Sinnerman (23 page)

Once I’d finished my talk with Gabby, I went back to my car. The slight chill that came with the tail end of August swept past me and reminded me it was almost long sleeve season again. Something moved in the tree next to me, and I halted and pulled my gun from its holster on my hip.

“Is anyone there?” I said.

No reply. Then the noise came again, above me. It shuffled and was restless, like the rustling of the trees in the winter wind. I pointed my gun toward the sky. An owl spread its wings and took flight.

I’d been on edge for weeks, and I needed to remember to take a breath every now and then. Giovanni’s men had my back. I was safe, and everything was going to be alright. I slipped my gun back into its holster and unlocked my car door and got in. I slid my key into the ignition and started the car.

“How touching. Did you tell your sister hi from me?”

It was like time had slowed to a halt. I swung my head around and focused on the needle that was pressed against my neck. It was filled with fluid. One wrong move and it would pierce my skin.

“I’ve waited a long time for this.”

“Me too,” I said, “and I’m not alone.”

“Correction: you weren’t alone. I’ve taken care of the others. It’s just you and me now. Feels good, doesn’t it?”

I didn’t know whether to believe him or not, but since no one had come to save me, I could only assume it was true.

“Why bother hiding yourself under that hat?” I said. “I know who you are, Samuel.”

“It’s Sam, or Sinnerman. Whichever you prefer.”

I closed my eyes and tried to not to lose myself to him. If I could just remain in control of the situation, even though it seemed like I was far from it at the moment, I might be able to save myself.

“Well Sam, you should know your grandmother is in the hospital right now fighting for her life, and that she still cares about you.”

He leaned in close, and I didn’t know whether he was going to stick me or bite me. With each word he uttered from his mouth my neck felt more and more like it was on fire. I wanted to grab my gun, but I couldn’t reach it unless I shifted my body toward the needle. It was too risky—I needed to wait.

“Don’t waste your precious words on a family I no longer have or care about. I’m here to talk about you Sloane Monroe—about us.

Us? Was that his twisted fantasy—not to kill me at all? Had he imagined we could have some sort of life together?

“I’m here, now what?” I said.

“Drive.”

“Where?”

“Let’s take it one street at a time, shall we? Wave goodbye to your sister and then back out and make a right at the stop sign.”

I reversed the car and turned right. Sam made a sound like the ticking of a clock and said, “Shame, shame. Not waving to your own sister. All this time, I thought she meant more to you than that.”

“I left your grandmother out of it, now you extend me the same courtesy,” I said.

“See how much we’re alike Sloane?”

“I’m nothing like you.”

“Oh, but you are. Aren’t you interested in how I know? I’ve watched you. Yes, that’s right. Don’t look so alarmed. At work, at home, out with your friends. I’ve been there, and I know everything. So much more than they know. Do you really think your friends know the real Sloane? Well,” he whispered in my ear, “would it surprise you to find out that they don’t?”

“Why are you so interested in me?” I said.

He inched back from me but remained close and said, “Make a left at the next light.”

“I asked you a question.”

“You’re in no position to make demands, but okay—I’ll bite. At first I was intrigued by the resemblance between you and your sister. Oh…I forgot, no talking about sis. I followed you, I watched you put that board up in your office and then cover it so no one else could see. It was like our little secret. You returned to it time and time again and posted all the things you collected about me: the newspaper articles, the photos, and then the note I wrote you. They were all there on one beautiful board. I became the center of your life—you cared about me like no one else ever had.”

Cared about him? He was more delusional than I thought, and I didn’t know whether to play into his emotions or balk at them. The fear was gone, and my thoughts didn’t center around what was to become of my life anymore. I was angry.

“Don’t want to join the conversation?” he said. “That’s okay; we have plenty of time for that.”

“What did you do to the others?”

“Those men who followed you like lost lambs? I put them to sleep.”

“You didn’t kill them?” I said.

“They are of no interest to me. Why would I bother?”

I felt a sense of relief and hoped he spoke the truth. I didn’t want anyone else to die because of me.

“There is the matter of that boyfriend of yours we’ll have to deal with.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“You’ll have to tell him it’s over so we can be together.”

“I won’t.”

He was in my ear again. “So defiant. So different than the others. I like it!”

And I’d like it if he rotted into the fabric of the deepest depths of hell.

“Take the next left please,” he said.

I may have been showered in darkness, but I knew what part of Park City we were in and the neighborhood. Decklan’s. But Decklan said he hadn’t seen his son for years.

My phone vibrated.

“Who would call at this hour? It’s late, and you need your rest,” he said.

I reached for it.

“You’re not going to get that are you? Pass it back to me. And don’t be foolish or try to be brave or this needle goes all the way in.”

I handed the phone back, and he pressed the flashing green light on my screen.

“Sam Reids here, who am I speaking with?”

Someone responded and Sam said, “Sloane can’t come to the phone right now. What’s that? Oh, it’s you—the soon-to-be ex-boyfriend. We were just talking about you. Tell me, were your ears ringing?”

The noise coming from the other end of the phone grew louder.

“Do not speak to me in that tone,” Sam said, and then a moment later, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to cut this call short. I’m sure you understand. Sloane’s with me now, so you can just go back to your life of petty crime and find someone else.”

Another pause.

“Anger won’t help you. Nothing will. You’ve lost her. Deal with it.”

Inside my head I had a screw this moment. My mind flashed back to a class on self-defense that I’d taken. The instructor said if I was ever abducted the best thing I could do was not to let the abductor reach their final destination and instead to ram the car into another—this was supposedly the best option for survival. There were no cars on the street for me to plummet into so I went with what was available and headed straight for it.

When I woke, one of my wrists was chained to a metal bar on a bed in a room. The other wrist was unrestrained, which confused me. Why would he allow me that small bit of freedom? My plan had failed and no one knew my location, I was sure of it. I looked around. The room was decorated in the same colors and style as my room at home. Even the furniture was the same. The desk had several pictures on it of me with friends, family, and one with Sam. He’d cut out a photo of himself and stuck it next to my head to make it look like we’d posed for the photo together. To say he was out of his mind no longer applied—he was far worse than that.

I lay still on the bed and tried to figure out my next move. Did I even have one? I had no idea how long I’d been out for: an hour, several hours, days?

I heard something. At first it sounded like a wounded dog, but the more I listened the clearer it became. It was a person—a woman, and she was crying.

“Hello,” I whispered. “Can you hear me?”

Silence. And then more whimpering.

“Who’s out there?”

After another pause the voice said, “Who are you?”

“My name is Sloane. What’s yours?”

“Angela.”

“How long have you been here?” I said.

“I—I don’t know. I just want to go home.”

“I’m going to do everything I can to make that happen.”

“You can’t. He’s going to kill both of us.”

“Angela, listen to me. I need you to tell me what you can see.”

“I can’t.”

“Yes you can. Just try. Anything you can tell me will help.”

“No I mean I really can’t. There’s a blindfold over my eyes.”

A door opened and footsteps descended the stairs.

“Be quiet,” Angela said. “Don’t speak to him or he’ll cut you—he doesn’t like it when we talk.”

Finally that part of the puzzle came together and I knew why some of the women had cuts on their legs. Maybe one gash for each time they spoke as a way to silence them. I didn’t care—I wasn’t about to keep my trap shut.

Sam walked into the room and sat at a desk across from me.

“Sorry about the handcuffs,” he said. “Or should I say cuff. I didn’t want to restrain you like that, but we need to have some kind of understanding.”

“Like what?”

“No more running cars into trees and trying to hurt yourself. I need to be able to trust you.”

I couldn’t believe he thought I was trying to hurt myself.

“Why is the room decorated like this?”

“It’s our room, Sloane. Don’t you like it?” he said.

Every time he said my name I wanted to projectile vomit all over him.

“I’ll admit, at first when I followed you I was just going to kill you. But over time I developed feelings. I wouldn’t say love—what is love, really? And what do people mean when they say they’re in love. Do they even know what that is? What we have is more real than any kind of simple love. We admire each other. Me from afar watching you, and you stopping at nothing to find me. I’m meant to have you. Wouldn’t you agree?”

At some point his fantasies convinced him that we shared the same obsessions.

“You’re insane if you think any type of love exists between us,” I said.

His voice elevated.

“You have a naughty mouth, and you need to get control of what comes out of it or I’ll have to cover it up, and then you won’t be able to talk at all. Don’t you treat me like you don’t want to be here after all I’ve done for you—for us.”

I wanted to fight, to tell him how much he reviled me—but I knew I’d said too much already.

“Tell me about my sister,” I said.

“Now you want to talk about her?”

“You were the last one to see her alive. When she spoke her last words, only you were there to hear them. You stripped me of the chance to have that experience for myself.”

“Alright then,” he said. “I can do that.”

There was one thing Sam didn’t know about me. I had small hands and even smaller wrists, and he hadn’t put the cuffs on tight. While he blabbed on, I twisted and turned my wrist. I didn’t care if I broke every bone in my body—one way or another, I would free myself.

Sam continued, “Your sister as you know was the last of my first victims, and that’s why she had to be the most beautiful. And she was—spectacular, just like you. I met her at the gas station. She asked if she could bum a cigarette from me. And I told her I didn’t smoke, but I went in the store and bought her a pack, and she was so thrilled she didn’t think twice when I asked her to come over to my car so I could give her a light. You two may look alike, but she’s doesn’t have half the brain that you possess.” He shook his head. “No sir. She pleaded and begged, and even when I cut her, she wouldn’t stop the constant jabbering.”

I felt my left eye go moist—I wanted to keep control of my emotions, but his callous words were too much.

“Wow,” he said. “Fascinating. Most girls cry for themselves, for their own lives and they’d do anything to spare it. Not you though. You shed a single tear, and it’s from someone who’s not even alive.”

“I don’t want to hear anymore.”

“Even if she mentioned you?”

“What?”

“Just before I squeezed her life away she said she was sorry about how things ended when you last talked to each other.” He laughed. “Course she was talking to herself, but even so, I suppose that means something to you.”

It meant everything. The last time I saw Gabby I was angry with her because she’d decided to marry a man she barely knew and didn’t know anything about. I’d thought about that conversation over and over in my mind—if only I could have taken it all back.

“Why don’t you let the girl in the next room go?” I said. “She doesn’t deserve to be here.”

“I’m offended by that, Sloane. I got her for you.”

“I don’t understand?”

“It took me months to find someone who looked like your best girlfriend…Madison, is it? But finally I did, and now you’ll have no reason to leave. You have me and you have your friend and you’ll stay with me. And we’ll be here together forever.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” I said. “This isn’t some silly little game; you can’t keep me here.”

“Of course I can.”

“I’m not your mother, Sam. You can’t create a world like this and think it’s perfect and expect me to live in it with you. You can’t keep me here against my will. Nothing you ever say to me will ever justify you killing innocent women, you son of a bitch.”

Sam bolted out of the chair and grabbed the framed photographs and threw them into a trash can next to the door. He faced me and balled his hands into fists and whacked both sides of his head with them.

“I hate you! Do you hear me? I wish you were dead! You were supposed to stay here and be with me and not leave. Why can’t you do that? You don’t care about anyone but yourself. You want to hurt me, and you want to leave me. Why? I did everything for you. I just wanted you to be happy, but you couldn’t be that way with me, and that’s why you went away. You left me.”

He wasn’t talking to me now. He was talking through me. He’d tapped into all his suppressed emotions and channeled someone else.

Sam crunched his fingers inward and reached for my neck. I broke free of the cuff that held me and swung at his head as hard as I could. He flew backward and crashed into the wall. I ran out of the room and into the next and slammed and locked the door behind me. Angela lay still on the bed. Tears stained her cheeks. At least fifteen rows of gashes lined her legs which made me wonder how long he’d kept her. I removed the blindfold, but I couldn’t free her from the cuffs on her wrists and ankles.