Fatal Intuition

by Makenzi Fisk

  “Have they issued a warrant yet?” He drained the rest of his beer and twisted off another cap. Between swallows, he rested the cold bottle against his throbbing testicle. He’d deserved it. He could see that now. What was he thinking?

  “Not yet,” Ernie’s voice dropped lower, “but Chief wants to talk. You need to come in now before this thing escalates.”

  “Is he there? He is, isn’t he?” Derek smiled. “Well, you tell the chief I’m innocent. Unless he has enough evidence to arrest me, and I know he doesn’t, he can kiss my hairy ass.” He ended the call and tossed the phone on the seat.

  The warmth of alcohol was replacing the searing pain in his groin when the lawyer’s car pulled in beside him.

  Richard skipped out the door and settled into Derek’s passenger seat. “You’re wanted for murder. I heard it on the radio.”

  “That’s a fine way to greet me, you little shit, and you’re wrong. They only want me for questioning. Ain’t no warrant because I didn’t do it.”

  Richard’s self-satisfied grin faded. “They seem to think you did.”

  “It makes no sense! Why the hell would I kill a man I didn’t even know was out of prison?” He pounded his fist on the dash of the rental car. “You’d better have a plan to get me out of this, Dick.”

  “They say you knew. They say you met with him that night.” His lawyer slumped in the seat beside him. “They say he’s the one who cut off your ear, back when you were—”

  “Okay, if you’re gonna bring that up, get it straight.” Derek forced the words through clenched teeth. “He didn’t cut off my ear. He bit it off. Like a goddamn rabid dog.”

  The lawyer’s eyes bugged out, and he stretched his lips into a tight grimace. “And then they called you van G—”

  “You weren’t inside! You’ve got no right to say that.” Derek leaned close enough for angry spittle to fleck the lawyer’s cheek.

  Grimace frozen on his face, the lawyer dared not make a move to wipe it.

  “They’re out to get me. I ain’t going back to prison. Get your ass into the station, and fix this.”

  “We can talk about that in a minute.” Richard slid an envelope onto the seat between them. “Here’s your money.” He flashed unnaturally white teeth that contrasted with artificially tanned skin.

  Derek hated him for it. His nose was too straight and his hair was too black. Why didn’t anyone look normal anymore? He riffled through the envelope, and held up three fingers. “I said three grand, Dick.” He curled his lip. “Not two. Three.”

  Richard’s cheeks reddened. “There is still the matter of my fee for your private investigator’s license. I simply deducted the registration—”

  “You don’t deduct squat.” He leaned over and exhaled beer-soaked breath. “I’m a desperate criminal, remember? I’m likely to lose my cool and murder you right here.”

  “Whoa, whoa, here’s the rest.” The lawyer retrieved a roll of twenties and dropped it onto the seat. He pulled out a second roll to place beside the first. “This is an extra thousand. A total of four. And I’ll agree to represent you at trial on that murder charge.”

  “Ain’t gonna be no trial.”

  “What do you say we resolve this with a little exchange? I’ve been thinking about your offer.”

  “What are you talking about?” Derek frowned.

  “Well, you offered to take care of my business partner.” His eyes darted to the alley and back. “You know, rough him up some.”

  “Don’t tell me, you’ve changed your mind, and now you want me to break both of his arms for diddling your wife?”

  “Not exactly. I’d like you to take care of my wife , permanently.”

  Derek stared at him. He set down his bottle, curled his fingers tight, and split open his barely healed knuckles on Richard’s face. The first punch flattened his nose. The second smashed the lawyer’s mouth and sent him backwards. He leaned across and pulled the door latch. With his boot, he shoved the man out onto the gravel in a humiliated heap.

  “I ain’t no killer for hire, and I don’t hurt women.” He swallowed the rough lump in his craw. He was not a monster. No, he wasn’t. “Don’t ever contact me again.” He pulled the door shut and spun his tires, leaving the man to spit blood through broken teeth.

  Derek slammed the gas pedal to the floor and hit the main road at highway speed. It occurred to him that if a patrol car spotted him, it would all be over. He swore through his clenched jaw and slowed the car. The lawyer had him all wrong. No matter how angry he’d been at his ex-wife, he’d never lifted a hand to her. That thing with Gina hadn’t really happened. It was a hallucination or something. That’s not the kind of man he was.

  Really, was he sure about that? Was he the reason his daughter was bad? Was it genetic? Had Tiffany given Lily the nightmares she drew on the closet wall? Had she really run off and left their daughter? Left him? Maybe it was all his fault. He was poison in their lives. Now, Lily was in a Canadian juvenile detention center, and Tiffany was gone. Had they failed so miserably as parents that they’d destroyed their kid?

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  In my dream, I shove my mother into the deep end of the bog. She’s always telling me what to do. Shut up. Shut up! I hit her with my stick, and mud fills her open mouth as she’s sucked under. A pocket of air burps to the surface, and then smoothes over as if she had never been.

  I squat alone on the little trail, her abandoned purse halfway between me and the spot where she disappeared from my life. The sun moves in the sky and the shadow by the rock inches toward me. Flies buzz around my head. Somewhere a crow calls.

  Inside, I expect to feel agony, sadness, all those emotions they talk about in the movies but there’s nothing, not a damn thing except a burning desire to know what’s in her purse. Finally, I get up to fetch it, take what I want and fill it with rocks. I throw it in after her. She’s never coming back.

  Worry I’ll be discovered, and relief that she’s gone, flutter together in my chest. I smoke all her cigarettes until my head pounds. It’s time to go. As I turn my back, a skeletal hand darts from the ooze. Bony fingers reach for me, gouge bloody trails in my skin. My mother’s face emerges, mouth open in a ghostly wail.

  “Mommy! Mommy!” I shove T’s arm off my bare chest and sit up.

  He groans, squints at me and rubs his eyes.

  It’s dark. Long seconds pass before I remember where I am, somewhere in Montana, or is it Idaho? In the old house where we are hiding out from the cops.

  My mother’s screams still echo in my ears, even through my cupped hands. She screams louder, and louder. I’m going insane.

  I rake the last few pills off the coffee table and shove them in my mouth. I don’t care what color they are, as long as they make the noise stop.

  T reaches over and slides a bottle toward me. “Nightmare, snuggle-bunny?”

  “I don’t dream.” I snatch it up, and down the pills with a few swallows of warm beer left over from last night. “And I don’t get fucking nightmares. That’s for pussies.” I wrap my shirt around myself and lean back. I’ll feel better soon.

  “Whatever you say, but yelling ‘Mommy’ in your sleep sure sounds like a nightmare.” He’s ready for it and deflects my backhand before it connects.

  When I’ve finished what’s left in the bottoms of all the abandoned beer bottles on the coffee table, my headache eases. “We’re out of pills and we’re out of beer. It’s time to go.”

  “Okay.” He gets to his feet and pulls his sweaty T-shirt on, adjusts his stained ball cap, and tucks his dark hair behind his ears. “Let’s see if there’s anything here we missed first. We were pretty wasted the last time we searched.” He tosses a crocheted doily at me and it makes a spiderweb across my face.

  I hate those dainty little things. It reminds me of churchlady’s house back in Morley Falls. Everything so neat, and tidy, and old. It was all old.

  He disappears into the back of the house and I hear the toilet flush. Then
he whoops like he’s scored a touchdown. “We forgot to check the bottom drawer in here.” He comes out with a handful of prescription bottles. “Look at all the goodies I scored.”

  I check the labels. “Oxy-something. You smeared it and I can’t read the rest.”

  He laughs with glee. “Don’t worry bunny rabbit, anything that starts with Oxy is bound to be good.” He pops open the bottle and puts a tiny white pill on his tongue. “What else do we have?”

  “There are red capsules, yellow ones and pink ones too.” I dump them all out of their bottles and mix them up in my hand.

  “That one looks good.” T reaches for a shiny red capsule. “I’ll have it for dessert.”

  I snatch it away at the last second, and he looks like I kicked his puppy. “Loser. You’re so slow.” The pills I already swallowed burn my stomach, and all the straight lines of the room bend into waves. Memories of the skeleton ghost in my dream flutter.

  “Give me those.” He chases me around the coffee table.

  With one hand holding my T-shirt in front of me, I keep the pills clenched tight in my other fist. His eyes flit to the revolver and back. I stop dead. “You wouldn’t.”

  “I’m smarter than that.” He snatches my shirt from my fingers and runs. I am after him like a panther, ready to rip him to shreds, but my legs don’t cooperate. Walls fold around me like wet cardboard.

  By the time I get to the kitchen, T has my shirt in the sink and is standing by an electrical switch on the wall. “Give me those pills or say goodbye to your shirt.”

  “Kiss my ass. I hate that shirt.”

  He flips the switch, and a god awful noise emanates from the garbage disposal unit beneath the sink. “You sure?” A wicked smile twitches at the corner of his baby mustache when he turns on the water tap and pushes my T-shirt into the drain.

  I narrow my eyes and turn on my heel. “You’re a pig. You always take too many. I’ll hold the pills.” I jam my fist into my pocket and walk out, naked from the waist up, to the sound of T laughing and my shirt being torn to shreds.

  In the living room, I pull out my lighter and hold it to a goddamn crocheted doily. Flames devour the lacy edges. I toss it on the couch when it singes my fingers. It smolders out. I light another, and another, until they’re all a heap of charred thread. The pills are no longer making me dizzy. Now I feel like I am standing a foot above the floor, and my fingertips buzz with energy. Maybe I’ve finally transformed into a superior being.

  I toss my head back and laugh, but no sound escapes. Instead mud erupts from my guts and splashes on the pink carpet. My mother’s skull rises to mock me with its black stare. She’s coming for me. Head first, I dive in to gather her bones in my arms. I kick to the surface and stack them like cord wood on the shore. I must burn them. Burn her. I have to get her before she gets me.

  “Lily! What are you doing?” T’s big hands shake my shoulders and I realize he’s standing over me, brows furrowed over dark eyes. “Are you tripping?”

  “I have to burn her bones.” I shake my head to clear my vision. Someone’s smashed the legs off the coffee table and I’m twisted in the throw blanket from the back of the sofa. My fingers are squeezed tight around my lighter. “I want to burn this place down.”

  “Is this about the lady from church? Are you thinking about how you killed her?” His breath comes, quick and shallow, and he shoves a hand sideways into his jeans pocket. “Tell me about it again.”

  “Churchlady? Oh, her. I actually didn’t know it would happen like that.” My head is filled with images of my mother rising out of the mud, and it’s hard to wrap my head around what he’s asking. “I don’t want to talk about churchlady.”

  “Please, sugar. Please? Tell me how you blew the back of her house clean off. Did you see her explode? Tell me what the fire smelled like. When did you know you’d killed her? Tell me how it felt. Do it for me.”

  I’ve told him before, and I tell him again, in a monotone. He thinks that was the first time I’d ever killed anyone, but it’s not. My mother was first, but I’m not talking about that. If I say the words out loud, she’ll hear. And she’ll claw me into the muck with her.

  When I’m finished describing how churchlady’s blackened shoes stood empty on the top porch step, he drops to his knees beside me. He peels off his T-shirt and slides it over my naked shoulders. It hangs on me like a trash bag. “Sexy,” he murmurs. He fusses with the oversize neck so it doesn’t slide off my shoulder, and looks down at my hands. “Here, let me help.”

  I relax my fist, and let him take the lighter from my stiff fingers. Solemn as the god he wants to be, he holds it out in front of his bare chest and ignites the corner of the paper take-out bag. Flames leap upward when he holds it to the drapes, and smoke roils like dragon’s breath across the ceiling. The fire alarm shrieks.

  T yanks me to my feet and presses the lighter back into my hands. “Your turn.”

  I light the rest of the wrappers, one by one, and toss the fireballs. My mother fades with each smoky breath I inhale. I’m done. “Let’s go.”

  “Just a sec.” He disappears into the bedroom and emerges, pulling on a western shirt that must be a hundred years old.

  I cover my mouth before I laugh in his face. “You look like a gay cowboy.”

  “You know I make this look good.” He snaps the pearl button on the breast pocket and stuffs the gun into the back of his jeans. “Let’s go get something to eat, sweet cheeks.”

  When we drive away from the house, an orange glow behind the curtains bids us goodbye. Fire is my friend.

  We drive until early afternoon and swap license plates, but we both know we need a new car soon. T has been begging for hours. It makes no difference because I won’t give him any more drugs until we stop for the night. He’s a useless moron when he’s high, and he chopped up my favorite shirt in the goddamn garbage disposal. His smells like a billy goat, so I’m not sure I can forgive him for it. He’s all smug in his gay cowboy shirt, driving like a boss, and I’m here in his sweaty, smelly shirt that’s falling off my shoulders.

  We do a gas and dash somewhere near Yellowstone Park, and T even scores us some food before we make a run for it. He’s more controlled, less of a maniac when he’s not high.

  “Blowing shit up is more fun than burning shit down,” he says out of the blue.

  “What are you talking about?” I lick the last of my lunch off my fingers and toss the wrapper out the window.

  “Remember how it felt when that lady’s house blew up in a big fireball? I know how to do that, on purpose. It’s way more fun to blow shit up than to play with matches.”

  “Shut up.” What right does he have to criticize my love of fire? “Asshole.”

  “Come on, sugar.” He tilts his head at me. “Don’t be like that. I’m only suggesting that you’d enjoy explosive devices. I used to make bombs with my buddies. It’s fun.”

  “I don’t think it’s my thing.” I imagine my lighter heating up in my pocket, burning a hole through my thigh in retaliation. The vision of churchlady’s house returns, the explosion and the concussive force of the blast knocking me on my ass, the wonder, the sheer awe of such power. My heart beat fast enough to tear through my chest. “Maybe. I’m just saying maybe.”

  His little mustache twists, but he’s smart enough to play it cool. “Awesome,” he whispers. “We are gonna have so much fun together.”

  I lean back in my seat and pull the huge T-shirt up over my head. He can drive for a while longer.

  Movement in my pocket wakes me and I instinctively lash out. We’re stopped on the side of the road and T withdraws his hand to pop something into his mouth.

  “You shit!” I kick him away. “I told you, no more until tonight.”

  “Only a couple, sugar.” He sticks out his tongue to show me that he finally got one of the bright red gel capsules. The dessert he wanted so badly. Beside it is a small yellow tablet, and he swallows quick before I can stop him.

  “Id
iot.”

  He flashes a row of white teeth and slides back behind the wheel. “Showtime. We need gas and there’s a little place up ahead. I doubt there are security cameras.”

  “Whatever.” If he does something stupid, I’ll put my knife in his throat and leave him behind. I don’t need his shit. I cross my arms, turn my face to the window, and ignore him until we get there.

  He pulls in front of the gas pump and gets out to fill up. “Stay out of sight, sweet thing.”

  I scrunch in my seat. By now, there could be descriptions of us everywhere. I imagine wanted posters on every fence post, like in the old west. In the picture, I’m leaning against the front bumper with the revolver in one hand and my knife in the other, a sneer on my lips. I wish it were true. It could be true if we had a camera.

  When T goes in for food, I follow. He shoots me a look and shrugs when the guy behind the counter ignores me. While he picks stuff off the shelves, I check out the cell phones. I’ve never had one, but kids in school were married to theirs, might as well have been, because they took them everywhere. They’d crowd around each other’s tiny screens, whisper and laugh. No one ever asked me to look at their phone. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that they were scared shitless of me. Well, fuck ‘em. Now I’m going to get my own.

  “Would you like to look at this one?” The man behind the counter has magically appeared, and can’t take his eyes off the way T’s big shirt hangs open at my neck. I’m pretty sure he can see right down to my belly button.

  “Yeah.”

  He takes one out of the box and turns it on. It lights up with rows of little square pictures when he hands it to me. I have no idea what to do but the kids at school poked at theirs, and wiped those little pictures around, so I do too.

  “Nice display, isn’t it? It works on GSM, HSPA and LTE. It’s got quad core processors and a sixteen megapixel camera.”

  None of that makes sense except the word camera. “Does it take good pictures?”