Desolate Angel

by Chaz McGee

  I did not want to crawl inside that hiding place with Hayes. I was filled with a mixture of despair and fear. I stayed outside, needing the sanity of the sun, but I could see his vantage point from where I stood: Maggie and Sarah, side by side, heads pressed together, whispering, forming a bond that threatened the hold Hayes had forced on his daughter.

  Then, like a ray of the sun, focused by the lens of a magnifying glass until it turned into a laser beam of heat, Hayes turned his full hatred on Maggie. He had eyes only for her. He had room in his mind only for her. I felt blistering fury wash over him as a single thought took hold—he would destroy her. His mind flickered through the ways he might humiliate Maggie, the ways he might rip her flesh away and make her scream in agony while he stood, gloating, staring down at her, letting her know that he held the power of her life and her death in his hands. It was as if I were being forced to watch a film despicable to decent people but with a pornographic allure to others. Hayes loved his imaginings, I realized. He enjoyed feeding his wrath because he felt more and more alive the more his hatred swelled within him.

  And then an even more terrible thought took hold of him. I could not quite touch it; it was there and it was evil, but all I could tell was that his mind had been distracted from Maggie, that his need for a more immediate release had overcome his obsession with harming her. His mind had wandered to another, I realized, someone who would be far easier than Maggie to take, someone more helpless, more willing to submit to his promised mercy, someone more like the one who had started it all, who had betrayed him to Maggie in the first place: someone more like his daughter.

  As Hayes unfolded his long limbs and fastidiously brushed the debris from his pants, I knew where he was going. I felt sick inside as I remembered the words I’d overheard on the school bus: “My dad is taking her to Bermuda for the weekend and he’s letting me stay by myself.”

  That beautiful, naïve, trusting, unknowing girl. Alone in her house, surrounded by hedges that hid all that happened inside from the neighbors.

  Hayes would take her that day.

  I knew it with every fiber of my being.

  He would take her, and then he would take out every ounce of his rage toward Maggie on that helpless young girl. She would pay the price for his frenzied hatred.

  I had to get there before he did.

  Chapter 29

  The girl was not alone. I thanked god for teenage girls who disobey their parents and have boyfriends over when they’re not supposed to. And although I knew it was possible Hayes might try to take her anyway, and harm her companion in the process, Hayes was above all else a self-preservationist. I thought there was a good chance the six-foot-tall boy lounging in the television room with the girl might dissuade Hayes from making an attempt, at least for that day. The kid was muscular and his age made him very unpredictable. He was potentially dangerous and in no way the passive victim Hayes desired—and Hayes would know it.

  The two teenagers were sitting side by side on the lumpy old couch in the den. Though it was barely afternoon and the room was flooded with sunlight, the boy was a teenager, after all, and taking full advantage of being alone with the girl. She was fending his hands off routinely as she watched television. No sooner had she removed his palm from one of her breasts than he was all over the other breast, or sliding his hand up her thigh, or trying to stroke the smooth expanse of her stomach. At first she was too engrossed in the movie to care much about these familiar territorial encroachments, but when a commercial flashed on, she turned her pent-up irritation on him.

  “Will you stop that,” she snapped. “I told you, no. It’s broad daylight and a Sunday afternoon and you’re not even supposed to be here and I am not in the mood. Quit pawing me.”

  The boy looked as if she had insulted him deeply. I’d have laughed under any other circumstances, since I’d tried that hangdog expression many a time myself as a teenager. But I could not laugh because I was terrified the tiff would escalate into a full-blown fight and he would leave her alone. She must not be left alone.

  “Come on, baby. What’s the difference?” He smiled. “Let’s draw the blinds and pretend it’s Friday night.”

  Wrong move. Ah, but high school football players should never go out with the smart girls. They’re just too easily outsmarted by them. The girl jumped to her feet, slapped his hand away, and told him to go now because she had to wash her hair.

  “Seriously?” the guy asked. He was incredulous. “That is the oldest excuse in the book.”

  “Really?” she asked, her eye blazing. “How’s this one? Get the hell out.”

  “Oh, come on, baby,” he complained as he started to rise from the couch.

  No, I rooted silently. How can you give up so easily? Stay put, man. Show some backbone. Don’t leave this girl alone. Please, dear god, do not walk out that door. Do not leave this girl alone.

  “You don’t really mean it,” he told her when she refused to dignify his comment with anything but silence. “You’re just going to call me in twenty minutes and tell me to come back.”

  It was so the wrong thing to say. Teenage boys and their egos. This one might cost the girl her life.

  “I don’t think so,” she told him, then turned her back on him and pretended to be interested in the TV. My hopes sank. She was giving him the silent treatment. There was no way to fight it. He’d have no choice but to leave.

  The boy shrugged and rolled his eyes, for my benefit only since the girl refused to even look at him. And then, to my dismay, he slouched out the front door. It slammed shut, bounced, and settled into the jamb.

  The girl did not lock it behind him. She had refused to give him the satisfaction of even acknowledging that he was leaving.

  I rushed to the front door and peered out through a window inset in it, hoping the boy would come back. I willed him to put his pride aside. I cursed the virtue that had caused the girl to want him to leave. And I cursed a world that would let a young girl die because she’d tried to live up to being the kind of young lady her father wanted her to be.

  The boy reached the end of the front walkway, then turned around and stared at the door for a moment. I peered back at him through the glass, willing him to return. And as I stood there, praying for him to come back inside, I saw it: a black SUV passed behind the boy. It was gliding slowly down the street, its engine silent and efficient, the tinted windows hiding the occupant from view. It hesitated, nearly imperceptibly, before sliding out of view. But not to go away, I knew that with a certainty. His need was too great. Hayes would park down the block, or circle it and return. He would keep watch, he’d see the boy was leaving, and then he would return. All I could do was wait.

  Chapter 30

  The girl was relieved to be alone again. She locked the front door, let out a deep breath, retrieved a journal from a hiding place under a cushion, and sat, cross-legged on the couch, writing out her frustrations. Her face was so beautiful in repose, so perfect caught in mid-concentration. Her mind was absorbed with her desire to try to parse the all-too-human riddle of being both attracted to and repelled by another human being at the same time.

  How I hoped that her teenage tiff would be the only crisis this day would bring her.

  I set out in search of Hayes.

  He was parked in the alley behind the girl’s house, his SUV concealed by the hedges and fences that a too-crowded neighborhood had put up for privacy. The alleyway was obviously used by sanitation crews to pick up garbage each week: most of the homes had backyards accessible to the narrow path by back gates flanked by neatly boxed-in garbage can areas.

  The young girl’s house was no exception. Hayes had parked his vehicle just a few yards down from the double doors of the gate that opened into her backyard. I checked the lock. It was still securely fastened, but it would not take him long to unlock it from the yard. If he brought her out the back way, she would be inside his SUV and gone before anyone could see what was happening.

  As I app
roached his car, the terrifying hum of his malevolent brooding washed over me like a stench. Hayes was sitting in the front seat, calming his nerves, savoring the moments before his hunt. I could feel his blood moving through his veins. It was thick with the need to kill, as deadly as a poison.

  He had stopped to make preparations on the way over from the safe house where his daughter was being kept. The backseats of the SUV had been folded forward. The floor of the back compartment and center section were now neatly covered with a plastic drop cloth, held in place at the far end by a lightweight dolly tilted on its side. Two-inch nylon straps lay neatly coiled at intervals along the perimeter of the vehicle, placed close by metal eyes that had been affixed to the SUV’s interior walls.

  My stomach lurched: I didn’t know where he took them, but I now knew how he got them there. And I knew by looking at his backseat that he could not wait to have them completely under his power. He had to be able to look in his rearview mirror and see them bound and spread out in the back, helpless and under his control. He was willing to take that chance, indeed he wanted to take that chance, to drive through the streets like a normal person, to idle at stop signs next to minivans filled with squalling children and harried mothers, to pass police cruisers and businessmen along the way, to offer his toll money to oblivious state workers—all with his victims bound and displayed a few feet behind him. He wanted his victims to know that he was so very much in control that he was willing to flaunt his act before others.

  It was an evil so finely honed that I knew a girl as young as the one who sat writing in her journal would never have a chance. Not for a moment, not for a second. She was ripe fruit for his picking and would fall, sweet and heavy, into his palm if he so much as brushed the branch.

  I was overcome with a panic so intense I was paralyzed. What could I do? How could I stop him? I had nothing to fight him with.

  His breathing had slowed and his body seemed little more than a statue as he sat, posture perfect, behind the wheel of his car, waiting for the right moment to begin. He was dressed, as earlier, in impeccable charcoal gray trousers, a black golf shirt, and shiny black loafers on his feet. His face, almost dreamy as he savored his anticipation, was utterly benign. And yet, beneath all that seeming respectability, a lust to annihilate innocence simmered.

  He was ready.

  He slid from the car as lightly as a shadow, glanced around to satisfy himself that he was alone, then stepped quickly down the alleyway to where the girl’s back fence began. He found a slender opening where the neighbor’s fence ended and a perpendicular hedge that demarcated the side boundaries between the two backyards began. He groped his way through a few bushes, then pushed past them into a shaded corner of the girl’s yard, where the landscaping was thick enough to conceal him from the girl’s view should she happen to look up from her writing. From there, he slipped from tree to tree, making his way closer to the house, his grace marred by the terrible certainty of what he hoped to do.

  He reached the base of the deck, stooped, and crept below its perimeter until he was once again in his favorite hiding place at the corner of the house near the side driveway. There, he could wait in the shadows between the evergreen cedar bushes and see into the back room through its sliding glass doors.

  The young girl had let her journal and pen slip onto the floor and was leaning back against the cushions of the couch, her eyes drooping drowsily. She yawned and lay down, her head on a pillow, her face relaxing into sleep.

  To wake up to someone like Hayes standing over her was an unimaginable horror. I did not let myself think of it.

  Hayes was thinking the same thing. He began to breathe more heavily but forced his mind inward until he was once more under control. I followed him around the corner of the house to a side door that led into the kitchen. He tried the door. It was locked. He crept toward the corner that led to the front of the house, but the traffic on the street out front had started to pick up. Families were returning from church. He would not risk being seen entering that way.

  He returned to the kitchen door. He gripped the handle and turned it one way and then the other, putting his whole weight on it as he pushed inward. The door gave lightly everywhere but near the doorknob itself: the young girl had locked it, but failed to turn the deadbolt as well.

  Hayes smiled to himself and went to work. He knew where she kept her spare key, but a lock this flimsy did not require one. He put on a pair of thin latex gloves and pulled a strip of gray metal from his back pocket, gently easing it into the opening between the door and its frame. He jiggled the doorknob as he felt his way along the edge of the pressure lock. His tongue slipped out in concentration and gently stroked his lips, and his hips thrust unconsciously to the right and then upward as he felt his way around the lock. There was something sexual in his movements, as if, in penetrating her house, he was penetrating her.

  The door slid open with a click. Hayes had to lean backward to keep from falling into the kitchen. He slipped inside, then carefully pushed the door shut behind him, barely letting it touch the frame—he wanted it to open with little more than a push of his foot when he left the same way.

  He inched across the tiled floor and peered into the hallway. He had only a few more feet to go before he would be at the entrance to the back room where the young girl slept. But as he stepped out onto the thick carpet of the hallway, the phone rang.

  He stepped back into the kitchen calmly.

  The phone rang again as the girl padded across the den’s carpet. Her voice was sleepy as she answered.

  It was the boy, calling to apologize. It was the boy wanting to be invited back over.

  The girl would not let him come. “Drop dead, Craig,” she said firmly and the sound of the receiver being slammed back in place was unmistakable.

  The girl did not return to the couch. Stretching, she walked into the hallway, yawning, then ran her hand through her long hair, flipping it back over her shoulder. Hayes tensed. She walked toward the kitchen and I could feel his heart start to beat with a rapid, determined staccato.

  The girl stopped and turned to go the other way.

  Hayes sank back against the kitchen wall.

  She made her way down the hall, passed several doors, then entered a bathroom at the far end.

  Hayes followed. He stepped out into the hallway soundlessly, the carpet muffling his footsteps. The girl had pulled the bathroom door shut out of habit, even though she was alone.

  I wondered if she had locked it out of habit, too.

  Hayes walked silently down the hall, closer and closer to the bathroom door. The sounds of water running came from the other side, accompanied by a sweet, high voice—the girl was singing to herself. I could hear drawers opening and shutting as she rummaged through them. She was automatically searching, as I had often watched my wife search, for a lipstick or something else to dab on her face so she could feel as if she had made an effort to look her best before she stepped back into the world.

  Hayes was directly on the other side of the bathroom door now, his right ear and his palms flat against the wood surface as if he were divining what she was doing inside. The girl coughed and he flinched. She slammed a drawer shut.

  He stepped back, stared at the doors lining the hall, then opened the nearest one, stuck his head in the room to check it out first, and stepped inside to wait.

  I followed and knew why he had chosen this room: it was her room. And he did not want to take her until he had violated this safe place, until he had left his mark on what had once been her haven.

  He walked across the pink carpet to her chest of drawers. He opened the top one and lifted some of her lingerie out, holding it up to his critical eye, frowning as if he were her father and did not approve of the maturity of her taste. He touched a photo on the top of her dresser: an older woman and a girl no more than ten or eleven years old. Her mother, I knew, probably with the young girl during a happier time. Hayes drummed his fingers impatiently against the
top of the dresser, as if he were not quite satisfied.

  The door to the bedroom began to open.

  Hayes stepped inside the closet.

  And that was what he had been waiting for. It wasn’t enough to watch her from the outside as she moved inside her house. No, he needed his violation to be nearer. He needed the terror she felt when she first glimpsed him bursting out of nowhere to be a horror that was immediate, all consuming, and above all, paralyzing. I knew that to his broken mind the rush of power he would feel at seeing her panic would be far more satisfying than an orgasm.

  He waited, just inside her closet door. He’d left it open a few inches so he could peer out at her as she walked restlessly around her room, trying to decide whether to lie down on the bed and nap away her last few hours of freedom or whether to use the time more productively. Her eyes lingered on a pair of running shoes tossed carelessly in a corner. She walked over to them. When she bent down to pick them up, she exposed several more inches of well-muscled leg. She was wearing a pair of shorts and they would not be enough protection if she was going for a run in the October air. She stepped out of her shorts, revealing a pair of panties so innocent they took my breath away: cotton, printed with little blue flowers, a tiny blue bow affixed neatly to the waistband.

  Hayes was reveling in his secret power. His breaths were deep and his whole body vibrated with a dark joy at the proximity he had to his prey. His excitement had grown to nearly unbearable proportions. I could feel the bloodlust rising in him overtake a more ordinary sexual excitement—every cell in his body hungered for that girl; every cell in his body wanted to overtake her.

  She pulled a pair of running pants from a drawer and bent over to put them on. Her long, smooth hair fell forward in a silky curtain as she did so.

  Hayes touched himself when he saw her hair swing forward, but he touched himself furtively, as if such an act were beneath a man of his caliber. And in a moment of terrible insight, I realized that it would not be long before he took her captive—because the act of overpowering her, then binding and torturing her, was designed not only to satisfy a deep need inside him but also to overpower a more base desire, one he would not allow to control him.