Dying Memories

by Dave Zeltserman

  It was always like this. Every time he allowed himself to dwell on Karen and their breakup it would end with him being swallowed up into a morass of bitterness and hurt. It was ridiculous, especially given how well things were going with Emily, but there he was again, slipping away as he burned with anger.

  He locked up his apartment, barely aware of what he was doing or what was going on around him. He knew at some level his rage had to do with all the bizarre shit with his dad, and that one of these days he would have to seriously work on it, but for now he’d just let himself stew.

  Earlier he had parked out in front instead of the back parking lot expecting to stop off at his apartment for only a quick visit, and as he stepped outside he was too wrapped up in his thoughts to notice the beat-up white cleaning service van that pulled up to the curb, or the large muscle-bound man moving quickly towards him from behind. It was only when the side door of the van slid open and he heard a rush of footsteps racing towards him that Bill became aware that something was very wrong.

  Chapter 16

  Before Bill could turn around he was hit hard from behind, the force of the blow sending him tumbling head first into the van. Hands reached out and pulled him deeper inside. Someone stepped into the vehicle after him—the guy who had hit him, then the side door was slammed shut and the van was driving away,

  Two sets of hands pulled him off the floor so that he was sitting on a bench between their owners. To his right was the same man who had pushed him from behind. To his left could’ve been the guy’s clone. Both of them were in their late twenties, big and muscle-bound, with thick necks and short buzz cuts. The two of them were even dressed identically; gray suits that stretched tightly across their chests, dark shades to hide their eyes, and steel-tipped shoes that could cause serious damage if needed. The starkest difference between them was that the one on his left had a thin goatee, wore diamond stud earrings, and smiled in a smug fashion as if he were amused by everything that was happening, while the other one was clean-shaven and had a hard, all-business attitude about him. They made him think of the Star Trek episode with the evil Spock, but goatee or clean shaven, he knew these two ox-sized thugs were both cut from the same cloth. In that moment all the rage that had swallowed him up earlier was gone and replaced by an icy cold panic.

  Bill tried to rip his arms free from the two goons he was sandwiched between, but he couldn’t budge them. Their fingers dug deep into his flesh, and held him as tightly as if they were steel bands. He looked up then and saw the man sitting across from him. This man, Simon, was older than the other two. Somewhere in his forties. He was also much thinner and smaller, his gray suit tailor cut, the material significantly more expensive. What struck Bill was how pink his face was, how his ears were almost pointy, and his eyes; how they looked no bigger than if a pair of dimes had been pasted onto his face. Bill couldn’t even see any white in those eyes; it was as if they were only big enough to hold his pupils.

  “It’s been a long time, Jeffrey,” Simon said, his narrow mouth crooked and twisting into a thin mirthless smile.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Bill said, his throat constricted, his voice barely a whisper.

  Simon showed an exaggeratedly perplexed look as he put a hand to one of his pointy ears. “You’ll have to speak up,” he said. “I can’t hear you.”

  Bill sat still as he struggled to compose himself. Then he repeated how he didn’t know what this man was talking about. “And tell your asshole buddies to let go of me,” he added with a forced bravado.

  Simon’s smile shifted subtly to express his disappointment in Bill. He made a tsk-tsk noise over Bill’s choice of vulgar language.

  “You’ve got the wrong guy,” Bill insisted.

  “Please,” Simon said, using the same sort of weary tone as if he were talking to a troublesome child.

  “Just let me out of here,” Bill said, his voice choked. “You do that and I won’t call the police about this misunderstanding.” That got the goateed thug to chuckle. A cold trickle of sweat worked its way down Bill’s back. His voice rose with a newfound panic as he added emphatically, “I’m telling you you’ve got the wrong guy!”

  “Lower your voice,” Simon commanded softly. “Shouting won’t do you any good. Quite the opposite actually. This vehicle is soundproof and all you’ll accomplish is annoying my two associates. And no, Jeffrey, we do not have the wrong person. So quit this childish charade.”

  “I’m not Jeffrey—”

  “Shut up.” He said this as softly as everything else he had said, but it stopped Bill cold.

  “I know who you are,” Simon continued. “You’re Jeffrey Vozzmer. And you’ll be let out of the car only after you tell me what I want to know.”

  “You’re wrong—” Bill started to say, but the clean-shaven thug on his right let go of his arm long enough to tap him on the ear with his fist, and the blow shut Bill up and left his head ringing. The ring the thug wore on his index finger had cut him and Bill felt a hot stickiness spread around where he was hit. He didn’t look away, though, and kept his focus on Simon who continued to stare at him with his cold, black, dime-sized eyes, his expression empty of emotion. The other two thugs were also staring at him. Time just seemed to stop. Bill could barely stand it.

  “Tell me what I want to know,” Simon finally demanded.

  “Fuck, I swear, I don’t know what that is.”

  “Yes you do, Jeffrey. We’re not idiots here. Tell me what I want to know and this will all be over.”

  “Check my wallet,” Bill pleaded. He was nauseous, his left ear throbbing. “My driver’s license will show you that I’m not this Jeffrey Vozzmer.”

  “And what would that prove?” Simon asked. “That you took the precautions to be carrying a fake ID? Please, Jeffrey, we’re not amateurs. You should know that.”

  “This is all fucked up,” Bill insisted weakly. “I’m not Jeffrey Vozzmer. I never heard that name before.”

  Simon ignored Bill, said patiently, “Tell me what I want to know.”

  “I don’t know what you want to know.”

  The same behemoth who had punched him before raised an eyebrow, asking an unspoken question. Simon, sitting opposite Bill, took his time before shaking his head.

  “No, I don’t believe that will be necessary,” he said. “I’m sure we can facilitate Jeffrey to talk without having to resort to any further violence, even if it won’t be of his own volition.” Then to Bill, “One last time, tell me what I want to know.”

  Numbly, Bill shook his head. “I swear, I don’t know what that is,” he said.

  Simon sighed and picked up a small leather case that was on the seat next to him. He opened the case carefully, almost lovingly, and took from it a hypodermic needle, which he held up for Bill to look at.

  “Relax,” Simon said. “It’s only sodium pentothal. More than enough to loosen your lips but not enough to cause any serious damage. At least not usually.”

  Simon then leaned forward. Bill tried to struggle, but the two thugs held him steady.

  “If there was a chance that you would cooperate and remove your jacket I wouldn’t need to inject this inside your gum,” Simon cooed softly. “But one must do what one must do. Now, please open your mouth or I’ll have my associates force it open.”

  Then it was as if a bomb had been detonated.

  Chapter 17

  That was all Bill could think of at first. That a bomb went off underneath the van. A deafening explosion was followed by the van violently being lifted off the ground, along with the simultaneous sound of glass breaking and metal twisting.

  For a few unbearably long seconds it felt as if the van was going to end up on its side, or possibly on its roof, but then it fell back on all four wheels. The clean-shaven thug on Bill’s right was out cold, the goateed thug appeared woozy as he held his head in both hands and moaned softly. Simon had been thrown off balance and was on his knees on the van floor. He looked as woozy as
the goateed thug, and he nearly fell over again as he tried to push himself back up. Bill moved quickly, wrestling the hypodermic needle away from him and jabbing it into the goateed thug’s neck, pushing hard with his thumb to make sure every drop of serum was injected into the thug’s bloodstream. The thug screamed then. Bill wasted no time scrambling over the unconscious body of the other thug and slid the van door open, then fell out of it.

  Only after he was back on his feet and staggering away from the van did Bill realize what had happened. A Hummer SUV had run a stop sign and broadsided the van. From the massive damage to both vehicles, the SUV had to have been going at a good fifty to sixty miles per hour on impact. The front of the SUV was demolished, the middle of the van caved in. Ironically, the two thugs in the van had protected Bill, acting almost as human air bags. Bill moved slowly backwards, observing the damage, then watched as the driver’s side door to the van opened and a man crawled out. The man’s face was a bloody mess. A paneled partition had separated the back of the van from the driver’s compartment, so Bill hadn’t been able to see the driver earlier, and with the condition that the man’s face was left in Bill still couldn’t get a good enough look at him to be able to identify him later. That didn’t matter. He watched almost mesmerized as the man crawled on all fours, then pushed himself to his feet. The spell was broken when the man pulled a gun with an attached silencer from out of his jacket. Bill took a couple of unsteady steps backwards before turning and running, making the same sort of quick zigzagging movements he was trained to do during his time in the army. He wasn’t sure whether it was his imagination or not, but he thought he felt something whiz by his ear as he turned a corner, the sound almost like a fly buzzing. After that he ran harder. He ignored a burning in his chest and a growing lightheadedness as he raced down three blocks before darting into a small grocery store.

  For several minutes he stood frozen inside the store, his hands on his hips while he sucked in air, all the while watching the street for any of the men who had tried abducting him. When he was satisfied that they weren’t coming after him he reached for his cell phone, then remembered he had left it in his car, as well as his laptop. Swearing softly to himself, he turned and saw that people in the store were watching him with a mix of curiosity and fear, probably thinking he was either crazy or dangerous or both. He approached the cashier and asked her if he could use the phone. “I need to call the police,” he said.

  Chapter 18

  After years of scrimping, Emily and her mom saved enough for her graduate studies so that with along with what she earned from the university by teaching an undergraduate course each semester, she was able to cover half of her costs for her college tuition and living expenses. The other half she made up for with freelance jobs, which were mostly graphic design assignment for web-sites. The university was good about letting her use her office and university resources for these jobs, and at that moment she was finishing painting a watercolor for a book cover that she had been contracted for. While she worked on her painting, Vivaldi’s Concerto in E Major for Violin played on a portable compact disc player that Emily had bought for nine dollars at a secondhand store. Emily liked classical music, particularly Vivaldi and the playfulness and exuberance of his concertos. Listening to Vivaldi and other classical artists allowed her to relax and empty her mind and tap more fully into her subconscious.

  Once the painting was finished, Emily would take a photograph of it and send it to the book publisher who had contracted the artwork to her. While it paid less than many of her graphic design assignments, she particularly enjoyed doing these book covers and the creativity involved with them. The painting she was now doing was for a lurid crime novel written by a local Boston area writer. Usually she didn’t like books as dark and violent as this novel was, but she found this one riveting, especially in its underlying themes of coldness and alienation in modern society. It was only as she was finishing up the painting that she noticed the excessively deep pink hue that she had used in coloring the villain’s face, and she realized then that she had painted the villain as the same scary-looking man that she saw a few days earlier who she thought might’ve been following Bill. It shocked her to realize that she had done this.

  A chill ran through Emily as she stared at her recreation of this very pink-faced man with his dead reptilian dot-sized eyes. She was struck with an impulse to show her painting to Bill so she could let him know that this man might’ve been following him, but the more she thought of doing this the more foolish she felt. The last thing she wanted was for Bill to think of her as a neurotic nut. A sudden resolve gripped her and she ripped her painting in half. She would start over, and this time she would play Chopin’s Nocturne, hoping that the moodiness of his music might provide better inspiration.

  And she would make sure she didn’t paint any more very pink-faced men.

  Chapter 19

  Things did not go well with the police. Bill gave his story first to a desk sergeant who stared at him as if he had escaped from an asylum, then after waiting a half hour he was brought to a detective who he told the same story. The detective stared at him with disinterest. Stifling a yawn he interrupted Bill and informed him that there was no sign of an accident where Bill claimed that an SUV had hit the van.

  “We sent over a cruiser and there was no broken glass, no pieces of plastic, no blood, nothing,” the detective said. “No one saw nothing either. Same thing when we sent a patrolman to your apartment building. No one saw a van in the area, and no one saw you being pushed inside of one.”

  Bill straightened in his chair, a coldness pushing deep into the back of his skull. It didn’t surprise him that no one remembered seeing the van. These cleaning service vans were so ubiquitous that they’re close to invisible. “It’s what happened,” he heard himself insisting.

  The detective eyed him harshly. “You don’t look no worse for wear, other than your ear looking kind of beat-up. Doesn’t look to me like you were in the type of accident you claim you were. You haven’t been drinking now, have you?”

  “No, I haven’t been drinking.”

  “Because it would explain things,” the detective said. “Maybe you went into a bar and took a shot to the ear. Maybe it made you dizzy and think things happened that didn’t happen. Are you sure it wasn’t something like that?”

  “It wasn’t anything like that. I was abducted. It happened the way I said it did.”

  “Then how come no one saw nothing then?” the detective asked. “And what happened to those two smashed up vehicles? They just disappear into thin air?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The detective leaned closer, his harsh stare intensifying. “You haven’t been doing drugs now, have you?”

  The coldness pushed harder into Bill’s skull, making it feel like he had the mother of all ice cream headaches. At that moment he just wanted to get the hell out of there. “There’s no point in my filing a complaint, is there?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” the detective deadpanned, his eyes glazing dully. “You could get yourself in a lot of trouble filing false police reports, especially if it’s only so that some dumbass reporter can try making a name for himself by making up a bullshit story. So you tell me.”

  Bill shook his head, more to shake out the iciness filling it than any other reason. “Could you have a police officer drive me to my car and make sure I get in it safely?” he asked.

  The detective reluctantly agreed to the request. Before leaving the police station Bill washed the blood from his ear and the side of his face. His damaged ear looked red and swollen, but the cut had already scabbed over and didn’t look bad enough for stitches, and outside of that and some shakiness he seemed to have escaped his ordeal intact. The thought that kept nagging at him was that the men who abducted him had to be tied to the government. That was the way it smelled from the very moment he was grabbed, and it explained how they were able to clean up the area as quickly as they did. He wondered whether the
y were able to influence the local police and whether there were witnesses who were being kept quiet. He’d have to look into that. He couldn’t imagine that type of car crash not attracting witnesses. The problem was he was too dazed and too singularly focused on the man with the gun to notice what else was around him at the time.

  The patrolman who drove him back to his apartment building showed the same level of contempt in his expression that the detective had held. He didn’t say a word to Bill until he pulled up behind Bill’s car.

  “You want I should have the bomb unit go over your car?” he asked. “We can bring dogs to sniff it out for you if that will make you happy.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Bill said stiffly. He left the police cruiser and moved cautiously to his car while half-expecting the same men from before to come charging onto the scene. Outside of the cop who had driven him and was now sitting in his cruiser glaring at him, the street was empty. The first thing Bill did once he was inside his own car was check to make sure his laptop and cell phone were where he left them. Then, squeezing his eyes shut and mouthing a silent prayer, he turned the key in the ignition. The engine turned over with a slight whirl. There was no explosion. He wasn’t engulfed in a fiery ball. The only sound was his heart pounding over the soft purr of his car’s engine. Bill exhaled in a loud burst and realized he’d been holding his breath since the moment he’d gotten into his car. He opened his eyes and looked in the rearview mirror and spotted the cop behind him. The cop shook his head with disgust, then putting his cruiser in gear, pulled away.

  Bill sat collecting his thoughts. What happened could have been a fluke. It could’ve been a bizarre case of mistaken identity, at least that’s what they wanted him to think. Maybe it was that way, but what kept flashing in his mind was that hypodermic needle and that seemed to make it something else. And then there was that email message for his new good pal, G. He used his cell phone to call Detective Chuck Boxer.