The Lonely Mile

by Allan Leverone

  At first, I was very angry with you, Bill. May I call you Bill? After all, sharing someone as close to both of our hearts as Carli makes us close as well, don’t you think? Anyway, as I did a little research into the man who ruined my carefully laid plans the other day, I discovered, to my surprise and delight, that fate had laid better plans right in my lap—the meddling man’s very desirable daughter.

  Thanks to the generosity of the news media, I was able to learn, right from the comfort of my own couch, who you are and what you do. (Really, Bill, hardware stores? How boring. How pedestrian. I would have figured you for, I don’t know, dentistry perhaps. Oh, wait, I’m sorry, that’s the profession of the man who took your wife. I so hope I’m not touching a raw nerve here.)

  Anyway, Bill, I’m sure you can imagine my surprise when I conducted my research and discovered that the interfering busybody has a daughter of his own. An angel, seventeen years old, blonde, beautiful and—if I may be so bold, Bill—incredibly sexy as well! Young and nubile, perfect in every way. I will be teaching her how to please men and to serve them, how to obey their every whim. My contacts will pay handsomely for that.

  So, thank you, Bill, for your role, however accidental, in orchestrating my knowledge of and meeting with your delectable daughter. I would much prefer professing my gratitude in person, but for obvious reasons, that can never happen. Please know in your heart that I will watch over my beloved Carli diligently and tirelessly. She is truly my princess, and after leaving my side, will no doubt serve honorably, wherever she ends up. Of that, you may rest assured.

  Sincerely,

  Your grateful friend

  Bill’s panic mounted steadily as he read the letter until he sat frozen in terror after reaching the end. He glanced at Carli, who had been reading along with him. Her face was bone-white. “Oh God, Dad. It’s him. It’s him. Now he’s after me!”

  Bill stumbled to the phone, hands trembling, struggling to keep the contents of his stomach from spewing out onto the floor, while at the kitchen table, Carli buried her head in her hands. He rifled through his wallet, bills fluttering to the floor, finally locating the business card Special Agent Canfield had given him. He punched in the number and waited impatiently, swearing at the delay as the line rang on the other end. Where was Canfield?

  CHAPTER 21

  SPECIAL AGENT ANGELA CANFIELD leaned over Bill’s kitchen table, studying the letter intently. After calling Canfield, Bill had driven Carli home, telling Sandra only that their daughter had had an encounter with the I-90 Killer and not to let her out of the house until she heard from the police. Then, he had driven home to meet with the FBI Special Agent.

  She read the letter all the way through without speaking, then immediately returned to the beginning and read it again. Bill watched without interrupting but wanted to see some action. He was nervous and impatient and pretty certain the letter wasn’t going to say anything different on the second read-through than it had on the first.

  Canfield leaned back and looked at the ceiling, lost in thought. “We’re going to need to speak with Carli,” she said, almost as if talking to herself. “And Carli’s friend, of course. What was her name again?” She finally looked at Bill.

  “Lauren.”

  “Yes, Lauren. We’ll need to talk with both girls as soon as possible.”

  “Of course,” Bill answered. “But what can we do about ensuring Carli’s safety right now? This lunatic approached her on the street and could have snatched her right then and there.”

  Canfield nodded. “We’re way ahead of you. We have already established a police presence outside your ex-wife’s home. Carli won’t be out of their sight. She will be perfectly safe, Mr. Ferguson.”

  “Bill.”

  “Okay, Bill. We’ll make sure she’s safe. I don’t believe she is really in any significant danger, anyway.”

  Bill raised his eyebrows, stunned. “How can you say that? Didn’t you read that letter? What the hell have you been doing for the last ten minutes?”

  Agent Canfield raised her hands in a calm down gesture. “Whoa, easy, Bill. Yes, I read the letter, twice in fact, but think about it. If he really wanted to kidnap Carli, his best chance would have been today, before she knew who he was and what he looked like. He had to know that, once you read his letter, you would react exactly as you did. Police and FBI would be notified, protection would be established, the letter would be analyzed. We’ll need to take this, by the way, for forensic analysis. This is not a stupid man, Mr. Ferg—Bill. Impulsive and rash sometimes, sure. Psychotic and delusional, definitely. But stupid? No.

  “I believe his intention was to throw a scare into you. To establish payback, so to speak, for interfering with his abduction of Allie Serrano, the young girl you saved at the rest area. Obviously, we will have forensics and a psych team analyze the letter, but it is my opinion that the I-90 Killer has accomplished his objective—taunting you—and will now move on to his next victim, and that victim will not be Carli Ferguson.”

  Bill was quiet. It was his turn to think. What Canfield said made a certain amount of sense. After all, if nothing else, Carli was now well aware exactly what the I-90 Killer looked like—assuming, of course, he hadn’t been wearing a disguise this afternoon, and it sounded as though he had not—and he would never again be able to get close to her as easily as he had today.

  Still, when he read the letter yet again, he saw a man consumed with exacting vengeance from the person who had disrupted his precious plan. And what better way to combine revenge with his sick, twisted little obsession than to kidnap Carli?

  Canfield carefully refolded the letter on its original creases and dropped it into a clear plastic evidence bag, along with the envelope. “We will need to keep the original,” she said, “but will be happy to provide you with a copy if you wish.”

  Bill shook his head. “That won’t be necessary, Agent Canfield—”

  “Angie.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said you can call me Angie. After all, it’s only fair if I’m allowed to call you Bill. Besides, I have a feeling we’re going to be seeing a lot of each other until we catch this guy, so we might as well dispense with the formalities, right?”

  “Okay, Angie, then. Thank you. Anyway, it won’t be necessary to provide me with a copy of that letter. I had every word of it committed to memory before you even arrived.”

  She nodded. “All right, but try not to make it into more than it is. Like I said, I think he just wanted to spook you.”

  “Then, he definitely succeeded.”

  CHAPTER 22

  THE DREAM IS ALWAYS the same.

  The man leaves your darkened bedroom after he has finished with you, and the first thing you do is swear that this time will be the last time. This time you will tell your mother. Morning will come and you will tell her what the man—who is supposed to take the place of your daddy—has been doing to you several times a week for as long as you can remember.

  Then you cry.

  Only then.

  You swear to yourself again, in the dark, with your head burrowed into your tear-stained pillow, that tonight was the last time he will get away with it. Ever. You will tell your mother what he has been doing to you, and she will toss the bum out of the house and then call the police. The police will come to the house in their black and white cars with their sirens screaming and their blue lights flashing, and they will take the man away in handcuffs and you will never have to see him again.

  It is a satisfying fantasy, and it never fails to calm your ten-year-old fears.

  But the dream, the long-repressed memory, is always the same. You never do tell your mother. You never tell her because, if you’re going to be honest with yourself, you are afraid, somewhere in the back of your frightened ten-year-old mind, that she already knows, or at least suspects. She knows or suspects what he has been doing and just won’t admit to herself what she knows or suspects. She is either too afraid or too uncaring to take ac
tion. To protect her child.

  The dream is always the same, and you wake up screaming. Unlike during the real-life horrors of your childhood, when you were never able to scream, when you choked down the humiliation and terror, you wake yourself up screaming. Your throat is hoarse, it hurts from all the screaming, but you don’t care. You scream.

  CHAPTER 23

  MARTIN WAS EXHILARATED. HE hadn’t felt this alive since his first couple of successful snatches, and those had taken place years ago. He actually was beginning to believe he owed a debt of gratitude to this Bill Ferguson character for forcing him outside his comfort zone, for making him break away from the same, tired ritual he’d been performing over and over.

  It was patently obvious that finding a new companion was now not going to happen the way he had been operating. He had been successful over a dozen times using the same scenario, but after the near-miss last week, he had to acknowledge that the authorities were becoming too familiar with the rest stop gig. But now he had a fresh challenge and objective and was totally focused on it—Carli Ferguson. And the best part was that he wouldn’t have to go anywhere near a highway rest stop to get her.

  No, the best part was that he could mess with the interfering busybody’s mind at the same time he was accomplishing his objective! Of course, he had known that handing the letter to his angel would make achieving his goal more difficult, but he couldn’t resist rubbing Ferguson’s nose in it. Besides, anything worth having was worth working for, as his father used to say—not that that loser had much personal experience with working.

  Besides, the pleasure of a few moments’ interaction with his angel yesterday had made all the extra effort worthwhile. It was everything he had imagined it would be and more. She was smart and pretty and exuded the sort of innocent sexuality that really cranked his engine.

  And, really, where was the fun in getting what you wanted if it came too easily? As a philosopher once said, “life is a journey, not a destination.” Or maybe it was a songwriter, but who cared? The point was still the same. Maybe part of the reason he had ultimately been disappointed with his previous companions despite his initial high hopes was because they had all come too easily to him. There was no real challenge in stealing young girls from under the unwitting noses of grazing sheep.

  Now, though, things were different. Now, he had a challenge worthy of his skills. The authorities knew he was coming to sweep his angel off her feet, and they thought they could stop him. Martin knew exactly how they thought. They would be convinced he wasn’t actually going to grab her after passing her that note, but, hey, that was their problem, not his. This time, when he welcomed a companion into his home, it would be after outwitting the authorities and sticking it to that nosy bastard. Just planning it gave him an adrenaline rush.

  Martin looked at his watch and was astounded to discover it was now nearly ten p.m. He had been daydreaming about Carli for over three hours! He smiled at his foolishness; he was acting like a love-struck teenager. It was okay, though, because a chance at possessing a fresh, innocent girl like Carli would never come along again, and there was nothing wrong with savoring that.

  Still, as enjoyable as it was to sit around and daydream about his upcoming conquest, what he wanted more than anything else in the world was to have her here, to enjoy her in the privacy of his home in all of the ways he craved, but that “society” said was wrong. Just who was “society,” anyway? And what right did “society” have to intrude on his pleasures?

  Martin thumbed his remote, and a new porn DVD sprang to life on his big-screen TV. He loved porn; the X-rated action relaxed him and formed a backdrop for most of his best thinking. Some people listened to Mozart for inspiration; Martin enjoyed the artificial ecstasy provided courtesy of the adult film industry. You say tomato, I say tomahto. The point was, he had some serious planning to do if he was ever going to be together with his little angel.

  Martin Krall relished the challenge. He sipped his drink and got to work.

  CHAPTER 24

  BILL DIDN’T THINK THERE was any way he was going to be able to sleep that night. The adrenaline was still pounding through his body at a rate nearly as strong as when he first finished reading that taunting letter from the I-90 Killer. He knew at some point in the not-too-distant future, all that adrenaline would wear off and he would crash, feeling headachy and sick to his stomach.

  But fall asleep? No way. It would never happen.

  But he did sleep, and when he did, his dreams came all night, nearly nonstop. They were vivid and colorful, free-form, filled with jagged shapes and menacing shadows and threatening monsters. Enemies he could not see or feel or touch assaulted him from all sides. He could hear them, though, and they taunted him, telling him they were going to tear him apart slowly, so that he could feel every limb as it was ripped from his agonized body, count every drop of blood as it spilled from his torn arteries onto the floor.

  Interspersed among these nonspecific visions of impending doom were other, more detailed dreams. They were like subconscious commercials, breaking up the longer. television-show dreams that spelled out in excruciating detail Bill’s demise or, he thought later as he considered their significance, the demise of someone close to him.

  Carli, of course.

  The shorter dreams were different; they felt more like flashes of something resembling memory than actual scenarios containing a beginning, a middle, and an end. Repressed consciousness or some such similar psychobabble crap, perhaps.

  The dreams continued on and off all night and finally, as dawn approached, Bill watched for what felt like hours, rather than just a couple of short seconds, as the man drove past in his repainted off-white box truck, the one with no identifying markings, the one that had obviously been repainted so it could not be identified. He stared and stared at the truck as it receded, hanging before his searching eyes forever as the I-90 Killer drove away. Something was not quite right, but Bill could not put his finger on what it might be. He felt frustrated and angry, like he was missing something of importance.

  These short snippets of the remembered encounter were the mini-commercials interspersed with the longer dreams—the main event, nocturnally speaking—where his body was rent; ripped and torn apart painfully, agonizingly, his screams echoing on and on until they were all he could hear. They were everything. It was the longest night of Bill Ferguson’s life.

  He awoke to the sound of his dying screams echoing through the tiny bedroom, wondering how many neighbors were cursing him, wondering when the cops were going to show up and serve him with a Disturbing the Peace citation. But they never did. He listened to his heart hammering in his chest as he wiped the sour perspiration from his face with his bed sheet and turned his pillow over, trying, unsuccessfully, to escape the uncomfortable slick of hot sweat.

  Finally, as the first hint of dawn’s watery arrival began to pry its way into his bedroom, Bill raised the white flag of surrender against his subconscious. He threw off the bedcovers, listening to his joints creak and complain as he drew stiffly up to his full height and stumbled into the bathroom to brush his teeth and face the day.

  He wondered if he had gotten more than ten or fifteen minutes of truly restful sleep. He doubted it. The entire, exhausting night was nothing more than a jumble of half-remembered nightmares and confusing dream sequences. Bill Ferguson was a man who rarely dreamed; or if he did, he certainly never remembered most of them. He normally awoke refreshed and invigorated.

  Today, though, was just the opposite. He tried to make some kind of sense of the vivid nightmares as he dragged his toothbrush back and forth across his teeth and gums, doing his best to saw away the sickly taste of fear and foreboding, and mostly failing.

  Bill walked down the short hallway to his kitchen, the worn vinyl flooring cool and refreshing on the soles of his feet. He started the coffee machine, hoping a good, strong shot of caffeine might reduce the pounding in his temples. If these dreams continued, he might have to invest in
a new coffeemaker, one of the fancy models with a timer so the coffee would be ready for him, hot and fresh, when he stumbled out of bed after suffering through eight hours of tortured, sleepless misery.

  The kitchen table felt foreign as he leaned on it with his elbows, holding the hot coffee with two hands in front of his face, blowing lightly on the steam rising in curlicue patterns off the top. He sipped his coffee and thought about Carli, presumably safe in her bed in Sandra and Howard’s house. He wondered what the I-90 Killer was doing right now and prayed to God Agent Canfield was right when she said the nut job had sought out Carli and written the letter only as some sort of cruel head game. He didn’t care about being messed with; he welcomed it, in fact, if it was all the perverted psycho had in mind. He could live with the strange dreams and the frightening nightmares of half-remembered significance if it meant only he, and not Carli, was being targeted.

  But the problem was he couldn’t be positive that was the case. Sure, Agent Canfield was the professional, she had probably dealt with dozens of cases similar to this one or maybe, God forbid, even worse. And her take on the note made sense. But what if he really was spelling out his plans for the immediate future in that letter? What if he really was coming for Carli, just as he had stated in plain English?

  If the sick bastard was coming for Carli, then his reasons were irrelevant, whether it was to get even with Bill or because Carli really did fit his twisted image of female perfection.

  Because it was all Bill’s fault.

  CHAPTER 25

  THE DREAM IS ALWAYS the same. You swear you’re going to tell your mother what the man is doing to you at night, in the dark, when he comes to you while she is fast asleep and safe in her bed. You swear you’re going to tell her, but you never do.