by Tim Kizer
It should be especially upsetting to die when life was so good. Yeah, poor Mister Stevenson would be mighty pissed off as he took his last breath.
“Now let me tell you why we’re really here,” Jeremy said. “You will kill Doctor Stevenson. You could cut his throat with that nice knife of yours.”
“I thought he was going to help me with my condition.”
“I was just messing with you, buddy. You don’t need help, you’re perfectly fine. We’re here because it was Stevenson who chopped the extra finger off your hand fourteen years ago. You obviously forgot his name, but I remembered it.”
“Yeah, we’ve got to punish him.”
“Right on, buddy, we have to give him what he deserves. Cut his throat. And don’t forget his wife if she’s there.”
Zack’s string of good luck continued when he climbed up on the porch and checked if the door was locked, hoping the folks in this upper class neighborhood had gotten less vigilant. The door was unlocked.
Zack entered the house and drew the patrolman’s gun out of his jeans pocket. He kept the gloves on in order to avoid leaving fingerprints, and his head was covered with the hood. As he crossed the living room, he saw a young boy sleeping on the couch. The kid appeared to be no older than ten or eleven years old and was probably Shep Stevenson’s son. Or nephew—Zack didn’t give a shit who he was. His finger on the trigger, Zack stopped by the stairs and strained his ears, attempting to locate the doctor. He soon heard the sound of a drawer being shut, which came from the second floor.
His heart throbbing with elation, Zack raced upstairs, quickly scanned the hallway, and headed for the room whose door was half open after spotting a moving shadow inside it. The pleasant sensation Zack was experiencing right now reminded him of the gratification he felt when he had taken a nice dump.
He pounced on Stevenson the moment he saw him: the surgeon was standing between the door and the desk, with his eyes fixed on the cell-phone in his hand. Zack slugged the man on the head with the butt of his pistol as hard as he could, rendering him unconscious.
As he severed Stevenson’s Achilles tendons (there was hardly a better way to ensure that a person wouldn’t be able to run or walk away), Zack noted to himself that it had to hurt pretty badly. For a moment, he felt a chill in the pit of his stomach when he imagined his own ankles getting cut with a knife. Yeah, he would have definitely hated it if something like that happened to him.
On the other hand, it was possible that Stevenson didn’t feel pain while unconscious. Wasn’t that how anesthesia worked?
13.
“Oh, you’re up. How is it going, man?” Zack waved at the surgeon and rose from the chair.
With a stunned expression on his face, Stevenson looked at his bound legs, then moved his arms, confirming his guess that they were bound, too. As Doc had drunk his coffee this morning, could he have even imagined that he would get knocked out and tied up in his own house today? Judging by Stevenson’s bewilderment, Zack reckoned that he could not.
When the surgeon shifted his eyes to Zack, the boy winked at him.
“Who are you?” Stevenson asked. His helplessness and poorly hidden fear made Zack’s stomach feel warm and fuzzy. “What are you doing in my house?”
“I knew you wouldn’t recognize me. I came here to ask you a few questions.”
“What questions?” Stevenson winced with pain. “If you need money, I’ll give it to you, just please don’t hurt my family.”
“Do you remember doing a surgery on a boy with six fingers fourteen years ago?”
Stevenson spent fifteen seconds digging in his memory and finally nodded. “Yes, I do remember that.” His high forehead was glistening with sweat; there was a mixture of terror and hope in his tired eyes. It occurred to Zack that the doctor must have still believed he had a chance of surviving this encounter if he played his cards right. He was probably one of those undying optimists. What a fool!
“Ask him what they did with your finger,” Jeremy said.
“Why? I don’t think there’s much of it left after so many years.”
“Don’t be so sure, man. I know what I’m talking about. It should still be alive unless they incinerated it. Wouldn’t it be cool, if we could find the little guy?”
“I guess so.”
Stevenson, who was silently observing Zack with a petrified look on his face, muttered, “Who are you talking to, son?”
Zack waited a few moments to see if Jeremy had anything to add and then replied to the doctor, “It’s none of your business, man. And I’m not your son, okay?”
“I’m sorry, I apologize.” Stevenson took a deep breath and continued, “I can help you. I’ll give anything you want. You don’t have to kill me. I’ll keep my mouth shut, I swear.”
Zack had no doubt that the doctor had just concluded his young guest was a nutcase because he appeared to talk to himself. Under different circumstances, Shep Stevenson would have definitely made a tactless comment about it; he was smart enough to say nothing now although he was probably itching to refer Zack to his psychiatrist buddy—that’s the power of the gun for you, ladies and gentlemen.
“I want to know what you did with my finger. The one that you cut off.”
“The hospital must have disposed of it. I had no control over that.”
“How did they dispose of it?”
“They probably cremated it. Most amputated parts are cremated.”
“Just what I thought,” Jeremy said. “Let’s wrap it up, Zack. We’re done here.”
Zack nodded. Then he wrapped his hand around the knife that lay in his left hoodie pocket and stepped over to Stevenson. “Okay, man. I guess I have nothing else to say to you. I think I’ll get going.”
Zack had thought about giving the doctor a false hope by making it seem as if he had decided to spare his life—he could step out of the room, say ‘Oh, one more thing,’ and then shoot the guy from the hallway while grinning—but eventually chose to do without the theatrics.
Stevenson kept silent, looking at him with pleading eyes.
“I’m going to kill you now, man,” Zack added and stabbed the surgeon in the chest, aiming for the heart.
As he walked downstairs, he found that Stevenson’s son (or nephew) had woken up and now was standing in the middle of the living room. To Zack’s astonishment, the boy was holding a revolver in his hand. Needless to say, the gun was pointed at Zack.
“What the hell are you doing?” Zack asked indignantly. “Give me the gun.”
The doctor’s son did not respond. Instead, he pulled the trigger, and the next second a sharp pain cut through Zack’s right thigh, a few inches above the knee. As the thunder of the gunshot rang in his ears, Zack touched the hole made in his jeans by the bullet—its edges were already wet with blood—and dashed after the boy. Unfortunately, his sprint ended once he put his weight on his wounded leg: the pain was far worse than he had anticipated; it felt as if he had stepped into a tub full of boiling water. Flailing his arms, Zack collapsed to the floor and lost consciousness.
14.
A nasty surprise awaited Zack when he came around several minutes later: he could hear police sirens approaching the house. The little fucker had called the cops! Apparently, Mister Stevenson had taken the time to teach his offspring what to do in case of emergency. Too bad he hadn’t instructed the kid to never touch his gun.
Thank God the boy hadn’t had the guts to stay inside and shoot the intruder in the head.
“Now I’m going to do a little magic here, buddy,” Jeremy said. “It looks like we’re surrounded, so we don’t have much time.”
“Maybe I should jump out the window in the back?”
“No, let’s not take any chances. With a wound like this, you won’t run very far. I have a better idea.”
“Okay, go ahead.” Zack felt ashamed he was almost panicking at this moment. Of all his fears, the idea of losing a leg was the most horrifying to him.
“I want you to
trust me, Zack. In a few minutes, you’ll be completely paralyzed and your heart and breath rate will become extremely low. The paramedics will rush you to the hospital, and once you get there, you’ll have no pulse at all and the docs will pronounce you dead. We need to go through this charade with the ambulance so you won’t have to lie here for hours, waiting for the cops to take you to the morgue. “
“Why do you want me to go to the morgue?”
“I’ll explain it later, but I hope you’ll figure this out on your own soon enough. By the way, please don’t panic and don’t try to open your eyes or move—you won’t be able to do any of that until I decide that the coast is clear. Your ears will still work, though.”
“You’re going to stop my heart? It sounds kinda scary. I don’t want to die.”
“You’ll be fine, buddy, I promise.” Jeremy paused. “Okay, the cops will break in here any minute now. I need you to drop dead before they get a chance to arrest and fingerprint you.”
“Are you sure you don’t want me to try and shoot them all?”
“It’s the wrong time to be arrogant, man. You don’t have a prayer against them, believe me.”
“Okay, I trust you.”
“It won’t hurt one bit, buddy. Just relax and wait for my signal. Hopefully, they won’t take too long to get you to the morgue.”
15.
“Are you going to just lie there and waste the precious time? Get up and get the fuck out of here, man.”
Jeremy hadn’t been completely right saying it wouldn’t hurt: there was quite a bit of pain as the paramedics attempted to defibrillate Zack’s heart with an electric shock. But that was okay with Zack.
They got lucky—or maybe that was the typical way it worked: the cops hadn’t fingerprinted him before he got carted away to the hospital morgue. They must have believed that he wasn’t going anywhere, anyway.
“I guess you learned a valuable lesson today,” Jeremy said when Zack was three blocks away from the hospital. “Never spare a life, no matter how young they are.”
“I’m going to cut this ungrateful asshole’s head off.”
“That’s the spirit, buddy!”
“I wish I hadn’t gone through this, though. My leg hurts like hell. Why didn’t you warn me about this kid back at the house? I thought you love giving advice.”
“It’s all part of your education, Zack. You need to harden up in order to move on to bigger things. You won’t survive for too long if you’re soft.”
“Yeah, whatever.”
“Are you ready to make a dent in history, buddy?”
“I sure am.”
Yes, he sure was.
THE END
INTOXICATION
Are you paranoid if you end up dead?..
Leslie has a suspicion: someone at work is trying to poison her. Can she prove it? No, and she doesn’t care that she can’t as she takes the law into her hands.
How about those who dismiss her fears and believe she is paranoid? Well, they certainly deserve to be punished.
What does she do when she starts questioning her own suspicions—and sanity? Hmm. That’s complicated.
#
When Leslie came back from the ladies’ room, she found out that Rick had drunk almost all of her poisoned coffee, which Helen Romero had brought to her office just minutes before Rick had barged in unannounced.
“I didn’t see your name on that cup,” she commented with slight but discernable irritation as she sat down next to Rick, whose left arm was resting on the back of the leather couch, waiting to crawl upon her shoulders. Of course, when she said it, she had no idea that the coffee was contaminated and that she and eight of her coworkers would die of poisoning in less than three weeks. “And who told you that you can come here without an invitation? Or at least some warning?”
“Come on, Leslie, don’t be in a bad mood again.” Rick smiled and kissed her on the cheek. “I was thirsty and I don’t drink those girlie diet sodas you keep around here, you know that. I missed you, by the way.”
Looking back on this boring, ordinary conversation and the subsequent brief twenty minute make out session on the couch before they headed to Rick’s place, Leslie concluded that drinking that particular cup of coffee had probably been the most useful thing Rick had done for her in their entire three year relationship. He saved her life that evening and it was hard to beat. It could have been her instead of Rick lying on the carpet, gasping for air, her eyes red, her hair tousled, her heart palpitating, her mouth full of foul taste, and her face glistening with sweat.
When he fell down on the floor halfway to the door out of the office, as if shot by a well-hidden sniper, Leslie thought it was one of those stupid jokes Rick liked to play. In those few moments it took him to collapse, he looked grotesque as he chaotically swung his arms as though trying to restore his balance or reaching for something to grab onto. Only ten seconds later did Leslie realize that Rick, who was helplessly squirming of the floor like a turtle flipped on its back, was not pulling a dumb stunt and actually could not get up on his own.
“Rick, what’s wrong?” Leslie dashed to the man and, hunching over, grabbed hold of his shoulders, in a weak attempt to lift him. “Are you okay?”
“I’m okay, I’m okay, don’t worry,” Rick mumbled. He tried to get up, leaning on his elbows, but quickly fell back on the floor. Leslie could swear his face was turning white.
Leslie snatched her cell phone from the purse and pushed the dial button.
“No 911! Don’t call 911!” hissed Rick.
“Why?” Leslie almost yelled. “Rick, something wrong is happening to you. You could be having a heart attack, do you understand that?”
Rick waved his hand in protest.
“Don’t call them. They’re going to test my blood. And I’ve got something in my system. Whatever you do, don’t call 911. I’ll be fine in a couple of minutes.”
“What do you have in your system?” Leslie angrily grimaced. “Are you doing coke again? You son of a bitch are doing that shit again?”
“If Dad finds out I was using it, he’ll cut me off, that’s what he said.” Rick’s speech was slow, his eyes turned into slits, which he obviously struggled to keep open.
Leslie heaved a sigh. How pathetic: Rick was thirty seven years old and still depended on his rich father’s subsidies. And he still had not gotten that monkey off his back; she would not be surprised if drugs killed him in the next twelve months.
“Go to my car,” continued Rick. “There are adrenaline shots in the glove compartment. Bring them here. If my heart stops beating, give me a shot. Only when it stops beating, okay?”
“Rick, you are an idiot! Did you overdose?”
Rick shook his head.
“Did I look overdosed when I came here? Don’t waste time, go to my car and get the adrenaline. Please. I’ll be fine.”
Rick turned out right. He was breathing when she came back with two adrenaline syringes. His eyes were shut, there was not a flicker of movement in his entire body, but he was definitely alive: her makeup mirror misted when Leslie held it over Rick’s nostrils.
#
Rick slept like a baby for the next three hours. He might have easily slept for another five if Leslie had not woken him up, having gotten bored of sitting in the office. Out of concern for his health—or, most likely, out of pity—Leslie drove Rick to her place and allowed him to stay the night. He was one of those people who, due to his own very questionable life choices, had never judged her and it would have been pretty sad to lose Rick only because there was no one to watch over him tonight. She poured herself half a glass of tequila and told Rick that she would break the bottle on his head if he tried to have some of it too.
“I don’t know what was in that coffee, but whatever it was, alcohol will make things worse,” she said. Suspicions began to accumulate in her mind on the way home and once Leslie verbalized a small portion of them, she realized that it all made sense.
With the b
rim of the glass pressed against her lower lip, Leslie confessed to herself that she believed Helen had put poison in her coffee. Why? She had not figured that out yet, but she would soon. She had not even made the first sip and now alcohol had found itself on the back burner of her consciousness.
They say poison is women’s weapon of choice. Was it reasonable to assume that a woman—Helen—had poisoned her coffee? You could call her dumb, but she would do just that. This saying was a result of centuries of human experiences and who was she to argue with it?
The most terrifying thing was it was so damn easy to put poison in her coffee! Anybody’s coffee in their office, for that matter.
Then she thought about Rick. It was rather bitchy of her to have criticized him, even if she had never said it out loud, for mooching money from his dad. You bet she would do the same if her parents were loaded, which they were not: her father was an engineer and her mother worked for a medium size public accounting firm, your regular middle-middle class types, you know.
Having forgotten about the glass in her hand, Leslie looked at the bottle of tequila standing lonely on the table. Or maybe the bottle was staring at her, disapprovingly, wondering why the hell she had all of a sudden stopped indulging in all that sweet, sweet firewater a year ago. Was it possible that her current moodiness was the result of losing that reliable source of fun and joy that booze represented? But you see, she had to quit after that little incident in Redondo Beach. The wake-up call was too loud to ignore. However, she still permitted herself to have a tequila shot or two from time to time—drink socially as they put it on dating websites.
They did not have sex that night: Rick was fatigued and Leslie was preoccupied with devising a plan of action.
That night, her descent into insanity began.
#
