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Jennifer's Murderer

Chapter Seven

When Jennifer left the apartment and closed the door behind her, Wanda flopped down in front of the television and floated in a warm and serene universe, wishing that she, too, was young and beautiful again. It seemed like only yesterday that she had been seventeen or whatever uncertain age Jennifer was with all the world lying at her doorstep. Year by year, the world had revealed itself to her as a landfill of corrupt human flesh, not fit for anyone’s doorstep. Her place within that tainted world had shrunk so much that it barely encompassed the need to find a healthy vein for the needle she had been using for the past week.

She sensed that something terrible had happened to bring Jennifer crashing into her apartment in the middle of the night. She told herself that she would have only burdened the younger girl in her flight to safety, but she had feared separating herself from the only dependable source of the drugs she needed to survive.

She’d be safe enough left behind. Who’d bother with her? At thirty-five years of age, men weren’t paying her the attention they had in earlier years. Not that she minded. The hassle of Miss Peugeot’s high-class lifestyle had taken its toll. It was so much easier to dish it out to slower traffic at fifty bucks a pop from her own apartment. Even the candy man made house calls in the hood.

If she was in any danger herself, it hardly mattered. Pain was tolerable. Pain had been an intimate part of her life for as far back as she could remember, the cold of an unheated flat in the winter, or the impact of a fist against the side of her face, delivered by her father, a drunk john, or a pissed cop. She had tolerance for pain, but none for fear, and fear had crept into every corner of her world, the creeping-type horror like in the movies where a fly with a human head shrieks for help, caught in the web of a large black spider. That would be her fate in life the day she became too old and ugly for anyone at all to bother with at all, johns and cops alike, unloved and unworthy of love, or even of pain. She would become that human fly, misshapen and easy prey for anyone out for a cheap thrill. She had already decided to overdose before that happened.

The tap at the door snapped her back from her foggy ruminations. “Hold your horses!” she called out, climbed back to her feet with a groan, and shuffled her way to the front entrance. Important people knocked at her door from time to time. Men with cash and drugs. Miss Piggy would never approve.

This particular visitor had silver hair and dark eyes. He had a nice smile, and with a faint European accent he said hello to her.

“It’s late,” Wanda said, suspicious of visitors so late at night. “What do you want?”

His smile was infectiously innocent, but he stepped close and forced her to back away from the door. Only when he filled her field of vision did she notice how pale he was, and the beads of sweat running off his forehead. His eyes were bright with maniacal fury. “Who was the kid?” he said, keeping his voice low. “Where’d she go?”

Wanda knew better than to volunteer information to a stranger, regardless of how high she was. “What kid?” she muttered in reply.

“Evelyn Haxx and I had a date tonight. The young one must have followed her. I caught her snooping inside my house.”

“She’s just a kid at that,” Wanda said cautiously. She understood now that he was speaking of Jennifer. “She’s not usually a problem.”

“She was a problem tonight. Where did she go?”

“Talk to Francis about it,” Wanda said in a monotone, dimly hoping he’d take no for an answer and leave.

The man chuckled. “I’d like to catch up with her tonight, if at all possible. We have a misunderstanding to clear up.”

Wanda kept retreating from the advancing man until she backed against the far wall. She wet her lips with the tip of her tongue, trying to sort out the nature of the crisis through her warm fuzzies. Evelyn wouldn’t have let a client deal with a problem himself, and Wanda had never known Jennifer to cause trouble. Therefore, her visitor spelled serious trouble all by his lonesome.

“If you had a date with Evelyn, call Evelyn,” Wanda said, certain that Evelyn would never have dated the likes of this man.

The man’s voice hardened. “I haven’t got much time. You know what I want. Where’s the girl?”

Some of her old discipline came to her rescue. “Francis handles complaints. It ain’t my department.”

She heard the snick of the switchblade the same instant his right hand caught her across the throat and slammed her head against the wall. She felt the blade sting her skin just below her navel. “Again,” he said through an unwavering smile. “Where’d she go?”

Wanda spat out the address through the pressure choking her, through her mortal terror. Afterward, she thought that she should have lied and fed him useless information, except that he’d come back and hurt her out of spite.

“That was a good girl.”

“You bastard,” she managed to spit at him through the pressure against her windpipe.

“The only thing I need from you now is for you to keep your mouth shut, and I know just how to arrange that.”

He drew the point of the blade higher, pausing just below her sternum. She didn’t think that he meant to hurt her, because his expression smoothed over so peacefully.

“If only you understood the pleasure of it all,” he whispered, and the knife plunged so deep that she felt the pressure of his fist against her skin and nothing of the blade itself, at least not for an instant.

The universe exploded in a primal fireball of pain and light. It was like the time she had dropped her hair dryer into the bathtub, a moment of violent chaos and then blackness descending like a protective cloak. That time, she had fallen out of the tub and saved herself. This time, nothing stopped the darkness.

She felt momentary concern for poor little Jennifer. Within fractions of a second, she had no surviving memory of Jennifer, none even for her own existence. The cloak of darkness evaporated into nothingness.

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