by David Beers
She took a deep breath and reached into her side pocket for her pack of cigarettes. She pulled one out, lit it, and inhaled deeply—filling her lungs up with smoke. The burn felt good.
Eve wasn’t here yet and Kaitlin wanted to finish her cigarette before calling to see where she was. She puffed, looking out at the parking lot.
The picture looked good; Kaitlin was actually shocked at how good. She always saw sketches on television shows, how detailed and accurate they came out, but she hadn’t expected real life to look like that. Truthfully, she had never seen anyone with such skill draw before. The man that ended up on the white paper, though, was the man she saw in the coffee shop. Wearing a suit. Handsome. Not quite middle aged but getting there.
She wondered if it would help at all? Or had she just put the cops on to some innocent person? Part of her wanted to say, hey, if he’s innocent, they’ll figure that out pretty quickly, but another, larger, part didn’t trust anything about cops.
Kaitlin walked down the steps and flicked the cigarette to her right as she did. Pulling her phone out, she found Eve’s number and dialed.
“Hey, you done?” Eve said.
“Yeah, I’m outside.”
“Okay, I’m about five minutes away.”
“Okay, thanks. I’ll be here,” Kaitlin said.
“Bye.”
Kaitlin put the phone back in her pocket and walked to the right of the entrance way, leaning against the wall.
She was just glad to be done with it all.
“Still think we don’t have to kill her?” Harry said.
John was grinding his teeth, though he didn’t know it.
“She’s standing right there in front of the police station. Think she was reporting another crime?” Harry said.
John didn’t answer nor look away from the thin girl leaning against the police station’s wall. He had left work an hour ago and went to the Starbucks, wanting to see her again. She wasn’t working and John did something that might have been dumb, but he just had to risk it.
“I was talking to a girl the other day, she serves me almost every time, but I forgot her name. She’s skinny, short hair, has a purple tattoo on her arm,” he said, pointing at his own arm.
“Kaitlin,” the barista said as he typed his order in. “Yeah, she’ll be in later but she’s still dealing with the cops, I think. That murder in Tribec, the guy was a regular here and she might have seen someone.”
John wasn’t sure the guy even realized he was speaking; he didn’t look up, just kept tapping on the screen with his finger. A stroke of luck.
John got the Americano and left, heading directly to Tremock’s police station.
“She might not even be there,” he had told Harry.
“Doesn’t matter. I want to see if she is.”
So they went and waited; an hour and a half passed, and John was just about ready to leave.
Then the girl stepped out of the building and lit a cigarette.
“Look, she might have told them what you look like, but if she can’t testify, it’s not going to hold too much weight. A sketch is a lot different than someone saying, I saw that man, the one sitting right there, Judge, and he was the last person to see Paul Stinson alive. The only way to make sure that doesn’t happen is to kill her,” Harry said.
John shook his head slowly, exasperated. “If they have the sketch, I’m done.”
“No. You’re not. If they have the sketch, you tell them you saw him there accidentally and had some coffee.”
“But I forgot to mention it when they called me? How’s that going to look?” John said.
“None of this is going to look good. Looking good is out of the question. We’re trying to live.”
Harry rolled his window down and lit a cigarette. He handed John one without asking. He took and lit it, rolling his own window down.
“How do we do it?” John said.
“It’s got to be an accident. She can’t look like the others, no guns, no mess. She walks out in front of a bus or falls down a flight of stairs,” Harry said, looking straight forward, the ash on his cigarette growing long.
“When?”
Harry shook his head. “Two or three days. Any longer and the cops are going to be watching you if they have your sketch.”
“And then what?” John said.
“After she’s dead? We wait.”
“Hey, he says he’s done.”
Alan looked down at Susan, standing over her desk.
“Completely?” she said.
“Yeah, want to go look?”
Susan smiled. “I’m surprised you even came over here to ask. I mean, that must have caused you to wait an extra thirty seconds or so.”
Alan knew what she was getting at, but didn’t have the time to deal with it. Thomas said he was done and, though Susan joked, it did take an effort to come over here and get her.
“You coming or not?” he said.
“Aw, don’t get upset, pookie,” she said. “I’m only kidding.” Susan stood up from her desk and Alan started walking.
He brought the girl in a little earlier, questioned her again, and then handed her off to Thomas. It took him about three hours to get the whole thing done; Alan had stared at Thomas’ office like a hyena waiting for a pride of lions to let loose a carcass. The lion finally came out and saw Alan sitting on the bench in front of his office, laptop open.
“Well, I’m done,” Thomas had said.
“Just give me a second,” Alan responded, closed his laptop, and went to get Susan.
“You haven’t looked yet?” she said now, as they walked down the hallway to Thomas.
“No, got you first.”
“You’re such a gentleman,” she said with a smile.
Alan ignored the rib and rounded the corner of Thomas’ office.
“Whatcha got?” he said.
Thomas reached for his sketchbook, a nice thing with thick pieces of paper inside. “Here,” he said.
Alan looked at the piece of paper, the lifelike drawing truly inspiring in its genius, but he had no idea who he was looking at. A man, probably in his thirties, with dark hair parted to the right.
“Fuck,” Susan said. “God-fucking-damn-it.”
“What?” Alan said, not turning around.
“That’s one of the fuckers from the SA meeting.”
Author’s Note
I’ve seen addiction through just about every possible lens. Enabler. Victim. Bystander. Addict. I’ve been to Anon meetings and worked the steps.
For the non-addict, addiction is incomprehensible. I’ve had therapists—those trained in combatting addiction—ask me why I do the things I do? I just had to laugh and shake my head.
Because I’m an addict, man.
I wrote Red Rain because I wanted to show what the addict’s head feels like. I wanted to show those around the addict and the horror addiction foists on them. I really wanted to show how we hurt those they love—and hate ourselves for it.
Harry is real. I need you to understand that, if nothing else. If you know any addicts who’ve spent time in Anon, we speak about our ‘addict’ as if it’s a separate person.
Which, in some ways, it is. It’s not who we really are. Who we want to be.
If Harry scares you, he should. He scares me. He’s a dangerous, dangerous guy.
See you in Book Two.
All the best,
David
6/22/16
Red Rain
Part I
Part II
1
Present Day
The drawing was impressive.
Detective Alan Tremock looked at it, wondering if he had any single talent like this sketch artist. Thomas had done this his whole life, though Alan imagined he could have done something else, something a lot more lucrative than working for the Dallas Police Department.
That’s not important right now, he thought and pushed the extraneous ideas from his mind. What mattered was who he sa
w on the thick sheet of paper in front of him.
“You’re sure?” he said to Susan.
“Yeah, that’s him. I think his name is John Hilt.”
Alan felt excitement rising in him, like a fissure in the ocean floor breaking through the crust, sending boiling liquid into the cold depths around it. He wanted to control the excitement because this picture didn’t necessarily mean anything. Indeed, there could be an infinite number of reasons why John Fucking Hilt didn’t tell Susan about his coffee date with the dead man, and more likely, an infinite number of excuses as to why he wasn’t the murderer.
“I didn’t think he was necessarily keeping anything from me, but I did have to press him on something he didn’t include in the interview,” she said.
“Something other than this?”
Susan looked at him. “Of course—you think I forgot that someone went to lunch with Stinson hours before he died?”
Alan smiled. “Sorry.” He turned to Thomas. “Thanks. Really great work.”
“You need anything else from me?” the sketch artist said.
“No, I think we should be good. The girl, Kaitlin, how did you feel about her?”
“She was nervous,” Thomas said. “But most people are when they come in here.”
No doubt about it, the girl didn’t like being in the police station one bit; John noticed the same thing during his brief interview.
“Can you email me a copy of this?”
“Already did,” Thomas said.
“Okay, we’ll get out of your hair,” Susan said and left the office. “Good news, huh?” she said once Alan caught up to her in the hallway.
“It could be. What do you think?”
“I think he kept something from us, which doesn’t look good for him.”
“But you talked with those guys,” Alan said. “Don’t they meet a lot like this? My uncle was in AA and he was always meeting with someone.”
“They do, but this guy told me he didn’t meet with people a lot because he didn’t need to, which kind of goes against what the drawing tells us.”
“Goddamn,” Alan said, unable to contain his happiness anymore. “We got him.”
“Whoa, cowboy. We don’t have anything yet except a reason to interview him again. That’s it. Him lying to us doesn’t mean he murdered anyone.”
“I’m going to interview him this time,” he said as they rounded the corner to the detectives’s floor.
“Yeah?”
“Do you mind?”
“I might a bit if what you just said is going to color the interview. He’s not guilty yet, Alan. Not by a long shot.”
“I won’t fuck this up. I want to squeeze him some, though, to see if he feels the pressure at all.”
“Just don’t put blinders on,” Susan said. She stopped and grabbed his elbow, making him turn to her. “Putting someone innocent in jail isn’t going to bring Teresa back. It won’t give her any justice either. Now this guy could be involved, but most likely, he’s not.”
Alan looked at her but didn’t say anything immediately. He saw the concern in her eyes and knew where its root lay. Cops went down when they followed only one path—good cops, too. People that you ate dinner and went to baseball games with. All because they got it in their head that they were chasing the bad guy.
“Okay,” Alan said. “Maybe he’s not our guy. We still have to follow the lead.”
Susan looked for a few seconds longer before saying, “Okay.”
A Portrait of a Young Man
Years Earlier
Dr. Vondi watched the boy walk into his office.
One always forms a mental picture when speaking about someone not yet seen, but the boy Dr. Vondi saw now didn’t fit the image in his head. He imagined a taller person, someone athletic looking, strong even—for thirteen, at least.
The kid crossing Dr. Vondi’s office didn’t look like any of those things. He didn’t wear glasses, but looked like they would fit his personality. He was thin, closer to a tennis player than a football jock. Dark hair like his mother.
“How are you?” Dr. Vondi asked.
“I’m okay,” John Hilt said.
“Go ahead and have a seat,” Dr. Vondi motioned to the couch. John sat and remained quiet. Vondi moved to his chair in the middle of the room. “Your mother told you she’s been coming to see me for a while?”
John nodded.
“What else did she tell you?”
The boy looked at him as if judging the truthfulness of Vondi’s words. His eyebrows didn’t scrunch or eyelids narrow, in fact, his face remained the same—yet, Vondi had a distinct feeling that something was happening inside the kid’s brain. Like, if he didn’t appreciate what came from Vondi, then he would shut the whole thing down.
A sense of control.
That’s what Vondi felt, that the kid was placing his will across this relationship.
That doesn’t make any sense, and you know it, he thought. Which was true, but that didn’t change his feeling at all.
“She told me that you were going to talk to me about how I feel,” the boy said, finally. And with that, Vondi knew John Hilt had passed some sort of judgment.
“She’s right. We’ll talk about feelings in here,” Vondi said, trying to escape the claustrophobic pressure inside his head. “You know what a psychologist is?”
“My dad says you guys don’t farm out pills, but actually talk to people.”
Vondi laughed. “There’s some truth to that, I think. We do talk a lot, perhaps that’s ninety percent of my job. Or rather, listening is what a psychologist really does. I asked your mom to have you come see me, actually.”
“Because of Harry?” John said.
Vondi nodded. “Partly, yes. What you saw was a pretty traumatic experience.”
“I’m seeing someone at school, too.”
“How is that going?” Vondi said.
John shrugged his shoulders.
Dr. Vondi nodded back, his mind quickly deciding which path he wanted to take. The boy wasn’t exactly uncomfortable here; in fact, he seemed at ease, yet something about him gave the impression that he didn’t want to be here.
“Has your mom said anything about what happened to Harry?”
“She hasn’t said a lot. She’s upset, though. Everyone is.”
“What do you think about it?”
The boy cocked his head to the side. “What do I think?”
“Yes. About what you saw. About everything that’s happened after. Just anything.”
The boy didn’t move his head, but kept that peculiar look. “What would you think if your best friend died?”
“Mine died a few years ago, actually,” Dr. Vondi said. “I thought a lot of things, but I mainly thought how much I would miss him.”
Neither spoke for a few seconds.
“I miss him,” John said. Vondi saw tears in the boy’s eyes, though none fell. He looked away from the doctor. “He was my best friend. Maybe my only friend.”
“Your mom misses him, too,” Vondi said.
The boy flicked his gaze to Vondi. “Is that what she tells you?”
“I can’t talk about what we discuss in here, not to your mom or anyone else. That also means I can’t talk to you about the things she and I speak about, but I think it’s obvious to anyone in this situation how much we miss those we love.”
“She probably does miss him,” John said. “I don’t think that’s why she’s concerned, though. I don’t think that’s why I’m here. Not to make sure I don’t miss him too much. I think I’m here because she thinks I killed him.”
3
Present Day
Alan rode the elevator up, looking at his shoes.
He was making a ballsy move, one that could backfire badly and waste a lot of time. But if it worked? Well, that’s why he was taking the risk, the payoff would be huge.
Detectives scheduled interviews as much as possible. This did a few things—it increased the odds the suspect w
ould attend, the suspect had adequate time to have a lawyer present, and it kept everything on the up and up. The one con was obvious: up and up gave the suspects time to develop a story, or jump ship if they didn’t have a story that worked.
Alan didn’t want this guy—John Hilt—developing any kind of story. He wanted to see Hilt’s reaction the moment he found out the police were looking at him with more interest than just a friendly interview. Alan thought he’d see something in that reaction, something that gave away more than anything Hilt might say if they called him down to the police station, a lawyer walking by his side.
The elevator stopped and Alan walked out. Office 1824. He hoped Hilt was in a meeting. He hoped people surrounded him and they all looked over at the exact same time when Alan walked in, just before turning back to look at Hilt—wondering what in the hell was going on.
Alan saw Hilt’s assistant, sitting in a smaller office to the right of 1824. Her door was open and she didn’t appear to be on the phone, so Alan leaned in.
“Hi,” he said. “I’m looking for John Hilt.”
“I’m sorry, he’s busy right now. May I ask who you are?”
“Sure,” Alan said, pulling his badge from his back right pocket. “I’m Detective Tremock and I’d really like to talk to Mr. Hilt as soon as possible.”
“Would you mind stepping outside? I’ll see if he can move his schedule around.”
“Sure,” Alan said, taking a few steps back and finding a chair in front of her office. Most times people were busy until they found out the cops wanted to see them, then they suddenly found the time. Alan sat for a few minutes, careful not to pull his phone out or do anything that might give the impression that his attention wasn’t fully here. He didn’t know what Hilt could see, whether cameras were looking at him, but his persona mattered.
Because the reaction that came in the next few minutes could say a lot.