A Checklist for Murder

by Anthony Flacco

  Tasha tried to focus on making her simple meal, trying to get the message across to him that there wasn’t any point in talking to her, but doing it gently enough to avoid setting him off. It didn’t do any good. He just kept hanging in the doorway. His questions turned to the topic of her mother. When was she due home today? Was she working late? Did she have plans tonight?

  Tasha played dumb to all of it. But maybe she ignored her father a little too hard this time. Perhaps that’s why the irritation in his voice changed so abruptly to raw anger. He suddenly dropped his questions, began pacing back and forth in the doorway, berating her for the high utility costs as he waved an electricity bill at her. He reminded her that even though he didn’t live there he still paid a lot of the bills and that as long as she stayed in his home she was on orders to turn off the television, every time she left the room.

  Throughout the tirade she glanced at him often enough to avoid making him feel he was being ignored. She had learned how to do it so that she hardly even saw him. Her concentration kept focused on getting the food ready, moving very evenly, deliberately. An invisible blanket softened the blows of his verbal attack.

  Finally he played himself out and walked away from her in disgust. He returned to the backyard patio, sliding the glass door closed behind him as he went.

  But he left the TV on in the family room. Tasha shook her head with a grim smile. So much for his concern about energy.

  She began to hurry, trying to get the food ready while he was still outside. Maybe the chores could wait until tomorrow, if he wasn’t going to leave her in peace. The food was almost ready. In a few minutes she could get it down and be gone. She could always walk to Patty’s place; it wasn’t that far. She could shower there if she had to, even borrow some clothes if there wasn’t time to change before Robert came back inside.

  But she was hungry, so she didn’t walk out right away. She didn’t want to give up on the idea of finishing her meal before she left.

  She was just beginning to eat when Robert came back inside. At the same time, the sound of the sliding glass door somehow brought the blaring television in the next room back to her attention. It was galling to be yelled at so stupidly over some miserly energy policy that he didn’t even follow himself.

  The urge to fight back rose quickly inside her. She had just graduated from high school and felt the power of her independence, her beauty, her strong spirit. She might have kept her mouth shut if she had taken a moment to think about it, but the words leapt out into the air, fueled by years of resentment and this new feeling of strength that was just beginning to enter her life.

  “What was that you said about the TV?” she called to him as he passed the kitchen door.

  “What?” He stopped, turned back, stood glaring in the doorway. “What did you say?”

  But she knew he had heard her. His voice tone gave it away. His expression.

  Still, the need to recapture something of her assaulted dignity was strong inside her.

  “The television,” she continued. “I didn’t turn it on. So who did?”

  His eyes turned to steel. The corners of his mouth turned up slightly. But it wasn’t a smile; it was smug, dangerous. Without words, the expression said, You’ve played into my hands.

  Tasha wasn’t really seeing him, even though her eyes looked directly at him. She felt offended down into the marrow of her bones by this father/stranger whom she saw as only coming over in the last four years when he felt like making trouble, grumbling around the place like some guy just waiting for anybody to knock the chip off of his shoulder. She was sick of the years spent standing silent under the onslaught of his same old yelling story. She had raised the invisible blanket again.

  And so she just had to add one more line:

  “Because you would never turn the TV on, and then walk out of the room for half a minute. Would you? Who’s wasting the electricity now?”

  She knew he would hit the ceiling at that one. She expected him to scream and yell and threaten her. She even knew that there was a good chance he would strike her, maybe knock her to the floor as he had in the past.

  So she wasn’t really all that surprised when, without a word, he leapt the distance between them and grabbed her with both hands around her throat. As he clamped her windpipe closed, her hands went instinctively to his wrists and held on tight. He didn’t say a word as he pounced on her and she couldn’t do anything more than gasp for what little air still managed to bleed in through her constricted throat.

  Tasha’s adrenaline spurted through her. It made their movements seem to snap into slow motion, as if the duo had lapsed into a deadly graveyard waltz. He drove her with his weight, forcing her to back up as he spun her around in the opposite direction and slowly walked her out of the kitchen. Robert was six feet tall and weighed over 180. She struggled, but it was useless. At five feet eight inches and 130 pounds, even though Tasha’s slim frame was built on long legs and firm muscles toned from her love of outdoors and physical activities, even though Tasha had grown up a tomboy and was never seriously accused of being a wimp by anybody, she had neither the physical nor psychological strength to mount any real defense against a sudden and brutal attack from her father.

  He directed all the power of his rage into clamping her throat closed while he drove her steadily into the next room. Now, for the very first time since he had given her swimming lessons so many years ago, for the first time since Tasha was a doting toddler obedient to Daddy’s every word, for the first time since those days, years before, when Robert was still the flattered father who loved his beautiful young daughter, the two moved once again in perfect sync.

  They became a father-daughter dance team as they staggered onward together. Tasha’s feet were barely on the ground as she struggled, twisted, writhed, in his grip. Dancing on air.

  Moments later they ended their last waltz as she fell backward and Robert landed atop her on the floor of the family room. But even with Tasha flat on the floor and helpless in his grip, his hands kept biting into the soft flesh of her neck.

  Up to that moment Tasha hadn’t felt that afraid, not really. She became calm. If normal and natural fear was blasting through her insides at the realization that she was under deadly attack, years of conditioning had calloused the part of her where she ought to have felt it. Her instinct for self-preservation took over and prior family experience rushed in to go to work. She had weathered a lot of his violent storms in the past and had usually come through them without having to go to the hospital.

  She knew the trick: Don’t resist. Take whatever blows he has to deliver and let his rage burn off before you get seriously hurt. Ever since she had foolishly stepped between Robert and Claire during that big family fight back when she was thirteen, ending up with a shattered arm and three weeks of traction for her foolishness, Tasha had learned well the lesson of dealing with her father’s rage.

  Let him lead; he feeds on open defiance. Keep him as quiet as you can and wait for your chance to escape.

  But now the impact of the floor against her back and the weight of his body on top of hers brought Tasha’s true emotions home. She instantly filled with a high-octane mixture of fear and outrage that struggled to explode out of her. She felt the cries building inside, hammering to get out. But the only point of self-control left to her was the need to avoid giving him the slightest satisfaction at terrorizing her. She strangled her own sobs down in her throat even harder than Robert was strangling her with the pressure of his thumbs. Keeping her eyes hard, she held the cries deep inside until, without warning—

  Robert stopped the attack. It ended as suddenly as it had begun. He remained on top of her, panting slightly, staring down into her face. Tasha began to hope that it was finally over, that she had played him correctly and let him satisfy his rage and his need to assert domination before she had to endure a more serious form of violence.

  “Are you okay?” he asked matter-of-factly, as if she had just fallen off a
bicycle.

  Tasha glared up at him as he pulled his hands from her throat. All her fear had already given way to indignant outrage. “I’ll live,” she answered as harshly as she could, voice still husky from the shock to her vocal cords.

  She rubbed her throat and avoided looking into his eyes. She wasn’t afraid to meet his gaze but didn’t want to absorb any more of his energy than she had to.

  Enraged thoughts flashed through her at lightning speed. This was it, she thought to herself. She was out of this dump, permanently. After all, she’d only remained living in her mother’s house because Robert had been separated from Claire for the last few years, supposedly giving Tasha a chance to grow up in some amount of peace. But if he was going to start showing up around the place again, acting this way whenever he wanted to, she was absolutely getting out. Now that she was eighteen nobody could force her to stay there anymore.

  Meanwhile Robert kept staring down at her and regarding her curiously, as if wondering exactly what his next move should be. When he finally spoke all trace of his rage was gone.

  “You have to understand, Natasha, I just can’t go on like this anymore.” He spoke softly, making an appeal for her to respect his deep need to strangle her. He shook his head sadly, full of pain. “Not the way my life is.”

  He sat back, still straddling her. But he didn’t get up. He just shook his head again, deeply depressed about the way his life felt to him.

  Natasha inhaled hard, pulling enough air into her chest to manage a reply. She forced the words out of her throbbing throat. “Well, you don’t have to worry about it anymore. I’m moving out. Patty and I are getting our own place. I was going to tell Mom anyway. I’m never coming back here. I won’t be a part of your life anymore.”

  Maybe her reply caught him off-guard; his response threw her a curve.

  “Do you need any money?”

  He remained on top of her, holding her flat on her back with his weight.

  She glared up at him. So, she thought with disgust, now he was offering her a bribe.

  “I don’t want any money from you.” She was used to his abrupt changes of tone, but from now on all of that would only exist in the past. Natasha knew in her heart that she would never willingly remain in this house now.

  That turned out to be true. She would never live in that house again. But there was a much different reason for it, as she was only moments away from learning.

  CHAPTER

  3

  Robert looked back down at Natasha for the last time before he rose. He seemed to have made his decision.

  “I have something that will make you feel better,” he said. He walked away, leaving her sitting stunned on the floor while he stepped out the front door of the house.

  Tasha fought to regain her wind and her self-control. The fear was growing sharper inside her now. Whatever her father had to make her “feel better,” she didn’t want any part of it. It was abundantly clear that she had made a mistake in remaining in the house while he was still in the backyard. She didn’t want to repeat it by waiting around to see what was coming next. But her thoughts ricocheted around without producing any answers while she labored to force a plan.

  She couldn’t go out the front without running into him. She could head for the back door, but the backyard was bordered by a steep hill and a wire fence blocking off an open field.

  Both routes at the sides of the house would only lead from the back to the front, returning her to where he already was.

  The garage door opened only a few feet from the front door, leading her back to Robert once again.

  Of course if she really turned up the volume on the situation, broke the lifelong family taboo about exposing their troubles to the neighbors, she could run screaming into the street and hope that some neighbor would get involved on her behalf before Robert could hunt her down and hurt her badly. But after years of living in this area, the male neighbors mostly avoided Robert Peernock and the female neighbors rarely even came to the house if they saw Robert’s car in the driveway.

  What if nobody stepped in to help? What if nobody happened to be around to do anything at all, not even call the police?

  Then he would have her. He would be very angry as he hauled her back into the house. Alone.

  Her desperate attempts to form a plan never went any farther. She heard a car door slam just outside the front entranceway and before she could form the hope that he might drive off, she felt footsteps vibrate the floor behind her as Robert returned to the family room.

  Everything began happening quickly. Before she could turn around she felt a burst of brute physical power seize her. It instantly took control. Her wrists were roughly grabbed from behind and held in back of her the way police will hold a suspect’s arms; there is little muscle strength available for struggling in that position. Panic flooded her, gave her extra power to yank against the grip while she squirmed and fought as well as she could from her position on the floor.

  Though she did everything possible to battle the much bigger man standing over her pinning her arms back, the conversation of wills was carried on without a single word. Nothing but gasping sounds came from both members of the father/daughter team. Their last dance together had turned to primal chaos.

  In seconds Tasha felt steel bands snap tightly around her wrists, first one and quickly the other. She was able to twist around just far enough to get a glimpse of a pair of handcuffs. But in the next instant she felt her head forcibly twisted back to the front; she realized the handcuffs weren’t the only things that her father had brought back inside to make her feel better. A flash of blue canvas flicked in front of her eyes and she felt her father’s hands on top of her head. Some sort of rough fabric was pulled over her face. His hands were forcing it down over her eyes, her mouth, all the way down to the base of her neck.

  Everything went dark. The hood had no eyeholes, only one small hole for her nose and another for her mouth. As she continued to fight him, kicking out with her feet in the last defensive moves left to her, a little bit of light sometimes bled in as the air holes moved around just enough to tease her with a glimpse outside. But each glimpse lasted only for a flashing instant before the darkness returned.

  She tried to throw herself onto her side and rub the hood off her head by scraping her face on the carpet, but her father yanked her up into a seated position. She felt something like a hangman’s noose dig into the base of her throat, searing the flesh.

  Any further resistance was impossible.

  But once she gave up her fight the tightness around her neck loosened slightly. She felt his fingers fumbling behind her at the back of the hood and realized that what had felt like a noose was actually some kind of lacing tied at the base of the canvas, woven through the fabric like shoelaces. Even as the pressure eased and allowed her to breathe without choking, she could feel the tiny loops of the laces digging into the flesh at the base of her throat and at the sides of her neck. She had no choice but to remain still. If she moved her head very much it pulled the hood tighter against her throat, cutting off her air.

  Now, as she found herself handcuffed and hooded and pinned to the floor, Tasha could clearly feel the bite of her fear. The longstanding protection that had always been afforded to her by the invisible insulation blanket around her feelings was of no use. With her skin, with her flesh, and with the marrow of her bones she felt all too clearly the piercing cold terror blasting through her.

  And some part of her that didn’t give a damn about handling the situation carefully just had to know whether or not she was watching her life in this world come to an end. She blurted out the words before she could stop herself.

  “Are you going to kill me?”

  “Yes.” The answer landed like a blow from a blunt instrument. No more explanations about how Robert’s life couldn’t go on this way anymore, no more pleading for her to understand. Just yes, Natasha, one of the things Daddy had brought you to help you feel better after being choke
d and dragged into this room and thrown on the floor is to assure you that your fears are correct. He is going to kill you.

  The hood’s mouth hole wasn’t much bigger than a dime, just large enough for the next surprise. She felt a rigid plastic tube press against her lips as it was jammed through the hood. Tasha started to cry out in reflex, but as soon as her lips parted the stiff tube was shoved down into her mouth. She had to concentrate to fight back the gag reflex, fearing that if she vomited she would surely choke to death right there on the floor of the family room.

  She didn’t know how it was being held in place, but she couldn’t spit the tube back out. Tasha wasn’t able to form words anymore even if she tried. The tube had focused all her efforts on breathing.

  The next sound seemed out of place, surprisingly harmless in the midst of this horror show. The squeaky pump of a spray bottle reminded her of cleaning windows in the summertime, or cleaning the glass doors leading out to the patio where her father had been when she failed to get out of the house on time. Cleaning the patio doors wasn’t one of the chores Tasha was supposed to do that afternoon, but it didn’t matter anymore. The other chores weren’t going to get done either.

  She could hear it easily, right in front of her. But it wasn’t pumping window cleaner; Tasha tasted alcohol dribbling through the tube and into her mouth. She thought it must be some kind of hard liquor, but she didn’t drink hard liquor and couldn’t tell what kind it was. The taste was strong, harsh. She coughed and tried to spit it back out, gagging it back onto the fabric of the hood.

  “Swallow it, Natasha. This is the best way. Just swallow it.”

  He pushed her down onto her back again and held the tube firmly in place as the harmless little pumping sound continued. Squirt, squirt, squirt, the alcohol ran down the tube and into her mouth, slowly enough for her to swallow, not so fast that it would run out and leave evidence on the carpet.