Crazy Wanda Page 5

  “Half now and the other half once you show me her place.”

  He studied the money in her hand, then her eyes, and then he took the cash. He folded it and stuffed it into a pocket.

  “When do you want to go there?”

  Angela was at work, so Wanda knew she wouldn’t be home for hours and hours. “I want to go now.”

  He nodded once. “All right, then. You open the hatch of your car and I’ll put my bike in.”

  CHAPTER 11

  After a long shift at the bar, Angela was looking forward to some solitude and some sleep. Brandy, the girl who alternated with Wanda on her nights off, was a lot less tiring to work with. She was cheerful, friendly, and efficient. More importantly, she was not subject to the same dark moods that could make for a long night.

  But then Barry had told her that Wanda had called in and quit. It was Wanda’s regular night off, as was the next night, so at least it gave Barry a couple of days to hire a replacement. He said that a woman, Tiffany, had come in asking about work, and that she seemed like a good fit for the spot. Angela was glad she wasn’t going to have to handle things alone, although she had done that enough not to be worried about it. She was puzzled, though, as to why Wanda would simply up and quit.

  After she parked her pickup in front of her house and shut off the engine, Angela put her head back against the headrest for a moment, just to enjoy the silence. When Bardolph howled, she smiled. She was excited that she would be able to get a glimpse of him and his mate. Seeing such magnificent creatures was always a treat.

  Once inside, she took out a couple of half chickens and set them on the counter while changing out of her work clothes. She was looking forward to a hot shower and a good night’s sleep, but first she wanted to take the chicken out to the wolves.

  Angela took one of the chicken halves out the back door in her left hand. In her other hand she carried a gun, as she always did. Even though they accepted a handout of raw chicken, they were still wild animals and Angela knew better than to assume they weren’t dangerous. Angela wasn’t so much worried about Bardolph, because he knew her, but the female had shown herself to be aggressive. Being pregnant probably only made her more edgy.

  As Angela walked out into the moonlit backyard, she spotted Bardolph sitting back at the edge of the woods. He let out a long, mournful howl. Angela frowned at how different it sounded from his usual howls.

  And then she suddenly saw why.

  Angela had almost stepped on the female wolf lying dead at her feet.

  In sudden shock and dismay, Angela knelt down beside the dead animal. It had an entry wound through the front of its chest, exiting out the back where the damage was extensive. It seemed clear that someone had shot the wolf with a large-caliber weapon.

  Angela ran her hand over the lifeless pups in the dead female’s cold womb. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered.

  She’d been delighted that Bardolph had found a mate so that he wouldn’t be alone, and that they were going to have pups. But now someone had unexpectedly put an end to it.

  It was shocking that the wolf had been shot and killed, but what was even more alarming was that someone with a gun had been on her property and close up by her house.

  Angela stood with her own gun in hand and looked around, searching the shadows, feeling unexpectedly vulnerable. She didn’t see anyone, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t still be there. She felt violated that someone had invaded her private sanctuary.

  She went back inside and retrieved a flashlight. She inspected the backyard but didn’t see any signs of who had been there. Since there was grass, rock, moss, and small brush, she wouldn’t necessarily expect there to be footprints, so she wasn’t all that surprised when she found none.

  She next walked down the drive, searching from side to side for tracks of any kind. Here and there, in the gravel, was a random footprint or two where the intruder had stepped off the grass onto the side of the road in order to avoid brush. The gravel was too dry and loose for clear footprints, but she could tell by the different sizes of the prints that they were from two different people.

  Out at the road, on the other side of her barbed-wire fence and the cable across the drive, she found tire marks where a vehicle had pulled off the road and parked. It looked to be a relatively small car. Stretching up and looking in both directions, Angela didn’t see any sign of it.

  When she spotted something in the beam of her flashlight, she squatted down and found the stub of an unfiltered cigarette. It was just beside the tire tracks where the car had pulled off the road and stopped. The cigarette was on the passenger side. There was a footprint that made it clear the passenger had gotten out and snubbed out the cigarette with a shoe.

  With nothing to be found other than the crushed cigarette and no one around, Angela finally made her way back up the road to the house. The tracks seemed to indicate they had deliberately pulled off the road and parked at the bottom of her drive. When they had walked up the drive and gone around the back of the house, the wolf had probably come out of the woods, possibly viewing the person as prey or a threat, and had been shot.

  It was puzzling that the house hadn’t been touched. She wondered if they had been spooked by the wolf and left, fearing that someone might have heard the gunshot.

  With a heavy heart, Angela retrieved a shovel and went about digging a hole near the woods. It was hard going through roots. She had to pry out rocks and toss them aside, but she was animated by her anger over the wolf having been killed, as well as the vulnerable feeling of someone having been right there around her house. At least they hadn’t broken in.

  When the hole was deep enough, she grabbed the two hind legs and dragged the dead animal into the hole. With the back of her hand, she wiped tears from her cheek, and then she started shoveling the dirt into the grave.

  Bardolph watched from the shadows among the trees. He howled once. When she had finished shoveling in all the dirt, she knelt down and used her hands to pat the dirt down.

  As she did, Bardolph came close and slowly walked past her, brushing his side against her before sniffing the grave. He seemed to understand that his mate was gone.

  He moved to the other side of the grave, lay down, and rested his head on top of the fresh dirt, as if he intended to hold vigil. Together they grieved for the dead wolf, and all that could have been.

  CHAPTER 12

  Wanda had been waiting in the parking lot not far from Ricky’s house for an hour. She was annoyed that he still hadn’t called. She had spent the last two weeks on the phone, reminding him how terrible it would be for him if his wife divorced him and how it was only a matter of time, now that she’d been told he was cheating. He would lose his house. He would have to pay a good chunk of his income to her for alimony. It could jeopardize his business. She would be a leech, sucking him dry, for the rest of his life.

  Wanda had hammered home how a divorce would ruin his life, and how in turn it would ruin their lives together. To keep that from happening, they simply needed to get rid of her.

  Wanda had kept Ricky at arm’s length while stoking the furnace of his fears. Wanda had wanted him aching for her until he finally saw that her way was the only way.

  But he was an hour late in calling her. If he chickened out on her now she was going to be a lot more than simply angry with him. She had invested too much time in this for him to have second thoughts.

  At last the phone rang. It was Ricky.

  “Well?”

  “She’s finally asleep,” he said, sounding frazzled. “It took a lot longer than we thought it would. She wanted to stay up and watch TV. So I made her another drink. I dissolved a couple more Valium in it. It took a while, but she’s finally out.”

  “Good. I’ll be there in five minutes.”

  Wanda was excited to get it over and done with. She had to force herself to drive the speed limit through the nice part of town. The last thing she needed was to get pulled over by the police.

&n
bsp; She yearned to live in such a nice area. Her parents’ house was a dump in a dumpy part of town. Her father had a low-paying job cleaning vehicles at a trucking company. If that wasn’t bad enough, he gave a portion of his income to the church. He always said that it was God’s house that mattered, not theirs.

  After a lifetime of putting up with her parents’ fanaticism and living in a run-down, dangerous part of town, and now living by the week in the wretched Riley Motel, Wanda deserved better. Now, it was finally within reach.

  As she came around the corner, past some beautiful maple trees, she saw that the garage door was open. She’d driven past his house a number of times before. It was the kind of house she’d dreamed of since she was a girl. A real pretty house with shutters. A real pretty house with a nice yard. A real pretty house with a good-looking husband to take care of her.

  Ricky was walking back and forth inside the garage, waiting, looking nervous as hell. She smiled as she parked off to the side, out of the way so he would be able to get his big Suburban out of the garage. Given how he was pacing, she thought that maybe she should have told him to take one of the Valium himself.

  “Do you have it?” she asked as she met him in the garage.

  He held up a big, heavy-duty, milky-white nylon cable tie as he pushed the button to lower the garage door. “What if she wakes up?”

  “There’s two of us and one of her. What’s she gonna do? She’s too drugged to be able to put up much of a fight.” Wanda smiled. “She’ll probably sleep through the whole thing.”

  Ricky paced anxiously. “Maybe we should just have used the pills. You know, given her enough of an overdose to stop her breathing. Made it look like suicide.”

  “Did you have an easy time getting half a dozen Valium into her?”

  “Hell no. Why do you think it took so long?”

  “Then how would you have gotten her to swallow half a bottle of them?”

  He made a face. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

  “You know I’m right. We’ve talked about this, Ricky.”

  She swept an arm around his neck and pulled him down to give him a passionate kiss. That did the trick. He put his arms around her and pulled her close to return the kiss.

  “It’s been too long,” he said, his voice thick with desire.

  “Well, when we get done with this business we can go to bed. Together. In our house.”

  “At last,” he said, smiling. “I can’t tell you how much of a relief it was to have her asleep after our big fight.”

  “What big fight?”

  “She was yelling and screaming, still pissed over finding out about us. She said she was going to divorce my ass and have everything. I told her that she was wrong, that there was nothing serious going on, and whoever told her I was cheating on her didn’t know what they were talking about.”

  Wanda wasn’t listening very intently. As she looked around the garage she was smiling over what was to come. Her parents’ house wasn’t big enough to have a garage, much less a garage with room for cabinets and a workbench.

  “I presume she didn’t believe you.”

  “Hell no,” he said. “It made her even more angry that I was denying it. She said then that she knew it was true because the old guy told her that he had seen us butt-naked in the back of my Suburban parked behind the bar.”

  Wanda frowned as she turned back. “What are you talking about? What old guy?”

  Ricky threw up his hands in exasperation. “She said she was suspicious of why I spent so much time at that bar, so she went there to see if she could catch me with someone, but before she went in she met this old guy in the parking lot, a guy on a pink bicycle. She asked him if he knew the man who had the big muddy Suburban. He said that for fifty dollars he’d tell what he knew. She gave him the cash and he told her, then, that he’d seen me together a lot with a woman named Wanda who works there in the bar. He told her that after the bar closed one night he saw us going at it in the back of my truck.”

  Wanda stood staring in shock.

  “She said she went into the bar the next morning when I was at work and told the owner she was a friend of Wanda’s and wanted to know where she lived so she could drop off some things she had borrowed. I guess Barry told her where you were living with your parents at the time.”

  That conniving bitch had made Wanda believe it was Angela who had told her, and all along it had been that bum, Albert. Wanda had gone to Angela’s house to get even for the betrayal, intent on spray-painting some names on her door, and then maybe shooting the place up. It had been dark out in the countryside and they could hardly see.

  Before she could do what she had intended, Angela’s dog suddenly appeared out of the darkness, snarling viciously at her. She instinctively pointed the gun and pulled the trigger. She hadn’t expected the force of the kickback from Brad’s .357. It nearly knocked her on her ass. The sound had nearly deafened her.

  After recovering from the shock of the recoil and noise, she had seen in the moonlight that Angela’s dog was dead. She had figured that was even better revenge than she had intended, so they had left.

  “I made a drink for her with a couple pills in it,” Ricky was saying, “and told her that I was sorry and that I’d make it up to her. I apologized and begged like crazy for her forgiveness. I put on quite an act convincing her I was sincere and to have a drink with me, then another. She finally calmed down. After the drinks she was slipping into a mellow mood and wanted to watch TV before going to bed. She could hardly keep her eyes open as it was, but she didn’t want to go to bed. I didn’t know what to do and I was afraid of making her angry, so I made her another drink and put a couple more pills in it.”

  Wanda was hardly listening. She was outraged that it had been Albert all along who had blabbed everything to Ricky’s wife. Wanda wanted to strangle the little snitch for making her believe it was Angela who had betrayed her, when all along it had been him. He hadn’t said a word about any of it as he directed her to Angela’s house out in the desolate mountains.

  “Let’s get on with it,” Wanda said, to stop Ricky from rambling on with the story. It was clear his wife had rattled him. Wanda knew he was on the verge of chickening out, so she turned him around and give him a little shove toward the door into the house.

  As Ricky led her through the dimly lit house, Wanda looked around with wide eyes. She’d never been in a house that nice. The carpet was plush underfoot. The furniture looked expensive. There was a huge TV on the wall. Ricky walked on tiptoes ahead of her, as if he might wake his wife and she would come out of the bedroom with a baseball bat.

  When they reached the end of the hallway, he quietly pushed open the door and stood aside to let Wanda see his wife sprawled on her back on the bed, her arms splayed out, one leg hanging off the side of the mattress. She was fully clothed in those same kind of jeans that displayed her big belly and fat ass. Wanda had a hard time understanding how a good-looking guy like Ricky ever ended up with such a pig.

  “Hurry up,” Wanda urged.

  Ricky looked back at her, then went in and put one knee on the bed to lean over his wife. He pulled the heavy-duty cable tie from his pocket and slipped it around her neck like a necklace. She moaned but didn’t open her eyes.

  Wanda stood beside the bed and watched him feed the end of the cable tie through the ratchet mechanism. He grunted as he pulled it tight.

  When he did, his wife started to have difficulty breathing. She opened her eyes as she urgently tried to suck in air. It made an awful sound as she struggled to breathe in and out through the constriction.

  “Pull it tighter,” Wanda told him, “it’s not tight enough.”

  He grunted with the effort. “I’m pulling it as tight as I can. My fingers keep sliding off. I can’t get a good grip.”

  “I’ll be right back,” Wanda said.

  “She’s trying to get up!”

  Wanda rolled her eyes at having to explain everything to him. “Put your knee o
n her damn chest.”

  While he followed her instructions, Wanda raced out of the bedroom, down the hall, and back to the garage. She snatched up a pair of pliers she had seen before on the workbench and ran back to the bedroom.

  When she got there, Ricky was trying to hold his wife down on the bed with a knee. She was clawing at him as she made a horrible sucking sound trying to breathe.

  “Here,” Wanda told him, “use these to pull it tight.”

  Ricky grabbed the tail of the cable tie with the pliers and, while pressing the heel of his hand against the catch at the side of her throat, pulled more through. It made a ratcheting sound as he pulled it tighter, locking it down ever harder. It bunched up her skin as it dug deep into her fleshy neck. His wife reached up, trying to get one hand around his throat as she clawed at the nylon cable tie around her neck with the other.

  “Tighter!” Wanda yelled.

  He gritted his teeth with the effort of yanking it tighter. It clicked a few times with each hard pull.

  No longer able to get any air, the woman opened her eyes wide in terror that overcame the booze and drugs. She was now wide awake and in mortal fear.

  Wanda leaned in over her. “Remember when you said you were going to strangle the life out of me, bitch? Well, I guess you’re the one having the life strangled out of her.”

  As she stared wide-eyed at Wanda, Wanda spit in her face.

  Her arms flailed weakly. As her face began to turn blue, her arms slowed down, and after a last swipe at her husband, they flopped down on the bed.

  Standing close together, Ricky and Wanda watched as his wife’s body convulsed a few times before it finally went still. Her lips were a blackish blue. Her bulging eyes remained open, but they no longer saw anything.

  Wanda felt a giddy wave of satisfaction at getting back at the woman for the scene she’d made in front of Wanda’s parents. Wanda smiled wider when she saw that the woman had pissed her pants.