Heartstopper (2 page)

Nobody but me.

Her head snaps up; her eyes shoot toward me, like a searchlight, and I jerk away from the wall, almost tripping over my feet as I stagger back. By the time I regroup, regain my breath and equilibrium, she is circling the small room, her eyes darting up and down, this way and that, the palms of her hands pushing against the unpainted, concrete walls, feeling for any signs of weakness. “Where am I? Is anybody out there? Why have you brought me here?” she is crying, as if the correct question will trigger a reassuring response. Finally, she gives up, collapses on the cot, cries some more. When she raises her head again—for the second time, she looks right at me—her large blue eyes are bloated with tears and ringed in unflattering red. Or maybe that’s just my imagination at work. A bit of wishful thinking on my part.

She pushes herself back into a sitting position, takes a series of long, deep breaths. Clearly, she is trying to calm herself, while she takes stock of her situation. She glances at what she’s wearing—a pale yellow T-shirt that shouts, MOVE, BITCH, in bright lime-green lettering across its stretched front, low-slung jeans pulled tight across her slender hips. The same outfit she was wearing … when? Yesterday? Last night? This morning?

How long has she been here?

She runs her fingers through long, strawberry-blond hair, then scratches at her right ankle, before leaning back against the wall. Some madman has kidnapped her and is holding her hostage, she is thinking, perhaps already wondering how
she can tell this story to maximum effect after she escapes. Perhaps
People
magazine will come calling. Maybe even Hollywood. Who will they get to play her? The girl from
Spider-Man
, or maybe that other one, the one who’s all over the tabloids these days. Lindsay Lohan? Is that her name? Or is it Tara Reid? Cameron Diaz would be good, even though Cameron’s more than a decade older than she is. It doesn’t really matter. They’re all more or less interchangeable. Heartstoppers all.

As am I. A heartstopper of a very different kind.

The girl’s face darkens. Once again, reality intrudes. What am I doing here? she is wondering. How did I get here? Why can’t I remember?

What she probably remembers is being in school, although I doubt she recalls much, if anything, of what was being taught. Too busy staring out the window. Too busy flirting with the Neanderthals in the back row. Too busy giving the teacher a hard time. Too ready with the smart remark, the sarcastic comment, the unasked-for opinion. No doubt she recalls the bell sounding at the end of the day, releasing her from her twelfth-grade prison. She likely remembers rushing into the school yard, and bumming a cigarette from whoever is closest at hand. She might remember snatching a Coke from a classmate’s hand, and guzzling it down without thank-you or apology. Several cigarettes and snarky comments later, she may even remember heading for home. I watch her watching herself as she turns the corner onto her quiet street; I catch the tilt in her head as she hears the soft wind whisper her name.

Someone is calling her.

The girl leans forward on the cot, lips parting. The memory is there; she has only to access it. It plays with her senses, goading her, like the bottom line of an eye chart, the letters right there in front of her, but blurred, so that she can’t quite make them out, no matter how hard she
strains. It lies on the tip of her tongue, like some exotic spice she can taste but not identify. It wafts by her nose, trailing faint wisps of tantalizing smells, and swirls around the inside of her mouth, like an expensive red wine. If only she could give voice to it. If only she could remember.

What she does remember is stopping and looking around, listening again for the sound of her name in the warm breeze, then slowly approaching a row of overgrown bushes at the edge of a neighbor’s untended front lawn. The bushes beckon her, their leaves rustling, as if in welcome.

And then nothing.

The girl’s shoulders slump in defeat. She has no memory of what happened next. The bushes block her vision, refuse her entry. She must have lost consciousness. Perhaps she was drugged; maybe she was hit on the head. What difference does it make? What matters isn’t what happened before, but what happens next. It’s not important how she got here, I feel her decide. What’s important is how she’s going to get out.

I try not to laugh. Let her entertain the illusion, however fragile, however unfounded, that she has a chance at escape. Let her plot and plan and strategize and resolve. After all, that’s part of the fun.

I’m getting hungry. Probably she is also, although she’s too scared to realize it at the moment. In another hour or two, it’ll hit her. The human appetite is an amazing thing. It’s pretty insistent, no matter what the circumstances. I remember when my uncle Al died. It happened a long time ago, and my memory, like the girl’s, is kind of hazy. I’m not even sure what killed him, to be honest. Cancer or a heart attack. Pretty run-of-the-mill stuff, whatever it was. We were never really all that close, so I can’t say I was terribly affected by his death. But I do remember my aunt crying and carrying on, and her friends offering their condolences, telling her in one breath what a great man my uncle was,
how sorry they were at his passing, and in the next breath, complimenting her on the wonderful pastries she’d prepared, saying “Could we please have the recipe?” and “You have to eat something. It’s important to keep up your strength. Al would want that.” And soon she was eating, and soon after that, laughing. Such is the power of pastry.

I don’t have any pastry for this girl, although in a couple of hours, after I’ve grabbed something to eat myself, I may bring her back a sandwich. I haven’t decided yet. Certainly a good host would provide for guests. But then, no one ever said I was a good host. No five stars for me.

Still, the accommodations aren’t all that bad, considering. I haven’t buried her in an underground coffin or thrown her into some snake-and-rat-infested hole. She hasn’t been stuffed into some airless closet or chained to a stake atop a nest of fire ants. Her arms haven’t been bound behind her back; there’s no gag in her mouth; her legs are free to traverse the room. If it’s a little warmer than she might like, she can take comfort in that it’s April and not July, that it’s unseasonably cool for this time of year, and that it’s evening and not the middle of the afternoon. Given my druthers, I too would opt for air-conditioning, as would any sane individual, but one takes what one can get, and in this case, what I could get was this: a dilapidated old house at the edge of a long-neglected field in the middle of Alligator Alley, in the middle of south-central Florida.

The middle of nowhere.

Sometimes being stuck in the middle of nowhere can be a blessing in disguise, although I know at least two girls who would disagree.

I discovered this house about five years ago. The people who built it had long since abandoned it, and termites, mold, and dry rot had pretty much taken over. Far as I can tell, no one’s made any attempt to claim the land or tear this old place down. It costs money to demolish
things, after all, even more to erect something in its place, and I seriously doubt that anything worth growing would grow here, so what would be the point? Anyway, I stumbled upon it by accident one morning when I was out, walking around, trying to clear my head. I’d been having some problems on the home front, and it seemed like everything was closing in on me, so I decided the best thing to do was just remove myself from the situation altogether. I’ve always been like that—a bit of a loner. Don’t like confrontations; don’t like to share my feelings all that much. Not that anyone was ever much interested in my feelings.

Anyway, that’s the proverbial water under the bridge. No point brooding about it now, or living in the past. Live for today—that’s my motto. Or die for it. As the case may be.

Die for today.

I like the sound of that.

Okay, so it’s five years ago, and I’m out walking. It’s hot. Summer, I think, so really humid. And the mosquitoes are buzzing around my head, starting to get on my nerves, and I come across this ugly, old field. Half-swamp really. Probably more than a few snakes and alligators hiding in the tall grass, but I’ve never been one who’s afraid of reptiles. In fact, I think they’re pretty awesome, and I’ve found that if you respect their space, they’ll usually respect yours. Even so, I’m careful when I come here. I have a trail pretty well etched out, and I try to keep to it, especially at night. Of course, I have my gun, and a couple of sharp knives, should anything unexpected happen.

You always have to guard against the unexpected.

Somebody should have told that to this girl.

The main part of the house isn’t much—a couple of small rooms, empty, of course. I had to supply the cot, which was kind of tricky, although I won’t get into any of those details now. Suffice to say, I managed it all by myself,
which is the way I usually do things. There’s a tiny kitchen, but the appliances have been ripped out, and there’s no running water in the taps. The same is true of the bathroom and its filthy toilet, its once-white seat cracked right down the middle. Wouldn’t want to sit on that thing, that’s for sure.

I’ve thoughtfully provided the girl with a plastic bucket, should she need to relieve herself. It sits in a corner to the left of the door. She kicked at it earlier, when she was flailing around, so right now it’s lying on its side at the other end of the room. Maybe she doesn’t realize yet what it’s for.

The first girl chose to ignore it altogether. She simply lifted up her skirt and squatted right there on the floor. Not that she had to hike her skirt very far. It was so ridiculously short, it could have passed for a belt, which I guess was the look she was going for—strictly Hooker City. Of course, she wasn’t wearing panties, which was pretty disgusting. Some might say she was no better than an animal, although not me. No way I’d say that. Why? Because it disrespects the animals. To say that girl was a pig is to slander the pig. Which, of course, is why I chose her. I knew no one would miss her. I knew no one would mourn her. I knew no one would come looking for her.

She was only eighteen, but already she had that knowing look in her eyes that made her seem much older. Her lips had frozen into a cynical pout, more sneer than smile, even when she was laughing, and the veins on the insides of her skinny arms were bruised with the piercing of old needles. Her hair was a frizzy cliché of platinum curls and black roots, and when she opened her mouth to speak, you could almost taste the cigarettes on her breath.

Her name was Candy—she even had a bracelet with candies for charms—and I guess you could say she was my test case. I’m the kind of person who doesn’t like doing anything halfway—it has to be perfect—and once I knew what
I had to do, I realized I’d have to plan everything carefully. Unlike so many people you read about, I have no desire to be caught. Once this project is over, I plan to retire and live peacefully—if not always happily—ever after. So, it was important that I get things right.

Hence, Candy.

I met her at a Burger King. She was hanging around outside, and I offered to buy her a burger, an offer she accepted readily. We talked, although she didn’t have a lot to say, and she clammed up altogether when my questions got too personal. That’s okay. I understand that. I’m not too fond of personal questions myself.

But I did find out some key facts: she’d run away from home at fourteen and had been living on the streets ever since. She’d met some guy; he’d gotten her hooked on drugs, and the drugs had, in turn, gotten her hooked on hooking. After a while, the guy split, and she was on her own again. She’d spent much of the last year moving from place to place, occasionally waking up in a strange hospital room or holding cell. One place was pretty much the same as the next, she said.

I wonder if that’s how she felt when she woke up here, in the underground room of this forgotten, old house.

Did I neglect to mention this room is underground? Shame on me—it’s what makes the place so special, the “pièce de résistance,” if you will.

I said before that, for the most part, houses in Florida don’t have basements. That’s because they’re built on what is essentially quicksand, and you could wake up one morning to find yourself up to your eyeballs in muck. Entire homes have been swallowed up, and I’m not just talking about the older, less substantial ones. There’s a brand-new subdivision going up not far from here, built almost entirely—and ill-advisedly, in my humble opinion, not that anybody has asked for my opinion—on landfill, and
one day, one of the houses just up and disappeared. The builders didn’t have to look very far to find it, of course. They were standing on top of it. Serves them right. You can only go so far challenging nature.

If I were going to build a house today, I’d hire the guy who designed this one. True, it’s seen better days, but whoever constructed it was a genius. He created a whole warren of little rooms underneath the main floor, rooms he probably used for storage.

I have something quite different in mind.

Candy didn’t think much of the place when she realized it wasn’t the kind of holding cell she was used to. Once I finally showed myself, and the seriousness of her predicament became clear, she tried all the tricks in her arsenal, said if sex was the goal, there was no way she was doing anything with me on that dirty old cot. She’d do whatever perverted things I wanted, only not here. The idea of sex with this person was so repugnant I was tempted to kill her on the spot, but the game was far from over. I still had some surprises up my sleeve.

Ultimately I killed her with a single bullet to the head. Then I dumped her body in a swamp a few miles away. If anybody finds it, and I doubt they will—it’s been four months after all—there’ll be nothing left to link her to me, no way of determining exactly when she died, at what precise moment her heart stopped beating. Even had she been found immediately, all in one piece, I know enough about DNA, courtesy of all those surgically enhanced forensic experts on TV, to ensure I’ve left no clues.