Kiss of Death

by Linda Palmer

  I thought about what I’d learned when I Googled Belle Valley, Ohio, from the library computer. Land area: 1.9 square miles. Population as of two years ago: 4,759. That was down 17.2 percent from the previous census. Twelve percent were unemployed. Median annual household income: $19,390. Median house value: $41,100.

  The crime stats were especially interesting to me. During the past three years, there had been no murders in Belle Valley, but there had been 20 rapes, 198 assaults, 71 burglaries, and 409 auto thefts. My conclusion was that it was relatively safe to walk through this town at night, but that it was dangerous to leave a car unattended.

  I drove slowly around Belle Valley’s outer limits, and then along streets dotted with fast-food stops, mini-markets, and liquor stores.

  Driving in an ever-shrinking square grid, I noticed small houses with yellowing lawns, a few kids on skateboards, tired-looking men and women coming home from work. On the patchy athletic field next to Belle Valley High School, boys were playing baseball while girls, giggling together, watched from one section of the old bleachers.

  Block by block, I drew closer to Webster Street, where Ray Wilson lived.

  As the afternoon waned and shadows deepened, I slowly passed number 404 Webster Street, and observed that Bobby’s use of the word “house” had been an exaggeration. The monster’s place was little more than a shack. There was no vehicle parked in front of it or in the oil-stained, cracked concrete driveway on the left side.

  On my second turn around the block, I stopped in front of number 404. While pretending to consult a map, I studied as much as I could see of the structure.

  Single story. Constructed of concrete blocks visible through a layer of stucco that had flaked off in large chunks. Concrete was a good material for my purposes; it contained sound better than did wood.

  A pair of windows bracketed the front door. The one on the right was boarded up with plywood. On the left, the view inside was hidden behind a shade pulled down to an inch above the sill. No light shone through that crack. Between the lack of a vehicle near the place, and no interior lights turned on, it didn’t seem that Ray Wilson was at home.

  As far as I was concerned, this hovel did have one very attractive feature: a hatchlike door on the left side, just aboveground. I guessed that it led down into a cellar. There was a window just above it. No light was coming from that portal, either.

  If I could get into the house through the cellar, it would eliminate the risk of using the lock pick on one of the doors, where I might more easily be spotted.

  Not wanting to call attention to myself by sitting in the car any longer, and possibly raising the suspicions of someone who lived in a nearby house, I folded the map and drove away.

  It wasn’t very far to the edge of town, where earlier I had passed a diner called the Blue Fox. There was a faded painting of a fox—red, not blue—on the sign outside. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast and needed nourishment. On the drive from New York I had only stopped for coffee.

  The small lot in front of the Blue Fox Diner was half full when I pulled into it at fifteen minutes after six P.M. I pushed open the door and entered a brightly lighted rectangle with a twelve-seat counter and eight booths. Elvis Presley’s voice singing “Are You Lonesome Tonight” flowed from a jukebox.

  The booths nearest the entrance were occupied, as were three of the counter seats. The booths were upholstered in yellow vinyl, torn over the years in many places. Rips in the fabric had been repaired using black masking tape.

  Yellow and black. The diner should have been called the Bumble Bee instead of the Blue Fox.

  As soon as I took the first breath inside, I was assailed by the smell of hamburgers grilling. Normally, it’s an odor that alerts my salivary glands to be ready for action, but this evening it made me feel a little nauseated. I wondered if it was the power of suggestion, because I was disguised as a pregnant woman.

  No. I’m queasy because of what I’ve come to this town to do.

  A teenage waitress with short, curly black hair and a name tag that said “Violet” must have seen some indication of distress because she came over to me with a concerned frown on her face.

  “You feel okay?” she asked.

  “Oh, yes,” I said brightly. “Just the smell of the meat …”

  Looking at my protruding tummy, she nodded. “I know what that’s like. When I was pregnant with my first, the smell of eggs cooking made me puke!”

  When she was pregnant? Her first? Up close, she seemed to be about fifteen, but she had to be older than she looked.

  “Come on. I’ll put you where you don’t smell the burgers.”

  Violet led me to the farthest table from the kitchen. It was empty, but still had dirty dishes on it from the previous occupant.

  “Can you squeeze in?” she asked, as she gathered up the used crockery and utensils.

  I maneuvered into the booth, with a couple of inches to spare. Mercifully, I couldn’t smell the grill from here.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  She deposited the dishes at the end of the counter, returned, and wiped the surface of the table clean with a damp cloth. “What can you eat, without going upchuck?”

  “This is my first pregnancy,” I said. “What do you suggest?”

  “How ’bout a milk shake? They kept me going. I’ll make it real thick.”

  “That sounds good,” I said. “Chocolate, please.”

  Violet returned a few minutes later with a glass the size of a flower vase; she used both hands to carry it. A straw was sticking up from the middle of her chocolate concoction. It resembled a flagpole anchored in cement.

  “This is thick!” I said. Too thick, it turned out, to suck through the straw. I ate her delicious ice cream and milk creation with a spoon.

  After consuming the world’s thickest shake and paying the bill, with a generous tip added, I again drove slowly past 404 Webster Street.

  The first thing I saw were the flickering lights from a television set, visible through the inch of space below the window shade. Someone was home.

  The next thing I noticed struck me like a blow to the stomach. Parked in the driveway was a van. Old and dirty, like the one the monster had when Walter found me. That van of my nightmares had been light gray; this one was a dark color, had patches of primer paint on the back, and one rear tire was missing its hubcap. Worse than the familiar silhouette was the fact that in this vehicle, too, the windows were blacked out.

  Terrible memories of being weak and helpless came flooding back.

  For a moment I thought I might heave up everything I’d swallowed for the last six months, but I fought down the urge to retch and drove on.

  You’re a grown-up now, I told myself. Tonight you will have a 9-mm automatic—and the element of surprise.

  Breathing deeply to calm my racing pulse, I steered the car around the corner to Franklin and up to Cook Street, which ran parallel to Webster, on the north. In my earlier reconnoitering, I’d noticed a motel on Cook that had a VACANCY sign. It was in the block just beyond 404 Webster.

  Two cars were parked in front of the line of ten cabins that comprised the Happy Hours Motel. A rusting marquee advertised cable TV. The T in TV was missing.

  In the motel’s tiny office, I registered as Charlotte Brown and paid in cash for two nights, even though I had no intention of staying that long.

  The motel manager was a thin, elderly man. Nearly toothless. What little hair he had shot upward from his mottled scalp in odd little outcroppings.

  I said, “I don’t like to park next to other people. They always seem to bang their doors into mine and chip the paint, so I’d like the cabin at the end of the row.”

  The manager shrugged, shot a stream of dark liquid from his mouth into a metal basket behind the desk, and wordlessly handed me the key to room number 10.

  THE MOTEL HAD been dark for more than an hour, and I didn’t hear any sounds coming from the two other occupied cabins. Without turning on the li
ght, I dressed again in my black slacks and navy blue safari jacket and fastened the money belt around my waist. In the deep left side pocket of the jacket I put the lock pick, the roll of duct tape, and the needle-nose pliers. The flashlight was stuck in the waistband of my slacks. In my pants pocket, my cell phone was set on vibrate.

  The Glock rested in the right-hand pocket of my jacket, loaded with a full fifteen-round clip. It felt comforting, there against my hip.

  Chapter 38

  AT FIFTEEN MINUTES before two A.M., I slipped out of my room at the Happy Hours into the humid late June night. Way off on a distant highway, I heard an eighteen-wheeler roar by the dot on the map that is Belle Valley. During the two minutes I waited in the shadows, only three cars sped past the motel.

  Leaving the Skylark parked in front of my door, I moved swiftly down Cook Street to the corner, and turned south on Franklin toward Webster.

  The sidewalks in this little patch of the town were deserted, and the houses mostly dark. Only about one in three streetlights were working, creating eddies of glimmer and eddies of gloom.

  At the corner of Franklin and Webster, shards of glass crunched beneath my running shoes. I saw that the globe above my head had been smashed. The milk-colored spheres on the other streetlights were intact; the bulbs inside the darkened ones must have burned out. I’d observed such a feeling of apathy in Belle Valley that I wondered if anyone who lived on the street had bothered to call the power company to report the dead lights. Maybe someone had phoned, and was put on eternal hold, still waiting to speak to a human being.

  While driving around this afternoon, I saw that everywhere I looked there were manifestations of defeat, an attitude of “why bother.” It was in the faces of the residents, in the poor maintenance of their homes and streets and public buildings.

  There was a working streetlight at the corner of Franklin and Webster, but the rest of the block where the monster slept was dark.

  Being careful to walk quietly and stay in the shadows, I reached number 404 Webster. No longer was there a sliver of flickering light from a television set coming through the crack below the front window shade. The decrepit van was still parked in the driveway. It didn’t look as though it had moved since I’d cruised by hours earlier.

  On one side of 404 there was a small vacant lot, overgrown with weeds and littered with junk, apparently the neighborhood dumping ground. On the other side, separated by approximately thirty feet of dirt and dying vegetation, was number 406 Webster. It was a single-story cracker box, only marginally more well cared for than the place I was about to break into.

  A window on the side of 406 faced the yard. My greatest danger—on the outside, at any rate—was that someone in 406 might pass the window and see me opening the hatchlike cellar door into 404.

  Crouched in the darkness beside my objective, I waited. And listened …

  The street was quiet. Not even a radio or TV playing near enough to hear.

  The glowing dial on my watch told me it was ten minutes after two A.M. I’d calculated that by this hour, Ray Wilson should be in deepest sleep, and most likely to be caught unawares. At least, that was the plan.

  I crept to the cellar hatch, stepping cautiously, keeping my breathing shallow and silent. My eyes were becoming accustomed to the darkness so that I could make out the shapes of objects, if not details.

  There was a rusty padlock on the hatch. Damn! I would have to use the lock pick on a door after all. But as I ran my fingers over the rough metal I realized that the lock wasn’t locked. Maybe there was too much rust, or Ray Wilson forgot to press the arm into the mechanism. I didn’t care why. The only thing that mattered was that I would be able to get into the cellar.

  I ran my fingers all the way around the cellar door and found no other obstacle. Without making a sound, I removed the padlock from the metal strap of the hasp and placed it on the ground. Grasping the edge of the wood with both hands, I eased the door up an inch.

  Creak …

  I stood still, and silently counted to sixty.

  Nothing stirred on Webster Street, but I couldn’t risk more noise from a corroded hinge. I would have given a thousand dollars for a can of WD 40, but when you don’t have what you need, you improvise.

  Holding the door in place with one hand, I used an old photographer’s trick that Ian had taught me years ago in Africa. Before digital cameras, it was something we did to clean 35-mm negatives for printing when we had to work fast and under primitive conditions, without luxuries like dust-free cloths. I took my thumb and index finger and rubbed them on either side of my nostrils, making “nose grease,” then massaged my homemade lubricant into the hinges. It took four applications, and I’d had to add some saliva, but it worked. I could open the door hatch, without it creaking, far enough so that I could squeeze inside.

  Lying flat along the edge of the opening, with the cellar’s cover resting on my back, I managed to pull the flashlight from my waistband, point it into the blackness below, and press the switch.

  The narrow tunnel of light showed me that I was staring into what had once been a storage cellar for coal. There were still a few black lumps of the anthracite scattered along the floor. This hatch had been used for delivery of the coal; the chute was still in place. A truck would back up to the hatch and dump the coal down the chute and into the cellar, to be burned in a furnace and keep the place warm during harsh Ohio winters.

  There was nothing near the opening that I could use to descend into the cellar, so I maneuvered my legs and rear onto the chute and started to slide. It was filthy, but that old chute saved me from having to jump down a good ten feet and chance breaking an ankle. In the unlikely event that I began to make a habit of breaking and entering, I’d be sure to bring a rappelling rope and hook, just in case.

  At the end of the chute, I landed on the cellar floor with a thump. Not too loud, but I switched off the flashlight, crouched into the damp darkness and listened.

  No sound from above.

  While I counted slowly to 120, I tried to keep my breathing shallow because of the basement’s unpleasant stench. It smelled of rats.

  Like the odor from a hostile skunk, the stink of rats is unmistakable, and impossible to forget. I hadn’t encountered that smell since Walter rescued me twenty-four years ago, but I recognized it instantly. This time the experience was different, because I was different. Tonight I was repelled, but I wasn’t afraid. At least, I wasn’t afraid of the four-legged vermin on Webster Street.

  After two minutes with no sound of movement from above, I stood up, clicked on the flashlight again, and examined the contents of the basement. There was an ancient furnace with the door hanging half off, several sagging cardboard boxes without tops. Newspapers and old clothes spilled out of them. In front of the boxes was a wooden kitchen chair. It lay on its side, with one of the back legs broken off.

  Tipped up against a wall, I saw the frame of a single bed. Carefully, quietly, I pulled it down to rest on its four legs.

  The bed had no mattress, only the metal frame and coiled springs. I reached into my left-hand pocket for the roll of duct tape. Assuming that I survived my first encounter with Ray Wilson this morning, I wanted to be ready for the second.

  With as little sound as possible, I tore strips of tape from the roll into twelve-inch lengths and attached several strips to each of the four corners of the bed.

  When I finished the preparations, I turned away—and accidentally kicked an empty gasoline can. My misstep sent it rattling and banging across the basement’s concrete floor. To my ears, it sounded as loud as a clash of cymbals.

  I heard movement upstairs in the house. The flesh on the back of my neck prickled with fear.

  Chapter 39

  I DUCKED BEHIND the furnace and pressed my back against the wall as footsteps shuffled across the floor above my head. They were coming from the left, from the back of the little house. I guessed that was where his bedroom was, and that the noise had awakened him.
>
  Bad news for me. I’d wanted to catch him while he was asleep.

  At the top of the stairs, the doorknob turned. The door screeched open and a man croaked out a stream of curses. His voice was hoarse and raspy. Even though I hadn’t heard it for twenty-four years, I recognized that voice. A chill knifed through me. Not more than twenty feet away stood the man from my nightmares.

  A light switch clicked on, and the center of the basement was illuminated by a weak bulb dangling from the ceiling on a frayed cord. It cut a few inches into the shadows outside its light radius, but it didn’t touch the darkness behind the furnace.

  He spewed more curses, followed by the word “rats.”

  He thought the noise had been caused by the reeking, four-legged residents of the cellar, and not by a two-legged invader. The noise hadn’t made him suspicious. That was vital, if I was going to succeed in what I had driven more than four hundred miles to do.

  I couldn’t see him from where I was, but I didn’t hear any footsteps descending. Another tense moment, then the light was switched off and the cellar door closed.

  Still in my hiding place, I waited and listened until I heard shambling footsteps, going away. But this time they were moving right, toward the front of the house. He was not returning to bed.

  The sounds of movement stopped. When I was sure it was safe, I turned on my flashlight and came out from behind the furnace. The first thing my beam caught was two glowing red eyes, staring at me. I gasped. But the rat must have been more frightened of me than I was of him, because he scurried away into a hiding place of his own.

  Taking a few deep breaths slowed my racing pulse.

  I moved the flashlight around until I found the broken kitchen chair. It was old, and constructed from solid wood. I picked up the detached back leg and hefted it. Used as a cudgel, it was heavy enough to do some damage, if that became necessary. I didn’t want to discharge my 9-mm pistol upstairs and chance waking up neighbors who might call the police. The Glock 19 isn’t a popgun.