Sentenced to Heaven

Chapter Two-1

Chapter Two

The Woman Wronged

“So you’re sure I can repair these myself?”

“Absolutely, ma’am. Short of being completely shattered, you know. These are the latest kind. Just climb up there every spring, and if you see any storm damage, just use that special tape like I showed you.”

Rachel nodded, her gaze contemplative on the solar panels.

Aside from the skylight and chimney these covered the entire roof. She’d already been living here a month, doing the special modifications inside herself. She knew the panels provided more than enough power, all she would ever need. Still she wanted every contingency covered. Besides living completely off the grid up here, she wanted no visitors or contact with outsiders more than was absolutely necessary. Bill, the contractor she was taking one last tour of the place with before they parted ways, offered further reassurance.

“And even if something really drastic goes wrong, you’ve still got your emergency generator down in the old cold cellar. It’ll run the necessities for a while in a pinch. Just take it outside first. You’ve got a hundred gallons of gas in the tank over there and could take more from your truck. But what could happen? These are pretty forbidding mountains, but they hardly ever get much snow anymore. You won’t be socked in for weeks or anything. And unless you’re besieged by zombies or something, it’s only an hour to the nearest town. You’re quite remote out here, and you’ll get your privacy and quiet. But this is still twenty-first century America.”

“Alas!” remarked Rachel in her new persona as a modern-day recluse determined to live in isolation and get back into harmony with nature.

“I agree it’s not pretty sometimes. Can you believe that s**t over in Fielding? I don’t blame you for wanting to get away from it all.”

Bill went on about the latest mass shooting, and how the zealots, paranoiacs and gun manufacturers of the NRA were disgusting more and more responsible sportsmen like himself with their hysterical intransigence in the face of even the most toothless regulatory attempts.

Rachel let him vent, following him around the cabin toward the back. There were still a few cords of seasoned hardwood stacked here from the previous owner. Though her high-tech additions to his formerly rustic hermitage allowed for complete electric cooking and heat, the big fireplace inside was still equipped with the exchangers which was all the old man had needed. Now Bill was motioning at the outhouse-turned-chicken coop on the other side of the garden.

“Of course you’ve got your modern indoor plumbing now, and this place sits atop a great aquifer. Unlike most of us, you’ll never want for water. But once again, come Armageddon or something, there’s still a hand pump both out here and in the kitchen. There’s a creek that comes down from the heights a quarter-mile up the trail too, no doubt you found it in your exploring.”

Rachel nodded and he went on. He wasn’t telling her anything she didn’t know. Still the reassurance was welcome.

“I know you’ve laid in a huge supply of canned food and staples, and no doubt have that new chest freezer filled with meat. But this canyon is teeming with game too. I see you’ve got your vegetables already planted. You could live almost entirely off the land out here if you wanted to. That’s what old Reginald did. He hardly came to town twice a year I hear, and he had none of these amenities you’ve installed. You’ll be just fine, Missus Kline.”

This was Rachel’s new surname, thanks to a trip to a document forger in Los Angeles. A completely new identity, backed up by all the requisite files, had been easily within her means once the settlement and Jimmy’s life insurance came in, along with the proceeds from her house. Her experiences with the military, however harrowing, degrading and infuriating some of them had been, had at least prepared her to remake herself and disappear. Now all her preparations for payback were complete, and just in time.

Satisfied, Rachel wrapped things up with Bill, guiding him back toward the three mile-long driveway without inviting him inside.

It wouldn’t do for him to see some of the other modifications she’d made. Besides, the way his eyes kept jittering between her face and t**s made her feel less than hospitable. Of course nearly all men did that, and if this one tried anything she could tie him in knots and break every bone in his body. Still it was tiresome.

The exuberance of youth behind her, Rachel had come to consider those pneumatic boobs a curse. They’d cost her a brother and a career she’d loved, no thanks to a misogynist, patriarchal army and the male fixation with mammaries. As the former Lieutenant Blaine had entertained little interest in her s*x appeal since being raped out of the military, and far less since being doubly bereaved, the stares she’d received all her life had gone from ego-boosting to amusing to annoying to occasionally infuriating – like those of the little bastard at his sham of a trial.

Bereaved, aggrieved and now hell-bent on getting revenge, Rachel would at least get to pay back those stares soon, along with so much else.

Colonel Lowell may have been untouchable thanks to having the most powerful entity on the planet behind him. But rich as he was, this boy was another story. After enduring so much injustice in her brief lifetime, this old soldier was finally taking matters into her own hands. Let one guilty little asshole pay for all – especially since he seemed to be perfectly willing.

The entire time she’d been buying and modifying her new home, consolidating, transferring, and transforming assets and identities, Rachel had spent counting the days of Alex Downing’s ‘sentence’. She monitored her old town on-line. She knew when he arrived back home.

The story of the accident and hearing had received its due media attention at the time, though neither Rachel nor the prosecution courted a circus. Still the ludicrous sentence and grisly victims merited milking, so a reporter for the local paper was sent to rehash the facts and interview the young villain on his return from the posh rehab clinic where he’d been sent. Though still furiously appalled at the court’s decision, Rachel had approved of his openness, and found the boy’s words grimly satisfactory and even surprisingly respectable.

He made no excuses and reiterated his tortured remorse. He also repeated the offer that had made the papers the last time, pointing out that he was now a legal adult and willing to liquidate his assets for her if she would just come forward to claim them.

Rachel spit on his filthy blood-money, though she’d taken that of his parents for raising such an irresponsible child. Then he again offered his life to her too, and this she had no hesitation in accepting. Young as he was, Alex Downing understood some things she’d had to learn hard in combat. He’d repeatedly sworn to die for her and she understood why. Some dishonors were impossible to expunge otherwise. And she too had heard screams she couldn’t forget.

The patronizing paper took Downing’s vow as hyperbole, or youthful melodrama. To Rachel’s penetrating gaze though there was evidence of the same sincerity she’d seen in him at the disposition. For example, he’d freely volunteered that he was living at home now while he took evening classes to finish his interrupted education. He even mentioned the school, which she knew to be within reasonable walking distance of his parents’ house.

Returning undercover to town to stake this out, Rachel indeed found the young man walking to school and back alone in the early and late evenings, as if deliberately inviting abduction.

It seemed even while she’d been plotting her revenge, he’d truly been intending to abet it. Well, now she would finally see. Honorable and sincere in his self-sacrifice or a coward talking out his ass, Alex Downing Junior was never going to make it home tonight.

***

Once Bill shook her hand, got in his truck and took his eyes elsewhere, Rachel turned back to her high-tech hideout.

Sturdily constructed of stone and mortared logs, this was pleasingly bunker-like, with thick walls and small windows, as if made to fend off Indian attacks. Like the solar panels and satellite dish, the anomalous skylight on the roof was her own addition.

Off the grid she might be, but she could live without seeing a swathe of the sky at night (especially out here) no more than she could do without access to the internet and modern media. Finished with her exterior inspection, Rachel crossed the porch and went through the heavy door for one last check of the inside.

Perfectly ordinary, lovely domesticity greeted her, along with the TV, which she’d left on.

Some Western about murder and revenge was playing, which certainly suited her mood and the business at hand.

“You just let him walk out of here, Riley? Just like that? When are you going to make that bastard pay?”

“Soon, Jimmy. Soon my darling Caitlyn.”

Rachel addressed her lost family rather than the TV, pausing between the kitchen on her right and the dining room to the left. Ahead lay the central living space, the dining area leading to that enormous fireplace. A black bearskin lay between the hearth and the comfortable leather couch. Locked into a gun rack over the mantle was a pair of different-sized rifles and a shotgun. Opposite this, past the kitchen and doors leading to her storage closet/larder and utility room, was her office space with file cabinets, desk, chair, computer and associated electronics.

“What do you want from me? I’m no more eager to hang than the next guy!”

“You should meet my new house guest,” Rachel answered again, a habit she’d developed in the solitude out here. She’d also begun talking to the visiting wildlife. Maybe she needed a pet.

Rachel grinned at that. Over past the fireplace, the sixty-inch TV dominated the rear wall it shared with the bedroom on the other side. Behind the wall backstopping her desk lay the bathroom, its modifications hidden from sight. Between these two rooms a hallway led to the back door. Just before the threshold, another perpendicular door in the floor led to the cellar.

That was where most of her work had been done, and Rachel couldn’t leave to pick up that house guest – excuse me, prisoner – without having one last look over the dungeon she’d prepared for him. Retired she might be with all the money she’d come into recently, but her second career as a corrections guard was far from over. Here she would have a very manageable convict population, and no bleeding-heart restrictions on how she managed it. She knelt down.

Throwing back the massive bolts she’d added, Rachel lifted up the heavy, counterweighted door and let it fall against the floor. Steep steps hewn of mountain granite, like the foundation all around, descended along that thick outer wall. Triggered by the door opening, long-lasting LEDs lit the way down with a strong white light, and she followed it through the open trap. The voice urging vengeance from behind quickened her step even as it faded into inaudibility.

“Sometimes you just have to act, Riley, and damn the consequences!”

“And sometimes you plan ahead, and either exacerbate or mitigate those consequences,” Rachel murmured back, grinning again at her wit and resourcefulness. No one would ever know she’d abducted Downing, they’d never find the two of them if they suspected she had, and here she would have free rein to accept his offer and so much more. When she was finally finished with him, the wilderness scavengers could scatter his bones.

Reaching the level, Rachel noted the generator nestled into a pit sunk further in the floor in the corner: the old sublevel cold cellar Bill had referred to. Seeing another heavy trap door tipped up against the wall, a belated inspiration struck, and she filed it away for later. Then she swept her gloating gaze around the rest of the meticulously cleared and remodeled subterranean space.

She took in the embedded iron rings and ceiling hooks, the chains, racks of restraints and implements, the improvised torture devices and larger apparatus. She nodded with satisfaction at the beyond-Spartan accommodations and remembered the effort it took to include the basement in the plumbing overhaul. Swelling with both accomplishment and righteous anticipation, she again soothed the impatient ghosts of her murdered family. Before the sun came up on another day, the villain who’d taken them from her would be suffering properly at last.

***

With a renewed bounce in her step, Rachel quit her homemade dungeon. Back upstairs she went to her bedroom to kit up for the mission. Though it was still only noon, she had a six-hour drive ahead.

Sun poured through the skylight directly over her bed. Before changing, she picked up a remote and flipped on the big TV on the wall opposite. Up came the feed from the webcam a floor below. She’d left the lights on, and could see nearly every detail: perfectly. She switched it off and quickly stripped.

After donning a flexible but supportive black body stocking, Rachel strapped a sheathed combat knife to her forearm and a holstered handgun to her ankle. She pulled on nondescript working clothes: tough but unrestrictive pants and a shirt, and sturdy hiking shoes. In case her prey needed persuading she slid a taser into one pocket and a hypodermic injector loaded with sedative into the other. Tugging her old lieutenant’s cap down onto her close-cropped hair, she grabbed her keys and went back into the living room.

“That’s what I should have done to you years ago, Flanagan! No one crosses the Rileys!”

The TV was still blaring, fusillades of gunfire announcing the film’s climax. Rachel paused long enough to see the bad guy get it, then shut everything off.

“No one crosses me either – or at least no snot-nosed, coddled little rich kid does.”

From the refrigerator Rachel retrieved the cooler she’d prepared. Stocked with fruit juice, ice tea, sandwiches and travel snacks, it should keep her going until she returned without the need to stop for more than fuel. Heading for the door then, she halted for one last look around.

Everything appeared completely innocent and normal. She was just an early retiree, retreating from tragedy into understandable seclusion. What secrets she might be keeping were no one’s business but her own.

Smiling to herself, Rachel left the cabin. She locked up and strode purposely toward her specially outfitted SUV. Eager to begin the long drive down from the mountains, she went to claim her right of vengeance.