by Matt Hader
His only comforting thought was that he did, indeed, have a decent insurance policy on his own life. If he died, Rebecca and the kids’ financial future would be solid. Unless Gregy came calling on Rebecca after he killed Keith and demanded the life insurance dough. That was always a possibility. Hell, why did he just conjure up that thought? Shit. His mood sank even further into the depths of despair.
Keith stepped up onto his porch and could see through the window that his father-in-law, Thomas, sat on the sofa in the living room, but he still had no clue why his wife used her cute voice. Once he opened the screen door and walked into the house, everything became terrifyingly clear.
Gregy, dressed in an expensive suit, held a tape measure as he smiled broadly, and checked out the dimensions of their front windows.
“We won, honey!” said his wife, as she launched herself into an embrace of the utterly confused Keith. “This is Gregy Gregers. He owns the blinds store that we see the commercials for on TV. I don’t remember filling out the entry, but we won free window treatments. Isn’t that fantastic?!”
“Oh, no, Mrs. Michaels. You didn’t fill it out, Keith did,” said Gregy through a toothy lie. He stepped forward and extended his hand to Keith. “Hi, I’m Gregy. Nice to meet you, Keith. And congratulations!” He shook the dumbfounded Keith’s hand in a bone crushing and painful manner. “I’m just finishing up.” He turned and grinned warmly at Rebecca, “I’ll make sure to take care of you personally within a couple of days, Rebecca. You are my number one priority. I’m sorry, can I call you Rebecca?”
Rebecca blushed and nodded like a schoolgirl.
Keith knew that Gregy had just threatened his wife, but he was frozen in the moment and couldn’t do anything.
“Gregy, if you don’t mind, you know, as long as you’re here, I just brought the home across the street and need you to give me some pricing on treatments,” said Thomas. “Maybe those plantation shutters would be a good fit. I have some furniture being delivered in a couple of days, so I’d like to get the ball rolling. What do you say?”
Gregy finally released Keith’s hand, but never took his eyes off of him. “It would be my pleasure to take care of you, too, Thomas.” Gregy winked at Keith.
“Thank you! That would be fantastic!” said Thomas, unaware that his life was in danger.
Gregy turned and approached the giddy Rebecca. He leaned in and gave her a little peck on the cheek. She melted, but recovered quickly when she saw the sickly look on Keith’s face.
“You have a lovely home, Rebecca,” said Gregy. “Keith is a lucky man to have such a beautiful woman in his life. I’ll be in touch.”
Rebecca blushed, cleared her throat, and blurted, “Thank you!”
“Shall we?” Gregy said as he motioned for Thomas to lead the way across the street.
***
The assortment of shotguns at the Sebela’s Sporting Goods super store in Hoffman Estates was huge. Mind-numbingly large. Just an endless sea of blue steel and polished-wood stocks as far as the eye could scan. Keith didn’t even know where to begin.
“Help ya?” asked the paunchy, and bearded man in the ill-fitted Sebela’s Sporting Goods golf shirt. Ten minutes later, with the help of the chubby and quite knowledgeable counter man, Keith purchased a simple and inexpensive pump-action, 12-gauge for just under $300.
***
“Breathe, damn it!” screamed old man Jenkins. He stood on his property ten feet in back of Keith as the councilman aimed his new gun at the earthen berm. Jenkins hiked up his overalls and said, “Breathe, and squeeze. Don’t pull. Pulling’s for pussies. You’ll miss every time. Breathing and squeezing made me plug every damned North Korean I aimed at. Saved my ass, is what it did.”
Boom!
“Good! Rack another!”
Keith, a bit apprehensive just a moment ago, loosened up some. He racked another round into the gun, aimed, breathed, and squeezed.
Boom!
Keith’s eyes said it all. He had this. This was good.
“Feels right, don’t it?”
“It does,” said Keith as he racked another round, aimed, took in a deep breath, and squeezed.
Boom!
“I can do this.”
“Of course you can, son,” said Jenkins, not really knowing what Keith was referring to.
“Piece of cake,” said Keith through a demented grin, as he racked another round.
Boom!
***
Keith stepped into his home office and stopped cold. She stood next to the filing cabinet, with her back to the door, and held the crinkled baby-face mask in her hand. She turned the mask this way and that and silently studied it.
“What are you doing?” asked Keith.
Rebecca spun, lost her breath, and put a hand on her chest. “Honey, I didn’t even hear you come in.”
“Why are you going through my stuff?”
“I was dusting, and-”
“Honey…” said Keith.
Rebecca caught her breath and bucked up some courage. “Well, you’ve been acting weird again. I wanted to make sure that you didn’t-”
“Didn’t what?”
“Go and make another stupid land deal or something. Okay?”
“Wait. What? You knew?”
“Baby, you were acting so strangely. It didn’t take long to figure it out. Well, not all of it, but I know that you took money from my accounts. Promise me it’s not that again. I love our new life here in town. I know dad is across the street, but I can keep him out of our daily lives,” said Rebecca.
Keith didn’t believe her last comment, but nodded and smiled sadly in agreement. He couldn’t bring himself to telling her that they only had a couple of days to live if he didn’t take Gregy out first.
He leaned closer to her, kissed her on the cheek, took the mask from her hand and placed it into the open file cabinet drawer and closed it tight.
“That looks like one of those masks the guy wore last summer when he was robbing everyone.”
Keith shrugged.
“Do you smell that? Smells like firecrackers.” She leaned in to Keith’s shirt, sniffed again. “Gunpowder, or something.”
“Huh? Nope. Don’t smell a thing,” said Keith.
The screaming voice of a woman in the front yard cut their conversation short. “Damn it, take wider turns! What the hell is wrong with you, kid?”
By the time Keith and Rebecca made it out the door, down the steps, and across the lawn, Kenny was terrified and in tears. “I’m, I’m, I’m sorry,” he sputtered.
“Kenny, buddy, go ahead and take it inside. Let me talk to Crystal for a second,” said Keith. When he noticed the murderous way Rebecca raised her gaze toward Crystal after she kissed Kenny’s forehead, he said, “Honey, I got this, okay? I’ll handle it.”
Crystal chuckled, let out a slow breath, and said, “Dude, you can’t handle shit. I told you. I can’t have this damage to my property.”
“What in the hell is wrong with you?” he asked as he took an angry half-step forward.
But that was all Keith could get out of his mouth before Crystal hooked her left leg around the back of his, and knocked him flat onto the sidewalk with a hard forearm shot to the chest.
“Don’t invade my space again, Keith. You understand me?”
Crystal turned just as her lover Babs, a portly and sweet 50-year old woman, stepped onto their porch and said, “Everything okay? Crystal, what’s going on?”
“Nothing I can’t handle,” said Crystal, as she backed away from the prone Keith, strode past Babs, and entered her home.
Keith, not hurt, but extremely embarrassed, got himself to a seated position.
“Are you okay, Keith?” asked Babs, the more approachable of the two neighbors
. “I’ll talk to her, okay? I’m so sorry about this.”
Keith waved that he was okay but noticed that Rebecca and Kenny were still positioned next to his house. He smiled and shrugged, but Kenny, with sad eyes, turned his electric chair. He rolled away without another word. Rebecca lowered her head and followed.
Keith looked up at the sky -– and then heard a man laugh. Thomas, on his front porch across the street, smiled and silently clapped his hands. He mouthed a few “bravos.”
Keith got to his feet, brushed himself off, and walked into his house.
***
He drove around to the backside of the two-story tall, brick, pre-war row of buildings on Main Street in Park Ridge, traveling at a snail’s pace. As instructed on the phone by Gregy, Keith parked his Chevy van in one of the three designated spots for the Gregy’s Window Treatments outlet store located there.
It was 11:30 PM and there was absolutely no activity in the area, either human or vehicle, as Keith got out and locked his van. He exited the tiny U-shaped enclosed parking lot on foot and walked around to Fairview Avenue. There he made his way to the storefront on Main Street and gently knocked on the glass door of the retail blinds business.
It took more than a few minutes for Gregy to finally open the door. There he was, though. He smiled and acted uber-confident as he frenetically flicked white powder residue off his nostrils with his right forefinger. He grabbed Keith by the shirt collar and unceremoniously tugged him into the building.
“You have it?” asked Gregy.
“Yeah.”
Gregy spun Keith around and frisked him. “You’re not thinking of stupid stuff, are you, Keith? Like killing me dead sort of stuff. Here you have me all alone in my business. Maybe you bring a piece and take me out?”
Keith nervously chuckled, and said, “Come on, I’m not a killer.” The shotgun he purchased earlier was loaded, safety off, and situated inside the passenger compartment of his locked van out back.
“Where’s the 100k?”
“In my van.”
“Let’s do this.”
“Yeah, let’s.”
Gregy lead Keith through the darkened building and out the rear metal door. He pushed the door open wide and it smacked hard into the front bumper of Keith’s van.
Keith opened his van’s passenger door with his key and felt around in the dark for the shotgun, but came up empty. “What the hell,” he whispered to himself.
Then Keith heard Gregy rack a round into his new shotgun – the live round already in the chamber bounced off the asphalt near his feet.
“Keith, man, not cool, brother,” said Gregy.
Keith slowly turned and awaited his fate. Gregy, wild-eyed as a result of the white residue encrusted around his nostrils, aimed the shotgun at Keith’s left eye and smiled. Gregy edged in a little closer, and the barrel of the huge gun pressed gently into Keith’s cheek. The NFL player-sized bully just stood there, wide-eyed.
Gregy’s expression softened just a bit and he slowly slid the gun back and away from Keith’s face. He ejected each of the remaining shells, and they all plunked harmlessly to the asphalt.
Keith’s eyes scanned the U-shaped, enclosed parking area, but there was nowhere to run. Gregy was still standing between Keith and any chance of escape.
“I’m keeping the gun. But I’m a gentleman. I’ll take a couple hundred off the 100 Gs you owe. Time’s a wasting, my friend.”
Keith gulped. It was his only tactical move.
“And Keith, don’t fuck around anymore, okay? You don’t want to deal with me when I’m really angry. I can get a little murdery sometimes. And you have such a beautiful family, you know.”
***
“You kidding me? We love to see returning customers, sir,” said the same counterman at the Sebela’s Sporting Goods store in Hoffman Estates, as he handed over another brand new shotgun. “Keeps me in camo and deer piss attractant for the fall season!”
“What? Eh, I don’t even want to know. This’ll work just fine,” said Keith. “I’m teaching my kid to shoot,” he lied.
“Get ‘em young is what I always say. Good on ya, man! Your kid a girl? We have a sweet little shotgun with a pink stock right over here. It’s a got a kitty-cat cartoon on it.”
All Keith could do was squint his eyes as he tried to understand what in the hell the man was saying to him.
***
He sat motionless on the folding chair for several minutes. He was out of options. After resolving to move forward with this current plan, it took a bit of doing, but Keith was able to position the small pink-stocked shotgun, butt down on the garage floor, barrel up, wedged in tightly under his chin. He was as comfortable as he was going to get under the circumstances.
An hour earlier, after he showered and put on a suit, complete with crisp white shirt, and paisley necktie, he ate a final meal of pita chips and hummus. He washed that down with a bottle of high-end root beer. It wasn’t the usual steak & eggs most condemned people desire, but all of his favorite foods were in attendance, so, there was that.
Keith’s hemming and hawing over whether his life insurance would actually pay or not, due to the seemingly airtight suicide clause in the agreement, led him to this last moment of life on earth. He believed that there was just the hint of a loophole in the contract.
After being humiliated again by Gregy, and getting his new shotgun taken away, Keith wrote a 10-page document on one of the public library’s computers. He succinctly laid out his history with Gregy and his late father, Franky ‘Five Bucks,’ their efforts to extort money from him through death threats, and his inability to pay. He chose to leave out any mention of John Caul and the previous Baby Face Robber business. There was really no need to muddy the investigative waters once the note was discovered.
The document stated, emphatically, that if he were ever found dead by apparent suicide that it would, in all actuality, be staged. He dated the document three months prior, printed it, and erased the library’s computer file. The printed document sat now in the filing cabinet next to the crinkled baby-face mask where his wife would eventually find it. The large, darkening bruise forming over his right eye from the errant mallet blow in the mansion would help to seal the staged suicide deal. He hoped it would look as if he was beaten into submission before his killer faked his suicide.
His life insurance would be paid to his wife and Gregy would be arrested. Maybe. It was worth the chance because, either way – Keith was a dead man.
If the plan worked it would most likely take a few years for Rebecca to get any payout from the insurance company, but that was better than nothing. It was all an extreme long shot, he knew that, but he was out of options.
He took a deep breath and remembered what his buddy, old man Jenkins, instructed him about being relaxed when shooting. He closed his eyes. He took another deep breath. He wanted to make this last bit of muscle movement as a human being pay off. He didn’t want to chicken out, or worse, partially miss without achieving his desired result of dying.
The electronic whir of Kenny’s wheelchair, as it hummed up the driveway, snapped Keith out of his death spiral.
“Dad!”
Keith carefully slid his finger off the trigger and quickly tucked the small shotgun against the wall next to the vertical wheel track for the garage door.
“In here. What’s up, buddy?”
Keith had installed a sensor pad on the outside of the garage that allowed Kenny to raise and lower the door when he needed access to the space. The second he heard Kenny’s wheelchair foot-plate strike the pad, Keith watched in horror as his brand new shotgun rotated from its hiding place, latched onto one of the vertical track wheel mounts, and began to glide upwards toward the ceiling of the garage. Once at the apex of the track, the shotgun was snapped into two sections wh
en it met a rigged structural crossbeam. The shotgun pieces clattered loudly onto the wooden storage platform above Keith’s parked van. Kenny looked up when he heard the pieces of gun land, but proceeded to glide right into the open garage without a care.
Keith tried not to look up, but had to make sure the gun, or the two pieces of it, were out of sight. He darted his eyes upwards and could see he was in the clear.
“I wanted to tell you something,” said Kenny, who then sensed that things were amiss. He took in the sight of his father as he sat in the dank garage, all decked out in one of his nice suits. “Are you okay, dad?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Oh. Okay. Well, there’s a girl I just met,” said Kenny as a grin curved his lips. He rolled further into the garage.
Keith blinked several times and allowed for his head to grasp the conversation that his kid was forging into.
“What’s that?”
“This girl…”
“Right. What’s her name?” asked Keith through a sad smile.
“Madeline. She’s really pretty.”
***
“Bernie said this is your third purchase this week, sir. Is that correct?” asked the suspicious, mustachioed manager at the Hoffman Estates Sebela’s Sporting Goods. “Is everything okay, sir?”
“Everything is great!” Keith lied, as he turned and nodded to the counter man he dealt with the first two trips to the store. “Talked my buddy into going duck hunting with me. He’s out of town and asked me to pick this weapon up for him, and-” Keith lost his fake smile and stopped cold. He stared at the two gun salesmen for a beat or two.
“Yes?” asked the Sebela’s manager.
Keith nodded to himself more than anyone and finally said, “Right. Sure. Now you’re worried I’m buying too many guns? What the hell do you care why I’m doing any of this?”
“Well, I don’t understand what you’re getting at-”
“Just do your job and ring it up. Don’t worry, you’ll get your commission.”