Belladonna

Belladonna

  By David M. Bachman

  Copyright 2012 David M. Bachman

  ****~~~~****

  He was halfway through his second drink when he decided that he could kill her and get away with it. Sitting there at the bar with this odd little vixen, an apparent runaway bride of the gothic sort, he listened to her speak but was not hearing her words so much as he was trying to decide how best to dispose of her.

  He didn’t need to really listen to her to know what she was prattling on about in her intoxicated state. Her fiancé was one of those psychotic, abusive, deadbeat scumbags that cheated on her constantly while constantly accusing her of trying to hook up with other men. She had finally had enough of his stupidity – her blackened left eye was the latest bit of evidence that she hid behind oversized sunglasses – and she had apparently decided to go ahead and make good on his accusations.

  This punky-goth girl went by the name of Bella, though it surely wasn’t her real name – she looked more like a Lisa or a Liz or something else starting with an “L.” That was okay, since he’d lied when he had told her his name was Robert. In fact, he was doing more to hide things about himself than she was in wearing the long sleeves and sunglasses to hide her bruises. He was sporting colored contact lenses, eyeglasses he’d stolen from the display of an eyeglass store, a backwards baseball cap, and sports-jock clothes that were totally not his personal style. This was his hunting outfit. Bella’s outfit was not so much for hunting as for hiding, but she could not hide from him. He saw in her something that even she could not: an opportunity to indulge.

  “So, now that you know my whole sob story,” she said to him at one point before pointing to the simple wedding band upon his finger, “what’s your excuse for being here?”

  The wedding band was a fake, too. He wasn’t married, couldn’t stand the idea of sharing his wealth with a woman that would only squander it, but he knew that wedding bands were undeniable magnets for women seeking a random connection. Any woman that was willing to throw herself knowingly at a married man was surely doing so because she had a need for discretion. Women that gravitated toward married men were most likely married, themselves, or in a committed relationship from which they also sought outside satisfaction.

  Bella wore more rings than she had fingers, including two in her right eyebrow and a small silver one in her left nostril – perhaps more in places he could not yet see. But even so, it was not the traditional mark of a taken woman nor her sob story that told him she was someone else’s. It was simply her attitude. She knew what she wanted, and she knew where to find it. He was willing to give that to her, along with something else she was surely not expecting at all.

  He rattled off a well-rehearsed tale of being a widower, having supposedly lost his young wife to a random car accident, and that he still wore his wedding band in memory of her. The story had worked on quite a few prior occasions, appealing to the emotional sensitivities of his prey, but only on five rare occasions had it led him to an ideal and worthy target. Bella would not be his first, though he knew she would surely be his sixth as he gauged her reaction.

  She was clearly moved by the little story. It should have come as no surprise. These goth girls seemed magnetically drawn toward gloom and doom, so a tale of tragedy not only appealed to the emotional impulses of the female mind but also to the thirst for tragedy that chicks of this sort always seemed to hold. He didn’t focus on any particular genre of woman, not wanting to establish an easily traced pattern, but Bella’s morbid predisposition made her an especially easy mark.

  With the initial flirtation done and stories exchanged, now came the heavy second wave where their intentions were made clear. She was stirring her drink and playing with her hair a lot, touching his hand, knee, and shoulder every now and then, and generally giving off nearly every classic positive sign of body language in the book. He thought of some lame invitation – “So, you like horror movies, huh?” – and he was soon paying their bar tab and heading out the door with her latched onto his arm.

  He invited her to follow him to his house. Taking her home on his sport motorcycle was impractical and, had he driven his car, using his own vehicle would inevitably leave forensic evidence that could potentially be used to link him to her death. He would dispose of her car later by using it to dispose of her body. Burning the girl’s car with her remains inside would cremate any connecting evidence, as it had in each prior instance.

  And so they arrived at his house, only a fifteen-minute drive away from the bar he had selected as his hunting grounds for that night. He was glad for the closeness of the bar he’d picked that night. He avoided frequenting the same bar or club more than once within a six-month period, and he sometimes had to drive far across the city to find a suitably anonymous location. He parked his bike in the two-car garage, squeezing it close to the other half of the garage occupied by his luxury SUV so she could pull her car in, too. He could dispose of her body and vehicle at his leisure, as his neighbors would not see the unfamiliar and beat-up Toyota that would have stuck out like a sore thumb in his upscale neighborhood. He closed the garage door and escorted her inside, both of them smiling as they shared completely different expectations for the events that would soon be transpiring.

  He decided to make good on his suggestion of a horror movie. He had quite a library of films of practically every genre. His income as a rather successful stock broker had afforded him quite a few luxuries aside from the obvious perks of a nice home and nice vehicles. Wealth equated to freedom in America, true freedom. It allowed one the means to a greater range of worldly pleasures in which to indulge, movies of every sort being one of his own passions.

  Bella was immediately impressed by not only the size and design of his home but particularly his home theatre arrangement. He had spared no expense in converting his living room into an environment that was not only on par with the real movie theatre experience but far, far superior to it. After all, one could not pause, rewind, or skip scenes while watching anything in a regular theatre, and few of the theatres that he’d ever been to served alcohol. The freedom to socially interact without the annoyance of other moviegoers was another perk, as it was also especially difficult if not impossible to have full-on intercourse in the middle of a public movie theatre. And even if it were not, his fine black leather sofa was a far more comfortable surface to use for said intercourse than any fold-up theater seating ever could hope to be.

  He allowed her to pick a random vampire-themed movie, although he did not particularly care what she picked. He had no intentions of actually paying any attention to the film. He fully expected his attention to be completely consumed by her as he anticipated savoring the initial glory of his already successful hunt. She seemed equally excited, and she was as ambivalent about the movie as he, for she spent perhaps not even fifteen seconds in picking it from his library before handing it to him. He asked if she wished for any popcorn; instead, her request for more alcohol was an even more pleasing response. The more intoxicated he could get her, the easier it all would be for both of them.

  He was inclined to go for something a bit more sophisticated like a top-shelf brandy, something good for sipping through the film on the way toward more exciting activities, but she immediately prompted him for cheaper booze. With a shrug, he produced an unopened bottle of some rather inexpensive spiced rum that he had been keeping in his cabinet for such an occasion … although he had long been expecting to be opening this for a holiday gathering with family members or co-workers, instead.

  The movie was already playing as he poured them both a double apiece in his favorite tumblers. She downed it without even flinching at its potency. She was a seasoned drinker, this Bella. He poured her another double, and she raised it to him
for a toast.

  “To the scary things that go bump in the night,” Bella said, “and to the other things that bump uglies.”

  It was weird, but what the hell. He went along with it. Glasses clinked, and more rum disappeared. Not wanting to get completely sloshed, he suggested mixing their rum with some cola. She immediately nodded in agreement. He went to the kitchen to grab a few cans of soda, figuring four would be sufficient, and he filled a bowl with ice to add to their tumblers. When he returned to the den, he found that she had inserted a thin, twisty, decorative drinking straw into each of their tumblers. Presumably, she had kept them from the drinks she had been sipping upon at the bar. She had seemed to enjoy nibbling upon the ends of