The Travelling Man (11 page)

She nodded her head in reply, not wanting him to know that she hadn’t even been informed that the FBI were in town, let alone excluded from the bust.

“Man, I bet that was something,” he cackled. “A real life serial killer in our midst and no one even knew it. Not that I’m casting aspersions, you understand,” he added hastily.

“I’m guessing that town’s buzzing,” she said lightly, knowing that old Cary had his finger on the pulse more so than anyone.

“Ayuh, Glenn reckons that the diner’s never seen such business and poor Bobby Cohen don’t know whether to shit or go blind being questioned by just about every news reporter on the planet.”

Cassie had been informed by Jeanne the dispatcher that the switchboard had been flooded with calls from out of towners all wanting a statement from the Sheriff’s Department, presumably after the FBI had given them all they were going to get.

“They’ll be gone soon, Cary; the heat will drive them city folk home soon enough,” she winked as she passed him on the stairs and headed up and out.

“Ain’t that the truth,” he laughed. “City folk,” he said, shaking his head as though discussing an entirely separate species.

She left him to his laughter and headed out quickly before too many other people noticed her presence. She checked her watch and saw that it was too late to take a trip out into the desert now; however much her intrigue was twitching, it would have to wait until morning.

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Becky staggered out of the news van barely clutching onto her dignity and panties. She left on the sound of sniggering laughter as Derek Rydal’s scorn followed her out into the night.

She had been all too willing to play the nymphet in order to get what she wanted, allowing the TV news reporter to treat her like a piece of meat while she was in control. He had listened intently as she spoke of her desire to forge an acting career and get out of Granton. He had listened and nodded as she spoke.  He had told her all about his contacts in the industry that could be invaluable. She had allowed his hands to roam and she moaned in all the right places offering encouragement as he had started thrusting into her roughly.

All the while that he was slobbering on top of her, she had kept the thought of his cell phone - with all of its juicy stored numbers - first and foremost in her mind. The only trouble was that when his thankfully brief attempt was over, his eyes had glazed over when she’d tried to speak to him again.

She had tried to steer the conversation back to his earlier offer of assistance but his face had turned cold and smug as he lay back on the floor of the news van with his pants still pushed down to his knees. “Help you?” he’d sneered. “Sure, I’ll help you. Here’s some free advice: lose about 20lbs, you fat pig, and learn how to give a decent blowjob because that’s about the only way someone like you is going to get anywhere.”

She did a hop, rather than a walk, of shame as she pulled her undergarments up and fought a losing battle to stop the tears from spilling onto her cheeks. She had been used by men plenty of times in the past, but she had always been the one in control and she had always got what she’d wanted. This time, however, she was sent scurrying into the cold night battered and beaten and it did not taste good.

She walked through the town centre, wrapping her warm cardigan around her body tightly as she shuddered - more through humiliation than the temperature. She moved quickly, hoping that no one she knew would spot her and want to talk. She was sick to death of this armpit of a town, a cowpat in the middle of nowhere populated by morons without the sense they were born with or any ambition to speak of. She felt like a butterfly trapped beneath a glass by a spoilt brat of a child content only to destroy beauty and suffocate potential. She deserved to flap her wings and fly, to leave Granton far behind her and soar to the sun, but she seemed to be permanently anchored to the ground.

She took a left past The Oasis Bare, avoiding the bright lights and noise of the patrons and headed for further darkness. There was a children’s play area that was always immaculately maintained, thanks to a bursary from Jim Lesnar, and she wandered across the garish artificial surface and sat down on one of the swings. Her ass barely managed to squeeze onto the black plastic seat but Derek Rydal’s jibe about her weight meant that she was always going to fit on it no matter how much skin she grazed on the metal chain links.

She rocked back and forth, picking her feet up off the ground, trying to let some of the burning hate go from her lungs as she exhaled.

“Such a pity.” A man’s voice startled her from somewhere inside the shadows.

Her feet slapped back down on the ground as she halted her swing and looked around nervously.

“No need to be afraid, Miss. I can assure you I mean you no harm; in fact, quite the contrary.”

His voice sounded like it was straight out of some old movie, rich and lush with clipped confident tones. He emerged from the shadows by the slide and she could immediately see that his appearance was a match for his voice.

The man from the highway was old without being elderly. He was dressed smartly in a full three piece suit that reminded her a little of her grandfather who was a man that she could never remember seeing without a tie. He walked slowly as though weighed down by his age at this hour. His face was kindly and compassionate and she could feel his concern.

“It’s Mr. Grange isn’t it?” she asked, thinking back to their earlier brief meeting when for some inexplicable reason he had spooked her but she couldn’t remember why.

“I’m new to town but not to places like this,” he said enigmatically as he took a seat next to her on the swings. “I come from a small town like this, you know. They are great places to grow up but not to grow are they?”

Becky responded by nodding her head in agreement.

“I always felt like I was trapped as I grew older,” the man mused as he lifted his legs and started to move on the swing. “When you’re just a babe in arms, the sky never seems so high and the horizon stretches on forever. It seems like the whole world is contained within the town borders, but as you grow you soon realise that the world is an ocean and you’re sitting in a puddle.”

Becky loved to listen to the man talk. After a lifetime of barely literate men grunting at her and prodding her with dirt stained fingers, it was like a warm spring shower. “I want to get out,” she muttered.

“But they won’t let you, will they? They just keep grabbing at your ankles and dragging you back down into the dust again, don’t they?”

She nodded fiercely.

“Their jealously is palpable and they don’t want you to bloom, do they? It’s always in their interests, my dear, to pull you down whenever you try to fly for their life is to wallow in the mud and the filth. I was like you as I fought to escape their clutches and forge a life beyond their narrow borders.”

“How did you escape?” she asked softly.

“By persevering,” he replied firmly. “By never allowing their grubby little hands to hold me back. A man came to me much as I am coming to you now with an offer, an offer to take me far away and show me the world and every delight that it has to offer.”

“What do I have to do?” she asked, entranced by his voice and the possibilities that it presented, however vague.

“You just have to say yes, young Miss. Just say yes and mean it.”

Becky could think of nothing but bitter hate and resentment towards the rest of Granton as they selfishly and maliciously kept her from her dreams. She looked down as Mr Grange stopped swinging and reached down to the ground. She saw that there was an old leathery case at his feet that she didn’t remember seeing in his hands when he’d walked over. He withdrew a piece of ordinary looking paper that was blank and held it neatly in his hands.

“What is it that you want, my dear? What is it that you want more than anything in this world?” he asked.

“I want to be a famous actress.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to be free of here; I want to show them all that I’m better than they are, that I deserve more and I want them to beg to be near me,” she said bitterly. “I want them to worship the ground that I walk on, and…, and…, I want them to love me,” she finished softly.

“Then you just have to sign,” Grange said, offering a pen.

She felt the small prick in her finger but barely noticed it. Her mind was full of Gilbert Grange and the world that she thought he could offer her. Somewhere deep and dark in her mind she knew that this was all wrong, that the whole thing was crazy, but she pushed the thought away angrily like some balaclava wearing home invader. She wanted her dreams to be met and for every man like Derek Rydal to taste what it was like on the other side of the equation, and so she signed.

As Grange took the sheet of paper back from her, she suddenly noticed that the sheet wasn’t blank as she’d first thought. There were multiple black lines of scrawled text but as she tried to read them the paper was taken from her and disappeared with a magician’s grace into Grange’s bag.

“What now?” she asked a little nervously as Grange’s face no longer looked kindly and wise; now it seemed old and cruel.

“Now? Now we begin,” he smiled.

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Jim Lesnar heaved himself off of the girl and rolled away feeling the same empty mixture of guilt and disgust. He dressed as quickly as he could manage, clumsily pulling on his pants and shirt and buttoning it with more difficulty than usual as he felt her eyes on him.

She was as attractive a woman as money could buy and the agency that he used only ever supplied the very best. Women of stunning appearance, well educated and capable of conversing across a multitude of subjects, they were also almost able to hide their disgust. Almost. He knew that he would never catch them openly gagging at his deformed physique but he could feel it behind their dead eyes where forced smiles never quite reached. He knew that he was always selecting women that reminded him of Jeanne Rainwood: an eye color here, a bust line there or maybe a perfume. He used the girls every couple of months or so, whenever the hunger got too much for him to bear. He knew that it was all fake and he knew that afterwards he would feel empty, but there was still always that distant hope that one time it would be real. That one time he would meet a perfect girl on her first “date” and they would feel that instant magical connection and they would save each other. But it was all just a daydream; he may have looked like a troll but life was no fairytale.

He was still puzzled by his strange conversation with the English guy in town. The man was new to Granton and to him, but somehow there was a familiarity to him as though Jim had been waiting his whole life for Gilbert Grange. The guy had promised to help him and Jim still couldn’t believe just how far down he had dropped his guard with a stranger. Grange had promised that he would help and Jim instinctively knew that the man could, but he had told him that the time was not now and that Jim was not ready. He didn’t know what Grange was waiting for but prayed that it happened soon as Jim didn’t know just how much longer he could wait.

“Will I see you again soon?” the girl asked, interrupting his thoughts.

She had given him her name but they were always fake ones and he didn’t bother to remember them. He looked into her smoky eyes complete with sympathetic expression and knew that she was just like the others: full of hidden sniggers and cruel comments. He had seen it all a million times before and as long as he had been alive.

He found his feet moving across the lush carpet as he walked towards her. He saw her face slightly falter as though she saw something in his eyes that hadn’t been there before. Her rock solid professional expression of warmth and seduction crumbled slightly as he reached the bed where she sat.

His hands reached out with a mind of their own and suddenly his thick ape like paws were clamped around her throat, stifling her scream of terror. Her eyes bulged in panic and he saw the face of every person that had ever mocked him beneath his dominant grip. He squeezed tighter, savoring her fear and relishing his sense of power and righteousness. He squeezed harder and harder, silencing the voices that laughed and sneered until every gasping last breath was extinguished and only then did he let go.

He stood back and waited for the guilt and horror to wash over him, but he felt neither. She had only got what she deserved and as he looked down at his huge hands, flexing them open and closed, hearing the bones crackle, he wondered just who else might deserve the same treatment. The list was long.

CHAPTER 8

altered states

Ellie was watching the TV, deep in fascination, with a small crinkle crease in the centre of her forehead that was an unconscious exact replica of her mother’s.

The news was full of reports of the Herod’s identification and subsequent take down. Ellie had little interest in the gun blazing world of the silver screen and as such she had yet to experience the usual
desensitization of her peers. Most of her school friends spent their evenings glued to video game worlds that glorified violence in red splatters across the screen. Her nights were more often than not spent with a large artist pad on her lap as her hand constructed visual representations of her imagination.

She had yet to find any external stimulation that could compete with what floated around inside her mind. Her room was a testament to her ability and varying influences, as the walls were covered with what she considered the better examples of her artwork. It wasn’t that she wanted to display her work; it was more that she didn’t want her mother or grandmother to start nosing around in her pads. So she displayed some innocuous pieces of landscapes and animals to show that she wasn’t some tortured artist. Her real work she tended to keep hidden as much of it seemed dark and twisted and she had yet to make much sense of it. Recently, her work had taken a rather worrying turn beyond any darkness that she had drawn before. Now her drawings were starting to scare her a little, as often it seemed that her hand was operating independently. She normally drew mainly in black charcoal but now there were slashes of deep red that she couldn’t imagine selecting, and yet there they were. Given her health situation, her mind tried to reassure her that it was all perfectly natural, but somehow she wasn’t convinced.

She wrenched her mind back from her internal dialogue with some effort. She had decided that living within the confines of her own thoughts was not a good address to reside at. Yes she was ill, but stressing about it could only make things worse and there was enough stress to go around already.

The pretty news anchor was wrapping up with reassuring last words about the FBI’s successful manhunt for the Herod serial killer. She had listened intently to various reports on several channels, all the while trying to understand why she had never heard of this “Herod” before.

Her musings were interrupted as she heard the front door open and her mom come in. There were muffled words as her grandmother and mother conversed and she waited.

“Evening, Ellie-Belly,” her mom greeted her as she entered the room.

Ellie rolled her eyes theatrically but secretly still liking the nickname as it harked back to a carefree time when there wasn’t the threat hanging over them.

“I didn’t see you on the news,” Ellie said. “I saw Mr Cohen being interviewed and a bunch of FBI men. How come they didn’t ask you?”

“Someone thought that I was just too damn gorgeous for TV. ‘Local Sheriff whisked off to Hollywood’. I can see the headlines now,” her mom said, laughing lightly.

Ellie appreciated her mom’s attempts at levity, but she could see that her mom looked tired and her
humor a little forced. She had been pondering showing her the newest of her dark drawings, but now she pushed that thought away as her mom looked like she had enough on her plate already. “Who you gonna play, Queen Kong?”

“Ha-ha. Can’t you see your old mom as an action hero? Or maybe running in slow motion on Baywatch?”

“Bay what?”

“The show about the lifeguards?”

Ellie shrugged.

“Sometimes you make me feel so old,” her mom said as she bent down and kissed her lightly on the forehead.

“Mom?”

“What is it, sweetie?”

“This Herod guy, was it really someone in town?”

“That’s what the FBI have decreed.”

“You know what’s weird?”

“What’s that?” her mom asked absently as she opened the gun safe in the closet and placed her gun and holster inside.

“I don’t remember hearing anything about the guy and now the TV is full of him. It’s as though it’s been the main story for weeks.”

“Well I’m glad that you don’t spend every moment glued to the screen; it’s hardly a nice story, after all.”

“Did you know about him?”

“Of course,” her mom replied, but only after the briefest of uncertain pauses.

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Deputy Kevin Bridges strained every sinew to complete the set. His arms screamed in protest as he pushed the bar up higher. His elbows started to tremble and, not for the first time, he wondered if his own arrogance was going to be his downfall. He had visions of being found dead with his throat crushed by the heavy metal bar in his garage/gym. It would seem like a stupid waste of life and he feared the embarrassment as much as the thought of death itself.

He pushed harder as his face flushed red with the effort until eventually his arms were raised high enough and the bar dropped back into the holders with a loud clang. His whole body shook with the adrenaline and the deep ache in his shoulders told him that he would barely be able to lift his arms come morning.

There was a long, full-length mirror propped up against the far wall and he took a moment to examine himself. He wore only sweatpants and his upper body gleamed and glistened under the bright overhead lights.

He flexed and posed, checking his reflection with a keen detached eye that was devoid of vanity. His physique was a constant work in progress and one that could never be completed as far as he was concerned. Once he was satisfied with the day’s results, he grabbed the towel from the bench where he had been lying down and turned off the lights.

The converted garage was link attached to the house and was the one room that he spent the most time in. Even after almost three years. he still thought of the place as his father’s house and that was unlikely to change anytime soon.

It was a reasonable sized three-bedroom detached house with a large garden and tall fencing. It was unusual for houses to have such privacy, but his father had been a private man, amongst other things.

His mother had passed away when he had been just a boy of 8 and his father had never forgiven him. They had been driving late one night, just Kevin and his mother. The night was clear and the stars were bright and there had been no reason for the crash that had taken her life. The car had rolled off the side of the road and down into a deep crevasse, which had split open the desert floor and swallowed them whole. Kevin had little memory of the accident other than the darkness as he’d sat pinned by the safety belt listening to his mother’s dying breath.

She had been a woman full of a whirlwind of emotions Kevin remembered vaguely. Her mood swings were dizzying at times, veering wildly from explosions of intense joy and activity to silent deeply dark depression. His father had been a stoically practical man who believed that everything in life should be dealt with in a stiff upper lip manner.

Looking back, Kevin knew that his mother should have been under the care or tutelage of a therapist, but he could never picture his father agreeing to such a practice.

Kevin had waited in that car for almost two days before he was found and pulled from the wreckage. His father had reacted coldly to his predicament, choosing to believe that a rambunctious 8 year old would have been more likely to cause an accident than his wife’s undiagnosed and unchecked mental condition.

Kevin had been forced to wear an abundance of medical supports upon his release and the next year or so had been full of rehabilitation for his shattered body. He had endured all of his seemingly endless painful sessions silently and without his father’s support. His father had always been a man frugal with praise and affection but Kevin found him to withdraw further into himself as the years passed.

Kevin had spent the first few years of his new childhood trying to win his father’s love and the rest of it trying to duck his father’s fists. Duncan Bridges had soon discovered a taste for the numbing effects of strong alcohol and suddenly he became infused with an emotion at last; unfortunately for a young Kevin, that emotion became anger.

He had endured his father’s drunken rants and beatings with the same kind of coldness that he’d inherited from the man himself. He took up sports in high school, enjoying the extracurricular activities that kept him away from home as often as possible. He’d found a fondness for football and the brutality that it offered, seeing his father’s face in every opponent that he smashed into.

By the time that he was 16, he had shot up in height and broadened through the school’s gym. He had towered over his father but the occasion had never arisen to stand up to the man as by then he was halfway dead and all the way in the bottom of a bottle.

Kevin had carried the anger with him throughout high school and college, never finding the right outlet to let it go. His father had finally succumbed to alcoholism and Kevin had been cheated of the confrontation that his mind demanded, but that he could never quite bring himself to force. As a result, he carried a burden of weight that could never be shifted from his shoulders no matter how hard he tried.

Football had soon lost its luster for him and the pointless physicality did nothing for him. Eventually he had joined the Police Academy, part of him thinking that if he couldn’t protect himself he could at least protect others. He had continued to build himself a body capable of such a task; muscle upon muscle, to stand in the way of men like his father and save boys like himself.

His lofty ideals, though, had soon been replaced by a pragmatism born of endless non-complaint filings by scared people unwilling to take things further after being saved from a beating or worse, by Kevin’s uniformed arrival. As such, he had taken to visiting men after hours and in plain clothes to distribute a little private education. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it only left him with bruised knuckles. Jeanne Rainwood had been one of the latter cases. Her husband was a thick headed man, seemingly incapable of learning any kind of lesson no matter how hard Kevin stressed the point.

Jeanne was a delicate flower that lived in Granton and Kevin had desperately wanted to save her, but her eyes had been full of resignation and had glazed over any time that he had tried to tell her that there was a life beyond her bullying violent husband. He had tried talking to her gently before raging at her in frustration, scaring himself badly as he had suddenly heard his father’s anger flowing from his lips.

He had wracked his brains about how to best save her, even considering making her husband disappear out into the desert. But in the end she had finally found enough strength to stand up to him and had plunged a carving knife into her tormentor’s stomach. Kevin couldn’t help but feel that he had failed her twice.

He showered himself, his mind still of thoughts of Jeanne. He knew that ordinary men would just ask her out on a date, but he also knew that his feelings towards her were complicated. There was a rage deep inside him that could never be extinguished or set free. It was part of him and part of his father and his greatest fear was always that he would become the one man that he hated the most.

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It was late by the time that Jim Lesnar finally reached home. The truck that he drove was now carrying an extra passenger, one that was bundled up in the trunk and one that he didn’t want discovered.

He nodded casually at the man on the security gate as he drove in, not bothering to even look to see who it was. His mind was full of his guest and just how to transport her to somewhere a little more private.

He drove around to his apartment at the rear of the mine. There was a waste chute some twenty yards or some from the closest spot that he could park. It would be a simple enough job to ascertain where those on the current night shift were, but somehow it didn’t seem right to draw attention to himself. He didn’t want anyone asking questions that might prod memories. “Yeah, Sheriff, I remember that night, Lesnar was acting strange and sent us away from the rear sector,” he could picture them saying.

Instead he parked up and switched off the engine. The night was cold and empty as he climbed out slowly and stood rooted to the spot, listening intently. Once he was sure that there were no approaching footsteps, he quickly lifted the rear door and dragged the woman out.

He flipped her body onto his shoulder wondering just what it was that made the slip of a girl so much heavier in death than in life. His body was so squat that her hands dragged on the dirt floor and he made a mental note to kick away any trail.

The waste chute wasn’t strictly legal as there were stringent regulations concerning the mine. But he had found that the removal of certain obstructions was often very costly and time consuming. Not many people knew about the chute and those that did were kept strictly under his thumb at all times.

He set the girl down as he removed the cover. The opening was around three feet wide and ran deeply into an underground chasm that was washed by an underground stream. He knew that once she was in the ground, the body would never be discovered. He could only hope that her employers at the agency would view her disappearance as an occupational hazard.

He had her back on his shoulders when he suddenly felt eyes boring into his back. He spun around quickly, despite the added weight, and stared off into the darkness, but he couldn’t see anyone there. He could feel the unmistakable presence of someone watching, but for some reason it didn’t feel threatening to him; it felt almost sympathetic and approving.