Invisible

  The sound of the New York City subway screeching by on the elevated track jolted Lynn Taylor into the day. From the bedroom window of her five-story walkup apartment, she could see the roof of the neighboring building, its shafts and machinery composing a madly disorganized terrain of steel and cement. About two hundred feet of track was visible just beyond the roof. Every few minutes, a train would catapult past, leaving the stench of burnt carbon in the air. In the steaming New York summer, the apartment heated up like a cauldron, so her window was always open, admitting not only olfactory insults, but also filthy black dust that rained down on all the surfaces in Lynn’s apartment

  The inside of her place looked like a cheap hotel room. Lynn had bought all the furniture at the Salvation Army twenty years ago, when she turned eighteen and her most recent foster mother informed her that her free ride with the City of New York was over. Someone from the NYC Youth Welfare Division had found this place for her and given her the money to furnish it. She hadn’t changed much of anything since then. No pictures, no mementos, nothing personal except clothing and toiletries and a collection of office supplies she’d stolen from her job over the years.

  Lynn was a production accounting clerk at Acme Screw and Bolt, a company that made custom hardware for the construction of industrial drill presses. The same hardworking youth worker who’d put her in her apartment had also helped her get hired at Acme

   Lynn’s boss, Chick Peterson, was an overweight, balding, sweaty man whose wife, as everyone knew, was sleeping with several of the high-level managers at Acme Screw. Chick couldn’t do much about it except to seethe and wreak havoc on his female staff. Lynn, at thirty-eight, was the youngest of the clerks, and mousy Zeena, at sixty-two, was the oldest. The lead “girl,” Emily, was in her mid forties. All of them desperately needed their jobs.

  Chick’s routine was to burst into the office suddenly and stand near the door without saying anything. Just staring silently. The clerks all breathed a little harder and turned a little redder in the face. The casual observer wouldn’t notice these reactions, but Chick’s antennae pointed to the most frightened woman and he summoned her to his office. Frequently, his target was Lynn, the most easily rattled of all of them.

  But something wonderful had happened to Lynn a few weeks ago. She felt an unfamiliar spark of excitement just thinking about it.

  Early one Monday morning, she’d gone to a free clinic for help with a painful bunion on her left big toe. The doctor had done minor surgery on the spot, and afterwards, given her some Oxycodone. After she got to work, she noticed that she no longer cared very much about whether her Excel spread sheet synced up with the master inventory. Lynn’s mind drifted and she began to look forward to lunch, when she could devour one of those marvelous garlicky burgers from the little stand on Seventh Avenue.

  She didn’t even notice when Chick first walked into the office. He looked far less formidable than usual. What an asshole he was.

  Chick’s little eyes surveyed the room, his reptilian tongue darted in and out of his mouth, and he took several quick, shallow breaths. Hunting for prey, was Lynn’s observation. Watching, sniffing, anticipating. Zeena sweated and poor Emily’s face turned bright pink.

  Oxycodone kept Lynn’s reactions to zero, and the lizard eyes moved disinterestedly over her. Chick waited for several minutes and finally set his gaze on Emily.

  “Emily! Come into my office with your stats for last month, and be quick about it.” Chick left the office, a wide smile on his face.

  “Yes, Mr. Peterson,” stammered poor Emily. She stumbled to her feet and dashed after Chick.

  My god, Lynn realized. She hadn’t gotten nervous, so Chick hadn’t even seen her. He had been looking for the most anxious clerk and her calm had acted like a shield. She had become invisible.

  The next few days, Lynn studied other women on the subway and walking in the streets. Some looked up as they walked, some looked down. Lynn noticed the set of their shoulders, the assertiveness of their movements, the way their clothes fit, and the looks on their faces. How did she compare to them? Could she blend into the background, unnoticed? A new world of possibilities opened to her.

  Weeks went by and Lynn worked hard training herself to be unnoticeable. She was never picked again by Chick to be his victim of the day.

  My god, what had she been thinking all this time? She looked at Emily and the others with contempt. They would never get it, she realized. And that was all to the good – they were there to take the weight while she worked in peace.

  As she honed her skill, Lynn ventured into parts of the City she hadn’t seen before. She practiced posture, movement, attitude, speech and expression, and taught herself to blend in almost anywhere.

  As summer faded into fall, Lynn was able to close her windows against the city’s filth and things got better all around. She bought a tailored jacket that she could wear with skirts or pants to achieve a more professional look. She bought some real shoes, shoes built for style as well as comfort.

  As she began to enjoy the richness of material objects, Lynn learned to apply her invisibility more broadly. When she walked into a store or restaurant, no one really noticed her. She could remove a pair of jeans or a book from a display and examine it as the eyes of the security teams swept over her disinterestedly. She represented a perfect median of the average customer.

  Lynn discovered upscale dining. She started with fancy hotel restaurants, like the Palm Court at the Plaza and last week she’d tried frog’s legs, can you believe it, at Jean-George’s in the Trump International Hotel. Donald could afford it, she thought as she walked out withuot paying.

  And this week, a new elegant outfit courtesy of Henri Bendel qualified her to try her skill at Daniel, on Madison and 65th. She’d always wanted to go there.

  Her usual trick was to dine magnificently, then go to the ladies room and exit in a wave of other guests, smiling all the while and leaving the waiter a generous tip. Not his fault, after all. Not once had anyone come running down the street calling at her to stop.

Chapter 2

  Neil Kowalski worked in the mailroom of Acme Screw and Bolt. He was a tall man, in good shape for a sixty-year-old, with hooded eyes, bad skin, and graying hair. His job was to wheel the mail cart around the building, deliver the incoming mail and pick up the outgoing mail. When he’d gotten the job, they told him he was replacing a retard. It was humiliating the way you got treated if you had a prison record. And they made him register as a sex offender. These people had no idea what a sex offender really was. He didn’t even come close, at least not since he’d come home from serving his country. And that was a long time ago.

  He had never really hurt anyone in New York, just scared them a little. All he’d ever done was to touch a few women’s asses in the subway. And because of that, the only job he could get was a retard job at minimum wage, so he couldn’t afford his own place and had to live with his mother in Queens. It wasn’t right. The only good thing about the job was he got to travel all over the Acme building looking at women’s asses. Like a tour.

  The ass he liked best was on a little lady who worked on the fifth floor. Neil didn’t know her name, so in his head, he named her Candy. That’s what she was. She wasn’t young, she wasn’t tall, and she wasn’t particularly beautiful. But her ass curved out in the back, the way he like it.

  Candy was a nice girl. She didn’t move her ass around when she walked. And the way she dressed – it seemed like she was doing her best to cover it up. But Neil noticed. He had an expert’s eye for asses and he noticed.

  Today Neil was anxious to see Candy. He went off his regular route to get to her office earlier than usual. The run would take him a little longer, but what difference did it make, anyway? No one ever noticed him or what he was doing.

  Here at Acme, they had no idea who they were dealing with, he thought with a smile. They had no idea that he’d been a scout in Cambodia, and then in Vietnam, that he’d survived an entire year in a job where the average life expectancy was thirty days. They didn’t know how many people he’d killed, either. Well, they weren’t really people he’d killed, they were gooks, but anyway, they were dead. And just before Sergeant Neil Kowalski’s honorable discharge, the army gave him a distinguished service medal for his fine work.

  Unlike most vets, Neil remembered Vietnam fondly. He got to shoot a lot of people and he got to touch ass any time he wanted. In fact, he’d done far more than touch. One time he and his buddy Franz had grabbed a young gook girl and taken her out in the jungle for a couple of hours. She finally stopped crying and passed out, so Neil had shot her.

  That was the great thing about being over there. You could do all the shit you’d always wanted to do, and nobody got pushed out of shape about it. Not like here in New York, where everyone was so touchy.

Chapter 3

  Emily was the senior girl in Lynn’s office. That meant she made more money, had a larger desk and was in line for promotion. Lynn wanted her job. Business was dog eat dog, wasn’t it?

  One morning, Lynn carefully block printed a note to Emily, put it in an envelope, and placed it in the inter-office mail basket. She left the return mail-stop address blank. Then she went to freshen up.

  A few minutes later, when Neil got to Candy/Lynn’s office, he dumped the contents of the office outgoing mailbox into his basket. Then, he took the incoming packets of envelopes and memos for the group out of a tray, and placed the appropriate envelopes on the upper right corner of each woman’s desk, as he’d been taught. He kept his eyes lowered, but as he neared Lynn’s desk, he saw that her chair was empty. Where was she? He felt a rush of anger. What right did she have to leave the office when he was there? Was she sick? Out for the day? Having coffee with some man?

  Finished with his chores, Neil stood for a moment in the corner of the room, pretending to adjust some of the envelopes.Strange, there was an envelope for Emily Simpson in the outgoing mail originating from her own office. It had no return address. He shrugged and threw it back in the basket. None of the mail could be very important – what was it – a bunch of desk jockies shuffling papers back and forth. And besides, he was too flustered. His whole morning was off kilter. Candy wasn’t there.

  The door opened behind him and Lynn walked in. She practically had to touch him, the space between the doorway and the rest of the office was so narrow. Neil could smell her perfume, feel the heat from her body, sniff the light scent of her shampoo. He felt dizzy. Being this close to her was almost too much.

  Only after Candy had walked by did he glance downward at her ass. It was magnificent today. She was wearing a cotton knit skirt that clung to her curves like a magnet. And it was a light color, sky blue. Not grey or brown like she usually wore. Neil couldn’t repress a smile, as he looked downward again. Mustn’t let anyone see him grinning. It was worth it today after all – going out of his way. He’d almost touched her. Humming softly, he wheeled his cart out of the room and down the hall to the elevator.

  No one even gave him a glance.

  Neil made all his rounds in the next few hours, and dashed out to the donut shop for a chocolate cruller and a cup of milk- and sugar-laden coffee. The girl in the donut shop was kind of cute, but too skinny and bookish for him. Maybe if she ate some of those donuts herself, she’d gain a few pounds and grow an ass. He gulped down his donut and left.

  Neil made his way to the basement mailroom, his kingdom, and sat at his desk. The small, windowless room was painted institutional green and smelled like mold. He liked it. It reminded him of crowded barracks. He could almost smell the cordite in the air, the damp wool blankets, the musk of other unwashed men.

  Shuffling through the mail, he picked up the mysterious envelope for Emily Simpson. Unhesitatingly, he opened it. Probably just more numbers crap, but just maybe it was something more interesting.

  There was a single sheet of white paper inside, and when he unfolded it, his heart leapt.

  The note said, “Emily, you bitch, look in your bottom right drawer.”

  Neil felt a jolt of happy electricity. Hatred and conflict thrilled him. He was in his element. Maybe he could make something out of this somehow – blackmail someone, threaten them. He put the note back in the envelope and routed it to Emily for delivery the next day.

  At five o’clock, the offices emptied like deflated balloons. Rooms that had been crowded and frantic, full of fears, triumphs, boredom, and malicious betrayals, became empty shells. Chairs were pushed neatly up to desks, piles of papers were straightened, humming machines were silent. The place looked like a ghost town.

  Some of the managers were still there. Several had their doors closed and the windows covered while they screwed their secretaries, other people’s secretaries, new young employees, and in some cases, other employees’ wives. Neil smiled. He had catalogued each of these situations and had started to make them pay off for him. He didn’t blackmail the managers directly because he would be fired, so he was doing it anonymously – through the interoffice mail, of course.

  Neil decided to see what the note to Emily was all about. He took the elevator to the fifth floor and walked quietly down the corridor to Cost Accounting, Candy and Emily’s office. Making sure he hadn’t been followed, he walked over to Emily’s desk. He cautiously pulled open the bottom right drawer and couldn’t suppress a little cackle of joy. There, nestled among the staplers and scissors was a big fat dead rat.

Chapter 4

   When Emily arrived at work the next day, she was in the dumps. Her sister Molly had just been diagnosed with a re-occurrence of her ovarian cancer and Emily was pondering the necessity of moving into Molly’s apartment to help her get through the tiresome, enervating course of chemotherapy. It was inconvenient that Molly had the re-occurrence. Maybe if she had exercised more, or eaten a healthier diet, things would have been different.

  Emily had heard a rumor about a possible personnel shake-up at Acme Screw and hoped it might lead to her long-awaited promotion. She wanted to focus on that – to shine at work, do a great job, pacify Chick as best she could, and put in extra time here and there. She didn’t want to be stuck in Brooklyn draining her energy by shuffling back and forth to endless appointments with Molly.

  Emily spotted the creepy mail guy coming into the office at about eleven a.m. Was it her imagination, or did he put the little pile of envelopes down on her desk with an unusually energetic zip?

  Emily finished the report she’d been working on, printed it out, checked to make sure it was perfect as always, and with a little flourish, signed it and sealed it in an envelope for the outgoing mail. This report was going to Canal Street. The troglodyte manager down there insisted on paper copies. Imagine – in this day and age.

  Humming contentedly, Emily reached for her mail. The envelope on top didn’t have a return address. Strange. She quickly unlatched the small metal catch of the interoffice mail envelope and pulled out a single piece of paper. When she unfolded it, she jumped to her feet and let out a little scream.

  Zeena, at the next desk, looked over the top of her trifocals. “What?”

  “Oh, nothing,” said Emily, sitting down. She composed herself and reached tremulously for the drawer. When she opened it, she was greeted by a sickening smell. Her office supplies had been covered with excrement. Not just placed in a pile, but revoltingly spread out, like icing on a macabre cake. And nestled in the excrement was a huge dead rodent, its legs stiffened upward. Emily fainted.

******************************

   The other clerks came running over to see what was wrong. Lynn walked calmly out of the office to get a cup of water for poor Emily. When she came back, there was quite a crowd gathered. The mail guy was lingering in the doorway and almost everyone who worked on Five had come to see what happened.

  Lynn glanced into the drawer and her eyes widened with surprise. It was perfect. What a touch of genius! She should have thought of it herself. Who had helped her and why? She craned her neck to look more closely at the disgusting mess in Emily’s drawer. Delighted, she walked, unnoticed, out of the room, went down the elevator, outside, and next door to the donut shop.

  The next day, Emily was absent from work for the first time in her twenty-three year career at Acme Screw and Bolt.

 
Chapter 5

  It took Lynn two days to figure out who her co-conspirator was. The morning after the shitty rat incident when she stopped for donuts, she saw the weirdo mail guy standing by the counter, and for the first time he made eye contact with her and nodded. She nodded back. The next day, he came in a minute after her.

  A light bulb went on in Lynn’s head. Of course, the mail guy would have been in the perfect position to read the note and add the shit to Emily’s drawer. And he wanted her to know it. But why? What were his motives? Was this his way of making friends with her? Would the cost be too high? Would he betray her?

  Lynn walked over to him, her cup in her hand. “Buy you a cup of coffee?” she asked.

  Neil’s eyes sparkled. “Oh – yes. Yes. Thank you very much, Candy.”

  Lynn frowned. “Candy? My name isn’t Candy, it’s Lynn.”

  “Oh sorry,” said Neil. “My mistake.”

  Lynn paid for Neil’s coffee and they stood together near the back counter.

  “You work on Five, right?” said Neil quietly. He was staring at her. He looked at her face, her neck, her breasts, her legs. Was this guy strange or what? He must have some fantasy about her. He’d called her Candy.

  “Yes, and I’ve seen you with the mail cart,” said Lynn carefully. Was he an idiot like the last one they had?

  “Hey,” the big man stammered. “Would you like to go get something to eat after work today?”

  Lynn hesitated, but not for long. He was an old guy – how dangerous could he be? “Sure. See you right here at five?”

   “Yes, that would be good,” Neil said, showing broken yellow teeth as he grinned at her. Nearly drooling.

  They had dinner in a big, loud Italian place on Broadway and Lynn decided to just go for it.

  “Listen, you did me a real favor the other day,” she said.

  “I know. It was fun,” Neil answered, blushing.

  Lynn leaned forward. “Why did you do that?” she asked.

  “For one thing, I thought it was funny, and for another, I’d guessed it was you who put the rat in there, and I’ve always kind of liked you.”

  Lynn looked at him. This guy had her by the balls so to speak.

  “What do you want from me?” she asked, slurping a long piece of fettuccine Alfredo.

  Neil put down his fork. “I like you. I want to look at you. Really look at you without you freaking out. I wouldn’t ever touch you. No sex or anything. I like your ass and I want to look at it. I promise, that’s it. And if there’s anything else you want me to do like I did today, I’ll do it.”

  He looked scared. Maybe he thought she was going to jump up and call the police.

  Lynn was quiet for a few minutes as she considered Neil’s bizarre offer and the dessert menu. Looking up, she said, “I think we could work something out. But you have to do everything I say, no more, no less.”

  “Oh, yes, thank you,’ whispered Neil. “Would you like some tira misu?”

Chapter 6

  Helene was exhausted. The morning rush at Daly’s Donuts was just winding down and she wanted to run out of the place. Away from the grease and sugar and out into the sun, out into the chaos of Seventh Avenue, out anywhere. She wiped her sticky hands on her soiled white uniform.

  Helene Jorgensen had arrived in New York from Eau Claire Wisconsin two years ago to go to Barnard College. She’d felt like a fish out of water in the city from day one and had flunked out in her third quarter. Since then, she’d had a series of meaningless jobs like this one, and told herself she was collecting little New York vignettes, slices of life, for the play she was going to write. The donut shop presented her with a cast of characters that would be the envy of any would-be writer. The faces of America.

  Chris Montrose floated into the shop. A six-foot-five transvestite queen wearing a compromise between business attire and night club glamour, he had on beautifully cut men’s dress pants with a blue silk paisley blouse complemented by tasteful blue earrings with faceted glass “diamonds” framing his fine-boned, ebony black face. His shoulder-length hair was smooth and supple, a deep shade of auburn. Chris always looked like he’d just stepped out of some twisted fashion magazine.

  “Hello love,” Chris sang happily. “I don’t know why I do this to myself,” he said, looking at his trim torso, “but give me one of those huge, ever-so-phallic éclairs. I just love those things. They’re big, they’re dark chocolate, and they’re full of cum.”

  He laughed hilariously at his own joke, as Helene blushed and allowed herself a giggle. Chris was one of her favorite customers, always in a good mood, always good natured. She handed him his éclair and turned to prepare his coffee, “light, bright and almost white.”

  Glancing out the window, she saw Hal Anastasio lurching toward the shop. Hal was a victim of diastrophic dysplasia he had told her, a type of dwarfism that causes progressive degeneration of the spine, along with misshapen hands, feet, arms and legs. This morning, his beret sat at a ludicrous angle on his disproportionally large head, but his necktie was tied perfectly. He had his usual unpleasant look on his face. Probably to keep people from asking him stupid questions, Helene figured. The world was not Hal’s oyster.

  Through the glass donut case, Lynn saw Hal’s beret cutting a wide swath back and forth through the shop and stop next to Chris. The beret was at Chris’ mid-thigh level.

  “Good morning, Hal,” she said, peering over the counter and handing Chris his order. “What’ll it be?”

  “Down here, cutie,” he growled in his odd voice. “The usual.”

  Smiling broadly, Helene considered how lucky she was to have Chris and Hal in her shop at the same time. What a spectacle, and she was the sole audience.

 
She poured the cream into Hal’s coffee and heaped in three teaspoons of sugar, just the way he liked it. Into a bag it went, along with two crullers. She walked around the counter and handed his order to him and took his money. Chris was sipping his coffee and commenting on the weather to an unresponsive Hal.

  Helene couldn’t resist. “You guys look good together,” she quipped. Chris whooped with laughter and Hal couldn’t contain a smile. It was a New York moment.

  “Come on, honey,” said Chris, reaching down and putting his hand on the dwarf’s shoulder. “Let’s go.”

  Helene wished she had a camera.

  The next rush of people entered the shop. There was that creepy old guy who worked at Acme – Neil, his name was. He was leaning against the soft drink machine, looking at her. Helene shuddered. There was something brooding and evil about Neil’s eyes. And why, she wondered idly, would that classy woman Lynn be his friend?

  She snapped back to attention. The volume of the crowd had amped up. There was a wave of frantic, money-waving sugar addicts, clamoring for sugar and fat. And she gave it to them. Zip, zap, the greasy treats flew into bags and money flew into the register. She forgot about Neil.

Chapter 7

  Lynn was on top of the world. With Neil’s help, she’d sent Emily three increasingly threatening anonymous notes, warning her not to come out of her house. The woman lost weight and her hands shook. Lynn was loving it, loving the power she had to devastate someone who was in her way. But it was time to get serious. She wanted Emily gone.

  One morning as Emily started off for the subway station, she was hit hard by a speeding cyclist. The bike rider hadn’t even stopped and had moved off so quickly that people who witnessed the accident weren’t sure which way he’d gone, what he looked like, or what he was wearing. Emily had been taken to the hospital in an ambulance. She had suffered a cracked rib and a dislocated knee. But the main damage was to her nerves. After she went home, she wasn’t able to leave the house. She ordered groceries delivered and didn’t answer the phone. She wasn’t surprised when she received a termination letter from Acme in the mail. Her sister Molly helped her as best she could.

************************************

  To pull this off, Neil had to learn to ride a bike, which he had never done before. He was hesitant, but Lynn had ordered him to do it. Together, they had selected a French racer for the job, liberating it from a bike rack in Greenwich Village. Neil’s surreptitious use of metal cutting shears was quick and skillful and the chain was off within moments. No one even noticed when the couple, walking casually with lattes in hand, strolled down Grant Street wheeling the shiny, black bike. Both of them were masters at deception, of blending into the crowd.

  Neil had grown to rather like the bike. Lynn was amused that he’d taken to riding along Riverside Drive on Sundays.

   Today, Lynn opened her eyes and stretched luxuriously under her seven-hundred count pink silk sheets, courtesy of Bergdorf Goodman. The reassuring hum of the air conditioner blocked out the sound of the trains and the cool air was so refreshing. The air conditioner, one of the new ductless Mitsubishis, had been a real coup. She’d ordered it from a custom environmental designer, Cool Design on East Fifty-Third, and told them she represented the president of Acme Screw and Bolt who was evaluating units for his estate in New Jersey. They had happily delivered the unit to the Acme loading dock, where Neil had grabbed it up immediately. He’d put it in his truck after work, driven to Lynn’s and installed it. When Cool Design called back a few weeks later, they were unable to locate Candy Moskowitz, the person who had initially called them.

  As Lynn got ready for work, her thin lips bent into a faint smile. She had the big desk now and had received a raise. Chick Peterson was putty in her hands.

  However, the relationship between Neil and Lynn was taking a turn. Four months had gone by and it had been getting more complicated for Lynn to balance their strange alliance. As much as Neil had enjoyed assaulting Emily with his new toy, Lynn knew she needed to find him some new outlets for fun.

  Meanwhile, Neil’s oblique sexual desires had modulated to the sinister, and it took all of Lynn’s skills to control him. She hated to end this delicately balanced friendship, but things were getting out of hand.

  Everything had escalated. It was no longer enough for her to stand smiling in place among the shrubbery while he watched her for the allotted fifteen minutes. Last week, when his fifteen minutes were up, he’d begged her to take off her jacket and let him touch her breast – just once, he said. Just once.

  What the heck, she had let him, and he was so happy he immediately stole a bottle of incredible perfume for Lynn at Saks Fifth Avenue. Maybe she could put up with this a while longer.

  But last night, after they had spent a long evening systematically stealing Chick Peterson’s financial identity, Lynn had looked up to see that expression on Neil’s face that meant he was going into his sick sex trance.

  As she put things away in her apartment, Neil remained silent, watching. When she turned to look at him, his face was purple-red and he was breathing heavily, staring at her so hard it seemed his eyes would bulge out of his head. At first she thought he was ill. Just what she needed. A sick lunatic.

  “Neil, are you all right?” she asked, without any real concern.

  “I’m fine,” he croaked. “I need to touch your ass.”

  “No, you can’t touch my ass.”

  “Lynn, I am starting to feel angry. Don’t make me be angry with you. I don’t want to do bad things.” He spoke in a low monotone she’d never heard him use before.

  Bad things? Lynn’s alarm bells went off. She’d thought he was totally under her control, but right now he wasn’t even under his own control. Time for him to go. How to end this peacefully…

  “Okay, if I let you touch my ass just once, will you leave right away?”

  “Yes, yes, I promise.” His words came out in a guttural rush as he lunged toward her, pulling her into an embrace against him, with both of his hands squeezing her buttocks into him. “Oh! Oh! Oh!” he cried.

  Lynn drew her right arm back and slapped Neil hard in the face. “Snap out of it, Neil,” she shouted.

  He let go immediately and stood looking at the floor, taking quick, shallow breaths, trembling.

  “Get out. Get out now.” Neil shuffled toward the door.

  He began to cry. “Are you angry at me? They always get angry, but I thought we were friends and it would be different.”

  “We are friends Neil,” Lynn said soothingly, desperate to get him out of her apartment. “You just surprised me, that’s all. Now you have to go.”

  “Okay, Candy,” Neil said and slowly walked out.

  Lynn closed the door behind Neil and slid all the locks into place. Her back against the thick metal door, she slumped over in relief. Neil was a nutcase. It wasn’t safe to use him any more. She’d have to find another assistant.

  He called her every half hour all night long until she unplugged the phone.

  The next morning, the phone rang at six a.m. and Lynn answered it. “I am so sorry, Lynn. forgive me, it will never happen again,” Neil stammered in a rush.

  “Yes it will, Neil. You are a twisted, sick man and I don’t want to be around you any more.”

  “Listen Lynn, I have an idea that you’ll like. Something we could do that’s better than anything we’ve ever done before.”