Hopper House (The Jenkins Cycle Book 3) (8 page)

N
ewly arrived
from the Great Wherever, the first thing I noticed was a terrible pain in my head. The second thing I noticed was far more disturbing: there was someone underneath me, and my hands were around his throat. I pulled them away and clambered to my feet. The man was about twenty years old, dressed in a suit jacket with a name tag, black pants, black shoes, and a simple striped tie.

I was in an alley with dumpsters running the length of a long strip mall. Quickly, before a delivery truck showed up, I pulled the man behind the nearest dumpster. I felt dizzy, my head hurt, and my stomach felt ready to heave at any moment. Closing my eyes, I waited for the feeling to pass. Upon opening them, I noticed something out in the lane. A bicycle, and another one a short ways off lying next to a second man. Blood pooled from his head and around one arm. There was a brick on the ground a few feet away from him.

I pulled him over to the first man, then retrieved both bikes and hid them behind the dumpster.

The one I’d been strangling coughed and groaned in pain. Both were dressed the same and were barely adults at all. If I had to guess, I’d say they were about nineteen or twenty.

“Mormons,” I said after reading the name tags clipped to their pockets.

Elder Kimball was still alive. Elder Oaks, sadly, was not.

There was nothing I could do for either of them, so I ran. After a while, the pain in my lungs competed with the one in my head, slowing my pace to a crawl. My ride definitely wasn’t a runner, but he wasn’t critically unhealthy, either.

A few minutes later, I arrived at a crowded corner in a built-up section of a city.

“Shit,” I said and touched my throbbing head, which pulsed painfully with every beat of my heart.

“Hey, buddy, watch your mouth,” a man said. He had two teens with him, both girls. They watched me the way you’d regard a snapping dog, and a space opened up around me.

“What year is it?” I said to the man with the kids.

“Don’t talk to me,” he said, standing between the girls and me. “Get going.”

A taxi rounded the corner, and I checked the license plate. Washington State. A look at the sign on the corner confirmed the city: Seattle.

Just when the man seemed like he might say something else, the light changed.

Nobody followed for a few seconds, giving me as much space as they could. I kept going on the other side and entered an area with trendy apartments on one side of the street and shops on the other. A minute later, I leaned over the windshield of a newish car and had a look at the safety inspection sticker. It was dated 2014 with a hole punched through May. The temperature was about forty degrees, so unless the owner was way behind on getting his or her inspection, it was either late 2013 or early 2014. Probably the latter.

I kept walking. In time, I noticed something strange: people flinched when they saw me closer than a few feet away. And those that noticed me from farther up took pains to circle widely. I hadn’t looked myself over yet, so I stepped out of the main flow of pedestrian traffic and made for a nearby coffee shop. The window reflected back a twenty-something man in sweat pants and a ripped jacket. He also had a big beard and a face streaked with dark, drying blood. Automatically, I touched the wound on my scalp, then looked down at my hands: pretty dirty, with grime caked under the long nails.

Patting myself down, I found a wallet with a state-issued ID—and a fortune in Monopoly money in $500 denominations. The funny money had the $500 amounts scratched out with a black pen, and $1000 amounts written beneath them in red ink. In place of credit cards were a few high-end properties and a number of yellow cards reading, “THIS CARD MAY BE KEPT UNTIL NEEDED OR SOLD.” Below that were the words, “GET OUT OF JAIL FREE.”

My guess was Trevor Ellis, from Nevada, suffered from a chemical imbalance of some kind.

Years ago, if someone had talked to me before my suicide, they would have wondered why I never quite met their gaze. If they’d said something interesting, it would have rolled right over me or gone unremarked upon. Back then, I only thought about one thing: my ex-girlfriend. A
thing
, not a person. The part of me that distinguished people from objects had been severely stunted at some point in my life. Like Trevor, it probably had something to do with my brain as well as my soul, and I’ve often wondered how much one influenced the other. After my death, it felt as if a heavy weight had been removed. Other people and the rest of reality suddenly mattered again.

Another look at my ride’s ID showed him smiling and clean-cut in his picture. Obviously before he’d stopped taking his medication. As usual with such rides, I didn’t feel the effects of his mental illness. I felt like me, Dan Jenkins.

“What happened to this guy?” I muttered, probing my cut. I needed to wash it out or risk infection.

The coffee shop bathroom was locked. I knocked on the door and listened, but nobody answered.

“Excuse me,” I said to a young woman working the espresso machine. “May I use your bathroom?”

“Bathrooms are for paying customers,” she said, not quite meeting my eyes. She also said it loudly, and a second later an older male worker arrived, watching me with a guarded expression.

“I just want to wash my face.”

“No can do, man,” the guy said. “Health codes.”

I looked around to see if anyone was listening who might stick up for me, but the closest person—a young guy in a T-shirt with different colored cartoon people holding hands—was busily examining the finer points of coffee shop architecture. It was no use. I left and continued on to the next block.

“Excuse me, miss, can you spare a few dollars?” I said to a woman who smiled hesitantly when she saw me. After the last word left my mouth, she looked straight ahead and quickened her pace.

“Hypocrite,” I called after her, and resumed my search for a charitable soul in Seattle. With a little water, I could clean up and … well, I didn’t know what. One thing at a time.

The hypocrites were out in force that day. After a half hour of humiliation, I crossed the street and headed back the way I’d come.

At the end of the block, two officers were talking to the first woman I’d asked for money. She pointed my way and they looked at me. Quickly, I slipped down the nearest street and took off running. Another block and I turned a corner, then skipped dangerously through traffic to widen my lead.

When I felt safe, I leaned down by a gutter with a pool of water in it. I scooped it up to wash the blood off my face—freezing cold—then checked in a parked car’s rearview mirror to make sure I got it all.

“Hey, Trev, what you doing?” someone called out. “Yo, Trev!”

A man stood about ten feet away, smiling at me. He was black, bearded, and maybe sixty years old. He wore a military jacket and a red woolen cap.

“What you doing in that puddle for?” he said. “You gonna get wet. Come on out of there.”

I stood up, wiped my face with my hands and sleeves, and went to him.

“Hi,” I said.

“You look all messed up,” he said, scratching his neck. “It was Chancy, wasn’t it?”

I nodded. Tell them what they expect, first rule of hopping.

“I told you to stay away from him. He crazier than you. He hit you with that hammer?”

I nodded. “On my head.”

“I see that,” he said, laughing. “Come on then, let’s go. You look hungry.”

“Where we going?”

“Where else?” he said and started walking way. After a few steps he glanced back. “Come on.”

Where else
turned into five blocks with no end in sight, but I didn’t mind. It felt nice to let someone else take the reins for once.

“What’s your name again?” I said.

He laughed.

“You’re a poor messed up white boy,” he said. “I’m Max, remember? Only known you a year, now, for Jesus…”

“Thanks, Max. What month is it?”

“Same January as yesterday,” he said.

“January, twenty fourteen. Elementary.”

Max smiled sadly, shook his head, and kept going.

With nothing better to do, and hopeful of quitting the cold, I followed him. After maybe twenty minutes, we arrived at a church. Homeless people milled around out front, coming and going at will.

“Come on, Trev,” he said when we stepped inside, and made his way past about fifteen big circular tables with homeless people grouped around them eating, talking, and seeming very much at home. A couple of them waved at Max, but nobody greeted me.

I followed Max to a row of foldout tables staffed by men and women in plastic smocks and rubber gloves.

“Cutting it close this time,” one young woman said to Max, and handed him a styrofoam tray.

“Well, you know, I like to live dangerous,” he said, laughing.

The woman scooped mashed potatoes onto a square-shaped section of his tray. She gave me a tray and scooped some for me, too.

Max moved through the line chatting with everyone there, receiving food the whole way. “Hey there, Tom, how you doing?” and “Bless you too, Larry” and “I’m doin’ all right” when someone asked if he was doing all right. My new friend Max knew everyone there, and it was clear they liked him.

The food looked good, and they were generous with it, though I did see a sign admonishing, “No Second Helpings.” I figured their mission was to feed as many as they could, so it made sense.

Max sat down at a table with just three other people, all of them women. I sat next to him.

“Take a look at Trev here,” Max told them. “Chancy did that, you believe it? He gonna get picked up, crazy mother…”

He looked sheepishly around the church.

“Young man, your head is bleeding,” a woman wearing two jackets said. She had an aluminum cane next to her, leaning against the table.

I felt my head again, and again it came away wet with blood.

Max said, “Look, Trev, you can’t go around bleeding like that. You need to see the doctor ’fore you upset people.”

I didn’t feel like walking another five blocks, but the older man came around and lifted me by the arm in a surprisingly strong grip. More surprising: he took me deeper into the church, and not toward the doors and the cold winter air. There was a privacy screen in one of the corners where a doctor was waiting on patients. When the way-too-young doctor saw me, he came over with gauze, had me hold it to my head, and told me to sit while he finished with someone else. Minutes later, he sat me behind the screen.

“I’m Doctor Cline,” he said in a calm, soothing tone.

“Trevor,” I said, and shook his hand. “Nice to meet you.”

“Let’s see about that cut of yours, okay?”

“Chancy hit him with a hammer,” Max said helpfully, standing just behind Doctor Cline, who started in surprise.

“A hammer? That’s not a very nice thing to do, is it, Trevor?”

“I didn’t think so.”

I felt bad for this Chancy person, but if he carried around a hammer and Max thought he had hit me with it, maybe someone needed to lock him up.

Max said, “I suspect that hammer may have fixed his head, doc. Trev ain’t talking crazy no more. He’s usually pretty crazy.”

Doctor Cline said, “I’ve got it from here, Max, thank you.”

“Sure, doc, sure. You take care, Trev.” He winked at me. “I gotta go see my new girlfriend.”

Max left. Then it was just me and the doctor, who’d started cleaning my wound with peroxide.

“So how is it you’re working here?” I said.

“Just a little volunteering,” he said with a half smile.

“That’s pretty brave of you.”

He eyed me quizzically, but didn’t reply.

“Fancy rich doctor,” I said. “And all these poor people…”

Doctor Cline chuckled. “You’re not thinking of suing me, are you Trevor?”

“I don’t know. What kind of car do you drive?”

“My feet. I only got licensed this year, and I’m rooming with two other doctors. If I had a car, I couldn’t afford the insurance for it.”

“You should try homelessness,” I said. “Free food, free medical, sleeping under the stars, and you don’t have to work.”

Doctor Cline reached in his pocket, pulled out a cellphone, and held it to his ear. “I’m with a patient. Yeah. Okay. Talk to you soon.” Then to me: “Sorry about that, Trevor. Now let’s see … you’re gonna need stitches. You’re not afraid of needles, are you?”

“I love needles.”

The doctor gave me a sad look. “Let’s get you sewn up. Don’t want your head turning blue, do we?”

While he stitched me up—not painful at all—I said, “I really appreciate you helping me like this.”

“I swore an oath,” he said, mock-seriously.

“Which is why I feel bad asking you for a favor.”

“Hold this,” he said, and pressed my hand over the bandage. “What’s this about a favor?”

“I need to make a phone call, and you’ve got a phone I’d love to borrow.”

The doctor smiled. “Oh, I don’t think that’d be a problem. No calls to Japan, okay?”

He reached in his pocket and handed it to me like it was no big deal. A cynical part of me wondered if he was pretending not to care if I stole it.

He’s a cool guy, stop being a jerk.

“Let’s get you to one of those seats over there,” he said and helped me up.

“Sure doc, and thanks.”

While Doctor Cline helped his next patient, I stared at the phone.

“You know you want to,” I said, and dialed.

T
he man
who answered was different than the one I’d talked to in Georgia. He told me to sit outside and wait for a car to show up. Neither friendly nor unfriendly, he processed my order professionally.

I must have waited three hours. The sun had gone down two hours before and the temperature was dropping. For entertainment, I watched the police drive slowly up and down the street, back and forth.

Feeling exposed, knowing they were looking for a brick-wielding homeless guy, I made sure to sit in the shadow of the concrete steps leading to the church. If the cops could get a description from the surviving missionary, they’d pick me up and toss me in a lineup, and I’d be the only one there with a wounded scalp.

Who knew Mormons were allowed to fight back? Not me.

I wondered what had happened with Trevor and those two. All my experience with Mormons had been way less violent. On various occasions, I’d even gone out of my way to talk to them. Mormon missionaries got so many doors slammed on them they were almost as starved as me for good conversation. Nicest people in the world. We’d chat for hours before they realized I was just a lonely guy who wanted to talk. Then they’d smile and shake my hand and say they had to get going. When that happened, I’d sometimes do my book memorization trick, quoting The Book of Mormon back to them word for word. That always kept them around. You haven’t lived until you’ve made a missionary burst into tears in public.

The street was busy with cars. Just as I wondered if I should give up and try to find shelter, one of them stopped. A town car. The driver got out and shouted, “You’re not Trevor, are you?”

“That’s me,” I said and got up.

The man on the phone had asked for
both
my names, which confirmed the landlord definitely knew what I was. A hopper—and yeah, it felt funny calling myself that. This put the official number of people who knew about me to five and a half: the minister, Nate, Rose, Peter Collins, Rose’s landlord, and an optimistic half for my mother. When I got a chance, I’d have to accidentally call her again.

The driver came around and opened the door for me.

Before I got in, he said, “You’re homeless.”

“But house trained.”

“You got some kind of ID?”

I took out Trevor’s Nevada ID and showed it to him.

Shaking his head, the man gave it back, let me in, and shut the door.

“It’s gonna be a while,” he said. “You want some music?”

“Not right now.”

“Personally,” he said, “I like long rides. Gives me time to think. Oh yeah, almost forgot.”

He pulled something from his jacket and handed it back. A half-ripped sheet of steno paper with a number on it: 27015.

“What’s this for?” I said.

“Don’t know. Dispatcher didn’t say much except write it down and give it to you. Mysterious, huh?”

He sounded a little excited about it. Chatty, too.

“I think I’d like some music after all,” I said. “Anything before the nineties is fine.”

Then I leaned back and shut my eyes.

“
H
ey
, buddy, wake up.”

I opened my eyes. The car had stopped, and there weren’t any streetlights.

The driver got out and opened the door for me.

“We’re here,” he said.

We were parked in front of a beach house at the end of a long drive with no nearby houses. Beyond it, what could only be Puget Sound stretched out of sight. The night sky was a gray helmet of cloud cover, and the world smelled like saltwater and homeless Trevor and nothing else.

“I don’t have any money,” I said.

“Already paid for. You gonna be okay out here?”

He looked around uncertainly.

“Sure,” I said.

“You want me to wait for you to get inside?”

“That’d be great.”

I walked to the front door and rang the doorbell. Nobody answered, so I rang again. Then I knocked.

“Everything okay?” the man shouted.

There was a metal box on the wall with a flap over it, just like the one in Georgia. And like that other house, it opened to reveal a keypad. The landlord must have gotten them in a sale.

Squinting at the paper in the meager light, I punched in the numbers. When nothing happened, I hit the pound key—and heard a click from the door. A twist of the knob and it opened right up.

“Got it!” I shouted back to the guy.

He gave me a thumbs-up and drove away.

On entering, I found a bank of light switches, flipped each one, and blinked in surprise at the security camera pointing down at the door. Again, just like the one in Savannah. Considering the types of people he rented to—party animals and messy health nuts—I didn’t blame him.

A couple of feet in and to the left was a large kitchen with white tiles and shiny appliances. A dining room opened ahead and to the right. I passed that and entered a living room with big cushy chairs and a massive plasma television. All the latest video game consoles were stacked neatly beneath it in recessed cubbies. There was also a satellite TV box to go with the dish I’d seen on the roof. On the wall beside the TV were floor-to-ceiling shelves stacked with movies.

I left off there and checked out the bedrooms, and that’s where the similarity in houses ended. The master bedroom had two beds in it, which was odd. Odder still were the giant mirrors on the walls and on the ceiling. There were also shelves with an assortment of sex toys displayed openly. Not family friendly at all. A small sign hanging above them read:
Please Wash After Use.

Gross, yet sanitary at the same time.

The other bedrooms also had sex toys with signs over them. More troubling was the box of disposable hypodermic needles resting open on a nightstand.

Turning to leave, I noticed something else—metal brackets on either side of the door fastened securely to the wall. In the corner stood a metal bar long enough to span the two brackets and secure the room from the inside.

That’s not scary at all.

A search of the fridge yielded sodas, juice, packages of sausage, condiments, and ice cream in the freezer. The pantry had cereal, crackers, boxes of spaghetti, and various canned foods.

I was about to close the pantry door and then stopped. There was a box on the bottom shelf with a cardboard sign taped to it reading, “Donations.” Yet again, just like the house in Georgia.

I looked inside and found four bottles of pills, a puffy bag of marijuana, little baggies of meth or heroin … and a black snub-nosed revolver.

“Weirder and weirder,” I said and shut the door.

Trevor was homeless, and I sensed he’d been that way a long time. Bad enough I had to occupy the body of a stranger. I didn’t have to be filthy, too.

Nothing strange about the bathroom—towels, soap, and shampoo. It also had razors and his and hers deodorant. I quickly stripped down to nothing at all and looked at myself in the mirror. Lily white. The only sun Trevor got was on his face and hands.

The shower was amazing, stunning, stupendous. I hadn’t realized how itchy I was. A minute into it, the tub was brown with washed-away dirt. At least I hoped it was dirt … No matter, it was washing away.

I scrubbed like I was searching for the real me, not bothering with shampoo, lathering my whole head and beard with soap. Maybe twenty minutes later, satisfied I’d gotten as clean as possible, I stepped out and dried off. I opened the door to let out the moist air, pumping it back and forth like a bellows. When the mirror started to clear, I closed the door and set to work getting rid of my beard.

Cleanly shaved, I didn’t look so bad. My hair was still a mess, so I used some scissors I found in a drawer and gave myself a haircut, making sure to catch the clippings on a towel draped over the sink. Style wasn’t important, just that it was short and hopefully free of critters. Afterward, I gave my head a quick run under the shower, toweled off, then collected my hair and went to find a trash bag.

“Hello,” someone said as I passed naked through the living room.

Up went the towel in my surprise, scattering hair all over the place. But that was the least of my concerns.

A man was sitting on one of the recliners drinking a soda.