IGMS Issue 9 Read online

  I did remember. Hearing this now, I was ashamed that I'd believed her.

  "When was that again?" I asked to mask my discomfort.

  "I don't know exactly. Early summer. After that . . ." She shrugged again and smiled, though it looked more like a grimace. "The hits just kept on coming. A black eye that I blamed on an inadvertent elbow during a basketball game; a swollen jaw that I blamed on my dentist; another bruise on my cheek that I couldn't explain, so I just stayed home for a week until it faded enough that I could cover it over with makeup. I think I pleaded flu on that one.

  "I once did a piece on battered women," she said, looking at me. She took one last pull from the cigarette, dropped it on the linoleum floor, and ground it out with her foot. "Were you at the paper yet?"

  "I don't think so," I said.

  "Maybe not. I remember thinking that their stories were sad, but also a little pitiful, you know? I mean, he's hitting you, so leave him. I might have even said as much to some of them. 'Why don't you just leave?' As if it were that easy. And a few years later, there I was, just like them, trapped in love with a guy who knocked me around every now and then.

  "Women like me -- professionals; strong, bright, educated women -- we're not supposed to be victims of abuse. Turns out that's horse shit."

  I wanted to ask her why she didn't leave him, just as she had asked those women. Because I didn't understand. I couldn't get past what I knew about her. Cassie was beautiful and smart and strong. She should have been able to walk away and make a new life for herself. But I didn't ask her about it. Instead, I kept to the story. "When did you decide to kill him?"

  She cast a hard look my way. "You know that's not how it happened."

  "I know what you said. But I'm still trying to understand. All of us are."

  Cassie reached for the cigarettes and lit up again. She'd once been such a health nut; it was hard to believe this was the same person. But I kept that to myself, too.

  "It got really bad," she finally said, each word emerging from her mouth as a puff of smoke. "He'd gotten his contractor's license not long after we were married, and for a while business was pretty good. Not great, but he was getting by. But then he had a problem with a client -- some rich guy up in the Crescent area. The guy sued and suddenly the rest of Kenny's clientele began to shy away. Pretty soon, he had nothing. No clients, no prospects, no way of paying his crew. I was making enough for both of us, but that just made things worse, you know?

  "He was angry all the time, and he started drinking." She closed her eyes and winced. "God. Listen to me. Somewhere along the way my life turned into a damn soap opera cliché."

  I didn't say anything. I simply watched her, my pencil poised over the paper.

  "One night he came home drunk and was yelling at me before he'd even closed the door. It wasn't just the beatings I was afraid of at this point. For a couple of months I'd been thinking that it was just a matter of time before he killed me. And this was the night. I was sure of it. If I hadn't --" Cassie looked away and lifted the cigarette to her lips. "I would have died that night," she said softly.

  "Instead he did."

  She nodded. "I'm still not sure how I did it. One minute he was coming at me, his fist raised. The next he was on the floor by the table, a gash on his forehead. You wouldn't have believed the blood."

  Actually, I'd seen pictures and I'd been appalled. You always hear that head wounds bleed like mad, but good God. There was blood everywhere. The police investigated it as an accidental death and concluded that Cassie had called 9-1-1 as quickly as anyone could have expected. But Kenny never had a chance. And as to her killing him -- a man that big? The lead detective said it was impossible. The coroner agreed. Case closed, at least for a time.

  "How did you do it, Cassie?"

  "I just told you, I don't know."

  I stared back at her, silent, waiting.

  "It felt . . ." She stopped, shook her head, took another smoke. "You'll think I'm nuts."

  "That would make me stand out in a crowd."

  She looked startled for just an instant. Then she burst out laughing. "Yeah," she said. "Yeah, you have a point."

  "You started to tell me what it felt like."

  Cassie nodded. "Right. It felt like I . . . like I pushed him. But with my mind, you know? I knew what I wanted to do to him. I was scared and angry and sick to death of feeling that way. Of being afraid of the man I was supposed to love. Just once I wanted him to feel what it was like to be weak and helpless. I wanted to hurt him for a change."

  She puffed fiercely on her cigarette. "So it was like I took hold of him somehow. I grabbed him and threw him at the table. Not with my hands, but with my mind." She shook her head. "I know how it sounds, but it's the truth. I was trying to make him hit his head. He . . . he did just what I wanted him to."

  "You mean the way he fell?" I asked.

  "I mean the way he died."

  I wasn't sure what to say. I cleared my throat and Cassie grinned, seeming to enjoy my discomfort.

  I forced myself to meet her gaze. "Then what happened?"

  "Very good, Eric. For a second there I thought you were going to leave."

  I looked down at my pad and realized that I'd stopped taking notes several minutes ago. Not that I was likely to forget any of this.

  "What then?" I asked a second time.

  Cassie shrugged. "I convinced myself that it hadn't happened. I'd never done anything like that before, and I couldn't explain how I'd managed it this time. The cops all said it was an accident, so that's what I told myself. I went back to living my life. I wrote. I slept around."

  I felt my face turn red.

  "Our night together came, what? Two months after Kenny died? Didn't that strike you as odd?"

  "I didn't really think about it," I said.

  She gave a short, harsh laugh. "Right. And afterwards you avoided me like I had the plague. Or was it the clap?" She grinned. "What was the matter, Eric? Wasn't I any good?"

  I felt the panic rising in me again. "That had nothing --"

  "Don't," she said. "It was a joke. That's all."

  I wasn't sure if she was referring to what she had said, or to sleeping with me. She was right, of course. I had avoided her, but only because it had been an incredible night for me and, I was quite certain, far less than that for her.

  "How long after that until you killed the second guy?"

  "All business, huh?" she asked, a crooked smile on her face. She puffed on her cigarette for a few moments. "It was probably six months after I killed Kenny. It was a late night at work and I wasn't ready to go home yet. I went to the Oasis, instead. You know the place? Over on Sixth, near Woodbine."

  I nodded. "Yeah, I know it."

  "I was drinking white wine at the bar. Nothing very good. But I was chatting up the bartender, this pretty college girl, and wondering if I was ready to try taking a woman home for a change. And then I heard them." She shook her head. "It was like being pulled back in time to a part of my life I thought I'd escaped forever. I heard them arguing, I heard the way he was talking to her, and I knew. I just knew that he was beating her. Not there, of course. But at home. He was Kenny. She was me. I knew it.

  "I listened to them, and when they left I followed. I was lucky, I guess. They lived nearby and they covered the distance on foot. They went in and I watched them through a window. And sure enough, as soon as they were inside the house, he started screaming at her and slapping her around. I don't know what he thought she'd done, but he was pretty pissed. She was crying, and she was bleeding from her nose. I could see it all. I could tell that she hated him, that she wanted to be rid of him, just like I'd wanted to be rid of Kenny."

  She'd sucked her cigarette down to the filter and she mashed it out on the table. Immediately she reached for the pack again, but then seemed to reconsider. Eventually she just looked at me.

  "I did it pretty much the same way. He'd smacked her, and she'd flown across the room. She was this tiny
thing -- that asshole must have had a hundred pounds on her. He was stalking her now and she was cowering against the wall next to the television. Before he reached her I pushed, hard this time. I knew what I was doing and I did it good and hard.

  "He hit his head on the set and landed next to her. And then for good measure I made the TV fall on him. For a while she didn't move. She just sat there crying, staring at his body, saying, 'Oh no, oh no,' over and over again. I thought maybe she was upset that he was dead, you know? But pretty soon she pulled herself together and called 9-1-1. Then she got herself a glass of water. I figured she was okay, so I left. I didn't want to be there when the cops showed up."

  "That was when you started going to the bars?"

  Cassie nodded. "At first I wasn't sure why I did it. I mean, I knew what I was listening for, and I guess I knew what I was going to do when I heard it. But it wasn't like I decided, you know, 'Okay, now I'm going to start killing guys who beat their wives and girlfriends.' A part of me just wanted to hear those conversations. In a way it made me feel better. I wasn't the only one, you know? There were all these women out there who were just like me, who were afraid of their Kennys. They just didn't know how to do this . . . this thing that I did."

  She stared at the cigarettes for several seconds before finally giving in and lighting up another.

  "Pretty soon I was noticing other stuff, too," she said, breathing out a haze of smoke. "I could tell when guys were cheating. It didn't matter if they were with their wives or their mistresses, I always knew. After a while I could tell with the women, too. But I left those folks alone -- the men and the women. That was . . ." She shook her head. "I didn't want any part of that; it's just normal relationship stuff, you know? But then there was a night when I saw this guy slip something into his date's drink. Them I followed. And when he tried to rape her, I killed him. I don't even think she noticed that he was dead -- that's how out of it she was."

  "How long was it before the papers started writing about you?"

  "It was the next morning. I had to take a cab to keep up with them, and the cabbie remembered me. His description was way off, but that's when the headlines started. Pretty soon they started putting other things together. People remembered seeing me at several of the bars where I found the guys I killed. Without meaning to, I'd been wearing my hair differently from night to night, so the police sketches weren't very good. But they were looking for me."

  I nodded again. The headlines had been sensational right from the start. "The Avenging Angel," they called her at first. But when that didn't prove lurid enough, they went the other way: "Hell's Fury." From that famous quote: "Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned." That was Cassie.

  "You didn't stop, even after the stories started," I said. "Why?"

  "I wasn't scared. I didn't think anyone could stop me." She took a long pull on the cigarette, her eyes locked on mine. "Do you have any idea what it's like to have the power I have? I can make people do whatever I want. I can kill with a thought. I can . . ." She trailed off. "You don't believe me, do you? You don't believe any of this."

  I wasn't sure what I believed, but in that moment I was terrified, of her, of the anger I saw in her eyes.

  "I just . . . I'm just wondering why, if you can do all these things, you're still here in this jail."

  "Is that all you're wondering, Eric? Aren't you wondering if I ever considered killing you? You bought me drinks, you drove me back to my place, and you screwed me -- twice as I remember it, though that first time didn't amount to much. And then you ignored me. You didn't call, or speak to me, or acknowledge what had happened in any way. After I was arrested -- after you read and heard everything they were saying about me -- you must have wondered."

  She was right about this, too. I did wonder. I was wondering at that very moment. If she really was all she claimed to be, all she appeared to be, then she held my life in her hands. Or in her mind.

  "Yeah," I admitted. "I thought about it. I'm out of my depth here, Cassie. I've never dealt with anything like this before. The things they're saying about you -- the things you're saying about yourself . . . I don't know what's real."

  "Yeah, well, welcome to my world."

  She stared at me for a moment. And then without warning, my chair flipped backwards. My pad and pencil went flying. I crashed onto the floor, the back of my head smacking the linoleum, the air leaving my body in a rush. I lay there for several seconds, trying to breathe and clear my vision.

  "You all right?" Cassie asked, her voice calm and even.

  Before I could answer, the door swung open and one of the guards stepped in. "Everything all right in here?"

  I rolled off of the upended chair and climbed to my feet. "Everything's fine," I said.

  The guard looked at me and then at Cassie, as if trying to decide if we were both crazy. After a few seconds he shook his head and left, pulling the door closed behind him.

  "You didn't have to do that," I said. I rubbed the rising bump on my head.

  "Didn't I? You believe me now, don't you?"

  I nodded, righted the chair, and retrieved my notes and the pencil. Sitting down, I touched the bump again, half-expecting my hand to come away bloody. It didn't.

  "You should put ice on that," she said.

  "Yeah, thanks."

  "Don't be pissed. I needed you to know that I'm not making this up. Now you do."

  I nodded, sullen, embarrassed. My whole body hurt.

  "One of the cops swears that he shot you, says he couldn't have missed. The others say he's nuts. But . . ."

  I stopped, my mouth falling open. Cassie had taken hold of the collar of her shirt and pulled it down so that I could see the top of her left breast. There was a small white crater there, about the size of a penny. It was perfectly round and slightly puckered in the center. I got up and walked around the table so I could take a closer look, all fear of her forgotten for the moment.

  "He did hit you," I whispered.

  Cassie nodded. "It hurt like a sonofabitch, but only for a second."

  "Tell me how it happened."

  "I was at some diner, listening as this older guy tried to pick up my waitress. I stayed to closing time. So did he. He hung around the diner and I pretended to leave. When the waitress came out a while later, he offered to walk her home. One thing led to another, and eventually he forced her into an alley and tried to rape her. I killed him before he could hurt her, but I was still in the alley when the cops showed up. I guess there were two of them -- cops, I mean -- and they entered the alley from opposite ends. I ran from one of them and ended up face to face with the other. I tried to shove him aside . . ."

  I looked at her and she shook her head.

  "Not literally. I used my . . . I did it the same way I knocked you over, the same way I killed Kenny and the others. Anyway, I wasn't quick enough and he managed to get a shot off."

  That was pretty much the story I'd gotten from the cop.

  For months before that episode the press -- mostly the tabloids -- had been writing about the supposed supernatural powers of this "vigilantess" known as Hell's Fury. Not only could she kill with her eyes, but she could make herself invisible. She could fly, and summon the dead to her aid. The police, of course, dismissed all of this as nonsense. She was just another wack-job serial killer who happened to be taking out creeps instead of more respectable folk. Then patrolman Peter Silofsky told his story about shooting her through the heart. After that no one was certain of anything anymore. Not the cops, not the press.

  Even as I stared at that tiny crater on Cassie's chest, I didn't know what to think. I didn't say anything. I just stood there, not believing it, yet not having any choice but to believe it.

  "There's a mark on my back, too," she said, "where the bullet left my body."

  I straightened, then hesitated. "May I?"

  She nodded.

  I stepped around to the back of her chair and as she leaned
forward I lowered the back of her collar so I could see. Sure enough, there it was: larger than the entry wound, less perfect, but still vaguely round. Spidery lines radiated from the scar in every direction so that it resembled a child's drawing of the sun. Given where the bullet had gone in and the path it had taken through her body, I didn't see how it could have missed her heart. I let go of her shirt and backed away from her. After a moment I returned to my chair, happy to have that table between us. I felt queasy, though whether from the smoke or the sight of that wound I couldn't say.

  "You should be dead."

  "I know," she said. "But they can't kill me. No one can. You want to know why I'm in jail? Why I let myself get caught? Why I haven't escaped? Because I'm tired of killing. And I'm tired of being hunted. It was either kill myself, keep going, or get caught."

  "You could have left," I said. "Gone somewhere else and started over again."

  "I don't think so." She smiled, though sadly. "I'm Hell's Fury, remember? Those sketches would have followed me anywhere I went."

  "They didn't look that much like you. Cut your hair, maybe dye it; no one would have recognized you."

  "It's not that easy. Given the chance to kill those bastards again, I'd do it in a heartbeat. Even Kenny. Especially Kenny. I don't feel guilty at all. But that's no way to live. And I would have kept on doing it. I'm sure of that. Once I started hearing those conversations, the violence hidden in those words, I couldn't get away from it. It's everywhere, Eric. What I said about you before . . ." She shook her head. "I didn't mean that. I never for a moment thought about doing anything to you. You're a putz. But you were sweet that night and I don't think you're capable of hurting anyone."

  I kept my mouth shut, sifting through my past, fearing that I'd find something -- anything -- that might prove her wrong.