WIDOW (16 page)

The victim didn't go down easy. Bruises laced both his upper forearms, and a half-moon bruise rode one hip, as if he'd been kicked. With that kind of resistance, someone might have heard him fighting for his life.

And that's what Samson had to find out.

He had to stop slipping into alleyways at two in the goddamned morning trying to talk with a stripper.

He had a job to perform, bad as it was, depressing as it made him feel, hopeless as it sometimes seemed.

He turned and moved from the alley to the street, blinking at the lights, the car horns, the giggles of teens breaking curfew who gave him wide berth as he stepped onto the sidewalk. He thought maybe he'd find Big Mac and see if she had something for him.

But before leaving the club behind him, he couldn't help one last quick furtive glance at the framed poster advertising SHADOW, THE NEWEST RAVE, and felt his heart leap and settle sick in his chest, lonely for her, sorry she was gone where he could not follow.

~*~

She thought she saw someone in her headlights as she drove too fast down the brick circle drive to the mansion but, just as the figure appeared in the heavy fog, it disappeared, and she decided she had been daydreaming, the way she did sometimes when she drove.

She parked underground in the dark cavernous garage, thinking, we need to get lightbulbs down here, and hurried around the big building with the deep thick scent of the garage's packed damp dirt in her nostrils. She ran up the wide marble steps leading to the second-floor front entrance. She had the keys out, the door unlocked, and was smiling before she saw Charlene in her blue slippers and housecoat, waiting with a dish of something strawberry in her hands.

“Are you hungry?” Charlene asked. “I made shortcake.”

“I can go for that.” She dropped the gym bag to the floor where she stood and took the saucer. She kicked off her shoes and glided to the leather sofa before the dead fireplace. The first bite was heaven. Strawberries and whipped cream brought a hungry moan to her lips.

“I did the floors,” Charlene said, standing over Shadow, hands hanging at her sides.

“They look great. Shiny and all. Why don't you sit down, take a load off? Aren't you eating?”

“I will later. I . . . I already had one. But there's plenty more'

“You're wonderful, Charlene. I could get used to treatment like this. I feel like a princess or something.”

Charlene bowed her head at the compliment. She took a seat in one of the big white cushiony chairs and crossed her feet at the ankles, hands in her lap. A content pose. Now that Shadow was here.

“I thought I saw someone outside when I was cleaning house.” Charlene's brow wrinkled as she reported this information. Her hands found one another and clasped tightly.

Shadow paused with a spoon of strawberries halfway to her mouth. She frowned. “Where?”

“Oh, at the door. At the windows. But I guess it was the fog playing tricks.”

Shadow thought about it. Charlene's nerves were not in the best shape in the world. Easily frightened, easily upset. But hadn't she too thought she had seen someone in the drive?

“When?” she asked.

“Earlier. Hours ago.”

“Is the door locked? Did I lock the door?”

Charlene started from the chair immediately, her slippers slapping pittypat across the marble to the door where she checked. Finding it unlocked, she turned the deadbolt and put on the chain. “There,” she said softly. “Safe.”

Shadow sighed, suddenly tired, the night closing down for those hours before dawn, her inner clock ticking slower and slower, her eyelids drooping even as she finished off the shortcake and licked the spoon clean. “We better hit it,” she said. “The dessert was great. Thanks for the calories, kid.”

Charlene took the saucer and spoon to the kitchen, a sincere and courteous “You're welcome,” trailing behind her.

Together they turned out the lights downstairs, checked the door one last time (Charlene did, just to be sure, she said), and went up the stairs to the bedrooms. Charlene turned to the left of the staircase, Shadow to the right.

“Goodnight,” Shadow called.

“Goodnight,” Charlene echoed.

Soon there was darkness in all the mansion and outside the fog moved conspicuously in waves and eddies against the barred glass.

~*~

Charlene swam from the black dungeon of sleep, where nothing disturbed her, to the shoals of wakefulness, just on the brink where reality was whatever she thought it might be.

His hands.

Bringing down the sheet, letting in the cool night to her uncovered arms and legs.

His fingers.

Lightly touching her gown, molding the cotton material against her breasts.

Her legs.

Pushed apart, the gown lifted, the air stirred by the balloon effect so that she shivered and swam closer to the surface where life might or might not be dangerous.

And then the weight!

And his breath staggering her senses, covering her mouth with a rough hand so that she was forced to breathe him in, his sweat and old-clothes smell.

Charlene woke completely into terror, frozen on the bed, someone, SOMEONE on top of her body, pressing at her.

His voice.

Shushing her. Quiet, quiet, he said, I can kill you if I want to, if you scream, if you move, I can take your eyes, I can break your neck, I can strangle you in a second, quiet now, still, lie still, I won't be long . . .

A total frenzy. Charlene coming apart. Flying apart like shattered glass. Splintering with a scream that drove his hand down her cheek to her neck where it tried to hold her fast to the bed. But she was too insane for him, too scared to care if he killed her, too willing to die rather than let him take her as she'd been taken before.

The scream was a long interminable screech from one dying, and grateful for it.

His hand slipped, sweaty, from the meat at her throat and plunged down into the pillow behind her head. He tried pinning her down again with his hips, his knees on either side of her, but she was wild with panic, driven to an explosion that made her physical form twisty as a snake, whipping back and forth to dislodge him, to shatter his existence. He lurched forward and down, forehead striking her teeth, blood from the gash spraying out over her face in the dark. His hat flew from his head, was lost; one of his shoes was knocked from his foot and clattered with a bang onto the floor.

She wouldn't stop screaming, the screaming filled the world and set off red blossoms of fear in his head.

But the fire that pierced his back between his shoulder blades caught him by surprise and it was that fire that made him rise up over the woman in the bed, grab awkwardly behind him, then plummet sideways to the hard marble floor, his head cracking, his consciousness spinning through a vortex sparkling with bursts of starlight, fading.

~*~

“Stop it!” Shadow slapped Charlene across the face in an effort to bring her from the madness that had claimed her.

Charlene's scream died so suddenly that the resulting silence was as loud as crackling from a stadium microphone.

“I think he's dead.”

Charlene lifted herself from the bed, her hair all in her face and standing out like a gray halo. She looked at Shadow in the dim lamplight coming from the bedside and said, “Who's dead?”

Shadow pointed to the body of a man lying in a pool of blood on the floor. He looked like a common middle-class working man—a salesman for an electronics store perhaps, a librarian, a bookkeeper. But his hair was sparse and blood-flecked, and his head was turned too far back. Much too far.

“What's he doing here?”

“Charlene, are you all right? Listen to me closely now. Remember telling me when I came home that you saw someone skulking around the house?”

“I said that?”

“Well, you were right. I thought I saw someone too, when I drove in, but I wasn't sure. Then I heard you screaming.”

“Did he . . . did he . . . ?” Charlene looked down at herself as if just discovering she was a human with a body. Her gown was torn. And bloody near the neckpiece, the lace there a muddy red. And still wet. “Sticky,” she said, feeling the material between her fingers.

“He was trying to rape you.”

“Did he?”

“No. I ran for the kitchen and found a knife. I need to see if . . .” Shadow dropped to the floor onto her knees and tentatively reached one hand to the man's neck to feel for a pulse. The handle of a knife stuck obscenely from his shoulders, the blade buried to the hilt.

“He's dead.”

“Oh God, oh God . . .” Charlene was off the bed in a second, rushing past the body and out the door into the dark hall of the mansion.

“Charlene!”

Shadow raced after her and took a hairpin turn through empty moonlit rooms to where Charlene ended up in the ballroom. Standing in a corner, talking to the wall.

“Aw, Charlene, come on now, it's all over, I didn't let him hurt you.”

“. . . in the twilight of the last day there will be men running swords through the children . . .”

“Charlene, honey, don't.”

”. . . when the bugle call sounds the dead will rise up to avenge their murderers . . .”

It was babbling. Eerie disjointed talk. Scarier than the man who had attacked them in the night.

“Oh, Charlene, it's all right, you're all right now. Nothing's going to hurt you, I promise.”

She led the woman from the corner, through the stippling of moonlight, across the wide-open ballroom floor. She shushed her, holding tightly to her arm, whispering close to her face.

Outside, the fog had shredded away, washed out to sea or inland, but gone. It was still dark and Shadow said, “I have to call the police.” But Charlene began that scream again, the one that was like a siren full blast, and Shadow grabbed her arms and shook her quiet then said, “All right, no cops. I'll take him out in the motor boat. Before light. And dump him in the bay, the motherfucker.”

And that is what she did. No regrets.

 

Fourteen

 

Nobody right. Nobody wrong.

As Charlene helped her carry the rapist's body across the catwalk and down the stairs to the back exit of the mansion, Shadow listened as those words circled through her brain. Nobody right. Nobody wrong.

They were black-vulture words. The kind that scavenged over morals, picking and choosing the tastiest bits.

Shadow had heard them in a song played by the DJ of the club where she danced. She didn't know the song's title or the singer, but the words came back to her when she lifted the rapist, holding him under the armpits, Charlene taking up the legs.

She thought she might have said it out loud to soothe Charlene's hysteria. “Nobody's right here, nobody's wrong. This guy took a chance to do what he wanted to do and he lost. I had to kill him, Charlene. He might have strangled you if I hadn't.”

What she neglected to say was that there had been a surprising lift when she sank the blade into the intruder's back.

When Charlene had first screamed, Shadow flung off sleep as if it was a shawl; her mind clicked into fast-time, time that ran faster than real-time. She dashed to the kitchen, found the knife in the dark, the drawer pulled from the cabinet, and dropping with a teeth-rattling clatter to the floor. One reel later and she was at the door to Charlene's room, bursting in, flying effortlessly across the floor to the figure humped over her friend, and it was . . . it was natural. It was easy to bring the arc of her arm down with all her strength.

Nobody right. Nobody wrong. The rapist should have died for his sins, therefore he did. Shadow was no more than a conduit of justice. She served it quickly, thoughtlessly. Execution was not so bad when it was done right.

“Do you want me to go with you?” Charlene had on her gray baggy sweater over the stained and torn nightgown. She stood twisting both ends of the sweater into knots.

Shadow thought it more hazardous to take her. “Stay here. Go back into the house and lock the doors again. I can do this by myself.”

“What if he's not dead?”

“He's dead.” Shadow untied the boat from the short pier's mooring.

“If he's not dead, he'll drown.”

“I don't give a fuck if he drowns. But he won't. He's dead.”

“You'll come back?”

Shadow paused before stepping into the bow of the small boat. She looked down at the sack of human excrement she must keep company into the dark waters of the bay.

“Charlene,” she said, “I'm your friend. I'll never leave you to fend for yourself. You saved me once. I saved you tonight.” She looked from the corpse to the other woman. “We're like sisters. I'll come back, I promise.”

Charlene nodded her head, accepting this as truth. Then, as Shadow watched her ravaged face, the tears formed two steady streams that flowed unimpeded down her cheeks. She cried silently, gaze locked on the pearl light creeping from the distant horizon of the sea.

Shadow felt the rage she hadn't acknowledged when murdering the intruder. It made her want to kill him all over again, in a slower, more torturous way. To stop those tears of hurt from Charlene's eyes at that moment, she thought she would have gladly skinned the rapist inch by inch, even if it took a week to do it.

She stepped away from the boat and put her arms around her friend. “Don't think about it. Put it out of your mind. Pretend it never happened. It was a nightmare.”

“I never know when they're coming,” Charlene said in a ragged breath that was hardly more than a whisper. “They come out of nowhere and they hurt me. I don't know how to protect myself . . .”

“Hush, hush now. You don't have to. I'll protect you.”

Once beyond the breakwater and rolling with the waves of the bay, the distant shoreline a row of lights strung through darkness, Shadow found herself —another surprise—talking to the body.