by Dan Jolley
Jenks stood abruptly. His voice still didn’t get any louder, but Feygen nearly cringed from it. “Get back out to that theatre. Figure out where the woman went. She was on foot, for Christ’s sake.” Jenks went to the door and opened it. “I don’t want some maniac thinks she’s Batgirl loose in midtown.”
Feygen got to his feet, stepped into the hallway, turned around to say something else to Jenks, and Jenks shut the door hard in his face.
Feygen let the crash of the door fade away, finished his coffee, and threw the Styrofoam cup in a nearby trash can. “Back to the theatre,” he said to no one, and wandered down the corridor.
* * *
At roughly the same time Zach Feygen’s boss slammed the door in his face, Janey Sinclair bounded down the front steps of the LaCroix and headed up Juniper Street, a spring in her step and a smile in her eyes. She still rode the high from the previous night’s success, and the funk she’d been in the day before seemed very far away. Thoughts of Tim Kapoor were a lot easier to manage today, as well; the office door had been closed and locked when she passed it, so she hadn’t had to contend with him on her way out.
Her destination was a little corner grocery several blocks up, where she planned to purchase the ingredients to her favorite lemon-herb chicken dish. She rarely ate meat, but she thought she owed herself something special by way of celebration. She already “had her mouth set” for it, as her father used to say, and could taste the herbed bread-crumb crust.
She laughed a little. This is how exciting I am. Celebrating with chicken.
Janey’s thoughts abruptly derailed as her eyes fell on a copy of the Chronicle lying discarded on a bench. Not the main header, but still above the fold, were the words:
Masked Woman Saves Cops’ Lives
The brief article had no art, but claimed that an “informed source within the police department” told the reporter that a masked female vigilante had stepped in last night and taken charge of things when a police operation went bad and endangered two officers’ lives.
She picked up the paper and walked slowly, still reading. The police and everyone else knew she was out here now, which was inevitable, of course, but she hadn’t expected it so soon. She’d hoped to operate for a few weeks, a couple of months even, before anything got out about her.
Guess that was unrealistic.
Janey rarely had anything to do with social media. She had never been able to shake the thought that participating in it was tantamount to rabid narcissism, and an outgrowth of that—along with strong, self-acknowledged Luddite tendencies—had kept her from buying a smartphone. But she also knew that social media’s role in society had expanded far beyond simple social interaction, and that entities such as Twitter had evolved into legitimate sources of news. She wondered if she’d made it into the Twitterverse yet.
Maybe it’s finally time to buy a new laptop. Her old one had broken down a couple of years ago, and she’d never bothered replacing it.
Janey shuffled on her way and tried to decide how she felt about the sudden publicity.
* * *
At 10:36 that night, Kaveyah Wilson pulled her books tighter to her chest and stared out across a vast expanse of pavement. She could just see her car from where she stood at the corner of the parking deck. It sat at the far end of the remote, dimly-lit, panhandle extension of the college’s central dorm parking area, quietly nicknamed “The Rape Lot.” Nobody liked to talk about it much.
Kaveyah straightened her slender frame and headed for her car. She tried not to be too conspicuous as she rearranged her keys in her right hand, so that they pointed out from between her fingers as she made a fist. Just like they taught in self-defense class.
Kaveyah Wilson was a sophomore dance major. Her instructors were unsure about her future as a dancer; they thought she’d be more suited to modeling. But Kaveyah wanted to be a dancer, and knew she had the talent, and daily thought of new places where her instructors could stick their opinions.
This is the last time I do this. It was after ten, and while the rest of the campus headed out for a typical night of fifty-cent beer and pick-up lines, Kaveyah had agreed to help her boyfriend Keith, a Journalism major who wrote for the school paper, study for an Accounting test. “Study,” she said aloud, and snorted, wincing as the sound echoed around her.
He could barely be called her boyfriend. They’d only been on two dates.
That was apparently time enough for things to get horizontal, at least in Keith’s opinion, and now she had to go all the way back to her car, out to the only parking place she could find on the overcrowded campus, alone and after dark to boot. Her eyes narrowed to slits. Under her breath she said, “Keith Gaffney, if I get attacked out here, so help me, I’ll kick your ass up around your ears.”
The car seemed only slightly closer.
The lot extended to the edge of a large square of bare earth, several months earlier cleared of trees for construction. Only a single line of mercury vapor lights lit the Rape Lot. The administration thought that was enough. They had agreed, grudgingly, to assign a twice-hourly security patrol to the area after reports of four rapes and two assaults were filed. Apparently it hadn’t occurred to them to close that section of the lot.
Modeling. She turned the word over in her mind. Keith insisted she was a dead ringer for Chrissy Teigen, and was missing out on a fantastic opportunity by not auditioning for modeling jobs. Yeah right. Chrissy got my chest and hers both.
Four cars away from her own, she heard a sound. She stopped dead still, listening.
Kaveyah drove a gray Honda, a gladly accepted cast-off from her MBA older brother. Parked between her and the Honda were two sedans and two huge SUVs. The sound seemed to have come from between the SUVs. She strained her ears to hear it again.
Nothing. Silence.
Kaveyah looked back toward the dorms, hoping to see the flashing yellow light of the security patrol truck, but there was nothing. Not even other people coming from or going to their cars. She turned back toward the Honda and moved into the center of the aisle, as far away from the deep shadows between the vehicles as she could get.
It might have been a cat. There were plenty of cats around.
But it hadn’t sounded like a cat. It sounded like something big. And it had come from between the two SUVs, where their high, square frames cast deep shadows.
She had parked next to the farther away of the two SUVs, and to get to her car she’d have to enter one of those deep shadows. Kaveyah took a nervous step sideways. Tried to decide what to do. She wouldn’t have thought a parking lot could seem this threatening, and surely during the day it wouldn’t. But the sun had set long since, and her heart pumped frantically, and she realized she was terrified.
Turn around. Turn around and walk to the dorm, simple as that. Call somebody. Anybody.
No no no. Dammit, stop being silly! You’re no little girl. You handled Keith tonight. There’s no reason you can’t walk to your car, for pity’s sake. So move. Go on. Go.
The seconds stretched out, and she didn’t hear the sound again. Keys bristling from her clenched fist, she started for her car and waded into the shadow.
Nothing jumped out at her as she fitted the key to the lock.
Nothing jumped out at her as she opened the door and tossed her books in the back seat.
Smiling to herself, she took one foot off the ground to put it on the floorboard of the Honda, and a hand flicked out from under her car and clamped around her other ankle.
The hand felt like stone, and jerked her shin into the doorframe. She lost her balance and bounced off the side of the SUV, and the pavement slammed into her and drove all the air out of her lungs, and she gasped as a man pushed and pulled his way from beneath the Honda like a giant slug and fell on top of her.
He was big, huge, a massive wall of soft rounded flesh supporting muscle and bon
es like steel beams, and she couldn’t believe he’d squeezed himself under her car. Kaveyah drew in a shocked breath and wished she hadn’t, he smelled so bad, dirt and sweat and urine ground into his clothes and his skin. She got one flashing look at his eyes: palest blue, almost gray, and very wide, whites visible all the way around. With a lurch she recognized him as one of the college’s landscapers. She’d seen him working around the dorms, and once or twice around Five Points, drinking and laughing with three or four other college employees.
He wore a work shirt with the name Glenn stitched above the pocket.
“Black bitch.” Guttural. Forced. “Black bitch, black bitch.” He curled one huge arm around her neck and hauled her to her feet. She clawed at the arm, gasping, unable to take another good breath, and he dragged her backward toward the edge of the lot. He told her in broken, muddled sentences some of what he intended to do to her. She still couldn’t scream.
She kicked as well as she could, but it was like kicking a mattress. She tried to slam a foot down onto one of his insteps, but he held her almost completely off the ground, and her feet couldn’t reach their target. Glenn twisted sideways, pulled her between the cars, still toward the trees. He began pawing at her with his free hand, shoved it inside her blouse, mashed her breasts. She made tiny hissing noises as the cartilage in her neck began to give way.
Kaveyah heard the sound of breaking glass, and the mercury-vapor light directly above them went out, enveloping them in darkness. Glenn stopped his chanting and let go of her breast as he turned his head to look up toward the dead light. His grip on her throat relaxed the tiniest bit, but he still held Kaveyah pinned. He made a strange, confused trilling sound in the back of his throat—and his arm sprang open convulsively. Glenn staggered away from her, out into the aisle between the cars.
Kaveyah had no idea what was happening around her, but she did know she was free, and realized she still gripped her keys in her fist, forgotten till now. She stumbled to the Honda and climbed in, jammed the keys into the ignition, slammed her door and locked it, turned on the headlights, and the twin beams lit the scene before her perfectly.
Glenn and someone else stood not five feet from the front of her car.
Glenn kept his feet, but just barely. A long, freely-bleeding cut curved down across his forehead and onto one cheek. The other person wrenched Glenn’s left arm into a punishing joint lock, and Kaveyah gasped.
A woman dressed head-to-foot in segmented gray body armor, a gray full-head mask covering her face, stood behind Glenn, forcing him onto the ground.
Relays clicked over in Kaveyah’s mind, and she realized this must be the woman from the paper. The vigilante. The woman who, until now, Kaveyah hadn’t really believed was real.
The vigilante turned her head and looked at Kaveyah through the windshield with eyes covered by black mesh, and Kaveyah didn’t know who to be more terrified of, the masked woman or the man who’d attacked her.
Glenn let out a scream like a rockslide and broke away. The vigilante fell back, half-crouched; she moved fluidly, gracefully. Like a dancer.
Lord, she’s better than I am!
Frozen, Kaveyah watched as Glenn knotted up a fist like a wrecking ball and slammed a punch at the vigilante’s head.
The vigilante twisted aside. She caught Glenn’s wrist as it passed her, pivoted, brought the arm up over one shoulder and snapped it cleanly at the elbow. Before Glenn could scream again, the vigilante shoved him a pace backward and delivered the most devastating kick to the groin Kaveyah had ever seen, in movies or real life. Glenn doubled over, his mouth huge and his great round gut heaving.
The vigilante pushed Glenn out of the way of Kaveyah’s car. The huge man fell to the pavement with a thick, meaty sound.
The woman in gray came to her door—Kaveyah realized the window was rolled down a crack, and scrambled to put it back up, but couldn’t find the button—but the vigilante only spoke to her.
“You’re safe,” she said, her voice cool and smooth and low. Kaveyah stopped fumbling for the window control and looked up at her. “But you’d better go now. Report this.”
Bizarrely, for a bare instant, Kaveyah thought she smelled lemon chicken. The vigilante backed away from her, into the shadows, and faded from sight.
For about a second Kaveyah tried to see where the woman had gone, but couldn’t.
She jammed the car in gear and got the hell out of there.
* * *
A little more than sixteen hours after Kaveyah Wilson called the police, a 2002 red-and-primer Camaro squealed its way down a narrow road in central Alabama, chrome flashing in the afternoon sun.
“You son of a bitch! Did you think I wouldn’t find out? Did you think nobody’d tell me?”
Julie Worley felt her face turning red, the tears starting in her eyes, and hated herself for showing so much emotion. Brett said nothing. He just kept staring out the windshield. Julie could only tell he was upset by how fast he took the turns.
“Did you? Did you think I’d never know?”
Brett still didn’t reply.
Julie Worley, a senior in high school, went out with Brett Griggs for the first time on her sixteenth birthday, almost two years ago. He was her first real date, her first real kiss. On her seventeenth birthday, their one year anniversary, he became her first lover.
She wished him dead.
Slumped back in her seat, eyes on the passing trees, she said, “I can’t believe this. How long’ve you been screwing her? A month? Six months, a year, what?”
Brett tightened his grip on the steering wheel. “First time was at my dad’s lake house, about two weeks after I popped your cherry.” His knuckles whitened. “Happy now? That what you wanted to hear?”
Julie stared at him open-mouthed, and as the tears spilled out she screamed and attacked him, punched and clawed, and tried her best to rip off as much skin as she could. Brett shouted and fought her away. The car swerved all over the road, and the passenger-side mirror clipped itself off against a DEER CROSSING sign. Brett stomped on the brake pedal and, when Julie didn’t let up, slammed his elbow into the side of her face. Her head bounced off the window and her fists fell into her lap.
Stunned, she sat for a few brief seconds of silence, and began to cry again. Brett curled his lip and pulled the car over to the side of the road, almost into the trees. He shoved it into PARK, reached across Julie, pushed her arm out of the way, and popped the door open.
“Out.”
Julie looked him in the eyes and tried to say, “What?” but Brett cut her off and said, “Out! Get out, get outta my car!” He unbuckled her seat belt.
“Out here? You’re just gonna leave me here?” Brett winced, and she immediately regretted sounding whiny.
“Just get the hell out!” he shouted, and Julie jerked back away from him. When she showed no sign of doing it herself, he put both hands and one foot on her and shoved her out the door. She caught herself on the doorframe and, when she got both feet on the ground, made as though to get back in. Brett hurriedly shoved the car into DRIVE and gunned the engine.
The Camaro sprayed Julie with gravel as it jumped away from her. Her books, which she’d forgotten on the floorboard, came flying out of the sunroof.
She stood and watched him go. Her cheek began to throb where Brett had elbowed her, and she felt the tears start again when she touched her face. Julie sank to her knees in the grass and for a few moments tried to think. When that didn’t work, she settled for trying not to panic.
She stayed there, on her knees, for a quarter of an hour. No cars came down the road. She wasn’t surprised, since not many people lived out toward her house, and those who did wouldn’t be getting off their jobs for another hour and a half. She checked her watch: three thirty-six.
A breeze blew, lifted her hair. A mockingbird started singing. She waited. More minutes ticked pas
t, and she had to try even harder not to lose control of herself.
Brett really wasn’t coming back.
Julie straightened her shoulders, wiped her face as best she could on the tail of her shirt, stood and went about gathering up her schoolwork and textbooks. The idea of being stranded here didn’t bother her all that much, really. Maybe in a big city, maybe in Birmingham, yeah, that’d be bad. But here, not too far from her home and in the middle of the day, no problem. Besides...concentrating on getting home ought to keep her mind off Brett. At least for a while. Ought to.
It didn’t work out as she’d hoped. She hadn’t been walking long when the reality of her situation hit her: she and Brett were over. Finished. She wondered how many people had known about it all along, how many people had laughed at her behind her back.
She and Brett had dated for so long. She realized with a sudden ache that she didn’t know how to behave anymore, what to do or where to go. No more movies together, with his arm around her in the theater. No more dances. No more of his mother’s cooking. No more trading music. No more kisses. No more nights together.
Julie gritted her teeth. She’d have to figure out how to spend Friday and Saturday nights again, and she’d have to face everybody in home room the next morning—and she’d have to explain it to her father, who’d convinced himself that Brett was a great guy, and told her on a regular basis how lucky she was to have caught him.
Well... She ground her teeth together as she walked. Screw ’em all. Screw ’em all.
Maybe she’d cry in the next few days, but damn it, it’d be for some other reason, because she wouldn’t cry for Brett. Not anymore.
Bastard.
Son-of-a-bitch.
In the middle of a thought Julie heard something and stopped to look behind her. It grew swiftly louder, and closer, and became a song, one she recognized, one Brett’s older brother Chad liked to listen to. Maybe...maybe Brett, coming back for her...?
