by John L. Monk
“I ain’t going nowhere!” she shouted, beginning to cry. “It’s raining! Wouldn’t have come with you if I knew you was gonna toss me so fast. I ain’t leaving, I don’t care what you do!”
She seemed the type that could fly off the handle at any moment, start throwing things and cause a scene. The last thing I wanted was someone calling the police and learning my ride had warrants out on him.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “What’s your name again?”
“Sally,” she said, wiping her eyes.
“Okay, Sally. Do you need me to help you find your clothes?” Helpful. Polite.
“It’s raining!” she said, pointing at the window.
I walked over and pulled the curtains partially open. Rain pelted the window, blurring my view of the nearly empty parking lot. The closest vehicle was a large minivan. I felt the glass with my hand—too cold to send anyone out in the rain.
When I turned around, Sally was standing with the bottle of whisky, pouring another drink for herself.
She blinked at me and said, “You want some?”
“No, thanks,” I said, shaking my head. “You go ahead.”
She didn’t nod or smile or say thank you back. She drank it down fast and poured another, grimacing as she did it. I hoped it’d knock her out. She probably did too.
I got the sleeping bag from the suitcase and flattened it, then looked for an extra pillow in the closet and smiled when I found one.
“What are you doing?” Sally said, eyeing me suspiciously. Her voice had changed. Deeper now, more careful.
“I think I’ll sleep down here tonight,” I said.
“For what?”
“I’m being a gentleman.”
She didn’t say anything at first. Then she started to laugh.
“You do that,” Sally said, and didn’t bother with the glass as she finished off the rest of the bottle in a single, long pull. She steadied herself briefly against the wall and sat back down on the bed. Her cigarette lay smoldering on the rug, so I took it and flushed it. When I came back, Sally’s eyes were closed in peaceful slumber. The poor thing. In sleep she looked almost ghastly.
Ever the gentleman, I covered her with the blanket.
I found clean underwear in the suitcase and put it on. Then I sat back on the chair and flipped through the channels on the TV.
The hotel had cable, but it didn’t have good cable. My eternal curse. There was a rerun of the Brady Bunch on—one of the Cousin Oliver episodes from season five, after the show had officially jumped the shark.
“How fitting,” I said.
When I got tired, I turned on the light by the door, shut off the TV and the light in the main room, then crawled into the sleeping bag and closed my eyes. It took me a while to fall asleep, and it felt like no time had passed when my eyes opened again in response to my full bladder. Eventually I got up, checked the clock and saw it was a little after two in the morning.
When I finished my business and tried to fall back asleep, I wondered: Why does he have a sleeping bag?
After that, I couldn’t fall asleep no matter how much I tossed and turned. Also, the ground was a little too hard for comfort. I considered slipping up onto the bed, but only for a moment. Instead, I went and sat in the soft chair.
Listening.
Other than my breathing, the room was very quiet.
I got up, walked over, and leaned down over Sally, straining to hear something.
“Sally,” I said, shaking her gently. “Hey, wake up.”
She didn’t wake up like I wanted. Her scrawny arm was as cold as the surrounding room, and she wasn’t breathing. Whatever was in the whisky had been in the bottle first and not slipped into the glass. By finishing the bottle, Sally had sealed her fate.
Chapter Fourteen
I found five bottles of Zolpidem Tartrate zipped in an inside pocket of the suitcase. Though invented to treat insomnia, it was also a popular date rape drug. Strong stuff. Each bottle was prescribed to a woman named Harriet Evans, of New Haven, Connecticut.
Though I felt sad for Sally, I was realistic about my part in her death. Nobody could have known what was in that bottle. But for once, the Great Whomever had come through: I’d finally caught an easy ride. There wouldn’t be any evil henchmen this time around, or leather-clad literary agents wielding machine guns. Sally would be alive if this guy hadn’t tried to drug her, and that’s all I needed to know.
I rooted through the suitcase for a cell phone but didn’t find one. Sally had a pink-covered phone in her purse. If the date was correct, it was early April 2008. Almost a month had passed since Denise had shot me, though it only felt like a couple of hours.
“Thanks for that,” I said to the Great Whomever. He could have made me wait out every boring second of it in real-time, or made it seem longer, but it only felt like a few hours had passed.
I worried about Sally’s phone. Everyone had friends, and someone was bound to miss her. Maybe her ol’ man. So I turned it off. Whatever happened, I silently promised Sally her death wouldn’t go unsolved.
I found my ride’s license in a green nylon wallet: Fredrick Evans of New Haven, Connecticut. Same address as Harriet Evans.
Provided the rules for occupying scumbags hadn’t changed in a month, I had a good three weeks—my arbitrary lease on life—in Fred’s skin before those telltale kicks threatened to let him walk free. It was my job to make sure that didn’t happen—within reason, and not necessarily right away. No more book signings, extreme sports, or drinking beer. I planned to have fun this trip.
I dressed myself in jeans and a red T-shirt with faded writing on it, then packed everything except for the sleeping bag into Fred’s suitcase.
“Sorry, Sally,” I said, and laid the bag next to her.
The next few minutes reflected poorly on me. Through a series of tugs and pulls, I managed to get Sally’s lifeless body into the sleeping bag and then zipped it up. I felt lightheaded, and noticed I’d been holding my breath.
Stepping quickly away from the bed, I forced myself to breathe deeply. My ride was old and overweight, and I didn’t want to faint.
I checked the covers and the nightstand for the money I’d given her but didn’t find it. And it wasn’t on the floor or under the bed. Frowning, I unzipped the bag again and found both twenty-dollar bills clenched tightly in her fist, now stiffening through the early stages of rigor mortis. After I got her zipped back up, I washed my hands to banish the lingering memory of her icy fingers.
Looking at my reflection in the mirror, I wondered what had gone so terribly wrong with this guy that he enjoyed drugging women more than romantic dinners, fresh flowers, and quiet conversation.
I smiled at my reflection and saw my unfamiliar face smile back. Normal smile, nothing sinister. Fred could have been a retired mailman or an executive or just some guy at the grocery store. What he needed was a thin black mustache to match his inner monster to his outer coupon clipper.
I stepped outside for a quick recon. It was a cloudy moonless night, the landscape rural and quiet. A Motel 8 sign and a few evenly spaced safety lights warded the gloom from the civilized world.
Directly outside my room was a shiny blue minivan. It had been backed into the space hatch-first to the room. A click from Fred’s keys confirmed it was his shiny blue minivan. As luck had it, the nearest cars were way down at the other end of a long stretch of rooms. Likely my ride had requested something far away from anyone else so he could slip out easily with Sally’s body, unconscious or dead, hidden inside the sleeping bag. It was a good idea.
So that’s what I did.
Sally was light, and she tended to slide around in the bag as I labored her into the back of the van. After she was tucked away, I shut the hatch and checked to see if anyone had seen me—probably not—then went back inside to get Fred’s suitcase. After stowing it between the back seats, I got in behind the wheel. The CD player came on with the engine, breaking the silence with the soulful harmo
nizing of a gospel jubilee quartet. Old stuff, like maybe from the thirties. That was too creepy for words, so I hit random buttons until the radio kicked in. Then I flipped around until I found a boring and predictable classic rock channel.
Pulling up to a deserted two-lane road, I considered my options. To the left, the unlined road stretched into darkness. If I went right, I’d pick up a ramp to what looked like an interstate. It was cold out, still raining, so I could have been nearly anywhere in the lower forty-eight, subject to the vagaries of April weather. I’d purposely driven past a few cars to check license plates, and of course they were from a bunch of different states.
I went right.
As soon as I got onto the interstate, it became quickly apparent I was in Fred’s home state heading north on I-95 toward New Haven.
Though I hadn’t memorized the street maps of every big city, I’d gotten most of them, including this one. Still, it didn’t mean I knew how the house numbers were laid out.
I took Fred’s exit and found his neighborhood a few minutes later, then drove around squinting at faded numbers on mailboxes until I found one that matched his license: a large Tudor-style house with a double garage and no neighbors in sight, unless you counted the porch lights winking through the trees.
Earlier in the drive, I’d found Fred’s phone in the dash. When I opened it, it had a full charge. Probably only used it for emergencies or he would have carried it with him everywhere like most people. Or maybe he hadn’t wanted to be interrupted while he did what he’d planned with Sally. Now I had two phones. Still no one to call, but that was fine.
The clock on the phone showed 3:52 a.m., while the clock in the dash showed 4:55 a.m.
“Typical,” I said.
I stopped the van and got out, my breath steaming faintly in front of me through the cold relentless rain. With the thick cloud cover and lack of streetlights, the world had never been so black.
For now, I left Sally’s corpse in the back of the van. The cool temperature would slow the rate of her decomposition, and the van would keep the animals from getting at her.
Fred’s front door was a longer walk than the side entrance next to the garage, so I opened the storm door and tried the keys until I found one that worked. On entering the house, I gave the air an experimental sniff. No tobacco, no decomposing bodies.
I wondered who Harriet was. His wife? A daughter, maybe? Whoever she was, I didn’t feel like dealing with her at such a late hour, so I stayed quiet and kept the lights off.
I used Fred’s phone to light the way, occasionally hitting a number on the keypad to keep it lit. By the dim light, I crept down a short hallway, past a staircase, and into the living room. Nobody was there. I found an office with books and papers and filing cabinets, but it was equally empty.
Suppressing a small shiver at the odd normalcy staring me in the face from everywhere, I stepped from a sparsely furnished bedroom back to the central hallway of the main floor.
I shuddered at the inexplicable feeling of something in the darkness reaching to snatch me away. As a child, I’d gotten that feeling at least several times a month. As if something were standing right behind me, and if I looked back, a corpse with red glowing eyes would smile at me with a mouthful of needle-sharp teeth. After that, I wouldn’t exist anymore. I’d either be eaten or possessed by the Devil. Or, when my family found me, I’d be stark raving mad, and parents everywhere would use me as an example of what happened to children who never finished their vegetables.
The moment passed, and my sanity remained unscathed. But Brussels sprouts still sucked.
The upstairs had three furnished bedrooms, each of them unoccupied. The last bedroom, the master, was surprisingly Spartan for a room so big. Like the other rooms, it had a bureau and a bed, though Fred’s was a king-sized bed. I opened a few of the drawers and found socks and underwear. In his closet were shirts and pants and nothing else.
Not a Harriet in sight.
I went back downstairs and searched more carefully. Just off the kitchen was a second set of stairs leading down to the basement. At the bottom was a heavy wooden door with throw bolts set into a steel frame.
“Now we’re talking,” I said.
After pulling back the bolts, I opened the door and stepped into an expansive basement, pitch black. I reached over and felt around until my fingers brushed a light switch. On flipping the switch, track lights flared to life from about ten locations, momentarily blinding my dark-adjusted eyes. Squinting, I saw a pole in the middle of the room with a chain looped around it, the end lying coiled on a ratty old mattress.
Approaching the mattress, I noticed the chain ended in a steel collar. I picked up the chain, lifted the collar to eye level, and examined it: about half an inch thick, locked and closed with a key sticking out of it. I turned the key and it came right out. I put it in and turned it the other direction and the collar popped open. I closed it again and locked it with the key, then put the ugly thing back on the mattress.
It’s a harsh thing to say someone’s better off dead, but if I’d picked the other portal and Sally had made it this far…
A quick check of Fred’s phone showed it close to four in the morning. His old, heavy body was tired, which meant I was tired. None of what I’d seen required me to do anything right now, so I huffed up the stairs back to the main floor, then the next flight to where the master bedroom was. By the time I got to the top, I was gasping and out of breath.
Fred’s bed was neatly made, the linen smelled clean, and I didn’t see any villainous dominatrices anywhere, which was great.
I took off my clothes and settled in to sleep.
Chapter Fifteen
Morning arrived with the promise of good food, movies, walks in the park, shopping sprees, driving around listening to music, fishing trips, indoor public pools, one or two naps a day, and my all-time favorite thing to do: sitting around reading in coffee shops.
But I couldn’t do any of that until I’d done something about Sally, still out there in the minivan. It was a little cold for April, but she’d start cooking from the inside if left for too long. When that happened, I wouldn’t be able to drive the minivan in the comfort I was accustomed to.
I still had a little time before that happened, so I went back through the house looking for anything I’d missed in my first sweep. The upstairs rooms were as empty as last night, but the light streaming through the blinds showed everything covered in a thick coat of dust.
I returned to the little office I’d seen last night and thumbed through the papers and boxes of opened mail. It became quickly apparent that Harriet relied heavily on Medicare to treat her various ailments, one of which was chronic insomnia. A minute later, I also learned she was dead.
Up on the wall, in a gilded frame, Fred had set Harriet’s death certificate proudly on display.
“Alcoholic poisoning,” I read. She’d died more than three years ago.
The date of birth on the certificate had Harriet older than Fred by two years. It also showed her as unmarried. I figured she was his sister, though she could have been a cousin.
With nothing more to look at, I left the room, shut the door, and resumed my tour.
The rest of the house had tables and chairs and things of that sort, but there was something about it all that didn’t look completely lived in. Take the dining room, for example. The table was loaded with fine china, crystal, and actual silverware. The lace tablecloth was now yellowed with age, and each setting had the forks and spoons in the proper locations. Yet the silverware was coated in a rainbow of colorful tarnish, and the china and crystal were grimy with fossilized dust. The whole thing appeared to have been set and left that way for years.
There was nothing physically wrong with the structure of the house, and with Harriet out of the way, I planned to stay there. I didn’t know enough about Fred’s finances, other than he had a few credit cards and a tiny amount of cash left in his wallet. So moving to a fancy hotel didn’t mak
e much sense.
The house had an attached garage packed front to back with boxes, tools, and old furniture. Also, it had a freezer. I couldn’t believe my luck. It was almost like someone upstairs was looking down and saying, “Dan needs a freezer, he’s getting a freezer.” It was a big one, too. Large enough to hold three more prostitutes if needed.
Anxious to start my day, I went outside to get Sally.
The light of the new day revealed something I’d missed last night: the property was sort of a mess. The lawn hadn’t been mowed—ever. The hedges under the windows were like Chia Pets who’d let themselves go, and a branch from the tree out front threatened to bash in two of the second story windows under the press of a light breeze. The house wasn’t falling down or damaged or anything. More like it was slouching around with the intent of one day crumbling and blowing away.
Fred’s minivan, however, was brand new. And clean—like he’d recently washed and waxed it. I wondered if he called it his baby.
After checking the perimeter, where Fred’s suburban savannah met overgrown steppes ending in a tree line, I concluded no children or nosey neighbors were hovering in wait for me to drag Sally into the light so they could call the cops.
Even through the sleeping bag, Sally’s body grossed me out all the way from the minivan to the side door. The garage would have been quicker, but it was too packed. Along the way, the hardness of her elbows and knees, and the wobbly weight of her head, were a constant reminder there was a human body in there. When I got to the freezer, I became seized with sudden terror at the thought she might still be alive, like Jacob back at that weirdo mansion.
I unzipped the bag and checked to make sure. Yep, still dead.
The freezer contained some packaged meat and bags of veggies, crusted with frost, but it was mostly empty. I set her gently inside it and used a bag of peas for a pillow. Then I pushed down on the lid along the edges in case one of the seams was loose or the door hadn’t been squarely placed. Working with as many freezers as I had, I knew what to look for.
