Trust Me

by Javorsky, Earl

  “Art, for God’s sake—” Holly began, but the man glanced sharply at her and held up a hand, palm out: Stop.

  Jeff found his voice. “I’m not interested in this stuff anymore. Why don’t you just go while you can?” He wondered where Ron and Leanne were, if they were stuck at the bottom of the canyon. And Joe, wasn’t he supposed to be here?

  “I’ll be going soon enough. But for right now—” Doctor Jack picked up the tire iron and leaned forward slightly, reaching across the table until the claw end was inches from Jeff’s forehead “—drink up.”

  Jeff didn’t move.

  “I SAY DRINK UP.” Jack stood, yelling now. “DO IT!”

  The tire iron slammed down so hard on the table that the bottles rattled and the wood split from end to end. Whiskey spilled from the cup and met the pile of white powder, amalgamating into an amber smear. Doctor Jack raised the iron again, his face looming over the table in a mask of rage.

  As if in slow motion, Jeff saw Holly’s right hand appear from behind her on the counter, the white Styrofoam cup drawing an arc above the table until it stopped just short of Doctor Jack’s face. The cup’s contents, the brown liquid from the restaurant, flew into the man’s eyes, causing him to bellow in pain. He dropped the tire iron and fell back into the chair, hands covering his eyes.

  Holly picked up the weapon and cocked it back behind her. Using her entire body, she swung it around in the same arc as the cup had drawn. The metal connected with a sharp crack just above the Jack’s eyebrows. His head snapped back and he fell backward over the chair.

  “Jesus Christ!” Jeff got up, walked over to the other end of the table, turned and paced back, too agitated to formulate an action.

  Holly stood as she had before, in her position with her back against the edge of the counter. Her face was white and he could see her fist tighten and relax its grip on the iron as she breathed.

  “Tie him up so I don’t have to hit him again, would you?”

  He pulled Jack’s body into a sitting position. There was some nylon cord in a utility drawer.

  “Christ. I can’t stand it.” Holly stared at Doctor Jack’s inert form, the blood flowing from his forehead. She bent forward and picked up the empty grocery bag from the table, placing it upside down over the man’s head. Jeff bound Jack’s wrists together behind his back. At a loss for what to do next, he walked around the table to where Holly stood and drew her to him. She resisted stiffly but didn’t pull away. After a moment she relaxed slightly into his arms. He could feel his heart pounding against her.

  There was a stirring from the table, a rustling from the paper bag. Holly jumped, startled, and said, “This is insane. I can’t handle it.” He pulled her back, her head nestled on his shoulder, and stroked her hair. For a moment the only sounds were of his breathing, deliberately slow and deep, and hers, still staccato but slowing in rhythm.

  CHAPTER 61

  ⍫

  It helped, being held by Jeff, but not enough. She felt consumed with a sense of dread that was nearly paralyzing. When Jeff stepped away and said he was going to call Ron, she fell backwards and had to catch herself against the counter.

  Jeff rang off in frustration. “Shit, he must be on the line. Where the hell are they, anyway?” Then he told her, “Wait here. I’m just going out to the driveway to look,” and walked out of the kitchen.

  She heard the front door open and Jeff’s footsteps on the gravel driveway. She leaned against the counter, numb with anxiety, wondering why she didn’t feel triumph, vindication, or at least relief. She needed her medication, but it was in the car, and she knew a seizure was coiling like a cobra inside her, ready to strike.

  The rustle of the bag startled her. She grabbed a knife from the counter and turned to see the man, grotesque with the bag over his head, fresh blood staining the front of his jacket, strain against the nylon cord and then relax, sitting erect now. A deep, malevolent chuckle issued from the bag and Jack began to gently rock back and forth.

  “Bravo, Holly, bravo. Home run.” He chuckled again. “All that anger finally found a target outside of yourself.”

  “You’re insane.”

  Doctor Jack’s shoulders raised once, a shrug. “Ah, well. Sanity. Such a delicate thing really, even in the best of men.” He was silent for a moment, then said softly, “Holly, trust me. The doctor needs your help.”

  Holly’s lethargy deepened; she struggled to say no but her heart wasn’t in it. Nothing mattered and she didn’t care. She heard it again, like an echo: “Holly, trust me. The doctor needs your help.” She stood over him, paralyzed. A tremor in her hand became a violent shaking; the knife flew out of her grasp and the seizure gripped her like a wolf shaking a rabbit.

  CHAPTER 62

  ⍫

  Jeff paced to the end of the driveway for the fourth time, checking the street as if it would help speed Ron and Joe’s arrival. He tried calling again. The air was hot and dry, and the smell of burning was thick on the breeze. As he turned to go back to the house, movement caught the corner of his vision.

  Holly’s BMW bore down on him like a strike ball on a leading pin. In an impossible frozen moment he saw Jack hunched forward at the wheel, grinning as he accelerated. He jumped to the side and watched as the car veered by, Holly slack-faced as a sleepwalker in the passenger seat. Gravel kicked up and showered him as he stumbled and then rolled to the side of the driveway.

  The car fishtailed out of the driveway and turned right. He knew there was only one house left before the street hit a dead end, and that although it had a long, circuitous driveway, the house was perched just up the hill and next door to Ron’s house, sharing a cliffside view of the canyon and the roads below. A narrow trail meandered through dry scrub brush most of the way between the two homes.

  He ran to the side of Ron’s house and started up the dirt path toward the neighbor’s house. He heard the neighbor’s dog barking incessantly; to his left, beyond the street, flames consumed the hillside. The wind swept down the canyon, pushing the fire toward him. He sprinted up the last of the trail and found an opening in the hedge that marked the boundary of the neighbor’s property.

  He crawled through the narrow space. Thorns from the hedge and burrs in the dirt pressed into his hands. He came out into the clear at the juncture of the driveway and the garage: Holly’s car sat askew in a flower patch across the driveway, both doors open and the engine still running.

  The front door was open. He entered a foyer that led into a huge room. Gold and platinum records lined the walls, and ornate Chinese lacquered furniture rested on expensive oriental rugs. There was no sign of Jack or Holly, but the dog’s barking was louder. He turned to his right, walked through the kitchen, and found a door to the side yard. He opened it to find a dog run; the neighbor’s huge Akita was on a chain linked to an overhead cable. The dog stopped barking and came to him and sat, as if expecting a treat from his master. He undid the clasp of the chain from the dog’s collar, then, as an afterthought, reached up and released the chain from the cable.

  The Akita bounded toward the far end of the dog run, then reared up and placed his paws against the house, growling. Jeff followed and saw that the dog was looking through the open half of a Dutch door and into a bedroom. Diagonally, across the room, was a sliding glass door, open, and beyond it, a porch that ran the length of the house, with Jack and Holly struggling at the rail.

  The Akita got there first and snapped at Jack’s leg. Holly slipped free but tripped over a chaise lounge as she backed away. Jack raised the tire iron high above his head, ready to bring it down on the dog, but Jeff raced through the doorway and swung the chain outward. He watched, fascinated, as it wound itself around Jack’s forearm, then yanked hard, ducking as the tire iron swung down and missed his head. He raised his left foot and came down with all his weight on Jack’s ankle; there was a satisfying snap of bone that told him at least
Holly would get away from this alive. The man roared like a beast and swung his body around, ripping the chain from Jeff’s grasp and smashing the glass door behind him as he spun.

  Holly was still on the ground where she had fallen. Jack completed his mad, drunken spin and tried to keep his balance on his ruined ankle. Jeff saw that the collapse would land him on top of Holly; he reached out and pushed Jack toward the porch rail, which cracked and splintered and almost entirely gave way, leaving Jack suspended over the sixty-foot drop to the street below.

  He picked up the tire iron and raised it as he stepped toward Jack, who was trying to disengage himself from the wreckage of the railing. He heard Holly cry out, “Jeff, no!” and relaxed his grip on the iron. He experienced relief that he wouldn’t have to kill the man, followed by a new surge of adrenaline when he saw the chain swing toward his face and Jack begin to lurch upward. As Jeff ducked he heard a low growl and saw the Akita launch itself at Jack, this time completing the job of demolishing the railing.

  The growl turned into a high whine and then a pathetic yipping sound as man and dog disappeared from sight. The sickening sound of the almost simultaneous impacts was followed by what seemed like complete silence, until gradually the sound of wind and flames reasserted themselves in the background and the sound of Jeff’s own breathing began to dominate. He leaned down to help Holly to a standing position. As they looked over the ruined railing, the screech of brakes accompanied the arrival of the Land Rover, which came to a stop an arm’s length from Jack’s body, and they watched as Ron and Joe stepped out of the car and looked, first at the bodies, then up at them.

  EPILOGUE

  ⍫

  There is a series of jetties, several miles north of the Santa Monica pier, across the Pacific Coast Highway from the eroding cliffs of Pacific Palisades. The first, southernmost, of these rocky extensions had once been called the Lighthouse Jetty, but the lighthouse had been razed for a lifeguard headquarters. Before that, it had been the site of one of the longest piers on the California coast, and a railroad track once led to its base. When Jeff had been a boy, before he had become caught up in it all, long before it had all caught up with him, he had ridden the waves that formed on the sandbar at the end of the pile of rocks, by then called simply the Jetty. His sister, Marilyn, would watch from her favorite boulder at the Jetty’s westward tip.

  Jeff sat on the tilted flat surface of that same boulder, thinking of Marilyn and how he had lost her—by losing himself—long before she died. He remembered her when they were kids, looking up and smiling with joy at her big brother. If she could see me now, she would smile like that again.

  It was early November, more than two months since the insanity of Doctor Jack’s murderous binge. Daylight savings was over, and the days seemed to end abruptly now that summer was coming to an end. There was a light chop on the water and the sun sat like an egg yolk split in half on the horizon.

  Life, Jeff reflected, even with its losses, was good. He had seen Lilah in the hospital, her head bandaged so that only a small window opened onto her face. She had smiled wistfully, only the little girl remaining. She told him he looked good, and that the doctors had told her she would recover. Mostly. When he said goodbye, she said maybe when I’m better you can take me to one of those meetings. He had said yeah, we’ll do that, but she must have seen something in his expression because she took his hand and said, “Just as friends.”

  He had gone to his parents in the spirit of amends, and his mother cried while his father did something Jeff had never known him to do before: wrapped his arms around him, pulled him to his chest, and held him silently for a fine and timeless moment.

  “Are you thinking good thoughts?” Holly, who had been squatting on a lower rock by the waterline watching the crabs scuttling in the crevasses, smiled up at him.

  “Yeah.” He smiled back. “I am.”

  She climbed up next to him and sat. The tide was high and a wave slid by in a thick hump, spraying water at their feet as it looked for a shallow place to rear up and break. The sea had gone from a deep green to a slate gray as the last sliver of sun melted into the horizon. Looking out at the spot where the sun had been, Jeff felt Holly’s arm go around him, her hand settling at his waist. He glanced at her and saw that she was regarding him with an amused look in her eye.

  “What?”

  “I was just thinking about Leanne . . . You know we talk a lot.” Jeff knew this and was glad; it was part of Holly’s own healing.

  “And I asked her about all this, you know, you and me.”

  “Really? What did she say?” He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

  “She said that you were definitely a fixer-upper,”—Holly grinned—“but she thinks you’ve got great potential.” She drew him closer, kissed him lightly on the cheek and then, perhaps embarrassed by the disclosure, averted her gaze and looked out at the water. Jeff felt a tightening in his throat, the pressure of tears upwelling, the sweet sad pain of gratitude.

  He grinned and said, “I hope so. I heard that a lot when I was a kid.”

  About the Author

  ⍫

  Earl Javorsky is the black sheep of his family of artistic high achievers.

  Acknowledgments

  ⍫

  To my kids, this time, and to the Howard family.

  Also by Earl Javorsky

  ⍫

  Things haven’t been going well for Charlie Miner. His work as a private investigator involves him with an endless roster of shady characters. His ex-wife is borderline crazy. And he hasn’t been getting to spend anywhere near enough time with his teenage daughter Mindy, the one person in his life who truly matters to him.

  When he wakes up on a slab in the morgue with a hole in his head, though, things get even worse.

  Just before the shooting, Charlie had been investigating a case involving fraud, gold, religious zealots, and a gorgeous woman who seemed to be at the center of everything. Even with a fatal bullet wound, Charlie can connect the dots from the case to his attack. And when his daughter is abducted by someone involved, the stakes get exponentially higher. Charlie needs to find Mindy before the criminals do the same thing to her that they did to him.

  After that, maybe he’ll try to figure out how he’s walking around dead.

  Here’s an excerpt:

  They say once a junkie, always a junkie, but this is ridiculous. I haven’t been dead more than a few hours and I already need a fix. It doesn’t make sense; my blood isn’t even circulating, but it’s the process I crave: copping, cooking, tying off, finding a vein, the slow, steady pressure of thumb on plunger, and now it’s my first order of business.

  One of the advantages of being dead is that people don’t expect you to get up and walk away. I don’t imagine it happens often at the morgue, anyway, or they would take precautions against it. Not that I think I’m the first to remain awake through the entire process of dying, or even of one’s own murder, perfectly aware of the bullet smacking into my skull, tunneling through my brain, bouncing off bone and ricocheting around like a bee in a bottle.

  I must have blacked out for a bit after it happened. There was a roaring sound, like a hurricane, that drowned out anything from the outside and made thinking impossible.

  When the roaring subsided, I woke up disoriented before I realized where I was: disembodied and looking down at the mess that was once me, lying naked on a gurney. I roamed around the room, light as a whisper, fast as a thought, and then returned to the body. When I got close enough, it pulled me in like an inhalation, and suddenly I felt the heaviness of physical being again. It took me a while to figure out that I could move my fingers, stretch, sit up, and even see through my own eyes. Running the body was awkward, like wearing a gorilla suit.

  The clock on the wall says it’s four. I assume it’s at night since the joint is so dead.

  As an experiment, I disengage from
the body again. This time, I roam the entire place to check for anyone working the late shift, but no one is around except for a technician in a bathroom stall. I re-enter the body, get off the gurney, and shuffle over to a stainless steel tub with a hose hanging above it. I climb in and turn the water on. Some real shampoo would be nice, but at least there is a dispenser with disinfectant soap. Eventually, I get all the blood out of my hair. The hole in my head is weird and I want to poke around in it, but I have stuff to do so I climb out, dry off with a lab apron, and go looking for a stiff my size that has some clothes I can put on.

  So here I am in Doc Martens boots, black Levis, and a white tee shirt. The only six-foot-two male body I could find was a goddamned skinhead with a big Aryan Nations tattoo and huge muscles. I hope he doesn’t get up and start walking around.

  There’s a clipboard at the end of my gurney. It has a report on it that says, “Unidentified male, COD gunshot wound to head”.

  I need a plan. I’m jonesing pretty bad, so, bail out of the morgue, score some dope to tide me over, and then on to the next order of business: finding out who killed me. The easiest way to do that, I figure, is to visit everyone I know and see who looks surprised.

  It’s time to split.

  ***

  Good luck. Nazi-boy’s jeans still had a wallet, and the wallet has more than forty bucks in it. Not enough for what I need, but enough to get me home. I call a cab from a phone booth on Mission. The cabbie is a small, wiry African man with sharp, chiseled features. He’s wearing a red and black Rasta tam that bulges in the back like a bag of snakes. A slender gold crucifix dangles from his right ear. The ID on his visor says his name is Daniel; his last name is unpronounceable. When he sees me reading it, Daniel says, “It means ‘God is my judge.’”