Tuesday Night Shift (1)

A cold, clear autumn night with a sharp wind shaking trees. The man in the shadows was trembling. The pa of his rubber-gloved hands were moist, and warm sv trickled down his face under the mask. Soon he would able to see her. To touch her. She wouldn’t see him, in the black of the moon shadow. She wouldn’t know was there until it was too late.

At first he thought it was a police trap. A girl, a young girl, in school uniform, walking all alone in Denton Wo at eleven o’clock at night. But how could the police know he’d be here? The other attacks had taken place miles away. And how could the police know it was the re young girls who turned him on. The police knew nothing. He was too smart for them. Far too smart. They] questioned him. They had cleared him. They had thanked him for his co-operation.

Even so, he hadn’t taken any chances. Only fools took chances. As always, he had carefully reconnoitred area. Nothing. Nobody. For miles around there was one but him, and the girl. The girl! In that school uniform. Wearing those dark thick stockings. She could be much more than fifteen… a schoolgirl, young and innocent, unaware of her developing body… just like girl in the book, the book he had hidden away in bedroom.

What was that?

He stood stock still, ears straining, his heartbeats booming in the screaming silence. He had heard something.

Something moving. He tensed, ready to tear off the mask and run. It was only the mask that could give him away. Without it the police had nothing. No leads, no clues, nothing. Even if they brought him face to face with his victims, they couldn’t identify him. The first they knew of his presence was the sudden suffocating blackness as the cloth went over their heads, and then the pressure of his fingers on their throats, squeezing, choking. One of the girls… the second, or was it the third?… had managed to tear the cloth from her face.