SIX
Angela clamped on to Owen’s wrist with both hands lest he pull her hair out by the roots as he dragged her across the rough ground. Her weight was no problem for him to handle. With the urgency with which he pulled her along, and with the way he was holding her by her hair, twisting her neck around, she could only get in a half step here and there. Most of the time, she was off balance as she was dragged like a rag doll.
Angela didn’t say anything. She knew Owen had done all the listening he intended to do.
When they reached the pickup, instead of pulling her into the cab as she had expected—the cab where her gun was—he went around to the back of the truck. He dropped the tailgate with his free hand, hopped up, and with one swift yank hauled her up by her hair.
Owen threw her down in the bed of the truck. He was done with proving to her that he was no ordinary guy. He had switched into psycho mode and was now intent only on what he wanted. He would now dictate what was going to happen. She knew that she shouldn’t expect anything less of him. She had told him, after all, that she liked guys who took what they wanted.
Angela was acutely aware of how very alone they were, and that no one would hear her screams any more than they had heard Carrie’s.
In a flash he was on top of her, pawing at her.
“I like your tits,” he said in a breathless pant laced with lust. “I don’t like those big, fake, plastic tits most whores have these days. I like real tits, like yours.”
“Kiss me,” she whispered urgently into his ear.
He pushed a knee up between her legs, forcing them open as he pressed his mouth over hers. His breath stank of alcohol.
Angela pressed her mouth back at him, encouraging him. He responded by pushing his tongue into her mouth. She didn’t resist. He unbuckled his belt and unzipped his pants, letting his uncomfortable erection spring out before going for the zipper of her shorts.
As his tongue probed deep into her mouth and his hand was busy fumbling with opening her shorts, she reached down to the top of her right boot, her fingers searching blindly.
Once she found what she was looking for and had a firm grip on the handle, she abruptly clamped her teeth down on his tongue as hard as she possibly could and pulled her head back.
Owen cried out in surprise, anger, and pain. His immediate instinct was self-preservation, so he leaned forward, going with her to keep his tongue from being torn open by her teeth should he jerk back.
At the same time as she clamped down on his tongue with her teeth, Angela yanked the knife from its sheath in her boot. She rammed her left forearm against his throat, abruptly pushing him back as she kept her teeth tightly clenched on his tongue, leaving less than an inch between their lips.
In that instant of an opening she swept the knife up between their faces and severed his tongue.
Owen fell back from the sudden release of tension, gasping in shock and confusion. Being as drunk as he was and the blade as sharp as it was, he didn’t feel it immediately. She could see by his expression that his intoxicated brain was scrambling to process what had just happened. Angela spit out his bloody, detached tongue.
As the pain began to register, Owen screamed, but it came out as more of a gurgling cry than a scream. One hand came up to cover his mouth as he tried to make sense of what had just happened. Blood seeped out between his fat fingers to run down his chin.
As he grasped what she’d done, anger flashed to the forefront of his mind. He grabbed her by the throat with his free hand. Angela stabbed the blade into his arm between the humerus and his bulging biceps, then pulled forcefully, severing the muscle in half. By the volume of blood spurting out, she knew she’d cut the brachial artery. The warm, wet blood flooded across her chest and bare midriff.
Despite the severity of the injury, his big hand managed to clamp her throat in a death grip. Angela gritted her teeth against the pressure of him trying to crush her windpipe and slashed the straining tendons on the inside of his wrist. As the muscles drew back up into his forearm, his fingers went slack. His arm finally flopped down onto the bed of the truck.
When he made the mistake of taking his other hand from his bloody mouth and again reaching for her throat, she slashed the inside of that wrist, then cut the bundle of tendons at the inside of his elbow before he had time to flinch back.
Just that quick, both his arms were largely put out of commission.
Angela leaned in. “Aren’t you glad I didn’t wait any longer?”
His eyes wide, he stared at her, confused by the question. He didn’t know what she meant.
She grabbed his shriveled penis hanging from his open pants. “Aren’t you glad that was your tongue in my mouth, and not your dick?” She showed him a grim smile. “See? Things could always be worse. And believe me, they are going to get worse.”
Finally realizing the full magnitude of the danger he was in, Owen raged and managed to prop himself up on one elbow as he banged his heels on the truck bed, trying to gain traction to scramble to his feet so he could at least stomp her to death. Before he could get his drunken balance, Angela turned the knife in her hand, holding it like an ice pick, reached around, and drove the blade into his left kidney from behind.
Owen stiffened from the shock of pain. It locked his breath in his lungs. It stiffened his legs out straight. Eyes wide, he couldn’t even scream.
Everything had happened so blindingly fast that he was not only bewildered, but now in the grip of immobilizing pain.
“Just when you thought things were going so good, here they are suddenly going oh so wrong. Right, Owen?”
Angela yanked the knife out and held the double-edged blade up before his eyes. She didn’t ever want to have to worry in an emergency if she had the knife turned the right way. With a double-edged blade, that was never a problem. There was always a cutting edge ready to serve her wishes.
“The secret to a good flesh knife is not using it for anything else,” she explained to him. “I never so much as open an envelope with my flesh knives. I save them for men like you. That way they effortlessly slice through flesh. I think you can tell that I take exceptionally good care of my blades. Right, Owen?”
As she was talking, at the same time she was gripping the handle of the knife, she reached around him. Using two fingers on his lower spine, she felt for the gap below the L3 vertebra. It was somewhat difficult with the way his legs were beginning to flail.
“What you’re thinking right now is ‘This is it. It’s either me or her.’ Right, Owen?” She leaned closer and whispered into his ear. “Isn’t that what you’re thinking, Owen? Well, I’ve got to tell you, ever since you came into the bar, I’ve known all along that one way or another it was going to be you.”
Once she found the area of the disk between the L3 and L4 vertebrae, she swept her left arm around his thick neck and pulled his head toward her as she pushed a knee into his gut. Bending him forward arched his back, opening the space between the vertebrae. She plunged the knife between them.
With all the fibrous sinew around that area of the spine it took committed force, but such a sharp, double-edged blade punched right through. She levered the knife handle from side to side. With each sweep, the blade scraped against the bone of vertebrae as it sliced apart the disk and severed his spinal cord.
Owen’s legs flopped down, at last motionless.
Each huffing breath as he gasped in pain and shock expelled droplets of blood all over her. She could see in his eyes that he was stunned by how fast it had all happened.
“Do you know what my name means, Owen?”
He looked at her, dumbfounded, unable to answer.
“Do you!” she screamed. “Do you know what it means?”
Terrified, he shook his head, never taking his gaze from her. Owen was not at all used to being on the wrong end of terror. She knew he was trying to assess the damage, trying to figure out if he could still make it out of this alive.
“I told you that my name means ‘angel’ in Italian? Remember?”
He nodded, panic-stricken at what she might do next.
“Good.” She arched an eyebrow at him. “But do you know what ‘angel’ means?”
Eyes wide, he quivered as he shook his head, unable to give any answer without his tongue except a groaning moan she couldn’t understand.
Angela abruptly pushed the knife in just below his rib cage until it found his liver.
Owen gasped, his eyes watering and going even wider as the pain of it reached his brain. He let out a high-pitched, falsetto squeal.
“Angela—Angel—means ‘messenger from God,’ ” she patiently explained to him. “So you see, Owen, you can’t really blame me for this, now can you? After all, I’m just the messenger. Right?”
As he struggled, twisting his torso, he only succeeded in slicing up his own liver on the double-edged blade, increasing his level of pain. Blood ran over her fist holding the knife and down her arm. She could feel it dripping off her elbow.
“You asked me before if the tattoo across my throat was some kind of joke. Remember? I told you that maybe one day you could answer that question yourself. I think that you ought to understand the meaning, now. Right, Owen? The meaning of my tattoo? The meaning of ‘Dark Angel’?
“So, you see, maybe I really am a messenger from God. An angel. But now you know that some angels are dark angels. Get it, now, Owen?”
“Peege opt.” Tears streamed from his eyes. “Peege opt.”
Without his tongue, that was the best he could do to form the words he so desperately wanted to get out.
“Please stop?” She cocked her head as she looked at him from under her brow. “Is that what you’re saying, Owen? Please stop? You are asking a dark angel for mercy, then?”
He nodded, relieved that she had understood the words.
Angela glared at him a moment before speaking in a soft voice. “That was what Carrie said when you were using your knife on her, isn’t it, Owen? When you were raping her? Isn’t that what she said to you? Please stop?”
He cried out in agony at understanding.
He may have thought it was revenge for Carrie.
Angela considered it more than that. A great deal more.
Angela considered it justice. Not justice in some abstract legal sense, but human justice.
Clear, cold, unflinching justice.
“There is no leeway for mercy in this, Owen. None.”
She slipped the blade in between two ribs, into his left lung. When she withdrew the knife, air hissed out, bubbling blood from the wound as his lung collapsed.
“You’re an aberration, Owen. A fucking monster living among normal people. You shouldn’t be allowed to live so you can hurt innocent people, like Carrie, or the other three women you murdered. It was their terrible misfortune to have crossed paths with you.
“Unfortunately for you, I’m an anomaly, too. A freak of nature. Maybe I really am a messenger from God sent to eliminate fucking aberrations like you. What do you think, Owen?
“I can’t seem to have a normal life, a happy life, like other people. Maybe I’m not meant to. Maybe I’m only meant to kill lunatics like you before they can hurt anyone else. What do you think?
“I mean, I do seem to have a knack for attracting psychos. Seems like I’m a lunatic magnet.” She grinned at him. “Maybe that’s my reason to exist.
“Then again, maybe I’m just a freak of nature. Know what I mean, Owen? After all, I do so fucking enjoy the hell out of this. I live for it. Kind of like you, Owen. I think only a guy like you could truly understand the pleasure I get from inflicting this kind of suffering and terror, from the blood, from the act of killing another human being.”
Owen gasped for air. He had lost a lot of blood. Those gasps hissed and wheezed through the knife wound in his collapsed lung.
By the icy dread in his eyes, she could tell that Owen understood he had run across that rare someone just as twisted as him.
He had encountered the flip side of his own coin.
Angela smiled as she pushed the blade into his gut, slicing through muscle and intestines. Owen stiffened, holding his breath, immobilized by the agony. Tears streamed down his cheeks.
His warm, slippery blood was still running all over the front of her. It felt good. It felt glorious. It made her feel alive.
Angela was in her element. She had this monster right where she wanted him and she was tripping on it the way her mother tripped on drugs. She didn’t want it to ever end.
Her mother often told her—Angela thought as a way of somehow justifying what she did—that when you do a line you live forever. That’s what Angela was feeling—like she was living forever in that moment.
Every synapse in her brain was firing to pull it all in so she could savor it, remember it. She wanted the feeling to last forever. Just like her mother when she was rolling.
Angela slammed the full length of the double-edged blade into another spot. It went in effortlessly, deliciously. Her head tipped back as her eyes rolled up in ecstasy at the feeling. She could sense the tip of the blade finding a vital, tender spot inside him.
The pleasure of it ran a shiver up her spine.
Her head came back down. “I have some bad news for you, Owen,” she murmured as she pushed the blade in again, just for the exquisite pleasure of feeling it slide through his flesh, muscle, and viscera. “I’m afraid you’re not going to be able to be an organ donor. You’re not going to have anything left worth donating.”
Owen wept in utter agony. For the first time in his life he was experiencing the helpless suffering he visited on others.
Using a knife to kill someone was hard, messy, tiring work. It was also dangerous. A great many people cut themselves badly when using a knife either to defend themselves or to attack someone. A lot of force was required and blood was slippery. More often than not, their hand would slip down off the handle, cutting their palm and fingers on the blade. Because they were using such force, such injuries were usually quite serious.
Angela knew better. Her knife had a cross guard to prevent her hand from slipping up onto the blade. The cross guard wasn’t large, but it was big enough to provide a stable place to brace her right knuckle and thumb for leverage. She was always conscious of being careful not to accidentally cut herself whenever she did knife work, and the cross guard helped protect her hands.
Angela knew what she was doing and did it well. She’d never cut herself.
Owen groaned incoherently. Tears streamed from his eyes as he trembled.
“Carrie cried just like you’re crying now, didn’t she Owen? She didn’t want to suffer, to be hurt, to die, just like you don’t want those things to happen to you. Right, Owen? The only fucking difference is that she didn’t deserve it.”
Angela gritted her teeth as she twisted the blade inside him. “You do.”
He let out another wet cry.
“Right now, Owen, all you know is pain.” Angela peered into his eyes. “But through pain comes knowledge, realization, understanding. Now, in your pain, maybe you can see yourself for what an evil monster you truly are.” Her brow drew down. “An evil fucking monster who shouldn’t be allowed to live among decent people. Right, Owen? Are you beginning to understand?”
Owen nodded as he wept. She wasn’t sure he understood any of it.
Angela didn’t really care.
She did.