Black Bird

by Greg Enslen

  The policeman approached and stood in Jack’s open window. He looked quite young, his youthful face bright yet cautious under the curve of his black policeman’s hat. His gold police shield suddenly reminded Jack of Sheriff Beaumont’s six-pointed star.

  “Good evening, sir. We’re conducting random sobriety checks tonight. As you probably know, most traffic fatalities are caused by drunk driving, and most of those accidents take place on Friday and Saturday nights.” He went through the short speech as if he had repeated the same tired litany countless times. “Could you please step out of the van?” The policeman’s careful eyes roamed all over Jack and the van as he talked, trying to take everything about Jack and his white van in. A character trait that probably made him an excellent cop.

  Jack was sure that the cop had figured out there was somebody else in the back of the van.

  “Thank you, officer, for your kind attention in protecting our streets from inebriated drivers, but I can assure you that I have had nothing whatsoever to drink tonight.” Jack was projecting his most congenial smile, and he was sure that combined with the flowery language, the cop would be helpless to resist. Besides, he didn’t sound drunk at all -- maybe this problem would just get back in his car and go away.

  The officer smiled back. “I’m sure that’s true, sir, but I still need you to step out of the van.” The officer’s eyes met Jack’s and held them for a moment. “And your passenger.”

  Jack swallowed, his hand tightening on the gun. “Passenger?”

  The officer seemed genuinely amused at Jack’s response.

  “Yes, sir. There is someone in the back of your van. I can hear them moving around.” He leaned forward a little, as if to look into the window. “Now, if they are drunk, there’s nothing to worry...”

  Jack jerked up on the door handle and kicked the door open savagely, catching the cop’s face squarely with the metal doorframe. The cop staggered backwards, his hands drifting mindlessly up towards his bloodied face, and he turned and fell down heavily, right in the middle of the westbound lane of the road.

  Jack hopped down quickly from the open door and strode over to where the cop lay, face down.

  “Having a bad night?” he asked, his smile genuine. He worked the revolver in his hand, spinning the chamber and letting in snap to a stop. The course of action was now decided, and there was nothing anybody could do about it now. Jack looked down at the gun, and he noticed that, in the headlights of the patrol car, he could still see the faint markings of the faded Liberty Police Department symbol on the butt of the revolver. It was a very old gun.

  “Where’s your partner?”

  The cop rolled over on the asphalt and looked up at Jack. His nose was shattered and useless, and it looked as if several of his front teeth had been forcibly (and not too tenderly) removed. Blood, shiny and black in the glare of the police car’s headlights, covered most of his face except for the eyes, which darted back and forth between Jack’s face and the barrel of Jack’s gun, watching it move and sway in Jacks’ hands like a cobra waiting to strike.

  “Ain’ god no pardner,” he answered from his ruined mouth. Brackish blood bubbled easily from one corner of it, dribbling onto his chin.

  Jack’s head tilted back and he laughed, a strangely hollow noise that echoed on the deserted highway. He saw a dark bird float down from the brightening sky and land on the roof of the police cruiser.

  “‘Ain’t got no partner’? Oh well. Next time, maybe they won’t send you out into this mean old nasty place all by your little lonesome, huh?” He looked at the cop, expecting a fearful look on the cop’s face, but Jack was surprised to see that the cop wasn’t even looking at him.

  He was looking behind Jack, at the van.

  Jack turned and saw the naked girl climbing down from the open driver’s door.

  Her skin was pale and ghostly in the glow of the brightening horizon and the glare of the police car’s headlights. Her hands were still tied together, but her feet had somehow come free of their bindings and, even after three endless days of excruciating physical abuse, she somehow still managed to scamper down and run quickly away from the van, towards the cop car.

  radio

  Jack leapt after her, his gun coming up. She ran, barefoot on the rough gravel, straight to the driver’s door of the patrol car, scaring the black bird away. She stopped and started to pull up on the door handle and that was when she saw him coming for her.

  She screamed.

  He had broken her, she had been putty in his hands. She was his to do with as he pleased. Yet here she was, defying him? The only thing she hadn’t done was beg for mercy. But this thing before him was still a person, still defying him.

  So, why was he running at her now?

  He stopped and fired wildly just as she got the driver’s door open, and the window shattered next to her, spraying shards of glass cut her bare skin from neck to knees, painting thin ribbons of blood across her. She let go of the door handle and fell to the sandy ground beside the car, falling between the car and the yellow strip that signaled the edge of the blacktop. The door stood open, useless.

  He walked over, kicking the door closed and looking down at her closely. Here, without the benefit of the cars’ headlights, he could only see that she lay on her side, bleeding profusely from a hundred shallow cuts. She turned slowly, painfully, and looked up at him, bringing her hands up to shield her face from him. He noticed that the backs of her arms, still tied together, were also stitched with thin long threads of scarlet.

  Jack shook his head, and raised the gun and shot her.

  The cop was busy trying to crawl away, the sand from the nearby beach gritting on the blacktop under his knees and hands. He had almost made it to the center dashed yellow line when Jack returned. He kicked the cop once solidly in the ribs.

  “Hey. Turn over.”

  The cop stopped crawling and flopped slowly over to look up at Jack. “Hey, man, you don’ have do do dis,” the cop muttered through his broken mouth. “Dey’ll jus hunt you down, man. You can’ get away wid killing a cop.” The words came out of his mouth slurred like those of a career drunkard.

  Jack smiled. “Done it before, my friend. Plenty of times.”

  Liberty, Virginia popped back into his mind again, and that night by the highway. He saw himself striding confidently up that rain-slicked hill, firing, his bag banging against his side as he fired, dropping the police one by one until it was only him and Beaumont on that lonely stretch of road. He had felt immortal, godlike. He’d only killed one policeman that night, as far as he knew - when he'd driven away, he'd heard the groans of the wounded. But he’d killed many cops since.

  Jack’s eyes drifted down to the revolver he was holding, and he looked at the faded markings on it for a long, silent moment.

  He had a sudden idea.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Jack said. “I’ll give you three chances, okay?” Jack popped open the chamber of the revolver, looked carefully inside, spun it lazily, and then clicked it back into place. “Two bullets in six chambers. What are those odds?” He seemed lost in thought for a moment. “One third, right?”

  Jack pointed the gun at the cops chest and, after a very long pause, pulled the trigger.

  CLICK.

  The cop jumped visibly, his eyes watering. He started to try and crawl away backwards, using just his elbows, but Jack stood up and kicked him hard in the ribs again.

  “Hey, hey, man", " Jack asked sweetly. "That’s cheating. Now, you play fair, okay?”

  Jack popped the chamber open and spun it again, once, twice, and clicked it back into place, showing it off to the cop like he was modeling the gun. He kneeled beside the cop and placed the gun barrel squarely between the cop’s eyes.

  The cop was trembling, waiting, expecting a deafening explosion to come at any moment and take away everything he was. Everything he had ever known, but nothing happened.

  No sound, no click.

  After a long moment, he
looked up at Jack.

  Jack was looking at him. When he spoke, his voice was low, almost too quiet to hear even in the silence of the night air that was broken only by the dull roar of the distant surf.

  “Ask me to pull the trigger.”

  “Pull it!" the policeman shouted. "Pull it, man, for god’s sake, pull it...”

  CLICK.

  The cop’s head jerked back, and for a moment Jack thought the cop HAD been shot and Jack just hadn’t heard it. Then the cop’s head came back up and Jack saw that he looked relieved.

  Jack stood up and regarded the gun, looking at it as if it had just magically appeared in his hand. “Now, isn’t that odd?” He popped the gun open and confirmed the fact that it indeed still held two bullets - he could see the shiny, pointy tips of the bullets glinting in each of the chambers.

  hurry up this is taking way too long what if a car comes

  “Well,” he shrugged, “maybe you’ll get lucky and beat the odds. Then I’d have to let you go, right?”

  Jack spun the chamber again, flipped it shut, and then knelt down next to the cop again.

  “Open your mouth.”

  The cop, his mouth swelling and still bleeding, stared up, straight into Jack’s eyes. “No.”

  Jack struck the cop squarely in the mouth with the butt of the gun. The cop collapsed back, blood oozing between his fingers.

  “Sit up! Open your mouth!”

  The cop struggled to prop himself up on one elbow and slowly, very slowly, he opened his mouth.

  Jack slid the barrel into the cop’s mouth, barely noticed that the cop was weeping. Jack felt sudden, naked disgust for this creature sprawled out on the ground before him.

  you have to hurry

  He pulled the trigger.

  CLICK.

  Jack yanked the barrel out, then stood and popped the gun open again and turned it to a full chamber, snapping it home.

  The cop’s expression of relief turned to utter horror in the space of a heartbeat. Jack pointed the revolver between the cop’s eyes.

  The cop stared cross-eyed at the barrel, suddenly huge.

  “You bastard,” the cop hissed.

  “Yeah.” Jack answered, and killed him.

  “Huh?” David sat up, suddenly awake, and shook his head, dazed. Bethany was standing over him, looking at him oddly, her long dark hair almost touching him.

  “Are you okay, David?” There was genuine concern in her eyes, deep and blue and loving. “I came back to tell you that the last customer just left, but you looked like you were asleep. What’s wrong?”

  He looked up at her and for a moment their eyes connected and he felt a sudden pang of regret. He’d broken up with her three weeks ago and at the time, it had seemed like the smart thing to do, but now he was starting to wonder. She was so pretty, and they had had so many good times together...

  David Beaumont shook his head.

  “No, I’m fine.” He turned his back on her and began setting up the paperwork again on the counter, ignoring her and her other attempts at conversation until she gave up and finally left the backroom.

  It was ten after 10:00 pm, and he was in the backroom of the store, working on adding up and matching the nightly figures. He worked at Big Video and More, a large video and music store, and his boss, Mel, was almost religiously meticulous about the nightly figures. Everything had to match exactly, down to the penny, every night, or someone would have to be written up, usually the manager in charge. David was an Assistant Manager for the store and third in charge, so to speak, and he usually closed the store two nights a week, including Saturday nights. He was already on Mel’s s-list for being 40 minutes late tonight, so David knew ahead of time that everything would have to match and the store would have to look good tonight, even if the whole crew had to stay until midnight.

  Bethany also worked at Big Video, and she was in line for a management position soon. A few months ago, David had begun training her in all of the jobs he did, and she had picked up very quickly, but so far Mel had neglected to promote her to a Manager Trainee, the lowest level of the store’s management structure.

  One of the reasons he had broken up with her three weeks ago was the fact that at Big Video, employees and managers were not supposed to date. They weren’t even really supposed to hang out together. It was one of the first rules in the photocopied handbook that every new Big Video employee was given on their first day at the store. David himself had even fired someone for the same exact offense last year.

  David and Bethany had gone to great lengths to hide the fact that they were dating, and the relationship amazingly had lasted almost ten months, a record for David. But he had gotten very tired of hiding the fact that they were dating, and for that reason and many others, he had broken it off. He’d regretted it an hour later.

  David finished counting down the fourth cash drawer and checked the total he had written down with the register report to make sure it matched. It did.

  He moved over to the calculator and ran a strip total of all the checks and credit card charges taken in for the day, and at the same time ran the nightly totals report from the main computer on the back counter. The backroom of the Big Video was huge, and one of the walls of the backroom was taken up by a three-foot wide wooden counter that ran for maybe thirty feet along the long wall. Stacked along this counter were various bundles of paperwork, movies and other merchandise waiting to go out onto the sales floor, and stacks of rolled posters and other display material.

  At the far end of the counter, away from the door out to the main sales floor, there sat a large computer terminal and an industrial-grade printer. A hole had been cut in the counter under the printer to feed paper up into it, and several boxes of computer paper were stacked underneath the counter, the top box open and feeding paper. If a person was curious enough to crawl under the computer area of the counter and looked up, they would see a hodgepodge of names and signatures and little jokes, poems, and dedications, all written in a dozen different colors of ink. Everyone that had ever worked at Big Video had, at one time or another, crawled underneath this counter and scrawled their own dedication to history. It was like a wooden yearbook filled with scrawled graffiti.

  The printer finally finished pushing out the nightly report and David tore it off, standing at the counter area he was using to tally up the night’s figures. Checks, cash, credit card charges, redeemed store coupons, and other various bits of paperwork had all been separated out into piles, and on top of each one was the adding-machine strip he had run. He compared the totals on each of the strips, and they all matched the final totals from the master printout.

  Nodding, he gathered up all of the paperwork except for the cash and stuffed it into a large manila envelope along with the computer report and some other reports he had run earlier in the evening. After writing the date and filling in the blanks concerning the nightly totals on the outside of the envelope, he set it down on the counter, unsealed, and began straightening up the backroom.

  After a few minutes the backroom looked better (it didn’t look all that much better, but it would have to do. David knew that Mel was opening the store in the morning, but David figured that no matter how good the store looked, Mel would still find something to rag on him about, so why break his neck to clean up?), David leaned out of the door to the main sales floor and called the other employees back to clock out and go home.

  Franklin was a part-time employee and a high school senior, a big guy who loved to wear tight black shirts that showed off his muscled chest and wide shoulders. He always seemed to have places to go and things to do and tonight he had a girl to see, so he was the first one into the back room.

  “Lights?” Franklin asked, his hand already over the four switches in the fuse box that controlled the lighting on the main sales floor.

  “Not yet,” David answered. “Double count the cash, okay?”

  Franklin frowned, grabbing the small stack of cash and quickly counting it. He sta
cked the different bills in little piles as he went, reducing the time it would take to recount it if he failed to get the same totals as David had gotten. Franklin got a total and looked at the outside of the small pink envelope marked “Saturday” to see what David had written there, and they matched. Franklin stuffed the bills and the few coins into the envelope, sealed it, initialed on the outside right next to David’s initials, and stuffed it into the big manila envelope, handing the manila envelope back to David. It had all taken less than two minutes. “Now the lights?” Franklin asked, expectantly.

  “Yeah,” David answered, smiling. He always got Franklin to double count the cash envelope, if he could. The guy was quick, especially when he was in a hurry, like tonight.

  Franklin flipped the rows of switches that controlled the lights. As soon as that was done, he moved over to clock out on the main computer. He brought up the time clock screen from the main system menu and entered his employee number, clocking him out. Leaving the time clock screen up, he went over to the break area to collect his things. Part of the backroom, the part furthest from the door and next to the bathroom, was separated off from the rest of the backroom by a little wall and contained the break area, a little corner of the backroom with a small microwave, a hot and cold-water dispenser, a refrigerator, and several chairs. Franklin grabbed his green and blue backpack and his car keys and headed back out onto the sales floor to wait up by the front door.

  Lisa and Bethany came into the backroom just as Franklin left. Lisa Stevens, another salesperson, played soccer at CEVA, or Central Virginia Community College, the school that David had attended for one semester last summer before dropping out. She clocked out and left the backroom after grabbing her purse. She didn’t even acknowledge that David was there.

  Bethany came up to David after she clocked out, carrying her purse, a simple white boxy one that David had bought her for her birthday several months ago. Back in happier times.