Mourn the Living

by Henry Perez

  “C’mon, I want you to see my homework,” she said, pointing to a computer monitor.

  Chapa spent the next forty minutes reviewing several days’ worth of math problems and geography questions. There was something very rewarding about seeing Nikki’s work, though he’d been hoping to get some alone time with Erin. Something was happening between them, or maybe it had already happened. Whatever it was, it wasn’t good.

  The sun was starting to sink when someone rang the doorbell at around four-twenty. Chapa and Nikki heard the trick-or-treaters at the door, prompting the young princess to leap out of her chair and run to the living room.

  “Time to go!” Nikki said.

  Chapa and Erin walked along the sidewalk as their children ran from door to door, cutting across front lawns and around the occasional scarecrow or plastic tombstone.

  “I have a feeling we need to talk,” Chapa said, half an hour and six blocks into their trek.

  “Maybe we do. I’m not sure I want to know what happened to you last night.”

  “I’m not sure you do.”

  She looked him over, more like an acquaintance than a lover or even a friend.

  “You didn’t even change your clothes, Alex. You look haggard, like you got roughed up or something.”

  Chapa nodded. “Something like that.”

  They walked another half block in silence, trailing the children by a house or two.

  “Yes, we do need to talk,” Erin said, finally. “Maybe figure out where we go next with all of this. But not tonight, please.”

  Chapa understood. He wasn’t one to put things off, but last night had been long and complicated and very unpleasant for all involved. Erin looked weary, something Chapa had only seen once or twice before. And he’d gone more hours without sleep than he cared to count.

  Erin called it quits around six-thirty, and they returned to her house. Nikki had decided she wanted to sleep in her own bed that night. Chapa saw a look of resolve in his ten-year-old’s eyes. She wasn’t about to let some stranger drive them out of their house again.

  Chapa hesitated at first, worried about the possible effect that taking her back there so soon might have on Nikki. But when he saw Erin nod to him in approval, he gathered his daughter’s things and said goodnight.

  “Did you have fun?” Chapa asked Nikki on their way to grab a burger before heading home.

  “Yes, I guess so.”

  “Okay, so you didn’t have that much fun.”

  Nikki hesitated, and Chapa watched in the rearview mirror as her expression shifted and changed.

  “I was hoping to be out longer. And, I hope this doesn’t come out wrong, but I wanted to be out trick-or-treating just with you.”

  Chapa had noticed that there were still dozens of kids out walking along every street they’d driven down.

  “Then I guess we’re not finished yet,” he said, then drove an extra three miles past his street to the Ridgewood Heights neighborhood, one of Oakton’s most exclusive areas. He parked his beat-up Corolla on a wide, well-lit boulevard, and got out.

  “Let’s go. Grab your pumpkin.”

  Each block had only five or six houses on either side of the street, and only a couple that were giving out candy, but Nikki’s demeanor changed immediately.

  “I got a full-sized chocolate bar,” she squealed as they walked between the pillars of a two-story brick house that was at least three times bigger than Chapa’s. “I didn’t realize there were houses like these in Illinois. This reminds me of my neighborhood.”

  Chapa did his best to smile and make it appear genuine. Half an hour later they had exhausted the area, and filled Nikki’s plastic pumpkin to the brim.

  “Ready to call it a night?”

  Nikki nodded, and didn’t bother trying to speak through a mouth that was crammed to capacity with chocolate.

  As he turned into his driveway, Chapa told Nikki to wait in the car for a moment. He got out, locked her in, then walked to the front door and opened it. Without looking at the walls any more than he had to, Chapa quickly moved from room to room, turning on every light on the first floor. Then he went back to the car and got Nikki.

  He wasn’t sure what to expect, or how his daughter would react. But she seemed more curious than afraid—until it was time to go to sleep. That was when Nikki’s resolve began to fade.

  “Will you leave the lights on all night, Daddy? She asked, holding her hands together near a wall in a way that blocked out enough light to make one of the figures appear.

  “Yes. I will. And I’ve already double and triple-checked that all of the doors are locked and bolted.”

  They went upstairs soon after, and Chapa tucked Nikki in bed, as he encouraged her to go to sleep. He was looking forward to taking a much needed shower before heading back downstairs to do some research online.

  But he’d barely made it back to his room when Nikki called out to him.

  “What’s the matter, Nik?”

  “It’s those stars up there, glowing, can you make them go away?”

  Chapa’s heart sank. Something had been stolen from his daughter, though she was too young to fully understand just how much.

  Half an hour later, Nikki crashed in her father’s bed. As he was dozing off, half sitting, his back against the head-board, Chapa thought about turning off the lights in the bedroom. But he couldn’t decide whether or not that was a good idea.

  Chapter 68

  The man did not sleep last night.

  He sat in a chair in the middle of his otherwise empty living room. Lights turned off, curtains drawn, silent. He sat there from the late afternoon when the sun was dying its next death through its rebirth a dozen or more hours later.

  A few of the neighborhood kids rang his doorbell last night. Trick-or-treaters scrounging for a piece of candy. Children who are still too young to know what horror truly is, out celebrating manufactured fear.

  The man knows. He first met horror as a child, swallowed it whole, devoured it before it could devour him.

  And then as yesterday slipped away and turned into last night, he became the darkness. Letting it move through him like a spirit until it washed away everything he did not need to perform his task. Until he wasn’t anyone, anymore. None of the names he’d gone by suited him now. And once again, the darkness took shape within him, filling him up until he was sated.

  His belongings have been reduced to a single suitcase, the clothes he is wearing, and his bag of tools. All else has been given away to charity, or disposed of entirely.

  He will no longer exist in twenty-four hours, and in time some will wonder whether he ever had. This is a day the man has been working toward his entire adult life, maybe longer. Yes, longer. Ever since that night he cradled his mother’s lifeless body in his arms.

  The man hears her voice sometimes, but never responds for fear that he might scare her off. But things will be different after today. After he’s avenged her murder. Not squared it, no, that could never be possible. What the man who then called himself Gilley stole from him can never be equaled.

  But he’s going to make him pay in blood and pain, and then with his life. After that, the man will be finished with Oakton. There’s more work to be done here, no doubt about it, but the walls have started to close in again, and a few loose ends have been threatening to unravel over the past week.

  There’s no fall guy or stand-in this time. No corpse to leave behind for misidentification. But that’s okay. There’s a finality to what he’s planning to do here, and the man senses that peace is within his grasp for the first time in his life.

  The cops in this town never got close, not really. For a time he actually considered staying here a lot longer, making a life for himself, just like other people do. But he understands now that after tonight that will not be possible.

  He sits quiet and still until the sun rises up over the trees across the street, then muscles its way through the narrow slits in the curtains and into the man’s empty
house.

  It’s November 1st. All Saints Day to some, the Day of the Dead to others.

  As far as the man is concerned, it’s a little bit of both.

  Chapter 69

  Chapa’s story ran in that day’s Chicago Record, though not quite as written. A few of the more scandalous details, those that he’d put in to stir things up and maybe shake a killer loose from his safety zone, were gone.

  No doubt Macklin would claim legal concerns, and that guy in his office, the one with a look of terminal constipation on his face, had signed off on those decisions. That’s what he was paid to do.

  Still, there was enough in there to rattle a cage or two. The discussion was now on the table, though Chapa was unsure where it would go next or whether he’d be with the Record long enough to follow it.

  He dropped Nikki off at Erin’s, planning to pick her up after lunch, once she’d finished her schoolwork. Chapa needed to clear his head for a few hours, so he put Tom Petty’s Highway Companion in his car’s CD player, and just let the road take him away for a while.

  Around eleven, he decided to grab something to eat. He checked his cell phone messages, then called home to find out if there were any on his machine. Nothing from the paper, which in this case was probably good.

  He thought about checking in with Erin, but decided that could wait. She was angry with him, something that hadn’t happened too often, and Chapa knew things were going to get edgier between them once he told her about his night in jail.

  Jake’s Bagels was starting to fill up as the lunchtime crowd wandered in. Office workers and guys who got paid to do the heavy lifting converging for thirty or forty minutes to eat and swap stories.

  The deli was a local legend, home to Chapa’s favorite sandwich, and one of the best places in the area to get an honest cup of coffee.

  Millie behind the counter was already preparing his usual—ham and provolone on a garlic bagel, warmed not toasted, with onions and lettuce—when Chapa stepped through the door.

  “What would you have done if I wanted something different today?”

  “Probably dropped dead from shock, Chapa,” she said without looking up at him.

  Millie had been at Jake’s longer than the many years Chapa had been stopping in for breakfast, lunch, and the occasional bagel fix. In that time Chapa had come to believe she existed only within the confines of this building in Aurora, along the river. That she probably vanished as soon as the lights went out, only to return the next morning in time to start baking that day’s batch.

  Chapa had once asked her why they had not yet named the sandwich after him, considering that he’d ordered it dozens, maybe hundreds of times.

  “You could put it right up there on the menu,” he said, pointing to the large sign that hung behind the counter. “Call it, ‘The Alex Chapa.’”

  Millie had responded with a smirk, and said, “Because, Chapa, the idea is to bring customers in, not to scare them away.”

  Chapa paid for his sandwich and coffee, confirmed that the fireside seating was already taken—it usually was—and sat at one of the tables along the front windows. He studied the paintings by local artists that decorated the walls of the restaurant, tranquil scenes of the Fox Valley area.

  He had just finished half of his sandwich when a man he’d never seen before pulled up a stool, sat down across the table, and introduced himself as Merv Olsen.

  “I’m an assistant medical examiner, Mr. Chapa.”

  “Here in Aurora?”

  “No, over in Oakton.”

  “That’s nice. Good job?”

  “Not bad, decent benefits and all. Can’t complain, especially during these times.”

  Chapa nodded, punched back the last of his second cup of coffee, then signaled to Millie that he needed more. She responded by pointing to the self-serve coffee counter.

  “I wanted to tell you something about that story you wrote in today’s paper,” Merv said and leaned in closer as Chapa braced for a round of criticism. “You’re spot-on about something being strange with those murders. You know, the college kid, the former cop in the windmill, and the guy in the alley.”

  “Why do you say that? Was there something in my story that tipped you?”

  “No, not what was in your story. It’s what wasn’t in there.”

  Chapa quickly thought through some of the material that had been edited out hoping to anticipate what this guy was going to say next.

  “It was the wounds themselves,” Merv said, his voice even quieter than before. “I’ve looked at my share of neck wounds, you know, cuts.” He ran a long, thin index finger across his neck for emphasis. “They’re always a quick slash, uneven, you know, and they usually start near the middle of the victim’s neck.”

  This wasn’t anything Chapa had considered.

  “You see, Mr. Chapa, one of the reasons they go for the neck—assailants, I mean—is because it’s not too difficult to kill someone by cutting them there. It doesn’t take a lot of strength or effort to inflict a fatal cut to someone’s throat.”

  “And these wounds?”

  “From jawbone to jawbone,” he said, pressing against either side of his face, just beneath his ears. “And deep, too. Like they used a sawing motion.”

  A pair of cops walked in. Chapa instinctively paused and checked to see if he knew them. He didn’t, but lowered his voice anyhow.

  “You said you’re an assistant medical examiner, have you shared your thoughts about these wounds with your superiors?”

  Merv checked his watch, then gave the place a quick scan, as the expression on his face became more solemn.

  “I’ve told a few people, yes,” he said, lowering his voice just as Chapa had. “But there seems to be some heavy pressure coming down. A lot of folks don’t want any of this to be true.”

  “What kind of folks?”

  “The kind who can reshape reality,” Merv said and gave Chapa a simpatico look as if to say, I know you get me. He reached across and smacked Chapa on the arm, then left the table and pulled up a stool at the far end of the room.

  Chapa was thinking about asking Merv Olsen to meet him for dinner later in the week, or maybe coffee someplace where they could talk, when “Daydream Believer” started playing in his pocket.

  I have to do something about my ringtone, he thought as several heads turned his way. He checked the caller ID, expecting to see Erin’s name, or the paper’s, but it read simply CELLULAR CALL.

  “This is Chapa,” he whispered as he waved to Millie and made for the door.

  “Alex Chapa?”

  “That’s right.” He was outside now, with a finger in his right ear, blocking out the traffic noise.

  “This is Walter Bendix, Dr. Bendix. We need to talk.”

  Chapter 70

  The doctor’s directions were too good to be spontaneous. The more Chapa followed each prescribed turn and noted every landmark, the more he sensed that Bendix had known exactly where he’d be coming from.

  The only time most people in the Chicago area ever thought about Kendall County was when it flashed across the bottom of their TV screens during a tornado warning, which happened about once a week during the spring and summer. Now Chapa was racing past vast farmland, and ready-made subdivisions where barns and silos stood not too long ago, on his way to a large parcel that Bendix owned on the county’s western end.

  Chapa turned left off the main highway and onto a narrow two-lane just past a place called The Chicken Bin that had been boarded up and abandoned years ago despite a sign promising, OUR GRILLED BREASTS WON’T GO TO YOUR THIGHS. Two miles later he passed through a tall wooden gate that read, BENDIX, in large, no-nonsense letters.

  He followed the rest of the directions past a stretch of cornfields to an enormous storage shed. As he drove up, Chapa saw Dr. Bendix standing by a small white plane along the backside of the aluminum building.

  Bendix was walking toward him as Chapa stepped out of his car.

  “I’
m Walter Bendix,” he said, extending his hand.

  “You wanted to talk about something,” Chapa said, accepting the offer.

  “That’s right. I read your story in today’s Record. I think there are some things you need to know.”

  Chapa nodded, and waited to be asked into an office inside what he now realized was a hangar.

  “C’mon, let’s go up.”

  Chapa stopped walking and stared at the small plane. He wondered where the rubber band that made it go was.

  “I know you probably didn’t plan on flying in a private plane today, Mr. Chapa.”

  “Or yesterday and probably not tomorrow, either.”

  Bendix smiled.

  “With the weather being what it is, today’s a good day to survey my properties, and it’s a lot easier and faster to do that from the air. Don’t worry, you won’t be up too long.”

  He was trying to remember whether Bendix was someone he could trust. There was nothing about the guy in any of Chakowski’s files, only stories detailing his entrepreneurial achievements and dedication to various charities. Walter Bendix seemed to have a hand in just about everything that went on in the area.

  Chapa now understood that could be good, or bad, but this guy seemed to be as clean as they came.

  “The sky is a great place to talk, Alex. You don’t have a fear of heights, do you?”

  “None that I know of.”

  For an instant, he thought about calling Erin and telling her where he was and what he was about to do. Then realized doing that would probably lead to another conflict, and though the sky was clear and the temperature was in the low sixties, he could still feel the chill that had recently permeated his relationship with her.

  Bendix was walking around the plane, performing what Chapa assumed were routine preflight preparations. After another moment’s hesitation, he pulled out his tape recorder, checked to make sure he had enough battery power left, then walked over to the plane, climbed in, and buckled himself into the copilot’s seat.