by David Kersey
CHAPTER FORTY THREE
Charlie Cramer was only moderately happy. Two weeks ago he was happy being Alan Abrams. His first kill went as planned. The first one had to be a man. All the rest would be women, women who had worn the uniform of either American soldiers or domestic police, but the military was far preferable. Last week, when he was Bill Brownley, proved to be also an efficient, clean kill, almost too easy. His first woman. He would change his name in his mind, not on paper, to reflect the number of kills he had planned. There were at present eleven more victims targeted, and by that time he would be Michael Moore, the M being the fourteenth letter of the English alphabet. Every move would be an ordered randomness, just like he had been trained by Uncle Sam for four hated years. If Sam only knew that training would turn on his own citizenry, the no count, good-for-nothing detestable females which he hated more than his own dead mother. He’d never be caught, he was too good. Yet his goal was to be the most notorious and deadly serial killer in U.S. history, so eventually there would be a day of reckoning.
His first victim, the man, turned out to be David Jones. It didn’t matter who the man was, he just needed a portion of the man’s skin, his hair, part of his clothing, and whatever the victim’s wallet contained that could be useful. Abrams, the name he chose for his first kill, waited at the rest station, which was more of a small boat launch than the larger, more secure rest areas on the Alligator Alley, recently renamed to Everglades Parkway to keep the tourists from bouts of anxiety, midway between the Gulf coast and Ft. Lauderdale. At shortly after three a.m. the opportunity became perfect after only two hours of waiting, watching, planning, and discounting earlier arrivals. There was no security at this rest stop, and at this wee hour there were no visitors other than himself. He made sure the man who drove in was travelling alone by inspecting the pickup truck after the driver had left for the men’s room. He waited outside the bathroom for the man to reappear. Abrams passed by him as if he too was going to use the facility, but once parallel with the man he swung his left arm under the man’s chin into a headlock. It was a coordinated move that happened in a split second. With his right hand he plunged the Trail Master San Mai, one of the sharpest blades ever known to man, squarely between the man’s shoulder blades. The nine and a half inch blade entered the man’s heart. The victim was dead before he would have hit the ground, but Abrams caught him under the armpits and drug him to the canal that was less than fifty feet beyond the rear of the building. A canal which usually had a good share of hungry alligators.
Abrams emptied the man’s pockets, which produced a wallet, car keys, pocket knife, loose change, and he removed the cell phone from the holster that hung from the victim’s belt. Dismembering the body was not a challenge. He needed to reduce the guy’s weight in order to lift him over the D.O.T. fence that separated the rest stop from the canal. In ten minutes he had laid aside both severed hands, the man’s head, and both legs just above the knees. He placed one hand, one leg, and the head aside, and also cut out a section of the man’s well-worn flannel shirt and stuffed it into his pocket. The rest of the dead man would become gator bait before the light of day. He threw one of the man’s legs into the canal. It was substantial enough to make a noisy splash that would attract the interest of any gators in close proximity. He swept the beam of his flashlight slowly from west to east along the canal. Two red dots to the east. The red eyes, at least a foot apart, meaning a large alligator, were moving stealthily westward. Abrams chucked the rest of the departed soul, including the torso which was reduced to less than eighty pounds, over the fence. The gator picked up speed. The torso was still too heavy to heave all the way into the water, but even so, the body would not stay on the bank long.
From behind the building he peaked around the corner to make sure there was no pedestrian traffic. There was none. He walked to the parking lot. No new vehicles. He returned to the body parts, decided he didn’t need the leg and threw that into the canal. The torso was already gone. He carried the head and hand to his car and placed them into the Igloo which still had plenty of ice, then used the men’s room to wash off the remnants of David Jones, according to the dead guy’s driver’s license. After slipping on a pair of rubber gloves, he opened the door of Jones’s pickup and drove it over a mile eastward where he parked it on the shoulder of the Alley, which is the extreme southern end of Interstate 75. He walked back to his car in the rest area and only encountered three cars travelling east in the ten minute trek. None stopped to make inquiry. He knew they wouldn’t because he wouldn’t. A potentially dangerous place at four in the morning.
Once in his own vehicle he shut his eyes and mentally replayed the events of the last hour, detail by intricate detail. Satisfied he had left zero evidence he started his car and backtracked eastward, past the abandoned pickup, to U.S. 27, where he turned north for the one hour trip to the Okeechobee lakeside community of Clewiston, the location of Janice Miller, the first female on his list and who would be no longer within a week’s time.