Crazy Wanda

by Terry Goodkind

  CRAZY WANDA

  An Angela Constantine Novella

  TERRY GOODKIND

  Copyright (c) 2018 by Terry Goodkind

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 1

  Just as Angela was locking her pickup before going in to her bartending job at Barry’s Place, trouble rolled up on a rickety, pink girl’s bicycle. Under the harsh glare of the light on the power pole at the edge of the lot, the frayed bill of the man’s leather baseball cap cast a shadow down over his gaunt face. His tattered white undershirt had tea-colored stains. The way his lips sank in around an unfiltered cigarette betrayed the fact that he was all gums. By his rattling cough as he had coasted to a stop, Angela was pretty sure that he either had lung cancer or was well on his way to getting it.

  The old man spread his legs and planted his feet on the ground to steady the bike as he cleared phlegm from his throat. He leaned to the side to spit out a big wad. At least he spit away from her.

  His gaze drifted up from her knee-high boots, up her bare, long legs and cutoff shorts, finally reaching her face. He squinted his left eye against a rising curl of smoke as he took a drag from the cigarette between his sunken lips. The glow from that long drag momentarily lit the coarse stubble covering the contours and folds of his leathery skin.

  He took the cigarette from his mouth with the first two fingers of his left hand and flicked off the ash.

  “Well, well, well,” he drawled in a raspy voice that still possessed the hint of a once-tough man. “Didn’t you grow up to be as pretty as an angel.”

  Angela was scowling. She had seen him panhandling in the parking lot before, but this was the first time he had ever approached her.

  She’d parked with her front bumper almost touching the wall of the bar. He was straddling his bike at the end of the gap between her truck and the car in the next spot.

  Without a word, she started to go past him. He put a hand out to lean against the side of her truck and block her path. It looked to her like the practiced reflex of a man who had used that same move to stop countless young women.

  “Get out of my way,” she said with menace.

  He gestured beseechingly with the hand holding the cigarette. “Might you give an old friend a bit of help?”

  “We aren’t ‘old friends,’ ” she said.

  She knew what “help” drunks and crackheads usually wanted. She had no intention of giving him any of her money. She worked hard and didn’t want what she earned going up in smoke.

  “Oh, but we are,” he said, squinting at her with the one eye without smoke in it. “I’m Albert. I’m your father.”

  Angela was caught off guard for only an instant. She huffed a laugh. “Yeah, right. I don’t know an Albert.”

  “I was a friend of your mother, Sally.”

  “So were lots of guys.”

  Any one of the drunks, tweakers, or dealers who hung around their trailer could have been her father. It wasn’t like it would have been a rare conquest. Neither her mother nor the degenerates she slept with gave paternity much thought.

  Over the years Angela saw all those men up close, many without their clothes. To Angela it didn’t matter which one of them had fathered her. They were all psychos. She didn’t remember Albert hanging around the trailer when she was little, but then, it was hard to remember all the creeps she’d seen back then.

  Since she had no intention of giving this man any money, talking to him would be pointless. She needed to get inside for her shift. As she went to push past him, he rolled his bicycle forward, planting the front wheel against the truck’s back fender to pen her in.

  “I just need some money to help me get by. Can’t you see your way to giving your poor old dad a twenty?”

  Much to his helpless annoyance, Angela grabbed the bike’s head tube, lifted the front end, and set it aside.

  That was when he pulled a knife. “You look like you could easily spare a twenty for your needy father,” he said with a cunning grin. Even though it was a relatively small knife and in poor condition, it was easily big enough to be lethal. “But since you want to be such a heartless little bitch about it, I’ll take all you got.”

  Because she was conceived by addicts and had spent nine months developing in a womb awash with alcohol and every kind of illicit drug her mother could get her hands on, it was something of a miracle that Angela had been born at all. While she might have appeared normal, she knew that she had been born broken, left with the quite abnormal and freaky ability to recognize killers by their eyes.

  She knew by this man’s eyes that he was in the declining stages of dangerous, but he wasn’t a killer.

  Of course, that didn’t mean, even at this late stage of his life, that he couldn’t start a new profession. She could tell by his eyes and his hair-trigger temperament that he had been an intimidating man most people would have avoided. Now, though, he was just a shell of his former self, a lion without his teeth.

  “Quit stalling. Do as I say and hand over all your money. I’d hate to have to stab my own daughter.”

  “If you really were Sally’s friend, then you would know that neither my mother nor the degenerates she slept with had any idea who fathered me, so your claim is baseless.”

  “Well, I slept with her a time or two, so it could just as well be me.”

  He waved the knife in her direction, hoping it would urge her to hand over her money.

  “Get that knife out of my face and get out of my way or I’ll call the police and file assault charges against you. I’d bet you have a long rap sheet and outstanding warrants, so they would be happy to throw you in jail.”

  He grew the kind of calculating smile that Angela knew all too well from men who intended her harm, even if they didn’t intend murder.

  The once-dangerous man reemerged in his tone. “One way or another you’re going to give me your money.”

  She leaned down toward him, close enough to smell his stink.

  “Move.”

  When he thrust the knife toward her she was ready. She caught his wrist and turned his frail arm out to the side, away from her. The ravages of a life of drugs and alcohol had left him skin and bones, hardly a worthy adversary for her strength.

  Yipping in pain, and apparently still intent on stabbing her, he struggled to wrestle his arm away. She held his wrist in a viselike grip as she kept his arm twisted aside. With her other hand she pried his little finger and then his ring finger from the handle of the knife, bending both back until he twisted and howled in pain.

  Once she had extinguished his aggression with a good bit of pain, she released his fingers, grabbed the end of the handle, and twisted the knife out of his hand.

  “Give it back!” he cried, cradling his sore fingers with his other hand. “It’s mine! Give it back!”

  He reminded her of nothing so much as a shriveled, gnomelike character whining for his magic knife back, as if it were the source of his strength.

  She pointed the tarnished blade at his face. “Get lost. If you ever threaten me again you had better hope that the cops take you to jail to protect you from me.”

  His gaze went to the large tattoo across her throat. “I see now what kind of angel you really are.”

  “Then I guess you had best get on down the road.”

  Angela heaved the knife away. It skittered across the
parking lot and came to rest in weeds growing in the cracked asphalt at the edge of the road.

  He glanced her way briefly to see if she intended to hit him, then pedaled away, intent on retrieving his knife. The bike wobbled as he tried to control it with one hand on one handlebar and a wrist on the other.

  Angela felt a little bad about hurting such a frail old man, but she had a rule: Don’t be nice to people who try to kill you.

  CHAPTER 2

  Angela woke with a start from a dead sleep when she heard a hollow thud come from outside the house. She snatched her gun off the nightstand before her feet had even hit the floor. A rush of adrenaline flashed like ice through her veins and brought her wide awake in an instant.

  Her heart hammered as she sat on the edge of the bed for a moment, listening intently, trying to make sense of the sound, trying to think of what it could be. It had been too loud to be a pinecone hitting the ground or even the roof. Those often made a thud, but not this loud. This had been something more substantial—a quick crack of sound that had reverberated back from the woods.

  She wondered briefly if it could be dear old Dad, but the old derelict couldn’t possibly have pedaled his pink girl’s bicycle this far out of town. He would have died of exhaustion before he got very far from his haunts.

  Unless someone had given him a ride.

  Ducking low as she crossed the room, she darted a glance out the bedroom door, first to the left toward the front, and then to the right toward the back door, where she thought the sound had come from. She knew that just because the sound had come from out back didn’t mean someone couldn’t be out front as well, or even inside the house. Living alone and with her house being so isolated, Angela always worried about a home invasion.

  Her long drive had a stout cable across it, but that wouldn’t stop a big wire cutter. The security provided by the cable was more in the statement it made, along with a skull and crossbones sign warning against trespassing. The only purpose in cutting the cable, though, would be to drive up the long drive to the house. She hadn’t heard car tires crunching on gravel.

  Just to be sure, she cleared the kitchen and then the living room on the way through. When she was away from home she carried a Walther P22, because it was lighter and much easier to conceal, but it required exceptional accuracy. If the shot placement was on target, though, it was as deadly as any gun but without overpenetration or making a huge, bloody mess. That was why it was the choice of assassins.

  In her house when it was dark she would likely only be able to see a bad guy’s dark shape. For that reason, she kept a Glock 9 mm loaded with hollow-points on her nightstand. It only needed to hit center mass to stop a threat.

  Stepping silently across the living room in her bare feet, Angela peeked out past the edge of the curtain to check the yard. The moonlight provided enough light to see that there was no car in sight, only her primer-gray pickup.

  After the quick appraisal out the front, gun up and at the ready, Angela hurried to the back door between the bedroom and the kitchen. She scanned out the small window in the door. The dense forest of towering pines blocked much of the moonlight, but because she’d been asleep her eyes were well adjusted to the dark.

  She spotted two shapes moving through those shadows. They were too low to be deer. She thought at first that they were dogs.

  Then, when one of them moved into the moonlight between the shadows, she saw that it was a dark-colored wolf. More than that, it was a wolf she recognized.

  It was Bardolph.

  Bardolph had been shot by a sheriff’s deputy the previous winter. Angela had been angry that the deputy had shot the animal. She didn’t want it to suffer a slow, agonizing death, and she didn’t have the heart to kill it, so she had taken it to an animal emergency hospital. While it was there the staff who had cared for it had named it Bardolph.

  Because the wolf was potentially quite dangerous, once it had recovered Angela released it quite a distance away from her house into the woods where she had found it. It had returned the favor by attacking a maniac who had tried to kill her. She had saved its life, and it had in turn saved hers. It had seemed that karma was alive and well in the universe.

  She presumed the wolf would live in the vast preserve surrounding her home. Now it had shown up by her house. Since wolves avoided people, she didn’t know why it would come around.

  Angela opened the door to get a better look. It was a relatively warm summer night, so she stood in the doorway in only her underwear, watching. It was then that she spotted the second wolf. Bardolph stayed back by the trees as he watched the second wolf investigating the backyard. It was lighter-colored and a bit smaller. Angela was pretty sure it was female.

  “Well, my old friend,” she murmured, “it looks like you found yourself a mate.”

  Wanting to see, smell, and touch everything in the yard, the female rubbed against the picnic table, leaving her scent. Angela saw, then, that a board she’d left on the table had been knocked off onto a knob of rock sticking up from the ground. She realized that that had been the sound she had heard.

  The whole time the she-wolf investigated the backyard, she kept a wary eye on Angela; then she abruptly advanced toward Angela, snarling, lips curled back, showing her teeth. It was a frightening sight.

  Angela had her gun up and at the ready. She didn’t want to shoot the creature, but she would if she had to. She hoped simply pointing the gun at the snarling beast would be enough to keep it at bay.

  It wasn’t.

  The female wolf suddenly advanced aggressively toward Angela, mouth opened, teeth bared, closing the distance.

  Just before Angela pulled the trigger, Bardolph loped up to intercept the female. He growled and snapped at her. In a display of dominance, he put his neck over hers and pushed her head down, as if to tell her to back off. She licked his face in submission and then they twined their necks together for a moment before bounding off into the woods.

  Angela stood in the doorway, gun lowered to her side, watching the dark woods where the pair had vanished. It had been an amazing sight. She was thrilled to have seen him again.

  She hadn’t seen Bardolph for months, not since back in the dead of a bitter winter. For the life of her, Angela couldn’t figure out why he had come around her place in the woods, and why he had brought his new mate.

  She heard the pair, then, off on Grandfather Mountain, howl at the moon.

  Her life in the woods, in the house her grandparents had built, was her sanctuary of solitude. It made up for the other part of her life working with her own messenger service and at Barry’s Place tending bar. Those two lives—one in the woods and one in Milford Falls—could not be more different. While they seemed opposites, in some ways, when it came to the evil men who occasionally crossed paths with her, those two lives were connected. Those evil men ended their murderous careers in Angela’s world of solitude, never to be seen again.

  CHAPTER 3

  As Angela set beers down in front of a boisterous group of men at a round table, one of them, Ricky Sparling, leaned back in his chair.

  “Where’s Wanda?”

  Angela put a bowl of pretzels on the table as she flipped the tray around with her other hand and tucked it under her arm. “Beats me,” she said over the loud thump of rock music. “She should have been here hours ago.”

  It was busy, even for a Friday night. With Wanda a no-show, Angela was being run ragged trying to keep up with orders. At least the extra tips helped soothe her annoyance at Wanda for leaving her high and dry.

  The men were a lumber crew from one of the remaining small operations working just outside Milford Falls. Ricky Sparling owned the small company and it made him a good living. They specialized in select cutting from property owners. They all smelled of fresh-cut pine, gasoline, and smoke from diesel equipment.

  Ricky had on a red plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He leaned in on his elbows.

  “I’m buying this round.” He grinned
at Angela as he handed her some folded bills. “Keep the change.”

  The men chuckled a little when he winked at her. She didn’t respond to his wink. “When Wanda comes in I’ll let her know you were asking after her.”

  Angela hurried back to the bar to get the next order ready. She set the tray on a stack at the side and noticed Barry on the phone in the hall. She quickly opened a bottle of beer for an older man sitting at the bar and scooped up the money he laid down. She rang the beer up on the cash register and gave the man his change.

  With the loud rock music that always played in the bar, Angela couldn’t hear what Barry was saying, although by his animated gestures she could tell he was miffed.

  When the call ended he quickly ducked into the cooler where the kegs were kept and returned with a hand truck loaded with cases of bottled beer for the refrigeration unit behind the bar.

  Angela gestured. “The second tap isn’t working.”

  Barry’s expression twisted with long-suffering displeasure as he loaded beer bottles into the cooler. “Probably that damn coupling again. I don’t think I have a new one. I’ll have to see if I can fix it after closing.”

  “Something wrong?” Angela asked.

  “Crazy Wanda.”

  “Ah,” she said with a knowing nod as she drew beers and poured shots for the next order. “So what’s her excuse for being late?”

  Barry straightened and leaned closer. “She got her ass thrown in jail.”

  Angela rolled her eyes. “Again?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s she done this time?”

  “She says it’s all a big misunderstanding.”

  Angela let out a half laugh. “Isn’t it always?”

  “She says she wanted to get her things from her ex-boyfriend’s place, but he wouldn’t ever meet her there to let her in. So, of course, crazy Wanda broke a window and let herself in. At least, that’s her story.”

  Wanda could turn the most ordinary of situations into drama. It seemed she had now turned a simple breakup with her most recent boyfriend into an arrest. Wanda was a walking, talking soap opera.