The Mural

by Michael Mallory

  Jack did not know what to do. At least his brain and his voice did not. Another part of him, however, acting completely on its own, did.

  Glancing at his cock, which was now poking through his shirttails, as hard and straight as a cedar, the woman smiled and then sashayed past him to the toilet stall next to the urinal. “I’ll be in here when you’re ready.” She slowly closed the stall door behind her.

  Jack felt weak, intoxicated, like he might pass out. The guy who was stepping frantically out of his pants and briefs, and ripping his shirt off seemed like someone else altogether, someone whose actions Jack was watching instead of performing. Within seconds, he had yanked open the door of the stall, so horny that he was developing chest pains. The woman was waiting for him. She wrapped her arms around him and, like a dancer, spun him around, then pushed him down on the toilet seat, while mounting herself on top of him. They began rocking and bouncing on the toilet, which gave way a little with each thrust, but right now Jack did not care of the thing tipped over. All that mattered was the redhead.

  When he finally came it was an explosion. His mind went red and he moaned like an animal. For a moment Jack thought that he might pass out from its intensity. All he could do was sit there, eyes tightly shut, gasping for breath, clutching onto the woman’s warm sweaty body for safety while he plummeted back down to earth.

  Jesus, Jack thought absently, nine years of absolute faithfulness to Elley, and then sex with two different women in as many days. And both times the ground seemed to move. Maybe he’d been a goddamned fool for being so faithful all those years.

  Apparently the redhead was experiencing a similar loss of physical control as him, since she now felt like dead weight on him. They had generated so much heat in the cramped stall that Jack would not have been surprised to see the paint on the walls blistered, but they were now quickly cooling. At least she was; the woman’s skin felt almost cold to the touch.

  “I don’t know what to say,” Jack panted, still inside of her.

  There was no answer from the woman.

  “Hey,” he said, opening his eyes. He could not see her face because her head was draped over his shoulder. He smiled. “It was like that for me, too.” He now had control of his breathing and was taking air in and out rhythmically. “Are you all right? Hey.” Jack stopped talking. He held his breath, waiting to detect the rise and fall of her chest against his.

  There wasn’t any.

  “Jesus,” he said, pushing his left shoulder forward to force her head off. The woman’s head flopped like a bag of flour, her long hair trailing along his skin wetly.

  Her long blonde hair.

  Jack opened his mouth to say something, but all words caught there. He was now able to see the woman sitting on top of him. It was no longer the voluptuous auburn-haired woman who had lured him into the stall.

  It was Dani Lindstrom.

  And she was dead.

  Jack tried to scream but only a whimper came out. He lurched up from the toilet and the woman’s body slumped to the floor like a pile of muslin rags, her flesh a ghastly, pale shade of bluish-gray, her dead eyes wide open and staring at him accusingly.

  Then Jack heard the bathroom door open, and his heart nearly stopped. He was about to be found in the stall of a grungy men’s room with the dead body of a friend with whom he had just been having sex! He began to pant out of terror, and felt lightheaded. He was hyperventilating. He couldn’t get air. Jesus, it was like he was in a vacuum!

  A scent hit him, the last scent he could have expected in a place like this or at a time like this. It filled the room, overwhelmed him to the point of making him gag.

  It was the scent of oil paint.

  Jack reached out and tried to maintain his balance by pushing against the stall walls. He looked down again at Dani. He started to laugh. That’s why she’s that color. She isn’t dead. She’s been painted.

  Then he stopped. However cold Dani Lindstrom’s corpse was at this moment, Jack bested her. He felt ice in his gut as the face of the auburn-haired woman came back to him, and he realized why she had looked vaguely familiar.

  Her face was the one he had photographed from the mural at the Wood City city hall, the same face that his daughter had drawn with unnatural skill in crayon at the restaurant. Only in here she had not been rendered in a cold, artistic, expressionless way; here she had been real. At least she had appeared real, and if not a real, living, flesh-and-blood woman, what in hell had he just been screwing so wolfishly?

  A corpse. He had entered and copulated with and ejaculated his burning seed into a corpse.

  That was Jack’s last conscious thought before blacking out.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The right half of Jack Hayden’s face was cold. There was something wrong with it. He couldn’t move it. Christ, had he had a stroke or something?

  He heard a voice from a distance, a woman’s voice saying, “There, leaning up against the window.”

  Somehow Jack knew they were talking about him.

  Somehow he managed to open his eyes.

  He was literally pressed up against a pane of glass. That at least explained why half of his face felt cold and dead. He looked around and saw a policeman coming toward him. Maybe he could explain everything else.

  “Sir, step away from the building, please,” the policeman said.

  “Sure,” Jack muttered, taking a few shaky steps onto the sidewalk. “What’s wrong?”

  “Put your hands on your head, sir.”

  “What?”

  “Put your hands on your head, now.” Jack could see a small crowd beginning to form around him. Small crowds were the only kind of crowds they made in Glenowen.

  “All right,” Jack said, complying.

  The policeman, a well-built guy of about thirty, patted him down for a weapon and, finding none, helped himself to Jack’s wallet and checked his ID. “Los Angeles, huh? Kind of a long way from home, aren’t you, Mr. Hayden?” he asked.

  “I’m here on business.”

  “Okay, you can lower your arms. Having you been drinking, Mr. Hayden?”

  “I had two beers, but I’m not drunk.” Only when he saw his wallet in the policeman’s hands and realized it had to have been taken from his pocket did Jack become cognizant of the fact that he was fully dressed. “Hey, what’s going on here? Why am I—” Then the fog in Jack’s mind began to part. “She was dead...my god, she was dead.”

  The policeman tensed. “Who is dead, Mr. Hayden?”

  “Dani...back at the saloon...in the bathroom...I have to get back there.” Jack looked around but could not see the Saddleback Inn. “I must have walked away.” He turned and started to run clumsily down the main street of Glenowen.

  “Hold it!” the policeman commanded, but Jack ignored him. He raced down the block and into the cross-street looking for the old saloon. It was nowhere to be found. He could hear the policemen yelling at him behind him, but paid no attention. Jack went another block, and eventually saw his truck up ahead. He stopped. The other way; the Saddleback had to be in the other direction. He had to go back.

  Powerful arms grabbed Jack from behind, immobilizing him. Before he could protest or even cry out, he had been lowered to the sidewalk. The policeman held his arms fast, and while he was not particularly large, the man was strong. “You try a stunt like that again and I’ll graze your calf with a bullet,” the cop said. “It won’t kill you, it won’t even maim you for long, but it will hurt like hell. You want to try me?”

  Jack shook his head.

  “Then I’m going to let you go, and you better not move.”

  Jack nodded. He felt the rush of blood enter his arms after the policeman released his iron grip from them. It was temporary relief, though, since a second later the cop muscled his hands behind his back and cuffed his wrists. Then he pulled Jack to his feet as though he weighed nothing. “What have I done?” he asked.

  “Perhaps you’re a little too far gone to remember it, but more
than one person saw you pull your little man out and relieve yourself on the corner of the store.”

  “I did what?” Jack looked down and saw that his zipper was half open. What’s more, his shorts felt damp. “Shit!”

  “We’re going to walk back to my vehicle,” the policeman said, “nice and easy, and as we do, you’re going to tell me who was dead.”

  “Christ,” Jack moaned. “I’m not sure I know anymore. That stuff was labeled Wood City ESB, but I think it was more LSD.”

  “What stuff is that?”

  “The beer I had in the saloon, the Saddleback Inn.”

  “And where is that?”

  “What do you mean, where is it? Right in the middle of town! Right where you found me.”

  The policeman stopped walking, so Jack stopped. “Mr. Hayden,” he began, “I have lived in this village most of my life. I know every inch of it. I have to. There has never been an establishment called the Saddleback Inn, and there has never been a saloon, as you call it.”

  “Oh, bullshit! I was there!”

  “Show me then.”

  They continued to walk until they had reached the place where Jack had first been approached by the cop, and then went further. One block; two. With each successive step, Jack became more agitated. “Goddamn, where is it?”

  “It’s not here. Now let’s go back.”

  Jack said nothing as they walked back to the khaki-colored Jeep that passed for a police cruiser, and nothing as he was helped into the backseat. The Glenowen police station, which appeared to be a double-wide trailer on a concrete foundation, was a half mile away, on the north edge of the town. The inside was as austere as the outside, with simple desks and plastic chairs. There was only one other person inside, a uniformed officer considerably older than the man who had arrested Jack. Jack was told to sit in one of the chair beside the workspace of the officer, who was identified by a name plaque on his desk as Robert Creeley, Chief of Police. He seemed awfully young to be the commanding officer. His subordinate, meanwhile, was a big, gray-haired, red-faced guy an inch or two over six feet and on the far side of fifty.

  The lack of clutter on the desk implied that Glenowen was not a hotbed of criminal activity. In fact, he was probably the most exciting thing that had happened here for a very long time. Since the policeman was still holding onto Jack’s wallet, he took what information he could from his driver’s license and then asked for the rest, and Jack willingly gave it. He didn’t see that he had much choice. “I’m going to give you a breathalyzer test, Mr. Hayden,” Creeley said, holding up a small box with a digital screen on it. “It’s very simple, you just breathe into this opening and it gives an instant read-out.”

  “I’ve seen things like this hanging on the wall in restaurants, but I didn’t realize the police used them too.”

  Creeley actually smiled. “We had an eatery go out of business here last year, and we picked it up at the auction. But it’s pretty accurate. Now, breathe, please.”

  Jack breathed into the opening and Creeley examined the results, frowned and asked him to breathe into the contraption again. Jack did, and Creeley asked: “How many beers you say you had?”

  “Two. They were pints. Thirty-two ounces.”

  “Well, Mr. Hayden, according to the results of your test, you have absolutely no alcohol in your system.”

  “That can’t be. I’m not faced, but I know I had three of those beers.”

  “Sorry, but I have to go by the facts, and the fact that you have no alcohol in your system kind of makes me wonder what it is that’s really wrong with you.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Do you take drugs, Mr. Hayden?”

  “No. I do not. I went into a saloon called the Saddleback Inn. I had three pints of something called Wood City ESB. I...well, some other things happened, and then I saw the body of a friend of mine, and she was dead.”

  “But there is no place called the Saddleback Inn, no saloon, and for the record, I’ve never heard of a beer called Wood City ESB. What’s ESB mean, anyway?”

  “Extra special bitter, I think.”

  “I’ll remember that, thanks. May I assume that you have no recollection of urinating in the street?”

  “I have a recollection of urinating, but I was in the men’s room of the Saddleback Inn.”

  “Which does not exist.”

  “So you say.”

  “What about that dead body? You said it was someone you knew. Somebody named Danny.”

  Jack’s temples had begun to throb, but he could not rub them cuffed. “Creeley, if the saloon doesn’t exist, then the body doesn’t either. It must have been part of the same hallucination. Could get these things off my wrists? I’m getting a little numb.”

  “Free him up, Carl,” Creeley instructed the other officer, who did so, keeping his gun in his hand.

  “Thanks,” Jack said, immediately starting to massage his temples.

  “You need to see a doctor?” Creeley asked.

  “No, no, I’m okay, I think. I’ve been under some stress lately. Maybe the atmosphere of the town did something to my subconscious and I blacked out.”

  “I can’t help you there,” Creeley said, setting his gun down on this desk, where it was still reachable should he need it, “and you seem to be rational enough now. I’d just prefer it if your subconscious would stop pissing on our buildings.”

  “Chief Creeley, I really don’t know what’s happening to me, but if I did indeed piss on one of your buildings, I am truly sorry.”

  “That’s a good start. Now the question is, where do we go from here?”

  “What are the options?” Jack asked, for the first time wondering how he was going to explain this to Althea once he had informed her that she was going to have to look after Robynn until further notice.

  Creeley turned to his subordinate officer. “Carl, can you go get me a burger from someplace? I missed lunch today.”

  “Sure thing, Chief,” the other man said, and he quickly exited the station. Jack was alone now with the young policeman, a fact that made him nervous. Creeley had already proven his strength, and if he decided he wanted to get physical with Jack, there would be little Jack could do to defend himself. Neither would there be any witnesses. When the policeman stood up and put his gun back in his holster, freeing up both fists, Jack was not sure whether it was a good or bad sign.

  The policeman began to pace leisurely. “I asked Carl to leave because he’s more of an old school law enforcement officer,” he began. “He likes to do things by the book. Sometimes I like to cut to the chase a little more. That’s the reason I didn’t bother Mirandizing you.”

  Oh, Christ,” Jack thought, trying to steel himself for the worst.

  “You wanted options. Well, we’ve got a little cell back there, so I could hold you on public indecency charges until your arraignment, which would take place in San Luis Obispo. You could plead not guilty at the subsequent trial test your blacking-out excuse with the jury to see what they think of it. You like that option?”

  “Not really,” Jack croaked.

  “Me neither. All of that would take a lot of time, and time is money, and money is something in short supply up here on a community level, as you can probably tell from our plush accommodations.” Creeley stopped pacing and faced Jack. “You ever been in trouble with the law before, Mr. Hayden?”

  “Parking tickets are about all.”

  “Yeah, you don’t strike me as the criminal type. So the easier solution might be if you were just pay a fine right here and now, and then be on your way.”

  “A fine,” Jack said. “This would be paid to you?”

  “The check would be made out to the city of Glenowen.”

  “What kind of fine are we talking about?”

  “Oh, how does three-hundred-and-forty-two dollars strike you?”

  Jack sighed, relieved. He had been expecting to get clipped for a lot more. “Three-hundred-forty-two, and that’s it?”

 
; “That’s it.”

  “Okay, though I want to make my position absolutely clear. I have absolutely no recollection of carrying out the act of which I have been accused, and therefore, it was not a conscious, premeditated act. Despite that, I plead culpability and will pay the fine as you suggest.”

  Jack reached into his pocket and saw Creeley tense. “I’m getting my checkbook.” Withdrawing it slowly, he wrote out a check to the City of Glenowen in the amount of $342.00, signed it, and handed it over to the policeman, who looked at the signature and compared it against the one on Jack’s license.

  “By the way, can I have that back now?” Jack asked.

  Creeley handed him his wallet. “Where are you staying?”

  “The Tide Pool Inn in San Simeon.”

  “You going to be back in Glenowen at any point?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Okay. The city limits are clearly marked, you can’t miss them. So whenever you’re between them, how about you pull out that cell phone that I felt when I was patting you down and you call me to let me know that you’re here, providing you can get service. If not, use a pay phone.” Rob Creeley took a business card from a ceramic holder on his desk and handed it to Jack. “Number’s right there. Me or ol’ Carl are either on duty or on call just about all the time, and I’ve got an officer on the graveyard shift named Ray Marciba, and a reserve to boot, so any time you’re in the village, day or night, you check in. Got it?”

  Jack nodded. “Can I go now?”

  “Have a nice afternoon, Mr. Hayden.”

  Jack got up and headed for the door of the tiny station, but then stopped and turned back. “Mind if I ask a question?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Why three-hundred-forty-two? Why not a round number like four hundred?”

  Creeley smiled. “Well, the last time I was down in your area I saw those carpool lanes that they put in on the freeways, and there was a sign that said violators would pay a fine of three-hundred-forty-one dollars if they were in the lane illegally. Seems to me that what you did was a little more serious than not having enough people in your car when you try to get around the traffic. At least a dollar’s worth more serious.”