Held & Pushed (2 book bundle) (39 page)

I had underestimated the amount of blood and
chunks of torn flesh that would be flying through the air, most of which landed
on my clothing. By the time I was finished destroying Ron’s soles, the bottom
of my shirt and top portion of my pants were covered in goo and gore. Since my
clothes were black, I couldn’t quite see the blood that had soaked through, but
I knew it was there. The clothes were wet and clung to my skin, and white
pieces of meat hung from the fabric.

My stomach turned at the sight of someone else’s
flesh attached to my clothes, so I quickly looked away, turning my attention
back to Ron, who had stopped squirming long before I turned off the sander.

The belt of sandpaper stopped spinning on the
handheld machine, blood dripping from it and plopping onto the concrete floor.
I looked up at Ron’s face and found that he’d passed out, pissing himself in
the process.

It was funny to see the man who had inflicted so
much pain and agony on so many others lying unconscious, underwear soaked with
his own piddle. But I didn’t laugh. It wasn’t that kind of funny.

I put the belt sander on the work table and
grabbed the water hose from its place on the wall. After turning on the water,
I squirted the front of myself, knocking each piece of Ron’s skin onto the
floor.

When that was done, I used the pressure of the
water from the hose to push the blood and skin across the floor. I watched as
it disappeared into the drain, both satisfied and horrified by what I’d done.

With the floor clean, I turned to face Ron. His
feet were still bleeding, but the blood didn’t fall to the floor. Instead, it
dripped off his heels and filled the trough that ran around the inside of
table.

I left him as he was and returned the hose to the
wall. Then I headed upstairs with a queasy stomach. It wasn’t that I felt bad
for Ron or felt as if he had been through enough already. He certainly had not.
But I had.

Though I tried to be a ruthless bitch around Ron,
on the inside I was still me. I was still a woman who never wanted to hurt
anyone, a woman who volunteered for charity events and donated to the homeless.
I was a woman who enjoyed helping others, not hurting them.

Upstairs, I pulled a fresh pair of clothes from
the duffle bag and headed into the shower, using the bathroom in one of the
spare bedrooms upstairs. With the water streaming out of the shower head as hot
as I could stand it, I scrubbed myself clean, erasing all of the blood that had
soaked through my clothes along with any trace of the deed I had done.

Once out of the shower, I transferred the contents
of the cargo pants into the pockets of the clean pair. I pulled on the fresh
t-shirt and clean socks. I brushed my hair and teeth, sprayed on deodorant, and
finally headed downstairs. Using only two fingers, I carried the dirty clothes
to the laundry room, holding them out in front of me as if they carried the
plague.

After throwing the dirty clothes in the washing
machine, I dumped in more detergent than was necessary. I brought with me only
the two outfits. As I wasn’t sure how long I would be staying at Ron’s house, I
needed to change back and forth. And since I was going to have to wear those
clothes again, I needed them to be as clean as possible. No amount of detergent
would’ve been enough.

With the chore done, I curled up on the couch and
cried. It was a body-racking sob that lasted for more than fifteen minutes.

When I had purged my mind of the sadness and
frustration, I pulled myself together and went into the kitchen, where I poured
myself a glass of wine and drank it down quickly, hoping it would numb me
enough to make it through the rest of the day.

Not yet ready to head back down to the basement, I
returned to Ron’s office and read the next few chapters of his latest book,
hoping to learn more about what type of person he was. Obviously I knew what
sort of things he did, the way he lived his life, but I wanted to know more. I
wanted to know why. Why did he kill women? Why did he enjoy torturing them?

Ron’s latest novel was written in third person,
but it was obvious to me that he’d put a lot of himself into the main
character, which in this case was a man who collected his victim’s feet and
kept them in a jar on a shelf in his basement.

Reading about it reminded me of the jars I’d seen
on the shelves in Ron’s basement. They really were feet. I’d suspected that’s
what they were when I first saw them, but I hadn’t been sure. Now I was
positive that they were feet, and I didn’t even need to see them to know I was
right. It was all there, written about in gory detail in his book. Ron was a
liar in real life, but he was honest on the page.

A few chapters into the story, I had to stop
reading. There was only so much killing I could take before I needed a break,
and when I felt myself sinking into a depression at the thought of what these
women had gone through, I knew I needed some happy to offset all the sad.

In the living room, I turned on the television and
clicked through the channels until I found a movie, a romantic comedy that was
sure to erase the blues that lurked in the shadows of my soul.

With my shoes off, I stretched out on the couch,
adjusted the pillow behind my head, and immersed myself in the movie. Whenever
thoughts of Ron slipped into my mind, I shut them out, paying extra close
attention to what was being said on the screen. It was a trick that worked, and
by the time the movie ended, I was in a much better mood.

To quiet the grumbling in my stomach and give my
body the boost of energy it needed, I went to the kitchen and made a sandwich,
thinking nothing of what I’d done earlier to Ron or of what I’d read about in
his book.

I ate at the breakfast bar, lost in thought and
engulfed in the silence of the house.

It wasn’t until I had finished eating that I
realized Ron got mail. Of course he got mail. Everybody did. For that very
reason, there was a mailbox at the end of his driveway, the black one with the
white numbers. I needed to check that mailbox. Not because I was interested in
who sent him what, but because if the mail piled up, the carrier would become
suspicious. Authorities may be called. I couldn’t let that happen.

I waited until night fell before walking to the
end of the driveway and retrieving the contents of the mailbox. Even if someone
had been looking, I doubted they would’ve been able to see me. Dressed in black
clothes, cloaked under the cover of darkness, I was virtually invisible.

Back inside the house, I laid the mail on the
table in the entryway. It would be a lie to say I didn’t flip through the stack
of envelopes to see if there was anything of interest, because I did. But I
found nothing other than formal-looking correspondences. There was nothing that
captured my attention.

I planned to let Ron stew in his misery for the
rest of the day and night, and then deal with him tomorrow. That meant I had
the whole evening free. Unfortunately, free time didn’t mean what it used to. I
needed something to keep my mind busy, to keep my thoughts occupied.

In Ron’s office, I settled in to read the next few
chapters of his latest book. However, after reading only one chapter of the
horrific acts he’d carried out, I became enraged with him. I was furious that a
person like Ron was free to do whatever he wanted—which just happened to be
torturing women—while those around him suffered. Not just the women whose lives
had been cut short by his hands, but also their families.
Mothers
and fathers.
Brother and sisters. And then of course, there were the
children. So many kids had been rendered motherless because of him, left with
no one to kiss them goodnight or wipe away their tears when they cried.
Children like my Mason.

I was pissed.

18

I
t
seemed like forever passed before Nicole came back to the basement where Ron
had spent the day drifting in and out of sleep.
Or
unconsciousness.
He wasn’t sure exactly which it was. All he knew was
that he would drift off in the middle of a thought, only to open his eyes some
time later.

The soles of his feet felt as if they were
hovering above a scorching fire, the flames licking at his skin.
Skin that was no longer there.

In his waking moments throughout the day, he’d
cursed Nicole. Sometimes in his mind, other times aloud. He wondered how she
could do something so horrible to someone who loved her as much as he did.
Though he kept trying to see the sense in it, he just couldn’t. He’d done
nothing to deserve bearing the brunt of her misguided anger.

It was during one of his awake periods that the
overhead lights flickered on, causing Ron to squint his eyes against the sudden
brightness. He heard Nicole pounding down the steps, and he turned to face the
sound, though his eyes had yet to adjust to the light.

When he was finally able to see her, he smiled,
though what he really wanted to do was gouge out her eyes and piss in the empty
sockets.

“Hello, Nicole. It’s good to see you again.”

“You shut the fuck up,” she shouted as she stormed
across the room, stopping at the foot of the table on which Ron lay with his
feet still oozing blood and some kind of clear liquid.

“What’s the matter?”

Clearly angry, Nicole’s chest heaved with her
breaths, shoulders rising and falling, keeping time with her flaring nostrils
and clenching jaw muscles.

Ron could only watch and wonder what had made her
so angry.

“Nicole, talk to me.” The worry was evident in his
voice, though he tried to hide it. He didn’t want her to know that she
frightened him, even if it was only a little bit. Frightened people had no
control.

For a minute, neither one of them said a word. Ron
figured that if he said anything else, he would be relinquishing what little
control he had left. Nicole appeared to be too angry to speak, so he figured
his best option was to wait and see what she had to say.

Then he saw what he’d failed to notice earlier as
the love of his life had entered the room. When he saw it, his curiosity got
the better of him and he decided to speak, even though it would make him appear
weak and vulnerable.

“What’s that in your hand, Nicole?”

She smiled. It wasn’t the kind of smile that lit
up her face. No, this was a dead smile, one that found her lips but never
reached her eyes. It was cold and calculating. Ron knew the smile well because
it was the same one he’d so often flashed to women, many of them in this very
room.

“What is it?”

“You’re about to find out.”

She held it up, a green bottle with a yellow
label, and unscrewed the lid.

“Nicole, listen to me,” he gushed. “Whatever it is
you’re thinking of doing, don’t. We can talk about whatever you want to talk
about, work out whatever needs to be worked out. But don’t do anything brash
out of anger. Think it through first.”

“Oh. You want me to think it through? Okay. Well,
let’s see. You’re a big
ol
’ asshole who tortures
innocent women for your own enjoyment. You ruin life after life with no
remorse, and you do it all without the fear of being punished. But you can’t go
on like that forever. Surely even you knew that at some point, something would
happen. Whether it was the police or one of your victims, there would come a
time when someone stopped you. That someone is me.”

She stared at him, a cold and an intense stare.

“Is that thinking it through enough for you?
Because all I’ve been doing for the past two years is thinking about what I’d
like to do to you when I got you alone. Notice I didn’t say if. It was never
if. It was always when, because I knew that one day, I would get to you. And I
would make you pay for everything you’ve ever done. Not only to me, but to
Stephanie and Melinda and Crystal and all the other women you’ve murdered over
the years.”

“Nicole, be reasonable.”

“I feel that I’ve been more than reasonable. I
probably should’ve killed you already.
Then again, maybe not.
Maybe I should’ve made you suffer more.
A lot more.
So
let’s go ahead and start doing that right now.”

She threw the lid to the floor and stepped closer
to the end of the table.

“Nicole, wait,” he nearly shouted. He still wasn’t
clear what she was going to do, but he knew it wouldn’t be good. “Please. You
don’t have to do this.”

Slowly, delivering each word deliberately, she
said, “I know I don’t have to do this. I
want
to.”

His eyes widened, fear gripping him. How many
times had he said those same words to a woman who was pleading with him to
stop, to let her live?

Ron’s blood ran cold as Nicole took the final step
toward him, placing herself at his injured feet. He realized there was no
talking to her, no stopping her. She was going to do whatever it was that she
came down here to do and all he could do was endure it.

He didn’t realize just how difficult that was
going to be.

She held the bottle just above his raw and
bleeding left foot and began to tilt it slowly, antagonizing him. Several
tension-filled seconds later, right before the liquid poured from the bottle
and drenched the bottom of his foot, Ron read the label.

Lemon juice.

He gasped, sucking in one last breath of air
before the pain set in. At first, he clenched his jaw shut and grunted through
the intense stinging, but it didn’t take long for the grunts to turn to shouts
and then to screams.

His head jerked from side to side and spit flew
from his mouth as he screamed. His body writhed in agony as the pain increased,
a pain from which there was no escape.

She continued to pour the lemon juice on his feet,
drenching first the left, then the right, until the bottle was empty. She
turned it up and thumped on the end to make sure every drop had been used. Then
the bitch tossed the bottle into the trash can and left the basement.