Page 65 of Return of the Spider
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Early in the eveningon Monday, three days before he was to start his new job at Washington Day School, Gary Soneji could not take it anymore. The hunger, the desperate need, had been building in him ever since his big fight with Missy.
The two of them had argued bitterly all weekend over everything from the wedding to finances to Roni’s day care.
Part of him wanted to just divorce Missy—or kill her—but another part of him acknowledged that his marriage to Missy gave him valuable cover, cover he was sure he would need in the future. But another fight like that and who knew what he might do to her.
Leaving home that morning, he’d decided to give in to the hunger. He was now two hours south of Washington, DC, waiting to sate his appetite. He wore the workman’s coverall and sat in the battered white panel van, a black balaclava rolled up on hisforehead. He’d parked the van in a dirt lot across the street from a strip club called Tillie’s, a low, gray cinder-block affair with a garish neon sign on a lonely route just north of Richmond near the town of Short Pump.
Two summers ago, when he was working to drum up new heating-oil business in the region, Soneji had often visited Tillie’s. He’d been obsessed with a dancer there named Bunny Maddox. Lean physique, large breasts, and wild mane of auburn hair.
He’d not only thought about taking Bunny to the Pine Barrens; he’d planned it all out, knew just how he’d grab her. Now he was going to put his plan into action.
Soneji sat there in the van, hoping that Bunny still worked the early shift. She tried to clock out by eight thirty so she could be home for her kid.
The boy had to be—what, five? Six? Not that he really cared. He remembered Bunny telling him that half the time, her kid lived down in Florida with her mom and older sister.
“I get anxious,” Bunny had told him, running scarlet fingernails down his cheek the last time he’d paid her to dance for him. “Which makes me want to get high or drink or both. Which gets me in trouble. Makes me a shitty mom sometimes.”
Soneji wondered if that was still true as he watched a dancer leave through the employee door at ten past eight. Then five more women from the day shift came out and drove away. He didn’t want to go inside the strip club and risk showing up on a security camera.
At eight fifteen, Bunny was still a no-show. Eight twenty, same thing.
At eight twenty-eight, he was thinking that it might be time to head north. He’d actually started the van when Bunny Maddox came out the door and stumbled slightly as she crossed the lot.
“Still has problems,” Soneji said, smiling. He felt a little breathless as he watched Bunny climb into a Ford Galaxie that had seen far better days.
Soneji waited until she’d pulled out of the parking lot and swung onto the county road heading toward Richmond. His heart beat faster. He put the van in gear and drove after her at a distance, telling himself to breathe deeply and slowly against the anticipation swelling in him.
There was no room for any sloppiness.
As Soneji had seen her do repeatedly during his scouting trips in years past, Bunny drove from the club to the closest Virginia state liquor store, where he knew she’d buy her usual pint (or quart) of vodka. Anticipating that she’d continue her typical pattern, Soneji drove ahead to her next stop, a Winn-Dixie about a mile away.
He parked the van and waited patiently with a panoramic view of the rest of the lot. Bunny’s Galaxie came rumbling in ten minutes later. After parking, the dancer ducked down where she could not be seen, probably so she could take a swig off her newest bottle.
The second he saw Bunny leave her car and wobble her way to the grocery store entrance, Soneji felt a sense of overwhelming confidence. If he stuck to his plan, took every precaution, and avoided sloppiness, Bunny Maddox was his.
CHAPTER
52
While bunny was inthe Winn-Dixie, Soneji drove west on Route 6 toward Maidens, Virginia. He took the Crozier exit and drove into a checkerboard of farmland and small wooded lots.
He liked rural areas. There weren’t a lot of people around, and residences were scattered and often isolated, making situations far easier to control here than they were in urban environments.
Bunny lived with her brother and a male cousin and, at times, their girlfriends. The presence of so many people would ordinarily have all but eliminated the dancer as a target in Soneji’s mind, and it certainly would have if she’d lived in a city. But Bunny’s house was well off a county road and largely blocked from sight by a kudzu infestation that crawled up the trunks of the pine and oak trees and hung down from their limbs like so much green drapery.
He saw the mailbox and slowed. Rain began to sprinkle as he lowered his window and peered down the drive into the kudzu and pines. He saw rusted gate posts set to either side about thirty yards in from the road.
Everything was as he remembered it.
Soneji drove over a rise in the road, pulled the van onto the shoulder where Bunny wouldn’t see it, and turned off his headlights. Then he tugged down the black balaclava, put on a headlamp and a second layer of latex gloves, and stepped out of the van. He shut the door softly and turned on the red bulb on his headlamp.
As he trotted back down the road, he peered south for headlights approaching but saw none before reaching the drive. He walked fast up the shallow grassy ditch and tiptoed across the gravel to the open gate.
Soneji swung the gate shut and wrapped the chain around the post just a few moments before he heard the growl of Bunny’s car coming. The rain was falling harder. He ignored the drops in his eyes, walked fifteen feet toward the road, pressed himself back into the kudzu, and turned off his headlamp.
The Galaxie came closer. Soneji retrieved the Bulldog pistol from his right pocket. He tugged a ragged two-inch strip of flannel fabric out of his left pocket and pushed it into the vegetation behind him.
