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 I am a new writer, working on my first novel. It is titled, "RACING TRAINS INTO DARKNESS," and is a suspense novel set in small-town Virginia, about a young woman who is bent on revenge but transformed by circumstance into an unlikely heroine.
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MY NEWS:
I am one hundred and ten pages into "Racing Trains Into Darkness" at this point, and have a complete outline, which I am fleshing out little by little... It is intended to be a full-length suspense novel.
Also have started working on another novel, called "Chaser." Kind of an Orwellian hard-boiled detective novel... Its still in its infancy, though!
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MY FAVORITE LINKS:
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MY RESIDENCE INFO:
City: Naugatuck
State/Country: CT
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BOOKS PUBLISHED:
 Adam Chambers
RACING TRAINS INTO DARKNESS
a novel
“It’s gonna be a world of hurt.”
-- The Drive-By Truckers
“I’ve always heard that love is blind,
But I know that there’s another kind.”
-- Steve Earle
part 1:
like blood for the tourniquet
CHAPTER 1
“WA…F…E HO…SE.” That’s what the sign said. The big, yellow, brightly lit squares emblazoned with their big black, “F,” “L,” and “U” respectively, had been shot out. Probably by some pimple-faced prankster who got an air rifle from Walmart for Christmas. And from the looks of it, a long time ago. So, the restaurant boldly announced to all of Southern Virginia that it was not the “WAFFLE HOUSE,“ but rather the “WAFE HOSE.” The big, the bright, the yellow, the one and only. And that’s where Angelina Renee Dickerson worked. At the Wafe Hose, in South Boston, Virginia. Right in the center of town, on Route 58. Far southern Virginia’s main East-West artery. The one that would take a car or a truck eventually to Interstate 85, and then to Richmond, if it drove East. Or very eventually to where highways 77 and 81 met, around Wytheville, if it drove West.
The Wafe Hose was conveniently located for Angelina, and for anyone one else whose Karma was just rotten enough to have placed them here, next to a hole-in-the-wall Shell truck stop. Parking for a handful of eighteen-wheelers. And maybe two handfuls of Hondas. And more conveniently for Ms. Dickerson, the Wafe Hose was located across the street from the Halifax County Industrial Center. Permanent residence of one very abandoned Dollar General Warehouse. A very abandoned and very convenient warehouse, which one Angelina Renee Dickerson was very interested in. For all the very wrong reasons.
“Hey, girl why don’t you take that last one before you leave. Looks like he’s good for a five dollar tip, maybe. And besides, he’s kinda cute, isn’t he?,” Shonda said from behind her, waking Angie from her mindless counter-wiping trance.
Angie looked up and saw that the tall trucker who had just walked in was indeed cute. But she didn’t have time for another customer. In five minutes she was outta here. And for good.
“That’s alright, Shon… You take him. I gotta get, if you know what I mean. Got important things to do, you know. But thanks anyway,” Angie shot back. Then she returned to her counter-wiping.
Angelina Renee. She had never liked the name. In fact, she had very much not ever liked the name. Because the “Angelina” was from her mother, who was Spanish. Who had also given her her height, her grace, and her beauty. And who had very much deserted her at the very graceful and beautiful age of three. Though these solemn facts probably had no relation to one another. And because the “Renee” had been her Daddy’s choice. Or so her Daddy had told her once. Her Daddy of the Bad Smells.
Angelina Renee Dickerson thought back to when she had been Kindergarten Angie. When Daddy had been Daddy of the Bad Smells. It had been 1984, the world outside her own burgeoning with mullets, skinny ties, and parachute pants. But in her little world, at the end of a dead end street in small-town southern Virginia, thing were different. Very different…
…She remembered nighttime the most. She remembered pulling the greasy, yellowed sheets up to her chin and waiting. The sheets that still held his smell. The bad smell. The dirty smell. Like the time she had forgotten to eat her lunch at the Kindergarten and opened up her lunch box the next day. That smell. But worse…
Angie tossed her rag into the sink, then washed her hands, drying them as she turned to Shonda and placed her hand on the other woman’s shoulder. “I’ll see ya, Shon,” she said.
“Alright, girl. You take it easy now, ya hear. That boyfriend of yours ain’t comin’ to get ya today?”
“Nah, its too nice out today to be cooped up in that stupid, smelly car of his. I’m thinking’ I’ll walk, ya know?”
Mama the deserter. And Daddy of the Bad Smells. That is why neither name would do for Miss Angelina Renee Dickerson. And why to most everyone she met, she became simply “Angie.” “Angie, if you’re nasty.” That was how she introduced herself, borrowing a line from an early eighties Janet Jackson song. (“Its Janet-- Miss Jackson if you’re nasty….,“ was how the immortal chorus of the MTV generation had echoed in millions of young American brains for the better part of a decade.) And nasty she was. She just couldn’t help it. It had been bred into her bones from an early age. Thoroughly, and completely. A nasty, bone-marrow core that left no room for deviation. No room for softness. No room for trust. In fact, Angie thought that she just might be the only unwaveringly nasty person that she knew. Well, maybe there were one or two others. Hell, maybe there was a whole generation of Nasty Young Americans, spread out across the purple mountains‘ majesties and amber waves of grain. Maybe Angelina Renee Dickerson was just the tip of an Iceberg of Nastiness. For all she knew, she may have been. But in her world, it was her iceberg that mattered. That shaped her and formed her. An iceberg whose cold, numbing pain would never melt. And for Angie, that iceberg of hurt was the realest thing-- the realest real-- that she knew. The only thing that she knew, for sure. All else was a question mark. The pain was real. And its what drove her back here.
…She remembered that still she would pull the sheets tighter around herself. She would grab them and pull them to her naked skin, like they were a warm coat she was clinging to against a winter chill.
And then she would shut her eyes and listen. Listen for the nighttime sounds. The squeaky sounds of his door as it opened. The quieter squeaky sounds of the hallway floor under his footsteps. Whispering to her. Warning her.
Rita popped out of the bathroom just then and reached around her back to re-tie her apron. Seeing Angie, Rita flashed her a smile and then held her gaze, sensing something in the look Angie gave her. Something final, maybe? A goodbye?
“You alright, hon?,” Rita whispered at Angie as she walked up to her.
“Yeah, Rita. I just gotta get going. Hey, I’ll see ya, alright?,” Angie said and then paused for a moment, not sure what to add.
“By the way,” she continued, “you’ve been real nice and all, Rita. You’ve been like a Mom to me these last few weeks. I just want you to know I appreciate it.”
Rita just gave her another sweet smile and a hug as Angie turned and headed to the bathroom of the Wafe Hose for a quick freshening up before leaving. It was clear the older woman knew it was Angie’s best effort at a goodbye, and it made her have to fight to hold back the tears. Rita cried a lot. And the two women had gotten close in the last few weeks, so Angie knew this time the tears were real. And she knew that Rita knew she wouldn’t be coming back to the Wafe Hose of South Boston, Virginia. Not on Monday. Not ever.
…That’s when she would squeeze her eyes tight. Squeeze them hard so the tears didn’t come out. He got mad when the tears came out. Then he talked to her in his mean voice, and the tears wouldn’t stop. If she was quiet, then he would be too. And it was easier that way.
Unwaveringly nasty Angie looked in the bathroom mirror. She was wearing unwaveringly tight, black waitress pants. Pants that advertised the immaculate curves of her genetically gifted Posterior Range. A cute little black waitress-pouch that flopped up and down as she moved, in rhythm with the sway of her breasts. And a very flattering bright yellow Wafe Hose t-shirt that was short enough it hung just above her genetically gifted posterior, giving the world the smallest glimpse of a bright silver belly-button ring. The kind with pointy tips on both ends that made it look like some kind of futuristic weapon for an army of Tinkerbells. The Wafe Hose t-shirt was rolled up once at each sleeve, revealing also the mini-skirted legs of a saucy Betty Boop that had been tattoed onto her right arm. A bright yellow t-shirt that sported three bright red ketchup stains on its chest , directly above her left nipple. And today, as it did every day, her long black hair fell over olive skin and sharp, angled cheeks which cradled large, green, wet eyes. Eyes that made the boys all swoon. Bedroom eyes, she thought.
Today, she was not Kindergarten Angie anymore. No, Kindergarten Angie had come and gone. A long time ago. Today’s Angie-- Angie of the Posterior Range and the ketchup stains-- had lived many lifetimes since then. Nasty lifetimes. In nasty places. Like Dallas (where Betty Boop had made a home on her bicep), Albuquerque, Detroit (much too cold), and Tulsa (much too creepy). But now she was back in South Boston, Virginia. South Boston of the Bad Smells. South Boston that had made her nasty. The bad-smell place she thought she would never come back to. The bad-smell place where the Daddy of The Bad Smells owned a Bad Smell Liquor Store now. Just as he had way back then. Right on the edge of town. Just far enough from all those who knew his Bread of Shame. That was a term from the Kaballah, the Jewish Mystical tradition which Angie had been learning about recently. And close enough to skim the fat off the wallets of the passing truckers and tourists. That was a technical phrase meaning, “robbing desperate men blind.”
It should have been called Daddy’s Bad Smells Liquor Store, Angie thought to herself as she counted her Wafe Hose tips. All twenty-three bucks and forty-two cents. And one piece of pink pocket lint. But instead, it was called “Dicker‘s Liquors.” Mr. Theodore Roosevelt Dickerson’s Liquor Store, to be precise. Yes, that was the scumbag’s real name. You’d think that such a ridiculous moniker would be enough to dissuade even the foulest of the foul from taking themselves seriously enough to actively become the scumbag he had. Such a thing probably took some effort, after all, she thought. But in her father’s case, the named hadn’t stopped him for a minute. In fact, he had proudly introduced himself as the late safari-hunting, bespectacled president’s namesake at every available opportunity throughout her childhood. It was a turn of phrase as predictable as the April rains-- “Hello, pleased to meet you. Mr. Theodore Roosevelt Dickerson at your service…” And one that never failed to make her skin crawl. As far as the elder Dickerson‘s liquor store was concerned, Angie had always thought that even simply “Dickerson’s” would have been better. But instead the little store had been given no choice but to bravely embrace the pathetic name. A pathetic name given to it by a pathetic individual. A pathetic individual who had in turn embraced the very pathetic name given him. So, “Dicker’s Liquors” it was to this day. An anchor of vice in the South Boston community. Stocking the kitchen cabinets and pickup truck beds of the faithful with enough overpriced Thunderbird and Yukon Jack to cast out any demons of conscience or inhibition that may have threatened to possess them.
…Because if the tears came out, they would come like blood. Like blood for the tourniquet. That was the thing daddy showed her when he cut himself real bad. The time he cut himself real bad, he showed her it. He said it would make the bleeding stop. It was the only thing that would, when the cut was bad. When the cut was bad, the blood just kept coming, and you had to stop it. Stop it, or you would die, he said.
And now, having counted her pathetic tip money and said goodbye to Rita and Shonda, the girls who had for the last five weeks shared the tedium of the Wafe Hose with her, unwaveringly nasty Angie was walked out of the bathroom of the Wafe Hose. She saw that the other girls were already occupied with new customers, so she just quietly snuck out the restaurant‘s squeaky back door.
She was leaving her job at the Wafe Hose. Bedroom eyes and all. Leaving it behind for the very last time. And Nasty Angie was walking. Today, she was walking, she had decided. In her cute little waitress uniform. She would walk from work, down Route 58, to Charlie’s Garage. To Charlie’s Garage wherein worked Ronny the Dumb. No, today, Angie the Nasty didn’t feel like waiting around for Ronny to come pick her up. Besides, she felt like a stupid school-girl when he did anyways. In his loud
car. With his dumb sunglasses on. Vroom, vroom. ‘I’m here, everybody! And I look like I just walked off the set of CHiPs. But don’t mind me…’ No, Angie wasn’t in the mood today. Today was an important day. And today she would walk.
…Then the tears would come. They would come out so fast, like blood from her eyes. And she would push the pillow hard, hard against them. Harder and harder. As hard as she could. Hard like daddy said to pull the tourniquet. Pull it hard to stop the blood. Pull it hard or the blood will keep coming, he had said. It will keep coming out ‘til there is no more. ‘Til there is no more blood to come out, he said.
Today was a nice day, anyhow, Angie thought as she set off. Sunny May Virginia skies. Pillowy white Dogwoods in bloom. And good smells. And nice, summer sounds. Smells like fresh-cut grass, and sounds like happy lawnmowers. All drifting across the air to Angie, making her believe. Though in what she did not know.
Maybe in the “beneficent energy of the Creator,“ which her Kaballah books told her she supposed to somehow get in touch with. (How, she had no clue.) Or maybe just in Chaos, which her books also talked a lot about, giving stern warnings to avoid it like the plague. Which so far seemed like pretty much an unattainable goal to Angie. But she was still learning. But in something, definitely. Even it was just in omens.
Omens were something concrete. Something she understood. And something she had perceived around her her whole life. So maybe it was just Omens she believed in. And just as Angie was thinking this, a large, gray-bearded man on a Harley noisily rode by. As the bearded biker showed his ever-shrinking back to her, Angie saw that the large white letters on his black leather jacket spelled simply the word, “AGONY.” Nothing else. Just AGONY. Well, maybe something like the word “DAYS” underneath it, though she couldn’t tell. He was getting too small and far away already. Probably just some weird biker club he belonged to. She’d seen much weirder-- The Riders of the Purple Pill, the Lady Killers (a group of retired grandmas from Pasadena), and others. But then again, maybe not a bike club. Maybe an Omen.
…Pull it hard or the blood will keep coming, he had said. It will keep coming out ‘til there is no more. ‘Til there is no more blood to come out, he said. And when all the blood is gone, he said, then it will be Dying Time…
Yes, an Omen. A gift from the universe, just for her. And with this vision, her skeptical faith was strengthened. Omens were the universe’s way of playing its sick, twisted jokes on you. One by one. Little by little. Like an indulgently bored housecat teasing its prey with a few preliminary whacks. And, she found, the universe liked to spread the omens out. Across the years, across the days. Across the souls, at least most of the time. And then sometimes it seemed, the universe waited, and saved up its predatory mischief for just one soul. One special soul. And it bestowed upon this soul special eyes with which to see all of its nasty omens. Special ears to hear all of the creeking and squeaking sounds it made as it snuck down hallway floors. And special skin that would feel its hot predator breath from miles away. And from within Angelina Renee Dickerson’s genetically gifted body, those special senses belonging to that special soul were on maximum alert as she walked, ketchup stains on flopping breasts, wrapped in a yellow Wafe Hose T-Shirt, strait to the door of Charlie’s Garage.
CHAPTER 2
On March 14th at 3 pm, under a clear blue late Winter sky, Ronny Dyson had had his life ruined. And it wasn‘t the first time, either. When it came to Ronny Dyson, the vengeful goddess of fate was having too much fun to let well enough alone.
This time the fate goddess had a new name. It was Angelina Renee Dickerson. “Angie, if you‘re nasty,“ was how she had introduced herself.
The last time he had had his life ruined had been six years ago. And the last time, the fate goddess’s name had been Olivia. Olivia Wrangle. No middle name. Just Olivia. Olivia who wasn’t nasty. But who had still made a damn fine mess of things. Same shit, different day, Ronny thought to himself.
Today was May 5th. Friday. Less than two months it had taken Ms. Angelina Renee Dickerson. The one who was nasty. At least she admitted it. Ronny remembered exactly when Angie had shown up in South Boston with her little broken down shitbox of a car. This time the fate goddess had had a sense of humor, at least. It had been a cold, clear March day in southern Virginia, a fine layer of snowy dandruff still coating the ground. And Ronny had been waiting for the last hour of his workday to creep by so he could get himself home to a cold Heineken and nothing else in particular. That was the thing about fate, it always snuck up on you from behind, when you were least expecting it, and least prepared.
“Did you check the oil?,” Ronny had asked the beautiful stranger as her little red Hyundai just barely putt-putted into the front lot of Charlie’s Garage.
“It sounds like its real low, the way that motor’s runnin’.”
“I didn’t know I had to. I thought they did that when you pay them to do an oil change,” the beautiful black-haired goddess of fate had said. It was all she had to say to hook him. Ronny had always liked the dumb ones. Something about women that needed a big strong man around...
After determining the engine was definitely going to need a rebuild-- it had taken he and Charlie about half an hour to figure that one out-- he had convinced Charlie to buy the little red shitbox from her for parts when they realized there was no way she was coming up with the three grand for the work needed . And that had left her needing a ride when Ronny got off work. She just needed some things at the grocery store, she had said, and then maybe he could drop her off at the Hilltop Motel after, if he didn’t mind… And one thing had led to another.
Together they had taken Ronny’s Camaro and Angie’s three bags of what seemed to Ronny like the treasured junk collection of an Obsessive-Compulsive, and headed off through the still-snowy town for a large Pizza at Hunt Brothers’ and a long conversation looking out on a Southern Virginia Winter sunset. The moon had been a full one that night, and had lit the way back to Ronny’s apartment for the two of them from behind a cloudless sky. It was only now that Ronny realized that he, not the beautiful if nasty Angelina Renee Dickerson, was the dumb one.
Angie had dragged Ronny back into his drug problem, big time, since that March night. Well, truth be told he had gone willingly, like a dumb little puppy following its master off to the kennel. Picking up the scent of a Bad Idea, but not caring enough to do anything about it.
What he and Angie had in common was a penchant for cocaine. And sex. Then more coke. And more sex. Of course where there’s cocaine there has to be money. Lots of it. Much more than a southern Virginia wrench-turner and a vagabond fate goddess had in their possession. So lately the theme of Angie’s conversations (and most of the conversations were Angie’s, not Ronny’s) had been a little more explosive than the simple tales of her travels and questions about his life that had comprised the start of their relationship.
“Hey, let’s just rob a bank!,” she had blurted one day, as if she were Benjamin Franklin upon the morning of a low-voltage eureka.
“It’ll be easy!….”
Sure, real easy…. He had put the kibosh on that one real quick, even though he knew they were both way past broke and half way to shitty, after only five weeks into their little white, powdery binge. He had tried the bank thing once before, and it hadn’t worked out so well. It had been six years ago, back in Roanoke. It was, in fact, the first time he had had his life ruined.
After Ronny and Olivia (the previous incarnation of Ronny’s fate goddess) had had little Sam. When things had started going downhill. Ronny missed the little guy. He had been named after Ronny’s dad, “Big Sam,” who had been a good man, Olivia had begrudgingly agreed. She would have named their boy Ryan or Blake or something else vaguely sexy and innocuous if it had been up to her. But Little Sam it was. Probably Ronny’s one and only victory on the battlefield of the sexes.
The drugs were the reason for the not-so-brilliant and not-so-original robbery scheme then, too. Well, Ronny’s rationalization, anyway. Not Olivia’s. She wasn’t nasty, after all. At least not in a drugged-out, bank-robbing kind of way. No, that time it had been all Ronny’s idea, the bank thing. And it had worked, too. If you call five grand a bank robbery. More like an unsecured personal loan… No collateral.
That was all they freaking had! Five grand. Well, all he had gotten anyways. And the price he had paid for it… He hadn’t been able to see his son more than once every few months since then. Usually in the dead of night, when Olivia agreed to let him sneak up there to Roanoke for a brief Kodak moment, of the “Hey Sammy, say Hi to your Daddy, now give him a hug then you can go back to bed” type.
He had had to change his appearance-- his Mom had been proud he finally cut his sandy blond rockstar hair at least. His name-- the Ronny Dyson moniker had actually been a choice, not a gift. His identity, at a cost of a mere $300 for a fake Virginia driver‘s license. And move down here to South Boston to start over. They hadn’t caught him, but he was wanted for questioning by some of Roanoke‘s finest, and that was reason enough to stay away. South Boston didn’t seem near far enough from the danger zone to Ronny. But any farther and he’d probably never see little Sam, who was going on six next month. That would be too high a price, even for a no-good, drop-out, drug-addict, wannabe-ex-con gearhead like Ronny Dyson.
So no bank robbery this time. That was that. But Angie had gone on weaving her web and making her big plans. The target had changed from “bank” to “liquor store“ over time.
In fact, she, “Knew the perfect one, right on the edge of town, set off , like, so no one would even see it go down if you picked the right time of day. And liquor stores always have lots of cash…”
That was how she had made her proposal to him. Her pretty olive skin shining in the sunlight. Her black hair tied back and making her look like some no-nonsense businesswoman. And her shiny, wet green eyes bursting with mischief and salesmanship. This goddess of fate was a businesswoman at heart, it turned out. Only without the Powerpoint presentations.
Yes, Angie had been all about getting the job done since then. If they were out of money, and nowhere near done with their little endorphine adventure, she had the solution. It was just going to take a little work, and, like everything worth doing, a lot of preparation.
CHAPTER 3
Angie, ketchup-stained breasts flopping under her yellow Wafe Hose t-shirt, strolled into the garage with Betty Boop in tow and interrupted Ronny‘s daydreams. She flashed him a big-toothed grin, full of pearly-white teeth. Then the grin was gone as quick as it had come. She looked up to the bright blue sky she had been walking under, full of its fresh-cut grass smells, and saw grayness and darkness moving in.
Just as Angie arrived at Charlie’s Garage, her pretty blue day was suddenly becoming another overcast Southern Virginia afternoon. Eerily like the March day when Angie the Nasty had first met Ronny the Dumb. Not snow this time, though, but rain. Well, rain clouds anyways. The big, lumpy, gray kind that left no doubt they meant trouble. Another omen, Angie thought as she turned her attention back to her boyfriend.
Ronny was supposed to finish at four today. It was three thirty now. When they left Charlie’s, they would get everything ready, tie up any loose ends before nightfall. Tonight was the night. Jesus, was Ronny stupid letting her talk him into this shit.
She had told him about her little spy missions at the old warehouse. And also that she had been scoping out the liquor store owner’s schedule, that he always closed at nine o’clock, but then stuck around by himself for about an hour. (She guessed he was cleaning up, counting all his money, that kind of thing.) So the perfect time to do the deed would be just as the guy was leaving. The guy left out the back door, which only faced into the parking lot, hidden from the street. And the only other business still fighting the brave battle against over-taxation and a horrible local economy in the little plaza, Ernie’s Barbershop, would be closed and its owner gone by six. Ernie didn’t have much money-counting to do, Angie guessed.
The job she had given Ronny was to grab the poor sucker in the dark doorway and force him back into the store. And he had to do it after the guy opened the back door, but before he set the alarm. When the lights were already off, so no one would see what was transpiring through the glass-fronted store from streetside. She would guard the back, keep the car running and ready to go. They had to wear identical coveralls-- the gray ones
from Charlie’s Garage would do-- and ski masks, she had told him. The two of them were about the same height, so in the dark, anybody who saw anything on the tapes later, if there were any (that she didn‘t know), would think it was one person, not two. This
was important, she had told him, because people knew the shit they were into together and if the cops were looking for some Bonnie and Clyde team, their jig would be up pretty quick.
“Ronny,” called Charlie, “You almost done with that alternator? I could use some help closing up here.”
“Yeah, boss. Be done in a minute,” Ronny yelled back in the direction of his boss and benefactor’s gravelly voice. Then Angie pulled him aside and whispered,
“Do you think he heard us?”
“Nah, the old man’s as deaf as a doornail ‘less yer talkin’ about money. Then his ears prick right up,” Ronny laughed quietly in Angie’s direction, in his thick West Virginia accent and running a still-greasy hand through his unkempt sandy-blond hair.
Then, turning toward the back office where he knew Charlie was thumbing through the day’s cash, Ronny blurted,
“All set, boss. Be right there. Just let me say say hi to my girlfriend, would ‘ya?”
Girlfriend!, Angie thought. Well, she’d been called worse…
When Charlie showed his oil-smudged face in the doorway about half a second later, both Angie and Ronny knew he’d been closer (or quieter) than they had thought.
“Well, well, if it isn’t the mystery girl,” he chimed in, throwing a broad, half-toothless grin Angie’s way.
His wrists were resting on the hips of his gray coveralls, a red oil-cloth suspended from one hand and an unfiltered Pall Mall from the other, dripping white ashes
onto the floor. Charlie stood in the doorway that Angie had come in, making her instantly obsess about how she was going to get out, since he was now blocking her only exit, like the lanky old oaf that he was.
She knew old Charlie like the back of her hand, even though he didn’t remember her-- at least he said he didn’t. And she was just fine with that. To her, Charlie would always be her dad’s old neighbor and sometimes-drinking-buddy. Nice enough guy, she remembered from her now-distant childhood-- another lifetime ago, really. And he had never laid a hand on her. But any friend of her father’s was suspect. It took one to know one. That personal philosophy had proved true for her several times over, when it came to dealing with the male species.
When she had first braved the return to South Boston, Virginia, after a fifteen year absence (she had run away at age thirteen), and stumbled into Ronny’s life and Charlie’s Garage with her little red hunk of junk not two months ago, Charlie had said, with a look directly at her,
“I used to know a girl named Angie. You look a little like her, come to think of it. But that was years ago. My memories are getting just as foggy as my vision is these days…”
He’d given her a funny look, for just a second, and then seemed to catch himself, as if not wanting to let anybody in on whatever Charlie’s Little Secret was.
Gosh, that was back in March already! Things had kind of snowballed since then, Angie knew. She felt a little bad about getting Ronny back into the coke and everything. He had told her a little about his life before, back in Roanoke. Just a little. Though it was enough to make her feel bad. Like it was her fault. God, he was a grown man. Couldn’t men just take responsibility for their own choices once in a damn while? That was the godamn story of her life. And she’d had enough of it.
She’d had enough of waiting, too. Revenge had been the whole point of her move back here, after all. Even though she thought the writers of the Kaballah would be extremely unhappy with her for thinking such “reactive” thoughts. But fifteen years was long enough for a girl to wait. That’s what Angelina Renee Dickerson had decided, anyway.
Charlie’s grin was frozen on his face for what seemed like an hour but was probably more like five seconds, while Angie thought all these things and Ronny tried to pretend he had “just finished” the alternator job he had been done with for an hour.
Without letting his smile slacken, or even moving his body, Charlie absentmindedly said to Ronny,
“You remember you’re covering Brad’s Saturday shift tomorrow morning, right, son? You best be here by nine. I‘ll need you to open up for me, now. So don‘t you two lovebirds go getting in to any trouble tonight, ya hear?,” Charlie said, then immediately fixed his gaze back on Angie, making her even more uncomfortable and annoyed than before.
How long had Charlie been listening to their conversation in the garage? Well, it was too late now, even if Charlie had heard anything. The plans were already set in motion, and in a few short hours would be well underway. There was no turning back now.
Besides, Ronny had said Charlie was “family.” And family could be trusted. Yeah, right! At least that’s what Ronny told her that his old girlfriend Olivia had said when she sent Ronny down here thinking it would be a good place for him to make a fresh start. Angie had never figured out exactly what kind of “family” Charlie was to Olivia. Or what kind of a “girlfriend“ Olivia was to Ronny, for that matter. But Angie figured they would just have to trust Charlie.
Angie finally gave in to Charlie’s weird grinning stare, and shot him the faintest, quickest smile back, tucking her long black hair behind her pretty right ear. She looked shyly to Ronny and said,
“Well, we’d best be going now-- right, Ronny?”
It shot out of her mouth like water escaping over the pent up emotional damn that was Angie‘s psyche.
It was a lame attempt at excusing the two of them, but it would have to do. They didn’t have time to sit around and chat. Charlie could close up his own damn self, for the peanuts he paid Ronny. And they had things to do. Important things. Like robbing a liquor store. Everything had to be timed perfectly And there were a few loose ends she had to tie up before nine p.m. Little things. Like masks, and guns. Matching masks and guns.
“You can’t rob a liquor store without a gun,” she had told Ronny.
“The guns ain’t up for debate. If you’re too much of a sissy, then I’ll just carry the real one, and you can go get yourself a damn water-pistol.”
“Nah, I’ll bring one,” he had snapped back at her. Just like she knew he would. “But we ain’t gonna use the damn things, are we?”
She had just looked at him and rolled her eyes. That’s all it ever took to shut him up.
As Charlie’s Pall Mall burnt down to white-gray stubble in his hand., Angie and Ronny squeezed past the older man’s weird frozen smile and out into the crisp and cloud-heavy May air and Ronny’s waiting Camaro without a look back.
CHAPTER 5
When Ronny cranked the key in the Camaro, Metallica’s “Master of Puppets” blared from the car’s eight speakers so loudly that Angie actually let out a shriek before glaring at him and slamming the stereo’s power button off. Angie’s shriek made Ronny burst out laughing, as James Hetfield’s intimidating voice crooned,
“Master of Puppets, pulling your strings,
Twisting your mind and smashing your dreams…”
at volume fifty-two, until Angie abruptly pulled the plug on the classic song.
It was Ronny’s all-time favorite by the group, and summed up for him the situation that his age-old demon, cocaine, had put him in yet again. Which is why he had been blaring it on the way to work that morning. Angie, however, apparently saw neither the humor nor the irony of it. And the look she gave him made his dopey grin disappear as fast as the Virginia storm clouds were now erasing any trace of the town’s previously sunny May afternoon.
Neither of them said a word for about eight seconds. Then Angie seemed to notice that Charlie was still watching them from the back door of the garage, with the kind of baffled curiosity that only an older generation can bestow on a younger one. She turned and yelled at Ronny,
“Just go already. Jesus! And why don’t you do a couple donuts in the parking lot on the way out while you’re at it. That way we can bring a little more attention to ourselves!”
Ronny felt his face turning a deep, Irish Crimson as he dejectedly put the Camaro in drive and putted off. Right now he figured he probably looked more like he listened to a lot of Barry Manilow at volume twenty instead of a lot of speed-metal at volume fifty-two.
“God, you’re a fucking moron,” Angie continued hollering at him.
“I knew I should have done this myself from the beginning.”
“Well, go for it, then,” Ronny finally piped in, after about three blocks worth of stubborn silence had passed and his face had turned three less shades of red.
“This whole thing was your damn idea anyways. I’m just trying to help you out, remember?”
“Bullshit!,” was Angie’s immediate comeback.
“You need the money just as bad as I do. I’d bet you’re jonesin’ even worse, actually. At least I know how to keep a habit under control. You guys just let it take over your whole fucking life, ‘til you can’t see the forest for the damn trees. Hell, ‘til you can’t even see the fucking trees!”
“Well, let’s just call the whole thing off then,” was Ronny’s quick reply to Angie‘s rant. By that point in their discussion, they had reached the parking lot of Ronny’s apartment building, and were both just sitting there in the Camaro, fuming.
Truth be told, “apartment building” was more of a euphamism than anything. The dozen or so “apartments“ were actually just boarding rooms, paid by the week, not the month. In cash only. The run down units had no kitchens. And you had to walk down the hallway to use the bathroom. They had both been going a little stir crazy here since Angie had moved in with him about three days after she had shown up at the garage that day in March.
“You go back to wherever the fuck you came from,” Ronnie said to her, restarting his mental engine after the silence became unbearable, and working up some momentum of his own now.
“And I’ll just go back to live with my Mom in West Virginia. I don’t care. She’ll set me up with some rehab program or something, and maybe I can get my life back together.”
“Oh, so you’re just gonna run home to Mama now, huh? No way, man,” Angie went on, Ronny feeling like her true colors were really showing now. He’d seen her this angry plenty of times over their short but intense life together. That wasn’t it. What was different was he’d never seen just how determined she was to do this thing. It made him think of some famous quote he had always liked since he heard it in high school:
“Hell hath no fury as a woman’s scorn…”
“We’re in this shit ankle deep, now, and we’re in it together,” Angie retorted at him, seeming to quickly gain control of herself again, her anger level dissipating.
Ronny cocked his head and just stared at his crazy girlfriend, suddenly imagining her as a performance automobile that had just been popped into third gear from fourth and whose RPM’s were quickly winding down from about three thousand to somewhere in the neighborhood of fourteen hundred. Then Angie took a deep breath and added the closing remarks to what was becoming a kind of pathetic impromptu sermon:
“And as much as I hate to admit it, I actually need your help.”
She said the last more to the dashboard than to Ronny, actually. And instead of a performance car, Ronny now imagined her as the minister of some wayward flock, whose words and gaze were trailing off quietly to some internal world. (Ronny flashed back on his childhood experience as a junior member of just such a flock, where that internal preacher’s-world had always seemed to Ronny to be located somewhere just behind the last pew of their tiny West Virginia church.)
Ronny’s anger ebbed away too, as quickly as Angie’s seemed to have, and was replaced by a tender determination. Affection even. He would try and become this woman’s hero, if that’s what she was not quite admitting she needed him to be. And he would do this thing with her. She needed him to. And being needed felt good.
She actually looked really sexy to him now as he continued to hold his head in that awkward angle you can only achieve in a conversation that takes place in the front seat of a car. Angie was sexy in a push-me-away-then-pull-me-closer kind of way. And he knew that the post-fight sexual chemistry that seemed to be the only glue of their relationship was probably whipping her into the same emotional state as him right now.
As they walked in the front door of the apartment their bodies brushed against each other, setting off a chain reaction that took them both from angry and hurtful to hot and horny in the blink of an eye. Call it crazy, but that’s how they were together.
They slammed the door behind them and pulled each other greedily onto the unmade bed. All Ronny could think was that if Charlie had still been watching, like he had been in the parking lot as they drove away, he probably would have had that same weirdly curious expression on his face. Then their bodies yanked the steering wheels from their minds.
CHAPTER 6
Angie’s lovemaking had always been amazing after an argument, she knew. And she knew that that’s exactly what Ronny had to be thinking at about five p.m. on what was to become the worst night of his life. She had attacked him with a vengeance, like some 5’11”, 125 pound Amazon Wafe Hose Warrior on a kamikaze mission. She didn’t think they had Wafe Hose’s in the Amazon, though. But she had heard that the jungle had been known to produce somewhat large and aggressive women. With whom she could definitely identify. Angelina of the Jungle. That’s who she had been today. And it had been almost too much for Ronny, she knew. She was actually afraid that one of these days she was going to give the poor guy a heart attack. Especially after the last line of blow in their possession had quickly wormed its way into his veins this afternoon, sometime between the door slamming behind them and the clothes landing all over the floor. A forty-three year old man was a forty-three year old man, after all. And not too many forty-three year old men could handle Angelina of the Jungle. Not when she was in full warrior mode.
But, she thought, he was probably still standing, if you could call it that. All sweaty and rumpled, and half-leaning against the dirty, peeling, boarding room wall. Trying to force his smelly feet back into his workboots. Probably without unlacing them. This beautiful vision, Angie thought, was just another one of the psychic occurrences to which she seemed to be subjected on a daily basis. Always mundane. Always useless. But nonetheless psychic. It was part of the sick, twisted gift that the God of the Universe had given her. A gift to perceive omens. A gift to see what shouldn’t be seen. To know what shouldn’t be known. Not really a gift at all, actually. Just a way for her to be further taunted her.
And this vision of Ronny, standing there struggling with his stinky boots, filled Angie with a pity and an affection she hadn’t been wiling to admit to herself that she had. Even though he was such a dork, and even though Angie would never tell him this to his face, she kind of thought she might love him anyways. Which was kind of too bad. Because it wasn’t going to stop her from doing what had to be done. She had waited too long. And Ronny was going to have to play his part. Like it or not.
Angie had gone out to the Camaro to retrieve the bag with the two clean coveralls she had had Ronny nab from the garage on his lunch break today. Brad was off this week, and Charlie always went home for a cheese-and-tomato sandwich, he had told them once, and a quick argument with Mrs. Charlie.
Actually, Angie thought she knew the lucky lady’s proper surname all too well. It was Mrs. Wrangle, not Mrs. Charlie, of course. But Angie’d be damned if she was going to let on to Charlie, Ronny, or any damn body in this God-forsaken town that good ole Mrs. Wrangle would always be to her the ‘lady who lived next door.’ Or ‘her best friend’s mom,’ a title she had taken on for Angie only in the last three years of Angie’s previous life in New Boston. The one which felt a million years away yet more painfully close than ever now that she was back. That was, if Mrs. Wrangle was the same Mrs. Wrangle Angie had known fifteen years ago…
The coveralls were both Ronny’s, but she’d be able to get away with wearing one of the pairs without too much difficulty, as she was only about an inch shorter and maybe thirty
pounds lighter than he was. With her hair tucked down into the neck of her T-shirt and
the black ski-masks she had picked up three months ago at K-Mart’s End-of-Winter Clearance back in Dallas (her latest “hideout” in a long line over the last fifteen years), no one would be able to tell the two of them apart. That’s what she was shooting for.
Gosh, Dallas. That had been a mess. It was there she finally decided it was time to“stumble” back in to South Boston, VA in her little red “shitbox” as Ronny had called it. The shitbox had served her well, though, the last five years. It was the first and only car she’d been able to buy, and it had just about killed her to purposefully let its little motor run dry so she would have the perfect excuse to show up at Charlie’s Garage and require some help from the handsome-if-a-little-dopey mechanic she had spotted there. Of course it had been a day earlier that she had spotted him. March 13th, she remembered. The first day she had been back. A day to just scope things out. Get the lay of the land. It had been a long time…
She’d brought the coveralls in to Ronny, thrown them at him, and told him she’d be right back. That she had to go to Walmart for the ski-masks. What she had really done was taken the Camaro and driven to the old abandoned warehouse she had scoped out over the last few weeks on her lunch break reconnaissance missions. The spot she had picked was that abandoned Dollar General Distribution Center she’d been scoping out on her lunch breaks at the Wafe Hose. The old warehouse was wide open, with easy access to a couple of enclosed truck bays. And no lighting whatsoever to reveal their presence to whomever might be working late in the Industrial Park. It was going to make the perfect spot... And as far as her alleged trip to Walmart, she knew Ronny would believe anything after he‘d been laid that good.
Angie had driven by what was to be hers and Ronny’s getaway spot after tonight’s big event, to check on her stash there. A large green army handbag she had picked up at a Dallas vintage store, which she had buried in a pile of leaves at the site, held precisely four things she was going to need.
One was her special love potion, intended for her special Ronny. Actually it was three ounces of Rohypnol that she had gotten from her ex-dealer in Dallas in trade for a quick and painless hand job (that was where she drew the line when it came to “bartering.”) And it would buy her all the time she needed to set Ronny up just right and get the hell out of Dodge.
The second was a bright green Bic lighter, tested three times by Angie. Which, along with the can of gas Ronny always kept in the trunk of his Camaro, would dispatch her
coveralls and ski mask quite nicely after the fact. His would be conveniently buried in their own shallow grave, next to whatever car Ronny managed to “borrow” from Charlie’s lot later.
The third was five days worth of clothes, her least flirty ones. And definitely no yellow Wafe Hose t-shirts. God, she hated those things. The clothes were packed neatly inside a plastic Shell truck stop bag. To this bag she added the toiletries she had grabbed from the apartment on her way out.
And the fourth and most important was the third gun. The one she had a feeling she might need somewhere between here and the Mexican border. The first gun, and maybe the more important one actually, was sitting under the driver’s seat of Ronny’s Camaro, fully loaded, waiting for Ronny to get his greasy little prints all over it. And then waiting for her to use to do the deed. (She would conveniently be wearing gloves, of course.) And the second one, identical to the first, was tucked into the ass of her jeans right now. It was the one she would swap with Ronny after he came out of the store tonight and she went in. Because it “kept getting jammed,” she would explain to him ahead of time. And it was the one that Ronny was going to involuntarily return to her possession (this he
didn’t know just yet) after getting his prints all over the one she would use to do the firing. The second one would be very, very lost by this time tomorrow. It didn’t matter. The first one and the third one. Those were the key.
All of these things waited there for her inside her cute green army bag. Which in turn was buried neatly beneath a pile of moldy, wet leaves which she figured had very conveniently blown up against the side of the old warehouse last fall. Apparently for no other reason than to assist Angelina Renee Dickerson in completing her mission.
When she got back from “Walmart,” Angie had a pair of black ski masks in hand, most likely lovingly knit by some poor eight-year old girl in some far off country. And it was clear to her immediately that Ronny was ready for Round Two. She actually felt guilty having to turn him down. She knew that men never understood that when it came to nymphomaniacs, which is what she was without a doubt, it wasn’t them that they wanted, it was it.
But he had humped her like a dog on a mailman’s leg earlier anyways. He pretty much always did, with just about the same finesse. (Why did she care about him? She really couldn’t answer that question.) So she didn’t feel too bad turning him down this time around. It was time to get to work anyways.
It was pushing seven o’clock, and neither one of them had eaten a thing since lunch. Can’t hold up a liquor store on an empty stomach… And they had to get dressed. Until they got to the liquor store parking lot at nine fifteen (the owner never left any earlier than nine thirty, Angie had told Ronny), the coveralls would remain hidden under their street clothes. Not too conspicuous, but funny-looking enough that they would have to order in. (He would want Chinese but she and Hunt Brothers’ Pizza would win the battle.) And it would be their last twenty bucks that paid for it too. Broke yet again, but this time it was just in time for Pay Day…
CHAPTER 7
Ronny looked at his watch. It was ten fifteen and the old man was still counting his damn money, apparently. Either that or beating off to Jessica Simpson playing Daisy Duke. Who cared? He just wanted to get this over with, hop back into this nice black Honda Accord he had “borrowed” from one of Charlie’s loyal customers, and make tracks. Or not make them, actually.
The Accord had been his inspiration. Angie had dropped him off at the garage at eight-thirty after they finished their pizza-- he had wished it was Chinese but knew by now he stood no chance of winning a battle over food against this or any woman. Then he had picked the Accord from among the dozen or so in the lot. It would be perfect for the job and was a long term project that wouldn’t be missed immediately by anybody.
When Ronny had shown up at the old warehouse, Angie had been impressed. They had parked the Camaro inside a dark, cobweb-covered bay door. And off they had driven into the sunset. Like a modern day Bonnie and Clyde. Kind of like that Travis Tritt song his little brother had liked so much that last year they were together back in West Virginia. Man, he hadn’t talked to his little bro in years. Some day he’d get back in touch. He missed the little shit.
Actually, the sun wasn’t setting, though. It had done that an hour earlier. An hour after the rain had stopped, the tired Sun God had passed his now very wet baton to little sister Moon. Which was good, as the cover of darkness was a necessity for their mission to be a success. That and Ronny’s suggestion that they shut off the headlights for the last quarter mile. (She had given him a sexy little wink and a pat on the thigh as she excitedly agreed.) Along with the fact that Ronny’s hot Accord was black (another good choice, and maybe he wasn’t such a moron after all, she had said.)
All of these things had helped them coast into the old man’s parking lot undetected. Well, mostly undetected. The parking lot was mainly dirt, recently hardened after the April rains, but now slightly soft again after this afternoon’s brief thunderstorm. The only noise the Accord had made as it rolled in off the street was the quiet POP of a couple of
stray pebbles catching and then releasing under the steer tires. Apparently, the treacherous pebbles had gone unnoticed by the liquor store’s occupant. The Old Man, as
Ronny had been calling him. As no one had come running out or even poked their head
out a back window to see what was going on. Hell, maybe the guy was spanking the monkey to the Dukes of Hazzard soundtrack, for all Ronny knew. Or maybe he was just intently counting his money.
Ronny had seen some motion from inside the shop in the hour or so they had been sitting there in the parked Accord. Some flickering of shadows that told him at least the man was alive if nothing else. But now the lights began to go out. One by one, from front to back. Until the rear door opened.
This was the moment. And Ronny was ready. He was pumped. More than pumped. He was stepping into a new role in life, and by tomorrow he would be a beautiful woman’s hero. Angelina Renee Dickerson’s. They would have money again. They would have their demon-drug. And maybe she would stop putting him down and hollering at him. Maybe she would make love to him every day like she had today. Hell, maybe they’d even run off to some Elvis Chapel in Las Vegas and make it official. He’d be up for that. The girl was a little hard to handle, but incredible. One of a kind.
He reluctantly took hold of the gun she had swatted into his hand as the store’s lights started clicking off, and swung open the driver’s side door of the Accord. They had parked it up along the rear wall, and it was almost fully hidden behind a green mini-dumpster bulging with black Hefty-bags. Ronny shuffled along the wall to the door’s entrance, wedging his hand in as the Old Man attempted to reclose the door one last time (just as Angie had said he would). One last time, in order for the alarm to properly set. One last time indeed.
CHAPTER 8
The Old Man. That seemed to work for Ronny. He had never even asked Angie the guy’s name. Easier for him that way, she guessed. Angie knew the Old Man as Theodore Roosevelt Dickerson, of course. Owner of the pathetically yet aptly named “Dicker’s Liquors.” Or Daddy of the Bad Smells. Take your pick.
And Angie knew that if Charlie had ever learned of her last name, which she had been very careful he hadn’t, the pieces might have all come together for him, maybe a little too soon. But Charlie, she had known as well, was all about penetrating looks, not penetrating questions. Fortunately or unfortunately, as the case may have been.
Fortunately for Angie, in this her second incarnation as a resident of South Boston, Virginia. Unfortunately for Charlie’s daughter, who had been Angie’s best friend and personal savior in the three years prior to Angie’s saying goodbye to South Boston and Mr. Theodore Roosevelt Dickerson the first time around. Unfortunately because Mr. Theodore Dickerson had gotten his grubby paws on Angie’s best friend in addition to Angie. And that had been too much for even Angie to handle.
So Angie sat there in Ronny’s stolen Honda Accord, and waited patiently while he jumped up and ran towards the door like a puppy dog going after a burglar. Except they were the burglars. Like Robin Hood and Maid Marian, stealing from the rich to give to the poor. Or something like that. She chuckled to herself at the irony of it.
Angi sat there and thought. Thought about Mr. Theodore Dickerson. “Daddy.” Daddy of the bad smells. Daddy of the hot breath. Daddy of The Tourniquet.
And she wondered if she could really go through with her plan. All these years she had been waiting for today. Building up courage. Milking her hatred of the man. Letting it ferment like fine wine. And hardening herself to the task. This was not supposed to be just any old robbery. Little did Ronny know, but there actually was a reason for the guns besides intimidation. She did feel bad for Ronny, and hated the fact that she had to use
him like this. But she wasn’t going to really leave any evidence to truly tie Ronny to the crime well enough that he would be convicted of it. Just well enough that she wouldn’t.
Sure, his life would be very inconvenient for about a year while they sorted everything out. Until they realized they didn’t really have enough evidence to convict anybody. Just enough rope to hang themselves with.
So Angie sat there. And Angie waited. Waited for Mr. Dyson to play his part. She really did feel bad for the guy. But there was no other way around it. She sure wasn’t going to sit and rot in prison for the rest of her life for being the only one in this God-forsaken town to actually bring justice to Mr. Theodore Dickerson. And Ronny wouldn’t either. He’d just get a good scare. Might help him grow up a little, now that she thought about it. And then maybe there would still be hope for the two of them…
CHAPTER 9
Shocked, Theodore Roosevelt Dickerson stumbled back into his dark liquor store as Ronny Dyson, in gray coveralls and black lovingly-knit ski-mask, took advantage of the man’s backward momentum, grabbing him by the collar and shoving him. Back and back the two of them went together, seeming to be doing some weird, homoerotic dance
as they yelled and stumbled towards the counter and the cash register. The old linoleum counter was where Old Man Dickerson’s considerable frame encountered its first real resistance in its backward movement. Ronny, not realizing in the darkness how quickly they were going to reach the counter, came up on Mr. Dickerson with a jolt, as if he were about to take the older and significantly smaller man in a passionate embrace. (Angie had gotten her height from her absentee mother’s side.)
As the eyes of both men desperately adjusted to the dim light, there was a moment when they each caught a glimpse of the other one’s wild-eyed nervousness. And this seemed to shake both of their minds into action at the same time.
Seeing Theodore Dickerson attempt to reach back and across the counter to its inner edge as if for something hidden there, Ronny kneed the man swiftly in the gut. This caused Mr. Dickerson to double over, at which Ronny hoisted him up again immediately, once again grabbing the pudgy little man’s collar to accomplish this. Ronny didn’t know too many tricks, it seemed, other than the ones he and his little brother had witnessed in all those late seventies Westerns they had loved to watch together while awaiting their father’s return from a long trip. He had actually never been in a fight of his own, though he would never admit that.
Then Ronny Dyson spat violently into Theodore Roosevelt Dickerson’s pudgy, time-worn and sweat-laden face,
“All the money! We need, I mean I need all the money you got! And make it quick, old man, and you j-j-j-just might (here Ronny’s decades-conquered stuttering problem unexplainedly reemerged) l-l-l-l-live!!!!”
With only a quick moment of hesitation, in which he seemed to be formulating a list of pro’s and con’s, advantages and disadvantages of complying with this masked intruder’s requests, Mr. Dickerson quickly nodded his head. And just kept nodding, now looking to Ronny like a real-life Bobblehead Doll. Then the Old Man slowly raised his hands and said simply,
“U-huh…”
To Ronny it sounded like the kind of response he might have gotten from Angie if he had woken her up at five a.m. and asked her if she wanted a cup of coffee. This was so easy! The Old Man was putty in Ronny’s hands…
“OK, then!,” Ronny shouted, more confident now as he gained control of the situation.
“Go slowly around to the register, open it up, and give me everything you got.”
He then added, for emphasis, “And no funny stuff!” This too, although he didn’t realize it, came not from him but from some vague childhood TV-Land memory.
“That’s it. Slowly. Put all of it in one of them big paper bags you got sittin’ there to put the whinos’ liquor in for ’em.”
Ronny’s thick West Virginia twang was also in full swing now, and together with the sporadic stutter made this request sound more like,
“Poopooed edaw in wonadem poo-paper bags yew got settin there…”
Mr. Dickerson seemed to get the jist of the message, though, and quickly acquiesced, apparently having taken a quick mental assessment of the pro’s and con’s list in favor of compliance.
Soon Ronny had three paper bags full of bills and was speed-walking towards the still-open back door. Mr. Dickerson, for his part, had simply slumped back against the rear wall of his little liquor store, the store which was his only real accomplishment in life, and let his body slide to the ground in a kind of upright fetal position.
CHAPTER 10
As Angie saw Ronny come out, she jumped up, raced toward him as if about to attack him in the same way he had assaulted Mr. Dickerson. She grabbed the gun from his sweaty hand in her gloved one, handed him Gun Number Two (her gun, the one that didn’t matter) and yelled at him to start the car and wait. She’d be right back…
Angie knew Ronny’s calculation was simple. Angie says to, so I should do it. She knew he would do as she asked, too stunned by what he had just done to really consider the question of just what she was up to. Looking back before entering the store, Angie saw Ronny climb in the driver’s seat of the Accord, throwing the paper money bags in the back. He cranked the engine but still left the lights off. In case anyone was watching, she figured he was thinking. With the lights off, maybe they still wouldn’t see anything unusual. Little did poor Ronny know, it wasn’t going to matter what anybody saw. Good old Angie had it all worked out.
Angie came upon Mr. Dickerson-- her “father”-- suddenly. It was dark inside the store. She had forgotten that it would be. And she actually almost tripped over him sitting there slumped against the wall in the dark.
She instantly froze up on seeing him up close for the first time in fifteen years. He looked so much older. Like a different man. Not the strong, young man she remembered him as at all. Truly an old man now. In every way. In the worst way. It was like he had rotted from the inside. She now felt nothing but pity as she stared at the man who had ruined her life. Who had hurt her and betrayed her beyond anything imaginable. Beyond anything that a real God would ever allow. This man sitting in front of her was, in fact, why Angie didn‘t think there even was a God. Despite what her precious Kaballah told her. At least not one that had any actual control over anything going on in his magnificent universe. No real God would ever let a father lay his hands on his little girl. Not in the way Mr. Theodore Roosevelt Dickerson had.
But she held the gun steady nonetheless. Arms outstretched and pistol pointed directly at the man’s head. He seemed to be in another world, unable even to acknowledge that she was there in the room with him, much less look at her. He was in shock.
Her words came slowly and quietly. So quietly that she wasn’t sure if he was even hearing them.
“Daddy?”
“You hurt me, Daddy.”
Angie paused and breathed in deep, the tears coming now. Coming like blood. Blood for the tourniquet. And this time she didn’t care if they stopped coming or not.
It was dying time.
Now louder, yelling almost, she said, “You hurt me bad! All those times, Daddy! I would lay awake and pretend to be sleeping so you wouldn’t come back and do it again!”
“I was so scared, Daddy! So scared of you!”
Mr. Dickerson seemed to now at least acknowledge that someone was speaking to him. He cocked his head slightly toward Angie, like an Autistic registering some emotional connection but finding it too difficult to make full contact. He didn’t make a sound.
“I’ve been waiting for this day. Waiting to come back. Waiting to hurt you like you hurt me. But now I know no one can ever do that. Its not possible. There is no justice. Not for you, Daddy.”
“Not then, not now, not ever.”
Angie began slowly to lower the gun, tears now flooding her face, totally spent.
In the moment the gun grazed her thigh in an admission of impotence, several things happened. So quickly Angie couldn’t process them all.
Mr. Dickerson suddenly turned his head. In the direction of the front of the store, now suddenly alert again. At the same time, Angie raised the gun again in his direction, this time out of fear. She did not know what was going on.
Then there was a shot. Angie didn’t know at first if it was hers or someone else’s. Although she thought she may have pulled the trigger out of simple jumpiness. She wasn’t sure. Then she heard glass break from somewhere inside the dark store. Lots of glass. Then she did fire her gun. And this time it was by accident. And it was out of jumpiness. And it was directly into the wall behind her father’s head. Then Angie lowered her gun as her father continued to peer into the darkness away from her. Now she looked that way too, following his gaze. Then in an instant, she knew where the other shot had come from. But it was too late. The BANG of a third bullet shattered the air of the dark store as she watched her father’s head snap backwards, and his seated body simply drop sideways onto the floor.
Her hand flew to her mouth, but no sound came out. She va
|
 CHAMBERS/ CHASER
chaser
by Adam Chambers copyright May, 2008
chapter 1
“It all started last Monday. I met this guy, down at Joey’s. The bar down the street. I was just bored, you know? Tired of sitting around in that stupid apartment watching reruns of Law and Order. Tired of having no social life. Tired of a lot of things. So I just grabbed my wallet and walked out the door. Thought I’d be back in an hour or so, so I didn’t even feed Charlie. Poor Charlie. More than anything, he’s what I’m worried about now. After four days of this. Poor little guy can’t even get out of there, no food, no water, nothing. How can I live with myself if I ever get back to that stupid apartment, knowing I killed my cat? Just starved him to death in some hot, miserable apartment. And didn’t even say goodbye to him.
“So, Joey’s. Right. I went to Joey’s. Ordered a strawberry frozen margherita. Sat at the bar. And what did they have on TV? Reruns of Law and Order. That just about did me in, right there. So anyways, this guy comes and sits down next to me. Introduces himself. No pick up line, nothing. Just, “Hi, I’m Andrew. What’s your name?” Beautiful man, though. Tall, black man, with the most perfect white teeth. Wearing this really nice linen suit. Like a summer suit, you know? He was like something out of the Land’s End catalog. And the weird thing was, I have no idea where he came from. I was facing the door, and nobody had come in that way. There was like nobody in the place, either, when I got there. The bartender, Mary, this one old guy in the corner, and me. I could have sworn that was it. Then all of a sudden this hot black guy just pops out of nowhere. “Hi, I’m CHAMBERS/ CHASER
Andrew…” With this deep voice, too. And this slight British accent. Not severe. Just like maybe he’d lived there as a kid or something.
“So ‘Andrew’ sticks out his hand-- he’s got these huge, basketball-player hands, you know, immaculately groomed nails, though, and this gorgeous silver ring on his middle finger. Like a horseshoe, I think. With lots of little diamonds. He catches me off guard, and he must have seen that I was kind of not prepared for this or whatever by the look on my face. So he kind of gives me this sly little grin, like confident, you know? Like he’d done this a thousand times before. And starts talking to me. Talking about baseball. The Yankees, and what a sucky year they had. Well, he doesn’t say sucky. That’s my word, I guess. I don’t remember what he said, exactly, tell you the truth. But I guess he figured since we were on Long Island, why not talk about the Yankees, you know? Pretty safe bet. And then we start talking about the weather, how cold it’s been this fall already. And he asks me if I have a coat. Which I thought was kinda weird. Like, why would he care if I had a coat with me? So that kinda made me uncomfortable a little, like started setting off these little bells in my brain. But I guess they weren’t loud enough. Or maybe a woman just gets a little starry-eyed for a handsome man paying her all this attention after a few years without that. Not that I couldn’t have had that if I had wanted, don’t get me wrong…”
Conners interrupts her here, Julie can see as she pauses the interview tape she has been reviewing for the fourth time, trying to catch anything she might have missed the first three times.
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“Ms. Kurosawa,” Conners delicately says, drawing out the tricky syllables of the young woman’s name, “Can you describe this man
again for me? I know its asking a lot of you after all you’ve been through. But any other details you can give us about him would go a long way towards helping us find this person…”
Here Conners clears his throat, reaches for the mug of black coffee on the interview room table in front of him, and continues.
“Or these people, if there is more than one individual involved here. Which there quite possibly is, to pull of the complicated scenario we are talking about. Anything at all would help us. You know? The details you’ve given us so far have been tremendous. Especially after what you’ve been through in the last few days…”
Julie watches Conners pause again on the tape, and Stefanie (‘with and F’) Kurosawa, of West Babylon, Long Island, New York, shyly (or nervously, Julie can’t tell which) glance down at the floor and briefly twirl her long black hair with her pink-nailed fingertip.
“But is there anything else that can help us? What about this man’s suit? You mentioned he was wearing a linen suit. What color was it? Did it look expensive? Or like he’d picked it up for a couple Ben Franklin’s at Burlington Coat Factory? What about his shoes? Did you notice what kind of shoes he was wearing?”
Here Julie pauses the tape again. She zooms in on the woman’s face
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as she reacts to Detective Conners’ questions. And she sees something. They’ve lost her. Right there. The lady’s eyes kind of gloss over and go blank, right when Conners looks into them and asks her about the guy’s damn shoes. Stefanie Kurosawa stops twirling her pretty black hair with her pretty pink fingernail and just stares off into space all of a sudden. She’s got that “thousand yard stare” like she was a freaking Marine just back from combat or something. Like somebody flipped a switch in her brain. From On to Off. Totally off. Lights-on-nobody’s-home off. In a heartbeat.
FBI profiler Julie Shapiro, Ph.D., (“Doctor of Phylogeny,” her father used to say) watches the tape a fifth time, then a sixth, but always hit’s the same brick wall right there. Conners picks up on something different in the woman, but keeps on with his questions anyways, and all he gets from that point on is a lot of shrugged shoulders, vacant stares, and several, “Are we almost done?”’s and “Is it OK if I go now?”’s.
That’s it. Nothing else. That was three days ago. Friday, September 24th. Five p.m. When Ms. Stefanie Kurosawa had walked in to the Suffolk County Sherriff’s Department on Sunrise Highway in West Babylon and said that she needed some help. That she had just woken up in the back of a van around the corner, that she was afraid to go to her apartment, even if she could have figured out how to get there. And how for the last four days she had been on “some kind of boat, somewhere.” She wasn’t sure where, she told Sergeant Tim Connors. And she wasn’t sure exactly how she got there, other than she met this guy at the bar, she agreed to follow him in her car to “his place,” she saw his car take a sharp right turn all of a sudden in front of her, and race across two lanes of traffic and off the right shoulder
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of the road right into the river. Then she stopped, panicking and thinking maybe he had a heart attack or something, maybe he was dead. Got out and ran to the spot where she saw his car go off the road. Then she saw the flashing lights. What she assumed was a police car. Sirens. Lights coming toward her. Out of nowhere. She stopped. Froze like a deer in the headlights. A man got out of the police car. Came towards her. Asked her for her ID. Checked it. Then said she was under arrest, could she turn around and put her hands on the car. Etcetera, etcetera.
Julie had been over it a million times in her mind since yesterday when Suffolk County called her. Well, since the FBI pre-empted the entire investigation and put her to work here. She had flown in Sunday early a.m. from Colorado, where she was enjoying a much deserved week off. Duty had called her, though. At one in the morning on a Sunday. And here she was. And here Stefanie-with-an-F Kurosawa wasn’t. No. Alas, poor Ms. Kurosawa would not be available for questioning anytime soon. That is, unless Julie wanted to make a trip to the Suffolk County Morgue, wherein the eight or so pieces of Ms. Kurosawa’s formerly beautiful body lay like some morbid jigsaw puzzle on a cold steel table. Waiting to be put back together.
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chapter 1
Julie Shapiro, Ph.D., criminal profiler with the Federal Bureau of Investigations, Denver office. Born February 18, 1969 in Idaho Springs, Colorado. Elevation 11,000 feet. Population 637. Well, now more like 1637. Spouse: none. Children: none. Hobbies: skeet shooting, midnight bowling. Interests: reading (anything she could get her hands on, but mostly the Russians-- Dostoyevsky was her fave), definitely not politics, definitely not religion, definitely not anything that reminded her of her job. Problem was, almost everything did…
Julie sat at a desk in the Suffolk County FBI branch office looking at pictures. Pictures of Ms. Stefanie Kurosawa. Old and new. The new ones were not so pleasant. The old ones were, though. Stefanie’s mom, who had ID’d her in the morgue two days ago, had provided Julie with several wonderful pictures of a young and very beautiful Stefanie growing up on Long Island. Eight-thousand miles from Okinawa, which is where the elder Mrs. Kurosawa had grown up. A very happy, very photogenic Japanese-American girl. In rollerskates at what looked like her 8th or 9th birthday party. On a whale-watching boat with Mom and Dad, with what looked like the word “Montauk” scrawled across the back, wearing white tennis shorts and a pre-teen scowl. In her high school field hockey uniform, looking more like the young woman Julie had witnessed on Sergeant Conner’s interview tape now than a “girl” at all. At her senior prom. At graduation from Long Island University in May of 2001. In that still-innocent time before the world exploded in confusion four months later.
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“Marketing Major,” Mrs. Kurosawa had told Julie as she thumbed through the photos together. With an expression of dull shock on her face. A face that had smiled now for the last time, Julie knew. That’s how it always was. There were no happy endings. When joy was gone, it was gone for good for these people. How could you lose your only daughter, in such a horrific way, and ever be the same again? The answer was, you couldn’t. So all Julie could do was to treat Mrs. Kurosawa with infinite tenderness and respect as the older woman showed her the photos. Like she was some delicate, fragile Praying Mantis in the palm of Julie’s hand, who’s world would be shaken even further by even the smallest insincerity or insensitivity.
Mrs. Kurosawa had gone hours ago, and now Julie was alone with her photos. The new ones, of course, would never be seen by Mrs. Kurosawa. They told a tale of nothing but horror and pain. And loss. The life of such a beautiful young woman cut short so violently in its prime. But why? What had taken Stefanie-with-an-F Kurosawa from Marketing Major to morgue? What misstep? What small decision of the seventy-thousand each of us makes in a day? What, or who.
The FBI had brought her in because they were concerned. Bells were going off. Connections being made. Stefanie Kurosawa was the sixteenth young, attractive woman of Asian descent to simply vanish in the last four months. Well, in Stefanie’s case, she didn’t just simply vanish. In fact, hers was the only case where there had been a body at all. Hers was different. But why?
The cases were spread out across the Mid Atlantic, as far south as Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, and as far north as Long Island. They
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had started June 4th with a young woman in Baltimore. Met a guy at a bar. Very nice-looking, very successful guy, from what the girl’s brief text message she sent her best friend said. And she was going to follow him to his place, she’d text her later… She had written that he had a really nice silver Porsche, too.
Then there was the one June 12th in Cape Hatteras. Young lady on vacation with friends from San Francisco, had excused herself from them for a while because she’d “met a guy” and she was “going to have drinks with him.” He was “so hot,” she had told them over the phone, and he drives this red Ferrari-- “you should see it…” And then nothing else. No phone calls, no trace whatsoever. They had found a six-hundred-thousand dollar Ferrari submerged off the northern shore of the cape three days later. Italian leather soft as a baby’s bottom.
And still no connections. No reason to look for them. Not yet, anyway. Not until August, when the count was up to twelve. All identical, or at least eerily similar, circumstances. Attractive men, fancy cars, a drink at a bar, and Presto! No more girl… All young, good-looking Asian girls. Gone. Like they’d been abducted by godamn aliens. Just vanished.
Then there was Stefanie. Something different had happened with this one. Something hadn‘t gone according to plan. And now Julie had something to work with. Not much. But something, and that was all she needed. All she had ever needed.
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