Birds of Prey - Crouch Blake - Страница 32

Her tongue ran across his chin. “And why is that, Luther?”

His move was sudden and violent, grabbing Alex’s shoulders, pushing her back into her chair, then leaning across the table, bringing his lips close to hers. “There aren’t many out there like us.” He edged closer, felt her breath on his teeth.

“Do you like killing people, Luther?” Alex said, so softly it was barely audible. “Does it turn you on to make people suffer?”

Luther inched forward and their lips touched. He tasted her bottom lip, running his tongue across the smooth and the scars.

He bit down and he kept biting down until the skin broke and he tasted a single bead of blood like a burst of hot rust on the tip of his tongue.

Alex moaned deeply, “Fucking take me. Now.”

Luther glanced over his shoulder at the window.

He slid off the table—

Alex said, “Where the fuck do you think you’re…”

—dropping to his hands and knees—

“Oh…”

—and crawling under the table. He ran his hands up her legs, through the chains, until he found the drawstring on her pants. Luther dug his hands into her waistband and tugged them down to her feet.

Long, perfect legs with the chains connecting her ankles and wrists running up the middle.

Alex scooted her bare ass to the edge of the metal chair and got his head inside her cuffed wrists. When he pressed his face between her thighs, Alex bellowed out in a big, throaty laugh.

Her laughter turned to moaning when his tongue found her.

She peeked her eyes open, locking stares with Jonas, who looked on, slack-jawed, through the tiny window in the door.

The orderly watched her come, bucking against Luther’s face, tangling her fingers in his long, black hair.

“I could…fucking…kill you right now…” Alex grunted, pulling her chains around Luther’s neck as the orgasm wracked her body.

Luther scooted up, into her manacled embrace, his mouth finding hers, one hand frantically tugging down his zipper.

He stood and lifted Alex out her chair, the chains drawing tight against the D-ring in the floor. He pushed her across the table onto her stomach as Jonas watched, eyes bulging out, his hand busy behind the door.

Alex spread her legs as wide as the chains would allow, and Luther drove himself into her, the steady slap-slap-slap of skin against skin building in strength and frequency until his legs went weak and he collapsed onto her, sweaty and grunting and their chests heaving against each other.

“I need more doctors like you,” Alex said, wiggling her ass against him.

Luther abruptly pulled out, collapsing into Alex’s chair.

“We need to get you out of this place,” he said, zipping up.

Alex sat up on the table facing him, her legs still open, completely comfortable with her nudity.

“How?” she asked.

“I could help you escape. We could go after Jack together.”

“I would love to kill with you, Luther,” Alex said, “and I want us to make that happen. But Jack is mine. You see what she did to me.”

“I think you’re beautiful.”

“She’s mine, Luther. You let me have her, and I’ll do things to you that will make your fucking head explode.”

Luther stood up, walking around the table to his original chair. He lifted his briefcase and opened it covertly, hiding it from Jonas who still stared through the window.

Luther removed the false bottom and took out three small items.

“Can you pick locks?” he asked Alex, lowering his voice.

She nodded, her eyes getting bigger. He reached over, clasping her hands, slipping her the lock pick, the tension wrench, and the plastic disposable lighter.

“There’s a utility closet down the hall,” he said. “Probably locked. Probably filled with flammable cleaning supplies.”

“There’s no way they will ever let me walk out of this dump.”

“So let someone else take your place.”

Alex nodded. “But even if I burn them, they’ll check dental records.”

“I couldn’t risk bringing in a pair of pliers, didn’t know if I’d have to go through a metal detector. But I’m sure you can make do.”

Then Luther closed his briefcase and walked briskly to the door.

Rapped on it twice.

“See you on the outside, Luther Kite,” Alex said as Jonas let him out.

In Which Blake and Joe Interview Each Other About the Experience of Writing SERIAL KILLERS UNCUT…

JOE: So once again, here we are, discussing the never-ending saga that has ultimately become SERIAL KILLERS UNCUT.

It seems like we’re writing an epic novel in installments.

BLAKE: We were talking about this recently, how if SERIAL KILLERS UNCUT (hereinafter, “SKU”) had been released by a legacy publisher, it would have taken us over two years to get to this point, and…

(a) no one would have gotten to read SERIAL, BAD GIRL, TRUCK STOP, SERIAL UNCUT, KILLERS, KILLERS UNCUT, or BIRDS OF PREY yet; and

(b) Even worse, we would just now be turning this novel in, which means it still wouldn’t be coming out for another 12-18 months, which is what, three and a half years after we initially released SERIAL?

JOE: In a way, we’re following the same model as independent musicians. Release the songs as they’re completed, then release the EPs (a few songs at a time), then the final album with everything together.

Do you feel like we’re ripping off our readers by doing this? Or being generous by releasing things as we write them, rather than making them wait months or years?

BLAKE: I can only put myself in their shoes. If I had the choice to read the work of my favorite novelist right now, as opposed to three years from now, I have to go with now every time. Besides, it’s not like we’re releasing $26.95 books every time out. Many of the individual stories that comprise SKU were priced at $.99 or $2.99. And SERIAL was and still is free. There may be some overlap between projects, certain stories being present in several omnibus collections, but I think that’s a small price to pay for having immediate access to our work. It simply wouldn’t work any other way.

Did you think when we started SERIAL it was going to morph into a 120,000-word double-novel?

JOE: No way. This project was a strange one for myriad reasons. Wonderful, and rewarding, but strange. We’re both fans of F. Paul Wilson (in fact, we wrote a novel, DRACULAS, with him), and Paul has done an admirable job linking his entire oeuvre together. The majority of his stories intermingle, and characters can pop up in seemingly unrelated books and stories.

As a fan, I LOVE this. It is rewarding to see a character I remember from a previous story come back in another one. So that’s the approach I wanted to take with this series.

The point of SERIAL was to see how two killers interacted when they met up on the road.

When we originally expanded SERIAL into SERIAL UNCUT, we wanted to take it up a notch. You took characters from your books and had them meet, I took characters from mine and had them meet.

Then we went even further with BIRDS OF PREY. Now we completely intertwined our universes. My bad guys meet your bad guys, from over a dozen of our novels.

BLAKE: You and I write a lot of bad guys. It was so much fun doing the killer-killer interaction in SERIAL UNCUT, that with BIRDS OF PREY, we simply said, let’s bring every major villain we’ve ever written into the same book. And not only that, let’s have Joe’s villains and Blake’s villains share scenes together. And not just any old scenes. Scenes that perhaps set up or anticipate big events in our major works like your Jack Daniels series and my Andrew Thomas series. I think of SKU as a glove that fits into all the spaces left between our collective novels. So Charles Kork from WHISKEY SOUR has a scene with Luther Kite and Orson Thomas from DESERT PLACES. Donaldson and Orson share a scene. Alex Kork and Luther Kite share a scene. And of course, there’s the centerpiece of the entire thing, “An Unkindness of Ravens.”