Silent Echo

by Rain, J. R.

  The woman before me is not a ghost. I can see her shadow splash over my fender and even across my own sneakers. She is breathing. Others appear to see her, too, as the two of us generate a curious look here and there.

  She says nothing, of course. No response at all to my opening up to her. Still, she keeps her kind gaze on me… and gives me her full attention.

  “I’m here to see my last sunset,” I say. “I know, that sounds a bit melodramatic, but you see, I was given six months to live and that was eight months ago. I’m not only on borrowed time, I know I am dying now. I can feel my body sort of shutting down. Even talking to you is exhausting me.”

  She doesn’t nod but she sort of bites her upper lip a bit. I sense this is her way of showing me compassion.

  “Somehow, I have stayed alive long enough to finish something that is important to me. Maybe that is why I was granted the extra months.”

  Seagulls circle above as the wind dies down a little. I catch restaurant sounds behind me, as Ocean Boulevard is lined with many of them. People laughing, the clanking of dishes, dinner and drink orders being given and taken.

  “I’m not sure why you are not talking back to me, but that’s okay. Maybe it’s better that way. I don’t have a lot of strength left in me to answer a lot of questions. You remind me of my grandma. I loved her a lot.”

  The woman smiles and tilts her head a little. She leans to one side, taking pressure off one of her legs. I wish I could offer her a seat, but there’s nowhere to sit, other than the fender next to me. Also, I am confused as to why she is here, watching me. Kindly, granted. But watching me, nonetheless.

  “I probably shouldn’t be telling you this—hell, I know I shouldn’t be telling you this—but something very bad happened to someone I cared about a long time ago—something that I could have prevented—and it’s been tearing me up for a long time now.” I pause, fight for a breath, and then continue. “And I realize I have wasted my life punishing myself.”

  The woman shifts her weight to her other leg. Her red sweats flap around her heavier frame.

  “No comment, huh? Well, maybe I should get going. I feel stupid talking to a stranger about this—a stranger who hasn’t said a single word.”

  Except I don’t leave. I keep sitting there on my fender, alternately looking out over the ocean and at the old woman standing to my side.

  I say, “I should have forgiven myself a long time ago. How was I supposed to know that a monster had been so close? I was just seventeen. A stupid kid.”

  The tears come and as they do the woman steps forward and puts her arm around me. Now I am embarrassed, too, but her touch feels wonderful, and she smells so much like my grandmother that I am briefly confused.

  She keeps hugging me as I speak into her shoulder, my voice briefly muffled, “And then I realize that if I should have forgiven myself long ago, I should have also forgiven the monster, too. But how do you forgive a monster? How?”

  I can feel my tears on her jumpsuit shoulder. I can also feel the press of her large breasts against my shoulder. Yes, she is very real.

  “But I don’t want to forgive him. I want to hate him and hurt him and destroy him the way he destroyed me.”

  I’m not even sure she can understand me, but now she is hugging me even harder. A complete stranger. What has my life been reduced to?

  “And then I realize that I haven’t given much to this world, other than heartbreak, and my own self-hate, but there is one thing I can leave behind.”

  She pulls away from me and steps back. She’s waiting.

  Finally, after a short struggle for air, I say, “I can leave behind forgiveness.”

  She holds my gaze for a long time, then smiles and nods once and reaches inside her front pocket of her red sweats. She pulls out a card and hands it to me.

  It says: “Hi, I’m deaf. I can read lips but I cannot speak. God bless.”

  She looks at me some more, then reaches inside her pocket and pulls out a pen. She asks for the card back and I give it. She turns it over and writes on the back. She puts her pen away, then reaches up and pats me warmly on the cheek.

  She slips the card in my hand, steps back, looks at me some more, then continues along the busy sidewalk. She doesn’t look back.

  I look down at the card in my hand and turn it over. Her shaking handwriting reads: “You are loved. By God, by your friends, by me. And by your brother.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  When I’m back in my car, breathing as deeply as I can, knowing I might have just seen my last sunset on this earth, I reach over and check my glove box. The .44 Magnum is still there, of course, just as it was when I checked it before coming out to see the sunset.

  As I drive, I can feel my body is shutting down. It is a strange sensation, to be sure. The world around me seems to be slowing down. My body seems to be slowing down, too. I could be in a dream, or on drugs. But I know it’s neither. My body is dying, right before my eyes.

  I consider pulling over and calling Numi, but I need to do this alone. All alone. So, I grit my teeth and focus all my energy on keeping the car straight and not crashing.

  How I get to where I’m going without killing myself or someone else, I don’t know. But I arrive outside of another apartment complex. This one is in Brentwood, not too far from where Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were slaughtered. In fact, if I turn in my seat a little, I can just make out the condo complex where Nicole once lived.

  Except I don’t turn in my seat. I stay where I am, breathing deeply. I feel weak. Too weak to do what I am about to do. “Fuck it,” I say, and open the glove box.

  I verify that a black BMW X5 is in the parking lot. Then, with the gun swaying in the front pocket of my light jacket, I take the stairs slowly. Not because I am being cautious, but because my legs are shaky. Halfway up, I pause, take in my air. My heart is racing. From adrenaline, from lack of oxygen.

  At the landing, I stop and silently wish there was a bench nearby. There is no bench. Just a few pots with plants and a short row of front doors.

  I stop in front of the third one down, breathing harder than ever. I wait for at least two minutes, catching my breath, willing my lungs to at least give me enough to get through the next few minutes.

  Finally, finally, my lungs cooperate and I suck in just enough oxygen to clear my head.

  I knock on the door as loudly as I can with one hand, and grip the handle of the .44 with the other.

  I hear slow footsteps from the other side of the door. A shadow passes behind the peephole. I’m being peeped at. I smile as brightly as I can.

  The shadow disappears and there is a long pause. The floorboards creak a little on the other side of the door. I am not psychic and I don’t pretend to be. I know the visions and dreams and strange events that are happening to me are a product of a delusional mind, a sick mind.

  But one thing I am sure of—beyond a shadow of a doubt—is that the man standing behind the door has just removed his own gun. Instinct perhaps. I’d been in this business nearly twenty years. I’ve faced nearly every dangerous situation a private investigator could face. Most investigators specialize in following cheating spouses. I have specialized in finding the missing. I’ve faced killers and kidnappers. Monsters and men. I’ve looked down the barrels of guns. I’ve seen fingers twitch nervously around triggers. I’ve thought I was going to die a dozen times over.

  But I’m still here, still standing, and I have my instincts to thank. Or maybe an angel or two on my shoulder.

  Either way, I pull out my own gun, hold it down by my side, and wait. I continue smiling pleasantly. Ever the affable detective and friend.

  The doorknob turns slowly in front of me.

  And when the door cracks open, I shove it as hard as I can and step quickly into the apartment, holding my gun before me.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Eddie doesn’t know what has hit him.

  Good. As he’s puzzling out what is happening to him a
nd holding his broken nose, I kick the door shut and deliver a punch that rocks my whole body.

  I don’t have a lot behind it, but it’s enough to send Eddie sideways and down to one knee. I feel no pain. I am on an adrenaline high. I have no clue how long it will last, or how long my strength will last. I suspect I only have minutes.

  Eddie says nothing. He is simply on one knee and dripping blood on his linoleum. Eddie is not an idiot. In fact, he’s a helluva smart guy.

  “The great detective finally puzzles it out, huh?” He looks up and doesn’t bother to stop the flow of blood that pours from his now-crooked nose, blood that pours over his lips and spatters as he breathes.

  I say nothing. I keep the gun pointed at the crown of his head. Any sudden movements and he is dead, and he knows it. He looks up at me slowly.

  “You look well, Jimmy.” He grins. He looks like a ghoul. He is a ghoul. Truth is, I’m still trying to wrap my brain around what is happening.

  I keep saying nothing. The gun is feeling heavier and heavier.

  “You’re shaking, Jimmy,” he says. He begins standing slowly. I see his brain working every which way. There are many ways this encounter can go, and some of them end badly for me, although most will end badly for him. He knows it. He’s calculating and thinking this through. One of his options is to charge me. If so, I will kill him.

  He doesn’t charge. At least, not at the moment.

  “Why?” I ask. My voice is shaking. “Why!” The gun is shaking more now, too. I can see a couch in my peripheral vision. The couch is empty. I sense the rest of the house is empty, too, although I have been lucky on that end. It could have been full of people.

  Eddie is calculating his odds of rushing me and grabbing the gun before I can fire. Eddie is athletic, but he’s also a good five feet from me. He will be dead before he covers two feet. He knows it.

  “Are you here to kill me, Jimmy?”

  I say nothing, mostly because I don’t have the energy to play whatever game he thinks will buy him more time.

  “I don’t blame you,” he says. “I sure as hell would kill me, if I were you. Then again, I like killing, so you probably shouldn’t listen to me.”

  He grins and the blood covers his upper front teeth. He looks like something from a nightmare. He is something from a nightmare. My head is spinning a little. I’m getting dizzy. The gun is getting heavier.

  “But why my brother?” I ask, quietly now.

  My friend of the last twenty-five years of my life watches me carefully. I raise my gun to him, keeping it aimed between his eyes.

  “Your brother was my first. Well, my first person. I’d been killing frogs and cats and dogs up until that point. Hell, anything I could get away with.”

  There was a buzzing in my head. My breathing was getting difficult. It was all I could do to keep it together.

  “I was at the Dodgers game, too. Don’t you remember? I had asked if you wanted to come but you said you had tickets for just you and your brother. I’d gotten there early. Turns out none of my friends could make it. I went alone. I had gotten there early and had waited in Elysian Park. Like you. Like the two honeys I had been watching from the woods. Yes, I was in the woods, back behind the trees, watching them and imagining what it would be like to graduate from cats and dogs to girls.

  “Imagine my surprise when I saw you and your brother show up. You were playing catch. Very big brotherish of you. And then I saw you do something curious. You purposely threw the ball over your brother’s head. I knew this because you first spied the girls coming your way, and then you chucked the ball easily five feet over your brother’s head. You told him to get the ball, then immediately went over to the two girls.

  “Bought yourself a little time there, did we, Jimmy? Sending your brother off into the woods alone? Dick move, bro.”

  He was right, of course. I had, in fact, purposely overthrown the ball to my brother. Jesus, he’d really been there. Seen it all.

  “So, instead of the two girls, you could say I focused my attention on your little brother. After all, you practically hand-delivered him to me. And, the closer he got, the more I realized I didn’t really want to go to the stupid ball game after all. My plans, you could say, changed.”

  “But why Matt?” I hear myself ask. Truth is, I’m back in the park, back to my last memory of Matt as I see him dash off eagerly for the ball, and as I turn my attention to the approaching girls.

  “Oh, I didn’t have a problem justifying it, Jimmy boy. First off, I wanted to kill a person. It was time to kill a person. Second of all, Olivia always loved you. Even back when we were in high school, she always loved you.”

  Perhaps it was true. I had always sensed Olivia had feelings for me, although we had never acted on them.

  “Was I always jealous?” asks Eddie. He reaches up and touches his nose for the first time, and winces. “Of course.”

  I lower the gun a little. I’m having trouble keeping it pointed straight. Truth is, it feels like I’m holding a dumbbell straight out from my body.

  Eddie gives me a crooked smile. Blood coats his lip. Outside, I hear cars come and go in the apartment parking lot.

  “I take it you put together my little riddle?”

  I still say nothing. I am conserving what energy I have to do whatever it is I must do.

  “We were in algebra together, Jimmy. Studying pi and its infinite possibilities. I suppose I could have carved the symbol for pi on your brother’s chest—”

  But he doesn’t finish. I raise the gun again and point it at his face, holding it as steady as ever.

  “If you’re going to shoot, you should probably shoot. Because you’re only going to get weaker, Jimmy. And I can promise you this: one of us is going to die. So, if you’re a smart man, you should probably just pull the trigger.”

  “And send you into Infinity, Eddie?” I ask.

  His smirk fades. “It’s a good place to be.” He now begins circling me slowly. I pivot, following him down the sight of my gun. He says, “Was it that last clue that finally helped you piece the whole damn thing together, Jimmy?”

  I’m ready to pull the trigger, but I hesitate for reasons that I can’t explain.

  “I mean, my God, I practically spelled it out for you.”

  I don’t mention that I nearly didn’t figure it out. That most people in their right minds wouldn’t call a cheesecake a pie, but then again, Eddie isn’t in his right mind.

  “And then I show up and happen to talk about Infinity and all its possibilities.” He stops near the refrigerator. “But you did good, Jimmy. I’m real impressed.”

  “Why did you kill Olivia?”

  “Olivia wanted to leave me,” he says, shrugging. “I couldn’t have that. Besides, I’d been looking for a reason to kill her. That was as good as any.”

  “And the boy, Angel?”

  “Is that his name? I had no idea. The boy was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was in a bit of a mood, you could say. Took it out on him, I guess.”

  “Why pi?” I ask.

  “Why not? Every killer needs his signature. Infinity is something real to me. Math is something real to me. Death is real. Blood is real. I enjoyed playing a game.”

  “You’re a psychopath,” I say.

  “I prefer sociopath,” says Eddie, “but, really, they’re one and the same. I could never understand why death meant nothing to me. So, I killed again and again, and cared less and less.”

  “So then, why do it?” I ask.

  “It was fun. It gave me a rush.”

  “Were there any more?”

  “Of course. Bums mostly. Prostitutes sometimes. A girlfriend once who pissed me off long ago. Strangled her. But they weren’t as fun. I would rather play a game.”

  “Because you think you’re smarter than everyone else.”

  “No, because it was fun.”

  “Why did you hire me?”

  “Because I was tired of playing the game, Jimmy.”
/>   “You wanted to be caught?”

  “No, I wanted you to know.”

  I grip the gun a little tighter. “You wanted me to know that you killed my little brother?”

  “The answer, in a nutshell, is yes.”

  “And then what?”

  “And I was going to put you out of your misery.”

  “Nice of you,” I say.

  Eddie smiles and some of that old familiar charm comes back. But the truth is, I’m seeing Eddie for the first time in a new light. Whatever face he puts on for the rest of the world is gone. His eyes look different, dead. His color has faded.

  “Didn’t you know I would come for you?” I say.

  “Admittedly, I thought you would meet in the woods, or call me over to your place. I didn’t know you would break my fucking nose. So what now?” he asks. “A bullet to my head? Claim it was self-defense? A pussy way to go, Booker.”

  “As opposed to killing kids?”

  “Hey, I didn’t say I wasn’t a pussy. I just expected more from you, Mr. Private Eye Detective.”

  I take out my cell phone and hold it up, where I had been recording this entire conversation. I showed him the recording. I next turn off the recording feature. He watches me carefully.

  “I’m not going to kill you, Eddie. But I am going to kick your ass within an inch of your life.”

  He snorts as I set the phone and gun down on the kitchen counter.

  Eddie doesn’t wait. He doesn’t laugh hysterically or tell me that I am going to regret this. He simply rushes me as fast as he can.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  I may not have much strength, and Eddie may be healthy as hell—at least, physically—but I do know how to fight. And I have adrenaline and rage on my side.

  He comes in swinging, and I duck the wildly thrown blows and drive my fist hard into his nose again. He curses, but does not stop coming at me.

  I realize my punches don’t have a lot of force—or weight—behind them. But I make up for it by delivering them accurately and correctly. Accurate and correct trump strength every time.