SIXTEEN
For the next few days, Angela couldn’t get the guy out of her head. She couldn’t keep the horrifying details of what he had done out of her nightmares.
She knew with every fiber of her being that it was true.
She did her best to put him out of her mind as she went about delivering and picking up packages. All the while she kept thinking about how much more money she could make tending bar. There weren’t many good paying jobs in Milford Falls. She decided that she would get some books on bartending so she would be prepared when she turned twenty-one.
But in the background there was always the memory of the man in the bar and the haunting images she had seen in his eyes.
As Angela went about her deliveries, she searched the people she saw, looking for him.
She didn’t know how she knew it, but she knew for certain that she had not seen the last of him.
That thought made her queasy with fear.
At the same time, it excited her in a way that nothing had ever excited her before.
She dreaded the thought of ever seeing that monster again.
And yet, she felt intoxicated with the thought of encountering him.
She finally decided that she was going to make herself crazy thinking about him, so she did her best to put him from her mind. She thought instead about the bartending job Barry had offered her. None of the people there were anywhere near as scary as the people who had hung around her mother’s trailer, so she was sure she could do it. When she finished all her deliveries for the day, she stopped at a bookstore and picked up two books on bartending.
She deliberately selected the simpler books, with basic drinks and lessons on the trade rather than how to make fancier drinks. Barry’s bar was decidedly not fancy.
On the highway before reaching the road that turned off to the north and eventually went past her cabin, she saw a blue muscle car parked off the side of the road. She remembered seeing a car like that in the parking lot of the bar.
Angela did not believe in coincidences.
It would be a long walk to her place from where the car was parked, but on the other hand the distance served to diminish suspicion.
When she reached the drive up to her cabin, she scanned the bushes and trees beyond the meadow as she lowered the cable. When she put the cable back up after entering, she looked around but didn’t see any footprints in the dirt. Of course, someone could have walked in from a different direction to avoid leaving footprints.
When she parked and then went into the dark cabin, she knew he was in there, somewhere.
She could feel him.
Her gaze searched every dark corner, but she saw no sign. Heart hammering, she unlocked the basement door, then returned to the living room and turned on a single light.
After turning on the light in the living room, she deliberately calmed her thoughts. Once she set aside the mental distractions, she began to feel his presence radiating from her bedroom. She found that as she focused on him, she could feel him crouching there in the bedroom, waiting for her.
She did not intend to play into his plan of walking into her bedroom so he could jump her. Instead, she flopped down in the chair at the dark end of the living room. She yawned and made some noise pulling the footstool closer and plunking her feet down on it.
Then she waited.
He was waiting too.
For nearly an hour he waited, until his lust for her got the better of him. She could feel his hatred of her, of her raw femininity, and the way it taunted him. She could feel his rage building to the point where he had to do something about it.
He stepped quietly into the living room.
It wasn’t a big house. The hall from the bedroom entered right into the center of the living room, so he wasn’t far away from her. In his mind he measured the few strides and big lunge it would take for him to be on her. Because of the isolation of her cabin and with him being so much bigger than her, he felt safe and in complete control. He knew he had her where he wanted her. His mind was already filled with visions of the things he intended to do to her.
Those thoughts petrified her.
When he took another step into the living room, he saw her arm resting on her leg. He froze when he saw the gun in her hand that she had leveled at him.
When he took a closer look and saw that it was a .22, he grinned and put his hands half up in fake surrender.
“Whoa there pretty lady. You aren’t going to blast away at me with that little peashooter, are you?”
His grin reflected the sinister thoughts filling his head but revealed absolutely no fear.
“Could be,” she said. “We’ll have to see how it goes.”
He lowered his hands. “I don’t think a pretty little thing like you would have the nerve to shoot someone, especially someone who only means to get to know you a little better.”
She calmly stared, gun still pointed at him.
“Besides, even if you did have the nerve to shoot at me,” he said as he gestured at her gun, “and even if you could manage to hit me, that little thing wouldn’t do me much harm before I got over there and took it away from you.”
“It would do enough harm if I shot you between the eyes.”
Her gun barrel followed every slight movement he made.
He glared for a moment before his grin returned. “I don’t think you’re that good of a shot, especially in the dark. How about I take that thing away from you and shove it up your pretty little ass?”
“How about I shoot those diamonds out of your earlobes just to show you how good a shot I am.” She cocked her head. “You know, most guys with an earring only wear one.”
He reflexively touched one of his ears before letting his hand drop. “Yeah? Well I’m twice what most guys are.” His expression turned murderous.
He suddenly started to take a lunging stride toward her.
Angela had the gun up in both hands and pulled off two shots before he’d finished the stride. She could see the splash of blood as his earlobes, along with their diamonds, were blown off.
He lurched to a stop as he put his hands to each ear.
“Goddamn it!” he screamed. “You motherfucking little cunt!”
His right foot started forward. Angela fired before his left foot could leave the ground. The round blew apart his left kneecap like a clay pigeon. He crumpled to the ground, clamping both hands over his knee as he screamed and rolled and cursed.
Angela, still sitting in the chair, her feet propped up on the footrest, hadn’t moved yet, except to fire her gun those three times.
“You goddamn little bitch! I’m going to break your arms off and stuff them up your fucking cunt!”
He managed to pull himself up, hopping on his good leg to get his balance. He yanked a knife from a sheath at his belt under his vest. When he lifted it over his head, Angela put a round through the joint in his wrist, shattering the bones. The round left a splatter of blood as it went through the wall behind him. The knife clattered across the floor.
“Fuck!” he screamed. “What the fuck’s wrong with you! You got no fucking right to do this!”
Angela didn’t answer. She got up and walked around him toward the hallway between the kitchen and bedroom. He was cradling his injured wrist.
On her way past, without a word, she fired a round into his other knee, shattering the patella. He fell over on his side, clamping his good hand over the freshly wounded knee.
Angela opened the basement door. She gestured with her gun.
“This way. Move.”
“Move? Are you fucking crazy? I can’t stand up!”
“I didn’t tell you to stand up, I told you to move. You’ve still got a good hand. Use it to drag yourself in here.”
She saw him look toward the knife on the floor. She walked around him, just out of reach of his good hand, her gun pointed at his face the whole time, and picked up his knife.
“I think by now you ought to know that I don’t miss. Now drag your sorry ass over to that doorway. I’m not going to tell you again.”
Panting as the pain was beginning to bear down on him in earnest, he finally did as she ordered and propped himself up on one elbow and his good hand to drag himself across the wooden floor. He grunted with each pull, leaving a smeared blood trail behind. He reminded her of a wounded seal.
He stopped, propped up on his one good arm, halfway into the dark doorway.
“Keep going,” she said.
He looked back over his shoulder. “I can’t see! It’s pitch black! How the fuck do you expect—”
Angela slammed her boot solidly into his back between his shoulder blades. It was enough to topple him in and down the stairway. She could hear him thudding and thumping as he tumbled down the steep steps. When he finally smacked onto the floor at the bottom and came to a stop, he let out a groan.
Angela flipped on the lights and saw him crumpled at the bottom of the steps, only partially conscious. Without wasting a moment while he was dazed and out of it, she raced down the steps and, before he regained his senses, pulled a law-enforcement-grade zip-tie restraint from a box of them she had on a shelf. She twisted one arm behind his back and pressed her knee on it to hold him down while she collected his other arm and twisted it back behind him. She used the zip-tie cuffs to secure his wrists.
He howled in pain when she grabbed his bleeding wrist and yanked the plastic strap tight. For good measure, she put another pair of the zip-tie cuffs on his ankles. With his blown-out knees, she didn’t think he would be able to do anything, even without the handcuffs—and she could always put a bullet in his brain if things got out of hand—but she wanted to make sure he was immobile for what she had planned. She also wanted him to feel completely helpless, the way the red-haired girl had felt.
It was frightening to be in the presence of such a brutal killer. But at the same time she felt more alive than any time since she had been with her grandparents.
Angela rolled him over and waited patiently until he regained consciousness. Once he did, he turned his head, looking around. He twisted and flopped around trying to get free, looking like a fish out of water. He was strong, but not strong enough, especially with his injuries.
“Goddamn you!” he screamed at her. “Why the fuck are you doing this?”
Angela lifted an eyebrow at him. “You broke into my house and hid in my bedroom waiting to jump me while all kinds of nasty thoughts danced through your head, and you ask why I’m doing this?”
“I didn’t mean anything by it! I wasn’t going to hurt you!”
“Yeah, right.”
“You can’t just shoot someone like this! It’s illegal! I’m going to call the police on you. I’m going to sue your fucking ass for everything you’ve got!”
Ignoring his threats, Angela went to one knee beside him, the wrist of her gun hand resting over her other knee.
“I’m bursting with questions,” she said. “I’d like you to give me answers.”
“Fuck you!” he yelled. He was so angry he was drooling spittle. “I’m not telling you a fucking thing!”
“Really?”
Angela got up and went to a shelf, where she retrieved a handheld propane blowtorch and a flint igniter that had belonged to her grandfather. She opened the valve on the propane tank, put the steel cup of the igniter up by the tip of the blowtorch, and squeezed the spring steel handles to strike the flint. After the blowtorch lit, she adjusted the flame and then carried it over to her houseguest.
Angela again went to one knee beside him and plunked the blowtorch down beside him where he could see it.
“Like I said, I’m just full of questions.”
He screamed and flopped trying to get away. “Fuck you! I’m not telling you anything!”
Angela picked up the torch. “Oh, I think you are.”
“If you know what’s good for you, you’ll let me go!”
“Tell me about the girl with red hair.”
He froze, his panicked eyes turning up at her. “What?”
“The girl with red hair. I want you to tell me everything you did to her.”
“I don’t know any girl with red hair!”
Angela swiped the flame across his face. His flesh blackened. He screamed and shook his head to get it away from the torch, so she put the tip of the flame to his upper arm. The fat beneath the flesh bubbled and the skin crackled. The whole room smelled like cooking meat. He panted and squealed.
It was exhilarating.
“Every detail,” she repeated as she held the flame up before his eyes.
His gaze went between the hissing flame and her eyes. “I didn’t mean anything by it. It was an accident. It was just rough sex, that’s all.”
Angela shoved the tip of the flame toward his left eye. It burned his eyelashes off. He howled with a bloodcurdling scream as he jerked his head violently from side to side.
She planted a boot on his jaw to keep his face still. In order to find out if her vision was accurate, if it had really happened the way she saw it, she needed him to tell her the details of what he had done. She knew without doubt that he was a killer, and yet she still had a hard time believing that she could actually have visions of such things. She had to know for sure if he really did everything to the red-haired girl that she saw in that vision, or if she had only imagined it.
With her boot on his jaw and using all her weight to hold his head still, she burned out his left eye.
She took her boot away and let him scream and flop for a while. As he shook in pain, Angela leaned in closer.
“Every detail. Start at the beginning.”
He looked again at the flame with his good eye. His jaw trembled uncontrollably. She saw him not as a man, but as what he really was—a monster who murdered women. He might as well have been a rabid dog that needed to be put down. What he once might have been, he no longer was. He was now a killer who would kill again given the chance. In fact, he had intended to murder her this night and have sex with her corpse.
“I took her to an abandoned building. I told you—we had rough sex. That’s all.”
Angela lifted the torch.
“The next time you lie to me I’m going to burn out your other eye, and that will only be the beginning. I want every detail. Beginning to end. The time has come for a full confession. Don’t leave out anything.” She thumped the propane torch on the floor to make her point. “Start talking.”
With the blowtorch sitting close, he finally abandoned all resistance and began spilling out everything he had done. He almost seemed relieved to confess his sins.
Every detail matched exactly the vision she’d had that first instant she saw him in the bar and knew that he was a killer.
It felt somehow amazing, but at the same time it sickened her to be in the mind of a killer, to see what he saw, what he had done, to be there and witness the terrifying, lonely helplessness of his victim. Angela was now that young red-haired girl’s only advocate.
It had been his first kill. It had been an orgy of rage that unlocked all his pent-up hatred and urges. It was his initiation to becoming a killer. Angela had put an end to it.
She still wasn’t sure how she was able to do such a thing, but that melted away into insignificance once she had confirmed that she had gotten every detail right. All that mattered now was that she could do it.
That night, something snapped in her, the same way it had snapped when that bigger girl had punched her.
She had passed through that mental doorway to become something she had never been before. She felt a new purpose in life. She had a new reason to live.
There were killers, and then there was her.
She was chaos among them. She was a disrupter. She was the unexpected, the unanticipated, the fly in their ointment. She was imbalance in their perfect equation of evil.
Angela had found purpose.
She spent the next three days down in the basement with the killer. He spent the next three days in hell on earth.
She had wanted it to never end.