Hollow Tree

by Ian Neligh

  “I’m hoping he still lives there. That at least would be a good start,” I said.

  We were headed a little way out of the city. It was funny how I felt exposed without the city’s buildings around me.

  I’d never felt that way before. Maybe it wasn’t the lack of buildings that was bothering me, rather it was the lack of people.

  “Probably not going to have a lot of exciting photo opportunities for you,” I said, looking out the window as the buildings began to get smaller.

  He shrugged. “I dunno, beats going to a school board meeting.” I didn’t want to point out that there generally weren’t bums with shivs at school board meetings.

  We pulled off the road onto the trailer park property. The houses, to my surprise, were in good shape. A place for retirees and low-income transient workers. My kind of place.

  It was a little run-down, but truly a world different from the chain-link fences and barking dogs that I half imagined we’d see. I started to feel optimistic about our chances of getting a story as I stepped out of the vehicle.

  Lance Kinny may not have had a lot of money, but he had taken care of what was his. The white square metal box of a home had a well-manicured lawn out front. There were a dozen others that looked exactly the same flanking both sides. Without ceremony, I walked up to the front door and knocked. Nothing. I peeked inside a window and saw only darkness.

  “Well, that’s that,” Sal said, taking his camera out of the back of the car. “I’ll start on this side of the row and see if anybody knows if he still lives here.”

  Nodding, I watched as Sal started knocking on doors. I’m not sure why, but before I turned away, I tried the door handle and it clicked open. The room was dark, and I got the vague outline of furniture and a television. The smell that can only be associated with someone’s unique domicile blew out into my face. I glanced around to see that I was unnoticed in my crime, then stepped inside, not knowing what I would find or what I was looking for.

  I stood there for a moment letting my eyes adjust to the dark. As I started seeing a little better, I realized the house was trashed. Papers and books littered the ground, along with the dim glint of broken glass. It also looked like someone was crouched in a corner of the room. Before I could decide if it was my imagination, it stood up, walked over, and tried to kill me.

  The Crazy Stuff

  It’s crazy the stuff you think of right before something really bad happens. Case in point, I once interviewed a guy who’d survived a drive off the side of the 43rd and Walton Street bridge into the Municipal City bay.

  I’d sat by his bedside a couple years ago as he recounted for me the last moments before hitting a patch of ice, getting T-boned by a pickup truck, and breaking through the guardrail for a sudden 150-foot high dive.

  He told me that never once did he think about dying, or any of that bullshit like having your life flash before your eyes. After licking his lips and staring up at the ceiling, he told me the only thing he could think of was not being able to pick up dinner for his wife, who was working late that evening.

  If he had died, people might have assumed he’d taken the plummet screaming his head off all the way to bottom. But they’d have been wrong. His almost-last moment had been spent thinking he was not going to have time to go grocery shopping.

  His story had struck me in a funny way, and I’d decided if I drove off a bridge, my thoughts would be properly squared away. I’d be thinking, as I peered over the steering wheel at the rapidly approaching water, something like, I wonder if the air bag is going to deploy?

  Despite this resolution, the only thing I could think of when a massive fist bent me over like a sack of flour, and another cracked into my jaw sending me sprawling to the floor, was: Two times in one day?

  I found myself getting attacked for the second time only hours apart, and I couldn’t wrap my head around it. It was unfair. The man wearing what I made out as an expensive set of clothing closed the front door, locked it, peered out the peephole, and turned his full and complete attention back to me. He was wearing a black ski mask.

  I tried to crawl away. The man helped me in my path along the floor by giving me a sound kick to the stomach. The salvo sent me sliding across the ground six feet away and crashing into a shelf of knickknacks, which came raining down.

  “Have you always been that way?” he asked.

  There was something about that voice. I knew that voice. Coughing, I got to an elbow, trying to get a better look at my situation.

  “Hard to say,” I said with a grunt and got to my feet.

  He nodded at my response. “Well, either way, it is damn inconsiderate to make me wait so long.”

  He was over to me before I could blink and kicked my legs out from underneath me. He grabbed me by my jacket and flung me to the other side of the room, where I hit the wall and fell in a shower of pictures and glass.

  “Sorry,” I said after a moment, trying to get back to my knees for a second time. “Traffic was shit.”

  He came at me again from across the room. “Well, there’s nothing that can be done about it now, is there?”

  “It’s been a rough day,” I said, grabbing a shard of glass from underneath me.

  “You’d think this was the only thing I had to do today,” he said, nearly on me. “Well, it’s not.”

  “How'd you know I'd be here?” I asked, waiting for my opportunity.

  “Your predictable,” he said, darting forward.

  I flung the glass at his face. He ducked, turned to one side, and then came around in a neat three-sixty with a solid kick to my solar plexus. The blow knocked the wind out of me, and I could feel the cheap metal wall bend behind me as I bounced off it. I sank to my knees, and he gave me a quick, savage jab to the face. Blinking in a pool of my own blood, I came to on the floor. He was off somewhere, looking for something in the house. I was thinking how much bigger the house looked from the floor when I saw the legs sticking out of the bedroom. The only thing they were missing was a toe tag.

  The kitchen wasn’t far from me, and in the dim light I spotted a very promising rack of knives next to an unused frying pan. I had hoped to get back to my feet but found the best I could manage was a painful crawl.

  Before too long I was in the kitchen, leaving a trail of blood behind me like some sort of sad human slug. I could hear the man with the ski mask rummaging around in the other room. Sal started calling for me outside and trying the door. The man gave out a sigh of exacerbation.

  By then I’d managed to climb my way up to the countertop and was fumbling with the knives when he came into the room behind me, flicking on the light.

  “Trying to be clever?”

  I spat out a wad of bloody spit and stabbed at him with my left hand. He caught my hand easily and was contemplating what exactly he’d do to it when I hit him full in the face with the frying pan in my right hand. As the metal rang in my ears, the man fell to a heap on the ground.

  The Bad News

  Sal came in through the back door as I decided it would be a good time to sit down. And I did. He helped me stand again, holding on until I gave him a thumbs up. He flipped his phone open.

  “Ordering Chinese?” I asked, making my way to where my assailant was just starting to stir.

  “Calling the cops,” he said.

  “No,” I said leaning in the door frame. “I got a funny feeling.”

  He paused for a moment, his supernatural ability to stay out of trouble working overtime. Then he swore and snapped his phone closed.

  I bent down and pulled the ski mask off my assailant and saw—Jeff Polar. Trying to focus on me, he had a dazed expression.

  “On second thought, call the cops,” I said.

  Polar screwed his eyebrows up, trying to piece something together, and managed a: “Don’t.”

  I motioned for Sal to wait. “If he finds out,” Polar sputtered. “We’re all dead.”

  “Who?” I asked, feeling like I’d been hit by and
then dragged behind the back of a train. Polar shook his head and sat up, still woozy. “The less you know the better.”

  Blood ran down the side of his head and contrasted with the amiable, aging frat-boy look I’d always imagined him to have.

  “Funny, I always thought it was the other way around. Is that Lance Kinny?” I asked, motioning to the other room. Polar said nothing, but Sal said plenty when he saw the dead body. I felt around in my mouth for loose teeth and looked at the police PIO. “Did you kill him? Mayweather too?” Polar snorted and shook his head. “Just a little housekeeping,” he said. “Someone’s got to fucking do it.” Here we were, and still I was asking him the same damn questions and getting shit for answers. “Besides playing soccer with my favorite kidney, what are you doing here?” He started to say something, when I spotted a rectangular object inside his jacket.

  “That looks important—hand it over,” I said.

  He nodded, slowly, stalling for time. His eyes moved back and forth, looking for another option. Seeing none, and with some effort, he worked out what looked like a diary. I snatched it out of his hand and stuffed it into my back pocket.

  “Nothing personal,” he said. “Like with the homeless guy. Believe it or not, I was doing you a favor, Jack.”

  It was the first time someone told me an ass kicking and a couple of weeks in the hospital, or worse, were things I should be grateful for.

  “Is Calhoun in on this, too?” I asked.

  Shaking his head and trying to gather his wits, he said, “Clueless.” This made me nervous. It felt like I couldn’t get out of the damn house fast enough. “He’s got people, you know,” Polar said. “The more he thinks you know—the more dead you are.”

  “Can you get more than just dead?” I asked, chuckling and feeling my sides hurt. “So what was that—some kind of karate?” I motioned behind me to the living room where, I suspected, he’d broken more than a few of my ribs.

  He started to answer, and I hit him in the head like I was teeing off at the golf course. It wasn’t artistic, but with a frying pan, it didn’t need to be.

  Only When I Breathe

  As Sal and I left out the back door we discovered a white van. Inside were canisters of gasoline and cleaning chemicals. Peeking in the glove box, I found the van was registered to Polar. He had probably planned to burn the building down, with whatever other information he couldn’t find inside with it. I closed the door and saw Calhoun standing at the front of the vehicle. He held a gun.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said through clenched teeth.

  “I wish,” he said with a sneer. “But I’m here for him”— he motioned to the house—“for Polar. He still alive?”

  I told him that Polar was still knocked out by way of frying pan, but the homeowner was acting as an eclectic doorstop. Calhoun nodded, still the small-minded bully but now crossbred with a shark. A shark that smelled blood in the water. I told a man I considered an enemy how the evidence had brought me there.

  “He thought he was so damn smart,” Calhoun said, walking up to the doorway and looking in to where Polar lay on the floor. “I checked for the missing video before he ‘found it.’ There wasn’t shit there. Then the dead cops. That’s the kind of thing that could make a man suspicious, you know? The kind of thing that makes you want to follow someone, to see what they’re up to.”

  There was no doubt Calhoun was an alcoholic scumbag, but stupid he was not.

  “You look busted up—you hurt or something?” he asked.

  “Only when I breathe,” I said. “So what do you say, Calhoun, is Jeff Polar our killer?”

  Calhoun shook his head and twisted his face up like he had a mouthful of bitters. “Nah, he’s a minion. Someone’s paying him for his time—he wouldn’t have been old enough in ’98. But he’ll work well enough for me.”

  I started to ask him another question when he interrupted. “Uh-uh,” he said, frowning. “You want an exclusive? Go fuck yourself. You being here just muddies the waters.”

  That’s when I noticed Calhoun hadn’t put his gun away. He intended to use it—only not on us. He hadn’t been involved in any of the murders, but that didn’t make him clean either. One way or the other he was going to see that the package was wrapped up nice and neat. Calhoun would say it was self-defense. He would have found the killer at the scene of the crime and put a stop to him, clearing his own name. But I knew the killer was still out there, and I was getting closer all the time. I hesitated. Polar would never know what hit him. Then I thought about how he tried to have me killed—twice in the same day.

  “You’re the police,” I said, turning my back on them both and getting in the car with Sal.

  Unusually quiet, Sal drove me back to the paper so I could get my car. It was clear he didn’t want anything more to do with the story. As a photojournalist he was fearless when the bad guy was easy to identify. But uncovering something was a little more complicated. His survival instinct told him to cut his ties to me and the story—and I didn’t blame him. Driving home in my rust-colored coupe, I took a shortcut to avoid a major accident backing traffic up on the highway as far as the eye could see. I needed to get to my apartment, circle the wagons, and figure out a plan.

  It started to rain again, but I didn’t bother turning on my wipers. Adams was a place I didn’t need to see well. It was a place where bricks looked soft because of the years of hardship and weather. Where sidewalks were so old they were almost black, and advertisements on all the billboards sold nothing but televised fights and cigarettes. It was a place I called home.

  As I drove down the quiet streets I couldn’t help but feel like I was in the magnified scope of a high-powered rifle. I felt uneasy and skittish, like a pad of butter on a fry cook’s griddle.

  Crowded on both sides by a dozen other ancient buildings, including a converted Indian restaurant, I pulled up to my apartment. I unlocked the front door to the building, checked my mail, then marched up the stairs to the second floor and down the narrow hallway, past the three other apartments next to mine.

  I still felt like someone was watching me. I turned and looked back down the hallway. It was empty. On my door was taped a blank envelope with a black thumb drive inside —The Raven’s video evidence. It was time to find out who had everyone so scared and who was killing cops and war veterans.

  Once inside I left the lights off and saddled up to my desk, putting the worn diary next to my computer as I plugged in the thumb drive. Looking at its contents, I saw there was a single video file. Double clicking on it, my computer began to play a video that was the same as the one I’d seen at the police station: security footage from inside the pizza parlor of the street and the entrance to the alley.

  For a long time nothing happened, then an elderly man showed up and walked between the buildings. Waiting for something else to happen, I blinked as the video came to an end. What was I missing? Seeing that Mayweather showed up in the tape was new—but it still didn’t show his murderer.

  If the video showed Mayweather walking up, why didn’t it show anyone else? Where was the murderer? I felt a flush of adrenaline as the answer dawned on me. You would see them if they walked by the video camera into the alley. But maybe they didn’t walk, maybe they flew. I played the video again, but this time looked at the windows on the second floor across the street. And that’s when I saw the yellow-and-red reflection.

  The Interview

  Finished flipping through my notepad, I glanced again at my watch and nodded to the newspaper stand’s cigar-chewing proprietor. It was about time for my interview with Mr. Hanson. I reentered the dark interior of the Amco Plaza building and walked back up to the security guard. Still visibly distressed at the sight of me, he nodded. “He’ll see you now.”

  In the elevator I punched the button for the fifty-third floor and saw myself reflected back as the mirrored doors closed. I looked like something that was broken, but that wasn’t how I felt. There was a nuclear fire burning in my
gut, and every move I made felt electrified. The elevator started moving up—there was no turning back.

  I’d written stories about Mr. Hanson and his various fundraising events around the city, but I’d only ever written about The Champion once. The piece had been about a cold and windy day about four years ago at a gas-station fire. I had turned away from what had started as a minor blaze toward a group of children who had congregated to witness the spectacle. I saw their mouths drop open and eyes grow wide as something exploded, casting my shadow over them. A firefighter in his yellow uniform ran between us, and they watched him and pointed. Ash and bits of debris blew past my legs and into the street. Someone had tapped me on the shoulder; I’d turned and saw Sal trying to yell above the sirens. I couldn’t make out what he was saying, but the gas station was by then completely in flames. The windows had already blown out and the fire department had already turned off the pumps, but the flames were crawling over the melting tires of a refueling semi.

  Sal had said something again, starting to look desperate. He had stopped taking pictures. This meant something. I nodded, not hearing but understanding. The semi was going to go up. I had turned back to the group of children to join them at a safe distance when they started going crazy. They were looking up.

  I had whirled back around and, in the black smoke, seen a red-and-yellow costume. Sal began to take photos again. It was The Champion. Of the five superheroes in the city, only he could fly. It looked damn strange to see a man move through the air like that. The other superheroes were unique in their own ways, but The Champion—well, he was just something altogether different.

  The burning semi had suddenly lurched up a foot, then two. A man-sized shape lifted the tanker end of the truck above his head. Partly hidden by the smoke, he’d jumped into the air like a human grasshopper, pushing the giant vehicle into the sky above us. Everyone watched him until it exploded. A violent fireball took everyone by surprise and a shock wave knocked us down. Cursing, Sal had tried to get to his feet, still cradling his cameras. But I had just lain where I was on the ground, looking up at the blank space in the sky.