The Catcher in the Eye (America's Next Top Assistant Mystery Book 1) (21 page)

“So, did you find
her?” I asked.

“I reached London,”
without admitting or denying my question, he shrugged. “After 5 years of
searching. When I first came across reliable information, I felt heavenly like it
was dreams came true—as if all those years of struggles and broken heart was
finally coming to an end, and replaced by joy and happiness. But noooo! It didn’t
go that way.” He spat angrily.

Now I wasn’t so sure
whether my keep-the-killer-talkin’ strategy was a good one or just a prelude to
a total disaster.

“It was a cold,
snowy afternoon in the bad area of the city. The streets were narrow and dark. Ancient
grey buildings were covered with gang graffiti all over. It was a typical
ghetto, I guess. She was a tenant at one of the worn-out apartments. I was full
of hope and anticipation to see the woman who made it happen for me to exist in
this world. Even now I can still feel the dump air and a stench in the alley. For
a while, I was standing there, holding my breath—as much as I was dying to see
her, my nerve was crushing my heart. Finally, I gathered my grits, knocked the
door, only to rattle the cheap plywood crap and wake up the cranky lady living
right next door. She stormed out, yelled to me that the door should be unlocked
‘coz no unit came with a working lock and went back to her room, so I turned
the door knob and went inside—Kelly, can you imagine the situation?”

“I believe so,” I
said, honestly. “As a person who’d gone through childhood and adult life
without knowing the biological father, I can imagine it.” I didn’t mention
having many faux-dads who were mostly okay to great.

“There was no life
in the room,” he continued. “She was gone.”

“I’m sorry, but
you could have continued searching for her. After all, you’d been searching her
for more than 5 years. Maybe she was not that far away—?”

“No, she was far,
far, far away—in a place I couldn’t reach. Her flesh was still remaining in the
room, but her soul was no longer there. It was obvious she wasn’t there anymore.
Her body was sitting on a chair completely motionless. I knew she had spewed
lots of blood. Brown blood was beginning to dry and cake. I couldn’t… I couldn’t
believe it!” He spat.

“She had abandoned
me before I was even born and now that I had found her after all those years of
intensive search and there she comes, without a word, without a hug, not even
breathing. Dead! She was dead!” He demanded, “You can’t imagine it, can you?”

I didn’t want to imagine,
but the imaginary scene of his first encounter with his mother came up into my
mind. I felt sick.

“If it wasn’t the
ultimate way of showing rejection, I don’t know what that was.” He muttered, slumping
the shoulders. “I was heartbroken. She refused to see me when I wasn’t even
born and then refused to see me when she met me for the first time. She didn’t know
how much time and effort I had invested to reach her, she didn’t even bothered
to care about it. I felt like dying on the spot. I went to the window, it was
on the third floor so if I jumped from there, I could probably have ended
everything. Then all of a sudden, a strong wind blew and hit my face with
sprinkles of snow, so I looked away. It was then something incredible had
happened—her eyes met mine.”

“Excuse me?” I
muttered.

“You heard me
Kelly, our eyes met. And I saw her eyes sparkle with recognition and well up
with tears.” He smiled from ear to ear. “It was the first time we got to communicate
with each other. At that moment, all the conflicts, wrath and resentment that
had been built up inside me had disappeared like vapor. What remained was love,
forgiveness and peace. We were finally united and I knew we’ll be together and
we’ll get to know each other.”

“But—” I fidgeted,
“that’s so impossible. You said she was dead.”

“Her body was
expired, unfortunately. Still, her soul was alive and we’re meant to be
together, forever and ever.”

He started talking
to the glass with two eyeballs. “Here we are Mom, it was a long, long journey
for us. Literally, we crossed the big water and I had to conceal you in a jar
of cold cream. But finally, we have found the right solution. This here is Ms.
Kelly Kinki, say hi to her. And Kelly, meet Mom.”

Alan saluted the
glass in my direction.  

“These are not
your mom!” I said, bewildered. “They’re nothing but just a pair of eyeballs
plucked out of a dead body.”

Seriously, I
couldn’t believe he was able to bring the eyeballs from the UK to the US. What
had happened to this world?

And… hello TSA,
are you there? Can you hear me? Remember you had confiscated my Juicy Tube lip
gloss from Lancôme as a potential weapon of mass destruction? Hey, now I know
you let a lunatic slip away carrying fresh human body parts with him. Good
thing the lip gloss was almost finished when it got taken away.

“Kelly, don’t be
rude to my mother,” he shushed me. “Just because she doesn’t have a body doesn’t
mean she has no feelings.” Then he talked to the eyeballs sweetly. “Mother, don’t
worry. I’ll soon settle you into her body.”

My jaw dropped.

“Y-yo-you,” I
gasped. A lesser woman would have fainted on the spot and a better woman would
have started giving out a badass rant. I was only myself, so I stuttered. “Yo-you’ve
got to be kidding.”

“No, I’m serious.”
And his face was serious. “I told you, after all, it was quite stupid and
unjustifiable the media called me Eyeball Snatcher because stealing eyeballs
has never been my purpose. And those lying schmucks in the media call
themselves journalists. Talk about an irony. They don’t give a damn about the
fact that I was merely looking for a body to host my mother’s soul. It’s just
that in order to bring my mother’s soul back to life, the body’s previous
occupant’s soul is not welcome.”

He took the knife
and grasped it. “So, Kelly, I need to remove your eyeballs out of your body.”

“Come on, Alan.
Don’t tell me the victims were killed because of your ridiculous attempts to
bring your dead mother back to life.”

“Unfortunately, I
have my share of disappointment in the pursuit to bring Mom back to life.” He
said nonchalantly.

“Oh my God.
Killing people in order to resuscitate a dead person from death? That’s the
most ridiculous excuse for committing mass murder.” I shook my head. I would
have added dramatic hand gestures for emphasis, were it not my hands being restrained.

“Kelly, I strongly
disagree with your calling my project ridiculous. You’ve got to invest lots and
lots of time and effort in order to successfully obtain the desired outcome.” Alan
shrugged. “So it was unfortunate that there were casualties, but nothing goes
without experiencing losses and failures. Take medical technology, the current
medicine saves lots of people from diseases and injuries, but in the process of
developing the technology now we enjoy, the whole lot more people had suffered
and died. Some from shaky techniques and others from experiments that didn’t go
so good as the initial hypotheses. In short, everything we do is a certain kind
of experiment.”

“But Alan, look at
the other eyeballs.” I pointed out. “So you’ve tried your resuscitation routine
with multiple victims of your crime in the past, and look what happened; you
failed on all the attempts. If I were you, I’d definitely conclude that
plucking eyeballs out of strangers and replacing them with the ones from your
dead mother wouldn’t resuscitate your mother. It’s not resuscitation but just
killing the innocent strangers.”

“But this time, it
works. I know it.” He said. “And it’s reincarnation, rather than resuscitation.”

“Get real.” I
said, trying to be persuasive. Oh yes, I tried. “Okay, so, to err is human.
Then again, making the same mistakes of killing people and having no regret
truly seriously ruins your karma, you know. That kind of sins really whack out
your karma to the point the judges in the afterlife divvy into smaller pieces
and you’ll be an ameba in your afterlife. You don’t want to be an ameba in the afterlife,
do you?”

“I don’t care
about my afterlife,” he shrugged. “What’s important is that you share some
critical personal traits with Mom, Kelly. You used to be called the poisonous
bitch, for instance, and you had this nickname Dragon Lady. My mother used to
be called with those names. Oh, did I mention her name’s Kelly as well? Just
like you. So I had picked women sharing some physical features like hair and
eye color with mom but they didn’t work well. Then again, you have more things
in common with Mom. Guess what? My mother has had her time called a bitch.”

“In that case, Patricia
Warshawski, the congresswoman seems to work magic for your needs.” I said,
crossing fingers of my hands tied behind. Screw karma, I needed to buy time. “Believe
me, she’s a real bitch. And considering she craves for media attention more
than anything, she’ll definitely accept meeting you one-on-one, trying to score
and prove she’s better than everyone in law enforcement.”

Desperate times
call for desperate measures. I didn’t feel bad at all about urging him to get
Bitchtricia.

Alright, so maybe I
too have some bitch personality myself.

“I don’t think so.
Her eye color doesn’t meet my requirement criterion.”

He shook his head
nonchalantly, as if it was a job interview or something.

Some women land on
with high paying positions with Goldman-Sachs and here I was, a candidate to be
brutally killed!

Talk about an
opportunity of lifetime.

“Kelly.” Alan told
me with a stern face. “You were not paying attention to my words, I’m afraid.” Just
like Mrs. Halliday told me when I was in third grade.

“Try concentrating
when you’re being stun-gunned, kidnapped, tied-up, and threatened to be killed
with a giant knife, you will have an attention problem.” I spat out.

“Don’t get me
wrong, Kelly.” He shook his head. “I’m not killing you.”

“If that’s the
case, can’t you at least ditch the knife?” I suggested.

“I don’t think so.
This baby is necessary for the procedure.”

“Forget the
procedure. Remember? It’s not an organ transplant. Also, speaking of a baby,
why did you do your sick trick on that baby of Dr. Julia Stewart’s? The baby
wasn’t even born. So, tell me. What had she done to deserve that kind of
cruelty?” I demanded.

For the first
time, he was silent.

“Tell me.” I
pressed. “Why did you have to yank her out of the mother’s womb? She was no
threat to you and considering you’ve brutally murdered her mother, she would
have died without your sick procedure.”

“It was not my
fault.” He said through gritted teeth. “It was her fault. That woman, the
coroner was so persistent—desperate even, begging and pleading me to help the
baby, not to touch the baby, do no harm to the baby. Baby, baby, baby! That
bitch! Her rapping about the damn baby, that was so sickening! So she was
oh-so-keen about protecting that fucking baby, guarding her belly with her bleeding
hands, even when I poked the eyeballs out of her. How could she do that when my
own mother had tried to kill me when I wasn’t even born? That’s not fair!”

“For your
information, life never has been fair.” I said. “Especially, when an unborn
child gets brutally yanked out of the mother’s belly by a jealous headcase so
that the fruitcake can play a goddamned sick trick on her by poking out her
eyeballs. Talk about unfairness. Stop victimizing yourself already!” 

“Stop judging me!”
He shouted. “I didn’t do it just out of jealousy. As they say little babies
have lots more potential for everything than adults, I thought maybe a baby
could bring Mom back to life. Though the result was disappointing.”

Shaking his head
as if to shrug off some kind of a burden, he continued. “But considering killing
the coroner and the baby had brought the chance to take a glimpse of you on TV
along with an opportunity to know you. Maybe that was time well spent.”

“I’m not quite
seeing your point, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, Kelly. You
would never imagine my excitement when I caught you on the TV for the first
time. It was just a moment or a half that the camera captured you for the nine
o’clock news. It was one of the old, boring news regarding this Eyeball Snatcher
bullshit. Then again, can you imagine how excited I got when I caught a glimpse
of you? When I was lost, clueless and frustrated, then all of a sudden, you
popped out in front of me.”

I couldn’t imagine
his excitement, and I wasn’t all that keen on knowing more. Too much
information. Still, he continued anyway.

“Your hair, body
shape, your face, the way you walked, how you looked away from the camera…everything
was brilliant. No, perfect is more like the word. On top of all that, it was
your eyes that was screaming perfect…the shape, the width, the color. Especially,
the color. The splendid shade of brown was true something other women didn’t
possess, and maybe it was your attitude that added some kind of sparkling fire
to your eyes. I had the feeling you’re the one. So I did a research on the web
and found out about your past. How you obtained the Vicious Bitch and Dragon
Lady status and all.”

He sighed
contentedly. “It was just a brief moment, but that was enough for me to know
you’re the one. Besides all that, take a look at this.” He took out something
out of the breast pocket of his shirt.

It was an aged,
fading photograph of a young woman. So she had brown hair and big brown eyes,
bearing some resemblance with my physical features. But that doesn’t
necessarily mean I was
the one
to replace her. Besides that, I would
sacrifice just about anything to welcome the baby and for the happiness of the
baby.

“Alan, so I may
have similar hair and eye color with her, but we have nothing in common. Whatever
you say, carrying out your demonic scheme will just increase the body count
without bringing what you want.” I said firmly.