Violet Darger (Book 2): Killing Season

by L. T. Vargus

  She suddenly remembered an article she'd read a few months ago in one of her psychology journals. The topic was one-night stands. A recent study had found that women — contrary to what is commonly suggested — do not enter into such a fling thinking it will turn into a long-term relationship. Instead, the women generally reported that they were pleased to be wanted. Flattered to be found attractive.

  The psychologist performing the study had noted the irony in that the men interviewed admitted to drastically lowering their standards when it came to one-night stands.

  "What's so flattering about a man wanting casual sex?" the researcher wrote.

  Violet wondered what Leonard Stump would have to say about it, with all of his theories about animals and ritual.

  Attraction is lust and lust is a nice way of saying that we’re all just rutting beasts.

  Fuck, she thought. She really was starting to think like him.

  Darger crumpled the bartender’s number in her fist and stuffed it in the seat pocket next to the barf bags. Pulling the blanket up to cover the silly dress, she thought that if she were lucky, she’d be able to sleep for most of the flight.

  Chapter 4

  Potential targets drifted over the blacktop. A white-haired couple loading bags into the back of their Mercedes. A young black mother with a toddler resting on her hip. A bum wearing a tattered flannel shirt, raising a tallboy wrapped in a brown paper bag to his lips. All ages. All races. All walks of life.

  Some would live, and some would die.

  He watched them all, watched the grocery store parking lot through the driver’s side window of a beat up Ford Focus, arms draped over the steering wheel. He tried to keep still, but his legs bounced, his hands twitched, his intestines squished and gurgled deep inside.

  Intensity. That’s what this was. Physical intensity. Some force, some passion that held him in its grip, made the synapses smolder that little bit brighter in his head, turned the volume up on all of his sensory perceptions.

  He felt every follicle of hair on his body, sensed the lingering moisture in his armpits, smelled the stale french fry stench that clung to the upholstery. His pupils dilated into black pits, eyelids opened wider than usual, almost stinging from the electrical sizzle of the energy burning just behind them, and he saw every movement in the lot like it was happening in slow motion.

  Men, women and children and shopping carts and bulging plastic bags and gallons of milk with that film of sweat beading up on them. Every satisfied shopper coming and going with no idea that a predator looked upon them. Judged them. Deemed them worthy of life or death.

  The sensation matched what he’d experienced when he parked the Jeep on the hill overlooking the highway. He’d never felt more alive than he did in these moments just before the event, just before the violence. His whole body woke up, his awareness, his state of being lurching toward some plane beyond normal existence, some form of divinity that he couldn’t hold onto for very long.

  His eyes drifted over the lot again. The Publix nestled in a suburban neighborhood. A land of polo shirts, minivans, Starbucks, and cleanliness. A soft energy pervaded the parking lot itself. Smiling faces that wouldn't look out of place on Food Network. Even the bum had straight white teeth.

  The neighborhood reduced the risk, Levi felt, of anyone else in the vicinity packing a weapon. In the inner city, he'd probably run into some gang banger. Out in the sticks, it would be some NRA freak's dream come true to put him down. But here in the middle ground, in the suburbs, it was all sheep and no wolves. Or so it seemed.

  Again, he fidgeted in his seat, fingers writhing on the steering wheel, liquid thrashing in his stomach.

  He checked his phone. Chuckled under his breath. Only two minutes since he’d last looked, though that felt impossible. 9:16 AM. It wasn’t hot yet, but even this early he noted that stickiness creeping into the air, that mugginess eagerly waiting to make everyone miserable. Not so different from his own plans, now that he considered it.

  That thought seemed as good an omen as any. He pulled around the corner to park out of sight and slid the ski mask over his face.

  Heat shimmered a little over the parking lot. It wasn’t as prominent this early, but he could see it better now that he was on foot, that slight blurring of all things just above ground level.

  He stepped onto the blacktop, his abdominals flexing against that bulk of cold steel tucked into his waist band, acrylic fabric forming black rings around each of his eyes. He had to resist the urge to scratch the places where the ski mask made his eyelids itch.

  The parking lot swarmed with life all the more now that he was up close, the people in motion everywhere around him — pushing carts, climbing in and out of cars, walking through the rectangle where the automatic doors swung open. From what he could tell, they took no notice of the masked intruder sauntering their way. Sheep, indeed.

  He pushed his forearm into the gun, the hard edges pressing into his flesh.

  This hadn’t been the plan. Not originally.

  He’d removed the backseat of the Ford Focus — one of the backup vehicles — so he could lie in the trunk and fire his rifle out of a hole above the license plate. The car’s body would serve as something of a silencer, at least enough to obfuscate where the shots were coming from. And he’d be ready to scramble into the front seat and be gone in seconds, probably without anyone seeing him at all.

  But after going through with the first shootings along the highway, things had changed. He didn’t do as much damage with the sniper rifle as he thought he might, but it was more than that. He needed to walk into the parking lot, to plod toward the grocery store on foot, to meet his victims face to face.

  He needed it to be personal, needed to feel it.

  He didn’t know why.

  He remembered hearing a boxing announcer once mention that during the truly great fights, it was an honor to get spattered with a little of the fighters’ blood while sitting ringside. Even as entertainment, violence was sacred somehow, the blood itself made precious. Almost religious. That. He needed to be close enough to feel that.

  As he drew up next to the cars parked toward the back of the lot, his perspective shifted. The people in motion before him became individuals, no longer moving pieces of an abstract whole.

  A fat man with sunburned cheeks checked that his Volvo was locked and then fished something out of his pocket and dropped it into the partially opened sun roof.

  A woman with freckled shoulders protruding from her tank top wrangled two toddlers into the child seat of a shopping cart.

  A young couple held hands as they moved into the automatic door. They looked so much more fit than everyone else. Lean and taut. Time and gravity hadn’t yet pulled their bodies into saggy wads of flab. Maybe it never would.

  Moments ago they’d been distant. Indistinct. Almost like ants in an ant farm. Now they were real live human beings with lives and families and faces that expressed great depths of emotion with the faintest change in the wrinkles around their eyes.

  He kept his pace. Swallowed. A spaghetti taste lingered at the back of his tongue, acidic and sour. His throat contracted again, an attempt to flush it, but no amount of swallowed spittle could wash it away.

  And his eyes darted to a college-aged kid in a wife beater and powder blue mesh shorts. Skinny and pale and heading this way. He drank Powerade, neon yellow fluid glugging around in the bottle when he tipped it. It looked like he’d been playing basketball. An early morning practice or something. Maybe that was true. Maybe not. It didn’t matter anymore.

  The kid was about to get…

  He grasped after a word, mentally flicking past the usual choices in his vocabulary for something appropriately exotic to match the drama of the occasion.

  Smoked.

  The kid was about to get fucking smoked.

  Icy fingers plucked his t-shirt out of the way, and he drew the gun from his belt as he closed the last few paces. His nerves steadied as soon as he felt
the grip in his palm. All fear, all anxiety, all shakiness fled his body at once, replaced by a calm, a coldness.

  Power. He felt powerful.

  He didn’t hesitate.

  He lifted the gun and pulled the trigger, the crack loud enough to make it feel like his ear drums had imploded.

  He could tell by feel that he’d let the muzzle drift high, and this sense was verified when the window of the grocery store shattered in the distance, white lines carving the safety glass into little shards. His recoiling ear drums could just make out the tinkle of the window coming apart, the sound so small and somehow musical.

  He steadied himself to fire again.

  In this fraction of a second, the kid in the mesh shorts jumped a little, arms folding in front of himself out of instinct. But he didn’t have time to think, let alone run.

  The second shot put a neat hole in his forehead and a big sloppy one where the brain sludge exited the back of his skull. The propulsion of the exit wound snapped the head forward, and the limp body followed the momentum, smacking the ground face first.

  Powerade spread over the blacktop like a piss puddle.

  He blinked and moved on, back straightening a little, pushing him up a little taller. The electricity surged in his skull, arcing brighter and brighter. The sizzle intensified in the wet of his eyes.

  He closed on a cowering old man crouched between a pair of mini-vans. He was black with a hunched back and one of those cabbie hats, the trembling palms of his hands obscuring most of his face. Good. He wanted diversity. Wanted his work to represent the chaos of absolute hatred, no bullshit political message. No lines drawn based on race or class or creed.

  Kill ‘em all.

  The Glock lifted again, and it strained against his arm, jerked in his palm, and two shots put the man down. One in the head and one in the chest. He was dead before he landed from the looks of it. Face all blank and slack.

  And he could feel the way the hate contorted his own face beneath the mask, the way it wrinkled his nose and snarled his lip, the way the heat of it seethed in his cheeks. But inside he felt only the power, the animal satisfaction of dominating this scene, this swath of land, mounting it and gouging away, just gouging the fuck away. And lusting after more and more and more.

  The people in the lot screamed now, little feminine mews and moans all around him. They responded like puppets to his every move, to his every whim. Some ran for the store, but many froze like frightened rabbits, twitching in unison whenever he took a step or turned his head.

  Total power. Total control.

  The tall man strode over the concrete land, and the lesser beings cowered in his presence, waiting their turn to die.

  Levi Foley.

  They would know his name after this. The whole world would know his name. Soon.

  He fired wildly into a cluster of sedans ahead and to the left, having sensed movement there. People cowered in some of the vehicles, he knew. And based on the fresh screams, he also knew he’d punched new holes in a few of them.

  He paused there a moment, jammed a fresh clip into the gun and pressed forward again.

  A woman was next. Judging by the streaks of gray in her hair, she was probably about his mother’s age. He didn’t wait to get within arm’s reach this time, gunning her down from a distance, watching the floppy body topple to the ground in a heap, maintaining his slow but steady momentum toward the storefront with the broken out front window.

  He’d need to turn soon, to walk the well-planned route of his escape, but not yet. One more.

  This was it. The fantasy made real. The power he’d dreamed of for all of those years. The release of a lifetime of pent up aggression. They’d talked about it so many times. Dreamed about it so many times.

  It felt good.

  A blur took shape in the corner of his eye, but he didn’t get a chance to turn his head that way before something struck him about waist high. Hard.

  His feet kicked out from under him, shoes scuffing a little before lifting off. And he hovered, his body made weightless in this slow motion moment. Some dark object latched onto his middle.

  His vision tipped skyward. Pointed him toward the indifferent blue stretched out above. Wisped with clouds.

  He looked down to see the greasy head of blond hair tucked under his arm. And it occurred to him that he was being tackled, though he couldn’t quite believe it. That wasn’t possible, was it?

  A hero.

  The ground rushed up to throttle him, his brain rattling around in his skull, cutting his vision out to black for an instant and fading it back in. And then an emptiness filled his torso, a feeling like the walls of his chest had contracted, his lungs rendered concave and motionless, his rib cage unable to expand to draw wind. In a way, he thought the only thing that kept him from getting knocked out was the intense pain of biting his lip upon landing. The blood pooled in his mouth, salty and warm.

  The greasy-haired hero drove his legs into Levi’s impact with the ground, adding a little torque. Probably a wrestler or football player. Some daring athlete here to save the day.

  Well, his brains would splatter the same as all the rest.

  It wasn’t until he went to pull the trigger that he realized the gun had skittered away from him when he landed.

  His shoulder blades scraped against the ground, and all of that power vacated his being as though sucked out by the asphalt. That animal swell of alpha pride he’d been drunk on drained rapidly. It left him small and vulnerable.

  The football player squirmed against him, a lean and hard muscle cinched around him like a boa constrictor. The hair obscured the face. Gave the eerie impression that the thing attacking him wasn’t human.

  He tried to scramble back, hands and legs pistoning in a crab walk, but every motion seemed only to tighten that sinewy grip of the thing adhering to him.

  Time slowed and slowed as they writhed in this hateful embrace. The seconds fragmented into minutes.

  Levi never saw the punch. It came from nowhere and cracked him in the crook of the jaw, snapped his head to the side and knocked the props of his arms out from under him, laying him out flat once more. His vision dimmed, smudged black along the edges, and his thoughts got slow and distant, his consciousness retracting into its shell some. It didn’t quite put his lights out, but damn near.

  In that dazed moment, eyelids fluttering, he saw it.

  The gun. It lay directly beneath the gas tank of a Mazda, shrouded in the shade there. It was ten feet from him. Maybe more. He’d never be able to reach it.

  Nausea welled in his gut at the sight of it. Jesus. He was on the bottom in this fight, getting bullied — getting his ass kicked — by what looked like a high school kid. He’d gone from the predator to the prey. This would be his legacy.

  Another punch glanced off the side of his head, the near miss actually sharpening his senses some. Time to fight or die.

  His hands scrambled out of instinct, finding the football player’s forearms and clenching. His grip should be enough to at least slow any more punches.

  The kid sat up, trying to pull back enough to wrench his arms free, and his face came into view. The sparse stubble confirmed it. He couldn’t be eighteen, even.

  Levi rocked forward, bashing his forehead into the kid’s nose as hard as he could.

  The blood seemed to appear there all at once. Gushing red. Strangely thick. It spread over the kid’s fingers when he brought them up to cover the wound.

  And the hero’s resolve seeped out of him. His grip loosened, and he scrambled back, hands and knees scuffing over the parking lot in a hasty retreat.

  Levi tottered to his feet and moved. He found his legs a little wobbly from the tackle and headbutt, but he leaned into the dizziness and jogged.

  As soon as he got around the corner of the building, he ripped off the ski mask and jacket and dumped them in the trash can there.

  With the disguise gone, he slowed, no longer jogging. He walked those last few paces to t
he car, taking even steps. He had to force his legs to keep the slower rhythm, the nonchalant beat.

  He couldn’t breathe, chest all tight and clammy. His mind fumbled for something routine he might be doing, some fantasy he could concentrate on to try to keep calm. He imagined he was some dad who had run in to grab some baby formula and had to get back to the little one. He even tucked his arm up against himself as though he were toting the can of powdered, artificial breast milk.

  And then his hand reached out, found the door handle, opened it. He slid into the Focus, started it, hitched in one noisy breath.

  Someone could have seen, but he didn’t think so.

  As he drove away, his eyes danced from the rear view to the driver’s side mirror, waiting for the twirling police lights to appear in one or the other, sure the cops would come ripping out of nowhere and grab him the way the football player had.

  Nothing happened, though. All the traffic around him behaved itself, acted like it was any other day.

  Six blocks later, he ditched the beat up Focus in the parking lot of an abandoned gas station and climbed into his Jeep, which was parked in the East Coast Subs lot next door.

  The vehicle switch seemed to ease that tightness in his chest some. He took a few deep breaths. He’d gotten away. He even smiled at himself in the mirror, but his teeth were all covered in blood.

  Chapter 5

  Her luck held, in that she was able to sleep for most of the first leg of her flight, and she made her connection in Minneapolis. Barely. She sent Loshak a text from the tarmac, giving him her flight details and time of arrival.

  She slept a little more on the way to Atlanta, but she was keyed up now. She’d had a chance to look into the sniper reports before the plane took off, and her head was filled with unanswered questions. Questions that rattled around until the plane finally touched down a few hours later.

  The morning was bright and warm as Darger disembarked in the Peach State and headed for the luggage claim. The saccharine smell of cinnamon goo and frosting wafted from one of the food stalls she passed, and her stomach rumbled. She hadn’t eaten for hours. It was tempting to stop, to dive headfirst into a cinnamon roll the size of a bowling ball, but she wanted to get her bags and meet up with Loshak as soon as possible.