Bush Bundi flinched every time he strangled someone. It wasn’t because the act was heinous to him. Actually, the act of strangling someone was pleasurable, particularly when he watched the eyes of his victim, not to mention the surge of power that pulsed throughout his body and mind.

The Rose Strangler, they called him in the media. Females. 40’s. Five to date. Said he pasted a rose petal right in the quarter-sized bowl at the base of their necks, that little indentation there.

Bundi raped them. Wrapped their bra straps around their throats and pulled them tightly until he saw the skin redden on their necks, then turn purple. Bruising and all, like short circuiting the air to their brains. He was that motivated. Compression of the carotid arteries on one or both sides of the neck restricting the flow of blood and oxygen to the brain, a Judo practice he knew.

In their blood, he clearly and neatly wrote across their breasts, “I had no other choice but to kill you.”

Crossie Bannister, a frail woman of 40 out of south Denver, with a predisposition for allowing the slightest thing gnaw at her like a chunk of cancer, nipped at her glass of wine. “Sure, you won’t be going that way, will you?” she asked. A news clip on a tv in the neighborhood restaurant caught her

eye.

A morose-looking tv anchor with a twitch said, “The Rose Strangler’s due to strike again. Seems he’s taken some time off since he murdered Josie Kalamath last month.”

Crossie’s look drifted to a mammoth of a man, a stranger in the friendly place. The man adjusted a sable Fedora on his head. He hovered at the far end of the bar. A corner there, dark, and unexpressive. He threw down a shot of tequila and made sure he kept his eyes down.

Gottleib Croaker, Crossie’s lawyer friend, a stick of a guy with an Adam’s apple that bobbed like a piece of wood in a stream, when he talked, bit down on a lump of chewing tobacco. “You’ve been going that way every since law school, Crossie. Something wrong, sweetie?”

“I don’t know, you know, when you get a funny feeling, you should pay attention to it. It’s nature’s way of stirring you up. You should do something about it.”

Croaker pushed the carafe of wine closer to Crossie. “You’re just going over to the courthouse to file the brief on the Cheney case. I’ve got a contract to finish. You’ll be back in no time. We can slip over to the mall, have some tacoritos and go see “The Screaming Church” at the Denver Metroplex. Huh, huh? What do you think?”

He patted Crossie’s hand.

Crossie looked down at her hand. Veins in it throbbed in an about-to-explode look. She was buff. Her skin was that tight. It was the diet, the elliptical machine, curls, things like that. But she was too thin. Probably not an inch of body fat on her. That was Crossie Bannister, a woman who took care of her father’s law firm he left her.

He got his sleeve caught in the auger of his corn picker that was jammed. The 40 acre farm was his baby, his love, since Crossie’s mother died unexpectedly nearly four years ago now, victim of a vehicle collision that decapitated her. The machine pulled him in there and chewed him up like a school of piranhas.

Crossie melted under Croaker’s touch. His red-rimmed eyes, always a diversion for her, smiled at her. She knew he was sick, very sick. Not much time left. 60 plus years of tobacco had sentenced him to death, she knew. But he was a good contract lawyer, and he was nice to her.

Crossie felt the first tug of her premonition when she felt something behind her. The movie, a parody of conservatives, and their penchant to bitch about the economy, taxes favoring the upper crust of American society, and the religious leanings that spewed fire and brimstone, but left the parishioners so confused they couldn’t come up with any solutions. Generalizing about some very definitive issues. That was about it. But Croaker liked documentary films and Crossie wanted to placate him, so she went with him to the movie. Crossie shot a glance over shoulder. A black Lexus SUV with tinted

windows chugged at her back.

The parking garage had its own little annoyance. Dark corners. Solitary. Silent. Carbon monoxide. The trek to the courthouse to file the brief failed to penetrate the inner and hidden parts of anyone, let alone Crossie. Quiet hung in the air like a thick wall. The hum of the SUV melded with it, like the engine was no longer running.

It was still, the eeriness of the air just before a tornado dropped down from the belly of an angry, black cloud. “Ugly looking things, SUV’s,” Crossie said. Her way of giving the driver of the SUV the finger for following her too closely. The immense man in the sable Fedora from the restaurant stepped out from behind a cement pillar.

Crossie began to cross over to the other side of the garage to put some space between them. He presented her a rose. Draped it gently on the hood of a red Subaru Outback. Crossie stepped up her pace, about ready to sprint. He shot across the space between them. Crossie took the full force of him. It slammed her smack down on the pavement. Her breath flew from her. The man tore at her clothing like a wild animal.

Crossie swung a free hand. It landed at the edge of the brim of the Fedora. The Fedora set sail for other destinations. The man’s face glared at Crossie. A pissed off gorilla. A jagged scar trickled down the left side of his face. A stream of past pain. His nose, a beak like a bald eagle’s. His teeth yellowed, but very straight. The skin, his skin, harbored ruddiness. Crossie wrestled with a pepper spray receptacle wedged in her handbag.

The man stranded a Colt .44 magnum in Crossie’s face. “Best damn purchase I ever made. Can stop an armored truck on a dime.” The man laughed like a mideval executioner with a beveled bladed ax, and huge, just he watched someone’s head spurt blood and crash into a basket.

The pepper spray grabbed Crossie fingers. She pushed it up. She aimed it at the man’s sick eyes. She pressed the press button. The spray nailed the man in one eye.

He screamed. She blasted him again and again. He stumbled. She kneed him. Then pushed him. He impacted into an iron reinforcement rod protruding out of a pillar. It exploded through his forehead. Crossie followed the rod to where it exited out of the back of his head.
The man hung there, slumped, dead.

Ben Smiles, a security guard in a spotless white shirt and navy blue trousers, raced up. Crossie blew the hair from her face. “I had no other choice but to kill him.”

The End