Hillside Stranglers by Darcy O'Brien

Author:Darcy O'Brien
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road

Even better, his application for membership in the Whatcom County Sheriff’s Reserves was accepted, and he began attending classes in police procedure: arrest technique, search and seizure, traffic regulation, firearm use, and so on.

To all appearances, family life and the move from Los Angeles were tonic to Bianchi. He was establishing himself as a respectable and socially responsible member of the community; he had the position of authority for which he had always longed. Yet all was not well with the inner Kenny.

Bellingham bored him. A town of about forty thousand inhabitants north of Seattle, less than fifty miles from the Canadian border, Bellingham lacked diversions appealing to someone of Kenny’s sensibilities. It was situated on the Washington coast. No setting could be more beautiful, looking out toward the pine-covered San Juan and Vancouver islands and the Strait of Juan de Fuca. It was a paradise for the woodsman and the fisherman and for anyone fond of fresh air and water and the reassurance of a coherent community, where violent acts were neither common nor tolerated.

To Bianchi none of these virtues meant anything, and the very cohesiveness of Bellingham, its smallness, and its human scale were irritants. He could not be anonymous here. In such a place every citizen had an identity, an imposition painful to a chameleon, to a man who, himself being nothing, liked to pretend to everything. The people here were disconcertingly direct and sincere. The dramatic, primary blues and greens of the landscape and waterscape oppressed him, conjuring certainties, implying definitions. The blurry grays and browns of smog suited him better, the days of night; and at night in Bellingham the too-bright stars seemed to watch him like lidless eyes. There were no freeways here, no instant-access routes to anonymity where, sealed in his car with the music turned up, he could melt into the columns of millions on his way to another scam. Worst of all, in Bellingham there was no Angelo Buono.

Kenny longed for Angelo like a lover scorned. And as the days of the year began to shorten, bringing long northern nights and the steady rains of the Washington autumn and winter, Angelo came to haunt Kenny’s thoughts more and more. He found himself thinking of Angelo day and night, images of strength and anger, Angelo grabbing onto some girl with his big hands, Angelo grinning, Angelo erect, Angelo taking what he wanted in front and behind, Angelo fingering a gun or deftly manipulating a roll of twine, Angelo a magnet to girls, Angelo looking on him, his own cousin, with scorn. Kenny’s job, driving around checking on security systems, patrolling vacation houses left vacant until the next season, providing the illusion of safety to householders who were happily unaware that they had entrusted their lives and possessions to a murderer and a thief, offered few diversions. He had to content himself with stealing canned goods, telephones, gardening tools, books, light bulbs, storing everything in his basement, which soon resembled a fallout shelter.

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