by J. D. Barker
How the fuck do they know about the baby?
From the minute Emma started to show, she didn’t set foot outside unless her belly was completely covered. Those last few months, she didn’t go out at all. How the fuck…
I think I killed two of them, maybe the third, too, I’m not sure. It all happened so fast. We got away and headed west. Stole a new car in Kentucky. Got another car in Illinois. Set the first one on fire at the back of a junk yard. Lost them, I thought. Almost a year in California without a sign of them. Then yesterday—
The baby doesn’t go outside.
We can’t let her.
You understand why, right?
Not much of a baby now. Walking! Crazy, right? You get it. You’ve got a boy.
She wants to go out, but we can’t let her. Our neighbors don’t know we even have a kid. Figured it’s safer that way. Can’t take chances.
Yesterday a truck parked in the driveway of the vacant house across the street. A white truck. Black tinted windows. Thought I was being paranoid again. People drive white trucks, right?
Vacant house no more.
Four of them.
Living right across the street.
I caught them taking shifts at an upstairs window, watching us.
Emma and I have been taking shifts, too, watching them watch us. We’re working on a plan to get out, to get away.
We’re coming back.
I don’t know what else to do.
We need to regroup. Figure out a way to deal with this together. We need numbers. I thought we could hide but that was stupid, they’re everywhere. I was wrong. Being alone like this just makes it easier for them.
I’ll get in touch when we’re close.
My best to Katy and your boy.
Stay safe—
Richard Nettleton
“Who’s Richard Nettleton?” Gerdy asked, her chin resting on my shoulder, her breath at my ear. “And Emma? Friends of your parents?”
“I don’t…” the words trailed off my tongue. I read the letter again.
Gerdy picked up the envelope and studied the stamp. “The postmark says Newport Beach, California. July 16, 1978. Addressed to Josephine Gargery instead of your dad. I guess they mailed the letter here and she gave it to him? Weird.”
She dropped the envelope down on the coffee table and began kissing my neck. “Does it mean something to you?”
“No,” I lied.
“You don’t recognize the names?”
“No,” I lied again.
Gerdy nibbled at my ear. “Your new guardian did seem slightly crazy. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything at all. Maybe it’s some kind of joke. Nobody’s going to confess to murdering two people in a letter. That’s just dumb.”
My mind was racing.
Had Stella ever told me her parents’ names?
I don’t think so.
Nettleton.
Richard Nettleton.
The baby. Walking now. 1978.
Stella would have been two.
My best to Katy and your boy.
Your boy.
Me.
Stella only told me how her parents died.
Gerdy, kissing my neck again, slid her hand down the front of my jeans. “I know you don’t want to tell anyone about the insurance money, but I think we should celebrate. You, Mr. Thatch, are a very wealthy man.”
My eyes were still fixed on the letter. The handwriting. The words.
White truck.
White coats, everywhere.
“I thought you had to work today,” I managed to say.
“Not until two.”
“It’s twelve after.”
“What?” Her hand left my jeans. “Shit, I gotta change.” Gerdy darted off to the bedroom.
“I’ll call Krendal and let him know you’re running late.”
“Thanks!” Her dress flew out the bedroom door and landed on the floor beside me. “I owe you something special later!”
I forced a grin and picked up the phone. Krendal answered on the third ring. I told him Gerdy would be there in ten minutes, maybe less.
“You should come, too,” Krendal replied. He usually shouted on the phone on account of his hearing, but his voice was low this time.
“Why? Busy?”
Krendal said nothing for a second, his breathing heavy. “Your friend Dunk is here. He’s got a friend with him.”
“Dunk always has a friend with him these days,” I replied.
“Not a lady friend. Somebody else. I don’t like it. I don’t want those people in my restaurant.”
Shit.
“Okay, I’ll be right there. I’ll take care of it.”
Gerdy came out of the bedroom, wearing her uniform, both hands working at her hair, attempting to tie it up in a bun. She crossed the room to me and planted a kiss on my lips. “I want you to know, I’m not wearing panties. I don’t plan to put on another pair of panties until after you find it appropriate to take advantage of my oversight. We’ve had too much sadness over the past few months. Your aunt did something wonderful for you, something life-changing, and I fully expect you to celebrate with me in all kinds of demeaning and adventurous ways. Drink lots of fluids while I’m gone. I’m off at ten. Maybe you should consider some stretching exercises an hour or so before that. I’d hate to see you pull something.”
“And if I don’t comply, Ms. McCowen?”
She grinned up at me. “Like I said, I will continue to go pantie free until you do. Perhaps I will attract another suitor at work, someone with waitress fantasies.”
“Could get drafty, cold even. Winter will be here before you know it. That skirt isn’t very long.”
“If I catch my death of cold, Mr. Thatch, it would surely be your fault.”
“Krendal said Dunk is there. I’ll walk you.”
“I’d never turn down an escort from a handsome gentleman such as yourself.”
I crammed the letter and envelope in my pocket. I needed to show Dunk.
A stack of posters with Stella’s face watched us leave from the seat of a chair near the kitchen.
Have you seen me?
Passing Ms. Leech’s door, I felt like we were being watched. Like she had her eye pressed to the tiny viewfinder, monitoring our every move.
As we left my building, I knew we were being watched. I never noticed the various vans parked on our street, until the other night when Dunk pointed them out, and then they stuck out in such a blatantly obvious way I found it hard to believe I missed them. I told myself they weren’t white SUVs, and my mind had been preoccupied for some time.
Today, we had Cloister Plumbing and Supplies.
This was the second time I saw that particular van, deep red with the company logo painted brightly on the sides and back. A man in a rumpled white shirt and tie stood behind the van, smoking a cigarette. Plumbers typically didn’t wear ties, nor did they carry concealed weapons tucked in leather holsters at the small of their back, yet there was the telltale bulge of a handgun.
As Gerdy and I passed the van, the man stubbed out his cigarette, his gaze fixed on me for a second before shifting to some unknown object off in the distance.
I almost nodded a hello to him as I would any other familiar face on the sidewalk, but I caught myself and continued to face forward, wondering if anyone else noticed this same man worked for not only Cloister Plumbing and Supplies, but also an electrician and a carpet company. Busy times, I supposed.
Up the block, about three hundred feet in front of us, a blue BMW sedan pulled into the handicap parallel parking space in front of Krendal’s. Four men dressed in dark suits got out with large automatic weapons in hand and immediately began firing toward the diner.
The sound was deafening.
The diner’s plateglass window exploded in a rain of tiny shards, and the four men continued to fire—their legs spread in a practiced stance, steady and sure. Two of them wore tiny earplugs, the other two did not. The muzzles of all four weapons moved
steadily back and forth in a sweeping motion, reminding me of sprinkler heads.
I counted no less than a dozen people on the sidewalk all standing perfectly still, frozen, as if watching a film or a television program as the bullets flew.
I pushed Gerdy down to the pavement, into the narrow space between a Volvo and a Toyota Sentra parked at the curb, and I fell on top of her, sandwiching her body between mine and the blacktop. I wasn’t sure when she had started screaming, but she was screaming now, screaming and kicking at me, but I wouldn’t let her go. I forced her head down, my face lost in her hair.
The shooting seemed to last for hours, although I would later learn all four gunmen used 9mm UZIs, Vector Arms HR4332 SBRs set to full auto—at 650 rounds per second, each of the 32 round extended clips were exhausted in under a second. Each gun had extra clips and reloaded an estimated three times.
The actual shooting time, as recorded by the police van a little more than a block away, was thirty-eight seconds.
When the shooting ended, my ears continued to ring, all other sounds nearly lost, muffled as if there were a thick wet blanket wrapped around my head.
I heard the last of the four car doors slam, followed by squealing tires.
“Stay down!” I shouted in Gerdy’s ear before climbing to my feet and running toward the diner. The blue BMW turned right on Clairton and disappeared.
I closed half the distance before the explosion.
The force of the blast knocked me back to the sidewalk, the sound of it breaking through the ringing of the gunshots. My head cracked against the pavement, and the breath left my lungs with the force of a linebacker shouldering my gut.
A fireball shot through the space where the diner’s plateglass window had been less than two minutes earlier and crossed half of Brownsville Road before disappearing back inside, the lick of some hideous, flaming tongue returning to its mouth.
I scrambled to my feet—part stagger, part run—reached Krendal’s, and climbed through the window frame into the diner, faint moans and screams coming from all around.
Smoke, thick and black, surrounded me, bellowing from somewhere in back. I tripped on an overturned table and nearly fell again when my foot landed between the legs of a chair. I pulled free, and that was when I spotted the first body.
A woman. I could tell only by the fact that she wore a green dress, her hair and face nothing but a charred block of flesh.
I pulled the neck of my Steelers sweatshirt up over my mouth in an attempt to block the smoke, but it did little good. The hot, acrid soupy air burned my lungs, my eyes. I peered into the blackness and saw nothing.
I nearly slipped in the coffee.
The cracked pot was at my feet, black liquid pooling out.
Lurline Waldrip lay beside the mess on the floor.
I dropped to my knees and gently turned her over, rolling her onto her back.
No less than six red spots bloomed on the chest of her pink uniform. Deep red at the center, where the bullets had gone in, less so directly surrounding each spot. One of the spots was between her breasts, at her heart. I knew she wasn’t breathing, I knew that bullet had killed her, but I pressed two fingers against her neck anyway and felt for a pulse, finding nothing.
I heard Dunk then.
I’m not sure how I knew it was him, but somehow I did, a muffled cry a few feet to my left. I didn’t want to leave Lurline like that, lying on the floor in so much filth, but I also knew I had little choice. Breathing was growing harder by the second. I wouldn’t be able to stay inside much longer.
I stood and shuffled through the upended furniture and other obstacles I didn’t want to identify toward the booths that lined the far wall, toward the one closest to the door, Dunk’s favorite.
I found Dunk lying sideways on the booth seat, the lower half of his body crammed under the table, his face and legs covered in blood. Henry Crocket sat across from him, his back to the door, his face pressed against the table, eyes wide and unblinking, fixed on a half-full cup of coffee. A plate of toast and butter was at the center between them both.
The back of Crocket’s head was missing.
A ragged tear started just past the center at the top of his head and ended at the base of his neck, as if a giant had reached down and twisted it off with a large thumb and forefinger. His back was riddled with bullet holes. The booth seat between him and the front of the diner was shredded, a mess of red pleather, stuffing, and plywood, chipped away and splintered.
Dunk groaned again.
I reached down into the booth and wrapped my arms around his waist, pulling his bulky body toward me until we both fell back onto the tile floor at the aisle. He fought me at first, his body going rigid, followed by a scream as the pain of movement washed over him. Then he went limp and silent.
I scurried to my feet again, and my vision went momentarily white. My legs disappeared from beneath me, and I collapsed. I wasn’t getting enough air, and I was going to pass out. If I passed out in here, I wouldn’t be leaving.
I forced myself to stand. Wobbly legs be damned.
I grabbed Dunk under the arms and pulled him toward the front of the diner, toward the missing window, while trying to ignore the slick, red stain his body left on the floor behind us.
What came next is a bit of a blur. I think I nearly passed out again. I remember falling or the feeling of falling. I can’t be sure. Then I remember other arms around me. Hands groping, fingers grabbing at whatever they could. I remember being pulled out of the diner, over the concrete sidewalk, and out onto Brownsville Road.
“Breathe, kid, breathe,” someone said. “We called 911. Just lie still.”
I saw a face hovering over me. A middle-aged man in glasses and a plaid shirt.
My head rolled to the side, and I saw Dunk lying there, unmoving.
I took a deep breath.
Although the smoke was thick here, too, clean air was thicker and my lungs welcomed it. Strength began to seep back into my arms and legs, the fog over my thoughts began to lift.
That’s when I remembered Krendal.
I remembered Elden Krendal and knew he was still inside.
The middle-aged man in the plaid shirt tried to stop me. So did others. He grabbed at my shoulder and tried to press me back down to the pavement when I forced my body to stand. At that point, others in the growing crowd grabbed at me, too—apparently what I planned to do was evident in my eyes.
I stood anyway and drew in a deep breath.
I shook off the man in the plaid shirt, I pulled out of the grip of the others, and I ran back toward the diner with the sound of sirens wailing somewhere behind me.
Without the large plateglass window at the front of the diner, the growing fire had no trouble finding food, and when I passed through the window frame for the second time, I could feel the air rushing in rather than pushing out, sucked in by the hungry beast devouring the restaurant from the inside out.
I clambered past the ruined tables, chairs and booths, past the counter, toward the swinging door on the side leading toward the kitchen, the heat unbearable and intensifying with each step. My eyes caught a glimpse of the space through the opening where Krendal normally passed food, but I could make nothing out through the wall of black smoke.
Flames licked up the walls near the swinging door, and when I touched the metal, the heat burned my fingertips.
I knew the explosion had been one or more of the propane tanks Krendal stored in the back for the stove on the off chance city gas stopped working. The gas had shut down twice since Krendal owned the diner, and each time it had happened during the lunch rush. He kept three canisters of propane at the ready in case it happened again. He even taught me how to switch the hose on the stove from one to the other and back again, something he claimed with pride he could do in under ten seconds.
I lowered my head and pushed through the lopsided swinging door, hanging by only the top hinge.
Flames leapt up to greet me, followed by bello
wing black smoke. I forced my legs to pump and pushed into the kitchen, jumping toward the tile floor on the right of the opening as the intense heat raced past me toward the fresh air outside.
With my face as close to the ground as possible, I wiped the tears from my eyes, the heat stinging.
The landscape was foreign to me.
The twisted remains of one of the propane canisters had crashed into the aluminum table that normally occupied the center of the kitchen. The table was now on its side, and the dozens of pots and pans and cooking utensils that normally filled shelves on top of the table were strewn around my limited field of vision. The floor was slick with the remains of today’s soup, the hot liquid soaking through the knees of my jeans.
I coughed. The involuntary action filled my lungs with smoke, tainted air.
I shouted out Krendal’s name, but the words came out as a garbled whisper.
Then I crawled in the general direction of the stove, my eyes pinched shut, my hands feeling the way, pushing through the mess on the floor. When I encountered the overturned table, I felt my way around it, the hot aluminum burning my fingertips.
I have no idea how I found him.
The kitchen wasn’t large, maybe four hundred square feet at most, but it might as well have been a desert and I the blind man trudging through the sand. I pushed forward on my belly over the slick tile, my hands flailing out in front of me, fingers outstretched. I heard part of the ceiling collapse somewhere to my right—the fire roared with newfound laughter at this, but I heard nothing of Krendal. And I was certain that if I found him at all, it would be by sound and sound alone, because within seconds of entering the kitchen, I couldn’t see anything.
My fingers brushed his leg.
At first I wasn’t sure it was a leg and I nearly went on, my thoughts muddled with lack of oxygen. As I grabbed at the material of his pants, his weak fingers wrapped around my wrist. I grabbed his arm and he took mine, and I knew neither of us would let go.
I immediately started crawling backward. With one free hand and two weak legs, I began to shuffle, pulling him along with jerks and tugs. We were halfway through the crooked kitchen door when another section of the ceiling collapsed, raining down on us. Krendal’s body jumped, and I knew something had landed on him or hit him, but I couldn’t see what. I didn’t stop moving. I pulled him through the door.