Final Edge

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A fall breeze lifted his hair and kissed his cheek as Dr. Arthur D. Belkvin raised the ax overhead, holding it over his victim's terrified eyes. The act of taking the life of this woman would engender no joy in Arthur, and he got nothing out of her terror, not like Lauralie did. Lauralie claimed to be only eighteen years old, but she gave the impression of a much older woman, her dark eyes, dark hair, and exotic skin making her irresistible to the thirty- year-old Arthur. But something in the wild, Tex-Mex- looking Lauralie Blodgett's body movements and eyes made her appear for the moment absolutely ecstatic in anticipating the fall of the ax.

Arthur felt he must say something to the soon-to-be- dead Mira Lourdes. "Don't think this was my idea. I'm not a freak," he told the woman at his feet, "but I gotta do what Lauralie tells me to do. I have no choice."

Hands tied to feet, her neck lying across a wooden post on the earth out back of a house in the woods, Mira Lour- des struggled and choked on a gag he'd placed in her mouth. She was only half aware that Lauralie, the woman he referred to, stood nearby, watching, guiding Arthur to do the thing he was told to do. To behead Mira. "Do it, Arthur, do it!" the woman chanted.

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