Angela shrugged. “Sure, no problem.”
Mike pulled the box from under the counter. It was long and light. She thought it might be long-stemmed roses.
When she saw the address, she immediately understood why the courier couldn’t find the place. It was in the industrial area where most of the abandoned factories were located. The area was a maze of streets, alleys, vast concrete expanses, buildings, loading docks, and train tracks with sidings beside old factories, as well as fenced areas guarding corroded, outdated factory equipment and heavy machinery parts slowly rusting away.
Many of the buildings had collapsed roofs, leaving only standing walls. Several of the buildings were still in good enough shape to be used for things like equipment storage. A few offered small office or business space. Those office areas were dingy and crude, but they were cheap and used only occasionally by the people who stored equipment there long-term.
Even though a few of the buildings were occasionally still used, Angela had never seen anyone in the area.
Because the old industrial tract was a labyrinth of derelict buildings, the addresses were confusing and for the most part missing. None of it was accurately located on any GPS. You just about had to be familiar with the abandoned area to find anything. The city didn’t care to spend money maintaining what was, in essence, a ghost town, so street signs were rare. She suspected they were stolen for souvenirs or for decorations in teenagers’ bedrooms.
Her grandparents had often taken Angela with them on a Sunday drive. Usually those rides went through the countryside, to be followed with getting an ice cream cone, but on occasion her grandfather would take them through the old industrial area, pointing out factories he had helped build. More than once Angela had listened to his stories of where a man had once died, hit by a girder swinging past him, and where another man had a heart attack and fell into freshly poured concrete footings, and where a fight had broken out over a dice game and one of the men had been stabbed to death.
“The guy left this as well,” Mike said. He laid two twenties and a ten on top of the long package. “He said this should cover it for finishing the delivery. He was insistent that it was supposed to be delivered quickly. He said he was a small one-man service, and his income depended on his reputation remaining good. I told him I had the right courier.”
Angela was much the same way—her courier business was built on good word of mouth. She gave the ten to Mike for handling the job. Paying him a commission kept him using her messenger service when he needed one.
“Thanks Mike. Catch you the next time.”
Once in her truck with the package, Angela pulled out an old map of Milford Falls that her grandfather had given her. She studied the map, trying to figure out where the address for Hartland Irrigation would be. She had a pretty good idea and the map confirmed her initial thought.
When she reached the old industrial area, rolling along among the abandoned factory buildings, she didn’t see any people or cars. There weren’t any new business in Milford Falls looking for factory space, so there was nothing keeping the industrial area from continuing its slow decay.
She recognized one of the businesses she passed. The space was rented by an old guy who welded together pieces of junk steel he scavenged from the abandoned buildings. He created fanciful animals out of the junk and sold the pieces at art fairs. The building he was in was perfect for that sort of thing—concrete, steel, and brick. Nothing to burn down with his torch and no one to interrupt him as he worked. But he was getting old and in ill health, so he was rarely there anymore.
Angela passed a building with rows of high windows divided up into small squares. Most of the glass had long ago been broken out. She recognized the place.
When she had first encountered the man who killed the red-haired girl, she had seen that particular building in the vision she’d had. That was the first time she had recognized that a man was a killer by looking into his eyes. He was also the first man she had killed. She had sent that killer down the hell hole after she’d made him confess every detail of what he’d done in order to confirm her vision.
As she drove past, she saw the cistern where that killer had put the body. It was sad to see such a place, and to know that the body of an innocent victim had surely rotted away down in the lonely, dark, wet hole long before Angela had encountered her killer.
Angela drove on among the buildings, looking for Hartland Irrigation. She didn’t see signs for it anywhere. That was hardly unusual. The place being so isolated and desolate was also probably why the sender didn’t mail the package, or send it by UPS, and instead sent it by courier.
Many of the buildings were covered with graffiti. Taggers, like the rats, came out at night. It was a sketchy area. Fortunately, she always carried a gun in the center console of her truck. But the graffiti was old. There was no one to see their work, so the taggers had moved back to bridges, walls, and businesses in town.
She at last spotted the address painted on a lonely, dented, tan steel door. There were no windows, and there was no name to go with the address. There was an older, beige, four-door Toyota Camry parked by the door. Out of habit when she delivered packages in rough areas she committed the license plate number to memory.
The black paint of the address did look somewhat fresh compared to all the other peeling paint. She parked next to the Camry and hopped out of her truck.
When she pounded on the metal door, she heard someone inside yell to come in. The door scraped on buckled concrete when she pulled it open. Inside was a small room without a ceiling or furniture, lit only by the high skylights and windows in the open area beyond. Long chains on geared rollers hung down to tilt the windows open at the top.
No one was in the small room. Voices echoed from out back.
Angela went through the opening in the front room, into the vast area of the old factory floor. Gray metal shelves stood to the right, sectioning off a smaller area from the open factory building beyond. To the left was another room.
There were several stained folding tables in front of the shelves. Old, dirty blankets covered lumpy shapes on the tables. She noticed that items on the shelves were also covered in ratty old blankets or greasy moving pads. Other than a few small work lights clamped to the tables, most of the light came from the high windows on the far wall. Dilapidated wooden rolling chairs were pushed up to the tables with the lights. It was a dingy work area for whatever Hartland Irrigation did.
Not far beyond the shelves there were several types of milling machines and a pair of red gas-powered generators to run them and the minimal lighting.
“Hello!” Angela called into the empty factory. “I have a delivery.” Her voice echoed back from the darkness.
A man in work overalls rushed out from the room to the left, wiping his hands with a filthy rag.
Angela recognized him.
Three other men followed him out of the room.
She recognized all four men. They were the four Hispanic men she had waited on at the bar the night Owen had come in.
“A delivery, yes, thank you, come in,” one of them said in a heavy accent. He gestured with a hand, inviting her in closer.
As the other three came forward she got a good look at their eyes for the first time. It had been dark in the bar and the rotating ceiling light made it difficult to see anyone’s eyes unless they were close, the way Owen had been.
After Angela learned that she could recognize killers by looking at their eyes, she came to learn to recognize a range of threat in the eyes of people who hadn’t yet committed murder.
Frankie’s eyes had been like that. Not a killer’s, but something close. Boska’s eyes had been even worse. They were the eyes of someone extremely dangerous, someone with a violent temper, someone who would hurt you, even though he had not yet killed anyone.
Both Frankie and Boska had the eyes of men who could at some point easily cross that line into murder.
The eyes of these four men wer
e like that. Cunning. Calculating. Cruel.
Boska had a certain cast to his eyes when he wanted her. A look of focused lust. A look of commitment to getting what he wanted. It was a look that made the hair on the back of her neck stand on end and paralyzed her with fear.
These four men had that look in their eyes.
Mole-face moved off behind her and into the front room.
She heard the dead bolt on the front door click home.
Angela was a rabbit in the center of a pack of rabid dogs.
TWENTY-TWO
The man with the rag finished wiping his hands and tossed it on a table.
“You have something for us, no? Something for Hartland Irrigation?”
“That’s right,” Angela said, trying sound official. She wanted to give them the package and be gone.
He put his fingers to his chest. “I am Emilio. Here, come put your package on the table.” He held his hand out toward the table beside him.
Angela couldn’t imagine anyone sending long-stemmed roses to these men, so she knew the package had to contain something else. At the moment, that was the least of her concerns. She tossed the long package on the table.
“There you go.” She backed away. “Thank you.”
“No no,” Emilio said, waving a hand back and forth, “wait for us to see if everything is … is …” He turned to one of the other two. “Que es la palabra?”
“No damaged,” one of them said.
“Yes, that is the words.” Emilio turned back to her with a smile. “No damaged. We will see first if the things inside is no damaged.”
“I’m running late,” Angela said as she continued backing away. She gestured to the package. “There is no damage to the outside of the box. I’m not responsible for what’s inside or how it was packed. If there is any damage inside you will have to notify the shipper.”
“The shipper!” Emilio said, looking at the others briefly.
His gaze returned to glide down her bare legs.
When his eyes turned up, he gave her a sly smile. “But they are very, very far away, so let us first see that there is no damage inside.”
She could sense Mole-face up close behind her, making sure that she didn’t try to leave. She could smell him—a combination of some chemical smell and stale body odor. She didn’t let herself turn to look at him. She wanted to break and run for the door, but she knew that he was waiting for her to try that. She also knew that he had locked the door, so it would take her precious seconds to unlatch the dead bolt.
Emilio pulled a big combat knife from a sheath under his waistband and slowly ran the blade down the length of the box. He returned the knife to its sheath and lifted the flaps of the box to look inside. He pulled out a folded piece of paper along with a long plastic tube, hardly thicker than his thumb. Inside the tube was what looked to be a long, folded, very thin wire with a red cap at one end. After inspecting it, he put it back in the box with the others and then set the box on the table.
He then unfolded a piece of paper and read it in silence, his smile widening as he reached the end. He showed it to the men to either side, pointing out something.
“Miguel, I think you should see this,” he said to Mole-face standing behind her. “These are orders from Rafael.”
Emilio stepped forward to give Miguel the paper. It gave him the chance to move in close in front of her. Closer than she liked. She was sandwiched between the two men.
Angela glanced around, looking for another way out. The front door wasn’t a good option because it was locked with a dead bolt. She didn’t like the odds of four against one, and decided that if it came down to it, her best option would to make a break for the empty factory floor. She was sure that out in the open she could run faster than these men, giving her time to try to find another way out.
She was acutely aware that her gun was out in the truck. A gun would even the odds, but carrying a concealed weapon was illegal, so she always had to leave it in her truck. Lot of good it did her there. With the door bolted, and these four close to her, there was not going to be any way for her to get to the gun if she ended up needing it.
A sickening sense of dread washed through her. Her knees felt weak. A voice in her head screamed for her to break and run, but she knew that predators were driven to chase prey when it ran. If she ran and didn’t find a way out, she would be trapped. Still, against four men, running was her best option.
With no time to waste, Angela suddenly bolted for the space between the men. She elbowed one of them aside as she made a mad dash toward the opening between the standing shelves.
Mole-face yelled to the others, “Agarrala! Agarrala!”
Everything seemed to move in slow motion, her legs feeling as if they were mired in molasses. As Angela knocked one man aside, two of the other men blocked her escape route. They each seized an arm before she could go for her knife as a third man, the one she had elbowed out of the way, swept an arm in around her waist from behind. With three men holding her there was no way for her to run or fight. She tried but couldn’t break their hold on her arms. The man with his arm around her waist snatched her hair in his other fist. Panting in fury, she tried to twist out of his grip around her, but he was too strong.
She kicked at them, trying to get them to let go. They danced around with her, avoiding her heels as she kicked. She squirmed and fought as they all tightened their grips on her, controlling her arms. As Miguel put his hands around her throat, she tried to use her head to smash his face, but the one holding her hair pulled her head back, preventing her from striking.
When one of them adjusted his grip on her arms, she landed a kick in the kidneys of the man to the other side. He immediately punched her in the gut to take some of the fight out of her. It worked. Besides struggling to get away, she now had to struggle to get her breath.
Angela didn’t know if they had a plan to begin with, but when they saw her—recognized her from the bar—and realized she was alone and vulnerable, they saw their opportunity to take something they all wanted.
“Hold her tight,” Miguel shouted as he went to a shelf and pulled down a grease-covered moving pad. He threw it on the floor.
He came up in front of her and put his face close to hers. He grinned. “I felt your leg before, remember? In the bar. I liked what I felt. I told my friends how good it felt. Now I am going to feel much more.”
Angela’s fear at what these men were going to do to her made her struggle frantically to get away. She tried with all her strength to break their hold on her arms. Not having the use of her arms only increased her sense of helplessness. She tried to kick Miguel. The men to each side locked a leg around one of hers, preventing her from kicking. Miguel slapped her hard across the face. The three men holding her had her completely locked down and unable to fight back.
Miguel sneered as he hit her again as if out of some deep-seated contempt.
He leaned in to whisper in her ear. “You are all the same. American women think they should have a say, but in the eyes of God you are all Satan’s whores. Women are dirt in His eyes, and the eyes of all devout men.”
Angela wasn’t sure what he was talking about, but it fit her first impression of these men when she had seen them in the bar. By the look in their eyes now she could see that they all shared some sort of fundamental disapproval of her, of her way of life. They were all somehow viscerally offended by her, and yet they were also sexually aroused by her.
Miguel unbuttoned her shorts and then slowly unzipped them. He sank down before her, pulling her shorts and panties down her legs as he went. Angela gritted her teeth as she growled in rage.
With the way the others were holding her, there was nothing she could do to stop him. He pulled her shorts and underwear off over one boot, then did the same to get them off her other leg. He threw her shorts and panties to the side.
Angela could feel her face going red with rage as well as humiliation.
Mole-face, still down on his knee
s, leaned in and kissed her belly. “It would be good for you to be with my baby, but you will not live long enough for that to happen.” He reached up and pushed her top up over her breasts. “Yes, you could be a good mother to feed my baby.” He squeezed a breast. “One day all American whores will have our babies to man our great armies.”
Angela strained and twisted, trying to get away, but it was hopeless. Even one of these men was stronger than she was. Four were easily able to control her. She was furious at her own helplessness, at her own inability to do anything to defend herself.
Even though she intellectually realized she would not be able to stop these men or get away from them, her fear and panic kept her struggling as hard as possible. She’d had enough visions from killers to know how this was going to end.
Miguel slid his hand up between her legs as he stood. He let out a moan of satisfaction at what he felt.
Angela gritted her teeth. “You are all going to die.”
Miguel, with his finger up inside her, smiled. “Really? And how are we to die?”
“I’m going to kill every fucking one of you, that’s how. You have my word on that.”
“I think we are the ones to do the fucking, no?”
The other three laughed.
Miguel punched her in stomach for her insolence. It bent her face down. His fist came up into her face. He called her an American whore and hit her in the middle again for good measure. It knocked the wind out of her. The pain was staggering. She gasped, trying to get her breath. She thought she might vomit.
He pointed at the moving pad on the floor. “Put her there,” he told the others. “Hold her legs. We will show her a woman’s proper place as a servant for men.”
When they got her down on the ground, two of the men pulled her legs apart while a third held her arms up over her head with her wrists held tightly together. The man holding her wrists punched her in the face, apparently to make her stop struggling. When she twisted again, he hit her again, but harder. It made her vision start to go dark. He grew angry and kept hitting her face as hard as he could. Grunting with the effort.