by Adam Sommers
The Deviant
The Deviant
Copyright © 2019 by Adam Sommers
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Printed in the United States of America
Cover Design by Claire Flint Last
Luminare Press
442 Charnelton St.
Eugene, OR 97401
www.luminarepress.com
www.SommersAdam.com
LCCN: 2019938158
ISBN: 978-1-64388-117-1
To my wife, Anne, and my children,
Abby, Grace, and Jack, who make me happy.
And to my mother, Arlene,
for her constant support and encouragement.
Chapter 1
She got off, and that allowed Tony to pull away to the far side of the bed.
“Much better,” she said condescendingly, “you’re learning.”
Twin beads of sweat slid down Tony Sclafani’s temples, and he could feel sweat cooling in the hollow of his neck as he lay on his back squeezing his eyes shut. What he hoped more than anything was that if he turned to his right, she’d magically be gone, or, because he could still feel the weight of her on the bed, that she’d be dead.
Of course she won’t be dead, thought Tony. She’ll never be dead. The only hope is if I kill her. Right now. Strangle her with the belt around my wrist this instant. Then she’ll be dead and I’ll be free. If I had any balls I’d have done it months ago. Tony Sclafani could picture himself springing off the mattress, wrapping the leather around her neck and pulling until she stopped breathing. He was a big, strong guy and would be capable of the deed. The only trouble, he acknowledged with self-loathing, was that he didn’t have the balls.
Instead, with the lights still off and his eyes shut, he found his clothes and left the elegantly appointed home outside Baltimore as quickly as he could without a word or a backward glance.
Chapter 2
“Hi, it’s John Williams from The Washington Standard.”
Eric Berger’s heart skipped a beat. It had been weeks since he sent in an application and been asked to come down for a one-day tryout they were holding to fill the rare opening at one of the country’s best newspapers, and he figured any chance he might have had was gone.
“Love to have you come down and be a part of our staff.”
HOLY SHIT! YEAH! YEAH! YEAH! He silently pumped his fist in the air three or four times and spun in a circle, twisting the wire around his body, but into the phone Eric Berger intoned, “That sounds very good, Mr. Williams. Thank you. I’m excited.”
Smiling to himself at the trace of freak-out that Eric Berger could not keep from his voice, John Williams said, “Excellent. Start you off at twenty-four-thousand-five, and we’re hoping you can come in maybe the beginning of next month. Is that enough time?”
I CAN START RIGHT THIS SECOND, YOU STUPID, BEAUTIFUL, BALD-HEADED MOTHERFUCKER.
“Yes,” Eric said into the receiver. “I’m sure the beginning of the month will be fine.”
“Great. Looking forward to it.”
“Me too. Talk to you soon.”
Chapter 3
Janon Masterson was about five-ten. Not fat like you’d look at him and say, “Whoa, that dude sure is fat,” but he had a torso like a medicine ball. His head was just as round and thick. His glasses were round and thick, and even his jet-black hair had a roundish-thickish quality to it, in addition to being perpetually greasy.
Talking to him was like drinking thumbtacks because there was never such a thing as a normal conversation. Everything was an argument, a contest to see who knew more about arcane bullshit like whether it was better to put a four-barrel or two-barrel carburetor in a 1970 GTO, or if the polar ice caps were melting faster due to excessive amounts of whale shit. It didn’t matter which position you took because he’d take the opposite side and keep hammering his points until you submitted.
As a result, the only way Eric Berger could survive being his friend was to immediately agree with him no matter what he said. That confused and subdued Janon, who was inevitably disappointed to not be involved in a verbal jousting match.
Eric gravitated to Janon Masterson only because they both had suffered a shortage of friends during much of their high school years. They were among the Others, those who were not jocks, burnouts, goths, or even nerds. Kids who didn’t quite fit in and became a default clique of their own, hanging out, fixing cars and listening to music because it beat being alone—if only just barely. Through its own momentum, the relationship continued into college, even though Eric easily made friends once at Montclair State.
Janon went to a nearby university, where he graduated with an engineering degree before going on to earn a law degree and getting a job with a good patent law firm in Alexandria. It seemed perfect, but it was doomed to fail. Janon was definitely not a suit-and-tie, yes-sir, no-sir kind of person. And, after a few short months, he had had enough. He left the profession to open a comic book shop, where he was in his element and as content as a cloistered monk.
He lived with his wife, Catherine, in an apartment complex with others struggling to make ends meet. The important part of this for Eric Berger was that Janon had an extra bedroom in the apartment, and since Janon was a great pal, he’d let Eric live there for the ridiculously low price of two hundred a month.
Eric could hardly have asked for anything better—at least, in theory.
Janon’s apartment was tolerably close to his office at the newspaper, and the rent was a fraction of anything he’d pay if he were on his own. But the great deal had a few significant downsides.
First: Crunching on cat litter. No matter where you walked—in the bathroom, the kitchen, the hallway, the living room, the bedroom, crunch, crunch crunch on the tiny tan pellets, prompting Eric to ask more than once: “Hey, Janon, maybe you should clean up a little, this is pretty gross.”
To which Janon typically replied, “It’s not the dirty litter. It’s clean, just spilled out of the bag. Put on a pair of shoes or something. It’s not even bad for you.”
Second: Cat hair. It coated everything and it was made worse by the fact that the animal had some kind of disease that made it lose most of its coat. Only a few days after Eric Berger’s arrival, the cat nearly died of the disease, but, to Eric’s chagrin, it made a miraculous recovery. Which prompted Eric to say, “Hey, Janon, ever hear of a pet brush?”
“There’s no point. It just comes right back. It makes more sense for me to use the time trying to get enough money to get a different house than to try to clean the hair out of this one.”
That, Eric found himself thinking, had a bizarre sort of logic to it. But wait, no. “Janon, people don’t live like this. Maybe if you didn’t watch twelve hours of ‘Dr. Who’ reruns every day you could actually clean the place, you know, like every other person on earth?”
“It doesn’t bother me.”
Third: piles of dirty dishes. Not just in the sink, but on the counters, the linoleum floor, the dust-coated top of the refrigerator. “Hey, Janon, you know there’s this great invention, just came out with it, called A SPONGE. They also have dish soap, Brillo pads. Those sorts of things.”
“Pshsst. That’s all Catherine’s job. I’ll get after her.”
Fourth, and worst: THE DOG, a flea-ridden, short-haired hyperactive maniac. When Eric went to sleep, the fleas jumped off the dog, found Eric’s legs and sucked his blood, leaving fresh trails of itchy welts the next morning.
All this was awful, but tolerable, because Eric Berger had a job he once could only have dreamed of—city reporter in the nation’s capital. If it meant living in squalor for the time being, that was a small price to pay.
Chapter 4
“Here’s your desk,” said the bustling and businesslike John Williams.
Eric was still in something of a state of shock. During his tryout a few weeks back, he’d been so focused on the silly weather story he had been assigned to notice how…well, beautiful…the newsroom was. This clearly was not the Paterson News, with its rickety desks and broken chairs tilting this way and that on the checkered floor that bore the scars of decades of abuse.
The Washington Standard newsroom looked more like the lobby of a four-star hotel than a business office. It was three stories tall, with mottled marble columns supporting an ornately carved ceiling. One wall was dominated by floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out onto a broad swath of rolling forest.
Eric’s desk was set near the window side, positioned so he could look out just by looking up. It was a moment that was so monumental in the life of Eric Berger that he had to stop for a moment just to absorb it. Here he was at the age of twenty-six, not just a reporter, but a city reporter in Washington, D.C., where Watergate had taken place; where Woodward and Bernstein had brought down Richard Nixon. He would get the same opportunity. Richard Nixon was long gone, of course, but there would certainly be someone else. Politicians were a slimy bunch, and Eric relished the idea of kicking over the rocks and exposing them to the sun. Politicians, businessmen, it didn’t matter. Even the local butcher scamming his customers. All would fall before his mighty pen and notebook. Beware, Washington, I am here, he thought as he gazed out the window.
“How’s it going?” Eric hadn’t noticed he was being watched intently by his neighbor, and it took a second for the voice to actually break through his glory vision. “Super, Eric,” he said, making a quick recovery and introducing himself.
“Duper, Mitch.”
“Your name is Duper Mitch?”
“Muha ha ha ha,” laughed Mitch Lozatti. “Just making a joke. You said ‘super.’ So I said ‘duper.’ ”
“Oh, yeah, I got it.” Eric thought it was weird and not that funny. But Mitch looked nice, and he was trying to make friends. At the moment, both were welcome.
“John give you a beat yet?”
“Nope, just got here. Day One. I have no clue.”
“Mu hah,” laughed Mitch Lozatti. “I’ve been here two years. Still don’t have a clue. Welcome aboard.”
“Thanks.”
Mitch was as delightful as he was silly-looking. Tall, with the physique of a swizzle stick, he had to be about Eric’s age, but even so, there was a distinctive old-man quality about his body and mannerisms. “I do G.A. I run out whenever they have something the Big Guys are too busy to do but still has to be done.”
“G.A.?” Eric asked.
“General assignment.”’
“Oh, I never heard of it. In New Jersey they just call it ‘reporter.’ ”
“You mean like: ‘Me, Reporter; you, Jane?’ ” Mitch laughed.
Eric laughed with him. “I guess that means I’m G.A., too?”
“Or they have something in mind that they haven’t told you about. Try to avoid the education beat,” he whispered and made a snoring noise. “Bor-ring.”
“I thought I’d be doing cops. That’s mostly what I did in Jersey.”
“Hah muh haha.”
“Why’s that funny?”
“You don’t just roll into town and start doing cops. Warren Zalinsky does cops. He’s been here for years.”
“Some kid choked on a pencil at St. Ambrose Preschool. Want to go?”
The voice did not come from Mitch Lozatti or John Williams, but from a woman who was sitting nearby whom Eric hadn’t noticed before. He thought it was rude for her to just butt into the conversation he was having with Mitch, and also to not even introduce herself, an oversight she corrected immediately.
“Sorry, I’m Debbie Harrison, assistant metro editor,” said the short, intense black woman in front of him. She held out her hand.
“Eric,” he said back and shook her small rough hand.
“Glad to have you. Is it just Eric?”
Eric gave a short chuckle, “No. Add a Berger.”
She smiled, “Okay, Eric Add a Berger. It’s over in Southeast. You have a car?”
“I do,” Eric laughed at her witticism, thinking she seemed fun to work with.
“Here’s the address.” She handed him a slip of paper and took a step back toward her desk.
That was it? thought Eric. No “Who are you?” No “How’s it going?” Just, “Here, go to work.” It didn’t particularly bother Eric, it just struck him as very odd.
For Debbie Harrison it was like the Mafia says: Nothing personal, it’s business. There was a story that needed to be covered and he was a reporter who needed to get to the scene as soon as possible. The chatting could wait. And, if Eric was mildly annoyed by her lack of social graces, she was getting equally annoyed by the fact that he was standing around waiting for her to bestow such graces upon him.
Mitch looked at her hopefully as if he, too, wanted to go. It could turn out to be a good story.
“You’re almost done with that convention center piece, right?” Debbie Harrison shot daggers at Mitch—already knowing the answer.
“Almost.”
“It’ll be ready in what, ten minutes?”
“Yeah, like fifteen, I’d say.”
“You didn’t start it yet, did you?”
Instead of answering right away, Mitch took two brand-new pencils and stuck them, eraser end first, one into each nostril. “No!” he said and snapped his head around in dramatic fashion, sending the pencils flying toward her. “Muh haha ha!”
Debbie rolled her eyes.
Turning to Eric, she said, “Call when you have something. And take photo” as she stomped back to her desk.
Chapter 5
The three women sitting in the corner booth at Luke’s knew each other primarily because they were all rich. They went to charity events, ate at the most outrageously expensive restaurants, and had palatial homes in cities across the country. But theirs was not the typical rich-lady, white-glove get-together in which each woman will subtly or, not so subtly, try to one-up the others in social standing and wealth, even if just slightly. It was also somewhat unusual in that the women were relatively young and still, at least in their minds, good-looking. They had, over the course of several conversations, come to realize that they shared the same sort of interest in sex.
It started at The Buttonwood, when Anita Juarez ogled a waiter at the Detalon Foundation Charity Auction and said, “I’d love to tie his ass up, ha ha ha.” But the woman she was with at the time, Pam Morgan, did not laugh, and in fact, suggested she might like to do the same, or something similar.
Chapter 6
Pens, notebooks and his car keys got stuffed into their assigned pockets in his cheap sports coat that matched his equally cheap tie and shirt. Eric turned to go, then paused, not sure what Debbie Harrison meant by “take photo.” Probably she meant “take a photo.” That seemed to make sense, since he was going out on a story. Although he didn’t have a camera on him at the moment, he usually did. It was generally expected of reporters at his previous paper, the thinking being that even if a reporter couldn’t take a perfect picture, they at least could take some picture that would go with a story and enhance its value.
“Sorry,” he confessed to Debbie Harrison, “I didn’t think I’d be going out on anything my first day. I’ll have to go back and get my camera.”
“No!” screamed Debbie. “You take Photo! Get a photographer to go with you!”
“Oh, got it. Great.” Eric Berger smacked himself in
the forehead out of stupidity, and started reevaluating just how much “fun” Debbie Harrison was going to be as a boss.
She turned away, leaving Eric in the middle of the newsroom, wondering exactly where one would find a photographer. He looked to see if Mitch Lozatti could help, but Mitch had fled to his desk and begun bashing away on his convention center piece in hopes of getting back in Debbie Harrison’s good graces. Eric didn’t want to disturb him.
“Over there!” shouted the irritated voice of Debbie Harrison, pointing to a corner of the newsroom that had a huge white sign with bright orange lettering that, helpfully, read: “PHOTO DEPARTMENT.”
“Got it.”
Before Eric even got near the double-glass doors of PHOTO, a spry middle-aged woman with a red shirt and spindly legs sped into the newsroom. She had severe, short, blond hair and a black bag slung over one shoulder. Two other cameras dangled from her thin neck.
Everything Kathy Drass did was done with swift, precise movements. “You got the preschool?” she asked.
“Guess so,” replied Eric.
“Come on. I’ll drive.”
Eric marveled at the fact that no one at The Washington Standard, with the exception of Mitch Lozatti, knew how to say “Hello, how’s it going?” But he didn’t have much time to ponder the phenomenon.
Kathy Drass slipped through the maze of chairs, desks, and cubbies in the newsroom without effort despite the heavy bag of gear and the cameras slung around her neck. Eric struggled to keep up although he was about a foot taller and long-limbed. He had to jog after her in the parking lot as she hurried to her car. She started it and began driving away before Eric had the door closed.
Kathy’s foot-on-the-floor driving didn’t surprise or bother Eric in the least. He knew from experience that photographers (shooters, as they were sometimes called) had to get there—and the good ones did so by any means necessary. Tickets, crashes, one-way streets, sidewalks. It did not matter. Get there. Get there. Get there. Those were the only three rules they obeyed.
