Grimoire Diabolique

Walt was quite understandably outraged by this bit of information and he began to snap his ankles and wrists madly, and quite uselessly, against their stainless steel fetters, blubbering: “Buh-buh-but you said if I didn’t guh-guh-go soft, yuh-yuh-you wouldn’t—”

“Don’t be a doe-doe, Walt,” Rena suggested, delighted by his state of prostrate and inescapable horror. “Don’t be stupid.”

Wendlyn’s pretty face grew alight in the knowing grin. “We just got done telling you that we’re killers, and if we’re killers, it only stands to reason that we’re probably liars, too.”

The tin snips slowly opened, like jaws.

Walt began to scream, as Rena began to snip.

««—»»

Which left them now in their current quandary, at precisely 4:26 in the morning, parked on the old Governor’s Bridge. Rena desperately rummaged through the Malibu’s cargo-hold-sized trunk. Where was it? Where was Walt’s dick?

Rena started crying.

“Oh, now,” Wendlyn tried to soothe her, rubbing her back. “Don’t worry about it. It’s not like he can be identified by his cock.”

This was true, unless of course the police had some secret new system of genital identification. Wendlyn smiled to herself. Perhaps one day she’d open the fridge and see a picture of Walt’s dick printed on a milk carton. There were, however, some other things that Walt definitely could be identified by, thirty-two of which Wendlyn now went to considerable effort to take care of. Before the nursing job, she’d been a dental technician, but that didn’t make the task of extracting Walt’s teeth any less laborious. The pliers were difficult to manipulate in such limited oral space. Eventually, though, she managed to get them all out of Walt’s dead maw, whereupon she placed them all into a small cloth sack.

Rena was still crying, rummaging. She was checking the toolbox, for God’s sake, and the plastic cooler they used when they went to the beach. “Oh, Wendy, I’m sorry! Where could it be? Did I leave it on the dresser with the keys? The kitchen counter?”

“Rena, I told you. Forget about his cock. Here. Help me get him out.”

They travailed then to lifting out the plastic dropcloth in which the deader-than-dogshit Walt had been carefully becloaked. Rena hammered the little bag of teeth against the asphalt with a four-pound sledge, until all were sufficiently pulverized. Wendlyn, meanwhile, removed the glass flask (one of many perks of working in a hospital) and emptied its teeming contents onto Walt’s remaining identifiable features. The concentrated nitric acid made short work of the hands and feet, fizzing away any and all ridge prints, loops, whorls, and bifurcations. Walt’s face, too, bubbled away with equal steaming vigor.

The unappreciated separation of his genitals from his groin, by the way, had not of itself spelled Walt’s demise. He’d screamed loud and hard as a horn on a semi-rig, thrashing amid his Peerless-handcuff trap, but had surprisingly not died. Nor had Wendlyn’s delvings with the Clay Adams brand bivalving scalpel done the trick. It got quite ugly, Walt screaming like that, and thrashing away with no penis. Blood gushed like Great Falls. Eventually Rena had stuck a knitting needle up his nose, driving it back with her palm deep into the meat of Walt’s parietal lobe. She’d jiggled it around a few times, until he checked out.

“Ashame about his face,” Rena lamented now, looking down in the moonlight. “He could’ve been on the cover of GQ.”

“Not anymore. Fangoria, maybe. Say goodnight, Walt.”

They hefted up either end of the dropcloth and rolled it over the rusty metal bridge rail. Ka-SPLASH! The moonlight rippled spectacularly.

Then they were driving away, off into the warm, star-chipped night. “Wendy, look!” Rena celebrated, bending over in the passenger seat. “I found Walt’s dick!”

So she had; somehow, Walt’s severed member had found its way to the footwell. “Now I remember. I brought it along to diddle with while we were driving out.” Rena picked it up and, ever the comedian, slid back her blue-leather skirt and held Walt’s now seriously shriveled cock to her clitoris, spreading her trim legs. “Look, Wendy! I’ve got a penis! I’m a man!”

Wendlyn rolled her eyes behind the wheel. “You’re so silly sometimes. Honestly.” She took the wizened thing and flipped it out the window, where eventually it would be eaten by possums.

««—»»