Black Bird

by Greg Enslen

  Jack, had he taken a little more time, would’ve assuredly recognized the location of the Mall - he had spent one drenched and exhilarating evening in that area of the woods, being chased by Sheriff Beaumont’s incompetent deputies, before emerging from the woods and gunning the good Sheriff down. But Jacks’ mind was on other things. The wet ground from that night so freshly in Jack’s mind was now shopping space and lamp poles and expansive parking lots - Jack would probably have appreciated the irony.

  But the mall was about the biggest sign of the growth of Liberty since Jack had left. There were still great areas of trees still stretching between Liberty and the I-95, broken only for a short stretch by the mall and its sibling parking lots, and Jack had passed the Mall on his left coming into town. He had seen the mall but failed to realize the importance or the irony of its location - memory and the passage of years had battled for a brief flickering moment, and the passage of years had won out, for now.

  He would remember it soon enough.

  Lisa Stevens was just finishing up and wanted to go home. She worked at Big Video and More, and her Sunday 10:00am to 4:00pm shift was almost up - she’d worked the same shift the day before, and all she wanted to do was go home and crash. She hadn’t spoken to Bethany yet today, but she had known that David Beaumont had left town this morning and that Bethany would probably be in pretty bad shape over it. Why Bethany should be sad was beyond Lisa’s understanding - she had never liked David and had never told Bethany anything different. She’d guessed that Bethany probably loved him, but Lisa certainly couldn’t understand why. Bethany was gorgeous, with the kind of looks that most girls would just kill for, and here she had been, hanging around with the brooding, quiet guy with the famous father. And then he’d dumped her! If it had been Lisa getting dumped by that guy, she’d’ve punched his lights out or something. Lisa Steven’s father had taught her at a very young age how to take care of herself around boys, and now she was something of a tomboy.

  Bethany and Lisa were supposed to be having a girls’ night tonight, with pizza and movies and no mention of boys at all, period. Lisa’s luck with men was notoriously bad, too, and she had no one special in her life at the moment either, so crashing at Bethany’s house and pigging out on a Sunday night was something Lisa had plenty of time for, even if she was tired tonight. And, even though Lisa didn’t care for David Beaumont and hated what he had done to her best friend, Lisa knew that Bethany was hurting and needed someone to be with. Sometimes, the best thing a friend could do is just sit with someone and be there for them.

  Lisa hopped up off of the sales floor where she had been sitting and began stacking the large green and white computer printouts back into the right order. She had been taking inventory of the New Age CD’s, and, even though they were just about done, she wasn’t going to stay and finish them up. She had learned early on to look out for herself and not pay too much attention to what other people wanted or needed. If Big Mel, as just about everybody called him behind his sizable back, wanted the New Age CD’s finished, he could either offer to pay her overtime or get somebody else to do it. Or, heaven forbid, he might even pry himself out of his sturdy chair in the backroom and get out here on the sales floor and do it himself. Nah, it would never happen, she thought, not unless you left a trail of M+M’s leading over to this particular section of the CD display cases.

  After she finished stacking and folding the large sheets and clipping the stack and her pen back onto the clipboard, she checked to make sure that she hadn’t forgotten anything of hers and then walked to the backroom, hanging the clipboard on a large hook labeled “inventories”, one in a row of similar clipboards on similar hooks with simple labels like “requests” and “overdues” and “FYI”.

  Big Mel was in his office-area of the backroom, cordoned off from the rest of the room with a thin wall and a weak-looking door. He was on the phone - no, he wasn’t actually ON the phone or it would’ve been smashed to little tiny pieces, Lisa thought with a little giggle- and he was talking in a low voice, which meant that he was either talking to a prospective date (just the idea sent chills up Lisa’s spine) or talking to his bookie, making bets. It was common knowledge around the store that Big Mel was a confirmed gambling junkie, and that he could and would bet on just about anything, and Lisa was sure he was calling to get the latest on his money.

  Lisa collected her schoolbooks and her purse from the break area at the far end of the room and then walked over and stood by the door into Mel’s office, waiting to be recognized. It didn’t take long for most people to recognize Lisa Stevens. She was very pretty. Very pretty indeed.

  “Hold on a sec, Mike, okay?” Mel said, and then held his big pale hand over the mouthpiece of the phone and turned to Lisa. She could feel his heavy eyes on her, and she wondered why she had ever picked out this tight little skirt to wear today, of all days. She knew what Big Mel was like, and she should’ve known better than to wear things that would just give him more ideas. Not like he needed her help with ideas, or anything.

  “Ready to go?” he said, unconsciously staring.

  She adjusted her books, trying to avoid looking right at him. “Yeah. I almost finished the New Age CD’s - ten more minutes and they’re done. It’s on the hook,” she said, gesturing in the general direction of the row of clipboards even though it was completely unnecessary - Mel had hung up those hooks a long time ago and knew exactly where she was talking about. He was the one who printed out each of the set of sheets for the inventory and hung them on the hooks, just as he printed out most of the other paperwork that this store produced. Big Mel ate paperwork for a snack, she had heard. He printed out a different inventory section every other day or so and hung them up on the clipboard and then expected the employees to complete them whenever there was a slow period. Whenever he caught somebody lazing around, his first question was always the same: “Is the inventory done, yet?” Everyone knew what he was talking about, because they had all worked on the inventory at some time or another.

  ‘Keep people busy’, that was Mel’s motto, if he had one. That and ‘never miss a meal unless you’re dead’, Lisa thought, a faint smile creeping across her red lips.

  “Great. Have a good night, okay?” Mel said, and Lisa could see the curiosity in his eyes, wondering what and where and who she was doing tonight. Well, sorry to disappoint you, fat boy, but this afternoon and evening will be a boring one for the Lisa woman. Just sitting around with a sobbing girl crying over her loser of an ex-boyfriend.

  Mel looked like he was also trying to come up with something else to say, and she was about to leave when he asked about her soccer team at the college.

  She sighed and turned back around. “Well, the team looks pretty good this year. We got a lot of the seniors from last-years LHS team. I was the captain of the High School team last year and we made it to the State Finals, so they’ve kinda put me in charge of the freshmen girls to get them in shape.” It was the same story she told everyone who asked, and it was getting pretty boring. It also wasn’t exactly true. It was true that as a freshman and as the former captain of the girls varsity soccer team at the High School last year, she had been put in charge of the freshmen girls, but none of them would probably play on the Central Virginia Community College team. They were good, but not good enough. The coach had told her that of the seven girls that had come over, Lisa would probably be the only freshman to get any field time at all for the first year.

  But Big Mel didn’t care - he had only asked her another question so he could stare at her legs a little while longer, she was sure. They were long and straight and tanned and she was very proud of them, but she hated the effect that they sometimes had on men. Men could stare, she had found, at something for a long time, blocking out everything else. It was weird, almost, how men could narrow their focus like that, concentrating so intently on something.

  Mel looked for a moment or two more and then he seemed satisfied, only nodding and going back to his phone call wi
th a smile on his face that she was sure was her doing. She left the backroom and went out onto the sales floor, said goodbye to the other employees and left. The other employees that she had talked to also seemed to miss David Beaumont, much to her surprise; it looked like Bethany wasn’t the only one sad to see him go. Maybe there had been more to him than Lisa had gotten to know - he’d seemed to make an impact on a few of the other employees here at the store.

  The weather outside was strange. The wind had picked up a bit and was now rustling the fallen leaves around the parking lot in swirling little patterns of fall colors, and when Lisa looked off to the south, it looked like a storm front was moving in. A long line of dark clouds hugged the horizon from east to west, and as she headed for her car, she caught the faint whiff of approaching rain on the quickening breeze. She had heard about the hurricane that was supposed to be heading up the coast, but this couldn’t be it already - probably just a little rainstorm.

  And it was getting colder. The weather had been unseasonably warm lately, and everyone she talked to had said that they thought that when winter finally did arrive, it would a bad one. It was common thinking that the later winter really got going, the worse it would be, but Lisa didn’t believe it. It had been nice lately, and now it looked like things were going to start getting rainy and colder. Lisa pulled her CEVA satchel-bag of textbooks a little tighter to her bare and goose-pimpled arms and fished her keys out of the bag.

  Her car was a ways away from the front doors to Big Video. Employees of the store and the other surrounding shops were “encouraged” to park a good distance away to allow the closer spots go to the paying customers, and many nights she walked a long way across this expanse of asphalt with a little knot of fear in her stomach. Her little red Tercel was parked in the first row of designated ‘Employee Parking’, an area smack-dab in the middle of the shopping center. She jangled her keys once and popped the door open, dumping the school bag into the back seat before she climbed in and started it up. She flipped the heater controls on for the first time since last spring, and waited for the air to warm her up.

  A flash of light caught her eyes. A solid piece of crystal in the shape of soccer ball hung from her rear view mirror, throwing off reflected slivers of the quickly fading sunlight all over the interior of her car. She reached up and tapped one side of the ball, sending it spinning, and for a moment it looked like a disco ball, spinning and painting the gray seats and doors and dashboard with little flecks of light. John Travolta popped into her mind in that silly white disco suit of his, and she let out a little laugh that she didn’t even hear.

  She let the engine run for a few minutes and the warmth came and her arms and legs began to grow a little warmer. The skirt had also been a poor choice for the coming colder weather, but she hadn’t thought it would get this chilly this quick - probably no one did. She rolled down her window a little to take the edge off the heat and pulled out of the parking lot. She knew it was a strange habit, but whenever the heat was on in her car she also liked to roll the windows down a bit. The mix of the warm air coming out of the heater at her feet and the cool air from the windows pleased her, and even though she had been asked about her odd habit a million times, she didn’t feel like explaining it to anyone. Of course when the weather got really cold, she left her window up all of the way (or maybe just barely cracked), but when the weather was in between, like today, she liked to have heat and cool at the same time.

  She waited at the strip mall’s exit for an opening in the traffic, popping a tape into her stereo. She finally saw an opening in front of a white van and she darted into it, heading for the supermarket and then home to change before heading over to Bethany‘s house.

  Lisa hadn’t seen Jack, but he had certainly seen her. He had been cruising through town, sightseeing and looking for a hotel or someplace to crash for the evening when she pulled out into traffic in front of him, cutting him off. Her blond hair, moving in the breeze of her open window, had caught his attention. Jack felt an urge stir within him, sudden and ominous, and he knew that he needed to take care of a little business before he could find a hotel room and crash for the evening.

  Suddenly, he needed to let Liberty know that Jack Terrington was back in town. Even if, for now, only one person could know.

  The white van pulled to within a short distance of the red Toyota, and Jack watched as she worked to get her seat belt on. She was a beautiful creature, and he backed off, content to follow for a little while.

  As he watched her, he could see that she was rapidly and repeatedly banging her hands on the dashboard and the steering wheel and the gearshift, and it took Jack a few seconds to realize that she was playing the air-drums to whatever music she had going on the radio. Evidently, she was really into it, because he saw that she came close to getting into a couple of minor fender-benders, paying way too much attention to her singing and her drumming and not enough to her driving.

  After a few miles, she slowed and turned into a Food Town parking lot. FOOD TOWN! This was the same one he had been to! He had clocked that chick deputy here, and he had shot Beaumont in the leg in the field behind this place! Jack felt a chill race over his body as the memories washed over him, seeing that the place looked almost exactly the same at it had before. But the place had been called Food Town back then - was it the same place and they’d changed their name, or had they gotten bought out or something? The supermarket was now book-ended with smaller buildings and new stores on either side, a small card store on one side and a travel store on the other, built in the alley area where he had pulled the chick down and started to unbuckle his pants and she had pulled a gun on him.

  Terrington smiled and followed the little red car.

  The girl pulled into a parking space closer to the entrance but, as he parked nearby and watched, she did not get out. She sat in her car and banged away on the dashboard, swinging her head around and singing to the music, music that Jack could now hear, even though he was a half-dozen spaces away. Not bad, considering she had rolled her windows up. It was loud and fast and, as he watched, the song finished up with a flourish, and she stopped her drumming, grabbed her wallet and climbed out.

  Jack was amazed at how good she looked. He could tell that she was a pretty girl from following her on the road, but he had had no idea HOW pretty.

  She had long, flowing blonde hair that seemed to float and bounce under its own power, framing a truly beautiful face. She looked like she might’ve stepped straight out of one of those women’s magazines, the kind he sometimes saw while standing in line at a store. She was tall, with the thin long legs of an athlete, and a deep, dark natural-looking tan that could take a man’s breath away. He looked at her breasts and her buttocks as she moved towards the entrance of the supermarket and his open hands started to move up and down his legs, slowly rubbing. He could easily imagine himself cupping those beautiful breasts, caressing them, kissing them...

  Jack Terrington rarely chose his victims for their physical appearance, but he did so on occasion. He had the same normal sexual urges as any other man, as far as he knew, and he had not been with a woman in several days, not since he had satisfied himself with that feisty little college girl in Florida, the one he had killed by the side of the road next to that police car. He had picked her up near the campus of Florida State University, but that had been over a week ago.

  Now, he felt the urge again, not the killing urge this time but the loving urge that he was sure most men felt, as he watched the little girl with the beautiful ass scoot across the parking lot and into the Food Town.

  Jack took only a second to make up his mind, as he did most of the time. Most of his best decisions were made on the spur of the moment, and this was just another one.

  He reached around behind his seat and, without looking, found his Jimmy. He waited a minute or two to make sure that she wasn’t going to return to her car right away, and then he climbed down from his van and walked over to her little red Tercel. Glancing
around, he saw nobody looking and deftly slipped the Jimmy down between the window and the rubber sealant of the passenger door, sliding it down and around and then jerking quickly up on the hook, pulling up on the mechanical latch inside the door and unlocking it. It took less time than anyone would’ve believed, but then Jack was very good at getting into things.

  He only climbed halfway into the tiny car, keeping the door open in case he had to split fast. The inside of the car looked like the inside of most people’s cars’ - there was the usual collection of things that people just seemed to accumulate in their cars, sometimes without their knowledge. There was a book bag in the back seat crammed with college textbooks and notepads and pencils that had started to spill out of the upside-down bag and out onto the back seat floorboard, competing for space with a mesh bag of soccer balls that seemed to take up the entire back seat. It was a girls’ car, that much was obvious: there was a box of Kleenex’s in the passenger’s floorboard, along with a jacket. In the passenger seat, underneath him as he squatted on his knees, was her purse, lying open, and from the looks of it, missing the wallet.

  The globe caught his eyes, a shiny, globe-shaped piece of crystal or cubic zirconium hanging from the rearview mirror by a thin strand of fine chain, spinning slowly and throwing off sparks and rainbows. Jack was taken with its simple beauty, the way the soccer-ball shape of crystal spun lazily, back and forth. It reminded him of those old disco balls they used to have hanging in every club and bar in the late ‘70’s.

  Carefully, he fished the globe’s chain off over the rearview mirror and put it into the pocket of his leather jacket. Jack always just took what he wanted.

  “Bethany?” Lisa was on one of the phones just outside the entrance to the Food Town. Her back was to her car, or she might have seen the crystal globe of hers bobbing and weaving on its thin silver chain before its sparkling light disappeared.