Hunting Michael Underwood

by L V Gaudet

  “Don’t call me that,” Michael says defensively.

  “You let him take us David. You let him take us and kill our mother. You let him keep us and hit us.”

  “Don’t call me David,” Michael repeats. “That’s the name he gave me.”

  He can taste the resentment of the name ‘David’ on his tongue as he says it.

  “You ran away and left me behind,” Cassie accuses. “You left me alone with him.”

  “No I didn’t,” Michael says. “You are lying now. You were already gone when I ran away. You were the one who left me alone with him.”

  “You made me go, David. They were not very nice people who took me in after. I went to foster homes. You know all about foster homes, don’t you David? You know because you knew lots of runaway kids from foster homes. You heard the stories about what they do to kids in foster homes.”

  “No,” Michael shakes his head. He is starting to feel sick. He doesn’t like this conversation. “You didn’t go to foster homes. You were adopted. You found a good family who took care of you.”

  “That is what you want to believe. I went to foster homes first, before I finally got adopted.”

  She looks down at her feet sadly, scuffing the dirt with a toe.

  “They were not very nice people, any of them. I was better off with him.”

  “No, don’t say that,” Michael whines. He is starting to sound like a little boy. He feels like a little boy, overwhelmed with a world that is so much bigger than him.

  Cassie looks up at him again, her eyes burning with resentment.

  “Then you let him take me again. You were supposed to protect me. Always, you promised to protect me always.”

  “No, you were gone,” Michael moans in despair. “You ran away. I found you. After years of searching, I finally found you. And you ran away from me. He couldn’t have taken you again. You ran away.”

  “You know he did, David.”

  “Stop calling me David!” Michael snarls. “That is not my name!”

  “Then who are you, David?” she asks, now mocking him. “Michael Underwood? Michael Ritchot? How many names have you had? Do you even know your real name? Do you even remember? David McAllister. That is who you really are. It doesn’t matter that is not the name you were born with. You are a McAllister, just like him. He raised you to be just like him.”

  “No!” Michael yells, half standing up. He makes himself settle back into the chair.

  Kathy hears Michael yell from inside the house and pushes away the urge to go see what is happening.

  Don’t torture yourself by looking.

  “I am nothing like him,” Michael hisses angrily, leaning forward threateningly.

  “Day-vid,” Cassie taunts in a sing-song voice, dragging out the sound. “Day-vid, Day-vid, Day-vid.”

  Michael lunges up from his chair, grabbing the chair in a fit of rage, the world around him fading, being pushed away to a distant place and replaced with the black fog of anger. He swings the chair viciously at Cassie and smashes it against the ground.

  “You hurt me David.” But it isn’t Cassie’s voice now. The voice is not that of a small child.

  Michael spins to face Jane Doe and blanches. His mind compartmentalized his sister, needing to separate the two of her into separate people. Cassie is the little girl, the innocent he needed to protect. Jane Doe is the woman, the stranger Cassie became, the woman who fought against him and ran away.

  “You took me and you hurt me David,” Jane says, her calm voice slicing through his heart in a way anger never could. “You hurt me and locked me in the cellar and you killed me. You were supposed to protect me David.”

  “No!” Michael cries. “I did not kill you. You are still alive. I know it and I will find you. Wherever you are, whatever he did with you, I am going to find you.”

  “No you won’t, David.” She coos at him. “You are bad. You are very bad. You were bad as a boy and you are bad now. I don’t want you to find me.”

  Michael is stunned. How can she not want me to find her? I have to keep her safe so the bad thing can’t happen to her.

  “I will find you, I promise,” he whispers. “I will keep you safe from him.”

  “Who will keep me safe from you, David?” she asks. “Who will keep me safe from David McAllister?”

  “Stop calling me that,” he growls. “I am not David. I am Michael. Michael.”

  He blinks. Jane Doe is suddenly gone. He turns in confusion.

  Cassie is standing behind him, watching him.

  “Cassie,” he begs.

  “You hurt me David,” she says quietly, her voice small. “You tried to kill me.”

  “No,” he says hoarsely.

  The flutter of a curtain in the window of the house next door catches his attention. He sees it out of the corner of his eye. Michael looks and the curtain is still, but he knows it moved. The neighbour next door is spying on him.

  With a sinking in his stomach, Michael realizes that he had been yelling. He groans.

  He goes into the house looking for Kathy.

  Kathy is trying to make herself busy tidying up, although she finds the task almost impossible to force on herself, the heavy weight of unhappiness dragging her down.

  “We have to go soon,” Michael says. “We have to move on, find a new place. We have to keep moving. Just for a little while.”

  Kathy stops tidying, looking at him.

  “That’s good. I don’t like this house.” She doesn’t tell him she is embarrassed and uncomfortable knowing that the neighbours see him talking to nobody in the back yard, that they know just as she does that he is crazy. Something is broken inside him and it is making him behave in ways that scare her.

  She won’t leave him. She still harbours that fear inside that she just can’t let go. She knows Ronnie is dead, but that nagging doubt keeps pushing at her. What if he isn’t? What if Ronnie is somehow alive and comes after her?

  Besides, Michael would never hurt her. He will hurt others, but never her. He even killed Ronnie so that he could never hurt her again.

  9A New Home, For Now

  Without any fanfare, Jason McAllister is dropped off at his new home by his social worker. He was released after a few hours of assessment in the mental institution. That was only a formality.

  Jason is an outpatient, living on his own under a strict curfew and regular checks with his social worker. Normally, this would have been the final step after years of therapy in the institution followed by a period of time living in a halfway house meant to help the mentally ill learn to live on their own.

  Jason has been granted his freedom in unprecedented time, almost freedom. They will be watching.

  He gets out of the car with the small bag that contains his worldly possessions, and looks up at the house.

  The car drives away without a wave goodbye from either him or the driver.

  It is a two-story rectangular house with a narrow front, stretching long towards the back of the narrow lot. The front door is on one side of a not-so-large living room picture window. The house sports a tacky paint job that needed to be scraped off and re-painted at least ten years ago, and an over-grown lawn that is more weeds than grass. A rusting motor-less grass cutter that works by the wheels turning the blades leans against the fence. The blades look too dull and eaten by rust to cut grass.

  The little porch sags and the railing looks like it will collapse if anyone leans on it. The windows are grimy and a second floor window has a crack running across it that would have glinted in the sunlight if it were not so dirty.

  The little white picket fence surrounding the yard is missing a few boards. A few more are hanging half off and leaning drunkenly. The gate is nowhere to be seen, rusting hinges half peeled away and bent, probably from when the gate had been savagely torn off.

  The low strains of country music can be heard coming from one of the rooms inside the house.

  “Home sweet home,” Jason says with a grim
smile.

  He approaches the house and mounts the wooden stairs. Looking down a hole in the porch, he can see the old concrete steps that came with the house originally. The door sticks and, for a moment, he worries it is locked. His social worker told him the landlord said it is supposed to be kept locked but he would leave it open for him.

  Jason pushes harder on the door and it pops open with a groan of the swollen wood doorframe releasing the door.

  The inside is dingy and full of shadows and an unpleasant smell. The decor is as outdated as the house is neglected.

  He is in a narrow entrance. Directly ahead is a narrow staircase pressed against a wall that would have been better suited to allowing a window to let some light inside. Next to the staircase is a short hallway. To his right a double-width doorway opens to a living room with furniture that looks like it had been pulled out of someone’s trash.

  A dead plant sits forlornly on top of an old tube television that he suspects probably quit working in the 1970’s, and drapes that look like they housed a multitude of moths over the decades hang in all their ugly glory from a slightly bent curtain rod in front of the window. Out-dated chairs and tables are barely visible.

  The room is sparsely furnished, but cluttered with garbage, dirty dishes, and discarded clothing, making him suspect someone is living in that room.

  Jason moves past the living room, deeper into the house, and as he does the unpleasant smell grows stronger.

  Past the living room, a door opens to one of two communal bathrooms. He peeks in and backs away with revulsion. The grout between the tub tiles is cracked and falling away in chunks, allowing the mould to flourish in the wall behind the yellow-green tiles that remind him of some rather nasty vomit. Some of the tiles are cracked. The sink is stained orange and a steady drip from the faucet is already pressing on his nerves.

  Beyond the bathroom is the kitchen. The cupboards and counters look like they have never been upgraded or replaced, and the fridge and stove are so old he wonders if they work. One cupboard is missing a door. Multiple holes are chewed into the wood where it had apparently been re-screwed on a few times before someone gave up on it completely.

  Jason flips the light switch on and catches the quick scurry of a cockroach fleeing the light.

  The table is scarred with childish attempts at crude artwork scratched into the surface with various utensils, and the legs are misshapen and bent. The one chair that has not been stolen has an ugly orange and yellow flowered vinyl seat from the thirties that is split wide open down the middle. The grey stuffing is spilling out and missing in the middle, revealing the rough wood beneath that would probably leave a splinter in the seat of anyone who sits on it.

  On the wall, which is the backside of the stairs leading up, is a door that presumably leads to the basement. The door is padlocked and has a dark stain splattered on it.

  “I don’t even want to know what that stain is.”

  Jason leaves the kitchen to the cockroaches, turning the light off as he leaves, and mounts the steps to the second floor. They groan under his weight.

  The second floor has another hallway, this one filled with doors. This part of the house had been renovated, making the rooms even smaller so that additional rooms could be squeezed in. There was barely any effort made to cover up where walls were moved. Wires hang from the hallway ceiling where a smoke detector was once wired in and at some point had been ripped out.

  The stairs turn and go up another level again, even narrower, to the attic space above.

  Jason looks up the stairs curiously. He didn’t think there was a third floor from looking at the place from outside.

  A door opens and he turns to see a dishevelled couple come stumbling out. They pause to lock the door behind them before coming towards him.

  “Don’t go up there,” the woman giggles, “the crazy guy lives up there.”

  “What’s up there?” Jason asks.

  “The attic.” He gets an unpleasant whiff of unwashed bodies as they get close and is glad when they squeeze past him and start down the stairs.

  “What’s his name?” Jason asks.

  “Who?” The woman seems to have forgotten who they were talking about. Then she remembers. “Oh, crazy guy!”

  “Don’t know, don’t care,” the man says gruffly, and they are gone from sight down the stairs. Jason hears the front door open and close, their voices and laughter outside fading quickly as they walk away.

  Jason turns away from the stairs and moves down the hallway past their door. None of the rooms have numbers on the doors.

  He finds the other shared bathroom and looks in. It is just as bad as the one downstairs; only this one is missing the showerhead. Water drips from the pipe coming from the wall in the shower, the swivel ball of the missing showerhead still screwed on, the head broken off at the ball hinge that once allowed its aim to be adjusted.

  He passes the closed door with the country music playing inside, silently dubbing the unknown resident as “The Cowboy”.

  His room is the only one with the door left open. He finds it from the description his social worker gave him. He steps inside. The room is at the front of the house. The only window is the cracked one he saw from outside, giving him a view of the front street.

  The paint on the walls is bubbled and peeling in places and the front corner near the floor where two outside walls meet is blackened with mould. If there ever was a carpet, it had been ripped out years ago without bothering to refinish the ruined hardwood floor beneath. The floor is worn and stained, missing most of the wax that would have protected it.

  The furnishings consist of a small scratched and dented dresser missing half its handles, a single battered looking wooden kitchen chair, and a rollaway cot with a mattress that would be better off burned. There is no pillow or bedding.

  That’s all the furniture that can fit in the tiny room.

  The room is filthy and he is pretty sure those are rodent droppings on the floor.

  This is home for now and exactly what he expected of a rooming house where people living well below the level of poverty can live for a day or a lifetime in a single rented room.

  The keys were left on top of the scarred dresser, two keys, one for the room and one for the main door.

  “It will do,” Jason says. He snatches up the keys, plops his bag on top of the dresser, and locks the door on his way out.

  “The first thing I need to do is buy some bedding and cleaning products and make this room liveable.”

  Jim’s phone rings and he answers it.

  “McNelly.”

  “He’s all settled in,” the voice on the line says.

  “Good,” Jim grunts. “I’ll give him a few days to get comfortable.”

  He hangs up the phone.

  “A few days to get comfortable, and then I’ll be watching Jason T. McAllister very closely.”

  10Investigating the Investigator

  Jim parks his ancient brown Oldsmobile in the only spot available on the street, the engine ticking away almost as soon as he turns it off as it begins cooling.

  The temperature gauge on the dash is running high.

  It matches his mood.

  The door squeals when he thrusts it open and the shocks groan with the shifting of his weight as he pulls his obese frame out. He takes a slender well-used leather case with him.

  He doesn’t bother locking the door when he closes it behind him. He never does. There is nothing worth stealing. The radio is about as valuable as an eight-track and the glove box holds a handful of parking and driving infraction tickets. A few are his, and a few are tickets he wrote against offending drivers and stuffed in his glove box instead of handing over when the driver reacted by rudely yelling their indignation.

  He would nod his head at them, tell them he’s letting them off this time with a warning, and stuff the ticket in his glove box. Let them pay the bigger fine, he would muse.

  He does let the odd one off with just a w
arning, the ones who make a good show of being apologetic or seem genuinely remorseful.

  Jim walks around the car to the sidewalk. His breath whistles in and out unhealthily as he walks the distance to the corner, turns, and heads up the next street. Halfway up the block is his destination, the precinct Michael Underwood transferred from.

  He enters through the front doors and pauses to take in the room and get his bearings. He heads for the reception desk.

  The young officer looks up. Everything about him screams green recruit. He is probably one of the unlucky ones, the most recent class graduates who were sentenced to spend a year on desk duty before being put on the streets.

  Jim is huffing from the walk as he approaches the desk. “Detective McNelly,” he announces, “I want to talk to the man who does the transfers.”

  “That would be Sergeant Reagers.”

  “Is he in?”

  “He is.” The young officer picks up the phone and calls the officer in question, talking quietly into the phone for a few moments. He hangs up and addresses Jim.

  “He’ll be with you right away.”

  Jim grunts and turns away, dismissing the young man’s presence. He studies the entrance, assessing how easily someone who does not belong might be able to get in and access areas that are not open to the public.

  “Detective McNelly,” a balding man in his forties with a slight paunch announces as he enters from the back hallway, “I’m Sergeant Reagers. How can I help you?”

  “You transferred a man to my department a while back, Detective Michael Underwood,” Jim says.

  Sergeant Reagers rolls the name around in his head, finally answering. “The name doesn’t sound familiar. Why are you asking?”

  Jim glances at the officer at the desk and turns his attention back to Sergeant Reagers.

  “We need to talk in private.”

  Sergeant Reagers nods. “This way.” He leads the way back the way he came and to his office, closing the door behind them.

  “Sit,” he waves Jim to the two chairs before his desk and moves to sit behind the desk.