THIRTY-ONE
Once she hung up, Angela started doing a search on her phone for the name Nate Drenovic. Surprisingly, there were a number of entries, but they were in other cities. Then she found one in Milford Falls: Drenovic Tactical. Under the name it said “Combat Martial Arts.” From what she remembered of him, that sounded like the same guy.
Angela knew roughly where the address was located. She replaced the knife in her right boot, the suppressor in the other boot, and the gun inside her waistband at the small of her back. It was uncomfortable leaning back in the seat of the truck with the gun there.
She reminded herself that the gun was not meant to be comfortable. It was meant to be comforting.
She felt safer having the gun on her, rather than left in the truck where it had been useless to her when she had needed it most—all because she had been following the law. But she knew that even having a gun wasn’t the whole solution.
She found Drenovic Tactical in a seedy strip mall set back from a busy four-lane street. She didn’t know if Nate would remember her. She’d been fifteen, maybe nearing sixteen at the time. She didn’t know if he was still into drugs, but since he had a business she was hoping not. If he was, she would simply find someone else.
With all the scary men at her mother’s place, she had thought he was one of the more decent guys who hung around the trailer. But he wouldn’t have hung around unless he did drugs or ran with people who did. At the least, though, he hung around with the wrong crowd.
There was also the matter of his manslaughter conviction. That worried her. She wondered what she might be walking into.
At the moment, though, he was the only one she could think of for what she needed. At least it was a place to start. If she didn’t like what she found, she could always walk.
Angela parked in front of the storefront window painted black from the inside, with the name DRENOVIC TACTICAL in gold lettering outlined in red. Because the window was painted over, there was no way to see what might be inside. She opened the typical strip mall aluminum and glass door, which was also painted over in black.
Inside, the place was basically all one open room. While not big, it looked like plenty of space for martial arts training. The bottom six feet of the walls were painted black, with a red band above the black running around the room, and white the rest of the way up to a high ceiling with exposed ductwork and vents. There looked to be a bathroom in back, and there was a desk with a few folding chairs up against the blacked-out window in front. Wooden benches lined one wall. Most of the room was covered with mats.
Two men were practicing some sort of arm locks and escapes in the center of the room. One of them pretty much fit her memory of Nate.
The other was older, more muscular, with a buzz cut, a wifebeater undershirt, and lots of tattoos upon tattoos upon tattoos. He was doing the kind of steroid-induced sniffing and shoulder twitching that made her wonder if she’d made a mistake coming into the place. The guy was clearly amped up. His eyes were bugged out. From lots of experience at quickly judging men as she had been growing up, she knew that he was trouble.
Both men disengaged from grappling and came over to Angela.
Nate was a ruggedly good-looking guy, at most maybe five or six years older than her. He had short brown hair that was pleasing in its disorder. The tight, black, short-sleeved T-shirt he had on showed that he was ripped, but not muscle-bound like the other guy.
“Hey, hot stuff,” the tattooed guy said as he circled in close beside her. He aggressively grabbed her ass cheek. “Nice.”
In an instant Angela had the barrel of her gun pressed up under his chin, lifting his head back a few inches.
He froze.
“Did you hear that click?” she asked.
“Uh … yeah?”
“That was the safety coming off. I’ve had a very bad day and I’m in a really, really bad mood. Right now I’d like nothing more than an excuse to pull the trigger.
“If you so much as fantasize about touching me again I’m going to send a bullet ricocheting around the inside your thick cranium. Do you know what ‘cranium’ means, dumb fuck?”
Her tone of voice turned him cautious. “Yeah, I know.”
“What? What ‘cranium’ means? Or that you’re a dumb fuck?”
He didn’t seem to know what she wanted him to say. “Uh …”
“All right, Malcolm,” Nate said, “listen to me—I know what’s going through your head right now and believe me, you’re just starting and you haven’t had enough lessons yet to even think of trying to disarm this pissed-off young lady before she could pull the trigger.”
Nate gently put his fingers on Angela’s forearm. “It’s all right. I swear I won’t let him touch you again, so why don’t you put the gun away?”
Angela glanced at his eyes. They were calm and confident. She put the safety back on as she pulled the gun from under Malcolm’s chin. She slipped the weapon back into its holster.
Nate put a hand against Malcolm’s sweaty shoulder, right over a tattooed nuclear radiation symbol, backing him away a few steps. “I think we should call it a day. We’ll pick it up from there next week.” He pointed a thumb toward the door. “See you then.”
Malcolm frowned in confusion at what had just happened and his quick dismissal. His bug eyes twitched back and forth between Nate and Angela.
“Fucking little cunt,” he finally said.
Angela glared at him. “Sticks and stones.”
“All right, that’s enough,” Nate told Malcolm as he started forward. “You know that one of the things I teach is when to walk away. This is one of those times. You don’t need to prove that you can beat up a hundred-fifteen-pound girl. You’ve made your point. I’ll see you next week.”
Malcolm looked between them once more and then finally snatched his shirt off the back of a chair. With the shirt clutched in his fist, he stormed out the door.
When she looked back, Nate had a puzzled frown as he stared at her. “Do I know you? You look familiar.”
She could see in his eyes that he was a killer, but in some mystifying way it was different from the eyes of every killer she’d ever seen before. Looking into his eyes brought on that same primal, bone-chilling fear of a predator, but at the same time there wasn’t the vicious quality to go with it. She also didn’t have any visions of him killing, only vague shadows fighting. It was oddly disorienting, because it was alarming but at the same time calming.
“Kind of. I’m Angela Constantine. Sally’s daughter. You used to come around to the parties at our trailer.”
He snapped his fingers. A pleasant smile spread across his features as he pointed at her.
“Right … Sally’s daughter.” He gave her a quick look down and back up. “Damn, girl. When you grew up, you did it right.”
She was not in the mood for flattery. “Are you still doing drugs?”
The question momentarily threw him off. He recovered quickly.
“Nah,” he said with a dismissive gesture rather than get defensive, “that was a phase. I was hanging out with the wrong crowd.”
“In my experience, people who say that are the wrong crowd.”
He turned a little more serious. “If you really must know, it had to do with a girl named Becky that I thought I was in love with at the time. I would have walked off a cliff if she asked me to. I was young and stupid back then.” He waved off the subject. “So, what brings you here?”
“I’m interested in learning some self-defense.”
He smiled as he shook his head. “Are you sure that you need it? You’re pretty damn fast with that gun.”
Angela didn’t return the smile. “Guns can’t always save you. Sometimes you don’t have a gun when you need it most. Even if you do, you might not be able to get to it fast enough. Even worse, some people know how to take a gun away from you before you can use it to save yourself…. Sometimes you simply get overpowered.”
He turned more serious when he saw that she wasn’t smiling.
“You’re right. Not Malcolm—not yet, anyway—but there are people who can take a gun away from you before you know what happened and then you’re in a whole lot of trouble. If it’s a bad guy, you’re dead.”
Angela studied his eyes for a moment. “You went to prison for killing a guy. Why did you kill him?”
He lifted a hand as if in defense. “Whoa, there. What kind of question is that?”
“The kind of question I have to ask before I agree to let you teach me anything.”
“Before you agree … ?” He planted his fists on his hips. “What if I don’t want you as a student?”
“Then I’ll find someone else. I started with you because I always thought you were a decent guy, despite the people you were hanging out with. I’m a pretty good judge of character. I wanted to come to you first because I thought you would remember me and might be willing to help me.”
“I see.”
“So why did you kill a man?”
He chewed his bottom lip as he stared off for a moment, apparently considering if he wanted to answer her. Finally, he looked back at her.
“Becky—that girl I told you I was in love with—discovered meth. She was getting wasted on it more and more often. Whenever I asked her to stop she would call me a chickenshit loser. So, for a while, I went along with it. I didn’t want her to dump me so I smoked pot when she did meth or when we partied. At your house when she smoked crack and I would smoke weed. I was trying to fit into her world and be part of her life.
“But I finally grew up enough to realize that I deserved better, so I told Becky we were through and I quit seeing her. Quit cold turkey. It hurt and at the same time it was a relief, you know?
“Anyway, she was royally pissed. Becky was damn good looking and no one had ever dumped her before. She didn’t like it. She wanted revenge.
“She told this other guy—a guy she was two-timing me with but I hadn’t known about—that I beat her up all the time so she’d left me for him. The guy was always getting wired on angel dust. One night he came looking for me to avenge the damsel.
“He caught me leaving a convenience store. I told him he could have Becky with my blessings, but the guy wouldn’t listen to anything I said. I didn’t want to fight him. He wasn’t having it and he got really pissed when I simply kept him off me and wouldn’t fight him.
“Then he came at me with a knife. I could tell by his eyes that he was flying on angel dust, and that he was serious about intending to kill me.
“He was a big guy and he kept swinging that knife at me. I tried to hurt him enough to make him stop, but he was so high on PCP that he wasn’t feeling any pain. Finally, when he lunged at me, I put him down hard to buy me enough time to leave.
“The thing is, when I flipped him down on the ground he landed on the stub of a signpost that had been broken off by a car. It was a freak thing. It severed his spine at the base of his skull and killed him instantly.”
When Angela had lived at home there were people who did Supergrass—marijuana combined with PCP. She knew how much it messed people up. The ones who did straight PCP called it Rocket Fuel. It made them behave like they were insane. Angela hid from them.
“That sounds like self-defense to me.”
Nate lifted his arms in frustrated agreement. “It was! I was going to be cleared of any wrongdoing. But then this fucking asshole of a prosecutor came across the case. He was running for reelection at the time and he wanted to look tough on crime.
“He wanted a murder case to puff himself up to voters. He had a dead guy and me. So he said it was a love triangle and charged me with second-degree murder. He got that bitch, Becky, to testify against me. She loved that. She wanted revenge for me dumping her.
“Fortunately, the jury didn’t entirely believe her and they convicted me of the lesser charge of manslaughter. I served a little over two years. So there it is. That’s how I ended up killing a guy and serving time. Becky got to gloat to her friends how she’d put me away.”
“Who was the prosecutor?”
“John Babington. Jobs are scarce in Milford Falls to start with, but on top of that, being a convicted felon makes it nearly impossible to get hired. I’ve studied martial arts almost since I was in diapers. So, I decided to put it to use and open my own martial arts studio to make a living.”
“Could you have killed that guy intentionally, if you needed to?”
He looked like he couldn’t believe she doubted his ability. “In the first second he came at me I could have broken his neck. I could have killed him a dozen different ways if I had wanted to mess him up. No problem. But I wasn’t looking to kill him, or even hurt him. I was simply trying to leave. I was done with that drama queen and I didn’t want to get dragged back into a soap opera.
“But Babington was happy to fuck up my life as long as he could use my case to help him get elected.”