I shrugged, “Not that I have much of a choice in the matter.” After a quick hug hello and goodbye, I got in my car and drove to work.
Chapter Five
I slept peacefully the following morning, dreaming I was a TV host on a show called, ‘What kind of free shit can I give you to make you shut the fuck up?’ Hey it’s a working title. My dreams were ripped away by a pounding on my door. I opened my eyes and looked at the clock, “9:45 A.M. unreal.” I grunted. The pounding got louder and louder. “I’m coming.” I yelled. I opened the door to find the same deer, er, police officer that had woke me up on Sugar Hollow road.
“Mr. Clark?” he asked.
“You seem to be making a habit of waking me up, officer…” My words faded off as I realized I didn’t know his name.
“Gottlie, Detective Samuel Gottlie. I’m sorry about waking you, but I’m here on serious business. Yesterday you received an email from one, Richard Schmidt, correct?” he asked. The detective stood somewhere in the realm of six foot, he wore the clique tan trench coat and his short pitch black hair was slicked back. In all honesty I was surprised his outfit didn’t come with a matching fedora.
“I did, how did you know?” I asked.
“I’m the lead Investigator on his case.” Detective Gottlie said.
“Case? Wait, Richard moved away like five years ago.” I commented.
“Well then he must have moved back at some point. Irrelevant, we’ve been investigating him in conjunction with the murders of several women.” His gray eyes showed the first sign of emotion as he said this and they emitted what appeared to be a mixture of anger and regret.
“That’s not possible.” I said.
“His guilt finally got the better of him, or perhaps he knew we were closing in. You see, he killed himself last night.” Detective Gottlie said.
“Holy shit!” I stumbled backwards and sat on the arm of a chair.
“I would say there was nothing holy about it. He hung himself with a string of Christmas lights. Now what can you clear up about that email you received?” he asked.
“I didn’t understand any of it.” I replied. “As the email said, it’s a load of gibberish.”
“That really is an understatement.” The detective handed me his business card and started to leave. “It’s important that if you think of anything you call me. You see there is one more missing girl.” With that he said good bye, I watched him in shock, as he walked out to his car.
Chapter Six
My eggs tasted like shit. Not having been able to find the garlic salt or the cayenne pepper, I substituted garlic pepper and table salt. They don’t combine together as well as you may think. I ate a couple bites and decided to toss out the whole thing. Trying to get myself back on schedule I walked through the kitchen on my way to the basement to workout. Three steps down there is a door to the backyard and to the pretend parking structure. As I passed by the door I distinctly saw something moving inside the tiny out-building. I walked out the back door to investigate. The shed door was ajar. Upon entry I found nothing out of the ordinary. Remembering the closet at the back of the garage, I figured I might as well double check.
As I reached the closet, its door swung open sending the contents flying. The crashing of all the miscellaneous unused yard tools caused me to throw myself sideways. “You think you can get me that easy? Ya gotta be kidding me!” I checked my breathing and began heading back to the house when the attic door flew open from the ceiling, smacking me in the face and throwing me back into the tools on the floor. I stood up, much more bruised than when I walked in. “You win this round.” I walked back to the house officially having been cowed by the shed. I headed down to the basement to run for a while, but my workout never even started because I was missing a shoe string from my running shoes. I threw in the towel and hit the showers, deciding to head to work early.
As I was leaving Nelli came walking up to the front walk, actually she was dancing. “Never been so happy for a Friday! Stacy, Marianne, Ginger and I are headed to the Castaway Resort. Stacy’s mom has some big business thing going on and we are going to get plowed on expensive champagne and plan on blue balling business men all weekend.” She said.
“That’s nice.” I walked passed her.
“Edward, are you ok? You seem to be distracted, I mean hell I thought of that bull shit the whole ride home and it zipped by without touching the top of your head.” Nelli chided.
“Sorry, I just found out an old friend committed suicide and I’m baffled by it.” I said.
“Who?” she asked.
“Richard Schmidt.”
“I saw him like a month ago, I told him to reach out to you.” Nelli replied.
“Thanks for that, but he never did. Wait you saw him?” I asked.
“Yeah at the farmer’s market,” She said. “He looked like hell and he was with some ginormous blonde bimbo, I really didn’t spend a lot of time with him. I’m going to…” she started.
“I know Stacey’s mom, champagne and business men, I heard.”
“You know better! I don’t even know a Stacy, I’ll be at Bridgette’s if you need me.” Nelli said.
“I figured as much.” I stuck out my tongue and blew a little raspberry.
Chapter Seven
Back on Sugar Hollow road after work the next morning, I found myself driving down the same hill that the deer held me up a couple days earlier. As the vineyard came into view I must have looked away from the road for a split second, a resulting bang grabbed my attention. That was when I saw the shadow just as it jumped out of my view, along the road.
“I guess I finally joined the ‘Deer Hitter’ club.” I stopped the car, set the emergency brake and turned on my hazards. “Or maybe not.” I said as I looked over my car, there was not even a scratch. I walked up the hill to make certain there wasn’t anything up there. Finding nothing, I got back into my car and continued on my way home.
“The good thing about Fridays? Only two days left in the workweek.” I joked with myself as I pulled into my driveway. After that adrenaline rush I was going to be up for quite a while. I locked the car and walked into the house, perhaps I’ll eat something as that seemed to always get me in the mood to sleep.
When I saw my computer I decided to switch up my plan, checking my emails may bore me into a stupor. The very first email had a subject line that read, ’98 ways to convert gibberish codes in emails and save your life doing it’. The person that had sent it was a friend of Richard. Now my interest was piqued, I opened it and read.
‘Edward,
‘Richard contacted me and requested that I give you a quick lesson on how to read his first email. Below is the cypher you will need…’ The email ended with all the decoding information. I found the Detectives card and forwarded this new email to him, explaining that this obviously went with Richard’s earlier communique.
Afterward, I printed off both of the documents and set about cooking my dinner and using the information in this mysterious email to decode Richard’s from yesterday, writing it all down on a third piece of scrap paper. Giving several additional rules about the ‘Unwanted Watchers’, and building upon the ones he had already given. It went on to explain that different people call ‘Them’ different things. ‘This is important, several people have given ‘Them’ a code name in an attempt to discuss ‘Them’ aloud, but this can’t work because call ‘Them’ what you want, ‘They’ will always know. Don’t play games with it.’ Thats when the sound of someone running up the stairs came. I hadn’t heard the front door open.
“Nelli? I thought you were at Bridgette’s house this weekend.” I left the papers sitting on the counter and went to see if everything was alright. “Nelli, I can hear you up there, you are not exactly sneaky.” Her door opened and closed. “I’m sorry did something happen? Are you ok?” My mild concern quickly grew into worry as she hadn’t answered me. I ran up the stairs and made my way to her bedroom.
Chapter Eight
Her door was locked. “Nelli, I’m going to let myself in if you don’t answer me.” Still not a sound could be heard, “Ok then.” I went over to my room and grabbed my smallest electrical controls screwdriver off my dresser. Putting it into the opening on the outside of the door, I heard a pop, as the door unlocked. “I’m coming in.” My voice actually trembled as I said it. She had never been so upset she couldn’t talk to me at all.
The room was empty. While there were piles of clothes everywhere, they weren’t big enough for her to hide in. “Seriously, what the fuck!” I searched the rest of the house and couldn’t find her anywhere. I went over to my desk and grabbed my cell phone off the charger and called her when the smoke alarm went off. “SHIT!”
My dinner was burned to a crisp. The odd thing was it hadn’t been my dinner that set off the smoke detectors it was the printouts that were sitting next to the stove. All I could imagine was the grease had jumped from the pan to light them on fire. “Well it’s a good thing I already read it.” I said dialing the phone.
“Hello?” Nellie answered her phone on the third ring.
“Where are you?” I asked, not masking the concern in my voice very well.
“At Bridgette’s house remember.” She said.
“And you weren’t here just a few minutes ago?” I asked.
“Edward, I’m at Bridgette’s and I have been here since last night.” Nelli said.
“Ok,” The smoke alarms went off again. “Damn it.”
“Are you alright?” she asked.
“Yeah, I just burned my dinner, a second time.” I answered and hung up the phone. I gave up on cooking for the morning, pouring myself a bowl of cereal instead. Ever since I started working nights it seemed funny how in the morning I want dinner, when cereal was the more common food choice during this time of day. ‘I need to get a normal schedule.’ I thought.
Chapter Nine
I sat in my cubical knowing there probably wouldn’t be any calls and hating the fact that it was my turn for the weekend coverage. If ever there was a weekend that I needed to be out in public, interacting with anyone other than myself, this would be it.
“Why is it that the company demands for us to be here on the weekend just to give things away? You’d almost think they actually care about the customers.” I said into the quiet.
“Heheheh.” The raspy laugh came from the hallway behind my cubical. I reeled around on my office chair to see nothing.
“Not cool.” I got up and went about investigating. The halls were empty as were the rest rooms, yes I checked both, and the break room. My earpiece started making the, ‘I’m losing my signal’ tone so I headed back to my desk.
I decided to make some notes about the odd things that had been happening, only to find every one of my pencils’ leads were broken off. “What the fuck did I do to piss off the cleaning crew this time?” I asked no one, and yes, this has happened before. Walking over to the only pencil sharpener on the entire floor with six of my number two old fashioned wooden pencils I set about giving an edge to my writing.
Grinding the electric pencil sharpener almost drowned out the scream, I stopped and listened. ‘It had to have been my imagination.’ I thought. Pressing the pencil into the little machine, gr-gr-gr, it started again, and again I swore I heard the sound of a woman screaming. I dropped my pencils and ran to the window. The highly humid night caused the majority of the windows to have a fog on them.
“Why do professional people feel the need to draw all over foggy windows?” I asked as I ran my hand on the foggy window wiping away a pterodactyl drawing as I walked by.
“Shame, that one was pretty good,” The voice was that of a middle aged man. When I swallowed my heart, I turned to find a desk chair spinning around slowly.
‘Had I bumped it as I passed by?’ I wondered as I looked around. Seeing no one and hearing no further screams or voices, I returned to the pencil sharpener.
“Seriously?” My palm smacked me on the forehead. All the pencils had broken when I dropped them. “What are the odds of this, really?” When they were all sharpened I walked back to my desk. I could hear my phone ringing so I clicked my ear-piece. “Hello.” The phone still rang. “Shit!” I ran through the cubes getting to my desk and grabbing the phone’s handset, “Hello?”
The woman had just gotten a roll of paper towels from the local big named franchise and the length of the individual towels was different than last time… blah blah blah. While she yammered away about quality control I looked at the docking station for my head set. The bundle of wires had been pulled out of its connector. “I’ll be damned.” I said.
“Exactly!” the woman said, somehow my comment fit in with her rant.
“Is there anything I can do to make this right? Sometimes we can get management to allow us to send a coupon for a couple rolls of paper towels…” I spun the cable in my hand noticing each of the wires had broken off, this was really odd. “…but in this case I imagine a full bundle makes more sense. I think I have a coupon here for a family pack of the extra soft toilette paper, how about I sneak that in as well?”
“I think that would be appropriate based upon this confusion.” The woman hung up after giving her address.
“Appropriate? Someone pinch me, not only did she get the paper she purchased now she gets more and a bonus… Yet somehow that’s ‘Appropriate’?” I said in exasperation.
I busied myself with changing my broken cable with one of the day time manager’s cables. He was never going to know as he never used his headset. Not that any of the day time managers did anything around here besides attend meetings. The rest of the night finished much like I had predicted; several hundred rounds of solitaire and a couple bags of microwave popcorn later, I was relieved by the day time shlub.
“Any calls?” The guy asked as he walked passed me.
“Just one, typical house wife, the sheet size is not the right size.” I said.
“Did you hit her with the free toilette paper?” he asked.
“I did.”
“Sweet. Careful, there’s a whole lotta fog,” He added.
“Thanks,” I said and walked out.
Chapter Ten
The ride home was in the worst fog I had seen in a while, the day shift guy hadn’t been joking. By the time I was half way down my favorite road I was wide awake, thanks to a tag team of deer jumping around in the fog and a woman walking out to get her Sunday newspaper, in her puffy white robe, just appearing in front of me. ‘At least I’m not falling asleep’ I thought and I turned the stereo up as a classic rock ballad came on the cd I was listening to making me want to sing.
“Down to the, LAUNDRY, I took my clothes there, TODAY…” I sang along enjoying the cool air blowing through the car. By the second verse I rolled the window up as the cool air began to feel frigid. “That didn’t help at all,” I commented as the cold felt as if it were penetrating my very bones. I turned the heat up and turned the radio down. Just enough time for the deer attacks to start again, I slammed on my brakes as a white tail showed up in the road. “WHAM!”
“What the fuck did you slam your brakes on for?” The man yelled as he stepped out of his pickup truck.
“Are you joking? There was a deer…” I stepped from my car.
“There weren’t no deer you asshat. Man, if I scratched my new bumper on that foreign POS I’m gonna put it in four wheel drive and crush that toy car.” He continued to yell. Based upon the size of the wheels on the thing he was driving he probably could too.
“Back your truck up and let me see the damage you did.” I said.
“I did?” He jumped in his truck, I could almost hear him yelling as he dragged my entire car backwards, when it finally extricated itself my lovely little car rolled straight into the ditch. The truck driver drove away giving me the bird. “Now that’s what I did! Haha!”
“Inglorious...” I said snapping a picture of the license plate with my cell phone. “…Asshat!” and then called the
police, along with a wrecker. For giggles I sent the picture to my new friend in the Detective department. “What the hell, maybe he can ID the guy quicker,” I mused. A moment later my phone rang.
“Edward, where did you get that email?” It was Detective Gottlie.
“I took the picture.” I replied.
“Picture? What picture? Look Edward, I’m at a crime scene and it would appear that your buddy Richard had an accomplice,” He said.
“Oh the email I sent you yesterday. I just sent you one two minutes ago, that’s why I was confused.” I said.
“Another email about Rich…” Detective Gottlie started.
“No, nothing like that, I just got hit by a truck that fled the scene.” I said.
“Not my division. Who sent you the other email?” he asked.
“I haven’t got the slightest idea. I even replied to it to ask who they were and I got a response that the email address doesn’t exist.” I explained.
“I got the same thing,” The detective said.
“Wait, why do you think he has an accomplice?” I asked.
“The missing girl I told you about was found dead this morning at the hotel downtown. She was brutally killed last night,” He replied.
“That’s terrible,” I said.
“Even worse than I can explain. I gotta go,” He disconnected the call.
I stood next to my car wondering if I could just get in and drive it out, but a terrible smell of decaying meat overwhelmed me. I stepped away from the tiny car and waited by a tree for the wrecker. “Must’ve driven yourself into a dead deer.” I said to my tiny red car. “Hell, after all of them that tried to get hit by you, seems fair.”
Signs Book One: The Unwanted Page 2