What The Cat Dragged In Ch. 16

Twenty minutes into the ride, he saw lights behind him again. Thirty minutes in, he interrupted the whore's steady stream of noise with a hard fist to the side of the head, breaking her cheekbone. For a moment, she was shocked into silence. Then a scream erupted from her.

He grasped her throat, pinning her to the seat. "Fuckin' drama queen, aren't you cunt?"

She gurgled and tried to struggle out of the cuffs that still held her hands behind her back.

"You're gonna listen and listen good. I've killed more whores than I can count. Most of the time, I do it just because it gets me off. Even if you had a fuckin' kid I wouldn't give a shit about that or anything else. To me, you're nothing but meat and the more you whine and scream and cry, the more I'm gonna make you suffer."

She croaked something, and he let go of her throat, only to take hold of either side of her jaw. Without taking his eyes off the dark road, he squeezed until the bone broke. She let out of strangled cry. Creed grinned and looked for the turnoff. That little doubling back trick might work again, but he didn't want to take chances at this stage of the game.

*~*~*~*~*~*

Murder was easy.

Humans were so fucking fragile the challenge wasn't in the kill itself. Sometimes Creed found the challenge in the chase. Sometimes it was in how much he could damage them before they gave up. Sometimes it was in how fast he could break them. It all depended on the circumstances, the mood he was in at the time, and the victim. Some of his victims thought they could play him. Appeal to some spark of empathy they thought was hidden behind professional walls. Like all prey, they were fucking clueless as to what was really going on in the predator's head.

The so-called 'profilers' liked to think they knew. Creed studied books on the subject in the same way he devoured forensics journals. The latter gave him a better idea of what kind of trace he was leaving behind. Both gave him tools he used to misdirect and mislead an investigation.

Sometimes that didn't matter. This time it did.

Conlon was still out misdirecting traffic, leaving Creed alone in the narrow ravine to consider his handiwork in private. He stared at the gutted corpse in front of him with a critical eye. Her teeth were sitting in a little pile with her hands and the piece of her intestine with an intact appendix. In all, he was relatively happy with it.

Complete destruction of the face might have made it look more like a personal thing, but he was counting on Conlon making DNA identification goddamn difficult if not impossible all together. The face would be all that was left and he needed her to be identified as the frail. Otherwise he would have gone through all this for nothing.

The overkill on the rest of her suggested a hell of a lot of rage. He hadn't been about to put his cock anywhere near that cesspool of a pussy of hers. He couldn't catch anything, but the thought of transferring something to the frail disgusted him and made him even more pissed off at the whore. His fist had made a good substitute and the scent of her bloody terror and the pitch of her screams had gotten him off anyway.

Her hold on life had been tenuous at that point, but she still managed a gurgling scream when he ripped into her soft abdomen. He hadn't been able to hold back a laugh at the shocked look on her face when he started pulling out intestine by the fucking foot. He smiled again just thinking about it. She died before he was done, but by that point he was really just taking care of the details.

He ignored the sticky blood that matted the hair on his chest and arms. His nose and ears told him that there was a small creek less than two minutes' walk away. He'd clean up when he was finished. He found two large rocks and started to crush her teeth into a fine powder. He was halfway finished when he heard a soft sound in the underbrush. He sniffed the air warily. Under the heavy scent of the whore's blood and shit, he detected Conlon.

He went back to his task. "Stop sneakin' around."

"I wasn't sneaking; I was trying to find you. It's damn dark out here."

Creed snorted derisively. "To you."

"Damn that's a mess." Conlon was putting on a good front, but Creed could see that he wasn't looking at the carcass any more than he had to. "You finished?" Conlon asked.

"Just about. How long's it gonna take you?" Creed knew Conlon's mutation allowed him to heat any liquid to boiling and beyond in seconds, including blood and other fluids in the body. He just didn't know how long it would take to accomplish that with an entire body.

Conlon shrugged. "Not sure. You're the first one who's ever asked me to use it this way before."

"Get started then."

Conlon found another rock and put it under the girl's head. He slammed her skull down onto it until he saw brain matter start to leak. Creed watched curiously.

"Vent," Conlon said.

Creed grinned. "Thought you hadn't used it that way before."

"Not strictly after the fact, no. Before...let's just say I didn't think of it and had a hell of a mess to clean up." That scent of embarrassment again.

The rock Creed was using paused in midair, and he started to laugh. "Just cook the bitch."

Almost immediately Creed started to smell something akin to roasting meat. The scent increased in intensity and before his eyes the fresh corpse began to change, to harden in a way. The swollen features changed, but if anything it made her look even more like the frail. A few minutes later, he saw Conlon's concentration shift.

"That's everything?" He asked curiously.

"Down to the marrow in her bones."

"Not bad." He crushed the last tooth and collected the particles in his hand. "I'm going to get cleaned up. Hands and part of the intestine are over there." Even though Conlon lacked experience in simple kills, he was damn good with disposal. Most protectors were. Kept the client safe and insulated from any nasty surprises later. Creed knew his meaning would be clear.

*~*~*~*~*~*

It seemed to take ages for the goon squad to pick up his trail again, but in reality it was less than half an hour. From there, it was fairly easy. Conlon would take care of making sure some of them happened across the body and then picked up his trail again. The police would be involved, but he was sure they wouldn't find anything about his identity. Even the plate numbers on his vehicle, if anyone happened to notice them, would take officials down a rabbit hole to a dead end. He didn't worry about any of those details. They'd all been tweaked and perfected on a thousand other jobs.

He worried about the frail waking up before they got to Chicago.