The Coffee Shoppe Killer

by Rod Kackley

  After collecting herself, she opened the boxes in her purse, and carefully read the instructions before loading her Beretta.

  When she finished, Mary Eileen knew she was locked, loaded and on her way to a new life with Hans.

  But first, she had one more class to attend the next night. A local hardware store was giving lessons to women who wanted to learn how to mix and use concrete.

  Christina was amazed when Mary Eileen asked her to cover her shift so she could go to that class.

  “Why would you ever want to learn that?”

  “Repairs, Christina, repairs. I know you have never been down to the cellar. But that is a lot of work to be done,” Mary Eileen replied. “And if I can do it myself, I can save a lot of money.”

  She waved her fingers in the air as she bid Christina farewell for the evening that night, feeling so good about herself.

  No one was rescuing Mary Eileen yet. But this was even better. No one needed to save Mary Eileen.

  Just like in the days after she landed at LaGuardia, Mary Eileen was solving her problems on her own.

  Three

  Mary Eileen was happier than she could ever remember being. Well, again, that was not exactly true. She had felt even more wonderful when she landed at LaGuardia.

  There were so many people, at the terminal, probably twenty times as many as Mary Eileen might have seen in her village on any day. They were all moving so quickly, too. And they were so loud! How did anyone in New York hear the birds, she would wonder later when she got into the city.

  Ah, New York City. If Mary Eileen had been amazed at the crowds, the noise, and the speed at which everything and everyone moved in the airport terminal; she was blasted into a coma when she got off the train at Grand Central Station.

  “So this is Grand Central Station,” she whispered to herself. Her mother had quite often described their village market as being “busier than Grand Central Station.” If her mum had only known how wrong she had been.

  The smells! Everyone who brushed by Mary Eileen — and hundreds did— had a different aroma. And they all spoke a different brand of English. Some sounded just like the movie actors Mary Eileen had seen at the cinema. Others had a twang in their voice like the country singers on BBC radio. Still, others were speaking different languages. She lost count at ten different languages, not including all of the different dialects of English.

  The noise! It was deafening and thrilling at the same time. Car horns were honking. Truck brakes were squealing. People were talking of course, all very loudly and very quickly. There were musicians on the street, too. Some were playing violins. Other had saxophones. And still, others were playing drums on upside down tin buckets of different shapes and sizes.

  Mary Eileen had not felt overpowered by any of it. She simply let herself be swept away into a new life; a life filled with hope.

  This morning in St. Isidore she was not feeling quite the same. Not even close, actually. After all, she wasn’t the same girl she had been that morning at LaGuardia or that afternoon in Times Square. Now Mary Eileen was no longer a girl. She was a woman. She was, in fact, no matter what David thought he knew, a naturalized American citizen.

  Now that had been a proud day in her life. She had only Christina and her customers to share it with, this was long before David, but it had been a happy day, and again a day filled with hope.

  This morning had gone wonderfully well. But it was not the great day either of those days had been. Yet, Mary Eileen felt very good. She felt powerful because above all, Mary Eileen Sullivan had hope.

  The weather was perfect for coffee. All of her customers had said so. It was the end of summer. The streets of St. Isidore were lined with children playing the last few days before school started, college students from all over the nation who went to schools like Grand Valley State University, and tourists from around the world in town for the annual Art Prize show.

  It had been a profitable morning. But it hadn’t been perfect. There was a problem with the pipes again.

  The plumbing was in terrible shape. The pipes in the stone-walled cellar — it wasn’t much more than a cave carved into the stone under the Coffee Shoppe that the locals called a ‘Michigan Basement’ — had always dripped. Now one of the damn pipes had broken.

  Maintenance workers came into the store, and went down into the cellar, then came back upstairs to go back out again for more supplies. There was only one entrance to the cellar. The workers had to go through the store and into the backroom to get to the cellar door. There was no alternative. Customers danced around each other and the workers, trying not to get hit in the head with the long copper pipes being brought in for the repairs.

  Oh, the plumbers could have gone through Mary Eileen’s office if it hadn’t been for the pipes they were carrying and her reluctance to let anyone but Christina into the room that held her safe.

  On top of the stream of workers who seemed to get muddier, dirtier and smellier with each trip, there was no way the customers and even the neighbors could miss the noise of the work. The echo of the banging hammers and the howl of metal cutting saws could be heard in the Coffee Shoppe and even out on the street.

  But the Coffee Shoppe had been so busy that neither Mary Eileen nor Christina had noticed the time and they got used to the noise. It had been a wonderful morning. They were making some real money for a change.

  Mary Eileen caught Christina’s eye and smiled. She was happy.

  There was a moment the night before when Mary Eileen had wondered if she had made a mistake by telling Christina that she should kill David.

  "Damn," she thought. "How could I have said that aloud?"

  David was sitting at that stupid computer on the kitchen table, “My computer,” Mary Eileen thought bitterly, when she came home from the concrete class at the Home Depot.

  She could have strangled him.

  David hardly noticed when she walked into the apartment. Just like every hour of every day, he was occupied with one of those idiotic war games, Mary Eileen thought. It's not like he does anything productive. Sure, he does social media for the St. Isidore Chronicle. But after that, he just runs up data and internet charges for useless games.

  “I might be shanty Irish,” she told Christina, “but he is a typical millennial Momma’s boy.”

  “Probably has a case filled with ‘Participation’ trophies,” Christina said.

  As she lay awake beside David—“What is he doing in my bed?” Mary Eileen thought—thinking about Hans. He had been in the Coffee Shoppe during the day. He wasn't pitching new ice cream machinery this time. Hans just sat at the counter listening to Mary tell him about growing up in Ireland and then what it was like moving to America.

  During a lull in business, Mary Eileen caught Christina's attention, winked and got a wink back. That meant Christina would cover for her while she and Hans snuck out to his car and made love in the back seat of her Volvo. It wasn't the first time it had happened, and it was never really like making love.

  "It was more like making lust,” Mary Eileen had admitted to Christina after the first time. But it was the best she'd had in a long time.

  Hans listened to me. He talked to me. And he turned me on, Mary Eileen thought, laying awake while David snored.

  Hans cares about me.

  If only Hans was laying beside me, she thought.

  But the slumbering, snoring, waste of humanity beside her wasn’t Hans. It was David.

  That was a depressing thought. But it could be worse. At least she had hope.

  Her plan was coming together. But Mary Eileen was worried that she might have tipped her hand to Christina. It was one thing to enlist her as a co-conspirator in slipping out the back for a quick roll in the Volvo, It was something else to talk about killing someone.

  But then again, it's not like they didn’t live in the United States of America where people get shot every day. And, sometimes, they just disappeared.

  Mary Eileen read about it
all the time. And her customers talked about it, too. Husbands and wives were always disappearing from one another. In this day and age, it isn’t any problem to just walk away, Mary Eileen thought.

  And with so many people in this country, in the state of Michigan and in this city of St. Isidore; who is going to miss just one more who disappears. It’s not like there won’t be another person to take his place.

  And with that thought, she fell asleep.

  In the morning, the sunlight was streaming through her bedroom window. Mary Eileen was alone. She touched herself and found she was damp. Mary Eileen had been dreaming about Hans and making wild love to him.

  With a contented sigh, she rolled over on her side and tried to go back to the dream, or at least to recapture the exquisite feeling of warm lust that had overtaken her.

  Then she heard David banging on the keyboard of her, yes her, computer. Mary rolled on her stomach and shoved her face into a pillow in an effort to escape.

  But the only real way to get away was to run to the bathroom, get in the shower, grab some coffee and toast, and go to work.

  David grunted at her as she went by. Mary Eileen was glad he did no more than that. The other day he’d reached around and slapped her butt. That was a morning when she just about lost it.

  Her Beretta was in her purse and she was as locked and loaded as the weapon.

  Four

  The people of St. Isidore liked to think of themselves as residents of a big city. One of the radio stations did traffic reports only because a survey showed their listeners, even though they never had to wait through more than one red light at any intersection, would feel more “big city” if they listened to traffic reports on the radio. But St. Isidore wasn’t Detroit and it sure as hell wasn’t New York.

  Mary Eileen laughed to herself when she thought about these people in St. Isidore dealing with the kind of crime and murder she had seen growing up in Dublin or even during her relatively brief stay in New York.

  Murder in St. Isidore? A dozen or so people got killed every year. But nobody thought it could happen to them, at least her customers didn’t. And Mary Eileen would be willing to bet none of her customers thought seriously about pulling the trigger on someone else’s life.

  But murder was on Mary Eileen’s mind.

  How else was she going to rid herself of David, who was not only occupying her apartment and monopolizing her computer; he was also sleeping in her bed.

  “You know I am fucking around on you, right?” Mary Eileen had said to him more than a month ago.

  He snored.

  “David, I don’t love you,” Mary Eileen said, straddling his body, shaking his shoulders to wake him up. “I do not love you.”

  “Is it your time of the month, already?”

  “You are walking on thin ice.”

  “Me? What about you? What would you do without me?”

  Just as the answer “Be happy,” sprung into her mind, Mary Eileen realized with a shudder that David was actually getting excited. She was straddling him and had made the mistake of putting her body directly on top of his cock.

  David was growing harder by the second. Mary Eileen, revolted as she was by the sight of this sleeping goon under her was getting wet. After all, there was a time when he turned her on. And she was still excited by him. David had made her feel special, loved, everything a woman wanted.

  He put his hands on her shoulders and started moving her back and forth and then around in small circles on his hard cock.

  “David, stop it,” she said, her breathing betraying her excitement. It was fun being on top.

  He didn’t answer. He just slid inside and started thrusting.

  “Oh, fuck it,” Mary Eileen whispered.

  “Yeah, oh yeah,” said David.

  It was over in a few minutes. Mary Eileen came out of the bathroom to find David snoring, again. God, how she hated that.

  “You know I am sleeping with Hans.”

  There, I said it, Mary Eileen thought. Might as well get it out.

  David snored.

  Mary Eileen took one of his nipples in her fingers and twisted hard.

  “Ow! Goddamn, woman!”

  “I said, ‘I am sleeping with Hans’”

  “I know.”

  “You know, and you are still here?”

  “We are divorced, right? What’s wrong with playing around? We can be friends, right?”

  “What the fuck? What did we just do?”

  “That was just one of the benefits of friendship,” said David.

  Oh, my God, Mary Eileen thought, as David rolled away from her. There is no end to this, is there?

  Wait a minute, she thought. It was an epiphany that came with an extra shot of espresso, a bolt of energy. Mary Eileen sat up in bed.

  If he doesn’t care if I am sleeping with Hans, who is David sleeping with?

  “You, motherfucker,” Mary Eileen said as she grabbed her pillows, pulled a blanket out of the cedar chest and stormed off for another night on the couch.

  “THIS IS ALL ABOUT YOU, isn’t it?” Mary Eileen said the next morning to David’s back while he worked on some stupid social media stuff for the St. Isidore Chronicle.

  Good god, what a slug, she thought. Sits around on that fat ass all day, never has to deal with a customer, sometimes I am the only human being he speaks with all day. Take a shower, fat ass.

  David kind of waved his hand back at her but didn’t bother to answer. He didn’t have to. Mary Eileen knew she was right.

  David’s self-obsession and stubbornness went beyond refusing to leave his ex-wife’s apartment and bed.

  He didn't even seem to care, that Mary Eileen had a gun, a Beretta pistol. She should have expected it. David loved guns. His guns were laying all over the apartment. Pistols, revolvers, even rifles, and shotguns. The idea that Mary Eileen was packing a gun in her purse, after the time she surprised him with it, never crossed his mind again. But it might have if David had known Mary Eileen had signed-up for marksmanship lessons at the St. Isidore Gun & Rod Club.

  She was learning how to use the Beretta. Better yet, she was not just learning how to shoot the gun; Mary Eileen was taking target practice with the weapon. Amanda and the rest of her fellow students would have told David that she was getting pretty damn good at it too if he had bothered to ask, or to even join them at one of their coffee get-togethers after class.

  Wouldn’t all of that set off alarm bells in most ex-husbands, especially ex-husbands who had to know they weren’t welcome?

  Mary Eileen even joked with Christina once about how she was going to use the pistol to kill David. But, then again, if David had learned about that it could have smoothed over any suspicions he might have been having. After all, what killer was going to tell her murderous plan to a friend if she was going to evict him with a Dear David slug from a Beretta? She must have been kidding or PMS-ing David must have decided.

  He would have been wrong. Nothing separates a couple like death. And that’s all Mary Eileen could think about even while she was at work.

  The rage simmered in Mary Eileen, turning her into a human pressure cooker. It’s one thing to decide to kill someone in a moment of passion or a flash of white-hot anger and then not act on the impulse.

  But when rage simmers, boiling up some days, down on other days, but always there; it can motivate a person to do almost anything.

  “If he leaves, we can be together,” Hans had told her more than once.

  “You will move in?”

  “We can marry.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really,” Hans answered as he actually dropped to one knee the last time they had had this discussion.

  “Please say you will be mine forever,” he said. “Please let me make you happy.”

  Mary Eileen wanted to be happy. She wanted to be with Hans. Everything she wanted was on the other side of David.

  Five

  Three days after Hans promised his undying lo
ve, Mary Eileen decided that she had had enough. The pipes were broken in the cellar again. The water pressure was so low it was tough to get even a simple cup of coffee brewed.

  The maintenance guys tracked mud all over the Coffee Shoppe. She and Christina had spent three hours after closing mopping it all up.

  “We clean up their shit, and still I have to pay them for the pleasure of the experience,” Mary Eileen said as she and Christina sweated.

  That was another thing. The air conditioning wasn't working well. So that meant more repairmen and more repair bills.

  God this life sucks, Mary Eileen thought they next day as she pushed a loose strand of her thick, auburn hair way from her face.

  It had been a rough morning. She decided it was time to go home for lunch. Just as Mary Eileen stepped out of the door and into the alley, the sky burst open.

  Spring had laid out its welcome mat early in St. Isidore a couple of days ago. It had been unseasonably warm, very pleasant actually. The snow and ice left over from a brutal winter had melted creating little rivers to wash the streets clean.

  But then it rained. It poured. And it was more than rain. Winter wasn’t ready to release St. Isidore from its ugly grasp. Some snow, sleet and ice came down with the rain.

  Mary Eileen was more what soaking wet.

  She was soaking miserable.

  Mary Eileen walked down the alley behind the Coffee Shoppe, and then up the stairs to the apartment that she was unwillingly sharing with David a day longer, with a splash. At least two inches of water were in her boots. Her feet were soaked.

  And then Mary Eileen saw David where he always was; at the kitchen table doing something — maybe working or maybe playing games — on the computer.

  She didn’t snap. She didn’t act on impulse. She simply boiled over.

  Mary Eileen pulled the Beretta out of her purse and fired three shots into the back of his head.