Pete Risley - Girl of Prey

Veronica Savinio, known as Roni, sat alone and chain-smoking in a booth at the Limbo, a dumpy bar her asshole husband, Shannon, frequented, waiting for him to show up to take her home after she’d worked late at her job at the Mirror, a nearby movie theater.

“No problem, just walk over to the Limbo,” he’d said earlier that evening. “I’ll be back there around midnight.” He and Dewey had some “errands to run,” he’d said, that had to do with “a job,” and wanted her to meet him at the bar after work since she didn’t want to hang around at the theater longer than she had to. “Okay, but be there right at midnight,” she’d insisted, and he’d said sure. She herself wouldn’t be there until about 12:15, but he was always late anyway. It was now quarter to one, and no Shannon. Plus, it was the first night of her boss Hobie’s beloved Halloween marathon, which she’d had to listen to him obsess over for the last four months, and she’d been working since ten in the morning with first Hobie and later a mob of partying kids driving her nuts, and was totally frazzled.

It was not the first time Shannon had done shit like this to her. Why did she put up with it? Why, in fact, had she married the fuckwad in the first place, when even her kooky friend Clare had read her the handwriting on the wall right from the start? Fucking thirty-four years old already and here she was, married to a total fucking waste of skin and working a shit job in Nowhere, Ohio.

The Limbo, full name Harvey’s Limbo Lounge according to the ancient and dingy Pepsi sign outside, was run not by a Harvey but by an old, cranky hilljack named Fred, who at present was sitting back behind the bar with his arms folded, craning his neck and staring crazy-eyed through farmer’s glasses at a pastel-suited televangelist on the TV perched high up on the wall above the bar. Then there was Heather, the barmaid, a short and pudgy bottle-blonde who spoke in an affected little-girl voice, giggled constantly and flirted with all the male customers, no matter how old, grizzled and soused they were. She now minced about in front of a befuddled-looking fat guy at the bar with a sparse beard and a hank of graying ponytail sticking out of the back of his John Deere cap.

Most of the regular Limbo patrons were lowlife drunks, some of whom Shannon had known since kindergarten here on the seedy west side of Stankerton. Veronica was from a suburb of Buffalo, New York, not a particularly affluent one, but way better than this flyover shithole, which she saw as a kind of urbanized version of Green Acres. Green Acres with pot, heroin, meth and oceans of beer.

There were only six other customers present, all familiar except the Deere cap guy, though she didn’t remember their names: two ancient ones at a booth hunched close together talking into each other’s faces, and two younger and even geekier-looking ones at the battered Ms. Pac-Man machine, pressing buttons with delighted expressions and guffawing when something surprised them on the screen. Most charming of all was Jaime Tales, in his early twenties, the oldest surviving male member of the locally notorious Tales family, sitting at the near end of the bar chewing his lips and darting an occasional lizard-like glance Roni’s way.

She checked her reflection in the wavy sides of the small silver jukebox in her booth. Her mark, as she thought of it—the hated dark plum-wine stain that lay beside, over and just beneath her left eye—looked huge, bloated. She knew, in the box’s swirled curves, it was hard to tell how much of what she didn’t like seeing was funny-mirror effect and how much was really the way it looked. The mark wasn’t supposed to change shape or size, and nearly everyone had always told her it didn’t. Clare Hardwick, in fact, was the only one who agreed it sometimes blossomed and shifted, perhaps with Roni’s moods, or her spiritual state, or even as an omen of forthcoming events. Clare might have been looney tunes in some ways, but Roni was certain the mark did go through changes and was grateful someone else acknowledged it, even if it was a person who aspired to be abducted by UFO aliens. Though she feared the mark might someday alter so radically everyone would agree.

She was also annoyed to see the jukebox-mirror made her chin look like it was doubling. It looked almost like Heather’s. But that, she was pretty sure, was just more distortion. She’d been trying to lose weight lately, but the slight sag under her chin wouldn’t go away. Maybe, she worried, her whole face was getting droopy because of aging, and that’s why the mark was changing as well.

She looked away, lit another cigarette. She probably should have stayed at the theater, but if she had, Hobie would have found some reason why she had to stay longer. And then there was Benny, Hobie’s recently discarded boyfriend, who kept wanting her to listen as he poured his broken heart out to her. Anyway, she was just about pissed off enough to order a beer—a light beer, anyway—but she’d have to ask Heather for it. Shannon might have some of that rancid Mexican beer he liked left in the fridge at home, she wasn’t sure. If so, that would do.

She might as well go home, she thought. He obviously wasn’t going to show up. She could walk, it was only about eight or nine blocks. It was fucking one a.m., and she’d probably get raped and murdered by the Westside Slasher on the way, but, fuck it. That would beat sitting here like a pitiful sap, a fucking Jerry Springer loyal white trash cheated-on housewife.

“Hey, can we change the channel?” said one of the two barflies playing Ms. Pac-Man to Heather, about five seconds after Fred rose from his chair and strode into the kitchen.

“He’ll just change it back when he comes back,” said Heather.

“Is he comin’ right back?”

“Probably. What you want to change it to?” This, Roni gathered, would provide an opportunity for Heather to stand on Fred’s chair and sway her big butt right in the face of the bozo with the John Deere cap. Indeed, Heather scooted the chair over and climbed up, wiggling it. Jeez, talk about broad in the beam, girl.

“We wanted to see if there was anything on the news about that new victim of the Westside Slasher dude,” explained the other barfly playing Ms. Pac-Man.

“It’s not a new one, is it?” asked his companion. “Thought it was an old one.”

“I think it’s an old victim they just found out about,” said the guy in the Deere cap, turning on his stool to glance at the others. He didn’t seem too interested in Heather’s huge ass.

“They’re saying now he cuts their fuckin’ hearts out,” said one of the elderly barflies.

“That’s the rumor,” said the Pac-Man player.

Roni hadn’t heard this before. She exchanged a glance with Heather. “Whaaaa-aat?” said Heather, mouth gaping like a guppy’s.

“The Westside Slasher, cuts those girlses’ hearts out. Said on the radio.”

“Said it’s a rumor,” his buddy pointed out.

“No way!” said Heather. “Their hearts out?”

“Whoa,” said Deere cap. “Sick puppy.”

The geeks both nodded. “That’s what they’re sayin’.”

“Omigod, that is so gross!” said Heather. She sounded delighted. “Cuts their hearts out! With what?”

“I dunno. Knife, I guess,” said Deere cap. One of the geeks laughed, earning a scowl from Deere cap.

“Ooooo! That just gives me cold chills all over!” She ran her hands up and down her plump arms. “He cuts out their hearts!”

“That’s not all,” said the other geek. “They’re saying he lops their titties off first. Gotta do that to get to the heart, I guess.”