Far From Ordinary

by M James Murray

  “You really have a shitty job, don’t you,” Browne said.

  “Let’s take a look.” Nieminen shoved Dick in front of her. “Follow the brown brick road.” They walked down to the cistern. Dick had never been in there without his breathing mask before. The smell hit him like a punch to the gut. Browne and Smith both started to gag.

  “Oh my God, I’ve never smelt something so bad in my life! I’m going to have to burn my clothes.” Nieminen covered her mouth with her blazer and was gagging.

  “By the way,” Dick said, “The smell can be a bit overwhelming.

  “Why didn’t you say anything sooner?” Browne asked, trying to suppress a gag.

  Dick shrugged.

  “Slipped my mind, I guess.”

  “Let’s get out of here.” Nieminen and Browne hurried out of the room.

  This is my chance to escape.

  Nieminen stuck her head back in the room and bellowed “Let’s go, cockbreath!” in a commanding tone.

  Dick reluctantly followed behind them, staying at a snail’s pace until Browne barked at him to keep up. He didn’t know what was at the end of the trail, but the possibilities worried him. Dick also knew that he wouldn’t be able to explain this one away, probably. Dick had been really quick on his feet today, granted, but he felt that even he wouldn’t be able to explain away a dead body.

  They followed the trail all the way to the broom closet, but not the one where Dick had hosed himself off earlier. Somehow the dead man must have dragged himself here.

  Browne’s hand lingered on the doorknob. He looked at Dick with an odd look on his face.

  “Do you know how much I like liars?” He asked slowly. Dick could feel his heartbeat intensify.

  “About as much as uninvited guests, I suppose,” Dick said.

  Why did I say that?

  Browne narrowed his eyes. Dick could see that he was grabbing the doorknob firmly in his hand. Did he imagine that the knob was Dick’s neck? He gulped, feeling the anxiety build in his soul.

  “Let’s see what’s inside, no?” Browne’s fingers tightened around the doorknob. He wasn’t breaking eye contact, as though he knew what was inside. Dick could feel the sweat trickling down his back. He ran his fingers through his straight, brown hair and waited.

  Browne tried to turn the handle. It didn’t budge.

  “Um, do you have the key?”

  “Oh yeah, absolutely. Here you go! No, not that one. The other one. The blue key. Yeah, that one.” Dick cursed himself again.

  Why did he do that! He could have said anything, could have made any excuse why he didn’t have the key, and it probably would have been entirely plausible.

  “Thank you.” He unlocked the door and passed the key back to Dick. “Now, where were we?” He opened the door. Dick covered his eyes.

  “Hrmph,” Nieminen scoffed. Dick risked a glimpse. Browne was looking around whereas Nieminen had crossed her toned arms with a bemused expression on her face. The broom closet was empty.

  “Well, that’s a development,” Dick said.

  Chapter Seven

  Sarah sighed and rubbed her eyes. By her count, she had been awake now for more than thirty hours, and it was starting to catch up with her.

  When she had been in her twenties that wouldn’t have been an issue at all. She could have just grabbed a cup of coffee and done a quick round of calisthenics and been good for another 12 hours at least.

  Now she felt like a semi-trailer carrying Nyquil had hit her. But her job was not yet done for the night.

  She and Connor Browne were sitting across from Richard Mitey, an odd-looking fellow, in a coffee shop illuminated with harsh fluorescent lights trying to sort out the events of the evening.

  She had wanted to bring him downtown to the CIA headquarters, but Browne hadn’t agreed.

  “Not worth it for all the paperwork that Mo would make us fill out. We both know that he’s not a suspect, he’s just dumb,” Browne had argued.

  Sarah wasn’t sure about the last part – Richard saw things differently, but she didn’t think he was stupid.

  “Tell me why there was a trail of sewage leading up to the broom closet,” Browne said.

  “Well, sometimes in my line of work things can get a little hairy.”

  “Shitty, you mean,” Sarah said. She was reasonably confident that the rancid mix of ammonia and nitrogen would stay on her clothes until she was forced to burn them.

  “Yeah, you could say that,” he had responded in his shrill, grating voice.

  There was something off about Richard Mitey. She wasn’t quite sure what that was yet. That he was lying was readily apparent, but why? The operatives had checked the entire plant top to bottom and had found absolutely no trace of Katzmann, alive or dead. It seemed that he had just vanished into thin air.

  Damn you, Rico, she thought, pinching the bridge of her nose between her thumb and her forefinger. If he hadn’t messed up the job at the dinner party in the first place, she wouldn’t be sitting across from this awkward looking man hearing stories about how sewage traveled through the plant.

  “Well I had to clear the blockage,” Richard explained. “So I had to stick my arm into the sewage and-“

  “Wait,” Sarah interrupted. “You actually stuck your hand in that shit?” That explained the smell which had lingered from the plant.

  “Yeah, it’s my job. Josh would get mad if the pipes got blocked. Not to mention all those people who would be out of work when the fixing happens.”

  Sarah detected a very light Southern Texas accent in his voice. He was from the city then, she deduced. Or he had spent a lot of time around people who didn’t talk with that familiar Southern twang.

  She had grown up in Michigan’s upper peninsula, so she knew a thing or two about losing accents.

  “What was the blockage?” Browne asked, disturbing her thoughts.

  “I don’t know,” Richard stammered turning slightly pale. “It’s, um, not usually recognizable.”

  Sarah exchanged glances with her partner. They both knew a lie when they saw one.

  “We’ll stop by later on today and pick up the security camera footage as well, of course,” Browne said in his paternal, no-nonsense voice.

  “Right! No problem,” Richard chirped. “You’ll have to ask for the weekend manager since Josh will be off tomorrow.”

  “Thanks,” Sarah responded.

  No lie there. So either Dick was just an incredibly odd fellow, or the cameras which they had observed inside the building were no longer functional.

  “That must have been a huge blockage,” Browne persisted. He had seen a weak point. He would zero in on it, asking the same question ten or more different ways until he was satisfied with the innocence or guilt of the person he was interrogating.

  “It’s got to be to shut down the pump like that. See, I was reading…”

  “A comic book. You fucking told us,” Sarah said. Was the lack of sleep getting to her head that much? She, like every CIA operative, was trained in interrogation techniques as well as in how to read people.

  It was apparent to her that the way to get Richard to talk was through pleasant conversation. Make him believe that they were friends, that she had his best interest in mind.

  Then why did I snap?

  This wasn’t an actual interrogation, though. Coffee shops at 7:30 in the morning weren’t the best locations for them. No, interrogations were done in dark rooms where waterboarding made it feel as though the suspect was drowning.

  “Sorry,” Richard responded. Sarah felt like she had kicked a dog. But she was experienced. She knew that it wasn’t about his feelings, it was about getting answers. She locked up the emotional part of her mind and focused all her attention on Richard Mitey.

  “How often do you clear blockages like that?” Browne asked, continuing his interrogation.

  “I’ve never had to before,” he said, paling a bit in his face. “But I’ve always known that I might. It was in the
manual, after all.”

  Sarah glanced over at Browne once again. His face confirmed what she was thinking. They weren’t getting anywhere talking to Richard.

  “I seriously doubt that he had anything to do with the murder,” she whispered to Browne.

  “He knows something, I can feel it,” he responded.

  “Whatever that is, he’s not telling. We’re wasting precious time talking to him, too. For all we know Katzmann is still nearby.”

  Browne nodded in agreement. Sarah looked up. Richard was looking at them with a peculiar expression on his face, as though he wanted to chastise them for talking about him right in front of him.

  “So, here’s what we think. We don’t think that you're completely honest with us,” Sarah said. Richard gasped, opening his eyes in surprise. “I’ve got half a mind to take you down and hold you in a cell, but Browne here disagrees.”

  There was a palpable sigh of relief from Richard.

  We scare him, she realized. And why wouldn’t they? Browne was the size of a linebacker and hadn’t shaved for a few days. He looked hulking and intimidating, definitely not someone which you wanted to see in a back alley.

  Sarah smiled a bit at the thought of anyone finding her intimidating. She was a hundred and fourteen pounds soaking wet.

  “You’re too pretty to be intimidating,” she’d heard from different operatives over the years. What a backhanded compliment that was.

  “…Here’s what we’re going to do,” Nieminen continued. “We’re going to take your information while we investigate this. We’re also going to take a look at the surveillance tapes. We’d better not see anything different from what you said.”

  He nodded sagely and didn’t say a word.

  “We need you to stay in town. If you have any trips or anything like that you’ll need to cancel. Do you understand?”

  “I understand,” Richard said, his voice barely audible.

  “Wonderful.” Sarah smiled, “Now give Browne your driver’s license. No, that’s not it. Why do you still have a membership to Blockbuster? Yeah, that’s the one.”

  Dick handed the ID over to Browne. His hands were shaking. He had seemed healthy before.

  Nerves, she realized. Whatever Richard Mitey was hiding, it terrified him.

  “You know you can trust us, right?” Sarah said. She reached out and held his wet hand across the table. It was a textbook way to get people’s trust, by establishing a physical connection and smiling at them.

  It seemed to work exceptionally well when Sarah did it.

  “Yeah,” he said, swallowing. He didn’t believe her at all, she realized.

  Chapter Eight

  Dick Mitey’s mother had always been very proud of him. She had thought the world of her son and consistently had his best interests in mind. So how did he get a name like Dick Mitey?

  A few inopportune events had contributed to his unfortunate name, but to recognize how one could get such a name you need to understand his mother.

  She was born in the deep south to a hard-off family who instilled a spirit of stubbornness in her. She had never gone back on a decision, regardless of the consequences.

  It started with a clumsy nurse who, thinking about her date later on that evening made a mistake in misreading Dick’s parent’s chosen name while she penned the birth certificate, changing “Nick” to “Dick” on an official, legally binding document.

  In her defense, parents seemed to be coming up with more and more ridiculous names every passing day, and that was hardly the worst name she’d seen.

  “That’s two Neveah’s today. And a Dick,” she remarked to her co-worker. Neveah – heaven spelled backward – had been an increasingly popular name among low-income families.

  The mistake that the nurse made might have just been a funny story to tell at cocktail parties if it hadn’t been for Dick’s father, who passed away when he was two years old. Like most good husbands he was in the delivery room as his son emerged into the world.

  Unfortunately, he had come right from an after-work meeting at the local watering hole and was more than a few drinks deep, causing him to mistake the umbilical cord for another, more sensitive, and much smaller part of the human anatomy.

  Upon receiving the birth certificate, Dick’s father thought that the name was very fitting and opted not to change a thing. He signed it and returned it immediately.

  As you can imagine, Dick’s name had given him considerable grief during his formative years.

  Although he insisted on being called Richard, every official class register showed his real name, announced it every morning during the roll call. The incessant teasing of his classmates caused him to change schools no less than five times from his early years until he graduated from high school.

  The pattern was always the same. Kids found out his actual name and teased him until he ran home from the school with tears streaming down his face.

  Over the years he learned to harden his heart from their mockery, most of the time at least. He was so desperate to fit in, to make friends, maybe even to kiss a girl that he would accept their mockery and laughter with a smile on his face.

  Once the schoolyard children figured out that their taunts wouldn’t have the effect which they’d hoped the situation typically escalated.

  When the schoolyard beatings started, Dick would be pulled from the school and enrolled in another. His mother – lord, bless her soul – would phone up the principal and berate them for hours around their inability to control their school before telling them that Dick would be transferring effective immediately to a Better school.

  Every school was always Better than the last one, but every school had the same issues.

  The frequent relocations had a few unintended side effects on Dick’s development. Firstly, he never developed any true friends over his twenty-seven years on the planet. Anytime he’d been close to making a friend he’d transferred away to a new school.

  Secondly, he was awkward around women. He saw some of his more attractive classmates speak to girls so effortlessly, but around the pretty ones he would get flustered and not think of anything even remotely interesting to say.

  Dick was thinking of this as he enjoyed his second cup of coffee of the day in his small bachelor pad apartment which he rented with the old creaking hardwood floors which stuck up in some corners. The wallpaper was floral print and ugly – Dick estimated that it had been papered onto the wall sometimes in the 70’s.

  A pile of mail rested on the table beside him, an eclectic combination of bills and junk mail which he hadn’t yet gotten around to opening.

  It was while he was drinking that second cup of coffee and tracing the patterns of watermarks on his table from cups of coffee past that he remembered the events of the night before.

  Dick sat up taller in his chair, as ice flowed through his veins, freezing his heart. That terrible sinking feeling which he had experienced so much over the past twelve hours had returned once again.

  He checked his watch. The time showed 12:00 flashing over and over again. It must have been affected by his excursion into the cistern to fish out the dead body.

  He then checked the clock above the stove, which said the much more reasonable time of 4:23 PM.

  Finally, he checked his cell phone. No messages. That was not entirely uncommon for Dick to see whenever he checked his phone, but then again, the night before had been nothing if not remarkable. Dick sensed that if someone working the day shift had found his big naked friend, there would have been more than a few messages.

  “He’s alive! He has to be.” Dick said to no one but himself. “I must have saved him!” That thought alone filled Dick with happiness. He had come to think of the big naked man as a friend already. I mean, how could you NOT be friends with someone who saves your life? That would be completely rude! That would be –

  A knock at the door sent Dick’ testicles right back up into his stomach. He remembered Nieminen and Browne, who had even
been so kind as to give him a ride home to make sure they’d gotten the right address, even though he had insisted on bussing.

  Could it be that they had found the body after all? But no, that wasn’t possible. On the night shift he was there alone, but for the daytime – even on the weekend – there were at least ten people there, if not closer to twenty.

  But Dick still hesitated as he walked up to the flimsy hollow wood door which separated his apartment from the rest of the building.