Carter & Lovecraft by Jonathan L. Howard

Mass killers are just children who want all the candy now.

Mass killers, the movie gets made about the victims.

That’s how you get a movie made about you. That’s how you get into the forensic pathology books. Delayed gratification is the mark of the intelligent mind. Those Columbine kids? That dickwad in Norway? Fuck ’em. That makes you a mass killer, not a serial killer, and mass killers are just douches. You’re not a real serial killer unless you’ve got at least five kills, just like a World War I fighter ace. Just be sure to score at least five victims. Want your fifteen minutes? Here’s how you do it, sport. The United States had a disproportionately high number of serial killings compared to other developed countries, a result of wide spaces, ease of procuring weapons, and-just maybe-it looking so damn cool on TV and in the movies. It was going to be one of those Hollywood cop days when the clues line up and they’d just follow them straight to the perp. Carter looked at the bodies for a moment longer, holstered his Glock 19, and went to the boy, to stay with him until the backup arrived. The kid was crying in the other room where Carter had left him, hopeless little jerking, mechanical sobs of a terror that had gone on too long. Suydam was happy Charlie had gutshot him, happy that he was dying, maybe even happy that Charlie had seen the joke, too, and followed him into darkness, a 9mm bullet as his invitation.

It wasn’t a malevolent smile, that was the worst of it. When the scene came back to Carter again and again over the following months, he would always remember the clack of the pistol’s aluminum frame against Charlie’s teeth, the smell of blood, and the smile on dead Suydam’s face. This was Suydam’s fault.Ĭarter turned to where Suydam sat propped against the wall, sitting in a pool of his own blood and piss, but there would be no answers coming from him. No reason at all.īut there had to be a reason. Crying and laughing, Charlie put his S&W Model 5946 between his teeth, squeezed the trigger, and excused himself from life.Ĭarter watched him drop, unable to comprehend what he was seeing, unable to take in that his friend had just killed himself for no reason.

Carter & Lovecraft by Jonathan L. Howard