Storm Vengeance

by Pamela Cowan

  wrists together,” Storm said. “Cross them in front of you.”

  “You’re my probation officer. She’s my probation officer,” she explained to her husband.

  Lauren took a roll of duct tape from the pocket of her coat, used her teeth to start it, and ran it around and around the woman’s wrists until they were held tight. She then did the same thing around her elbows, pulling them as close together as she could. There was a pillow on the floor next to the bed. Lauren knelt down and grabbed it, pulled off the pillow case, and slipped it over the Prentice woman’s head. She fought for the first time, tossing her head back and forth and screaming, “Stop, stop it now!”

  Lauren twisted the pillow case so it was tight around her neck, grasped the extra material like a dog collar, and shook her with it. “Stop moving,” she commanded.

  Storm noticed Lauren was biting her lower lip, whether out of nervousness or excitement she couldn’t tell. As soon as Ms. Prentice stopped fighting, Lauren tore more duct tape from the roll and wound it around her neck, using the pillowcase as a cushion between the tape and her skin. Next she put a few wraps of tape around the pillow case where the woman’s eyes were. She might be able to see under the tape, but all she’d see would be the inside of the pillowcase.

  “Now it’s your turn, tubby,” said Lauren. “Put the shirt on.” While his wife was being tied and blindfolded, the man had rolled to his back but kept his face turned to watch. His breathing in that position was labored, his chest rising and falling with a rough quiver. A small line of spit ran from one corner of his mouth. His eyes went from squeezed tightly closed to wide open over and over, as if by shutting them he could escape the nightmare and by opening them he could snap out of it into a better day. Looking terrified enough to wet himself, he fumbled for the shirt but there was no way he could put it on in the position he was in.

  “Let him get up,” Storm said to Lauren. She had moved to the foot of the bed and closer to the wife, making sure Lauren could tie the man’s hands without getting in the line of fire. Storm had trained long and hard, studying scenarios that let her to automatically consider the innocent lives both beyond and between her gun and her goal. Lauren, in this scenario, was an innocent life.

  “Go on,” said Lauren. “Do what she says. Get your fat butt up.” Then she backed away, not wanting to be too close as he worked his way to a sitting position.

  “Okay, you saw what your wife did. You do the same. Get your wrists out there, cross them, and sit still unless you want a nine millimeter bullet in your brain,” Storm told him.

  Sitting sideways, with his legs hanging off the side of the bed but not touching the ground, the man extended his arms. Lauren quickly wound tape around them and all the way up to his elbows. “Taking a lot of tape. Hope we’ve got enough,” she said. “Just gonna blindfold him now.” She reached for the pillow behind him, momentarily getting between him and Storm. He took the moment to rock forward and lurch to his feet. His bound fists rose up into Lauren’s stomach and he half lifted, half threw her into the wall beside the bed.

  Storm froze for a moment. Her finger was resting along the side of the gun as she’d been trained. It was not on the trigger. In the second it took her brain to tell her body to put her finger on the trigger, she came up with an alternative solution. She grabbed the clothes iron from the ironing board and threw it, not at his face or chest, but at his feet.

  The heavy iron smashed into the top of one of his feet and he howled and jumped back, falling onto the bed. By the time he realized he was once again a prisoner of his own weight, Storm was on top of him, the gun pressed against his top lip, the soft flesh captured between his teeth and the hard muzzle. “Don’t you move,” she told him. “You either, lady,” she cautioned his wife, who had leaned towards her husband but done nothing else.

  Lauren got to her feet, ran her left hand up her right forearm, rubbed gently at the elbow that had been rammed into the wall. Then she extended her arm twice, seemed to think it was okay, and reached for the pillow again. This time she succeeded in ripping the case off. She tugged it over the prone man’s face, now mottled with red and gleaming with sweat. Then she managed to wind tape around the pillow at both his neck and eyes, just as she’d done with his wife.

  “Okay,” said Storm to the Prentices, gesturing for Lauren to leave the room ahead of her. “Get up and walk down the hall, down the stairs, and into the dining room.”

  “We can’t,” Mrs. Prentice said. “We can’t see.”

  “This is your house. You’ve walked around in it in the dark one time or another. So don’t give me that crap, and get moving.”

  Lauren had moved past and was waiting on the landing. A light came on and Storm realized Lauren had found the switch for the hallway. That helped. Storm backed down the hall with the Prentices’ right in front of her. The small woman had taken the lead, her husband trailed, limping, right behind.

  As they began to move, the Prentice woman seemed to gain confidence. “What do you want?” she demanded. “We don’t have any money. We don’t have any fancy stuff for you to steal.”

  “Those ain’t burglars,” her husband spat out gruffly. “Didn’t you see them. Those are social workers.”

  Storm cocked an eyebrow. Armed social workers? Bizarre. Crazy. But then they’d have to be crazy to do what they’d done to their kids. Storm flashed on an imaginary moment. Saw the man standing over his girls, breathing hard the way he did, leering. She saw their mom kneeling down, tying the shoe strings, winding them around and around the girl’s tiny wrists. That a mother could do that to her own child, to any child. Storm had to swallow the bile rising in her throat. She backed up to the stairs. “Keep coming,” she said, her voice cracked. “Come on.”

  The Prentices balanced themselves by leaning against the narrow stair rail and slide-walked down one step at a time until they reached the bottom of the stairs.

  Storm directed them across the living room to the dining room where Lauren helped them sit in the chairs she’d turned so their backs were to the table. Storm watched Lauren tape the Prentices to the chairs so they could barely move. Unless they broke one of the chairs—and at what appeared to be four hundred plus pounds, Bret Prentice just might—they were going nowhere.

  “Used up two rolls. Good thing you brought plenty,” Lauren joked as she smoothed the end of the strip she’d just wrapped around Mrs. Prentice’s right ankle.

  Storm didn’t respond. Time seemed to be slowing down. The drag of despair and pain pulled at her. She remembered the Prentices’ eyes following her up there in the bedroom. Their eyes were already haunting her, and they weren’t even dead.

  “What should we do now?” Lauren asked.

  Storm ignored the question and said, “Bret and Marilynn Prentice, you have committed a horrific act of pain and terror against your children. As parents it’s your responsibility to protect your children from monsters, not become the monsters. Nothing you say or do can change what you’ve done. You have been judged and condemned.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Mrs. Prentice asked.

  “She’s gonna kill you, you stupid shit,” said Lauren, “for what you did to your kids.”

  “Watch them,” Storm said, then walked into the adjoining kitchen and opened the refrigerator with her left hand. Her gun was still in her right, where she planned to keep it. She reached into the fridge, then came back into the dining room wearing a big smile. Her earlier reluctance was gone.

  “No sense wasting our supplies,” she said, holding up a pair of syringes.

  “What the hell?” asked Lauren.

  “Insulin,” Storm explained. “I saw a blood test monitor in the kitchen when we came in. I figured a guy that big, he must be diabetic. But ironically,” she said, setting the needles on the table, “it’s not his. All the stuff has her name on it. She’s the diabetic. Isn’t that funny?”

  “Funny as hell,” agreed Lauren. “I love irony.”

  “
Better yet, it’s the fast-acting kind of insulin.”

  “So . . .?”

  “So, we’ll get out of here faster. I swear, it must be destiny. We’ll inject him. Make it look like she was trying to kill him with her insulin. He started feeling bad, figured out what she’d done and went after her. She fought back, hit him with something. Maybe a cast iron skillet or a baseball bat or whatever.”

  “Good, but then he got it away from her, right?”

  “Exactly.” Storm set the needles on the table. That’s when she spotted the hammer half-hidden under a recent Sunday Oregonian. Maybe they were putting up family photos of their loving family, or maybe it had been sitting there a long time, left over from some remodeling project.

  It made her remember the basement. She stepped back so she was facing them again. The man on her right, the woman on her left.

  “We were talking about how you disciplined your children,” Storm said, addressing the woman.

  “We didn’t do nothing to those kids but try to teach them the right way to live,” she answered.

  “You tied them up and broke their bones and probably killed one of them,” said Storm softly, her anger slowly coiling inside, like a venomous snake preparing to strike.

  “Wasn’t our fault. Those kids had demons. They never did what they was told to do. We tried everything, didn’t we, Bret?” she asked her husband. He didn’t respond, just sat quiet and motionless inside his pillowcase blindfold. His wife turned her face away from him and back toward Storm. “We grounded them, gave them time outs, took away their toys, and threw them out. Nothing worked. They broke my dishes. They ruined . . .”

  Every word hit Storm like a blow. She moved as if under the control of some greater force. Before she was fully aware, the hammer was in her hand, the wooden handle smooth and curved just right, the weight a perfect assist. As if of its own volition, the hammer carved a smooth arc through the air, then came to a sudden stop as it met the woman’s skull.

  The impact rocked her back and the chair nearly went over before settling back on all four legs. She made a high pitched keening, squealing sound. It tore through Storm’s head like bees swarming. A dangerous sound. It had to stop. She swung the hammer again. It sank deep and resisted when Storm tried to remove it. Finally, she pulled it free and spun the handle in her hands. It felt the same as when she spun her tennis racket, moving from a forehand to a backhand swing. It was a move she’d shared with the kids when she taught them to play. Tennis was fun. It was also fun to bring the hammer down again. When it met its target, it sounded just like that time she’d dropped a watermelon from the trunk of her car to the driveway. The pillowcase was sodden and red and tore wide open on the final stroke, revealing matted black hair, and white skin mottled with bright red blood.

  Storm bent in half from the waist. She was panting. Sweat ran into her eyes. The gun was in one hand, the blood spattered hammer in the other.

  A musty stench filled the room. Storm looked up from under long bangs. Under the big man’s chair, a stream of urine was puddling on the floor. The pillowcase over his head was being sucked into an oval and then pushed out as his breathing pulled it into and out of his wide-open mouth. Storm could hear him, imagined he always sounded like that, out of breath, asthmatic, that little chuffing sound right before he exhaled. She wondered if his children hid when they heard that sound.

  She rose to her full height, brought the hammer up across her body to her left shoulder, then down, claw side first. She’d been aiming for that soggy disgusting, cloth and the gaping mouth behind it. Her aim was bad, though, and she missed. Instead the claws sank deep into the flesh at the juncture where his double chin rested on his collarbone.

  Storm heard the audible crack as his collarbone snapped. She dragged the hammer back, working it back and forth to break it free. It finally tore loose, exposing jagged ends of broken bone. Storm raised her arm to strike again, felt a hand on her shoulder, small but strong fingers digging in. She turned toward the touch. It was Lauren. She was saying something.

  “Stop it, Storm. Stop and think.”

  Noise crashed in, the man’s pain-filled bellowing. So much noise.

  “Shut up,” she shouted, and she pressed the hammer against the man’s forehead, forcing his head back.

  “Get the insulin,” Storm said.

  The man went still. He was shuddering, his body making the feet of the chair skitter across the wooden floor. He whimpered. The sound was almost inaudible, so Storm didn’t correct him again. Tears and snot soaked through the pillowcase. Blood soaked into both his t-shirt and long-sleeved shirt, spreading wider every moment. Storm wanted it over. She wanted a shower.

  Lauren took the preloaded syringe and stabbed it into the man’s fleshy arm, right through both shirts. Then she did it again. He didn’t react until nearly an hour later when he shuddered again, only this time it went on for several minutes. When it was over, Storm checked his neck for a pulse. He was dead.

  It took another hour to remove every trace of duct tape, and remove the pillowcases and long-sleeved shirts. They made sure that the fingerprints of both Prentices were where the police would expect to find them, the handle of the hammer, the syringes. Then they posed the bodies. Storm wanted them lying on their arms so lividity, the dark pooling of blood to the lowest place on the body after death, would help mask any telltale signs that they’d been tied. She checked their wrists and arms and was grateful that the broad tape had only left one small welt on Mrs. Prentice’s right wrist.

  “I think we look okay,” Storm told Lauren. She moved into the living room, twitched aside the curtain. “Street looks empty. We should go.”

  Lauren took the large green garbage bag they’d stuffed the clothes and tape into and tied it closed. Then she rolled it into a small bundle and stuffed it into a plastic grocery sack she’d found in the kitchen.

  “We’ll find an apartment complex and toss that in a dumpster. Let’s get out of here and go home.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  “THAT WAS BAD. That was really, really bad.”

  “I know. Shut up,” said Storm. “Stay quiet until we get to the car.” They were leaving as they had entered, through the back door. It was cold and an icy drizzle had begun to fall. Storm was careful to lead them across the concrete pad and then the paving stones. Footprints in the mud couldn’t lead the police to them, could it? This wasn’t television. Still, it never hurt to be careful.

  They practically jumped into the car, and Storm was driving away and fumbling with her seatbelt at the same time.

  Lauren snapped her seatbelt on, then rubbed her hands together as if to warm them. “I’m not sure anyone will buy the murder-suicide story. You messed them both up pretty bad,” she said.

  “You get all the duct tape?” Storm said, ignoring the accusation.

  “Yeah, and when I put it on, I did like you said and made sure there was material between it and their skin. There shouldn’t be any marks.”

  “Or adhesive,” said Storm. “That’s good. They still might buy it. She shot him up with insulin. He went after her. She grabbed a hammer and hit him. He got it away and finished her off. Then his blood sugar dropped too fast, and he couldn’t get to a phone to call for help.”

  “I think it was good thinking, stomping on his cell phone.”

  “Well, it’s what I’d have done if I really was going to kill my husband. Make sure he couldn’t call 911.”

  “Makes me glad we’re not married,” said Lauren. The bad joke lessened the tension in the car. “What do we do now?”

  “Now we go home and sleep.” The adrenaline that had wound Storm up was slowly seeping away, replaced by a bone deep weariness. “We’ll take the bag with the tape and their shirts and drop it in a garbage can somewhere. Then I’ll take you to your car. You need to go home and get some sleep.”

  “Sleep? Who can sleep after something like that?” Lauren asked. “That was amazing. Those people were monsters, and we go
t rid of them. There are so many bad people in the world. I had no idea.”

  Storm only nodded, but she was thinking, Are you one of them? You’re not who you said you were. You’re not Lauren Barry, so who are you and what do you want from me?

  Storm dropped pretend Lauren at her car, waiting to be sure she had no problem starting it, then headed for home.

  Dannisha was fast asleep on the couch when she arrived home, so, after locking up, Storm checked that each of her children were safely tucked in, took a short but nearly scorching shower, and crawled gratefully into bed.

  Though her body was exhausted to the point that her joints ached, Storm’s mind would not slow down. Images of the night’s justice kill flashed like a crazy kaleidoscope. Two more names to add to her list. Bret and Marilynn Prentice. The list was growing. Even so, she knew every name and could recite them like poetry. Rule number three. No trophies. But that wasn’t really true. She did take trophies. She kept their names and their crimes: Jeffrey Franklin Malino, who used dogs to discipline his children; Gavin Lester Everett, who used cigarettes on his son; Helena Smith, whose child’s whole world was a sodden mattress beneath a car; Angela Ruiz, who hurt her children by dating bad men; Aislynn Clevidence, the nurse who had tortured Lauren; and now Bret and Marilynn Prentice, who had abused both of their children for years, leaving scars on their minds and bodies that might never go away. Assuming they even lived.

  Storm hadn’t heard about the youngest Prentice girl. She’d have to ask around at work, unless there was something in the paper. She doubted it, though. Child abuse rarely made the headlines, usually showing up, if at all, as a half inch of space on the page reserved for crime reporting.

  Better than counting sheep, the names repeated over and over lulled Storm into a deep and dreamless sleep.