by Renee James
The place is famous for druggies and sex. I've never liked it. I've always felt like I was swimming in a sea of wasted lives when I was in here, even before Strand came along. It’s where the desperate engage in acts of self-defilement. It’s depressing.
It gets worse. As I try to quell my queasiness, I get a feeling that someone is watching me even as I watch the woman who will lead me to Strand. I look around and don't notice anyone. But the feeling is so profound I can feel my skin tingle. I search the crowd again, trying not to appear too obvious, to see if anyone is too interested in me, but see nothing amiss. . I wish I could leave and never return, but I can’t. I have a mission to accomplish and I won’t ever get this far again. I know it. I may back out, but not yet.
***
AFTER FORTY-FIVE MINUTES of mutely observing the dancers and hustlers and sex-hungry throngs, my cue to act comes up.
A skinny transwoman with very long, very blonde hair and a super-low-cut blouse barely covering the nipples of her bulbous breasts opens her cell phone and holds it to her white-blonde hair. She looks to be all of eighteen, but the extensive work on her body suggests someone at least in their mid-twenties. The breasts are at least part plastic, her lips are too full and don’t smile quite right, her cheekbones seem artificially high, the skin around her eyes has been stretched to make a masculine face look feminine. It works. It should. She’s wearing tens of thousands of dollars of plastic surgery, not to mention her investment in female plumbing.
I can’t hear her. The place is so loud I wouldn’t be able to hear her if we were side by side. But it’s not hard to interpret her conversation, even from twenty feet away. She smiles, says something, listens, smiles again, her lips reading “Okay.” I learned about her from following Strand around. She's his new tranny squeeze and the Great One has just beckoned her. Sometimes they just meet at his love nest, sometimes he picks her up here. He never comes in, of course. He has a reputation to protect. She gaily flits to the coat check. I follow and move past her as she waits for her coat. I exit the club, make two lefts and walk down the block into the shadows, looking for Strand’s car. I know the pattern.
His car is parallel-parked near the end of the block, in the shadows. The engine and the lights are off. He's almost invisible. I spot him only because I know his car and I’m looking for it, and because I’ve seen how he plays this game.
I’m halfway down the block when the girlfriend turns the corner, her stiletto heels tapping out echoes as she starts down the sidewalk. I stay on the other side of the street, well out of the range of Strand’s view. I put on disposable gloves as I walk—the kind I wear for doing color. We’ll be doing red tonight, I think.
The girlfriend might be able to see me in the distance, but to her I’d just be a local boy going home. As I near Strand’s car, I drift out of the streetlight toward the porch of a brownstone and nestle into the shadow of a tree. I’m sure Strand is completely unaware of me. My heart is pounding and I’m wheezing as if I’ve just run a four-minute mile. I can feel perspiration on my face and beads of it trickling down my back. Even as I try to focus on Strand and keep my panic under control, I get that feeling again that someone is watching me. I make nervous glances up and down the street, but see only the young woman flouncing down the sidewalk.
The girlfriend is still a hundred feet away when he spots her in his mirror and starts the car. I hear the door locks click open, see the brake lights come on. This is my cue. My anxiety hits heart attack levels. Really, as hard as I breathe I feel like I’m suffocating. I need to dash across the street, open the driver’s door, subdue Strand and push him to the other side of the car, then drive off before his girlfriend is close enough to identify me.
But I can’t move. My need for oxygen is so severe I double over. I can hear the girl’s footsteps change speed as she approaches the car. I look up when I hear the door open. I am furious with myself. My time has come and gone. I can no longer get to Strand without being seen. I feel tears of fury and frustration form in my eyes.
“Hi, sailor, looking for a really good fuck?” she says, loud enough for me to hear across the street, over my own near-death rasps. Not a good move if you want to curry favor with Mr. Secretive.
The interior light of the car gives me a theatrical view of what happens next. Strand lunges across the passenger seat, grabs her arm, and yanks her violently into the car. Her head strikes the door frame and I hear her short cry of pain. The door is still open when she turns to Strand, one hand on her head, tears coming from her eyes, her mouth forming the words “What’s wrong?”
Barely has she formed the last word when Strand’s fist strikes a vicious blow to her face. The sight and sound of it is sickening. I know exactly how that feels—the shock, the numbness, and the pain. The humiliation. I can see splotches of blood on her face, the look of distress and hurt.
Love, Strand style.
The distraction curbs my anxiety attack. Fear and doubt give way to seething anger. In a rage I stand, wheezing, shaking, but mobile, not sure what to do. I want to attack, but I can’t have a witness. Strand’s rage settles the matter. He slaps her across the face with the back of his hand so hard I can hear it. Her head swivels violently, like a rag doll. She struggles to get out of the car and he tries to grab her arm and pull her back in.
I dash for the driver’s door in a stumbling sprint, my legs not working quite right, pulling the needle out, the cap off. As I near the door, the girl twists out of Strand’s grasp and sprawls on the grass by the curb. She is sobbing, but not screaming. She has no voice to scream, it's a casualty of shock. She is scrabbling on her hands and knees, her ass hanging out of her tiny skirt, her purse strewn beside her, looped to her wrist. She is trying to find her feet so she can run.
As I reach for the door handle Strand flings open the door to get out of the car. He registers a shock of his own when my body fills his view, an intrusion he could not have imagined. I'm operating on instinct now. The world is moving in slow motion. I see Strand’s eyebrows arch in surprise and his mouth make a small puckered “O.” His arms begin to move into a defensive posture but it’s too late. Before his brain can trigger any movement in his hands and arms, I stick my thumb in his eye. He brings both hands to his face and cowers. I drive the needle into the side of his neck and squeeze. His arms move another five or six inches, then his jaw drops and he gapes at me as his body melts into a limp pile and sags back onto the driver’s seat.
We’re now in the dream I envisioned when I planned this, Strand in a stupor in the driver’s seat. Part of me is stunned at this reality, but mostly I’m acting out the vision just like I saw it. On automatic pilot. No second thoughts. No doubts. Just do it. I roll him over the console, onto the passenger side. As I push his butt and legs over the obstruction, his head and shoulders drop to the floor in front of the seat. I reach across him and pull the passenger door shut. I check for the girl. She is halfway to the corner, stumbling and staggering, arms flailing, in full panic. I doubt she saw me. I doubt she has seen anything since Strand bashed her in the face. She has no idea that her assailant has now become a victim himself.
I drive a zigzag course for several minutes to see if anyone is following me. The feeling that someone is shadowing me still haunts my senses, but no vehicle is following me, and no pedestrian could keep up. It's just my nerves. I force myself to ignore the seat belt warning that repeats itself after short pauses. It reminds me that I have an unbelted kidnap victim in my car.
My heart is racing. I am panting and sweating. My senses are taking in every sound, every sight, every moving thing. I want terribly to put the gas pedal to the floor and be gone from here. But I make myself focus. I make myself keep the car at the speed limit. I take stock of the situation.
It occurs to me that Strand may suffocate the way he's positioned, and even a minor fender bender would snap his neck, a much easier death than I have planned for him. I stop on a quiet street and adjust him so he’s sitting up in the pa
ssenger seat, seat belt on, and continue on my way.
When I was fantasizing about taking my revenge on Strand, I envisioned all kinds of ways to kill him and places to do it. I favored torture, with him hanging from something, me cutting off his genitals, and still later opening his abdomen and showing him his own entrails. That was an angry fantasy. I don’t think I’m capable of that sort of torture, but the killing part of my plan is murky even now. He will know who is killing him and why. The rest I’ll kind of make up as I go along.
When I was imagining this, my favorite location for his death was the alley where I was raped, but that isn’t practical for many reasons. I'd thought about trying to find an abandoned warehouse or maybe an unoccupied house somewhere. I once went for a hike in a forest preserve, scoping out places I might use. The safest and smartest thing would have been to just kill him with the needle and leave him in his car somewhere. But that would have just been murder. I want more. I need more.
In the end, I decided on using his place. Not his multi-million-dollar condo in the sky—there would be too much security to overcome there. No, I am headed for his other place, his love nest, an apartment in a quiet neighborhood, lots of privacy. I know where this apartment is, but I’m temporarily disoriented from my zigzag driving. Panic begins to overtake me as I imagine him recovering consciousness while I’m still trying to get my bearings. I breathe deeply, once, twice, five times. At last, Lincoln Avenue comes into view. I'm minutes from his special apartment.
I steer into the alley behind his building and kill the car lights. I find a garage door opener in the glove box; when I press it, one of the two garage doors in front of me rises. I pull into the garage and close the door. I flip on the overhead lights before the opener light goes dim. I take two lengths of nylon cord from my pocket and tie his hands and ankles. I stuff a rag in his mouth and tie a length of cord around his head to hold the gag in place. Then I go through his pockets. I find a key ring with what looks like house keys on it.
I turn off the garage light and cross silently to the building’s two back doors. One opens to a staircase going up. I choose the other one. When I followed Strand to this place, I didn’t dare follow him into the alley, but I watched from the street and marked where I saw the lights go on. This building, first floor.
I don’t know if he has an alarm. There’s no way to find out but to enter, so that’s my plan. If I trip an alarm, I just leave him there and try to disappear.
I try three keys before I find one that works. I open the door and step into a hall that leads to a kitchen. No alarm panel that I can see. I check the front door. No alarm. I wait and listen. No alarm. No noise. The place seems deserted. I take a quick tour of the place to make sure no one is there. . Two bedrooms, two baths, living room, kitchen with eat-in space. Everything is empty. Curtains drawn on every window. A cold, lonely place. As a love nest it’s like sex in a casket.
Hauling in Strand is exhausting. He’s a fit six-footer, maybe 180 pounds. Maybe more. It would have been hard for Bob Logan. For Bobbi it’s nearly impossible. I hoist him on my shoulder and my knees buckle. I right myself, then stagger one laborious, lurching step, teeter, balance, then another step. It seems to take forever but I finally reel across the threshold and haul his limp body into the living room.
I lock the door and turn on a few lights and go through the place again. The rooms are big with high ceilings. It’s an old building that probably had an expensive makeover in the eighties or nineties. There are a few plates and glasses in the cupboards, a few beers in the refrigerator, a bottle of wine on the counter. A few place settings and utensils in a kitchen drawer.
The larger bedroom is fully decked out, the only room in the house that looks like it’s used much. It has a four-poster bed with nice linens, nightstands on both sides with clock radios and reading lights, two chests of drawers, an easy chair and footstool in one corner, area rugs, and a walk-in closet. One of the chests is completely devoted to sex toys—dildos in a variety of sizes, chains, a velvet whip, restraint devices, soft ropes, a box of condoms, several lubricants, body oils. I don’t have time for a full inventory. I’m fighting panic and anxiety with every breath I take. But before I close the last drawer, I grab a section of rope.
As I look for a place to hang Strand—by the hands, not the neck—he begins to stir. Panic sets in. My pulse races and I start panting. I can feel beads of sweat trickling down my face, my back. I worry that I'll have a total panic attack, like on the street. That makes it worse. I breathe deeply to calm myself.
I have about ten feet of strong nylon cord and a heavy lag eye screw in my pocket. My plan is to sink the screw into one of the beams in the ceiling and hang him from it. In my days as Bob the home handyman I was handy enough to know it could be done, but the chance of me finding the beam on the first try is worse than awful. My backup plan is to lay him out on the floor and tie his arms above his head to a door knob or something, and his feet to something else. But I’d rather have him hanging vertically. It seems more personal.
Strand moans. The clock is ticking. I look for a likely place to sink the lag-eye screw. I choose an archway that separates the living room from the kitchen. I slide a kitchen chair to the threshold and twist the lag screw through the drywall and into the two-by-four framing. I run Strand’s bondage-game rope through the screw eye, and then sit him in a chair underneath it. I run the long rope between his hands and partly boost, partly hoist him upright. When I finish, he's dangling from the arch, his feet just touching the floor. He’ll be able to relieve the pressure on his wrists and shoulder sockets by standing on his feet, but he won’t be comfortable.
I check my watch. It’s nearing three o’clock in the morning. Strand and I have two hours left together. Five o’clock in the morning is the best time for me to leave. It’s dark and early enough that neighbors probably won’t see me, and anywhere else I’m seen I’m just an early shift worker.
I go into the kitchen and sit down at last, exhausted, nervous. . Until now, I've been executing a plan, focused on each step, blocking out everything else. It helped keep the panic under control. I have been amazingly proficient. As I sit here I realize with awe and dread that I have done this with the ruthless efficiency of a professional killer.
Having time to consider all this is not good for my mental state. Doubts cascade into my consciousness. I’m not a killer. I’m not even a fighter. I don’t even engage in nasty conversations. What am I doing here? But how can I walk away from this without killing him?
I begin planning how I will leave before Strand sees me. I could just leave him dangling. Someone will find him eventually. He’ll be pissed but maybe he won’t know who to blame. Sure, and people will start mistaking me for Julia Roberts. It’s an attractive fantasy, but a fantasy nonetheless. He would keep stalking me. He won’t stop until he kills me. Or I kill him. Would I rather be the one getting killed? Being the killer is so ugly. So messy.
Or I can still leave and take my chances with the police. Sure. That would be as effective as getting a Toy Poodle to protect me. The thought evaporates. No. I will not be the victim. Somehow I have to find the strength to do the unthinkable, right here, right now.
Strand is mumbling and shaking his head. I go back in the living room to see how close to consciousness he is. I try not to see him as a human being. I want to look at him and see him beating Mandy to death. I want to see his fists pounding her body to a broken pulp. I want to see his cold fish eyes as he squeezes my breast until I cry. I want to envision him as he tells his thugs to beat and rape me. I want to look at him and feel my anus being violated, I want to feel that pain and see him laughing as his buddies tell him how it was, butt-fucking the tranny.
But what I see is a human face. I can see that he is feeling pain. His eye is swollen and red from my thumb. I can feel the unbearable ache in his shoulders. I see his hands turning white from lack of blood circulation. I want out of here. This is not where I belong. This is not me. I’m a
hairdresser. A sissy. I want to be giving some crabby old lady a perm. I want to be a girl. I want to wear makeup and get my nails done. I don’t want to hurt anyone.
And I don’t want to have to live with the memory of killing someone. I should go. I should get out of here right now.
I hold my head and try to turn off the torrent of thoughts.
Strand reaches consciousness. He groans in pain and looks around slowly, not understanding. I stop crying and watch, mesmerized. The man whose last conscious act was beating the shit out of a transwoman is waking up dangling from the ceiling of his own love nest. What a mind-fuck that must be.
At last his sweeping gaze stops and comes to rest on me. He has trouble focusing because of the swollen eye. He blinks repeatedly. After a while, a sort of recognition kicks in. He’s a prisoner. I’m familiar to him. He takes in my tears, my effete stance. He sneers contemptuously. He thinks tears are a sign of weakness. Stupid man. Stupid, arrogant man. His sneer recharges my determination.
I stand in front of him. He stares at me, his eyes glaring with hatred and sheer rage. He makes angry noises muffled beyond recognition by the gag. I wait for him to stop.
“Welcome to our last date, Strand,” I say. My voice is the final clue as to who I am. He roars into his gag, almost no sound coming out. His rage is terrifying. A psychopath out of his mind with anger, all directed at me. Trussed as he is, I can feel him ripping my arms from my body, tearing my flesh from its bones.
That fearful vision makes me take a short breath and bring my hands to my face. He sees my weakness and lashes out with his feet to kick me. I dodge him easily. All those hours of self-defense lessons and conditioning make it child’s play.
My fear gives way to reflexive action. I strike him with a karate jab flush in the solar plexus. It is a hard punch, with perfect leverage and timing. My knuckles penetrate well into his diaphragm. All the breath leaves his body and he gasps for air through the gag. His face turns red. He wets himself.
