A young hippie guy came out of her building and walked the other way. Kowalchuk ground his back teeth together and cursed, because he hoped the hippie didn’t notice the tape. Kowalchuk entered the hallway and pushed the door. It opened up for him, and he smiled as he entered the downstairs corridor. Those damned hippies are so spaced out they don’t know what the hell’s going on. If the door was off the hinges they wouldn’t notice.
Kowalchuk stealthily climbed the stairs. This was the tricky part, and he’d have to be careful. He’d also have to be lucky. But he wanted to see Evelyn’s dirty blood and take her money, and he was hungry as hell. His stomach had been growling all night and he had a headache. But it was good to miss meals because that would make him lose weight so he could fool the police.
Up the stairs he went. Evelyn lived on the top floor in back, and he passed her floor, climbing the section of stairs that led to the roof. Halfway up, he stopped and sat down. He’d sit down there and wait until she came out of her apartment, then go down and have a little chat with her.
A door opened several floors down, and someone descended the stairs, but it was too many floors down to be Evelyn. He hoped nobody would come up to where he was, but if someone did he’d pretend to be a drunk asleep on the stairs. It was common in the East Village to find bums asleep on the section of stairs between the roof and the top floor of apartments. On East Ninth Street he’d heard that a bum had once spent an entire winter on that section of stairs in the building next door. The building had been full of hippies and none of them had the heart to throw the bum out, but if Kowalchuk had been living in that building he would have thrown the son of a bitch off the roof. He’d never liked bums, and after his weeks on the Bowery, hated them even more, especially since one of them had tipped off the cops to his identity. But that old buzzard had paid for it. Kowalchuk had followed him to the toilet and cut his throat while he was taking a piss. The fucking bum didn’t know what hit him.
Kowalchuk heard doors opening and closing inside the building. He peeked through the railing and saw hands going down the banisters on their way to work or maybe one of the neighborhood bars. He looked at his watch and it was nearing eight o’clock in the morning, the time Evelyn used to leave for work. He knew the time because he used to walk her to the subway when the neighborhood was crawling with junkies.
A door opened at the front on the floor beneath him, and Kowalchuk held his breath. The door closed, he heard the locks click, and then the person moved toward the stairs. Kowalchuk looked through the railing and saw a man’s black pants going down the stairs. Did she have a guy staying all night with her?? he wondered, angry and jealous. No, she wouldn’t dare do that in a building where many people knew her. The guy probably was from the other apartment at the front of the building.
Ten minutes later he heard another door open at the front on the floor beneath him. He heard a jangling of keys and was sure that was Evelyn because she always used to jangle her keys while looking for the right one to lock the door. She’d always carried a lot of keys around, to closets and trunks and things. Evelyn was a little bit of a nut when it came to locking things up.
Footsteps moved toward the stairs, and Kowalchuk looked through the railing. He saw a woman’s tan raincoat and a hand on the banister that looked like Evelyn’s. It was now or never. He got up and moved down the stairs. He descended to the landing of Evelyn’s floor and hopped down the next flight, going fast enough to catch up with her but not enough to alarm her. He heard her quicken her pace, she probably wondered who was coming down the stairs. People in the East Village could get awfully paranoid.
He turned the corner of the stairs between the fourth and third floors, and saw her on the third floor landing. Nervously, she glanced over her shoulder at him. She was a dumpy woman with short black hair, and her eyes widened with fear at the sight of the bearded stranger. She hesitated and opened her mouth. He came at her quickly, taking out his switchblade and hitting the button.
“Don’t make a sound, Evelyn,” he murmured, descending the last few stairs to the landing.
Her face went pale. “You!”
“If you scream I’ll kill you where you stand,” he said softly. “Turn around and go back to your apartment.”
Her lips quivered and her feet became frozen to the floor. “What do you want?”
He pushed her gently. “Get moving.”
She tried to intimidate him like in the old days. “Now put that knife away and stop being silly!”
He looked around nervously, sweat forming on his forehead. “Get moving Evelyn, or I’ll cut you down, so help me God.” He brought the point of his knife to her throat.
Evelyn looked fearfully at him, blinked, and began climbing the stairs. She’d read the papers and knew he was the Slasher. When she’d found out, it had nearly floored her, but she never dreamed that he’d come to see her. She thought he’d forgotten all about her.
Kowalchuk walked beside her, the knife hidden beneath his denim jacket, feeling a tremendous surge of power and confidence. He’d let her push him around for years, while this was all he’d had to do.
They returned to her floor and she took her ring of keys out of her pocketbook. Her hands trembling, she selected the two that opened her door, inserting them in the locks and twisting. She looked up at him. “You’re not going to hurt me, are you Frank?” she asked in a quavering voice.
“Not if you do what I say.” She opened the door and they entered her spick-and-span kitchen. It smelled fresh, and all the fixtures were gleaming. For Kowalchuk, it brought back memories of the times she used to let him inside her apartment. He used to love to come here, even though she’d been so mean to him. And it was here that she’d brought that sanitation worker to fuck and suck, instead of him.
He bolted the door behind them and she looked at his knife, terror in her eyes. It appeared that she might faint at any moment. “What do you want, Frank?”
“How much money have you got with you?”
She placed her purse on the table and opened it, taking out a wallet. ‘ ‘About eighty dollars.”
“Give it here.”
She withdrew the money from the wallet and handed it to him; he put it in his jeans pocket.
“I know you always keep money around for emergencies, Evelyn. Where is it?”
“In my bedroom.”
“Get it for me.”
They walked through the living room to the bedroom, the room where he’d always wanted her to take him, and she took the sanitation guy there instead. It was neat and clean like the kitchen, with white lace doilies covering the dressers and the fragrance of her perfume in the air.
“I’m afraid of you,” she whimpered.
“You should be, after all you did to me. Now get me the money.”
She opened a dresser drawer and took out a white envelope, which she handed to him. He looked inside and saw a sheaf of bills. Taking them out, he counted two hundred dollars in tens.
“That’s all I’ve got here, Frank,” she said.
“How much you got in the bank, Evelyn?”
“The bank?”
“Yeah, the bank.”
“Around three thousand dollars.”
“Where’s the bank book.”
“In here.” She took the bank book out of the same drawer where she’d kept the envelope of money.
He opened the bank book and saw that she had $3,443.26 saved up. “How much of this is mine?”