by Zoey Parker
He shut the trunk. “Ready?” he asked.
I nodded numbly and climbed in the passenger’s seat. He swung himself into the other side and started up the engine, then pulled out of the parking lot and onto the road that led back towards the apartment.
A question occurred to me. I’d been dying to ask for a long time, but I didn’t know who to consult or when the right time would be. Jay seemed like a good enough guy, and since I couldn’t say for sure if or when I’d ever see him again, I figured I had to give it a shot.
“Jay, why does my father hate Ben?” I asked quietly.
I saw Jay’s fists tighten on the steering wheel, but he didn’t say anything for a long time. It wasn’t until we arrived at the apartment that he finally spoke. “I can’t talk about that,” he said. “You’ll have to ask Ben yourself.”
I tried to get him to tell me something, but he wouldn’t budge an inch. He carried the packages of new clothes up to the apartment and deposited them in a neat pile on the coffee table. Just before he left, I grabbed his arm. “Jay, please,” I said. “I have to know why I’m in this mess. There’s more to it than just my father’s anger. There’s history; there has to be.”
He shook his head sadly. “There’s bad blood between them,” he said. “That’s all I can tell you. You’ll have to ask Ben to explain.” He walked out without another word.
Chapter Eighteen
Ben
“Nope, never seen him before,” the man said gruffly. He shut the door in my face.
I growled and slammed my fist against my thigh. Then, realizing I was crumbling the paper in my hand into an unusable mess, I relaxed and smoothed it out. I plucked the pen from my pocket and scratched off another name from the list.
I was painfully aware that going down all the John Robinisons in the phone book was an idiotic way of doing things, but I didn’t have any other ideas that struck me as particularly brilliant. Half a dozen down and not a single one of the bastards had ever even seen the man in the photograph that Ivan’s guy had given me. There were only a couple more, and then I would be back to square one.
Dina hadn’t been much use. I’d stopped by her place first, on the off chance that she knew something she hadn’t already told us years ago. One look at the picture and she shook her head confusedly. She looked up eagerly and asked, “Do you know something new? Are you going to catch them?”
“I don’t know, Dina,” I’d said. “I’m trying my damnest. I don’t know whether this picture is even helpful. Even if the guy does know something, it’s been three years since Olaf went down. The son of a bitch could’ve skipped town a long time ago.”
She’d clutched my arm, her grip surprisingly strong for a woman as tired-looking as her. “Find him,” she’d said, eyes blazing. “He knows something. I can feel it.”
I promised her I’d do my best, then I’d hit the sidewalks to beat down doors until someone gave me an answer worth chasing.
Yet, a full day later, it looked like I was going to come up empty-handed. I was down to the last JohnRobinsonthe book, and the sun was about to set behind me. I felt my muscles sagging on the bones. It was tiring to have doors slammed in my face over and over again, not just literally but figuratively, too. Every person who told me they’d never heard of JohnRobinsonnever seen a man like the one in the picture was one more severed possibility, one more nail in the coffin of my dead friend, my murdered brother.
I checked the address on the mailbox in front of me with the list in my hand. Yep, this was the place. One last visit before I headed home and tried to figure out what my next move might be. I walked up the driveway, climbed the short staircase to the porch, and pressed my thumb against the doorbell.
I heard it echoing inside, followed by the yip of a little dog and a man cursing. “Shut up, ya cunt,” he bellowed roughly. Slippered feet slushed along the floor, growing louder as he walked in my direction. The chain rattled and then the door was yanked open. “What do you want?” he demanded.
I looked up. It was him. John Robinson. There wasn’t a sliver of doubt in my mind that this was the same man. The mustache was gone, but there was no mistaking that bulbous nose and shiny bald head I’d been shoving in people’s faces all day. It was him.
I wasn’t going to take the chance of him getting away. I was sick and tired of being polite. A full day of rude assholes slamming a door in my face had worked my patience to the bone, and I was never a patient man to begin with.
I moved quickly. I leaned forward and planted one wide hand on the door to prevent him from shutting it. He began to shout, “What the fuck—” but the words were barely out of his mouth before I’d reached my other hand forward to pin him by his throat against the wall.
“Let’s go, motherfucker,” I growled. “You and I are gonna have a chat.”
His eyes bulged out of his skull as he gurgled, spit flecking on his lips. I threw him down the entry hallway and kicked the door shut, locking it behind me. I didn’t want to risk someone else coming home unexpectedly.
“Who the hell are you? How dare you assault me in my own home. I’m going to call the police right this fucking—”
“Shut the fuck up, John,” I said calmly. I turned and lifted the bottom edge of my shirt to show him the gun tucked into the waistband of my jeans. He turned white and stopped talking immediately. “Good man. Now, walk inside, and let’s have a seat. I’m not going to hurt you. I just have a few questions I’d like to ask.” I let the shirt fall back over my weapon. When he didn’t move, I raised an eyebrow and jerked my head towards the living room.
“Okay,” he mumbled, turning and shuffling inside. “This way.”
I followed him in. Something collided with my ankle and I looked down to see a curly-haired little dog planting its feet on my calf and looking up at me with its tongue out. “Cute pup,” I remarked.
“That’s Noodle,” he said. His voice was still shaking with fear.
“Come here, Noodle,” I said. I picked him up and placed him on my lap as I settled down on the plaid couch. “Sit, boy. You, too, John.”
John took a careful seat in the rickety chair that faced opposite the couch. He had put on a few pounds in the years since the picture I had was taken. A small potbelly stretched the fabric of his undershirt. “This is about what I saw, ain’t it?” he asked dejectedly. “The woman, Stanwell or Sanders or whatever her name was.”
I nodded slowly, keeping an eye on him as I petted the dog in my lap. Normally, I hated little rodent-looking fuckers like this, but for some reason Noodle was winning me over. He curled into a ball in the crevice between my knees and started to snore. “Tell me everything you remember,” I said.
“I knew it. You look just like the bastard who was there that night. The one who got all shot up.”
“Watch yourself,” I warned.
John blanched. “I’m sorry. Was he a friend of yours?”
“You could say that.”
“Well, I meant no disrespect. He was a mess, that’s all I’m sayin’. They did a number on him, poor fella.”
“Start from the beginning, John.”
He leaned back, sniffled, and wiped the back of his hand across his nose. “All right. I used to be on the force, yeah?” He pointed at a medal hanging on the mantle above the fireplace to my left. Albuquerque Police Department was stamped across the outer rim in big blue letters.
“Anyway, being a policeman ain’t exactly the road to El Dorado, if you know what I’m saying. Almost every guy in blue takes side jobs to make ends meet, put food on the table for the wife and kids, you know.”
“Sure.”
“Some guys do the seedier stuff—playing bodyguard for a mobster type, giving some of the coyotes a hand with pullin’ immigrants across the border, you know. I never had much of an appetite for that kind of thing, though. Too much risk. I ain’t much of a risk taker. But a man’s still gotta provide, and my ex-wife, being the money-grubbing whore that she was, didn’t make that easy on
me. So I took a job working security at night for an apartment building that one of the biker gang guys owned.”
“James Sanders.”
“That’s the guy. I never met him personally; it was all set up through a buddy of mine, God rest his soul. But it was a steady gig, it paid pretty well, and there was never any trouble. Well, until all of a sudden there was.”
I dropped the dog and scooted forward onto the edge of the couch. “Keep going,” I ordered. “Don’t leave out a single detail.”
John sighed and scratched at a scab on the side of his head. “I don’t think you’re gonna love what I have to say.”
“I don’t care. Just keep talking.”
“Okay. So, this night, the night everything went down, I was at the desk up front, as usual. I’m half paying attention, half reading the newspaper, ’cause I didn’t expect anything, you know? Nothing had ever happened before! Not an ounce of a stir, and then, boom! There he is.”
“Who?”
“That’s the thing,” he said timidly. “I don’t know.”
I was on John in a single pounce. I grabbed the front of his shirt in my hands and roared into his face, “Why don’t you know? Why don’t you know, John?”
“He was wearing a mask! He was wearing a mask!” he screamed. He was blubbering all of the sudden, fat, pathetic tears rolling down his face.
I dropped him back in the chair, disgusted, and wiped my hands on my jeans.
“Please don’t hurt me,” he moaned. “I’m telling you everything I remember, I swear.”
I sighed and plopped back down on the couch, my head in my hands. The dog jumped back into my lap. I was too depressed to shoo it away.
Ivan’s tip was useless after all. This sorry bastard had actually seen the motherfucker who did it, the man who killed Olaf and James’s wife, but I was no closer to figuring out who it actually was than I had been this morning. All this for nothing. Not a damn thing.
“He jumped over the desk and hit me with the gun,” he continued in a low voice. “I blacked out. When I woke up, the ambulances were there and the people were already dead. I swear, that’s all I remember.”
“Thanks,” I said. I stood up and started to walk towards the door, dropping Noodle back into John’s lap as I passed him.
“It was funny, though. The paramedic said he’d never seen such a weird bruise before. Looked like the outline of a big knife in my forehead.”
I froze in my tracks with my hand on the doorknob. “What did you say?” I asked cautiously.
John twisted in his chair to face me. “On my forehead, where the guy hit me. It left a big outline of a knife in the skin. They actually tested it and said there was red paint flakes in the wound. Weird. Never did figure out what that meant.
Red paint. A knife imprint. A memory hit me. Jay tossing a gun on my desk. “Duncan and Spark took this from one of the guards.” I looked at the butt of the weapon—a red knife was printed in the handle.
“You’re sure?” I asked.
“Scout’s honor,” he said, eyes round with seriousness. “Just one of those weird things, you know? It never led anywhere.”
I stared him down for a moment. As far as I could tell, he was telling me everything he knew. There was no reason for him to hold back. The police had finished interrogating him a long time ago. Besides, being unconscious during the crime made one neither a liability for the murderer nor a suspect for the police. They’d probably figured he was useless. I would have, too, if I were them. But now he was telling something that might take me one step closer towards finding this son of a bitch and doing what should have been done a long time ago: getting my revenge.
“Thanks, John,” I said. “You’ve been very helpful. If you remember anything else—anything at all—you come on down to the Dark Knights’ headquarters and you tell me.”
“Will do.” He nodded furiously. I was about to leave when he added, “And I’m sorry about your friend, by the way.”
“I am, too, John. I am, too.”
Chapter Nineteen
Carmen
I was on my knees, working away at a stain on the bottom edge of the oven that refused to yield an inch to my furious scrubbing. I heard the door squawk open and slam shut, followed by heavy, booted footsteps thumping into the room. Only men walked like that, as if they needed the whole world to hear them before they were seen. Men like Ben—full of enough testosterone and bravado to make a whole high school’s worth of teenage boys swoon in jealousy—were the worst offenders.
I was so close to peeling away the stubborn top layer of whatever vile substance had managed to cake itself on the stainless steel when I heard the footsteps come to a stop behind me. I set the sponge down with a sigh, rocked back onto my heels, and blew away the hair that had fallen over my face. Turning around, I saw Ben was standing and staring at me with his mouth agape.
“If you don’t close your mouth, something’s gonna fly in there,” I remarked.
He blinked hard and came to his senses. “What are you doing?” he asked dumbly.
“Well, what does it look like, Einstein?” I teased. “It’s not like I’m composing a symphony or doing brain surgery over here.”
“You’re cleaning.”
“I thought it was my job to state the obvious around here.”
He closed his mouth, opened it again as if he were going to say something, then stopped and frowned.
“You look way more confused than I would have expected,” I said.
“It’s just…I don’t even know. I never clean.”
“You didn’t have to tell me that. This apartment is a pigsty. How long did you say you’ve had this place?”
“Two weeks.”
“Two weeks?” I exclaimed. “Good God, do men just secrete disgusting messes and empty boxes of takeout Chinese, or did you buy all that pre-fab?” He looked even more confused and upset. I laughed. Who would have thought that it’d be so easy to get the infamously cool under pressure Ben Killmore to fluster? “Never mind,” I said, rescuing him from the need to come up with any kind of reasonable response to such a commonplace domestic activity. “I’m almost done anyway.”
“Okay.” He turned to walk away, but paused. “What’s that smell?” he asked, sniffing the air.
“That would be dinner,” I deadpanned. “Jay took me to a cooking supplies store today, so I bought a crock pot. I’m not that great of a cook, but those things make it easy for anyone. I bet even you could make something halfway decent.”
He was slowly coming back down to earth after the surprise and confusion I’d apparently inflicted upon him in droves. “That would be a losing bet, I’m afraid. My best dish is cereal.”
“Cereal? That’s it?”
“Well, I make a mean piece of toast, too.”
“Very impressive, Chef Killmore.”
“That’s Mister Chef Killmore to you.”
“Is that how those titles go?”
“My kitchen, my titles.” He smirked.
I giggled. “Yes, sir. Anything in particular I should know about your highness’s palate?”
“Yes,” he said with utmost seriousness, suppressing a playful grin beneath his scowl. “All meats must be hunted and killed by hand. Vegetables are to be home grown and skinned with a straight razor, none of this vegetable peeler nonsense.”
“Do you even know what a vegetable peeler looks like?”
“I wouldn’t be able to point one out if you stabbed me in the face with it.”
I laughed again. “I didn’t think so.” My knees were starting to ache from being pressed against the tile floor of the kitchen. I reached up and planted a hand on the counter to steady myself as I started to rise to my feet, groaning. I’d been crouched over for so long that my right leg was completely numb, and the second I tried to put weight on it, it nearly gave out under me.
Ben saw me beginning to tumble and rushed over immediately, catching me by the crook of my elbow and keeping me upright. “Ea
sy, tiger,” he said. “That first step’s a doozy.”
I blushed. It was fun bantering with him, but I didn’t like to look like such a weakling in his presence, as if I couldn’t even stand up without his assistance. I needed to prove to him that I was perfectly capable of handling my own business, that I wasn’t some whimpering little girl who required doors to be opened and seats to be pulled out for me. My daddy may have been a bastard, but he hadn’t raised a weak daughter, and I was determined to show that to Ben.
