To Probe A Beating Heart

by Wren, John B

  “No!”

  Averell got out of the van and crossed the parking lot to the theater.

  “Theater two, please,” and handed the kid a ten.

  “Thank you sir, it will begin in eleven minutes.”

  Averell took his change and went to the snack bar where he bought a box of chocolate covered raisins and some other hard candy. He got a large drink and headed for theater two. When the movie was over and he left the building it was dark, street lights were turned on and he paused to think about which way he should go to find a motel. As he was pondering, the sleeper staggered up to him and said, “Hey, Buddy, could you do me a favor, that som’ bitch in the tavern won’t sell me no more drinks. An’ I need another drink.” He was several years past middle age and a bit overweight. His light gray suit was rumpled, stained and smelled of spilled, cheap whiskey. His tie was pulled loose and his tousled, graying hair was matched with a two day growth of whiskers.

  Averell looked at him with disdain and was trying to think of a way to escape this sad excuse for a man when he said, “Well, maybe you shouldn’t have one, you are loaded.” He had seen this type before, in the Army. There were guys who drank just because they thought they were supposed to and others who drank intentionally to get “smashed”. Either way, it was disgusting. He helped the man maintain his balance back to his car and pushed him through the door. His keys were still in the ignition and ‘Sleepy’ slumped over in the front seat, closed his eyes and didn’t move.

  As Averell was positioning ‘Sleepy’ in the front seat, he mumbled to himself, “Why don’t you stay here and I will get you a bottle of wine from that drug store.” Averell never intended that ‘Sleepy’ would hear him, or that he would actually buy him the bottle.

  “Okay, I’ll wait here” came a surprising reply.

  Averell waited a few minutes and decided to leave, Sleepy was out

  cold in his car and not his problem. He got into his van, pulled out of the parking lot and started toward the highway where he had booked a room in a motel for the following night, thinking that he might be able to get in this evening. He pulled up to a red light, stopped and was waiting for the signal to change to green. Then he heard it, somebody was pissed off and laying on the horn. Then there he was, Sleepy. He had gotten out of his car and came up to Averell’s door.

  “Hey, where’s that bottle? I gotta’ have a drink.”

  Averell thought for a moment and said “Sorry pal, the store was closed and I gotta’ go.” Averell pulled away, turned onto I-90 and sped up the road to a rest area. He pulled in and waited. If ‘Sleepy’ flew by, he would wait a bit and go to the next exit. If not, he would do the same. One way or the other he would be rid of the drunk ‘Som’ Bitch’.

  As he sat there waiting a car pulled in behind him and parked. It was ‘Sleepy’. He got out and came over to Averell’s window. “Where’s that damn bottle?”

  Averell got out and led ‘Sleepy’ over to a bench near the toilet rooms. “Sit down and let me look in my van, I might just have a little

  something.”

  “Okay, I’ll wait here.”

  Averell scrounged through a plastic container that he had kept in his car and had transferred to the van. He had a few tools, jumper cables, some duct tape, a roll of paper towels, a few plastic garbage bags, two quarts of oil, some brake fluid and fuses that fit in his old car. The tools included pliers, two screw drivers, a knife and a set of wrenches. He took the knife and put it in his back pocket and the duct tape and walked back to the bench. ‘Sleepy’ was half asleep, seemingly more tired than asleep. Averell said, “I don’t have anything to drink. Nothing. And I have to go. Do you understand what I said?”

  “Yeah, you said you were goin’ to get a bottle an’ you don’t got it.”

  He stood and started at Averell. Averell said “Hey, back up! I don’t want to do this.”

  “You said—.” and he lunged, very clumsily, but a lunge nonetheless.

  Averell pulled the knife from his back pocket and thrust it into ‘Sleepy’s’ mid section. He pulled the knife up and out creating a large gaping wound and allowing blood to flow freely. Sleepy slumped, staggered and looked at Averell.

  “Why’d you do that?” and he fell to his knees grasping his belly. Averell thought it over quickly, he had to finish this. He stepped behind Sleepy and with one hand grabbed ‘Sleepy’s’ hair and with the other he drew the knife across his throat. A short throaty gurgle and Sleepy fell to the ground in a pool of blood.

  Averell looked around, nobody. He grabbed ‘Sleepy’s’ ankles and dragged him into the bushes. He did not see any cars on the road coming into the rest area. It was late, dark and traffic was light. Averell went to ‘Sleepy’s’ car and with a handkerchief he took the keys and closed the door and locked it up. He then went back to Sleepy, rolled him over and took his wallet out, still using the handkerchief. There were only two singles, he took them and looked through the wallet, pulled out the credit cards which he couldn’t use, wiped clean and dropped them on the ground for someone else to find and use. He then tossed the wallet into the bushes along with the keys.

  Back at his van, he opened the door and noted that he was covered in blood, his shirt, pants and shoes were all partially covered in blood. This was bad. Again he thought. First things first. Get out of these clothes and into something else. He went into the toilet room and washed his hands and face. Then back at the van he got a clean pair of pants and shirt. Back in the toilet room he undressed, cleaned off what blood he could see and put on the clean clothes. He put everything with blood on it into the plastic bag and loaded it in the van. Again he looked around to be sure nobody else was around and he drove out of the Rest Area.

  “Wow, that was cool,” said Stelian.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Sure you do. We should go back to Erie and turn around. Maybe spend the night,” said Stelian.

  “Now, I agree.”

  He drove north on I-90 and pulled off at a motel near Erie.

  “Just one night, and I will be on the road early, I want to be in Mentor by 8:30,” said Averell.

  “Yes sir, I got you in 108, the door to the lot is right across the hall,” said the clerk.

  “Thanks, good night.”

  He went to his room and once again undressed, looked at his underwear and noted a large, light blood stain. Again he made a bag of bloody things and stood in the shower for about fifteen minutes with the knife, cleaning both himself and the fatal blade. He sorted out everything, washable stuff and trash. He double bagged the trash and took it back out to the van, got two more plastic bags and back in the room, he double bagged the clothes. Before going to bed Averell made some notes in his log book. Anyone reading the log would think that he had spent the entire day and night in Erie. The tricky part of this was getting the mileage recorded correctly so that his extra miles to and from his episode with Sleepy was blended in over the next few weeks. He started a separate record of the additional 175 miles he had driven going to Mentor and back to Erie that he had to hide in his log. He kept it on a sheet of paper folded in the log book. Each leg of every trip over the next several days or weeks whether to the drug store or to Toledo would be increased until the 175 excess balance was down to zero. Thus the additional 175 miles he put on his car was spread out over the next three weeks.

  In the morning he was on the road by 6:30. As he passed the Rest Area he saw ‘Sleepy’s’ car but nobody else. He kept driving. When he was a few miles outside of Mentor, he spotted a 24 hour coin operated laundry. He pulled in and looked through the windows, nobody. He took the bag of clothes and put them in a machine, pants, shirt, underwear, socks and his running shoes, adding bleach and soap. The bleach ruined the clothes, but had the desired effect. He ran them a second time again with an excess of bleach. An extra few minutes in the dryer and the clothes were ready to be disposed of in a Salvation Army donation box. Almost done. He then drove to his appointment in Mentor.

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nbsp; After the first appointment, Averell found a dumpster completely out of view and disposed of the bloody paper towels. He took the knife and dropped it in the dirt and rolled it around. He then placed it on a block and stepped on the blade breaking it at the hilt, perfect. He picked up the knife and went back to the van, and drove to his second appointment. There he saw another dumpster and tossed the knife away. After his final appointment that day he drove west to East Cleveland and up into Cleveland Heights. He liked this area and drove through whenever he had a chance looking at the homes and thinking that he might just move here, to live.

  He found another motel and signed in for the night.

  “Nicely done,” said Stelian.

  “Yeah, very messy, but we were lucky.” He turned on the television and sat on the bed to watch the news. There it was, the Rest Area, ‘Sleepy’s’ car, his wallet and keys and a stretcher with a full body bag. The police sergeant being interviewed said it was a robbery gone bad. A man killed, his wallet empty but credit cards still there and his car locked in the lot. They assumed that he had stopped to use the facility and when threatened, he tossed his keys in the bushes and let them take his wallet. Throwing the keys probably made the robber or robbers angry and that probably led to his being killed. It happened on the north bound side and they were looking for suspects as far north as Erie.

  Averell relaxed and thought about dinner.

  “See, I knew we could do it. And you liked it, didn’t you?” said Stelian.

  “It was messy.”

  “Yeah, and—?”

  “Alright, it was a little cool, but we can’t do it that way again.”

  “What should we change?,” asked Stelian.

  “I don’t want to think about it right now. I’m going to dinner, that was a lot of work and I’m hungry.”

  Averell went to the motel’s restaurant and ordered a large steak with baked potato, some red wine and a little cheese. Dessert consisted of ice cream and a little warm apple pie. The end to a pretty good day.

  The next day Averell was on the road again. After three more appointments in the Cleveland area he was driving to Toledo. That is as far west as his route would take him and then he would turn around and try to arrange two or three appointments each day all the way to Albany.

  His new van was a pleasure to drive, he sat up high and listened to his tapes and CD’s. Two weeks passed without incident, when Averell noted a drunk in a parking lot.

  “That could be fun.”

  “No, I think it’s dangerous, and ‘Sleepy’ was not fun, there was no

  challenge and it was sloppy.”

  “So, what do you propose?”

  “If, and I mean IF, we do this again, we have to use the plan, make sure that we have covered all of the possible glitches, as many as we can see. The whole process should be more like the squirrels, neat and clean. I don’t like messy.”

  “Then, let’s plan, it’ll be fun.”

  “If we do it right. Yeah, it could be fun.”

  “It would be more fun if we did the one we really want to do, you know what I mean?”

  “Yeah, sooner or later I want to do both of them.”

  “Sarah and Ellie?”

  “Yeah, as a matter of fact, I want to do Sarah first, with Ellie watching. Then, Ellie, while Sarah is fresh in her mind.”

  “Why don’t we just do them now—?”

  “No, I told you, I want to be ready, I want to do someone else as a

  practice session, then, when we know what will work, then we do them. We will do them both, maybe a little to one, then a little to the other. Let them each watch as the other feels the pain, then switch.”

  Averell began to plan a ‘Session’ with someone, someone he referred to as a ‘test subject’, someone he had not yet selected. The time was now right for him to begin collecting the necessary tools for his ‘sessions’. He went to several different stores in different cities over a two week period, and bought the tools he thought that would need. In the first week, he selected three different sized knives, two saws, a flashlight, a large battery powered lantern and an ice pick. He picked up the pieces in different stores, always paying cash and being sure to avoid cameras. Each time he went in a store, he saw something else to add to his tool collection. He bought a hammer, pliers, wire cutters and screwdrivers. All these tools were not yet needed for his session with a subject and he assembled his tools into two different plastic tool boxes. He included his probes both new and old in one of the tool boxes and placed them in his van. He had another plastic container in which he kept plastic bags, rope, duct tape, rubber gloves and paper towels. Folded in the back of his van he had three plastic painters tarps.

  His plan included a reason for selecting someone.

  “We should only pick a subject because they deserve to be probed, to be cut and to die.”

  “Who fits that bill?,” inquired Stelian.

  “We have to look closely at everyone that we know. Some will be too close and doing them could be very bad for us,” replied Averell.

  “Well I think that we should consider someone very like Sarah and Ellie,” said Stelian.

  “Yes, but maybe only one at first, so we know what it’s like, then we can do two. We have to be very careful and not let any of the preliminary sessions tip our hand. When we do get to them, it has to be a surprise, they should not see it coming.”

  “What about Steve, he should be a target.”

  “He would be difficult, I don’t want to deal with ‘difficult’. He would

  be a physical challenge. Maybe if he was drunk, or if we could catch him when he was distracted.”

  “Maybe we should just pass on Steve and concentrate on the other two.”

  “Agreed, and if that goes the right way, we could re-evaluate. “

  “Yeah, but we will keep him on our list, right?”

  “Oh yes, very definitely keep him on our list.”

  Averell enumerated a number of people that he knew and loosely

  arranged them in order of best to worst candidate for the first session. The basis was similarity to either Sarah or Ellie and one Marlene Fielding came to the top of the list.

  Averell had met Marlene at a store in Toledo. She had no connection to him other than they were both in that one store at the same time. She was tall and of medium build probably weighing about 160 pounds. Blond hair and blue eyes were mindful of Sarah, but her eyes were lifeless, empty, rather like a sharks eyes and her dismissive attitude toward Averell he noted was applied to every man she met on that day. Her name rose to his number one after Averell considered what several other people had relayed to him about her. She was divorced, and was constantly suing her former husband, apparently determined to break him financially claiming that everything that he owned was actually hers regardless of where it came from. He had entered the marriage with a tidy sum of money saved and intended to continually add to it for the next twenty years and possibly retire at an early age well before he reached his sixtieth birthday. Their marriage lasted a bit less than two years and she filed for divorce, claiming abuse as the prime reason. The court ruling left the man broke and all but homeless.

  Good enough, he thought, and if there was to be a prime suspect it would be the ex-husband or someone else she had insulted or injured, not Averell. He felt that this subject would leave him safe, nowhere on anyone’s radar. Now to the planning. The appeal was partially to rid the world of a cancer as he saw it, but also and probably more so, to do someone who would not evoke the sympathy of the public in general. Now, how to acquire this ‘subject’, this woman whom nobody really liked. There was always alcohol, if he could get her to have a drink and use some kind of knock out drops. No, that would probably mean being seen in public with her. A thump on the head, get her some place where she was alone, someplace secluded. He would have to watch her and see where she went that could offer the right conditions. This was going to be a good test for Averell.

  * * *
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br />   CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  This is really going to hurt . . .

  Marlene Fielding was a creature of some habit, going for an early morning run several times a week. A run that often ended quickly and became a brisk walk. Averell observed her over a period of several weeks, each time he visited Toledo. He had located a vacant building in an industrial park that was easy access from her “running route”. He also noted that the local police visited that specific industrial park every day at roughly the same time, not to return until the next day. They had gotten very lax and removed the lock from a gate, allowing anyone who would venture the two hundred feet off the road along the fence line to that side gate to gain easy entry. A further advantage was the several buildings within the park were arranged such that the truck doors were not visible from the main road. Anything short of a major fire in one of these buildings would go unnoticed until a close inspection occurred.

  Averell positioned his van on a side street out of sight to the main

  street and waited. Marlene usually passed here about this time of day and Averell allowed a thirty minute window for her arrival. It was almost 7:30 am when Marlene rounded the corner wearing a dark blue sweat suit with a white stripe along the outside of both legs and a water bottle in hand. She had already given up running and was walking with determination and a frown as she came up behind Averell’s van. He saw her as she approached and waited until she was a few feet past the van when he quickly got out and hurried up behind her with his sap in hand. She ignored the rather slight man getting out of the van and following her until she sensed the stranger directly behind her. She turned to challenge him and he hit her on the head with his sap. She went down on one knee and was immediately given another hit on the back of her neck. She fell the remaining distance to the pavement and felt nothing, she was unconscious, laying face down. Averell went back to the van and pulled it up a foot past Marlene’s outstretched frame. He opened the rear door, put on a pair of rubber gloves, placed a bag over her head and wrestled her into the van onto a plastic painters drop-cloth. Marlene was not as easily moved as he had thought she would be, but moved nonetheless.