A Guardian Angel (12 page)

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
dozen 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 live 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.