by T. Braddy
“Are the doors locked?” I asked, trying to will my legs to move. I was moving my feet, but they were barely sliding along the wooden floor.
“Yes.”
“You sure?”
“No. I don’t know!”
“Listen, I’m on my way, but I need you to do something. I need you to go and make sure the doors are locked.”
‘No. What? I’m – he’ll see me.”
“He’s probably already seen you,” I said. “He’s probably been watching you for a while now.”
I imagined the man with the neck tattoo and the facial scar sitting in the bar, hand clasped rigidly around the base of the glass.
But he didn’t work for Bellerose. What the hell did he want?
“Crawl, if you have to. But you must go lock the doors. Go.”
“I can’t. I can’t move,” she said.
With that, as if some kind of spell had been broken, I was able to move. I went back inside, downstairs by the gamer guys, and picked up my wallet, keys, and gun before heading to my car. I heard the gamers calling back at me over their shoulders, but I never quite got what they said. Could have been another language for all I knew.
“Did you do it?”
“No, I’m still waiting,” she said, whimpering. “I see him in the yard. He’s just standing there, on the front lawn, staring. Oh, my God, Rolson, he’s wearing a mask. He’s going to kill me, isn’t he?”
“No,” I told her without conviction. “But he’s not doing anything to you? Right now?”
“No, just staring. I can’t see his face – it’s in shadow – but, oh God, he’s just there. He’s just there, Rolson, and I won’t go tell him to leave.”
“I didn’t think you would. Why don’t you call the cops?”
“Because I want you here. I don’t trust the cops in this town. Half of them are crooked, and that’s the good half.”
“Okay, hang on. I’ll be there in a little while.”
“A little while?” Her voice was thin, exasperated.
“I’m not at my house.”
“But– wait, are you at Allison’s?”
Without thinking, I said, “Uh-huh.” I couldn’t very well tell her I was hiding out at the house of the man she had openly accused of hitting her.
“Okay. Hurry.”
My phone beeped. Battery was dying.
“Be there soon.”
I wanted to tell her something else – the thought flittered away, though, even as I was having it – and my phone died.
That’ll do, I reckon, I thought.
I limped out to the car, favoring everything that hurt, which was everything but the soles of my feet. I absconded down those roads, counting in my head and trying not to imagine what might be happening at Jess’s house.
There was another, more darkly cynical thought lingering in the back of my mind. What if it were a trap? What if, in some kind of panic – or under some threat of violence – she decided to roll over and sell me out to a group of savage thugs? I didn’t know her well enough to discard the idea, and I couldn’t presume to speculate on it. We were virtually strangers, brought together by a shared physical loneliness. What allegiance did she have to me? None. Not a single one.
But the same was true for Richie. Dude gave me a slightly skeezy vibe, but he was by no means the most unseemly of my new acquaintances in Savannah.
* * *
I parked a hundred yards away from Jess’s place and weaved through random backyards in an attempt to be discreet. Her squat little duplex was the worst house in a good neighborhood. Unlike the houses around it, this one was worn down. Chipped paint. Uneven yard. Bars on the doors and windows.
But no dude. Not even a hint of a dude.
A single, bare bulb threw illumination across the small yard. I crept around it, pulling my piece and trying to find a side entrance. I slunk up by the house under cover of darkness, peered in through the windows until I saw a hallway light. There was sufficient yellow glow in the house to convince me I wasn’t being ambushed.
I approached the front door, keeping an eye out for people in the shadows, and knocked.
No answer. I thought I heard a TV, but it could have been the house next door, which elbowed up to Jess’s place. I tried the doorknob, but it had no give. I slipped a credit card from my wallet and tried to wiggle in through that old trick. The door had a bolt, too, so if it was in use, the card wouldn’t work. However, a trick of the wrist, and the door clicked open, and I was inside.
The smell of rotting food and stale smoke wafted out to surround me. Dishes filled the sink, and cigarette ash covered leftovers caked on dishes. The dwelling of someone deep in a binge.
And no sign of Jess.
I passed through the den and kitchen and pressed myself against the hallway wall. No shadows in the light. I waited breathlessly for someone to appear. My heart thrummed in my ears as I turned and quietly made my down to the back bedroom, where I heard the sound of an off-kilter fan whirring at full tilt.
Something was up. If Jess were all right, she’d have met me at the door. This was eerily close to what had been happening at my house. They – whoever they were – had left me alone for the past few days, but it appears as though they had descended upon my acquaintances.
Phase 2 of their master plan to drive me insane, maybe.
The helicopter whir of the fan grew louder. I stepped into the bedroom and checked the mattress. Nothing. Nobody. Outside, the sound of a distant siren could be heard. I didn’t intend on staying long enough for it to get close. I was going to get Jess and get the hell out of there.
A thin sliver of light from the bathroom led me forward. I knocked once and whispered Jess’s name, but after two minutes of silence, I turned the knob and peeked in.
Forgive me this impropriety, I thought, hoping she was at least clothed.
She lay in a heap on the bathroom floor, arms up and away from her, legs stretched out as if she had landed in that specific position. Eyelids stretched open, revealing dilated pupils. No blood. No perpetrator. The bruises had begun to fade, but she looked no better.
She wasn’t dead; she was just really fucking high.
A thin trail of saliva glistened at the side of her mouth, dripping into a pool beneath her cheek, and her lips quivered with attempts at words, though none of them quite made sense.
“Jess,” I said, and her eyes clicked over to me. It was a mechanical gesture, as one possessed by a demon in a low-rent horror movie.
This was the opposite of what I imagined her preferred high was.
She wasn’t a downers sort of person. It was all coke and speed and meth with this girl, but here she was, zonked on something which had dragged her down into the depths. Heroin, maybe. Or pills. Something pretty immediate. I checked her heart rate. Slow, but stable, so far as I could tell, and I really couldn’t. I was just guessing.
“Did you do this to yourself?”
She just stared.
“Did somebody – did he – do this to you?”
Her eyes barely moved.
“Try to blink. Do something with your eyes, if it’s a yes.”
She wasn’t able to do a full close, really, but her eyes moved, and I saw something in them that told me it was a yes.
“Pills, too? Did he force feed you pills?”
Again, a slight movement of the eyes.
Her arm flopped down, perhaps in an attempt for her to grasp my hand, and the gesture revealed her cell phone. She was shivering, eyes sort of rolling back in her head, so I grabbed the phone and dialed 911. When the operator answered, I went out to check the house number on the front of the building, and I gave the woman the situation and the address.
“I see. We’ll get an ambulance out there ASAP. And with whom am I speaking?”
I hung up.
The front door had been locked. I backtracked through the house, listening to the siren growing closer, and checked the back door.
Wide open.
&
nbsp; I loaded a round into the chamber of my .45 and slunk into the darkness. Whoever had perpetrated this was probably long gone, but I decided to take my chances, anyway. I fled headlong into the gloomy, wild-eyed night, ignoring the caution which had brought me here.
I was met with a completely barren landscape. Zombie movies had more life in them. The road was completely still and empty. I checked the window of each parked car but came up with nothing. No hiding monsters. No halfwit gangsters. No hit men waiting their turns.
Further down 31st, I stopped in front of a church. I whispered an obscene prayer to myself. Hallelujah. Mother Mary, full of grace, deliver me unto evil so that I may stomp it a wet new asshole.
It was then, in the middle of my attempt at mild blasphemy, I noticed the sound of a car idling somewhere behind me. Didn’t have the regular chug-chug of a high-end muffler system, but it was audible all right.
I didn’t immediately turn to face it. Didn’t want to draw attention. I took a few steps forward, continuing my route along the tree-lined street. I gazed up at the Spanish moss hanging over me and proceeded to speed up just a little bit. Behind me, the car started moving.
No headlights. Bad sign.
There was a long stretch of open road in front of me, and one single car parked at the end of it. I picked up the pace, putting the church in my rearview. So to speak. Leaning slightly forward. Hands jammed in too-small pockets. My feet kept a rhythm I could focus on, kept my pulse rate low. I needed to stay calm.
Reaching the parked car, I stopped and turned. I couldn’t take it anymore.
What I saw was a police cruiser. Lights off, pulling to a stop next to me.
The window whirred as it rolled down. My mind had already begun to rattle off a list of excuses for why I was wandering around Savannah with a loaded .45 in my jeans. My imagination was already several steps ahead of me. It had placed me in lock-up, awaiting a first-degree murder beef.
I opened my mouth to say something, raising my weapon in a non-defensive gesture, when the darkness of the car exploded in light and chaos.
Gunshots ripped through the otherwise calm night air.
A white hot pain opened up in my shoulder. I dropped to the ground and crawled for the car. Touching the wound with two fingers, I pulled away bloodied digits. Grazed but not unscathed, either. More heavy rounds knocked me from a slight shock. A flurry of metal-on-metal violence. The sound of two robots fighting, or getting off.
There was a silence then. The guy had emptied a clip into the air around me. I felt the presence of more light. People climbing out of bed to see the commotion. Old men looking for somebody to scream at.
“Stay in your homes,” I screamed, but the last of my words were cut off by the sound of more gunfire. Windows exploded. Tires deflated. The car next to me riddled with bullets. I didn’t get hit, but I also didn’t imagine I’d be able to hide much longer.
During the second lull, I popped onto my knees and aimed right for the window. I put three shots into the blackness there. I was not on point, but these shots were mostly dead-on.
Glass shattered. One guy screamed. A lost display of violence. Tires squealed. The car sped away. I circled around to the street and put two more rounds in the back of the car. Both shots landed.
At the end of the street, the car wheeled left and disappeared. I hadn’t noticed the other approaching sirens, but they were close. I ducked into a yard and ran across several blocks before slowing down. When I was sure I could calmly make my way back to the car, I looped back to Jess’s house. She was being loaded into an ambulance, and two police cruisers had parked nearby, neither one sporting fresh bullet holes.
At least she was being taken care of.
fourteenth chapter
Winston’s house was closer than Richie’s, and I felt like I needed a calming influence – someone to help me reach my zen side – so I drove there. I only waited four or five minutes for someone to answer the door.
“Rolson, what in God’s peculiar name are you doing here at this hour?” Winston asked. Yaelis stood behind him, arms crossed, eyes barely open.
“I needed a place to crash,” I said. “I’m having a crisis of conscience.”
Winston shifted his weight, hands fixed firmly on his hips. He peered at me through a thin veil of sleep, and he must have seen a bottle hanging like an albatross around my neck, because he turned and let me into his home.
Yaelis came over and hugged me. I raised the wounded shoulder so she couldn’t see it – or get blood on her – and hugged her back. Sweet kid.
“Thank you,” I said. “I need to use the restroom real quick, and then I’ll be right back.”
I left a heavy silence in my wake, but it was absolutely necessary. I had to check on my shoulder, which – miraculously – neither one of them had noticed. Or they had noticed and had chosen not to comment.
I peeled my shirt off and checked myself in the mirror. The bullet had grazed me, but the wound undoubtedly needed stitches. There was no time and no means for patching myself up like that in this house, so I went for the only possible solution: I clenched my teeth and pressed the flesh together, using half a box of Band-Aids I found under the sink to keep my skin from separating.
A makeshift solution, but I’d live.
I gently slipped the tee back on and met the bewildered pair in their kitchen. There was a cup of sweet tea on the counter waiting for me. I stood with the injured shoulder facing away from them and tried not to gulp, but it tasted damned good and I was dehydrated.
“Did you have a drink tonight, Rolson?”
Winston’s arms were crossed, an untouched glass of water next to him. He was trying to make eye contact, but I denied him. Yaelis was sitting on the kitchen counter, sipping a Diet Coke through a straw, just watching the entire situation.
“No, but I wanted to,” I said. Not a complete lie. I always kind of wanted a drink.
“You look like hell,” Yaelis said from behind her father.
“Y.”
“I know, dad. Language. But it’s true. Are you sure you’re all right, Rolson?”
“I’m coming down. I just had one heck of a bad night.”
“It’s all right,” Winston said. “You can say ‘hell.’ Seems like my daughter isn’t offended.”
She smiled sleepily. “I’m not.”
I took another lengthy swig of tea and placed the glass on its water ring.
“When you get to be my age–”
“Your age,” Winston said. “Just wait a decade, my friend.”
“Y, men like me – even men of my particularly young age – sometimes carry a lot of bad mojo with them. Might be literal, in some cases, but most of the time, it resides up here.”
I tapped my forehead. Winston shifted his weight, trying to look pissed and not pissed.
I said, “You get so used to the weight that you don’t always notice it, but then something happens, and it brings to bear all of that weight. You realize you don’t think you can keep on carrying it with you, and all you want to do is lie down.”
Winston’s eyes softened at that last piece. Sounded like something Brother Winston might say while standing at the lectern.
“Amen, brother,” he said.
Yaelis stared in a way that told me she didn’t buy it, but I went with that story nonetheless.
* * *
The next morning I awoke to the sound of a door being thrown open.
“The hell, Rolson?”
Winston’s face was a mass of worry.
“I don’t–”
“You know, exactly,” he said. “The news, Rolson. You’re all over the news. In connection with a murder charge? Firing at police officers last night? That why you came here: you needed someone to cover for you?”
I could have lied. “Yes.”
I sat up. Winston stepped forward and took a swing at me. I let him. I kind of deserved it.
Swallowing blood, I said, “I was going to leave as soon as I got up
.”
“My daughter is sleeping down the hallway, Rolson. There was a time– I am no saint, and I’ve had plenty of scrapes with the law. There was a time when I would have put you up and fed your ego about being a badass, but now is not the time. She’s all I’ve got left, Rolson, and if something happens to her...well, Jesus Christ.”
“I know.”
“By God, my fucking daughter lives here,” he said, holding back tears like two men trying to fight. “I can’t even believe you would do this. To me.”
He said the last part as though he himself didn’t believe it.
“I didn’t think– I made a choice. I needed a place. I didn’t think it was this bad. Not yet.”
“Oh, no? Well, it seems to be a whole hell of a lot worse, by looking at it.”
When Winston stepped out of the way, I saw Yaelis, wide-eyed, standing in the hallway. Her skin looked even darker against the bright yellow of her pajama top.
“Is there something I should know here, dad?” she asked.
“No, honey. You go on back to bed. We’re just talking.”
“Dad.”
He turned and she held his gaze. She said, “Absolute honesty. Remember the promise?”
The hands which had been resting on his hips now ran over his hair. “Baby, I’ll tell you later. Let me and Rolson hash this thing out and–”
“Dad.”
He sighed. “Rolson’s in a spot of trouble. Got the police chasing after him, and he come and stayed with us last night. Seems to me he was disrespecting our house, our rules regarding honesty. What do you think?”
“What did you do?” she asked. She came a little bit closer and leaned against the doorway. She was trying to look relaxed, but I saw the whole of her body shaking.
I stood up. “Got myself involved with some bad people. Long time ago, I reckon, but also pretty recent. They’ve got me pegged, and they’re turning the screws.”
“Did you do it? Whatever it is they’re saying you did?”
I glanced from her to Winston. “No. Man broke into my house, tried to kill me, so I shot him. He walked out of my house, and somebody– you sure you want me to tell it?”
