Pure Hate (21 page)

Natasha tried to pretend that Edward’s calm
soothing words were having some impact.

“Everything’s going to be fine. The cops have it
under control. You know I wouldn’t let anything happen to you.”

She had changed her name and moved
out of Germantown after high school. Her phone number and address were
unlisted. She had no contact with anyone she knew fifteen years ago. Even the
cops were unable to locate her. She had avoided contacting them out of fear
that they might lead Malcolm to her. So far, she’d been safe. More than a
decade had passed since she’d seen Malcolm, but she knew he was out there
looking for her, and all her precautions, all of Edward’s soothing words, all
of the police efforts to catch Malcolm weren’t going to stop what was coming.
She knew it the day she slept with Reed. She’d told herself that Malcolm loved
her enough to forgive her but she’d known. When she told Edward what Malcolm did
to Renee’, she could feel the knife sliding into her own gut, opening her up,
spilling her intestines onto the floor. Edward didn’t understand. The cops
didn’t understand. But she knew.

“He’s probably just running from the police now.
He did kill a cop after all. If they catch him, he’s done. Natasha? Natasha,
are you still listening?”

“Uh huh. Look, I’ve still got a lot of work to do
here. I’ll give you a call when I get home.”

“You sure you don’t want to stay at my house? At
least until this whole thing is over?”

Natasha thought about it and quickly dismissed
the idea. She knew Edward wanted to protect her, but he couldn’t. If Malcolm
found her at Edward’s house, they were both dead. Alone, maybe she could reach
him. He loved her once. Maybe that meant that he wouldn’t murder her?

How could a man love someone and then
kill her?

Those others, yes. Even Renee’ she
could understand. But she and Malcolm had been something special. Renee’ was
his lover, but she’d never been his friend. They’d never laughed together the
way Natasha had made Malcolm laugh with her. She had been his friend. But then,
so had Reed.

The fear started in her again. She’d been
fighting it all day, but now it gripped her deep in her stomach, twisting. It
clamped down on her spine and shook her. Natasha dropped the phone and grabbed
hold of the desk, holding on as the world turned and flipped at odd angles. She
squeezed her eyes shut and tried to resist the urge to crawl under the desk and
curl into a fetal position. If she gave up now, she was dead for sure. Malcolm
would eat her alive. She picked up the phone and let out a long breath to
steady her nerves.

“Natasha? Natasha?”

“I’m here and thanks for the offer, but I think I
need to be alone tonight. I’m pretty worn out and I sleep better in my own
bed.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

There was a long, awkward pause as Edward
struggled with the idea of saying, “I love you.” Natasha felt his struggle and
wasn’t in the mood for it. She hung up the phone, helping him to solve his
dilemma. She knew Edward loved her, but he didn’t want to be the first one to
say so. It was one of his insecurities. He didn’t want to be the only one in the
relationship who was “in love.”

Natasha didn’t want to be in love at
all, not with anyone ever again. Love scared her. She’d loved Malcolm. Malcolm
had loved her. And because of that love, she’d probably be murdered.

Natasha dropped her head to the desk and cried.
She hated herself for it. They were tears of self-pity and fear. She felt weak
and pathetic, but the crying helped. She could feel eyes on her as people
walked past her office and looked in at her, watching her sob like a baby.

She’d always hated the fact that all
the offices at Creative Computer Concepts were made of glass. She felt like a
bug in a child’s ant farm. Natasha loved her job. It wasn’t what she thought
she’d be doing when she was an art major at Creative and Performing Arts. By now,
she figured she’d be showing her Picassoesque oil paintings at galleries all
over Greenwich Village, Paris, and Italy. Now, she channeled all her artistic
talents into putting a good twenty-first-century face on automotive supply
stores, furniture warehouses, restaurants, and discount stores. She spent the
greater portion of her day in cyberspace. The good thing was that computer
geeks were supposed to be eccentric, so she could come to work in Birkenstocks,
paisley skirts, loose, blousy, mid-rift shirts that revealed her pierced belly
button and sunflower tattoo, and she could read comic books at her desk and
call it research. In other words, being a professional didn’t mean she had to
grow up.

There was a soft knock at her door and Natasha
knew it was one of her fellow geeks coming to be supportive, probably hoping
that her moment of weakness would make her an easy lay for the right comforting
shoulder. The last thing she wanted to do was hear trite words of support and
encouragement from some leering quasi-virgin whose sexual vocabulary included
computer jargon.

One of her co-workers, a disheveled computer-game
junkie with an Adam’s apple the size of a golf ball, opened the door without
waiting be invited and stuck his head in.

“Are you okay?”

Natasha sighed heavily and slammed her hand down
on the table.

“Go away. Yes, I’m sure. No, I don’t want to talk
about it.”

She didn’t even bother to look up to see his
reaction.

She heard the soft footsteps
tentatively creep away. She hated to admit it, but her own cruelty energized
her and shook her out of her depression. She got up from her desk, picked up
her Carhartt bomber jacket and Kenneth Cole black leather purse and walked
toward the elevator. The closer she came to the street, to abandoning the safety
and mundanity of the office, the less confident she felt. By the time she
reached the elevators, she felt like she was walking toward the gas chamber.

It was the same dull, hopeless dread she’d
felt since she heard Malcolm’s name on the news. When she heard that he was
wanted in connection with Reed’s slaughtered family and that Renee’ and
her
family were missing, when she learned that Malcolm was the prime suspect in the
brutal murders of half a dozen families over the years, Natasha felt every
meal, every breath, was potentially her last. She felt every person she spoke
with was goodbye. Her senses were aroused and fevered as if for the last time.
She was a condemned woman, and she’d never felt more alive.

The elevator doors slowly shut, locking her in
its tomb, and began to descend. Going home was the scariest part of her day as
she waited to feel his powerful hands clamp around her throat.

Each evening at the end of her
workday, when she stepped through the door to her apartment and found it empty,
the relief, the release of tension, was almost sexual, orgasmic. She would
collapse onto her couch and stare out the window wondering where Malcolm was
and when he was coming for her, how much longer she had.

The elevator doors opened with a whoosh and Natasha
stepped into the lobby, walking briskly, her heels tip-tapping across the
granite tile and through the glass revolving doors. Cold air hit her face. The
chill afternoon air on her skin felt refreshing, invigorating, strangely
soothing after eight-and-a-half in her little office inhaling stagnant air and
staring at her computer screen. She walked quickly toward the subway, weaving
between slower pedestrians as she lengthened her stride into the walking sprint
that she’d used ever since she’d been in high school, walking home beside her six-foot-five
boyfriend.

She stood on the subway platform waiting for her
train and staring at the other passengers, wondering how many of them were
worried about being murdered when they got home.

The moment Malcolm heard Natasha’s keys in the
front door, a rush of adrenaline and endorphins dumped into his bloodstream.
The excitement was luscious, sensual. He hadn’t seen Natasha face to face since
he’d left the hospital fifteen years ago with stitches and staples holding his
throat together. He wanted her now more than he’d known possible.

The apartment was a tomb. Malcolm hadn’t turned
on a light. The sun set and night crept in to slowly leech away all light. He
sat in the living room, staring at the front door, watching the shadows slip
along the floor toward him. He hadn’t spoken to Rick, who was nervously pacing
from one room to the next, in hours. The tenebrous shadows had occupied all of
his attention as the night slowly absorbed him, sucking his black skin down
into darkness, leaving only his feral silver smile glinting in the faint
moonlight.

When the door opened, the widening
triangle of light from the hall reached across the floor, slicing a wedge out
of the darkness that left Malcolm’s legs and feet revealed. Natasha was so busy
with her oversized purse and shrugging out of her extra-large bomber jacket
that she almost didn’t notice. Then, just before she shut the door and turned
on the light she stopped, frozen. Her breathing became quick and audible.
Malcolm leaned forward in his chair until the bottom half of his face entered
the funnel of light so that his mouth and chin were visible, leaving his eyes
still enshrouded in night. He smiled ear to ear and ran his tongue over the
tips of his platinum canines.

Natasha’s silhouette shook and
swayed, backlit by the hall light. She didn’t speak. Her hand was on the light
switch, but she hadn’t turned it on. Her other hand was still on the front door
knob, but she hadn’t shut it or tried to run. She seemed confused about what to
do. She was just frozen there. Her breath came faster and faster. Malcolm could
see her chest heaving. It looked as if she might be having a heart attack. She
took one long, ragged breath and exhaled long and slow. Her breathing then
returned to normal. Malcolm was impressed.

“Hello, Natasha.”

“Malcolm.” Natasha finally said in a calm,
measured tone, not a question or a welcome, just an acknowledgement.

“Close the door and leave the lights out.”

“Yeah, I remember. You and your thing with the
dark.”

Her tone held the glimmer of sarcasm,
but there was something else there, a hint of sexual innuendo, the same fatal
flirtatiousness, the same fearless, careless, mischievousness that had first
attracted him. That same devil-may-care attitude had no doubt led them to this
moment, the way it had once led her to fuck Reed.

Natasha shut the door to enclose them in
crypt-like darkness. Malcolm’s eyes had adjusted to the darkness. He could see
her clearly without the light. He felt his own pulse quicken as he realized
that she looked exactly the same as she had fifteen years ago. Not a wrinkle or
a gray hair or a pound of extra weight. She still dressed the same. Her
mannerisms were the same. Her hair was still cut short like a boys in what was
almost a crew cut. She still had that slight, slender frame with small breasts
and large ass perched high on her back that almost seemed out of place on a
body so skinny. It was disconcerting. She was a woman in a child’s body.

Natasha had never been very tactful
and fifteen years hadn’t added much finesse. Even faced with violent
annihilation she got right to the point.

“So, did you miss me or did you come
here to kill me, too?”

Love died hard in Malcolm. But so did
hate. He smiled, but didn’t reply. He rose from the overstuffed leather lounge
chair and stretched, drawing out the moment, luxuriating in his own power.

He looked bigger than Natasha
remembered. In high school, Malcolm had been tall and skinny. Now, he was huge.
Even in his suit, she could see his powerfully built shoulders and chest, his
biceps stretching his sleeves, ready to rip through the seams of his finely
tailored jacket. His body seemed to have been engineered for violence. His eyes
were boiling pits of dark flame. She could see her reflection in their hard
dark surface, boiling on his retinas like ink in a cast-iron skillet. As he approached her, Malcolm seemed to
bring the darkness with him, swallowing up all the light in the room. He was
like a black hole about to suck her down into the void.

“Yes, I missed you and, yes, I’m here
to kill you.”

Rick also stepped out of his shadows,
and Natasha visibly recoiled from him. She obviously remembered him. She’d
never trusted or liked him. Malcolm remembered the way Rick used to leer at her
when he thought Malcolm wasn’t looking, like a starving mongrel slavering
hungrily beneath his master’s table, waiting for his chance to eat. Rick was a
sneaky little psychopath and seeing him in her apartment, waving a big shiny
gun at her, was freaking her out even more than Malcolm’s presence.

“Wait.” Malcolm barked.

“What’s he doing here?”

“Back up.” Malcolm answered.

“You were afraid I’d be too much for
you?” She was taunting him. Malcolm responded with another gruesome smile.

“ I don’t want anyone interrupting
us.”

Malcolm wanted her so badly he could
taste the smell of her skin. He wasn’t ready to see her die. Killing her would
be hard, like doing Renee’ had been easy.

She had disappointed and disgusted
him. Fat, filthy, living in squalor with her dimwitted, overweight husband and
her litter of dimwitted, overweight kids. She’d been the first woman he’d ever
fallen in love with and, even more special to him, she’d been the first woman
to fall in love with him, the first to look at him and not see a monster, the
first to see something special, something good that could be loved, something
he couldn’t even see in himself.

Then she’d fucked Reed, turned her
back on Malcolm, betrayed him. He was sickened by what she’d allowed herself to
become. It had been a pleasure to end her existence, to make her suffer,
scream, beg as he cut open her torso and fucked her insides, ejaculating within
her ribcage and onto her still beating heart. He didn’t know how she could’ve
possibly imagined that life with that slovenly, lowbred, peckerwood she married
would be better for her than the life Malcolm offered her. There was nothing
that Malcolm would not have done for her. He would have conquered the world for
her and laid it at her feet. Instead, she’d chosen to lay her pearls before
swine. So, he’d come to take both the pearls and the swine to slaughter. He’d
turned her filthy, white trash home into a butcher shop.

Malcolm remembered how Renee’ looked
when she opened the door and saw him. Her face twisted in terror and Malcolm
saw something else in her fear: guilt. And that had been enough. He ripped that
family apart. He’d wanted to destroy every part of her, every part of the life
she’d built without him. Even the kids had not escaped his wrath. That was the
first family he’d taken and afterwards he’d been ashamed at what he’d done to
the kids. So he hid the bodies. He wrapped them in trash bags and stuffed them
in the Impala, the kids in the trunk, Renee’ and her pig of a husband in the
back seat.

The drive back to Germantown had been
nerve-wracking. A casual inquiry from any traffic cop and he’d have been
fucked. When he finally made it back to his neighborhood, he buried the bodies
in the basement of an abandoned house on Duvall Street. He felt nothing as he
shoveled dirt onto her lifeless face. She was dead, her whole family was dead,
and he still felt the emptiness, the sadness, the rage, but not guilt, not
remorse.

When he packed the dirt down with his
foot, he began to smile. He did feel something. Joy. This killing had been
exhilarating, electric. He felt a euphoria wash over him as he replayed the
moment he ripped the trench knife from Renee’s belly to her throat, feeling her
hot steaming guts boiling out of the incision, the blood wash over his hands in
a warm, red torrent. Malcolm savored the look on her face as she begged for her
life, promised to love him again as she tried to tempt him with her disgusting,
fat body. He’d felt nothing but contempt for her. In his heart, he’d still
thought of her as perfect all these years, and seeing her as she really was
freed him from delusion. She was disgusting, inferior, not worth the years he’d
spent suffering over his false memories. Malcolm wanted to reclaim those wasted
years from Renee’ one pound of flesh at a time.

He’d left their burial scene in a
walking dream, not seeing the streets as he whizzed past at nearly sixty miles
an hour, but intead the mortal terror of his victims played out before his eyes
as if he were watching them on a VCR. Finally, he’d had to pull off to the side
of the road to release the roiling storm of sexual agitation building within
him. After he satisfied himself, he went back to Renee’s house to clean up the
evidence, worried that someone would make the connection between them. But that
connection had been severed fifteen years ago. No one even noticed that they
were gone. That killing thrilled him more than any other.

So, when he found out that Reed was
having a child the Chaperone had become the Family Man. Soon afterward, Malcolm
tracked down Natasha. But he knew that if she disappeared too, the police would
start to get suspicious, and the only connection between the two girls were
Malcolm, Reed, and Rick. But Rick would never
tell. He was loyal. Reed would have pointed the cops right to his doorstep.
That was all a moot point now. Everyone knew Malcolm was the Family Man, so now
there really was no reason not to kill Natasha.

Rick wanted to kill her and Malcolm
knew Rick, the type who let his emotions better him, the type to do something impulsive.
Malcolm wasn’t so sure he wanted her dead just yet or so fast. But he knew he
wanted to hurt her. He needed to hurt her like she’d hurt him.

“What do you mean wait?!” Rick’s face
was screwed up in a scowl of anger and disgust.

“Don’t mad dog me, nigga!” And though
Rick turned away from Malcolm’s fury, his expression hadn’t changed.

“I thought we came here to kill this
bitch.”

“Oh, I want to do much more than kill
her.”

Malcolm reached out and gripped
Natasha’s jaw in his hand, digging his long, spidery fingers into her cheeks.
He pulled her closer until her face was less than an inch from his. With his
other hand, he reached around and grabbed her ass.

“Daddy’s home,” he growled.

With one hand, Malcolm grabbed hold
of the front of Natasha’s shirt, nearly jerking her off her feet as he
violently ripped it from her. Her small, perfectly round breasts, bounced and
bobbled when he ripped the shirt down off one shoulder and tossed it to the
ground. Her other shirtsleeve remained on her shoulder, strings dangling where
the stitches popped. She didn’t bother to try to cover herself. She let her
arms dangle limply at her sides and the rest of her shirt slowly slid down her
arm to the floor.

Malcolm licked his canines. His eyes
roamed her creamy, silky, white skin. As Malcolm’s arousal increased, so did
his aggression. He unsheathed his straight razor and grabbed Natasha’s skirt,
ripping that off as well.

“Don’t move.”

With the straight razor in his hand,
Malcolm knelt down in front of her and sliced off her panties.

Once again, he reached out and
grabbed her naked buttocks, gently caressing each cheek. He pulled her closer
until her pubic hair was pressed against his lips. Lovingly, he kissed her
vagina, slipping his tongue up inside her. She shook with fear and what
might’ve been excitement. He released her, looked up into her eyes and smiled,
again dragging his tongue over the gleaming tips of his platinum canines.