Road Kill

by Hanna Jameson

  ‘What, he’s possessed or something?’

  ‘No, I mean, that’s ridiculous… That’s ridiculous.’

  But he didn’t say anything else.

  I said, ‘Well, maybe Trent was the sort who would pick up a machine gun and shoot up an office, take heroin, download kiddy-porn; how would you fucking know? You didn’t know the guy. No one did, by the sounds of it.’

  I thought I’d actually hurt Eli’s feelings. He looked so troubled by the idea.

  ‘Or he really was in trouble,’ I added, trying not to turn the analysis into a confrontation.

  He turned another postcard over.

  This is Disneyland.

  ‘This is fucked,’ he said, attempting to slick back his hair with nothing. ‘That’s what this is.’

  I found a postcard in my pile.

  Man – Dig those crazy Los Angeles freeways.

  Eli stared at the faded pink Disneyland card as if he was about to cry. ‘He just had money, that was it. He opened up to Melissa, or at least he talked to her more. I suppose I always found that interesting too. Melissa didn’t talk to just anyone.’

  ‘So what was Melissa to you?’

  ‘Colleague. Associate.’

  ‘Just a colleague?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter now,’ he said, unable to subdue a lie. ‘I just need to know. I can’t go back with you to London until I know what the fuck happened with him.’

  It’s about Melissa.

  ‘Because you’ve come too far now?’ I said, as if I was following him.

  Maybe they had an affair.

  Melissa and Eli, or Melissa and Trent…

  He indicated the paper and cards, shaking his head. Look at it, it’s… bizarre.’

  Blessed are the destroyers of false hope, for they are the true Messiahs – Cursed are the god-adorers, for they shall be born sheep!

  ‘Eli...’ I said softly.

  It was addressed to Edward Saxon, at Stay On Main.

  There was a stamp from Staten Island.

  I flipped the postcard it was written on, and involuntarily grabbed Eli’s forearm.

  ‘Eli! Staten Island. This picture is the Staten Island Ferry.’

  ‘You think he went to Staten Island?’

  ‘It was sent after he has been in LA, otherwise why would he have addressed it to Saxon? I mean, Staten Island is a weird choice, there’s nothing there.’

  Eli dropped his head forwards, as if he had run a great distance. ‘Well, at least now we have somewhere to go.’

  I understood perfectly now, I thought. It’s definitely about Melissa.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  I went to a late-night bar just off the road about three hundred yards back, where they had free Wi-Fi, and sat in a corner to do some online stalking of Melissa de Ehrmann. Everyone – apart from Eli himself it seemed – had an online presence, especially if you were an entrepreneur. They had LinkedIn and Twitter and all that shit. Noel was too scared of computers to handle anything like that but I loved it. It could only be good for people like us, with so many new ways to dig up dirt.

  I wasn’t sure if this place did table service, but I waved the young bartender over anyway. He approached me with apprehension, saying, ‘Er, you order at the bar.’

  ‘Yeah, whatever. Can I get a Guinness, please?’

  ‘Er… Yeah. Yes, sir.’

  He almost bowed as he moved away.

  It was one in the morning. There was no one else here.

  Melissa did have a LinkedIn account.

  Connect.

  She had been an editor of fiction for about six years before becoming a writer herself, and relocating to Paris. She’d written two novels, a book of poetry, did copy editing on the side, and had apparently moved back to London in the meantime. She also translated novels from French to English and from English to French. There was nothing about her personal life on here.

  I stared at her photo. This was a more professional one, with a white background and sepia lighting. Old girlfriend? Eli didn’t seem the type to maintain a girlfriend. Maybe she was a relative, though they looked nothing alike…

  Facebook. That fucking goldmine.

  My Guinness was brought over.

  ‘Public, fuck yeah!’ I raised both my fists in victory as I opened her profile page.

  The bartender gave me a polite nod.

  Her profile wasn’t that old. It only went back to 2009. Not nearly long enough ago to contain anything about Eli. But I scrolled through her photos anyway.

  However…

  ‘What?’ I mumbled, spotting something familiar.

  It was a photo of Melissa and Eli, an old one. In fact, it was the photo he had given me in her dossier. Only now I realized that it wasn’t a friend who had been cropped out. It was Eli. Eli and Melissa were standing in front of a river, arms around each other like some sort of… couple.

  ‘No,’ I said, out loud.

  I clicked on the photo, enlarged it, and stared for a while. It didn’t look real. Eli was smiling.

  Fucking weird.

  Melissa’s hand was on Eli’s shoulder. There was a ring on her finger. That finger.

  ‘No fucking way!’

  I looked around the bar, as if I could find someone to share my incredulity. There was no way in hell Melissa de Ehrmann could have been Eli’s wife. Eli couldn’t have had a wife. Especially not a wife who looked like that, and…

  And he wanted to kill her.

  It was about Melissa.

  Were they still married? I guessed not, given the amount of time that had passed. There was a chance they still could be, but the evidence pointed towards a divorce.

  I sat back, the photo still large and ostentatious across my screen.

  I’d been dragged on a deranged revenge mission, but it hadn’t been the deranged revenge mission I’d thought it was. Had all this talk about his business, about his associates, about betrayal, killing Thomas Love and chasing this ghost, Trent Byrne, around a continent, just been a smoke-screen?

  I saved the photo, kept it open in a separate window, and scrolled down her timeline as far as I could go.

  All stories.

  I remembered my Guinness and took a gulp.

  Most of her posts were music videos, quotes from books I didn’t recognize, quotes from poems I didn’t recognize.

  I heard a Fly buzz when I died, The stillness round my form was like the Stillness in the Air, Between the Heaves of Storm.

  Some photos she was tagged in, from Paris. All the comments were in French.

  I wondered what her voice was like. It almost didn’t matter; French sounded hot on anybody.

  I hated people who posted shit like this all the time.

  There were no public photos of her with any other men. No new husband or douchebag boyfriend for Eli to become jealous over.

  Relationship status was blank.

  I opened Twitter in another tab and checked if she had an account but I couldn’t find one. No Instagram either. I typed her name into Google Images and she came up a few times, mostly at publishing events, some generic tags in Getty Images, a few from book signings, readings, Amazon links, a personal website…

  Another glance at the door. Another gulp of Guinness.

  Melissa’s website mostly consisted of links to her social media. She did have a Twitter account, I discovered; I’d just been misspelling her name. There was also a gallery of images and a Contact Me page.

  I hovered over the blank box, awaiting text.

  I wrote, Have you spoken to Elias Cain recently? but deleted it.

  I wrote, I’m a friend of Eli’s but deleted that too.

  I paused, and drank some more Guinness.

  The music in here was weird, some repetitive beat with a woman’s voice singing over it.

  I wrote, Do you know what happened to Trent Byrne?, filled in the return email address with my business one, and clicked Send before I could think too much about it.

  I Googled Ca
meron Hopper, but there was no recent news on him.

  Opening another tab, I typed Trent Byrne into Google, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

  Jack. Shit.

  For a joke, I added the word Satan to my Google search.

  I closed Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn straight away, and trawled through several pages of Google results. It didn’t help that most of the results were about Trent Reznor. But after all the NIN articles, something caught my eye and I stopped. It was a tiny news story from a few years ago.

  Satanic Substitute Teacher Suspended.

  That was the headline. Below it were two or three paragraphs; Trent Byrne, substitute English teacher, had been suspended for preaching Satanism to his classes. At first I thought it was about St Louis, but this had happened in LA, at one of the poorer schools. Apparently he’d ‘distributed Satanic literature and given anti-Christian lectures’ to the children, and he’d also had no comment to make about it.

  That was it. There wasn’t even a photo. I had no way of knowing if this was even the right Trent Byrne, but it had to be.

  I bookmarked the page and emailed the link to Eli. I thought about the postcard and the burning palm trees. If I’d had the postcard with me I’d have tried typing some of the stuff he’d written into Google, but I made a mental note to try it later or get Eli to do it.

  An image came to mind, from my previous forays into Google while looking for the source of one of Eli’s quotations: a photo of Richard Ramirez with his palm open, the lopsided pentagram held out to the court.

  ‘There are different sects of Satanism. The Satanist admits to being evil.’

  Ramirez had stayed in the Cecil too, when he had been breaking into people’s houses and raping them and killing them. According to Cathal’s scrapbook he used to discard his bloodied clothes in a dumpster before climbing up the fire escape.

  They enter through the windows…

  I thought back to the guy who had taken Eli’s arm, eyes rolling around in his head like a chameleon’s.

  ‘Cecil means six. Cecil means the devil.’

  The eight-pointed star.

  The girl in the water tank.

  I started to feel a bit odd – not scared or anything, just a bit odd – and shut the Trent Byrne tab. I didn’t want all this shit in my head, all these strange coincidences and connections.

  ‘Can you play something more upbeat, buddy?’ I called out to the bartender, grimacing and making a mental note to never use that word again.

  ‘Like what, sir?’ he asked, making his nervous jerky approach.

  ‘I don’t know, Bon Jovi or something. Just something… happy, you know?’

  The music stopped abruptly, but he must have become distracted because he didn’t replace it with anything.

  I didn’t stay long after that.

  The walk to the motel seemed longer and darker on the way back.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The following morning, I noticed I had an email from Melissa’s website when I was in the car the next morning. Flinching, I killed the screen and started playing Angry Birds instead. Eli paid too much attention to his surroundings for me to risk reading it in front of him.

  We stopped briefly for gas outside Oklahoma and I ducked into a wooden shack masquerading as a toilet to read it.

  The email said, Who is this?

  That was it.

  A little disappointed, I leant against the side of the shack and typed, A friend of Eli’s.

  I watched the four words vanish and stared at the phone for a while, as if she might reply instantly despite the time difference. I asked myself what I wanted to achieve with this secret dialogue. Was it for the sake of undermining Eli? Or did I really suspect that he had another agenda?

  ‘Are you going into labour or something?’ Eli banged a fist on the side of the shack. ‘Come on, let’s go!’

  As I made to unlock the door, my mobile vibrated.

  I looked down.

  The email said, Don’t contact me again.

  ‘Um, a second,’ I said, pausing.

  I had to say something. This would be my only chance for miles.

  Call me later. Trust me, it’s in your interest.

  I gave her my mobile number, hoping I could rely on her curiosity. People like that had no self-control; they had to know. It was a much more common trait in females, I noticed. Men could walk by any open doors and speed past a car crash without thought, without a lost second of sleep. But women had to know things.

  ‘Ron!’

  Another bang on the side of the shack.

  ‘Jesus, OK!’ I slammed the door open, hoping it wasn’t a conspicuous overreaction. ‘Keen, much?’

  Eli stared at me as we swapped places.

  I went to stand by the car, glanced at my phone, but there was nothing.

  Walking to the doorway of the store, I peered in. I wondered how many armed robberies they had out here. It wasn’t as if there were any police stations in the vicinity to respond to a panic button.

  The man sat behind the counter met my eyes.

  I nodded and smiled.

  He must have a shotgun by his knees, I thought.

  I heard Eli enter the store behind me.

  ‘You’re not from round here?’ the man behind the counter said, with the tiniest of inflections.

  ‘No, passing through,’ I replied.

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Home,’ Eli said.

  ‘We don’t get many expensive-looking suits around here,’ the man said, taking a twenty dollar bill.

  I saw his eyes drop to our waistbands, but my gun was in the car.

  Eli selected a postcard from a cylindrical rack by the till, nodded at it and then held it up to me.

  USA ROAD TRIP.

  There was a gaudy drawing of the White House beneath the bubble writing, scrawled across blue sky.

  ‘For posterity,’ Eli said.

  As he slapped it on the counter I saw the man’s eyes flicker downwards, his crossed arms twitching for a fraction of a second.

  I went to lean against the car in the sunshine. My mobile started vibrating but it was an Unknown Number. Eli was coming, so I cut the call off and put my phone in my pocket.

  Eli stuck the postcard to the dashboard.

  I just had to hope that, if it had been Melissa, she’d call again.

  *

  ‘I don’t think this kind of extended holiday is appropriate, Ronnie. Given the circumstances.’

  Now it was Edie on the phone.

  ‘It’s hardly a holiday. I was meeting Eamonn out of prison.’

  ‘And that was how long ago now?’

  ‘Do you want me to fill in a timesheet for you, boss?’

  It was terrible for Eli to be witnessing this. I hoped the signal would cut out.

  She said, ‘If you want to remain one of my managers, you’re going to have to start acting like one.’

  ‘It can’t be helped. I’m sure Noel will be fine until I get back.’ Lie. ‘This is personal stuff, and I’m also helping Mark chase a lead on Seven, if that means anything to you.’

  ‘I’m not interested in what you say you’re doing.’

  ‘I’ll bring back Seven’s head on a platter, how will that go down?’

  ‘It’s your head you should be concerned about.’

  And the bitch actually hung up on me.

  It wasn’t the signal.

  She hung up like I was nobody.

  I flushed, heart pounding with rage, and Eli pretended not to notice.

  About eighty miles down the road he pulled us over again, adamant that he wanted to buy alcohol. We were still nowhere near a motel and night was falling. Both of us were too wiped, too jittery, to drive any more.

  When are you getting here?

  Mark Chester, in Chicago.

  I don’t know. Soon.

  Bro, when you going to Chicago?

  Eamonn, in Philadelphia.

  I don’t know. Soon.

&nb
sp; Bitch hung up on me…

  There wasn’t much in this town. We weren’t quite in the suburbs but I could see a liquor store to our right and a kids’ park to our left across the road. It was humid.

  ‘I haven’t been on swings for years,’ I said.

  ‘I never used to play in parks.’

  We crossed the road.

  I couldn’t imagine him as a kid. I couldn’t imagine him ever wanting to play with anything, in innocent fashion. Eli would play with things like a cat, batting them back and forth until they died.

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I used to have lots of models, animals and dinosaurs and stuff.’ Eli took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one.

  ‘Yeah, me too, and cars.’

  ‘My mum said that I never used to move them or speak or make-believe voices or anything like that. I used to just sit there and watch them.’ He made an expansive gesture with his hands, cigarette clamped between his teeth. ‘I used to do everything in my head. I’d arrange them and then look at them. To the outside it looked as though I was doing nothing, but in my mind it made perfect sense. I could see them moving and hear them speaking. Then, when the time came, I’d move them all into a different position and do it again.’

  ‘That’s well creepy.’

  He shrugged. ‘Yeah, it probably was. Just this kid sat on his own staring at toys, not making a sound. Must have seemed like the kid from The Omen.’

  ‘You basically are now.’

  He shot me a grin as we stopped outside the liquor store, waiting for him to finish his cigarette.

  ‘I wasn’t as creepy as one of my friend’s brothers,’ he said, snorting. ‘He was a really intense kid and everyone was scared of him. This was when we lived in Boston, by the way, so he also played with his dad’s gun way too much.’

  ‘Did he ever do anything?’

  ‘He used to bring his dad’s gun with him everywhere. When he was fifteen he cornered us in my back garden and made me and my friend play Action Man with him.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound so bad.’

  ‘Yeah?’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘He made us play at gunpoint. We were eight.’

  I put my hands on my hips and nodded. ‘OK. Yeah, OK.’

  ‘Put me off Action Man for life.’