Robert Tanenbaum - Outrage

He lived most of the time on the streets or in various homeless shelters, so his bathing was infrequent, too. But Kadyrov didn’t care. He desired two things in life-crank and sexual killing, each having become an addiction. Only torturing and murdering young women gave him the same sort of high he got from speed; indeed, each seemed to enhance the pleasure of the other.

The craving for both had increased while he was in jail. He’d only been out for two weeks when shortly after shooting up one afternoon, he spotted Dolores Atkins as she was entering the tenement off Anderson Avenue. He’d quickly made up his mind and bounded up the steps in time to catch the security gate before it closed and enter behind her. She was a little older than he’d thought at first glance but was a brunette and a close enough resemblance to his whore mother.

Dolores was clearly uncomfortable when he got on the elevator after her. And she avoided eye contact when he offered “please, to help” her with one of her bags. “No, thank you,” she’d said tersely.

In the past, if his efforts to charm the women into gaining access to their apartments didn’t work, he’d have moved on to a more cooperative victim. But there was something about this woman, maybe the way she summarily rejected his offer to help, that really made him angry.

He suddenly grabbed her by the throat with one hand as he held the blade of his knife to her neck with the other. Lack of proper nutrition, and a lack of interest in food when on meth, had caused him to lose weight from his already thin physique. But like many fellow users, he’d developed a sort of hard, rope-like musculature that could be astonishingly strong when he was high. He told her that they were now going to her apartment, where they were going to get busy. And if she screamed, he’d cut her fucking head off.

What he’d actually done was worse. “Slaughtered” was the word that reporter Ariadne Stupenagel had used, quoting her unnamed police sources. He liked the press coverage in all its macabre detail-it gave his “work” a sort of religious quality. The killing certainly released a lot of anger, so that after it was over, he was able to calmly clean himself up and then slip out of the apartment with no one the wiser.

Still, forcing women to take him into their apartments as opposed to talking his way in was a change in the way he liked to do things, and it made him uncomfortable. He recognized that he was taking a greater risk of being discovered.

Then there was the woman at Mullayly Park, which was yet another change and even more risk. Attacking her had been a spur-of-the-moment decision. He’d been out wandering the streets, wondering how he was going to score more meth when the last of his supply-one more hit-was gone. He wasn’t really even interested in raping or hurting her; the bushes in a park weren’t his style, at least not yet. Robbery had been the motivation, and it almost backfired.

Fortunately, the little Hispanic girl over in Bed-Stuy had taken care of both of his needs. The bloodlust was sated and he had enough cash to stay high for a week.

Time to party, he thought as he reached the six-story public housing complex off Watson Avenue. The building was an ugly, unimaginative box built of dull red bricks, just one of many similar public housing complexes and tenements that dominated Soundview.

The security intercom and locking gate had long since been destroyed by vandals, so Kadyrov was able to just enter the building and make his way to the stairs leading to the third floor. He walked down the long dark hallway-most of the bulbs had been removed or never replaced-and put his hand in his pocket, clasping his new switchblade. For many years, the Bronx’s notorious Soundview section had been dubbed “the murder capital of New York” by the media; more than half the population of seventy-five thousand residents lived below the poverty level, and crime was a way of life for many of them. The knife made him feel safer.

He walked to the apartment on the far end of the hallway and knocked on the door. “Quien es?” a gruff voice behind the door demanded. “Who’s there?”

“The police, open up,” Kadyrov said. He could feel the occupant looking at him through the peephole. “It’s Ahmed. Who the fuck do you think it is? I know you’re looking at me, you dumb fuck.”

The sound of bolts sliding and chains being unhooked came from the other side of the door. The door opened and a tall white man with a large protruding forehead rimmed by long stringy gray hair peered out. He was wearing a stained long-underwear top and frayed boxer shorts from which his long bony legs protruded like those of an ostrich.

“Watch your mouth, asshole, or next time I won’t open the door, and you can buy some of that rat poison they’re selling on the sidewalk,” the man growled. “You got cash? No money, no honey, son.”

Kadyrov held up the wad of bills he’d taken from his victim in Bed-Stuy. “Here’s your honey, muthafugga.”

The dealer glanced at the cash and then nodded. He turned and led the way into the one-bedroom apartment. He was carrying a big. 357 Magnum revolver, which he now laid on the counter that separated the tiny kitchen from the living room.

The apartment was a filthy mess that smelled of mold, urine, and rotting food. The stained and threadbare carpeting was littered with trash and dirty clothes that looked like they’d been jettisoned on the spot and left to rot by their former occupants. Dirty dishes, glasses, and porn magazines seemed to cover every usable space, and cockroaches roamed freely in and out of various food containers. The only art on the walls was a torn black-light poster of Elvis Presley.

The room was only nominally lighter than the hallway. The sole illumination was provided by a small window that was so dirty it might as well have been a gauze curtain. A heavyset woman with long gray hair sat in a sagging orange chair near the window, reading a magazine. She wore an old blue bathrobe over men’s pajama bottoms and didn’t even bother to look up when he came in.

“Hi, Lydia,” he said without expecting much of a response. He didn’t like her, and she didn’t like him. She looked over her magazine at him and grunted.

“What can I do you for?” the man asked as he sank down into a large overstuffed recliner that appeared to have been salvaged from some alley Dumpster.

Kadyrov noted the pump-action shotgun within easy reach of the chair. When it came to methamphetamines, whose users tended to be violent, dealers didn’t trust their customers any more than strangers on the streets.

Vinnie and Lydia Cassino were two of the only whites still living in the Soundview neighborhood, which was mostly populated by blacks, Puerto Ricans, and Dominicans. Most of the other whites had long since fled, but the Cassinos had been there since the 1970s and stubbornly refused to move-even when Vinnie went to prison in the 1980s and ’90s. They were both tough and known to carry, and if necessary use, guns. That along with Vinnie’s connection to a good cheap source of crank, which the smaller dealers below him could cut with strychnine to increase profits, meant no one bothered them much.

Kadyrov sat down on the couch next to Vinnie’s chair and tossed his money on the coffee table in front of them. “Two hundred worth,” he said. “I should get a good deal too for that much cash.”

“Two hundred bucks is shit,” Vinnie said. “I’ll give you a deal when you’re buying an ounce at a time, not a couple of grams. If you and me didn’t go back a ways, I wouldn’t sell to you at all.”

By that he meant that he didn’t trust Kadyrov, who might just rat him out to the police if Vinnie cut off his supply of clean meth. And as a two-time loser, if he got busted again, they might put him away for life.