Act of Love (2011) Read online

  ACT OF LOVE

  Joe R. Lansdale

  Flyboy707 eBooks

  Flyboy707 eBooks

  No Copyright 2011 by Flyboy707

  No rights are reserved. All part of this book may be reproduced in any form and by any means without the prior written consent of anyone.

  ABOUT THIS EBOOK

  FOREWARD

  ACT OF LOVE

  THE BEGINNING. . .

  Part One:

  Part Two:

  Part Three:

  EPILOGUE

  ABOUT THIS EBOOK

  I created this eBook directly from my scan of the original 1981, first edition, first print, hard-back Act of Love.

  No portion of the text (i.e. the actual words of the author) of my ebook has been altered in any way. I have only added an author’s “Forward” to the book that I created from two book descriptions from publishers of the original novel.

  I endeavored to duplicate the book as closely as possible, while making this eBook a retail-like format for your ereader device. I keep as closely as possible to the paragraph and sentence structure, page breaks and chapter starts. The “page breaks” you encounter throughout my ebook are exactly how they appear in the original novel.

  Due to how ereaders function and displays ebooks, as well as, how the final conversion to an epub occurs, there are certain places within the original scan that I had to alter so that it would look correctly on your ereader. My ebook was tested on a Nook Color primarily and also on an iPad 1 and 2.

  Finally, my wish is for you to have a pleasurable reading experience!

  Flyboy707

  September, 2011

  FOREWARD

  In 1981, Joe R. Lansdale, then a noted short story writer, published his first novel, a paperback original entitled Act of Love. A ferocious account of the search for a killer known as the Houston Hacker, Lansdale’s debut was written years before the Hannibal Lecter phenomenon left its mark on American popular culture, years before the “serial killer novel” became a distinct — and highly marketable — publishing category. Thirty years after its initial appearance, this pioneering novel continues to exert a raw but undeniable narrative force.

  Set in the vividly evoked urban squalor of Houston, Texas, Act of Love moves with great authority between the disordered mind of a compulsive killer and the increasingly desperate perspectives of the policemen who hunt him. In the process, it offers a detailed portrait of a complex murder investigation and anatomizes a city under siege, a city held hostage by a latter day Jack the Ripper.

  As long time Lansdale readers will note, Act of Love introduces the soon-to-be-familiar figure of homicide detective Marvin Hanson. More importantly, it introduces, in embryonic form, some characteristic authorial virtues: the deceptively effortless prose, the flawless sense of place, the graphic depiction of inhuman violence, and the casually profane, instantly recognizable Lansdale humor. Unavailable for far too long, Act of Love makes a welcome reappearance in this deluxe anniversary edition, which includes the definitive text of the novel, a new introduction by the author, and a never before published short story featuring Marvin Hanson. The result is a significant — and necessary — act of rediscovery and an irresistible gift for Lansdale aficionados old and new.

  ACT OF LOVE

  The screeching of tires frightened Tommy, who was being followed by the blue van—its lights slicing into his Grand Prix like a razor.

  "Crazy fool!" Tommy said as the van bumped the back of his car.

  "What's he doing?" cried JoAnna, tossed forward into the dash. She clung to Tommy and fastened her seatbelt as the van bumped them again.

  "Christ, I can't outrun him I He's got something special under that hood!" Tommy screamed, his speedometer nearing eighty. "Ever seen someone take a right turn at eighty?" he asked JoAnna.

  The tires screamed and sparks flew out from beneath the car as the axle bounced down and scraped the pavement. It mounted a curb and ended up in the soft dirt of a front lawn. It yawned and heaved but remained still. All Tommy and JoAnna could hear was the whine of the engine and the whirl of the tires—as the van quickly approached them and came to a stop.

  The van door opened. A dark shape, a man, emerged, wearing a long coat, but a hood covered his face. JoAnna, looking out the back window, saw something in his hand. Something long and shiny.

  Tommy gassed the car in reverse and it bounced over the curb and into the street.

  In less than thirty seconds the van was hot on their tires again, pulling neck and neck. The driver of the van, his hood pulled up over his head, looked like some kind of monk.

  "Why, Why, WHY?" JoAnna screamed.

  And just as the van reached them, a tire on the Grand Prix blew . . .

  Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?

  —From the opening of The Shadow

  Blood! Bah!

  —Michael Le Faucheur

  It will have blood

  —William Shakespeare (Macbeth)

  Viva la Muerte! (Long live death!)

  —Millan Astray

  I could not love except where death,

  Was mingling his with Beauty's breath

  —Edgar Allan Poe

  Oh let me love you

  with this blade?

  In passions lull

  your tiny breast lines heave,

  I watch them fade

  For I shall dream of falcon flight and pray

  for all consuming night and,

  I will be your minute man,

  and show you love, I know I can I

  Oh let me love you with my blade.

  —Mignon Glass (The Psycho's Song)

  THE BEGINNING. . .

  Pearl Harbor is not just the place the Japanese bombed; it has a namesake, so christened for the blood that's been shed there—more blood than the original Pearl Harbor ever saw. It's a vicinity in the Houston, Texas ghetto called The Fifth Ward. It's just off Lyons Avenue (Soul Street) and Jensen, and if you're thinking of suicide, or if you want to get cut from ear to ear, it's the place to stroll late at night, jingling your money. For that matter, you don't need money. Saying goes, "There's folks down there can't sleep at night unless they've killed somebody."

  So death, blood and violence are no strangers to Pearl Harbor and The Fifth Ward ghetto. It's a tight, black world crowded with both flesh and poverty; a cesspool of despair. Over thirty-four percent of its residents live below the poverty level compared with Houston's ten percent. The median income of The Ward is just over five thousand dollars, while Houston's overall average is almost ten thousand dollars.

  The people of this ghetto, like ghettoes everywhere, are swamped in the darkness of ignorance, pain and destruction. But for all its seething hatred and explosive violence, it is endowed with a peculiar sort of pride fostered by emptiness and desperation. A pride that allows its members to not only live in pain, but in occasional joy . . . and sometimes it must share in something that is not quite either. Something that is certainly no joy, and something beyond the pain of The Ward's daily existence.

  Something akin to horror.

  Something that did not end there, but began there.

  Something like the arrival of the cold, calculating madman who would come to be known as "The Houston Hacker."

  SUNDAY . . . 11:58 p.m.

  Thinking back on the blood and her struggles, he had an erection.

  He came out of the dark and into the weak glow of the street lamps; lamps long dirty and specked with the splattered ruin of kamikaze bugs. The ankle-length raincoat he had been wearing was now folded over the bloody bayonet and his freshly acquired treasure. The raincoat was tucked tightly beneath his arm. There was nothing hurried about his steps, but then his movements were
not lazy either. There was black greasepaint on his face, gloves on his hands and a close-knit cap pulled tightly on his head.

  He went to the brown Volkswagen parked at the curb. It had been stolen for two hours and thirty-five minutes. His own car he had left in an all-night parking lot. It was within walking distance of the Jack-In-The-Box where he had, with his ring of keys—the same sort used by professionals for repossessing automobiles—stolen the Volkswagen to use for tonight's job. The first job of many.

  He unlocked the Volkswagen, slid inside and started the engine. While the motor idled he used the handkerchief to clean his face. There was a jar of cream he had brought with him to make the task easier that sat on the passenger's seat. From time to time he dipped the corner of the handkerchief into the cream and applied it to his face.

  No way could he fool someone into thinking he was black, but at a distance, which was the only way he was going to be seen—little nigger bitch in the alley exceptioned, of course—it was an effective disguise. He had even worked on his walk so that it would appear black. He had once seen a movie called Cotton Comes To Harlem, and in that movie a black junkie had identified some masked and gloved men by the way they ran. He had said something like, "I know they was white, man. They ran white."

  Well, he could walk black. He put the lid on the cream, folded the blackened handkerchief away in his blue-jean coat pocket, put the Volkswagen in gear and eased away from the curb, headed away from the heart of Houston's nefarious ghetto, The Fifth Ward.

  The Fifth Ward. He thought of that, tasted the words on his lips. The Fifth Ward. The words were sweet. Fear defeated, he thought, destroyed like an ant beneath his heel. When he had been in high school all the boys used to say. "If you want to get your guts cut out, just cruise on out to Niggertown and ride up and down Jensen late at night, and one of them woolies will do it for you."

  He smiled at the memory. It had been a fear of his childhood, and he had dreamed of defeating it. He was not a man to merely dream anymore—and there was more to it than defeating fear, much more. There was the enjoyment to be gained, enjoyment he had long denied himself, except in dreams, and except for an occasional dog or cat beneath his knife. But that was not enough, not anymore.

  Mentally, while walking down the street, while at work, he watched people—especially women, mostly women—and thought how it would be to remove their arms and legs and heads, and how they would look. Little rag dolls pulled apart, liquid, red stuffing, flowing out and away, and he wondered too how it would be to drink their blood, to lap it from the floor with his tongue like a dog. The taste of it and the smell of it had haunted him in his dreams, but tonight, back in that cold, hard alley it hadn't been a dog or a cat, it had been a woman.

  He thought again of his childhood fears of The Fifth Ward, said aloud to himself, "If there's going to be any goddamned gut cutting around here, I'll be the one to do it."

  God, he almost pounded the steering wheel in delight. It had been wonderful! Much better than his dreams. Much, much, much better. The bayonet a shining arc in the dim street light. The blood, a crimson splatter of draining life, her agonized twistings, her muffled screams trying desperately to penetrate the fabric of her panties. And that had certainly been a good part, putting that razor sharp bayonet against her throat, forcing the panties into her mouth, telling her all the while that his intentions were rape, nothing more. Then when she was gagged, and her arms tied behind her back, he had pulled the blade in a slow arc across her belly, letting it slice deep into her ebony flesh, watching the blood bead like shiny, red pearls pulled up from the black depths.

  And then the memory faded a bit.

  He would have to work on that part, learn to concentrate and prolong the victim's agony and his pleasure, but he did remember the stench and the sound of her intestines pushing free of her abdomen, swelling out of her belly like coils of rope, and then he had taken her, right there in the alley on cold concrete amidst the smell of blood, intestines, excrement, garbage, urine and cheap wine.

  Easy as eating cake. He had just slipped his penis out between the buttons of the raincoat and slammed it to her. Her face, even in dying, had been a beautiful sight. Twisted, disbelieving, the eyes losing their fire, falling away into the distance of her dead mind.

  The dead eyes had been fascinating!

  When he had finished, he had simply removed the raincoat, folded it inside-out over the bayonet and his little prize, and left the body to the night.

  Delicious.

  It had been delicious, and best of all, the smell of death was still with him.

  MONDAY . . . 12:02 a.m.

  High on wine and ready to piss, looking for the darkness of a back alley to let it go, the black wino known only as Smokey found the first hacked body, and upon seeing it through wine-filmed eyes in the half-light of a bug-swarmed streetlamp, lost not only the wine in his stomach, but the remains of a sardine and cracker meal as well.

  At first he thought (wanted to think) he was seeing a mannequin surrounded by garbage. Garbage was a common sight and smell in Smokey's world, and for that matter, so was blood and sudden death. He had narrowly escaped Old Man Death a few times himself. But this was something much worse than a Saturday night knifing or bottle beating. This was mutilation for the sheer joy of it— sickness, not frustration or anger. For the mannequin was no mannequin at all, but what was left of a local poke and hop head, Bella Louise. Even in her present state Smokey recognized her. Not more than an hour ago she had taken his fiver, dropped her pants, and with her hands on another alley wall— not even as well lighted as this one—had let him rut out his passion in a quick succession of bumps and groans.

  What Smokey had thought to be strewn garbage was in fact intestines. They had been ripped from the body and tossed about. There was enough of the face left to be recognized. Her nostrils had been slit, her lips removed, and a slash as wide as a finger and twice the depth ran the length of her face, forehead to jaw. Her head was nearly disconnected from her body. It clung to her torso by a thick, bloody hunk of flesh and a whitish fragment of bone. One of her eyes was missing. Her once blue blouse was dark and wet and pulled up beneath her armpits. Her formerly pendulous breasts had been hacked away to leave dark, wet wells. Her belly was split from breast bone to crotch. The pants she had worn (Had they been glitter green? Smokey tried to remember), were nowhere to be seen. There was something white, specked with dark blood, stuffed in her mouth.

  The smart thing, thought Smokey—and he would certainly think this later—would be to turn out of the alley and step like hell. Let The Fifth Ward take care of its own. It had in the past, it could in the future. But he couldn't. Bella had been little more to him than two minutes in the dark, but some second sense seemed to tell him that this wasn't any of The Ward's doing. No. This was something altogether different, and as much as he hated the goddamned hassling cops, he was going to patter on down to that wine store he robbed from time to time, find a phone and give The Man a bell.

  MONDAY ... 2:38 a.m.

  Home: that greasy part of the city stuffed with stink and death. He could afford more. Much more. He had the money, but his apartment was enough. In fact, it was perfect. There was the smell of the street cluttered with garbage and the smell of the old, the sick and the dying. The apartment house was practically an old folks' home due to the cheap rent, mostly inhabited by old, wrinkled women perpetually in flannel nightgowns and fuzzy shoes that looked like dead, dyed rabbits.

  Sometimes he wanted to cut those old women.

  Do the old bleed as well as the young? He wondered.

  Sometimes, he could hardly sleep for wondering. Sometimes he wanted to take his bayonet and go downstairs and take the old woman on the bottom floor and do things to her, the things he had done to the girl in the alley.

  But he was too smart for that. He lived by a motto: You don't piss in your own sink, you don't shit on your own rug. You play it cool, close to the chest. The city is full of fruit just the
re for the plucking. Ripe, young fruit and that which was aged as well.

  Someday an old one though. Most certainly. One like his mother. All sass and filthy mouth with wine breath and dark gums full of rotten teeth, eyes full of past sins . . . Yeah, like his old lady.

  And when he found her . . . and he would find her . . . Hack! Hack! Hack!

  He climbed the stairs with the raincoat tucked securely under his arm. He unlocked his apartment and went into darkness. He went to the dining table without bothering with the light. He knew his apartment well without lights, what little there was to know. The table, two chairs, a writing desk with typewriter and a foldout bed was the bulk of its contents. There was a little kitchenette and a small bathroom with both tub and shower. The floor was ancient wood, dirt-brown and peeling with the heads of nails staring up from the boards like small, flint-grey eyes.

  He took off his gloves, laid them on the table. He unwrapped the raincoat on top of them, removed the bayonet from the mounds of flesh there, and put it on the table. He picked up the hacked breasts in both hands and squeezed them like sponges, felt the blood drip onto his fingers and run down his sleeves.

  "Now, that's copping a feel," he said aloud.

  He put the meat back on the raincoat, went over and turned on the light. His hands and the light switch were bloody. He would clean them later. He went back to the table, and cradling the hacked breasts in the raincoat, he took his treasure to the rust stained sink, set the package on the drain board. He took a glass from the overhead cabinet, set it beside the raincoat, and then, carefully, he lifted the raincoat, and pinching one corner of the folded vinyl into a sort of funnel, he drained a quarter glass of blood from it. He drank the blood. It seemed like an elixir; cold, congealing, but still liquid. He got a knife out of the utensil drawer and set about slicing up the flesh for frying.