He unlocked the door, including the deadbolt, and entered the apartment like a man who’d broken into more than his share of ladies’ apartments.  He wasn’t on tiptoes like inexperienced burglars would be.  He was flatfooted, moving stealthily, making certain that he avoided that part of the floor that creaked.  And he knew every part that creaked.  That was his preparation.  Whenever Nikki was at work late at night, and the rest of the apartment dwellers were indoors worrying about their own lives, he entered her apartment.  Smelled her clothes.  Laid on her bed.  Came thinking about her juicy black ass.  Went through her things.

It was a creep’s life, but what did he care?  It got him through the night.  But he was always careful to place everything back as it were.  He prepared!

Not that he planned to ever have to use his preparation.  Nikki had too much mouth for him to take that chance.  She was a feisty bitch he didn’t want to tangle with.

But she’d crossed a line tonight.  Nobody talked back to him the way she had.  And especially not some nothing nigger on the begging list.  She was going to pay dearly for what she owed him tonight, and then he was going to do to her what he had to do to his wife that time in Tahoe when she disrespected him.  He was going to silence her forever.  And take pleasure in doing so too.

But first, she was going to give to him what he felt was rightfully due to him.  She was going to pay her rent, all right, but she was going to pay it on her back!

He could hear her snoring in the bedroom, as he made his way further into her apartment.  She was clean, he’d give her that.  One of the cleanest apartments in the building.  He’d clean up the mess, too, when he was finished with her.  All the cum he was going to enjoy spilling all over her, was going to be wiped clean.  And then he’d take out the trash.  It was going to take a hefty bag, big as that ass was, but he’d take her out.

He went, first, into her kitchen.  As he already knew, she had a knife holder filled with generally weak, in-need-of-sharpening kitchen knives.  He took the entire holder and placed it on her top cabinet shelf, so far back she would need a chair to reach it, and so behind everything else that she wouldn’t even see it.  Just in case, he thought.

Then he pulled out his own tools:  the rope, his own big knife, and the ether-filled cloth he was going to place to her big mouth to put her to sleep.  Then he was going to have uninterrupted pleasure.  For as long as he could.  Maybe multiple times.  And then end it all.

And when he gingerly walked into that bedroom, and he saw her laying there with the covers pulled back, in a skimpy nightie that barely covered her ass, his dick began to get hard already.  He’d never admit it out loud, but Nikki, like a lot of black women in his building, had the kind of body he craved.  Curves going to town!  And every curve in just the right place.  He was going to enjoy this!

He sat the rope and knife on her dresser, and then walked to her bed.  As she slept the sleep of the seriously tired, he prepared the ether-filled cloth in his hand.  Then he slowly, delicately, lifted her nightgown just above her butt.  Tight and right, he thought, when he saw her bare butt.  Perfection!  And he touched that brown mound of gorgeousness as if he was touching something remarkable.  But then, to wake her up so he could see the terror in her eyes when he put her into a drug-induced sleep she wouldn’t be waking up from prematurely, he rubbed her.

As soon as he rubbed, Nikki’s big eyes flew open and her body quickly turned onto its back.  When she saw that Louie was in her bedroom; that the building’s superintendent was in her apartment, she was, at first, confused.  She couldn’t get her brain to accept what she was seeing.  What was he doing in her apartment?

But Louie smiled when he saw the terror in her eyes.  This was going to be a piece of cake.  He had her exactly where he had envisioned she’d be.

But something clicked in her brain, and she began kicking the covers completely away and was about to scream a blood-curling scream.

But Louie readjusted, too, and came hard at her with that ether-filled cloth in his hand.  He attempted to smother her nose and put her out so that he could have that uninterrupted pleasure he’d been lusting for.

But Nikki wasn’t thinking about his pleasure.  She saw a man capable of ending hers.  And she fought for her life.  She wasn’t going out like this!  If she allowed him to put her to sleep, it would be over for her.

She kicked at him and kicked at him and moved her face, her nose, away from his aim.  He grabbed the back of her head, to try to hold her in place long enough for the drug to connect with her nostrils, but she was grabbing his hand with both of hers, and she was moving her head side to side to get away from him.

Louie was strong, but he wasn’t fit-strong, he was just man-strong.  She could handle man-strong.  She just had to get on her feet first.  And she struggled with him, and she struggled with him, until she had her foot in just the right position: partially hanging over the bed.  She wasn’t on them as she would have preferred, but she had to make it work.

She took the bottom of her foot, her heel, and kicked Louie as hard as she could in his groin.  It was just enough force to cause him to react.  And his first reaction was to drop that cloth and bend over, with both hands covering up in protection of his now pained manhood.

But it was enough.  Nikki rolled over and got out of bed on the opposite side of the bed, giving herself room to maneuver.  Then she really got busy.  She grabbed any and everything she could find and threw it at him.  He ducked and dodged as high heels, a lamp, an antique phone sailed past him.  But he was once-bitten.  He wasn’t allowing anything to hit his balls again.  He kept one hand in that compartment, and he warded off all comers with his other hand.

But he was stunned by the level of madness he was encountering.  He knew she was a feisty bitch.  He knew she would put up a fight.  But damn, he thought!  He never dreamed it would get this out of control!

But Nikki wasn’t done yet.  In her mind, he’d already violated her.  In her mind, if she tried to make a run for it he’d run her down and overpower her.  And no telling what he’d do then.  That was when she eyed the knife.

It was on the dresser near the bedroom door, sitting beside a freaking rope, and she knew that was her only way out.

But Louie saw what she was eyeing, and he knew what she was thinking.  And both of them made a run for that knife.  Both of them had to have that weapon of war!  But Louie was closer to their target, which gave him a great advantage.

But Nikki knew she had to have a backup plan.  And she had one.

As soon as Louie rushed for the knife, a knife he expected Nikki to run for, too, Nikki jumped up on the bed, ran across it, and jumped down onto the floor.  She grabbed that ether-filled cloth Louie had dropped and ran for Louie just as he grabbed that knife.  She jumped onto his back and tried to smother him the way he had tried to smother her.  But it was no use.  He flipped her over, causing her to crash into the dresser, spewing everything on it, and he swiped that knife at her, barely missing her.  Nikki knew she was in a hole.  A knife versus a cloth was no contest.

She had to use the only advantage she had, and that was her speed.  She jumped off of the dresser when he tried to swipe at her again, and she ran.  She ran out of that room.

With that knife still in his hand, Louie angrily ran out of the room after her.  He knew he had to run her down.  He couldn’t let her get to that front door!

But Nikki knew the front door would take too much time to open.  She knew a knife could sail faster than her feet.  She wasn’t running for the front door as Louie had expected, but she, instead, had planted her back against the wall just outside of her bedroom door.  And when Louie ran out of that door, she took that ether-filled cloth and smothered it over his nose.  It had to work, or she knew she’d be done for.

Louie began to wobble and stagger backwards as he attempted to reach up and remove her pressure on that cloth.  But it was too late.  He was losing strength, not gaining it.  And then he almost fell to his knees.

Nikki tried to take advantage of his weakened state, and take that knife, but Louie almost cut her.  She, instead, tried to get away from him.

But Louie was a big man.  It was going to take more than the amount of ether on that cloth to knock him out.  He was weakened, but still awake.

Nikki ran.  Louie was wobbled, but he ran after her.  He wasn’t going to catch her.  In his weakened state, he wasn’t going to catch her.  But he knew he didn’t have to catch her.  He just had to have an aim.  And he did.  He stopped and aimed that knife, ready to throw it and hit her squarely in the back, when she made a sudden change of course.  He was blindsided once again!

Instead of running out of the apartment, as he just knew she was trying to do, and therefore was aiming in that direction, Nikki ran into her kitchen.  But he smiled.  He’d already removed all of her knives out of sight.  He had her slick ass cornered now!

The ether still had him slowed, but not enough to ever stop him.  He hurried toward the kitchen, to finish the bitch off even though it was going to interfere with his own plans for pleasure.  But he had no choice now.  She had to go!

He ran toward that kitchen, and he crossed its threshold just as Nikki was coming out.  But she wasn’t coming by herself.  A gun, a little A-frame pistol, was in her hands.  And she was pointing that motherfucker like she aimed to use it.

He backed up quickly.

“What you wanna do now, Louie?” she asked him angrily as she aimed and moved toward him.  “What you wanna do?  What your bad ass wanna do now!”

“Put that gun away,” Louie was saying as he backed up.  “What’s wrong with you?  Why you acting like some crazy bitch for?”

“I got your crazy.”  Nikki didn’t normally hate, but she was hating on him.  “I got all kinds of crazy in each and every one of these bullets.  Just try me motherfucker.  I want your ass to just try me!”  She was trembling with rage.

And Louie, no fool, kept backing up.  But not to get away.  His fat ass couldn’t outrun a bullet!  But to get in position himself.

“Okay, you got me,” he said, and lifted his hands in surrender.

But as soon as he lifted his hands, the one hand still containing that knife was ready.  And he threw it toward her with a force that, if it connected, would kill her instantly.

Nikki leaped out of the way of the coming knife, but not before she fired one shot of her pistol.  Just one shot.

When she landed further over, and the knife hit the kitchen floor, and Louie fell to one knee, she realized that one shot was enough.  He had tried to take her life.  She, instead, took his.

At least that was what it looked like.  Her shot landed in Louie’s chest.  He looked at her as if he still couldn’t believe how wrong his plan had veered.  He was so methodical.  He was so careful.  But how could he plan for this kind of crazy?  How could he plan for this level of feistiness?  She had more fight in her than most dudes he knew!

And then he fell to his other knee, and then he fell over. 

Nikki was shaking, and angry, and terrified too.  She’d done it now.  She’d killed a man!  Her black ass was going to spend the rest of her life in prison, if not on death row, if they caught her!

Her brain was going nonstop.  What was she going to do?  They might believe it wasn’t her fault.  They might understand that he was in her apartment without her permission and had brought that ether cloth and that knife to do her harm.

OR . . . they might choose to believe the fantasy of it being a sadistic love night gone wrong, and she decided to kill the man she slept with and still owed rent money to.  It wasn’t rape, they could claim.  It was a woman trying to get out of paying her debt.

She could stay and tell her story, hoping they’d believe the truth.  She had a fifty-fifty chance of them believing her.

OR . . . she could get the hell out.

Life had taught her one thing in her thirty years on this earth: the odds were stacked against her.

She quickly stepped over Louie’s body, ran to her bedroom, put on a pair of jeans, a sweatshirt, and tennis shoes, grabbed her phone, her keys, and whatever money she had in an apartment that now felt like a deathtrap.  And with the smoking gun hidden on her person, she did what she came to believe was the only real option for a struggling, powerless woman like her.

She ran.

She got the hell out.