I’ll have made my entrance, coming in through the same window I used this morning, and if that’s locked, I’ll dig the spare key from the dirt in one of the empty potters in the shed. Leroy Ashley will not be expecting me, because I have been very, very careful. I will punish him for what he’s done. I will get what I want: vengeance.
I dress in black pants and a black shirt. I am not slight or skinny. I do not give the appearance of someone able to be blown away by the slightest gust of wind. I have evolved from a pink, doughy girl, who kept her eyes firmly glued to the sidewalk, to a killing woman corded with muscle, who looks everyone in the eye, searching for their sins. I twist my hair into a tight knot on top of my head, securing it with bobby pins. I pull on my steel-toed boots, and then slip my fingers into my gloves. Before I leave, I look at myself in the mirror. Not the girl from the Bone. Not a girl from anywhere. I look dangerous … like an animal. Or worse. Animals don’t kill for sport. They kill to eat.
I carry my weapons in a duffel bag, to the garage where I keep my Jeep. I lay them side by side in the trunk, underneath a blanket—three knives of various sizes, rope, plastic handcuffs that I bought at a fetish shop, a Taser, and a pocket pistol, a Kel-Tec P-3AT that I bought from the fry cook at work. I’d taken it to a shooting range, and was pleased with how light it was. Next to all of my dangerous-looking weapons is a small, pink Zippo, taken from and never returned to Judah Grant. It was this weapon that I intended to use on Leroy. I pocket the Zippo, put the handcuffs, the Taser, and the smallest knife in my knapsack, and cover the rest of the weapons with a thick, felt blanket. Over the blanket I put half a dozen plastic bags of groceries I keep there for show. Bags of canned vegetables, two boxes of Diet Coke, a giant sack of dog food. All deterrents in case the police pull me over.
But, the police do not pull me over. I drive the sixty miles to Leroy’s grimy neighborhood, slowing down when I pass his gravel driveway to see if the lights are on in his kitchen. They aren’t. Which means he is following his routine and is in bed. Tomorrow morning he will get up, smoke his joint, pop his waffles into the toaster, and pour himself a giant glass of orange juice. Then it will be a waiting game.
A mile from Leroy’s, and down a driveway covered in overgrowth, is a dilapidated house that is scheduled to be demolished. I found it weeks earlier, and called the city pretending to inquire about purchasing the property. It’s already sold and set to be demolished, a woman told me. Then, after a brief pause, she added, They’re building a new house, one with three stories and a pool! I wondered what anyone in Washington would want with a pool? I thanked her and hung up. I had the house to myself for the next few weeks at least. I pull the Jeep into the garage; the floor is scattered with smashed beer bottles, strewn about like the last tenants had an epic party before they said goodbye. The garage door has to be lifted manually. I pull it down, over the Jeep, over me, and make my way into the house where I wait.
I think about Leroy as I wait, wondering what sort of childhood he had. If he justifies what he does to women, or accepts himself as a monster, like I have about myself. When I think about the big, hulking man as a small, innocent baby like Mo, I feel ill. We are all innocent once—every killer, every rapist, every terrorist. None of us asking for this life, but life as it is, being thrust at us by our parents, who hadn’t the slightest clue what they were getting into. And while some parents thrived under the flush of the demands that came from parenting, others grew emotionally slight, withdrawing, silently blaming the small humans who were ruining their lives. Humans who never asked to be brought into their morass in the first place. But still … not every person who was handed the shitty parent card turned into a murderer or a rapist. People prosper, children are resilient. What is it that turns a soul sour? What is it that turned me sour?
I place the gun on the filthy floor beside me. I am sitting in what was once a dining room; all appearance of what must have once been a beautiful room, is gone. Indigo wallpaper, ripped and rotting, the previously rich, walnut floorboards scratched and sagging from water damage. There isn’t a window intact in the entire house, each one boasting a large and jagged hole, the rock that made it lying in a cobwebbed corner. When I found the house, it had one of those heavy bolts on the front door, to keep out the vandalizing teens and the bums. Whoever had installed the lock had forgotten to secure the garage. A silly mistake. I had pulled up the door and walked right into the kitchen from the entrance inside.
I pick up the gun and hold it to my temple. Then I move it to my mouth. If I kill myself, there will be less people dead. But, will that be a good thing? Is what I am doing good or bad? Can you label something like killing a person in the way they killed? What would the American public think of me? If I were caught, I’d be put on death row. My trial would be quick, because I would, of course, plead guilty. There would be no appeals, no drawn out life in prison. When I slammed Vola Fields’s unsuspecting head into the side of the dresser, I had not planned on killing again. It was an automatic response based on what she was doing to Little Mo. And even when I stalked, and eventually burned, Lyndee Anthony alive, I had not taken joy. Yet, here I am: plotting, planning, and looking forward to watching the life drain from Leroy’s body.
Margo the Murderess. It has a nice ring to it.
I don’t want to hurt people, I don’t have an innate need to, but they must be punished. That’s what I do, or what I tell myself I do. I punish. I feel responsible for it. An eye for an eye. A beating for a beating. A burn for a burn. I have a conscience. It is different from the conscience of the average person, but at least it’s there. It is there, isn’t it? Yes, I feel remorse, I feel love, and guilt, and hurt. That counts for something in the study of the broken human brain. And I study my differences, hold them against the rest of the world, and then, very quietly, with my insides quivering like raw egg, against the psychopaths, sociopaths, murderers. I read every piece of information I can get my hands on. I want to know why I feel it’s all right to do what I do, and how it became me so easily. But there is no one to speak to, no one who would understand. So I read. I contextualize.
At seven forty-five, I lift myself from the floor, dusting off my pants and allowing the blood to flow back into my stiff limbs. Three cans of Red Bull stand straight up, like sentries, on the windowsill. I take them with me as I make my way back to the garage to prepare.
The window slides open without squeak or protest. My moves are rehearsed. I climb in the way I climbed in last time, taking precaution not to disturb anything. The kitchen light is on, a bag of waffles on the counter, thawed through. Leroy’s glass is on the table, drained of the juice, the pitcher empty beside it. I can smell his weed as I walk through the kitchen and enter the living room. The ghost of a smell, clinging to his clothes, I imagine.
I find him upstairs, lying on his back on the floor. I step over his body, pulling the plastic cuffs from my back pocket. His chest is rising and falling in time to his labored breaths. Leroy Ashley is sleeping deeply. I have to heave his body to the side, something I never would have been capable of in my old body. I smile to myself as I lift his wrists, placing one then the other behind his back. Now, my muscles strain and burn as I flip him over. I am barely winded, barely afraid. I hum the tune of “Werewolf Heart” as I work.
WHEN LEROY WAKES UP, he does so with remarkable noise. He’s all grunts and moaning as he rises from his drug-induced sleep—ground Ambien and a handful of generic sleeping pills I tossed into his breakfast cocktail. I watch raptly, hungry for his reaction. I feel like a child, eager to see if my experiment with a comb and light bulb has generated a charge. Leroy lies still for the moment, gagged with one of his own sweat-stained T-shirts, and spread eagle on the bed, his limbs secured to the posts with flexicuffs. He looks like a pitiful human sacrifice, one that the gods would find inadequate. The ache in my shoulders and back brag dully, after dragging two hundred and fifty pounds of Leroy Ashley across the room and onto the bed. Even now, as I gaze down at his body
, which is trembling in shock, the small half-smile on my lips, I feel euphoric. I succeeded. I have brought another criminal to my version of the electric chair. I sigh contentedly and lift my arms above my head in a stretch, while Leroy begins to fight against his gag.
It looks like he’s choking, but I don’t care. I let him struggle, his head rocking from side to side. His penis hangs limply between his legs, a shriveled mushroom of a thing. The sight of it revolts me. How can something that looks so harmless ruin the lives of so many women? I bring my hand down and touch his ankle to alert him to my presence. It’s vile, touching him. I immediately feel the need to scour my skin with hot water. His eyes, which are two black marbles, search the room for me. When he sees me, he yells something around his gag and yanks at the flexi-cuffs until bright welts appear on his wrists. I laugh.
“Hello,” I say. “You took a very long nap.”
He can’t see my face. He tilts his head this way and that while I hide momentarily in the shadows, buying a few more seconds until my big reveal. Leroy struggles, his solid belly jiggling in the dim light. I walk my fingers up his leg, and he watches me with wide-eyed terror. When I reach the junction of his thick, sweaty thighs, I grab his penis; I grab it hard, squeezing it in my fist, digging in my nails. His eyes flare open, and he screams in pain.
“What?!” I say in mock surprise. “You don’t like it when someone roughs up your junk? I thought you were into that sort of thing.” With tears of pain pooling down his cheeks, he stills to look at me. Really look at me.
I step out of the shadows, stand where he can see me. Leroy looks genuinely surprised. He doesn’t recognize my face—I was too careful for that—but he recognizes my womanhood. He heard my voice, perhaps didn’t believe it, but here I am, standing five feet six inches tall. A woman who drugged him, tied him to his own bed, and is now hurting him. He roars.
“What? You think you’re the only one who stalks people?”
His nostrils flare in response. I am enjoying this. Though I don’t have time to dwell on the worry of why. I am standing in this rapist’s house, towering over his trembling body, and all I can feel is … power. I have the power. I am the power. Margo the Murderess.
“How many women have you raped?” I ask. He narrows his eyes, and I see the full extent of his hatred. He hates women, I think. Women with brown hair.
“How many?”
When he makes no move to answer me, I pull out my knife and run it along his shin.
“What? Did your mommy do you wrong? Is that what turned you into a filthy pig? Was she a brunette, Leroy?”
Still nothing.
“My mommy did me wrong, too,” I say with false cheerfulness. “I guess that’s why we’re both here!”
I set the knife down and pick up the pink lighter instead, which I had placed on his nightstand after hauling his heavy ass onto the bed. I have been reading the old Seattle Times; I’ve scrolled back ten years, searching the archives for rape stories. What I found was Leroy Ashley. His ability to get away with the crime, but he still left marks, followed patterns. The police couldn’t find him because he wasn’t in the system. He remained undetected, unseen. A true and accomplished stalker.
I crack my neck. I feel good. I feel so damn good. This, I think, is what cocaine must feel like. Murder, the upper of uppers.
“I know you know what it feels like to hurt someone. I know you like it. Just so you know, I like it too. So I’m going to take my time.”
I flick the wheel of the lighter, and a small flame pops out. I lower the flame to the underside of Leroy’s arm and hold it there. He roars so loudly that I’m sure the entire street can hear him. When he opens his eyes, I see tears of either pain or rage trickling down his cheeks.
“Are you afraid of this little, pink Zippo, Leroy?” I say, holding it up. It’s about the size of your little, pink dick. I like for weapons to be of equal proportions. Is that all right?”
He looks at me like I’m mental. Me. I feel sudden rage. I spin the wheel of the lighter and hold it to his rib cage. His skin bubbles under the flame. He thrashes so wildly that he knocks the lighter right out of my hand. It skids across the wooden floor coming to rest in the far corner. I yank the bandana from his mouth, and then pull back my hand and slap him. His head jerks to the side. He slowly straightens it back to look at me, his usually dead eyes lit up with anger.
“You cunt bitch!” he snarls. Spittle flies from his lips, his bared teeth are yellowing and crooked. If you’re going to smoke all of those cigarettes, you should really make an effort to whiten your teeth, I think impassively. I feel slightly better about his rage; his silence bored me. I pick up the lighter and begin again. Leroy does not cry or beg. I was expecting him to—the sniveling pig that he is. Instead, he takes it, and flings obscenities at me while he thrashes in anger, the corner of his mouth frothy with spit. I urge him in a patient, calm voice to confess.
“You’re a rapist, Leroy. Say you’re a rapist.” He will not. I realize that to beg me to stop would be like Leroy admitting he was wrong, and he doesn’t think what he did was wrong. Leroy is narcissistic and delusional. I hold the lighter to his skin until I have burned away my anger. He stopped screaming a long time ago. His eyes look sloppily around the room, one roving left, the other staring up at the ceiling. The room reeks of sweat and human flesh. I am tired. I turn my back to retrieve my knife, just for a minute. A minute too long. It’s so quick I don’t even feel it. When I wake up, I am the one bound and gagged.
HE KEEPS ME IN THE BASEMENT—a cold and unfair prison since I at least had the decency to tie him up in his own bed. It’s damp and barren; there aren’t even boxes or junk. I’ll die of pneumonia before he can kill me. He’s old school. The knots he’s used to bind my ankles and wrists look like something you’d learn in Boy Scouts, though I doubt anyone loved Leroy enough to put him in Boy Scouts.
I can’t move; he made sure of that before he tossed me onto the cold concrete.
He doesn’t rape me, but I didn’t think he would. I do not fit the look of his victims, with my white-blonde hair and pale eyes. I am not a mother. I’m just the girl who found him out, and now he’s figuring out what to do with me.
I hear his footsteps upstairs, something being dragged across the floorboards, then the solid pop of a hammer. I tortured him until he screamed and wet himself, so I’m sure he has something truly remarkable planned for me. I wait, hog tied, wishing I could gnaw on the rope around my ankles, wishing I hadn’t been so arrogant. Arrogance makes your senses dull. I didn’t think he’d trump me. I didn’t even hear him try because I was so filled with my own small victory.
I roll onto my knees, shivering. My head aches at the base of my skull where he hit me. I close my eyes and let the pain flair and furl. It’s a concussion. I know because I’ve thrown up, and all I want to do is sleep. If I could get out of these ropes, I could reach my thigh—my backup plan. My carefully placed precaution. A Band-Aid—square, and the size of my palm. The type that sticks so hard you need water and a quick rip to tear it off. On top of that is another Band-Aid the same size. And nestled in between the sticky tape, resting on the patch of white in the middle, is a small razor blade. If I could get to it, then I could slit Leroy’s throat before he slit mine.
After about an hour, my knees begin to ache. I roll back onto my side. I tell myself that Leroy isn’t a murderer. Just a rapist. Maybe he won’t kill me. I spend the hours wriggling my wrists back and forth trying to loosen the rope. I was going to be one of those girls who just disappears, no one to even notice I’m gone. Just a smudge on the map of existence. You’d have to lean in real close to even notice I was there.
I float in and out of consciousness. Once I hear the basement door open and the creak of a stair, I bolt upright, forgetting I’m tied to myself, and pull a muscle in my back painfully. I wait, tense, then I hear the door close and Leroy’s footsteps across the kitchen floor.
“Why don’t you just do something, you fuck!”
I yell at the ceiling. I am tired of waiting. I want it over … whatever he’s planning. I can dish it; I can take it. I fall asleep, my left breast in a puddle, my throat burning, realization as thick as mud. I am going to die.
When I wake up, I am being dragged across a floor. My head aches, and my skin feels like it’s on fire. My wrists and legs are no longer tied together, and I’m able to flail about as my shoulder hits the bottom stair. He has me by the hair. I imagine he’s pulling out chunks, and I picture myself yanking away from his grasp, leaving him with handfuls of it. I realize, at once, that I am very sick. So sick I’m finding it difficult to fight, and each time my head or shoulder slams into one of the concrete stairs, I find it harder and harder to open my eyes. The light in the kitchen is bright. I catch a glimpse out the window and see that it is night. I smell bleach and cooked meat, and I want to vomit, except there’s nothing in my stomach. I am a rag doll, popped and propped at his kitchen table. He reties me as I gaze at him through half-open lids; hands behind my back, he leaves my ankles loose. I need to piss. I tell him so.
When he doesn’t respond, I say, “I can do it right here, but then you’re going to have to clean it up.” This seems to change his mind. He hauls me up by the scruff of my neck and shoves me toward the bathroom. I notice the bandages on his arms and wonder how bad the burns are. I want my pink lighter—a thing of security to me. He frees my wrists and ankles and stands in the doorway with his arms crossed.