But could they really get her for murder? They had kept her locked in a cage. Didn’t that give her the right to free herself and to defend herself against the Atkinses? She didn’t know. She wasn’t a lawyer. And people did whatever the hell they wanted and got away with it. Just like the Atkinses had for so many years.
The immediate years after her escape hadn’t been much better. She was a very tall nineteen-year-old with the mental awareness of a preteen and the emotional maturity of someone even younger. Her naivete had led her into treacherous situations. Her fear of the authorities had steered her to groups that had exploited her, damaged her further, chewed her up, and then spit her out. And then one day Cain had woken up and said to herself, Enough. And then she’d said it even more forcefully to the biker gang member she was shacking up with, leaving him a bloody, pulpy mess. It was the least she could do after months of beatings from him. After that, it was her, solo. It would be her solo until the day she died, she had promised herself.
Cain slept fitfully for a couple of hours and awoke ravenous. She splashed water on her face, and since the room rate obviously didn’t include towels or a washcloth, she used a spare sweatshirt to dry her face. She had purchased a new pair of shoes with her MMA purse and now slipped them on.
She drove to a nearby Wendy’s and had a chicken sandwich, fries, and a vanilla milkshake. She looked around at the other tables and saw moms helping kids with their food, wiping mouths and noses, and cleaning up spills, just normal stuff. Still, she felt something odd in her head. Funny scenes appeared there. She had had them before. Dim memories . . . of something . . . someone. A girl laughed and put her hands over another girl’s face. The other girl screamed with giggles. It was like a dream so vivid, it gave you the sweats. Yet when you woke up you could really remember nothing about it.
She left and drove back to her new home. The first thing that confronted her was the scream. It was loud, scared, and when it died out, she opened her car door and looked around for its source. There were other residents around, some sitting on fold-up outdoor chairs or on the ground, or on overturned five-gallon paint buckets while smoking and drinking and shooting the breeze. Two others were playing cards with piles of quarters as chips. Not a single one of them reacted to the screams. Cain wondered why. And she meant to find out.
Cain walked over to one of them, a burly guy in his fifties with thick gray hair poking out from under a John Deere ballcap and wearing a dirty T-shirt and old-style white painter’s pants covered with colorful splotches. He had a can of Bud in one hand and a cigarette in the other. His eyes were red and unfocused, and she wondered how many Buds he’d downed.
“What the hell is going on?” she asked him.
“What?” he said, looking confused at the query.
“The screams.”
He shrugged. “Ain’t none of my business, sweetie.”
“Not what I asked.”
He pointed his smoke at room 104, about the time another scream sounded from within. “Girl’s getting her punishment again.”
“What girl?”
“Ken’s girl.”
“And why is she being punished?”
“Cause Ken says so.”
“And who the hell is Ken?”
At that moment the door to 104 burst open and a young woman came running out, her hands over her head. She was dressed in her underwear and was barefoot. She was Hispanic, in her early twenties, with beautiful features and a sleek, lean body.
Coming out after her was, Cain assumed, Ken. He was in his thirties, about six feet tall, around 250 pounds, and built like a bowling ball. He was shirtless, which showed off his powerful arms and thick, heavily tatted shoulders, and muscular forearms. His beer belly was impressive, Cain thought. He looked pregnant with triplets. His shaved scalp and forehead had a large skull tat embedded on it. Among the other tats was a swastika on his right forearm. He held a belt in his right hand, and a cigarette dangled from his mouth. A knife rode in a holder at his waist.
“Get back here, Rosa; don’t make me chase you, girl. It ain’t gonna be good for you if I do. You ain’t got no clothes on, you dumb bitch. Ain’t you got no shame, woman?”
Rosa turned, spat at him, and hurled a machine gun’s worth of Spanish, none of which Cain could understand, nor, did it seem, could Ken. Cain could see the bright red marks on Rosa’s arms and legs where the belt had struck her. Cain involuntarily rubbed her arms where Desiree had struck her innumerable times with her damn belt.
Ken took out the smoke and ground it under his boot heel. He snapped the belt like a whip and growled, “I told you before, you speak American. You gonna make double trouble for yourself, you stupid tacohead.” He laughed at his insult.
“You are tacohead!” barked Rosa. “That’s why you’re so fat. You eat too many, you pig.”
His smile faded as his poor attempt at humor was thrown right back at him; he looked around at everyone staring. Cain knew that men like Ken had only one reaction to such public insult. His lack of wit and deep-set insecurities quickly gave way to his abundance of brute physical strength, and uninspired knee-jerk reactions, which would always be violence-based. Grim-faced, he advanced on her, while Painter’s Pants Man hurriedly retreated, and most of the other people got up and fled inside their rooms.
Cain turned to her left and saw the woman from the office staring at them outside the glass doorway and wearily shaking her head. Then she moseyed back inside like this was simply a daily event. And Cain clearly understood that it was. The Kens of the world all had the same playbook and never deviated from it. That made them dangerous, but predictable. And that made them imminently beatable, if you approached them just right. And Cain had a PhD in the subject of idiot boy-men.
As he advanced on a defiant Rosa, Cain stepped into his path. “Put down the belt, go back inside, get your head clear, and don’t do anything else stupid,” she said.
Painter’s Pants Man took another long step back and muttered, “Oh, hell, you dumbass woman.”
Ken didn’t say anything back. He just swung a lumpy fist at Cain’s head.
CHAPTER
19
CAIN SIDESTEPPED THE BLOW and drilled a razor-sharp, thunderous uppercut right into Ken’s diaphragm. He doubled over, and his face turned crimson as every ounce of breath in his body got kicked out into space from the staggering blow. While he was dealing with that, Cain launched an elbow strike into his right kidney. It connected with the ferocious impact of a two-by-four with a nail sticking out. He screamed and, his adrenaline spiking and overcoming the pain, he threw another fist at her. She easily blocked it with her forearm, gripped his wrist and elbow, pulled in opposite directions, and Ken screamed again. She pushed him to the ground and said, “Walk away. Last warning, dickhead.”
Ken staggered to his feet, his big belly sucking in and out as he tried to get his breathing and his pain under control. He whipped out the knife. Before he could raise it, though, Cain lunged forward and kicked it out of his hand. The knife sailed ten feet away.