“Are you really ready for this?” he asked. He looked over at the apartments like a startled rabbit. It seemed as though he expected an ambush. His nerves didn't comfort Andy. The hitman ignored him as he slipped out of the vehicle. Steven pulled the car away to find a better place to hide while Andy made his way through the dark areas of the back yard until he came to the garage. The door was locked, as it should be, so he made use his of long-learned skills of lock picking to pry his way in.
The only thing in the entire garage was an older brown Subaru. It sat in slumber on the concrete floor with worn wheels. Andy made his way over to its side and rested his kit of things on the cold concrete floor. He found that the car was unlocked when he tried the handle. This would be too easy, Andy thought.
He worked to turn the front wheels of the car all the way without making a racket, then slipped back out and located the brake line. He noticed the door leading toward the rest of the apartment was cracked open. Every instinct told him to walk away from it, to go back to the brake line and slash it with haste. But for whatever reason, something drew him toward it. He cracked the door more and peeked into the building.
It was dark and dormant. No one stirred, but Andy waited in silence to make sure. The last thing he wanted now was to get caught, to have the choice he had to make taken away from him. He didn't want to lose control but he couldn't leave. He could feel his heart beat.
He tiptoed into the apartment, observing everything in detail and doing his best not to disturb a thing. There were signs of a recent shower, the mist still in the air. Still, there was no movement. The entire apartment seemed like a dead, decaying version of itself in the dark night. Like all of the things left in it were abandoned by the previous residents.
Andy made his way to the stairs with soft steps when breathing drew him away from them. Carefully, he cracked open a door to a room by the first landing. A dull light bled through the doorway as he opened it. He was terrified, certain that someone was watching him. The snoring put him at minor ease. As he looked in, nothing could be discerned. The fragile and feminine tone of the breathing heap on the bed became unmistakable.
Haley Flynn looked gorgeous, even in the dull light of the lamp on the nightstand. She held her expressions in a lazy way as she slept. She must have fallen asleep right after showering, waiting for the time of her departure to arrive. She laid with her pillow as if it were a lover, a comforting friend that had no doubt been cried into dozens of times. Snoring wasn't the term Andy would use to describe the noise coming from her, but more of a childlike purring.
She was dreaming.
For a moment, Andy wondered where her mind was taking her now. If it was showing her a marvelous scene of joy or whether it clung onto her high hopes and brought them down in despair. Perhaps, wherever it was that she dreamed of, it was her place to go and hide from the rest of the world. In her investigations she no doubt had evil things creep into her head. Bad things that she did not put there herself.
I wonder what a nightmare is for Haley Flynn, Andy thought. Was it a world in which people stabbed each other in the back the moment they're turned just to insure that the same isn't done to them? If so, then she's going to wake up in a nightmare, Andy decided. A world where people die without knowing it. Without ever facing their killers. Without knowing why.
I could do it right here, Andy thought. Cover her mouth and make sure that another breath never escaped. He knew that she would wake up. She would kick and try to scream, all the while staring some strange uncharacteristic stare of horror straight into his eyes. The man she fancied. Killing her. Because it's his job.
That's not what it's about anymore, though, Andy added. It's me or her. If Leroy Graves doesn't have Haley's body, he will go to extraordinary lengths to get his. And she still wouldn't be safe. She would be hunted to the ends of the earth. That's the kind of man Graves is. He will not let this go. And I can't protect her if I'm dead, he thought.
With the movement of a cat burglar, Andy lifted a pillow from the chair by the door. Smother her, he thought. She wouldn't even have to see him do it. She wouldn't even have to know what was happening.
At that moment, there was a cough from upstairs. A woman's voice. Haley rolled over onto her side and faced Andy. His heart pounded to the pace he wanted to flee the house in. Her eyes remained sealed.
My God. That was all Andy could think when he truly took a long look into Haley's face. My God.
Andy retreated from the room, setting the pillow back in its chair. As he slipped out of the door, he blew Haley's sleeping form a kiss.
He would die for Haley Flynn.
-Chapter Eleven-
Max
“I'm going to report my car as stolen,” Steven told Andy the next morning. Andy was not able to sleep at all during the night. He had just sat in the armchair until Steven awoke to find him there. “Nobody knows that you've been here except for Graves himself. Just drive it to the airport and abandon it there.”
Andy looked up at his friend. “Thank you,” he said quietly.
“Take this,” Steven offered up an identification card. The photo inside it was of Andy himself but the name on it said Franklin Bottomer. “It's a card I would use when I did some of my less glamorous stalks.”
Andy accepted it and bowed his head. He felt so trapped.
“Also, this.” Steven handed him the notebook filled with details about Haley. “You need to take this for my sake.”
Andy accepted that as well, nodding in agreement. Steven needed to get rid of anything connecting him to the whole ordeal.
“Look at me,” Steven demanded. Andy obliged. “They aren't going to find you.”
“Don't worry about me,” Andy said, his voice strained with fatigue. “Just make sure Haley is safe.”
“I'll be watching her,” Steven promised. He choked up as he spoke.
“Thank you,” Andy said again. He produced another item from inside his jacket. An envelope.
“What's that?” Steven asked.
“For you,” Andy said, handing it over. He turned to the door with his luggage and reached for the knob.
“If this works,” Steven started, staring down at the envelope in his hands, “come see me.”
“I will,” Andy swore. Then he walked out of the door.
Steven slid open the envelope and poured out a couple hundred paper bills with an identical portrait of Benjamin Franklin on them.
As Andy drove, starting to pull out onto the freeway, he remembered Max.
Maxwell Shepard was, to say the least, a troubled child. He witnessed countless occasions of domestic abuse between his parents who were far too wrapped up in hating each other to care much about him. So, by those means, he found it easy to slip away from home and find time with himself.
He tried hard not to become a cynic, to believe that good preceded bad in the order of life. That in order to get anywhere worth getting, you had to be decent and kind. Curiosity, however, got him into uncomfortable trouble. His first criminal offense was the shoplifting of a movie tape. He had hoped that it could calm down the household long enough for him and his parents to be distracted by the adventures of Marty McFly. He did finally get attention in the form of harsh words and constricting punishments.
He never explained where his bruises came from, but Andy always knew.
The two of them were inseparable. Together, they escaped every reality thrown at them and lived the lives their dreams only dared to touch. In their imaginations, they had conquered foes that make things like shitty parents seem miniscule. Beasts that threatened everything. Nothing could stop them.
When high school ended, the two of them chose separate paths. Andy had ambitions and the hard work he had put into academics to support him. Max had nothing and was left behind.
Max found one true talent of his, however, and moved to his cousin's place in Chicago shortly after. He lived the life of a confidence man. He had over a d
ozen false names that he was well-known under. Nobody ever knew the man that lived so remarkably as Maxwell Shepard. He was able to steal quite a lavish lifestyle from society, moving out on his own. He was damn proud of his work.
It was a random encounter by a local schoolyard that introduced him to Justine Cladas. She was a young teacher, naïve to the spoiled and selfish nature of children and full of faith in humanity. This faith was most heavily placed in Max.
She knew him as Louis Thompson, the identity he used to pick up women. Louis was a successful sound engineer who claimed that he was working with Trent Reznor. She didn't recognize the name, but that detracted little from his charm. She brought him to her house only once, where he instantly fell in love with her.
Her home was littered in Jesus paraphernalia and toys for her dog, a small chihuahua named Hamilton. They had dinner together. Max wanted to impress her, so he wore an attention-stealing red suit he had stolen along with his grandfather's cowboy boots. She wore a magnificent lavender dinner dress. During the conversation, she brought up her rusting Volkswagen that sat dormant in her garage, never to run again.
Max was interested, absorbing her passion about the vehicle. It was the particular paint job that must have brought some sort of hazy happiness to her as it was the most frequented detail. Had Max any of the huge sums of money that his character Louis had, he would have gone out and bought her a new one that night. Still, he left her home ambitious. And for the first time in his life, youthful. He had always seemed so much older than any of his peers in spirit, aged by sadness. He was like a war veteran, disconnected from the trivial concerns of his fellows. Like he had seen so much more than them. He most likely had.
He tread through the warm night, walking because he never owned a car. He was a careful man, deliberate in his actions. Everything he had ever stolen he found means that justified it and a process that eliminated himself as a suspect. He forged credit cards, primarily, and then abandoned them after having them rejected. His purpose of making worthless credit cards that would never complete a transaction was to give him an identity to the cashier. That way when their supervisors asked them who the man sneaking away with a stereo was, they would say “Mario DeBruin,” his suspect identity.
Wine did not allow for consideration and tact. That's why when he stumbled across a Volkswagen Bug that had an identical paint job to Justine's, he hot wired it and drove off, drunk. He took it home and parked it in his garage, planning to surprise Justine with it the next day.
He awoke the next morning to police rapping on his door. Memories of the previous night flooded back to him like a nightmare that just couldn't be true. No! he thought. He couldn't have been so stupid.
That's what he kept chanting to himself as he sat before the judge. All of the evidence of every crime he had committed since hitting puberty was laid before him and the jury. When he was found guilty, he was sentenced to five years minimum.
He did the time. In fact, prison only brought him and his new love Justine closer because she sympathized rather than condemned him. She cared for him and told him every time that she could manage to visit that he was a good person and that once he was freed he would be a new man. Jesus forgave, she explained, and so shall she. Not even finding out his real name discouraged that.
Justine kept him hopeful.
One day, the guards escorted him to one of the solitary confinement cells in the bowels of the prison. No amount of prying brought any answers. No shrieks of protest changed a thing. They kept telling him that he was losing his grip of things, demanded that Justine was not a real person. They continued threatening a mental hospital transfer to him, but the warden pulled a few strings to keep him from such a grim prospect. In fact, just a week after he was moved, the warden paid Max a visit.
“Hello, Mr. Shepard,” he said, acting as if they had many conversations together.
“Get me out of here,” Max demanded. “I'm not insane. I'm not violent. I don't belong here.”
“You're right,” the warden insisted. He had an ugly sneer on his face, as if Max was a piece of shit. “You belong rather to State Mental, you do – ”
“I don't!” Max screamed back.
“You do!” the warden matched his volume. “You do and you know it!” He cleared his throat, beginning a new approach. “You don't have to, however. We can keep you here, even move you back to your old cell, but you need to submit to medical treatment.”
“Medical treatment?” Max echoed. He was confused.
“Your psychosis is dangerous,” the warden explained. “We need to treat you so you can become rational. This is the only way to get back to your cell, Maxwell.”
“What do you mean?” Max started.
“You need to take pharmaceuticals. Drugs,” the warden offered. “Things that will help calm you and suppress your violence. And we're going to start today.”
Max decided to agree for the sake of getting back to where he could be visited by Justine.
“This is going to pinch just a little. Keep your eyes on me,” the doctor told Max. Max was a hard man to give injections to.
“Needles?” he yelled at the warden who watched from the corner of the room.
“It's how we administer the drug,” the doctor insisted.
“I thought you meant pills!” Max protested, still addressing the warden. The warden and his stupid smirk.
The needle went in without pain but it still terrified Max. He had been afraid of needles ever since he had walked in on his mother using them when he was a child. “There,” the doctor said.
Max observed the pin-sized hole in his shoulder, struggling to get a good view. “What is this anyway?” he asked.
He received no answer.
Max was dying. There was no doubt of that in his mind. Ever since they had begun the medical trials, he thought, I've only gotten sicker and sicker. He must have been allergic or the needle must have been contaminated. If only he knew what drug they were giving him.
This is the last time I'd allow them to stick me full of needles, he decided as he walked into the prison's clinic. The warden was waiting for him there with the doctor, a sight he hadn't seen since they had begun giving him the drugs, months back. This piqued his interest.
“Maxwell, good news,” the warden said. He waited for a reply from the inmate, but got none. “This is your last injection.”
“It's a follow-up drug,” the doctor explained. “A one-time shot that will rinse out all of your negative symptoms. You'll feel good as new by morning.”
Max made his way over to the chair where he had gotten so many injections during his sentence. “One more,” he said. “I'll give you one more.”
“Excellent!” the warden declared. “Today, you'll go back to your old cell. You seem to be recovering.”
“Really?” Max asked. He had started feeling a little clearer in thought, even though his body screamed in agony. Perhaps it was just a minor thing.
“Absolutely,” the warden promised as they began the procedure. “Take good care of him,” he pointed out to the doctor.
“Of course, Mr. Graves,” the doctor replied.
On Andy's twenty-second birthday, he ate two slices of toasts made from expired bread. He celebrated by himself in a dark apartment. The electricity had been shut off due to delinquent bills. An eviction notice still hung onto his front door. He couldn't bring himself to take it down and put it inside. His stomach gurgled, unhappy with malnourishment.
It was his second year in Chicago and he was dying. Slow, of course, but he assumed he would be dead within the week. He ate one meal every other day, and it was always tasteless and stale. His ribs were defined through his thin flesh, visible in any position. He had no money left and no one to turn to. His parents would not give him a “handout,” as they called it. He vowed to never speak to them again and took it upon himself.
He had already been evicted twice, and one of those times he had to liv
e on the street for three weeks before convincing a landlord to ignore his bad credit and let him have an apartment. The paneling on the walls had long since peeled out, and the toilet was just a bucket. If he had anything to cook, he did so on a little barbeque in his kitchen and he disconnected the fire alarms. Heating was nonexistent and instead he huddled in bundles of blankets throughout the winter.
At night, he often cried to himself as he tried to remember the taste of fresh fruit, or the sensation of being hugged. No one in his life knew how he struggled and because of that he felt abandoned. He would remember his teachers' praise in high school, and how much faith they had in his talents. They said he would make a great actor, and at one point he attempted it, joining his school's drama club. Now look at me, he thought. His heart wrenched at the sound of his own lamenting. What would they say now? He reckoned they wouldn't even recognize him. If they ever saw him laying drunk in the gutter some day, they would look right past him and beam about whatever new pupil inspired them. Forgotten. Alone in a sea of people like a piece of debris among the stars. Floating and wishing for any alternative. His only solace came in sweet dreams at night. His only blessing.
Almost every job turned him down. His failure to stay enrolled in school and obtain a degree was a mistake he cursed each morning that he woke up nauseous from hunger. He needed either experience or a certification, neither of which he had. He worked for only a few months as a grocer, but when the management neglected his paycheck, he quit in a rage. Another mistake he regretted. If only I had just smiled and took it, he wallowed. Then I would be happy.
It was only by the grace of some unseen luck that Andy finally got a job as a bouncer at a local bar. It was a pisshole, but the owner was nice and sympathetic. She was an alcoholic with easy access, and though she struggled with her own finances, she gave what she could. Many times she invited Andy over for a homecooked meal. Every bite would be like an orgasm. Even though he suspected she only did this because she was interested in him, he was grateful.
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