“Well, well,” the man sitting there at the bar said. The man whose visions she’d just had. “Aren’t you just the prettiest little thing.”
Angela stood paralyzed by what she had just seen in her mind’s eye, what she had seen this man do to an innocent girl with red hair.
The whole thing had all come to her in a millisecond. It was as if she were recalling a vivid memory.
His memory.
She could even feel the shiver of his sexual gratification as he’d come in the freshly dead corpse.
She didn’t know how she knew the whole thing was true, but she knew it just as surely as if she had been there when he had done it.
“What’s the matter,” he asked. “Pussy got your tongue?”
“Fuck off,” she said to the guy, her gaze still locked on his. She knew saying that would bait the guy. She wanted more than anything to bait him. “Asshole,” she added for good measure.
Angela had no idea how she could have recognized a killer for what he was. She didn’t have any idea how she could have had visions of him murdering the girl with short red hair.
Angela knew in that moment that there was no going back through that doorway.
Not ever.
She knew that her life would never be the same.
The only explanation that made any sense to her was that she truly was a freak of nature. Her mother’s constant drug use, along with that of the tweaker who had fathered her, had left Angela to grow and develop in a toxic broth of what was flowing around in her mother’s veins.
Angela had been born broken.
The only thing she knew for sure was that she had, for the first time ever in her life, come eye-to-eye with a killer.
It terrified her.
But more than that, it excited her.
SIXTEEN
For the next few days, Angela couldn’t get the guy out of her head. She couldn’t keep the horrifying details of what he had done out of her nightmares.
She knew with every fiber of her being that it was true.
She did her best to put him out of her mind as she went about delivering and picking up packages. All the while she kept thinking about how much more money she could make tending bar. There weren’t many good paying jobs in Milford Falls. She decided that she would get some books on bartending so she would be prepared when she turned twenty-one.
But in the background there was always the memory of the man in the bar and the haunting images she had seen in his eyes.
As Angela went about her deliveries, she searched the people she saw, looking for him.
She didn’t know how she knew it, but she knew for certain that she had not seen the last of him.
That thought made her queasy with fear.
At the same time, it excited her in a way that nothing had ever excited her before.
She dreaded the thought of ever seeing that monster again.
And yet, she felt intoxicated with the thought of encountering him.
She finally decided that she was going to make herself crazy thinking about him, so she did her best to put him from her mind. She thought instead about the bartending job Barry had offered her. None of the people there were anywhere near as scary as the people who had hung around her mother’s trailer, so she was sure she could do it. When she finished all her deliveries for the day, she stopped at a bookstore and picked up two books on bartending.
She deliberately selected the simpler books, with basic drinks and lessons on the trade rather than how to make fancier drinks. Barry’s bar was decidedly not fancy.
On the highway before reaching the road that turned off to the north and eventually went past her cabin, she saw a blue muscle car parked off the side of the road. She remembered seeing a car like that in the parking lot of the bar.
Angela did not believe in coincidences.
It would be a long walk to her place from where the car was parked, but on the other hand the distance served to diminish suspicion.
When she reached the drive up to her cabin, she scanned the bushes and trees beyond the meadow as she lowered the cable. When she put the cable back up after entering, she looked around but didn’t see any footprints in the dirt. Of course, someone could have walked in from a different direction to avoid leaving footprints.
When she parked and then went into the dark cabin, she knew he was in there, somewhere.
She could feel him.
Her gaze searched every dark corner, but she saw no sign. Heart hammering, she unlocked the basement door, then returned to the living room and turned on a single light.
After turning on the light in the living room, she deliberately calmed her thoughts. Once she set aside the mental distractions, she began to feel his presence radiating from her bedroom. She found that as she focused on him, she could feel him crouching there in the bedroom, waiting for her.
She did not intend to play into his plan of walking into her bedroom so he could jump her. Instead, she flopped down in the chair at the dark end of the living room. She yawned and made some noise pulling the footstool closer and plunking her feet down on it.
Then she waited.
He was waiting too.
For nearly an hour he waited, until his lust for her got the better of him. She could feel his hatred of her, of her raw femininity, and the way it taunted him. She could feel his rage building to the point where he had to do something about it.
He stepped quietly into the living room.
It wasn’t a big house. The hall from the bedroom entered right into the center of the living room, so he wasn’t far away from her. In his mind he measured the few strides and big lunge it would take for him to be on her. Because of the isolation of her cabin and with him being so much bigger than her, he felt safe and in complete control. He knew he had her where he wanted her. His mind was already filled with visions of the things he intended to do to her.
Those thoughts petrified her.
When he took another step into the living room, he saw her arm resting on her leg. He froze when he saw the gun in her hand that she had leveled at him.
When he took a closer look and saw that it was a .22, he grinned and put his hands half up in fake surrender.
“Whoa there pretty lady. You aren’t going to blast away at me with that little peashooter, are you?”
His grin reflected the sinister thoughts filling his head but revealed absolutely no fear.
“Could be,” she said. “We’ll have to see how it goes.”
He lowered his hands. “I don’t think a pretty little thing like you would have the nerve to shoot someone, especially someone who only means to get to know you a little better.”
She calmly stared, gun still pointed at him.
“Besides, even if you did have the nerve to shoot at me,” he said as he gestured at her gun, “and even if you could manage to hit me, that little thing wouldn’t do me much harm before I got over there and took it away from you.”
“It would do enough harm if I shot you between the eyes.”
Her gun barrel followed every slight movement he made.
He glared for a moment before his grin returned. “I don’t think you’re that good of a shot, especially in the dark. How about I take that thing away from you and shove it up your pretty little ass?”
“How about I shoot those diamonds out of your earlobes just to show you how good a shot I am.” She cocked her head. “You know, most guys with an earring only wear one.”
He reflexively touched one of his ears before letting his hand drop. “Yeah? Well I’m twice what most guys are.” His expression turned murderous.
He suddenly started to take a lunging stride toward her.
Angela had the gun up in both hands and pulled off two shots before he’d finished the stride. She could see the splash of blood as his earlobes, along with their diamonds, were blown off.
He lurched to a stop as he put his hands to each ear.
“Goddamn it!” he screamed. “You motherfucking little cunt!”