very mundane, very normal desk job. It involved a lot 
of phone calls, a lot of kissing ass, and a lot of travel to kiss more ass. The job 
itself he hated, other than allowing him to 
manipulate everyone freely. And the travel was a godsend in many 
ways. For one thing, it gave him flexibility to pursue his...hobby.
     But the job brought good money, and one result of that money 
was a Pentium-powered computer. It allowed him to organize his 
life, down to the minute if necessary. It gave him information, 
which often in turn gave him an upper hand, both in business and 
in pleasure. He was very careful, however, not to document 
anything on the computer which might prove dangerous to himself if 
anything disasterous were to happen. Larry worried about that a 
lot. He was conscious not to let himself operate out-of-control, 
yet in the back of his mind there was an inevitibility that he 
would find himself locked in a situation he couldn't squirm out of.
     Larry dropped a CD-ROM into the drive and launched its 
program. It was a database of every phone book in the nation, 
searchable by name, by city--and by address. Larry entered his own 
city, state, and the address he had written down earlier. The disk 
spun as the computer worked it out, then returned a name:
     Brian Paulkonis.
     Paulkonis's phone number was also listed, but Larry doubted 
it would prove useful. The girl's name wasn't there. She was 
probably only a girlfriend who lived someplace else. The guy's 
name was enough to get Larry to her, though. Larry was not only 
patient and methodic, but resourceful.


                            _Day Two_

Jessica Weinman looked out the window at the car parked by the curb, 
an emerald-green Acura only eight payments old. _Her_ 
car. Hers. She could do with it as she pleased--drive the stick as 
fast as she liked, let styrofoam fast-food containers pile up in 
the backseat floor if she wanted, drive it anywhere the urge took 
her.
    Anywhere.
    Even back to her husband.
    God, what a mess.
    Less than 72 hours ago, she had left her husband Larry. More than 
once since arriving at her parents' house in Evanston, she would 
look at the car and realize how _free_ she was. She didn't 
have to drive back to the man who lapsed into long and 
unpredictable periods of silent moodiness, whose idea of 
recreation was to obsessively wash his blue car inside and out, 
sometimes two or three times in a single weekend. And although she 
had lived with him for four years, made love to him countless 
times, there were moments when he would look at her in a way that 
made her spine tingle, her heart pound, and the hairs on the back 
of her neck rise. There wasn't anger or hatred in his eyes, but 
something much colder. Curiosity. Curiosity, she felt, to feel the 
last warm pulse of her jugular beneath his thumb, her final breath 
on his lips.
    Then she would push the idea away. In the six years she had 
known him, he had not once lifted a hand against her, or even raised 
his voice. He had always been very calm.
    Almost _too_ calm.