Diary of a Teenage Serial Killer

by Jem Fox

  No witnesses.

  I got a shove in the back and looked around to see Lucas being pulled blinking from the van. There was one last desperate thrashing from Ramón before the doors slammed shut on him.

  GLG had been joined by a couple of thuggish friends. Young. Student-age or a little older. Acne and bad haircuts and cheap clothes. They led us inside into a warren of cheap offices that had a stale, abandoned look. The walls and floors were dirty. Shreds of trash littered the floor.

  The doors to the half-dozen “offices” were open and each one had some kind of bed or couch in it, maybe one other piece of furniture, and, as I glanced into the third one we passed, I saw a table pushed up to the opposite wall with a cheap laptop on it.

  Behind a closed door we could hear someone crying.

  They led us all the way through, past a big open space with a couple of beat-up and abandoned desks floating in the middle — some kind of secretarial corral. Just past it was a short hallway and a closed door. GLG leaned up against the wall by the door, smiling at me. He reached out with one hand and lightly tapped the door with one knuckle.

  A muffled voice answered from within.

  Lucas seemed more confused than afraid. I was aware of him standing a few feet to my right and slightly behind me, with a couple of thugs roping us in. He didn’t exactly radiate calmness, but he wasn’t shaking. He wasn’t in shock. He was just wary. Which our situation definitely called for.

  The door opened and another young guy with bad skin and no expression was standing there. He looked us over, then stepped back so we could go in. GLG came in behind Lucas, and the others stayed in the hall.

  The door shut again. We were in the corner office — as luxurious as it gets for people who sell widgets for a living out at the back end of a beat-up industrial park. The windows had been covered and the room was dark. Three heavy metal folding tables were set up in a U-shape holding three giant computer monitors pushed together and a pile of other electronics I couldn’t identify. A guy sat in an expensive-looking executive chair in the center, tapping a keyboard and ignoring us. GLG stood at relaxed attention. Junior thug #3 had faded back into the shadows by the door.

  There were a row of TV monitors along a shelf above the desk set-up and each one showed one of those rooms we’d passed. They were all empty except one. In that one, a girl was crushed into one corner of a cheap sofa wracked with muted sobs.

  The guy in the computer chair sighed and pushed himself away from his keyboard. He glanced up at the TV monitors and reached over to click off the one where the girl was playing out her silent performance. Then he slowly spun his chair around to look at us.

  He looked like nothing to me — a computer store geek with glasses, in his early 20s and already starting to lose his hair, bit of a soft belly rolling over his belt. He drummed his fingers on his knees and looked us over. He addressed himself to the dark corner. “Daryl, we don’t need you right now. Wait outside.” The doorman immediately slipped outside, closing the door softly behind him. The light from the hall made me realize what a dark cave the room was. My eyes had already adjusted.

  He laced his fingers over his stomach and rocked back and forth a little. GLG had moved to lean against the door.

  “So, Darla.”

  I didn’t answer. But I didn’t like hearing my name come out of his mouth.

  “We went through your bag. We found Robby’s gun. I guess it’s looking like you were better friends with him than you let on.”

  I just looked at him.

  He looked me up and down. “How old are you?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “Huh. You look a lot younger.”

  I waited. He waited for me to crack and ask him what he wanted, and I just stood there. Lucas did a good job. He didn’t talk either. I was afraid he might start demanding to be let go. ‘My dad’s a professor’ — that kind of thing. But he just stood there. Maybe he was following my lead.

  Finally, the creepy geek gave up on me becoming curious and started talking again.

  “Let’s just cut to the chase. You’re going to bring the girl back here by—” He looked at his watch. “—this time tomorrow. Four o’clock in the afternoon.” He pointed up to a grainy black-and-white monitor perched at the end of the row of TVs. It showed the gravel area outside the metal door we’d come through. I could see the side of the panel van. “You’ll come to that door with the girl, and we’ll let you in. You come to that door without the girl, and we won’t let you in. Clear?”

  I just looked at him.

  He turned to Lucas. “What’s your name?”

  Lucas cleared his throat and said his name. Just his first name.

  Creepy geek nodded. “I hope you like it here, Lucas, because you’ll be our guest until your friend here comes back.”

  Lucas looked startled. I think up to that point he was thinking we’d be leaving in a minute and he’d have a story to tell his friends.

  “But—”

  The geek had already rotated back to me. “I heard what happened. I’m thinking Lucas’s mom and dad are going to be quite alarmed when they get home tonight and find a dead man on the kitchen floor and their boy missing. What do you think?”

  He was soft and flabby, like something pale and white that had slid out of its shell. His wrists and ankles were just bone. I was thinking about how I could snap him like a twig. Like a handful of twigs.

  Then I heard the unmistakable sound of GLG clicking the safety on his gun. He was still standing behind us in the deeper shadows by the door. It was like he could read my mind and wanted me to know I wouldn’t get too far if I went for his boss.

  Creepy geek smiled at me. His mouth looked strange. It was hard to see in that light, but I finally realized that he had those plastic braces — the ones that are supposed to be almost invisible. He was running some nasty little operation that made girls cry and he was straightening his teeth at the same time.

  Creepy geek kept his eyes right on mine. “Say goodbye, Lucas.”

  Lucas made a sound like he was wetting his lips. “Goodbye.” He almost whispered it.

  GLG opened the door behind me and the light from the hallway came streaming in. I glanced back at Lucas on my way out. I had told him in the van I didn’t have whatever it was they wanted. He either believed me and thought I was walking out and leaving him to God knows what, or he thought I was a Liar. And if I was a Liar, why would I come back and save him?

  I said it for him, not for the geek.

  “I’ll be back.”

  The junior thugs walked me down the hall. GLG stayed in the office with Lucas and the geek. I didn’t catch his expression as I walked out.

  I wasn’t really thinking about what I was going to do, but I think in the back of my head I wasn’t planning on leaving the building before I went back for Lucas. Twenty-four hours was about twenty-four more than I needed. But then I saw something that made me change my mind. Someone.

  As we passed that big open secretarial area, I glanced over and saw two girls standing in a kitchenette on the far side. They looked at me, too, and one of them recognized me. I sure recognized her. It was Melody, from the cafeteria.

  When we got back to the metal door, I stopped and waited for them to open it. One of them came around, but he was facing me and smiling in an unfriendly way. The other two were close behind with their legs spread wide, standing well into my personal space.

  When I was nine, I went to school for awhile when we were living in West Virginia. My father had stumbled by chance into a good job and it came with a little house on the edge of town where there could be no bullshitting about me being homeschooled. There was no way to hide me from sight, so I went to school.

  A skinny new girl with no existing friends and no talent for making new ones is a bully magnet. It must be hard on a regular girl to draw such immediate and rapt attention followed by the worst mental and physical cruelty children can dream up. For me, it was always interesting. I had been trai
ned to take down a full-grown man, so it was like a little field exercise.

  It got to where I could see in the first few minutes which one was the bully, which ones were his little toadies that would sneak around behind me, and which ones were the weakest of the lot, the ones that would be sent to lure me to the far side of the playground or the hidden corner of the gym out of fear that they’d be the next victim if they failed.

  That boy when I was nine was a vicious little shit and in the end, I broke his arm. The other kids, including the toadies who’d circled around behind me to keep me from getting away, couldn’t hide their glee. The teachers and the principal hated him as much as the kids did, but they had to punish me so I was suspended on my first day. I didn’t get expelled because it was generally agreed upon that he was twice my size and three times my weight so the broken bone must have been a freak accident.

  That might have ended things, but it turned out the boy got his nastiness the old-fashioned way — he inherited it from his father. Long story short, some months later my father ended up killing the bully’s father, and once again we had to move. I was sorry because of the good job and the little house, but I didn’t miss school one bit.

  Now here we were some seven years later and that old familiar feeling was stealing over me again. Bully and toadies, quiet corner with no one to see, etc., etc.

  They all looked alike to me — skinny, pimpled, and badly dressed — but the one in front was obviously used to calling the shots. He was going to get first crack at me and the others could match to see who got sloppy seconds and thirds.

  If I was going to postpone my return, then I obviously didn’t want to tip my hand by leaving these three in a damp heap of splintered bone on my way out the door. Once again I thought about just ending things now, maybe before they managed to traumatize Lucas for life. But my curiosity had been engaged by Melody. Melody and the missing “item” which had now been revealed to be a human girl.

  I smiled back at the skinny thug in front of me. I’m not in the habit of smiling and I’ve been told that when I do smile, it can be disconcerting. He looked a little thrown.

  “Do you know what your boss said to me,” I said, still showing him my teeth.

  “What?” His voice faltered a little. I felt the others behind me draw back a bit, and they couldn’t even see my face.

  “He said … wait. I want to get the words exactly right.” I took a breath and looked skyward like a child getting ready to recite a Bible verse. “He said, if those human shit-stains lay a finger on you, tell them I’ll cut their balls off on camera and feed them to my dog.” I smiled a little wider and tipped my head to the side.

  The guy in front of me looked pale. I heard one of the ones behind me mutter to the other one, “I didn’t even know he had a dog.”

  He opened the metal door and leaned way back while I passed. “Road back to town’s that way.” Then he slammed the door.

  I looked at the van as I left, standing there on the cement, baking in the sun. I cocked an ear and listened just a second but I couldn’t hear anything inside.

  It was a long walk back. I used the time to prepare myself mentally. I thought about the door, the camera, the offices, the crying girl, the geek, GLG and his gun, and the young thugs. I thought about Lucas, and I thought about Ramón rolled up in his dirty carpet.

  I figured when the prof and his wife found Flunky lying in a sea of his own blood on the kitchen floor, they’d come around to my name pretty quick — assuming the prof even remembered it after looking at my student ID for three whole seconds. I wondered how soon they’d come looking for me.

  Then I wondered what, exactly, they’d be looking for. Some skinny girl in jeans and a t-shirt? With nothing-colored hair and a nothing face? A girl who had no job, no house, no driver’s license, no family, and no friends. Good luck picking up that smoking-hot trail.

  Maybe someone saw Ramón or GLG go into the prof’s house. Maybe they noticed the panel van with the mud-covered plates. It might get them started. Maybe they’d get back to that industrial park and rescue Lucas before I had to get involved.

  But I was not raised to have a lot of trust in the system. I was raised to just solve problems on my own.

  The two pieces of paper I took from the back of the rape van: One, a cardboard menu for a Chinese restaurant. Nothing written on it. Two, a photograph, shiny and new like it had just slipped out of an envelope picked up at the drugstore. It was a picture of GLG at the playground with a little boy. His brother? His son? In the photo, GLG had his arm around the boy, waving at the camera. He smiled with his mouth shut. He’d learned to hide those little headstone teeth.

  It’s disheartening when the bad guys have families.

  I walked into the cafeteria and straight back toward Merle’s office. It was the dinner hour and the air was all steam and the smell of canned beans and the crashing sound of aluminum pans and plastic trays. Crowd noise from the tables seeped back into the kitchen.

  Merle was standing over the steam table wearing an apron as big as a bedspread and her face didn’t so much light up when she saw me as flare up.

  I cut around the workers to get over by her.

  “Dammit, Darla, where’ve you been? We’re so shorthanded the last couple days…”

  “Sorry, Merle.”

  “Girl, you better be here to tell me you want hours, because if you just came waltzing in here looking for a check…”

  “No, Merle, I want hours.”

  She gave a sigh of relief and pointed over to the dishwashers. “Well, go help out…”

  “I can’t work right now.”

  Her mouth came together like a bunched-up fist but before she could light into me, I twinkled my fingers at her. “Doc says I’m still contagious and can’t be around food for two more days.”

  She canted back a little and raised one eyebrow. “What’s wrong with you?”

  I looked at my fingers like I’d never seen them before. “Some kind of bacterial thing. Felt like my insides were trying to escape out my ass.”

  She made an ugh face. “Fine. Whatever. If you can’t help, get out of the way. If you’re contagious, why the hell are you in my kitchen?”

  “I’m not touching anything. I need Melody’s address. She borrowed my book and I got a test tomorrow.”

  Merle didn’t even go through the “not university policy” routine, she just pulled the plastic stretchy bracelet off her wrist that had her office key on it. She wrinkled her nose as she handed it to me with forefinger and thumb. “Just leave it in there and leave the door unlocked. I’ll come lock up when I’m through here.”

  “Thanks, Merle.” She’d no doubt bring a can of Lysol with her.

  I walked through the noisy kitchen back to her little phone-booth-sized office and let myself in. I slid into her seat at her little metal desk with the shelves about caving in over my head piled with binders leaking yellowed paper. The computer screen was so old it looked like an antique, if antique computers are a thing.

  I pulled up the right file and wrote Melody’s address and phone number down on my hand with one of Merle’s pens. I hesitated, then went ahead and looked up a couple other addresses while I was at it. Then I stole one of her energy bars out of her drawer. I felt like I hadn’t eaten in two years.

  Melody lived in a neighborhood of falling-down houses just off campus, the ones with the asphalt shingle siding where the pizza guys won’t deliver.

  I was worried Melody wouldn’t be there, but when I rang the bell she opened right up. She gave me a wan little smile, like she’d been expecting me.

  Based on the number of broken plastic toys in the front yard, she lived with her family. The couch looked like somebody was using it for a permanent bed, and the coffee table was buried under pizza boxes and empty cans of beer and soda. There were sleepy flies buzzing in the windows and the place smelled like the inside of a hot lunchbox. It made my place look like the Four Seasons.

  She led me back
to the kitchen. The counter was heaped with dirty dishes and pots and pans. She sat down at the piled-high table, pulled her bare foot up onto her ripped vinyl seat, and gave me a tired smile. “You want a soda?”

  “Sure.”

  She pointed to the fridge. I helped myself to a can of generic orange soda and sat down at the table with her, keeping clear of the sticky top. I popped my can open and drank. Tasted like kids’ cold medicine.

  Melody was picking at her toenail polish. “I figured you’d come over after I saw you out there.” She raised her eyes to mine. “I’m sorry you got involved.”

  I wiped the back of my hand across my mouth. “I’m not really involved. Yet.”

  Her eyebrows went up. “Really? Well, that’s great. Good for you. If they don’t have you in it, though, why—?” She trailed off and frowned at me, like she was trying to puzzle it out.

  “How’d they get you?”

  She sighed, rested her chin on her knee, went back to picking at her toes. “Oh. Same way they get all the girls. Robby’s the one who got me in there at first, the little shit.”

  “How’d he do it?”

  She shrugged, embarrassed. Her face turned a little red, and she didn’t look up at me. She glanced over at the doorway. “It’s so stupid, but he got me in the food locker at work. I was so dumb. He told me he liked me.” She rolled her eyes. “I didn’t care anything about him until he said that. I can’t believe I fell for it. But he was being real nice to me, kept pulling me in the locker every chance he got. Finally, things…” She pinked up some more. “… progressed. Stuff happened. Then he took me out there one day to show me where he worked. Took me into one of those rooms. I was so weirded out. I didn’t know what they were doing there, right?” She glanced up at me. “Then he showed me on the laptop how he’d been taping us. In the food locker. He had video.”

  She lifted both her hands and pressed them to her face, like she was checking herself for fever. “He said nobody’d seen it yet, but they could if he said so. And he said he wanted me to do some things on camera. And I’d get paid. And if I didn’t, then maybe he’d show that tape to his friends. And other people.”