by John Inman
A smile came across my puss. Totally unbidden. Totally unexpected. “Yes, I know the exact expression you mean.”
Mom harrumphed. “I thought you might.”
“Where did you have lunch?” I asked.
I could picture her flapping my question away like a gnat. “Oh, who gives a shit? I think he’s in love with you. That’s what I think. What do you say about that?”
“I say you’re smoking that whacky t’baccy again.”
“Oh pooh. You don’t know anything.” I heard more sucking sounds, heralding another massive intake of carcinogens. If I had been in the same room with her, I’d have opened a window by now and dragged out the Glade.
“He didn’t tell you about our lunch date, Larry?”
“He told me you were having one, but then he didn’t mention it again.”
“You didn’t ask?”
“Well, yeah, I did. But Kenny seemed to think the time he spent with you was somehow sacrosanct and none of my business.”
“What a lovely boy.”
“Shut up, Mother.”
“So how do you feel about him?” she asked, infuriatingly unperturbed.
“You do realize I’m almost thirty, right?”
“So? What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?”
“Stupid expression,” I groused. Then my voice softened without my volition. “I like him, if you must know. I like him a lot.”
“It’s not exactly ‘like’ that I hear in that sentence, dear.”
I felt myself blushing. “Oh please. This matchmaker routine doesn’t fit you.”
“I’m smart enough to matchmake when I see a perfect couple waiting to be shoved together.”
“If we belong together, don’t you think we can figure that out for ourselves?”
“Kenny, maybe,” she said. “But not you. You’re not bright enough. You hang around computers too much. No human interaction, that’s your problem.”
Between banging Kenny every five minutes and recently suffocating a pedophile in his bed, I thought I had experienced a lot of human interaction lately. Of course, I couldn’t tell her that.
“Listen, Mom. Let Kenny and me handle our own love affair.”
“So you admit you do love him.”
I wondered how far I could throw the phone. Or my mother. “We’ve been together less than a month, Kenny and I.”
“Sometimes that’s all it takes. Your father and I were together only three weeks when we married.”
“Yes, and the marriage only lasted two.”
“Well, if you want to nitpick. Let’s just say your father wasn’t ready for commitment, or at least he wasn’t ready for commitment with me.”
“Gee, imagine that,” I said.
“Thank you, Dr. Phil,” my mother snapped. “Let me just say one thing, Larry. If you hurt that boy, I’ll never forgive you.”
If I hurt him, I’ll never forgive myself. But I couldn’t really say that either. “Don’t worry,” I said instead. “It’s my heart I’m worried about. Not his.”
I heard the repeated banging of plastic against wood, and my eardrum quivered from the impact. She was pounding the phone on a tabletop. The soul of restraint as always. “I knew it!” my mother cried. “You are in love with the boy. You are!”
I lightly switched off my cell phone and laid it in my lap. I stared at it for the longest time. Then I picked it up and dialed her back. She answered right away.
“I forgot to say goodbye,” I said. “Goodbye, Mom.”
My mother’s voice was peaches and cream, some sort of whipped-cream soufflé, and maybe a dash of cotton candy. “Goodbye, honey bunny,” she cooed. And this time she hung up on me. I could imagine her grinning when she did it.
God, my mother was a pain.
Another week slipped by, and it was a terrific week because I shared each night with Kenny. I didn’t tell him about the infuriating phone call from my mother, nor did it escape my notice that he was a little flummoxed that I had so drastically altered my daily routine, no longer spending every waking hour dispensing karma on evildoers but staying closer to home instead. Not that Kenny ever mentioned it, of course. Still, I got the distinct impression he would happily ride this new relationship train as long as he could, not daring to question my motives for being so dotingly adhesive.
I found myself smiling a lot that week, seeing how my new schedule pleased Kenny so. Still, I knew there were commitments out there waiting to be honored, and sooner or later, whether it displeased Kenny or not, I would have to honor them.
It wasn’t for reasons of solidarity with Kenny that I had stepped away from close surveillance on John Allan Davis. Not by a long shot. It was simply that I still got a chill when I thought of Davis eyeballing me from his apartment window. I would resume surveillance soon. Tomorrow, in fact, if my plans panned out. But I would do it in a rental car, since clearly the familiar sight of my beloved Kia was becoming somewhat of a liability to the business at hand.
As if worrying about Davis wasn’t enough, I still had my conversation with Kenny to think about. I’m referring to the conversation we shared after making love that night, back when Kenny listed all the things we would never be able to do together because he was blind. It was also the night I came dangerously close to blurting out things I wasn’t sure I was ready to say.
I ran everything we talked about through my head countless times as the days clicked by. It seemed to be on an endless loop, that conversation, spinning forever inside my brain like a little toy train on a little round track. I remembered every word we uttered. Every facial expression Kenny made. Every touch we shared. I couldn’t get away from the memory of it. I was perfectly aware how close I’d come to saying words that can’t be easily taken back. Words exploring a growing closeness. Words from the heart. Words that might risk everything and, at the same time, promise even more. And the funny thing was, now I sort of regretted not saying them. I knew that it wasn’t the fear of Kenny’s possible refusal that held me back that night. It was something else entirely.
In truth, what held me back was my job. And Kenny’s lack of enthusiasm for it. The way it frightened him. And in frightening him, the way it also began to scare the hell out of me. Before, if things went south, I had only myself to lose. Now I had more than me. Now I had that enormous two-letter word that people spend their lives protecting. Us. Kenny and me. That was my new us.
It wasn’t Davis’s cold, beady eyes staring at me through those ratty curtains that stopped me in my tracks. It was the spark of worried fear in Kenny’s eyes every time I left for work that did it.
Maybe the fact that Davis had spotted me was only an excuse. I had been fingered before on stakeouts and never backed off because of it.
Good lord, had I lost my nerve? Could it be that the time had finally come for me to go out and find a normal job? Just bite the bullet and become like everybody else. Draw a regular paycheck. Slog through an endless string of workdays, each and every one exactly like the one before. Maybe I should apply at some bug company or other, don little white coveralls with my name embroidered on a patch on the chest, strap a tank of bug killer to my back, and go into an on-the-job training program to become an honest-to-God exterminator. I could kill roaches for a living instead of murderers. Slay ants instead of pedophiles. Of course, slaughtering insects clearly wouldn’t pay as well as wreaking revenge on the scum of the earth. But on a brighter note, I wouldn’t be risking a stretch on death row by doing it.
Or more to the point, risk losing Kenny.
These were the thoughts rampaging through my head on the day that I finally decided to push it all away and get back to work. My work. In the end, it was neither my concerns with Davis nor with Kenny that got me back on track. It was something more basic than that.
It was the snapshot of little Tommy, with that baseball bat draped over his shoulder. It was the empty eyes of his mother sitting there in the firelight of her too-quiet house, holding his
photograph in her hand. It was the father looking so lost, so helpless. It was the framed square of netting drawing dust on the front porch. The netting that no longer snagged errant baseballs because there was no one in the house to hit the balls anymore.
It was the echo of a child’s laughter that I seemed to almost, but never quite, hear—that’s what pushed me back to work.
That and John Allan Davis, sitting in the shade in his filthy shorts with his grungy toenails, guzzling beer, stealing cars, driving without a license, threatening other innocent lives. Endangering other innocent children. And not showing a single dab of remorse for the young life he had already taken. That’s what drove me back to work.
So the next morning, I was once again on the job. I wasn’t exactly proud of myself for it. But still, I was determined again. I had a new sense of purpose, a fresh spring in my step. I was ready once more to do what I knew best how to do. Wield my karma stick. Take out another scumbag. Give a family the peace of mind that only comes in knowing that your son’s death has been avenged.
At Alamo, I rented a pickup that was ratty looking enough to maybe pass for not being a rental, if one didn’t look too closely at the license plate. I parked around the corner from the apartment building this time, closer to the garage where Davis stashed the car he wasn’t supposed to drive. Assuming it was still there. I had been a no-show for almost two weeks. Anything might have happened.
I glanced at my watch. It was past noon. If previous experience meant anything, Davis would be dragging his lazy ass out of bed soon, since during all the days of my previous surveillance, I had never once seen him show himself during the morning hours. With the sun high in the sky, he would come slouching down the front steps and take off up the street to the corner market three blocks away. There he would buy his usual allotment of junk food and beer. Since I had timed him on previous trips, I knew I would have at least fifteen minutes to check out the apartment and learn the lay of the land, so to speak, before he returned.
When I heard the familiar screech of rusty hinges on his front door, I ducked down in the seat and peered through the steering wheel like some little old lady out tooling around in her ’69 Bonneville. It was Davis, all right. He was wearing his usual filthy shorts, had crusty looking flip-flops on his feet, and since he would be out in public, he had topped off his outfit with a T-shirt that was so wrinkled it looked like it had been chewed on by a Komodo dragon.
I ducked lower as he strolled past my rental truck on the opposite side of the street. He never once glanced my way. I continued watching until he turned the next corner and disappeared from sight.
Two seconds later, I was out of the truck and scooting across his yard, taking advantage of a narrow walkway between the garage and the side of the apartment building. I wasted maybe ten seconds peering through the dusty garage window but couldn’t see much. I figured I would save that for another day and, taking three steps at a time, climbed the rickety wooden steps to Davis’s back porch.
From that vantage point, I could look down and see his favorite chair off to the side of the yard. The ground around it was still littered with empty beer bottles from previous drunken afternoons. Apparently the guy never picked up anything.
I snagged my favorite lockpick from a trouser pocket, inserted it in the old Yale deadbolt that secured Davis’s back door, and in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, as they say, I was safely inside. I pulled the door closed behind me and took a look around.
The first thing to hit me was the smell. My nose led me to a wastebasket overflowing with garbage under the kitchen sink. When I opened the little door, roaches scattered like looters. Yikes. No Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval here.
I peeked through the kitchen doorway into the rest of the apartment. It was your typical four-room layout. Kitchen, living room, bedroom, bath. The carpet was threadbare in places, not one picture on any of the walls hung straight, and the occupant had a collection of potato chip bags and Hostess Twinkie wrappers scattered around the sofa in front of an expensive smart TV that was as big as a drive-in theater screen. I was halfway tempted to look around for a pole sticking up out of the floor with a pair of speakers hanging on it.
In the bedroom, his bed was unmade, the sheets brown. Not that they came out of the store brown. No, they came out of the store yellow. It was only that now they were brown. Jesus, this guy was a pig.
I checked my watch. Six minutes to go.
Back in the living room, I spotted a handwritten note resting on a Formica dining room table that Davis must have gleaned from a thrift store somewhere. The note read simply I See You. I prayed to Christ the note wasn’t meant for me but suspected it was.
On the table beside the note I spied a small hand mirror with the residue of some white powder lined up across it. A battered Vons card lay beside it. Clearly the chopping tool. I dragged a fingertip across the powder and carried it to my tongue. Crystal meth, just as I thought. So not only was Davis a drunk, he was also a tweaker.
I whirled around, feeling eyes on the back of my head. There was nothing there but shadows and stink. I let a sigh dribble out.
After wiping my tongue on my shirt sleeve, I pulled my cell phone from my pocket and quickly snapped photos of every room in the apartment from every angle. If I had to sneak in here in the middle of the night in total darkness to do my dastardly work, it would be nice to have the layout memorized before I came.
Mission accomplished, I made a quick scan through the living room window, peering out between the same faded curtains I had seen Davis peering through when he spotted me. And just as Davis spotted me, I also spotted him. He was shambling up the sidewalk, still a block away but moving quickly enough that I’d have to kick it into high gear to get the hell out before he showed up.
I relocked his back door behind me, descended the stairs, and waited in the shadow of the garage until I saw Davis toddle past. His arms were loaded with beer and grocery bags. This time when he walked by, he eyed my rented pickup across the street, but it was a casual glance, so I didn’t think much about it.
When he was out of sight, heading for the front steps, I ducked around to the back and took off down the alley at the rear of the property. I hiked to the end of the block, made a right turn, and headed back toward the street where I’d parked.
Rather than return to the truck, I walked to a small brick house with a fence across the front of it that was buried in oleander bushes. The gate was a flimsy wooden thing, so I carefully wrangled it open and stepped inside. From there I strolled up the walk to the front door like I owned the place.
My knock was answered quickly. Too quickly. It was almost as if the old lady who opened the door, had been waiting inside, expecting me all along.
I nodded a friendly greeting. “Sorry to bother you. Wonder if I might speak to Jim. This is the Cotton residence, right?”
The old lady was still in her bathrobe. Her skin was pallid and loose, her hair uncombed. She looked like she’d been ill. She studied me with weary blue eyes that seemed to catch the light like pond water. Placid, unreflective, without a sparkle of life at all.
“You’re him, aren’t you?” she asked. She moved slowly, as if underwater. Even her changing facial expressions ticked past as if in slow motion. Her old hands worried the belt on her bathrobe while she spoke, wringing it so hard with sweaty hands that deep wrinkles, like scars, were forming in the fabric.
I blinked. “I’m who, ma’am? Who is it you think I am?”
She didn’t answer, but simply stood there in the doorway staring at me.
I tried again. “Ma’am, I’d like to see Jim Cotton if I could. Is he home? Do you know where he might be?”
A soft mew came from below, and she bent to pick up a small black cat. She hugged it to her breast as she turned back to me.
“Oh yes,” she said. “I know where he might be. He’s at the city morgue downtown. You know where that is?”
Oh shit. I swallowed hard. “Yes, ma’am. I kn
ow where it is.”
“The police are holding his body there and won’t release it to the funeral home. In other words, they won’t let me bury my own husband. Apparently that’s what they do when a person is murdered. Did you know that?”
“N-no. Not exactly. Well, sometimes. So are you telling me Jim was… killed?”
She nodded. It was rather succinct and businesslike, considering the circumstances. “He died five days ago now. He was mugged, or so they said.” She tilted her head toward the street. “They found him right out there on the sidewalk. His wallet was gone, and he was dead. His skull was cracked open like a watermelon.” That memory seemed to shock her. Her expression grew even sadder. I thought I understood now why her eyes looked the way they did, so pale and empty and colorless. They were cried out. It was as simple as that. They were just plain cried out, with no more tears left to shed.
She lowered her chin to press her mouth to the forehead of her little black cat, but those wounded blue eyes never once left my face.
“You and I both know he wasn’t mugged, don’t we?”
I thought of Jim Cotton’s feisty smile, his penchant for horehound candy. Then I thought of the outrage we had shared. The outrage that a man could kill a nine-year-old boy and just walk away without being held accountable at all. We shared that, Jim Cotton and I. But I wondered if his wife would understand it at all.
I cleared a ball of emotion from my throat. “You think Davis did it?” I asked.
Her eyes narrowed even more. “Don’t knock on my door again, sir. My husband told me about you. He told me what you came here to do. Does that worry you?”
“Maybe a little,” I said, wary, trying to read her intentions. Trying to understand exactly what it was she was trying to convey.
“Good,” she said. “I like you worried. I like you scared like I’m scared.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, for lack of a better response. “I didn’t intend for Jim to get caught up in this, you know. I never wanted him to be—”
She waved me to silence. “You listen to me. Like I said, I know why you’re here. Jim knew too, and he understood it, even if I didn’t. But now, I suppose I understand it a little better. Suddenly we’re all on the same page, I guess. I want what you want now. I want what Jim wanted too.”