Killing Ways

17

Carrie Longman sat on a high stool at Manny’s Bar on 38th and Walnut. It was Open Mic night and a tiny girl with a big guitar was filling the gloomy stage. She looked to be in her mid-twenties, a delicate thing with a cute black cowboy hat on, and her dirty blonde hair falling across one eye. There was no doubt she had once been beautiful, but was now damaged, possibly by drugs, or mental illness, Carrie guessed. This was the type of girl who rang alarm bells for Carrie Longman, the type she rescued every week. Now, she felt permanently on high alert: there was a serial killer out there. One month had gone by since the prostitute, Donna Darisse, had been found. She thought of her face, she thought of the others who had gone before her. And that girl on stage, looked, to Carrie Longman, exactly like the type this psycho was going for.

‘You’re not at work now, Carrie,’ she said to herself. ‘Your only task tonight is to get very, very drunk.’

A spotlight came on, and the singer, her rough face now clearer, leaned into the microphone.

‘I’m Dainty,’ she said in a smoky Texan drawl, through barely parted bow-shaped lips. With her skinny limbs, and her body curled in on itself, dainty she was.

She shifted the guitar on her lap. ‘This song is about my father...’ she said.

A few people in the scant crowd said ‘aw’.

‘... and how he abandoned me and my sister,’ said Dainty.

The ‘aws’ turned to ‘ooohs’.

‘Even though,’ said Dainty, ‘he was right at home with us, right before our eyes. It’s about how my mama broke his heart, and he broke ours, me and my sister.’ She cleared her throat, shifted on the stool, adjusted the guitar, looked around the room, nodded to what looked like no one in particular. ‘So this is called “Croon On, Motherfucker, Croon On”.’ Dainty smiled a closed-mouth smile, incongruous in her little heart-shaped face, with its slightly jutting, pointed chin.

Every fiber in Carrie Longman’s being wanted to storm that stage and rescue this Dainty stranger. Instead, Carrie Longman spoke to herself sternly, inside her head, as she often did: ‘Carrie, you’re drunk, your boyfriend’s just dumped you, the shelter is running out of money fast... you cannot rescue yourself and you sure as hell cannot rescue this one.’

Dainty’s mouth curled up at one side before she opened it to sing. The place went as quiet as the grave. Her voice was like that of a chain-smoking woman twice her age with the sorrows of a thousand trailer parks weighing down her soul. It was ragged and beautiful, and the crowd was enthralled.

Carrie Longman took out a pen, grabbed a napkin, and started writing.

At the end of the gig, Carrie Longman headed straight for the ladies’ room. She swayed back and forth, bumping against the walls in the hallway. Crazed flies were charging the electric fly-killer, buzzing and dying.

In the ladies’ room, the floor was littered with balled-up paper towels, the bins were overflowing, there was no soap. There was another electric fly-killer.

‘You cannot rescue the flies, Carrie,’ she said to herself. She smiled into the mirror. ‘Drrrunkard! But not drunk enough to use these heinous facilities. Hell, no!’

She left almost as soon as she walked in. People pushed her away as she knocked against them on her way past. She thought of her ex, pushing her away. Six years together, four hours apart. ‘Croon On You Too, Motherfucker!’ said Carrie, this time, out loud. She started to cry.

She stumbled out into the parking lot. She stopped dead — she hadn’t driven here. She had left her car somewhere off 16th Street. She had walked away from the bar where her boyfriend had left her. Now here she was: drunk, carless, crying again, and three miles from home.

‘You are a big loser, Carrie. America’s Top Loser. Biggest Model. Whatever...’

She swayed back and forth, rummaging for her keys in her bag.

He was sitting in the dark in the borrowed truck, watching her.

You came into this bar crying, you walked out of it crying — who am I to turn off those tears? And you can’t find your keys, you dumb bitch, ’cos I got them right here from when you dropped them on the floor by the bar when you pulled that sweater out of your purse. Isn’t a place like this a little empty, a little off the beaten track for a girl who wears pretty sweaters with pearl buttons? But you are wasted. You don’t know how wasted you are. I bet I could knock you down with two fingers, even though you’re a big fat bitch, loose and lonely by the looks of you. You’re not my type, now, are you? That’s the problem with the news reporters, fixing their lipstick one minute, talking about someone like me the next. You can send the skinny blondes scuttling under a rock, all you like, you painted bitches, but I’m going to stomp on a big fat brunette instead.

Carrie Longman, bound at the wrists and ankles, rolled back and forth in the back of the truck. She had watched survivor episodes of crimes shows: meet the women who got away from their would-be killers! Live to Tell!

‘You will be one of those women, Carrie,’ she said to herself. ‘You will be eloquent, calm, convincing, clever. You will be able to describe everything. The police will find this psycho. You will save lives. You will be a heroine to women.’

The truck came to a stop.

He dragged her out the back by her ankles, let her fall, her head making a dull cracking sound on the dry earth. He kept dragging her until they were under a tree.

He crouched down in front of her, bound her wrists with skinny, fraying rope.

‘My name is—’

‘No!’ screamed Carrie, shaking her head wildly. ‘No! Don’t tell me your name. Don’t. I don’t want to know!’

‘My name is... Your Killer,’ he said. ‘My name is Your Worst Fuckin’ Nightmare. My name is Your Mama’s Worst Nightmare, Your Daddy’s, Everyone’s Worst Fuckin’ Nightmare.’ He smiled. ‘How. Do. You. Do?’

She screamed, and he let her, and she knew then that they were miles from help.

‘Please,’ she sobbed. ‘Please...’

He remained silent and focused as he stripped her to her underwear. He slowly trailed his eyes down her body, shaking his head.

‘Now, you do not have the body I like to take pleasure from... but I’m going to do it anyway. It’s just I might not be able to... you know...’ He shrugged. ‘Doesn’t mean I won’t give it my best shot, though.’

He laughed at that.

‘But you do need to shut the fuck up.’

He pulled a rag from his left-hand back pocket and made a gag from it. Soon Carrie Longman’s sobs were sucked into the thick, filthy fabric.

‘I may have a way to solve this problem,’ he said. ‘The problem of you being...’ He shuddered. ‘You know what a titty fuck is, right?’ He pulled a photo from his other pocket. He showed it to her. She started to convulse. Tears poured down her face. He laughed as he pushed it between her breasts.

‘Now,’ he said, grabbing onto the waistband of her panties, ‘let’s see what we’ve got.’ He ripped them off, staring at her, opening the legs she was trying desperately to keep closed.

‘Nothing you can do now, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘It’s just you and me, this late-night romance.’ He opened his belt, and started pulling at himself. ‘This is your fault. I’m prepared to commit a felony for this, and I still can’t get a hard-on between your wide-open legs.’

He started laughing, and as he was still laughing, he grabbed the broken branch he had set against the tree earlier that evening. He had carefully chosen it to exactly match the size of the biggest man who used to visit his mama when he was a boy.

As he thrust the branch in and out of Carrie Longman, working on her utter destruction, his eyes were on the photo stuck between her bulging breasts. It was of Hope Coulson’s scrawny little ass and the two perfect stab wounds he had made above it. There would have been no real evidence of those very particular wounds when they had found her. Not after three hot weeks in plastic.

He pressed Carrie Longman’s face hard into the ground. He heard a cracking sound. He could feel the blood pour through his fingers.

Face down in the dirt and dying.

THIS was it.

Face down in the dirt and dying.

He looked down at the branch. For a moment, he drifted, staring at the thickness of it. He remembered wondering at the time if the size of that man had hurt his mama as much as it had hurt him.