by Sean May
But then the knob turned to the right.
I turned the knob more firmly this time, thinking the inner workings of the knob were just in need of some WD-40, but then I felt the door push in toward me.
I stepped back, and for a moment I thought to myself that it was just a weird coincidence that I happened to be opening the door when Becca’s roommate, Jane, was coming into the room to apologize profusely for forgetting to pick her up from work. But then I saw the hand and forearm pushing in the other side of the door, and either I was in for some real serious shit, or Becca’s roommate was the hairiest, roughest looking girl I’d ever encountered.
The door opened the rest of the way, and I stepped backward into the room. I began to calculate all the ways this could go really bad really quick. The man that entered the room was short and bulky, a continuous knot of muscle running from his sinewy neck down to his midsection. He wore a military green jacket and gray pants, and his hair was a disheveled mess.
He stared at me, his face quickly going from indifference to an intersecting array of angry, aggressive lines and wrinkles. The vein on the side of his temple, a blue shockwave shooting out of his eyebrow to the top of his hairline, began to throb.
“The fuck are you?” quickly followed up by “The fuck are you doin’ here?” were his greetings.
“I...uh...Becca...” I fished for words, for explanations as to why I was here at this moment, but nothing was coming...and I don’t think he even saw the small detail that Becca was laying on the bed naked in a post-coital slumber.
Both his compact palms flew up in an instant and slammed into my chest, taking me off balance and robbing me of my breath. I gasped for oxygen and tried to get my bearings as he walked across the bedroom, his military grade boots stomping against the wooden boards creating an echo in my head.
“Becca!” he screamed, flinging the sheets off of her and into the corner of the room “You fuckin’ whore...you goddamned fuckin’ cunt...what’d I say if I found you with another guy again, huh? What’d I fucking say?”
Becca was just beginning to join the party as her boyfriend continued his profane verbal bender. “Huh? Whu...huh?” Was her contribution to the scene.
The man slapped Becca on the face just as hard as he’d body checked me just a minute ago. The sharp crack of flesh against flesh sounding like an M-80 going off inside the resonant bedroom. Becca reeled and skittered across the bed to the far corner, away from her assailant. The look in her eyes was more frustration than fear, as I imagined this wasn’t the first time he’d laid hands on her. I didn’t really have a clue why Becca would associate with this guy, not to mention date him, but the fact was that he was in the room, right now, beating the shit out of the girl I’d just had the best night of my life with.
“You hear me, you dumb bitch? I said I’d fuckin’ kill you if you had some other guy fucking you this soon after we broke up!”
“Jay...please...I’m...I’m”
“Oh, I bet you’re gonna say you’re sorry, huh, whore? Is that it? Say it!” He grabbed her chin “Say it!”
“...sorry” she said, her voice small and distant, like a fading memory.
The slap this time was even more shocking and loud, and it sent Becca’s head tracing a pinball’s path around the objects surrounding the bed: she careened off of the windowsill first, followed by the bedside table, and finally she came to rest on the bed.
“And I bet you thought I wasn’t serious...I bet you thought I’d just let you walk all over me like you did before, you cunt. Well...” he breathed in sharply, his nostrils flaring and his brow collapsing into a vicious arc “not this time...”
"We fucking broke up, Jay! We're over! I told you that a thousand times already!" Becca screeched, her face glowing red and streaked with tears.
That’s when the gun came out. A small pistol withdrawn from somewhere, I wasn’t quite sure because I was still trying to comprehend how quickly this perfect night had gone off the rails so quickly. He seemed like the kind of guy who kept a gun in the waistband of his pants at all times, just in case things got out of hand, or maybe for the sole purpose of making things get out of hand. He held the gun to the side of Becca’s head and clicked the safety off.
Sometimes, when people are faced with circumstances way beyond their normal skills, they will do things that at once seem both irrational and heroic at the same time. They’ll run into burning buildings to save the things they love the most...they’ll sacrifice their own bodies, their own lives, just for the sake of another, sometimes even a stranger. These are called hero moments.
I was having a hero moment.
Maybe it was my need to protect Becca, maybe it was the alcohol and adrenaline mixing up again once my blood started pumping, but I got back onto my feet and gripped my fists into tight wrecking balls, ready to either make the most heroic or stupid decision of my entire life.
“Hey!” I said, first not getting his attention “You piece of shit, I’m the one you should be pointing that gun at, I’m the one who fucked your ex.” I said the words, but I felt that I was just watching myself say them, reciting a composite of lines I’d heard in a thousand action movies.
“Yeah?” Jay said, turning his attention and the barrel of his gun away from Becca and over to me.
Jay walked over to me, gun still leveled at my chest like a true professional, and got to within lethal distance. “What, you gonna stand up for her or somethin’?”
“I’m not going to just sit here and watch you—“
“No! Listen!” He shoved the tip of the gun into my chest “I asked you a fuckin’ question...are you gonna stand up for this piece of shit, ‘cuz I’m either gonna kill her or I'm gonna kill you tonight, but that's up to you.” Jay was seething, and the rabid fury in his eyes convinced me well enough that he was serious about wanting to kill someone, or maybe even both of us.
Becca was beginning to rouse, her head lolling around on the bed. One of her eyes, her glimmering green eyes, opened up and stared straight at me. The stare bore a hole through my chest.
Not left with many other options, and feeling that it was my only way to make something happened, I grabbed at Jay’s gun. Harnessing the secondhand self defense knowledge gleaned from late night cable TV, I tried to wring it away from him, first turning the gun away from me and simultaneously twisting his arm. He didn’t give up at first, trying to fight his arm back to get a shot off, but after a couple more twists, even he didn’t have the will to keep holding on. The gun thudded on the floor and dropped right between us.
“You motherfucker...” Jay said
As Jay reached for the gun, his head down to about my waist level, I brought my knee up to meet the very crown of his skull, knocking him onto his back. Not knowing when to stop, I jumped over to him and placed one knee onto his chest, applying all my weight.
Jay still fought back, waving his arms in wild circles that landed in dull blows to my ribs. He was screaming something, a roar from the depths of his vocal cords, but the blood in my ears built into a kettle drum beat that washed out all other sounds. My vision was a blurry red smear as I continued to rain down blows onto Jay’s head and chest. I became lost in the violence, the catharsis it brought me. I’d never been in a fight before in my adult life, and even as a kid my fights were relegated to playground scuffles that got broken up by a teacher within seconds, but now, here I was, fighting in a duel that was becoming more one-sided after every blow. Each time Jay would raise his head up, I’d pound it down again, a rhythm developing of left, right, left, right as I alternated fists.
I reeled back for another hit with my left hand when I heard something, the first sound I’d processed in at least two minutes. It was Jay, a guttural death rattle being pushed out of his body, through the blood, through the broken bones. It was the thing that snapped me back into reality.
Looking down at Jay’s lifeless body, his blood and my blood built up on my battered knuckles, the room began to spin around me
. My fists ached, and both were cross-hatched with scrapes and knots. I had blood all over my chest, the point of impact producing a fanned-out palm frond on my skin. I tried to stand up, but there was no way that was happening any time soon. I stumbled away from Jay, away from what I just did, and clung to a chair to drag myself into it.
“What...what...just happened?”
Shit. Becca. In the process of beating the life out of Jay, I’d totally forgotten about her.
“I think he’s dead” I said, informing Becca but also admitting to myself about what I just did.
Becca got her bearings and her attention focused on Jay in the middle of the room, a lifeless husk of a body whose face at this point didn’t even resemble the man Becca once loved.
“I’ll call the cops.” I said, beginning to pull my phone from my pants pocket.
Becca practically jumped from the bed to stop me “No!” she screamed.
“Why not? I mean, it was self defense...I was protecting you, too, Becca.”
“No, no, listen, the cops can’t come here...we’re both in way too deep of shit.”
“What do you mean? We were just...”
“I’ve got a stash in the apartment. Jay and I...we deal...or I guess we used to” She said, getting used to referring to Jay in the past tense proved difficult for her. “If they come here, they’ll find it and arrest me.”
“Listen, I’m sorry, get rid of your stash or whatever, but this...” I indicated Jay’s body “...isn’t just going to go away, and I can’t have something like this weighing on me...when I call the cops, they’ll see it was self defense—“
“Self defense...after you took his gun and then beat him to death once he was completely defenseless?”
She was right. If I’d just subdued him after the gun was out of his hand, I’d be in the clear, but what I did to him...it was overkill. I didn’t defend myself, I acted on my animal instincts and destroyed him.
“So” I paused for at least five seconds, a million thoughts buzzing around in my head “what do we do?”
“We get rid of him” Becca said, not even pausing.
3
An abandoned and overgrown field on the barren, ragged edge of town proved to be Jay’s final resting place. Cramming his small frame into my car was difficult, but with enough wrangling we were able to fit him into the trunk, wrapped in a plastic tarp and three layers of garbage bags. When we pulled Jay out, neither of us saw any blood in the trunk compartment. We looked for any spatters or stray fibers, but nothing jumped to our attention.
Staring at Jay’s corpse, which was beginning to turn gray, Becca laughed “You probably did them a favor...Jay wasn’t exactly a model citizen, I don’t know if you noticed.”
“Yeah, but they still investigate murders, even if the victim was a criminal.”
“Not if nobody reports it. Jay doesn’t have family, and all of his friends on skid row aren’t exactly going to jump up and file a missing persons report for the guy.” Becca said, then she turned her flashlight onto me “He’s just another dead dealer, Nick. Yeah, what you did was crazy, but the cops aren’t going to strain themselves looking for his killer”
“How can you be so cold about this? I mean, he was your boyfriend.”
“He was my owner, Nick. He liked to say boyfriend, but there was no question what our relationship was. You ever wonder why I never got out of this town, out of all this shit, Nick, after the kind of future I had ahead of me when we graduated? Him.” She pointed to the mummified Jay, who was unable to defend himself from the accusation. “My freshman year in college, I started getting into a little bit coke, you know, just to keep me going, and Jay was my dealer. As it turns out, coke’s pretty expensive, and eventually it’s not enough, the high doesn’t work anymore...by the end of the those four years, sure I had my degree, but on top of my student loans I was a total coke and speed fiend, and I was in debt to Jay for twenty grand alone.”
“So that’s why you never left?”
“Yeah...” she pushed a wisp of hair from her forehead “Jay had some contacts, dealers around the city who he had us do courier jobs for. He said I’d be out of his servitude in under a year at the rate I was going. I even had Jane help me out on some jobs to make it look like I was doing double the work. The thing was, the more money I pulled in, the more drugs Jay gave me” she paused “or, at least he said he was giving them to me. After I came down from the high, all of the sudden I’d have another five grand tacked on to my balance, and it never stopped, but I couldn’t stop snorting coke or smoking meth...in this city, you need something to just make the world a little blurry so you can deal with it. I needed it. Still do.” Tears were beginning to well up in her eyes. “I guess, really, I should thank you. Now my debts are settled, I can go off, maybe move somewhere warm, and start over.”
“Umm...you’re welcome...I guess.”
“You should probably move, too. You’ve seen what this town can do to people.” She said, pulling the shovels from underneath Jay’s body. She handed me one of them. “But before that, we should probably get to digging”
We dug for at least an hour, the moon a sickle hanging over the two of us flinging shovelfuls of dirt out of Jay’s grave. Once we got to a comfortable three or four feet, we dropped Jay in along with the trash bag of paper towels, sponges and bottles of bleach we’d used to clean up the blood in Becca’s room, then we piled the dirt on. The field itself was an untilled mess without any sort of grass cover, so a pile of dirt wouldn’t arise much suspicion even if someone did happen to accidentally wander into the long forgotten and abandoned plain. To be safe, we scattered some rocks onto the grave to camouflage it more.
To finalize things, we stopped the car and threw our shovels into the rock quarry that was a few miles back down our path. The shovels freefell for a couple of seconds before splashing down into the water, making distant plops that sounded like books closing.
I dropped Becca off at her house. “Thank you, Nick...just...thank you.” She said to me, leaning into my car in front of the home. “You sure you don’t want to stay the night here?”
“I better get home, and besides, we need separate alibis, just in case.”
“I, I understand.” Becca took me by the hand and kissed me again, a rough kiss with cold, dry lips. “See you later.”
I drove home placid, without any anxiety, considering the events that had unfolded, I guess that was a good thing. Once Becca’s house faded out of view, small raindrops began to plop onto my windshield. This whole thing, the dizzying heights of finally getting close to Becca, followed by Jay’s death, it seemed like a cruel punctuation mark in my life, both things there, occupying one memory, to haunt me for years down the road. I had to go, I had to make the jump. I decided I would pack up everything I needed and I’d get on the next plane to New York City. Everyone needs a reason to escape the little cages called towns they grow up in, but some people just get pushed a little harder than everyone else to get them out, though I doubt many of them had that epiphany while dropping a tarp-wrapped corpse into a shallow grave with a co-worker they just had sex with. The rain picked up as I drove home, and I couldn’t help but feel that the rain was washing away all the awfulness of the night, baptizing me as reborn, as new.
4
The next morning I realized that I couldn’t just let this end, I couldn’t just let Becca go. We’d shared everything with each other, and even though we both were facing the possibility of hefty charges, if we both left soon enough, once they found Jay’s body Becca’s involvement with him would probably be nothing more than a footnote. Plus, they would probably not track her down even if they found him, he was just another drug dealer after all.
I drove back to her house so that we could formulate our plan to get out of here as soon as possible. Once I got into the driveway, I saw a black sedan pull up behind me, pinning me in. A couple of officers got out of the unmarked vehicle, their guns drawn. I got out of the car and one of the officers i
mmediately yanked me away and pinned me to the ground, his elbow digging into my spine as he tightened the cuffs around my wrists.
As it turns out, there was a reason that field was abandoned, never cultivated by a farmer for at least a century. It was a massive flood plain, and every time it rained the water rushed in, ruining any chances of planting crops. Even with a half inch of rain, the ground became saturated, and things began to float, even things with a few rocks and a trash bag full of bloody paper towels on top of them, would rise to the surface. A couple of kids on their four-wheelers, buzzing by the flooded area to get to some dunes a couple of miles away, found the rolled tarp on the edge of the water, a rusty cloud of blood and muddy water surrounding it.
The police identified the body as Jason Parks, a thirty-one year old convicted felon who was born just five miles from where his body was found.
The police had gotten a report from some neighbors saying they’d seen my car leaving Becca’s house late last night, and those same neighbors had even reported that they saw Becca and I loading something rolled up into the trunk of the car before speeding off.
The cops later told me, as I was being driven to the station for processing, that they’d come to the apartment to find Becca, whose last name was Charles incidentally...a detail I hadn’t even really cared to know even after I’d slept with her and killed her drug dealer boyfriend, but Becca was gone. Her roommate, Jane, said that Becca had simply vanished in the middle of the night without a note or any explanation, taking only a few things with her, including at least $10,000 in cash from the drug stash that was kept in the house, probably what Jay was coming for when he originally paid Becca a visit.
While I was at the station, waiting to be questioned as a person of interest in the murder, the cops let me know that there would be no reason for questioning, as the trunk of my car had yielded plenty of forensic evidence. It was dark last night, and I must not have noticed the blood that had seeped through the dark floormats into the foam pad that lined the inside of my trunk. Combining that fact with the scrapes on my hands, which were conducive to being in a pretty brutal fistfight the night before, the police were convinced they had their man.
