Tuesday February 18th
6:00 p.m.
Under the circumstances, everyone would have understood if Jeremy had called off band practice, but Jeremy wanted to get on with his life. In fact, he had been looking forward to it since Sunday afternoon – sometime after it was clear that he was going to live, but well before the police were done asking him the same questions over and over.
Kelly had been the first to arrive – two hours early. She wanted to hear the story of his abduction without anyone interrupting but her. It hadn’t been necessary. Talking still hurt Jeremy’s mouth so he had typed up a fairly complete version of the events.
Kelly’s first word when she walked through the door was, “Talk.”
Jeremy responded by handing her his prepared account. It read:
I’m typing this up to answer your questions, and so I won’t have to repeat myself much. As you might be able to guess by looking at my face, talking hurts at the moment. The cut on my cheek goes all the way through, and I have a matching cut on my tongue. You don’t want to know what it feels like to have stitches on your tongue.
I have these wounds because Saturday night, Aldous Andmour, who you might know as the tall creepy tour guide with no hair and tattoos on his head, went around the bend and tried to kill me. Before you ask, no, I don’t know why. All I know is that I woke up in the middle of the night with him sitting on my chest, and before I knew what was happening, he had glued my lips together. Then he tied me up, shoved me in a duffle bag, and tossed me in the trunk of a car. Meanwhile, he had also tied Sarah up, but she didn’t get the glue or duffle bag treatment. She got to ride in the back seat as Aldous drove us out to a little house in the middle of nowhere, that could have been a set from any given horror movie. When he pulled me out of the bag we were in a room that had been gift-wrapped in galvanized steel. My guess is that the décor was to make blood easier to clean up, but that is just a guess. He might just like the look or the way screams echo off it.
Sarah was chained to the wall, and he tied me to a cross. He gave Sarah a deranged little speech, which I couldn’t repeat, and didn’t make much sense even at the time. Then he glued my nose shut.
Fortunately, I have a guardian angel. Sarah has skills beyond what you would expect from a street corner angel, and she managed to not only escape her handcuffs, but also find it in herself to cut Aldous’ throat. After that she had the presence of mind to jam that knife through my cheek, which let me breathe.
The bad news is that merely having his throat cut doesn’t seem to have been enough to kill someone as evil as that bastard. Aldous got away. The cops say that Sarah must not have cut deep enough to sever anything vital. They found his car a few parishes away. It looks like he killed a cop and stole his car. The cop might still be alive, but everyone doubts it.
Anyway, we got out of the house alive, and it burned behind us. We walked about a mile down the road, where a mysterious stranger picked us up and took us to the hospital. I call him a mysterious stranger because nobody knows anything about him, other than the fact that the car he was driving was stolen. He disappeared after he dropped us off. Anyway, I really hope I meet him again someday, because I want to thank him. Few people would help a couple of strangers while driving a stolen car.
Since then we have spent a lot of time in police stations telling this story over and over.
Aldous is out there somewhere, and I don’t have any reason to believe he won’t try again. I got a lot of his blood on me, and I had an open wound, so it is pretty safe to say that any diseases he had, I’ve got. Basically I am scared, and I’m scarred, but I’m happy to be alive.
And that is really all I feel like saying about it right now.
Kelly read over the paper twice, and handed it back to Jeremy. Then she hugged him, which caught him a little off guard; Kelly was normally a lot more physically aloof than that. She said, “Well, if you don’t want to talk about that anymore, how are we supposed to spend the next two hours?”
Jeremy put his hand on her butt, grinned and wiggled his eyebrows. She laughed and pushed him away. “I don’t think Sarah would like it very much if we did that ...”
“I don’t either, but if you give me a straight line like that, how do you expect me to resist?” His speech was slow and slurred, and it did hurt to talk, so he walked over to the laptop and typed, “I could probably spend the next two hours telling you how great Sarah is.”
Kelly said, “I’m sure you could, but you don’t have to. I already told you that you could keep her. This feels weird, you typing and me talking.”
He typed, “I could go to the other computer and we could message at each other, just like we used to.”
“I’d rather get used to the weirdness.”
“I can live with that.”
“True, weirdness has never bothered you.”
The front door opened and Jeremy jumped. His reaction made Kelly jump. It was Sarah. Before she could even shut the door, Jeremy crossed the room and kissed her. Kelly noticed that Jeremy was suddenly covered in sweat.
The three of them chatted for a while. Actually, the two women chatted while Jeremy hugged on Sarah, until Steve showed up, followed closely by Jimmy. It was only seven o’clock, and it was the first time Jeremy could remember that the entire band had been early for band practice. Jeremy suddenly felt loved.
After everybody had a chance to read Jeremy’s letter, and express concern for his well-being, they got down to the business of playing music.
Wednesday February 19th
Aldous woke to daylight streaming through the east windows of the cabin. He was still on the floor. He rolled over and crawled to the water cooler. There was a blue enameled-steel cup hanging from it. He rinsed it, pouring the dusty water on the cabin’s plywood floor, and then filled it and drank. He filled it again. He stood. He was weak but the sensation of extreme heaviness was gone. He opened the swamp side door and stepped onto the porch. He leaned over the rail and threw up, almost casually, as if it was just a normal part of his morning routine.
Aldous walked slowly back into the cabin and took another handful of the antibiotics. He washed them down with a sip of water, then lay back down on the floor and poured more peroxide on his wound. It didn’t seem to hurt him so badly this time. He sat up, packed his neck in gauze, wrapped it with a bandage, had another few sips of water, and actually made it to the bed before passing out.
Thursday February 20th
4:00 p.m.
Jeremy was checking his email. It was, as usual, mostly spam. Some of it was funny, at least the subject lines, but most of it was just annoying. He found himself wondering who in their right mind would buy anything from an unsolicited email. He had to wonder how many were outright fraud, where no product was ever shipped, versus how many were merely scams, selling real products that didn’t work.
The doorbell rang, and Jeremy’s spine turned to ice. He wasn’t expecting anyone. There were millions of people that Jeremy wouldn’t mind finding on his doorstep, and only one that he was afraid would be out there. Why did every sound convince him that Aldous was back?
Jeremy trotted down the stairs and checked out the peephole. It was Jimmie. He was carrying an acoustic guitar case.
Jeremy smiled and said, “What brings you to this part of town?”
“I was feeling the need to make a little noise. Can Jeremy come out and play?”
“Have you ever known me not to want to play? Come on in.”
Jeremy ran upstairs and grabbed his Martin acoustic from its bedside stand and trotted back down to the living room. Jimmie was already sitting in the living room with a resonator guitar in his lap. Jeremy quickly checked the tuning on his guitar then gave Jimmie an E to tune to. Jimmie’s guitar was a little off of Jeremy’s, but that condition didn’t take long to fix.
Once they were in tune, Jeremy started strumming a twelve
bar blues progression. It wasn’t anything fancy; anyone who knew three chords could have kept up. Jimmie let him go through the progression once, while he pulled a bottle-neck slide out of his shirt pocket, then he joined in.
Jimmie’s guitar sounded like a cat in heat that had learned to sing the blues. It wailed and protested in joyful misery. Eventually he backed out of solo land and started strumming the chords to give Jeremy a chance to noodle, but instead of soloing Jeremy sang.
I’ve got the victim blues
Oh I’ve got the victim blues
There’s a killer after me,
What am I gonna do?
Singing was making his cheek hurt, but it felt good anyway. He was making the words up as he went along, but he was letting out feelings that had been building since the night Aldous had tried to kill him.
They say he must be dead
They say he must be dead
But I bet he’s not,
And he’s comin’ for my head
Maybe I should hide
Just run away and hide
Pack up what I’ve got
And leave my life behind
Jeremy started to solo, but Jimmie stopped playing. Jimmie said, “Well, you just answered a question I was afraid to ask.”
“Which question would that be?”
“How you are holding up.”
“I’m scared.”
“Yeah, I kind of got that. Is there anything I can do to help?”
“You could teach me how to defend myself.”
“Nope, I can’t do that.”
“What do you mean you can’t? You’re a certified Tae Kwon Do instructor. I’ve seen you punch through a brick. Why can’t you teach me?”
“Maybe I should say: I can’t teach you in the time period you would need me to teach you. If a guy walked into this room off the street and asked you to teach him guitar, how long would it take you to teach him the chords to what we were just playing?”
“Maybe fifteen minutes, if the guy was slow.”
“And how long would it take you to teach him how to improvise a tasty solo on top of those three chords?”
“A lot longer.”
“And how long would it take you to teach him to play anything he wanted?”
“I don’t know, I still can’t play everything I want.”
“Exactly. In fifteen minutes I could teach you five things to do against five different attacks, but I couldn’t teach you how to improvise if your attacker didn’t follow the script. From what I’ve heard, this guy coming after you isn’t a three chord song.”
“So what you are saying is that I’m toast if he comes back.”
“Not necessarily. There are ways of evening up the odds somewhat. There used to be a saying, ‘God made men, but Sam Colt made them equal’.”
Jeremy let his surprise show. “You want me to carry a gun?”
“I’d say it would improve your odds of surviving another encounter quite a bit.”
“But I don’t like guns.”
“You would rather be killed? If it was a choice between him and you, who would you rather see dead?”
“If you put it that way, the choice is easy. But I don’t think I could do it.”
“Fair enough, but if you have a gun at least you’d have the option.” Jimmie sat thinking for a moment, and then added, “I tell you what, I’m going to loan you mine.”
“You have a gun? But you’re Mister Black Belt, who can defend himself against a dozen attackers!”
“A dozen unarmed attackers, sure. Two dozen on a good day. And I’ve got the smarts not to get in a fight at all if I can help it. But I also know that there are some arguments you can’t win unless you are speaking the same language.”
“I’d say carrying a gun just gives you a false sense of security, and probably opens you up to more risk because you’d be willing to go places that you wouldn’t if you were unarmed because you have a six-shot talisman to protect you from danger.”
“Jeremy, I don’t go traipsing down dark alleys, and I know what parts of town to stay out of, armed or unarmed, but that isn’t the point. What we are talking about right now is your situation. There is a very dangerous, very deranged man out there that you might never see again, or who might be waiting for you just outside your door. If he comes back to try to finish what he started, I’d like you to have a chance at stopping him.”
Jeremy didn’t say anything. He felt vaguely like he had just found out that his close friend was a heroin addict or child molester. He didn’t want to get sucked into the mindset that guns could solve problems. But Jimmie was making sense, at least to the scared part of Jeremy’s brain. Aldous was bigger than him, meaner than him, and crazier than him. If he wanted to survive another encounter with the madman he would need some sort of edge. He would prefer a full police escort at all times, but the cops had already ruled that out.
Jimmie watched his friend’s face for some sort of confirmation, but he couldn’t find any. He decided to blaze on anyway. He reached into the small of his back and pulled his gun and its holster out of his pants. “Jeremy, I’d like to introduce you to my gun. It is a five-shot .38 caliber Smith and Wesson Airlite revolver with a shrouded hammer. It is a gun that is designed to be concealed and easy to carry.”
Jeremy remained silent.
Jimmie went on, “The shrouded hammer means that the hammer won’t get snagged in your clothes if you have to draw it in a hurry. This holster is designed to clip inside your pants and help hold the gun in place, protect it, and help conceal it. Never just tuck the gun into your pants. Bad things can happen if you do. The biggest is that you run the risk of not being able to draw it when you need it, but you also you greatly increase your odds of shooting your own dick off.
“But considering your circumstance, I would suggest that you not worry about drawing it at all. The beautiful thing about a shrouded hammer revolver is that you can carry it in a jacket pocket, keep your hand on it, and shoot it through the pocket if you need to. If you do, be ready to take the jacket off in a hurry, because it will be on fire. So if I were you, I would wear a big jacket, and keep my hand in the pocket a lot. But never with your finger on the trigger. Never put your finger on the trigger until you are ready to shoot. I’d hate to have to bail you out of jail because you shot a grocery clerk because you sneezed.”
Jeremy hadn’t said, “No, I don’t want it” yet, so Jimmie kept talking. “The trick to being safe with a gun is to get used to it enough that you aren’t scared to have it, but to stay a little afraid of it. If you are a little afraid of it, you’ll be careful with it, and that is what you want. Never point it at anything you would mind shooting, even if your finger is off the trigger.”
Jimmie laid the gun on the table and said, “So, are you going to take it?”
Jeremy reached out and took the gun. Being careful to not point it at anything, which was actually impossible, there was something wherever he pointed it, he pulled it from the holster.
Jimmie said, “Good boy, now let me show you how to use it.” Jimmie gave Jeremy a brief lecture on the basic mechanics of the firearm, showing him how to unload and load it. He went through the cycle a couple of times, then gave the gun to Jeremy to practice.
When the gun was unloaded Jimmie said, “Now, for the most important thing: aiming. The first thing you have to understand is that you aren’t John Wayne. John Wayne could point his gun in the general direction of seven bad guys and kill all seven with only six shots, without even moving his gun. Pretty much all American males grew up watching movies where the good guys just point and shoot and it works. In real life it doesn’t work that way. That is why, in real life, it is usually better to have a man shooting at you than a woman. Most guys think the bullets will take care of themselves, but most women take the time to grab the gun with both hands and aim.”
Je
remy said, “I guess they are more serious about it. The guys are still playing cops and robbers. The women are fighting for their lives.”
“You got that right. Remember though, if you see this guy again, you are going to be fighting for your life. What I am going to have you do is called dry firing – shooting without bullets.”
“I like it already – guns aren’t all that scary. It’s the bullets that are bad.”
“Pretend you are going to shoot that lamp. Aim the gun at it. The front sight should line up with the rear sights, now squeeze the trigger until it clicks. That click would be the bang. Try not to jerk the gun, see how steady you can keep it on the target even after you pull the trigger.”
Jeremy pointed the gun at his lamp, click, click, click, click, click. The gun didn’t move much. Jimmie said, “Good. Practice doing that a couple of times a day. Always make sure the gun is unloaded when you are practicing, always make sure it is loaded the rest of the time. Always keep it with you. It won’t do you any good if it isn’t where you can get it.”
Jeremy loaded the gun, put it back in the holster and set the holster on the table. He was careful to point the barrel away from himself and Jimmie. He smiled and said, “Now let’s get back to making some music.”
They played.
Thursday February 20th
Something was wrong. Aldous didn’t know why, but he was afraid. Fear was not a familiar emotion to Aldous, and he had known more in the last few days than he had in his entire life.
Aldous sat up and looked around. Someone was looking into the window, over the cot where he slept. His fear faded. He could deal with an intruder, and a fresh soul would give him some energy.
He grabbed a gun and shot the intruder in the chest. The intruder did not respond. He shot again. Aldous knew his aim was true – his shots were punching nice holes in the pane of glass in front of the intruder’s heart. The intruder remained impassive. Aldous’ fear came crushing back. Even though the intruder’s soul would be wasted, Aldous raised the gun and shot the intruder in the head.
The Whisper Garden Page 18