9
Ahmed Kadyrov twitched and scratched at his arms as he walked along Watson Avenue. He was badly in need of a fix and had come to the right place even if it was still early in the morning. The avenue, which cut through the notorious Soundview neighborhood, was the biggest open-air drug market in the Bronx.
However, he wasn’t just going to buy whatever meth one of the losers on the street was offering out of his pants pockets, cut with God knew what shit. He was heading to the apartment of a dealer one step up from the streets who sold a better product, if you were willing to pay for it. And Kadyrov was willing and able.
He felt the left side of his face-the swelling had gone down overnight but it was still tender and he had a nasty purple bruise. He’d slipped up with that bitch over near Mullayly Park. Distracted by the guy with the dog and then getting the arch of his foot stomped, he hadn’t seen the elbow coming and it had rattled him pretty good. Stunned and panicked, he’d been lucky to get away and catch a subway into Manhattan and over to Brooklyn while he gathered his wits.
It had taken the last of his meth, which he shot up in a stall of a public bathroom along the Coney Island boardwalk, to feel right again. Wish I’d cut the bitch, he thought. But the next woman, a pretty Hispanic girl who’d fallen for his offer to help her move a box into her Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment, had paid the price. She’d apparently just cashed a paycheck, too, because her purse had more than two hundred dollars in it.
Although his eagerness to “help” worked with the Hispanic girl, Kadyrov had been finding it more difficult to lure young women into letting him into their confidences and apartments. Thanks to the meth he was losing both his looks and his charm.
Since the previous July, when he’d taken the violence to a whole new level- What was her name? Oh yeah, sweet Olivia — his life had been going downhill. He’d been arrested for an aborted snatch-and-go robbery of a Jewish diamond merchant in the subway that ended when the man’s two huge bodyguards caught him before he could get away. Along with a beating from the merchant’s men, he’d spent six months in the Tombs.
It could have been worse. In his struggle with the bodyguards, he’d managed to get rid of his switchblade by tossing it under the subway platform. Getting caught with it might have prompted some ambitious detective to try connecting him with two recent knife murders near Columbia University. But instead, he just copped a plea to two misdemeanors, petty larceny, and possession of stolen property, and got a half year in lockup.
Forced to go cold turkey in jail, once he got out he jumped back into the drug scene. Crank made him the king of the world. When he was powering along on methamphetamine, he could stay up for days, fantasizing about all the great things he would accomplish, making grandiose plans. His self-confidence and self-esteem-neither of which existed without meth-soared; he believed that men envied him and women wanted him, and in the early days, some of them did. He was a sex machine, and his mind worked at a thousand miles an hour, displaying what he considered to be a dazzling wit and impressive intelligence, especially compared to those around him.
Crank also seemed to give him almost superhuman strength and alertness. Without it, he was depressed and just wanted to sleep all the time. He didn’t like what he saw in the mirror. Why in the hell would he want to give up meth?
When he got out in March, Kadyrov started shooting up again with a vengeance. However, the more he used, the more he needed, and the more he needed, the more he changed.
His formerly olive complexion turned sallow and his skin had a dry scaly look to it-he’d even taken to wearing a long-sleeved sweatshirt to cover the scabs from his constant scratching. He was having problems with his gums bleeding and had lost a bottom front tooth when it just fell out one morning. And his hair, which he’d once taken such pride in, was thinning and had lost its luster.
Kadyrov considered his large brown eyes one of his chief physical assets. Only now, bloodshot and yellowed by jaundice, they burned with a sort of crazed intensity-at least when he was high-and constantly darted around, as if he expected an attack from any side.
The more significant changes, however, had been psychological, although he failed to recognize them. Speed still made him feel like he was on top of the world, but he was also more irritable and aggressive. Paranoia was a way of life. The mere sight of a cop car made him jumpy, and he suspected everyone of plotting against him. Thus he stayed increasingly to himself, except when preying on others or buying drugs.
As his physical appearance deteriorated so did the pride he once took in how he dressed, even if it had been for the purpose of luring his victims. He’d returned to his basement apartment in the South Bronx from jail only to find that his landlord had tossed all of his belongings out on the sidewalk and rented the room to someone else. That left him with the clothes he walked out of jail wearing, plus the tattered gray hooded sweatshirt he’d dug out of a Dumpster.
He lived most of the time on the streets or in various homeless shelters, so his bathing was infrequent, too. But Kadyrov didn’t care. He desired two things in life-crank and sexual killing, each having become an addiction. Only torturing and murdering young women gave him the same sort of high he got from speed; indeed, each seemed to enhance the pleasure of the other.
The craving for both had increased while he was in jail. He’d only been out for two weeks when shortly after shooting up one afternoon, he spotted Dolores Atkins as she was entering the tenement off Anderson Avenue. He’d quickly made up his mind and bounded up the steps in time to catch the security gate before it closed and enter behind her. She was a little older than he’d thought at first glance but was a brunette and a close enough resemblance to his whore mother.
Dolores was clearly uncomfortable when he got on the elevator after her. And she avoided eye contact when he offered “please, to help” her with one of her bags. “No, thank you,” she’d said tersely.
In the past, if his efforts to charm the women into gaining access to their apartments didn’t work, he’d have moved on to a more cooperative victim. But there was something about this woman, maybe the way she summarily rejected his offer to help, that really made him angry.
He suddenly grabbed her by the throat with one hand as he held the blade of his knife to her neck with the other. Lack of proper nutrition, and a lack of interest in food when on meth, had caused him to lose weight from his already thin physique. But like many fellow users, he’d developed a sort of hard, rope-like musculature that could be astonishingly strong when he was high. He told her that they were now going to her apartment, where they were going to get busy. And if she screamed, he’d cut her fucking head off.
What he’d actually done was worse. “Slaughtered” was the word that reporter Ariadne Stupenagel had used, quoting her unnamed police sources. He liked the press coverage in all its macabre detail-it gave his “work” a sort of religious quality. The killing certainly released a lot of anger, so that after it was over, he was able to calmly clean himself up and then slip out of the apartment with no one the wiser.
Still, forcing women to take him into their apartments as opposed to talking his way in was a change in the way he liked to do things, and it made him uncomfortable. He recognized that he was taking a greater risk of being discovered.
Then there was the woman at Mullayly Park, which was yet another change and even more risk. Attacking her had been a spur-of-the-moment decision. He’d been out wandering the streets, wondering how he was going to score more meth when the last of his supply-one more hit-was gone. He wasn’t really even interested in raping or hurting her; the bushes in a park weren’t his style, at least not yet. Robbery had been the motivation, and it almost backfired.
Fortunately, the little Hispanic girl over in Bed-Stuy had taken care of both of his needs. The bloodlust was sated and he had enough cash to stay high for a week.
Time to party, he thought as he reached the six-story public housing complex off Watson Avenue. The building was an ugly, unimaginative box built of dull red bricks, just one of many similar public housing complexes and tenements that dominated Soundview.
The security intercom and locking gate had long since been destroyed by vandals, so Kadyrov was able to just enter the building and make his way to the stairs leading to the third floor. He walked down the long dark hallway-most of the bulbs had been removed or never replaced-and put his hand in his pocket, clasping his new switchblade. For many years, the Bronx’s notorious Soundview section had been dubbed “the murder capital of New York” by the media; more than half the population of seventy-five thousand residents lived below the poverty level,
