Angela squatted down beside the two dead men. Her address was listed everywhere as a box at Mike’s Mail Service. The address of her house was not listed anywhere or easy to find. They had tortured Barry until he told them where she lived. She didn’t blame him for talking. In fact, she wished he had told them what they wanted to know before he had been so badly hurt.
Anyone was going to talk under torture. Holding out during prolonged torture wasn’t going to accomplish anything, because they would give it up in the end anyway. She knew that well enough.
Angela found a knife on Pedro. It was inside a sheath tucked down in his pants. It was a serious combat knife. It was big enough to decapitate someone. Other than that, he didn’t have so much as pocket change. No ID, no keys, no nothing. The only thing in his pockets was some lint.
Juan’s knife was still in his fist where he had fallen on the steps. It was the same kind of combat knife as Pedro’s.
His fist was still clenched around the handle from that instant when his brain function ceased. A person who died that fast couldn’t even unclench their fist. They couldn’t even pull the trigger if they had a gun in their hand.
He didn’t have anything in his pockets, either. The only way she knew the men’s names was because they had used them when they had been raping and beating her. They had not expected her to leave that abandoned building alive.
Neither one looked so smug, now. Since they had both died instantly when the bullets had shut down their brain function, each man’s eyes were open, staring, in death, looking up at her. She smiled back at them.
Angela knew that moving dead men was damn near impossible, and yet she couldn’t leave them both sprawled in front of her house. She had to do something. She quickly went back inside and retrieved a new plastic shower curtain. She managed to roll Juan onto it, and then she was able to pull him the rest of the way up the steps. Once she got him inside, it was relatively easy to drag him—rolled up in the plastic shower curtain—across the floor to the basement door. There, she rolled him off the shower curtain and let him tumble down the steps. She used the same plastic shower curtain to drag Pedro to the basement doorway and dump him down the steps as well.
She flicked on the light again and went down to find Pedro’s lifeless corpse sprawled atop Juan. Fortunately, neither man was big. She opened the hatch, then grabbed Pedro’s wrist to drag his body close. Once she had him to the hatch, she rolled him into the hell hole. She did the same with Juan.
There was a little blood on the shower curtain, but like anything else with evidence on it, it had to go. Rather than let it billow out on the way down and possibly get hung up on something, she folded it up to make a relatively heavy, compact bundle and then threw it in after the men.
“Two down, two to go,” she said under her breath as she tossed the second gun that day into the hole. She closed the hatch.
Using a .22 kept the bullets contained within the skulls. That meant a minimal amount of blood. Lots of guys thought big guns were best, but a .357 would blow out the back of the skull and spray blood, bone, and brain matter all over the place. It made a huge mess that left evidence everywhere, and, importantly, the victim was no deader. That was why assassins liked to use a .22.
But even with only a .22’s small entrance wound, there was still some blood. The shower curtain contained what blood there was as the men were dragged through the house until the bodies were in the basement. The outdoor hose and then rains would wash away what little there was outside.
Angela again pulled out the hose and washed down the steps and basement floor. By this time, her feet were freezing.
She still had the problem of what to do with Babington’s car.
FORTY-FOUR
Angela went back upstairs and finally took a hot shower. She shivered under the stream of water until it banished the chill. She took special care to wash her hair thoroughly. She dressed in jeans and a longer top to hide the gun she holstered in her waistband.
Worried about leaving any evidence in Babington’s car, she put on a hoodie and drew the drawstring tight around her face. She wanted to make sure she didn’t leave any of her hairs in his car. She picked up the car keys with a little finger through the key ring. Not wanting to leave any fingerprints, she retrieved a pair of disposable gloves and stuffed them in a pocket.
She left her phone at home on her nightstand for the same reason Babington didn’t bring his phone. She didn’t want anyone to be able to track its position to where she would leave his car.
After she locked her front door she pulled on the gloves, opened the car door, and started Babington’s car. She stopped at the entrance to her drive and put the cable back up to make sure no one wandered up her drive.
It was late in the evening, but not so late that people driving around would be viewed suspiciously. There was no traffic on the road leading away from her house—there rarely was—but once she got into town the traffic started getting heavier. She didn’t want to take the chance of having someone recognize John Babington’s car with her driving it, so she took side streets, rather than four-lane roads where people could pull up beside her at traffic lights.
Once she reached an upscale motel near downtown, she parked on a side street right around the corner. The parking lot of the motel was likely to have surveillance cameras. She didn’t want to be recorded driving or getting out of Babington’s car. She kept her hood up over her head in case there were any cameras pointed out at the street she intended to walk down just around the corner from the motel after leaving the car.
She hoped that when the car was eventually found the police would theorize that John Babington had been going to a late-night liaison and parked where his car wouldn’t be seen on the motel’s cameras, and that he was then robbed, taken somewhere else to be murdered, and his body dumped. With the density of the surrounding forests just outside town, that happened occasionally and the bodies were rarely found.
That was, in fact, what Owen had done. He had dumped his victim’s body like trash. If not for Angela seeing in his eyes what he had done, Carrie Stratton likely would never have been found. Angela might have been born broken—born a freak—but at least she could use that for something good.
Angela locked Babington’s car with the remote. She peeled off the disposable gloves and put them in the pocket of her jeans along with the car keys. Later, she would toss the keys and gloves down the hell hole.
She kept her head down, hood up, and started walking.
When the strip mall finally came into sight, Angela was relieved to see that the lights were still on at Drenovic Tactical. She had ditched the car where she had because that motel was only a mile and a half from Nate’s place. Nate had done a good job teaching her what she needed to know. But now she needed him for something else.
She pushed back the hood and opened the door. Nate was sitting alone at the desk doing paperwork. He stood in surprise.
“Angela! What are you doing here at this hour?”
Angela stuffed her hands in the pockets of the hoodie. “I need a favor.”
Nate shrugged. “Sure, anything. What do you need?”
“I need a ride home, if it’s not too much trouble.”
“No problem. But what are you doing here? Did your truck break down or something?”
“No, it’s not that. I had a date. The guy turned out to be a real jerk. I didn’t want to do what he had had in mind, so I dumped him. Now I find myself without a ride home. I can walk if it’s too much trouble.”
A cab would have left records, so that was out. It would be an awfully long walk, so she had been hoping Nate could drive her home. But she had also been prepared to walk if he hadn’t been at work or couldn’t give her a lift.
Nate opened a drawer and retrieved his car keys. “It’s the least I can do.”
“What do you mean?”
He gestured around the empty room. “Business has been slow. Seems like every strip mall has a martial arts school next to a nail salon. Even Malcolm stopped showing up. Teaching you kept my head above water.”
“I should hope so. You were charging me enough.”