by Paul Cleave
Bad news—Sandra is dead. You can’t fix that in the rewrite.
The smelling salts work. Eric opens his eyes and there’s a muted sound of coughing that can’t quite make it past the duct tape. He looks confused. He squints against the light and twists his head away from the light of the cell phone. He starts to fight the duct tape holding his hands behind his body. He starts squirming on the ground.
Hans punches him in the stomach. Hard. There’s a sharp intake of air through Eric’s nose. Jerry always thought his friend would be capable of something like this, but seeing it happen makes his own stomach clench.
“Calm down,” Hans says, then gives Eric a small slap. “Calm down.”
Eric can’t calm down, but he manages to stop coughing and he manages to stare at his two captors without struggling. He doesn’t manage to hide the fear in his face.
“You know what we want,” Hans says. “First there’s something we ought to show you.”
They get Eric to his feet. The orderly tries to struggle, but the duct tape is keeping the fight to a minimum. They stand him against the window so he can face out, then Jerry realizes Eric probably can’t see much at all. He takes the orderly’s glasses out of his pocket and puts them on Eric’s face.
“You’re obviously a bright guy,” Hans says. “You’ve proven that by getting away with murder. Since you’re bright, you must be able to figure out what’s going to happen if we throw you out the window, which we’re willing to do, unless you tell us about the women. First some facts. We’re two stories high, and if you survive landing on your head from that height you’re going to wish you hadn’t. Second, when we take the tape off your mouth, you’re going to have the urge to scream. I would advise against that. We’re in the kind of neighborhood where people are used to hearing screams. Maybe one of them will call the cops, maybe not. What’s doubtful is somebody rushing over to help you. What’s doubtful are the cops getting here in the time it takes for you to travel from the window to the patio. Do you understand what you’re being told?”
Eric nods. They turn him so his back is to the window. The whole time his eyes are wide, bugging out of his head is perhaps how Henry would describe it if Henry was in one of his less original moods, Jerry thinks. Or as big as saucers if Henry was being a lazy prick.
“We know you killed the girls,” Hans says, and Eric looks confused, or at least is trying to look confused. Jerry studies his face, his features, looking for recognition and understanding, but all he sees is fear and uncertainty.
“We know you injected my friend here,” Hans says, and flashes the cell phone light in Jerry’s direction for a second. Now Eric looks even more confused. Hans carries on. “We know you snuck him out of the nursing home. Now, I’m going to take the tape off your mouth and you’re going to answer me—if you don’t tell us what we want to know, we’re going to drop you. Okay?”
Eric, who is shaking his head through the last bit of Hans’s speech, now starts nodding. Hans removes the tape, and the moment he does Eric draws in a deep breath and starts to cough. A few seconds later he gets himself under control.
“I don’t,” he says, and then coughs a little bit more. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Are you sure?” Hans asks.
“I’m positive.”
“I mean are you sure that’s the way you want to play it? We know you set up Jerry here.”
“You injected me,” Jerry says.
“Of course I injected you! You were getting out of control. We had to calm you down!”
“You’ve injected me more than once,” Jerry says.
“We often have to inject you.”
“Then how does he escape if he’s been sedated?” Hans asks.
“I don’t know,” Eric says, his voice breaking a little. “Nobody knows. But the days he escapes he’s not sedated, and last night, well, it must have worn off.”
“You hear that?” Hans asks.
“Hear what?” both Eric and Jerry say at the same time.
“A reason to toss you out the window,” Hans says. He spins Eric around so he’s facing the view outside again.
“But—”
Eric doesn’t get to finish the sentence, because right then Hans punches him in the side of the face, a fast, hard jab that rocks Eric’s head sideways and knocks his glasses off, the hit echoing through the room, bringing an extra layer of reality to a day that has been unbelievable and way too real for Jerry all at the same time. Blood flows from Eric’s nose. Jerry wants to say something, but isn’t sure what. He wants his friend to dial it back, but this is the way things get done. This is how you get the facts from bad people, and those who don’t stay committed only get lies and half-truths. He crouches down and grabs Eric’s glasses and puts them back on for him.
Hans puts the duct tape back over Eric’s mouth then pushes his head through the open window. Eric struggles at first, then relaxes as more of his body is pushed through, a struggle at this point only doing him more harm than good. His face bangs against the building as they lower him, his body dragging over the windowsill, bumping and slowing as different body parts grip against it. Then he’s all the way out, Eric holding one leg, Jerry the other, both of them straining at the effort required.
“He’s facing the wrong damn way,” Hans says.
“I’m sure he still gets the point,” Jerry says, struggling for breath.
“We should try and turn him.”
“How?”
“How about—” Hans says, but it’s how about nothing, because Jerry loses his grip on Eric, then with all that extra weight Hans loses his grip too, and then Eric is falling, the distance covered so quickly he reaches the concrete before Jerry is even aware of what’s just happened. Eric’s sudden fall ended by his sudden stop, and Jerry wonders if this is one more death that will be filed away on his things-to-forget list, whether tomorrow he’ll be denying this to himself, perhaps the same way he’s been denying everything else.
DAY TWO WITHOUT SANDRA
You slept upstairs last night. It felt like a betrayal leaving Sandra downstairs, but you couldn’t spend another night on the floor next to her. You just couldn’t. You didn’t sleep well, just in fits and starts, and you lost count of how many times you reached across the bed, needing to find Sandra asleep and okay and not being able to. When you went into the office this morning, you went with the hope she wouldn’t be there, that she would be cooking breakfast or reading a book. But of course she was there, she’s still here. You sat on the floor next to her and spun the chamber in the gun around and around, thinking about putting it to your head and pulling the trigger, but never getting close.
The alarm guys came to the house yesterday. At least you think it was them. There was knocking from the front door a few times that you ignored. They eventually went away. Last night you called Eva and gave her the We’re busy looking at nursing homes line, and she wished you the best of luck. The moment you call the police you will lose her.
You are in limbo now, just spending the hours imagining your life without Sandra. But that was your future anyway, wasn’t it? So here’s what’s going to happen, Madness Journal. This will be Past Jerry’s final entry before being shipped off to jail, his final few lines before calling the police later today. Or tomorrow. The longer the wait, the more time Eva can have thinking the world is okay.
So, what to say to the police? Say nothing. Don’t tell them anything. If this is all you remember, Future Jerry, then remember this: don’t tell them about Belinda, about the shirt, the knife, about Hans. It’s their job to figure out what happened, and if you lay all the evidence out there for them, they won’t look beyond it. You’ll go from Jerry Grey Crime Writer to Jerry Grey Death Row Inmate. You’ll be a scapegoat. They’re not going to believe you had nothing to do with Belinda Murray’s death, and they’ll shape the evidence around Nurse Mae’s statement. They’ll say the timeline was off, that you were there earlier or Belinda died later. You�
�ve written about this world long enough to know how it works.
Say nothing, Future Jerry. Say nothing.
Who knows, in another month or two maybe you’ll have forgotten all about this.
Final words?
Stop writing what you know.
And fake the rest.
They run downstairs, each of them stumbling, Jerry tripping into Hans, Hans tripping into Jerry, more good luck than anything else keeping them upright as Hans’s cell phone lights the way. When they get to the bottom they don’t actually know where to turn. They don’t know the layout of the place. Hans makes the decision and Jerry follows. They head into what turns out to be the dining room, then the lounge, no furniture to bang their knees into. From the lounge there’s a sliding door to the backyard. Both men are breathing heavily. Neither has said a word. They stick to that tradition as Hans twists the lock and opens the door.
Because Eric’s hands were tied behind him, he never had the chance to try to use his arms to break his fall. There is no need to check for a pulse. Jerry can feel something rise up in his stomach.
“Hold it in, Jerry,” Hans says.
Jerry takes a deep breath. He tries to hold it in. But he can’t. He turns and vomits against the side of the house. He can still hear the sound Eric’s head made when it hit the pavement, can feel that sound vibrating around the bones in his body, like biting heavily on a ball bearing and cracking a tooth. He wipes his sleeve over his mouth. His hands are shaking, and then he realizes his legs are shaking. His arms too. Everything is shaking. This is what it is like to have killed a person. If he’s done this before, surely he’d recognize the feeling. This is new to him.
“Why the hell did you let him go?” Hans asks.
“Don’t put this on me,” Jerry says. “It’s not like I have experience at this kind of thing. This is why in movies the guys doing the holding look like bodybuilders.”
“All you had to do was hold on.”
“Well dangling him outside the window was a stupid idea.”
“Yeah? You want to carry on doing this alone?” Hans asks. “You think you’re better off without me?”
“No, of course not,” Jerry says. “I just didn’t know we were going to be killing anybody. We just murdered him, Hans.”
“Damn it, Jerry, I know that, okay? But before you head to church to confess, just remember what he did. He killed those women and framed you for it.”
“But we don’t know that,” Jerry says, “not for a fact, and even if that is true who the hell is going to believe us, huh?”
“Come on, let’s go,” Hans says.
“And what? Just leave him out here?”
“We need to make use of the time we have,” Hans says. “Soon his wife is going to start wondering where he is, then she’s going to start phoning around, and in a few hours she’ll probably be calling the police. They’re going to make the connection pretty quickly since both of you have gone missing,” Hans says.
“We can’t just leave him like this,” Jerry says. “It’s not right.”
“There’s no point in dumping him anywhere,” Hans says. “We’re going to have to admit to what happened, but once the police figure out the kind of man he really was, then that’ll go in our favor. Plus it was an accident.”
“I don’t mean dumping him anywhere,” Jerry says. “But we can’t just leave him out here on the patio. It’s not right.”
“None of this is right,” Hans says, then he disappears inside.
Jerry leans up against the house because the ground is swaying. He crouches down and tries to be sick again, but there’s nothing, just bile. When Hans comes back he’s carrying a shower curtain. They roll Eric into the shower curtain, his body making clicking sounds as broken bones roll over each other. Jerry picks Eric’s broken glasses off the ground and puts them in Eric’s hand. When they’ve turned him into a cocoon they try to lift him. The wrapped feet keep slipping out of Jerry’s grip and hitting the ground. Somehow the dead man feels heavier than he did five minutes ago. Jerry fills his hands with layers of plastic rather than trying to scoop them under the body. This time they get Eric inside and they lay him gently on the floor, and he doesn’t go oomph because he can’t make those noises anymore. No matter what is real and what isn’t, Jerry just killed a man.
Hans uses his phone to light their way back through the house. They don’t say anything as they walk out the front. Hans closes the door behind him and the lock latches back into place. They walk casually to the car and climb casually in and then casually drive out of the street—nothing to see here, nothing going on, no sir, no ma’am, just two law-abiding citizens out for a drive after casually dropping somebody to their death.
The tension builds in the car as they drive. Jerry can’t tell whether Hans is going to take him right to the police or hang him out a different window all by himself. In fact he has no idea where Hans is going. It’s creeping up to eight o’clock and there isn’t much to see in the way of life on the streets. They drive for fifteen minutes and Jerry watches the houses and the cars parked out front and the occasional person wandering along, and he craves all of it. He wants to wrap himself up in that life, the normality of thinking about dinner and TV and the onslaught of bills. He wants to be Jerry Grey back before Captain A steered him into the dark.
“We’re here,” Hans says.
“Where?”
“Eric’s house,” Hans says, turning the car into the driveway. He presses the button on the remote to open the garage door. “We’re committed, buddy, and we’ve come too far to turn back now.”
“You’re kidding.”
“How long have we known each other?” Hans asks.
“Honestly, I have no idea. I don’t even know how old I am,” Jerry says, but as soon as the words are out an answer comes to him. He’s forty-nine. One year short of the big midlife crisis.
“You’re fifty,” Hans says, and the news is almost as upsetting as any other he’s had today. “In that time, have you ever known me to kid?”
“Honestly, I can’t remember that either.”
Hans laughs at that. “God I wish that was a joke. Come on, let’s start looking around.”
“Didn’t you say he was married?”
“I did, but look—do you see any lights on? And there’s no other car in the garage. Come on.”
“Doesn’t mean she isn’t home.”
“The house is empty,” Hans says.
“How can you be so sure?”
“I can just tell. It’s like a secret power.”
“But isn’t that what you thought earlier when you first came here only to find Eric inside?”
“It’s a secret power that is occasionally wrong. Like I said, Jerry, we’re committed.”
They drive into the garage. Hans pushes the button to close the door behind them.
“So what’s the plan?” Jerry asks.
“The plan is we don’t mess things up,” Hans says.
“And if the wife is home?” Jerry asks.
“Then that will be a problem,” Hans says, “but thankfully we have these,” he says, and pops open the glove box and pulls out the leather pouch with the syringes inside.
“Good thing you brought them along.”
Hans shakes his head. “These aren’t mine. I found them in here earlier. They’re Eric’s. They’re what he sedated you with. No reason for him to have them in his car, right?”
“He had his car yesterday,” Jerry says, “when he came to the house.”
“And he should have returned them to the nursing home, but he didn’t, because they are for his own personal use.”
“What if we use one on his wife and she’s allergic to it, or we overdose her?”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“So what do you want to do, Jerry? Nothing? Go to jail and let the world think you killed those women when it was Eric? The chances are she’s not even home, and
the longer we sit in the car debating it, the closer she’s getting. We could have been in and out by now. Come on, we have to go in and prove he did these things.”
“And what if he didn’t?”
“Then we just killed an innocent man. There’s no point in holding back. We’re so far down the rabbit hole that it doesn’t really matter how much deeper it gets.”
They move into the house, the internal door bringing them into a hallway. Hans flicks on a light. Jerry notices his friend is still wearing gloves. “See? I told you it was empty.”
“Shouldn’t we leave the lights off?”
“Why? Eric was supposed to be home, right? It’d be weird if the lights weren’t on.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“You go search the study,” Hans says. “I’ll start elsewhere.”
The study is the first room on the left. There’s a bookcase on the wall and Jerry’s books are there, plus those of others, a bunch of authors Jerry has met and had drinks with at festivals, a bunch of true crime novels, some how-to and tips on writing. There’s a desk facing them. It’s solid wood with scars and scratches and dents. It looks old, all that character beaten into it over the last hundred years. Behind the desk is an office chair on wheels, and on top of the desk a computer, a printer, a couple of novels, a bottle of water, a phone, and a printed out manuscript. On top of the manuscript is a snow globe a little bigger than a baseball, a castle on the inside of it, the flecks of glitter lying prone on the bottom. The room is carpeted, which makes it unlikely there are any hiding spaces beneath the floorboards, but he still kicks at it anyway, listening for something that might give, but there’s nothing.
He sits in Eric’s chair. He starts with the drawers. There are some magazines, some office supplies, some bank statements. No jewelry, no strange porn or photographs of neighbors through windows. He picks up the manuscript. It’s bulky. It’s been many books since he last printed out a manuscript. He used to do all his editing and reading on the computer. He figured he was helping save the environment.
