Orchard Grove

by Vincent Zandri

  Pulling into the convenience store lot, I parked around the back of the small wood building near the dumpster and killed the engine. I exited the car and limped around to the front of the store, entered into it through a front glass door that sported a picture of a giant green bass breaking the water’s surface in a flying leap, the words, “Fresh Night Crawlers for Sale!” printed in big black letters below it. That’s what I was to the Albany cops. A night crawler. A worm. A slimy insect.

  There was an old man sitting behind the counter on a stool. The scraggily gray beard he wore made him look old anyway. He was watching a television that was mounted to the wall above the counter, directly beside the overhead cigarette racks. It was still dark out, yet he barely acknowledged me as I stood by the now closed door.

  “ATM?” I asked, trying not to look at him directly.

  He slowly peeled his eyes away from the tube, nodded.

  “Behind you,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  I turned, eyed the gray cash machine set up against the exterior wall by the window. Pulling out my wallet, I slid out the red ATM card, entered it into the card slot. When the screen came up asking me for my PIN, I entered it and waited. That’s when the silence was broken by the sounds coming from the old man’s television, as if something he’d just witnessed on the screen caused him to dramatically turn up the audio.

  “This is your news on the nines for the top of the five o’clock hour. Police are on the lookout for a North Albany screenwriter suspected of murdering a local APD detective in a bizarre homicide-made-to-look-like-a-suicide plot only Hollywood could cook up.”

  My knees grew wobbly, my foot throbbing with my every pulse, the skin that surrounded it feeling too small for the swelled, sutured flesh… feeling as if it was splitting apart. I made the mistake of looking over my right shoulder at the old man who shifted his eyes from the television to my face. I quickly turned back to the machine, hoping against all hope that it would disburse my cash immediately. Instead it asked me if I’d be willing to pay three dollars to access my cash account. I pressed Yes. As if I had a choice in the matter.

  Then it asked me how much I wanted to withdraw. The most it offered up was two hundred bucks. But there was another option called “Other.” I chose that one. Meanwhile, the bad news continued to spill out of the television just three or four feet away.

  “The body of APD Detective John Cattivo, forty-one, was discovered last evening by his wife immediately after she heard what was described as a gunshot coming from one of the rooms in their North Albany home. Initial reports indicated that Cattivo died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head while alone in the room. Later on, however, it was reported that Cattivo had been accompanied by his next-door neighbor, local screenwriter Ethan Forrester, into the room only moments prior to the suicide. After careful questioning by APD Senior Homicide Detective Nick Miller, it was determined that Forrester either tricked Cattivo into acting out a suicide on behalf of research he was said to be conducting for an upcoming Hollywood production or, Forrester actually pulled the trigger himself. Preliminary ballistics reports indicate that Forrester’s prints were not only discovered on the suicide weapon, but also on the single bullet casing that, by all appearances, had been secretly loaded into the otherwise empty automatic’s nine round magazine.

  “A second source for the APD, Sergeant Carl Pressman, who is also reputed to have been the deceased’s partner, reports that Forrester who, it should be noted is on crutches after a recent foot surgery, had been harassing Cattivo’s wife, Lana. According to Pressman, Forrester who lives next door to the Cattivo’s on Orchard Grove, has shown up on numerous occasions to their home uninvited. Mrs. Cattivo has also lodged several complaints with the APD after discovering Forrester spying on her from a window that looks directly out onto their next-door home and backyard.

  “Miller, who is presently in charge of the on-going investigation, told Channel Nine that he was able to obtain a bench warrant for Forrester’s arrest only a few hours after the fatal early evening incident. However, when the APD made a raid on Forrester’s Orchard Grove home at approximately three-thirty AM this morning, the screenwriter had already fled the scene, perhaps acting on a tip-off from some unknown party.”

  I could feel the old man’s eyes digging into me as I typed in the numbers, 1-0-0-0 into the ATM, pressed Enter. When it spit out an electronic beep and flashed the words, “$500 Maximum Withdrawal,” I was left with no other option but to cancel my request and type in 5-0-0. I bit down on my bottom lip so hard I thought I drew blood, pressed Enter and waited for the ATM to cough up the cash. I tried to turn off the voice on the television and concentrate instead on the mechanical workings of the machine, the bills being electronically counted and collected by the wheels and gears.

  “Excuse me,” the old man said. Just the sound of his old, gravelly voice sent a jolt of electric sparks throughout my nervous system.

  A stream of cash began dispersing into the gray plastic tray in twenty-dollar denominations. It spilled out like green blood.

  “Hey you,” the old man pressed. “That’s you on the television, ain’t it? Ain’t…it?! You’re the killer. ”

  I tried to ignore him. But my head was filling with the sound of a thousand blaring trumpets and beating, pulsating bass drums.

  “Hey you, killer!” the old man repeated, his voice louder, more insistent, more threatening.

  I grabbed my money, shoved it into my jeans pocket. It wouldn’t be enough, but I was on the run from the law. Somehow I would have to find a way to get to that coffee can in the pot patch. But for now I had to stay away or else risk getting snatched by Miller and his blue knights. I was floating alone in a great big wavy ocean, and there were storm clouds overhead, lightning bolts striking all around me. A fugitive from a kind of half-baked justice where a cop gets to wave a loaded gun at my wife’s head while forcing her to get half naked and perform sexual acts with his own wife. Doesn’t matter if it turns out that both women surly enjoyed the act. Right is right and wrong is fucked up. So what if the end result was my helping him kill himself? He had it coming. The only thing I did wrong was not finding a way to kill him when he was still holding a gun on my wife out on my back deck.

  I turned, faced the old man.

  He was wearing a wife beater that had turned fifty shades of gray. His gray hair was over grown like a patch of weeds, except for the very center of his skull that was egghead bald. His eyes were bloodshot and wet with decades of accumulated rage. Now was the moment he’d been waiting for his entire life. He reached under the counter and came back out with a pump-action shotgun. He pointed the barrel at my chest.

  “You don’t want to do that,” I said. “You have me confused for someone else.”

  “The hell I do,” he said. “I want you to put them hands over your head, and drop down to your goddamned knees. I’m gonna call the cops and they’re gonna cart your fancy cop killin’ ass to jail. You hear me, movie star?”

  “I write film scripts,” I said. “I’m not a movie star. And you’re making a big mistake.”

  “You’re making the mistake by opening your mouth. You don’t care about people. You care only about yourself. You put a bullet in that police officer’s gun and you blew his brains out. That’s murder and you die for murder. That’s the law.”

  The pulse pounded in my foot and in my brain. Okay, I pulled the trigger on John Cattivo. Sure I wanted him dead, and sure I agreed to arrange his suicide. But I was set up to be the lone murderer.

  I began to raise up my hands, like I was surrendering myself when in fact I was stalling. At the same time, I began to lower my body. But that’s when I caught sight of the stack of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup cans over my right shoulder. There was a cardboard sign Scotch-taped to the pyramid-like stack announcing a ninety-nine cent per can sale.

  “Get down!” he barked, cocking a fresh shell into the shotgun chamber. The tight mechanical metal-workings of
the shotgun filled the store.

  Reaching out quick, I snatched up my ninety-nine cents worth of soup, sending the rest of the stack tumbling to the floor, and tossed it at his head. He ducked and triggered the shotgun, blasting away the cigarette rack. Cigarettes rained down onto the floor as I speed-limped the couple of steps to the counter.

  Extending both arms, I lunged forward off my good foot, caught the counter with my left hand while grabbing hold of the shotgun barrel with my right. As we struggled, he managed to cock another round into the chamber. He fired again and the blast sent me sliding off the counter and onto my back while a chunk of plaster ceiling came raining down on me. He bounded up onto his feet like a man years younger, and came around front, aiming the barrel down at my head. Pointblank. At that range, he would vaporize my face.

  “You attacked me,” he said, cocking his head up toward a video monitor. “I got it on film. You attacked me, and you killed that officer of the law and now I’m gonna blast you away in self-defense.”

  The old man meant business. I saw the death in his eyes. It was as plain and despairing as the broken blood vessels that streaked across the wet whites. I recognized his dire need to kill me. His hatred and his lust for what he was about to do. Like he’d waited for this singular moment in time for his entire life, and that once accomplished, he could die without a shred of remorse. He didn’t just want to kill me. He wanted to kill himself, and all of mankind. In a word, he’d had enough already. He cocked a round into the chamber and he smiled the smile of a man who had finally found peace.

  “Give my love to the devil, asshole,” he said, as his finger slithered onto the trigger.

  But I reached out fast. Grabbed hold of the barrel, pulled it out of his hands. Leaning up, I swung the stock against his knee, dropping him on the spot like a scarecrow made of twigs. Then I swung it in the opposite direction, connecting with his head. I felt the crack of his skull more than I heard it, as its energy travelled from the wood stock along the length of the metal barrel, into my hands and arms. It was no more or less an act of nature than if I’d just cracked open an egg. Surrendering the devil that possessed him, he collapsed, while the blood that tiredly poured from the split in his head made a thick pool on the filthy wooden floor. He was a dead man now, and there was no question in the world about who killed him and why.

  I used the shotgun like a crutch to pull myself up off the floor, before I got soaked in blood. My head pounding, the wound sutures in my foot no doubt having split open, I limped over the old man, went around the back of the counter. The register was closed, and I had no idea how to open it. I did the only thing I could think of which was to raise up the shotgun, slam the stock end down on the machine.

  The drawer shot open.

  I grabbed up what little cash there was, stuffing it into my pocket. Then, peering down under the counter, I located the open box of 12-gauge shells. Grabbing a fist full of them, I filled my jeans pocket. As my final act in the Godforsaken place, I searched the narrow cubby behind the register for the security system tape loop. When I located it, I pulled out the plastic cassette tape, and shoved it into my pant waist.

  Making my way back around the counter and the front door, I made sure not to step in any of the old man’s blood. After all, I was leaking plenty of the stuff myself. On my way out the door, my eyes caught sight of wooden hat-rack that was screwed to the wall and that displayed maybe a dozen baseball caps. One that bore the letters NRA on the brim in big white letters caught my attention. The tag attached to it read eight dollars. For a brief second, I thought about digging into my pocket for a ten spot, setting it onto the counter.

  “How stupid is that?” I whispered aloud.

  I was already a killer who’d just robbed the till. What difference did stealing a cheap baseball cap make? Pushing the door open, I made my way out of the store, a desperado whose time was about to run out.

  It was still dark out. But dawn couldn’t be that far off on the horizon.

  I was sure no one had seen me or heard the shotgun blasts. But that could have been wishful thinking, like believing Susan, Lana, and I could have lived together happily ever after. The world was getting smaller. Even in a remote area like this one. For all I knew, the state police had employed a drone to scour the countryside for me. I’d written one into a script once, just to keep up with modern tech. But I’d never really seen one in person. Looking up at the sky, I listened for the buzz and hum of tiny propellers. I didn’t hear any. But that didn’t make me feel any less vulnerable. Peeling the round gold price tag off the cap’s brim, I put it on, yanking it down over my brow. It wasn’t much of a disguise, but it would have to do.

  Back at the car, I tossed the shotgun onto the passenger seat, and pulled the security tape out of my pants. I stuck my fingers into the cassette, yanked out the tape, snapped it in two, then tossed the whole thing into the dumpster. Slipping back behind the wheel, I fired up the Porsche and, once more pressing my left foot on the gas, drove out of the lot with the headlights extinguished.

  I had no right in the world to pray. Rather, I had no right to pray and believe that Jesus, if he could actually hear me, owed me a solid. And I sure as shit knew that I would never see nor get to know him after the two men I killed in a single day. Correction…two men who might have killed me first given the opportunity. Technicalities. But regardless of how Jesus or God or Buddha felt about the death trail I was leaving behind, praying felt like the right thing to do for a man who was wanted as much by the police as he was Satan.

  “Our father who art in heaven,” I said aloud into the wind, “please save my sorry ass.”

  Hooking up with Route 9-and-20, the old road that used to connect Albany with New York City before the construction of the New York State Thruway, I drove for another twenty or thirty minutes through the desolate countryside. Other than sleeping off a few hours of a whiskey drunk, I hadn’t had any decent sleep in close to forty-eight hours. I was dead tired. Tired and wired and afraid of what awaited me around the next corner. I knew the right thing to do was to keep going until I at least made it to the Catskill Mountains where I could find a place to hide in the woods. Maybe an old wintertime hunting cabin I could break into. But I was driving with my left foot while my right foot was bleeding badly and my eyes were closing involuntarily. The immediate danger I faced was running off the road due to exhaustion. I’d be lucky to make it another five miles without crashing.

  I recognized the area as a once popular tourist destination back in the Forties and Fifties for the World War II generation who returned from the battleground looking for cheap getaways. No one used the area for vacationing anymore now that Cape Cod and the New Jersey boardwalk were all the rage, but the old motels still remained, mostly as overnight beds for sleepy truckers.

  Forcing my eyes to stay open, I drove until I came to the first roadside motel I could find that looked somehow inviting. The one I found had a few pickups and a couple of semis parked outside in the gravel lot. There was a big, vertical neon sign that said Motel in descending letters, only half the red and green neon in working order. But the lights were on in some of the rooms. Rooms that belonged to truckers looking to get an early start on the day.

  I pulled up outside the front office and turned the car off. Before I got out, I laid my jean jacket over the shotgun. Last thing I needed was someone spotting the weapon used to kill a man, even if that killing were conducted in self-defense.

  Standing outside the car, I looked to the east and made out the vague hint of sunlight as it was starting to rise over the mountains. A quick glance at my watch told me it was going on six o’clock in the morning. In a few minutes, daylight and humid summer heat would wash over this motel like a filthy, cum-stained bed sheet. When it came, I wanted to be secured behind the dead-bolted door of an anonymous room, the blinds closed, the air conditioning unit blasting cold, manufactured air.

  I needed time to think.

  To plan.

  To figu
re a way out of this mess or at the very least, expose Lana for who she truly was. Whatever the case, I was starting to think that turning myself into Miller before somebody else got killed might not be the stupidest of ideas. At the very least, I’d be able to get my foot looked at. At this rate, I was risking the onset of gangrene. Once that happened, the foot was as good as gone.

  The sound of two or three electric jolts filled the air, and the neon sign went dead for yet another day. Must be on a timer. I wondered if that’s what an electric chair sounded like. Turning, I limped up onto the concrete sidewalk and approached the glass door, the words OFFICE stamped on it at eye level in white paint that was chipped and browned with age and over exposure to the sun. Opening the door, I approached the empty Formica-covered counter. Maybe we were living in the digital age, but there was a good old fashioned bell set out on the counter. I slapped it, the ring so surprisingly loud, it took me by surprise.

  After a slow couple of beats, a woman stepped through a door-sized opening that was partially covered by a brown curtain. She was old, and she looked even older in her baggy housedress, worn slippers, and head of dyed black hair that had been put up in curlers. Her face was covered in a mask of translucent crème that belonged to the bedtime routine of a woman who, many decades ago, might have been as pretty as a movie poster. Now she seemed as aged and broken as the sign out front. Maybe as aged as the motel itself, her wrinkled body a worn casualty of the greatest generation that was now mostly dead.