She swiped her hair back off her face, then jerked on the rope, checking the knot. She was drenched in blood. It dripped from her hair, looking in real life like the way she had dyed it that morning.
She didn’t want to get in the cab of her pickup and get blood smeared all over the inside, so after retrieving her knife off the floor of the truck, she walked back up the path to a spot where the stream was close.
After the violence of unleashing her rage on Owen, it was a wonderful, peaceful walk in the faintly moonlit woods. Owen was dead. The world was rid of a killer.
Angela sat on a rounded rock in the small stream and cleaned her knife in the running water before slipping it back into the sheath in her boot. She splashed water over the laces, rinsing blood out of the crevices in the leather. The suede boots would never be the same after getting drenched this way, but she didn’t care.
Angela lay down on her back in the stream, letting the cold water wash over her hot flesh. Despite how cold the water was, she lay in the running stream for a time, staring up at the glow of the moon through the fog.
It was a wonder the way she couldn’t see very far ahead when driving through the fog, but when she looked straight up through the blanketing layer of it, she could see all the way to the moon.
She rolled over several times to wash off the blood as best she could. It was dripping from the tips of her hair, so she washed her hair in the running water and scrubbed blood from her face.
It took a while in the cold water but she did a pretty good job of getting the blood off her. Most of it even washed out of her shorts and top. She regretted that. Having his hot blood all over her had been an intoxicating rush.
Being covered in the blood of a monster like Owen was the only time Angela truly felt alive.
Once she was washed as clean as she was going to get in a stream, she returned to her truck and backed out of the turnoff. She spun the steering wheel as she reached the road and backed onto the bridge, parking at an angle in the middle with the tailgate protruding over one of the steel girders.
When she went around to the back of the truck, Owen was, of course, no more than a fresh corpse. Even though it was over, she was still filled with rage. She would need that anger for the final effort.
She tied the rope to the steel guardrail and then hopped up in the bed of the truck. Thick blood sloshed out the end of the bed when her movement rocked the truck. She stood over the slain monster, still seeing visions of the things he had done to Carrie and the other women, and reveled in his agonizing death. She only wished she could have made his end last a lot longer.
Angela let the thoughts of him enjoying torturing and killing innocent women fill her with rage. That rage powered her muscles to help with the last bit of it.
Owen was a big man, making him a lot of dead weight. Freshly dead people were heavy and extremely difficult to handle. She wasn’t anywhere near strong enough to lift their weight. Even dragging them for more than a very short distance was almost impossible. She had learned that she needed to kill people where she meant to leave their body, because she wasn’t going to be able to move them very far once they were dead.
All the slippery blood in the bed of the truck made it somewhat easier to slide Owen to the end of the bed. She tugged until she was able to spin him around so that his head stuck off the tailgate.
She put her boot against his ass and with one mighty, final push, slid him off the tailgate. Owen nosedived out over the bridge.
Angela stood on the tailgate, holding a steel girder for support, as she leaned out and watched him tumble through the murky, moonlit darkness. The rope snapped taut, but held. Owen flopped and bungeed up and down a bit on the end of that rope, arms flailing outward like a brawny ballerina’s as he spun and twisted, until he finally settled down to dangle by one ankle at the end of the rope.
His body swung back and forth slightly over the highway below. The rope wasn’t long enough that a car could hit him, but there would be no missing him hanging there, one leg flopped awkwardly out to the side, his genitals dangling through his open zipper, his arms dangling out and down, his knife stuck in his back, a human sign confessing his guilt and telling people where he had dumped Carrie’s body.
Angela had gotten blood all over her hands pushing Owen around and on her boots from walking around in his blood, so she went to a puddle at the side of the road and stood in it to wash her boots clean as she squatted down and cleaned the blood off her hands.
She shook her hands dry as best she could before getting up into the cab of her truck. Her shorts and top were soaking wet, but at least it was only water and not Owen’s blood she was getting all over the upholstery.
When she turned the key the powerful engine roared to life.
She felt powerful, too.
EIGHT
By the time Angela reached the turnoff onto the long, winding drive up to her cabin back in the mountains, the truck’s heater had gotten her warm and mostly dry. There was a gap for her drive in the substantial barbed-wire fence along the road.
The barbed-wire fence, with no-trespassing signs posted at regular intervals, was intended to keep people out, rather than keep anything in. A determined person could, of course, use a wire cutter to cut through the fence. The height of the fence was meant to be a statement that the signs meant business.
Angela put the truck in park at the opening through the fence, unlocked the padlock, and dropped the cable with a sign that had a white skull and crossbones against a black background above the words “NO TRESPASSING.” It was a sign not easily missed, and its serious appearance was not frivolous. Once she drove in, she parked again and pulled the cable back across the opening, locking it with the padlock. Angela didn’t like visitors any more than her grandparents had.
A half mile up the winding one-lane drive past a meadow and then back into thick forest, the brick cabin came into view. It was tucked into pines growing in the craggy rock that began ascending behind and to each side. The small, hunkered-down building looked sinister in the pale, foggy moonlight. She liked it looking sinister.
Most locals were afraid of the place. Trespassers had, in the past, tended to have “accidents.”
Built by her grandparents, Vito and Gabriella Constantine, the place wasn’t the usual backcountry cabin. Most of those were little more than wooden or log hunting shacks deep in the woods. But hunting was not allowed in the preserve around the property, and her grandparents had long ago posted no-hunting signs.
Her grandparents called the place their cabin, even though it was built of brick, because that was the local naming convention for places people had back in the woods. The solidly built little house had really been their retreat, their second home.
Vito Constantine had been a bricklayer and a union steward. He’d helped build many of the old, sprawling manufacturing plants in Milford Falls that were now mostly graffiti-covered shells with broken windows. After saving for most of his life, he’d bought the commercially useless sixty-odd-acre leftover parcel of land and put his cabin in the recess between mountains.
The vast, surrounding preserve had been established by one of the wealthy factory owners back when he had more money than he knew what to do with and rocky land could be had for next to nothing. He’d had grand ideas about eventually donating it to the park service, but after the factories closed he left the area and lost interest in the project. The preserve remained intact, managed by a small trust he’d established that nowadays rarely kept tabs on it.