Justifiable Homicide
Jesse Bastide
Second Revised and Updated Edition
Copyright 2014 Jesse Bastide
All rights reserved.
1
Selena didn't know it yet, but this day was about to be a bitch.
She was walking out of the Save Mart by her house. She was carrying two paper bags, one in each hand, the weight in them keeping her forearms tense.
She did the grocery shopping in the middle of the day. She did that because the crowds were always thinner then.
It looked to be a nice day. Funny how looks could be deceiving. There were a few puffy cumulus clouds in the sky. Mostly sunny.
Her husband was a meteorologist who worked for a local TV station. He was always naming clouds when he was off-camera. She never thought of herself as interested, but she guessed that some of it had rubbed off on her. She knew cumulus and stratus and alto-something (not sax) and her favorite – cumulonimbus.
She was walking across the half empty parking lot to her light blue Jeep Cherokee. She'd gotten a good deal on it at Renny's Used Cars in Gray. It was only two years old, under 20,000 miles. A hell of a deal is what it was, but Renny and her husband were, if not friends, at least closer than complete strangers. In Renny's world, that was enough for him to make them a smoking deal on a car. Renny explained it like this: “People buy from people. And word of mouth is the best advertising.”
Selena got to her Jeep. She put the two grocery bags down by the back bumper, the weight of the groceries settling against the paper sides of the bags and threatening to topple one of them if she didn't load it into the back fast enough. It was the bag with the dozen eggs resting on top of the tomatoes in a slippery plastic shell.
She reached into her pocket for the plastic key fob, taking it out and simultaneously feeling for the button to unlock the doors. She pushed the button and heard the beep and the rapid mechanical click of the locks. She glanced across the parking lot and saw an old woman, a collection of loose skin and thin bones and wisps of white hair all wrapped in a coat that was too thick for the weather, an unseasonable coat. The old lady was trying to wrestle a walker out of a car trunk that, from a distance, looked like an open mouth disgorging undigested bones from its belly.
Selena could have gone to help the old woman, but it was all the way across the parking lot and it would take more effort than she was willing to give. That gave Selena a quick pang of guilt, until she remembered that she had steak in one of the bags and if she left it in a hot car it might spoil. It made not helping seem reasonable instead of cold.
She looked away from the old woman and reached for the latch to open the back of the Jeep.
That was when the man came up behind her.
That was when her day went to Hell.
2
Selena didn't know what was worse – the bump on the back of her head, or that she was duct taped with a gag in her mouth and stuffed into the trunk of what felt like a big sedan. She woke up in that trunk.
She struggled against the tape on her wrists, which were pressed together hard and sweating. She tried to call out for help, but it just came out as low, muffled cries through the gag. Not that it would do much good, anyhow. The car was moving. There wasn't anyone around to hear her cries for help other than her presumed captor up front, behind the wheel.
Panic wouldn't be too strong a word to describe what Selena felt. She tried to calm her breathing down. Her heart was beating ten miles a minute with a sickening thump on each contraction that jackhammered against her chest from the inside.
Panic. She played the movie back in her head in concise flashes of imagery: her at the Jeep; a grocery bag almost falling over; the old woman struggling with the walker far away; reaching for the latch on the Jeep. And then black. Waking up here.
I'm being kidnapped, she thought.
The big car bounced. She felt the suspension toss her up and down on slow motion coil springs. It was like riding on the Peak's ferry in light to moderate swell and it also reminded her of the Buick her grandparents had.
The tape felt too tight. She tried to move her legs and met the same resistance she'd felt at her wrists. She realized they were taped too.
Selena tried not to think about what was going to happen to her, but that was like telling someone not to look at a gruesome car crash on the side of the road. Everyone slowed down for a look. And what did happen to women who were kidnapped? Did they ever escape?
No – they ended up in ditches with their throats slit, with dirt and fragments of DNA under their fingernails and their vaginas torn and leaking blood. She didn't want to think about it, but the thought was flashing in her head, as big as a Las Vegas casino neon sign: Rape. I'm going to get raped. Then he's going to kill me.
She was pinning it on a he, but she didn't know for a fact that a man had taken her. She hadn't seen her assailant. But wasn't it always a man?
Breathe, she thought. In...hold two three...out....
She felt her heart settle, downshifting from Extreme Fear to merely Profound Dread.
She looked at the synthetic carpeting in the trunk. It had little fibers that curled upward and might snag on a piece of clothing. They were the kinds of fibers that, on CSI, sometimes got put under a microscope as forensic evidence during a criminal investigation. But that was always after the murder.
She cried softly.
3
The car stopped. There was a moment of silence, and then Selena heard a car door open. He – it had to be a he – was getting out.
She heard footsteps walk alongside the car, then stop. And even before he put his hand on the trunk to open it, she imagined that she felt him standing there looking at her sheet metal and steel and carpet prison.
There was a flood of natural daylight. She was blinded by it as the lid of the trunk rotated upward. She saw the person who had taken her. It was a man, but she couldn't see his face.
That's good, right? she thought. If he wanted to kill me, he wouldn't be afraid to show his face.
She observed what she could, knowing that it might not help her survive, but at least it gave her something to do other than cringe and shake. And false hope was better than none. She saw that the man was wearing a camo balaclava and reflective aviator RayBans. He was over six feet tall, and everything about him was thick. His neck and shoulders and arms and thighs screamed exogenous testosterone! He was in jeans and a wife-beater.
His choice of shirt wasn't lost on Selena. It had to be intentional.
“Up you go, missy,” he said.
She tried to say let me go, but all that came out were muffled grunts through the gag. She felt herself drooling from the corners of her mouth.
The big man reached in and lifted her out of the trunk, slinging her over his shoulder.
She looked at her now inverted surroundings and didn't recognize the place. There was a dirt parking lot. There weren't any other cars. There was a warehouse with a rusty sheet metal corrugated roof. There were evergreen trees around the parking lot. She kicked her bound legs in tandem in a feeble attempt at a struggle.
“Easy, now,” said the man. “Easy.” He said it to her the way people talk to old horses before leading them into the kill room of a slaughterhouse. If he had any intention of future violence, he wasn't betraying it in his tone. His voice was a smooth mask, which only made it more threatening.
She grunted again and stopped her kicking. She could smell him, and the twin aromas of Old Spice and tobacco reminded her of her dad. That made everything worse.
They got to the warehouse door. The man reached forward and opened it and carried her inside.
It was dark.
4
Her eyes ad
justed. The warehouse was almost deserted. Almost.
There was a large cage in the middle of the room. The cage was made of chain-link fence and steel posts. It had a steel roof. It had a hand-fabricated, intentional look, as though it would have fit right in at a gallery exhibit on the culture of modern torture.
The man brought her to the cage. He opened the door, and it swung open on smooth, noiseless hinges. He put her into the cage, setting her down lightly so that she was sitting on a cold concrete floor. He looked down at her and took a hunting knife with one serrated edge out of his pocket.
Selena saw the blade and felt a knot in her stomach and started to moan, wondering if that would be the last sound she would ever make. But the man only stepped around her and cut the duct tape from around her wrists. He did it without so much as nicking her.
She brought her hands in front of her and looked at them. Her wrists were pink from the tape. She flexed her fingers and her sore wrists. She was still sitting on the floor with her knees bent in front of her.
The man walked in front of her again and looked at her, still wearing his reflective sunglasses. She didn't know how he saw anything with them in the dim light. He reached down and offered one of his large hands. She stared at it for a second before taking it; when she did, he helped her up. His gesture felt dissonant to her, like a bad chord that didn't belong in a song.
Selena got the strange feeling that she was a doll and he was rearranging her, positioning her in different ways to see if he could satisfy himself.
He put his hands on her shoulders and then slipped them underneath her armpits. He lifted her up the way a parent might reposition a wayward two year-old and carried her backward until she made contact with the chain-link fencing of the cage. She felt herself sink against the chain-link as far as it would flex, and then it pushed back.
The man raised one of her hands above her head. She looked up and saw a leather strap attached to the cage, a detail she'd missed when he'd carried her in.
He cinched her wrist into the strap, and the constriction felt worse than the duct-tape. Her hand was also higher than the level of her heart, which meant the pins and needles from lack of circulation started almost immediately.
He put her other wrist into an overhead strap and gave it the same rough treatment.
The man knelt down and cleanly cut the duct tape off her ankles with a slice of his knife. He followed that by methodically removing her shoes, pulling off her jeans (but not her underwear), and putting back on her shoes. That left her legs naked, her crotch nearly so, and her feet protected from the cold floor.
She looked at the back of his balaclava, then at the leather straps that were no doubt meant for her ankles in a matter of seconds.
Selena's next decision was more emotional than calculated. It was borne of a feeling of impending doom, triggered in no small part by the leather straps and her lack of pants, which evoked nasty sex-torture imagery that she was sure she'd never seen before but nevertheless feared. She didn't want to be a prisoner anymore. She didn't want to be strapped to the cage. So she reacted.
She kicked him in his masked face, her foot cracking the cartilage in his nose and breaking the sunglasses.
It was the wrong thing to do.
5
The man cried out and put his hand against his face, clutching it. One of his eyes was swelling. The blood from his face was soaking into the balaclava. He stood up slowly, exhaling forcefully like an angry bull, and let his hand fall. He put his face six inches from hers and said, “You bitch. You fucking no-good cunt. I'm going to show you what we do with bitches like you.”
Selena sincerely hoped there wasn't a we, that there weren't more monsters like him out in the world. His eyes were dark with rage, and the word for Selena's favorite storm cloud came back to her: cumulonimbus.That's what she was dealing with here.
He pulled off the mask with both hands and the mask smeared the blood across his cheek and down his jaw. She saw the outward signs of damage from her kick, his crooked nose and the swelling of his eye and the blood that was steadily flowing down his upper lip and into his mouth.
The man looked at her and then spat blood into her face in a spray of mixed-size droplets. She closed her eyes after the wet drops landed on her. Some of them got into her mouth and into her eyes, contaminating her precious mucous membranes. She wondered if he had AIDS. If he did, he wasn't dying yet. He was too strong for that. Too thick. Without the balaclava, she could also see the shaved head and the sharp jaw, as though he would have fit in for a military casting call looking for fit, angry-looking men between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five.
He sneered at her and knelt down again. He grabbed her leg with a firm grip and strapped it to the fence, making her wince in pain as he tightened the strap. He did the same with the other leg.
She was spread-eagled. Unable to move.
He stepped back to admire his handiwork. She noticed his yellow Dexter work boots. They looked new.
He looked her up and down, grinning.
“I'll bet you'd like me to take that gag out of your mouth, wouldn't you, sweetheart?” The slaughterhouse calm that had been in his voice earlier was gone.
Selena pissed herself, a one-time gush from her bladder that ran down both legs and into her socks and her shoes.
The jackhammer was starting up in her chest again, and part of her wanted to bust a valve right now and check out for good so she wouldn't be around to find out what this sicko was going to do.
“You know what?” he said. “I'll take off the gag if you promise not to scream. Will you do that? It's not that I'm afraid of anyone finding us. It's just that screaming makes my head hurt. My ex had a baby girl that screamed all the fucking time. You know what I did with that baby girl?” He smiled as he remembered. “Well, let's just say that I took care of the noise problem. And that baby's momma was no good anyway. The two of them deserved each other. I scored a two in one, and no one else but me had to know. Did the world a service, is what I did.”
Selena felt woozy. Sick.
He went up to her. He peeled the tape off her face in a fast, all at once motion that stung her cheeks. He took out the gag.
Selena coughed and then took a deep breath through her mouth. Almost a small victory.
“What you got to say for yourself, honey?” he said. “You must have something to say to me.” He gave her a moment to answer, but Selena didn't talk.
The man left the cage, closing the metal door with the silent hinges and setting the lock, and walked out of the warehouse.
She was alone for now.
6
When she was alone, Selena's eyes looked everywhere for a way out. There were no windows. There were inadequate lightbulbs in the ceiling providing sometimes flickering, pale illumination, but even in her distressed mental state she could see the obvious: the cage was locked with a steel bolt.
She wouldn't ever be able to escape, even if she got out of the restraints. She started to feel sorry for herself. And what was wrong with that? She didn't want to die. She didn't want this thick man to rape her. To slit her throat and dump her.
She started to cry again, this time in big sobs that took great lungfuls of air to produce. She did it because she could. Then she shouted at the top of her lungs, saying one word that echoed in the warehouse:
WHY?
When her voice got hoarse she stopped shouting. She got quiet. Even her sobs diminished into uneven breaths and wet rings around her eyes.
She waited so long enough that her stomach started to grumble. She felt thirst.
7
Heavy footsteps.
Selena didn't turn her head toward the sound. She looked at her feet and her bare legs with the dry piss against them. She looked at the cold concrete in front of her.
The bolt slid in the lock and the man opened the cage door and walked in. He stood a few feet away from Selena and pulled down his pants, stepping out of them with rehears
ed precision.
Oh no, she thought. This is how it happens.
She froze her breath, willing herself to pass out, but she couldn't close her eyes.
He was wearing jockey shorts. He pulled them off. He had an erection that was like the rest of him: thick. To Selena, it looked like it could hurt. An obscene phallus that was part cock, part steel pipe.
The man went up to her. He rubbed himself up and down her bare legs, holding his cock in his hand. He put it between her thighs, tapping it against her underwear. In a soft voice, he said, “Playtime, sweetie. You be good and I just might keep you around a while.”
She turned her face away and tried to put her conscious mind somewhere else, as if it was an entity you could hide in a shoebox and tuck away up on a high shelf. If you go out of your mind, he can't break you, she thought.
She saw herself in her own house, lying in her own bed, next to her husband Raymond on a Saturday morning reading the paper.
The man pushed against her and then he was tearing his way inside. She cried out in agony.