A Perfect Canvas

by Kevin Adkisson

  Chapter 11

  Eddie jogged down the stairs, hit the bottom step, and looked up at the same dirty white concrete building that always welcomed him to work. The old twelve-story building loomed over him as a reminder of skilled builders long in their graves. Black birds pecked in the small patch of grass in front of the building. Why Demchata Graphics had ever picked such an old building in this part of town was beyond him. The whole area reeked of diesel fuel from the bus depot down the street. He could almost taste it.

  When Paige called he would let her have it for not calling him back when she’d said she would and for leaving her ringer on silent or letting her phone go dead. Assuming her phone had gone dead. Whatever had happened, she should have called him to let him know she was okay.

  Downtown had to be considered one of the better parts of the city. Millions had been spent transforming the area into a bustling entertainment district, and they’d done a nice job of it. The historic red brick district, only a few blocks away from the arts district, was quite beautiful with its restaurants, nightclubs, and river walk. Properties in the area demanded premium prices. But the building where Eddie worked hadn’t yet been spit-shined. His office had a quaint view of the one part of downtown that was like the scum you’d find under the lid of a never-been-cleaned public restroom toilet.

  Eddie strolled to the front door and slipped a yellow key card out of his pocket. Glancing up at the security camera, he smiled while passing the card down the access panel. The light on the door went from red to green and clicked as it unlocked. He jerked open the glass door, and the sound of fabric ripping filled the vestibule. One of the security bars had caught on the sleeve of his shirt tearing it. The words “It’s a wonderful day in the neighborhood” immediately went through Eddie’s mind. The day was quickly becoming the worst ever.

  He walked to the reception counter where Joe, an overgrown security guard with a boyish face and the annoying habit of sweating regardless of the temperature, leaned against one end of the counter.

  Joe sized Eddie up, grinned, and pointed at Eddie’s ripped T-shirt. “Looks like you’re having a nice day.”

  Eddie ignored Joe who smelled a little ranker than usual. Somewhere between rotting tuna and a hog farm. He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand and turned away from Joe.

  He got on the elevator, leaned on the button marked five, and waited for that familiar stomach-hitting-the-floor lurch to let him know it was on the move. Floors dinged off and the elevator grumbled like it was about to jackknife within the shaft.

  When the door slid open, Eddie meandered past a yellow wet floor sign into the cold office. It wasn’t much of an office, more like two cubicles in a clinical room. A long stainless steel table, like the kind a coroner would perform an autopsy on, split the room. What the table’s purpose was, Eddie didn’t know. It had been there since he’d gone to work for Demchata.

  Rows of file cabinets and storage shelves ran the length of two walls. Across the room, two desks snugly hunkered in front of a large window with a unpleasant view of an alley. The smaller of the two desks was Eddie’s.

  The dim computer monitor the company had provided him was nearly impossible to read, even on cloudy days. They wouldn’t buy him one of the newer, brighter flat panel monitors like the executives used, even though he did the graphics design work that was the bread and butter of the company.

  Eddie had considered moving the monitor to the stainless steel table in the center of the room to get it away from the light of the window, but he hadn’t been able to muster up the courage to do it. He’d had Frankensteinish nightmares about the long steel table. It gave him the willies. Besides, he figured once he went blind from squinting at the monitor he’d have a groundbreaking worker’s compensation claim. Then money would rain down on him, and he could quit, go back to writing just as Paige had suggested.

  Paige. It bothered him that the cop had seemed so sure Paige was cheating on him. Why did he think that? Paige cheating on him made no sense to Eddie. She was happy, wasn’t she? They had a great relationship, a great sex life. The cop hadn’t even been all that concerned about the possibility of her being abducted. Had he spent enough years on the streets, interviewing people, being thrown into situations that he’d developed a knack for spotting things like that?

  Eddie wanted to know who Nicholas was, how he knew Paige, and how Nicholas had known where he was going to be eating. Not to mention why he’d said he had Paige when he didn’t, unless he’d misunderstood Nicholas. What if “had” didn’t mean physically? What if he had her emotionally? Maybe “had” meant he “had” her in a relationship.

  Eddie grabbed a comfort doughnut out of a box on Sam’s desk--Sam always brought doughnuts--and bit into the sugary dough, hoping for a creamy center. No creamy center.

  Sam craned over his computer with nose tilted down like an old man looking over his glasses even though Sam didn’t wear glasses. He was one of those people who concentrated so intensely on what he was doing that the world around him could disintegrate without him noticing.

  Eddie slapped Sam lightly on the back to let him know he had arrived and caught a good whiff of Sam’s Old Spice for his trouble.

  “Hey, Sam.”

  Sam raised his hand up without looking back. “Hey, Eddie.”

  Mouth dry, Eddie grabbed a coke out of the fridge and gulped at it until it burned his throat. Everything with Paige was fine. She wasn’t cheating on him. His phone would ring any second, and he would find out she had just finished up a large deal, an enormous deal. She had turned off her phone while they hammered it out, that’s all.

  Eddie slipped his cell phone out of his pocket, stared at the display, attempted to will it to ring, and then put it away. He sat down at his desk and listened to Sam’s rhythmic typing. It helped to settle his mind into work mode.

  Eddie tapped his password in left handed then pulled up his e-mail. Using his left hand to get any work done was going to be a real pain in the ass.

  Two e-mails blinked at Eddie from his inbox. He clicked open the first, a standard company notice that had gone out to everyone, something about only using the Internet for company business. He hit the delete key and opened the second e-mail.

  “Everything okay?” Sam asked.

  Eddie rolled back from the desk, turned to face Sam. “Why does everyone ask me that when things are not okay? No one ever asks me that when things are okay.”

  “What happened?”

  “Some cop thinks Paige is cheating on me.” It came out in a can-you-believe-it huff.

  “I meant, what happened to your hand?” Sam pointed.

  “Oh.” Eddie lifted his hand, looked at the bandage. “A guy tried to kill me.”

  “By cutting your hand?”

  Sam had a point. Nicholas could have done a lot more damage. He’d only cut him on the hand. It wasn’t even a bad cut. He could have just as easily gutted him or slit his throat.

  “Well, no. I guess not. He did threaten to kill me though, and then he cut my hand.”

  One of Sam’s thick, brown eyebrows lifted, and Eddie told Sam what had happened with Paige, Nicholas, and the cops.

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “What can I do?”

  Sam crossed his legs, seemed to think about it a minute, then uncrossed his legs, leaned forward.

  “You should get your stuff out of your house. Or better yet, get your locks changed. I had a buddy who caught his wife fooling around. When he came home from work, she’d cleaned him out. Took everything but the toilet paper.”

  “Paige isn’t cheating on me, and even if she is, she certainly wouldn’t do something like that.”

  “That’s what my friend thought. Guess someone forgot to tell his wife though. Got a gun?” Sam asked.

  “What?”

  “Do you have a gun?”

  “I have a couple of them.”

 
“One a pistol? You know a .357, 9mm, or a .38?”

  “I have a .45. Why?”

  “You should carry it. Then, if this guy shows up with a knife again...” Sam let it hang there.

  “I don’t have a permit to carry a gun.”

  "So? You don’t want me to be reading about you in the paper in the morning do you?"

  Sam showed up to work fifteen minutes early every morning to read the obituaries. When Eddie had asked him why, Sam said he just wanted to know if anyone he knew had died. Eddie found the habit a bit morbid. He guessed Sam’s wife felt the same way since Sam read them at work and not at home.

  “No. I don’t want you reading about me in the paper.”

  “Then get that gun, carry it, and if that crazy shows up again, I’ll read about him.”

  Sam turned back to his monitor.

  The idea of shooting someone, possibly killing them, made Eddie want to throw up. Even so, Sam made some kind of weird sense.

  Eddie was an excellent shot. It was something to think about.

  He brought his attention back to the dim computer screen and clicked on the second e-mail. He hoped Paige had e-mailed him, but he knew the hope was unrealistic. She’d be more likely to call him than to send e-mail especially if she was out working a deal.

  The message on his screen was short and simple: PHONE DEAD. MEET ME AT THE CLUB TONIGHT, 10PM. WE NEED TO TALK. PAIGE.

  Eddie practically fell out of his chair. This isn’t good. Why so late? And where was the “love you” she typically signed her e-mails with?

  There was little doubt as to which club the message meant. The only club they ever went to was Isis. The club owned by Paige’s best friend Tabitha. Eddie looked to see what e-mail address Paige sent the message from, but there was no return address. Normally, all e-mails had one. He considered the possibility that it was some sort of glitch.

  “Hey, Sam. Take a look at this. You ever see an e-mail with no return address?”

  Sam rolled his chair over next to Eddie. “Can’t say that I have.”

  “Could it be a glitch in the system?”

  “I suppose, but maybe she doesn’t want you to know where she sent it from.”

  Eddie thought a glitch more likely, but something about the e-mail bothered Eddie, something more than just the absent return address. It didn’t feel right. He wondered what to do. He could call the police. Couldn’t he? But what would he tell them? That he’d received an anonymous e-mail from Paige asking him to meet at a club? The police might not laugh at him while he was talking to them, but he figured they certainly would once they got off the phone.

  The strange encounter with Nicholas was making him jumpy. Wouldn’t it make anyone jumpy? The simplest answer was the most likely one, wasn’t it? Paige’s cell phone had died, and she’d sent him an e-mail message as soon as she’d finished her real estate deal so he wouldn’t worry. But why was she meeting him so late? After work made sense. Ten o’clock at night didn’t.

  Maybe she was still angry about their argument that morning. Maybe she wanted to sit down away from the house to talk to him about quitting her job and returning to painting. Tabitha would be there to support her and a two-pronged attack had worked on him before, like when she’d wanted to buy the Volkswagon.

  It was obvious to him now that he thought about it. They would occasionally get into little spits like this when it came to decisions involving money, and Tabitha usually ended up in the middle of the argument, or rather, on Paige’s side of the argument.

  Tabitha wasn’t his biggest fan, but in that moment, he thought she just might have more answers than he did. He considered trying to reach her by phone, but Tabitha hadn’t joined the cellular phone craze. She considered having a cell phone an electronic leash she would never willingly wear. She rarely even answered her home phone.

  No matter how much he was dreading the encounter, he made a mental note to stop by her place after work. See what she could tell him. And after all was said and done, he would go to the club. Paige would be there. His mind flashed on the sickening thought that Nicholas could be there too. But, what choice did he have?

  And there was still something about the e-mail that bothered him. Something that made his skin crawl.

  Sam leaned over Eddie’s shoulder then and poked him in the side with his finger. “You know if I was you, I would get that gun.”