Orchard Grove (29 page)

They look so beautiful. Angelic in their matching white dresses, their soft, olive-colored skin, and their deep-set eyes. Lana is holding a bright red apple. Bringing it to her mouth, she takes a bite out of it, then hands it to Susan who does the same. I’m trying to speak to them, but it isn’t easy. It’s as if my jaw is partially wired shut.

When finally the words come to me, I say, “Why did you stab me in the back?”

But the women just stand there chewing while a cold wind blows up and down the empty city street. But soon something starts coming out of their mouths. It’s blood. The blood flows dark red against the black and whiteness. It flows out their mouths, down their chins, and onto their chests, staining their white dresses. They’re no longer sharing an apple. Instead, they’re eating John’s severed, bullet-damaged head. The thing is, he isn’t dead. His blue eyes are wide open and he’s smiling that devil grin that I’ve come to abhor.

“You know for a screenwriter,” he says as Lana takes a big bite out of his exposed brains, “you sure are a stupid fuck, Hollywood.”

That’s when I’m startled awake.

I bounded up into sitting position, as if my backbone were a heavy-duty spring. I breathed in heavily, the sweat soaking my face, soaking through my clothing. My head was filled with chunks of concrete and rusted barbed wire, and my foot felt like someone chopped it off while I slept, leaving only a bloody stump. I glanced at the time on my watch. Four in the morning. I’d been out cold for four hours.

My hands felt strange. My fingers stung, and the skin on my palms was sticky, like I’d dipped my hands in a bowl of maple syrup before collapsing onto the bed. Flicking on the light beside the bed stand, I saw that the insides of both hands were nearly covered in dried blood. Then I remembered that I’d cut both hands with the French knife when I was stabbing the apples, and now the cuts had bled out and cauterized themselves while I slept off the booze.

That’s when I began to hear the sirens.

Soft at first, but then louder the closer they came to sleepy Orchard Grove. In all honesty, the sirens were only now registering while surly I’d been hearing them even in my sleep. It must have been the sirens that woke me up in the first place. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard sirens in the middle of the night, but there was that voice inside my gut again, trying to tell me something. It told me the sirens were meant for me. It told me the digital photos Miller laid out on the dining room table were just the start of something bigger and more sinister. Somehow I knew that he had enough evidence by now to take me into custody, and that custody would lead to indictment and an arrest for Murder in the First.

I bounded out of bed then, feeling like my head was split down the center. I went to the bathroom and urinated. Spotting my shirt on the floor, I knelt down without falling down, picked it up and pulled it over my head and shoulders. Limping as fast as possible into the kitchen, I went to the sink, opened up the hot and cold spigots and washed my hands with soap and water until the blood fell off the skin and circled the aluminum drain. The sting from the many cuts was enough to make my eyes water. But they were only surface cuts, and nothing to worry about.

Splashing some water onto my face, I then dried it with the dishrag, which I dropped to the floor. I located the keys to a car I hadn’t driven since my foot had been operated on. For a brief second, I thought about heading down to the pot patch to grab the coffee can I’d buried there weeks ago. A can that contained five thousand in cash. Cash I’d been hiding from Susan. But the sirens were getting louder. There was no time for hobbling down to the tree line. Not with my gimpy foot. I would just have to grab some cash from an ATM.

Snatching my cell phone off the kitchen counter, I shoved it in my jeans pocket. I pulled my Levis jean jacket from the closet, and left the house through the front door. I got into my ten year old, top-down Porsche-Carrera that was parked in the driveway, and turning the key, set my left foot on the gas.

It started up right away.

Backing out with the headlights off, I shifted the auto-tranny into drive and toe-tapped the gas. I was hooking a left onto the cross street that would take me away from Orchard Grove, just as the blue-and-whites turned into the neighborhood, lighting the joint up in their red, white, and blue LED flashers.

By the time they pulled up into my driveway, I was already gone.

I
desperately needed a place to go. A safe house. A friend.

But who the hell would take me in?

I had no friends. Susan had been my friend. Now she was gone.

Options.

I might head into the city, hide in my writing studio. But then, that would be the second place the cops would look for me once they’d finished up with the Orchard Grove house. I could hit the northbound highway, head for the Canadian border two hundred fifty miles away. But I’d never make it past the border without getting busted on the spot. Plus I didn’t have my passport on me, or one of those special digitally enhanced new driver’s licenses.

Going south was always an option. Mexico. But that would take two or three days of nonstop driving. By then, my disappearance would be broadcast all over the social media sites. Miller would send out an APB, the Staties and the FBI would grow massive hard-ons that pointed at me, and then the roadblocks would go up. I’d be lucky to make Ohio.

I drove away from the city, knowing that they’d comb every street and alley for me. No choice but to hit the highway until I was beyond the city limits. From there I’d hit a back-country road, maybe find a motel-no-tell where I could hold up for the night until I scripted my next move. It wasn’t much of a plan, but then, I’d never run away from anything before. Never run for my life.

Dead ahead, the entrance ramp to New York State Highway 90.

I swerved into the right lane and drove onto it, then started heading east along a back- country road. The dark of night hung over me like a black shroud. The humidity was so thick; the air that blew against my face as I drove with the top down had little effect. Or maybe my foot was infecting, causing a fever from which I would never recover. Maybe it’s what I deserved for what I’d done to John. Or what the hell, maybe I deserved a medal.

I went as far as the Nassau exit and got off.

To say the place was sparsely populated was saying a lot. It was nothing but wide open farm fields and the occasional farm house. Without a roof over me, the smell of cow shit tainted the every single ounce of oxygen I breathed.

Up ahead on my right, a twenty-four hour gas station/convenience store. My gas tank registered three quarters full, but I was in desperate need of cash. I could have kicked myself in the ass for not digging up my coffee can from out of the pot patch before I split Orchard Grove. It would have taken only a few minutes at most and I’d be five grand richer for it. If only I’d woken up just five minutes earlier, I might have had the time to grab the money and avoid the police. Now I was a prisoner to whatever was left in my joint checking account with Susan. That is, she hadn’t already emptied the sucker out. I also knew that the cops would attempt to trace every credit card transaction I made prior to putting a hold on all my accounts. Which meant speed was of the essence.

Pulling into the convenience store lot, I parked around the back of the small wood building near the dumpster and killed the engine. I exited the car and limped around to the front of the store, entered into it through a front glass door that sported a picture of a giant green bass breaking the water’s surface in a flying leap, the words, “Fresh Night Crawlers for Sale!” printed in big black letters below it. That’s what I was to the Albany cops. A night crawler. A worm. A slimy insect.

There was an old man sitting behind the counter on a stool. The scraggily gray beard he wore made him
look
old anyway. He was watching a television that was mounted to the wall above the counter, directly beside the overhead cigarette racks. It was still dark out, yet he barely acknowledged me as I stood by the now closed door.

“ATM?” I asked, trying not to look at him directly.

He slowly peeled his eyes away from the tube, nodded.

“Behind you,” he said.

“Thanks.”

I turned, eyed the gray cash machine set up against the exterior wall by the window. Pulling out my wallet, I slid out the red ATM card, entered it into the card slot. When the screen came up asking me for my PIN, I entered it and waited. That’s when the silence was broken by the sounds coming from the old man’s television, as if something he’d just witnessed on the screen caused him to dramatically turn up the audio.

“This is your news on the nines for the top of the five o’clock hour. Police are on the lookout for a North Albany screenwriter suspected of murdering a local APD detective in a bizarre homicide-made-to-look-like-a-suicide plot only Hollywood could cook up.”

My knees grew wobbly, my foot throbbing with my every pulse, the skin that surrounded it feeling too small for the swelled, sutured flesh… feeling as if it was splitting apart. I made the mistake of looking over my right shoulder at the old man who shifted his eyes from the television to my face. I quickly turned back to the machine, hoping against all hope that it would disburse my cash immediately. Instead it asked me if I’d be willing to pay three dollars to access my cash account. I pressed Yes. As if I had a choice in the matter.

Then it asked me how much I wanted to withdraw. The most it offered up was two hundred bucks. But there was another option called “Other.” I chose that one. Meanwhile, the bad news continued to spill out of the television just three or four feet away.

“The body of APD Detective John Cattivo, forty-one, was discovered last evening by his wife immediately after she heard what was described as a gunshot coming from one of the rooms in their North Albany home. Initial reports indicated that Cattivo died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head while alone in the room. Later on, however, it was reported that Cattivo had been accompanied by his next-door neighbor, local screenwriter Ethan Forrester, into the room only moments prior to the suicide. After careful questioning by APD Senior Homicide Detective Nick Miller, it was determined that Forrester either tricked Cattivo into acting out a suicide on behalf of research he was said to be conducting for an upcoming Hollywood production or, Forrester actually pulled the trigger himself. Preliminary ballistics reports indicate that Forrester’s prints were not only discovered on the suicide weapon, but also on the single bullet casing that, by all appearances, had been secretly loaded into the otherwise empty automatic’s nine round magazine.

“A second source for the APD, Sergeant Carl Pressman, who is also reputed to have been the deceased’s partner, reports that Forrester who, it should be noted is on crutches after a recent foot surgery, had been harassing Cattivo’s wife, Lana. According to Pressman, Forrester who lives next door to the Cattivo’s on Orchard Grove, has shown up on numerous occasions to their home uninvited. Mrs. Cattivo has also lodged several complaints with the APD after discovering Forrester spying on her from a window that looks directly out onto their next-door home and backyard.

“Miller, who is presently in charge of the on-going investigation, told Channel Nine that he was able to obtain a bench warrant for Forrester’s arrest only a few hours after the fatal early evening incident. However, when the APD made a raid on Forrester’s Orchard Grove home at approximately three-thirty AM this morning, the screenwriter had already fled the scene, perhaps acting on a tip-off from some unknown party.”

I could feel the old man’s eyes digging into me as I typed in the numbers, 1-0-0-0 into the ATM, pressed Enter. When it spit out an electronic beep and flashed the words, “$500 Maximum Withdrawal,” I was left with no other option but to cancel my request and type in 5-0-0. I bit down on my bottom lip so hard I thought I drew blood, pressed Enter and waited for the ATM to cough up the cash. I tried to turn off the voice on the television and concentrate instead on the mechanical workings of the machine, the bills being electronically counted and collected by the wheels and gears.

“Excuse me,” the old man said. Just the sound of his old, gravelly voice sent a jolt of electric sparks throughout my nervous system.

A stream of cash began dispersing into the gray plastic tray in twenty-dollar denominations. It spilled out like green blood.

“Hey you,” the old man pressed. “That’s you on the television, ain’t it? Ain’t…it?! You’re the killer. ”

I tried to ignore him. But my head was filling with the sound of a thousand blaring trumpets and beating, pulsating bass drums.

“Hey you, killer!” the old man repeated, his voice louder, more insistent, more threatening.

I grabbed my money, shoved it into my jeans pocket. It wouldn’t be enough, but I was on the run from the law. Somehow I would have to find a way to get to that coffee can in the pot patch. But for now I had to stay away or else risk getting snatched by Miller and his blue knights. I was floating alone in a great big wavy ocean, and there were storm clouds overhead, lightning bolts striking all around me. A fugitive from a kind of half-baked justice where a cop gets to wave a loaded gun at my wife’s head while forcing her to get half naked and perform sexual acts with his own wife. Doesn’t matter if it turns out that both women surly enjoyed the act. Right is right and wrong is fucked up. So what if the end result was my helping him kill himself? He had it coming. The only thing I did wrong was not finding a way to kill him when he was still holding a gun on my wife out on my back deck.