by Knight, Dirk
She doesn’t have to check any further to be sure that this is the address of the dead man’s house, and that that was where Dennis has scampered off to.
Who, the hell, are you? she thinks.
She shoots to her feet as though snake bit and lunges the fifteen-or-so feet to her purse, and in it, her phone.
Darting back to her pre-warmed seat, she installs herself again while the cellular connects the call. Dennis doesn’t answer. After the second attempt, she aborts the effort and begins to type out a text message.
That’s when the knock at the door scares her badly enough to yelp.
Elisabeth Langston, frazzled by her research and hopeful for a returned Dennis—hopeful that all of the scenarios she just imagined were just in her mind—runs to the door.
Stoned on pills and horny, wearing nothing but a sweatshirt, she opens it blindly.
Through The Oleanders
Again in the perceived safety of his stylish coupe, Dennis’s confidence slowly starts to return. He isn’t sure why he keeps seeing the face of his ghost haunting him; he isn’t a superstitious man or spiritual person, but in the back of his mind he is beginning to think that Jiménez is just that . . . his ghost.
Like he is now responsible for the miserable fuck that died nothing more than a stain in a convenience store parking lot.
No, that can’t be right. It’s impossible, he keeps repeating in his mind.
Nonetheless, he feels as if he’s not done with Hector Jiménez quite yet.
More curious than afraid—of course he is now that Jiménez isn’t present to intimidate him—he starts to drift into thoughts of what the vision could mean. Is he suffering a waking dream? Is he cracking up?
Either way he feels he needs to know more. Having learned as much as he could from internet people-finder sites, and studying Jiménez’s neighborhood on real estate databases, he feels that he has only scratched the surface of who this man is.
Was, rather.
He is headed behind enemy lines to conduct recon and secure better intelligence on the spook in his mirror.
Many of the homes are vacant, or have been foreclosed. Houses are cheap in this area, and for good reason; no one wants to live here. The Arizona housing market has crashed, along with most of the rest of the country, and the houses have fallen in value to a quarter of their worth. Still, people are making foolish investments, building their own houses, brand new, custom homes in far-out suburbs and developing more, and more, worthless land—harsh desert land with no water or utilities, no stores or police and fire—while the existing homes go to pot.
Banks are still giving money to people with little to no income or assets for new purchases, but not willing to forgive any of the ridiculous mortgages, on which they have already signed off.
Though this broken version of America is not helping the common man pull out of the wreckage, this is a good sign for Dennis. Vacant homes mean fewer eyes that could happen upon him as he travels. The last thing Dennis wants right now is another visit from the smug prick of a detective.
Dusty yards filled with cactus and random metallic outcroppings littering the mounds of rock greet his eyes as he pulls onto St. Charles Ave. Circling the block, he locates the rusted mailbox bearing the numbers he has come looking for on St. Kateri Ave, the next street over.
Dennis wonders what is so saintly about being poor. The worst neighborhoods in the country surround streets named after peaceful people, like Martin Luther King, or one saint or another.
Nice neighborhoods always have streets named after great men, like his father, who had built things and created empires.
This neighborhood is a shithole, and its avenues are rightly named after false idols of the Catholic Church.
Luckily, the real-estate web portal has been accurate in its assessment of the vacancies of this retched poverty-stricken borough, and the cramped development makes for easy transition from one yard to the next.
Dennis pulls into the vacant house at 87 West St. Kateri Ave, which, his satellite image printout shows, shares a fence with Jiménez’s crummy house on St. Charles. Backing his Acura deep into the carport to conceal his license plates and as much of his car as possible, he prepares to exit the car.
Hopping out, he appears to be a man who’s just left a funeral, just another random mourner. He didn’t flash, until this moment, why he had opted for formal attire on a weekend.
He is wearing an expensive black suit. His dark hair, combed back and plastered to his head, prevents the wind from tussling it. His meaty fists are clad in black leather Isotoner driving gloves—complete with little holes along the knuckles and smaller ones down the length of the fingers (to let your fingers breath as you explore the open road)—which Dennis wears too often.
For the final accoutrement, he is carrying the loose bundle of wild flowers he plucked from the cemetery.
He walks down the driveway and onto the potholed and pockmarked thoroughfare that is St. Kateri. He will walk to Jiménez’s from here.
There is a small patch of grass in a clearing between the tracts of homes. This is no doubt to make up for the fact that the houses do not have yards adequate for the kids to play. Stepping briskly along the block wall, which borders the east boundary of this meadow, Dennis is soon on St. Charles, and just thirty feet from his destination.
He keeps a watchful eye on all of the surrounding homes, and does his best to walk, not run. Any time he sees someone running on the street, unless they are wearing shorts and headphones, his first assumption is that they are running from the scene of a crime. He expects other people make the same assumptions.
Every cell in his body is fighting him to speed it up, but he doesn’t want to be remembered, especially in this neighborhood.
Cholos and Nig-Nogs don’t run unless there is a ball, or a purse, in their hand, he thinks.
His gloved hand raps on the weathered and splintering front door. The thumping echoes through the empty home beyond.
Eventually satisfied that there are no persons within, he rests the flowers in the curved hooks below the mailbox, and slinks around the patio railing, curling back into the carport towards the overgrown back yard.
The raggedly unkempt oleander and bougainvillea in the back yard overpower the tiny lawn that dwells beneath. A tangley thicket of green, pinkish-purple, and stark white leaves and branches overwhelms a tricycle and a small child’s plastic playhouse. Weeds have sprung up, pell-mell, from beneath the gravel landscaping material. A rusted charcoal grill stands next to a single steel folding chair and a bucket overflowing with cigarette butts.
The entire yard seems to say, to Dennis, that the house was abandoned years ago. A harbinger of the tragedy and sadness within: that, perhaps, the man had died sometime long ago; not days, but many years before.
The setting is one of despair and solitude, and Dennis happens upon the scene as an archeologist come to unearth mysteries of an extinct culture or creature.
It is the first time Dennis has considered anything human-like in the man he killed.
He doesn’t like to humanize him.
Hector Jiménez was a dog that needed to be put down, he thinks, steeling himself against the humanity that is permeating him.
Rusting away his mettle.
Still, it gives him the creeps.
The screen door groans loudly on its oxidized and corroded hinges as the even rustier spring expands.
He is surprised to find the interior door unlocked, even with the home in such apparent squalor. Cautiously eking his way into the home, he peers once more over his shoulder, but nothing greets him other than oleanders.
Inside the kitchen, he smells fresh coffee. Not fresh, like this minute, but definitely brewed today, and definitely since Jiménez bled out. Dishes gather and collect stagnant water in the sink.
Someone else lives here too, he realizes and ventures further into the house, a little more cautiously now.
In the living room, there is a cane
leaning against the arm of the couch, near the front door. In addition, there is a TV tray set up in front of this region, which has the remote to the television, a hearing aide, and a set of massively thick glasses.
Dennis would venture that if he were to snap on the tube, the sounds of an old spaghetti western or World War II movie would rattle the windows.
The toilet seat is up in the sparsely decorated bathroom. A couple magazines languish in a makeshift rack near the shitter.
Whoever lives here is old, and most likely a man, judging from the shamble of the kitchen and the decorum in the lavatory, he thinks.
Pay dirt. The first bedroom has an oxygen tank and heavy-duty bedrails, and a treasure trove of prescription medicines lining the dresser. He picks one bottle up. Diaz, Carlos, it reads. So just who the fuck are you, Carlos?” he says under his breath. The next bedroom, clearly the Master—although calling this room “Master” cheapens the very meaning of the word—will have the things he wants to examine.
The primary suite in this pitiable dump of a house smells empty. It smells silent. It oozes with the lack of life that now fills it, floor to ceiling. The air is thick and palpably hollow. The emptiness isn’t a vacuum like in space, is not easy to move through. The emptiness is thick and oppressive; a morass of molasses that threatens to drown Dennis in its quicksand.
“Get in, get out,” he says to himself in a whisper. “In the crime novels they always get caught because they get too comfortable and dawdle around.”
The phrase dilly-dally pops into his head and he releases an unexpected chuckle.
Dennis is suddenly overcome with the tingling in his groin and lower body that usually accompanies a bout of giddiness, laughter, and arousal. It’s a feeling of almost having to take a shit, but not quite.
Pulling out drawers and thumbing through stacks of paper on the dresser reveals little other than shutoff notices from the utilities, and socks that should have been retired many washes ago.
There is a bowl with some tacky costume jewelry in it; brooches and dangly ethnic earrings with cut glass masquerading as precious stones and shabby tin coated in gold leaf, or painted with chrome, to ward off tarnish. On the top of the pile is a cheap, and worn, golden wedding ring. The band is bent and scratched, with a thin gold-plated chain running through it. Dennis suddenly decides on taking some souvenir, but this isn’t the piece; he leaves it.
In the closet, he finds a small safe with its door open. Two boxes of leaden slugs wait inside. One is for a 9-millimeter, and is half empty, while the other is for a .38. Dennis had gotten a good look at the nine that had consumed those shells; he has even taken a shot from one of them.
The .38 snub-nosed is still in the safe, snugly encased in an old leather shoulder holster that looks like it came from a ’50s noire film. Dennis pulls it out gently, with its full box of hollow-point rounds, and becomes comfortable with their weight in his hands.
He pockets the bullets into his Armani overcoat, but continues to squeeze and massage the smoothed wooden handle of the revolver, discarding the aged cowhide holster, for a few more minutes before concealing it in his waistband.
Don’t shoot your nuts off, he thinks, realizing he has never been a ‘gun guy’ and that his only experience with holding guns in beltlines has come from movies about tougher men than he.
After further consideration, and some difficulty securing a good grip on the handgun, he moves it to the decidedly less dangerous position, to the front right pocket of his slacks. He likes feeling the weight of the steel against his thigh.
When the front door rattles open, he is so deep into his thoughts that, although he hears it, he does not register that anything is out of the ordinary, or that he should be worried. He is still swimming through the loneliness and despair of the master closet when Carlos Diaz enters the room carelessly.
Suddenly aware as if awakened by smelling salts, Dennis charges headlong into the ailing man, knocking him through the door and onto his back in the attached bathroom. He thinks of running away. His fear paralyzes him, his Italian leather shoes cemented onto the filthy brown shag carpet. He is staring as the elderly man struggles to regain the breath knocked from his lungs, to pull himself up.
Carlos is thoroughly dazed, and in an act of desperation, grips the first thing his hands find purchase upon, and pulls the shower rod and curtain down on his own head. Dennis pounces, stretches the see through curtain over the nose and mouth of Carlos with his left hand, and proceeds to pummel the side of the man’s head and face with his right. Blood seeps from Carlos’s nose and eye, creating a pool under the film, increasing the seal of the rubberized layer over his face and aiding in the smothering process. The old man’s struggle ceases long before Dennis finally stands and takes his weight off the chest and face of Carlos Diaz.
Without knowing why, Dennis thinks of his mother again.
Taking one final look down at the asphyxiated man, searching for the slightest movement or glimmer of life in the milky, cataract-blinded eyes, he slowly backs out of the room. His heart is pounding, overwhelming the sound of emptiness that had filled his head when he first entered Jiménez’s room.
His nerves begin to betray him, first with a wobbly step, then with a tightening of his abdomen and a watering of his mouth.
Soon, he fears, he will start to convulse until he can expel the heavy breakfast of the morning. Though breakfast has only been a couple short hours ago, he feels as if it were in another year, on another planet, far removed from the vibrancy and clarity of his waking self. He is racked with fear, guilt, shame and now . . . nausea.
Putting his wobbly legs to the test, he tracks back through the house, breathing through his mouth, and rushes into the back yard, creaky screen door screaming open in its accusatory tone—I know what you did, it says—and slamming shut behind him as he stumbles down the steps into the unkempt grass.
Into the oleander bushes he dives, swimming through the bougainvillea and treading through the weeds, he ends up at the chain link fence separating the yards of the two houses on St. Charles and Kateri—separating him from his car.
The oleander’s thick oily smell permeates the air and becomes more and more pungent as Dennis struggles against the thorny edges of the shrubbery, his every movement releasing more of the acrid, lingering pheromones. The aroma slaps him in the face, increasing his urge to purge his stomach. The only thing keeping his eggs, bacon, and coffee down is an even bigger nausea brought on by the thought of life in prison.
A life in prison he would receive, if and only if he left a steaming, smelly, sticky puddle of his DNA all over the fucking yard.
Finally, he tops the fence and plows through the neighboring bee brush and Mexican bird of paradise plants. He fights back a final surge of vomit and swallows down the acidic bile as he reaches the gate to salvation, and his car.
The pistol, his trophy, slips and falls from his right front pants pocket as he gets into the car. It tumbles to the passenger-side floorboard, and out of his reach.
That’s not important right now, just get the fuck out of here, he thinks as he latches the door deliberately. He is careful to pull away slowly, to be as stealthy as possible in his bullet-addled car, but his adrenaline is fighting him every step of the way.
At the stoplight outside of the saintly neighborhood, Dennis pulls the hand brake and leans over to the passenger side, fully extending to secure the pistol.
His floundering fingers cannot find it amidst the rubble and debris that has overtaken his floorboard.
“Fuck” he shouts in furiosity, and begins to reach backhanded under the passenger seat, his hand is awkwardly wrenched, palm up. He is now convinced that the pistol must have slid under the seat, but he still feels nothing.
A blaring horn tells him he is sitting through a green light, pissing off the drivers behind him. He straightens up, depressing the release on his emergency brake, and the bald Mexican is in the passenger seat, holding the snub-nosed revolver.
> “Oh my God! What the fuck do you want?” Dennis squeals.
The man in the passenger seat just smiles again and this time expels a little chuckle, never diverting his eyes.
Or his gun.
Dennis’s gloved hands whine against the leather of the steering wheel; his fists clenched to the point of rupture, almost as tightly as his anus.
“Keep your eyes on the road, puta,” The Mexican says in a calm, deep voice. The .38’s barrel is the only thing more level and chilling than his cadence.
“Seriously bro, what do you want? Are you, like, his brother or something? I swear man, I just came to pay my respects is a—”
“Stop fucking sniveling, asshole. I can’t believe I was killed by a blabbering little bitch like you. I always figured it would be a guy on a horse.” He chuckles again. “Listen here, guy, we have unsettled business, you and I, but that’s not until later. For now just keep driving. This place gives me the creeps.”
“You’re joking, right? This is some kind of practical joke? You are just fucking with me.”
“Shut up, faggot.”
“Yeah, that’s it. You’re fucking with my head, and then you’re just going to shoot me. Well fuck that, man! Just fucking do it! Get it over—”
Jiménez raises the gun to his temple and Dennis whines and shies away. His eyes close. The snubbed barrel clacks against his skull, echoing through his brain, and bringing imaginary stars into his vision.
“Eyes on the fucking road, Dennis! I don’t think you’re listening!”
The final word comes out sounding more like ‘lee-sin-een,’ in a cheesy, false-stereotypical Mexican accent.
“Okay, okay. Where are we going?” Dennis says, choking back tears, which are only blocked by the humiliation he has to swallow after the man called his bluff so effortlessly.
“You know where the fuck we’re going. You were already going there before I got in the car. Run on home to Mommy now, puta.”
Staley Pops By
The call, which he received from the pump jockey at the Circle K, put Staley on edge, even more so than is his normal M.O. His partner had tried his best to convince Staley it’s a mere coincidence, and that there was no need to interrupt their lunch to chase down the lead. Called it a goose chase, but under the surface Staley could tell that Eleman’s hackles were rising as well, even if only because he was in the habit of trusting Staley.