I wish my alarm clock would go off.
I can’t even remember where I went to sleep. If I’m in my van, I’m going to have a stiff neck. And no alarm clock. So I’m stuck. I don’t even remember how I got into this. Why do people have to die? Why did anyone have to die?
This girl is crying now, her cheeks shiny and wet, and she’s pounding on my chest. Pounding and pounding. Slapping me. Shaking me. All in slow motion. I’m trying to tell her to stop, but I can’t even form a syllable in between her peppering blows.
So I shout to myself in the dream. Tell myself to wake up. And the kid is up off the couch, staring at me. The more I scream, the more freaked out she gets. I even feel like Oprah would tell me to shut up.
And the shadow creeps into the edge of the room, male, female, I don’t know. Pushing past her, moving for me. Closer and closer, stretching out, coming straight at my face.
All I want is to open my eyes before it reaches me.
This was just supposed to be a small enlightenment. Clearwater should have been painting pictures of Susan Schrader in my head, but it’s fucking with me now. I’m not learning anything.
The dark shape has palmed my face, fingers forcing my mouth apart, reaching and grabbing my tongue, pushing into my throat. It’s funny, the things you try to forget, they never let you go.
I hate it when I can’t wake up.
Chapter Four
There are nine people left on my list. I’ve been reading it over and over since I woke up in a puddle of my own sweat. I was sitting outside of my van on the sidewalk, in broad daylight. Parked in the suburbs. The sun had just come up and I was lucky that no early-morning joggers saw me and tried to help, or worse, called for help. So I climbed inside my van and tried to figure out where to go next.
You’d be surprised, if you really sat down and thought about it, how many people are responsible for one act of violence. And I don’t mean that in the psychobabble, I had a bad childhood, Daddy-made-me-wear-a-dress-so-now-I-must-kill kind of way.
I’m learning this as I go, most of it. I know I’m being stalked, that much I remember from last night. And I remember watching Vasili flop. But I don’t remember doing it. So much the better, I guess. I added another tick next to his name on the list. Now I’m staring at number nine. Picturing her face, remembering everything I can about her. Why I hate her enough to kill her. Those are memories I can inject when the time comes. In the meantime, I need to plan. No repeat performances of last night’s post-game show.
There are some things that come naturally to me. The shooting, I’ve always known. It used to be such a great thing. Relaxing with a rifle and a loved one. The most hardened NRA member would weep at the beauty of my idea of a perfect date. I just don’t remember who it was I used to go with. My husband. Sure. But that’s pretty ethereal. I need a name.
What’s new to me? The logistics. Planning. Moving. Stealth. Sabotage. Vital points. How to kill with a gun. A knife. Your bare hands. How to improvise a blunt-force object. There are so many books that teach you how to do these things. I’ve read most of them. If I make it out of this, I’ll compile them all into a handy guide. The Happy Homemaker’s Handbook for Homicide. Miss Massacre’s Guide to Murder and Vengeance.
Today, I’m going to buy a Boy Scout’s field manual. There are knots after knots after knots in there. I will learn new and better ways to climb. Better ways to secure things. I will not lose another item.
It’s all a growing experience. Learning to climb, learning to move again…that was my favorite media quote: “One life has finished for her. And now, like an infant, she must learn to eat, to move, to walk…to live again. The painful memories of her past are mercifully lost. Now she can work to make new ones. Back to you, Jane.”
All of these media reports I watched, they thought of me as one of those fighters, a story that would make people at home sit up and root for me while their own lives fell apart. Mostly, they were right. I had to start completely from scratch. First came breathing without assistance. Then came eating, which will never be the same again. Then walking, crawling, communication.
After the basics of life returned to me, I started to read up on detective work, sniping, hand-to-hand combat, and interrogation techniques of the world’s elite forces. I mean the really good ones: Spetsnatz, SAS, Delta Force. You read books about these groups, you realize what people are capable of, and you lose all hope for a brighter future. You think about what SEALs and German GSG-9 forces do to preserve peace and you know peace will never exist. In a chicken-or-egg way, the presence of such men guarantees violence. Someone, somewhere, is always ready to pick a fight. Maybe it was because my mind was empty there in the hospital, but it all just fit so nicely into my brain. Each of these books was like reading a favorite fairy tale. I knew all of the characters, knew the ending, and just read for the joy of it.
Once I was out and about, my life became about digging. Rummaging through records and files and photos. Trying to remember what happened to me, which I think I’ve got down, and trying to remember who was responsible for it.
There are details I’m still shaky on. My husband. I remember snippets of our life together. Not who he was, or what he did. But he was handsome. I don’t think we fought much. Maybe we hardly saw each other at all. My daughter. Where I used to live. Which hospital I was in. But then there were all of the missing pieces, little black marks across my brain that drove me insane. Did I have friends? What kind of wife had I been? What was my husband’s name? My daughter’s? Mine? The more I thought about that, the more my brain kept feeding me images of who put me there.
So I made a list.
I remembered their names, mostly. Some of them were shadows and vague memories. I remembered some locations. From there, I talked to people who knew people, and I was on the move. Nobody thought to ask why. Apparently I had been quite the social butterfly on the underground circuit. Everyone thought I was tracking down a fix. And I was, but I got information too.
So the mind was willing, but what about the body? I could shoot. Could I fight?
Practice. I found a few homeless people, drunks. I didn’t kill them, just tested myself to see if I could throw a hard punch, or even just strike a person in cold blood. It got easier with each one. I learned to grapple, found ways to fight that worked more on leverage and grip than power and momentum.
Then, I met Charles Baldacci. The details here are fuzzy, too. He was trying to break up my practice with a strung-out junkie in a courtyard. She was a bleeder and a screamer. Not that I was going to do anything more than scare the hell out of her. Maybe get her to quit, to become all of the things I couldn’t. I had my gun out. Just to convince her. A little nudge. But Baldacci saw us and yelled, and without thinking, I just turned and fired. Quick-draw style. I didn’t even know I had it in me.
Thirty feet away, a hip shot with a revolver.
Right between the eyes, literally.
Luckily for me, the junkie, who was in shock, went nuts. She ran over to his body, babbling from withdrawal and nerves and who knew what else. She bled herself out on the ground. The cops wrote it off as a drug deal gone bad. I knew better. It was two less roaches in the motel. I told myself this was a step towards making sure nobody else close to me got hurt again. I stepped on that little voice that told me there was nobody else, that everyone I cared about was long gone. But anytime it ate at me, I could always inject my cares away.
I need something to take the edge off, so I pull the bottle back out. The national Clearwater boom started right here in our humble city when an ambitious piece of trash named Shakes was on a bender. He was working for a man who, at the time, was called Pompidou. Pompidou was playing hypodermic darts and Shakes was his board. Stuck seven different needles in his chest, Demerol, morphine, chased it with a couple of oxycontin pills, a little nicotine, you name it. From this, another ambitious fucker named Dr. Robert Fortescu refined what we know as Clearwater. Word has it that the Doctor and some of the highe
r-ups in the other drug cults are working on a chewable soft tab form. Higher, faster, and no track marks.
Just thinking of that sordid history makes me hungry for a jolt. So I take a tiny taste, a few drips in the lower lip. Junkies call it Three Tears. A trio of little droplets that kind of does a drive-by on your heart, makes you think some amazing high is coming, but it never does. Still, the adrenaline starts to flow, my head floods, and I can focus.
Time to get down to business. The list.
The ten, I knew for sure, were the prime players. At one point, I just bought a box of bullets and thought it would be enough. But this is going to be dirty work.
Right now, the list looks like this:
10. Vasili
9. Susan Schrader
8. Grace Brooks
7. Shakes
6. Caligula
5. Delia Sugar
4. Hooded Jack (?)
3. Dr. Robert Fortescu
2. Veronica Madden
1. ???
It’s a mighty big river. And now I’ve taken the first step with Vasili, forged into those raging waters. And there’s no turning back.
I knew this the first time I helped someone take their last breath. I knew that my lifespan would shorten the more I did it.
The underworld is a small community. People talk to people about other people. Shakes. Caligula. I’ll see them soon enough. And I know they’re connected. You have to stack these things carefully. I need all of the information flowing to me, and I need everyone downstream to remain blissfully unaware that I’m sailing.
By the time I set up for the evening, I’ve read the Boy Scout Manual back to front, front to back. Shaded in the little symbols on the page as I finished. Were I many years younger and male, I could be a Wolf Scout. I’m just satisfied that the knots I’ve used can hold my weight, and the makeshift pulleys I’ve made will help me down. Plus, I can use a compass, fold an American flag properly, and identify poison oak. I’m a regular Davy Crockett. My gear will stay dry in the future.
Moot point, as tonight’s festivities are indoors. Number nine.
* * *
21.00 hours – I lay back, relax up here like Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel, me and my list, me and my gun, the finger of God reaching out to take back what he gave. Even God makes mistakes.
I’m chained to the ceiling, using some fire-sprinkler pipe to take my weight. When the time comes, I’ll roll over and shift to the nylon cords I strung through the cement crossbeams, and I’ll be facing my target. Hell of a climb. I’ve been here since about 17.59. I rolled by the parking garage in full homeless mode at about 17.00, staking the place out before making my move. You don’t need to be in a building to see what’s inside. There are blueprints. Maps. Luckily, mine were accurate.
I just had to wait for a large enough SUV to exit, blocking the parking attendant’s view. Then I coasted around the corner, hustled down the ramp, and rounded another corner. Past 17.00, most civilians are out of an office building. I had a window of about thirty to forty minutes while all of the office staff inside cleaned up and shut down for the day. I got into position in a corner and waited until 17.45, then I made my move.
I found the crossbeams I needed. I found the inclines just like the paper said. I made the climb up in just under eight minutes. When I practiced for this, I made it in three. Nerves. But I got up here, and thank God the copper piping held me. Now it’s just a matter of waiting.
What I’m looking for is a flutter by the door. A little trick I learned by watching the others leave. There are three sets of doors leading to this garage. Air doesn’t circulate too well if they’re all closed. When someone opens the second set of doors, on their way in here, the paper shreds I stacked on the floor will be disturbed by a breeze that blows under the crack in the last door. The door to the garage.
I have two pistols tonight. Fully-loaded. Laser sights, mostly just for effect, because I’m at close range. I’m expecting three people.
Susan Schrader will be coming, followed closely by a personal assistant or two. My right hand is for her, my left hand is for them.
My right hand holds the good stuff, cross-tops, steel-jacketed hollow-point rounds. The kind that will leave a dime-sized hole on one side of her body and a softball-sized hole on the other. My left hand holds the rubber bullets. Little high-velocity jelly sacks that are playfully marketed as “less-lethal ammunition”. Just a nice solid dose of pain for the peons.
Susan, hard worker that she is, isn’t wearing her high heels tonight. I know the hallway isn’t carpeted, so I should have heard her coming. It almost surprises me when I see the paper on the floor move. Last one out of the building. She’s earned a little comfort, right?
I’ll give her comfort. I’d rather give her fury, an angry speech that will make her realize that tonight, she doesn’t get to drive her Audi back to her penthouse. Tonight, you punch out for good. I don’t know, some dramatic thing like that.
When I planned this out in my head, I always envisioned stalking over my target, forcing them to look at my body. I would ask them:
Do you see what you did? Do you know who I am?
But it all seems like wasted time and wasted energy. It’s much better their final bit of oxygen is used up making their brain spin through the Rolodex in their mind, searching for answers: was it this person or that one? This wrong revenged or that hungry criminal bidding for more power? Better they shouldn’t know.
Or maybe I’m still too chicken to talk. It’s not easy for me. Other people can speak without thinking. Insert politician joke here. But for me, speech is work, and damn hard work at that.
I can hear them talking out in the hallway.
-Did you remember your papers, someone asks.
-Let me check.
-Did you call your husband?
-I’ll call from the car. Can I relax? Can I have a minute to my own thoughts? I’m going home to eight more hours of paperwork. You’ve got, what? Two hours of social media before you fall asleep watching sitcoms online?
Susan, Susan. So shrill.
I understand how hard you’ve been working. Who you’ve been helping to put back on the streets. Whose cries you’ve ignored in your quest to line your pockets. You deserve a break today. I’d like to start with your spine.
Someone’s hand is on the door. I hear the knob shift ever so slightly. I hear keys jingling. There’s a beep as they pass their access card over the sensor. The lock clangs over and the door opens.
Everything has to happen fast. Fast fast fast.
I stiffen my right arm, hoping I’ve profiled the woman correctly. She’s got her PAs pretty whipped. She’ll be the first one through the door. She’s neurotic. She walks too fast and too stiff in her high heels. Problem is, tonight she’s barefoot. This works to my advantage. She’s carrying them, holding them by the straps. At the same time, she’s checking her cell phone for messages and trying to reach for her keys.
She’s under me. Right under me.
But the damn PAs haven’t come in yet. Susan hasn’t moved far enough from the door to allow them passage. Not that they would dare to walk in front of their mistress.
Can’t take her down until I can take them down. Once they get inside, the magnetic lock on the doorway seals. Only someone with a keycard can open it, and the only people with keycards are bosses like Susan. So everyone has to be inside the garage where they can’t run back for help. Plus, I need time to get away. A lot of time. I’ve got my harnesses rigged in so I can drop to the floor quick after the kill. Then I have to get over to them and get their phones, this by crawling with my arms.
Susan finds her keys and now she’s moving, like someone lit her rear end on fire. This is horrible. I can take her now, but I’ll have to get the others at the same time. Two shots, two different directions, then a clean up.
I focus and take a breath. I look at the PAs and pick the quicker-looking one. I look at Susan and lock my right arm. I close my eyes,
and when I open them, I squeeze. Sight-acquirefire.
I watch the PA go down in a heap, gasping for breath and hands scrambling at her exploded shirt.
Susan is bent at a funny angle over the trunk of her car, a huge burgundy blossom spreading across the side of her blouse. The second PA, God bless his helpful little soul, goes rushing right over to Susan. He’s patting her, calling her name, getting fingerprints all over her. Not that I’m reading into any of this, but he’s shaking her by the butt as he asks if she’s all right. I think he’s taking what he can get.
My left arm stiffens and I squeeze and I nail him right between the shoulder blades. He gets a lot more of Susan than he counted on. He collapses over her doggie-style and then falls to the floor, pulling her down on top of him.
For a minute, there is no noise. The peons shake a little bit, but you couldn’t call it moving. Jelly sacks hurt a lot. If you’ve never been shot before, you’re going to think you’re dying. You’ll feel like your guts exploded. Hell, even if you have been shot before, you won’t be whistling Dixie. They’re both in shock. They don’t know what to do next, and thankfully, they’re blind to anything that doesn’t involve their immediate safety.
I ratchet my way down from the ceiling, stopping just above the ground to release myself. But my waist pack snags one of the nylon cables, twisting it off. I make a move to catch the pack, but it’s falling too fast. It hits the ground, and then, unfortunately, so do I. All of this anticipation, why do I always rush?
When I fall, it’s in slow motion, so even though it’s only about three feet, it feels like an eternity. And my legs begin to kick, feet pointing to the ground, body trying to right itself. Except I don’t have feet, which means the stump of my right thigh jams into the concrete first, causing pain like I haven’t felt in some time. I almost black out.
Paranoia sets in, and adrenaline follows. I roll over, tap the stump to check for blood: it’s dry. One quick look at Susan: still dead. Time to clear out the evidence.
Miss Massacre's Guide to Murder and Vengeance Page 3
