She slept. He didn't wake her; he never did. It was 4:06 am on a Wednesday morning. About one more hour until his newest fascination showed up at the phone booth. But though he enjoyed his little games over the phone, he found himself sincerely not in the mood for one. His precious little friend, his link to a different kind of social life, was falling ill again. She lay curled up peacefully on the mattress to his left from where he sat in front of the window. Though he had long turned off the shade-less lamp in the far corner behind him, the streetlamp from beyond the window illuminated her face, white as snow never mind the dark circles and light pink swelling around her eyes. Her lips were terribly chapped too, cracking and bleeding. He longed to purchase some medicine for her, and perhaps he would discuss it with her later when she woke up.
Removing his glasses, he briefly rubbed the bridge of his nose, tilted his head until he heard and felt a pleasing pop, and then replaced them. It wasn't that he was sleepy, though he certainly was. He might have been still trying to adjust to having a companion. To actually caring for someone else. It had been sixteen days now that they shared the same place.
Unlike most he stalked and then proceeded to terrorize with the phone calls, and of course his .30 calibre, the phone booth was not how he came to be aware of her. Well...perhaps that was not entirely true, since it was the abusive shitbag who had dared to refer to himself as her boyfriend that had drunkenly ambled into the phone booth at 7 in the morning about four weeks ago. He had passed out there and there he remained until one of the hookers from the sex joint below his building had awoken him later in the day and flipped a bitch about wanting to use the phone. In the end, the hung-over shitbag fled the booth and managed his way back into his own apartment. Out of interest, or perhaps boredom, he had followed him there and continuously spied on him from the second story of the library building across from the apartment. And that was how he found her. The first time he saw her was a Friday afternoon, around 6. As much as he had wanted to unscrew the scope from his calibre or even settle for a pair of binoculars, he couldn't afford to make himself out to be suspicious in the library, therefore the details of what when on in the apartment were not very crisp. But he could tell she was pretty. How? Young women don't usually stay home on Friday evenings. In fact, young women don't usually stay home every single day. He'd been watching the apartment for about a week and never once did she leave. However, she did nothing in the apartment either. She slept a lot, sometimes read a book or turned on the TV. But she never used the phone, and after hacking with his laptop into the apartment building's phone line, he learned there was no phone connection in the apartment. No one else ever entered the apartment, other than the shitbag, and when he was there, he was sleeping, eating, or having sex with her. That is, after he yelled at her, sometimes hitting her once or twice. Pretty girls don't stay in a relationship like that because they want to. And shitbags don't force a girl to stay in their home with no method of escape because they're ugly. No, he didn't need the stupid binoculars to see that she was pretty. And finally, on the tenth day of watching them, she did leave the apartment. In an ambulance. At about 9 am on a Tuesday, he arrived at the library only to see the street blocked off by three police cars with an ambulance quickly speeding away, zigzagging through traffic. The next morning he picked up a paper in a café about a block away from his own apartment and turned to the police reports. He read a brief statement about a Simon Bellecoast arrested yesterday and currently being held in jail, charged with domestic violence and attempted manslaughter. Alright. So while the shitbag faced prison time, where was the pretty girl? Attempted manslaughter meant she was alive, at least for now. He thought of going to the hospital, but here he stopped, unsure what purpose it would serve him. If shitbag walked, well, he could take care of that himself. Therefore, if his last tie to these people was her well-being, then he could stand to wait until he next saw her. So he waited in the library. Perhaps she had some belongings she would need to pick up, and he could always follow the person who might be sent to get them for her. But that wasn't the case. He waited that day and the next from 5 am to 9 pm, but no one returned to the apartment. After 9 pm, he went back to 53rd and 8th, back to gazing out his window at the phone booth, sometimes listening in on the calls made in it. A lost old woman, calling her son for directions to the restaurant they were supposed to meet in. A man with stringy red hair calling his cell phone service provider, asking what the hell 'Lo Batt' meant, the dumb fucker. And of course the hookers, or 'escorts' as they called themselves, participating in the 1-800 number love lines, wheeling and dealing, arranging for the hotel rooms. Nothing interesting. That is, until Thursday at 11:46 pm when who of all people should enter the phone booth but her.
It was raining out and she didn't have an umbrella. She was soaking wet and shivering by the time she reached the booth, closing the folding glass door behind her. He didn't even need the scope to know it was her. He recognized her outfit; a black, zip-up jacket with a hood and a pair of worn out blue jeans. He then realized why she hadn't shown up at the apartment. She had no belongings. And over time, he also assumed she had no home to go to. After all, he didn't know how long she'd been stuck in that apartment and of course someone would have noticed her empty home. No money for a temporary hotel room either, as he couldn't see how she might have held up a job.
He rebooted his laptop as she fumbled in her jacket pockets for some change, the plastic bracelet from the hospital still around her tiny wrist. He was ready to listen in on the phone call, but she wasn't dialling. Detaching the scope from the plastic hold atop the rifle next to him, he gazed through it and into the phone booth. He saw the quarter, pinched between her thumb and index finger, ready to slide into the coin drop on the pay phone. But she was just standing there. He tried to discern why, focusing on her face. Her eyes were shadowed by her hood, but there was a nervous frown on her lips. Her dark hair was quite long, he remembered, so he assumed it was tied back. But that frown... What did it mean? Why should she be nervous of making a phone call? Does she not remember the number? Is she worried that her call may be unwanted? Does she even have someone to call?
He was two seconds away from picking up his phone and dialling the booth himself when she finally dropped the change into the machine. As she put in another quarter and then a dime, he wondered what he might have said to her. Of course, he would never know. Almost all of his questions that he asked strangers over the phone line to answer were spur of the moment. He didn't think, didn't guess. Just flowed, it seemed. And finally, she was dialling. The number she dialled, which had a 215 area code for Philadelphia, was one he would later use to forward a call from to the phone booth itself. He couldn't make the trip to deal with the woman the number belonged to directly, so he had to be satisfied with sky-rocketing her phone bill. Pulling his earphones on and plugging them into his laptop, he listened as the phone rang once, twice, and finally a third time before it was answered.
A groggy voice with a distinct accent that he placed as something similar to if not Russian answered lazily. "Hello, Lande Residence?" But once again, pretty girl stalled, lips trembling but no sounds coming out. "Hello?" spoke the call recipient, annoyed. Finally she swallowed and spoke tearfully into the receiver. "Mother?" There was a sharp intake of breath on the other end of the line. "Rachelle? Is that you? Honey, what's wrong?"
She was visibly crushed; through the scope, he saw her grit her teeth and wince, and then bite her lower lip once, which he would later learn was a nervous habit she often utilized. "No, it's-... It's Angelique."
There was silence, long and unsettling. Her facial expression, furrowed brows and an even deeper frown than before, exploited her worry. It worried him too.
"Mother?"
"I'm sorry. You have the wrong number."
A light click. Then a dial tone.