Blind Spot

by Terri Persons

  “Someone in your building didn’t tell you some inside dirt about August Murrick, did they? Stuff only the cops should know?”

  “What stuff? What are you talking about? I told you I bumped into the guy. That he lives upstairs.”

  Garcia’s eyes widened. “He used to live upstairs.”

  “He still does. With that wiener dog of his. Oscar. They’ve been partying upstairs from me. I had to tell him to turn it down.”

  “You didn’t mention the dog or the music before. That would have clued me in that it wasn’t another Murrick you saw. That you really…” His words trailed off.

  She didn’t like the horrified look on his face or the shakiness of his voice. An icicle shot up Bernadette’s spine and wrapped around her middle. “That I really what? What’s going on? You’re scaring me, Tony.”

  Turning his head away from her, he said to the driver’s window: “August Murrick is dead. So is his dog.”

  Forty-two

  Her heart pounded as her mind frantically backtracked. During their first meeting, she’d been alone with Augie and Oscar in the hallway; there’d been no one else to hear them or see them. What about at the crowded Farmers’ Market the next morning? Had someone besides her interacted with the man and his dog? Taken notice of them? She remembered the woman in line at the bagel stand, staring at Bernadette and nervously wheeling away her stroller. The mother didn’t want to be near a woman carrying on a conversation with thin air. Augie’s warning about the wake had been prophetic, as if he had some supernatural insight. His place had been sparsely furnished and dusty for good reason: no one was living there!

  I slept with a…

  She couldn’t even finish the thought, let alone say it out loud.

  All of it was coming true. The stories they’d told about her in Louisiana. The tales they’d spun around New Orleans about her talking to the dead. The warning from the Franciscan.

  Demons twisting your hands and your heart.

  She instinctively reached up and put her hand over her chest—the spot where, beneath her clothing, her husband’s wedding band hung from a chain next to her own ring. “That can’t be. How can that be?”

  Snapping his head back around to look at her, Garcia barked: “You tell me!”

  She bunched her hand over her talisman. While outwardly denying the dead, Bernadette silently prayed to them. She petitioned her husband and her sister and her parents to make it all go away. “You’re wrong or I’m wrong or someone’s jerking me around. It was a different Murrick.”

  “His body was found in the basement of his own building. Your building. Murrick Place.”

  “Stop.”

  “Police figured it was because of a meth case Augie had lost. Not even a federal one—a pissant one. His clients blamed him, and hired someone to execute him and his dog. One bullet each to the head. Cops never caught the guys.”

  She put her hands over her face. “No.”

  Garcia kept going. “It was all over the local news, but that was months ago. You were down south. I doubt the papers there ran anything.”

  “Stop.”

  “And the details were never published.”

  She was shaking her head. “That’s enough.”

  “Murrick was a big rock-and-roll fan. He was wearing an Aerosmith shirt when he died. I only know that because I’ve got a cousin in St. Paul Homicide. Ironic, actually. The tee said something about…”

  “Nine lives,” she said through her fingers.

  “Exactly,” he breathed.

  “Dear God,” she prayed into her palms.

  “You’ve been seeing spirits? Talking to a dead guy and his dead dog? Is that what you’re fucking telling me?”

  “No,” she said into her hands. “That’s not right.” She couldn’t tell him she’d done more than talk to a spirit; she’d made love with him.

  He put a hand on her shoulder. “You need to…”

  “I don’t need to do anything.” She pushed his hand away. She didn’t want to hear about how she needed to get some sleep or take some time off or see a shrink. She turned around and threw open the car door and jumped out. She didn’t know where they’d stopped. Somewhere with woods. She didn’t care. She started to run for the trees, her way illuminated by the Pontiac’s headlights. Behind her, she heard his car door slam and his footsteps crunching. His voice.

  “Cat! Stop!”

  Bernadette set her sights on a black gap between two pines. She told herself if she could make it to the evergreens and run into the forest, she could emerge from the other side of the woods a different person, a normal human being with two brown eyes and no extraordinary skills. A regular woman with a quiet job and a living husband. Living lover. Kids and a house in the country. The woman she’d always wanted to be.

  “Agent Saint Clare!” he yelled after her.

  She ignored the voice behind her and kept going. Almost there. A normal life just beyond those trees.

  He tackled her from behind, and they both went down on the ground.

  “No!” she screamed into the grass.

  “What’re you running from? Where’re you going?”

  “Let me go! I’m a freak!”

  “You’re not a freak!” He sat up and gathered her into his arms.

  She buried her face in his jacket while pounding on his chest with her fists. “I don’t talk to the dead! I don’t see the dead! I don’t! That’s not what I do!”

  Forty-three

  Damian Quaid slipped naked between the covers of his childhood bed. Staring up at the ceiling, he counted out loud.

  “One…two…three…four…five…six…”

  When he was in grade school and studying the planets, his mother arranged a constellation of plastic and paper glow-in-the-dark stars over his bed. There were 299. There used to be three hundred, but one of the paper ones had fallen off long ago.

  “Thirty-three…thirty-four…thirty-five…thirty-six…”

  The counting relaxed him, frequently helped him nod off.

  “Fifty-seven…fifty-eight…fifty-nine…sixty…”

  The exercise wouldn’t work tonight. He stopped at ninety-nine and rolled onto his side. He kicked off the covers, threw his legs over the side of the bed, and sat up. He reached over and snatched a compact paperback Bible off the nightstand, cracked the book open to a random page, and started to read. He’d landed on Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians 2:17–19.

  So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints, and also members of the household of God…

  Quaid tried to concentrate and continue, but they were conciliatory words and he wasn’t in a forgiving, generous mood. He snapped the book closed and dropped it back on the table. Wondered if he should go downstairs and turn on the television to catch the local news. Maybe there was something about his last two executions. Checking the nightstand clock, he saw it was too early. There wouldn’t be any local news on until six or seven, and that was hours away.

  Opening a drawer in the nightstand, he rummaged around for some clean socks and boxers and a tee shirt. Quaid stood up and went to the closet and yanked a flannel shirt and a pair of jeans off the hangers. An old barn coat. As he buttoned up his shirt, he thought about the shed and its contents. The ropes. The blades. The small engines. The aroma of motor oil and gasoline and sawdust and metal. He’d spend some time organizing the ropes and sharpening the tools, getting select ones ready for the next mission. Quaid was already formulating a way to choose his next fiend. He’d abandon his original list and pick a different state, another one without the death penalty. Perhaps Iowa or Wisconsin or someplace out east. He’d start reading up on the worst crimes ever committed in those places. A check of the Internet and the newspapers would reveal who was due for release, or who’d never gotten prison time in the first place. His
candidates would have no connection to Minnesota or him or anyone he knew. His execution of them would be a purely selfless action. God would be proud of him, and there’d be no chance of getting caught by the authorities.

  Quaid started down the hall and remembered he’d dropped some essentials on the bathroom counter. He stepped into the bathroom and scooped the keys and the flashlight off the counter, and dropped them in his coat pockets. He crammed his wallet in the back pocket of his jeans. Finally, the gun. He picked it up and held it in his hand for a few seconds, enjoying the shape of the thing, and the color. Like his weight-lifting gloves, the revolver made him feel strong and manly and in control. He slipped the weapon into the front pocket of his jeans.

  He went down the stairs and into the kitchen, stepped into some barn boots he kept by the back door and went outside. He locked the door behind him and then paused at the top of the stoop to listen. The wind had died down, allowing him to hear the frogs in the pond. The clouds had thinned, and he could see a splash of stars. He was home. Clicking on the flashlight, he thumped down the stairs and headed for the metal shed planted half a football field away from the house.

  Quaid was stepping onto the driveway, between the house and the shop, when he heard movement in the woods. It wasn’t the wind; the noise was too concentrated. He froze and ran the beam across the wall of trees that bordered the property. More rustling. He switched the flashlight to his left hand and put his right palm over the bulging front pocket of his jeans. “I’ve got a gun,” he yelled into the darkness.

  A fat raccoon waddled out of the greenery, stopped, and stared directly into the light with its bandit eyes. Behind it trailed five kits; they stopped behind their mother.

  Quaid slipped his hand into his jeans and slid his gun out of his pocket. Shooting with one hand looked easy on television westerns. His revolver had a fierce recoil that made such fancy firing difficult. He’d been practicing with cans behind the house, and this would be an opportunity to see if his work was paying off.

  He raised his right hand and reconsidered. What if, instead, he rested his gun hand on top of his flashlight hand? He’d seen that technique—or something like it—on a cop show. He brought his left wrist under his right hand.

  The mother raccoon wasn’t budging. She was staring at the light as she stood less than twenty feet away. Behind her, the kits were moving around, playfully jostling for position.

  “Steady,” he said out loud. He put his finger on the trigger and aimed for the mother’s face, so much like a robber’s masked face. He inhaled and started counting in his head. One, two…

  On three, he exhaled and squeezed the trigger.

  The animal exploded. Her kits turned and ran into the woods. Grinning with satisfaction, he followed their retreat with the beam of his flashlight. She’d been an easy target. A man or a woman wouldn’t be so motionless, so accommodating. Still, he’d proved to himself that he’d gotten better at firing the thing. As with the rope-tying, all it took was practice.

  He lowered the gun and slipped it into his coat pocket. Shining the light on the ground ahead of him, he continued making his way to the shop.

  The shed looked like a small airplane hangar. A half-cylinder of metal made up the roof and long sides. The metal end wall facing the highway had a double garage door and a heavy wooden storm door. His father had installed the garage doors—and constructed the building close to the driveway—so on occasion he could veer off the gravel and steer his truck directly into the shed to unload it. On the opposite end of the cylinder—facing the pond and the woods beyond it—was another metal end wall with another wooden storm door. One large, wood-framed window was mounted on each side of the door. The structure sat on a concrete slab, was wired for electricity, and was easily warmed with a couple of space heaters.

  Quaid went around to the far end of the shed. He’d installed a security lamp against the back of the building; the light went on every night at dusk unless he shut it off manually from inside the shed. He punched off the flashlight and stashed it in his coat pocket. He shoved a key in the dead-bolt lock—something he’d added to the door after his family was killed—and turned. He pushed the door open, and left it open while he felt the wall just inside the doorway. He flipped the switch up, and the fluorescent tubes mounted to the ceiling flickered and filled with white light. He yanked his keys out of the lock and closed the door behind him. Quaid turned the lock on the dead bolt while nervously eyeing the naked glass on either side of the door. This night in particular—a night that saw him tricked into performing a mistaken execution and then forced into conducting an impromptu one—he felt ill at ease with the uncovered windows. They made him feel vulnerable. They faced the pond and the woods, and he knew bad things could come out of the woods in the country—especially after dark.

  Quaid ran his eyes around, zoning in on the rag bucket he kept in the far corner of the shed. He crossed the room and picked through the heap of material—socks with holes, ripped tee shirts, a worn flannel shirt, and other scraps he used to wipe his hands. He pulled out two bath towels and threw them over his arm. Snatching a hammer and a fistful of nails off one of the benches, he went to work dressing the windows with makeshift curtains. The towels had a couple of holes in them—that’s why they were in the rag bucket—but they’d be enough to keep someone from seeing directly inside.

  After nailing the cloth to the window frames, he surveyed the rest of the shop. The space was the width of a triple car garage and was at least as long as the house. He felt comfortable and protected under the metal. The ribs that curved up the walls and ceiling made him feel as if he were inside the mouth of a whale. It was a safe, fortified shelter, a place untouched by violence. Though the murderers had stolen rope from the shed, none of the slaughtering had taken place in the shop. No blood stained the slab. No ghosts hid in the corners.

  Each of the long walls was lined with a workbench that stretched from end to end. Stationed here and there along the benches were tall, backless chairs that allowed him to sit down and work. As a kid, he and his father would sit side by side on the stools and work silently on rope projects. When he grew older, he was allowed to help with the machines people brought for repair. His father started him on the push lawn-mowers, letting him work on sharpening the blades with a large hand file. It was a simple, mind-numbing chore that Quaid still enjoyed. He found something satisfying about dragging the file over the edge of the blades until they looked and felt dangerous enough to do the job. The screeching, grating noise made by metal against metal sounded like exotic, ethereal music. Angels rubbing their wings together.

  He had an old gas mower parked in a corner of the shop. Perfect, he thought. He’d work on those blades a while, until his body and his mind started to unwind. Quaid went over to the mower, picked it up, and set it on its side on top of the bench. Before going any further with his repair job, he took one safety precaution his careful father had taught him: he pulled the spark-plug wire from the top side to ensure that the mower wouldn’t start up accidentally.

  He needed a wrench to remove the blade from the underside. Taking an inventory of the tools hanging from the pegboard over the bench, he saw the wrench and took it down, leaving a black outline of the wrench behind. His father had used a laundry marker to draw around the tools as they hung from the board. That way, when something was taken down it was obvious where it needed to be put back.

  A single nut held the blade up against the lawn mower’s deck. After applying a little muscle, he was able to loosen and remove the nut. He slipped off the blade and clamped it in a vise mounted at the far end of the bench.

  Quaid scanned the pegboard again and saw an empty rectangle. He’d taken down the ten-inch mill file during an earlier visit and failed to put it back. His father would have disapproved. Scanning the bench running along the opposite wall, he spotted the file, retrieved it, and dropped it next to the vise. He took down a set of safety goggles and slipped them over his eyes, tightened t
he vise’s grip on the blade, and went to work.

  Using long, broad strokes away from him, he followed the forty-five-degree factory angle of the cutting edge. As his father had instructed him, he kept the pressure firm and pushed the file and his arms from his shoulders, not his wrists. The scraping sound was as soothing and relaxing as any piece by Beethoven or Bach. Each stroke had its own rhythm and music and yet remained connected to the action before it and after it. Movements of a sonata written for metal.

  When he was finished with the mower, he moved on to other garden tools. All the shovels needed work, and they would take a while, since there were five of them. He used a bar clamp to hold each to the bench. He started on the left side of each blade and filed to the center. Then he switched to the right side of the blade and worked toward the middle. His arm movements were long and smooth and consistent. Each shovel took about fifty strokes. Most folks didn’t think of sharpening shovels, but his father had taught him that sharp shovels made digging much easier. They went through the soil like it was butter and cut roots with no problems. While he worked, Quaid wondered if they could slice through other things easily, too, and made a mental note to bring the sharpest of the lot on a mission.

  He propped the last shovel up against the shed wall and took a break. Leaning one hand against the edge of the workbench, he dragged his coat sleeve across his forehead and then across his upper lip and mustache. He’d worked up a sweat; he liked that. He unbuttoned the coat, yanked it off, and dropped it over one of the stools. Searching the ribbed walls for more tools in need of sharpening, his eyes landed on the collection of axes hanging from the pegboard.

  Forty-four