"CHARLES"

"Shut up, shut up, shut UP already," thought Charles as the fat, balding real estate agent in front of him droned on about sewer regulations. Charles studied the man in front of him, who was sweating profusely in the Nevada sun. He’d seen ones like this before, they were the worst. Egos the size of elephants with brains the size of walnuts, he mused to himself as he reached down into his pocket, this bastard deserves it.

The real estate agent didn’t have time to scream when the 900,000 volts shot through him. He crumpled with a satisfying thump to the desert floor. Charles grinned delightedly and jogged to his van, choosing a pick and shovel from a pile in the back.

He returned to find the realtor making a soft keening sound. The empty building lot lay silent and still in the August afternoon, broken only by the sounds of the shovel as Charles finished the job. He made sure to keep an eye out for cars and stay hydrated as he dug the hole and shoved the agent in. He hummed as he filled the hole in and tamped the dirt down. He hopped back in the van and headed back to the hotel for a swim.

Two days later he found himself in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. The hotel was a disgrace by all means, but the free real estate magazine he’d picked up as he left the grocery store was thick and full of promise. He sat in the dingy vinyl chair eating a delicious chicken dinner and flipped languidly through, folding over the corners on pages advertising empty lots.

“Steamboat Special: Just Waiting to be Developed” caught his eye, a colorful, full page advertisement for ‘Paula’s Realty’. Prominently displayed on top was a photo of Paula herself. Ugly bitch, mused Charles, she looks stoned…probably some Jesus freak cult leftover from the seventies. He popped the last of a biscuit into his mouth and threw on his sneakers. It was time to make a call to Paula.

Charles was in luck, as Paula herself answered the phone. He gave his name as Ben Lewis, but Paula didn’t seem to pay notice. She seemed rabid to meet at the lot, possibly make another sale, and without divulging any information, Charles had an appointment to meet her in an hour. Charles drove aimlessly around town, chain-smoking and sipping a Big Gulp, eager as a teenager going on his first date. He could tell this one was going to be special; she was crazy, and best of all, greedy. He arrived at the lot fifteen minutes early to decide the best place to kill her. No taser this time, though, Paula was getting a different surprise.

When she arrived ten minutes later in a garish champagne-colored Cadillac, his delight grew. Paula was even uglier in person. She had no interest in listening to anything he had to say, so he stood quietly, nodding and muttering the occasional ‘mmm hmmm’ or ‘I see.’ She was so into her sales pitch that her face didn’t register surprise when he slammed the knife into her throat, severing her vocal cords. She opened her mouth and blood gushed out; her fish eyes bulged out of her skull. He ripped out the knife and took her eyes out, one, two, pop, pop. They’d bothered him.

Paula was buried, and it was almost three days before anyone had noticed she was missing. Apparently she was neither a good realtor nor a good friend. Charles heard about it on the radio, but by that time he was in Arizona. He’d taken down two more realtors in New Mexico and one in Flagstaff.

As he drove towards Phoenix, he wondered to himself, "Why? Not even why, but how? How can they all look so different, market themselves as the smartest and the best, when in reality, they’re all the same. Greedy, lying, crazy pigs, all of them."

Charles tried not to think of his parents back east, living in a filthy, rat-infested apartment in Bridgeport, Connecticut. When he was growing up, the family lived in a tidy home in Fairfield. He smiled to himself and lit another cigarette as he remembered cook outs on Sundays with his mother and father loading up the grill with hot dogs and burgers; as he and his little sister splashed and laughed in the pool.

He could remember exactly where everything had fallen apart. Charles was living in Manhattan then, working for a publishing house, and he took the train up to Boston to his sister’s college graduation. “I’m so proud of you, kid,” he’d said, handing her a bouquet of purple roses, “I know you’re gonna change the world someday.”

Only a mere year and a half later, she had changed the entire universe for Charles and his parents. She’d destroyed it. Finding no jobs available in her field, she moved back in with their parents and taken a job as an office manager for a real estate company. She’d had the job for only two weeks when the late night phone calls started.
“Charlie!” she’d shriek when he answered, “What’s up?!” He could tell she was drunk. Almost every night she’d call, slurring to him about her boyfriend and the fun they were having, a new movie she’d seen, the book she was reading. Always on weeknights, always sounding more and more tired, beaten down; sad. When he tried to ask her what was wrong, she’d change the subject. When he’d ask about her job, she’d tell him “I’m not there right now so I don’t want to talk about it,” in a dead, angry tone he’d never heard her use before. Then a month would pass and calls to her would go unanswered, his parents telling him she was either in her room sleeping or out.

His mother had found her. She stepped into the garage that January morning and found her daughter hanging from a rafter. She’d been dead for hours. Charles had talked to her boyfriend at the funeral, his father unable to speak to anyone beyond formalities and his mother under a Valium haze.

“Her job,” said her boyfriend, weeping openly, “She couldn’t deal anymore, I know that’s it. I should have done something, I dunno, forced her to quit, called the police, kidnapped her, something…” Charles listened silently. “They never even called her by her name. They called her ‘secretary.’ They lied to her about her wages; they all ignored her unless they were telling her what to do. They called her every name in the book. Stupid. Mean. Rude. Unprofessional.”

At this point, Charles could no longer see anything but red. Somewhere, far off, he heard his sister’s boyfriend dissolve into loud, choking sobs. “It was them! They treated her like such shit every day, they killed her! She was in the hospital a few times because she thought, she thought she was having a heart attack. She couldn’t breathe. She thought she had an ulcer. She was drinking every fucking night!”

A few people glanced over to where they were standing and he lowered his voice, “Look around you, Charles, not one of those assholes she worked with showed up here, the fuckers didn’t even send your parents a card. They killed her, Charles, and we all let them,” and once again started sobbing.

His parents, knowing nothing about what had happened at their daughter’s job, sold the house she’d killed herself in a month after that day. The realtor who’d handled the sale was from a different agency, but had convinced his grief-stricken parents to sell their home for a grossly low price and pocketed an enormous commission, leaving his parents almost broke. His mother told him that in the Bridgeport apartment, sometimes she’d hear gunshots, his father had been mugged once right outside their building.

The publishing company had offered Charles two months leave. He’d said thanks, but no thanks and quit. He bought the van two days after the funeral. In almost two months, he’d killed almost thirty realtors. In Phoenix, a quick glance at a paper in a gas station gave him peace. He’d seen and heard nearly nothing about the murders across the country until now. Apparently, just as the realtors didn’t care about anyone but themselves, no one seemed to care about them until they started dying en masse. He grinned as he thought this, plunking down money for the paper and a candy bar.

When he reached San Diego, the newspaper headlines were larger, more urgent. They had to find this criminal. The editorials called for the head of this ‘sick fiend,’ as they called him. Charles paid this little notice. I’m not the one who’s sick. I’m not the one who’s a killer. Those agents are the sickos, they’re the real killers. I’m a fucking hero here, who knows how many innocent lives I’m saving?
Charles considered laying low for a few days, but killed twice in California. He began buying every newspaper he could find, looking to see if he’d been caught.

It was a Tuesday morning when he knew it was time to move. The police across the country were making connections, putting the pieces of the puzzle slowly together. A sanitation worker in Cleveland gave the police a description of a man who looked a lot like Charles walking around an empty lot around the time one of the realtors was to have disappeared. I tortured that one, he remembered, made that one beg for her life, the stupid bitch. She only knew hell for an hour. My family is in hell forever. He remembered her muffled screams behind the tape as he severed each of her fingers. How when she looked at him with eyes pleading for mercy, he’d put a lighter to them.

Before he left California, he’d cleaned and abandoned all of his tools. He bought a pair of jeans and a button down shirt before burning all of his clothing he’d taken with him. He kept his wallet. Charles always gave fake names, and he’d need proper ID to get to his next destination

Time to roll, he thought as he headed up the Pacific Highway, the ocean crashing and sparkling alongside him. He rolled down the windows to the van and smiled up at the sun. Alaska, the last frontier. Clean, free…a new start, and so much open land.

©2008 Nicole Morin