Psychopath [antikvár]

oneJANUARY 23, 2003ROUTE 90 EAST, 37 MILES OUTSIDE ROME, NEW YORKMahler's Tenth Symphony played on the BMW X5's Stereo, but even that serene music did nothing to calm Jonah. His skin was hot with anger. The palms of his hands burned against the steering wheel. His heart pounded, squeezing more and more blood with each beat, flooding his aorta, engorging his carotid arteries, making his head throb inside the skull, somewhere within the temporal lobes of his brain. At last count his breathing had risen to eighteen respirations per minute. He could feel a dizzying undertow of oxygen sucking him inside himself.His hunger to kill always began this way, and he always believed he could control it, ride it into submission down a long highway, the way his grandfather had broken sinewy colts on the plains of the Arizona ranch where Jonah had spent his teenage years. So cunning was his psychopathology that it fooled him into thinking he was greater than it was, that the goodness in him could overpower the evil. He believed this even now, with seventeen bodies strewn along the highways behind him."Just keep driving," he said through gritted teeth.His vision began to blur, partly from surging blood pressure, partly from hyperventilating, partly from the milligram of Haldol he had swallowed an hour earlier.