Bill Bantling looked around the six-by-nine-foot cell that had been his home off and on for most of the last ten years. A cot, a TV, a plastic mattress, a pillow, a toilet and a sink. A collection of books. Some magazines. His drawings. The mental inventory was complete: he didn’t have shit.
With his back to the surveillance camera that constantly watched him, he lay down on the cot. With a jagged thumbnail, he carefully opened the three-quarter-inch slit where the seams met in the mattress’s corner. Using his little finger, one by one he slowly pulled out the drawings he’d stashed away inside. Over the years, different administrations had come and taken his drawings away from him, some while he was still creating them, calling them gross or inappropriate or, his favorite — menacing. The pictures that he had finished, the ones he absolutely couldn’t stand to part with, he’d stuffed into his hiding spot, which, surprisingly, no one had ever found. It was his own little photo album from the past, created solely from memory.
He peeked at each one until he found the one he was looking for. He unfolded it and placed it next to his face on the pillow. His fingers moved over the crumpled paper. No matter how many times he gazed at it, it still stirred him. In his head he could actually feel the curve of her face, her heart-shaped chin, the ripples in her trachea. With colored pencils, he’d shaded in her green eyes, her silky, long blonde hair, her pouty red lips. He could smell her in his mind. He could still taste her in the back of his throat.
Chloe … My not-so-sweet Chloe Joanna …
And now he was one step closer to out. A fantasy that had played in his mind so many times might at last become reality. He might actually see her again — an encounter he fantasized about more than the prospect of freedom itself.
He was obsessed. She was all he thought about. He could understand now how that happened to someone — how all they dreamt of, thought of, imagined was that one face. That one person. He understood why someone would give everything in their lives up — their jobs, their marriage, their children, their parents, their freedom — and risk it all for the object of their fixation. He also understood why someone would want to snuff out the very life he lived for. How love and obsession could easily jump the line into pure, unadulterated hatred.
She had used her legal degree to railroad him into a death sentence. How much of his persecution had been coincidence and how much had been the calculated maneuvering of others, he might never know. Was it pure happenstance that it was her courtroom he’d ended up in after an unlawful traffic stop had netted the police their big break? Someone had put the body of Anna Prado in the trunk of his car that night for the police to find. Someone had called in an anonymous tip to the police that there was something of interest in that trunk. Was Chloe behind that, too? How far back did her plans to murder him originate?
Yet here he was, ten years later, alive and kicking. And thanks to the ambitious efforts of another pretty prosecutor, he might soon be a free man.
The moment he got out, Bill was going to pay a visit to the woman who’d been his addiction for almost two decades. And he was going to hold her once more in his arms and tell her just how much he both loved her … and despised her. Then those arms would close around her and crush the life breath out of her once shapely body. When those pouty red lips turned fat and blue he would be the last man on this earth to kiss them goodbye.
Boy, was she going to be surprised to see him. That moment was going to be priceless. It would be worth the risk. He was going to take his time with her, even more so than their first night together. This go-round he’d make sure that the moment lasted, in what would, for her, surely feel like a lifetime of pure agony. She would be begging for him to finally end her.
He smiled at his picture and kissed her on her cheek. He had drawn her how he remembered her when they’d met years ago, which was, sadly, probably not the way she looked now. He wondered if she still dyed her fabulous blonde hair that drab brown, or was she completely gray now? Did she still dress like a school-marm, with conservative, dark suits and clunky heels, hoping to melt into the background? Would she have rivers of wrinkles cutting through her once flawless, creamy, sun-kissed skin? Would she hide her emerald eyes with unremarkable brown contacts? Or wear a pair of thick Granny glasses so no one could read the fear in them when she was up close and personal? He knew that was still there, no doubt. It was a gift he’d given her, that she always carried with her — fear. And she always would, no matter where she lived. Because Chloe Joanna, of all persons in this world, knew that until a needle was shoved in his veins and a doctor actually pronounced him dead, Bill might well come for her again, as he had promised. Metal bars and steel doors could not offer 100 percent assurance that she’d be safe. She could run again and again and again, but he’d always find her — eventually. The mafia found stoolies in the Federal Government’s Witness Protection Program — eventually. Nowadays it was even easier to resurrect the dead and the AWOL — thanks to the Internet and, sometimes a few, small, despicable favors to people who had access to the Internet. So no matter how clever or thorough Chloe thought she was at hiding her tracks and starting anew, she wasn’t. She could change her name to C.J. or Christina, or whatever other new alias she wanted, because it was only a name. People always left a piece of themselves behind; you couldn’t erase a life completely. Someone like Chloe couldn’t simply walk away from the people she loved.
Over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house we go …
He looked at her long flowing hair, curling in gentle spirals as it cascaded over her shoulders. Those defined cheekbones, her mouth. Hopefully she’d gone back to a bit of her old self. He imagined her slender, curvaceous body outfitted in tight gym clothes, her perky tits bouncing about braless in a tight, white T-shirt as she hummed and sang show tunes in her kitchen — like the good old days. And high heels. Oh, yeah. Those pretty high heels she used to love to wear. Stilettos and pumps and straps. In shiny black patent leather or fire-red leather. Perhaps he would bring her a present and make her wear a pair of those for him again. And her hair — it would be long and honey blonde and wavy, the way he remembered it. Smelling of Herbal Essence shampoo and Aquanet. It would be long enough for him to lose his fingers in it. Long enough for him to wrap it around her throat and tie it in a nice tight knot …
His tongue wandered into her waiting mouth, which he had drawn open. His fingers stroked her exposed breasts. His other hand slid into his prison pants and moved south to relieve the pressure. He couldn’t wait till he made her do it for him.
Just like the good old days.
When he was done, he wiped the sweat from his lip and folded his very best work into a neat square before tucking it into the mattress. It was the only possession he had in the world worth taking with him when they came to tell him it was time to go home to Miami.
Like a boomerang, karma was coming around. Like he had told that pretty redheaded prosecutor, it always did. Sometimes it took a while. Sometimes it took a lifetime, but it always came in the end.
He nibbled off a sliver of fingernail and smiled to himself.
This time around, retribution would be his.