Love Thy Neighbor

by Mark Gilleo

  “You fit better than Syed did,” Ariana said.

  “Well, he got to ride by himself.”

  “We are out of time. I can’t take you one-by-one.”

  “Can’t you just blindfold us?”

  “And drive the two of you around the nation’s capital? Two blindfolded Arabs?”

  “I can go without the blindfold,” Karim offered.

  “The others traveled in the trunk. You two will also travel in the trunk.”

  Karim continued to protest and Ariana reached into her pocket and pulled out a black rectangular device the size of a cell phone. Karim started to speak but his voice was cut short by 80,000 volts of electricity. As Karim’s body arched and twitched, Abu tried to climb over his incapacitated traveling partner. Ariana quickly redirected the stun gun to Abu’s exposed neck and he joined Karim in uncontrollable thrashing.

  “Watch your head and arms,” she said as she shut the trunk quietly. She took one look around the dark neighborhood and wondered if she would need to come back.

  Ariana crossed the train tracks on Georgia Avenue and entered into a non-residential area highlighted by a dozen businesses bordering on bankruptcy. She turned left down an alley just inside the D.C. city limits near Takoma and snaked behind two old brick buildings. She rounded the corner near a lot with crushed cars stacked ten feet in the air, the rolls of razor-wire on the fence costing as much as the junk it protected.

  At the end of a small road the lot widened into an open patch of asphalt and mud, a mixture of blacktop and exposed ground. She pulled the Camry over near the last warehouse on the well-hidden block. Unpainted cinderblocks with a brick façade supported a two-story metal roof. The building stretched forty yards across. On the left was a single bay door with two lone windows six feet off the ground and completely blacked-out from the inside with plastic trash bags and tape. In the middle of the warehouse stood two huge bay rollup doors, each large enough to park an oversized tow truck. The large windowless doors took up most of the front of the warehouse. Near the right hand side of the warehouse Ariana slipped her key into another solid metal, windowless door and disappeared as the spring-loaded hinge pulled the door closed behind her with a resounding thud. She took one look around the warehouse and checked on the Piedmont Delivery truck in the otherwise empty floor. She hit a green button on a hanging control panel and the door on the left chugged upward. She went back to her car and drove the vehicle into the car bay.

  When the large bay door shut, she exited the car and walked to the rear of the vehicle.

  “Rise and shine,” she said, opening the trunk.

  Karim nearly leaped from his confines, pulling himself out by the edge of the trunk.

  “What the fuck was with the stun gun?” Karim asked, the veins in his neck and forehead pulsating. Abu joined in the verbal assault and tried to exit the trunk but his legs were asleep, the blood trying to find its way back into his lower extremities.

  “The stun gun was a necessary evil. You’ll both live.”

  “You touch me again and that is more than I will be able to say for you,” Abu said, still in the trunk.

  Ariana pulled out the stun gun and a blue electric current danced between the delivery prongs. “I’m the only one in the position to make threats,” Ariana added, cooling Abu’s temperament.

  Karim helped Abu up by the armpits and both men looked around at the warehouse.

  “Where are we?” Abu asked.

  “Home,” Ariana answered.

  A small seam of light escaped from beneath a door on the far side of the concrete expanse. Karim followed Ariana toward the light as Abu limped slowly behind them. They approached the door and Ariana knocked once before opening it.

  Chapter 10

  Officer Jim Singleton pulled himself out of his police car and walked up the driveway. He hated house calls. He had, in fact, ignored the first inquiry from a worried out-of-state relative who had tried to reach the resident in question. The man’s employer called next, concerned that its star employee was incapacitated. When Officer Singleton got a third call from the man’s brother, the fifteen-year veteran decided he would personally stop by the house in question on his way to lunch. Not because it was his duty, but because it was near his favorite gyro restaurant.

  Walking up the three steps of the front porch, Officer Singleton, crumbs from breakfast still in his brown beard, knocked on the glass in the upper-half of the white storm door. “Arlington County Police, can you come to the door please?”

  He waited for a moment and looked at the neighbors on both sides of Coleman’s Castle. He knocked again. “Arlington County Police Department, I would like to have a word with you.”

  Officer Singleton’s memory served up a fresh reminder of the time he kicked in a front door after being called to a house for domestic abuse. As the door smashed open, Officer Singleton had pulled his gun on a local doctor delivering a doggie-style, free medical exam to one of his office assistants. Knocking three times became the standard for all future house calls.

  Singleton walked to the side door of the house at the end of the driveway. He knocked once more, and reached for the knob. The door swung open.

  Singleton identified himself three more times from the new stainless steel kitchen. He listened intently for any sound as sunlight shined through the bay window on his dark blue uniform. The house echoed with an eerie silence. Five years pushing papers hadn’t dulled his senses. He knew there was a body on the premises. The only thing left was to find it.

  Out of respect for the dead, Officer Singleton announced himself as he entered every room. He scanned the original three-bedroom, one-bath layout, and stood at the top of the stairs to the basement. He looked up at the skylight over the new foyer in the back of the house, and walked up the staircase which opened into an office with a view of the neighborhood. Officer Singleton enjoyed the view just long enough for his brain to register the large body on the floor in front of the desk.

  “Good God,” he said, stooping to find a pulse on Allan Coleman’s neck. At thirty-six hours after death, the victim was cold. Not in-the-refrigerator cold, but certainly chicken-on-the-counter cool. Officer Singleton wrestled Allan onto his back and looked into the grimace of pain still frozen on his face. His eyes were almost bulging, his mouth open in a painful, stretched grin. The officer looked around the room. He grabbed the tri-fold leather wallet off the desk and checked the driver’s license. Allan R. Coleman. Singleton looked at the face of the deceased and compared it to the picture. The DMV-issued photo was far more appealing than the one now on the victim’s face. He checked the contents of the wallet and pulled out three hundred and forty dollars. So much for a robbery.

  He put the wallet on the desk and saw the white pills. His mind switched into detective gear and he noticed several more pills lodged between the keys of the keyboard. He grabbed one with his fingers and brought it to his nose. He scanned the work area, checked the floor, and found the prescription bottle on the other side of the victim’s head. Nitroglycerin.

  Officer Singleton called dispatch and reported that he had found the body of the individual reported missing earlier in the day. He took one look at the obese man, set the bottle on the table, and walked downstairs to wait. Case closed.

  Clark heard the ring and searched for his cell phone under a pile of papers on the dining area table. He answered on its fifth ring.

  “I thought I saw your car in the driveway,” the voice said.

  “Yeah, just arrived with another load of stuff.”

  “Got a few minutes?”

  “What’s up?”

  “Grab something warm. I’ll meet you out front.”

  Clark did as he was asked. Two minutes later he was standing at the foot of Mr. Stanley’s driveway. The World War II veteran was ambling down the drive in a huge dark parka with a white furry fringe around the hood. Clark looked at his neighbor and realized just how far down the scale of importance fashion was for a man in his mid-eig
hties.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Around the corner. It’s time to be nosey neighbors.”

  Clark walked with Mr. Stanley through the small blacktopped path that ran through county land between his house and the Krause residence on the far side of the dead end.

  “You know, I remember when this park was nothing but woods. The trees were the only buffer between the W&OD railroad and the housing development.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Most of the rail traffic was before even my day, but I think the last train passed through in, oh, must have been 1968 or so.”

  “Well, at least we don’t have train whistles screaming through the neighborhood. I’ll take a bike path anytime,” Clark said, referring to the recreational area that now extended along the former tracks, stretching from D.C. to Leesburg, forty miles west.

  Clark added, “I haven’t been in this park in years.”

  “It hasn’t changed much, except for the paths. Once they laid down blacktop, they opened the park to dog walkers and strollers.”

  “That might be better than the former clientele. When I was a kid, we used to find all kinds of stuff back here. Beer cans, condoms, underwear.”

  “I’m not sure that’s any better than dog shit.”

  “Maybe, but some of those condoms we found were used.”

  “You can’t prove any of them were mine,” Mr. Stanley said, straight-faced.

  Clark laughed loud enough for it to echo in the leafless trees. “Well, it was good to be a kid. We used to catch crayfish, play war, splash in the creek.”

  “Nothing like getting wet and dirty as only boys can do with God-given material.”

  “For a while, and then one day we found ourselves older, dumber, and more adventurous. I am not sure whose idea it was, but one day we decided it would be more fun to build a swing to go over the creek than it was to trounce through it. I learned an important lesson that day.”

  Mr. Stanley pulled the left side of his parka back away from his ear so that he could hear Clark as he talked. “Which was?”

  “If you are going to build a rope swing, don’t use a garden hose. Particularly if your friend is Jimmy Shultz who weighed a hundred and fifty pounds in the sixth grade. Hoses stretch more than you think. Not only was that the day I learned about the elasticity of a stolen garden house, but it was also the day that I learned the expression ‘to get racked.’”

  “Sounds like Jimmy Shultz learned the real lesson.”

  “I guess you are right about that.”

  “You know, you were probably the last generation to play outdoors. Nowadays, between video games and child molesters, kids don’t play outside.”

  They approached an intersection of paths and Mr. Stanley took a right. A minute later they were on the street behind Dorchester Lane. An ambulance with flashing lights was parked in front of Allan Coleman’s house. Before Clark asked, Mr. Stanley answered.

  “I saw the flashing lights out the back window. Figured it was my duty to at least come and see what was going on.”

  “Your duty?”

  “My duty as a good neighbor.”

  “I thought it was nosey neighbor.”

  “Call it what you want.”

  “I just did.”

  Clark had yet to win an argument with Mr. Stanley. The reason was simple. The cagey neighbor didn’t fight fair. Whenever the tide in the debate turned against him, Mr. Stanley quit talking. Sometimes he blamed it on his aging ears. Most of the time he simply acted as if the conversation was over; and if one-half of a two-person conversation deemed it over, it was.

  Coleman’s neighbors from the next street over huddled near the corner of the dead man’s property line where a chain-link fence met a small wooden post. A middle-aged woman wearing only a sweater hugged her teenage children for warmth, support, or both.

  Clark talked with Mr. Stanley as they strolled up the sidewalk, still fifty yards away from the scene. “I think the show is over.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “No one seems to be in a hurry. The EMT driver is sitting behind the wheel, talking on the radio. The cop on the front porch is more concerned with his nicotine intake than with what’s going on in the house.”

  As if on cue, Officer Jim Singleton cupped his hand over the end of his cigarette trying to light it against the wind.

  Clark stepped toward another middle-aged mother, appropriately dressed in a black down jacket. “What happened?”

  “Looks like Mr. Coleman had a heart attack,” the woman’s son said. His eyes were glued to the side door of the house. His mother hushed him and put her fingers over her lips.

  “How long has he been dead?”

  “The cops won’t say,” the boy answered through teeth with braces.

  The mother rolled her eyes and looked down at her son. “It appears that Mr. Coleman died in the last day or so. Natural causes. He obviously wasn’t the most health-conscious individual.”

  Everyone’s suspicion was confirmed with the arrival of the long black car that opened from the rear.

  “This is going to be interesting,” Clark whispered to Mr. Stanley. “This guy was huge.”

  Mr. Stanley flicked his head and Clark followed. “Good afternoon, officer. My name is John Stanley. Former Marine Captain. What’s the story?”

  “Retired Marine?”

  “Yes sir. Retired with enough shrapnel in my ass and legs to set off the detectors at the airport.”

  Clark looked at Mr. Stanley and bit the inside of his cheeks.

  “Did you know Mr. Coleman?”

  “He was my neighbor. We exchanged greetings from time-to-time.”

  “Well, Captain, Mr. Coleman passed away sometime in the last two days, most likely from natural causes.”

  “Who called you?”

  “His brother and his employer.”

  Officer Singleton was summoned from inside the house. “If you would excuse me.”

  Inside the house, it took four people to get Allan Coleman into the extra-large body bag and six to get him onto the stretcher. With the joints of the stretcher protesting, the six adult men struggled to maneuver Coleman’s three hundred and seventy-eight pounds of deadweight down the stairs.

  Inside Coleman’s office, no one seemed to notice the stack of voyeur-themed porn on the floor in the corner under a recent Time magazine, or the high-powered binoculars that rested on the windowsill overlooking the neighborhood.

  Chapter 11

  The natural light from the outside was tracking across the ceiling in the morning sun, waking the cavernous room from its gray darkness. The new rays of indirect sunlight struggled to push through the windows near the top of the wall into the garage turned warehouse.

  Abu and Syed were busy cleaning, their arms tired, their fingers wrinkled from the damp towels they had used to wipe most of the surfaces of the warehouse, as far up as they could reach. Karim was on his hands and knees with a scrub brush, working to remove hardened bird droppings that dotted the floor near the base of a main support beam. Ariana walked by and looked up at the ventilation hood above. She put it on the list of things to secure.

  James drew the short straw and got the bathrooms, of which there were two. The American Muslim was at work on the small bathroom near what would become the group’s sleeping quarters. The single sink and toilet were covered in mildew from months of non-use. The shower stall was a science experiment-in-progress, a green fungus growing out from the grout lines to reach half-way across each tile.

  Next to the crude bathroom facility was another heavy steel door. Ariana opened the door and the hinges squeaked. A wave of must greeted her. She checked the floor for water and touched the wall. It was cold and moist. She looked up at the window twelve feet above. The confining walls and the lone trace of light above sent Ariana back in time. She shut her eyes and saw the steel door shut behind her. She felt the club come down on her head and the boot hit her in the ribs. She
shivered, and opened her eyes, thankful she had avoided the memory of her final lesson in her training years before. Thankful for unconsciousness as she lost the last remains of her innocence.

  Mentally back in the room, she walked off the dimensions between the walls. When she was finished she smiled, the specifics of the warehouse, down to the cubic-foot space, were as she memorized. But for some reason the room she was in now felt smaller, tighter. With her soldiers in mind, she imagined the configuration of the barracks. She stepped out of the room for a moment and tried to pinpoint the direction of Mecca with as much accuracy as she could. The far right corner, she thought to herself. She smiled. With bunk beds, she could have received twice as many men.

  Satisfied, Ariana made her way across the warehouse, glancing at her Toyota Camry and the Piedmont Delivery van that occupied the garage turned warehouse floor. She put her key in the lock, entered the small office in the corner and shut the door behind her. She flicked the lone light switch on the wall near the door and the ten-by-ten foot room received its first light in three months. The glass walls of the office looked out onto the floor of the warehouse. Two sets of metal filing cabinets stood in the corner side-by-side. A lamp and a black phone sat on the desk in the middle of the room. The outdated calendar on the wall depicted a large-busted woman with a handheld drill bending over the side of a motorcycle. It was hard to tell if it was an advertisement for the motorcycle, the tool, or for silicone implants.

  Ariana noted what she needed to have a business up and running. Paper, pens, a computer, folders. Her eyes looked around the room, envisioning a fully functioning office. Or at least a room that would give the appearance of one. She picked up the landline phone and the dial tone greeted her ear. She put the phone back on its cradle and checked the desk drawers. They were locked, just as she had left them.

  She opened the office door, looked around at the warehouse and her human resources. Then she curved her thumb and middle fingers to make a ring, pushed them to her lips, and let out a whistle that froze the room.