Final Justice

by W. E. B Griffin

She had gone to the bar to cock-tease some dummy, get him all worked up, and then let him know she wasn’t at all interested in fucking him. What she got her kicks from—just like Bonnie the Bitch—was humiliating some poor bastard, letting him know he wasn’t good enough for her.

  The first night when Cheryl had left Halligan’s Pub, he had followed her home. That time he was driving a year-old Cadillac De Ville, used as a loaner by Willow Grove Automotive, where he had parked the rig. Las Vegas Classic Motor Cars did a lot of business with Willow Grove—on that trip, he had dropped off two Porsches from California, and would leave with a really nice Rolls Royce—and the guy who ran it always loaned him a car overnight when he was in town.

  That first time, Homer had watched her park her Chrysler Sebring, watched as she entered the apartment building, and then stood in the shadow of the tree until lights went on in a second-floor apartment. Then he went to the Sebring— Homer had once spent six months working for Las Vegas Towing and Repossession, and getting into the Sebring was no problem—and got Cheryl’s name, address, and phone and social security numbers from documents in her glove compartment.

  Then he got back in the De Ville and went back to Willow Grove Automotive, parked the De Ville, gave the keys to the security guy, went to the rig, made sure the current had been plugged in, and then went to the compartment in the trailer, locking it from the inside.

  He took off all his clothes and sat down in front of the computer, turned it on, took one of the good CDs from its hiding place, slipped it in the drive, looked at the index, thought a moment, and then decided Saint Louis was what he wanted, transferred the Folder STL to the computer, decrypted it, then ran Photo-Eaze, which allowed him to run a slide show of the digital images in STL.

  The girl in Saint Louis—Karen—didn’t look as much like Bonnie the Bitch as the one tonight did, but he’d had his good times with her. As the slide show ran, he dropped his hand to his groin and played with himself. He ran the slide show again—there were twelve pictures—and then pushed Hold on Number 11, which showed Karen tied to the bed immediately after he’d slipped her the salami. He’d really shown her she wasn’t as high and mighty as she thought. She looked soiled and humiliated.

  It’ll really be great to get this new one, this Cheryl, like that!

  That thought had been so exciting that he ejaculated before he intended to.

  Couldn’t be helped. Goddamn, this Cheryl’s really going to be a good one!

  He cleaned himself up with Kleenex, then took the CD from the drive and put it back in the hiding place, erased Folder STL from the hard drive, and then started the U.S. Government Approved Slack Wipe Program. That would run for a couple of hours. What the program did was overwrite and overwrite and overwrite again the slack space on the hard drive, so there would be no chance of anybody ever being able to recover the images of Karen he had just looked at.

  Then he took a shower and went to bed.

  At seven the next morning, he got behind the wheel of the Peterbilt, got on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and headed west. There was a guy in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, who collected Rollses, and there was a good chance he’d be interested in some kind of a deal with the one now in the rig.

  Three weeks, more or less, later, Homer had again stood in the shadow of the tree outside Cheryl Williamson’s apartment. He had gone to Halligan’s Pub in hopes of seeing her there, and when she hadn’t shown, he’d gone to the apartment complex.

  By then, primarily because of a credit check he had run on her, he knew a good deal about her. He knew where she worked, for one thing, and where she had gone to school, and that she had never been married, and that she owed fifteen payments of $139.50 on the Chrysler Sebring, and thirty-three payments of $105.05 on the furniture in her apartment.

  The lights were on in her apartment, which meant that she was there, and that he could probably take the coveralls and face mask and Jim Bowie knife from his briefcase and get the job done. It was a temptation. He’d thought of her a lot.

  But it was also possible that she wasn’t alone in the apartment, and there was no sense taking any chances. All things come to he who waits. He had decided to wait.

  It was a month after that that he stood for the third time in the shadow of the tree looking up at her apartment. This time, Cheryl had been in the Harrison Lounge, cock-teasing some poor slob who had no idea what a bitch she was, and when she’d left—alone, of course—he’d followed her home again. That night, he was sure, was going to be the night. He even went back to his car—this time a Plymouth Voyager loaner from Willow Grove, there being nothing better on the lot—and changed into the costume.

  When the lights went out in Cheryl’s apartment, he decided he would wait five minutes before climbing the back stairs to her apartment. Thirty seconds later, Cheryl came out of the building, got into the Sebring, and drove off.

  There was no way of telling, of course, where the bitch was going. Or when—even if—she was coming back. If he continued to wait in the shadow of the tree, somebody might see him. And if he went back and waited in the Voyager, the cops might drive by and wonder what someone was doing sitting in a car at quarter to three in the morning.

  When he got back to Willow Grove and the rig, he loaded DEN into the computer, and watched the sixteen pictures he’d taken three months before of an arrogant bitch named Delores in Denver. A not-so-arrogant bitch anymore, which was nice to look at and remember. But Delores was not nearly as pretty as Cheryl, and Delores didn’t look nearly as much like Bonnie the Bitch as Cheryl did.

  Tonight, Homer had the feeling everything was going to fall into place. Willow Grove Automotive had loaned him a dark gray De Ville—not the one he’d had before—and when he got to Halligan’s, the minute he pulled into the parking lot, he saw Cheryl’s Sebring, and didn’t even have to go into the lounge.

  He just sat in the De Ville and waited for her to come out. When she did, a guy came out after her, and they had a little argument in the doorway. The bitch was obviously telling the guy she’d been cock-teasing for the last hour, at least, that he had it wrong, that not only was she not that kind of girl, but even if she was, she wouldn’t give any to a jerk like him.

  The guy went back in Halligan’s Pub, Cheryl got in her Sebring, and when she was out of sight, Homer started the De Ville. He knew where she lived and he didn’t even have to follow her. And when he got near Independence Street, he saw—on Sixty-seventh Avenue, North—a dark place where he could park the De Ville where it wouldn’t attract attention, and where he could change into the costume without being seen.

  And when he got to the tree and looked up at Cheryl’s apartment, the lights were on. He figured she had been there no more than four, five minutes at most.

  The light came on a minute or so later in a little window he was sure was the bathroom, and he thought about what Cheryl would look like in the shower while he waited for the light to go out.

  Ten minutes later, it went out, and no more than a minute after that, so did the lights in her bedroom.

  Homer checked the pockets of the coveralls to make sure he had the Jim Bowie replica knife, the camera, and the plastic thingamajigs he would use to tie her spread-eagled on her bed.

  As he pulled on a pair of disposable rubber gloves, Homer started to get a hard-on thinking about what he was going to do, and told himself to cool it. He didn’t want it to be over too soon.

  Outside wooden stairs, with a narrow platform, had been added to the old building to provide a rear entrance to the second-floor apartments.

  He went up them quickly, putting his feet on the outside of each step. If you stepped in the middle, sometimes the stairs would squeak, and the last thing he wanted to do was to have some yapping dog hear him and start barking.

  When he got to the platform and her back door, he pulled the black ski mask from his pocket and pulled it over his head, then took a close look at the door. There were actually two doors, an outer combination screen and winter door
. The screen thing was in place.

  He put the blade of the Jim Bowie replica in the crack between the screen and the frame, and carefully pried it open wide enough so that he could get his hand inside to unlatch it. Then he very carefully pulled it open. It came easy, without squeaking.

  Once he had the screen door open, he made sure that the screen was back in place. He was pleased when he saw that he hadn’t even scratched the sonofabitch.

  The inner door wasn’t much more trouble. There was a pretty good lock, but the construction was cheesy, and all it took to pop the lock was to force the blade of the Jim Bowie replica into the frame and lean on it a little.

  Homer opened the door wide enough to get the blade inside and ran it up and down, checking for a chain or whatever, and when there was none, opened the door all the way, stepped into the kitchen, and then closed it behind him.

  After a minute, there was enough light for him to see pretty good. He was glad he’d waited. There was a little table in the kitchen he probably would have bumped into.

  This was the hairy part of the operation, making it from just being inside into the bedroom and to the bed itself without making any kind of racket.

  Homer made his way slowly and carefully through the kitchen, into the living room, and then to a door he was pretty sure was the bedroom door. This sometimes was a problem; if there was a lock on the bedroom door and it had to be popped, it sometimes woke the bitches up.

  No lock.

  The door opened smoothly inward.

  There was more light in the room, two of those go-to-the-bathroom little lights plugged into sockets near the floor.

  Cheryl was in bed, lying on her stomach. She was wearing pajamas.

  Homer walked to the bed, very carefully reached out for Cheryl’s shoulder, and then suddenly grabbed it, jerked her over on her back, then pushed her hard down on the bed with his hand on her throat.

  “One fucking sound and you get your throat cut!” he said, waving the Jim Bowie replica in front of her face.

  Cheryl whimpered.

  “Please don’t hurt me,” she said. Scared shitless.

  “I’m going to fuck you, bitch,” Homer said. “It’s up to you whether you get hurt or not.”

  He grabbed Cheryl’s left wrist, put a plastic tie on it, jerked it tight, and then tied it to the bed.

  The headboard was wrought iron. Sometimes when the headboard was material—or there was no headboard at all; that had happened twice—there was a problem. You had to tie the bitch to the springs, which meant tying a couple of the ties together to make one long enough.

  No problem like that tonight. He tied the left tie to a curve in the wrought iron, then reached across the bitch for her right hand.

  Cheryl started to sob.

  Homer slapped her, hard.

  “Not a sound, bitch!” he said.

  Once he had the second plastic tie in place, he jerked on it to make sure it wouldn’t come loose, then jerked on the other one.

  Then he knelt on the bed, sat back on his heels, and ran the blade of the Jim Bowie replica down Cheryl’s body, from the neck between her boobs to her crotch.

  She whimpered again.

  He tied her right ankle to the wrought iron at the foot of the bed, and then the left ankle. Then he ran the blade up her body again.

  “Not a peep, you fucking bitch!”

  He went to the light switch by the door and flipped it on.

  Cheryl’s eyes were wide with terror.

  He leaned over the bed and put the blade of the Jim Bowie replica under her pajama top, and one by one cut the buttons off so that it could be easily opened when it came time for that.

  He took the digital camera from the coveralls and took Cheryl’s picture.

  Then he leaned over her and pushed the left side of her pajama top off her breast and took a picture of that.

  Very nice. Her nipples had become erect.

  Homer became aware that he had a hard-on. A real hard-on.

  He reached into the coveralls and took it out and waved it at her.

  “This is for you, bitch!” he said.

  He walked to the bed and pushed Cheryl’s pajamas off her right breast, and then took a picture of her like that.

  Then he went and knelt on the bed so that he could rub the head of his penis on her nipples.

  That was very exciting, so exciting that he knew he was going to have an orgasm, and since that was the case, he might as well have a good one, so he put his hand on it and pumped rapidly until he ejaculated onto her breasts and face.

  She turned her head and whimpered.

  As fast as the camera would permit, Homer took three pictures of that, and then had an artistic inspiration. He took the Jim Bowie replica and carefully scraped some of the semen from Cheryl’s breast on it, and then laid it between her breasts, with the tip just under her chin. And he took two pictures of that, looked at them in the camera’s built-in viewer, and then put the camera on the bedside table.

  “I’ll be right back,” Homer said. “We’re just getting started.”

  He went into the bathroom, and first urinated, and then, standing over the washbasin, washed his genitals, toying with them, thinking that when he went back in the bedroom, he would be able to get a shot of his sperm on her breasts and face.

  That was an exciting thought, so exciting that he felt himself begin to grow hard again, and he thought that’s what he would do, get it up again, so that when he went back in the bedroom, she would see it and get a hint of what was in store for her.

  When he went back in the bedroom, the goddamn bitch had somehow got her right hand free from the plastic tie. That had given her enough movement to twist onto her side, and to pull her telephone from the bedside table. She was punching in a number.

  “You goddamn fucking bitch!” Homer said, angrily. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

  He moved quickly to the bed, made a fist, and punched her as hard as he could in the face. He turned her on her back again and punched her again. He reached for the telephone, to pull the line free from the socket. It wouldn’t come at first and he pulled harder, and then the line snapped, and the phone came out of his hand and flew across the room and smashed into the mirror mounted on the wall. The mirror broke into three large pieces, and two of them fell to the floor, where they shattered into small pieces.

  Jesus Christ, that made enough noise to wake the fucking dead!

  “That’s going to cost you, bitch!” he said, menacingly.

  He realized he was breathing heavily and took a moment to calm down.

  Then he looked down at Cheryl.

  There was a little blood on her face, running down over her lips, and she was looking at something on the ceiling.

  He looked up to see what she was looking at. There was nothing but the ceiling and the light fixture. He looked back down at her, and she was still looking at the ceiling.

  He waved his hand in front of her eyes. There was no reaction.

  “Jesus Christ!” Homer said, softly.

  He reached down and slapped Cheryl on both cheeks.

  “Goddamn you, wake up!” he said.

  There was no reaction.

  “Oh, shit,” Homer said, softly, and waved his hand in front of her open eyes again.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” Homer said.

  Then he went to the door, turned the lights in the bedroom off, and made his way back through the apartment to the kitchen, and let himself out, taking care to make sure the screen door’s latch had automatically locked after he pushed it shut.

  He went quickly to the De Ville, and was halfway down the block before he remembered to take the black ski mask off.

  And then Homer had an at first chilling thought.

  I don’t have the fucking camera!

  He patted his pockets to make sure.

  Shit, shit, shit!

  Oh, fuck it! I never took the rubber gloves off, so there won’t be any fingerprints, and the
y can’t trace it to me. I bought it in that store with the Arabs in Times Square in New York, the time I picked up the silver-gray Bentley. I paid cash. I’ll just have to get another one. It was getting pretty old, anyway.

  SEVEN

  [ONE]

  On the other side of Cheryl Anne Williamson’s bedroom wall in her second-floor apartment on Independence Street was the bedroom wall of the apartment occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Herbert McGrory.

  There was a mirror on that wall, too—the apartments were roughly mirror images of each other—and when Cheryl’s bedside telephone slipped out of Homer C. Daniels’s hand and flew with sufficient velocity into her mirror to cause it to shatter, it also struck the plasterboard behind the mirror.

  At that point on the wall, behind the plasterboard, was one of the two-by-four-inch vertical studs, arranged at sixteen-inch intervals along the wall. Between each stud, insulation material had been installed, more to deaden sounds between the two apartments than for thermal purposes.

  Technically, this was a violation of the Philadelphia building code, which requires that living areas be separated by a firewall, either of concrete or cement blocks. The building inspector somehow missed this violation. Over the years, a number of Philadelphia building inspectors have been found guilty of accepting donations from building contractors for overlooking violations of the building code.

  Many—perhaps most—of these corrupt civil servants have been found guilty and fined or sentenced to prison, or both, but it was obviously difficult for the city to reinspect every structure examined and passed by the inspector caught not looking, and it wasn’t done.

  The stud moved, not far, but far enough to strike the back of the mirror on the McGrorys’ wall. The mirror bent, then cracked, and then a large, roughly triangular piece of it slid out of the frame and crashed onto the floor.

  The noise woke Mrs. Joanne McGrory, a short, rather plump thirty-six-year-old, who was in bed with her husband, who was tall, rather plump, and thirty-eight years old.

  She sat up in the bed and exclaimed, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!”