The Creep by B. W. Battin

Author:B. W. Battin [Battin, B. W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: serial killer thriller
Publisher: Crossoad Press
Published: 2015-12-06T00:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

As he drove along the divided street, he thought about his identity. He was Richard. And he was Phillip. Though dormant for more than twenty-five years, the Richard Locke part of himself had never died. Nor would his Phillip part die just because of Richard’s awakening. He had been Phillip too long; Phillip Nash was part of him.

So which one was he?

The only answer seemed to be that he was both. Which wasn’t really so bad, he decided. He could learn to live with it. Besides, as long as he was outwardly Phillip Nash, respected educator, Richard could continue doing what he had to. Who would suspect the high school principal who’d lived quietly in the community for more than two decades?

And what Richard had to do was important. Someone had to rid the world of the bad people, the bullies. The creeps.

It was a nice night, warm for a fall evening. Phillip wondered whether it foreshadowed the onset of Indian summer. He stopped at a red light, and cars pulled up on both sides of him. He studied the occupants. A middle-aged blonde woman was driving the small red car to his left. On his right was a blue station wagon driven by a dark-haired man in his thirties. Two children were with him, a boy and a girl. None of these people seemed familiar. When the light changed, the woman in the red compact accelerated ahead of him; the station wagon turned right.

A patrol car passed him on the opposite side of the street, and the Richard part of himself watched it warily. It was an old habit, left over from the days when he was an escapee from the mental hospital in Minnesota. His breakout had been nothing spectacular. A door had been left unlocked, and he’d walked through it to freedom. Richard had been twenty years old at the time. He’d spent four years in the Oak Hill State Hospital.

He hadn’t known where he was going, other than away from Oak Hill, Minnesota. Because patients at the hospital didn’t wear uniforms of any sort—no booby-hatch white pajamas or the like—he had simply hitchhiked. His first ride had taken him south to Albert Lea. His second ride had taken him to Des Moines, and from there, he’d headed east, ending up in Pennsylvania, where he’d changed his name, built a new life.

Rolling down the window, he let in the warm night air. He recalled the rainy night he’d struggled in the mud with Ned Vukelich at the Maple Grove dump. Although the rain had washed the mud off his car, dealing with his filthy clothes had been more difficult. Fortunately Anne had been in bed, so he’d slipped out of his muddy things and put them in a plastic garbage bag, which he put in the trunk of his car. The next day he’d driven to a laundromat in a town fifteen miles away, washed everything—suit, overcoat, all of it—and then, after making sure there was nothing in the clothes that could identify him, he’d dropped the mined garments in a Goodwill box.

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