Gas Station Redhead 18

I don't know her, that's important. Sixty to eighty percent of bodies are linked to someone they know, it's the first place the cops look. Twelve to twenty-five percent are taken by family members. More than half are taken by friends or neighbors, some acquaintance they've met.

She started working at the Pump 'N' Chug filling station four weeks ago. I didn't pump gas there, I never went up to the little window to pay her for anything.

This is important. Only around ten percent of bodies are made by strangers.

I've never seen her up close and I've never talked to her. She's never seen me before and I've only seen her from the window of my truck as she clocked in for her shift at the Pump 'N' Chug.

I chose her at random, which makes things cleaner. There's no type that anyone can tie to me, no M.O.

They're all different.

I like her hair and her freckles, I can see them from clear across the highway.

Fuckers at the Pump 'N' Chug must've dangled the day bait when she applied 'cause they stick her with the graveyard after her first week. I don't mind the adjustment. In fact, I prefer it.

Everything's clearer to me at night. That's when I can organize my thoughts and iron out my plans.

You gotta pay attention, you can't just trust your instincts. A man's gut can be a deceptive thing.

I watch her as the season changes and the leaves turn the same color as her hair. She's a simple girl, but not basic. No material girl bimbette bullshit with this one. She takes the bus, she keeps to herself, and she even reads. Like really reads actual books.

She takes her break at quarter to ten, right before the midday clerk goes home for the night. She eats simple meals she's prepared at home—a small Tupperware container full of bok choy stir-fry, an avocado grilled cheese cut into four triangles. She only ever drinks mint iced tea from a glass bottle and recycles the bottle when she's done.

I like a chick who recycles, it demonstrates an awareness of the natural order. Everything in this world dies and is repurposed by the earth. Same goes for glass and plastic and everything else. There is no end, not really, just reconstitution.

I watch her for the better part of a month, her comings and goings. She lives with her parents, but they don't speak. She takes dinner in her bedroom. This suits me.

When she has a day off from the gas station, I can usually find her at the library or the cemetery. She's one of those girls, the kind that prefer graveyards to the beach, but you'd never know it from looking at her. She isn't Goth.

She's not a mall girl either, there's nothing in her hair or clothes that screams valley girl. She's simple, a little hippie mixed with a little tactical—beige jeans with minimal flare and boot shoes with a solid heather blue babydoll tee.

Nondescript, the kind of girl people don't notice.

I keep my distance, following closely, but not so closely as to raise any alarms. Just close enough to test her intuition, waiting for that glimmer of suspicion she inevitably gets—that feeling that she's being watched.

When she turns around, I'm already gone.

I repeat this process twice a week for four weeks, so that she'll have something to remember later on. Gives her something to think about when I'm not around.

I like to look at pretty things and she definitely fits the bill. She's peculiar, which if I had a type would probably be the best way to describe it.

She has fair skin with warm undertones and freckles sprinkled all over her small, straight nose and upper cheeks. Her large brown eyes are dark as a cellar and her heart-shaped face is well-defined, with soft cheeks, a strong jawline, and a rounded chin.

As I watch her, I find myself fixating on her Cupid's bow and the way her full, symmetrical lips part just a little when a sentence captivates her. She's in the middle of reading Bluebeard by Charles Perrault, the copy I mailed to her job.

I know what you're thinking. Sounds risky. But I know what I'm doing. I used a relay service to handle delivery. No return address, no fingerprints, no handwriting. Clean.

The book will be coming home to me soon enough. For now, it's fun to imagine what's going on inside her head.

Judging from where she had placed her bookmark, I could tell she was getting close to it. I could hear the words accosting her brain: “After some moments she began to perceive that the floor was all covered cover with clotted blood, on which lay the bodies of several dead women ranged against the walls.”

I was watching from across the street the day the package arrived. I watched as the owner chewed her out for giving out his business address.

She didn't argue, didn't plead, didn't insist she hadn't done what he was accusing her of. This stuck with me—still does—like maybe she was saving up any fight she might have in her for when she'd really need it.

I didn't snatch her from her job. You can't do it at night, that's what they expect.

Cops are always on high alert at night. People look out their windows.

In the daytime everyone is busy with work and responsibilities, all their petty grudges and preoccupations. No one is ever paying any mind when you take one during the day.

* * *

She's looking tight when I creep up on her. Like maybe some part of her knows it's coming.

The brain is a curious organ, no one can tell when it comes to intuition.

She was dressed for work in her tight light brown work jeans and a heather gray T-shirt. The minute I saw her, I wanted to leap out of my truck, bash her skull against the passenger side door and bury my face in her ass. Those jeans were just so goddamn tight, but you can't let your emotions get the best of you. That's how you get caught—with your undies around your ankles in some mall parking lot.

I waited till she reached the sidewalk adjacent to a dormant construction site.

It's not like in the movies where the chick panics and fights back. The whole thing is over before she knows what's happened.

One minute, she's walking down the street, thinking about what to get for lunch, and the next she's falling to the ground as the two dart-like probes of my TASER find their zone of capture and her whole body locks up from her lats to her abdomen.

It's funny watching them jiggle like a jello mold. This ginger-headed bitch had legs so long her ankles stuck out the bottoms of her jeans as she was laying there, shaking and pissing herself on the pavement, and I watched her rawboned ankles shaking like a can of agitated paint as the TASER worked her over.

I stuck her in the ass with the Pentobarbital I scored off the vet's assistant—paying cash, mind you—and tugged the barbed darts out of her back, gathering her in my arms and lifting her out of her puddle. I had her under a tarp in the trunk in under thirty seconds.

You've gotta learn to manage your urges or the fun won't last long. There's nothing I would have enjoyed more than having her on my floorboards, her tiny body curled up shotgun on the ride home, but you gotta be a few bricks shy of a load to think the universe won't ass-fuck you for being that sloppy.

We reached the farmstead by the early afternoon, giving me plenty of time to amuse myself before she had herself a fright. I backed my way up the gravel path, pulling around to the back of the house.

The deed is not in my name, but the property is mine now. Find yourself an old enough cunt in the boonies and you'll have no problem securing a plot where you can play with your things.

She was still out cold and compliant from the dog sedative when I popped the trunk. I laid her down on the pool table in the b