The Girl in the Moon

  So, rather than try to outguess what forensic scientists might be able to find on her shorts, or underwear, or top, or boots, or gun, or knife, everything she had on when she executed Babington went down the hell hole along with his body. Her best protection was to make sure there was never any evidence to be found.

  She sometimes wondered if an archaeologist tens of thousands of years in the future would discover the hell hole and all the remains of predators at the bottom. She could only wonder at what theory they would come up with about what it all meant.

  Angela knelt and went through everything Babington had emptied out of his pockets. She tossed the change down the hole. He had nearly five hundred dollars in his wallet. She pulled the cash out. She couldn’t see the point in throwing away cash. She looked through the photos. There was a picture of a boat, and a photo of a middle-aged woman, presumably his wife.

  “I just did you a big favor, lady.”

  Angela tossed the wallet down the hell hole. She threw his whole four-leaf-clover key ring full of keys down into the darkness. His luck at getting away with the things he did had run out. She stuck her little finger through the key ring with his car keys and remote and set them up on the counter.

  After she had thrown everything of no use or potentially incriminating down the abyss, she took the garden hose off the wall and thoroughly washed down the floor to get rid of any trace of blood. The water was freezing cold on her bare feet. She promised herself that after she was finished she would take a hot shower. She also needed the shower to make sure that any speck of blood or brain tissue was washed out of her hair.

  After winding the hose back up on the reel at the end of the basement, she took a new pair of boots out of the lower cabinet where she kept a dozen pair. She’d used two pair between Owen and then Babington. She made a mental note to order some more. She pulled out a new knife, in its new sheath, and slipped it into the pocket she had already created between the lining and the leather of the right boot.

  Once she had new boots prepared, she took a new Walther P22 out of its box. She tossed the box, with the serial number and the shell inside from the manufacture’s test firing, down the hell hole.

  She loaded one new magazine with ten rounds, the second with nine. They were supposed to hold ten rounds, but she had learned over years of practice that the magazines didn’t always feed reliably with ten rounds. If she was just target-practicing, she might load ten rounds. It gave her practice at clearing random jams. But when her life depended on the reliability of the gun and magazines she carried, she loaded those spare magazines with nine rounds.

  She shoved a magazine loaded with ten rounds into the gun and cycled the slide to chamber a round, leaving nine in the magazine. Having one chambered and nine in the magazine gave her ten rounds the first time around, and nine thereafter if she needed to reload with a fresh magazine to keep firing.

  So far, with the murderers she had killed, she’d never needed a second magazine, but she always carried extras just in case. Her grandfather always told her that you could never have too much ammo.

  Naked, holding new boots loaded with a new knife under her left arm, her holster and a few full magazines in her left hand, and her gun in her right hand with her finger along the side of the slide, she went upstairs to take a shower.

  As she clicked off the basement light and then the living room light switches with the back of her hand, she heard a car drive up.

  Angela froze.

  No one ever drove up uninvited past all the no-trespassing signs. She remembered that she had left the cable down after Babington had driven in, so it was always possible that it wasn’t trouble arriving at her door. It could be some innocent visitor looking for directions.

  Angela didn’t think she could be that lucky.

  She dumped everything she was carrying, except her gun, on the couch. The hall light was still on, but otherwise the place was dark.

  She peeked out the door. The beige, four-door Toyota Camry that she knew all too well was just coming to a stop.

  Angela held the gun behind her back and stepped out onto the porch, naked.

  FORTY-THREE

  All four car doors popped open. The two men on the passenger side stepped out first. In the moonlight she could see that it was Juan and Pedro.

  Angela, gun in hand, was already in a near trance, the same as when she practiced with her grandfather’s target. She had put thousands of rounds into that steel triangle. Tens of thousands of rounds. Hundreds of thousands of rounds. That triangle haunted her dreams.

  An ear-to-ear grin grew on Pedro’s face. “Ah, I see the American whore is naked and eager to—”

  She put a round through the center of his face, stopping him cold.

  The bullet entered through the soft area of that triangle formed by the points between the two eyes and tip of the nose, the triangle her grandfather had told her about when she was younger and had her practice hitting.

  The bullet ricocheted around inside Pedro’s skull, turning his brain to pulp and instantly ceasing all neurological function. He dropped where he stood before he had been able to complete the sentence. The way he went down, it looked as if his bones had dissolved.

  Even as Pedro was still falling, Juan pulled a knife and screamed some sort of battle cry in Spanish that she didn’t understand.

  He charged for the porch. Angela was in no hurry. Her aim had locked on to him. He was that target, wobbling, moving, swaying.

  Angela shot him between the eyes. He fell dead at her feet.

  Even as the sounds of the two shots were still ringing through the night air, and the two men were hitting the ground, the other two men realized they were in trouble and slammed their doors shut. The driver threw it into gear and matted the gas pedal. Wheels spinning, the car reeled around, throwing up a cloud of dust as it raced back down the driveway and into the darkness.

  Angela didn’t shoot at the escaping car. She didn’t think a .22 bullet would penetrate the metal of the car reliably enough to kill the driver. A shot through glass at an angle would deflect a bullet. She doubted that the small-caliber slug would blow out a spinning tire. Shooting at the car would be little more than random shots in the dark. She didn’t like low-probability shots.

  Besides, she didn’t want the shot to be luck. She wanted to look into their eyes when they died. She wanted her face to be the last thing they saw as they knew they were an instant away from death.

  Angela’s immediate urge was to go after the two men, but she was naked. By the time she threw on some clothes and grabbed the keys to her truck, she knew they would be long gone and she would be unlikely to find them. It would be a series of choices—left or right—and in the end they would probably be gone.

  She would find them, and when she did, she would kill them, just as she had promised that night in that filthy room on the greasy moving pad. They were not going to get away. They had come back to kill her. They were not going to give up. Neither was she.

  The most important issue at the moment was the two dead guys in her front yard and the car of the now officially missing Assistant District Attorney John Babington sitting in front of her house.

  She believed that she knew generally where she could find the other two men. She thought they were up to something in the old industrial area, so they weren’t likely to leave town. They weren’t going anywhere for now.

  She had been out to the deserted industrial area many times, looking for them, so far with no luck. But they were still out there, somewhere. She knew they were. The fact that they had just shown up at her door to finish the job they had started that night proved it. She would find them sooner or later. And if they showed up at her house again, all the better.

  Angela squatted down beside the two dead men. Her address was listed everywhere as a box at Mike’s Mail Service. The address of her house was not listed anywhere or easy to find. They had tortured Barry until he told them where she lived. She didn’t blame him for talk
ing. In fact, she wished he had told them what they wanted to know before he had been so badly hurt.

  Anyone was going to talk under torture. Holding out during prolonged torture wasn’t going to accomplish anything, because they would give it up in the end anyway. She knew that well enough.

  Angela found a knife on Pedro. It was inside a sheath tucked down in his pants. It was a serious combat knife. It was big enough to decapitate someone. Other than that, he didn’t have so much as pocket change. No ID, no keys, no nothing. The only thing in his pockets was some lint.

  Juan’s knife was still in his fist where he had fallen on the steps. It was the same kind of combat knife as Pedro’s.

  His fist was still clenched around the handle from that instant when his brain function ceased. A person who died that fast couldn’t even unclench their fist. They couldn’t even pull the trigger if they had a gun in their hand.

  He didn’t have anything in his pockets, either. The only way she knew the men’s names was because they had used them when they had been raping and beating her. They had not expected her to leave that abandoned building alive.

  Neither one looked so smug, now. Since they had both died instantly when the bullets had shut down their brain function, each man’s eyes were open, staring, in death, looking up at her. She smiled back at them.

  Angela knew that moving dead men was damn near impossible, and yet she couldn’t leave them both sprawled in front of her house. She had to do something. She quickly went back inside and retrieved a new plastic shower curtain. She managed to roll Juan onto it, and then she was able to pull him the rest of the way up the steps. Once she got him inside, it was relatively easy to drag him—rolled up in the plastic shower curtain—across the floor to the basement door. There, she rolled him off the shower curtain and let him tumble down the steps. She used the same plastic shower curtain to drag Pedro to the basement doorway and dump him down the steps as well.

  She flicked on the light again and went down to find Pedro’s lifeless corpse sprawled atop Juan. Fortunately, neither man was big. She opened the hatch, then grabbed Pedro’s wrist to drag his body close. Once she had him to the hatch, she rolled him into the hell hole. She did the same with Juan.

  There was a little blood on the shower curtain, but like anything else with evidence on it, it had to go. Rather than let it billow out on the way down and possibly get hung up on something, she folded it up to make a relatively heavy, compact bundle and then threw it in after the men.

  “Two down, two to go,” she said under her breath as she tossed the second gun that day into the hole. She closed the hatch.

  Using a .22 kept the bullets contained within the skulls. That meant a minimal amount of blood. Lots of guys thought big guns were best, but a .357 would blow out the back of the skull and spray blood, bone, and brain matter all over the place. It made a huge mess that left evidence everywhere, and, importantly, the victim was no deader. That was why assassins liked to use a .22.

  But even with only a .22’s small entrance wound, there was still some blood. The shower curtain contained what blood there was as the men were dragged through the house until the bodies were in the basement. The outdoor hose and then rains would wash away what little there was outside.

  Angela again pulled out the hose and washed down the steps and basement floor. By this time, her feet were freezing.

  She still had the problem of what to do with Babington’s car.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Angela went back upstairs and finally took a hot shower. She shivered under the stream of water until it banished the chill. She took special care to wash her hair thoroughly. She dressed in jeans and a longer top to hide the gun she holstered in her waistband.

  Worried about leaving any evidence in Babington’s car, she put on a hoodie and drew the drawstring tight around her face. She wanted to make sure she didn’t leave any of her hairs in his car. She picked up the car keys with a little finger through the key ring. Not wanting to leave any fingerprints, she retrieved a pair of disposable gloves and stuffed them in a pocket.

  She left her phone at home on her nightstand for the same reason Babington didn’t bring his phone. She didn’t want anyone to be able to track its position to where she would leave his car.

  After she locked her front door she pulled on the gloves, opened the car door, and started Babington’s car. She stopped at the entrance to her drive and put the cable back up to make sure no one wandered up her drive.

  It was late in the evening, but not so late that people driving around would be viewed suspiciously. There was no traffic on the road leading away from her house—there rarely was—but once she got into town the traffic started getting heavier. She didn’t want to take the chance of having someone recognize John Babington’s car with her driving it, so she took side streets, rather than four-lane roads where people could pull up beside her at traffic lights.

  Once she reached an upscale motel near downtown, she parked on a side street right around the corner. The parking lot of the motel was likely to have surveillance cameras. She didn’t want to be recorded driving or getting out of Babington’s car. She kept her hood up over her head in case there were any cameras pointed out at the street she intended to walk down just around the corner from the motel after leaving the car.

  She hoped that when the car was eventually found the police would theorize that John Babington had been going to a late-night liaison and parked where his car wouldn’t be seen on the motel’s cameras, and that he was then robbed, taken somewhere else to be murdered, and his body dumped. With the density of the surrounding forests just outside town, that happened occasionally and the bodies were rarely found.

  That was, in fact, what Owen had done. He had dumped his victim’s body like trash. If not for Angela seeing in his eyes what he had done, Carrie Stratton likely would never have been found. Angela might have been born broken—born a freak—but at least she could use that for something good.

  Angela locked Babington’s car with the remote. She peeled off the disposable gloves and put them in the pocket of her jeans along with the car keys. Later, she would toss the keys and gloves down the hell hole.

  She kept her head down, hood up, and started walking.

  When the strip mall finally came into sight, Angela was relieved to see that the lights were still on at Drenovic Tactical. She had ditched the car where she had because that motel was only a mile and a half from Nate’s place. Nate had done a good job teaching her what she needed to know. But now she needed him for something else.

  She pushed back the hood and opened the door. Nate was sitting alone at the desk doing paperwork. He stood in surprise.

  “Angela! What are you doing here at this hour?”

  Angela stuffed her hands in the pockets of the hoodie. “I need a favor.”

  Nate shrugged. “Sure, anything. What do you need?”

  “I need a ride home, if it’s not too much trouble.”

  “No problem. But what are you doing here? Did your truck break down or something?”

  “No, it’s not that. I had a date. The guy turned out to be a real jerk. I didn’t want to do what he had had in mind, so I dumped him. Now I find myself without a ride home. I can walk if it’s too much trouble.”

  A cab would have left records, so that was out. It would be an awfully long walk, so she had been hoping Nate could drive her home. But she had also been prepared to walk if he hadn’t been at work or couldn’t give her a lift.

  Nate opened a drawer and retrieved his car keys. “It’s the least I can do.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He gestured around the empty room. “Business has been slow. Seems like every strip mall has a martial arts school next to a nail salon. Even Malcolm stopped showing up. Teaching you kept my head above water.”

  “I should hope so. You were charging me enough.”

  He smiled. “I was. I hope it was worth it?”

  “It was,” she hastened to add,
along with a smile.

  “I wish you were still taking lessons. It paid some bills.” He held a hand out toward the door. “My car is right outside.”

  Nate didn’t know where she lived, so Angela had to give him directions as they drove out of town and toward her house. When they finally reached her driveway, she had him pull off the road and stop just before the cable. He was surprised to see that she lived outside Milford Falls in such a remote place.

  “Thanks for the ride, Nate. You’re a lifesaver.”

  “Stop seeing jerks and you won’t need rides home.”

  Angela couldn’t help smiling.

  “I’m glad that at least I was able to teach you how to handle trouble if you end up in a bad situation.” Nate gestured at her drive. “How about … I don’t know. How about you show me your place?”

  “It’s been a long day. Maybe some other time.”

  “Oh. Okay. Sure.”

  He seemed deflated. She didn’t want to leave it like that.

  “You know the place I tend bar?”

  “Yea, Barry’s Place.”

  “Well, some guys tortured him and beat him really bad.”

  “My god, that’s terrible. Why would they do that?”

  “I don’t know.” She waved off the question to get back on topic. “He’s in the hospital and right now we don’t know if he’s going to make it.”

  “I’m so sorry to hear that. If they wanted to rob him, why didn’t they just rob him? Why would they torture him?”

  She couldn’t tell him that he was tortured to find out where the driveway was where they were sitting at that moment.

  She couldn’t help feeling guilty about Barry.

  “I don’t know,” she lied again as she ran her finger back and forth over a piece of chrome on the center console. “Listen, Barry is in bad shape. Even if he makes it, it’s going to be quite a while until he is back on his feet. I don’t want him to lose his bar in the meantime. Me and some of the other girls are going to open the bar tomorrow and keep it up and running for him. You know, until he gets better. We’re hoping to get people to come in and support his business.”