A Killer Harvest

by Paul Cleave

  “Turn to page fifty-six, everybody,” Mr. Stone says, and everybody does, including Joshua, and he’s thankful he’s looked through the beginning of this book over the weekend, otherwise right now he’d be feeling even more embarrassed than he does. Even so, when Mr. Stone starts talking, he feels immediately out of his depth. None of this makes sense.

  This new world is going to chew him up and spit him out.

  TWENTY-SIX

  “We don’t know that for a fact, Ben. Doesn’t matter how many times you watch it, it’s not going to change—we never see him go into Erin’s room.”

  Ben looks up from the screen to Detective Vega. They’ve interviewed staff and patients and visitors from the hospital without any luck, and are now once again watching the security footage. Ben is halfway through a bacon sandwich and a coffee and Vega is halfway through a salad and an organic smoothie, the components of which look like they washed ashore. Vega has been assigned as Ben’s temporary new partner. It feels like a betrayal to be moving on after Mitchell’s death, but he’s not fool enough, or Hollywood enough, to argue that he works better alone. He thinks the trial partnership will become a full-time partnership. He hopes so. He likes Vega and he likes having a second set of eyes and somebody to watch his back. He’s never known anyone like her—she looks more like an actress playing a cop in a movie than an actual cop, and with her long dark, wavy hair and big green eyes and smile that always makes others around her smile, she has the ability to flirt with her suspects and make them open up, and if that doesn’t work, she can flatten that smile and tighten her jaw and look like somebody who could break you in half. Which, he thinks, she probably could. He’s known Vega for five years but doesn’t know anything about her outside of work, though it’s obvious she spends a lot of her downtime at the gym beating the hell out of punching bags and benching more than her own body weight. Ben has always kept himself in shape, but he wouldn’t ever want to go one-on-one with her in an arm wrestle.

  “It’s too much of a coincidence,” Ben says.

  She talks around a mouthful of salad. “That doesn’t mean it’s not just that—a coincidence.”

  “Somebody tried to kill her,” Ben says. “Twice now.”

  “The doctors said it was an embolism. They said it’s not that uncommon to experience one after surgery, and she did have a lot of surgery.”

  He puts his sandwich down. He hasn’t had much of an appetite over the last few weeks, and today is turning out to be no different. “I know. I know that, okay? The doctors have said that a hundred times already. But this guy,” he says, and he taps the computer screen where there’s a paused image of the man with the flowers, “he hurt her. I’m sure of it. Why else go to the effort of setting that fire?”

  “I’m not saying you’re wrong,” Vega says. “I’m saying you can’t be sure.”

  He thinks back to the moment he came down the stairs. This man wearing the baseball cap—or Mr. Baseball, as they’re now calling him—is the man he ran into. What did his face look like? He doesn’t know. He saw him and dismissed him in a heartbeat—there was no reason not to—as he was focused on getting to Erin, and it was that focus that allowed the doctors to save her. Any delay could have cost Erin her life.

  Either they’re dealing with some whackjob trying to kill her, or they’re dealing with some whackjob trying to burn down the hospital and kill everybody.

  They can trace some of his movements using surveillance footage. They see him enter the hospital. They see him step onto the elevator and they see him step off on Erin’s floor. There is never a good view of him; the peak of the baseball cap is covering his face. He spends time making a phone call before walking towards Erin’s room, but then there are no cameras to cover the angles or to see if he actually enters the room. When he reappears he finds the bathroom, then reappears six minutes later, now without the flowers. He goes back towards Erin’s room, and a short time later smoke comes out from under the bathroom door and somebody pulls the alarm.

  There is even footage of the moment Ben ran into him a minute later by the stairs.

  If it is a coincidence, it’s one of the biggest ever. Why would Mr. Baseball risk returning to finish Erin off? Because she can identify him. That’s what Ben thinks. Which suggests she knows who he is. His cop instinct makes him question if Mr. Baseball is an ex-boyfriend; if this were any other case, he would question if it was somebody the victim was secretly seeing. Proposing to her the night before, was that the trigger that sent Mr. Baseball into a rage? Did he steal the engagement ring out of some kind of resentment?

  The last footage they have of their arsonist is him exiting the hospital towards the street.

  “If that fire hadn’t been contained—”

  “But it was,” Vega says, “and he didn’t disable any of the other sprinklers. As soon as it spread beyond the bathroom door, others would have been activated.”

  “We don’t—”

  “Either way,” Vega says, interrupting him, “he’s going to go away for a long time.”

  “If he’s responsible for what happened to Erin, he’s not going away at all.”

  Vega turns to look at him. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  Ben thinks about what he said. Then he shrugs. “It doesn’t mean anything. I’m venting, that’s all.”

  “Don’t do anything stupid, Ben.”

  “I won’t.”

  Vega stares at him silently.

  “What?” Ben asks.

  “Nothing.”

  “If you’ve got something to say, say it.”

  Vega puts down her bowl. The salad has gone. He’s never understood how people eat them. “People are talking.”

  Ben leans back in his chair. “What people?”

  “Other detectives. Other officers. There are rumors going around the department.”

  “What rumors?” he asks.

  “I think you know,” she says.

  She’s right. He does know. “They think I executed Simon Bower.”

  “They think you were so angry at what he did, that you staged the scene and killed him. They think you even shot yourself with the nail gun.”

  “And you? What do you think?”

  “I think that you’re at work when you shouldn’t be. I think you shouldn’t be on this case, because it’s personal. I think that statements like the one you made thirty seconds ago don’t make people want to believe you.”

  “What happened to Simon Bower was self-defense,” Ben says.

  “And I believe you,” she says. “Even if it wasn’t, there isn’t a single person here who doesn’t have your back. Bower got what he deserved, and nobody here will argue that.” She pauses for a few seconds. “Look, I want you to know that I think it’s a mistake for us to be on this case. I know you pulled some favors to be working it, but your judgment is clouded. You can’t take a step back and look at things with an open mind.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No. That covers it,” she says.

  He picks up a handful of printouts of Mr. Baseball. “Good. Then let’s go talk to Erin’s colleagues, see if anybody there looks like our guy, or if anybody can identify him from these pictures. Somebody has to know who he is.” He gets out of the chair. Vega is staring at him. “It really was self-defense,” he says.

  “And like I said, I believe you. But if you have to take similar self-defensive actions against this guy, the walls of the police department aren’t going to be thick enough to contain the rumors anymore. You’re going to start making the headlines.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “I said you’re a freak, freak,” the boy with the pimples says.

  It’s the same boy who was sitting in front of Joshua in class earlier, and now he realizes what word was being mouthed to him back then—freak. Joshua looks at his bag on the ground, his schoolbooks spilling from it. Then he looks back to the boy talking to him. One of his front teeth is sitting on top of the one next to it. His breath smells
bad, and there are small blackheads dotting the sides of his nose. He’s a big boy, a little shorter than Joshua, but solid looking, the kind of solid that makes him look taller than he really is and that in ten years will turn to fat. Joshua thinks this kid probably knows that. He can be mean to everybody he wants now, but in ten years’ time he’ll be eating pizza from the box in front of a TV, wondering why he has nobody in his life.

  But that’s in ten years. Right now the boy has him pinned up against a locker. Other students are walking back and forth, none of them paying any attention, making Joshua realize this must be such a common occurrence that everyone is bored by it.

  “You going to do anything, freak?”

  Never has anyone shoved him before. No one has ever called him a freak. He doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t know what to do.

  “Bet you think you’re so special around here, right? All famous and everything because you got your name on TV and in the papers, but that don’t mean shit around here. Around here you’re a nobody, loser.”

  Joshua still says nothing, because he doesn’t know what to say, and even if he did, he’s sure it would be the wrong thing.

  “So you got a new set of eyes but no tongue, is that it? Geez, you really are a freak.”

  “I’m not a freak,” Joshua says, finding his voice.

  “Well now, what do you know? The freak can talk,” the boy says, then looks to his right, where his two friends are standing. One thing Joshua has learned from books and lately from TV is people bully only those they know they can intimidate. They don’t bully those they think can or will fight back. Bullies are bigger. They’re meaner. Bullies attract bullies and like to hang out in numbers. Good information to have in your back pocket, but fairly useless at the moment. What would help would be to have someone—preferably another bully—on his side.

  “What do you want?” Joshua asks.

  “It’s not about me,” the boy says. “It’s about you, and what you want, and right now you want me to slap you in the face a little,” he says, then slaps lightly at the side of Joshua’s face, over and over. “You also want me to give you a titty-twister,” he says, then reaches down and grabs Joshua’s right nipple through his shirt and twists.

  The pain is immense. “Stop it,” Joshua says, trying to fight him off.

  “Maybe you want me to do this,” the kid says, and his friend hands him a can of soda, as if they’ve done this a hundred times already today. The boy points it at him and pulls the tab.

  The soda erupts, and the kid aims it at Joshua’s shorts, soaking the front of them. When Joshua tries to move away, the boy uses one of his meaty forearms to hold him in place, and with the other keeps the soda flowing.

  “What’s wrong?” he asks. “Did you wet yourself? Is that what you used to do when you were blind because you couldn’t find the bathroom?”

  Joshua tries to push forward, but is held in place. The boy tosses the can and what’s left in it into Joshua’s bag. “Calm down, freak,” he says. “Unless you want me to knock you on your ass.”

  His shorts and underwear are soaking. So are his socks. He doesn’t understand why any of this is happening. What did he do, other than show up at school? Then he realizes the enormity of the situation—as bad as this is, it’s only day one. What if every day is like this? What if this happens before and after school, as well as on lunch breaks? What can he do?

  He has to fight back.

  He pushes himself off the locker, but right away his feet slip on the soda and he falls over, landing on his butt. People are laughing at him.

  “Give me another soda,” the big kid demands, and when he has one, he leans down and points it at Joshua’s face. Before he can pull the tab, they’re interrupted.

  “That’s enough, Scott,” a girl says, the same girl who was sitting to the left of him in class.

  Scott sneers at her. “Yeah? What are you going to do about it?”

  “Tell everybody a little something that nobody is meant to know.”

  He pauses. “What do you mean?”

  “I think you know, but if you don’t, I can always tell you in front of everybody.”

  “Nobody would believe you,” he says.

  “How about we find out?”

  Scott glares at her, then at Joshua. “We’re done here anyway,” he says, and he and his buddies walk away.

  Joshua gets to his feet. He wants to crawl into a hole where nobody can ever find him.

  “I’m Olillia,” the girl says.

  “Joshua,” he says.

  “No, I said Olillia.”

  “Huh?”

  She smiles at him. “It’s a joke,” she says. “To cheer you up. I said I’m Olillia, then you said Joshua, and I acted as if you’d misheard me and that you thought I had said Joshua.”

  “Oh,” he says, feeling lost.

  “Let’s start again. I’m Olillia,” she says, and puts out her hand. Olillia is a little shorter than him, skinny, with dark hair tied into a ponytail. She has a great smile, and big blue eyes that seem to smile too, and he never knew such a thing was possible. He remembers his first thought when the bandages came off in the hospital, when he looked at Dr. Toni and thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world. A few days after that, he thought that the woman with the long red hair who read the news on TV late at night was the most beautiful woman in the world, and there have been others too, on TV and in magazines, but right now none of them can compare with Olillia.

  “You’re supposed to shake it,” she says.

  “Huh?”

  She takes his arm and extends his hand and takes it with her other hand. “Like this,” she says, and shakes hands with him. “Nobody taught you that?”

  “Sorry,” he says. His hand is wet from where he pushed himself back off the ground. Her hand is warm. It feels nice.

  “Can I have my hand back now?” she asks.

  “Sorry,” he says again, and he lets it go.

  “You apologize a lot,” she says, wiping her hand on her bag. “And you’re wet too.”

  He’s about to apologize again, but catches himself. “Nice to meet you, O . . .”

  “Olillia,” she says.

  He bends down and takes the soda can out of his bag. Whatever had been left in it has leaked through his books. His shorts and underwear feel uncomfortable, and he isn’t sure what he’s going to do. He has twenty-five minutes until the lunch break is over. He can’t imagine drying out much in twenty-five minutes. What he can imagine is leaving a wet soda patch everywhere he sits.

  “You don’t talk much, do you?” Olillia says, still smiling at him.

  “I guess not,” he says.

  “That’s okay,” she says, “I can talk for the both of us. My family says I talk too much anyway. My mom used to say it’s because I’m a Sagittarius.”

  “What about your dad?”

  “He’s Taurus.”

  “I mean—”

  “I know what you mean,” she says, and laughs. “My dad thinks I talk too much because I’m a girl, and when I say that’s sexist, he says it’s not sexist, but hereditary. He says his mom was the same way, and his sisters too, who never stopped talking when they were growing up. Both of them are lawyers now, so they get to talk all the time. Only it means everything they say is pretty boring. Is it true? Everything the news said about you?”

  He’s still struggling to keep up with her, but he likes the feeling. He’s embarrassed standing in his wet shorts, and he’s humiliated that he’s been bullied, but if it hadn’t happened he wouldn’t be talking to Olillia right now.

  “I haven’t read all the stories,” he says, “but yeah, I used to be blind.”

  “Wow,” she says. “I’ve never met a blind person before.”

  “You still haven’t,” he says.

  She laughs, and it makes him feel great. “You’re funny,” she says.

  He looks up and down the corridor, unsure where to go next. He wants to keep talking to
Olillia, but he also wants to wring as much of the soda out of his clothes as he can.

  “I’m sorry about what Scott did,” she says. “He can be a real jerk, but I assure you there aren’t many people here like that.”

  “You mean there are more?”

  “It’s a universal thing,” she says. “You didn’t have bullies at your last school?”

  “Not really,” he says.

  “Then you’re catching up,” she says. “You should use a bathroom. You can rinse your clothes off and hold them under the hand dryer until you have to go back to class. It’s probably your only option. Also, lesson 101 with bullies—it’s probably not going to help if you go and tell any of the teachers. I mean, I don’t know if that’s what you were planning on doing. Was it?”

  “I . . . I don’t know,” he says, and he really doesn’t. His thought process has been distracted by Olillia.

  “I’ve seen it before with Scott and other Scotts of the school,” she says. “It’ll have short-term gains. They might get into trouble and might even have to serve detention. Then they might leave you alone for a day or two, but then it’ll be worse.”

  “So what do I do?”

  Her smile fades. For the first time in the conversation, she looks sorry for him. “There’s not a lot you can do.”

  “You could tell me what it was he doesn’t want people to know.”

  She laughs. “There’s nothing,” she says. “I made it up. People like Scott, they always have something to hide.”

  “That’s . . . that’s really impressive,” he says.

  She smiles. “One of my lawyer aunts taught me it. I’ll see you in class, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s nice to meet you, Boy Who Used to Be Blind.”