As weird as you please. That’s the most I can say about this story.

Oh, it’s scary, too.

In fact, you’re likely to be left with a full case of the creeps after you’ve finished. You’re definitely going to pay more attention to your surroundings.

The Futility Of Seeking Answers

We read articles. Watch documentaries. Read volumes of books, and although intrigued, we never understand what goes on in the mind of a predator, men so empty of everything that is good that we’re never going to get what it is that makes them monsters. What it is that went wrong, so very wrong. Or how God can allow them to live at all.

And it’s true, what they say; you could be in line at the deli counter in your supermarket and never know that the man behind you has killed 13 people. Or raped 10 women.

But what about the ones who set off alarms, the ones who chill your blood to the last red cell? The ones you do notice?

I’m sure you’ve seen them. They can leave an impression not with mere looks, but words. Words that give them away as being dangerous. Words, or moments of silence. Either one is inappropriate in its turn.

And so I come to the one man I can never forget. The one I kept crossing paths with. A predator without a soul.

The First Encounter

There was a car wash, a self-serve with bays and high pressure wands and islands in back for vacuums. I was at one of them, cleaning the carpet in my 1985 Mercury Cougar, a car so shitty that none could be seen on the streets after 1990.

At the island closest to the Baltimore Diesel building there was a woman of about 25 years using the vacuum on her Jeep. With the top down I saw that she had a wee baby in a carseat carrier. She was taking too long and it was getting too much sun, but the little one just chilled.

She was very beautiful, a blonde in cutoff blue jeans and a bikini top. I’d have given her a stare, but then I saw something that took my attention well away from her.

At the same island, opposite her but mere feet away, a young man who had supposedly been using the other vacuum stood still, rigid, unmoving as if posing for a portrait. He stared hungrily at her and immediately set me hyperaware. The potential threat he posed to her was inescapable; I had never, ever seen anything like it. I can’t tell you exactly what I saw, but I can tell you what I did not see.

It wasn’t sexual attraction.

It wasn’t sexual arousal.

It wasn’t remotely the look of one who’s lovestruck.

Surely a more feral, hungry creature in a human body never existed. This was the closest thing to my father I could have imagined seeing. And yet, he struck me as far more dangerous than my father had ever been, and that is saying something. A man who held a .357 magnum to my head.

This guy, this thing I was looking at, it was some beast straight from Hell. It’s really all I registered, as I was focused on his proximity to the woman and seeing if I could detect any movement that indicated his gathering for attack.

I hated it…him…and I knew that if there was anything that could keep her safe from him, it was me. No one else was using the car wash. No one was outside at Baltimore Diesel. The Glen Burnie Mall sat to the north behind me, but someone there would be unlikely to see anything. Less likely to intervene. All my life I’d seen the watchers, chickenshits who saw but never acted. I’d been one. But today, no. Not this day.

The woman probably took too long because she refused to look at the fucking creepy guy. I’m positive that she wanted him to leave first. She was almost certainly afraid that he would follow her. The intensity of his stare would have unsettled anyone.

But he wasn’t leaving. And she finally had gotten her fill of pretending to vacuum the carpet in her Jeep. She got in, cranked the motor up and left. And, as she knew he would, I also knew that he was dead on her six when she turned through the gate onto Holsum Way toward Ritchie Highway.

And, unnoticed, I was dead on his ass, leaving no room for anything to get between us.

She turned north on Ritchie Highway headed toward Brooklyn Park. Left lane. Went past Holiday Inn, Hardees, up the hill. She turned left onto Hammonds Lane, and by then I knew that he was aware of me. I’d been on his bumper the whole time. Nobody fails to notice that.

He made the wise choice of not turning to follow her. I made sure that he continued on, giving her enough time to get home or cut through to Linthicum Heights. He wasn’t going to find her. I broke off and went home.

The Second Encounter

I can’t remember how much time had passed. I was now a driver for Bob’s Transport in Dundalk. I’d lost my job at B. Green & Sons, a job I loved. One night while at the dispatch window, checking out my paperwork so I could go home, the Predator walked in. He was a driver too, and I told Hawk, another driver, that I’d seen this guy before. I said, “watch this guy. He’s a psycho.”

A few nights (we worked graveyard shift) later, Hawkins said he believed me, that he’d seen Predator do something screwy with a woman at the window at some place where we picked up freight. But I lost that job not long after because of an accident. I thought, at least, there was an upside to it: I’d never have to see the Predator again.

I was wrong.

The Third Encounter

Sometimes when I fell down, I fell very far. So in the summer of 1992, I was a lowly security guard stationed at Brandon Shores BG&E power plant. On office duty at the gatehouse one day, in walked the Predator. In uniform, same as me. He never recognized me. But I knew him. I was never going to forget him.

For some reason, starting swing shift that day, he’d brought his mail with him. Sitting in an old swiveling office chair, he opened a letter and let out a whoop. He said that he had been accepted into the Baltimore City Police Department academy. He said, spinning round like a kid in his chair, “Finally I get to kill people!”

It was the last time I saw him.

I never did get to know if I had made a difference the day I tailed him. When we act to protect someone from harm, we don’t often get to know if we made a difference. It is this fact that keeps me not merely humble but hard on myself. I don’t know and tend not to believe that I ever made a positive difference to anyone.

But at least I tried.

That’s more than a lot of other people do.

And the Predator?

I don’t know what became of him. My guess is, logically, that he was rejected by the BPD and went on to another shit job. And that eventually he took his psychotic anger and hatred out on someone who crossed his path and never lived to tell the tale. Because predators always end up showing the world just how evil and depraved they are. They can’t hold back the beast within. They don’t even want to.

The mom with the bikini top wasn’t out to tease anyone. She was catching some rays and staying cool. And predators aren’t moved to action by skin. They’re motivation is hatred toward women and a need to control and dominate. He was possibly angry, but not aroused, by her summer attire. Perhaps he thought himself some avenger for God against sin. Perhaps that’s why a badge also appealed to him: it would be a mark for him to wear as a killer angel. It would be legal. I truly hope that he met his end trying something evil like that. It is a sin for me to think it. But is it not also out of concern for others?

It is. And if that is true, then am I not somewhat vindicated?

He would have already been replaced by a thousand others, some like him. Some worse.

And the decent among you must be vigilant and willing to intervene. So you may not get to know if you made a difference. So what? You don’t do the right thing for recognition. You do it because it is the right thing.