Out Cold ddm-3

by Tom Schreck

  "Yeah, I guess."

  "Truly the All-American boy in that sense, too." We came up on the noise and chaos of a high school at lunch. I caught a whiff of the cafeteria smell, and my high school years came to me through my nostrils. I tried to decipher the aroma. The best I could come up with, fried frozen food and the horrible gravy that seemed to be there every day, in one form or another. Here it wasn't hard to believe Karl's theory about evil food conspiracies.

  The cafeteria doubled as an auditorium. Kids ran around yelling to each other, some wore ear phones connected to IPods, while others hunched over laptops staring at their computer screens rather than doing any human interaction.

  "Can I treat you to a Salisbury steak with Maybeline's famous yellow gravy," a voice said to us from behind. It was Jamal.

  "Please, just the mention of it gives me the shits. 'Ol Maybeline still in charge of the kitchen?"

  "Yep and still fuckin' up everything she can."

  "You know, Jamal, I thought old black southern women were supposed to be able to cook."

  "Ah shit, Duff, and I can tap with Sammy Fuckin' Davis Jr. You white people kill me."

  "Hey, this is my buddy, Karl." Up until now Karl had been standing, turned three quarters away from us, surveying the cafeteria. He turned to shake Jamal's hand.

  "What's up, man" Jamal said. "Hey, you played for VHS awhile didn't you?"

  "Yeah, halfback," Karl said.

  "I remember you. You had some hop."

  "For the Suburban League."

  "Yeah, I'm glad you said it," Jamal said. Karl went back to looking around the room.

  "Yo Duff, I love you like a brother from another mother, but you mind telling me what coming here is all about?"

  "Ah, well, we're kind of looking for someone or, more accurately, some thing."

  "You wanna explain?"

  "Uh, do I have to?"

  "Hey, man, you call me to come visit the school, you bring your friend here, who's been doin' some sort of surveillance thing and I'm not supposed to know. I think not, my friend." Jamal raised his eyebrows in the impossible way that gave him one of the most expressive faces I've ever seen.

  "Okay, everyone else in town thinks I'm nuts, why shouldn't you. We're looking for kids, maybe kids who are a little fucked up. Depressed, disenfranchised, angry, maybe even violent kids who might, you know, be angry with the world."

  "You just about describe all of adolescence, Duff." Jamal starred at me. "What the hell are you really talking about?"

  "We're looking for kids who might want to go Columbine." Jamal put his hands on his hips and starred at me. I looked back at him and kept his eyes as long as I could.

  "Duff, what the f-"

  "Them," Karl said, softer than his usual voice. "Them, what's their story?" He pointed with a nod of the head. In that direction was a group of kids dressed in black, with the requisite black boots, dyed black hair and dark tattoos.

  "C'mon, fellas. Those are the resident Goths. They're the wannabe angry teens trying to make a statement by being different-all of them being exactly the same different at the same time," Jamal said.

  "Duff, I got a feeling." Karl turned toward Jamal. "You remember Chipper Newstrom. He was the quarterback on my VHS team?"

  "Yeah, sure. He could play a little ball. It's weird you bring him up because I-"

  "He was here wasn't he?" Karl broke in.

  "Yeah. I saw him in the parking lot before class. How did you know?"

  Karl looked up at me. So did Jamal.

  "Holy shit." It was all I could think of saying.

  35

  We followed the kids in black after school. Eight of them and they smoked cigarettes behind the bowling alley, five blocks from McDonough. We sat in the El Dorado, two blocks away, watching the area they disappeared into through the woods and broken-down cement half wall that used to be part of a garage years ago. After 45 minutes, three of them came out, and looked like they were headed home. They laughed and walked like any other kids, except they all dressed in black and all had the same tattoos on their forearms. The one in the middle had another tattoo on the back of his neck.

  "Karl, how long are we going to sit here?" I said after another 45 minutes of watching kids through the trees and bushes.

  "I don't know, but it feels like we've got to do something," he said.

  "So far the most nefarious thing we got them doing is smoking cigarettes. You want to call Richie and Potsy and tell their moms?"

  "Either Newstrom has intervened already or he's still working on them. This thing could be going down tomorrow."

  "Or never," I said, starting to feel pretty stupid. Fifteen more minutes went by without us talking. It was getting darker. I didn't see the use of waiting around much longer.

  "Karl, I can't just sit here, it makes me nuts. I'm going to visit our friends in black."

  "Duff, I don't think that's a good idea. They could be dangerous."

  "Yeah, well, sitting around in a car listening to the two of us breathe is dangerous to my mental health." I opened the door and headed to the brushy area behind the bowling alley. I heard Karl's door open and close a few seconds behind me and his running footsteps as he caught up with me.

  "What are we going to do when we get there?"

  "They're scrawny kids. What are they going to do? Pop a zit on us or something? We're adults and they'll be scared of us because they'll think they're about to get in trouble." We got to the edge of the bowling alley. I looked at Karl. He raised his eyebrows as if to say 'What the hell?' I nodded as a signal to go.

  We walked around the corner, stepped over an overgrown hedge, and looked into a cleared circle with empty beer cans, cigarettes, milk crates, a tire, and an old bike frame. There were no kids there. It looked like every kid's spot for bush drinking I had ever seen.

  Karl walked ahead of me looking around.

  "They went out this way." Karl pointed to a hole in the fence that went to the back of the bowling alley. He bent over and picked something up.

  "Duff, you better see this."

  I walked over and looked at Karl's find.

  "Those are shell casings to a high powered assault weapon. They're similar to the ones I used. Newstrom would have access to them. He's been training them and he's equipped them."

  "How do we know it's not kids screwing around and this is their clubhouse type of thing? Maybe there is nothing more serious than target practice going on."

  "BB gun, slingshots, CO2 pistols are one thing, Duff. These are high-powered assault weapons. Where would McDonough kids get them?"

  I didn't have a plausible explanation for any of it and I knew it. It felt like something awful was about to happen and I didn't have a clue what to do about it. I decided to call Jamal and tell him what we had found.

  "Duff, I'm at practice. Can't this wait?" he said after picking up his cell phone. I told him I didn't believe it could wait and asked him for some of the kid's names. He told me the ringleader, if you could call him a leader, was Andy Katzman, and his two best friends were Michael Corona and Eddie Stain. He didn't know their exact addresses, but said they lived north of Jefferson Hill on the west side of the city.

  "Hey, Duff, what makes you so sure they're going to do something?"

  "Sometimes you get a feeling, Jamal."

  "How have your instincts been serving you lately?" I didn't have a good answer and hung up. Next I called Kelley and begged him to come see what Karl and I had found by the bowling alley. He wasn't pleased, but agreed to meet us there in a half an hour. In the meantime Karl and I went the six blocks over to the public library to look up the kids' addresses. We found three addresses for kids with the names Jamal gave us in the West Jefferson neighborhood.

  We got back to the bowling alley and saw Kelley had beaten us there. His cruiser, parked like any other car in the lot, idling like he was taking a break.

  "You got something to show me?" Kelley sounded just a tad more impatience than usual.

/>   "Follow us," I said. The three of us walked back to the area behind the bowling alley.

  "We found some shell casings to some serious assault weaponry. This isn't kid stuff," Karl said. We got to the back of the bowling alley, each of us swinging our legs over the half wall. In silence, the three of us walked to the center area where Karl and I had been about half an hour ago.

  "They're not here. They were here just a minute ago. Somebody must've come and scooped them up to cover their tracks," I said.

  Kelley just looked at me for a minute. Then he put his head down and kind of gently kicked the gravel. He looked up at me again.

  "He's not crazy, Officer," Karl said. "I saw them myself. They were from a military issue."

  Kelley kind of squinted at Karl; then he looked at me, and he put his head down again. He sniffed a little bit, looked up at me again, and then exhaled hard. It looked like he tried to say something, but he couldn't find the right words. Then he started to walk away.

  "C'mon Kell, I'm not nuts, I swear to God I'm not nuts." He kept walking and didn't slow up.

  36

  Back at the Blue it was time to make a plan. Everyone who knew me at all thought I was crazy. I knew Karl was crazy and Karl called himself crazy. I don't know if we made the foundation of a real strong think tank. Fortunately, we had a Black Muslim basset hound to help us-though his arch enemies appeared to be the sparrows.

  "Karl, if we're going to go through with this, we have to at least get some handle on what Newstrom and his high school buddies are going to do and when," I said. I paced back and forth in front of the couch where Karl sat with Al's head on his lap.

  "Yeah, that's kind of the tough part," Karl said.

  "Let's break down what we know. Let me think out loud and you fill in the gaps," I said. Karl sat up with his elbows on his knees. Al let out a heavy exhale and spun around on the couch three times.

  "Go Duff," Karl said.

  "Alright, what's Newstrom's goal? Money, right?"

  "It's only part money. The rest is power and control."

  "Okay, what are his resources? He must have the backing of someone or some group."

  "His resources are almost endless. He's literally got billions of dollars at his disposal."

  "What are our resources?" The room got quiet as we looked at each other and Al. "Okay, let's not focus on our resources too much." I chewed the end of my thumb because that's what guys in movies did when they thought deep thoughts. I was no Brad Pitt.

  "We have the knowledge of what's going on-no one but Newstrom seems to know or care," Karl said.

  "Which is why he cares about us. We know what he's up to, but everyone thinks we're nuts. Why does he even bother with us."

  "We're loose ends. He's military, he hates loose ends," Karl said.

  "So why not just kill us, make us disappear and be done with us?"

  "He might do that, but think about it Duff. You're reasonably well known and I'm your client. If we both turn up dead for no good reason, there will be questions asked. It's not efficient." Karl petted Al's head while he talked.

  "So you think his goal is to eliminate us while he has his gang of misfit kids go Columbine on McDonough."

  "That seems to be what he said. He would prefer it if I just killed myself. Then he might not have to do the other stuff here."

  "Do you think he believes you'd do it?" Karl looked down at Al, thinking.

  "There was a time I would've, and it was when he knew me. He could still believe I would," Karl said.

  "Could we fake your suicide and get him off our backs and maybe save ourselves and McDonough?"

  "How do you fake a suicide? We'd need help and everyone who could help thinks we're nuts."

  "Yeah." I stopped pacing and looked Karl in the eye. Al opened his eyes for a second and furrowed his brow. Then he closed them and rolled over on his back.

  "So if Newstrom's goal is to take us out and do a Columbine at McDonough, what can we do?" I said. The room got quiet while we both thought.

  "Duff?" Karl almost whispered.

  "Yeah?"

  "We can get him another way." Karl stood up.

  I looked at him and waited.

  "Look, he's used to getting what he wants. Shit, he's good at getting people to do what he wants. He's committed and he does what he sets his mind to. His goal is to get us out of the picture and get his Columbine. It's all about efficiency."

  "Yeah, so?"

  "Sometimes you got to go with the flow." Karl smiled.

  "What the hell are you talking about?"

  "We set ourselves up."

  "Huh?"

  "We make killing us and the school thing easy." I stared at him wondering how nuts he really was.

  "Look, Duff, we send him a message that we're going to be there to foil his plans and he'll have to kill us to make it happen. Give him what he wants on a silver platter." Karl started pacing in the living room too. It made for a tight space. "That way he'll come for us and we'll be there knowing he's coming."

  "So we somehow get a message to him saying we're going to stop him and he'll react and come for us. We tell him we're going to protect McDonough or something like that and he'll know exactly how to plan everything."

  Karl broke into a smile.

  "Can we get the message to him?"

  "Yeah, I can get it to him easy enough with a call or two. He'll be waiting. It won't be hard." Karl was excited about his revelation.

  "Karl, so we'll flush him out by making it easy to kill us and do his school project at the same time?"

  "Yes!"

  "You mean make ourselves sitting ducks?"

  "Exactly," Karl almost shouted.

  37

  The kid with the bad skin pulled out a rifle and shot me in the center of the forehead. Blood ran down my face and in into my eyes. My chest hurt. The second kid, the shorter one, pulled out his own gun and shot me in the chest. Blood poured out of me but I still stood.

  Jamal is saying to me I'm nuts and nothing is really happening, it is really all inside me. As he speaks to me he is shot in the head and though half of his skull is exposed, he continues to talk to me like nothing's happened. Blood continues to come out of my head and get in my eyes to the point where it is getting very hard to see.

  Jamal keeps on talking, asking me what's wrong with my eyes.

  My heart feels like it will implode inside of me. Then, the first shooter, the zit kid is right in my face smiling.

  "Duffy, you've gone crazy, you know," he says.

  A piecing sound and a wet swipe across my eyes made me look up. Al is sitting on my chest telling me to stop dreaming. He looks like he's hyperventilating and concerned.

  "I'm all right, Al. Take it easy."

  Al flopped off of me and headed to his chair to keep an eye on the sparrows.

  Nightmares suck. In fact, they suck so much that not sleeping is almost a better option. That is until you get about three days in a row without any sleep at all and you feel subhuman.

  Subhuman or not, I needed coffee. Taped to the Mr. Coffee was a note from Karl.

  I'm going to make contact with Newstrom. Wish me luck. I can't wait until we get the bastard.

  K.

  That's great. I was about to go to war with a guy who has a lifetime of espionage and dirty military tricks up his sleeve. I bet he wasn't sleep deprived or having creepy nightmares about zitfaced kids shooting him in the face. The other great thing, my partner in all of this, good 'Ol Karl, who I kept kind of forgetting was certified Looney Tunes. Currently, he was supposedly out to make contact with an agent of worldwide terror and corruption. The fact Karl might be wearing his Redskins helmet didn't give me a ton of solace. My coffee was only marginally better than the job's. Just not having to drink it within the proximity of the Michelin Woman probably accounted for the improvement in the coffee's taste. I called in again and said I would be faxing a doctor's note, which was a lie, but one I was confident I could get around. I flipped on t
he TV and went to one of the cable news networks. I could tell by the graphics and the reporters something out of the ordinary had happened.

  A reporter who looked half-black and half-Asian tried to keep an ear piece in while he posed in front of what looked like a high school. The graphics underneath him said "High School Slaying Outside of Nashville-Three Known Dead." The reporter got his cue to speak.

  "This is Karl Bendorf, in Crawford, Tennessee, where there are reports of a Columbine type assault on Crawford High School. Information continues to come in. Already there is conflicting information about what has occurred. One report is three students dressed in trench coats opened fire on a library filled with students, killing three and wounding several others. There is one confirmed death. A school employee named Elaine

  Fogarty was fatally shot in the face. There are other reports that as many as ten students have been killed but the report has not been verified. I repeat, it has not been verified…" Crawford, Tennessee? I didn't even know there was a Crawford, Tennessee. Did somebody get their information twisted and do the wrong crazy terrorist act? Is it just some sort of bizarre coincidence? I had no idea what to think. Almost as if on cue, the phone rang. It was Karl.

  "Where the hell are you?"

  "I tried leaving messages for Newstrom with my contacts and left word for him to contact me. So far I haven't heard anything yet," Karl said.

  "Have you been listening to the news. There's been some sort of shooting at a High school in Crawford, Tennessee."

  "What?"

  "You heard me." Silence came from the other end of the phone. After a long pause Karl came back on.

  "That's a mistake, a coincidence. It just can't be Newstrom."

  "How can you tell?"

  "It just doesn't fit."

  "You know, Karl, a lot of shit doesn't fit."

  "Hang on Duffy, I'll be home in an hour, and we'll make a plan then."

  He hung up. I looked at Al. He furrowed his brow and lay down to go to sleep. The whole thing didn't seem to make much sense to him either.