The night was falling quickly, but that was no deterrent to the tourists who flocked to New York City to see the sights and sounds of the Big Apple: The Empire State Building, Central Park, the Statue of Liberty and Times Square.
It was in Times Square where he stood, scanning the crowd. His eyes surveyed the spindly wrought iron tables sitting in the middle of what had once been a street, and the people who had draped themselves over the chairs parked at those tables, his eyes narrowing in contempt at the sight of lattes and iced cappuccinos. He liked his coffee the old fashioned way: black and steaming hot, served in a thick white ceramic mug that had stains on the rim and along the bottom. He had killed a woman once simply because she had left a thick red lip imprint on his favorite coffee cup, an act he now found ironic, all things considered.
A group of young women decked out in blue jean shorts, tank tops that clung to their concave bellies and high-heeled sandals, darted past, chattering excitedly while shopping bags swung from their hands. A group of German tourists stood in the center of the Square, craning their necks at the glittering cascades of neon and the buildings that pointed their heads up at the sky. One of them asked, in somber tones, where the hookers and drug dealers were, and while a few people within earshot laughed, he did not. He missed the Times Square of yesterday, the dangerous and seedy little section of town that had once been the pinnacle of all things reckless and free. In his opinion, the new and shiny Times Square with its pretension and bland smugness was no match for the one it had so easily replaced.
The Lion King advertisement incited squeals from a group of passerby’s, as did the appearance of some soon-to-be-forgotten pop star from the back entrance of one of the stone-laced buildings. He often wondered why the tourists didn’t just stay in their rooms and watch television, after all, they seemed more caught up in the digitalized images than they were the actual physicality of the place they stood in.
“The Creeper.”
The words caused him to instantly freeze in place, his hand tilted slightly toward the pack of cigarettes in his front pocket. He let his hand fall, a look of practiced chagrin appearing on his features, to anyone watching they would have assumed he was simply remembering that he could not smoke the cigarette in the place where he stood. His senses alight he carefully angled his head just a tiny bit to the left in order to hear the conversation taking place behind him.
“The bastard has killed five women already,” a young man grumbled. He held a portable tablet to his chest, a kind of mobile device that allowed him to connect to the Internet. He read from it slow and carefully, and the man he was reading about felt some amusement rising up inside of him as he heard himself described as a complete and total sociopath.
There was nothing further from the truth, he thought as he left the Square and ambled down a back alley, hoping to find the woman he had been watching for several days now. She often disappeared on the side streets, she was quick and elusive, which was why he wanted her so very badly. He was sure she had no idea she was being watched, she simply practiced the self-defense procedures she taught in her nightly classes: alternating her routes, never going to a place more than one or two times a week and then at differing times. It amused him that she was so incredibly hard to catch, in his obsessive game of cat and mouse, but there was no doubt in his mind - he would catch her eventually.
“Sociopath,” he muttered. “Sociopaths have no feelings. I have a lot of them.”
He tapped a cigarette out of the crumpled pack and lit it, inhaling its rich acrid odor deeply into his lungs.
From a narrow doorway a young woman wearing a soft pink dress and fashionable heels appeared. Her burnished copper hair should have looked ludicrous against the pink hues, but it didn’t. She moved with a willowy grace and a calm confidence and he smiled. He had just found her home.
He walked up behind her; but she sensed danger just a fraction too late.
“Hello, Mary Grace,” he whispered as his hand came down to grip her shoulder.
***
“Now stop that Sassy!” Sophie gently scolded the white and brown Shih Tzu she had rescued from a shelter a few weeks before. She had been horrified by the fact that shelter did not have a no-kill policy in place and that the tiny little dog was about to be put to its death in a matter of hours. She had not really been able to afford the recue fees but she had paid them anyway and when the cage had opened the feisty little bundle of hair had jumped into her arms, wagging her long curly tail with so much enthusiasm that Sophie had had to laugh.
She had understood exactly how Sassy had felt, she had felt pretty much the same way the day she had been able to walk into the foster home that she had hated so much, stuff all of her clothes together in a duffel and walk back out. Her eighteenth birthday present had been freedom from a cage, and she had had to give that gift to herself. Being able to free Sassy had allowed her to put some, if not all of her bitterness to rest.
Sassy gave her a long stare from her brown eyes and Sophie laughed, “I know what you want you greedy little darling.”
She bustled around the large and drafty apartment, skirting boxes and a pile of pots and pans. She hummed as she moved, and kept up a running stream of chatter as well. Sassy barked occasionally, or whined, as if she were answering back. Sophie didn’t think of that as odd, she had been incredibly lonely before Sassy had come along and talking to the dog had developed naturally from that.
The white foam container opened to reveal rich brown gravy and sautéed onions over wooly looking meat patties. The diner she worked in threw away all of the food that went uneaten from their daily specials and the cook, who had a daughter of his own, politely turned his back when Sophie filled the to-go boxes with enough food for her and Sassy every night before she left even though the rules clearly stated the food was to be tossed out, not given to employees. The dishwasher always took a share of it as well, as did the other nighttime waitress. Sophie used to worry she would get caught and fired but the owner and manager never seemed interested in coming in where the real work was done, preferring to spend time in the tiny office or at the bar, drinking red wine and talking business.
Mashed potatoes filled a smaller container, plump golden corn filled another. Banana pudding and yeast rolls rounded it out. Sophie placed a Salisbury steak patty onto plate for Sophie, quickly cut it into bite sized pieces and added a handful of her dried dog food to the dish, pouring extra gravy on top as a treat.
“Two more days, Sassy,” she sighed, as she sat in the recliner with the busted springs and the squeaky headrest. “We will be leaving here in just two more days. Goodbye diner job, goodbye memories, I am blowing this town.”
Sassy looked up from her plate and Sophie laughed at the blot of gravy on her nose. “You need a napkin,” she said and Sassy’s tongue swiped out, licking the gravy away neatly. “Or maybe not. This is better than last week, I think he used red pepper and didn’t cook them so long.”
Her eyes fell on the picture of her and Susan together and the old familiar lump rose up in her throat. They had gone through foster care together, had been each other’s defenders and friends and had known exactly what darkness had lurked beneath the surfaces of their lives and who had been responsible for most of those shadows.
Sophie and Susan had both worked all through high school to make sure they had money for an apartment and when the time came, they got one. Sophie smiled as she remembered the day when they had finally claimed freedom. She had walked up to the door of the foster home ready to collect her friend, when Susan had come flying out, her red hair gleaming brightly under the sun and hectic spots of color in her normally pale cheeks.
“Today our lives begin!” She had screamed and the two of them had run up the sidewalk, giggling, carrying Susan’s one small suitcase and record player.
Sophie set her plate aside, her appetite gone. Sassy whined up at her and she reached out her arms, the signal that it was okay for the dog to jump on the chair and join her. Burying her face in Sassy’s long silky hair she closed her eyes and tried to stop the tears but they fell anyway.
She had finally gotten to dealing with Susan’s things. Some of her stuff had been so old or destroyed it had to be tossed, the drugs that had ensnared Susan had not been kind and she had let herself go. Her clothes frequently stunk and her body had become so emaciated that she had sewn the waistbands of her jeans to keep them up, making big puffy and ludicrous pockets there. Her shirts all had sweat stains under the arms because her**n addicts liked to keep the oils in their skin, if they bathed they didn’t get or stay as high.
Sophie did not want to remember all the nights she had come home to find Sophie on the floor with money scattered around her and her eyes at half-mast, the needle still in her arm. She had worked at a series of strip clubs, each seedier than the last, until she had hit rock bottom, then she had sold herself on the street for months at a time, coming home only when she was too broke or sick to make it on the streets anymore.
Six months before Susan had committed suicide. She had gone to the home of their former foster parents and shot herself on their doorstep. Wracking grief ate into Sophie as her eyes fell on the record player and the hundred and seventeen records that had been Susan’s pride and joy as they had been her only link to her birth parents. Unlike Sophie, who had wound up in foster as a twelve-year-old child, Susan had been abandoned at the age of seven by her aunt, who had been unable or unwilling to tell the authorities where the girl’s birth parents were. Susan had nothing except the records, not even a photograph. She had been too old for most people who were looking to adopt and so she had begun the rounds of orphanages and placements that had eventually landed her in a room with Sophie at the house they often grimly referred to as the Casa De Blighted Sunshine.
Sophie forced that thought away. She wiped her eyes and reached for the money she had earned that day and counted it. Seventy-four dollars and sixty two cents. “I’m leaving this place, Susan,” she said out loud but there was no answer.
There was twelve thousand dollars sitting in her bank account. She had been saving for years, hoping to go to college at some point, but not all of the money was hers. The day she had committed suicide Susan had stopped off at the apartment first and left a note, it read:
Don’t worry about where this came from: only think about where it can take you. You always wanted to go to New York City, to be out of this town and away from all the memories, leave me here too. Leave me with all the other stuff and don’t you dare look back. Let them burn me and take my ashes and scatter them out at the lake. That is all I want really, just to be forever out on the lake. I love you; now go get yourself a life so big that when you finally do die you will have a lot to tell me about. I’m not sorry I’m doing this and I won’t say I am. I’m tired. I’m just so very tired. –Love you Sophie Blue, always, Suzie Q
She had left her five thousand dollars in cash. Sophie had read the note and run for the front door, her eyes wide with shock. When she got home much later that night she was stunned to find that the money was still there, still real, and she had wept for hours, her tears soaking into the crumpled bills.