by Sean Lynch
After the trial, he and his mother stayed shut up in the house. Ray would go to school each day and endure taunts and beatings. His mother would go to work and to the grocery store. Beyond those required excursions, neither Ray nor his mother, who reassumed her maiden name of Cowell, ever ventured out of doors. His only friend was Skipper, his beloved pound puppy.
One autumn afternoon, Ray returned home from another hellish day at school to find his mother burying a newspaper-wrapped bundle in the backyard. When he asked about it, she merely stood up and kicked the bundle with her shoe.
To Ray’s horror, the parcel contained what was left of Skipper. Skipper’s eyes were open and bulged out of their sockets, and his tongue filled his gaping mouth. Pinned to Skipper’s collar was a note. All it read were three letters: R.I.P.
“He was poisoned,” Ray’s mother said harshly. “Found him on the porch. Now don’t you start crying. You know I hate crying. What’s done is done. Anyway, it’s your own damned fault. You shouldn’t have let him get out.”
Ray ran into the house and buried his face in his pillow as his mother buried the only friend he had in the world. He cried for the whole rest of the day. Sometime during the night, his mother came into his room and sternly ordered him to stop whining like a little baby and be a man. She smelled of vodka, which was becoming more common in the evenings, and was unsteady on her feet.
After Skipper was gone, Ray’s only friends became his books and magazines. He spent every waking moment scouring the pages of almost any type of literature he could get his hands on, anything to distract him from the painful reality of his daily existence. His favorite books were about aviation, but he loved military books in general and sports stories. When not devouring the printed page, Ray spent hour after hour meticulously constructing model aircraft; working tirelessly to get even the tiniest detail correct. He spent all his paper route money on magazine subscriptions, books, and model airplanes.
As Ray grew older, he became even more reclusive. His books became his friends, family, and lovers. They taught him amazing things and took him to exotic places. His books did not judge. And like his mother’s vodka, they numbed him to the stark reality of his daily life.
His voracious reading had its rewards. Ray excelled in school despite the constant bullying. When he turned sixteen, he got a job at a local electronics store by impressing the manager with his extensive knowledge of hi-fi stereo systems, know-how gained from the pages of countless electronics journals. He brought in extra money repairing appliances and used the additional income to pay for correspondence courses in everything from gun repair to diesel mechanics.
One other consolation Ray allowed himself came, like his other magazine subscriptions, on a weekly basis. But unlike his other magazines, these arrived wrapped in plain brown paper and bore no return address. These magazine he kept stored in a box on the floor of his closet, away from his mother’s prying eyes.
In the solitude of his room, with the help of these special magazines, Ray would turn the pages and enter a world of flesh. A world whose inhabitants were always “turned on” and “wanted it”. Ray knew it was dirty and he should be punished for reading the “filthy” magazines, as his mother used to call them when she found them in his father’s garage, but was locked in a fascination born from his remembrances of Sissy.
In fact, though Ray’s special magazines always featured a menagerie of women of different races and appearances, it was the dark-haired, light-skinned women, like Sissy had been, who gave him the most pleasure. Those and the blond-haired ones, with the innocent eyes, like the little girl at the courthouse.
By the time Ray turned seventeen, he had completed his high school equivalency diploma. He asked his mother for her consent to join the army since he wasn’t yet eighteen years of age. At first, she refused to sign the enlistment papers, until she learned what his income would be. Once she realized how much money Ray would be sending home, she signed in a flash.
A week later, a pale and skinny Raymond Cowell boarded a bus in Oakland, bound for basic training in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. It was the first time Ray had left the San Francisco Bay Area.
Ray was a quiet recruit and endured the rigors of military indoctrination without complaint. He enjoyed basic combat training and was an attentive student. Ever the loner, he eschewed the unity-building camaraderie of the barracks, preferring instead to spend his few free moments rereading his field instruction manuals.
He had enlisted under contract to become an aviation electronics maintenance specialist, a military occupational specialty that would enable him to utilize his already considerable electronics skills, as well as work on the aircraft he had adored all his life. For the first time since childhood, Ray was close to being happy.
But things were not to remain happy for Private First Class Raymond Cowell. Shortly after his eighteenth birthday, and a week prior to graduation at the top of his avionics radar systems class, his military career and all that it promised came to a screeching halt.
By then, Ray had been in the army for almost a full year. He was stationed at Fort Rucker, Alabama, while attending advanced aviation electronics training. He’d made rank quickly and had attracted the attention of several of his senior instructors for his unassuming personality, laser-like focus, and burgeoning electronics skills. As a result, he’d been recommended for assignment to a rotary-wing maintenance unit, highly coveted duty typically not offered to a soldier of his limited tenure. If Ray worked hard, he could be assigned to a helicopter maintenance aircrew. After that, maybe even advancement to warrant officer status and a shot at becoming a crew chief on a helicopter of his own. His boyhood dreams of flight would be realized.
With newfound confidence chipping away at his normally restrained temperament, Ray allowed his fellow graduating classmates to talk him into a night of celebration. The party was to be at one of Enterprise, Alabama’s local nightclubs. It would be a night Ray would never forget.
Ray and his classmates went to a club whose patrons consisted mostly of soldiers from nearby Fort Rucker. The place was loud, raucous, and packed with GIs in various stages of intoxication. The club was also brimming with girls.
Ray had never before consumed an alcoholic beverage. His introduction to the world of liquor was shots of tequila washed down with mugs of beer. And Ray had seldom ever spoken to a member of the opposite sex, much less been on a date. It was therefore both strange and exhilarating to find himself for the first time chugging drink after drink and dancing with girl after girl.
As the evening of revelry progressed, his fellow soldiers took turns staggering outside to the parking lot with a girl, to the leers and cheers of his drunken pals. One of the soldiers had driven the group to the club, and his parked car was serving double duty as a makeshift hotel room. After a few minutes, each soldier and his companion, usually wearing sly grins and adjusting their disheveled clothing, would stagger back into the club, this time to the thunderous applause and lewd comments of the crowd. Suddenly it was Ray’s turn.
By now, Ray had lost track of the number of drinks he’d consumed and was having difficulty focusing his vision. He realized he was about to have sex; something he’d hitherto only read about in magazines.
Leaning against him was a slovenly, dark-haired girl who said her name was Candy. She insisted she was eighteen years old; a claim few believed but nobody disputed. Ray learned that Candy was a regular at the club, and he’d lost track of the number of times she’d dragged him onto the dance floor. As his buddies raised their glasses and cheered, Candy led him out to the parking lot.
A moment later, Ray found himself sitting in the back seat of his classmate’s car, his head swimming and his stomach lurching. His hands felt many times their normal size, and he kept waving them in front of his face in a dazed stupor. Candy, who seemed to hold her liquor far better than Ray, was busy undressing.
Candy removed her bra and lifted her skirt above her waist. She began to undress Ra
y and struggled with the brass buckle of his class A uniform belt.
Ray was disgusted. He knew this was supposed to be fun, and the curiosity he’d built up over the years was about to be answered, but he found himself repelled by what was transpiring. As he watched Candy tugging his pants down, a wave of repulsion swept over him.
Candy wasn’t one of the sleek and silky women from his magazines; she was a short, fat, ugly, drunk girl with a mottled complexion and without even the pretense of femininity. She wasn’t even clean.
What Candy lacked in hygiene she made up for in enthusiasm, and she busied herself doing battle with his trousers. As soon as she had his olive drab boxer shorts down, she pounced. Ray fought the urge to puke as Candy’s superior weight pinned him to the back seat. She reached down between their collective legs to guide him inside her, but let out a gasp when she found him limp.
“What’s wrong with you?” she shrieked in an alcohol-slurred voice. She stared at his shriveled gland. “You some kind of a weirdo? Can’t get it up?”
Ray looked down in dismay at his unresponsive penis. The car was spinning.
“Fucking loser,” she blurted. “Wait till I tell ’em about this. Can’t even get his dick up. Real party animal, that’s what you are.” She started to climb off Ray. “You aren’t a homo, are you?”
Ray bolted upright and smashed his fist directly into Candy’s mouth. Blood sprayed from her lips. Both his hands found Candy’s throat and he lunged forward, pushing her against the front seat.
“Fucking whore!” he screamed as he choked her with all his might. Candy struggled and tried to yell out, but Ray punched her again and again, returning his fists to her throat between strikes.
“Slut! Whore! You fucking whore!” he howled repeatedly. Blood from Candy’s nose and mouth stained his hands. As he alternated between hammering her with his fists and strangling her, Ray noticed that his formerly inert penis was now ramrod straight. He couldn’t remember ever being so aroused. He closed his eyes and saw images of Sissy, back in his father’s garage, as a boy.
Suddenly, the world turned upside down. The car’s doors were wrenched open from the outside, and Ray was roughly grabbed by several pairs of hands. He found himself on the dusty ground of the nightclub parking lot with his pants around his ankles. He sensed a crowd around him and could hear Candy howling hysterically. He tried to stand up but his level of intoxication, combined with the trousers bundled around his feet, hampered him. He struggled to his knees and was just getting his balance, when something hard struck him on the back of the head and the lights went out.
Ray woke up the next morning with the worst headache he’d ever experienced. He was lying on the floor in a cell and covered in his own vomit. The night before was a hazy blur.
It was the end of Ray’s military career. Due to Candy’s level of inebriation, her age, and inability to coherently testify, formal civilian prosecution was not pursued. But the Armed Forces Uniform Code of Military Justice was not as lenient.
Ray was dismissed from the army with a dishonorable discharge. His military career, along with his dream of aviation, was obliterated. A crushed Ray returned home to California.
Back in Alameda, home was no home. Things had only gotten worse in his yearlong absence. His mother, now unemployed and drunk most of the time, followed him around the house, berating him. With no money, Ray had nowhere to go and no choice but to remain and endure it. The seeds of bitterness planted in the child began to flourish in the man.
Once again, his chances for success and happiness were dashed. Destroyed by a whore. A slut. If only he hadn’t gone to the nightclub. If only he hadn’t been drinking. If only the slut hadn’t made fun of him and called him those names. If only things had turned out different.
If only Sissy hadn’t been a slut. And a whore.
If only.
Ray snapped out of his reverie as the object of his vigilance came into view. He tossed his cigarette out the window and put the Mercury into gear as the Saab passed by him on Island Drive. Ray pulled his car out of the empty parking lot and cruised into a position directly behind the convertible. He could see the lone occupant of the Saab clearly as both vehicles crossed over the Bay Farm Island Bridge.
CHAPTER 14
Paige had almost no warning before the impact.
What little warning she did receive arrived in the form of a screeching blue blur that exploded into view from her peripheral vision. In the next instant, she felt a grinding shock and her car skidded out of her control. The Saab completed a full one-hundred-eighty-degree turn before slamming into a signal light at an intersection. Fortunately, Paige was wearing her seatbelt. After the crash, she remained behind the wheel, stunned and shaking cobwebs from her head.
A moment before, she’d been driving to her father’s house from the ruins of her own. She was still clad in her damp exercise clothing, and the collision was an unexpected and unwelcome addition to an already bad day.
Paige unbuckled the seatbelt and began to clamber from her wrecked car. The collapsible fabric top of her convertible sedan had offered no protection against the toppled light pole, which sheared during the impact and now occupied the passenger seat of her crunched vehicle. Had the pole landed a foot or two to the right, Paige would have been crushed.
As Paige reached for her car’s door handle, the door suddenly opened from the outside. Looking up, she saw a man in coveralls and a ski mask looming her. Before her astonished and terrified mind could react, he reached a gloved hand towards her. There was something in it.
Paige started to scream. The man pressed the object, which looked not unlike a handheld transistor radio, against her chest. A split second later, she was on the ground, her brain scrambled and her body convulsing.
The object was a stun gun, specifically, a Nova model XR-5000, available to virtually anyone by mail order. Used by police officers and civilians alike and powered by a nine-volt nickel-cadmium battery, the Nova stun gun sent forty thousand volts of incapacitating electrical energy into its victims. The Nova typically rendered all but the most drug-crazed and determined attackers instantly and temporarily immobile. It worked even better on already-dazed young women.
Paige looked up from the ground. She could see what was transpiring but was frozen, her limbs unresponsive. She saw a blue sedan wedged against her once-pristine Saab convertible, and a pair of work boots directly in front of her face. She realized she was flat on her back and helpless. Stark panic completely overtook her thoughts. She could neither scream nor move.
The ski-masked face leaned down to within an inch of hers. Paige could smell the cigarette odor on the wearer’s breath and recognized the smile behind the mask. She’d seen those nicotine-stained teeth before.
She felt her limbs begin to recover, and tried to move and shout at the same time. The stun gun touched her chest again. When the flashing lights finally cleared, Paige was again on her back and immobile.
“Hi, Paige. Good to see you. Nice tits.”
Paige felt a gloved hand roughly kneading her breasts. She wanted to scream; the hand felt like an insect crawling over her.
“We’re going to have a lot of fun, whore, before I kill you. You’re going to be punished. Come on, slut; we’re going for a ride.”
Paige wanted to close her eyes and block out the horrifying images before her. But her eyes, the only part of her which seemed unaffected by the stun gun, could not look away. With mounting dread, she felt herself being dragged across the pavement toward the open door of his waiting car.
Paige realized she was being abducted. The fear welling within her sparked a superhuman effort to move the lead weights her arms and legs had become. She started to struggle, and again the dual electrodes of the stun gun descended, jolting her into submission. This time, she was barely able to remain conscious.
Her mind shrieked in agony. She prayed for help, for someone to intervene, but knew as silent sobs racked her body that just like yesterday on the be
ach there would be no deliverance.
Suddenly, there came the sound of brakes screeching and a car door opening. She felt the hands dragging her across the pavement release her. She landed on her face, unable to break the fall with her numb hands.
Paige desperately tried to roll over on her back again. She could hear the sounds of a fierce struggle and knew that someone had indeed intervened and come to her aid. On her third try, she was able to roll onto her back and view the events transpiring above her.
Paige could see the man in the coveralls rolling on the ground with another, larger man. It was clear from their sprawling posture that the newcomer had hit her attacker in a flying tackle.
She saw both men scramble to their feet. The newcomer, a muscular Caucasian fellow with blond hair who appeared to be in his mid-twenties, seemed vaguely familiar to her. She tried to yell out a warning about the stun gun, but no sound escaped from her lips.
Paige watched impotently as the ski-masked man’s hand reached out with the stun gun. The other man blocked the blow with his forearm but caught the leads. Paige heard the static buzz sound again, and the man went to one knee from the shock. Her heart sank.
But the big sandy-haired man did not fall. The electrical pulse had obviously shaken him, but he didn’t go down. He shook his head, and as ski mask moved in to zap him again, he punched his adversary directly in the groin.
Ski-mask howled and Paige felt a brief pang of joy. He fell to his knees, both hands over his crotch. The stun gun clattered to the pavement.
It wasn’t over. Both men slowly rose to their feet. The blond man’s face was pale from the charge of the stun gun. She hoped his opponent was hurt as well.
The man in the ski mask tore open the front of his coveralls and reached a gloved hand inside. In response, the blond man went similarly into his own coat. He came out with a large black revolver and fired as ski-mask emerged with a squat black semiautomatic pistol of his own.