by G. M. Ford
“I saw the footage of the meter maid on TV.”
“I seem to have gotten in a bit over my head this time.”
“What else is new?”
“I’ve exceeded even my own high fuck-up standards.”
“And that’s saying something.”
Long pause.
“Sorry things ended like they did,” I said.
“It was inevitable. You and I aren’t on the same life path.”
“We used to be.”
“No we didn’t,” she said. “We only pretended to be.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say, so we lapsed into silence again.
Finally, Rebecca broke the ice. “You saved my life, Leo,” she said. “You saved my career . . . you’ve been my best friend since the fifth grade . . . Don’t think I don’t appreciate that . . . I do. But . . .” For a moment she seemed at a loss for words, then she found some.
“I see enough pain and suffering every day at work; it makes me want to keep it out of my personal life. You, on the other hand, seem to revel in it.”
“It’s a gift,” I joked.
More silence. Thicker and heavier this time.
“Be careful, Leo. Be well.”
“You need any help . . . I’m sure Tim would be happy—”
She cut me off. “Stop matchmaking,” she said.
“He’s a good man.”
“I have absolutely zero physical attraction to Tim Eagen. Never have. Never will. Besides which, he’s a cop, and if there’s a warehouse for toxic masculinity, police departments are it. Pushing other people around is why the vast majority of them join the force in the first place.” She made a rude noise with her lips.
“Tim’s not like that,” I said.
“Doesn’t matter. My mother was right. Remember. She married one . . . No cops.”
Dead air.
Finally, I cleared my throat and said, “Okay . . . I guess this is it for a while . . .”
“Goodbye, Leo, and good luck. See if you can’t keep yourself from getting killed.”
She broke the connection.
I flipped my phone onto the bed and watched as it bounced a few times. I’d been down this road before. More than once. We were approaching the intersection of self-doubt and human frailty, a four-way stop somewhere out in the desert, where the oncoming lanes were always filled with skeletons you recognized.
I read a book once where the author said that psychopaths very often believe that everybody else on the planet believes the way they do but are just scared to say it out loud. A rather queer notion that has been rattling around in my head ever since.
Because . . . you see . . . I just don’t have a “we” inside myself. I think in “I,” not “we.” Don’t get me wrong; I’m just like everybody else. I want to love and be loved, but I’m not willing to mortgage the rancho to get it. Probably explains why I never got married. I’m just not a “we” person. Never seemed to me that what I stood to lose was worth the risk.
Like everybody else in high school, I read all the dewy-eyed Romantic poets wasting away over a lost love or for the even dewier Annabel Lee at the bottom of the sea, and you know . . . it never seemed real to me. It always seemed overblown. Like a bunch of stuff people made up so’s they’d seem more sensitive. Seemed so over-the-top that I could only take it as a metaphor for something else, except I didn’t know what.
That’s where the psychopaths come back into it. Somewhere along the way it crossed my mind that maybe I was just weird that way. When you looked around the planet, it sure seemed like coupling up was the natural order of things, and I began to wonder if maybe I wasn’t one of those empty shells who thought everybody secretly thought like they did. Could be, I supposed, but that’s just how I am.
The lights went out. I held my breath and waited for the generator to kick on. Nothing happened. I walked into the kitchen and looked out at the backyard. Everything in the neighborhood was out.
I pulled out the Smith & Wesson as I walked to the front of the house. Hairs on the back of my neck were beginning to vibrate. Much as I’d have liked to pretend this was just a normal power outage, something in me knew better.
I jogged back to the bedroom and called 911 . . . men with guns . . . then pulled my granddad’s 12-gauge goose gun out of the closet and headed back to the front, figuring if I could stay alive for the next five minutes or so, the cops would be showing up.
I found myself a tight little corner up at the front of the house, stone on three sides. And then peeped out the nearest window. I could see my new neighbor’s house across the street. No lights there either. I duckwalked across the room and peeked out in the other direction. The Morrisons’ lights were out too.
Outside, nothing was moving. I called 911 again. “Yes sir, officers responding.” As I huddled against the wall, it occurred to me for the first time that the power outage might be just that and that I was so paranoid I’d turned it into a murder attempt.
Where are those damn cops? my brain was screaming.
That’s when I heard the first shots. Rat ta ta ta tat, from somewhere over in the direction of the Morrisons’ house.
Ten seconds later, the truck hit the front gate. Some kind of big black Ram coming as fast as you could be going and still make a ninety-degree turn. The gate bent, but the pillars held. The truck engine screamed like a panther as it tried to shoulder its way through the steel bars. The driver kept it pegged. The engine started to smoke. The truck began to bounce on its tires in the moment before the engine blew up with a bright-yellow flash, bending the hood into a crouch. Flames spewed from under the hood like a fire-breathing dragon. I caught a flash of movement out in the orchard.
I heard shots again. This time from the other direction. The truck doors bounced open. I saw the bottom half of two men getting out and sprinting for the street as more shots rang out.
Then it hit me: They’re not letting anybody get up to the top of the hill. The cavalry wouldn’t be arriving anytime soon. I was on my own. Worst of all, I’d underestimated these haters yet again, as if some suicidal part of me could simply not deal with the fact that these hate-fueled maniacs were sufficiently skilled to pull off something of this magnitude. This wasn’t a murder attempt—this was a military operation.
I got to my feet, sprinted for the front door, and twisted the handle, pulling the huge wooden door inward and hitting the deck. When my eyes stopped bouncing, I got to see the very moment when he touched the thing off. This loud whoosh. Then the sparks coming out the back of the tube. I watched in slack-jawed horror as some kind of handheld missile screamed across the yard directly at my forehead, screeching and dripping sparks as it closed the distance.
I tried to press myself through the floor. It was all I had time to do. The missile flew down the hallway at a slight angle, hit the front left corner of the kitchen door, and tore the back half of the house off. I blinked my eyes in disbelief. I was looking at the garage. Everything between the garage and me was gone or on fire or both.
I began to crawl along the floor. The bedroom ceiling had partially collapsed. I crawled in, pulled my duffel bag from the bed, and then backed out. Inching backward was harder than it looked. I had to stop at one point and beat out a fire on one of my pant legs. I pushed the bag over the stone floor with one hand and Granddad’s shotgun with the other. Two-thirds of the way up the hall, I looked up just in time to see a guy in an orange jumpsuit with an assault weapon hanging around his neck.
I pushed myself into the sitting position, lined up the bead on the middle of him, and pulled both triggers. Blew him all the way into the parlor. Blew the assault rifle in half and me over on my back.
I struggled to my feet and looked into my mother’s favorite room. The place where I’d met with Art Fowler what seemed like years ago. The drapes were eight-foot candles. Her favorite brocaded couches looked like flaming funeral biers. Orange Jumpsuit had a hole in the middle of his chest the size of a soccer ball. I threw the
shotgun at him and crawled toward the back of the house.
The smoke had nearly reached floor level. Looked like the whole joint, top to bottom, was fully engaged in flames.
Why they felt they needed to fire another rocket was beyond my comprehension. The second one hit somewhere up on the front of the house and took the rest of the place with it. The force of the explosion blew me out into the backyard. I landed on my ass in the grass and began to move backward in that position.
The section of roof over the dining room went down in a whoosh. Bright-yellow flames rose sixty feet into the sky, leaving a trail of floating embers to mark their way. Black on black, the rising smoke was even darker than the sky. I crawled to my feet. Stood wobbling in the yard. The heat on my face forced me to turn away.
Above the crackle and roar of the burning house, I could hear the wail of sirens and uneven splatters of gunfire. I ran past the garage and slid my back along its south wall, until I came to the five-foot chain-link fence that stood on top of the retaining wall.
Behind the fence and the wall was nothing. A forty-foot drop to the rear of our property. My old man had built it that way. Nobody was sneaking up behind him. Right from the beginning, they’d let the bluff grow over with blackberry bushes. I used to crawl down and pick the berries as a kid.
Tonight, however, I climbed to the top of the fence and stood on top of the chain links for a moment, wobbling back and forth, holding on to the garage roof with my free hand. I looked back over my shoulder at the world’s biggest bonfire, then put my roof hand on the gun in my pocket, clutched my duffel bag hard to my chest, and jumped.
They watched as the big yellow front loader went bobbing out through the front gate. The house had collapsed in upon itself. The SFD had front-loaded and backhoed all the debris from the stone foundation, gone through it piece by piece, and then put it all back where it had come from.
The SFD lieutenant crossed the driveway. “It’ll have hot spots for a week or so,” he said. He waved a hand at the pile of smoking rubble that had once been a house. “Not that there’s much of anything left to burn, but the neighbors have volunteered to keep an eye on it for us. Anything flares up, they’ll give us a call.”
Tim Eagen nodded. It had taken the SPD cops forty-five minutes to fight their way past the skinhead roadblocks. By the time it was safe for the fire department to begin operations, there wasn’t anything they could do except keep the neighbors at bay and watch the place reduce itself to a pile of glowing ash.
They stood and watched as the lieutenant hopped up into the passenger side of the fire truck and started off down the driveway.
Tim threw a glance over at Ibrahim, Rebecca’s longtime assistant. Ibrahim zipped up the black body bag and began to wheel the gurney toward the medical examiner’s van, which stood where the garage once did.
“That’s the only body they found,” Tim said.
Rebecca nodded. “You sound like you’re disappointed,” she said bitterly.
“Mighta been better if it was Leo.”
She looked at him as if he’d lost his mind.
Eagen held up a hand. “Not like that,” he said. “I meant it might be better . . .”
“Better what?”
“Might be better if Leo was listed among the dead.”
Ibrahim folded the gurney into the back of the van, closed the doors, and double-timed it their way.
“You gonna be able to get a positive ID on that one?” Tim asked.
“Probably not,” she said. “He’s Crispy Crittered.”
Eagen didn’t say anything. He stood there staring at her.
Rebecca threw her eyes over at the van. “That’s not Leo,” she said. “Believe me, I know Leo. Leo could carry that guy around like a purse.”
Eagen bobbed his thick eyebrows up and down. “It’s Leo if you say it is. As I understand it, you’re pretty much the final authority on the dead in these parts.”
Ibrahim suddenly piped up. “Missy . . . ,” he said. “We gotta do it for him. He save my family. He save your life. You gotta do it for him. Nobody gonna know but us.”
Tim nodded. “Generally I don’t believe people keep secrets worth a shit . . . but I don’t see anybody here spilling the beans. Do you?”
Stony silence.
When the quiet got too much for him, Eagen threw his final two cents into the pot. “These guys ain’t gonna stop, you know, Becky. As long as they think Leo’s alive, they’re gonna keep trying to kill him.”
Nobody said anything for quite a while, until Rebecca looked over at Ibrahim.
“Put him in the old cooler,” she said.
She meant the old part of the autopsy facility that they used these days only when they started to overflow in the shiny new one. “You remember how to turn it on? Number twenty-five,” she said. “The big drawer, way down at the end. No paperwork.”
They watched Ibrahim hot-foot it over to the van, get in, and drive off.
“And if Leo shows up later?” Eagen asked.
“We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it,” Rebecca said.
The big eighteen-wheeler hissed and spat like a locomotive as it eased over onto the shoulder. Gravel cracked and popped under the tires as it steamed to a complete stop.
The hitchhiker slid along the rumbling, quivering side of the truck. The passenger door popped open. The driver leaned over the passenger seat and peered down at the hitchhiker. He had a big gap-toothed grin plastered onto his unshaven face.
“Boy . . . you doan mind me saying . . . you look like hell.” He chuckled. “Look like you tried to stuff a house cat in a plastic bag.”
The hitchhiker didn’t speak. The driver pointed at the man’s bloody hands. “Look like you been in a fight too.” He pointed again. “What’s that there . . . sticking in your knuckle there?”
The hitchhiker looked down. “Looks like a tooth,” he said.
“Yeah it does. Who’s it belong to?”
“Last guy picked me up.”
The driver laughed. “Ain’t much of an advertisement for givin’ you a lift, now is it?”
“Guess not.”
The driver watched as the man took hold of the tooth and yanked it free of his hand. He dropped it on the roadside and looked up.
“He said he was going to L.A.,” the hitchhiker said.
“Said?”
“Turned out what he wanted was a blow job.”
“I’m guessing he didn’t get one,” the driver cackled.
“Another case of truck-stop love gone bad,” the hitchhiker said.
“Lotta perverts out here on the road. Folks get lonely.”
“Gonna get even lonelier till he finds himself some new teeth.”
“Well then, pilgrim, climb on in. I got a schedule to keep.”
The hitchhiker reached up, grabbed the chrome handle, and boosted himself onto the step. “Where ya headed?” he asked as he settled into the seat.
“Bakersfield,” the driver said.
“Garden spot of the Western world,” the hitchhiker said.
“Ain’t it ever.” The driver grinned.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
G.M. Ford is the author of ten other novels in the Leo Waterman series: Who in Hell Is Wanda Fuca?, Cast in Stone, The Bum’s Rush, Slow Burn, Last Ditch, The Deader the Better, Thicker Than Water, Chump Change, Salvation Lake, and Family Values. He has also penned the Frank Corso mystery series and the stand-alone thrillers Threshold and Nameless Night. Ford has been nominated for the Shamus, Anthony, and Lefty Awards, among others. He lives and writes in Ocean Beach, California.
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