Dimly, Through Glass

by Knight, Dirk

  Would Bundy still have snatched up Ann Marie Burr, if he lived in the same world, with the same forensic knowledge as Dennis? He liked to think that he would. Ted had to do it.

  Dennis had crossed the line by accident, which was not to say that he hadn’t prepared for it. That he hadn’t thought day and night about finding a whore to bring home and how best to end her whoring life. He had studied anatomy, butchery, mapped out places to dump bodies; he studied the law and forensics, like Bundy (and countless others). He had made murder his area of expertise, and studied under the greats. He had been down to Twelfth Street and Van Buren where he learned that getting a girl in your car could cost you as little as the promise of twenty dollars.

  He had read the papers and studied up on brutal homicides and then had come to recognize a man who had no issue representing the killers; even had a successful track-record in the judicial setting. Letting murderers and rapists back out to live again among the whores and pimps.

  He leaves a message for Whesker with his paralegal, whom he’s met briefly. He can tell by her face and the prostitute-esque application of her eye makeup that she is a slut too.

  Now that he has indeed crossed the line into the realm of a killer, he is temporarily satisfied by the power. The hunger he had suffered under is finally quenched and he feels freer and more powerful, like a runaway train. His momentum and velocity will carry him to where he’s going. Now he has tasted the drug; he has held a man’s life in his hands and watched the light twinkle out. Twice. But, he still craves the bounty of a woman, and now he cannot turn back; there is nothing that can stop him now that some insatiable hunger inside him has been switched on.

  Jiménez asks him if he likes finally being a man.

  “Why yes, yes I do, Hector,” he says, not sure if he says it out loud or if it’s in his head, as Jiménez surely must be.

  “When did it take over? The hunger?” he asks.

  “My mother.” Dennis says.

  “No, that’s maybe when it started, but I want to know when it took over. That’s when you started to become a man, finally. Before that, you were just a little bitch, who let his women suck everyone’s dick and take your money. Was it when you choked her?”

  “No, I choked her because I had to.”

  “Was it when you killed me?”

  “No, I was consumed long before that. You just opened my eyes.”

  “Was it the day you raped her? Your so-called girlfriend . . .”

  “I had to do that, she needed to be shown.”

  “But that’s close, isn’t it, mijo?”

  “Yeah, I guess it was right around then. When I couldn’t stop thinking about the sluts anymore; when I just wanted to make them suffer, like I had suffered growing up with a whore for a mother.”

  “Oh, I know what it was. I remember now. It was the nigger girl from Alabama, wasn’t it?” Jiménez asks.

  “How could you know that? You weren’t there.”

  “I know everything, mijo, haven’t you figured it out yet? I am you,” he says and erupts into a glorious pseudo-maniacal fit of laughter.

  Dennis sees the snubbed .38, back in his own hand.

  He stares at the pistol, and looks back up to see Jiménez empty handed, but smiling.

  He squeezes the .38 until his fingers whiten from the pressure, and then slides it into his waistband again.

  “I guess I really am going fucking crazy—”

  “You wanted that power, the power the men held over the bitch from Alabama. You wanted to be the one to teach her a lesson. I know; I was there.”

  “You were there, when?”

  He was there, when . . .

  He was there when Dennis was driving to work . . .

  The radio had cracked and buzzed as Dennis fiddled with the station selector, trying to find his favorite show, “The Morning Sickness.”

  “Let’s play a game,” the host had said, “we’re going to announce five newspaper headlines and you have to guess which ones are real.”

  And so the list began. Some were ridiculous. Men in England placing grandiose wagers on their own mortality, stating that if one lives past the date offered by his oncologist, he will win somewhere close to one hundred thousand pounds; the host hadn’t been sure how many dollars that equated to.

  A couple equally pointless headlines had followed. Then he told the one that had taken up permanent residence in Dennis’s mind, created a nest, and laid eggs that would hatch and consume his thoughts like a syphilitic infestation. It was a story that most people would have thought disgusting, and subsequently moved on, but Dennis had latched onto it as if he were a leech in a dark swamp, and the tale were a fat poacher who’d gotten in past his waders.

  Keisha Tucker was walking to school one foggy winter morning. She was wearing a fluffy down overcoat and thick, but tight, sweatpants. Her hair was pulled back into a small knot on the back of her head. She was in the eleventh grade, and quite the student. She played volleyball on the varsity squad and had the ass and thighs to prove it. She also carried a 4.0 GPA, and she was being courted for a scholarship to Duke University. It’s not likely she will ever see the inside of a classroom at Duke, or even leave her house, after what is about to happen on this bitter Alabama morning.

  Along the foggy, dimly lit highway, there was little traffic at that time of day. Trees enveloped the route as she walked. A crew cab pickup truck, with an enormous camper shell on the back, slowly rounded the corner ahead of her. She could see the thickness of the fog captured in the headlights of the truck. She could make out silhouettes in the cab, but it wasn’t until the vehicle got much closer that she saw the four men leering out at her. This was when she flashed recognition that the truck was moving much slower than was necessary on the dew-slicked roads, even in the fog.

  She kept her head down, walked in her narrow lane along the shoulder and braced herself for some form of redneck racist commentary.

  The truck drew closer and pulled onto the shoulder just ahead, blocking her path. Two of the men jumped out, grabbed her and threw her into the back of the truck, under the camper shell, and held her in place while the monstrous Chevrolet diverted off-road and into the brush, under the canopy of the pines, oaks, and maples. She had screamed at first, but had quickly given up, realizing that there was no one there who could hear her.

  Her heart sank and she began to shiver with adrenaline when she heard the gradually slowing clicks of the truck’s parking brake, which warned her that whatever these men had in store for her, was going to happen now.

  Here.

  The other two men in the cab exited and walked around to the rear of the truck, dropped the tailgate and propped up the glass door of the camper.

  The man who had been the driver said, “I’m first.” Those were the last words spoken by any of the men until it was over. They continued to hold Keisha down, ignoring her screams to be let go, while the driver readied his cock, and so on. Neither had responded to Keisha’s pleas, as her sleek black pants were torn from her supple legs and tossed into the woods. One by one, the men entered her. Her cries of rage fizzled into despair, and then into small whimpers as her mind and body met in hopeless defeat.

  By the third redneck she ceased yelling, didn’t even squirm. She just took it and went to another place in her mind. A place where the hillbilly rapists couldn’t hurt her anymore.

  After the fourth man had finished in her, and she lay holding herself, trying to stay warm against the cold of the steel truck-bed beneath her, the biting, damp air around her, and the penetrating emptiness inside her, the men again listened as the driver spoke. She heard him say that he had a gun, as he walked back toward the front of the pickup. One of the men followed, and said something she could not make out. While this was going on the other men, the two who had grabbed her off the road, had negotiated a trade for a cigarette and lighter. They were clearly the dimmest members of the inbred clan, and they were distracted.

  This was her last cha
nce. She summoned all the force that remained in her quivering legs and sprang past the men as they fumbled in their pockets. A leathery hand gripped her slender bicep, but she tore away. Young and athletic, scared for her life, the men could not catch her. They couldn’t turn the truck around fast enough.

  A bullet cracked into a tree ahead of her a split-second before the sound of the gun-blast reached her ears.

  Keisha ran and ran, barefoot with panties torn and stretched around her ample bottom—one hand absently holding them up to preserve some semblance of dignity—and with a down jacket. She ran on shredded, frozen feet. She ran on burning depleted legs. She ran on fear and adrenaline. She ran until she reached the highway, now busy with commuters, the sun finally coming up.

  She stumbled into the ditch and somehow summoned the will to climb out onto the shoulder. She lay on the gravelly edge of the road and fought back sobs, and then she thanked God for having spared her life.

  A middle-aged man in a sedan saw her and pulled over, rolling down the window.

  “Do you need help?” the man asked, already knowing the answer.

  She affirmed him with nothing more than a nod and he opened the door to her. He asked her what happened, where he needed to take her. She vomited out the details of what had just happened, too in shock to feel shy or embarrassed about it yet. She hadn’t filtered any of the details “Four men just kidnapped and raped me, but I was able to get away,” she said calmly. She didn’t cry just yet, but she would before the ride was over.

  While she was telling the “Good Samaritan” about the rape, he started looking down at her thick athletic Nubian legs, her torn panties, and imagined her warm thighs around him. He saw her beautiful, young, vibrant—although besmirched with blood—face and somehow decided to throw another dash of salt into the cuts.

  The man raped her in the same woods she had just escaped from, and then let her go. She didn’t even have the will left to resist his onslaught. She just wept and let him have her, praying it would be over soon. No longer thanking God for sparing her life, she was now praying for death.

  “Okay, now it’s your chance to call in and tell us which ones are real and which ones are bogus,” the DJ said in conclusion.

  Dennis had immediately recognized this most horrifying gang rape to be the true story. He didn’t know or care about the other stories enough to even take note. He’d been concocting his own gritty details, reenacting the story of Keisha in his private mental cinema, since the DJ first mentioned the rapes. Whether it was true or not, the idea of the story was too much for him to pass up. But he instinctively knew that there was something so dark, malicious, and heinous, and yet so elegant that it simply could not be fiction. His suspicions were confirmed by the radio commentator, who went on to announce that the British man’s death wager was also true, but Dennis flicked the power button and rode the rest of the way to work in relative silence. Only the sound of the road and his thoughts had accompanied him.

  He’d been aroused, which confused and shamed him. How had such a horrible and dark story aroused him so much? He was consumed with visions of what the girl would have looked like. She surely had been incredibly beautiful, or else she wouldn’t have attracted so much attention. He constructed vivid scenarios in his mind, recreating the exact situations that must’ve occurred in order to have had this passionate and filthy crime happen.

  He had wished, and still wishes to this day, that he were part of it. He hoped that one day he would happen upon a lonesome girl in tattered clothing, beaten, scared, and defeated.

  He held only the slightest bit of jealousy for the four men in the pickup, but the fifth man he detested due to his envy, for he had done what the other four men could have only dreamed. He had taken from her the only thing she had left; not her dignity, not her innocence in the sense of her virginity, but the innocence that had fled when she lost all hope and sought only death as a release.

  The fifth man had stolen her will to live, and perhaps her faith in God.

  Dennis wanted so much to defeat and destroy a young woman as totally as this final man had done. He thought about it relentlessly.

  He’d carried this lust and rage with him all day at work. He had phoned up a prostitute, whom he found on the internet, driven to her desired meeting place. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do when he got there, but his lust had consumed his every thought since hearing the story of Keisha Tucker.

  Upon arriving to meet this prostitute, he had lost his nerve. He hadn’t known for sure she wasn’t a cop; he didn’t trust the internet. Also, she was much older than she had looked in her online advertisement, and he didn’t want to fuck her as much as he wanted to punch her in the throat, so he told the hooker he had left his wallet in the car, and then squealed tires all the way out of the subdivision.

  He had then called Libby, and tried like hell to reach her, but she was not answering. Later that night she called him drunk, and said she was stranded. He gathered her from the parking lot where she’d been dumped. And then she continued by rattling off her own whorish tales of the evening.

  Without being able to stop himself, he went on to beat and rape her, knowing that he was, undoubtedly, the fifth man that night. Just as he had imagined Keisha had, Libby didn’t cry until the end either.

  “You were there?”

  “Hell yeah I was there, puta. I’ve been with you all along, mijo. And I’m telling you that bitch had it coming. Young girls like that; they want you to take the choncha from them. They parade around in those tiny little shorts, and tight-ass tank tops, begging for attention. Holding the bait just outside the cage, trying to taunt the lions, but most of those boys are so afraid to take it from them, like you used to be. Not anymore, huh ese?”

  “You really think they want it?”

  “You tell me, bro. Does Libby cry about it anymore?”

  Fucker had a point.

  It was Jiménez who told him to stop in the rest area. It was Jiménez who noticed her license plate first. Hell, it was even Jiménez who’d asked for the cigarette, but Dennis didn’t object. He was hoping to be able to teach the bitch a lesson for the way she treated him, like he was a punk bitch. Like he didn’t have the courage to take it from her. She should have known better.

  His car has little difficulty catching up to the large blue sedan. In his gut, Dennis knows what he’s going to do next; he just needs Jiménez to say it aloud to make it real. To breathe life into it.

  “I can’t wreck my car. It will look awfully suspicious if I’m driving around with a huge dent in my car.”

  “That shit will buff out,” Jiménez interjects. “Besides, your dad has all those tools just sitting around gathering dust—”

  “How do you know about my dad?”

  “I thought we covered this, mijo . . . I fucking know everything. So just shut the fuck up and give this bitch what she deserves.”

  Dennis punches the accelerator down, gaining the last few inches between her rear bumper and his own car. He dives down onto the shoulder just enough to give his front bumper clearance of her width. In one smooth motion, as if it’s been practiced hundreds of times, he pulls the wheel left, his bumper finding purchase on the right rear quarter panel of the sedan; he accelerates a bit more and pushes through, spinning the rear of the Lumina toward the center of the highway. He has seen this on television and cop shows as many times as every other American, and has always wanted (like every other American)to try it.

  The P.I.T. Maneuver works—the front end loses traction with the roadway, and the unforgiving desert claims her tires, flipping and rolling the car onto the dusty apron below the roadway, and leaving a yard sale of debris in its wake.

  Pulling to the side of the highway, and carefully down the graded slope, to better hide his car from passing rubberneckers, Dennis gets out to inspect the damage his car had sustained in the skirmish; very little, just as Jiménez predicted.

  He’s proving pretty useful, that guy, Dennis thinks to
himself.

  He will be able to buff the minor scar from the finish of his bumper. His father’s workbench comes to mind. He’d not lived with Dennis after the divorce, but had left all of his tools, and his garage, complete and intact.

  His father had drunk himself away after he moved out. He had no need for the automotive tools. Repairing cars had just been a hobby for his pop. His trade was in architecture, and he had been quite well known and respected. Dennis excelled at business, and he was good with numbers, like his father, but his fondest memories came from the time he and his dad had spent a weekend day under the hood of his old muscle car.

  “You’re not such a coward either,” Jiménez echoes in his ear. “Now let’s go finish what we started. Bring the multi-tool from the glove box.”

  “Good call,” Dennis says as he gathers the compact Swiss-army-like automotive tool.

  It folds and transforms into pliers, a screwdriver, a small saw for seatbelts, and has a hardened attachment for shattering automotive glass. Perhaps the best white elephant gift he had ever received from the office Christmas party.

  The girl is dazed and bloodied from the crash. Seeing Dennis coming, and perhaps shrugging off the initial shock from the tumble, she screams and fumbles with the handle, leveraging her shoulder into the doorframe. Her car has come to rest against, and most likely was stopped by, a large boulder, which is now pinning her door.

  Realizing the door will not budge, she lunges to the passenger door and manages to get it open. Even though adrenaline has shielded her from the injuries she sustained while being slammed throughout the cabin, she cannot fight back the screams as her shattered ankle gives out under her full weight and she flounders onto her face, just feet from the car.