Trust No One

by Paul Cleave

  “No,” Jerry says, “you have no idea.”

  “Eva called me earlier, plus now it’s on the news and—”

  “It’s worse than that,” Jerry says. “Can you come and get me? Please? I really need help. I’m at a mall.”

  “Which one?”

  “It’s . . .” he says, and he knows the name of the mall, it’s on the tip of his tongue. “I can’t think straight.”

  “Go and find a security guard, or the mall management office and tell them who you are. You can wait there while—”

  “I can’t do that,” Jerry says, shaking his head.

  A pause for a few seconds from Hans’s end of the phone, and then, “What is it you’re not telling me?”

  Jerry stares down at the bag with the sandwich and the bottle of water he bought earlier. “I’ll tell you when you get here. I’ll go out front and see what mall it is and I’ll call you back.”

  “What’s happened, Jerry?”

  “I’ll tell you when you get here. I’ll call you back.”

  “Just stay on the line, Jerry.”

  He stays on the line. He walks out of the bathroom and into the river of people carrying books and DVDs and clothes, some pushing strollers, some pushing shopping carts, and he walks to the same entrance he came through earlier. When he’s outside he turns around and there in big letters is the name, and he feels stupid for having forgotten it. He tells Hans, and Hans tells him to stay exactly where he is, and that he’ll be there in ten minutes.

  Jerry hangs up and tucks the phone into his pocket. He opens up the bottle of water and drinks a quarter of it while staring out at the cars, all while staying exactly where he said he would stay. He’s opening the sandwich packet when it hits him.

  He’s left the bag with the towel and the knife back in the bathroom.

  He is desperate to start running, but restrains himself as to not draw attention. There are so many shops, so many ways to turn, so many people around him as he walks. He can’t figure out how to get back to the bathroom, not right away, and by the time he does his ten minutes are up and Hans is ringing him. He opens the bathroom door and goes to the stall where he sat earlier. It’s empty. He looks at the back of the door to make sure it’s the same stall. Fuck the world. The bag with the towel and the knife has gone.

  W MINUS THREE

  You went wandering again today, and because of that Sandra considered keeping you in tonight and not sending you on the bachelor’s party. You didn’t really care one way or the other, but in the end she decided she wanted you to go. Probably so she could get you out of the house for obvious reasons. You went along and spoke when spoken to and didn’t cause any kind of scene. No doubt the party became more raucous once the old-timers had gone, that Rick and his friends drunk their way along to a strip joint, but for you it was just dinner and no wine but water, some overcooked chicken, and a soggy salad. You sat there pretending not to notice the whispered comments and not-so-subtle nods in your direction. You were the guy with Alzheimer’s, and to them that made you a joke. It made you a joke because they would never be like you, the same way you used to think you would never be like this, and what could be funnier than your mate’s father-in-law losing his mind at forty-nine and occasionally going off to Batshit County for long walks in Batshit Park? You were home by ten and are keeping your promise to ride the sober train all the way to Eva’s wedding.

  So. The wandering. That’s what you want to know about, right? What tips can that sieve of a brain of yours hold? Well, there are a couple of things. If you’re going to wander, take a wallet with you. It’s good if you can identify yourself, and even better if you can pay for a taxi or a bus. Money is good—so keep it on you. Just as good is a phone. Try to take your phone with you. A bottle of water would be good too—helps with the dehydration, and who knows how far you can walk?

  Today you snuck out the window to avoid the house alarms, and the thing is, you have no memory of doing it. You have no idea if the intent was there to go for a walk on your own, or to go and buy flowers, or to do any number of possible things a man will do once he leaves his home with barely enough cash to buy a hamburger combo. You don’t know which version of Jerry made that decision, or which version of Jerry showed up at the florist where Belinda works. The florist is in town, right between the two main drags of Manchester and Colombo. And how did you get there? A true magician never reveals his tricks, Jerry, and Captain A is nothing but the master of slight of hand. Look over here while he wipes Jerry’s mind!

  Belinda asked if you were okay, and you told her you were, because you really were okay, Future Jerry, you were on a mission, one so top secret even you didn’t know the agenda. She knew about the Big A (it seems everybody does), and she sat you down in the office and made you a cup of tea and rang Sandra and told her she would drive you home. By this time Captain A was releasing the reins a little, and you were becoming equally aware and embarrassed of the situation. Belinda kept smiling at you, and told you not to worry, that her grandmother has Alzheimer’s and she’s used to it, which actually upset you because it made you feel so old.

  She swung past her house on the way to pick up something for Eva that she would have been dropping off later in the day anyway, which is why she was happy to drop you home. She asked if you would be okay waiting in the car, and you said yes, and that bit you remember, but then Captain A tightened the reins a little and Belinda found you sitting on the back doorstep talking to her cat a few minutes later.

  Sandra was worried sick by the time you got back to the house. She’d been getting ready to call the police just before Belinda phoned her. The net result is alarms are being put on all the windows. If that doesn’t work, then perhaps the next step is to have a GPS chip sewn into your back where you can’t reach it.

  Good news—the wedding is close now. There’s the rehearsal in a few hours, and remember—practice, practice, practice. Bad news—Sandra said earlier, I can’t wait for all of this to be over.

  When you asked what she meant by that, she sighed, and said, What do you think, Jerry? before storming off.

  Honestly? You don’t think she’s just referring to the wedding. She probably has some pamphlets somewhere, the way people do when they’re thinking of shipping their folks off to a home, the final step before they visit the big home in the sky.

  Jerry’s cell phone is still ringing. It echoes around the bathroom. He stares at the stall where a few minutes ago he was sitting, as if by looking longer and harder the bag with the towel and knife will reappear. He heads into the corridor and answers the phone.

  “Where are you?” Hans asks.

  “The bathroom.”

  “I told you to wait outside.”

  “I’m heading there now.”

  He hangs up. He almost drops the phone when he puts it into his pocket because his hands are shaking so much. He takes the same route back outside. Hans isn’t there, not right away, but then ten seconds later he is, pulling up in a dark blue SUV. Hans leans over and opens the door and Jerry climbs in. He drops the supermarket bag on the floor between his feet. He wipes his sweaty hands on his jacket.

  “Jesus, Jerry, you look terrible.”

  “Drive,” Jerry tells him, and that little gem has come right from the Henry Cutter playbook, along with Follow that car and It’s quiet. Too quiet.

  Hans doesn’t need to be told twice. They move smoothly through the parking lot past other cars, turning into and out of parking spaces.

  “You got a destination in mind? The nursing home?” Hans asks.

  Jerry stares at his friend while thinking of an answer. He has put on more weight than the Hans he remembers. Some of that is muscle and some of that is the accumulation of pounds you see on out-of-shape bouncers, the slab weight that enables them to pop a punching bag off its chain but would have them puffing to pick it back up. It looks like he has a few more tattoos poking out from beneath his collar too. This Hans has evolved so much from the one he first met
in university.

  “Not the nursing home,” Jerry says. “Just away from here.”

  “Tell me what happened,” Hans says.

  Jerry leans back. His legs are jittering, his knees popping up and down. They exit the parking lot. “I’m not . . . I’m not entirely sure,” he says, which sums up his life these days pretty well, he thinks. “I escaped the nursing home.”

  “You’ve done that a few times now.”

  “They keep you updated?”

  “Eva keeps me updated on your progress,” Hans says.

  “It’s not progress,” Jerry says. “It’s the exact opposite of progress. It’s . . . is there a word for that?”

  “Unprogress,” Hans says. “You want to tell me what happened, or do you just want me to drive around aimlessly?”

  “Let’s put the air-conditioning on,” Jerry says, and he starts fiddling with the controls but to no avail. His hands are still sweaty. “It’s a hundred and fifty degrees in here.”

  “It’s seventy,” Hans says, then flicks a switch. Cool air comes through the vents and Jerry holds his hands in front of them. “Maybe if you took your jacket off you’d feel better. Jerry?”

  Jerry reaches into the bag for his water.

  “Jerry?”

  He gets the lid off. He gulps down a mouthful, then another, so quickly his throat hurts.

  “Jerry?”

  He wipes his hand across his mouth. He looks at his friend. “It’s possible I killed somebody,” he says.

  Hans looks over at him. “What? Jesus, Jerry, what?”

  Jerry turns the air-conditioning off. He suddenly feels cold. “I woke up in a house I’ve never been in before, and there was a woman there.” His words start to speed up. “She was naked and lying on the lounge floor. She’d been stabbed.”

  “Oh thank God,” Hans says, and he smiles, and looks genuinely relieved, and that reaction is completely opposite to what Jerry was expecting. Is this all some kind of joke to him? “Trust me, everything is going to be okay.”

  “I found her that way, but I didn’t do it. Somebody is trying to set me up, but I don’t know why.”

  “Calm down,” Hans says, and he checks his mirror, he indicates, and then he turns the corner and parks on the side of a quieter street in the shade. He takes his seat belt off and twists in his seat so he can face Jerry. “You didn’t kill anybody. You know what you used to do for a living, right?”

  “Of course I know, but that isn’t about this.”

  “You wrote crime novels,” Hans says.

  Jerry is shaking his head. “I know. But like I said, this—”

  “Very good ones too,” Hans says, interrupting him. “People were always saying how real they felt. So if they felt real to other people, Jerry, how do you think they felt to you?”

  “This isn’t like those other times.”

  “You’ve been confessing to crimes that were in your books. These are all—”

  “You’re not listening to me,” Jerry says, fighting the frustration.

  “I am listening.”

  “No you’re not,” he says, and he opens the jacket to reveal his bloody shirt. “I didn’t do it. I was there, but I didn’t do it.”

  Hans says nothing. He drums his fingers on the steering wheel while he stares at the blood, and after a while he stares out the windshield. Jerry lets him think. He can’t remember this morning, but he can remember that Hans likes to really think things through. He takes another mouthful of water then puts the bottle back into the bag. Finally Hans looks at him. “Are you sure about this?”

  “Very,” Jerry says. “Somebody is going to find her soon and the police are going to think it was me.”

  Hans shakes his head. “Listen to me, trust me, this is all some plot out of one of your—”

  Jerry shakes his head. “You’re still not listening. They already think I killed somebody, and I’m not talking about Sandra.”

  “You know about Sandra?”

  “That she’s dead? Yes. That I killed her? No. It wasn’t me, but that’s not who I’m talking about. Yesterday I had to go to the police station,” Jerry says, and of course he doesn’t really know it was yesterday—maybe it was last week. Or last month. “This other woman the police questioned me about, she was the florist for Eva’s wedding.”

  “Oh shit,” Hans says.

  “What?”

  “They’re asking you about Belinda Murray,” Hans says, and here comes the concern Jerry expected from him two minutes ago.

  “You know her? Wait, wait, did I know her?”

  Hans doesn’t look just concerned but worried too. He starts drumming his fingers faster. He checks over his shoulder as if looking for somebody watching them. “You took . . . well, you took quite a liking to her. You wandered out of your house once and went to see her at work.”

  Jerry shakes his head. “You’re making that up,” he says, trying to figure out a reason why Hans would, and coming to the conclusion he wouldn’t. “Even if you’re not, visiting her at work isn’t the same as killing her.”

  “You’re right, it’s not the same,” Hans says, and he looks away. He stops drumming his fingers.

  “What?” Jerry asks.

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on, there’s clearly something you’re not telling me.”

  Hans turns back towards him. “It’s like you said, Jerry, it’s not the same.”

  Jerry shakes his head. “Just tell me.”

  Hans shrugs, then sighs, then runs his hand over his smooth head. “Well, the thing is, Jerry, you also visited her at home.”

  “What do you mean I visited her at home?”

  “I mean exactly how that sounds. It was when you went to see her at work. She gave you a lift back to your house, but she swung by her house too. So you knew where she lived.”

  Jerry keeps shaking his head. It can’t be true. However, there are so many things happening that seem impossible, yet he knows they aren’t. Things like waking up this morning in the home of a dead woman, to finding a bloody shirt under the floorboards of his house.

  “They never found her killer,” Hans says.

  “You think I did it?”

  “I’m not saying that,” Hans says.

  “What are you saying?”

  Hans looks out the windshield a moment. He does that Hans thing that Jerry has seen so many times before; he can almost see the gears turning inside his head. Finally his friend looks back at him.

  “The night she was killed you rang me. You were lost and confused, and I picked you up on the street and you had blood all over your shirt. Just like now. I asked what had happened, and you said you didn’t know. I drove you home. I helped you back through your window. I sat with you on the couch and you remained quiet for some time, then you begged me not to call the police, and when I asked you what you had done that required the police to be called, you refused to answer. I . . . for some reason, for some stupid reason, I didn’t call them. Because you were my friend, and what was done was done, and I didn’t call them when I should have.”

  For a few moments Jerry’s mind is blank. Absolutely blank. It’s sensory overload. Too much information all in one hit, and he and Henry and even Captain A are all switched off into darkness, but then one simple piece of information sneaks in and reboots his system: he is Jerry Grey and he is a monster.

  “Jerry?”

  “It’s Henry’s fault,” he says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Henry wrote those books and it made me crazy. I became one of the monsters he kept writing about. I really did it? I really hurt these people?”

  “I can’t make the same mistake again, Jerry. I’m sorry, but I have to take you to the police. We have to let them figure out what’s going on, and most of all we have to make sure you can never hurt anybody else again.”

  W MINUS TWO

  The rehearsal last night went well. You may be a sandwich short of a picnic in the upstairs department, as yo
ur grandfather was always keen to say (before it became a picnic short of a barbecue, then a picnic short of the Pope shitting in the woods—that was a red flag there), but everything went off without a hitch.

  The church—boy, you’ve been there so many times this week you might need to start paying rent. Father Jacob is a priest hovering somewhere between sixty and old age, a down-to-earth guy who seems to have never laughed at anything in his life. He’s pretty okay for a priest, but you’ve never really been a priest guy. Add that to your list. You’re not a car guy, a priest guy, a jeans guy, or a religion guy. You’re a dessert guy. You’re a running-out-of-sandwiches guy. Every time you step into that church here comes Henry Cutter, the failed horror writer to darken your mood by playing the Something bad is right around the corner game, probably because right around the corner is the graveyard. Horror Hack Henry, would you like to take over?

  “I do,” Eva said, and the crowd was smiling and some, like Eva’s mother, were weeping. Weddings had always made her weep.

  “I now pronounce you man and wife,” Father Jacob said, then smiled and looked at Rick. “You may now kiss the bride.”

  Rick kissed his bride and the crowd started to clap. Everything had gone off without a hitch—even Jerry had walked his daughter down the aisle perfectly, the right pacing, the right smile, the right amount of pressure on her arm as hers interlocked his. It was a long kiss between the new husband and bride, and people started to laugh, and then the happy couple turned towards the crowd and they smiled.

  Soon the wedding party was moving down the aisle, people throwing confetti into the air, an usher waiting at the door, and that’s when it happened, the front doors busting open as the zombies piled in, the doors hitting the walls so hard that wood splintered everywhere. Dozens of zombies who had just clawed their way out from the graveyard behind were coming into the church.

  “I do love a good wedding,” the first zombie said.

  “Brains,” said the second one.

  “Good point,” replied the first one. “Brains.” Then another said it too, and another, and the word was catching, because soon it was on the lips of all the dead people. The other things on their lips were the living as the zombies tore into them, and within seconds Eva and Rick were running for their lives. . . .