by Mike Wehner
THE
GIRL
WHO
CAN
COOK
A novel
Mike Wehner
(WAYNE - err)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, events, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2018 Michael J. Wehner
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, digitally stored, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the express written consent of the publisher. Unless you are singing it wild praises, in which case do what you can to help this and other independent authors everywhere.
ISBN (eBook) - 978-1-7322911-0-2
ISBN (Paperback) - 978-1-7322911-1-9
Published by Progressive Thoth
eBook & cover design by Mike Wehner
http://www.mikewehner.com
In loving memory of Citizen.
and
To my wife Katherine, minion, friend, finite, skeptic, favorite, infinite. The upper limit of my sequence, without you I trend towards nothingness.
“For the bear there was a moment of recognition [of her murdered cub] but bears are constantly living in the present ... and in the present moment ... what’s there now is meat on the ground.
...It’s a simple decision at that point if we don’t carry the traumas of our past with us, there’s meat on the ground. You eat the meat.”
—Aubrey Marcus, The Joe Rogan Experience, Episode 809
One
DAY 947
They say you don’t love someone if you’ve never wanted to kill them, if that’s the case then Erin Rhodes was my soulmate. A cheeseburger is something you want—my need to hurt her was entirely different.
My car sat in the dark spot between two street lights in front of Erin’s restaurant and I watched silhouettes chew and grin through the glass. I had hours before she was done for the night, before she jerked the front door twice to make sure it was locked and then slid out the back alley towards her car.
I thumbed through a set of pictures on my lap, long since memorized on how to get inside her silver hatchback without a sound. How to shimmy open the door with screwdrivers wrapped in dish towels then fish a plastic pipe through the gap to punch the unlock button and let myself in.
When I got tired of the photos I studied the front door, who ate there, what they wore.
A man struggled to park in the space ahead of me. He swung his boring sedan towards the curb and backed it out after he’d cut the wheel too soon. The poof of frizzy hair blooming over passenger seat reached over to console the driver with a forearm pat, like it wasn’t a big deal. It was, whether she wanted to admit it or not. The beasts have relocated, parallel parking is a survival skill in the aluminum wilds of San Francisco’s East Bay.
My white T-shirt flashed to pink in his brake lights and I wondered if that was the color blood made once it soaked into a shirt. White. Pink. White. Pink-pink. Was that Erin’s color inside, diet blood?
Her parts must be different from mine. Did she have the blue blood of a spider, or was it a leech’s green? Tonight I find out I thought, tonight the female isn’t deadlier than the male. Tonight, she never sees it coming.
I sat there so long that the people I watched go in started coming out, so I studied them again to see how they changed. I’d tried to go inside when I first arrived in California but the front door was too heavy to move. My footsteps echoed louder the closer I got to the entrance, but when I grabbed the handle a snuff film erupted in my mind’s eye that ended with me in handcuffs. I wanted her dead, but not if I was going to end up in a cage. I’d been sitting out in the dark ever since, scheming ways to kill her without being found out. Erin was the one who deserved to be punished, not me.
The kitchen was at the back of the restaurant, behind the rows of talking heads. I only saw it when an explosion of fire burst up from a pan, exposing the room with a brief sepia filter that gave the distant shadows shape. A spark of brandy for the pork, rum for the bananas.
After a final study of the photos I paced the block of rubber-stamped storefronts to see if any were open. The pig in the window of the butcher had closed branded on its belly. The bank was dark save for one florescent light in the ceiling. The mattress store empty. I noted the cross streets then walked the alley behind the restaurant and stomped in every puddle to find holes that might break my ankle as I fled the scene of the crime. Nervousness began to swirl in my gut. My gloved fingertips tingled when I dragged them across the passenger door of Erin’s car.
It was parked along a side street, in a smart spot where the city had removed the yellow line from the curb and the gingivitis stain left behind deterred anyone but a savvy local from parking there. Her tiny hatchback sat in front of a specialty oil and vinegar shop where you might buy your mom a bottle of tangerine balsamic that she’d keep for a year then throw away. The rain-wet street steamed and the mosquitoes swarmed when I double-checked the license plate. In the bottom center of the back window was an ironic sticker that said, "ENOUGH," a campaign I’d seen on TV aimed at ending domestic violence and sexual abuse. It stretched a tilted Grinch’s smile across my face, assured she was a deluded monstrosity. Once I was in the car there’d be no turning back.
I dug my fingers into the door frame and jerked it back a few times before the first screwdriver slid in the top. Hands occupied, I spat and blew at the buzzing insects in my ears. I jerked on the handle to pry open a gap and jam the second screwdriver in—then palm-punch it down to the frame. A gap formed to slide in a piece of plastic tubing and stab at the shadowed lock controls.
The sketchy guy in the FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY video fired through these steps in under fifteen seconds according to the timer at the bottom of the screen. I kept that pace until I had to push the unlock button. The lip of the pipe rolled off the switch or bowed when I pushed on it too hard. Focused on the task, I stopped paying attention to my surroundings.
“Hey, what are you doing?” a meaty pedestrian asked from behind me.
“A friend of mine locked her keys in the car.”
“What’s all that stuff you have?”
He pulled his cell phone from the pocket of his jeans and held it out like a handgun.
“Look,” I reached for my phone, “we found this video on how to get into her car. I have it queued up. I think I might be doing something wrong, maybe you can help.”
“Where’s the owner?” He lowered his phone after pressing a few buttons. I kept my voice steady.
“She’s on her way, went home to try and find the spare key. Poor girl can’t afford a locksmith and we don’t want to break the window. You want to try and push the button? I’m getting really frustrated,” I said with the pole held out as a peace offering.
The man took the plastic in his hands and bowed it a few times, then shrugged and poked it through the slot. By the flashlight function of my phone he was able to unlock the door after five or six firm stabs. I thanked him for getting me laid maybe, he chuckled and walked on.
I rested the door against the latch then vanished into the alley to throw my tools into the nearest dumpster. The trash man must have come that day because the first screwdriver gonged against the empty metal bottom—sending my heart into a frenzy. I slid the rest of the tools down the front lip and walked back to the car wishing I had a way to clean the dumpster goo from my forearms.
The front passenger’s seat was tilted back like someone had been napping on a road trip. Coffee cups and wax papers with fractal che
ese smears catapulted onto the floor when I flopped the seat up. Paranoia continued rising and I looked off in every direction simultaneously to make sure I wasn’t seen.
In the back seat, I yanked a tangle of extra-long zip ties from my coat and fed the ends through their eyelets until they clicked once to form rings. The various loops piled up in a plastic popart heap of blues and yellows and greens. I sized each circle over the headrest to find one that was right diameter and weight.
I jammed the ill-fitting loops underneath the seat and set the chosen in the center of the floor beneath me. I joined the ring, starting with my knees and wiggle-wiggled into the dark below. I wrapped my hands tightly at ten and two on the ring and pressed my nose into the ketchup stained carpet. Under the seat, the cap of a red lighter reflected the rays of a street lamp. I ducked and peeped the shimmer of light off the metal top to pass the time.
Down there in the dark was like any other night in bed, I closed my eyes and I’m in the rectory with John’s family. We’re standing over his five-bulleted body in a circle holding hands. Tonight the holes made a stigmata with a head shot, other nights I don’t remember.
On the floor with nothing to obstruct my view I laid with a revisionist image of my dead best friend splattered across my sight line, murdered in his own home by the woman he loved. I squeezed the sharp plastic edges with excitement, I was ready to encircle Erin’s head, spiral it shut around her throat then zip-click-tug until it could get no tighter. Tonight the pain would end, she was finally going to get what she deserved.
Voices in the street and footsteps on the sidewalk raced my heart, sweat and breath heavy with worry that someone might see my spine cat-stretched through the window and call the cops. The police would drag me from the bottom of the car to the bottom of the world and bludgeon me to death without asking why I was there. Without giving me the opportunity to explain to that this was a necessary evil, that I was a real-life superhero out fighting crime and giving the bad guy what she deserved.
I wondered which part of me to defend when they dragged me out. Both hands over my face or one across the head and the other down low to protect my organs from the sharp knock of their steel-toed boots. I mimed out the defensive position I’d take and as my right arm cradled my rib cage and my left covered my forehead the gravel shuffle of feet scratched on the road above me.
I eased my hands back to the plastic ring, the door locks chunked and the front door swung open with a creak. I pressed my hands into the floor as hard as I could to keep them from shaking.
I eased the zip tie up the side of the door, head down, suckling on rotten tomato air.
The front seat rocked and settled as the girl sat and her keys scraped on the ignition.
I inhaled and exploded upwards, perfect circle in hands—certain the tie end faced me. Her shoulders were my new targets of ten and two, the loop slid easily over the headrest and bounced up over her nose.
Her hands flew up, flailing and swatting, then both arms raced towards her throat the second I yanked back on the tie.
She thrashed in every direction. The bottom rim of the plastic hung up on her collar bone—which gave her the freedom to rake and slap at my face and ears behind the seat. The flesh peeled off her neck with each click, click, click. The pinned skin popped the same way pork fat does when you rip it off the top of an untrimmed shoulder. Once the collar was secured under her chin I pressed my forehead against the back of the headrest. Her panicked claws took more of my ear and I huffed a muted sigh of relief into the dense fabric.
Blood pinged my forearms as the tie pinched her windpipe shut. The girl had two fingers pinned beneath the wire which made her left elbow flap and knock the window each time I jerked on the cord.
I stopped a notch or two short from as-hard-as-I-could to watch her from behind, to press my palm into the back of the seat and feel the fight and struggle as she suffocated.
After a gorgeous few seconds of frenzy the jerks became more desperate but less frequent. Her amplitude had peaked, the feminine wave would soon become a flat line.
Her light was almost out when a knotted swirl of golden hair unpinned from her ponytail and bobbed between my head and the review mirror.
I shot my face between the seats to get a look at her. No, no, no. This was wrong. Erin’s locks weren’t blond, her hair was the color of a feral Irish pit bull. It was maybe-brown or maybe-red but who cares it’s on a monster we have to kill it.
I’d never met Erin but I knew her face. I knew it from photos, videos, and even one of those 10 p.m. network true crime spots on horrible things that are supposed to happen in the great beyond, to other people and not to your people. The stammering blond girl in the driver’s seat wasn’t the Erin Rhodes I set out to kill and collateral damage wasn’t acceptable—this was justice not war.
“Easy, stop writhing,” I said and eased my hands to her shoulders. She shuddered. Purple faced, the girl seized back at me. I bit and tore at the thick blue nubbin where the zip tie came together, each tug pinched the back of her head to the seat. Teeth locked and head twisted, I remembered the packaging that had drawn me in: for industrial use, unbreakable.
I let go and she gulped a huge breath of air. The tie was stretched far enough that she could breathe, but not well. Both her hands tugged on the collar and once she had air back in her lungs she roared at me with all the hate and all the fear.
Blood from torn gums filled my mouth and smacked metallic while she screamed. She didn’t cry or plead, she fought. I liked that.
“Fuck you,” she said a hundred times. “Psychotic piece of shit.” She clawed at me with pretty teal fingernails even though I was trying to set her free.
“Don’t move, stop, I promise I am getting it off.” The red lighter was now underneath the tie where it stretched. Blood stung my right eye. The car filled with noxious rot and after a few seconds of heat I plucked it to see if it would break. It didn’t, so I flamed on until both my eyes burned and my lungs filled with soot. A violent cough blew the lighter out and the tie gave way.
The pretty girl slammed forward onto the steering wheel and it honked for a lightning strike which stiffened her upright. She snapped back up and slashed my arm one last time as she shot out the door and ran through the back alley along my primary escape route. I was happy to see her go, she had more passion for hurting me than I’d ever had for Erin. I was afraid to look in her eyes and see what fractional madness I might hold in my own. I splashed puddles down a dark passageway, jetted up a side street and found my car in the dark spot between twin circles of light.
◆◆◆
A year later I sat in the same spot watching different heads swivel and nod while they ate. The light was different now, it rung across the hood and splashed down through the windshield. A white book on the passenger seat lay in a private spotlight inside the shadowed car. The sun was down and the windows up, sweat collected on my upper lip and salt water ran between the cracks into my mouth. A tangled couple shuffled out of the restaurant’s front door, their arms knotted together as they doted up the street. They seemed happy for having left that place and I’d be no different.
This was my first time back to that street, to its light and its dark, but I’d never left California. I was going to finish what I started but I couldn’t kill someone unless I was sure that I ought to. My job interview at Essen was scheduled for 9 a.m. the next morning.
Grief Journal
OPENING PAGE
Plan B: If I don’t get the job I’ll book a flight out of this mild-weathered nightmare and stop off to stab her in the heart on the way to the airport.
0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21
My dad told me that he and Mom were getting divorced on an April morning before school. I was thirteen or so and sat in homeroom an hour later waiting for the middle school version of the morning news to come on. I was upset, not by what he’d said but by the matter-of-fact way he’d said it. Dad was faucet of platitudes who worked as an electrician but
hated everything that ran on electricity. An analog guy who believed a man should mow his own lawn, shovel his own snow, and shut the hell up if life was hard because things could always get worse.
When the news clicked on a reporter was standing in the rain next to a mousy teen girl, face streaked with mascara, wailing about her fallen hero Kurt Cobain. Cut to a shot of his lifeless foot in a One Star through the doorway. Cut back to the girl in an extra-large T-shirtcovered with crooked lyrics and song titles—scribbled on with colored markers that smelled like fruit. Across her breasts it read: Milk It. I put my head down on my desk and cried so hard the snot pooled and ran off the edge into my shoe. I hated Nirvana.
That was the last time I remember crying and that’s what I thought of the night John was killed. I tried to remember what it was like to cry because I couldn’t. I was the man of the house now my dad told me all those years ago, no time for tears.
When a man like that suggested I look into, "gettin' some kinda therapist," I took it to heart. This was after John’s funeral. I went on a leave of absence from work and spent most of my time on the couch watching TV with the volume too low to hear but loud enough for the muffled infomercial voices to keep me awake. Dad came by every few days after work with beer, at three or eleven. His condolence mutated into condescension as the weeks passed.
Mom came too, with pans of lasagna and she’d pull a chair next to the couch and rub my head from above while I rubbed my dog Zeke's the same heartfelt way. She collected empty beer bottles and counted them off as each one clinked into the recycling bin. When Dad stopped bringing beer and started suggesting therapy I complied.
I saw Dr. James. Then I saw Mrs. Gallmeyer. After they didn’t work out it was on to Tim—don’t know what his title was. Tim ironed his jeans and crossed his legs all the way over so his feet came together backwards, pinkie toes stacked. He clicked his loafers when he thought I was taking too long to answer a question—it made me feel the way a waiter does when you snap your fingers to get their attention.
