“Damn, dude, I really didn’t think you would be back,” Raul said, shutting the door behind me.
I didn’t have time for small talk. The entire scene was making me quite nervous. I just wanted my stuff and to get the hell out. I sort of just stood there, unsure what I should do next. It’s not like I was a seasoned drug buyer.
“So, you have something for me?” Raul said as he sat in the thick, leather chair behind the enormous desk.
I reached into my jacket and extracted the wad of cash, setting it down on the desk.
“Twenty-five hundred…as promised.”
I swear I could almost hear the saliva dripping from his jowls. He snatched the money and thumbed through it with the practice and speed that only comes from doing it numerous times, then reached inside the top drawer and handed me the small plastic baggie full of snow white powder.
“Grade A shit, my friend. Now, the other part of the deal…still in effect?” he said, eyeing me with a strange mix of curiosity and disdain. I am sure part of that was the odor exuding from my person.
“I am a man of my word, Raul. Next bit of trouble you find yourself in, you get a ‘get out of jail free’ card from me.”
He smiled, his crooked grin revealing a perfect set of white teeth. I found it quite humorous that he worried about his appearance, considering the low-lifes he surrounded himself with.
“All right then. When you’re ready for more, and if you promise to continue as a regular, I’ll cut you a better deal. For now, you go on and enjoy your little ‘vacation’ and party up. Remember though, that stuff is straight. Better get somewhere safe before you hit it.”
I nodded in agreement. “Call me if a fire arises.” And I walked out.
And just like that, my first dabble into drug trafficking happened and I was on my way back to my car with some pure heroin. Once inside my car and back on the main road, I made sure to obey every single traffic law and made my way across town, heading for the squalor that Ethan called home.
I couldn’t believe what I just did, yet the rush of excitement was intoxicating just as much as I assumed the drugs were to an addict. I was actually doing it! No others involved—just me. Soon, the whole mess would be over, and I would no longer have a noose choking my air supply. I could get back to my life as a respected lawyer and devote my extra time to charity to help ease my guilty conscience.
Twenty minutes later, I circled the block twice by Ethan’s. His car was still parked on the street and a light was on in the kitchen, so he was still up. I parked several blocks away and gathered all my surprises for the evening and made my way through the debris and filth that lined the pathway toward his house. The sound of dogs barking in the distance greeted my ears, then yelling between a male and female, arguing over something with loud voices, but too far away for me to make out the words.
I pulled out my new cell phone and dialed his number. As it rang, I watched him sprint through the small living room and grab his phone. When he answered, I could immediately tell he was rolling high.
Perfect!
“Speak now or forever hold your peace,” he squawked into the phone.
“Ethan, I have the items you requested I procure for you. All filed and ready for you to start living your new life. Thought I would stop by and pass them along and retrieve my possessions. Do you have a minute?”
I watched him pace like a jungle cat back and forth in front of the window, his excitement evident as he pumped his fist into the air. He tried to perform some sort of happy jig but almost fell over. He was like a little kid that just learned Santa Claus was real and was coming to visit him. I had hoped I would be greeted by such a reaction and that he would be flying high as well. He was so out of it that he didn’t even question the fact that I had his phone number and called him.
“You work fast! No wonder you charge out the ass for your services!”
“Well, there was a lot riding on delivering this to you in a timely matter, wouldn’t you say?”
He laughed a true, genuine laugh that almost made him sound human.
“No doubt. Ok, let me give you the address…”
I hung up after I smiled and told him I would be there shortly. I had counted on the fact that he would be soaring above the stratosphere and not question me, and that little calculated gamble paid off. Money and drugs, and not always in that order, were his driving forces, and I was sure he didn’t care how, when, where, or from whom he got them, just so long as he had them in his grubby paws.
For the next ten minutes, I listened to the sounds of the slum, oddly amused by the yelling, the sirens, and an occasional gunshot in the distance. Once again, the lure of intoxicating my brain to the point I thought living like this was normal, did not interest me in the least. I stood there in the darkness and observed my newest prey as he flitted about the living room, smoking one cigarette after another. I could almost hear the thoughts in his head while he tried to settle on which direction he would take when he became the official heir of the Kemper family fortune. I gave him a few extra minutes to immerse himself inside his rampant thoughts, knowing they would be the last things that ever crossed his mind, then made my way to the front door and knocked.
He sprinted to the door and opened it after the first tap and ushered me inside. His normally light blue eyes looked almost black, they were so dilated. He couldn’t hold his hands steady as he pointed toward the kitchen.
“Step into my office.”
Stepping inside, I noticed that the place was a mess. Drug paraphernalia littered the small, cheap table in the small area that served as the living room. There were no pictures on the walls nor were there decorations in any area that I could see. Dirty clothes covered just about every available space, including the backs of the kitchen chairs. Overflowing ashtrays seemed to be everywhere, and the smell of stale cigarette smoke was worse than it had been at the strip club.
Judging by the sparse surroundings, it was impossible to tell that Ethan was the son of a very wealthy man. Knowing Olin like I did, it was no wonder that he disowned his son, for even if the sheer embarrassment of having a drug addict as a child weren’t enough, he lived, and smelled, like a street urchin.
I walked over and set down my leather satchel, unloading the forged documents. Looking at my little masterpieces under Ethan’s yellowed light bulb which hung precariously over the kitchen table would help add to the illusion of the authenticity of the papers. I held them in my hands and asked, “So, where are my items?”
“Oh yeah, almost forgot!” he said, the giddiness in his voice comical. He sprinted into the living room and I heard him forage around through the mountainous piles of clothes. Then he returned with his laptop and a small paper sack.
“Here is the recording, and here is the tape of my sperm donor’s death. Damn, what an evil bastard he was! I listened to the whole thing twice and it made my stomach turn.”
I took the treasures from him and placed them inside my briefcase, still holding his documents in my hands, laughing on the inside at his disgust at his father’s actions, yet he seemed to not draw the direct correlation to his own. He reached for them, but I moved away, holding them above my head like a school yard bully holding the wimpy kid’s lunch money.
“Aren’t you forgetting something else?”
“No, actually, I’m not. I want to see those papers first.”
“Well, now we are at an impasse, aren’t we? I want to make sure you delete those electronic files before I hand this over to you. So, how about we compromise? You log on, and once you do that, you may peruse the documents all you wish. Deal?”
His tweeking brain only took a split second to answer. “Deal.”
In the flash of a few key strokes, he was logged on to his email account, and sure enough, there sat the email in his draft folder. I smiled and handed him the will.
“As requested.”
While he scanned each page, I quietly took out one of the morphine pills I had crushed up earli
er and tapped it out on the table, then produced a straw and faked the snort, actually blowing out through my nostrils rather than in. My head turned just enough where he could tell what I was doing, but not enough to actually see my trick. He stopped perusing the papers in his hands and just stared at me, his mouth agape.
“Dude, I didn’t know you imbibed! Hell yeah! This calls for a celebration! I’m rich, bitch!” he said, then leaned over and hit “delete” on the email. He then reached into his own pocket and pulled out his stash of the white stuff, saddened when he realized that there wasn’t enough left for even one line.
“Ah, don’t worry, Ethan. You have enough money now to buy all the pure blow your heart can take,” I said, wiping my nose for effect. But hey, no hard feelings, huh? Business is business, and now that it’s over, it’s party time. I don’t mind sharing, since I am in a celebratory mood myself.”
With that, I extracted the baggie from my pocket and set it down in front of him, then handed him the straw.
“Well, you’re a lot of all right, dude. I might just have to hire you as my lawyer, you know, to take care of all my affairs once I start rolling in dough. You up for that?” he said, then held his left nostril shut and took a huge snort of the heroin.
Reading on the Internet and seeing the same scene faked in movies was one thing, but experiencing the effects that a person high on cocaine that just snorted pure heroin was quite another. His eyes bulged and began to roam all over, unable to focus on any one thing. His head began to shake and blood and mucous slung all over the table, spattering droplets down his shirt. It took him a good thirty seconds to finally eek out the words, “What the fuck…”
As soon as those syllables left his lips, a frothy, white substance began to leak out of his mouth and down his stubbly chin. His body started shaking, and he grabbed the table with both hands for support. He tried to look over at me, his eyes completely black as his pupils had dilated completely from the lethal combination flowing through his bloodstream.
“I believe, Ethan, that the correct term for what you just did was a ‘speedball,’ and from what research I did, it is a deadly mixture. Right now, your heart is receiving dual signals from your brain. One signal is telling it to increase your heartbeats, the other, to slow down. I also believe that the next thing you will experience is that your heart will lose its rhythm, and when that occurs, the electrical charge dies. And so do you.”
Ethan tried to form the word “bastard.” It came out a garbled mess but close enough I understood exactly what he meant. While he jerked and convulsed, I put the gloves on that I brought with me and then picked up his laptop. It only took a few memorized steps and poof, his hard drive was erased, his email account deactivated, and then I shut the system down.
The color of Ethan’s face was something straight out of a horror movie. His convulsions abruptly stopped and his body went rigid then tumbled out of the chair and hit the filthy linoleum with a loud thud.
I gathered up all I brought with me and repacked my briefcase. I picked up the straw and wiped it, making sure that my fingerprints were completely smudged away, then stuck the tip end in his bleeding nostril. Ethan was almost paralyzed but his eyes followed my every movement from his position on the floor. His breathing had become ragged, and when he inhaled, his chest didn’t even rise.
I started to load his laptop in my bag, then at the last minute, decided not to. It was already wiped clean and the last thing I needed was to be found with it on me. I gave the room one final sweep with my eyes, making sure I removed all traces of my presence. Satisfied that no one would tie me to the crime scene, I leaned down toward Ethan and said, “Ethan, Ethan, Ethan. Little boys shouldn’t play in the big boy arena until they are fully trained in mortal combat. Blackmail is a dangerous sport, and one shouldn’t try to start out so big. Greed and drugs are a deadly combination, just as coke and heroin are. Enjoy hell, you bastard, and tell your dad I said hello.”
And with that, my second murder in less than a week was over. I made my way through the darkness of the dimly lit streets that I never wanted to see again. After less than twenty yards, I heard the front door open and watched Ethan’s body tumble out onto the small stoop. His body let out a final full spasm, then he moved no more. His last struggle for breath ended his life, but it started my new one. Satisfied that he was gone, I turned and trudged back to my waiting rental, eager to put the disgusting thoughts and actions behind me and start the task of learning to live, and hide, what I had become.
A stone cold killer.
Lost inside my new world I created and struggling to retain my grip on sanity, I never heard footsteps approaching until it was too late.
“Give me yo bag. Now motherfucker. And yo wallet.”
I froze in mid-stride. I could see my car in the distance, a dark shadow less than fifty feet away. There was no way I could cross that distance in time.
A young boy, no older than fifteen, stood in front of me, his eyes dark and somber. The semi-automatic weapon he held in his hand was aimed directly between my eyes.
“Toss it.” He motioned, his voice a deep rumble from within, his gaze that of a hardened street thug.
This isn’t happening. There is no way I’m handing this over.
“I don’t have my wallet on me. It’s in my car,” I said, trying not to show my paralyzing fear. I pointed with my head over toward the rental. He cut his dead eyes across the street then trained them back on me while I clung on for dear life to my thin briefcase.
“Keys then. And yo bag.”
“Okay, they are in my right front pocket, but the bag? No way.”
Suspicion rose behind his eyes while he sized me up. The breath I had been holding came out in a small whoosh when he responded, “Grab them. No tricks, bro, or I’ll empty my clip in yo ass.”
My left hand moved like it was in wet concrete and retrieved the keys. Then I extended my hand out, dangling them in front of him. His arm shot out with lightning speed, yanking them from my hand. Heart pounding, I realized prayers for salvation were racing through my mind, yet somehow, I knew they wouldn’t be answered and that I was on my own.
“Take the car and the money and cards that are in my wallet. It’s under the passenger seat.”
His eyes moved to the car as he clicked the key fob in the darkness, waiting to ensure that the keys really belonged to that vehicle. It was the opportunity I needed to jump him.
That opportunity never came to fruition, for just as my muscles tensed, his honed street instincts sensed my movement, and in a flash and a loud bang, it was over.
I didn’t feel myself hit the ground, but I knew I was lying on it since the only thing I could see were the stars above me in the night sky. My body jerked as he yanked my bag from my fingers and my heart sank. Jesus, all the work I toiled over ruined, just so some street thug could make a fortune selling the contents of my bag to the highest bidder. The video would surely go viral. Dear God, Bob would be devastated. What had I done?
Although I couldn’t move, I heard my killer rummaging through my bag, mumbling as he went. His words were fading, and I was having difficulty understanding them. The last thing I heard was his disgusted voice bemoaning the lack of money or drugs inside. Then I caught a glimpse of frayed VHS tape float past me in the air and then the crushing of plastic. I could only hope that I wasn’t hallucinating and that maybe, just maybe, he had destroyed the evidence that would shatter my reputation forever. Then, I heard nothing at all as everything went dark.
EARLY FRIDAY MORNING
I BLINKED TO FOCUS my eyes on the clock beside the bed. I tried not to let the groan I felt escape my lips when I read that it was four o’clock in the morning. Steve was in deep slumber, his breathing rhythmic and solid and his warmth seeping into my soul. I turned my head and just watched him sleep, still in awe that he loved me despite all the ugly baggage I brought to the relationship. I had loved James in my youth, but that feeling was so different, so superficial compared
to what I felt for Steve. I still couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that he asked me to marry him. Maybe I was still in a coma dreaming. Or maybe my Mr. Perfect did have a character flaw—he was in love with a woman that was marred by an insane amount of personal issues.
I had woken up from peaceful dreams, which was a new one for me. Normally, my dreams were horrid monsters that fed upon my soul. But my dream earlier had me reliving the strange visions of meeting and talking to Gina and Jesse. When I first came out of my coma, the visions of that experience were fresh in my head, yet I just assumed they were deep seated longings of what I wanted to see. However, they were so real, the feelings so strong, and after experiencing them again earlier, I realized that it wasn’t some brain-fuddled dream; it was as real as the man lying next to me.
That dream gave me some hope for the future. Honestly, thinking about the afterlife was not something that I ever had contemplated, and I think that was one of my bigger issues in terms of dealing with Jesse’s death. Not only did I feel extreme guilt because I worked myself into a frenzied state and didn’t take care of my body during my pregnancy, but when I miscarried, in my mind, he just ceased to exist. That was the hardest part to overcome. But if what I experienced was truly a glimpse into what was to come and that life didn’t just end when the body died—that there could actually be a soul that continued on—brought me a sense of peace for the first time in years. What did Rosemary call it? A peace that surpasses all understanding. Well, that certainly was true, for I didn’t understand it, yet I surely felt it. I made a mental note to call her later and ask her over for dinner. I wanted to share my vision with her and to ask her opinion about not only it, but the afterlife. I already knew the surface of what she believed, yet I felt ready to delve deeper.
It also made me think about the conversation I had with Rosemary about forgiveness for not only what things I had done, but extending forgiveness to those that had hurt me. Had I done that, I wouldn’t carry the label of killer. Even though I ended one life to save another, according to what Steve told me, did that give me the right to take a human life? Thinking about all of this was making my head spin. It didn’t help that I couldn’t remember what happened that night in Rosemary’s house. Having that void in my head and then someone telling me about my actions that I couldn’t recall was a very strange feeling. Part of me wanted to remember, to fully absorb what occurred that night from my own memories, yet part of me was terrified of remembering them. Dr. Kingston told me that loss of memory was a safety valve in my mind, and it would only be released when I was ready to deal with the events of that night. Obviously, I wasn’t ready, so it was time to concentrate on other things.
Eviscerating the Snake - The Complete Trilogy Page 54