Dark Angels

Chapter Nine

Chapter Nine

“My father had one.” Lee bent to examine the sleek, gun-metal gray face-plate with two digital displays and a row of glistening LED’s.

The salesman handed Lee the instruction manual. “I’m more of a HAM Radio nut myself, but a lot of guys buy these Radio Scanners to eavesdrop on the police transmissions. I gotta say, you’re the first woman that’s taken an interest.”

Lee ignored the inference, figuring the guy was on the make and occupied herself with the manual’s list of police slang, jargon and the acronyms dispatches use to rely calls to emergency responders: The cops, fire department and the medical response teams.

“I can have a technician drop by your house this afternoon,” the clerk continued. “He’ll set you up with an antenna, wire everything, and test the unit for you.”

Lee reached for her shoulder bag. “That’ll be fine. Put everything on my card.”

Later that night, Lee sat in her home office and fiddled the squelch control on her new piece of electronic gadgetry. The technician had positioned the radio on the corner of her desk and taken the time to give her a crash course in its operation. Lee, being more technically inclined than most, had been a fast study and now was confident with the operation of the police radio.

With the volume adjusted to her liking, she sat in the darkness with her Bushmills and listened to a 10-51: Some poor drunk bastard didn’t know it yet but the cops were closing in, responding to a drunk and disorderly call from the City dispatcher. By the time Lee had finished her drink, a 10-52 came down the line: Someone had run their car into a pole and needed medical attention. An ambulance had been mobilized, Code 3.

Lee fought a gnawing hunger and studied the radio manual. A case of s****l assault would be an infrequent event in Lee’s small corner of Iowa, dwarfed in comparison to the number of traffic accidents, fires, trespass, and noise violations. But with two rapes occurring in the past week there was mounting tension and Lee’s radio would keep her informed of new developments.

Lee wasn’t too disappointed when, by eleven o’clock, nothing of interested had been heard from the radio and she returned to her computer to check in with the s****l Assault Forum. Pretty slow night, Lee thought while looking at a screen that held nothing of interest. But all that changed the following evening:

Lee had almost missed it. She had worked late and walked through her front door ready for a quick drink and then bed. On her way to the kitchen she dropped her brief case onto her desk in the home office and, without much interest, she flipped on the police radio.

She had her head in the fridge searching for a fresh tomato and was ignoring the crackles that were emanating from the radio down the hall. She thought she heard a report of a drunk-driver, a 10-55, but couldn’t be sure over the sound of frying bacon. The toaster popped and Lee was just reaching for the mayo when her mind triggered. Her chin came up. Had she heard that right? There was an urgent undertone to the dispatcher’s usual monotonic voice. Everyone in the City was keyed. The knife fell from Lee’s fingers and rattled across the counter-top, splattering mayonnaise.

This is Unit 06 responding, Code 3. Possible 10-44 in progress. Back-up requested.

Lee was already running along the hall, her BLT left cooling by the stove. She charged into her home office and hit the button on the digital voice recorder that was wired into the back of the police scanner. “An address! Give me a f*****g address,” she screamed bending over the radio, unable to bring herself to sit down.

Dispatcher: Unit 06, what’s your 20?

Response: Just turning onto Durard. Over.

Lee lost valuable time searching for her street map and vowed from now on, it would be tacked to the wall. Durard Street was on the East Side, clear across town. It would take the best part of thirty minutes if she pushed the speed limit. Lee bolted out of the house and was fumbling to lock the front door when she discovered she didn’t have her keys. With a frustrated groan she went back inside to scuffle around the hall table with frantic fingers. She needed to be more organized.

Lee turned the corner onto Durard twenty-five minutes later. An ambulance with its lights blazing was pulled up along the curb and had already attracted a crowd of spectators. Three cruisers were stationed, nose to tail across the street; their throbbing lights turning the street-scene into a macabre circus show. Lee cranked the wheel and rammed the curb; parking haphazardly with one wheel up on the sidewalk. Getting out of her car she was aware of the crackling sounds of radio static and, fighting the insane feelings of wanton lechery, almost in a panic, she crossed a neighbor’s lawn. She jostled her way through a thickening crowd and avoided a cop who stilled her with a hard stare.

A distraught woman stood on the front steps of a squat, three-story walk-up. She was sobbing heavily in the arms of another woman; a neighbor, perhaps. They were both older and Lee guessed the one with the shoulders heaving had to be the victim’s mother.

There was a ripple of anticipation as the front doors opened and an ambulance attendant backed out, negotiating the narrow opening with his gurney. He gripped the stainless steel bars and lifted the end over the sill and backed down the steps. Lee pushed a hand against her teeth. The victim was a mess. And she was just a kid.

The girl rolled her battered face from side to side, in agitated denial. “How could you?” Lee heard her crying over and over: “How could you? ...How could you?”

The child’s lips and nose leaked blood and her eyes, swollen and blackened, overflowed rivets of angry tears that glistened in the streetlights. As the gurney rolled past, the girl’s long pale arm flopped free and bounced as one of the wheel’s caught a crack in the sidewalk. Lee saw something fall from the girl’s hand. Like a delicate bird, shedding a downy feather, something fluttered to the sidewalk.

There was an abrupt movement in the crowd, opposite; someone was jostling for a look. Lee glanced up, missed it at first, but with senses pricked she jerked back like she had heard a pistol shot. Her insides pitched. There was the flash of red hair as the woman retreated into the bystanders. Lee only saw her for an instant and even then, only from the back; never saw her face. But there was something in the way the woman tossed her head. It could only be the woman from the hospital.

“There’s the bastard!” someone shouted and the focus of the crowd shifted. A man was led out onto the steps, held upright between two cops. He was older, close to sixty with graying hair and a seedy unkempt beard. The front of his shirt was torn open and he was still bleeding from the deep lacerations where the girl had raked his chest with her nails.

“I married an animal!” The distraught woman had come to life, lurching forward, her eyes blazing like a jungle cat; her hands curled like talons. “I raised her for this? So you could help yourself to her body as soon as she was old enough to be of any use?” She went for his eyes but a cop intervened, got his arms around her and wrestled her flailing arms and legs back inside the door. Her neighbor bolted after them.

The drama over and the girl’s father safe from lynching, stowed hunched in the back of a cruiser, the crowd started to break up into smaller groups. Some wandered away, others stood dissecting the events that had marred their quiet evening. Lee moved over to the sidewalk, over to where she had watched something flutter from the girl’s hand. It took a moment for her to spot it in the hazy light, but it was there. Lee looked around nervously then stooped down. It was a bloodied fingernail. It had been torn clean away at the cuticle and looked like a tiny seashell. Lee hesitated before reaching for the blood-covered memento.

She reached with tentative fingers, bobbled the nail in her palm a moment and then, looking around once again, she popped it into her mouth.

Doctor Sue Bowen’s clinic was located on a forgettable backstreet and was indeed a storefront, squeezed in between a dry cleaner’s and a defunct barber shop. The window was masked with brown paper but the lights shone through. A group of four women huddled together on the sidewalk coaxing the last of the nicotine from cigarette ends.

Lee hid the Porsche across the street, tucked in behind a panel van, and made her way toward the front door. The smokers turned and smiled when they realized she was one of them.

The room was long and narrow. The chrome and vinyl chairs were of thrift shop vintage and had been set up at one end. A shiny coffee urn sat on a table positioned to one side and a group clustered around a woman troweling out naomi bars from a baking dish and distributing them on paper napkins. “Coffee dear?” she called out when she saw Lee watching.

“Please,” Lee acknowledged and accepted a styrofoam cup.

The woman was a pleasant-looking forty-year-old. “Your first time, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Yes,” Lee confessed feeling disassociated and she took a sip of coffee so she wouldn’t have to elaborate. It was like she was a fraud.

The woman misinterpreted the nervousness and reached out to touch Lee’s arm. “You’ll be fine, dear. Once you get to know us. We are a very friendly group and Sue is the greatest. Have a naomi bar,” she said, holding out a napkin.

Lee accepted the chocolate square. “Thank you. This is very kind of you.”

“Nonsense. Now, we are about ready to begin. You come and sit beside me and later, I’ll introduce you around.”

Doctor Sue Bowen not only got all the brains in the family, she got the looks as well. Lee, seated among fourteen other women, watched the tall blonde rise to address the group. Lee could see the family resemblance to Jenna, her ad rep, but where Jenna was as cute as a button, her older sister’s looks were more refined; lush and full. Sue’s expressive eyes and wide mouth needed little makeup. Her hair was held back with a clasp, and the jeans she wore did little to camouflage the length and curve of stupendous thighs.

The group of women settled into their chairs. “Good evening everyone. I see several new faces tonight so let me start by introducing myself. My name is Sue Bowen. I hold a doctor’s degree and am a clinical psychologist with a private practice here in town. I formed this discussion group five years ago after I was raped in my apartment.”

Lee’s head came up. Jenna hadn’t disclosed her sister’s gritty past.

“I was working at Women’s Hospital at the time and had returned home late. I unlocked my front door and found two men sitting on my sofa. They knew I was a doctor and demanded drugs. When I couldn’t comply, they took something much more precious to me.” Words of consolation and understanding were whispered throughout the room.

Lee went all watery inside. Christ! This is what she had come for!

“They put a gun to my head and told me to take off my clothes. After I undressed, I was paraded about the room and forced to assume revealing positions while they photographed me. Later, they pushed me down on my knees. I suffered both oral, vaginal, and anal penetration. The police were unable to affect an arrest and those men are still on the street.”

Sue Bowen took a step closer to the front row and raised a fist. Her blue eyes flashed. “But I refuse to be a victim!”

The women followed her lead, shouting in a joyful chorus of agreement: “I refuse to be a victim!”

Lee had to hold her styrofoam cup in two hands to prevent the coffee from slopping over. The image of this proud elegant woman on her hands and knees, her thighs separated, had turned Lee’s own body into a lightning bolt. She jolted at the thought of a man lowering himself into the forbidden darkness; a place where his p***s had no earthly right to be.

Sue’s admission that the men had gotten away... had never been held accountable, opened up a whole new dimension for Lee: The assailants had helped themselves to the physical attributions that Sue Bowen held most dear, and after using her, had walked away, clean-handed, out her front door and onto the streets.

And they were still out there, somewhere. Still reliving the night they got the fuckin’ tall blonde b***h down on the floor and did her from behind. It was no wonder that Sue Bowen had been adamant that Jenna bare her soul publicly and take steps to have the photography student who had ripped her shirt open, exposed for what he really was. And expelled from art college. Lee watched the defiant woman striding back and forth and tried to place her emotions:

To the women in the room, Doctor Sue Bowen was larger than life. She was a fighter who had gone down but risen again to overcome the odds. Their champion. A super-hero. As she prowled the room, Sue Bowen empowered the women. They were feeding off her words; clinging to her like sheep that run to the shepherd when the wolf rings the dinner bell.

In Lee’s eyes, Sue was magnificent. Watching the woman’s body move, Lee was enthralled; couldn’t pull her eyes away.

And Sue had a wonderful body, one that a much younger women would die for: Slender, muscular and tightly packed. How hard it must have been to render that body up, Lee thought, to a couple of lowlifes who didn’t deserve to lick Sue Bowen’s boots. Lee tried to envisage what had happened that night: Sue walking into the safety and seclusion of her home after a long day only to be faced with two louts lolling on her sofa, faces plastered with cheap dirty grins.

She tried to imagine the icy fear that Sue must have felt when she saw the gun. The dreadful feeling of hopelessness as the two slowly got to their feet and ambled toward her; the realization that she was trapped.

Beyond closed eyes, Lee saw the men backing Sue into a wall to reinforce the feeling of entrapment; saw Sue shrinking from their hands. But with no place to go Sue could only turn her face away as they touched her about the breasts, groping and squeezing; searching out the thrust of her n*****s. Then, with the gun to the side of her head, Sue would have fumbled the buttons. And then the clasp of her bra.

With her breasts swaying free, the men must have enjoyed a longer look at the slope and weight and then smirked and pointed to her skirt. The tug of the zipper and the sensation of the skirt falling. And finally, Sue would have struggled with her shoes and pantyhose.

The humiliation must have seemed unbearable, standing naked, told to pose, but quickly replaced with horror when they forced her down onto hands and knees. Sue would have been struck in the face by the reality. She was to be used like an animal. Forced to submit to abnormal and morally repugnant behavior: She was to be brutally sodomized.

“And tonight we have a very special guest.”

Lee opened her eyes and was unceremoniously plopped back down into the room full of Doctor Sue Bowen groupies. The women were applauding and turning in their seats. Lee looked over a shoulder and saw a middle-aged woman beam graciously and rise from her seat. The woman was carrying a book and, in her business suit, had the unmistakable look of an author.

Lee was just raising her hands to add her own polite support when she saw the flame of red. The celebratory author had made a sidestep between the chairs and behind her, in the last row, Lee saw the long copper-colored hair. The look of surprise on the woman’s face as their eyes met was unmistakable. There was the flash of guilt. There was no question: It was the same woman that Lee had seen at the hospital, hanging about young Rosemary’s door.

The redhead’s eyes held Lee’s for only a moment. Then, still dealing with the shock and absurdity of the situation, the woman jumped to her feet and pushed past the startled woman who was seated beside her. Once free of the row of chairs, the redhead bolted toward the door.

It took Lee only a moment to gather her wits and, without a thought as to how things might look, she jumped up and madly beat after the woman.

Outside, the night had turned cold and standing on the damp sidewalk, Lee searched right and then left through the mist that was rising from the pavement. She spotted the redhead half a block away, a sizable lead, but the woman was skittering atop high-heels and wore a tight skirt. Lee wore jeans and her Reeboks.

It was totally insane but Lee took off after the fleeing woman. And was quickly closing the gap when the redhead seemed to hesitate; either realizing that she couldn’t out distance Lee, or perhaps she became aware of how ridiculous the situation had become. Either way, she eased up and offered no resistance when Lee gripped her upper arm and spun her around, face-to-face.

Lee was breathing hard. “You’re... You’re from the hospital. And I saw you at the rape; the other night. That young girl. I saw you. Saw the guilt on your face. Don’t deny it.”

The woman was older than Lee, either side of forty, well dressed, and strangely composed. “I don’t deny it, dear. Why should I. You were there, as I recall. For the same reason?”

Lee blinked at the woman, feeling a bit off base. “But...”

The woman opened her purse and handed Lee a tissue. “Blow your nose, dear. My name is Margret, but I am called Red Margo. And who might you be?”

Lee held the tissue in her hand. “You’re some kind of a predator.” Lee found herself filled with indignation and scrapping for a fight. But wasn’t entirely sure why. “A stalker, maybe...”

Margo smiled and hooked a displaced curl behind Lee’s ear. “As are you, my dear. One of the phantom vultures.”

“But...” The fight drained from Lee’s limbs. “I don’t understand.”

“The nose, dear. First the nose and then your name. Please.”

“Leanne but everyone just calls me Lee.” She blew into the tissue.

“Well Lee. I can’t tell you how nice it is to finally meet you; a kindred spirit, as it were.”

Lee was aware of the woman still stroking her hair. “A kindred spirit? Lady, I don’t know you and I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“Oh. Now who’s in denial? It’s so obvious who you are, Lee. And what you are. You may deny it, but you choose to walk the dark side of the street. You look for despair where others seek only happiness. You are touched by women’s pain, but for all the wrong reasons. You crave lust over love, fact over fantasy. You prefer to move among the tormented souls.”

Lee felt a growing despair in light of all the woman was saying. Margo was right. Lee had never faced up to it, though lately she had suspected she might be some kind of freak. She reached out for the woman’s arm. “I thought I was the only one,” Lee conceded.

“Oh no, child. There are others of us who live in the shadows. I can take you, and you will see. You need never be alone, dear; ever again. You have sisters; angels of the darkness.”