If you live anywhere long enough, you’re bound to see the same faces from time to time. Even in a city of millions, there’s a fair chance of running into someone twice. Or three times. Four times? By the fifth time I’m no longer sure. It’s him again, two spots behind me in line at Stop & Shop, watching me place some apples on the belt. Last time was a week ago at the burrito place across from the library at Brown University. Before that it was at the park while I was walking my dog. He was just sitting there on one of those gross benches surrounded by trash that only people like him seem to use. The first two times were both at Anton’s, while I was picking up orders for GrabNGo. At first I figured he was just another devout Anton’s regular, but now I’m seeing him everywhere and it’s got me out of sorts. I try not to think about it. After all, I’ve seen plenty of weird stuff doing these deliveries; by now I’ve done thousands.
What started as a side gig after college to make some cash until I found a real job, well… now five years later it is my real job. I should probably be more ashamed of my lack of ambition, but to be honest I enjoy the work. It’s passive, predictable, and reasonably steady pay. I don’t have a boss or coworkers. I can work whenever and for however long as I want. And I spend most of my time listening to music or podcasts in the car, or reading while I wait at restaurants. Sometimes people even cancel orders after I’ve already picked them up and I get a free meal. I won’t be living like royalty any time soon, but I know what to expect.
I’ve made quick work of checking out at the store, as not to linger with my observer in tow. As far as I know, he doesn’t know which car in the parking lot is mine, and I think it’s best to keep it that way. I head home for a few hours to eat and rest. It’s Friday and the dinner rush picks up a little after four o’clock. The rent is due tomorrow and I’m a little short, so I need to get a decent haul tonight.
Fingers crossed.
*****
It’s now 11:43 PM. Normally by this hour, when I can’t take any more Top 40 radio and my contact lenses have begun to dry out, I would have called it a night. But I’m still twenty-three dollars short on rent. A few more small orders or one really good one would do it, but who am I kidding? By now, all the good orders have come and gone. The catered dinner parties. The sweet old ladies who buy pasta and breadsticks with their grandchildren’s help and tip in cash. Those families with two or three kids out in the suburbs who live in large houses with two front doors; they almost always order the virtually identical twenty dollar “meal deals” at places like Chili’s or Applebee’s. All those people have long concluded their evenings. No, by now all that’s left are the dregs—the final late-night impulse purchases of Rhode Island’s finest: the students, drunks, and creeps. The kids at Brown or Providence College who are so high out of their minds, they’re willing to pay ten bucks for someone to bring them one can of Red Bull and a single white Airhead from the 7Eleven just around the corner from their dorm building. Or those unsavory figures who emerge from crumbling duplexes to collect bottles of liquor which they clearly don’t need and for which I typically get paid a mere $3.75 to deliver. And let’s not forget the creeps. Those who answer their doors clad in unwashed underwear beneath transparent bathrobes, cigarette in hand, and reeking as one does when they haven’t left home for several days. But to serve such clientele is the price I pay for the freedom to work on my own terms, and I do so willingly.
By midnight, I’ve made another fifteen dollars thanks to Abby F. of the West End, who ordered a two liter Coke and a bottle of white rum from Ocean State Wine & Spirits. Eight more dollars to go. One more order, I tell myself. Maybe two, if I get a couple of non-tippers. Most of the street spots are open now, so I’m parked across from a few burger joints and the liquor store—my only viable prospects for business past midnight.
Five minutes go by.
Then fifteen.
Half an hour.
It’s now quarter to one and I’m about to call it. My phone is down to five percent battery now anyway, and the charging cable in my car is broken. I’ve been meaning to replace it, but I keep forgetting. I’ll just get up early and do a breakfast order before the landlord comes by to grab the check, I decide. I turn the key and start to pull onto Cranston Street when the chime disrupts the silence of the night. An order.
I face the screen and freeze. Across the bottom it reads:
Pickup: McDonald’s
$55 (tip included)
Emile V.
Fifty-five dollars?
I wonder for a moment if perhaps I’ve fallen asleep in my car and this is a dream, but a few slaps on my cheek confirm otherwise. Fifty-five dollars is simply an astounding fare. The most I have ever earned on a single order was around thirty dollars—and that was a catering order with five or six bags sprawled across the back seats of my car. This order is for a single cheeseburger combo from McDonald’s at 1:00 AM—with a drop-off only two blocks away. Such an order calls for maybe five bucks, tops.
“Fifty-five dollars,” I say aloud to an empty car. They must be as desperate for fast food as I am for money, I suppose, but I’m wasting time. I crank the stick into drive, head to McDonald’s, order the food, then make my way to the address. It’s an apartment complex. Of course. Though I also live in one, I hate them. They’re hard to navigate, impossible to park in, and the buildings themselves usually stink of weed. But this order is fifty-five dollars. Hell, for that much I’ll feed the entire meal to you one bite at a time and throw away the trash on my way out.
I take the stairs up to the long hallway of the third floor. Half the lights are out completely, while the other half produce something sickly and pale. Fifty-five dollars now strikes me as an impossible figure for someone living in a place like this, but I’m not asking questions.
I knock on the door and wait. Nothing.
I knock again.
Thirty seconds go by and I’m getting annoyed now. Is this a prank? Has someone set me up to look like a fool?
On the third knock it swings open at once, as if three was the magic number of knocks they were waiting for.
“Here you go sir, have a good ni—“
A sudden warmth permeates my chest. As I raise my eyes to meet those of the customer, I’m struck by a face that I’ve now seen a sixth time.
Six times is definitely too many, I think.
He drills me with a look of recognition as his lips curl into a grin.
He knew I was coming, I think. Somehow he planned this.
But how? Drivers are assigned at random. Did he know it would be me before he placed the order? Or did he keep placing and cancelling orders, waiting to be matched with me? A sweat breaks out on my forehead and I start to shake, but my life may depend on my ability to stand, so I force my legs to keep from buckling in.
Now it’s been a few seconds—way too long. I’m sure he’s going to reach for me or follow me if I try to leave, but he just stands there. Staring. Grinning. He doesn’t speak and I don’t wish him to. I don’t dare speak either. In one fluid motion I drop the McDonald’s bag at the door, take a few steps back, and sprint for the stairs. I don’t look back and I don’t stop running until I’m out of the building. How long do I have? Minutes? Seconds? I’m about twenty steps from my car when the thought comes automatically and without hesitation:
Don’t take another step towards the car. He’s watching you.
And just like that I know it to be true. He must have a few windows in his apartment, and there is still a chance that he doesn’t know which car is mine. For him to see me get into my car now gives him more information. I drive an old Saturn Ion plastered in bumper stickers—one could easily pick it out of a lineup of half the cars in Providence. To drive it around with him knowing that I’m the owner would give away much of what little protection I might have left. That could be why he set this up. He had his chance to get me, and didn’t take it. I took the bait and nibbled at the hook, but he wasn’t ready to make the catch. Maybe all he wanted this time was information.
No car. So now what? I glance at my phone for a second to see the order still waiting to be marked as completed. The battery is clinging to dear life at 1%.
Fifty-five dollars, I sigh.
The amount feels almost comical now. Much too low a price for such a near miss—for what might have been a brush with death itself. The fact remains, however, that I’m in no position to turn down the money, so I swipe. Then I cash out my earnings, close the app, and watch my phone die.
Shit.
It’s now quarter past one. I’ve left the car, my phone is dead, and I have nowhere to go. I’ll never make it home at this rate, so I follow my route back towards McDonald’s and think of what to do. Across the street, the liquor store stretches beneath the sleepy glow of the golden arches. Above me, a dozen flying insects orbit a humming streetlight. The night air is hot and quiet. I never feel quite safe in these moments of stillness, when the world is at rest. I’m not sure that anyone does. The night is a fearsome creature with whom we have been embattled since the beginning of time. It doesn’t matter how many lights we turn on; at this hour, there’s nothing to mask the terrible naked truth that in this world, anything could happen and you never know what might be coming for you.
It’s then that it hits me—a truly terrible idea, but the only one I have:
Abby F.
Amazingly, my mind hasn’t tossed away her address as it usually does immediately after I’ve delivered an order. It’s still there. She’s a total stranger of course, but only a few blocks away. And she’s likely still awake since I just delivered her rum about an hour ago. It’s a stretch, but if she sees me at her door maybe she’ll assume there’s an issue with her order and not turn me away immediately. That assumption alone could buy me a few seconds to explain myself. At the very least, maybe she’ll let me borrow her phone to arrange a ride home. It’s the only option I have that doesn’t involve a night-long walk across the city or a stop back at Chez Emile.
I’m at her door now. The lights are still on in her kitchen, backed by the muffled chatter of the television. Same as I left it. I push the button on her video doorbell and cringe at what I’m doing. I don’t have much time to dwell on it though, because unlike Emile V., she answers over the speaker right away.
“You’re back? I’m pretty sure I paid for my stuff, right?” she asks, quite reasonably.
“Uhh. Yeah, you did. Sorry, I have never done this before but I’m in a bit of a weird situation. I had to ditch my car and my phone’s dead. Could I possibly use yours to order a ride home? I wasn’t sure where else to go.”
There are a few seconds of silence, but I haven’t lost her yet.
“Damn. You’ve had an even worse night than mine, haven’t you?”
This eases the tension a little and I manage to crack a smile. “Well I don’t know what’s happened to you, but on my end it seems like someone’s stalking me.”
There’s another longer moment of silence, but this time her voice comes back through the door as she cracks it open and peers out.
“Come again?” she says. Her face is serious and focused.
“Uh. You know… stalking. I think someone’s been following me for a while and then just now I had them as a customer. It was really scary, actually. I think they somehow planned it and I don’t know what to do. I may be in serious trouble.”
I don’t know why I’m telling her all of this when I’m only here to use her phone. But then I realize that maybe I am here for more. A ride home is only the first—and smallest—of the problems I now seem to have, but the look on her face tells me that she might actually be able to help.
She looks up and down the street, then directly at me. Her eyes betray a certain confidence like she knows something important, and that makes me feel less alone.
“Let’s not talk out here,” she says. “Come inside.”
I do exactly what she says. In fact, right now I will do just about anything she asks of me. Anything to get off the street and wash away the image of the man’s piercing stare and his slow, manufactured smile. The moment I step through the door I feel invincible, like I’ve entered a fortress. I scan the contents of the walls and wonder if perhaps I actually have. Various types of antique weaponry and several certificates are mounted along the walls. At the far end of the room, two flags rest behind glass above the mantle. One is orange, white, and green in vertical stripes; the other is blue and red with a crest in the center. Abby F. follows my eyes as she mutes the television.
“My father was Irish and my mother was Haitian. They were both so proud of where they came from. I try my best to carry that pride for them now,” she says, then pauses. “I lost them both in a car accident—five years ago today, actually. That’s why I’m still up drinking alone, in case you were wondering.”
“I’m so sorry,” I say. “That’s awful.”
“Thanks.” She pauses again, then turns back to me. “But that was five years ago. We need to talk about what happened with you tonight.”
The tone has shifted, and I wonder why she has become so readily invested in my safety.
“Look, I’m sorry I came back here—and so late, at that. I really just needed to use a phone and find a ride home,” I say. “I didn’t mean to put all this on you. It’s not your problem. And it sounds like you’ve got enough going on toni—“
“No, you don’t understand,” she interrupts. “This may be my problem. I don’t know how you got so lucky as to be so bold and come back here, but it just might have saved your life.”
I’m lost now. “What do you mean?” I ask.
“I’m Special Agent Abby Fitzgerald, FBI.” She says, pulling out her badge. “The encounter that you described outside sounds like the work of The Sugar Hill Slicer. I have been tracking his movements for years and if your story is true, then you’ve just led me straight to him.”
Of course. I felt it. I knew something wasn’t right. I feel faint now, but she grabs my shoulders and shakes me to attention.
“Stick with me. You need to listen carefully.”
“I delivered McDonald’s to a serial killer,” I say as both a clarifying question and a statement.
“It sounds like it, yes,” she says. “Either way you were actually in no immediate danger tonight. He never kills on the first encounter. That’s your first stroke of luck. Had this been your second order, though, you’d almost definitely be dead.”
I’m processing this more slowly than she would prefer, but I’m doing my best to keep up.
“Your second stroke of luck—and I mean a once-in-a-lifetime stroke of luck—is not only that I happened to be one of your customers, but that you somehow thought to come back here. Nobody has ever gotten help in time. Those who’ve called the police on him in the past all waited until the second time they ran into him. By the time they call, he’s on them before we can get any real information. He uses different addresses and names to place his orders. We’ve found many of them, but he’s always long gone by the time we arrive.”
“Has anyone ever gotten away from him?” I ask.
“It’s possible. But all the ones that we know about are dead.”
I let this sink in. They’re all dead. All those other people who got an offer that was just too good to refuse. Late at night before the rent was due, at their most desperate hour. He knew exactly when to drop the hook into the water. He followed them, studied them, waited for his moment. He knew when to make himself known and when to be invisible. And he reeled them in—every last one.
“The addresses,” I say. “Won’t he eventually run out of places to hide?”
“You’d think,” she says. “But he’s slippery. He breaks into vacant homes and apartments that have been for sale or rent for months on end with no takers. He’ll even commandeer people’s homes when they’re away on vacation or at work—but leave them alone completely. There have been people who have had him coming in and out of their house for days or weeks at a time totally undetected, only to find out that he was there at all by seeing it on the news.”
“That’s insane… Wait, so he breaks into random people’s homes only to lure in and kill other people?”
“That’s right. He couldn’t care less about the people living in these places. He’s only interested in killing delivery drivers. Which means right now, he’s only interested in killing you.”
What do I say to this? I feel dead already. It’s just a matter of time until he finds me and adds another notch to the tally. I’m just another little fish swimming around in his pond, waiting to be caught.
She takes a swig of the rum that was sitting on my passenger seat not long ago. The bottle is nearly halfway empty now, and I realize this man has been slowly killing her in another way. She sets it down and looks at me.
“…You’ve never heard of this guy before?”
“I don’t really watch the news,” I say. “So how long have you been after him? Years, you said?”
“Well, when I got assigned his case after academy, he’d already been at this for almost twenty years. A lot of these types have a territory they stick to—home turf. But this guy’s an itinerant killer, moving from state to state, city to city. He first showed up in New York back in the late nineties going after pizza delivery guys. Got his nickname in Harlem after murdering three drivers from Sugar Hill Pizzeria. Killed them all with a fucking chef’s knife. The place had to shut down; couldn’t manage to hire anyone after that. Go figure.”
“Jesus…”
“Yeah, go ahead and call upon Him. You’ll need Him.”
“I’ll take all the help I can get at this point.”
“Anyway, NYPD was on his trail, so his best chance was to keep moving. He worked his way up the eastern state line, eventually hopped over into Vermont, then New Hampshire, then Maine… a few months here, a year or two there. But then after a few murders in Boston, he went dark. We got nothing on him for a couple years, so we thought he might finally be done. We even considered the possibility that he was dead. Then about a year ago we picked up a string of murders here in Providence, including all of his signatures. With a new spot and all of these new delivery apps blowing up, he’s got plenty to do. It’s like some big end-of-career comeback—his third act, so to speak.”
“What if I just stopped doing deliveries?” I ask. I haven’t actually considered the implications here, but I’ll be happy to find another job if it saves my life.
“If only it were that simple,” she says. “If he’s been following you, then he’s already made up his mind. He’s coming for you. Quitting now won’t change that.”
“Well what am I supposed to do then? I can’t keep going out there!” I feel myself getting angry, not so much at Abby but at the finality of it all. As if it has already been determined and I’m just running down the clock to the end.
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Abby says. “If you quit, it might slow him down, but he will find you. He always does. But if you keep delivering, that gives us a line to work with. It’s actually our best chance of catching him.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean we’re going to set him up—and unfortunately, you’re the bait.”
“What if I don’t go along with this?”
“I think you already know what will happen if you don’t.”
I pause, then nod.
“Good.” She sighs and glances at her phone. “It’s getting past 2:00 AM now. Why don’t you just stay the night here on the couch? We can talk through a plan in the morning.”
Normally I would at least offer some polite back-and-forth here, but I don’t have the energy. I wouldn’t feel safe at my apartment anyway, so I’m more grateful than I let on.
I nod again at her suggestion. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” she says. “Let’s see if we can save your life, first.”
Part 2: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/w90d07/death_by_delivery_part_2/
Part 3: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/w9ygmj/death_by_delivery_part_3/