Chapter Forty-three
Los Angeles, the present
Henry waited until the blonde waitress was only a few feet from her car before stepping out from the darkness.
“Brenda, thank God I caught you,” Henry said.
The waitress spun around to face him, startled, and was about to scream when she recognized Henry from the last two nights. “What are you doing here?” she asked.
“I left something really valuable inside the restaurant. I was so worried I wouldn’t get back here before the place was locked up for the night.”
All at once Henry’s knees buckled and he clutched at his chest. Then he pitched forward face first onto the dirt surface of the small parking lot behind the restaurant.
“Oh my God, oh my God,” Brenda gasped out as she rushed forward to Henry. She got down on her knees next to him and put her hand against his neck to search for a pulse, and was surprised to feel it beating as fast and strong as it was. With a surprising quickness, he grabbed her by the wrist and yanked her down and rolled on top of her. He pushed his left forearm into her throat to keep her from screaming, and then punched her hard in the nose, breaking it. Her eyes fluttered for a moment before rolling up into their sockets. She was out cold.
Henry moved quickly as he picked her up and carried her to his car where it was parked in the shadows. Aside from Brenda’s car, there was still another in the parking lot, and Henry wanted to get out of there before that person finished locking up the place. He didn’t bother tying up or gagging the waitress. Given how hard he had hit her, she was going to be out for a while. He dumped her in the trunk and moved fast to get behind the wheel, and he burned rubber as he tore out of the parking lot. After a mile or so, he forced himself to slow down. He had to remind himself that there could be extra patrols on the road because of SCK.
He had the radio tuned in to a news station, and the big story that night had been about Morris Brick single-handedly foiling a Beverly Hills jewelry-store robbery. Heck, they were even giving the story more coverage that night than the Skull Cracker killings, and they were going into a lot more detail than the earlier report he’d seen on TV. If what they were reporting was true, Henry could understand why. Supposedly Brick took the gun from one of the robbers as he beat the man unconscious and then in a split second shot the other robber, disabling him. What made it an even bigger story than Brick’s heroics was that a famous actor had gotten shot during the ruckus. Henry had never heard of this actor before, but the news reports made a big deal over him, and of course, Brick was also credited with saving this actor’s life.
Henry tugged at his lower lip as he thought about Brick being like Superman. Or maybe more like Batman. And this was who he had to have chasing after him? The news report had played a few comments Brick made at an impromptu press conference, and one of them was about the Skull Cracker Killer. According to Brick they were following up on a lead from New York that was looking promising. He refused to say anything more about it other than he expected this to lead to SCK’s arrest. Henry had thought about that and decided Brick was trying to play some sort of mind game on him. There were no leads in New York or elsewhere they were following up on. Brick was only trying to get under his skin and scare him into making a mistake, and no matter how good Brick was he wasn’t going to be able to do squat. After tonight, Henry was done, and SCK would no longer exist. He and Sheila would wait an appropriate amount of time to move back to Portland so as not to attract any attention, and that would be the end of it.
Something Henry had recently read popped into his head. An article about how the police could trace the location of someone’s cellphone. He couldn’t remember whether the cellphone had to be turned on for the police to do this, but then again, he had no idea if the waitress had a cellphone with her, and if she did, whether it was turned on or not. He pulled over and opened up the trunk. She was still out cold. He dumped the contents of her pocketbook into the trunk, and sure enough, she did have a cellphone and it was turned on. He turned it off, then dropped it to the asphalt and smashed it several times with his heel. After wiping off any prints he might’ve left on it, he flung it as far as he could while making sure not to get any fingerprints on it.
He couldn’t help chuckling to himself over how sloppy he’d been and the potential disaster he’d narrowly avoided. Even if the police couldn’t trace the waitress’s phone, if she had woken up, she could’ve used it to call for help.
Wow, he thought. He looked up toward the night sky. Someone’s got to be looking out for me!
Once he was back in the car, he changed the radio to an easy-listening music station and whistled along with the songs that they played. During the twenty-minute ride back to Simi Valley, he passed at most a dozen cars, none of them police cars. By the time he pulled into his garage, he was feeling relaxed and at times had even forgotten about the waitress he had stored away in the trunk. Not completely of course, but enough so that he had moments where none of this seemed quite real.
When he opened the trunk, she was not only awake, but had gotten her hands on the tire iron that was back there for changing a flat. She surprised him with how quickly she leapt from the trunk like some sort of crazed banshee, almost as if her legs were spring coils. Her face was a bloody mess, but that didn’t stop her from clobbering him pretty good with the tire iron, hitting him right above his left ear. The blow dazed him enough that he almost fell to the floor. She should’ve used the opportunity to keep hitting him. If she had done that, she would’ve lived. Instead, in her panic she ran to the garage door and tried to lift it open. If she had pulled the manual release handle, she would’ve escaped, but as Henry got his bearings and watched her struggle to open the door, he realized she’d probably never seen a garage door rigged up with an automatic opener, which would make perfect sense for an apartment dweller. At the last second, she noticed the red handle attached to the trolley mechanism. As she reached up for it, Henry ran at her. He sort of stumbled into her, hitting her with his shoulder, and the force of the blow knocked her face first into the door and sent her sliding to the garage floor.
As she lay unconscious, Henry went back to the car and got the tape and rag out of his gym bag. His ears were still ringing from the tire iron she’d bounced off his skull, and he had to steady himself for a moment before he moved back to her. After he taped her wrists and ankles together and stuffed a rag into her mouth, he left her alone in the garage. He was still feeling too woozy to carry her inside the house.
Sheila’s eyes held a feverish, expectant look in them as Henry walked past her. She didn’t say anything to him, but Henry knew she was dying to ask him about the commotion she’d heard coming from the garage.
Henry was still staggering a bit as he made his way to the bathroom. For several minutes he splashed cold water onto his face, and when his eyes could focus, he studied himself in the mirror. Maybe he was imagining it but his left pupil looked larger than his right. He grimaced as he gingerly touched the area above his ear where she had hit him and could feel how swollen the lump had already gotten. That waitress had clocked him pretty good, he had to give her credit for that.
Henry found a bottle of extra-strength Tylenol in the medicine cabinet, spilled several tablets into his palm, and made a face as he stared at them. He was nauseous and wasn’t sure he’d be able to keep the Tylenol down, but he swallowed the tablets anyway. He stood for a moment wishing the room would stop spinning on him, but he knew that wasn’t going to be happening anytime soon. Gritting his teeth, he staggered out of the bathroom and went to the utility room where he found a plastic tarp that he’d used when he painted some of the rooms after they bought the house. He brought the tarp out to where Sheila was sitting and spread it out on the floor. Then he went back to the attached garage.
He still wasn’t feeling strong enough yet to be able to pick up the waitress, so he dragged her by her feet into the house and onto the tarp. His thinking was still cloudy, and he only then remembered that his gym bag was still in the car, so he had to go back to retrieve it. When he returned, Sheila was staring keenly at the waitress.
“She has to still be alive,” she said in her slow, painful way. “It’s no good if she’s already dead.”
“She’s alive,” Henry said.
“What did you do to her? Her face is a mess.”
“What I had to.”
“Clean her up. I need to see what she looks like.”
Henry swallowed back the cutting remark he almost let loose. After what he’d been through that night, Sheila was going to be picky about this? But there was no point in arguing with her. He left the room so he could bring back a bucket of warm water, soap, and a washcloth. The waitress stirred slightly as he washed her face, but otherwise was still out of it. Once he had her cleaned off, Sheila nodded her approval.
“Wake her up,” she ordered.
Henry slapped the waitress lightly on her cheek until her eyes fluttered open. Then he rolled her onto her stomach and used the hammer and chisel on her.