After The Flesh

by Colin Gallant

  Bullshit. Or at least in my experience. Freddy didn’t want to get caught. I was the only part of him ever saying he was wrong. Flesh was objectified and no one could tell him otherwise. But in order to not get caught, he needed the smoke and mirrors. Even as he changed and his obsession evolved, he could not alter his plan. He could not change his m.o. – at least not yet.

  The cop was going to be a hassle. Freddy knew he needed to kill at least twice, likely three times in order to secure the plan. But the damn cop was not going to make it easy. More and more often, Freddy stepped out his front door only to see the same unmarked, grey-blue Caprice sedan parked just down the street, the same bulky silhouette etched in shadow through the windshield.

  Freddy saw him everywhere. He had no idea where Sobeleski would show up next. He even saw him sitting outside Tina’s house the night of the first party and most of the parties after that – no matter when or where they were held. The cop even followed him out of the city when he went on an evening cruise or to visit his mother.

  That last, the tail to Prince William Falls, is what infuriated him the most. If he still had the Impala, Freddy knew he would be able to outrun the ghost car but in his little Blazer he knew better than to even try. He could go off road and that would lose Sobeleski, but those common-as-dirt Moto-Masters were not exactly designed for leaving the pavement. The last thing he wanted was the cop taunting him from high ground as he sat up to his running boards in mud or snow. He didn’t know if Sobeleski was actually aware that Freddy had spotted him. The cop was trying not to be spotted but Freddy was always on the lookout – even before Sobeleski came into the picture.

  At Thanksgiving, still not quite cold enough to kill, Freddy glanced in his rear-view mirror and easily spotted the big Chevy’s front-end half a mile back. Freddy wasn’t twenty minutes out of town yet. He knew the car would be in his mirror until he took the PWF turnoff three hours later.

  Freddy was ready for him this time. The night before, Freddy rigged up a small bladder of motor oil under the hood of his SUV. The jug was positioned over one of his exhaust manifolds and a cable was fed through the network of ducts and wires under the dashboard. The manifolds were made of cast iron. By now they would be hot enough to flash-fry an egg. When Freddy gave the cable a tug and the oil dumped, a fat cloud of blue-white smoke would billow up out of the engine bay. It would look like he had blown the motor but aside from stink and mess no damage would be done.

  He waited until the road dipped into a network of valleys connecting the Sheep and Highwood rivers. The cop would want to taunt him. Freddy was sure of that. They had that kind of relationship now. They were like old pals gone bad. It had been like that ever since the incident in the restaurant the previous May.

  Freddy needed to time it perfectly. The road dipped and the view out his rear-view mirror disappeared. He would have about eight or ten seconds. If he timed it badly the cop would taunt him all the more. If his timing was dead-on, Freddy would be grinning the rest of the day.

  He had the spot picked out. As soon as the Caprice’s roofline dropped out of sight, Freddy jumped on the brakes and flicked on the hazard lights. He slid to a stop on the shoulder and leapt out of the vehicle without looking back. Looking would cost him time and time was something he did not have.

  Freddy sprinted to the rear bumper, the ice-cream pail from the passenger seat held low and ready. The pail was full with blackened caltrops. He made each with two framing nails bent and tack-welded together. The heads were clipped off and all four points were sharpened and dusted with matt black paint. No matter how they landed one point would always be sticking up.

  Ten paces back from the bumper, Freddy pitched his bucket out across the paved shoulder. He was sprinting back before the first caltrop had landed. He tossed the pail into the passenger seat and leapt in behind the wheel. His left knee struck the edge of the door but he barely noticed. Later he would feel it. His ripped jeans would be crusted with dried blood and the leg stiff and nearly unusable for three days. But for now, he had more important things to worry about.

  Freddy reached for the cable even as he was shutting the door. Only then did he glance in the mirror. Two things happened a split-second apart. Freddy tugged the cord and oil hissed and fried on hot metal. A gout of thick, stinking smoke nearly erupted out from under the hood. That was followed in slow motion by the Caprice’s roofline rising out of the blacktop behind him, much closer now.

  He followed the cop’s approach in the mirror, his heart tripping in his chest. He was reminded of the anticipation he felt in the moments leading up to a kill. He waited as the cruiser took shape. It grew larger in his mirror as it drew closer.

  With a second tug of the cable, Freddy tipped the rest of the motor oil out onto the exhaust. Smoke plumed again. The cruiser drew nearer and Freddy was certain Sobeleski would keep on going. Maybe he thought Freddy hadn’t made him. Maybe he wanted to think it. Either way maybe pointing and laughing was not worth exposing himself. Freddy thought of the hours he had spent making those caltrops – the bending and welding, cutting, sharpening and spraying. He had even gone so far as rinse every last one with bleach to eliminate every trace of himself from them. The rage brimmed in his gut, rising in his throat like vomit. He was nearly sick with it. Up to the very instant the cruiser slid over onto the shoulder, its hazard lights blinking to life, Freddy was sure the whole plan would have been for nothing.

  The Caprice glided down the shoulder. Freddy followed it in his rear-view mirror. The rage was gone now as quickly as it came. He imagined the Sobeleski grinning behind the sun-struck windshield. Freddy was not grinning. For half a minute he didn’t even breathe.

  Fifty feet back, when the big car’s front end took a sudden nosedive into the pavement, Freddy let himself breathe again. An instant later the rear end followed, leveling the car out again. It was all Freddy could do to keep from jumping around in his seat.

  On four flats, the cruiser came to a halt. Freddy’s window was opened. He stuck an arm out and waved. Freddy punched the throttle and sped away. He never saw Sobeleski’s face but he could imagine what it looked like. He drove straight through to Prince William Falls. He wasn’t grinning but he felt like he could. He would if he could only shake the sense that the ante had just been raised.

  -

  Spiking his tires was like grabbing a rattlesnake – you were fine until you did it and once you got it in your grasp you don’t quite know how to let go again. Freddy wasn’t stupid. He knew he couldn’t just fuck with that cop and get away with it. But Freddy did know he could fuck with him just a little bit. Seeing the cop in his rear-view mirror south of town did give him a certain amount of confidence in just how far he could push it.

  Any judge would consider what Sobeleski was doing to be harassment. He was sure of it. Freddy was keeping records. He had more than a hundred photos of the cop sitting down the street, outside the coffee shop and nearly a dozen other locations Freddy frequented. He had several shaky video clips of the cop prowling his property and one of him actually picking the lock on the garage door and letting himself in.

  Freddy thought he was safe. There was a line he knew the cop wouldn’t cross. He just didn’t know what Sobeleski would be capable of doing from there. He decided to study the cop. Freddy would turn the tables on him. He would become the tail.

  Daniel Jacob Sobeleski was his full name. Freddy figured that out easily enough. He learned where Sobeleski lived just as easily. He discovered he was right about the divorce thing and he was right about the drinking thing.

  He lived alone on the fourth floor of a singles-styled apartment complex designed for divorcees and middle-aged cranks finally evicted from their parents’ basements. He bought the booze nearly by the case. It wasn’t Jameson as he suspected but Scotch – Ballantine’s to be exact. As payday approached the Ballantine’s reverted to Canadian Club or Seagram’s or whatever rye was cheapest.

  Sobeleski had been tight and trim when they first m
et but he was beginning to grow soft in the middle and his ruddy cheeks were definitely looking jowly. He was aging before his time. Whatever his obsession with Freddy was it would cost him his job and his health before long. Freddy needed him to go away. To do that he would need to kill. He needed to kill right under the cop’s nose. Sobeleski unwittingly handed him the opportunity.

  Instead of a silver platter it was a silver Crown Victoria. The blue-gray Caprice disappeared. Two days later Freddy noticed the Vic parked three houses down across the street. A new car but no new tactics. Freddy grinned inwardly. He pretended not to notice the shiny new sedan as it pulled out to follow him.

  For five days Freddy went about his business. He went to classes and to the library. He was already doing preliminary research for his master’s thesis and that took him all over town. His topic was The Emergence of Deviant Cultures in Western Society. He did much of his research at malls and night clubs. Mostly he just watched. He did take notes. Sobeleski saw him taking notes.

  To any cop this behavior might appear suspect. To this cop, Freddy might have looked like he was hunting for his next victim. Freddy wanted him to think that. But the truth was he had already found his next victim. He was just going out of his way to avoid her.

  Freddy borrowed Tina’s car. He told her his was on jacks in the garage at home and he needed to run some errands. Tina rarely drove. She used the car to visit family and that was about it. She said he could keep it as long as he wanted. He drove his Blazer because he didn’t want the cop to wonder why he wasn’t and managed to lose him in rush hour traffic. He parked in a strip mall and took a cab to Tina’s. He parked the Corolla a block from his house and cabbed it back to his own vehicle.

  When he pulled into his driveway, he noticed the Crown Vic parked just down the street. That was good. He wanted the cop to see him. He slipped into the garage and went around to the front door to check the mailbox. He had already emptied it but he checked anyway – just to be sure Sobeleski got an eyeful of him heading in. He did and that was good. Freddy shivered in his light coat. The weather had turned cold. That was good as well. It was time.

  Her name was Alisha Holmes and she satisfied him. But Freddy took no true pleasure in killing her. He needed to act quickly, work quickly and get home before Sobeleski got bored and left or got daring and knocked on the door.

  Freddy went for a quick jog that afternoon – just around the block, just to check the lay of the land. He was pretty sure Sobeleski was working alone but pretty sure is never positive. He looked for other vehicles that stood out and he looked for heavy tread patterns of military style footwear in the light skim of snow that had fallen that morning. He saw nothing. He knew he would have his throat way out on this one and even with that degree of certainty he was still feeling an unaccustomed nervousness as he readied himself to leave.

  He slipped out the back door with the hockey bag full of his supplies resting heavily on his shoulder. The Toyota was parked past the mouth of the alley out of the glow of a streetlight just flickering to life. He did not look around while he walked because, if someone was watching him, they might get suspicious. He also made every effort to make the big bag appear as light as possible – not an easy feat considering the twelve gallon-sized jugs of bleach stashed inside it. The whole time Freddy knew he might have been made already but he doubted it. Sobeleski was a loner. He had to be. It was the only thing that made sense.

  Alisha was something of a recluse. As most of his victims did, she lived alone. She rarely went out except for school and work. Freddy knew she would be home.

  He scoped the ground floor apartment and found the patio door unlocked. Alisha was a smoker and she was in and out every hour or so. The living room was empty. The walls ran with the lazy green and yellow swirls of a lava lamp. Quiet music drifted from the bedroom down the hall. Because of the fresh skim of snow Freddy made his approach along the lee of the building, walking in the two-foot gap between the light powder and the base of the wall. He made no tracks. Before entering the living room, he slipped nylon booties over his shoes and went to the kitchen for a knife. He moved into the dark hallway.

  Freddy could see her in the bedroom. She was at a small IKEA desk, her head bent over a text book. The Cranberries were playing on a slim bookshelf unit beside her. She was half turned to him. He was in darkness, she in light. That would change the moment he crossed the threshold. But Freddy could move as silently as the breeze and just as swiftly.

  She might have seen him as a flicker of movement in the corner of her eye. She did begin to move. Her face was still serene and untroubled as the kitchen knife flicked across her throat. Two pints of blood had sprayed over her biology text, the desk and the wall beyond before she even realized she was dying. There was no cry of alarm. She no longer had the equipment to make it. Alisha kept her knives sharp and her eight-inch butcher went nearly to the bone in one pass.

  Freddy had her in the tub in less than ten minutes. Twenty minutes after that he had the trace cleaned up and the heat knocked out. He put the chain on the front door and slipped out the way he had come in. As a final measure he propped the security drop bar so that it would fall in place when he closed the sliding door. Alisha was dead in a place locked from within. I think that’s the craziest part of it all.

  Not two hours after he slipped out his back door, Freddy was home. Fresh flurries had begun as he was driving. His garbage was in the dumpster behind a convenience store ten blocks from Alisha’s apartment and Tina’s car was parked back out at the mouth of the alley. In the darkness of his spare bedroom, Freddy surveyed the street outside. His heart was thudding heavy, slow beats in his chest. It took him only a moment to find Sobeleski. The cop’s cruiser was parked where Freddy had last seen it, its silver paint glittering beneath the halo of a nearby streetlight. It was probably the only car on the street without snow on its windshield.

  Freddy went out to the garage and started the Blazer. He backed out of the garage and headed for Starbuck’s. Half a block down the street he saw the Crown Vic pull out to follow. He didn’t really feel like studying and he definitely didn’t need the caffeine. What he wanted to do was occupy the cop for at least a couple more hours. He sat at his little table by the window with his cappuccino and his binder of notes. Freddy felt the giddy urge to smile, to laugh. He wanted to tell someone what he had done. He needed to.

  He told me the next morning but by then the cop’s fate was sealed. Freddy didn’t tell me about that until afterwards. He claimed that was his masterpiece. He said it was a beautiful thing so unlike his sacrifices it would spoil his appetite for more of the mundane. He told me about it and I thought it was colder and far more brutal than anything else he had done before or likely would after that. It was something neither of us would forget.

  -

  Freddy was forced to stick with his m.o. when he killed Alisha Holmes. But he wanted her found as quickly as possible. He killed her on a Friday night and he knew her boss would miss her by seven on Saturday morning.

  Her boss called and he got the machine. Likely he figured she was just running late because of the snow and he waited until eight before trying her again. The second phone call resulted in a second message. Alisha’s emergency contact at work was her mother in Saskatchewan. Her boss called her mother just before nine. He did not want to alarm her but he managed to do exactly that.

  Alisha’s mother called her landlord and asked him to check on her. She told him to just let himself in if no one answered. She said she would call back in twenty minutes because it was long distance. He knocked three times and waited a full minute before knocking a fourth time. He unlocked the door and found the safety chain on. He also felt how cold it was within the apartment. Breathless, he reached his own apartment and called 911. I can’t imagine what he told her mother when she called back.

  The coroner placed Alisha’s death within a six-hour window between five and eleven the previous evening. Her mother narrowed that down to sometime a
fter six because they had talked on the phone as they did almost every Friday night at six precisely. Telephone records confirmed that last phone call had ended at six twenty-two. Freddy had killed her at just before seven. Without knowing it or planning it his timing had been absolutely perfect.

  Sobeleski had watched him enter his house at just before six and drive away again at ten to eight. He watched Freddy sit in Starbuck’s until they closed at eleven-thirty. Freddy had been the last customer in the shop and he even helped flip chairs onto the tabletops, chatting and flirting with the two girls working closing shift the whole time. The cop had followed him home and then sat outside until one on Saturday morning.

  Freddy had stood in the darkened spare room watching while he was in turn watched. He only went to bed after the Crown Vic fired up and fishtailed out onto the street, rooster tails of fresh powder flung high from its wheel wells as it shot passed the house. Only then did he sleep because he was sure he was safe. He was positive.

  Freddy was certain he wasn’t going to see the silver Crown Victoria again. Smoke and mirrors – keep your eye on the ball, spot the queen of hearts. I could have told him the same thing that makes magic work and lets people lose at Three Card Monte would work against him. The eye saw what it wanted to see and the mind believed what it wanted to believe.

  By nine-thirty Saturday morning Dan Sobeleski would have been notified about Alisha’s death. He was on Freddy’s doorstep before ten. He would have had to come straight from home before even going to the crime scene. He pounded hard enough to rattle pictures on the wall inside.

  Incredulously Freddy went to the door. He had worked quickly but he had been thorough. He knew it was Sobeleski before he opened the door and, in the following minutes, he came to understand the depth of Sobeleski’s obsession even if he couldn’t believe it. Despite everything wrong with it, Freddy’s mind was always a rational one. That trait – rationality – he assumed was highly prized with law enforcement.