Killer Among Us

By Carmen Cross & Adriana Hunter

Copyright © 2013

Carmen Cross & Adriana Hunter

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All characters appearing in this
work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or
dead, is purely coincidental.

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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 heroin 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