Stolen Souls

33

BILLY CRAWFORD WALKED directly to the trade section of the hardware superstore where they stocked building supplies. He hadn’t expected the girl to call so quickly or he would have been better prepared. Normally it took a week or two of abuse at the hands of their captors to make them desperate enough to find a way to call him.

But this girl was different.

If he’d known, he wouldn’t have made the contact so close to Christmas. Thankfully, it had occurred to him to double-check his tools before it was too late. On inspection, he realized he needed blades for his twelve-inch hacksaw, a new chisel bit for his handheld pneumatic drill, and ballast for mixing concrete.

The cellar of his house had a linoleum-covered floor beneath the toolbox and the few pieces of furniture that lay there. If a person were to remove those items, then pull back the linoleum, he would find a concrete surface. And if that person looked carefully, he would see five patches, each roughly a meter square, that had been dug up and filled in again.

There was room for perhaps five more such excavations. Once those were filled, he always had the backyard. Plenty of room.

The cellar’s concrete floor was only two to three inches thick, laid over packed earth. The first time he’d had to remove a square of the flooring, he’d used a concrete saw, but it had been difficult to work with in such an enclosed space, and far too powerful for what turned out to be a reasonably straightforward job. The second time, he simply used his pneumatic drill with a good chisel bit to cut the shape of a square, then set about breaking it. By the third occasion, it took less than an hour’s work to clear a patch of earth. Another couple of hours’ digging, and he was done. All that remained was to mix the concrete and refill the hole and its contents.

Even allowing for all the sawing to be done, he could start at nine in the morning and be finished by early afternoon. Tiring, certainly, but no more than a day’s work on a building site would be.

He wheeled a flatbed trolley to the trade section of the hardware superstore on the Boucher Road. Seasonal music played over the public-address system, interspersed with sales messages disguised as holiday greetings. Only a few other shoppers browsed the aisles, all middle-aged men with nothing better to do over the next few days but complete some DIY project or other.

Like him.

There were smaller, friendlier stores much closer to his home, but even if they had been open on Christmas Eve, he would still have come here. He favored the anonymity. Here, they had self-service checkouts where you could scan your own goods and pay without having to engage in conversation with anyone.

He exited the trade section with a twenty-kilogram bag of ballast, a mixture of sand and aggregate to which he would add cement powder and water to make concrete.

Next he went to the tools and accessories aisle and found a pack of heavy-duty hacksaw blades. When he’d first begun, he’d wondered if he would need a butcher’s saw for this kind of work, but the blades and frames were shockingly expensive, so he’d tried a regular good-quality hacksaw and found it to be perfectly adequate for the task. He dropped the pack of blades onto the trolley beside the ballast and went looking for the chisel bit.

He searched through dozens upon dozens of drill bits, all hung on pegs, an entire wall of them. Were they out of stock? This close to Christmas, it could be days before they’d have more. What would he do with the girl for all that time? He couldn’t keep her in his house for three or four days. Even if he saved her tonight, as he had planned, by Boxing Day the smell would ripen. That had been the case the first time, before he had planned out his procedure properly. Four days it had sat there, festering, before he figured out what to do with it.

Calm, he told himself.

If they were out of stock here, they had another depot to the north of the city. He could simply drive there. The chances of their being out of stock in both places were slim.

As his heartbeat came back under control, he spotted the metallic shape in a bin of loose drill bits on the floor beneath the display. He knelt down, pulled the chisel bit from the bin, felt the heft of its thick shaft, the sharpness of its cutting edge through the thin latex skin of the surgical gloves he wore. It made a satisfying heavy clank as he dropped it on the trolley bed.

He scanned his purchases at the checkout, keeping his gaze downward, making eye contact with no one. He fed the machine paper money, waited for his receipt, and wheeled the trolley toward the exit.

As he reached his van, a voice called, “Sir? Sir!”

He stiffened, pretended he didn’t hear. He unlocked the sliding doors and heaved the bag of ballast up into the van.

The voice called again, a young woman, shrill and insistent. He tossed the hacksaw blades and the chisel bit in after the ballast.

Footsteps coming, the voice piercing.

He wheeled the trolley to the bay, wished the young woman would leave him be.

She would not.

“Sir, you forgot your change,” she said as she approached. He feigned startlement. “Did I?”

“Here you go,” she said, smiling, holding it out to him. She wore a bright orange bib that matched her poorly applied fake tan. Tinsel circled her neck like a snake, a Santa Claus hat on her head.

“Thank you,” he said, reaching for it.

She noticed the latex covering his skin.

“Eczema,” he said.

Her smile almost flickered out before she remembered the good manners her employers had taught her. She dropped the coins into his palm without touching him.

“Thank you,” he said. He checked her name tag. “Collette.” “S’okay,” she said, backing away. “Merry Christmas.”

“Same to you,” he said.

He watched her retreat to the store before he climbed into the van and started the engine. As he pulled on to the Boucher Road, he argued and counterargued the seriousness of what had just happened.

Yes, he had made her nervous.

Yes, she would remember him, the items he bought, and the surgical gloves on his hands.

Yes, she may even have noted the registration of his van.

All those things would be of concern if the police were to ask her any questions.

But what reason would the police have to question her? What crime would lead them to her door? What news item would cause her to remember the strange man in the car park and lift a telephone?

None at all.

There would be no crime.

That was why he chose them as he did. The stolen souls, the lost girls, the whores with no identities. Would the thieves of young women go to the police when in turn those same young women were stolen from them?

“I steal the stolen,” he said.

He coughed and reddened when he realized he had spoken out loud. It had been happening more often lately. At the oddest of times, a thought would fall from his mind and onto his tongue before he could catch it.

Sometimes he would follow it, respond to it, begin a conversation. He had been calling himself Billy for so long now that it seemed his old self was another person entirely. This other self and Billy would exchange ideas, concepts, argue the rights and wrongs of the world.

Occasionally, not often, but enough to be worrying, the conversations became heated. These incidents had become more frequent since he’d begun his work. Once, sometime between digging the second and third holes in his concrete floor, he had even come to blows with himself.

Such foolishness had to stop. He couldn’t afford to be unpredictable in his own mind. His work needed care and a steady hand. Rash actions would see him destroyed.

“Enough,” he said to himself.

Time to think of the now, the definite, not the maybes or the mights. It was afternoon already, and he still had a long day ahead of him. He had a young girl waiting for him, soft yellow hair on her pretty head, and two rows of lovely white teeth behind her lips.

He could almost feel them on his tongue.