by John L. Monk
The best place to hide, if I didn’t want to lose him, was directly across from his car, sandwiched between a white car and a red minivan. Like Gerald, I backed into the spot. Then I put my seat back and slouched down out of sight. Gerald didn’t know me, but he knew he was hated and that people meant him harm. Likely he went through the world a little more cautiously than your average scumbag.
Waiting with the radio on, I cycled back and forth between classic rock and a seventies soul channel that had a lot of great tunes. Just waiting.
Still waiting.
My original plan was to follow Gerald home. Thanks to the security job, I had a half-formed plan for dealing with him later. But now I was worried. What if he showed up with some kid he’d snatched? I cursed myself for not thinking of that before.
If he had a kid with him, I could pull out and block him from leaving. Then what? Would he get in his car and try to push me out of the way? Overpower me and take my keys? Maybe he had a gun. If so, he had the perfect hostage.
Crap.
An hour later, it all became academic when Gerald came strolling to his car from the corner stairs closest to the mall. He was alone, but he didn’t seem upset about it. He still had that weird smile on his face. There was a point where I could have sped up and rammed him into the car next to his, possibly killing him, but the moment passed with me hunched down, torn with indecision.
Gerald chucked the backpack and teddy into the back seat. He didn’t act like he’d seen me, and when he pulled out he did so at a safe speed. Right before he turned to go down the ramp to level two, I followed him.
Just like the other day, he exited out the same spot on the lower level, a creature of habit. He passed the exit to the interstate, heading deeper into the city. At one point, he turned and drove through a dense residential area of multi-level townhouses, making me think he was heading home. Then, for no discernable reason, he left and got back on the main road.
Two minutes later, I followed him into a busy area with lots of apartments.
He seemed to pause overly long at stop signs. Traffic was heavy, and one old lady beeped at him. From two cars back, I could see him craning his neck this way and that as he searched the streets.
No, not streets—the playgrounds. All of them empty, thank goodness.
In time he sped up and left, then drove two more miles and pulled into a supermarket parking lot.
Even though there were plenty of spots in the middle and close to the front, Gerald parked way off to the side. I didn’t want to spook him, so I chose a somewhat closer spot between him and the front doors and parked.
Gerald got out carrying the backpack, leaving the teddy behind this time. He didn’t look my way. Dropping his weird smile, he affected a worried expression, like he had a flat tire or needed help or something equally important. Then he ducked into the store.
About ten minutes later, he came back out—briskly, grumpily, shaking his head as if offended. When I glanced back at the sliding glass doors, a male worker in a red apron was standing beside a woman with a little girl. They were talking together and staring after Gerald, and they didn’t look happy.
Gerald didn’t waste any time. He hopped in his car and was moving before anyone could get his license or a good description. He didn’t speed or cut anyone off or act like he was fleeing, but he didn’t slow down for the yellow light onto the main road—which caused me to run the red light just to keep up with him.
This time he went much more quickly through the city, driven by a different motivator. Still not speeding, but when he shifted lanes it wasn’t with the same smooth motion I knew he was capable of.
Ten minutes later he pulled into a rundown neighborhood of single-family homes, all quite small.
With the decrease in traffic, I eased the distance between us, but still had no problem keeping pace as he wormed his way into the neighborhood. A minute later, he pulled into a driveway in front of a small blue house. Because I wasn’t supposed to be following him, I drove past and took the next right turn. After I cleared his line of sight, I sped up to the next house, pulled into the drive, and backed out. Then I crept to the corner to see if he was still there.
Gerald was out of his car now, carrying neither teddy nor backpack. He stared down at the ground with his fists balled, talking to himself. Cursing, it seemed like. Certainly upset. He stalked into the house, struggling with the keys briefly before going in and slamming the door behind him.
To think this was the same guy who’d had a happy smiley kids’ show.
His was the only car in the driveway, and he didn’t have a garage. I couldn’t imagine him living with anyone. But after all the things I’d seen thriving in the dark cracks of the world, I knew anything was possible.
It was just after four in the afternoon. According to the calendar in the trailer, Brad would have been at work an hour now. He seemed like a nice guy. Punctual, dependable. I was counting on it.
Staring at Gerald’s empty front yard, I thought through my options. Then I went back to Fred’s house for my second nap that day.
* * *
Fred was a good napper. When I woke up, I wasn’t achy or sore, and I was hungry—my favorite thing to be, because it meant I could eat.
I didn’t need to work for four more hours, so I ordered a pizza. Much safer than eating out because I couldn’t be sure how much credit Fred had on his card. I didn’t know his PIN number, so I couldn’t call the eight hundred number on the back of the card to get a balance. The pizza place charged me first, and thirty minutes later I was chewing my way to Heaven. I even got Cinnasticks, with the sugary spread they give you.
After dinner, I went to work.
Thinking back, if I’d lived long enough to survive my first girlfriend, maybe I would have become a security guard. Plenty of time for reading, nice and quiet, and nobody to bother me. That way, during the daylight hours, I could do other things, like hiking and woodworking. An economical solution to the problem of having to work a job and get in one’s reading time, while still engaging the world. Also, at night, when I stepped away from the streetlights near the trailer and stared at the sky, I could see the occasional falling star.
Around midnight, I saw a huge one zipping along Orion’s belt, and for a moment I felt a vast and terrible loneliness because there was no one there to share it with.
I realized I was wrong. If I could do it all again, the last place I’d work was a night job outside a warehouse. Maybe an amusement park—somewhere with lots of people. Then I could hang with my friends all day and after work, too, and I wouldn’t read as much because I wouldn’t have time.
When I turned around to head back to the trailer, there was someone coming my way from a fancy black car parked next to Fred’s minivan. I pointed my flashlight at him and he covered his eyes.
“You!” he shouted, pointing at me. “Get over here!”
Since I was heading there anyway, I obliged him. And because it would seem weird if I just kept walking, I stopped when we were within easy talking distance.
He was a big guy with fake blond hair, and he wore several gold chains. He had on a silk shirt with the sleeves rolled up, shiny leather shoes, big-shot gold rings, and he was about forty years old. Unlike the other people I’d seen so far, he didn’t have a guard’s uniform on.
I smiled. “Howdy.”
“Howdy?” he said, making a face like he was talking to a dingbat. “What are you, a dingbat? I been calling that goddamned phone all night.”
“What, you mean in the trailer?”
Sneering, he said, “What, in the trailer? Where the hell have you been?”
Then it dawned on me.
“Ah ha,” I said. “You’re Cliff, aren’t you?”
“Shut up, asshole. You know how much shit you’re in for that fuckin’ mess on Twenty-three East? It’s gonna cost a fortune to get it scrubbed and repainted.”
“You could always leave it that way,” I said. “I can’t read the word
s but it looks pretty cool. And I think it might be socially relevant.”
Ignoring me, Cliff said, “If I had my way I’d fire the lot of you losers. You don’t do shit. Only here for the insurance break.”
“Sorry, Cliff. I—”
“Shut up,” he said. “And another thing—you don’t work overtime. Someone gets sick—yeah, that’s right, I heard about that. Someone gets sick, they goddamn well call me, not you. We clear?”
For a guy with gold chains and a silk shirt, he seemed like kind of a hothead, so I paused thoughtfully before answering. “What if you’re sick? Then who do I call?”
Cliff bit his lip. “What was that?”
“Just trying to cover all the bases, boss. Wouldn’t want to get in trouble.”
Quietly, he said, “Listen, you wrinkled piece of shit. You wanna fuck with me, I got ten people who want your job. But if you really wanna fuck with me, I—”
“—like to cuddle?” I said, smiling.
Cliff glanced around him, as if at an invisible posse, and said, “The fuck you say?”
Tired of Cliff, no longer worried about the job, I thought up something even more irritating, but then he punched me in the stomach. Coughing and struggling for breath, I fell hard to my knees. Then I came to an important realization: bullies may be fun to mess with, but none of them like to cuddle.
“You’re done, fat ass,” he said. “If I see you again, I’ll bury you. Now get off the property before I kick the shit outta you.”
Down through the row of warehouses, a familiar set of headlights drove past—the graffiti artists, oblivious to the violence going down not a hundred yards away. That got me laughing, though I totally tried not to because it hurt.
Laughter turned to coughing, and I felt light-headed from lack of oxygen. Old guys like Fred weren’t resilient, and young guys like Cliff should have known better than to hit them. Or anyone, for that matter. Briefly, I wondered if all security jobs were this rough. Maybe the warehouse had illegal guns, or refugees off to work in black market textile jobs in New York, like in this movie I once saw…
I tried to stand but wasn’t fast enough. Cliff grabbed my collar and yanked me up, somehow angrier. And before I knew what I was doing, I slammed him in the balls with the eighteen-inch flashlight.
Cliff dropped to his side, groaning. Boy it must have hurt. Now he was bicycling around on the ground with his mouth open and his eyes very wide in his head.
He was a first rate jerk, and I was pretty sure he’d call the cops on me and ruin my ride. So I did what any rational person would do in my situation—when he got to his knees, I hit him on the back of the head with the flashlight. Pretty hard, too.
“Uhng!” he gasped, falling down flat. When he tried to rise, I reared back for another hit, but he fell back down again.
I leaned down and checked his breathing, suddenly worried I may have killed him. Being a jerk didn’t mean he deserved to die—then I’d be a jerk. Talk about bad karma.
Cliff was breathing, though it sounded staggered and raspy.
“Dammit,” I said.
This was bad. Real bad.
For the first time in sixteen years, I was officially in big trouble.
Chapter Nineteen
Fred was seventy years old, and he was unhealthy, but he wasn’t weak. Being big like that adds muscle, even if it tired me out when I did too much at once. For the next twenty minutes, in full view of anyone who cared to drive by and look, I tested the limits of Fred’s endurance.
The first thing I did was search the trailer for something to tie Cliff up with. I didn’t find any rope, but I did find a thick roll of duct tape, which was actually better. Using that, I taped Cliff’s arms behind his back, and then taped his legs together. It was hard because I had to hold him up one-handed while I wrapped the spool around him, feeding it out like a spider, making sure to apply enough pressure so he couldn’t slip out. I considered taping his mouth shut, but for all I knew he had allergies and a stuffy nose. If I killed this guy … scratch that. I could not kill this guy. Not unless he had a dead hooker somewhere I didn’t know about, and that wasn’t something I was ready to bet on.
Cliff wasn’t a huge man, but he had muscles. Guys like him went to the gym and ate protein powder and took steroids to get big and meaty. Probably why he was such a jerk.
Through tremendous effort, I got him up and over the bumper of his fancy car—a shiny Mercedes—and into the trunk, leaving it open. Afterward, my heart was hammering in my chest and I saw little flashes of color, making me think I was about to black out—something that couldn’t happen if I wanted to stay out of jail.
Panting and sweating, I climbed the two steps back into the trailer, popped open the fridge, and grabbed a soda. Gulp gulp, breathe. Gulp gulp, breathe. I checked the clock—1:07 a.m. Plenty of time before my relief arrived.
Gulp gulp, breathe.
When it was safe to start moving again, I closed the door to the trailer, fished Cliff’s keys out of his pocket, and shut the trunk. After a final look around, I got in his car.
Fred was a little taller than Cliff, so I had to adjust the seat back, and then I had to adjust the mirrors. When I turned the car on, some kind of easy listening kicked in, so I had to adjust the radio or risk being miserable yet somehow more mellow. And since I was hot and sweaty from all that exertion…
With the AC and the radio and the mirrors and the seat situated, I set out for Fred’s house. Hopefully I wouldn’t get stuck at a light next to someone with an open window, or a motorcycle cop, because that’s when Cliff would come to and start screaming.
As it happened, I did pull up next to a cop. He even turned toward me, not smiling of course. I smiled at him and nodded, because that’s what you do. It was late at night and I wasn’t drunk and weaving around the road. And Cliff had a nice new car—not a sports car or a monster truck or a clunker with a busted taillight. The cop pulled ahead of me when the light changed, and I continued at the posted speed limit.
By the time I got to the house I felt stronger, and my breathing was back under control.
I remembered seeing a rusty wheelbarrow in the garage. If the garage hadn’t been so packed with stuff I would have backed the car into it. Instead, I dug out the wheelbarrow and set it close to the back fender.
Cliff was beginning to wake up when I opened the trunk. He was still too groggy to fight, and wonder of all, he actually popped his feet out for me and leaned forward when I tugged his arms.
“…the fuck,” he muttered, then gasped when he landed butt-first in the wheelbarrow.
For a moment, I struggled to keep it upright on the top-heavy tripod, but got it leveled out. Behind him now, I tugged Cliff into a sitting position, then grabbed the handles and wheeled him to the side door leading to the mudroom. A lip up into the house caused me a moment of worry, but I was able to get him over it by pulling from behind. The sides of the barrow barely cleared the doorframe without scraping.
“…dead. Kill you,” Cliff said, struggling now and jerking around.
Before he got too much of his strength back, I pulled him through the foyer and into the hall leading to the kitchen. Then my foot caught something and down we went together in a noisy mess.
Cliff kicked the wall with his taped legs, shouting how I was going to die.
No way could I get him back in the wheelbarrow, and he couldn’t stay in the middle of the floor like that.
Mustering the remainder of my strength, I seized him around the middle and pulled him backwards toward the basement stairs. Then, careful not to trip and fall backward, I dragged him down into the basement and over to the ratty mattress.
When Cliff was close enough to the chain and the steel collar with the key in it, I set him down and unlocked it. He was grunting and twisting and making it harder than it needed to be, but I resisted the urge to hit him again. Eventually I got the collar around his neck and latched it shut, then pulled out the key.
Briefly, I wond
ered where they sold stuff like that. It had to be the Internet. Everything was on the Internet.
“Be right back,” I said, pocketing the key.
I went upstairs, got a drink, and found a paring knife. Fred’s heart was hammering in his chest, making me worry he’d have a heart attack. I splashed water on my face to cool down, then blotted it dry with my sleeve.
I went back down.
Cliff said, “You’re so dead it’s not funny!”
There was a puddle of puke on the corner of the mattress near his head.
“So you’re going to kill me?” I said.
“Soon as I get outta here.”
“Have you ever killed anyone before?”
“Just you, asshole. Wait and see.”
I stepped over to him and showed him the knife. He yelled more bad words and thrashed around and I said, “Dammit, Cliff, if you move I’ll cut you, now just hold still.”
He wasn’t a big one for holding still, but I was careful and managed to cut the tape off his wrists without nicking him. Then I hurried out of reach. The chain was about four feet long.
“You can do your feet if you want,” I said.
Cliff glowered at me, not saying anything, working the tape with his fingernails to find the seam. Then he set to unraveling it.
“You sure you never killed anyone?” I said, trying not to sound desperate.
“No, dick, I never killed no one. The fuck you keep asking for?”
I sighed.
“What about selling drugs,” I said. “You ever do that?”
“What? Me?” He laughed derisively. “Clifftonite makes good money, what the hell I wanna screw that up for?”
“Clifftonite? What’s that mean?”
“That’s what they call me,” he said. “Like kryptonite. Only thing stronger than Superman. They call me that.”
Just my luck—a punchy jerk who said no to drugs and referred to himself in third person.
Cliff finished with his legs and stood up. Then he took the chain and tugged hard against the support beam like that’d actually work.
