Kill Me Once (7 page)

But now she wished she had listened to the doctors. How she wished she had just
listened
to them.

As her watery vision gradually cleared, she could see that the figure was simply standing over her bed, his huge arms hanging limply by his sides.

He was an extremely large man, much larger than Jerry. Much larger than even Ed had been, and Ed had been a rather big, strong man in his day. She couldn’t quite make out his face in the darkness, but his deep voice was exceptionally calm when he finally spoke.

‘Don’t scream, Mary Ellen,’ he warned softly. ‘Don’t even move, OK? Because if you make a noise – or even move, for that matter – I’m going to have to hurt you very, very badly. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?’

Stunned, Mary Ellen could only nod dumbly in response, part of her not sure if this was even
real
yet. A dozen questions raced through her mind before suddenly slamming into each other and shattering into an indecipherable jumble of useless letters.

Who was this man? How had he gotten into her apartment? Most importantly, what was he going to
do
to her?

She tried to speak but no words would come out. The fear had completely paralysed her vocal cords, robbing them of all their strength.

Heart pounding madly in her throat, she swallowed dryly and tried again. ‘How do you know my name?’ she finally breathed. ‘Who
are
you?’

Amazingly the large man actually
smiled
. She knew this only because she could see his bright white teeth gleaming at her through the darkness. They were unnaturally phosphorescent, sharp, pointed – like a vampire’s.

By way of introduction, he removed the cap from his head and bowed quickly to her with the exaggerated flair of an accomplished actor, moving with a speed that belied his considerable size. ‘Why, don’t you know me, Mary Ellen? My name is Richard Ramirez. I’m the Night Stalker.’

For a brief moment she was thoroughly confused.

Richard Ramirez. The Night Stalker. She remembered the name. The serial killer. But wasn’t he in prison? Or
dead?

The large man in her room dismissed the question on her face with a quick wave of his hand. Turning to his side, he carelessly flung his baseball cap like a black Frisbee over into the corner, where it landed softly on a large pile of dirty clothes. He shook his head as though he didn’t approve. ‘You really should clean this place up, you know. No offence, my dear, but it’s pretty fucking disgusting.’

Mary Ellen didn’t answer him,
couldn’t
have answered him if she’d tried. Her badly labouring heart was now pumping so much blood that she was sure she’d used up a week’s worth of beats in the past minute alone. She wondered hazily how many she had left, wondered if the pacemaker might have saved at least a
few
of them. After all, every little bit probably counted now.

Silently praying to God, she slid a trembling hand beneath Ed’s pillow, feeling for the gun she knew wasn’t there. Ed was gone, had been for more than a decade now. His gun, too.

‘Looking for something, my dear?’

Mary Ellen shook her head weakly, badly tweaking a tendon in her neck and sending an electric jolt of pain shooting down her left arm.
A heart attack?

If only she were so lucky.

‘What do you want from me?’ she whispered hoarsely. ‘I don’t have any money. Are you going to
kill
me?’

Through the darkness she saw him shake his head slowly again, looking almost disappointed with her question, disappointed with
her
. His look
shamed
her.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he grunted, the smile gone now. ‘Of course I’m not going to kill you.’

But the words had barely left his mouth before he was suddenly lunging out for her throat in a black flash of movement. Recoiling in horror, Mary Ellen squeezed her eyes tightly shut, mortified to feel her badly swollen bladder burst in a warm, wet rush of urine that flooded her cotton underwear and completely soaked the threadbare sheets below. Somehow she managed to feel even
more
shame through her terror. She was embarrassing herself badly, she knew, and she had always prided herself on the ability to make a good first impression.

Unbelievably, she felt absolutely no pain at all as she was brutally being murdered. Not even a pinprick.
Odd
. Whenever she’d watched similar stories on
Cold Case Files
, she’d always thought it would hurt like hell.

Tentatively opening one eye into a tiny quivering slit, to her complete astonishment she saw that he was still standing over her bed, had only been reaching for the lamp on her bedside table, not her throat.

He clucked his tongue in disapproval. ‘I
told
you I wasn’t going to kill you, Mary Ellen. I’ll tell you what, my dear – you’re really going to have to try to be a bit more trusting if you expect us to get along here tonight. I haven’t even made you swear your love for Satan yet and this is how you treat me?’

In the pale yellow light of the bedside lamp, Mary Ellen finally saw his eyes. Brown. Glittering.
Insane
.

A lifelong devout Catholic, in that instant she no longer believed in a God or a heaven. But hell was a completely different matter altogether. She had no trouble believing in that at this exact moment. She was there now, she knew.

With the devil.

The huge lump of fear clogging her throat was making it impossible to breathe. She desperately tried to swallow it away, but knew she might as well have been trying to swallow away a softball at this point.

Even the smog would be a welcome relief now
, she thought hazily.
Big, hot, poisonous lungfuls of it
.

Anything was better than the nothingness she was choking on now.

Mary Ellen watched numbly as the large man removed a sharp knife from the leather sheath on his belt and slowly twisted the black handle back and forth in his palm so that the silver blade glinted in the soft glow of her bedroom lamp.

An impotent whimper escaped her cracked lips. ‘You said you weren’t going to kill me,’ she sobbed.

Another disgusted look and Mary Ellen felt the hot shame rush into her cheeks again.

Was it possible to die of sheer embarrassment?

‘Oh, I was telling the truth about that,’ he grunted, his throaty voice suddenly charged with an unmistakable sexual energy. ‘You see, my dear, it’s not
me
who’s going to kill you; it’s Richard Ramirez who’s going to do the deed. But first he’s going to rape you. Don’t take it personally. We certainly don’t find you
sexy
or anything. It’s all just part of the script.’

‘Part of what script?’

Everything happened so fast from there that Mary Ellen didn’t even have time to scream. Quick as a rattlesnake he struck out, launching his enormous body through the air and landing down hard on top of her.

She finally heard herself screaming as her fragile pelvis exploded into a thousand jagged pieces beneath the crushing impact of his two-hundred-pound frame. Bright white stars of agony danced in front of her eyes and a sudden burst of vomit erupted from her mouth, completely drenching the front of her thin nightgown. In the very next instant his heavy fist crashed down hard into her brittle eye socket, caving it in on itself like an eggshell beneath his thick knuckles. More stars came, these ones purple and green. With preternatural speed he tore the thin sheet from her weak grasp, roughly forced her trembling, varicose-veined thighs apart with his powerful legs and drew back his well-muscled arm.

With terrifying fluidity the knife violated her again and again. That was when the shock set in.

Through the haze of mind-numbing terror, Mary Ellen somehow remembered the Life Alert. With the last ounce of energy she had left in her dying body – as the razor-sharp knife viciously shredded her most intimate parts – she frantically pressed the button for help just a moment before her world went completely black.

As she slowly floated off into the inky darkness of her eternal dreams, Mary Ellen Orton was dancing again, back in Ed’s strong arms as they moved across the dance floor.

She’d always saved the last dance for him.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Fear and excitement gripped Nathan Stiedowe’s heart when the sirens came wailing up outside several minutes later. Sputtering, he realised this wasn’t just a fantasy any more. This was really happening and he had to execute the plan perfectly from here.

He’d been watching the headlines out in Cleveland with great interest for three months now and couldn’t help wondering how they’d report this murder in the LA papers. Maybe he’d finally start getting the recognition he so richly deserved. Maybe he’d finally get a decent moniker, too.

About fucking time.

He leaped off the old woman’s broken body and rushed to the bedroom window, flinging the curtain aside. The metal fasteners screeched across the rod and crashed in his ears like the screams of a thousand tortured souls.

An ambulance?

Medical techs frantically wheeling a gurney in front of them over the cracked sidewalk were rushing toward her door and loudly calling out her name. ‘Mary Ellen? We’re coming, sweetheart! Just hold on, ma’am!’

Nathan had to act fast. Heart slamming in his throat, senses
on fire
with the importance of the moment, he raced over into the corner of the room and scooped the AC/DC baseball cap off the pile of dirty clothes before dashing into the living room and tacking a plastic convenience-store bag onto the wall. Latest round of breadcrumbs dropped, he managed to pull himself up through the same window he’d entered an hour earlier just a split second before they burst inside.

Phase One complete.

The rental car would be abandoned – part of the plan and the beginning of Phase Two. The most
important
phase. If he did this correctly, the Night Stalker’s unforgettable murder would leap through the years and land on the top of the front page again.

The story of Richard Ramirez’s downfall flashed through his mind as he tried to control his hammering heart.

After traveling to San Francisco to kill the ridiculously named Peter Pan – a sixty-six-year-old Chinese man from Lake Merced – the Night Stalker had moved on to Mission Viejo for his next kills. When he was unsuccessful in his attempt to murder twenty-nine-year-old Bill Carns and his twenty-seven-year-old girlfriend Renata Gunther, the girl had caught a glimpse of his licence plate as he sped away.

Authorities quickly traced the number to a stolen car that Ramirez dumped a short time later. When they lifted his fingerprints from the vehicle, the Night Stalker’s downward spiral began in earnest.

Ramirez was buying groceries at a family-owned convenience store in Los Angeles a week later when he noticed his picture on the front page of the newspaper. Several patrons – including the husband of one of his earliest victims – immediately recognised him and the chase was on from there. It didn’t last long.

Nathan shook his head in disgust as he made his way as calmly as he could over to the murmuring crowd that had gathered in the street around the flashing blue lights.

‘What in the hell happened in there?’ a pretty young Latina asked him.

Nathan took a deep breath and raised himself up to his full height. He glared down at her menacingly. The young woman’s eyes widened in horror as her stare ran over the length of his body.

Do it, bitch. Do it now. Say the words I need you to say
.

And she did.

‘There’s blood all over him!’ the young woman screamed.

A stunned silence hung in the air before several large men in the crowd suddenly reacted, angrily coming for Nathan with murder in their eyes. But he was ready for the assholes, had been the entire time, every muscle in his body corkscrewed and ready for action, the painful memory of all those hill repeats still carved deep into his powerful thighs.

In the blink of an eye he exploded right past their outstretched hands and knifed his way down the alleyway at the side of the building. Reminding himself to control his breathing, he unbuckled the leather sheath from his belt and jammed it hard into his sock before tearing away the breakaway athletic pants to reveal the clean jogging pants underneath.

The hours of intense physical training paid off handsomely as he easily left the would-be heroes eating his dust. But just to be absolutely certain, he continued running through backyards and hopping over fences for the next twenty minutes, periodically lifting his stare to the sky to see if the LAPD had a chopper in the air. They didn’t, of course. Incompetent fools.

When Nathan was finally out of breath, he stopped behind an abandoned old warehouse at the west end of town and lifted the cap off his head to mop at his heavily sweating brow with one muscular forearm.

His sides ached as he quickly stripped off the bloody shirt and tossed it to the ground. The grey undershirt he’d been wearing beneath was ringed with sweat but otherwise bore no evidence of the brutal murder he’d just committed.

No one had caught him. They hadn’t even come close. A little goddamn
discipline
was all it had taken to get the job done right.

Panting as he leaned over and supported his weight on his trembling thighs, Nathan dropped the baseball cap to the ground. The fierce AC/DC logo glared up at him. After a moment, he smiled down at it.

Success
.

Two hours later the taxicab dropped Nathan off at the cheap motel. The high was still with him as he walked back into his room. His body felt light, tingly, like flames were licking his skin.

As he settled in for the night, he rewarded himself for his flawless performance by slowly masturbating to the memory of Mary Ellen Orton’s delicious terror. The others liked to take physical souvenirs from the scene – which was about the
stupidest
thing you could do in a situation like this – but all
he
needed were the graphic mental images he’d collected on the night.