The Flip (An Angel Hill novel)

by C. Dennis Moore

  Her entire body shook, then tightened up all at once as every muscle contracted. She stretched and twisted into a shape he couldn’t bear to look at and he wondered how she wasn’t snapping her spine doing that.

  “Tell me what happens,” he said. “I’ll stop it. I won’t let you die, love, and I promise I won’t die on you.”

  “You can’t stop it,” she moaned, now writhing, trying to roll across the couch from one direction to the other. “They’re all dead. My God. My God, love, everyone!”

  She screamed then, a shriek like he’d never heard outside of a haunted house on Halloween, some manufactured shrill wail.

  He looked away for a second, wondering what was in his hand, then he saw it was just his phone. When he looked back again, Amy was unconscious.

  Chapter One

  For the first time in Brian Thompson’s thirty-nine years, he woke up to an empty house. God, it was a strange feeling. He had often wondered what it would be like to have his own place, but considering he was paying the bills, it sort of was his own place. He just didn’t have his name on any of the paperwork.

  He knew he was going to spend the day alternating between grieving and arranging for their funerals, but right now, first thing in the morning, all he could think of was how quiet the house was.

  He wasn’t sure he liked the silence.

  Something else he didn’t like was the sense that, now that he was completely alone, he was being watched.

  He wondered how long that feeling would last, that his parents were still here, only now they could see everything. It was going to be a while before he went to any porn sites, he felt pretty sure of that.

  He wanted nothing more than to spend the day in bed--or rather the evening, since it was already afternoon. That was a plus, he thought, to working third shift; he wouldn’t be spending his nights sleeping in this uncomfortably empty house. No, he realized, he’d just spend two nights a week, wide awake at 3:00 a.m., wondering who or what was watching him from the shadows. But it’s only two nights a week, he thought. At least he wouldn’t be waking up every night at that same time, wondering what that creak in the dark was from.

  Christ, he thought, it’s been one day and already I’ve got them haunting me.

  Brian had never arranged a funeral before, and had no idea where to start. He knew his parents had a plot at Mount Olivet in St. Joe, so he should probably call one of the funeral homes there to make arrangements. Most of their friends and family, including Brian’s sister Melanie, were still there anyway.

  They had moved to Angel Hill shortly after Brian graduated from Central High because his dad got a job in Angel Hill and didn’t want to make the twenty minute drive to and from town every day. So they’d packed up and bought a house here. Brian had gone to work at the Burger King in town--that was where he met his friends Steven and Keith and reconnected with an old classmate from St. Joe, Mike See--but five years later, when his dad got fired and they didn’t know how they would pay the bills on Brian’s fast food salary, Brian had done the only thing he could think of and got a different, better paying job. The only job he found that would pay enough to get by was the wire rope manufacturer in St. Joe. Brian made the twenty minute drive to and from town every day, partly to spite his dad, with whom he had always been a bit angry for moving them in the first place. He never told his dad any of this.

  So now here he was two decades later, still working third shift, making that shift differential payment, and finding himself suddenly alone. He wondered if it had been the thought of being alone that might have contributed to his never leaving home, or if it had been a feeling of obligation. Because if he didn’t live with his parents, then his parents were probably going to have to live with him. What choice did they have? His dad never had found a new job. Nothing worth taking anyway.

  Brian never knew his dad’s trouble in finding work, and he never questioned it. He did what he had to, and he made enough working the strander all night that he was able to pay their bills and still had enough to dump into his own hobbies. He didn’t do a whole lot of reading, but he’d never missed an issue of Batman, Green Lantern, Superman, Justice League or The Legion of Super-Heroes in over twenty years.

  And really all of this was nothing more than Brian putting off the inevitable. He was going to have to get up no matter how much he would rather do anything else than what he was going to have to do today.

  But it was already afternoon, and he had to get moving.

  He finally climbed out of bed and went into the bathroom. His dark brown hair was at the midway point between too short to do anything with and too long to leave alone and it stood out at every angle. At nearly six and a half feet tall, he had to stoop to look into the mirror. He had a lean, angular face with bags under his eyes thanks to the last twelve hours. After a piss and a tooth brushing, he got dressed, then picked up his phone and called in to work. While the thought of being here alone all night didn’t appeal to him, he knew there was no way he could make it all night at that machine with his parents’ deaths on his mind. So he called and said he was taking bereavement leave and would be back in a few days.

  In the kitchen he ate half a dozen mini powdered donuts with a glass of milk, then called Mike to tell him what happened. He’d call the others after, but he’d known Mike since the fourth grade.

  Mike answered with the usual, “What’s uuuup?”

  “You don’t even want to know. But that’s why I called. Mom and Dad were killed last night.”

  There was silence for a moment from the other end, then Mike said, “I assume you’re kidding.”

  “No, man, last night. Out in the car, it was pouring rain and they slid off the road, I guess, and into a tree. Man, this sucks.”

  “Wow, you ain’t shitting. Man, I’m sorry.”

  Brian shrugged, but of course Mike couldn’t see it, so he said, “Yeah, thanks. I don’t even know what to do. Fuck, I gotta call and tell Mel.”

  “Your sister doesn’t know?”

  “No, they called me at work last night and I came right back to town. I wasn’t even thinking of calling her, I just now remembered.”

  “Well don’t do it over the phone.”

  “Yeah, I guess. Look, I’m not gonna keep you, I just wanted to tell you what’s up.”

  “Thanks for telling me, and I’m really sorry. I’m here if you need anything, you know that.”

  “Yeah, I know. And I probably will. Alright, I’m gonna tell Keith and Steven, then I guess go up to St. Joe and see Mel. I’ll talk to you later.”

  “Cool. Later.”

  That actually hadn’t been as difficult as he’d expected it would be. And he hadn’t even cried once. But that’s because you’re in shock still, he told himself. It would hit sooner or later, and when it did, it would hit like a hurricane. So he had to keep busy and do what needed to be done quickly, before the flood.

  He hit Keith’s number in his phone and waited.

  Mike See had spent the last two hours searching web site after web site, looking for a job in or around Angel Hill that didn’t require either a bachelor’s degree, a CDL, or a nursing degree. If he’d known twenty years ago how in demand truck drivers and nurses were, he’d have gotten the necessary training and experience and never again had to worry about being out of work. But this wasn’t twenty years ago, and for the first time since high school, out of work was exactly what he was.

  Then again, after what Brian just told him, he was thinking his problems weren’t so rough after all. Mike was a smart guy, he’d been a good manager, and a hard worker. He would find a job, sooner or later. But dead parents are dead parents and there’s no changing that. Point to Brian, he thought.

  Mike rubbed his eyes and closed down the screen, then ran his hand over his stubbly head. He needed to shave. He rubbed both hands over his cheeks, which would also benefit from a razor, then smoothed out the thick salt and pepper Van Dyke, which was in desperate need of a trim.

  He gla
nced down at his gut and thought the beard’s not the only thing that needs a trim. Mike had what he considered to be the standard fast food manager build. He was almost six feet tall and had a thick torso with strong arms and a pronounced gut, developed after years of ordering other people to do things for him. He knew if he got off his ass and just did something he could shed the extra weight. And he planned to get around to that, but first he had to find a new job.

  There was nothing there, not even a crappy temp job he could work until he found something better. There was just nothing in Angel Hill.

  He was prepared to travel for work, but if it was further than St. Joe or Kansas City, it wasn’t going to be worth taking. And while he would work in KC if he had to, he’d just as soon avoid it. Nothing wrong with Kansas City, but Mike had spent the first ten years of his life in St. Joe, population 76,000 and some change, then moved to Angel Hill, which boasted an even smaller population. He wasn’t a big city kind of guy and wasn’t interested in trying to navigate the streets of downtown KC. There was always Fairfield, but at least a quarter of the people he’d hired over the years at Burger King had been from Fairfield, so if people were coming to Angel Hill for a fast food job, obviously the job market there wasn’t so hot, either.

  He’d received a very nice severance package in exchange for signing their separation agreement promising he’d never sue them or disclose anything about their business practices, and he’d had to think about that one for a couple days. Because suing them was exactly what he wanted to do when they told him. He hadn’t just been a good employee, he’d been the best they had in years, operating the store at over a million dollars every year he’d been in charge. He was loyal, dedicated, and did what was necessary for the good of the company, starting from the day he was hired at sixteen.

  He had never worked anywhere else, but it had only taken two years to be promoted to shift manager, and he hadn’t even graduated high school yet. By the time he was thirty, Mike had the run of the place, and they never failed a health inspection, the place was always spotless, and he made damn sure the service was as fast as it could be.

  And how had he been repaid?

  By being summarily executed, that’s how he thought of it. A hefty pay off, sure, enough to keep him in regular paychecks for the next 6 months, but what then? Another managerial job, he assumed, but after twenty-two years, did he really want to go back to fast food? Not especially. But it was all he knew. One job for twenty-two years had to look good on a resume, but it was still only one job in twenty-two years.

  He was over thinking things, and he knew it. He needed to stop stressing about it and take the time he had to figure out what he wanted to do. But he knew those six months were going to go by fast, especially if he wasted those days away “taking it easy”.

  He didn’t need to find a job right away, but it wouldn’t kill him to put some thought into what he wanted to do next.

  And, he convinced himself, that’s what he had been doing, just skimming the job listings, seeing what was out there to give himself an idea of what to expect when he really started looking.

  But he didn’t need to rush things or take the first job that presented itself.

  Relax, he told himself. Go for a drive.

  Actually, a drive sounded like a good idea. As far as he was concerned, mid-April in Missouri was about the most perfect weather for being outside. Plus he’d recently bought a used Mazzy Star CD but hadn’t bothered to give it much of a listen. He grabbed Harvey Danger’s King James Version too, just in case he didn’t care for the Mazzy Star.

  He grabbed his keys and wallet off the kitchen table, a Coke from the refrigerator, and locked his front door. In his Cherokee he popped the tab on the Coke, put in the CD and buckled up all before turning the key. The engine chugged to a start and the CD player hummed briefly before the jangly guitar of “Halah” filled the speakers.

  He had no idea where he was going, but that seemed like the perfect description of his life lately.

  Angel Hill was a rectangular city, divided by the Platte River and US169, which crossed in the dead center of town at southwest/northeast and southeast/northwest directions, into four equally sized triangles. Mike lived in the west section of town on Parade Street, across from where that guy went crazy a couple years back and painted all of his windows, then jumped out from the attic. Mike always wondered what happened to that guy; he’d moved out a couple weeks later and the place had been empty ever since. No one wants to rent a house where someone went crazy.

  He pulled away thinking the owner needed to do something with that house. The property values were dead around here.

  He decided to drive the outside rim of Angel Hill, so he turned onto A Street, which was the westernmost street. He turned left and listened to Mazzy Star on his way to Henry Street at the southernmost edge of the city. By the time he reached Henry, “Hallah” was over and while the next song, “Blue Flower” was good, it wasn’t what he was in the mood for so he switched to Harvey Danger.

  On Henry, he sped past the Alphabet--the north/south streets along Angel Hill’s western and southern sections had been given the ridiculous names of letters of the alphabet from A to J, while the northern and eastern section’s north/south streets had been numbered, from First Street to Tenth Street--and lost himself in the bleak and depressing lyrics of Sean Nelson.

  Once he reached Tenth Street at the eastern rim of town, he was good and plenty zoned out.

  He tried to envision Angel Hill as a whole, from above, imagining the grid of the city and trying to zero in on where there might be jobs available for a thirty-eight year old man with no experience in anything.

  He could start his own business, but, again, he ran into the problem of being good at nothing but running a fast food place. And while he’d been good at it, even if he decided to go back to another restaurant, owning one was nothing that interested him at all.

  He sat at the light on Tenth Street and US169--the stretch of highway that ran from the northwest corner to the southeast, splitting Angel Hill in half, which locals called “The Slant” as it had more flow than saying US169 and, well, looking at a map of the city, the street was slanted--watching the red glow above him, watching cars speed past by the dozens, and it began to seem the light would never change.

  “God hates me,” Mike told Sean and the band. “This is my life, perpetually waiting at the stop light that is progress. You should write a song about that, Sean. Oh wait, you guys broke up. Like I said, God hates me.”

  The CD segued from “Why I’m Lonely” to “Sad Sweetheart of the Rodeo” and he was still sitting at the light.

  He looked to his left and saw Fett Tech and wondered how to get a job there. But Keith had been laid off from there last year. Besides, what little hands-on work Mike was capable of was relegated to the more mundane variety. He’d done some small electrical and plumbing at his parents’ when they’d needed someone but couldn’t afford a professional, but that was years ago before they moved to Phoenix. And that wasn’t going to help at Fett Tech where they built control panels. What did he know about circuit boards or utility trucks? Keith had gone for two years to a vo-tech school for that training.

  He wondered if Brian could help get him on at the wire place in St. Joe, but knew now wasn’t the time to ask.

  Steven was another possibility, but he worked at the Wal-Mart in Angel Hill and something told Mike he wouldn’t be making the kind of money he would need to pay his bills on a Wal-Mart paycheck. Steven said several of the people he worked with there had another part time job on the side.

  The light changed and Mike finally got to go. Tenth Street was a hodge podge of different kinds of neighborhoods. Low rent housing stretched from Small Street up past Cross to Meyer, then there was a strip mall on Spader, restaurant row on Checker, more housing from Dayan to Mimosa and the hospital on California Street. Everything from there, which was only Marshall and Shine before he got to the Garden at Daisy Avenue, was mo
re housing with a lot of small, locally owned businesses. Those wouldn’t be hiring, and if they were, they wouldn’t pay much.

  Mike rounded the Garden, onto Rose Drive--which crossed the Platte River--and past Sunflower Boulevard, onto Grey Street.

  The north section of town was mostly homes, with the exception of the college, NWAH on Second Street. While he was up here, he decided to drive down through Fifth, then take Jones and over to Fourth Street to check out the old house down there. It had been a pretty popular sight a couple years ago when it burned down. In a small town like Angel Hill something like that was big news for weeks. Mike heard it had been renovated, but hadn’t seen it yet. He wasn’t sure why it mattered that he see it at all other than to satisfy his own curiosity. It wasn’t like he had a stake in the house. He hadn’t known any of the people involved and, before it burned up, couldn’t have picked it out of a line up.

  He did drive by the burned out husk a couple of times, though, whenever he was in the neighborhood. Something about that blackened and charred skeleton of a house spoke to him. Not the house itself, but the potential.

  That ugly mess was gone, though. Whoever had done the work on it had done an excellent job. He couldn’t tell, from driving by, that it had ever burned. It looked like it was still empty, though. All he knew about the house was rumor and town gossip, but he understood how a thing like that, in a town this size, was probably the death of a neighborhood. Which was a shame, because the house was huge, in a great location, and had good curb appeal.

  He wondered for a minute if he could possibly get a job on a construction crew. That had to pay decent, right? But, again, it came down to experience, and he didn’t have any.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he told Sean Nelson who was now singing about running away and starting a little independent repertory movie house or something, “God hates me anyway.”

  He missed the turn at Pacific and would have to turn around at Irving, back up Third to Grey before heading over toward the north end of The Slant and back down to Custer where he could get home. But once he got to Irving and he saw it, and he looked across the street and saw Upper Hill Park, knowing The Slant was just on the other side of that and the river was only a block away, he heard a repeating phrase in his head, spoken by too many home improvement television show hosts to name and Mike See had an idea.