Stalk Me

by Richard Parker

  It was like tourists had got themselves present in Beth’s worst nightmare. She was thankful the angle didn’t allow her to see Luc’s face. It was turned away from the camera, but she inhaled sharply as she made out her own swollen expression. She was trying to understand him. The female paramedic stood over her, looking from side to side, and then moved away and out of shot.

  She found herself frowning, appropriating the look of painful confusion she could see on her own face. Then her injured self squinted briefly out of the clip at her sitting in Jody’s lounge.

  It was the first time she’d registered the crowd watching them. But it felt as if she was looking directly at herself.

  Cold bubbles fizzed at the base of her spine.

  Her horizontal self’s attention returned to Luc as he shifted on the trolley. She watched her inflated lips move as she tried to get him to lie still. She frowned harder. Beth wondered if this was the moment Luc apologised to her.

  Her distended features looked out into Jody’s lounge again and this time there was disbelief and anger on her face.

  How can you watch this?

  She swung her feet off the trolley, sat up and reached out to Luc. She clenched the balled hands at his chest, gripping them tightly.

  Beth found her own fingers doing the same. Her face in the present screwed up a few seconds before the expression on the screen, however, because now she knew it didn’t matter if she held on tightly to Luc. She’d already lost him. He started to convulse.

  Her onscreen self yelled to nobody in particular. The mic barely picked up the words, misshapen by her swollen mouth and smashed jaw.

  Beth’s finger rose to hit the pause button again but she forced herself to continue watching.

  She stood up from the trolley, a red blanket falling away from her. Her sapphire blue dress was soaked and clung to her trembling body and her short red curls were dark and plastered to her scalp. Her shoes had gone and her tights were both ripped at the knees, revealing raw and bloody gashes. She pitched forward and Beth winced in both moments as her body harshly struck the edge of Luc’s trolley. She observed herself crawl up to Luc and tenderly touch his face. She could see from the distress in her reaction that the pain he was in made her invisible to him.

  The paramedic appeared again and started to help her to her feet. “Couchez-vous!”

  She turned to the paramedic, issuing a guttural plea for help and then looked out at Beth again, mortification and anger in her eyes.

  “I will. Lie down first.”

  She could see the panic on the paramedic’s face and registered how young the black woman was. Mid-twenties? Her dreadlocks were tied in a ponytail behind her head, and it whipped about her shoulders as she supported Beth under her arms and looked for assistance.

  Beth’s gaze was still fixed, accusing, almost as if the censure was for her sitting watching the event from the comfort of the armchair. She broke free from the paramedic’s grip and strode shakily across the road. The paramedic was about to pursue her but seemed to have second thoughts.

  When she threw the first punch, the operator of the phone stepped back and briefly she could see their shoes – a pair of green trainers. A man’s or a woman’s? The recording didn’t cease, though. It repositioned itself a few paces back from the crowd that was scattering and settled to capture Beth wildly swinging her fists at anyone within reach.

  Although it repelled her, she felt strangely envious of the undiluted anger she was exhibiting on the screen. Beth wondered if she could ever be capable of such feral rage again. Since she’d woken, she knew there were components of her missing. Anger was one. It didn’t feel like it was being blocked, but as if her capacity for it had been completely removed.

  The sound of the helicopter distorted in the mic. Beth’s hair bristled in its draught as she turned to look upwards, and leaves whirled and blasted against her. When she retrained her aggression on the crowd, she looked right into her own eyes and scarcely recognised herself.

  She’d been recorded in countless clips at family gatherings, but apart from her physical appearance, no other part of her she knew was present.

  She gripped the tablet tightly. More than this past desire to harm the voyeurs, Beth knew she wanted to confront the driver of the brown camper, the man who should have helped them but had instead attacked her and not called an ambulance. It was the coach driver who had alerted the emergency services. How many valuable minutes had been wasted as they’d lain there unaided? Would Luc have survived if they’d arrived sooner?

  Behind her she could see a male paramedic and two police officers darting over to restrain her. The female paramedic was beyond them, leaning over Luc.

  But even though she wanted to physically attack the driver who had fled, a man she knew she would never meet, she felt the compulsion only as a cold current flowing from somewhere distant. It should have consumed Beth, but the truth was that even maintaining the emotion exhausted her.

  The phone operator stepped back a few more paces, the camera tilting to the grass and then focussing on Beth again just as the male paramedic and two officers reached her and she collapsed in their grip.

  Chapter 8

  TWO STUDENTS KILLED WITH CLAW HAMMER

  It has been revealed that the bodies of Jocelyn and Ella Dunlop, discovered on the MSU campus by fellow student Natalie Smalls on April 8th, had both been bound with fishing wire and repeatedly bludgeoned with a claw hammer. In a police statement issued yesterday Detective Ryan Mills, Deputy Chief of the Bozeman Police Department, said the extensive injuries sustained by the two students, who were both attending MSU, “had rendered initial identification impossible.”

  Police are still calling for witnesses or anyone who might have seen anything suspicious on or around April 8th.

  Mimic examined the online news article on his iPad for the second time, but figured he’d bided his time in the car long enough. He put the device in the glove box and took off his jacket. He rolled up his powder-blue shirtsleeves and gently closed and locked his charcoal Toyota Corolla behind him.

  It was past dusk and the kids he’d watched earlier sharing crank by the deserted gas station had moved on. All in the scuzzy neighbourhood was still as he ambled up the tiny incline of gravelled driveway. It bordered an unkempt garden and led down the side of the dilapidated two-storey house he’d been observing.

  He didn’t want to leave his car unattended for too long. It would be like a punk magnet in a shithole like Billings. There were some local places worth visiting, though. He’d done a little online research and gleaned the Pictograph Cave State Park was a must, as well as Lake Elmo and Pompey’s Pillar National Landmark. It wasn’t a rush job and that made a pleasant change. Normally he didn’t have time to take in the scenery, but he was determined to do a little more of that while he was on the road.

  He paused a third of the way along the alleyway between the vinyl sidings of the house and its neighbour. A door slammed and then bare feet slapped on concrete. Somebody had just walked from the back of the property into the yard situated through the wooden side gate to his right. There was only one person it could be.

  Trip Stillman’s long yard was secluded, tall conifers affording him privacy but also obscuring the back area from any windows overlooking him. He’d inherited a burglar alarm and had security lights front and back. It took Trip just under three minutes to hang out his washing, but it was two minutes and fifty seconds longer than Mimic needed. He slipped in during the gap in illumination Trip repeatedly triggered by waving his hand at the sensor as he pegged out his laundry. When Trip returned to the kitchen, Mimic was upstairs.

  Trip put the empty basket on the table and locked the back door again. He knew he had to be security-conscious. It was a bad neighbourhood he’d just moved into, despite his parents’ misgivings, but snapping up the foreclosed property was the only way he could afford a place of his own. He thought he’d never escape Kalispell but he’d just put over four hundred miles
between him, Skylar, his psycho ex, his brain-dead band members and all the assholes of his childhood, even if the south side of Billings was where he’d landed.

  Mimic waited, crouching low on the far side of his bed in the gap between it and the wall. The bed sheets were a dirty grey and smelt of stale sweat, and the carpets hadn’t been vacuumed since he’d moved in. Trip couldn’t afford a vacuum. He’d posted that on Facebook. Although Mimic’s body exhibited the wear, tear and encroaching flab of over half a century, he was very much an ambassador of social media.

  How long should he wait here, until Trip came upstairs? The houses opposite were boarded up so nobody could overlook him work. It was late and maybe time for Trip to take a shower. Naked was good. He got a waft off the bed again. Perhaps washing wasn’t top of his agenda, though. Attacking him on the landing would be better. The passage between rooms was usually where people least expected to be assaulted.

  He listened to the downstairs activity, looked at his hands hanging between his knees and the blue surgical gloves he’d just pulled on. Trip had the radio loud and was singing along, badly. He liked to wait. Give them a sense of all being normal; let them settle into their daily rhythm. It was when they were most vulnerable.

  His breathing had slowed now but was slightly constricted by his squatting position, and his knees ached. He hadn’t had any dinner and hoped Trip had something in the refrigerator. Some ham and cheese for a sandwich, maybe. His mouth watered thinking about it. His stomach gurgled a response.

  That made his mind up. He heard his knees crack as he raised himself and strode back across the bedroom. He stopped at the small Heineken mirror beside the door and examined his reflection. Mimic was balding at the front but had a thick step of amber hair at the back of his pate. Most people thought he wore a toupee but, in fact, the fibrous yellow clump was all his.

  He was way below average height, five foot four and shrinking. It meant he got overlooked in bars and lost in crowds, which was a real virtue in his line of work. He had an avuncular face that appeared to be tanned but was actually a mass of freckles. They usually flourished in the summer, but their reactions had slowed as much as his had lately and set up permanent camp on his weatherworn features.

  His only distinguishing detail was a straight line that ran from his receding hairline and cut through his temple, stopping just above his right eyebrow. It looked like somebody had taken a blade to him, but it was a sleep wrinkle that was getting deeper. He supposed the passing years made the skin hang looser around your skull.

  But he was more distracted by what was at the corners of his mouth. The little blobs of white spittle were already back even though he’d only just wiped them away. It made him look as if he were permanently eating a chicken mayo sandwich. The deposits seemed to materialise the day he turned fifty. He took his white handkerchief out of his top shirt pocket and swiped them off, and took a deep, faltering breath at the door.

  People’s reactions were often unpredictable, but he’d learnt to anticipate every conceivable eventuality. Flight was the usual response. But as he’d heard Trip lock the back door, he knew he had the time it would take him to try and unlock it to subdue him. Defensive counterattack was also likely, particularly with women. They seemed to respond with physical force faster than men. Males took several more seconds to realise it wasn’t a joke and for their egos to recover from having been caught off guard. Those few seconds were his window of opportunity. Brute force took care of faster feminine reflexes.

  He didn’t need to cover up his footsteps back down the stairs. The radio and tone-deaf singing gave him ample cover. Mimic couldn’t sing either, and the idea that somebody had been listening in on him in such a private moment would have mortified him. He stood outside the door to the kitchen and waited for Trip to finish murdering Chris Martin. Somebody should, he thought. When Trip started the next performance he would walk in.

  But at that moment, the door opened and Mimic was face-to face-with Trip’s anaemic features. He was chewing gum and his jaw halted. Mimic grinned as if he’d been caught midway through some piece of well-intentioned mischief, removed the hammer from the waistband at the back of his pants and slammed it forcefully into the left side of the kid’s skull. His head sunk to the bottom stair, and the weight of it dragged the rest of his limp body down.

  Mimic dumped the bloody claw hammer on the kitchen table. It was a clumsy but effective implement. A glance at the crime stats for a two hundred mile radius had soon yielded the story about the Dunlop sisters being bludgeoned with the same weapon in Bozeman last April. The perp had never been caught. Mimic had purchased the hammer and fishing wire from a hardware store before he’d entered Billings.

  He opened the refrigerator door. Corned beef. OK, he could work with that. As long as there was mustard. No fucking mayo.

  Chapter 9

  Jody shuffled into the lounge in his dressing gown and found Beth seated on the edge of the armchair. “You watched it?”

  Beth nodded once but didn’t look up. She heard Jody unscrew the cap from a bottle and discard it before the sound of liquid pouring into glasses. “It’s nearly...it is morning.”

  “Not officially morning until seven.” He handed her a filled glass.

  She took it and sipped. She hated bourbon but the taste brought her back to the room. She watched Jody drop into the armchair opposite and balance the second glass on his paunch.

  “You had to, sooner or later.” He said stolidly and examined his generous measure.

  “Sorry if I woke you.”

  He shook his head dismissively.

  They drank slowly and didn’t speak. Beth emptied hers before Jody. She wasn’t a liquor drinker. Always drank it too quickly. She could feel her insides shrivelling against it but reached for the bottle on the coffee table. She wanted the warmth again.

  Her mother and father didn’t drink, and it was their teenage infractions that had united her and Jody as they’d grown up. They’d both been subjected to their tag-team lectures. Being partial to the occasional spliff was their most heinous crime, but only Beth had ever been caught. When the French investigating officer, Sauveterre, made insinuations about her and Luc’s substance intake prior to the accident, which were entirely untrue, her parents had deftly distanced themselves, fearing the procedure would throw up her criminal record.

  It had happened thirteen years ago and she’d mistrusted law enforcement officers ever since. She’d been spot-checked outside Brixton Academy when she was eighteen and had a large amount of cannabis resin found about her person – way too much for it to be for personal use.

  Ironically, she really had been holding it for someone. Granted, someone who had promised her a fraction of it for concealing it while he dealt. It had never been clear if John Dukes was really her boyfriend. All these years later and she still didn’t know. John had said she had too honest a face to be searched. He’d been right, until then. The female police officer had seemed just as surprised after frisking Beth.

  Bottom line, Beth was charged with possession and got a criminal record. It wasn’t the beginning of her parents’ disappointment in her – her first tattoo had seen to that – but it had made things nice and official.

  It was why she hadn’t told them about her ordeal at the station. The police hadn’t thrown her in a cell, but they’d deliberately put her in a holding room with a homeless man strung out on something much harder than she’d been busted with. She’d never forgotten him. He’d looked like a walking, jaundiced corpse and had initially ignored her while his constant scratching had intensified and he’d clawed the skin on his neck raw.

  His hallucinations prompted the beggar to plead with, and then attempt to assault Beth. The desk officer had taken great glee in letting things play out before he’d eventually intervened. It was the first time she’d experienced their indiscriminate mishandling of civilians. It had shaken her up badly, but she hadn’t let her parents see just how much when they’d picked her up from t
he station.

  She started smoking the odd joint again with Luc, and they both did it for nostalgia’s sake. If she was honest, it had never done much for her. Red wine was always a more reliable way of loosening up. Blow only seemed like something illicit to repel the sensation of being too safe.

  Another thirteen years of life later, half of that spent working on the periphery of the criminal justice system, and she was still wary of the police and their methods. When they’d questioned her after the collision, she’d assured them she didn’t do drugs anymore. If they’d tested her at the crash site, they would probably have found small traces of it from their nights relaxing in front of the wood burner. But she hadn’t been smoking or drinking prior to the car journey to the restaurant. The police said there was no way of knowing for sure because she hadn’t been breathalysed at the scene.

  “You going to watch the rest?” Jody refilled his glass.

  Beth shrugged her shoulders. Did she need to see them? She knew she’d have to. There was so much activity within that small frame. Would she glimpse something in the others? Perhaps the man from the camper? The police said they’d examined all the recordings and not found anyone outside of the roadside witnesses who’d made statements.

  She wondered which one of them was “bloodlegend”. They’d uploaded a YouTube clip and called it “nut job crash bitch goes postal”. The banal description of her trauma was obscene. Why were these creeps allowed to get away with posting stuff like this? But she knew she was trying to misdirect herself from her aggression at the crash site.

  She’d erupted when she should have been with Luc. She’d assaulted strangers instead of comforting him. Would he have even known she were there if she’d stayed with him? But despite the antipathy she felt towards the ghouls, Beth realised her behaviour disgusted her more than the people who had recorded them.