Lady Vigilante (Episodes 16 – 18) (Lady Vigilante Crime Compilations)

by Hayley Camille

  “But you’re not a stranger, not anymore!” Nancy enthused. “And you said we could leave early and be home after dinner. We could go today! Wouldn’t you love to surprise Roger by arriving in time for lunch? Besides,” Nancy’s expression darkened, “I’m sick of being treated like a child! I’m sick of being told what to do and what to think. I can look after myself!”

  “I won’t argue with that,” Violet said, thoughtfully. “But it’s a little reckless, isn’t it?” Violet countered. “Keeping secrets from your mother.”

  “She keeps secrets from me!”

  “Well, that’s true. And you do seem so much more mature than other girls your age. And you’re clearly very clever and capable of making your own decisions.”

  “That’s right, and this is my decision.”

  “There’s no harm in visiting your own father, I suppose.”

  “He’ll be thrilled to see me!”

  Violet paused a moment, then stood up, clapping her hands together. “Alright then, let’s do it! You’ve entirely convinced me. When should we leave?”

  “Now, of course!” Nancy said, jumping to her feet and sweeping her hair back.

  “Now?”

  “Yes, right this minute! If you could just call by my home quickly for my coat and scarf –”

  “But your mother –”

  “I’ll just poke my head in the door, my coat is right in the hallway! Then we can drive to Pine Camp and be there in time for dinner instead! Can you imagine it, Violet? Pop will be so surprised, and you’ll be able to see Roger!”

  “You are a daredevil.”

  “Trust me, I’ll be super fast.”

  Violet’s face split into a wide grin. “I bet you will,” she said.

  “Let’s go then!”

  “But I don’t even know where you live.”

  “It’s not far, I can show you.”

  Violet laughed. “Alright then, Nancy. Let’s run away together.”

  *

  “It’s this one,” Nancy instructed. She was almost bursting with anticipation and nerves. Violet’s car pulled up in front of the perfectly manicured cookie-cutter home. A powder blue Schwinn bicycle was leaning against the side of the house. “Drat, mom is already here,” Nancy grimaced.

  Violet’s eyes didn’t leave the closed front door. “You have a lovely house,” she murmured. “Now, hurry up, before your mother sees us.”

  “I’ll be quick.” Nancy jumped out of the black Mercury and raced up the driveway toward the front door. As soon as she was out of the car, Violet slipped a notebook and pen from the glovebox. She scribbled a note, tore it from the book and folded it in half, then dropped it out of the driver’s side window. When she looked up, Nancy was back in the passenger seat, coat bundled in her arms.

  “Goodness, that was fast.”

  “I told you.”

  “Nancy?” A voice called out from behind them. Nancy spun around in the seat. Her father’s black Chevrolet was parked in front of Mrs. Porter’s house and Adina was just stepping out, her arms full of books. “Is that you, Nancy? Could I have a word?”

  Violet turned her head to look through the rear windscreen at Adina as she approached the car. The two women locked eyes. Adina’s widened in recognition. Her mouth dropped open. A crash of books scattered to the ground.

  Violet smiled, a malicious, slow crawl that caught Adina trapped in horror, unable to move. Violet’s hand found the stick shift, pushed the Mercury into gear, and she took off, screeching away up the leafy, suburban street.

  Nancy was gone.

  *

  The front door of Betty’s house smashed open. Betty raced out, taking the porch steps two at a time and dashing across the lawn, far faster than she should.

  “Adina!” she cried, all pretense at social etiquette gone. “What happened?”

  Because Betty was certain that the flash of heart-stopping terror that had just jolted her friend and then leapt, unbridled into Betty’s own mind must have been truly dire, to have pierced her carefully constructed shields. Betty didn’t wait for an answer. She forced her own mind past Adina’s pale face, still frozen with shock and grasped for the memory herself.

  The black Mercury. Violet Mills. Nancy.

  Betty stumbled. It was a rare thing that made her lose her ground.

  “My darling child,” she whispered. “What have you done?”

  “Betty?” Adina seemed to vacillate before Betty’s eyes like a mirage. “Betty! It was the Boudoir Butcher – that Violet woman! She had Nancy in her car and she just took off. Nancy ran to her –”

  Betty held her hand up for silence. She had already witnessed Nancy’s actions, of course, though Adina did not know her own mind had been breached to see it. Betty needed to focus. She took a deep breath. Her body still. Her eyes focused, razor sharp down the empty street as Betty cast her mind out as far as she could like a great net, grappling to catch a shred of Nancy’s intentions.

  Nothing.

  Nothing.

  Try as she might, there was no scrap of thought to latch on to. The girl’s shields were intact, strong and unrelenting to the desperate force of her mother’s efforts. I’ve taught her too well.

  Relentless, Betty’s target shifted. Not the child, but the woman. Betty was hunting now, driving her power to its limit, as the Butcher slipped further and further out of range, into the bleed of traffic pulsing across the city.

  Then Betty caught it. A flash of vision from Violet’s mind.

  The shadow of a great arm stretching across the sea.

  Scent of brine.

  Bustle of suits.

  Peeling blue paint almost faded to nothing.

  Concrete. Cobblestones. Crates.

  Betty knew the place. She had been there before.

  JT Vargus, Wholesale Fishmongers, Fulton Fish Markets, NYC.

  She took off.

  “Betty!” Adina’s shrill shout followed her. “Where are you going?”

  “To get my bike. I have to find Nancy.”

  “But you don’t know where they’ve gone!”

  “I have a pretty good idea.” Betty grabbed her bicycle by the handles. She wheeled it toward Adina.

  “But you can’t go alone,” Adina said, stunned. “We must call the police.”

  “Call Jacob then,” Betty said. “He can meet me there.”

  The woman blanched. “Where?”

  “The place he found Marco Pinzolo,” Betty said, and then, in her own mind, after I killed him.

  “You’re going alone? And on a bike? We must wait for the police – if you tell them you know where she is –”

  “No, they’ll only get in the way.”

  Adina blinked, dumbfounded. “Get in the way of what? What can you possibly –?”

  Betty threw her leg over the bicycle and pushed off.

  “No!” Adina dashed forward and grabbed the handles of the bicycle. Betty’s eyes flashed as she was forced to stop. “Please, I don’t know what you’re planning to do, but I’m not as useless as I look,” Adina pleaded. “I can drive you wherever you want to go. As fast as you like! You can’t go there alone. Be reasonable, Betty!”

  Betty looked toward the house where her son and Teddy were finishing their lunch. Her chest roared with the need to protect them. Adina was right. She needed to stop. Think. Only the prospect of losing her daughter could have forced her hand into such impulsive action. Betty shook her head, chastising herself. She didn’t even have her knives.

  A flutter of white on the asphalt caught her eye. She stepped off her bike, leaving it in Adina’s grip as she picked the paper up. A handwritten note.

  You took my child, so I have taken yours.

  “She knows we have Teddy,” Betty said, perfunctorily. She passed the note to Adina, who gasped. “The boys are in the kitchen, Adina. Get them out please. Take them next door. I need to leave.”

  “Just give me a minute!”
Adina begged. “I’ll drive you. You’ve helped me so much, let me help you. Please.”

  She raced into Betty’s house, the note tight in her fist.

  She’s right, Betty thought. The car would be faster. Betty wheeled her bike back up to the edge of the house. She ducked through the side gate and pulled up the loose paving stone outside the laundry window. Dusting off a layer of dry dirt, Betty unwrapped her quarry.

  Gleaming silver. Polished with use.

  It was delightful how untouched they looked after so many murders.

  She tucked the knives into her garters.

  One. Two. Three, on the right.

  Four. Five. Six, on the left.

  Cold and tight against her thighs.

  Comforting.

  By the time she walked back out to the road, Betty’s plans were whirring in her head. Her shoulders were back, head high. A tiny glint of death in her eye.

  The Boudoir Butcher was about to die.

  *

  “I need you to stay in the car, Adina. No matter what happens, do not come in after me.”

  Adina shot a frightened look at her passenger but simply nodded. Her hands were trembling on the steering wheel as she wove in and out of traffic along Grand Central Parkway, heading to the docks shadowed by the Brooklyn Bridge.

  “Betty,” Adina began, then closed her mouth again. It was another minute before she spoke. “I know we haven’t spoken properly since – well, since I found out that Jacob is Nancy’s father. It’s been – a little awkward. I was upset, not with you, but with Jacob and this whole mess I’ve found myself in.” She took a deep breath as she drove, blinking hard. “And then that woman turned up at the orphanage and you’ve had little Teddy on your hands too. I just –” Adina paused, changed lanes, then flicked a glance at Betty as she sped up. “I just want you to know I don’t blame you for keeping it a secret. I can’t imagine how hard it was for you, alone with a baby. I know what it’s like to be outcast and judged.” Another deep breath. “You’ve been so good to me, and now I understand why. It’s because you know how it feels.”

  Betty forced a smile. Though every fiber of her being was laboring to simply arrive and find her daughter, she saw Adina’s raw heartbreak weighing her shoulders and lining her face.

  “Did you call Jacob for me?” Betty recalled Adina hadn’t spoken to Jacob since they had fought on her front lawn.

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you, that was good of you. Though he may arrive too late.”

  “Yes. No, I mean, I think he will be too late. He wasn’t there, so I had to give the message to Officer Parker.”

  Betty frowned. Parker was no slouch in a fight, but Jacob was far more experienced. Still, by the time anyone else arrived, Betty planned to be finished and gone.

  “What will you do?” Adina whispered. “Do you have a gun?” She looked as though she might be sick.

  “No, I don’t,” Betty answered truthfully, then decided it was best to change the subject. “I’m good to you because you deserve goodness, Adina.” she said gently. “And despite what you think of Jacob right now, he thinks you do too. He’s just a little lost. I can’t presume to know what’s on his mind at the moment, but I know that deep down, he does love you.”

  Adina laughed, a soft note of irony. “How odd you say that, because it’s the precise opposite to what he said himself.” Adina shook her head, staring out at the road. She picked up speed. “He said you could read his mind. All our minds, in fact. That you and Nancy are, some sort of unnatural creatures who can sense what we all think, almost before we do ourselves.”

  “Did he?” Betty frowned, watching the other woman with a critical eye. Jacob hadn’t confessed that he had told Adina the truth. A rush of heat brushed her skin.

  “It’s preposterous, of course,” Adina continued. She shot a look at Betty, then turned back to the road. “He was –” Adina’s pretty face fell into tired creases, “he was disturbed. Not in his right mind. He seems to think you’re some sort of crusader, Betty. I know that you’ve been friends for a longer time than I’ve known him, but I’m not sure you are doing him much good right now. He’s… infatuated with this foolish notion of you.” She shook her head sadly. “I can’t compete with that. I shouldn’t need to. I think he needs help, but not from me.”

  There was a moment of silence as Betty considered her next words. It made sense now, Jacob not confessing that he had told Adina the truth. It was he who had been exposed and humiliated by it, not Betty. Adina hadn’t believed him.

  “Adina,” Betty said quietly. “You underestimate him. I only hope he forgives you for it.” They passed the rest of the journey in silence.

  “Remember what I said, stay in the car.”

  “But what if –?”

  “Please Adina, stay in the car.”

  Betty slipped out of the seat and smoothed her dress. She cast a warning look back to Adina, then ducked along the slipway. It was just after midday and there were people about. Betty cursed under her breath at her inability to get there unseen. Behind her, along the frozen pavement beneath Brooklyn Bridge, the cavernous sheds of the Fulton Fish Market were finishing their business for the day. At daybreak, they were a spectacle of commotion. Careening forklifts towered over crates of fresh seafood brought in by the night trawlers. Fishmongers in rubber boots hacked and haggled with buyers for their best price.

  But now, the trucks were gone, filled to glutton on their way to restaurants and markets across the Eastern Seaboard to deliver their prize. Only stragglers and peddlers remained.

  Outside on the slipways overlooking the water, tramps were rubbing threadbare gloves over glowing trashcans. Hard-worn fisherwomen were leaning against their barrels of eels and carts strung up with sand sharks, calling out to frugal housewives who came browsing for cheap fish to plump their children.

  Betty looked over her shoulder. She preferred the cloak of dark night and the madness of a throng to blend into. Daylight was far more dangerous.

  Nancy. Violet. Vladimir.

  Nancy. The Boudoir Butcher. The Tin Man.

  Nancy. Murderers.

  Betty’s fears were in danger of defeating her.

  A frozen wind-swept salt sprayed across from the river, staining Betty’s lilac day dress and leaving it damp. She hadn’t had time to grab her coat, but no part of her was complaining. Rage burned beneath her skin, leaving it impervious to the chill. My Nancy. In the hands of murderers. The thought of it was almost too much to bear. It was all Betty could do to stay focused, one foot in front of the other, as she paced toward the murky alley where the warehouse hid.

  Calm. Strategic. Clever. Betty breathed the words over and again. She straightened her spine. Pushed back her shoulders. Let the mask slip across her face. One mistake, and the price she would pay was far too great to imagine.

  “Fifteen cents a box!” called a hawker, waving a packet of cigarettes at her with a toothless grin. Betty forced herself to smile as she shook her head, moving quickly across South Street to disappear down a burrow of alleyways. Rows of concrete warehouses. The stench of fish guts and urine. Old newspapers piled against the concrete walls, warm with rot, inked words long bled away. Here, there was no one to see her run.

  Faster.

  Within a minute, Betty stopped in front of the warehouse with peeling blue paint. She had been here before, just once, nearly two years ago. The night she had killed her cousin Marco Pinzolo and his sycophants. The night she had begun her double life. A life of revenge. The life of a Lady Vigilante. She looked up at the sign.

  JT Vargus, Wholesale Fishmongers, Fulton Fish Markets, NYC.

  Why here? she thought, then dismissed it. The why didn’t matter. Only the how.

  How am I going to get Nancy out of there? The warehouse was at the far end of a long, triple story building divided into parts. There was a small front door for each section, each locked shut and abandoned. Betty imagined that in the
alley behind, a larger, double door must be accessible, to allow cargo to be shipped in and out for storage. Down the right-hand side of the building there was a narrow alleyway – an alternative entry into the end warehouse. It was the door she had used on her last visit. She considered for a moment, then threw her mind behind the wall like a great net, sweeping for clues of an advantage she might still hold.

  But no. There was no use being coy. They knew she was coming. They already knew, in fact, that she was standing right outside their door.

  C'est la vie.

  Betty walked up to the front door.

  Knock. Knock. Knock.

  She barely had time to lower her hand before it opened.

  The man in the doorway smiled widely.

  Straight, white teeth. Smooth skin. Golden hair that seemed to glow, pulled back into a loose ponytail at his neck. But it was his eyes that couldn’t be forgotten. Betty had seen them before, reflected back at her in the memories of Anastasiya the barmaid at Dom Serdets. Hollow, hypothermic eyes. The eyes of a sociopath. One of them was bruised and swelling.

  Vladimir Malinov. The Tin Man.

  “Mrs. Jones,” he said pleasantly, with a thick Russian accent. He pulled the door wide. “I don’t believe we have met.” His lips twitched as he took in Betty’s form, raking his eyes down her body. “But I’ve heard so much about you. What a pleasure this is.” He stepped back, holding his arm out in welcome. A caliber .45 automatic pistol was in his hand. “Please. Come in.”

  “Why thank you, Mr. Malinov,” Betty said, the perfect match to his overstated manners and mockery. The Tin Man looked amused. “Pleasure to be here.” Betty’s eyes flashed. Her own smile was dazzling. It was almost time to lose herself a little. But first, she needed to know that her daughter was safe.

  Betty stepped inside. They were not alone.