Leaning against him was a slovenly, dark-haired girl who said her name was Candy.
She insisted she was eighteen years old; a claim few believed but nobody disputed.
Ray learned that Candy was a regular at the club, and he’d lost track of the number
of times she’d dragged him onto the dance floor. As his buddies raised their glasses
and cheered, Candy led him out to the parking lot.
A moment later, Ray found himself sitting in the back seat of his classmate’s car,
his head swimming and his stomach lurching. His hands felt many times their normal
size, and he kept waving them in front of his face in a dazed stupor. Candy, who seemed
to hold her liquor far better than Ray, was busy undressing.
Candy removed her bra and lifted her skirt above her waist. She began to undress Ray
and struggled with the brass buckle of his class A uniform belt.
Ray was disgusted. He knew this was supposed to be fun, and the curiosity he’d built
up over the years was about to be answered, but he found himself repelled by what
was transpiring. As he watched Candy tugging his pants down, a wave of repulsion swept
over him.
Candy wasn’t one of the sleek and silky women from his magazines; she was a short,
fat, ugly, drunk girl with a mottled complexion and without even the pretense of femininity.
She wasn’t even clean.
What Candy lacked in hygiene she made up for in enthusiasm, and she busied herself
doing battle with his trousers. As soon as she had his olive drab boxer shorts down,
she pounced. Ray fought the urge to puke as Candy’s superior weight pinned him to
the back seat. She reached down between their collective legs to guide him inside
her, but let out a gasp when she found him limp.
“What’s wrong with you?” she shrieked in an alcohol-slurred voice. She stared at his
shriveled gland. “You some kind of a weirdo? Can’t get it up?”
Ray looked down in dismay at his unresponsive penis. The car was spinning.
“Fucking loser,” she blurted. “Wait till I tell ’em about this. Can’t even get his
dick up. Real party animal, that’s what you are.” She started to climb off Ray. “You
aren’t a homo, are you?”
Ray bolted upright and smashed his fist directly into Candy’s mouth. Blood sprayed
from her lips. Both his hands found Candy’s throat and he lunged forward, pushing
her against the front seat.
“Fucking whore!” he screamed as he choked her with all his might. Candy struggled
and tried to yell out, but Ray punched her again and again, returning his fists to
her throat between strikes.
“Slut! Whore! You fucking whore!” he howled repeatedly. Blood from Candy’s nose and
mouth stained his hands. As he alternated between hammering her with his fists and
strangling her, Ray noticed that his formerly inert penis was now ramrod straight.
He couldn’t remember ever being so aroused. He closed his eyes and saw images of Sissy,
back in his father’s garage, as a boy.
Suddenly, the world turned upside down. The car’s doors were wrenched open from the
outside, and Ray was roughly grabbed by several pairs of hands. He found himself on
the dusty ground of the nightclub parking lot with his pants around his ankles. He
sensed a crowd around him and could hear Candy howling hysterically. He tried to stand
up but his level of intoxication, combined with the trousers bundled around his feet,
hampered him. He struggled to his knees and was just getting his balance, when something
hard struck him on the back of the head and the lights went out.
Ray woke up the next morning with the worst headache he’d ever experienced. He was
lying on the floor in a cell and covered in his own vomit. The night before was a
hazy blur.
It was the end of Ray’s military career. Due to Candy’s level of inebriation, her
age, and inability to coherently testify, formal civilian prosecution was not pursued.
But the Armed Forces Uniform Code of Military Justice was not as lenient.
Ray was dismissed from the army with a dishonorable discharge. His military career,
along with his dream of aviation, was obliterated. A crushed Ray returned home to
California.
Back in Alameda, home was no home. Things had only gotten worse in his yearlong absence.
His mother, now unemployed and drunk most of the time, followed him around the house,
berating him. With no money, Ray had nowhere to go and no choice but to remain and
endure it. The seeds of bitterness planted in the child began to flourish in the man.
Once again, his chances for success and happiness were dashed. Destroyed by a whore.
A slut. If only he hadn’t gone to the nightclub. If only he hadn’t been drinking.
If only the slut hadn’t made fun of him and called him those names. If only things
had turned out different.
If only Sissy hadn’t been a slut. And a whore.
If only.
Ray snapped out of his reverie as the object of his vigilance came into view. He tossed
his cigarette out the window and put the Mercury into gear as the Saab passed by him
on Island Drive. Ray pulled his car out of the empty parking lot and cruised into
a position directly behind the convertible. He could see the lone occupant of the
Saab clearly as both vehicles crossed over the Bay Farm Island Bridge.
CHAPTER 14
Paige had almost no warning before the impact.
What little warning she did receive arrived in the form of a screeching blue blur
that exploded into view from her peripheral vision. In the next instant, she felt
a grinding shock and her car skidded out of her control. The Saab completed a full
one-hundred-eighty-degree turn before slamming into a signal light at an intersection.
Fortunately, Paige was wearing her seatbelt. After the crash, she remained behind
the wheel, stunned and shaking cobwebs from her head.
A moment before, she’d been driving to her father’s house from the ruins of her own.
She was still clad in her damp exercise clothing, and the collision was an unexpected
and unwelcome addition to an already bad day.
Paige unbuckled the seatbelt and began to clamber from her wrecked car. The collapsible
fabric top of her convertible sedan had offered no protection against the toppled
light pole, which sheared during the impact and now occupied the passenger seat of
her crunched vehicle. Had the pole landed a foot or two to the right, Paige would
have been crushed.
As Paige reached for her car’s door handle, the door suddenly opened from the outside.
Looking up, she saw a man in coveralls and a ski mask looming her. Before her astonished
and terrified mind could react, he reached a gloved hand towards her. There was something
in it.
Paige started to scream. The man pressed the object, which looked not unlike a handheld
transistor radio, against her chest. A split second later, she was on the ground,
her brain scrambled and her body convulsing.
The object was a stun gun, specifically, a Nova model XR-5000, available to virtually
anyone by mail order. Used by police officers and civilians alike and powered by a
nine-volt nickel-cadmium battery, the Nova stun gun sent forty thousand volts of incapacitating
electrical energy into its victims. The Nova typically rendered all but the most drug-crazed
and determined attackers instantly and temporarily immobile. It worked even better
on already-dazed young women.
Paige looked up from the ground. She could see what was transpiring but was frozen,
her limbs unresponsive. She saw a blue sedan wedged against her once-pristine Saab
convertible, and a pair of work boots directly in front of her face. She realized
she was flat on her back and helpless. Stark panic completely overtook her thoughts.
She could neither scream nor move.
The ski-masked face leaned down to within an inch of hers. Paige could smell the cigarette
odor on the wearer’s breath and recognized the smile behind the mask. She’d seen those
nicotine-stained teeth before.
She felt her limbs begin to recover, and tried to move and shout at the same time.
The stun gun touched her chest again. When the flashing lights finally cleared, Paige
was again on her back and immobile.
“Hi, Paige. Good to see you. Nice tits.”
Paige felt a gloved hand roughly kneading her breasts. She wanted to scream; the hand
felt like an insect crawling over her.
“We’re going to have a lot of fun, whore, before I kill you. You’re going to be punished.
Come on, slut; we’re going for a ride.”
Paige wanted to close her eyes and block out the horrifying images before her. But
her eyes, the only part of her which seemed unaffected by the stun gun, could not
look away. With mounting dread, she felt herself being dragged across the pavement
toward the open door of his waiting car.
Paige realized she was being abducted. The fear welling within her sparked a superhuman
effort to move the lead weights her arms and legs had become. She started to struggle,
and again the dual electrodes of the stun gun descended, jolting her into submission.
This time, she was barely able to remain conscious.
Her mind shrieked in agony. She prayed for help, for someone to intervene, but knew
as silent sobs racked her body that just like yesterday on the beach there would be
no deliverance.
Suddenly, there came the sound of brakes screeching and a car door opening. She felt
the hands dragging her across the pavement release her. She landed on her face, unable
to break the fall with her numb hands.
Paige desperately tried to roll over on her back again. She could hear the sounds
of a fierce struggle and knew that someone had indeed intervened and come to her aid.
On her third try, she was able to roll onto her back and view the events transpiring
above her.
Paige could see the man in the coveralls rolling on the ground with another, larger
man. It was clear from their sprawling posture that the newcomer had hit her attacker
in a flying tackle.
She saw both men scramble to their feet. The newcomer, a muscular Caucasian fellow
with blond hair who appeared to be in his mid-twenties, seemed vaguely familiar to
her. She tried to yell out a warning about the stun gun, but no sound escaped from
her lips.
Paige watched impotently as the ski-masked man’s hand reached out with the stun gun.
The other man blocked the blow with his forearm but caught the leads. Paige heard
the static buzz sound again, and the man went to one knee from the shock. Her heart
sank.
But the big sandy-haired man did not fall. The electrical pulse had obviously shaken
him, but he didn’t go down. He shook his head, and as ski mask moved in to zap him
again, he punched his adversary directly in the groin.
Ski-mask howled and Paige felt a brief pang of joy. He fell to his knees, both hands
over his crotch. The stun gun clattered to the pavement.
It wasn’t over. Both men slowly rose to their feet. The blond man’s face was pale
from the charge of the stun gun. She hoped his opponent was hurt as well.
The man in the ski mask tore open the front of his coveralls and reached a gloved
hand inside. In response, the blond man went similarly into his own coat. He came
out with a large black revolver and fired as ski-mask emerged with a squat black semiautomatic
pistol of his own.
The sound of the revolver was very loud, and the bullet struck ski-mask full in the
chest. He staggered back, reeling. To Paige’s astonishment, however, he not only didn’t
fall but recovered enough to raise his own gun and point it at the blond man who had
just shot him.
Blondie fired once more, from the hip, as he leaped over the hood of Paige’s Saab.
Ski-mask opened fire and sent a torrent of bullets in his direction. The sound of
the shots from ski-mask’s gun weren’t as loud as the revolver’s, but there were a
lot more of them. She lost count of the gunshots as round after round tore into the
chassis of her wrecked car. She didn’t know how many times ski-mask fired, but it
seemed like a hundred. The bullets shattered what was left of her car’s windshield
and side windows, raining a shower of glass particles onto the pavement.
The next thing she saw was ski-mask running for his car, which still had its engine
running. She watched as he ducked into the open driver’s door, where only a moment
before he’d been trying to drag her inert body. Her attacker was making his escape.
What relief Paige may have felt at her assailant’s exit was quickly drowned in a tide
of fear as she realized her legs lay in the path of one of the Mercury’s wheels. With
a Herculean effort, she willed her paralyzed body to roll and scooted clear of the
tires just as the blue sedan gained traction and sped away.
As the car fled, the blond man emerged from behind her smashed and bullet-riddled
Saab and assumed a two-handed shooting stance. He fired four times at the fleeing
blue vehicle with no apparent effect.
Paige felt waves of pain and dizziness flood over her, and her vision blurred. She
felt hands again on her shoulders. The fuzzy contours of the blond man’s face filled
the void in front of her.
“Relax,” a faraway vice soothed. “You’re safe now.”
After hearing his voice, Paige was even more certain she’d previously encountered
the man somewhere and was frustrated she couldn’t recall where or when. Before she
could ponder further on his identity, darkness enveloped her.
CHAPTER 15