He turned a little more serious. “If you really must know, it had to do with a girl named Becky that I thought I was in love with at the time. I would have walked off a cliff if she asked me to. I was young and stupid back then.” He waved off the subject. “So, what brings you here?”
“I’m interested in learning some self-defense.”
He smiled as he shook his head. “Are you sure that you need it? You’re pretty damn fast with that gun.”
Angela didn’t return the smile. “Guns can’t always save you. Sometimes you don’t have a gun when you need it most. Even if you do, you might not be able to get to it fast enough. Even worse, some people know how to take a gun away from you before you can use it to save yourself…. Sometimes you simply get overpowered.”
He turned more serious when he saw that she wasn’t smiling.
“You’re right. Not Malcolm—not yet, anyway—but there are people who can take a gun away from you before you know what happened and then you’re in a whole lot of trouble. If it’s a bad guy, you’re dead.”
Angela studied his eyes for a moment. “You went to prison for killing a guy. Why did you kill him?”
He lifted a hand as if in defense. “Whoa, there. What kind of question is that?”
“The kind of question I have to ask before I agree to let you teach me anything.”
“Before you agree … ?” He planted his fists on his hips. “What if I don’t want you as a student?”
“Then I’ll find someone else. I started with you because I always thought you were a decent guy, despite the people you were hanging out with. I’m a pretty good judge of character. I wanted to come to you first because I thought you would remember me and might be willing to help me.”
“I see.”
“So why did you kill a man?”
He chewed his bottom lip as he stared off for a moment, apparently considering if he wanted to answer her. Finally, he looked back at her.
“Becky—that girl I told you I was in love with—discovered meth. She was getting wasted on it more and more often. Whenever I asked her to stop she would call me a chickenshit loser. So, for a while, I went along with it. I didn’t want her to dump me so I smoked pot when she did meth or when we partied. At your house when she smoked crack and I would smoke weed. I was trying to fit into her world and be part of her life.
“But I finally grew up enough to realize that I deserved better, so I told Becky we were through and I quit seeing her. Quit cold turkey. It hurt and at the same time it was a relief, you know?
“Anyway, she was royally pissed. Becky was damn good looking and no one had ever dumped her before. She didn’t like it. She wanted revenge.
“She told this other guy—a guy she was two-timing me with but I hadn’t known about—that I beat her up all the time so she’d left me for him. The guy was always getting wired on angel dust. One night he came looking for me to avenge the damsel.
“He caught me leaving a convenience store. I told him he could have Becky with my blessings, but the guy wouldn’t listen to anything I said. I didn’t want to fight him. He wasn’t having it and he got really pissed when I simply kept him off me and wouldn’t fight him.
“Then he came at me with a knife. I could tell by his eyes that he was flying on angel dust, and that he was serious about intending to kill me.
“He was a big guy and he kept swinging that knife at me. I tried to hurt him enough to make him stop, but he was so high on PCP that he wasn’t feeling any pain. Finally, when he lunged at me, I put him down hard to buy me enough time to leave.
“The thing is, when I flipped him down on the ground he landed on the stub of a signpost that had been broken off by a car. It was a freak thing. It severed his spine at the base of his skull and killed him instantly.”
When Angela had lived at home there were people who did Supergrass—marijuana combined with PCP. She knew how much it messed people up. The ones who did straight PCP called it Rocket Fuel. It made them behave like they were insane. Angela hid from them.
“That sounds like self-defense to me.”
Nate lifted his arms in frustrated agreement. “It was! I was going to be cleared of any wrongdoing. But then this fucking asshole of a prosecutor came across the case. He was running for reelection at the time and he wanted to look tough on crime.
“He wanted a murder case to puff himself up to voters. He had a dead guy and me. So he said it was a love triangle and charged me with second-degree murder. He got that bitch, Becky, to testify against me. She loved that. She wanted revenge for me dumping her.
“Fortunately, the jury didn’t entirely believe her and they convicted me of the lesser charge of manslaughter. I served a little over two years. So there it is. That’s how I ended up killing a guy and serving time. Becky got to gloat to her friends how she’d put me away.”
“Who was the prosecutor?”
“John Babington. Jobs are scarce in Milford Falls to start with, but on top of that, being a convicted felon makes it nearly impossible to get hired. I’ve studied martial arts almost since I was in diapers. So, I decided to put it to use and open my own martial arts studio to make a living.”
“Could you have killed that guy intentionally, if you needed to?”
He looked like he couldn’t believe she doubted his ability. “In the first second he came at me I could have broken his neck. I could have killed him a dozen different ways if I had wanted to mess him up. No problem. But I wasn’t looking to kill him, or even hurt him. I was simply trying to leave. I was done with that drama queen and I didn’t want to get dragged back into a soap opera.
“But Babington was happy to fuck up my life as long as he could use my case to help him get elected.”
THIRTY-TWO
“As it just so happens,” Angela said, “I met John Babington today. It did not go well.”
He looked surprised, and a little suspicious. “Really. What were you doing with Babington?”
Angela pulled out the mug shots. She unfolded them and handed all four to Nate.
“I have a courier business. I delivered a package to these four men. They overpowered me, raped me, beat me nearly to death, then hung me by my neck from a beam and left me to die.”
“Yeah …” he said quietly, “I saw what’s left of the bruises and abrasions around your neck from the rope. I wondered what that was about. I’m sorry you had to go through that.”
He gave her a puzzled look. “But if they left you hanging there by your neck, how the hell did you get out of it?”
Angela pulled her knife from her boot and held the blade up briefly, then slid it back down into its sheath. He looked a little surprised to see that besides the gun she also had a knife.
“I gave the police their license plate number along with their names and descriptions. All four were arrested. John Babington dropped the charges and had them released.”
Nate made a face. “Why?”
“They’re illegal aliens. This is a sanctuary state. Babington didn’t want to be accused of being a racist for prosecuting illegal aliens, or get in trouble with the politicians above him for violating that policy. It would be bad for his career. So, he dropped the charges.
“When I objected he said I was a whore and implied that I probably got what I deserved for enticing the men. The police had confiscated my knife when I was in the hospital. He threatened to prosecute me on concealed-weapon charges, along with invented drug charges, if I made a fuss over it. He’s a pompous prick. I knew better than to cross him.”
Nate let out a sigh. “That sounds like Babington. I’m glad you were smart enough not to test him. He would have carried out the threat. Believe me, I know.” He folded his arms. “So, what do you want from me?”
“Those four men overpowered me in an instant. I had this knife on me, but they grabbed my wrists before I could even try to get to it. I tried as hard as I could to get out of their grip, but I couldn’t. They were a lot stronger than me. I was at their mercy and they had none. I was helpless. I don’t like being helpless.”