What they did know was the signature: medical precision and a grim kind of Old Testament justice. An eye for an eye—or in this case, a man’s pride for a young woman’s future. Ordinary people, quietly and without saying so too loudly, felt a certain satisfaction. But the wolves had started to panic.
Victor Rankin and Stan Warren understood that someone was hunting them. Stan Warren, the prosecutor’s son, was not a coward like Larry. He was two hundred twenty pounds of muscle, county boxing champion, and mean to the core.
When he heard what had happened to Larry, he didn’t hide. He got angry. “Whoever did it, I’ll smash him flat,” he growled, pounding the heavy bag in the gym. “Let him come near me.”
He believed in his fists. He believed brute strength could solve anything. Antonia watched him and took his measure. She saw how he came out of the gym rolling his shoulders, looking at passersby like they were beneath him.
She knew she could not handle him the way she had handled Larry. You couldn’t simply step out in a dark alley and expect him not to react. He was too fast, too strong, too used to violence.
“You don’t hunt a bear with a pocketknife,” she thought, sorting ampules in her hiding place. A bear gets caught in a trap. Or taken when it’s off guard. She chose the one place where even the strongest man lets down his defenses.
The shower room at the municipal athletic center. Stan liked to train late, after the place had mostly emptied out. He enjoyed the quiet, the sound of his own punches in an empty gym.
Afterward, he took long showers, washing off sweat and sometimes blood—often somebody else’s. Antonia learned the janitors’ schedule. On Tuesdays and Fridays, the evening cleaner was an elderly woman named Mabel.
Mabel could barely see and often left early, tucking the keys under a mat in the supply closet. Friday, November 13. An ominous date, maybe, but Antonia didn’t believe in omens. She believed in chemistry.
This time she needed something stronger than a muscle relaxant. She needed a drug that could drop a giant. She prepared a special mixture—a heavy tranquilizer combined with a cardiac depressant.
It was risky. Too much, and his heart would stop. But by then she no longer cared much which way it went. If he lived, fine. If he died, the world would not be poorer for it.
Around eleven that night, Stan Warren stood under the hot shower. Water hammered the tile. Steam clouded the room. He was relaxed, confident, humming some tune to himself…
