by Tyler Wolfe
One thing that I had learned to watch out for were something called guilt gifts—a sudden improvement of her treatment of me because she felt bad about doing something wrong. Was I doing this now with her?
Shoot, I probably was. I would have to back off again after this and treat her well “just because” and let the entire thing fade away behind us. I wouldn’t spoil her suspiciously, but neither would I neglect her again. We would move some place else, some place nice, where I could take my run without having to worry about getting mugged.
It was time to get rid of the rest of the evidence. I ripped up the other ransom note and flushed it. I shoved the Zippo with Diasko’s name on it in my pocket, planning to throw it in one of the nearby lakes when I went out to put the bag, the hoodie and the sweatpants into three different donation bins around town.
As I left the house to run my errands, I decided to turn down Fernery first. Diasko’s place along with the side lot was cordoned off, but free of investigators. I stopped to take a look as this was probably the one and only change I’d have to take a quick survey of the scorched remnants. The vacant lot was half-burned, with blackened debris scattered about. The remaining trees and grasses struggled in a morass of black mud and bits of junk.
Seeing Diasko’s house now hammered home what I had done. The place had burned to the foundation, and then the foundation had burned. The cracked, decayed, ash-clogged slab that was left couldn’t have given up much information. I was surprised that they had found enough of Diasko to consider him a body, or maybe not.
I drove on, headed for the first donation center. The lighter was a weight in my pocket that I could never quite stop feeling. It felt like evidence, but it also felt like some sort of trophy. I knew I should not have taken it from the moment I had tossed the cigarette onto Diasko’s chest, but here it was, in my pocket.
Get rid of it. That was the smart thing, but part of me resisted. It was like a memento from a hard-won fight. When I looked at it, I remembered what had happened to the last bully who had tried to mess with me. It made me feel powerful.
It can also condemn me all by itself. I need to be smart.
And not just about that. I needed to follow the news and neighborhood gossip for a while, to make sure nothing new was being said about the fire. This time around, my getaway wasn’t so clean. The body had gone up in an explosion, not slipped quietly between the surface of the lake and then been forgotten.
Maybe the cops were curious. But that was no reason to panic. I was careful. I’m being careful right now.
I didn’t think there would be any real evidence left behind. The fire and blast should’ve taken care of everything. All the police had was some cremated remains and a burned down house. There would be people wanting answers, but who knew what would come of that. What were the odds that anyone would ever suspect me? All the same, I couldn’t afford to live in fear of that. I needed to keep myself prepared for anything, but, I also needed to keep calm and carry on as usual.
I dropped off the clothes. I visited a jewelry store, but found nothing to Zoe’s taste. I couldn’t find a spot private enough to ditch the lighter. Guess I’ll have to use our lake.
Instead, when I came back to the house, I just went inside, kicked off my sandals, and sat on the bed looking at the Zippo. I turned it slowly in the dim light. In the clean room that still smelled faintly of Zoe’s perfume, I saw the etched letters gleam as the light caught them. I’ll never know that poor boy’s name. But now I’ll never forget the name of the one who deserves to be forgotten forever.
“God rest your soul, in Hell” I growled half-mockingly as I tossed the lighter into my junk drawer, then covered it up with some magazines. I closed the drawer then headed to the kitchen for a beer.
They’ll never figure it out.
CHAPTER 19
Chance Meeting
Two months passed, and though I couldn’t say that things were entirely back to normal, they were definitely going more my way than not.
Bob was no longer bothering me at work. In fact, he was no longer bothering anyone at work. The ritual public firings had died down. I don’t know if he got reprimanded by the higher-ups, or if one of my co-workers had threatened him, but something had spooked him.
I wished that I knew who to thank because it made going to the office a lot easier to deal with. He sat in his office day after day, handed out assignments via e-mail, and did not hold meetings. Without him constantly interrupting and stressing out his team, we actually got things done.
Now and again, I would catch him watching me nervously, but I had never done anything at work to arouse suspicion, so I wasn’t worried. That cowardly idiot wasn’t smart enough to even suspect that he was looking at a man who had killed two people in a month. I suspected that all the calls from HR people about my out-of-state interviews had given him the idea that I would get some revenge before I left. But leaving was my revenge.
I had survived this office the same way that Luis had. I had made myself indispensable. But unlike Luis, who gloated over Bob’s inability to fire him without dooming the office, I had let myself get taken for granted. For years and years, I had taken on more and more responsibility, doing the work of three of my co-workers. It was all easy work for me; the annoying part had been Bob.
Now, I would take my expertise, my hard work and my experience and leave, and he would have to hire three people to replace me. With all the firings, the mountain of work that had backed up was already overwhelming the rest of the staff. Maybe the reason Bob kept watching me nervously was that he knew the hell he was going to go through finding new people.
Zoe and I kept warming to each other more. It seemed as if the rough patch we had been going through was permanently behind us. We laughed together more, made love more often, and started planning for our future again.
A future in another place.
We were still deciding where to go. I had started doing phone interviews with supervisors at five different locations, all of whom seemed interested. After all, I was a veteran of one of the most infamous branches in the company, and I had managed to keep my job, my sanity and a spotless performance record. Apparently, that wasn’t very common.
Nothing more was ever again said about the fire, the explosion, or Diasko’s death. It wasn’t in the news, the police had stopped asking questions, and eventually, even the yellow caution tape was taken down.
The owner of the destroyed lot and the half-burned vacancy hired a crew to bulldoze everything, haul away the wreckage and clean up the site. By the time two months had passed, both lots were already overgrown again, and both had been sold.
The only thing left by the time the weather started getting cooler were the rumors. They had grown and mutated and taken on a life of their own in the intervening months. Phyllis knew them all, and for a while, it was all she had been able to talk about.
Diasko was running a meth lab out of his house and made a mistake.
Diasko blew himself up rather than be kicked out of his house.
The landlord hired someone to blow the house up because Diasko wouldn’t leave.
There were dozens of different stories being told.
Someone had even found a charred porn magazine on a rooftop three blocks away the night after the explosion.
And supposedly some kids had found two of Diasko’s teeth embedded in a tree.
I was a little disappointed that nobody had even brought up the spontaneous human combustion angle. Then again, those were stories of people burning up, not people exploding with enough force to shatter a house’s foundation.
It was strange that all official channels lost interest so quickly. In the end the police must not have had any solid evidence to build a case, or maybe it all just got the back burner to something else more important. Lakeland was dealing with a huge epidemic of opioid addiction, like a lot of other places, and there was plenty of meth to go around, too. Maybe the cops figured that a filthy, drunken recluse who st
ockpiled fuel in the house was most likely the victim of his own stupidity.
I would never understand why Diasko lived like that, or why he was such a bitter man. Maybe it was burnout. Maybe noticing me moving that kid’s body had been the only exciting thing that had happened to him in years. But instead of being scared of the guy who gift-wrapped a corpse to go, he had decided to be the villain of the piece. His choice. His mistake.
And now the villain was dead. No ceremony aside from two lines in the obituary section, unmourned, and soon forgotten. I couldn’t have cared less if I had wanted to.
The news never reported anything else on the story after the second week. From then on, only the local kids and Phyllis kept the rumors alive. Everyone’s attention spans were so short these days, and Joe Diasko, low-life scum, blackmailer and general creep, just didn’t rate that much attention.
And he thought he could intimidate me into paying him off. Me?
When I had passed by the place for the last time before it was sold, I had entertained a little fantasy of buying the land up myself. It had to be dirt cheap after what had happened. I had reasoned that the current owner would want it taken off his hands, and in a dark little way, I found satisfaction in the idea of taking that land, the place where I had experienced so much horror, for myself.
But when I had gone by later and seen the Sale Pending signs up, I had felt a surge of relief. Why in the world would I want to own anything on this block? This place was full of pain, suffering, and death.
I wondered what condition exactly Diasko’s remains had even been found once the fire crews had been able to put the flames out. The body had been burning the longest of anything, and even though he had been a big guy, there couldn’t have been much of him left. Certainly not enough for anyone, even a forensics expert to conclude that he had been murdered.
Then again, I wasn’t sure. How could I be? I had never been able to dislodge that damn cable leash from the meat of his neck. I had expected the gas can to melt and burn—but what if it hadn’t? Maybe the police had found the gas can, the leash, or gasoline residue. Maybe they were waiting to see if their mystery arsonist would strike again.
Or maybe I was torturing myself for no good reason. Maybe the police had ruled it as an accident, or a suicide and closed the case.
Either way it didn’t matter. It was all over, and in another month or so, we wouldn’t even live here anymore. We were flirting with the idea of California where the new branch needed veteran workers the most. They were offering me an assistant manager position to start, and the pay raise that I had so patiently been waiting for.
The day I got the offer letter, I decided to stop in at a local watering hole called Lucky’s, to celebrate. I wanted a couple of mixed drinks, but Zoe was slammed at work and I didn’t want to interrupt her by going there instead.
I had passed the low, rambling bar with its sprawling outdoor patio on my way home many times, but never stopped. Luis liked to drink there; he told me that it was a decent bar with cheap prices. I almost wished he hadn’t already left for Miami; he was one of the first people I wanted to tell about the offer letter.
Hell, I half wished I could tempt him to come with me to California, but he had too much family here.
I pulled into the graveled parking lot and had to hunt for a space. The lot was full of a mix of work trucks, cars and a row of similarly detailed motorcycles. The signs of a biker gang using this place as a watering hole made me hesitate.
But, it was also seven at night, and I was already there. “Eh, fuck it. I’ll give it a shot.” At least I didn’t have to worry about being unable to defend myself anymore. No matter what happened, I would never freeze again. I might not even run.
I turned off my truck, locked it up and headed inside. The front door was a huge, heavy black-bolted chunk of timber that looked like it came out of an old ship. It took real effort to get the door open.
The inside of Lucky’s was exactly as I had pictured: a deliberate dive, complete with vintage beer signs and battered timber furniture. The place was big—the main room had a long bar stretching from literally a foot from the entrance all the way to the back door, with a secondary bar on the patio beyond. A few low-tops sat off to the left, and a pool table hugged a corner in the back. The air stank of cheap beer, sweat and the cigarette smoke that swirled thinly a few feet above the patrons’ heads.
The place didn’t feel like it had any air conditioning. The windows were open, worn screens blowing in the slight draft, with several ceiling fans slowly rotated to provide circulation. I felt sweat gather on my skin and wondered why they didn’t turn the damn fans up.
The bikers, mostly older guys, were clustered around the pool table, beers in fists, placing bets on each other and yelling rowdily when one of them got a good shot. A few people hunkered down at some of the tables. A few more patrons sat at the bar while the bartender, a chubby, beardy old fellow with prison tats, stood listening to an old black man in paint-spattered jeans, run on unhappily about something.
Something in the unhappy patron’s face was familiar. He was tall and skinny, with a graying fade, a narrow jaw and wide dark eyes. I couldn’t tell where I had seen him before, but it made me curious.
I decided to take a seat a few stools down from the conversation, considering the drink list as I sat down. Thank God that this was more a beer and whiskey place than a typical Florida daiquiri-and-mojito palace. I decided on a Long Island Iced Tea and signaled the bartender. He made his way down to me after quietly saying something to the guy he was listening to.
It turned out that the drinks at Lucky’s were poured strong as hell. No wonder Luis likes this place. I started to wonder if I should have ordered a Bud Light instead, but one stiff drink wouldn’t put me over the limit for driving. And I really needed a cold one, so I eagerly took a long swallow of it, and sat half-listening to the conversations going on around me.
The best thing about going to a new bar was that nobody knew you—that was both good and bad. It let you drink alone, but it also meant that you probably had to. I wasn’t looking for conversation, but had not expected the sudden sense of isolation that hovered over me as I settled in to sip my drink. The overall vibe of the joint was like “you’re new and we don’t care”: I could have been invisible.
Then again, going unnoticed has its advantages, I thought as I looked up at the old television in the corner which was showing the news without any sound. They were done with breaking news and headlines, and were on to some lifestyle puff piece about feral iguanas. I looked away again after a few moments, becoming bored.
California. Zoe will be over the moon. The winters will be mild, and the summers will still be hot, but drier and kinder. Also, if I’ll really be making that much bigger of a salary, she’ll finally get her chance to be a mom.
I was realizing more and more that that right there, besides our screwed up opposing schedules, had been what had driven a wedge between us. I wasn’t to blame for not being able to support us both at my current job, or for Bob freezing raises and promotions. But Zoe had been unhappy about it, and so had I, and the unhappiness had lowered patience and shortened tempers.
Things are definitely looking up for us. I can’t wait to show her my letter once I get home.
The bikers finally took their beers and filed out to the back patio, where I could smell burgers grilling. My stomach growled, but I didn’t feel like shouldering past a dozen leather-clad hard-cases to get at an evening snack.
In their absence, the bar went very quiet, with the exception of the low buzz of the ceiling fans and the mumbling of a few patrons. The loudest one of all was two seats down, still chewing off the slightly bored-looking bartender’s ear.
I looked over at the familiar-looking man again. The guy looked like he was definitely a regular and a serious drinker. It was still pretty early and he already had a half-full beer, two empty bottles and a few empty shot glasses in front of him. His face had the dried-up look and
bloodshot eyes of a man who drank far more alcohol than water.
He was hunched over on the bar as if it was the only thing holding him up. Besides the dirty jeans, he was wearing a dark blue flannel shirt, open, showing his undershirt, which might have been white once but now was a filthy-looking yellowish-gray. The man’s shoes were some cheap black loafers that were half fallen apart from age. This was a guy hanging on by his fingernails, whose every spare dime went to drink. It didn’t look like even the booze was enough to kill whatever the poor sonuvabitch was carrying.
I had mixed feelings about alcoholics. Watching this guy now reminded me of Diasko. Chasing his vices to distract himself from the misery that he let pile up all around. Mom and Dad would have judged him harshly for his imperfections. Zoe dealt with his kind every day. Me, I felt a detached curiosity, like a scientist studying the dying.
I started to eavesdrop on his ramblings as I drank. It was the only entertaining thing to do at the moment. I thought if the conversation was interesting enough maybe I’d try to join it. Neither one seemed that bad of a guy, and with my escape plan from Florida almost in motion, I was full of goodwill.
I kept my eye on the television, but focused my ears on the aging drunk with his dark, weirdly familiar features. Maybe if I listened in long enough, I would figure out why he looked so damn familiar.
The guy wet his mouth with his beer and licked his lips, head drooping over his bottle. “I dunno… he was such a good kid, ya know. We had our problems, but we were getting better at living together now that he’s older.
“He was gonna go to that junior college. The boy had plans. He was going somewhere. I don’t know why he’d leave in the middle of the night.”
I took another sip of my drink, not much minding that the melting ice had thinned it. The burn of the booze had been overwhelming in spots. Which kid, his? Or maybe his grandson? Alcohol and the exhaustion of poverty had aged him; he looked sixty but could have been in his forties.
