FIFTEEN
The next time one of those unexpected mental doorways opened was several years after she had moved to the cabin. She had made sure to keep her grades high enough that she was able to graduate high school. Being out of high school was a huge relief. Graduation was a joyful event, because it meant formally leaving the misery of childhood behind.
Angela had always thought of herself as an adult trapped in a child’s body. At long last, her body and mind had reached parity. She was truly an adult, even if not legally until she was twenty-one.
Being done with school and on her own, she was finally able to work full-time. One of the houses she cleaned was for a couple who were both lawyers. Mr. and Mrs. Bollard appreciated the job Angela did at their house, so they asked her to clean their office as well. Since they were pleasant and treated her fairly, Angela was happy to do it.
One day, as she was emptying wastebaskets, she overheard Mr. Bollard telling his wife that he needed to get some papers across town. They were debating how they would do it, since it was urgent they get some signatures but neither could leave the office right then.
Angela straightened. “I’ll do it.”
The both looked up at her. “What?” Mr. Bollard asked.
“I’d be happy to do it.” When they stared at her for a moment, she added, “I have a courier service,” she lied. “I can deliver the papers for you.”
They shared a “why not?” look with each other. Mrs. Bollard slid the papers into an envelope, wrote a name and address on it, and handed the manila envelope to Angela.
“Ask him to sign the papers. When he’s done, please bring them right back here.”
“No problem,” Angela said.
After that, they gradually came to depend on her to deliver things like court documents on a regular basis. One day when she brought a package to them, Mr. and Mrs. Bollard asked her to sit down.
“You do know that you’re charging half the going rate other courier services charge, don’t you?”
Angela shrugged. “It’s enough to cover my costs and make me some money. I appreciate the work and I’m satisfied with what I make doing it. It’s an attractive enough price that you keep using me instead of anyone else. You’re happy, I’m happy.”
Mr. Bollard leaned back in his leather chair and tapped a finger on the armrest as he studied her face.
“You’re more than you appear.”
Angela frowned. “Excuse me?”
He shrugged. “You look … well, you don’t exactly look like the determined and meticulous young woman you really are.”
Angela frowned. “Are you unhappy with something I do?”
“No,” he said. “No, not at all. It’s just that we’ve learned we can depend on you. You don’t screw up. You get contracts and papers where they need to go, when they need to be there.”
“So, what’s the problem?”
“You don’t have a business license, do you?”
“Well …”
“Insurance?”
“I have insurance.”
“I don’t mean on your car. I mean, do you have a business license and business insurance? Are you insured and bonded? Did you post a bond to have a courier service?”
Angela let out a sigh. She didn’t have any of that. She imagined that the money she made with her new courier service was about to evaporate.
“No,” she admitted.
He appraised her for a time, considering something.
“You do a good job, Angela, taking care of our house, and the office, as well as the other places you clean, and you always get documents where they need to go on time, and get them back to us on time. But you need to have a business license if you are going to do this kind of service for us, and you need to be bonded to have a courier service. We’re lawyers. We can’t use you without everything being legal.”
Angela could feel herself sinking into her chair. “I see.”
“I’ll tell you what. My wife and I can handle all the legal matters. You’ll need to have an official business name and the money for the bond, but we can take care of the paperwork and filings for you so that you don’t get into legal trouble.”
Angela sat up straighter. “You would do that for me?”
“Sure,” Mrs. Bollard said. “You’ve helped us out of spots enough times.”
“What would the bond cost?”
Mr. Bollard smiled. “We’ll make you a deal. We’ll handle all that and in return, you just deliver documents for us for two months for no charge. That should cover the costs. After you’re legal, then we can not only use you, we can recommend your courier service to other lawyers and people we know.”
“That would be great. Thank you both.”
With that deal, Angela moved up from maid service to courier service. Once she had a business name that played on the meaning of her name, and her license, she bought herself a plastic, magnetic sign for the door of her car. ANGELA’S MESSENGER SERVICE. GIVE YOUR PACKAGE WINGS.
Some of the clients the Bollards dealt with were people in a variety of legal trouble. Some were criminals. The people in legal trouble started to ask her to deliver documents for them as well. Besides the lawyers she handled, she became known among people in legal trouble as a trustworthy courier service. They liked that she made a point of her service being confidential.
She never asked questions and she never talked about her other clients. She discovered that the more confidential she kept everything, the more business she got. Not only from people in legal trouble, but even from places like the hospital, where the law required patient privacy.
It was the end of one hot summer day, during one of those deliveries, that the new mental doorway opened for her.
Mrs. Bollard had given her a package of legal documents to deliver to a seedy little bar at the edge of town, called Barry’s Place. The plain block building was rather dark inside. There were people at small tables and a few at the bar. A rotating ball in the ceiling projected sparkling light over everything.
When she spotted a man behind the bar, she crossed the room, weaving her way among the patrons. He watched her out of the corner of an eye as he dried glasses.
She leaned in over the bar to be heard over the rock music.
“I’m looking for Barry.”
“I’m Barry. I own the place. What can I do for you?”
Angela handed him the envelope with legal papers.
He looked at the return address of the law firm. “Ah, good. Thanks.”
Angela turned to leave, but he told her to hold on. She turned back.
He smiled, but not in a slimy way. Angela knew slimy smiles filled with meaning when she saw them. Barry’s smile was pleasant and respectful.
“I don’t mean this in a sleazy way,” he said, “but you have some damn fine legs.”
Angela was wearing low-rise shorts. She knew he had been looking at her legs when she walked across the room.
“Thanks,” she said cautiously, fearing a proposal.
“Have you ever thought about tending bar?”
That wasn’t what she had been expecting. Angela made a bit of a face. “No. I don’t know anything about being a bartender.”
“It’s not all that hard.” He gestured around. “This isn’t a fancy place. I can teach you all you need to know. Besides, you have the most important part down pat already.”
She frowned. “The most important part?”
He gestured with the hand holding the rag. “Those legs of yours. I mean … damn. Legs like that bring in business and they could earn you more in tips than you could ever make delivering packages.”
“Really?”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty.”
Barry sighed. “Crap. You need to be twenty-one. How long until you’re legal age?”
“Five months.”
He made a face as he considered the obstacle. “You come back here on your birthday and I can give you some part-time work. If it doesn’t make you at least double what you make with your courier service, I’ll make up the difference, but I guarantee you, it’s not going to cost me a dime.”
Angela thought about it briefly. She would certainly like to make more money. If she worked at the bar at night, she could get a better car and still have her courier service. She didn’t want to give that up.
“My name is Angela. I’ll see you on my birthday.”
Barry flipped the towel back to lay it across his shoulder. “Cut those shorts shorter when you come back, Angela, and you’ll make triple what you make now.”
Angela smiled. She always thought her legs were too long. If they could make her more money without having to wrap them around some scumbag, she thought that she might as well do it.
“Deal. I’ll be back just as soon as I’m twenty-one.”
“See you then.” Barry smiled, but in a friendly, nonthreatening way, before picking up a few empty boxes and heading into the back room.
When Angela turned around, she met the gaze of a man sitting close by at the bar.
He was a bull of a man, at least six-four and 250 pounds. His sandy-blond hair had been pulled back in a ponytail. His hairline was just starting to recede, the way it sometimes did prematurely with men in their late twenties. He had on a sleeveless denim jacket that showed off not only his tangle of tattoos that colored both arms, but his muscles.
All the tattoos were grim. There were skulls, snakes, reptilian monsters, and graves with ravens overhead. A snake tattoo coiled up from beneath his denim jacket to bare its fangs on the side of his neck.
He had a diamond, or maybe a fake diamond, in each earlobe. Although, just his presence told her they had to be real. He was the kind of man who would not appreciate having it pointed out that he was wearing fake diamonds.
For the first time in her life and with absolute certainty, she realized that she was staring into the eyes of a killer.
In that instant, she was sucked through that doorway and her life changed irrevocably.
Besides comprehension, fear also flashed through every fiber of her being. She was frozen in place. Sweat felt like ice on her skin.
In that instant, gazing into the man’s eyes, she had a vision. It was something that had never happened to her before. She saw this man straddling a girl with short red hair. They were in one of the old, abandoned factories with broken windows. Angela knew that place. It was just getting dark in that vision. He pulled off the girl’s jeans and panties so she was naked from the waist down. She was begging him not to hurt her. She promised not to tell anyone if he would let her go.
She trembled in terror. Angela knew the feeling well.
In her mind, she could see how excited he was becoming by her begging. It thrilled him. He got off on her fear. He ripped open her blouse. She screamed and begged. He suddenly stabbed her in each breast. It was a quick, one-two jab. It wasn’t deep enough to mortally wound her. He didn’t want her to die yet. He wanted to terrify her.
Her screams excited him even more than her begging.
He started stabbing her, making her scream all the louder. He held the knife in both hands, lifting it over his head and then driving it down over and over as fast as he could. He continued stabbing her in a frenzied fury even after she had gone still.
As she was gurgling her last few breaths, eyes wide open, he undid his pants and penetrated her. He didn’t orgasm until she was long dead. He liked that. It gave him a sense of triumph to fuck her into death.
When he finally pulled out of her, he went wild, slashing her face repeatedly until it was unrecognizable. He found a nearby piece of iron and used it to bash out her teeth. When he was done he wrapped her in a piece of burlap that had been lying in a pile of rubble in a corner. He then carried her outside to an old cistern with a concrete lid. He was muscular and had no trouble lifting it aside. He threw the girl with red hair down into the lonely darkness and then replaced the lid.
He doubted that anyone would ever find her before she rotted away to nothing, but if they did, with her skull crushed and without her teeth he figured they would have a hard time of identifying her. He would later throw the pieces of teeth into the woods.
“Well, well,” the man sitting there at the bar said. The man whose visions she’d just had. “Aren’t you just the prettiest little thing.”
Angela stood paralyzed by what she had just seen in her mind’s eye, what she had seen this man do to an innocent girl with red hair.
The whole thing had all come to her in a millisecond. It was as if she were recalling a vivid memory.
His memory.
She could even feel the shiver of his sexual gratification as he’d come in the freshly dead corpse.
She didn’t know how she knew the whole thing was true, but she knew it just as surely as if she had been there when he had done it.
“What’s the matter,” he asked. “Pussy got your tongue?”
“Fuck off,” she said to the guy, her gaze still locked on his. She knew saying that would bait the guy. She wanted more than anything to bait him. “Asshole,” she added for good measure.
Angela had no idea how she could have recognized a killer for what he was. She didn’t have any idea how she could have had visions of him murdering the girl with short red hair.
Angela knew in that moment that there was no going back through that doorway.
Not ever.
She knew that her life would never be the same.
The only explanation that made any sense to her was that she truly was a freak of nature. Her mother’s constant drug use, along with that of the tweaker who had fathered her, had left Angela to grow and develop in a toxic broth of what was flowing around in her mother’s veins.
Angela had been born broken.
The only thing she knew for sure was that she had, for the first time ever in her life, come eye-to-eye with a killer.
It terrified her.
But more than that, it excited her.