Animosity (15 page)

After a few more seconds, the crowd had dissipated entirely.

Several houses down, a door slammed like a small-caliber gunshot in the night. A garage door rattled down its track somewhere on the other side of the street.

Then everything was still. So still. My yard was empty. The road was clear. And quiet as the grave…

My own heavy breathing was the only sound on Poinsettia Lane now, my trampled lawn the only proof that anyone had ever been there at all. Even Norman’s tantrum had faded to a series of confused whimpers.

I raised my head toward the starless night sky, and I screamed at the top of my lungs, “
What do you people
want
from me?!
”

My voice echoed through the neighborhood like a mischievous phantom mocking my rage.

I ran one hand through my sleep-tousled hair. Took several faltering steps forward, into the middle of the yard, as I wondered what to do next. My socks made squishy noises in the dewy grass, clung to my feet like a second soggy skin.

I came to my senses when I looked down and saw the long black flashlight in my hand. I could have smacked myself! A lot of good the flashlight had done me moments ago, when I needed it most.

I clicked it on, and the Maglite’s bright white beam split apart the night. The bushes at the edge of my yard twitched and rustled with the movements of nocturnal creatures within, and I might have even glimpsed several pairs of glowing yellow eyes peering back at me, reflecting the light. But I paid them no mind. I swung the flashlight back and forth, from one side of my property to the other. Then I did again, only this time in a slower arc…

When the light struck my Explorer in the driveway, my balls crawled up inside of my abdomen. My bowels lurched.

My vision blurred and my knees grew weak as I approached the vehicle.

“Oh, no…”

A gaping, silver-white mouth grinned at me from the center of the Explorer’s windshield. I shined the beam through that jagged hole, and identified the cause of it: a massive concrete block. That explained the sounds on my roof, I realized. Whoever had done this had climbed atop my house in order to give the heavy projectile the momentum required for it to bust through my windshield. The driver-side window had also been shattered. And a headlight. Broken glass sparkled and glimmered upon the Explorer’s upholstery and across my blacktopped driveway as if a blizzard of diamonds had blown through town while I slept.

“Shit!”

The Explorer’s tires had been slashed as well. Their low, serpentine hiss seemed to swirl around me in a taunting whisper as the vehicle hunkered down onto its rims like a fatigued old beast conceding to its dire fate.

The worst part, though, was the vile message my neighbors had left for me down one side of my demolished SUV.

Though the Maglite’s beam bobbed and jerked and wavered every which way in my trembling hands, that horrible slogan scrawled across the Explorer’s driver-side door was as legible as it would have been had I discovered it in the light of the morning sun. Gouged deep into the Explorer’s paintjob, not with a key but with a knife or an icepick or some other very sharp object, it read:

“
Oh, Jesus
,
” I whispered. “
Jesus
…”

I grew light-headed, felt as if I might pass out right there in the middle of my glass-speckled driveway.

“Short Eyes,” I remembered from my research on one novel seven or eight years ago, is what convicts call pedophiles in prison.

Short Eyes…
demented dregs of humanity who get off on hurting children.

I dropped the flashlight. It clattered onto the pavement, flickered once but did not die.

If I had not known it before, I knew unequivocally what my neighbors thought of me now.

Detective Norton had been wrong. So wrong.

I
was
in danger. More and more, with every passing second.

I ran for home.

On my way, a noise caught my attention from nearby. A soft tapping sound, like a flurry of cotton balls bouncing off glass…

Next door, Ben Souther always kept one of those bright yellow bug lights burning on his front porch after dark. The kind that is designed to repel moths and other nocturnal insects, but it usually only draws them in droves.

As I glanced over there, wondering somewhere in the back of my mind if old Ben might have stepped out this evening with the rest of Poinsettia Lane… the light blinked out.

The pitch-black night closed in around me. Smothering me. Watching me with a thousand unseen eyes.

Like something alive. And hungry.

My hands were shaking so badly I could barely hold my cell phone as I punched the three numbers: 911.

Not that calling the police did me a damn bit of good. Again.

I rubbed my eyes, yawned. I watched the glowing green numbers on my microwave clock change from 3:48 to 3:49 a.m. as a husky-voiced woman informed me that an officer would arrive “momentarily” to investigate my complaint.

I sat. Waited. Drank a pot of coffee.

Waited some more.

The officer in question—a diminutive, curly-haired fellow by the name of D. SANCHEZ according to the brass nametag above his badge—finally arrived an hour-and-a-half later, as the morning sun rose over Poinsettia Lane. When his black and white patrol car pulled to a stop mere inches behind my ravaged SUV, those first golden rays of dawn glinted off its hood like a taunting wink my way.

The neighborhood was still quiet. Too quiet. A lone early bird chirped from somewhere within the copse of trees beyond my property. A soft breeze sighed through Marianne Souther’s rhododendron bushes.

Meanwhile, my neighbors watched us from behind closed doors. Through thin gaps in parted curtains. I did not see them, but I knew they were there. I could
feel
their hateful eyes upon me.

Officer Sanchez wasted no time in taking my statement, filing his report. He walked around my Explorer at least a dozen times, inspecting it with a sort of dull, halfhearted interest as if it were some curious archeological find he knew should impress him but he couldn’t quite wrap his brain around it. His brow creased as he nodded sympathetically and mumbled helpful phrases like “hmmm” and “did quite a number on it” and “that’s not good at all.” I couldn’t stop thinking as I watched him work that he barely looked seven or eight years older than my daughter. Just a kid, fresh out of cop school. He even sported a childish smattering of freckles across his nose and cheeks.

I shoved my hands in my pockets, stared numbly off into space while he peered through the Explorer’s shattered windshield at the concrete block lying in the front seat. He jotted something down on his notepad. Studied the block again. Scribbled something else.

A few minutes later, as he rounded the driver’s side one last time, he said, “Short Eyes.”

He turned to look at me with a sick little grimace. As if he had eaten something bad for breakfast and was only now beginning to feel its repercussions.

“You do know what that means,” he said, but it was more a statement than a question.

I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. Started gnawing at my fingernails. I nodded.

All told, he remained on my property for a total of about twenty minutes. And the verdict proved no different than thirty-six hours before, when I informed Detective Erik Norton that someone had been digging through my garbage.

Young Officer Sanchez put his notepad away, and said, “We’ll be in touch.”

Broken glass crunched beneath his boots as he returned to his patrol car.

“So… that’s it?” I said.

“Yes, sir,” he replied. “For now. Of course, we will be speaking with your neighbors over the next few days. We’ll ask around, find out if anyone saw anything.”

My neighbors,
I thought.
Now there’s a novel idea, Officer Sanchez. Because
they
can sure as hell answer
any
questions you might have about what happened here…

He paused as he climbed back into his vehicle, and he turned to look at me with an expression that seemed to indicate he felt
sorry
for me. I wondered if he knew the details of my predicament, if perhaps after my last call to the boys in blue I had become the laughing stock of the entire police department. For that matter, I wondered if he was buddies with Keith Whitmire. If they went out drinking together after work several nights a week…

No. I doubted Officer Sanchez was old enough to imbibe.

“Can I make a suggestion, Mr. Holland?” he said. “Just between you and me?”

“Sure.”

“Don’t get your hopes up, okay?”

“What do you mean?”

“Cases like this, ya gotta understand… if you didn’t catch the perp in the act, it’s rare that anything ever comes of it.”

“Right,” I said.

“And even then, it’s your word against theirs.”

I shook my head, stared at my shoes. Bit my tongue so hard I tasted blood.

“Just so you know, sir. It is a long shot. Without any physical evidence—fingerprints, et cetera—there’s not a whole lot we can do. I’m just sayin’… you shouldn’t sit around expecting something that—to be perfectly honest with you—is probably not gonna happen.”

“Of course not,” I said. “I’d
never
do that.”

I tried to keep the sarcasm out of my voice. I knew he meant well. But my efforts were futile.

“Have a nice day, Mr. Holland,” said Officer Sanchez. “Hang in there.”

The radio on his dashboard squawked and trilled like a dying bird as he slammed his car door. He gave me a little salute through the window before starting the engine. I watched him back out of my driveway, then cruise slowly down Poinsettia Lane.

I sighed, just kept shaking my head. Wondered
when,
exactly, he planned on speaking to my neighbors. Certainly not today, judging from the direction he was headed. His patrol car did not stop until it reached the end of my street, its brake lights flashing briefly in the pinkish half-light of dawn before the car turned right onto Brookshire Boulevard.

Feeling more hopeless than I had ever felt in my life, I headed back inside.

I crawled into bed, curled up in a fetal position beneath the covers.

I did not sleep, however. No way could I go back to sleep even if I had wanted to.

I just lay there for several long hours, staring at the wall.
Through
the wall…

Wishing I could be far, far away.

***

When I finally dragged my ass out of bed that morning around eleven o’clock, I called Rick’s Flatbed Service to come haul away the Explorer. Subsequent conversations with Bill’s Body Shop and 12th Avenue Tire across town proved frustrating at best. Both informed me—with a snide sort of delight, I thought, but surely I imagined as much due to my own wretched mood—that they were extremely backlogged and the earliest they could start repair on my SUV would be a week from the following Monday.

“Whatever,” I said as I hung up.

I felt numbed by it all, not the least bit surprised.

And in some strange, detached way, I wondered if I even really cared.

A few days later, I found another message from my neighbors.

This one had been snipped from the
Harris Weekly Independent
(“The Heart o’ the Matter” Op-Ed feature on Page 2), and was stapled to my front door:

WHO IS ANDREW HOLLAND?

(Portrait of a Scaremonger)

By Jeremy Webster, Editor-In-Chief