Zero Worship: Confessions of a Fake Psychic Detective #6

Chapter 20 - Tab A, Slot B, I See

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After Zandra hears the man from the van re-enter the house, she expects to hear one of two things.

Either there will be silence—bad because it means Pixie isn't alive anymore—or there will be the remaining stages of a murder in progress, which is only slightly less bad.

Zandra hears the latter.

He's stabbing her, right? Her moans come in spurts, almost like he's thrusting into her with a knife.

After a few seconds, she changes her mind.

Well, he's certainly thrusting into her. Are they really fucking in the kitchen?

The clattering of pans and the slamming of cupboards confirms as much. Zandra slips the lawnmower knife out of its sheath. It's in rough shape, as it always is, but there's a sliver of polish on the flat of the blade. It's just enough that Zandra might be able to use the knife as a mirror. She slowly raises the blade above her head at an angle.

Were there a proper mirror finish on the knife, this trick might've worked. However, there's nothing proper about the lawnmower knife.

I can't see shit. Let's just assume that's them fucking in the kitchen.

Zandra lowers the knife and sheaths it up her sleeve.

Maybe I'll get lucky, too. Maybe Pixie will say the man from the van's name. That'd help. Chad and Bexley might've gotten a look at him, too, when he came out to yell at them.

The noises grow more intense. Although she can't see the sex, she can still draw some conclusions from it.

Both of them are completely engaged with one another. Lots of verbal feedback. "Put your X here." "Move Y like last time." "Use the Z." "Oh, fuck, oh, fuck, oh fuck." Etcetera.

Zandra swallows a cough.

Why would the man from the van go straight to Pixie's house after our meeting for grenade-grade sex? One last go before everything turns to shit? No. Men—straight men—generally need sex to feel loved. Women in that equation generally need to feel loved to have sex. He knows she cheated, but she doesn't know he knows. Not yet anyway.

A bird chirps in the woods. It startles Zandra, but not enough for the otherwise occupied occupants of the house to notice.

Is he trying to fuck the pregnancy out of her? It wouldn't be the first time some idiot-dicked jackass held a warped idea about how pregnancies work.

The window above Zandra's head shakes as the two lovers apparently switch positions in the kitchen.

No, that's not it. He's too smart for that. That they're having sex—especially in this way—tells me that he didn't tell her that he knows. It also means she didn't tell him. If either of those two things happen, there's no way I'm going to be able to ID this other man Pixie is cheating with. The man from the van can only control one of those scenarios, so rather than talking to each other and risking a slip that would smoke out the other man, the man from the van goes straight for sex. It reinforces to Pixie that all is well, as much as it possibly could be.

And that buys me time. Not much time, but enough time.

Maybe this man in the van isn't so bad. It's a nice change of pace to not work with a complete moron for once.

The sex continues for several more minutes. Zandra tries hard to be repulsed, but she can't quite muster her usual acidity. However brief and two-faced this round of lovemaking is, there's a normalcy to it. Take away everything else, and it's two people in a relationship engaging in what people in relationships do. Typically, these details are related to Zandra second hand—at least in the last 25 or so years. Clients came into Sneak Peek with all manner of romantic issues. Thankfully, they did not reenact these issues in Sneak Peek, so Zandra only heard about them.