Sheriff Ken Porter had chili on his face, and sweat dripped from his forehead. “I dunno ‘bout you,” he coughed as he dabbed at his nose with a napkin.. “But I gauge chili by whether or not it makes my face break out into a sweat, and if it makes my nose run. And this here’s some good stuff.”
Porter was sitting with a deputy in his favorite booth at Whitey’s restaurant in Wilmington, NC. The interior of the place hadn’t changed since it was first built back in the 50’s, and neither had the uniforms the waitresses wore. Porter slurped coffee and wiped his mouth off. He looked into his deputy’s face, waiting for him to respond to the comment he’d made about his lunch. No reply was forthcoming.
“What’s wrong, Ben? Cat got your tongue?”
Ben Ripley was watching the traffic on Market Street, lost in thought. As if he was coming out of a trance, he looked at his superior and asked, “Do what, now?”
“Oh, nothing,” Sheriff Porter muttered, shoveling another heaping spoonful of the chili into his mouth.”I was just makin’ conversation while you were on visual traffic patrol. What’s on your mind, Ben?”
“I been thinkin’,” Ben responded. “Wilmington ain’t seen a rash’a killings like in some places, and I’m wonderin’ when we’re due. Somebody was tellin’ me the other day that we should be due a Hurricane anytime now, and I got ta thinkin’ that the same might be true about killin’s.”
“KILLINGS, you say?” Sheriff Porter almost choked on his coffee, and did his best not to burst out laughing. “What kind’a killin’s, man? You talkin’ about serial killers, or what?”
“Well, yeah.” Ben offered. “Surely there’s gonna be some serial killin’s here one day. I mean, think about it. Wilmington’s surrounded by swamps, and woods, and just up the road there’s Wrightsville Beach. Shoot - a serial killer might’a been killin’ folks left and right here for years, and no one even noticed. There’s plenty’a places ta stash bodies.”
For some reason what Ben was saying touched a nerve in the Sheriff, though he didn’t want to admit it. He’d been having troubling dreams for months, most of them revolving around corpses coming to light in the swamp lands around Wilmington once the tide was low enough for them to be seen. Sometimes his dreams dealt with a running storyline in which he’d killed someone himself, and was afraid the dead bodies he’d dumped in the swamp would be found. Ludicrous, he knew, but troubling nonetheless.
The two officers continued their talk over their meal, speculating about the possibilities that Ben’s concerns might one day prove to be true, and wholly unaware just how soon.
Meanwhile, a few miles from Whitey’s, a muffled scream went unnoticed by the residents of the Alandale subdivision. Blood spray covered a wall in a dark room where curtains were drawn as a throat was slit, and a dead body slid jerkily to the floor. Bert Rampling wiped off his blade and grinned. “Another notch on my wall,” he laughed to himself. Then he began his clean-up ritual.
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