Unseen - Nancy Bush

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for a specific purpose. She’d learned a few things during the twenty-seven years she’d been on the planet. She knew how to take care of herself. She could accurately fire a gun up to twenty yards. Well, fairly accurately. And she could break into and steal older-model vehicles—the only kind she would drive because she distrusted air bags. Those things could kill you. She knew a guy who would dismantle them for her, which was a good thing, because it was getting harder and harder to find vintage cars available for her purposes, although she currently had a ready supply from Carl’s Automotive and Car Rental. Hunk O’Junks. That’s how they were advertised by the amateurish spray-painted sign posted off Highway 26, about fifteen miles east of Seaside, Oregon. Hunk O’Junks. Yessirree. They could be rented for $19.99 a day, but Lucky didn’t bother with that. A sorry line of tired-looking vehicles they were, too, but they served the purpose. No one noticed when they were gone. No one commented when they were returned.

      Cars were a simple matter to hot-wire. And she was adept at using a flat bar to slide down the inside of the window and pop the lock. It was then child’s play to dig under the dash, yank the wires, spark the ignition and drive away.

      But the Hunk O’Junks were perfect in one more aspect: the owner left the keys under the mat. In the early hours of this morning she’d simply helped herself to the one farthest from the flickering vapor light at the corner of the automotive garage and driven away. The horny mechanic and sometime car thief who’d shown her the ropes and introduced her to Carl’s Automotive had been as unfaithful as a rutting bull. She’d used him as a means to an end and they’d almost parted friends. But he’d pushed it, had actually attempted to rape her. Lucky had been down that road before and nobody was going to try that again and live. She’d grabbed a nearby table lamp’s electrical cord and wrapped it around his neck. He’d been bullish enough to scarcely notice, so involved was he in spreading her thighs and jamming himself into her. She’d pulled the cord taut with all her strength, with all the rage of injustice she’d nursed from years of abuse. He passed out and she held on. It hadn’t been his face she was envisioning; it was someone else’s. Someone faint in her memory, yet dark and looming. Twenty minutes later she’d surfaced slowly, as if awakening from a long illness, her fingers numb, her mind clearing. She didn’t have much faith that anyone would believe her about the attempted rape, so she gathered up the lamp and its cord from the dirty and sparse living room he called home, wiped down everything she’d touched, and left someone else to find his body. She’d made the mistake of entering his home after this, their last car-thieving lesson, because she’d begun to think they were friends.

      She hadn’t made that mistake since.

      Now, she slouched behind the wheel of her current Hunk O’Junk, her gaze centered on a light brown van parked near the jamboree parking lot exit. This maybe wasn’t the best venue for what she’d planned, but it could be worse. And it was where he trolled. And it had that unlucky feel she could almost taste. Edward Letton wasn’t aware that he was being followed. Didn’t know she’d found him out, that she’d tailed his van through parks and malls and schools, the environs of little girls.

      Lucky had originally picked up on Letton by a means she didn’t fully understand herself. They’d crossed paths in a small clothing store in Seaside, a place that specialized in beach togs and gear. She’d brushed past him and read his desire as if he’d suddenly whispered his intentions in her ear, making her skin crawl. Glancing back, she saw the way his gaze centered on a young girl who was trying hard to display her breast buds as the real deal, the tiny buttons pushed up by an underwire bra, the girl thrusting them forward, her back arched like a bow. She was around eleven. Gawky. Un-formed and unsure. She both hung by her mother for protection, and stepped away from her scornfully, as if she couldn’t bear the idea that Mom was so old and completely uncool.

      Letton stared and stared. He was so hungry Lucky felt his lust like a living thing. It filled her senses as if he were secreting pheromones. Made her ill. So, she started following him. That day she tailed him a good fifty miles, all the way back to Hillsboro and the untidy green-gray house where he lived with his adoring, mentally-suspect wife. Not the brightest jewel on the necklace, her. Letton was some kind of middle-grade manager at a machine-parts company. Lucky had watched him from the parking lot of his workplace and followed him around, in and out of restaurants, to an all-you-can-eat place where she seated herself in the booth in front of him, her back to his. Even though he was with a co-worker she sensed he’d unerringly watched the girl in the T-shirt serving soup whose chest was so flat she could have been a child.

      He didn’t drive the van to work. It was parked in his garage, and Lucky didn’t know about it at first. Neither did his dimwit wife. His garage was his domain. He drove a Honda Accord to work, new enough to be reliable, old enough to be forgettable. She knew those kinds of cars well.

      And then she realized he used the van when he went trolling. Nobody had to tell her what he was planning. She knew that hunger. That build-up. That need. She’d been on the receiving end of it and it hadn’t been pretty.

      He had almost grabbed a girl at the mall, but she was with friends and hard to snatch. Lucky had watched him, her gloved hands tensing on the wheel of her appropriated car, but he’d passed up the chance, though he’d climbed from his van and paced around it, watching with distress as his victim and friends meandered across the parking lot, ponytails flouncing, out of his reach.

      But here he was, a scant week-and-a-half later. Saturday morning. Cruising past soccer fields was one of his favorite pastimes. She’d parked today’s Hunk O’Junk, an early ’90s model, half a block down from his house, dozing a bit as she’d risen before dawn. When he backed the van out of the drive, she let it disappear around a corner before she started to follow. He didn’t try any tricky moves on the way to the fields. He drove straight to the jamboree. Once there, he circled around, parking at the end spot near the girls’ fields, nose out. It was early, so Lucky parked her sedan across from him, a couple of slots down, and let him see her as she locked the vehicle and strolled across the road toward a strip mall with a coffee shop, its door open to the cool morning air. She wanted him to think she was just another soccer mom, biding time before the games, going to buy a latte or mocha.

      As soon as she was across the street, she circled the east building of the strip mall and settled behind a row of arbor-vitae directly across from the jamboree parking lot. Hidden behind the trees, she put a pair of binoculars to her eyes, watching Letton through the foliage.

      More cars arrived. Teams of boys and girls. Letton watched and waited as the girls banded into teams, running in their uniforms, blurs of red, green, yellow, and blue, young legs flashing in heavy shin guards and cleated shoes.

      She had never played soccer herself. That had not been the kind of childhood she’d experienced. Mostly she’d plotted and dreamed of escape. Sometimes she had thought of murder.

      Now she waited until another crush of people arrived—more vans spilling kids and equipment onto the pavement—then hurried back, blending in with the other moms, sliding into her silver car. Letton was too enthralled by the bounty of adolescent flesh to even notice her. She was pretty sure he was jacking off in the driver’s seat.

      The teams began to gather in groups, readying for play. Every group was a tight, wiggling pack, like a hive of bees on the move.

      And then a young girl, ponytail bobbing, broke free, running across the fields toward the parking lot, her gait stuttering a bit as her cleats hit the pavement. What worked on grass didn’t offer the same kind of purchase on asphalt. She was clomping toward the portable bathrooms, passing directly in front of Edward Letton’s van. He called to her. Lucky had rolled her own window down and now she turned on the engine and slipped the car into gear, foot light on the brake.

      “Hey, you’re with the Hornets, right?” Letton called to the girl, climbing from his seat. He was obviously quoting from the back of their jerseys, which displayed their teams’ names in block letters. He left the door ajar for a quick getaway. She could hear the thrum of excitement in his voice as he headed toward the side door of the van, sliding it open. His pants were still unzipped.

      “Yeah?” the girl said warily.

      “I’ve

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