Читать книгу I'll Be Watching You - M. William Phelps - Страница 10

I

Outside, the stars in the night sky are a brilliant shade of silver, flashing dimly against a dark plum-purple canvas. A vestibule, really. An inviting end-of-the-summer evening. Cool. But also crisp and refreshing, especially after what has been a long summer of fiery temperatures and stagnant, choking air.

This beautiful night doesn’t seem to have an effect on this one man sitting, watching the Red Sox game on a big-screen television, inside Kenney’s Restaurant and Bar, in downtown Hartford, Connecticut. To him, well, to this man it is just another night—consequently perfect in so many different ways, none of which having much to do with the weather.

Before we get too far, however, you must consider that “he” or “him” are relative terms. There are some who see this man as a predator. Nothing more.

Certainly nothing less.

Yes, when you clear away the residual variations of him being just another middle-aged man sitting at a bar, having a beer, it is a persistent evil inside his soul, behind his eyes, of which he can’t seem to refuse or rid himself. Those thoughts of harming women and rendering them unconscious. Then grabbing their throats.

He cannot stop these random images—no, urges. Of squeezing and killing. Even as he sits calmly and watches a simple baseball game. There they are. Impulses. They come to him in waves.

I’m dying to know what causes this turmoil…inside of me, he once wrote, questioning it all himself.

II

Sitting with his chest against the edge of the bar, he switches his focus from the television—the Red Sox are likely losing, anyway—to her. Staring, he is quite infatuated tonight by her not-so-flawless figure: the bumpy, hourglass curves of her hips, her long legs, velvety dark hair, and large breasts—yes, double Ds, which are, surely, of great importance to him, not to mention a necessary part of his plan and basis for the illicit fantasy.

Although she is a bit rough around the edges, she looks good, all dolled up with dark red lipstick, rosy red cheeks of powdery blush, and a sultry, inviting smile. Tonight, for some reason, he can’t seem to resist or turn away from her. She holds a sort of candid, arresting, magnetic attractiveness, like, say, for example, the urge some of us have to maybe slow down and have a quick peep at a fatal accident on the side of the interstate.

He doesn’t want to look, but he does.

He doesn’t want to give in to his impulses, but he will.

He’s studied her for a few weeks. Even spoken to her. “I’m a maintenance worker in town,” she had told him one night.

“Yeah, OK,” he probably answered, not believing her for a minute.

Analyzing her every move, watching her closely, and getting to know her personally, however, aren’t things he’s done for the sake of love, companionship, or even obsession. He wants nothing to do with her in any of those ways. His motive tonight, so say law enforcement, is clear: she fits perfectly into an assortment of prey he’s collecting, a mold he created while incarcerated from 1988 to 1999.

Tonight she is the Chosen One. She plays a role. Nothing more.

Tonight she is, simply, the Victim.

III

It took him some time to dredge up the nerve to talk to her. Before he had even opened his mouth, he watched as she schmoozed with other patrons, finagled free drinks out of the college kids, and, twisting her hair, prowled the bar for God knows what else. He’s heard stories about her. Even offered her money for sex. With a voice gravelly from nicotine, she made idle chitchat with him one night, likely about the weather and baseball, as if she actually gave a damn about either.

He knows she doesn’t.

But then, truthfully, if we’re being honest, neither does he.

She tries to sit with him on occasion. In public, he shoos her away, same as the homeless he sometimes passes near Bushnell Park on his way into the bar; after all, to his fellow barflies, those sitting next to him night after night, he’s a clean-cut businessman, a well-groomed and well-mannered professional. Yes, a working stiff like the rest of them.

During the day, he’s a “food counselor”—a lavish industry term for a plain old-fashioned salesman—for a frozen-food company with a satellite office in Wethersfield. He travels alone all over the state of Connecticut and the Northeast. It’s been quite a professional drop on the vocational ladder for a man with a bachelor’s degree in business science from Rutgers—someone who had once lived in New Jersey and worked for Hewlett-Packard (HP), traveling all over the country, making 40K a year, when the base annual income for Americans was half that. Indeed, selling boxed meats, frozen pizzas, and vegetables out of your trunk to the middle class of Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts is a slap in the face.

And he knows it.

A job is a job, he might have told someone who cared to ask. To me, in a letter, he writes, I am simply referred to as…a door-to-door meat salesman. Ha! [My company did] not sell frozen foods door-to-door. We made appointments.

As if it actually matters.

He has no friends, perhaps as a result of having an enormous growth erupting from his neck. And never—that anyone who ever knew him could recall—has he kept a girlfriend longer than the time it takes her to figure out how perverted and abnormal he is. And even then, the only girlfriend on record he’s had was later found murdered—stabbed and strangled, her body posed—in her apartment.

But what is an ex-con supposed to do with his life after prison? Where can a convicted felon—a man who has admitted strangling and stabbing a woman to death, and strangling and stabbing another who survived to identify him—go for a job? He is lucky that after he came clean with his boss about his past, the guy hired him anyway.

None of that matters at the moment, though. Right now, he sits and he stares. Thinking about her. Waiting for her to leave.

Yes. Waiting for her to walk out the door so he can follow.

Tonight, he’s decided, it feels right.

Tonight, most definitely, it’s her turn.