by Tim Kizer
“You promised to meet with Frank,” Graham said. “You gave your word, Marilyn, and you are supposed to keep it. I’m quite disappointed in you, to be honest.”
“You sound kind of creepy, Graham. Almost like those psycho killers in horror movies.” Ron laughed softly. “Don't scare her too much. When a woman is scared, she can’t think straight.”
“Yeah, don't push too hard,” said Josephine. “Even though I have no doubt now that she’s lying to us.”
“What can I do if he’s busy all the time?” exclaimed Marilyn. “I can’t order him to meet me. And he’s still a married man, remember? Maybe he doesn’t want to be seen with me.”
“We’re screwed if Frank dumped Kelly in the lake,” said Ron. “It will be tough to get her out of there.”
“We’re screwed if he cut her into pieces,” remarked Josephine. “If she’s in the lake, chances are she’ll float up to the surface sooner or later.”
“I can give you two more days. Do you promise to meet him within the next two days?” said Graham.
“Let's hope he didn't cut her up,” went on Josephine. “He doesn’t strike me as a guy capable of doing it.”
“It’s a definite possibility that he dumped her in the lake,” said Ron. “I’d hate it if he did.” He opened another can of beer for himself and two more cans for Josephine and Graham.
“Okay, I’ll meet him in the next two days,” replied Marilyn. “I promise, Peter.”
“Have you told anybody about our conversation?” asked Graham. “Remember I asked you to keep your mouth shut?”
“Yes, I remember that. I haven’t told anybody about you.”
Ron jammed the remains of his cigarette into the ashtray and said, “I’m telling you, Josephine, it’s about time we spoke to Frank directly. There are many ways to make him talk.”
“The trick here is to make him tell the truth,” said Josephine. “If he’s scared to death, he might just bullshit us to buy more time. Torture doesn’t always work, Ron.”
“You're not playing games with me, are you?” said Graham. “You shouldn't play games with me, Marilyn.”
“Graham, you’re going to scare the shit out of her,” said Ron. “Keep it gentle for now.”
“I still don't understand why he decided to kill Kelly,” Josephine said, looking meditatively at her cigarette. “Did he lose his mind? There was no reason for him to do it.”
“Did you come up with a way to get that information from Frank?” Graham asked. “You’ve got to be very careful.”
“Okay, guys, you wrap it up here without me. I’m going back to the shower.” Josephine rose to her feet.
“You just took a shower ten minutes ago,” Ron said.
“You made me leave before I washed my hair. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes.” Josephine headed for the stairs.
“I may join you in the shower in a minute,” said Ron.
“I'll be very careful,” Marilyn answered. “Don't worry, Peter, I’m not trying to screw you over.”
“Very well, Marilyn. I believe you,” said Graham. “I'll call you this Wednesday.” He hung up, leaned back in the armchair, and cast an inquisitive look at Ron. “I got a weird vibe from her. Did you feel it, too, Ron?”
Ron wrinkled his forehead as if he was racking his brain and then shook his head. “What do you mean?”
“She didn’t sound particularly scared. I wonder what she’s up to.” Graham crossed his arms on his chest. “I think I'll take a shower, too. Together with Josephine and you. You okay with that, Ron?” He burst out laughing.
“Sure.” Ron let out a smoke ring. “Speaking about Frank. I had doubts till the last moment, to tell you the truth. He doesn't look like a killer to me at all.”
“He’s a good actor, that’s all,” Graham said. “I'm going to the bathroom.” He started walking towards the stairs, unbuttoning his shirt and murmuring ‘I kissed a girl and I liked it.’ As he climbed the first step, he paused and said, “My wife just loves this stupid song. I have no idea why.”
3.
Back and forth, back and forth. Albert squeezed Laura’s breasts as tight as he could and began moving faster. Back and forth, back and forth. He was lying on his left side, naked, his chest and stomach pressed against Laura’s back, his erect penis relentlessly pounding her vagina. He growled as the intense delightful sensations began to spread across his crotch and hips. Laura emitted a moan and dug her right hand nails into Albert's buttock, encouraging him to thrust harder. Albert clenched his teeth, pushed his penis inside his wife one last time, froze, and closed his eyes, enjoying the orgasm.
“Damn, it felt so good,” he said, rolling away to his side of the bed.
“Of course, you don’t care if I came,” said Laura. She breathed out loudly.
“Did you come?”
“Never mind.” Laura sat up and put on her panties.
“I may be a little late tonight. I have a meeting with a friend in Niagara Falls.”
“A meeting? Is she hot? And what is she doing in Niagara Falls?”
“Why do you automatically assume that it’s a woman?”
“Is it a woman?” Laura looked straight in Albert’s eyes. Albert shook his head and said, “No, it’s not. This guy is offering me a part-time job. You want me to make more money, don’t you?”
“Well, if it’s about a job.” Laura kissed him on the cheek. “What time do you meet him?”
“At seven. I’m going to take off at six.”
“What kind of job is it?”
“I don’t know all the details yet. His company sells medical equipment.”
“How much are they going to pay you?”
“I’ll discuss it with him tonight. Hopefully, enough to make your mother happy with me.”
“Come on, Al. My mom loves you. We barely talk about you, which is a good thing.” Laura got up and put on her jeans. “Do you know what our son does in his room when no one’s looking?”
“What? Smoking?”
“He watches porn, Al. And I suspect it’s yours. Didn’t I tell you to hide those movies better?”
“Paul’s only twelve. Are you sure he’s watching porn?” Albert chuckled. “I don’t remember watching it when I was twelve.”
“Your father must have never left smut movies lying around the house. And yes, I’m sure. I found a porn DVD in the DVD player in his room. He either forgot to take it out, or simply doesn’t care if we find it.”
“For God’s sake, why would you snoop around Paul’s room?”
“I was looking for drugs, if you must know. Why do you keep them out in the open? Could you hide them a little better? Or better yet, throw them out?”
“Honey, it’s one of mine. My stash is locked up, and I’m the only one who’s got the key. He must have gotten it from his friends.”
“Well, I don’t really care how he got it. He’s just too young for this type of movies. And he probably masturbates to this garbage, too.”
“Masturbates. I hate this word. Why can’t you say ‘jerk off’? It’s an absolutely acceptable word. I think I started jerking off when I was twelve, too.”
“Al, you are intolerable,” Laura grumbled.
“When did you start playing with yourself? Thirteen? Fourteen?” Albert chuckled. “I bet you liked it.”
“You have an outstanding ability to say the wrong things at the wrong time, Al.”
“I’m sure you did it. All girls flick the bean.”
Half an hour later, Albert locked Paul’s porn collection—he had found three more disks under his son’s bed—in the cabinet that housed his own XXX movies and told Laura that if she planned to lecture Paul about the dangers of skin flicks, she would have to do the talking herself.
“I’m not one of those ‘do as I say, not as I do’ people,” he said. “And personally, I’m glad it’s not gay porn or some such crap.”
“As I said, he’s too young for this filth. And I’m not going to let you be the good co
p in this, okay? We’ll talk to him together.”
“Only after I have thoroughly examined those movies, honey.”
One hour before leaving to meet Graham, Albert caught Paul in the front yard and warned him that Laura knew about his newly acquired passion for adult films. Paul lowered his eyes and replied, “Dad, what are you talking about? What DVDs?”
“You are so damn lucky, son,” said Albert. “When I was your age, most kids watched tapes, and you had to try hard to get hold of good porn.”
“You did? Whatever, Dad. I still have no idea what you're talking about.”
“Cool. Deny, deny, deny. Smart strategy.” Giggling, Albert let his son go.
Then he drove to the hotel where his meeting with Graham Bibey was supposed to take place.
Albert had met Graham three weeks before in the hospital cafeteria. Graham, who was visiting a sick friend, joined him at the table and struck up a conversation. Looking back, Albert suspected that there had been no sick friend and that Graham had chosen his table on purpose. Their casual chat about the taste of the cafeteria food and the weather soon morphed into a talk about employment opportunities.
“You could make six figures doing one hour of work a week,” said Graham.
Albert, who was barely making double the minimum wage at the time, agreed to discuss Graham’s proposal in more detail later. Why would he pass a chance to make decent money and finally begin earning more that his wife? Of course, he had some doubts, but the sight of a genuine Rolex watch on Graham’s wrist gave him hope that this man wasn’t just yanking his chain.
“Hi, Al,” said Josephine, rising from the armchair, when Albert entered the hotel room. “Nice to meet you.”
“That’s my friend Josephine.” Graham shook Albert’s hand. “She’s the boss.”
“Graham’s just flattering me,” said Josephine. “Tony is our head honcho. You’ll be able to meet him soon.”
Then she cut to the chase and laid out their offer, which turned out to be what Albert had suspected: they were in the market for human blood and were willing to pay a thousand dollars for a half liter bag. Albert agreed without much hesitation: the regular spoilage at the blood bank was large enough to accommodate for the dozen bags he would steal every month.
“Are you feeding a vampire with it?” he joked when handing Graham the first batch of blood, which consisted of three bags. Of course he had no idea that he was right on the money.
He met Tony after selling the third batch. The meeting took place at a hotel in Cheektowaga on a weekday night. Accompanied by Ron Buckhaus, Tony arrived at half past eight, when the sun had been gone from the sky for about an hour. The head honcho appeared to be at least in his forties, judging by the wrinkles on his face and the multiple gray hairs scattered throughout his dark brown mane. Shallow as it might have seemed, Tony’s reluctance to dye his hair made Albert feel instant respect for him. This man had to be the real deal since he didn’t try to pretend what he was not.
“That’s the boss,” said Josephine. The next moment she pulled a knife out of her purse and stabbed Tony in the chest. Before Albert realized that he was scared shitless, Tony burst out laughing and unhurriedly drew the knife out of his body.
“Relax, I’m fine,” he said. “Excuse our theatrics, Al. We just thought it would be the fastest way to convince you that we’re not a bunch of kooks.” He dropped the bloodstained knife into the plastic bag held by Josephine.
It had been a good call; Albert had no trouble believing that he had become a backup blood supplier to a five-hundred-year old vampire.
“It’s a chance of a lifetime, Al,” said Josephine. “Do you want to become part of the elite group of people who live forever, or do you want to continue being a nobody rotting in the shadow of his wife?”
Yes, Albert preferred to be part of the elite.
“Take a sip, Al. And welcome to eternity.” Josephine had smiled radiantly.
4.
“Take a sip, Al. And welcome to eternity.”
Then Albert Hutchinson woke up.
Again this shit. Albert emitted a snarl and tossed the blanket aside. He glanced at the clock and hissed, “Shit.” It was 4:07 am. Yeah, this dream tended to come to him at the most inopportune moment.
Again he fucked Laura, again she complained that he didn’t care about her orgasm, again she asked him to hide his porn better, again he spoke to Paul, and again he met with Graham and Josephine. It was a recurring dream, and its contents had remained almost unchanged from night to night.
‘Do you want to become part of the elite group of people who live forever, or do you want to continue being a nobody rotting in the shadow of his wife’—those were the words he had remembered by heart. Josephine had put a lot of thought into preparing her pitch and managed to hit the right notes with him.
4:09 am. Well, he shouldn’t be pissed off too badly: he had scheduled his routine drive to Frank’s place for five o’clock in the morning. The house Albert had rented was located just half a mile from Frank’s residence, so it only took a minute to get there by car. It was Albert’s own idea to personally observe Frank’s house every morning and night: he was afraid that Frank would flee Buffalo and seeing this moron with his own eyes calmed his nerves. Josephine saw no necessity in such surveillance and believed that the GPS tracker on Frank’s car and the bugs in his living room and bedroom were enough.
As Albert sat up, Jerry Cleveland’s name came to his mind. They had discussed the other day whether they should dispatch Jerry or not, and Albert had supported Graham, who believed it would be smart to get rid of that guy right now.
“He could try to blackmail us after we kill Frank,” said Graham. “He’s not completely dumb; he’ll figure out it was us sooner or later.”
“Let’s wait until we find Kelly,” said Josephine. “Like you said, Jerry’s harmless as long as Frank’s alive. There’s no need to waste our time and effort on him right now.”
“Besides, I don’t think he’ll bother to see what happened to Frank,” Ron said. “He’s probably happy we didn’t screw him over money. Why in the world would he care about Frank?”
In spite of Josephine's and Ron's arguments, Albert believed that they shouldn’t drag their feet on this matter. Last night, as he lay in the hot bath, he had tried to come up with a way to make Jerry’s death look like an accident. His favorite idea was to drop a couple of crushed Ambien pills in Jerry’s tequila. No matter how insignificant, Jerry was still a loose end.
Albert got up and walked to the bathroom after realizing that he had no desire to stay in bed. The damn dream had somehow energized him.
‘Take a sip, Al. And welcome to eternity.’
It sounded a little corny, but it was no exaggeration: he had indeed entered the door to eternity back then.
Albert emptied his bladder and then spent some time in front of the mirror over the sink, pulling faces out of boredom. As he wiped his hands on the towel, he asked himself if he wanted to take a shower now, before the trip to Frank’s house. The answer was no; it seemed like too much effort to him at the moment.
That dream had felt amazingly real, too. He was sure he had experienced a genuine orgasm after sex with Laura, even though there was no semen on his underpants.
‘Take a sip, Al. And welcome to eternity.’
Yeah, things he would do right now to take a nice big gulp of the vampire blood, a.k.a. ‘the juice.’ And then another. And then one more.
Was he happy with his ration of the juice he received from Josephine once a week? Hell, no. Half a glass a week was far from enough; he used to consume three times as much before things went to hell. However, these were hard times and they had to be prudent, as Josephine kept saying. Well, he did not disagree with her on this one: they had to stretch their juice reserves since God only knew when they were going to get hold of another vampire.
He returned to the living room, grabbed the lighter and the pack of Marlboro from the dining table, put a ci
garette in his mouth, and lit it up. As he took a long puff, he walked up to the window and looked outside. It was still dark; the sun wouldn’t rise for another forty minutes, according to Albert’s phone calendar. Albert had never been an early bird, but he had quickly gotten used to his new schedule. He had actually begun to enjoy watching the night fade away as he sat in his car a hundred feet away from Frank’s house.
Frank must still be in bed right now unless he had changed his habits and moved his wake-up time from six to a quarter to five. Was this son of a bitch having dreams and what kind of dreams were they? Albert hoped Frank had been tormented by nightmares this whole time because he deserved that.
‘Welcome to eternity.’
Yeah, Josephine had never been able to resist using flowery words. Albert noted to himself again how vivid these dreams had been. Cliché as it might sound, he felt as if he had traveled back in time and relived that fateful conversation with Josephine.
With ten minutes to kill before he was going to leave, Albert picked up his cell-phone and dialed Josephine's number. He would drive to Frank's house right after this phone call.
5.
“I don't think it makes sense to quit drinking now,” said Ron Buckhaus, inquisitively looking at Josephine, the mysterious woman he had met at the NYU Cancer Institute two weeks ago. Half a year earlier, the doctors had informed him he would be dead by the end of the year, but he was still grasping at straws, one of which was the latest series of chemotherapy sessions at the Institute. He had gotten very close to accepting the fact that he would lose this war to skin cancer; nevertheless, he felt obligated to fight till the end. Melanoma could be cured relatively easily when the tumor was small and thin, and Ron was ashamed that he and his doctors had somehow missed the beginning signs of cancer, especially considering his net worth of thirty million dollars, which ought to have guaranteed him the best health monitoring on Earth.
Well, it was now pointless to argue who was to blame for his impending death: his doctors or his cavalier attitude towards moles on his body. In the last months of his life, Ron had fully embraced his new passion: he’d been drinking most of the time spent away from the Cancer Institute. Just to be on the safe side, he had asked his doctor whether hard liquor could interfere with the chemotherapy. In a typical cover-your-ass fashion, the doctor had advised him to moderate his drinking even though there was no particular risk in his case. Ron had taken it as permission to go crazy with vodka and tequila, his favorites.
