Orchard Grove (33 page)

“That flexy sealant shit is pretty expensive,” the kid said.

Digging into my pocket, I pulled out a fifty, handed it to him.

“Keep the rest,” I said.

“Sweet,” he said, craning his neck to get a look at the girl.

“Mind your own business,” I said.

He shot me a wink and left.

We sat back against the headboard and shared my pizza and my bottle. I’d almost forgotten that the television was on, until something slashed across the screen that captured my attention. It was a videotaped shot of the convenience store where I’d killed the clerk. There was a reporter standing outside the front door of the store beside the gas pumps, and she was talking into a hand-held microphone. With the sound muted I couldn’t exactly make out what she was reporting.

The scene shifted to the interior of the store.

There was a black rubber sheet covering clerk’s corpse. A few close-ups followed. One in particular of the now empty cash register. Another of the antiquated security monitoring system that was missing the cassette tape. Another shot followed that nearly sent me through the ceiling. It was portrait of me. A professional portrait snapped for me back in LA for my inclusion in the Screen Writers Guild.

I shot out of the bed, bad foot and all, hopping over to the television where I killed the power.

“What gives, Summers?” Casy said.

I inhaled, exhaled. By sheer luck or Providence, she hadn’t noticed my picture on the screen.

“Gotta break up the party,” I said.

She slid off the bed, glanced at her watch. “Oh my God, I should have been on campus a half hour ago. Well, looks like I’m missing my first class.” She smiled. “But that was fun. Just hanging out in my birthday suit, eating pizza and doing shots. Ain’t life grand.” Looking at me thoughtfully. “Who exactly is Lana? And why aren’t you with her if you love her so much?”

My sternum tightened.

“It’s a long story,” I said, pulling out an extra fifty, handing it to her.

She looked at the money in my hand, took it. I knew she thought I was crazy, and maybe I was. But I didn’t care anymore. I might as well have had terminal cancer. It was just a matter of time until I was finished. Just a matter of when and how.

Casy got dressed, packed up the kimono.

“Listen, Summers,” she said, “let me know next time you’re in town for a… whatcha-ma-call-it… trap shooting contest.” She leaned into me, planted a kiss on my cheek.

I’m not sure why, but I felt a pleasant wave of warmth wash over me then. It’s the way I would have wanted to feel if I’d just spent the past hour with the real Lana. The Lana I dreamed about once upon a time.

But that hour would never come.

W
hen she was gone, I closed the door behind her, locked the deadbolt, slipped on the chain. Grabbing hold of the can of Flex Seal Clear, I limped my way to the bathroom where I sat down on the toilet, slowly removed the blood-soaked sock. Aiming the nozzle at the foot, I sucked in a breath, held it, then proceeded to spray the exposed wounds with the liquid rubber sealant. The cold sealant on the inflamed skin sucked the oxygen from my lungs. But as the material solidified and bonded, my bleeding stopped.

When I got my breath back, I raised myself up off the toilet, positioned the crutches back under my arms, and headed out of the bathroom. I wasn’t two steps past the threshold when cops pulled into the motel.

S
he sits inside a concrete room with no windows. Only a big rectangular window that takes up much of the wall to her left. She’s dressed in a pair of gym shorts and a gray sweatshirt that one of the smaller cops pulled out of his locker. The shorts and the sweatshirt bear the APD logo in big black letters. She also wears flip-flops on her feet, the tattoo of a red bleeding heart recently acquired at a downtown tattoo parlor plainly visible on her left ankle.

After a time that seems forever, a man walks in. It’s young Detective Miller. He’s carrying a cup of tea in his left hand, the Lipton Tea tag hanging off the rim of the paper cup by its white string. He sets the cup down in front of her.

“How you feeling?” says Miller.

She stares down at her tea, feels the steam rising up from it clouding her view, coating the skin on her face. After a reflective time, she raises up her head, takes a good look at the tall, thin young man, at his full head of short cropped sandy blond hair and boyish face. She would never say anything about it, but she’s pretty sure he doesn’t have to shave more than twice a week, if that. A part of her is attracted to him, and another part… a more powerful part… wishes he’d answered one of her personals ads. How nice it would be to have him fall under her spell, then make love to him, and achieve climax by cutting him up. She would like to see that confused look in his eyes that always accompanies the first cut from the cleaver. The cut that doesn’t cause pain so much as surprise and misunderstanding. Of course, the cleaver is gone now and so are her days of avenging her step-monster’s atrocities.

“Think you can give me a description of the man who abducted you?” Miller says, his tone gentle and nonthreatening. Not the tone of a cop, like on TV. But of a man who really cares.

She steals a sip of tea. Then, “I told you, it’s hard to say. It all happened so quickly. I was out for a walk and suddenly this man pulls me into the woods.”

He looks at her forearms.

“Which arm?”

“What?”

“Which arm did he grab hold of? I’m assuming he grabbed you by the arm.”

She doesn’t anticipate this question.

“The left,” she lies.

“Funny he didn’t leave a mark on your arm. A bruise. You ladies bruise easier than us men. Thinner skin.”

“I think he was wearing gloves,” she says. “He was all covered up.”

“Maybe that explains it,” he says. “But it’s awfully hot out to be all covered up like that. Continue.”

“Well,” she says, “that dead guy was already there, down on his back.” She takes a minute to work up some tears. Something she’s not half bad at. “His throat was cut and there was blood all over. I tried to scream but the man’s hand was wrapped around my mouth. Then you guys showed up. He let go of me, and I ran the opposite way. He must have run off too.”

Miller sits back, digests her words. She’s already described the man who abducted her as over six feet tall, heavy set, all dressed in black…“covered up.” Amazing that a guy of that size didn’t leave any marks on her, and what’s more amazing, is that he was able to slip away undetected. Perhaps he’s militarily trained. But even if he is, it all doesn’t add up. If Miller’s scientific profiling serves him right, the perp responsible for the killings… the beheadings… is almost certainly slight and quick and young. Someone who can get the jump on his victims, slash their throats. Someone who would more than likely dress and uncannily present himself as a woman in order to fool his heterosexual victims into trusting him. If he did attack this young lady, she is almost certainly his first female victim, signifying a modification or mutation in his MO.

…It just doesn’t add up…

Still, he has no reason not to believe this girl. No reason to hold her. It’s precisely what he relays to her in that same soft, gentle voice.

She takes another sip of her tea, works up a smile as she stands.

“Say, where’d you get that tattoo?” he asks.

She tells him.

“What’s it mean?” he says. “Droplets of blood from a heart.”

She reaches out, sets her hand on his hand.

“For me to know, Detective,” she says. “And for you to find out.”

T
he sound of sirens, the roar of engines, and the screech of tires as their brakes lock up outside my front door… It shattered the silence of my safe house.

I crutched my way back to the window, peeked out.

Three state trooper cruisers were parked diagonally in the dusty lot. A second unmarked cruiser was parked beside that one. The side passenger door on the unmarked car opened and out stepped Detective Nick Miller. He was holding his service weapon in his right hand, his left hand gripping the right wrist, combat position.

The troopers emerged from their cruisers, some of them holding automatics, a few others, short-barreled shotguns. One of them, a stocky woman, stood behind the open door of her blue and yellow cruiser, held a microphone up to her mouth. A black accordion style wire hung from the mic and extended into the open door of the cruiser.

“Ethan Forrester,” she said, her deep unfeminine voice tinny and loud through the speaker. “You are under arrest. You must come out with your hands in the air.”

There must have been a half dozen weapons aimed for my motel room. Some people began to gather behind the cops and troopers. I saw the old woman who owned the hotel. She was dressed in tan shorts, a black tank top befitting of a much younger woman. Her gray hair was no longer put up in curlers, but instead planted on her head like a dry, silvery bush. Out the corner of my right eye, I made out a tow truck that was only now coming into view. My Porsche was being pulled behind it. Now I had no way out of this place other than on foot.

One good foot… one foot not far from amputation…

I closed the blind, sat with my back against the narrow piece of wall between the window and the door, my shoulder pressed up against the easy chair. Was this it? The end of the road? Did the hooker give me away? The pizza boy? In answer to my own question, I shook my head no.

Those kids didn’t give me away at all.

I gave myself away by not running away. Instead, I gave in to my obsession. My need to be with Lana. The law was standing outside my door, prepared to blow me away if need be simply because I left a trail too obvious to ignore. My blood and my prints would be all over that convenient store. So would an electronic record of my having used its ATM minutes before the established Estimated Time of Death for that old angry clerk.

In all my exhaustion and shock, I’d mistakenly attempted to use my Amex to pay for the motel room. By using a false name, I must have raised one hell of a red flag to the owner when, after all, she could plainly see that the name on the Amex, and the receipt for the failed transaction sported an entirely different name. A name that, sooner or later, she would connect with the man who was suspected of killing a cop in Albany and a convenience store clerk in Nassau.

You just couldn’t avoid the news these days. If you didn’t get it on your TV you got it on your smartphone. If you didn’t get it there, then you got it on Redditt, Facebook, and Twitter. Drones filled the air, phones were tapped, security cameras were mounted everywhere. No one was safe anymore because there was nowhere to hide. The whole wide world could see up your ass and you had nowhere to hide.

I’d been screwed from the start. And I’d been avoiding the news… avoiding the reality of what was happening on Orchard Grove and inside my brain. I guess I just wanted to escape, even if escape meant hiring a hooker to play the part of Lana…
Good
Lana. I just wanted out. To be free. To wake up in my bed and breathe easy, because this whole thing from start to finish had all been a silly nightmare.

“Ethan Forrester,” the voice blared once more. “Come out with your hands up or we will remove you by force.”

I knew what force meant. It meant they would come after me with smoke grenades, tear gas, and bullets. I turned around onto my knees. An electric pain shot into my right foot. Slipping the shotgun off the chair, I reached into my jeans pocket for the shells I’d lifted from the convenience store. I shoved the four shells into the shotgun and cocked a round into the chamber. Raising up the stock, I smashed a small hole in the bottom of the window pane.

The noise got the attention of the jumpy troopers.

The one on the far left triggered his automatic. There was the explosion followed by a wallop in the wood door and a hole the size of my fist blown out of it. He missed by a mile.