His right foot started forward. Angela fired before his left foot could leave the ground. The round blew apart his left kneecap like a clay pigeon. He crumpled to the ground, clamping both hands over his knee as he screamed and rolled and cursed.
Angela, still sitting in the chair, her feet propped up on the footrest, hadn’t moved yet, except to fire her gun those three times.
“You goddamn little bitch! I’m going to break your arms off and stuff them up your fucking cunt!”
He managed to pull himself up, hopping on his good leg to get his balance. He yanked a knife from a sheath at his belt under his vest. When he lifted it over his head, Angela put a round through the joint in his wrist, shattering the bones. The round left a splatter of blood as it went through the wall behind him. The knife clattered across the floor.
“Fuck!” he screamed. “What the fuck’s wrong with you! You got no fucking right to do this!”
Angela didn’t answer. She got up and walked around him toward the hallway between the kitchen and bedroom. He was cradling his injured wrist.
On her way past, without a word, she fired a round into his other knee, shattering the patella. He fell over on his side, clamping his good hand over the freshly wounded knee.
Angela opened the basement door. She gestured with her gun.
“This way. Move.”
“Move? Are you fucking crazy? I can’t stand up!”
“I didn’t tell you to stand up, I told you to move. You’ve still got a good hand. Use it to drag yourself in here.”
She saw him look toward the knife on the floor. She walked around him, just out of reach of his good hand, her gun pointed at his face the whole time, and picked up his knife.
“I think by now you ought to know that I don’t miss. Now drag your sorry ass over to that doorway. I’m not going to tell you again.”
Panting as the pain was beginning to bear down on him in earnest, he finally did as she ordered and propped himself up on one elbow and his good hand to drag himself across the wooden floor. He grunted with each pull, leaving a smeared blood trail behind. He reminded her of a wounded seal.
He stopped, propped up on his one good arm, halfway into the dark doorway.
“Keep going,” she said.
He looked back over his shoulder. “I can’t see! It’s pitch black! How the fuck do you expect—”
Angela slammed her boot solidly into his back between his shoulder blades. It was enough to topple him in and down the stairway. She could hear him thudding and thumping as he tumbled down the steep steps. When he finally smacked onto the floor at the bottom and came to a stop, he let out a groan.
Angela flipped on the lights and saw him crumpled at the bottom of the steps, only partially conscious. Without wasting a moment while he was dazed and out of it, she raced down the steps and, before he regained his senses, pulled a law-enforcement-grade zip-tie restraint from a box of them she had on a shelf. She twisted one arm behind his back and pressed her knee on it to hold him down while she collected his other arm and twisted it back behind him. She used the zip-tie cuffs to secure his wrists.
He howled in pain when she grabbed his bleeding wrist and yanked the plastic strap tight. For good measure, she put another pair of the zip-tie cuffs on his ankles. With his blown-out knees, she didn’t think he would be able to do anything, even without the handcuffs—and she could always put a bullet in his brain if things got out of hand—but she wanted to make sure he was immobile for what she had planned. She also wanted him to feel completely helpless, the way the red-haired girl had felt.
It was frightening to be in the presence of such a brutal killer. But at the same time she felt more alive than any time since she had been with her grandparents.
Angela rolled him over and waited patiently until he regained consciousness. Once he did, he turned his head, looking around. He twisted and flopped around trying to get free, looking like a fish out of water. He was strong, but not strong enough, especially with his injuries.
“Goddamn you!” he screamed at her. “Why the fuck are you doing this?”
Angela lifted an eyebrow at him. “You broke into my house and hid in my bedroom waiting to jump me while all kinds of nasty thoughts danced through your head, and you ask why I’m doing this?”
“I didn’t mean anything by it! I wasn’t going to hurt you!”
“Yeah, right.”
“You can’t just shoot someone like this! It’s illegal! I’m going to call the police on you. I’m going to sue your fucking ass for everything you’ve got!”
Ignoring his threats, Angela went to one knee beside him, the wrist of her gun hand resting over her other knee.
“I’m bursting with questions,” she said. “I’d like you to give me answers.”
“Fuck you!” he yelled. He was so angry he was drooling spittle. “I’m not telling you a fucking thing!”
“Really?”
Angela got up and went to a shelf, where she retrieved a handheld propane blowtorch and a flint igniter that had belonged to her grandfather. She opened the valve on the propane tank, put the steel cup of the igniter up by the tip of the blowtorch, and squeezed the spring steel handles to strike the flint. After the blowtorch lit, she adjusted the flame and then carried it over to her houseguest.
Angela again went to one knee beside him and plunked the blowtorch down beside him where he could see it.
“Like I said, I’m just full of questions.”
He screamed and flopped trying to get away. “Fuck you! I’m not telling you anything!”
Angela picked up the torch. “Oh, I think you are.”
“If you know what’s good for you, you’ll let me go!”
“Tell me about the girl with red hair.”
He froze, his panicked eyes turning up at her. “What?”
“The girl with red hair. I want you to tell me everything you did to her.”
“I don’t know any girl with red hair!”
Angela swiped the flame across his face. His flesh blackened. He screamed and shook his head to get it away from the torch, so she put the tip of the flame to his upper arm. The fat beneath the flesh bubbled and the skin crackled. The whole room smelled like cooking meat. He panted and squealed.
It was exhilarating.
“Every detail,” she repeated as she held the flame up before his eyes.
His gaze went between the hissing flame and her eyes. “I didn’t mean anything by it. It was an accident. It was just rough sex, that’s all.”
Angela shoved the tip of the flame toward his left eye. It burned his eyelashes off. He howled with a bloodcurdling scream as he jerked his head violently from side to side.
She planted a boot on his jaw to keep his face still. In order to find out if her vision was accurate, if it had really happened the way she saw it, she needed him to tell her the details of what he had done. She knew without doubt that he was a killer, and yet she still had a hard time believing that she could actually have visions of such things. She had to know for sure if he really did everything to the red-haired girl that she saw in that vision, or if she had only imagined it.
With her boot on his jaw and using all her weight to hold his head still, she burned out his left eye.
She took her boot away and let him scream and flop for a while. As he shook in pain, Angela leaned in closer.
“Every detail. Start at the beginning.”
He looked again at the flame with his good eye. His jaw trembled uncontrollably. She saw him not as a man, but as what he really was—a monster who murdered women. He might as well have been a rabid dog that needed to be put down. What he once might have been, he no longer was. He was now a killer who would kill again given the chance. In fact, he had intended to murder her this night and have sex with her corpse.
“I took her to an abandoned building. I told you—we had rough sex. That’s all.”
Angela lifted the torch.