by B. E. Scully
Shirdon looked back up at the porch where the young man had been. “What’s his name?”
Mr. Hayes rubbed his hands together, eager to assign any possible blame to anyone other than himself. “Let me think a minute…it’s right on the tip of my brain, just a minute, just a minute… Got it! Ross Delvin! That apartment is rented out to a young man named Ross Delvin. His girlfriend used to live there with him—Blair or Blythe or something like that. Something with a ‘B.’ But she moved out a while ago. As far as I know it’s just Ross Delvin and his computer up there now.”
PART II
1
Ross crawled across the living room floor and down the entryway as slowly and quietly as he could manage. He already knew why that idiot apartment manager was banging on his door, acting like he “just had a few questions for him.” It was those two cops who really had the questions. Because that woman cop had seen him.
When he finally made it, he crouched down and pressed his ear against the door. More than anything else in the world, he wanted to stand up and look through the peephole. But it wasn’t worth the risk. All he really needed was to hear what they were saying. About him.
The manager’s high, reedy voice came to him first. “I don’t think he’s home.”
A woman spoke next—the cop who had seen him. “I just saw him up here, so if he’s not home, he must have bolted pretty fast.”
“Well, there is a back door and the stairwell exit, so—”
A gruff male voice cut him off—the other cop. “Here, let me try.”
BAM-BAM-BAM!
The door rattled against the side of Ross’s head and he caught himself just in time to keep from crying out, though not quick enough to stop the stream of urine now darkening the left leg of his jeans. Soiling himself twice in two days—Ross was on a real body fluid roll lately. The Eye must really be loving that one.
“If you like, I can open it up for you. Technically we’re supposed to give notice first, but if there’s a cause for concern or a safety issue, then that’s different. And since this is a police matter and all…”
The silence on the other side of the door stretched out. Ross fought down a hot wave of nausea. No more body fluids today, thank you. If the cops came in now, it would be all over. He could never get it together enough to come off as anything but deranged. Not now. Not with everything happening with Brooke. Or not happening, as the case may be.
The bitch had unfriended him on Facebook! He still couldn’t believe it. She was just lucky that the Eye had targeted that idiot Liza Looney or Loopy or whatever the hell her name was. Because if Brooke would have been standing in front of him in that moment—
The woman cop’s voice broke into his thoughts. “No. We can come back and talk to Mr. Delvin some other time. If we need to.”
Suddenly Ross knew she was a part of the script. She knew he was crouched on the other side of the door, listening. She knew he could hear them. The Eye—they were all a part of the Eye’s bigger plan.
Lately Ross had taken to searching for videos of himself. He hadn’t found any yet, but he was sure that sooner or later the Eye would start leaking promo content. He knew that whenever he clicked a link, someone tracked it. He’d started searching for video equipment everywhere. Yesterday he’d taken apart the fire alarm in the hallway, looking for cameras.
Unlike the cameras, the people in the hallway right now were plain as day. When their voices finally faded away, Ross stayed in his crouch a while longer. Then he stood up, silent as the grave, and peered through the peephole. He fully expected to see the woman cop’s eye staring back at him from the other side, but it was just the empty hallway.
A violent fit of shaking took hold of Ross and wouldn’t let go. He shambled back into the living room and curled up on the floor, careful to avoid the reeking spot where he’d voided himself the day before. He realized he was hungry—starving, in fact—and he took out his phone and ordered a pizza from the place down the street. Their crust tasted like cardboard and the cheese had the texture of laundry detergent, but it was cheap. He tried to remember the last time he’d eaten and couldn’t. Before Brooke’s betrayal, anyway. Before Liza Looney.
Liza Looney, who is now dead. Liza Looney, who YOU killed…
No!
Ross hadn’t been the one to kill her, not really. It had been the Eye. The Eye, who saw everything, knew everything, also knew that Liza Looney and her goddamn garbage had been the last straw.
He’d just finished cleaning the shit off himself when he’d gone to check Brooke’s timeline. And couldn’t. Unlike him and Tyler, Brooke kept her account set to “private.”
“Why would I want complete strangers to know my business?” she always said. “For me, it’s friends and family only.”
Which meant that Ross was no longer her friend. And just like that, nothing seemed worth it anymore—not Brooke, not the money, not himself. Not even the Eye. And then Liza Looney had come home.
He heard her bound across the floor of her apartment just like always when she got home from whatever shitty job forced her to live in a dump like this. Then she would mess around in the kitchen making something to eat. Then she would bound out onto the sixteen-by-seven-foot gangway the building owners called a balcony, lean over just far enough, and hurl her fucking trash eight stories down into the dumpster.
If her aim was good, the trash would hit its target. If not, it would land right in the middle of the walkway for Ross to step in the next morning when he took his trash out the proper way. Sometimes, if the wind was right, some of it would blow back onto his porch.
Still curled into a ball on the living room floor, Ross watched through the glass door as a gust of wind caught a balled-up coffee filter, tore it open, and sheeted his porch with wet, stinking grains.
It wasn’t as if he hadn’t asked her. Not directly, of course. The first and last time he’d tried to talk to her, at the mailbox when she’d first moved in, she’d given him a look like she’d just stepped in dog shit. So he knew better than to even waste his time on the garbage. The apartment manager couldn’t even keep people from letting their stupid dogs shit all over the walkways let alone deal with trash throwers. So Ross had resorted to posting a letter in the lobby, politely asking all residents to refrain from throwing trash from their windows. The coffee grains now covering his porch were a testament to how well that had gone over.
Ross probably would have just cleaned up the mess and swallowed it down along with the rest of his shit-milkshake life if the Eye hadn’t come through loud and clear.
It would serve Looney Tunes Liza just right if that balcony would give way some day. Screws come loose; railings collapse all the time.
The Eye had never told him to hurt anyone before. Not like this. At first he didn’t think he could do it; even fame and money weren’t worth hurting someone. But then he thought about Brooke. She hadn’t thought twice about hurting him. Why was he always the one worrying about hurting everyone else and no one ever gave two good goddamns about hurting him? And was it really too much for a guy to want clean walkways and a porch that didn’t look as if Godzilla took a shit on it every afternoon?
He’d waited until the dead time of early morning. Balancing on his own porch railing, it was easy to grab hold of the grillwork of Liza’s railing and pull himself up. Then all it took was a little handiwork with a screwdriver and lowering himself back down to his own porch. He’d worn rubber gloves and a face mask just in case. The Eye was filming everything, of course. Someday the whole thing would go public. But he would worry about that later. When he was rich and famous.
Back in the safety of his apartment, he’d fallen straight to sleep on the couch. He might have missed the whole thing if not for Liza Looney and those damn bounding elephant feet of hers.
Shaking himself awake, Ross waited. The Eye waited with him, watching, always watching. He heard the glass door slide open above him. He stood up and slipped out onto his porch. Now that it was real,
Ross panicked. He almost leaned over and shouted up at her to stop, to go back inside until maintenance could have a look at that loose railing. But it was too late now. The Eye wanted its show.
He watched Liza Looney lean over the railing. In her hand was a plastic bag tied off at the top—probably filled with cat turds or bloody goddamn tampons or something gross like that. He watched the railing give way, the same one he’d loosened the night before. Liza Looney cried out. For one terrible moment she stood suspended like a magician performing a trick, her arms pinwheeling through empty air. Then the magic gave way to gravity, and Liza Looney plummeted screaming to the concrete walkway below.
Ross wondered if she’d landed on a pile of dog shit. He thought about dialing 911 and then thought better of it. He had his phone anyway, though, because Ross Delvin had not only been watching the whole drama unfold, he’d been filming it.
His contract stated that he wasn’t allowed to upload any of his own film or post any blogs as Mad Dog. But if Ross Delvin had learned one thing since graduating college, it was to never trust anyone. Not even your so-called friends. So he made sure to write down every instruction, every task the Eye gave him, and every successful completion. He recorded every date, every detail. And whenever he could, he backed up the Eye with his own films. Of course he couldn’t capture everything like the Eye did—it was everywhere, all the time. But if the Eye decided to screw him in the end, he had all of his own ammunition locked, stocked, and ready to go. He had an entire file on his computer called “Mad Dog’s Revenge,” just in case. What did Tyler used to tell him back in the good old days? “Always have a backup plan; always stay one step ahead.” Right. Ross was a thousand fucking steps ahead.
But then that woman cop had seen him.
So what?
That wasn’t the Eye talking this time; it was Mad Dog. Ross had gradually come to recognize the voice—cocky, confident. A man of the world who knows it and owns it. In other words, nothing like his own whining, plaintive voice, the one that signaled defeat before the battle had even begun. Mad Dog would take that voice and shove it right back down Ross’s throat—
The banging on the door caused Ross to jump up and then instinctively curl back into a crouch. The cops had come back! They had found some evidence, some witness—they knew it was him! Ross looked wildly around the room—would they be able to see the Eye? Would they know that they weren’t really talking to Ross Delvin but a mean son-of-a-bitch called Mad Dog? He forced himself to stand up and walk to the door. He peered through the peephole and started laughing so hard he had to lean over to steady himself. Then he opened the door to a slouchy kid radiating boredom like a force field.
The kid shoved a greasy pizza box at Ross without a customer service skill in sight. “Ten bucks.”
“I ordered this pizza like thirty minutes ago.”
The kid shrugged and let out a sigh that said Ross was the biggest waste of time this pimply faced sandbag had ever encountered in his entire non-life. “Traffic.”
“Bullshit! Your store’s right down the street. Knock half the price off the pizza and we’ll call it even.”
“We don’t guarantee a delivery time. But I guess I could give you a coupon for a discount on your next order.”
“So you’re telling me I have to spend more money at your lousy restaurant to make up for the lousy service I got the first time?”
The kid threw an eye-roll into the sigh-shrug routine. “You don’t have to do anything. Do you want the coupon or not?”
“How about if I call your manager and ask him if thirty minutes is your standard delivery time?”
“Go ahead and call. She probably cares about as much as I do about a lousy ten-buck pizza.”
The kid pushed the pizza box at him and held his hand out for the money. It was one push too many. Before Ross even knew what he was doing, he grabbed a fistful of the kid’s hair and banged his head off the side of the door frame hard enough to cause the picture hanging in the entryway to tilt sideways in puzzled consideration of what it had just witnessed.
The kid slumped to the floor. A thin trickle of blood oozed from his ear. The pizza box fell from his hands and a greasy wedge of double-cheese with pepperoni peered uncertainly out of the cracked open lid.
If Ross called for help, he could save the kid’s life. He might even get away with misdemeanor assault charges. After all, the kid had provoked him. But Ross didn’t call for help. Instead he looked up and down the empty hallway, then dragged the kid’s twitching body into the apartment where he pummeled the rest of his head in with the utility flashlight he kept by the door in case of emergencies.
He hoped the Eye had gotten the whole thing. Ross filmed the kid from a couple of good angles just for good measure, then sat down at his keyboard without even wiping the blood from his hands. He wrote quickly without any consideration of sentence structure or punctuation. He had to get it just right.
The crack of bone reverberated through Mad Dog like a signal lighting up some secret source of power. Before, the signal was always too weak to come in clearly. But when Mad Dog battered the life out of the kid, it was as if all the force and energy flowed out of that extinguishing soul and straight into his. Every asshole who’d cut him off in traffic, every burned piece of toast, every flatulent-assed morning, every flab-roll pile-up of failures and kick-in-the-balls demolitions of pride—all of it vanished. Every lucky bastard who’d won the prize, gotten the girl, made it to the top of the heap when he knew goddamn well it was too late now to even hope for the middle—all of it vanished. When the signal lit up, he was the lucky one, the strong one, the powerful one. In that moment it was possible to believe he just might beat this rigged game—in that moment he wasn’t so much killing one human being as annihilating the entire rotten inhuman race.
Without rereading what he’d written, Ross/Mad Dog Delvin hit “save” and smiled his first genuine smile in a long, long time.
2
Detective Cassie Shirdon stared at the face on her computer screen. The young man in the driver’s license photo had a mop of sandy blond hair and a hopeful smile on his round, eager face. But his eyes had a permanently downward cast, as if the upper half of his face was in pessimistic opposition to the more optimistic lower half. The kid had the look of someone who knew he was doomed right from the start but wasn’t quite ready to give in yet. Only Detective Shirdon wondered if Ross Delvin had finally given in. The only question was, to what?
She sighed and reread the typewritten, single-spaced note the apartment manager had given her, the one that had been “anonymously” pinned to the community bulletin board:
Residents are reminded that throwing rubbish and food items out of windows is unhygienic, disrespectful of fellow neighbors, and punishable by fines according to city litter ordinance 5783.
Terse, maybe a little on the haughty side. But nothing hostile or threatening. Nothing to indicate it had been written by someone angry enough to get violent about the situation—to, say, unscrew a balcony railing and kill someone.
At the bottom of the note, a few of the building’s other residents had added their own two cents. The first comment was “Thank you!!” underlined three times; beneath that came, “Find something better to complain about, you stupid faggot maggot.” The last comment said, “If you’re going to bitch, at least have the BALLS to sign your name!!!” Shirdon noticed that the commenter, however, had failed to sign his or her own name. Welcome to the Internet generation, where everyone’s angry and everyone’s anonymous.
Maybe her partner Martinez was right—maybe she was reading too much into this Liza Loney case. If it even was a case. Because the death had occurred under unusual circumstances, an autopsy was being done, but Shirdon didn’t expect much. The young woman’s death would no doubt be ruled accidental, one of those tragic flukes of bad luck, and that would be that. But how did a porch railing just come unscrewed all by itself? Something didn’t feel right about the whole thing. And again an
d again that feeling came back to the figure lurking on the porch below Liza Loney’s apartment—the same sad-faced figure now staring back at her from the computer screen.
A beefy hand delivered a coffee cup to Shirdon’s desk, followed by the square-jawed, bulldog face of its owner. Martinez always looked tired these days, but despite the puffy lids and half-moon shadows framing them, those eyes saw everything, and questioned even more.
In looks, the two partners formed almost comic opposites. Where Martinez was dark and solid as a block of concrete, Shirdon was pale and slight. Even though she was of average height, Martinez could inspect the top of her head without even stretching. That is, if he could see through her shock of red hair, which always reminded him of a curly little animal trying to break loose from her scalp. Some wiseass had once said that when the two of them walked next to each other, it was like a reverse shadow. But despite the difference in looks, they were in perfect synch in all the ways that counted.
Martinez took a gulp of his own coffee and squinted at his partner’s computer screen. “Are you still hung up on that Loney case?”
Shirdon pushed back in her chair and stared out the row of windows lining the wall behind her desk. Construction was about halfway finished on the new shopping plaza at the end of the block. An upscale boutique had driven out her and Martinez’s favorite greasy spoon years ago. The cup of coffee in her hand probably cost more than their entire lunch tab had back in those days. And now kids like Ross Delvin didn’t even have to leave their apartments anymore. They lived inside their computers. Or did their computers live inside of them?
She shook her head and took a sip of the steaming coffee. Thoughts like that weren’t going to get her any closer to figuring out this case. And yet something about this kid just didn’t feel right. “Hey, Martinez, your oldest daughter is, what, fifteen now?”