by Stella Noir
I occupy the bar stool next to my old friend and order a Scotch without saying a word. The bartender knows how to interpret my gesture well enough.
Joseph places his elbows on the bar and looks at me through his deep, dark eyes.
“Thought you went completely off the radar,” he murmurs.
We haven’t seen each other since then. Since we ended that douchebag’s life together.
“You scared or what?” he asks.
I frown at him.
“What would I be scared of?” I ask back. “We were smart, nothing to worry about.”
Joseph shrugs his shoulders. “True.”
“Just been busy is all,” I add, taking the first sip of my Scotch, savoring the burn as it coats my throat.
“You know we did the right thing.”
Our eyes meet and I see that same worry in Joseph’s eyes that I’ve seen before on other faces. It speaks of fear, the fear of rats. Friends can turn into rats if they start questioning their actions. A murder, many murders, could be called a questionable act if you looked at it from a normal person’s angle.
But Joseph and I are not normal people. The difference between us and a normal person is that we don’t accept things as they are. We don’t accept that certain creatures have the opportunity to terrorize an entire neighborhood for generations because the police are too scared or misinformed to act. I’m all for the rule of law, but not if it’s not carried out in the harsh way these assholes deserve.
“Of course I know,” I hiss at Joseph. “He had to go. I’m not doubting anything. I won’t snap. I won’t talk. Stop worrying.”
“Okay, okay,” he replies, lifting his hands in defense. “But something is up with you man, I can tell!”
“Nothing is up,” I lie.
“What’s keeping you so busy then?” he wants to know. “And why are you still here? You’ve been giving me mixed signals all this time. You fucking show up out of nowhere, announcing that you’re back in town. Then your mother dies — again, sorry about that. We get into this shit together, you tell me you’ll be outta’ here once that’s done, and now you linger around but make yourself invisible. Seriously, what gives?”
“I have shit to take care of,” I say, finally coming up with a good excuse. “My mother’s place. I have to get rid of stuff and sell it.”
“Sell it?” Joseph asks, his eyebrows arching. “I didn’t know you owned that little shithole.”
“I bought it a few years back after she refused to move,” I explain.
“Huh.” Joseph takes another sip from his drink. “Didn’t even know you could buy a place like that.”
“You can’t, normally,” I say. “But I had to make it happen. If she insisted on living there even when there was no need to, I at least wanted to make sure that she wasn’t wasting money on rent.”
“Sure,” Josephs agrees. “Gotta’ be nice. To be able to do that shit for your family.”
I glance over to him. Joseph never made it out of the hood, and I know that a small part of him resents me for being successful away from this hell that we called home. I was willing to put in the kind of work that he always thought less of. I became a corporate snob and started my own company with what I learned during my early years as a trainee. It wasn’t all me, of course. If anything, I just reached for the hand that was held out to me. My mother worked her ass off to make this possible for me, she literally sold herself. How could I not make something out of myself? That woman didn’t deserve to be betrayed like that. It was bad enough that she knew about my vigilante activities. She had always been torn between pride and fright when it came to that. The thought I was running around, chasing bad guys never sat well with her. I know she worried, but she never asked a lot of questions, mainly because she was afraid of the answers, I’m sure.
But she understood. She understood where I was coming from and she knew I had good reasons to get involved. That’s the part that made her proud. The best part.
“I’d have prepared for her to live somewhere else,” I say, absentmindedly turning the glass between my hands. “I will never understand why she insisted on staying in this hood.”
Joseph huffs.
“Of course you won’t,” he says. “You left as soon as you could. But we’re not all like you. Some of us actually feel attached to our home.”
He doesn’t look at me, but he doesn’t have to for me to understand that he’s reproaching me for leaving.
“This neighborhood needs us,” he says.
“Maybe,” I admit. “But you know that most of those who stay are part of the problem.”
“What?” he asks, now turning to me with a sour expression on his face. “Like me? Or your mother? Or my fami—”
“Most! Not all!” I interrupt him. “Damn it, Joseph, you know what I mean. This community is infested with assholes that feed off each other.”
Joseph lets out an angry grunt instead of giving me a reply. We both take another sip of our drinks and sit together in silence for a while.
I haven’t gotten one step closer to solving my dilemma with Meadow. All I know is that she weakens me. Caring for someone in that way automatically creates a weak spot for you, and I know I care for that girl.
I made her squirm with pleasure, I made her moan in ecstasy, I made her smile. She’s mine now, my problem, my sweet dilemma. She has shown no desire to leave the apartment and get on with the life she was ready to throw away, and I haven’t suggested it for a while now. But we both know that things can’t go on like this. I can’t take care of her like a baby, and I’m growing uncomfortable with the idea of her living in my mother’s home. What I told Joseph about wanting to get rid of her stuff and sell the place was true. It was one of the reasons why I stuck around for longer than planned.
No one is expecting me back in Boston any time soon. My company was bought out by another one a few months back. That deal has been in the making for a very long time, and I was so relieved when it was all done because it not only provided me with a shit load of money, but also the freedom to embark on the next endeavor. Whatever that might turn out to be. My visit home was supposed to serve as a little timeout to clear my mind. It was a terrible coincidence that my mother died just a few weeks after I got back to town. A fucking heart attack. Knocked her out right away. She always said that’s how she wanted to die, or something close to that.
“I better be holding a good Scotch in my hand when I say goodbye!” is what she used to tell me. There was no Scotch, but a cup of coffee. Her heart failed in the morning, while she was drinking her first cup of the day. The first of many, that’s for sure. She loved her coffee, and her Scotch, sometimes both at the same time. She was a good woman, a strong woman, a badass who wasn’t afraid of anyone or anything, not even death.
She was my weak spot, the only person I cared about. After her death, I had no one to be scared for, to worry about, no one to take care of. No weakness. I was as free as a man can be, but I never enjoyed that kind of freedom.
Maybe that’s why I took Meadow with me. Meadow and her troubles. Meadow and her sad eyes, that beautiful body and her melancholic face that is able to display so much more than sorrow in such a mesmerizing way.
I might be addicted to her already. Too attached.
“You know he also killed others?” Joseph asks, interrupting my stream of thoughts.
I cast him a quizzical look. “What?”
He scans our immediate surroundings before he leans in closer to me, now whispering.
“The guy we offed,” he murmurs. “They are looking for him out of state.”
“For what?” I ask.
“Same as here, rape and possibly murder,” Joseph replies. “He might have killed at least two in Pennsylvania before we got him.”
“Pennsylvania?” I ask. “When? Old stories?”
Joseph shakes his head. “Not at all. This year. I mean, not sure if it’s really him, but from the description I’ve heard… too damn close. Sa
me strategy, too. Same kind of victim.”
“Drunk college girls?” I ask.
Joseph nods. “That’s the kind. He was a lazy coward.”
“Fucking asshole,” I hiss. I hate to be even reminded of his face. This guy really rubbed me the wrong way. A rapist and murderer who went after vulnerable girls when they were least expecting it. There are no words to express the disgust I feel towards men like him.
“Let’s hope we got him,” Joseph adds. “I would hate to think that there’s another motherfucker like him still running around out there.”
“There is,” I whisper, sounding bitter. “There always is. No matter how many we get rid of, there’s always a new one showing up. If not here, it’s in fucking Pennsylvania or God knows where.”
Joseph sighs, rolling his eyes at me. “Oh, you again with that depressing talk! Shut the hell up, will ya’? Don’t matter if we only get rid of a tiny portion of them. Every single one of them is an insult to humanity.”
He has a point there. But I still can’t fight the damn hopelessness. Yes, we got rid of this one, and the ones before him. Every time we made one of them disappear, the next one practically showed up on our doorstep. They’re easy to spot and there’s too damn many of them. I hate knowing that I can’t make all of them disappear. Sure, the police take care of the ones who are caught the proper way, and if we’re lucky the guy ends up in prison for a very long time. If he’s only been raping but not killing — yet — he’s out within years, maybe even months. And then they do the same thing all over again.
It sucks. It fucking sucks, and I hate having this shit happening in my neighborhood.
I don’t even want to think about something like this happening to Meadow. She needs my protection, and I trust that she’ll know what to do with it. She’s a sweet little lamb.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Meadow
I wait for a few minutes after Kade leaves the apartment. Just to make sure. He’s never returned once he walked out the door, but you never know. If today was that one exception to the rule, I sure as hell don’t want him finding me snooping around in the one room he keeps locked up.
He said this room was private. It could be his old bedroom, for all I know. If he used to live here when he was a little boy, it would only make sense that this room was his.
I know I shouldn’t be snooping around, and I feel bad about it, but something tells me that there’s more to that room. Something tells me that this is not just the room an adolescent boy left behind after he moved out.
I keep myself busy with washing the dishes and cleaning the kitchen. It helps to make the time pass until I can make sure that he’s not going to return until later. If he sticks to his usual behavior, I won’t see him again until tomorrow. He always shows up some time in the middle of the day, usually in the afternoon. We fuck, we eat, we talk a little, and then he disappears and doesn’t come back until the next day. It’s the weirdest life I’m living right now. A life that only consists of sleep, food, sex and occasionally reading. I’ve been scanning through the many books in this place, mainly to distract myself and pass time. It stops me from thinking about my situation too much and facing reality.
I’m hiding. While I failed to end my life, it turns out that I’m quite good at hiding from it. Everything is on pause. My life is defined by the complete dependence on this man. He is my everything. Literally.
And I’m about to betray his trust.
I should feel worse about it than I do, but when I finally make my way over to the door, turning and squeezing the key in my hand, my heart is not pounding because I have a bad conscience, but because I’m scared. I’m still scared about him coming back too early and catching me in the act. I’m also scared about what I might find when I open that door.
What am I hoping to find?
I stop in front of the door and try the key on the lock. Until now, I couldn’t even be sure that it’ll work, but a faint click tells me that it does. I take a deep breath before I dare to turn the key and open the door.
Darkness greets me as I slowly push the door open and take my first peek inside. It’s not quite dark outside yet, so I haven’t turned on the other lights in the apartment. The curtains are closed in this room, so even the faint remains of daylight don’t enter this little dungeon.
Dungeon appears to be the proper word for what appears in front of me. I flick on the light switch to my right inside the door. The room is about the same size as the other bedroom, and just as I suspected, it looks like it belonged to a teenage boy. Furniture is limited to a small single bed right positioned against the wall opposite the door, a dark wooden dresser, one bookshelf in a similar color, and a desk and chair situated right beneath the only window at the far end of the room.
I step inside the room, leaving the door wide open so I can hear the lock on the apartment door in case Kade decides to show up unexpectedly. At first glance, there doesn’t seem to be anything unusual about the room. The small bookshelf is filled with comic books, school books, almost no fiction books unlike those in the living room and the other bedroom, and a few items such as pens, collectibles, and random things kids collect. There are no posters or pictures on the wall, but I can tell that there used to be a few, because the wallpaper shows signs of removed tape and outlines indicating something once existed on the walls. The bed is made up in dark blue sheets, but nothing indicates that someone has slept in it recently. The bed frame is covered with a thick layer of dust, as are the dresser and the bookshelf.
But the desk is not. The small desk beneath the window and the office chair in front of it both seem like they have been used recently. The surface is covered with notebooks, paper and pens instead of dust. I step closer and examine the notes on the table. The handwriting is very hard to decipher. I pick up one of the pieces of paper and hold it up close to my face to read it. At first it looks like a grocery list with bullet points, but it’s not. It appears to be some kind of schedule, with times written down in the far column and then notes on what to do during that specific time spelled out right next to it.
The date that’s written in the upper right corner of the note is the date Kade and I met. The day that was supposed to be the last day of my life.
I freeze when I see the number because it brings back all the memories that are attached to that day, that decision. Everything that lead up to that point is expressed in those simple numbers.
Was this his schedule? All the things he had planned for that day instead of finding me?
I try to decipher the notes, but find it close to impossible. However, there’s one word that does look familiar. The name of the canyon and the bridge where he found me. The time that’s written next to it is the approximate time we met. I never asked him why he was driving by that deserted bridge at that particular time of the day. I had chosen it because I knew that hardly anyone ever went there at that time, so I could be sure not to be seen. From the looks of it, he had done the exact same thing.
He didn’t just drive by or cross the bridge on his trip somewhere else. It had been his destination. There’s just one word written next to the time at which he intended to reach the bridge. “Dump,” it says.
“Dump?”
My voice sounds weirdly foreign in the silence surrounding me. He wanted to dump something down into the canyon?
I search my memory, but there’s no image of him holding anything when he was walking up to me, nor do I remember seeing anything inside the car. Whatever he wanted to get rid of that day, he didn’t do it while I was around. What on earth could be worth driving so far out of town just to dump it down into a desolate canyon? Was it some kind of toxic waste? Something illegal?
My heart starts racing. I knew there was something weird about him, scary even. What kind of business is he involved in? Drugs maybe?
I look at the rest of the notes for the day, but they confuse me even more. The next word is “Burn” and then there’s what appears to be a phone number. Mos
t of the scribblings above have been crossed out so that it’s impossible to read them. And whatever he had planned after “dump” and “burn” did not have to be written down.
I put the note back on the table, trying to position it just the way I found it. I scan the rest of the papers and notes on the desk, but decide not to touch any of it. Instead, I find three little drawers along the left side of the desk. There’s a keyhole on the first one, but it’s not locked. My heart stops when I see what’s inside.
It’s a gun. I’ve never touched a real gun before and the sight alone causes me to freeze instantly. My family never owned a gun, which is probably for the best considering my parents’ drinking habits. Of course, having a gun does not make him a criminal, but it still scares the shit out of me. Don’t people say that owning a firearm makes them feel safer? How come it does the exact opposite for me?
I close the drawer as quickly as I opened it. Why does he have a gun in here? And why in this room, the one that is always locked? Does he just keep it locked because of me? If he is hiding anything truly bad in here, he’s not really doing a good job. A simple door lock wouldn’t keep the police out if they busted in to investigate him.
Even though my rational mind is telling me to leave this room, I keep snooping and open the next drawer. I still don’t know what I’m looking for, but with every stone I turn, I have more questions. The second drawer reveals a folder that looks like the files they have in a doctor’s office. However, it’s anything but a health record. It’s filled with blurred black and white pictures that must have been taken from a far-off distance. The quality is quite poor, and some of them are partly covered by something blocking the subject, leaves of a tree or bushes mostly, but I can tell that they are all pictures of the same man. At first, I almost mistake him for Kade because he’s the same type: dark, rather tall and strong-looking. But the man in the pictures has less hair and is not as handsome as Kade. It doesn’t seem like he’s aware that someone is taking his picture. I flip through them, cold shivers wandering down my spine as I realize that these are the kind of photos a stalker would take of his victim.